lemur

If you want to be truly empirically rigorous, you have to regard every piece of historical writing as itself an historical artifact crafted by the writer. From there you can attempt to discern clues to actual events that may or may not have actually occurred. You have to ask whether the writer of the text would have had direct access to empirically observe the events described in the text, and if not, what basis would s/he have had for writing what they did. If you take such critical rigor very seriously, you can even get to the point of criticizing the very descriptive language used by (macro)historians. After all, how can they report the general events and outcomes of some macro-event like a war or extended time period as a direct witness of empirical events. They only have access to second-hand reports, and even then they have to synthesize those reports into coherent narratives. So all historiography is ultimately highly-processed derivatives of long-forgotten empirical events. By "empirical events," btw, I mean the empirical interactions between the history-writer and her/his sources, since the empirical experiences of those sources is already lost in the transmission of information from them to the writer. So the best you can really do with ANY historical text is to critically reason about the claims made in the text. You will never be able to establish their basis in fact because the facts are history, so to speak. All you can ask is why the writer may have written what they wrote and what does that say about the writer and the social and material context(s) of that person's life.

Yet, if you compare the level of debt of these households to others among the global poor, who has more debt to pay off? Technically, debt is less possible for the poor because their credit would be worse, allowing them to borrow less. However, drowning in debt is maybe worse than sustainable poverty where you don't get much but you are able to make due with what you get. Also, these households that have TV, satellite/cable, internet, car(s), gas-money, etc. may be spending a lot on these things but they may at the same time be especially lacking in the ability to live-well without them. If you take a random developing-economy family and provide them with a source of clean water and decent food supply, many would live healthier and happier than a developed-economy poor person receiving the same basic necessities but losing their means of transit and media access/entertainment. So there is clearly some issues of dependency in addition to the problem of material deprivation. Part of it may be social/emotional deprivation that drives media-dependencies in the developed-economies.

I think there is generally a certain propaganda approach to authoritarian power that involves asserting non-interference between "autonomous sovereign nations." Hegemonic control involves first and foremost discouraging the will to resistance. So anyone who would resist the assertion of sovereign autonomy through collective boundary-setting is automatically labelled an aggressor. Then, of course, it makes sense to define one nation as the greatest superpower and simultaneously the most aggressive imperialist, because doing so motivates the strongest resistance to national-penetration, which is of course the main hegemonic goal for national sovereignty. The best offense is a strong defense, at least within the ideology of motivating national resistance to power that doesn't submit to the will to autonomous national sovereignty. If you're comparing nations in terms of reputation, I would say you're completely caught up in this ideology of national unity. In reality, national identities are mainly used to promote psychological associations between relatively independent agents. Yes, a good deal of energy gets spent on coordinating such agents to pursue global and local goals in terms of common collective interest, but in reality interests conflict whether they are labelled as national commonality or not. It's far easier, imo, to focus on specific political/economic interests and how these interact on the global stage. If you're really interested in the role of nationalism, you can analyze how national-identity gets used to mobilize support for various global interests. What is occupation in the context of nuclear capability? The US has occupied every individual globally since 1945 insofar as none are immune from nuclear or other bombardment. No controller of nuclear weapons can ever de-occupy anyone in range of their weapons except insofar as people release the terror from their hearts, which many people have. Beyond that, national sovereignty is an anachronism of the pre-nuclear era. In other words, they want the nukes on their side? By "not getting their democracy," do you mean that their mean level of wealth doesn't increase? That seems to be the main interest, as I understand it. What do you mean?

Personally, I dislike the culture of whispering about sex. People subdue their voices to tell some secret about who is doing it with whom in a way that expresses that what's going on isn't quite kosher but they like the intrigue. If they would actively reject sexual taboos or actively criticize the behavior, they would talk openly about sex. If they would legitimately want to keep it secret, they would remain silent instead of whispering. Yet there seems to be some special pleasure in whispering. Whispering generates intrigue and tension. It suggests manageable danger, maybe. It breaks taboos without rejecting them outright. Why aren't people more uncomfortable with the hypocrisy inherent in it, though? Or do people just enjoy spreading intrigue and scandal simultaneously?

