lemur

That's too general to suggest any conclusions. The question is what was tried, how it failed, and why. Which means not only is reducing driving a goal but also reducing consumption (or finding more fuel-efficient goods to consume). Maybe it hasn't worked because of high labor costs and input costs. Local farming has gained popularity lately so maybe these farms are increasing their utilization of local inputs and otherwise finding ways of reducing their fuel-dependency so that there will be sufficient food available at affordable prices regardless of how much fuel prices drive up costs of more shipping-intensive foods. Why do people assume that the current economic culture is necessarily inflexible? My sense is that social conventions are more determinant than anything else in necessitating people to show up at an office 5 days/week. As for businesses that require physical presence, why shouldn't these be located close to the residential neighborhoods they serve and whose residents work there? Why can't businesses cluster around neighborhoods where service amenities are already clustered? Should we start a separate thread about trade-routes of NYC or do you just want to assume there's no way to provide sufficient food for New England without shipping it from southern California? Good examples. And good point about transit-choices being motivated by concerns other than conservation. The problem is that when gas is cheap, the cost of choosing an alternative to driving too often outweighs the benefit of doing so.

As I understand it, below the frostline the ground stays @50F year round. The advantage is cooling in the summer and some warmth in the winter. I suppose it depends on the method you're using to harness it though. My favorite is living in a cave, but I may be biased toward ancient traditions:)

I bet you couldn't produce an example of fundamental science that I couldn't contextualize with a potential application.

Agreed, but stating it as a problem of infrastructural determinism creates a chicken-egg problem of how to change infrastructure without people changing their habits first. In reality, it is usually possible to get out and walk/bike on existing sidewalks when there are no bike-lanes, but it's the fear of social stigma that deters people from actually doing it, along with the time it takes to walk/bike, etc. Regardless, I think if people really wanted to restructure their lives to walk/bike they could, though it does take a lot of effort. It would be nice if government would do more to promote it, but then they get complaints from all the people who see pedestrian infrastructure as a waste of resources needed for maintaining the preciously lucrative automotive infrastructure. They think, "how can we afford to walk when we need to work multiple jobs all over town to afford new cars for everyone in the family?"

I didn't mean gravity between the atoms/molecules in the chemical reaction. I meant gravity levels in the gravity well where the reaction is taking place. In other words, if you had a chemical reaction taking place among a collection of particles floating together far from any gravity well, they might be able to interact with lower levels of ionization than if they were in a gravity well. E.g. if you had a cup of some chemicals on the moon, the particles in the cup would be compressed against each other with a certain amount of force due to gravity that they wouldn't have compressing them if they were being compressed at a lower level of gravity. It's just a thought insofar as gravitational force builds up in a gravity well whereas it's practically irrelevant among individual atoms/molecules.

Often people overeat in search of comfort for various negative emotions. If embarrassment to go out and exercise because you're overweight is such an emotion, the effect could be a vicious cycle. When people are able to interrupt such a cycle and go for a walk/run/swim/bike-ride/etc., it may give them a sense of feeling good at temporarily breaking with the pattern of hiding and eating. So what I'm trying to say is that avoiding eating the sugar by finding the strength in exercise or something else that boosts ones sense of strength/independence may be more effective than driving the price up.

It's not that I don't worry about such things. In fact, social exclusion in various forms is a serious ethical concern of mine. However, I'm also aware that the desire to "fit in" (i.e. to be included) is the flip side of the coin of exclusion. Another way to put this is that when someone exudes fear of exclusion, it can trigger similar fear in others. If no one is big enough to express a comfort level that eases tensions, people will react to their fear of exclusion with various forms of aggression. These forms of aggression (often passive) are what ultimately result in exclusionary behavior because people basically want to exclude themselves from being excluded, which means distancing themselves from so-called "black sheep." So please don't make yourself or anyone else a "black-sheep." In all the posts I've read written by you, you have come across as a pretentious overeducated young intellectual (e.g. someone who is well-situated in a university education and social circles). I'm not saying "pretentious overeducated" to be derogatory, though I can see how it could sound like that. What I actually mean is that you basically precisely fit my expectations of what I expect to encounter on science forums. This is WHY I like participating in science forums, actually. I guess it's Nietzche in me that doesn't like to hear people couch their intellectualism and intelligence in false modest, play down their vocabularies, etc. This makes people seem more egoistic to me than when they are fully deploying their vocabulary power. Of course I don't like to read unnecessary jargon and wordiness more than anyone else - though I probably produce a lot of it as second-nature. Anyway, I'm rambling but the point is that the purpose of these intelligent forums is to be able to read and write in an intelligent way. So if you're doing either or both, which I think you do, why would anyone have a problem with your participation?

