lemur

The basic premise of the OP is that there is a high density of EM energy (i.e. a great deal of energy - as much as constitutes an electron - concentrated in the volume of an electron, whatever that volume would be). Since you said this couldn't be achieved with just one photon, it becomes a multitude, but it doesn't make much difference to the issue of expansion. If it was multiple photons, they disperse. If it was a single photon, it would expand right? Either way, my main question is why/how it becomes a particle with mass and can suddenly decelerate below C.

I'm not sure you're using the term, "passive aggressive" right. Passive aggression is like when you don't want to directly express your anger toward someone so you say talk in a hyper-formal tone to them. Who's to say the US or anyone else is going to support the rebels once they find out what their politics really are? It makes sense that the US and their partners are in support of the rebels' democratic right to express their political will, but that doesn't mean they're going to agree with it when they are liberated to do so. It's like when a student says they're afraid to express their opinion in class so you assure them that everyone must respect their opinion and then they say something blatantly offensive or impossible and expect you to validate their point because you assured them that they should be confident to express themselves.

They also nurse their young. Whale milk is supposedly similar in texture to cottage cheese.

Whose expressing an opinion of "these people?" I was thinking more in terms of the short to medium term endeavor to re-build and clean up. I liked the post about drying out fuel by putting it near the fire before burning it. You could get a good fire going with some gasoline or whatever is available. Ideally some kind of large boilers could be set up in new buildings that are going up so that the debris could be used to heat multi-family residences. It might be hard to set up a whole incinerator-type assembly for every new residential building though. If a power-plant were set up, though, there would be the problem of power lines to distribute the energy as electricity. What a conundrum!

So are there as many different possible particle/masses of matter as there are amounts of radiation that can be lumped together? The premise of the OP was that you would have EM radiation of a high frequency and high amplitude such that the amount of energy per unit volume would be comparable to a particle with mass, say an electron. Now you say that density of energy could form into a matter/antimatter pair and I'm wondering why it would stay "bound" as a particle of matter (e.g. electron) instead of just continuing to move at C and disperse as an array of separate photons.

From what I've read, the economic dissatisfaction is not due to lack of basic necessities. During recessions, middle-class people squeeze each other as hard as they can for more revenues. I suspect it was/is more inability to cooperate economically that was/is the cause of economic dissatisfaction. They probably just wanted him to sell more oil and distribute the money to the people so they could import whatever. Whether he was resisting out of greed, megalomania, or some other reason, my opinion generally is that the global middle-class doesn't do enough to make due with less and cultivate less materialistic lifestyles that render happiness nonetheless. edit: that's why in the absence of more detailed information, I tend to assume that every rebellion is yet another uprising against recessionary pressures to cut costs. This world is well-stocked with people whose main concern is to maintain a relatively privileged level of materialism that they have become accustomed to through many years of industrial growth.

Looking at the piles of rubble and debris from the tsunami leads me to wonder what I would do with it all. Since it's pretty cold there now, I thought about burning it for heat but then I wondered how much is wood/combustible and how dry it would be by now. What do you think? Is harvesting the debris as fuel a viable means to combine clean-up efforts with energy-needs, or are there reasons this would be impractical?

So is the matter-side of a "matter-antimatter pair" a particle of regular matter if/once the antimatter is removed from it? If so, what causes it to remain bound instead of continuing to dissipate as a photon array?

Then why did he say he didn't subscribe to the belief he was answering with? Or, rather, why did he answer with a belief he didn't subscribe to?