Whatever the level of ignorance, the fact is that there exists connectivity and responsibility has to be taken for the connection(s). Why is global interaction always framed as "interference" when multiple national identities are involved? Despite attempts at maintaining national-separation, isn't the fundamental reality at least since colonialism that the world is a global village (not to say a peaceful one by any means). Is Egypt an exceptional case that should be especially shielded from global interaction? If so, why?

So far so good, though I would question how far minorities should be able to take the logic of protection because that can lead to authoritarian-type mandates. I see the critical factor in democracy checking and balancing of power through other power. Minorities check majority and vice versa, and groupism ultimately gets checked by individualism, though the reverse wouldn't seem too democratic to me. I suppose if you had individuals worshiping certain individuals for their individuality, groupism could function as a check/balance for such people's authoritarian worship of individual heads of state, celebrities, etc. The second part, regarding intrinsic power, is more of a statement of fact than an ideal. No form of social power can function without consent of the governed. Even forceful coercion works by demanding consent by threat. Yes, you can physically manipulate people in certain ways but none of them have a broad spectrum of effects. You can lead a horse to water (by force) but you can't make it drink, for example. Consent of the governed also must not be treated as an absolute criteria because that would facilitate authoritarian abuses of freedom. E.g. if someone refuses to stand trial for killing, for example, they have to be tried and jailed by force if necessary to prevent them from exercising authoritarian power over life and death. Regarding the OP: democracy is a concept that can be appropriated for authoritarian purposes like any other. Using democracy as an impetus to pursue authoritarian power is as easy as using the idea of freedom to manipulate people into indenturing themselves to others. Still, when people unconditionally reject the idea of struggling/fighting/warring for democracy, that also facilitates a form of pacifist authoritarianism. In other words, when anything is an unconditional imperative, it results in totalitarian policy. E.g. if war is an absolute taboo, any and all provocations and ethical abuses can be procured without response because the response would entail breaking the taboo. It would be like if there was freedom of speech but the death penalty for battery, people could harass and provoke each other to no end if only to seduce a violent response from their victim, which in turn would result in the death-penalty for that person. So you have to have some check/balance for every form of power, including war and terrorism. Without it, unchecked/unbalanced exercises of power would become authoritarian, I think.

Not only that but think about how much less infrastructure they require than any form of surface transit except ships/boats. When you talk about the pollution and fuel usage of passenger jets, just think about how much pollution and fuel-usage is the result of road and highway building or building and maintaining rails for trains. What about tires? How many tires would get used if everyone in a passenger flight travelled the same distance by car or bus? In fact, I can't think of any aspect of air-transit that is less green than surface-transit. Compare this with sitting in any other vehicle for the same period of time. True you can stop and get out for a while when you're on the ground. If you don't like the food, why don't you bring a bag lunch or take-out? Also, I wonder why no one has come out with sleeper-aircraft that fly at night. People could sleep in stacked drawers, which would fit far more people into the plane. I guess the problem would be evacuation in case of emergency. I think people get burnt out on flying because they have to do it so much. It ruins the fun of it to do it so much. Maybe telecommuting and other virtual meetings and work-interactions will replace business travel and re-open the industry for (occasional) leisure travel.

What do you mean by "appreciable gravity?" Wouldn't any amount of gravity generate SOME amount of heat, no matter how small? Also, how much energy would be imparted to a meteoroid of say, 1 cubic meter with a perfectly smooth surface (to simplify things). Let's say it is a cube actually, so 6m^2. Is the background radiation you speak of enough to keep this cubic meter of iron at 2.7K? If so, what about something denser, like gold? Or would it radiate exactly as much energy out as it receives, simply as a matter of entropy to equilibrium?

Could defining phases of matter be as simple as comparing momentum to binding force in a particular situation? If momentum is greater than binding force, the particle fragments into smaller pieces, right? Or it overcomes whatever force causes it to cling to its neighbors in some way. So if solidity can be fragmented into liquidity and condensation of liquid can be overcome to gasify the particles, and the electrons can be fragmented to ionize or plasma-fy them, why wouldn't it be logical that the nuclei can further be destabilized to the point of fragmentation? I don't know why this would be called a quantum phase, though. Isn't all matter in a quantum state insofar as it all consists of electrons whose energy levels vary in fixed amounts/quanta in that the photons they emit or absorb can only carry energy in such fixed amounts? I suppose if EM energy quanta define electrons and photons, though, why shouldn't they also define any particulate fragmentation at any sub-atomic level, right?