I'm not saying that cash4clunkers was a success or failure in any sense. I just mentioned it as part of the bigger picture of fossil fuel reforms that were supposed to be on the agenda since the previous period of high gas/oil prices. In general, I think average fuel-efficiency may have gone up some since SUVs were at the height of their popularity. I also think people have learned to control their driving habits to a degree that they weren't before. I think there may still be many businesses lagging as far as telecommuting and other alternatives to driving to work are concerned. It's a pain to move businesses and housing around, change jobs, coordinate schedules for carpooling, etc. So the moment gas dropped to $3/gallon, I think a lot of people just gave up on reforms. Still, many people didn't and I'm wondering how much progress those people have made and in what ways.

I don't think you should regard an online forum as a "place." I think you should just take it as a collection of user-posts to read and if a post interests you, you can respond or ask further question (i.e. engage and discuss). If people respond inappropriately, you should report it, imo. If you have something you are interested in, start a thread and see what response you get. Sometimes I start threads and get nothing and think this isn't a good forum to post that thread. But then a similar issue will come up in another thread and I'll get a lot out of the discussion. As for your level of professional/academic achievement, I don't think that matters (although it always will to you - maybe). Imo, online discussions are a good way for people to engage in interactive intellectual the same way they would by interacting with other students and teachers in a school setting. Anyone who has interacted intellectually in higher education should tell you that the level of exchanges in online forums like this one is of comparable quality. The exception might be for rigorous technical procedures that have to be learned through more tedious practice and application than by conversational exchange. Still, you could always find a (used) textbook and/or online materials, study those, and post questions where clarification is needed. Needless to say, I don't think people should worry about "fitting in" and other issues of social inclusion/exclusion. Although some personal bickering can take place, the internet has always been heralded as a medium that allows people to escape physical and social constraints to engaging in meaningful exchanges.

You think driving up the price of sugar and corn-syrup by making it more scarce would decrease obesity? I think obesity has more to do with patterns of transit and physical activity. Replace driving with pedestrianism and biking for everyday transit and how many of those people would be obese? Likewise, what would it do for cardiovascular health, digestive health, etc.? Maybe I'm making exercise into a panacea but if anything is, I think it would be exercise (along with sunshine and fresh air maybe).

Generally, no. But there was cash4clunkers that supposedly scrapped large numbers of older inefficient vehicles and promoted more fuel efficient ones as a replacement. Likewise, there has been increased pedestrian/bicycle infrastructure built and biking and walking seem to be gaining popularity increasingly. Also, because consciousness of fuel-dependency has remained high since the previous spikes, I think people have continuously thought about ways to reduce their personal/family dependence on fuel, but some of this has been dissipated as pie-in-the-sky dreams of electric cars, trains, hydrogen/biofuel, etc. Some people have blown extra insulation into their attics and installed wood-stoves or coal-stoves maybe, considering there were subsidies to stimulate that. I can't think of anything else, but that's why I posted this thread - to find out if other people know of any measures that have been taken or can be to mitigate price-spiking.

There is nothing fair about subjugating everyone to the same corporate hierarchies. Those corporate systems are in themselves unfair systems of distributing resources and responsibilities/labor. By redistributing wealth and/or income, all you do is increase corporate revenues, which makes it possible to increase their power to create the kinds of inequalities that they do. If you wanted to increase equality, the best way to do so would be to have people who make more money simply conserve instead of spending it. It doesn't matter how much or little money a person makes if they are living about the same as other people with less income/wealth. Then, if you really wanted to make economics fairer, you would try to integrate different jobs some so that people would have more diverse responsibilities, e.g. managers do some floor work, cleaning, etc. and floor workers, cleaners, etc. gain some managerial responsibilities.