I think you have me backward. My concern with cults of authoritarian figures is that they tend to shift the focus completely to the exceptional individual and thus distract from attention for other individuals. Obviously the rebellion is not an undifferentiated collective mass but consists of individuals with various motivations and interests. I agree with you that there is more going on than humanitarian goals, and I think you should also consider that this rebellion may have been incited in the first place as a means of creating an impetus for interventions. Regardless of whether this is the case or not, the broader point is that politics should never be the result of negative reactions against an individual or group. It should always be a pro-active case-making for positive/constructive reforms. This whole situation is just a series of destructive reactions with very little pro-active voicing of political interests and intent. A true democracy-oriented political movement would have involved a global discourse regarding Gaddafi's politics and the politics of oppressed dissidents. If that would have been done, we might have gotten to understand how the situation evolved the way it did and what constructive steps forward could/should be taken. Personally, my interpretation has become that Gaddafi was in a precarious position because he was both head of state and a power private controller of oil-wealth. Then, add to this the fact that other citizens seem to view government as an instrument to wrest wealth away from private ownership. This would, imo, logically motivate the use of the regime to repress attempts to gain control of government as a means to take over private wealth. I don't think Gaddafi is the main force behind this class struggle. I think there is a broader elite wealth-controling class who do not want to give the lower classes license to take over wealth and do whatever they want with it. So the lack of democracy is not just due to the repressive government, but also to those who simply want to redistribute wealth without discussing why and how to regulate a more social economy in a way that respects the interests of the wealthy as well as those who stand to gain. No, not everything has to be and I wish it weren't interpreted so as much. But it would be naive to say that this individual is a murderer bent on attacking innocent civilians for no reason. As I've said in earlier posts, if you listen/read Gaddafi's speeches, he is concerned about things like poverty and African independence, so he's not a misanthrope. So what else could be behind the conflict between the regime and the rebels except oil-wealth? Have any other forms of social-cultural oppression been named other than economic dissatisfaction? I think people all over the world will continue to hate the west as long as it abuses oil to generate high levels of materialism and GDP that prompt its citizens to vehemently oppose migrations that allow non-westerners to participate in western prosperity. I.e. I think people 1) feel excluded from the prosperity and 2) question the goodness of prosperity that leads to so much hate and exclusion.

It's funny to me when people think it's sophisticated to point out the banalities of religious mythology. To me it is just as banal that people seek out simplistic strawman arguments to undermine the basis ideas of religion instead of addressing the real point of the stories. The story of Job employs the characters of God and Satan the way it does as metaphors for the trials of life. The fact that the forces of good and evil were personified in an anthropomorphic way doesn't really make any difference. The important ideas are that bad luck tempts people into cursing the fundamental nature of existence as being evil. Then, the point is that when/if people curse their existence as evil, they give up the hope that their luck will turn around. It's basically a story designed to encourage people to persevere through suffering with the hope that they are just being tried and when they pass the test, life will get better. That is a comforting thought that could keep your spirits up, don't you think? You can undermine most all theology by focussing on the metaphors, personifications, and other stylistic choices for representing philosophy as mythology. I feel the same way when I read symbolic language that I don't understand yet. Still, I know it would be naive to reject the possibility that there are actual ideas being expressed in the mythological language. Thus, if I were you I would at least make it a point to understand the meanings being conveyed and reject the theology on that basis instead of trying to attack it on the basis of its symbolic framework.

Have you ever seen the episode of the original Star Trek series called "Return of the Archons?" It is about a totally authoritarian society where people celebrate "festival" by engaging in the wildest behaviors in order to let go of all their pent up energy that's been repressed by the rigor of structuring every other aspect of their lives to a tee. I agree that social coordination can be good in many ways, but it causes problems, imo, when people start viewing the institutions as fundamental realities in themselves and defend them like a permanent womb they can't survive without.

Ok, thanks for clarifying that photons are fixed-sized particles. Now what about the energy-density of a high-energy, high-frequency EM wave? What would happen if it contained as much energy in the area of an electron as an electron does? Or is that even physically possible?

I said, "As the centripetal centers emerged, they would cause kinetic energy of the coalescing particles until a state of relative equilibrium was reached due to friction preventing further settling." I think I'm missing what you're arguing against that I said now. All I was trying to claim was that gravity can have an organizing/stratifying effect, i.e. anti-entropic. I guess you are pointing out that the kinetic energy generated as a cloud coalesces would result in radiation, which is entropic dissipation of energy from the system. I agree with that, but does that diminish the anti-entropic effect of the gravitational coalescing? Must entropy refer to net entropy of a system, or can one form of entropy be taking place while organizing forces are producing a new system of potential energies?

This is basically a question to be answered by standard physics but it seems like a speculative enough scenario to be put in speculations. Anyway, my thought was that EM waves (photons) can be of different amplitudes with the same wavelength. So as they move away from their source, they must stretch out in their area while getting thinner in their amplitude. So what happens if their amplitude is so great and the frequency so high that the amount of energy in a given volume of radiation exceeded the density of a particle of matter, like an electron? Would they then have to exert gravitation equivalent to that of a particle of matter of the same energy-quantity and volume? If so, would you have basically an electron traveling at C or would the energy condense on itself under the force of its own gravity to form an actual particle of matter (electron)?