That is why a drop of undissolved dye at the bottom of a glass of water will leech upward through the water, no, even if its density is greater than or equal to the water, right? I guess another way to look at it would be to say that gravity is the force of attraction that remains between electrostatic systems after they have organized to the point of maximum entropy and thus charge-neutrality. Still, there must be SOME level of electrostatic attraction that is weaker than gravity in some situation, no? Also, it raises the question of what happens to chemical reactions in stronger gravity fields. Does gravity create a threshold of electrochemical reactivity by maintaining pressure/heat/energy levels above that which would allow weaker chemical bonds to form? Maybe I'm diverging too much from the thread topic with that, though.

You can't, actually. Contrary to Nietzsche, it is impossible to transcend good and evil. Joy and sorrow are going to be experienced in one form or another. Neutrality is a secondary emotion. You can be neutral about being happy, sad, or neutral but you can't totally replace happiness and sadness with neutrality. If you did, you would be either happy or sad about just being neutral, I think. Of course, this is my opinion based on personal introspection. Maybe someone else will post that they're completely neutral about being neutral and they experience no other feelings at all in any way. I would suspect them of lying or repressing true emotions, though.

Nice picture, thanks. What is striking to me is that while the intermolecular interactions may be weaker than chemical bonding, they are of a more similar nature than I previously thought. Basically, it sounds like molecules in solutions bond together the way that atoms bond to form a molecule. Apparently, each time bonding occurs at any level, some residual dis-equilibrium is created that results in further bonding potential. The parallels with gravitational potential are really interesting. It's like just as objects fall from positions of higher potential to lower positions within a gravity well, atoms and then molecules fall into each other's electrostatic fields in an entropic process. Does this mean, for example, that some (small amount of) heat is generated when substances dissolve into a solution?

As I recall, the last time gas prices were rising there came a point (@$4/gallon) where media sources reported as the breaking point where people were willing to make drastic changes to their daily practices, seek more fuel-efficient vehicles, etc. instead of just accepting persistent price increases passively. As fuel prices subsequently decreased (to @$3), it seemed like people/businesses were going to make many reforms to prepare for the possibility that prices would go up again. So, what do you think? Have people/businesses developed coping strategies that make them less dependent on fuel or did people expect the government to fix it all and avoid making any adjustments at the individual and local levels?

Well, based on the logic of the dipole-dipole attraction through imbalanced distribution of charge between the hydrogens and oxygens in the water molecule, I would guess that water would do a poorer job dissolving molecules with a similar configuration of strong-positive + weak-negative charge, because the positives would repel each other. Are there, on the other hand, molecules with strong negative charge and a weak positive pole that dissolve better in water and worse in each other?

So the relatively high strength of the oxygen in the water molecule results in concentration of positive charge which draws electrons away from the hydrogens somewhat and causes the oxygen side of the molecule to bond intermolecularly with other water molecules through opposite-charge attraction with the hydrogens in those molecules. So the water molecules are electrostatically attracted to each other because their charge is not homogenous throughout the molecule, which makes them behave almost like a magnet (or maybe it would make more sense to compare it to a pair of ions, one negative and one positive). So is this also what causes some kinds of molecules to dissolve in some solvents and not in others? For example, when salt or alcohol dissolves in water, is this due to dipole-dipole attraction between the different molecules? Does oil resist mixing with water because it doesn't have dipole attraction? And the amount of dipole-dipole attraction differs according to the relative weights and structure of the atoms in the molecules along with the distribution of electrons in the specific types of bonds for the molecule, etc.? This is very interesting stuff, btw. I've always thought of chemistry as arbitrary formulas and rules, but this is starting to make it seem like atomic mechanics at the inter-atomic level.