I wasn't aware international law was so explicit about responsibility for interim government formation. I believe I read somewhere that Gaddafi said something about staging the whole thing to garner refugee visas so people could leave, but who knows that could have been made up to scare people who are afraid of refugee migration. My concern with Gaddafi the man at this point is that he has been so blackened that his life may be in danger if some angry mob decides to short-circuit his human rights and murder him on the spot. Look what happened with Saddam Hussein when he was turned over to the new Iraqi government. I'm not saying he shouldn't stand trial, but I think the trial should be fair as it should be for any other individual, regardless of public profile. It's not the fact of the oil. It's the political precedent that gets set by global powers uniting to support populist/majoritarian control over oil-wealth. It means that people all over the world could rally to take over oil-reserves located within their regional jurisdictions and distribute the proceeds according to popular interest. I would guess OPEC would expand to include emerging oil-republics in an effort to control supply but I don't know what they would do if there was popular rebellion due to economic dissatisfaction. They would probably try to install repressive regimes like Gaddafi's. To the extent that modern materialism/consumerism functions to promote certain people to higher social status and demote others to lower status, people are being deprived of numerous social privileges due to perceptions about their relative social status. I do actually 'practice what I preach' by trying to avoid materialist consumption that promotes status. I treat people with decency and respect and expect the same whether people I meet are relatively well-off or 'dirt poor.' Still, I believe it would be better for the poor people if the wealthy people would wear the same brands of clothes and walk or ride a bike like the poor people, live among them, and constrain their materialism to roughly the same level as poor and working class people. That way, there would be less elitism and disdain on the basis of social status and people could receive social benefits like friendship, dating, etc. purely on the basis of personality affinities. Granted there are also educational differences that translate into status differences, but there's really no reason poor people can't educate themselves if they are literate and have internet access and the time and interest to study.

Ethical scientists would only want to collect data from you if they were certain that it wouldn't harm you in any way. They would probably, thus, require you to first be evaluated psychologically. They could then study what you are experiencing and come up with tests to see what may be causing it. However, since what's happening with you sounds like it is causing you suffering, their first concern would have to be with alleviating it rather than allowing it to persist unnecessarily just in order to collect more data. The only person who can legitimately study what's going on with you without seeking treatment for you is you - and then the question is how ethically are you treating yourself by not seeking advice about how to inhibit whatever it is, whether telepathic signals or mental aberrations. If, however, you don't find it more than a minor nuisance, you could collect data by keeping a detailed journal of your experiences. You could then publish your journals for researchers to study. If you really believe it is telepathy, I would suggest trying the tin foil wrapping and keeping accurate records of any changes in your experiences. Just for the record, however, please remember that I am in no way suggesting that any of this is more than ideas for amateur research you can do for yourself. I am not suggesting that this is in any way a substitute for medical or psychiatric care that may help you after dealing with troublesome experiences.

Why can't you view a coalescing cloud of matter as a collection of emerging centripetal concentrations. As they coalesce, their centers would be in motion relative to each other and they would be drawing matter away from their lagrangian point and thus creating an increasingly empty vacuum-space between them. The initial potential energy was in the dispersion of original matter. As the centripetal centers emerged, they would cause kinetic energy of the coalescing particles until a state of relative equilibrium was reached due to friction preventing further settling. How is this immune to Newtonian analysis?

Within your body there are nerve cells. I don't know much about them but I know they don't extend beyond your skin. If you were transmitting or receiving signals, it would have to happen through EM wave signals. What does get transmitted between individuals is sensory information. Audio, visual, and tactile as well as smell all transmit information. Electronic media such as TV, internet, telephones, etc. are used extensively to convey all sorts of complex messages, many of which operate on sub-conscious levels. Although these are sub-conscious, they're not that hard to discern if you analyze them. You just have to be careful not to read things into them because that can allow your mind to become hyperactive. This is when you hear about people watching TV and thinking that secret codes are being transmitted, etc. That doesn't happen as far as I know. The sub-conscious information communicated through media is more like the tone of voice of the newscasters suggesting things about what they're reporting. E.g. when newscasters report that Gaddafi hasn't stepped down from power yet, they use an annoyed tone that sub-consciously cues people to feel like everyone gets annoyed when people make unpopular decisions, etc. I suppose if you were really in tune with people's intonation and ways of expressing things, it might feel like they were sending telepathic messages to you. In reality, people do try to communicate a lot of information without saying things explicitly. You can relieve your brain of the burden of decoding all their implicit messages by simply asking them to say things more explicitly. Many times people will resist and get upset, but many will understand your discomfort with decoding their unspoken messages and attempt to relieve you of the burden by saying things outright.

Ethics need not be an illusion. What you're calling "officialism" is what I would call "institutional realism." "Institution" refers to patterns of behavior and knowledge that get recognized and viewed as independent realities, almost like physical objects. The calendar is an institutionalized quantization of the year into days. If you didn't focus on a specific moment of transition between days, months, seasons, or years, you would just gage the weather for trends. E.g. you might think it's getting colder and the days seem shorter so fall started or that the days were starting to get longer so it was winter. Without the institutionality of the calendar and clocks that count seconds, you could not count down to new years. Thus by doing the new year's countdown, people are real-izing ("reifying" is the correct term, I think) the time-measuring institutions as realities in and of themselves. Yes, I agree it creates all sorts of problem, including much obfuscation, that people think like this. It diverts them from more direct consciousness of the realities that the institutions are supposed to help them control better. It's great that the calendar has been refined to such precision, but the point of refining it was to track trans-annual phenomena, not count down the seconds until the new calendar starts.

Let's just assume for a moment that telepathy is possible. If it was, it would have to occur through some form of electromagnetic transmissions, right? E.g. radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, UV, or x-rays. Now, as far as I know, aluminum foil blocks out all types of electromagnetic waves except x-rays, which require lead. But unless you are receiving telepathic transmissions in the x-ray spectrum, covering your receiver in aluminum foil should block any transmissions. You would only have to figure out what part of your body was receiving the transmissions. If it was your head, you could just wear a proverbial "tin foil cap." If it was located somewhere else on your body, you might be able to figure out where by systematically covering a different part of your body each day in aluminum foil. You could wrap yourself from head to toe in foil but that might make it difficult to accomplish daily activities. If you just tried on leg one day and the other one the next, etc., you might eventually deduce a part of your body that could be blocked and stop the telepathy that way. If the transmissions turn out to be x-ray band, you might have to switch to lead, which would be heavy - but since xrays are carcinogenic, I would guess you'd be experiencing cancers by now from the transmissions so they're probably not x-rays if they're real at all.

Can you think of any way to verify or falsify, on the basis of existing knowledge, whether spacetime can extend infinitely beyond gravity-wells or whether it must necessarily curve in on itself? If it were something that were universally present before the big bang, I would say that it could extend infinitely regardless of matter/gravity; but since it is supposedly expanding along with the matter and energy of the universe, that leads me to believe that it cannot extend infinitely beyond the gravity wells it emanates from. But the universe was a relatively homogenous dispersion/cloud of matter, wouldn't it tend toward aggregation into increasingly distinct gravity-wells? I would not expect galaxies to gradually disperse into a more homogenous distribution. Even the EM wave-emission would keep tracing the curvature of spacetime as determined by gravitation, no?

I understand your point, but my issue has to do with whether spacetime can actually continue extending indefinitely beyond a gravity-well. Or would it curve back around to itself or another gravity-well. It seems to me that people are always treating spacetime as something that mass exists within when imo it seems more logical that matter and gravitation are part of the same phenomenon and spacetime is basically just gravitation itself. So although we observe spacetime to extend indefinitely outward and to be expanding, I wonder if this isn't the effect of the dispersion of matter. Put another way, if you analogize "the fabric of spacetime" (i.e. gravitation) to an expanding balloon, the balloon could rupture and the remaining fragments would collapse because they were no longer being stretched by the rest of the balloon. Do you mean potential energy getting expressed as kinetic energy as the settle deeper into the gravity well? I guess what I'm trying to say is that gravity pulls matter away other matter, which creates relative order and potential energy, which is somewhat insulated against entropy of friction by the vacuum that forms between the gravity-wells.

That's why I brought up gravity. I wonder if gravity ultimately serves as a "containment force" that holds the universe together or if it can expand indefinitely (e.g. as radiation) without its emergent force-relations causing it to re-condense (and stratify). I don't understand what you mean with this. You're saying that the particles have to move to stratify? But isn't the force of gravity sufficient to induce the motion that mobilizes the particles to stratify?

I would say that stratification occurs when substances of different densities don't dissolve into each other uniformly but rather organize into layers of relatively homogeneous density. Then wouldn't mixing between the layers/strata require energy (stirring up) to increase entropy? E.g. if a star would supernova and absorb surrounding planets before re-condensing, it would gain new fuel but if it would condense into multiple gravity-wells, it would maintain fuel-reserves in the form of planets. So it seems like to the extent gravity can stratify matter into separate layers or gravity-wells, it can be an anti-entropic force, though it can also result in entropy, presumably, when for example heavier particles created by fusion sink into the higher-density layers of the star to undergo further fusion. Sorry, btw, if I am perverting astrophysics here since I'm just guessing about how this process could work based on assumptions about gravity, pressure, and fusion.