Why don't you ever take the long-term effects and price-restructuring that would result into account? If you gave homeless people $100,000 each, they would start consuming more presumably, right? This would result in, say, more revenue for local fast-food restaurants. That revenue would be distributed more to the owner of the franchise and to the corporate suppliers than to the restaurant employees, correct? Then, some more jobs might be created due to increased business, but they would be minimum-wage jobs, right? In the mean time, the homeless person with $100,000 isn't going to want to take the job in fast food until their $100k runs out, right? So who is going to take those fast food jobs if money gets redistributed from the rich to the poor? The answer is that they're going to raise the price of fast food until enough revenue is available to raise wages to levels that people are willing to take the job. However, if the price of fast food increases along with the wages to produce it, all that happened was inflation. The basic economic relations remain that impoverish some people to motivate them to take undesirably (relatively) low paying jobs. So what did you solve by redistributing the money from the rich to the poor?

Why can't you have it all?

I don't really know much about the concept of "multiverse," but it occurred to me that this term could be used to refer to the experience of meeting other people that exhibit various degrees of identifiable resemblance to oneself and ones own experiences. So, for example, you may have begun with pre-med in your early university years and switched to chemistry. Then, you might run into a doctor later on in life who shares other aspects of your pre-chemistry history. I.e. It could be as if you were running into a version of yourself that you branched off from in choosing to shift from pre-med to chemistry. 1) Does this at all resemble the concept of a "multiverse?" 2) Could people social-psychologically identify with others as versions of themselves that variously diverged and converged in different ways during their personal development processes? I.e. are people living in a multiverse of potential versions of themselves, subjectively, as a result of interpreting others in terms of recognizable aspects of their own lives and knowledge/culture?

US politics consistently attempt to thwart dependence on the wealthy by reducing the need to tax them to achieve sufficient public amenities without them. Likewise, many US citizens attempt to build and/or maintain their own homesteads with as little dependency on the rich as possible. The problem is that the wealthy attempt to invest their wealth in ways that create such dependencies so that they can exploit these for the purpose of increasing their wealth. The question, however, is whether this is as detrimental to other people and natural resources as the middle class's lifestyle and consumption patterns, since their numbers are far greater than that of very wealthy people. In fact, more so than being concerned about authoritarian control by a super-wealthy elite, I would be concerned about the inability to reform middle class culture, since these people have the power of normalcy to shield them against change. All any middle-class individual has to say to avoid change is to orient their behavior toward social conformity with other middle-class people. This way, this class can resist change just be deferring to the authority of "the majority" of people besides themselves. The main power the super-wealthy seem to have is to avoid the middle-class "rat race" and enjoy higher levels of consumption relative to average middle-class consumption. The main reason they are targeted so much is because 1) people are jealous and 2) there is a false belief that if their wealth was re-distributed it could somehow be transformed into significantly higher standards of living for everyone else. The simple fact is that the masses can only get what they produce. Wealth does not directly produce welfare, it buys it from others. So the level of welfare enjoyed by the minority of people who are very rich would spread too thin when distributed among everyone else.

Typically, those who criticize such science for being "out of touch" are just concerned about money. If you tell them that your research on the flagellated bacterium will lead to patentable engineer-able bacteria for performing various bio-medical interventions, they will be impressed because they think medical technology costs a lot and generates a lot of money. Then, if you tell them that the research will enable poor people living near the Amazon to use naturally-abundant bacteria to cure parasite-infections, people will say it's pointless research because they don't care about people living near the Amazon unless there's money in it. However, when you say that these same people who have no money have diets that cause cancers to shrink after they form, and studying the bacteria that cure the parasites will make it possible to develop cancer treatments, they will once again see the research as worthwhile. Capitalism has the nasty side effect for many people of causing them to divide the world into profitable vs. worthless aspects, when in fact science generally offers insights into numerous potential practical applications if people would be creative enough to come up with engineering applications for them.

The problem I think you run into with this is that there's some subjectivity involved in what is obvious to whom based on what they know and don't know. It's true that things that can be googled don't necessarily need to be asked, but sometimes wiki or other pages aren't clear and it helps people to seek clarification. I don't think it would be fun to have a "police state forum" where posts are constantly being censored or criticized for various aesthetic reasons. Better, imo, to ignore posts that don't interest you and respond to ones you find interesting. Maybe there should be a +/- rating system for threads like there are for individual posts within a thread.

Ok, but do you have a simple way of explaining how this works at the level of (sub)atomic forces?