So what does this mean for an iron meteoroid traveling for a long period through intergalactic space (assuming this can/would happen). The meteoroid would radiate until it reached thermal equilibrium with the radiation it was receiving from distant galaxies. Then would parts of it be at absolute zero relative to the parts that were absorbing and conducting energy from the distant starlight? Then would you measure its temperature as a gradation from its surface to absolute zero, or assign it a mean temperature and claim absolute zero can never truly be reached? Actually, I wonder if the gravity and other forces that hold the atoms of the meteoroid together would also result in energy that would also result in some degree of heat. So maybe absolute zero isn't achievable because there is no situation in which particles are completely devoid of interactive force?

This is generally what I would assume and expect from women, but it also seems that sometimes some women dislike having their sexuality ignored or neutralized. E.g. they may want or expect you to act gracious because they are wearing an elegant dress or flirtatious because they are dressed sexy. It's as if they are trying to set the mood with their appearance and if you don't tune into the mood they're trying to create/express, they aren't happy about it. But why shouldn't be able to ignore someone else's signals and just treat them as a person without disappointing them? It's like women want to be the ones to control when they can be feminine and when they should be treated gender neutrally? Does that mean men should be able to control when women submit to them for their masculinity and when women simply treat them as equals/peers/colleagues? No kidding, and many of "us visually unstimulating" men should maybe not be cooperating sexually with women who are attracted to us (i.e. using us) for other things. If women don't like being used for physical attraction, why should men want to be used for other characteristics? Yes, and it is interesting to delve into the functions of aesthetics. But I also find it interesting that when you focus on something in terms of aesthetics, it can distract from functional approaches that ignore how something looks/appears in favor of what it does. Generally, I think aesthetics results in an exchange mentality instead of a mentality that focuses on action/labor/etc. "Beholding things" replaces "doing things" and even active-activities become more about the style or other aesthetic qualities of performing the activity instead of about accomplishing the goal of that activity. There are numerous problems that come with an aesthetic approach instead of a functional one.

That's a good point, but then what happens to the energy put into accelerating the object once more energy is added to it to decelerate it? That energy has to be conserved so it has to go somewhere. When the object accelerates, the added energy is expressed as speed/momentum. So when it decelerates, you're basically saying that this is acceleration from the opposite direction as it accelerated (since it is at rest relative to itself). But since speed has to be measured relative to some other point, changes in momentum relative to that point constitute storing or releasing of energy, no? This is confusing because motion is typically identified as kinetic energy, not potential, but doesn't momentum store energy that is released upon collision with another object? So, if an object is collides with another at 0.98C, wouldn't the impact transfer more energy than at 0.95C according to how much energy was required to accelerate it from 0.95C to 0.98C? Isn't this like saying that there's no event that can occur in a car traveling 100mph that wouldn't occur if the car was parked? That would be true as long as the rest frame of the car doesn't interact with the rest-frames of any other cars, trees, etc. but if it did, the events inside the car would suddenly reflect the energy of the frame relative to the frame it's running into (or which is running into it, if you prefer to look at it that way)? But I think you're actually saying the same thing I'm saying with kinetic energy in one frame existing as potential energy within the rest-frame of the object. Now my question is whether this has any relationship to energy levels of atomic electrons. I.e. do they accelerate to move away from the nucleus and by doing so acquire a type of positional potential energy? Does that also explain how ionization can eventually occur and why ions can be used to store electrical energy in a battery? Or am I confounding things with flawed basic assumptions?

So temperature is a frame-dependent concept, thus absolute zero could only be absolute relative to the frame being considered. So two atoms at ground-state traveling parallel to each other in the same geodesic path could have a temperature of absolute zero relative to each other within the time-frame prior to any collisions with other particles in their path? I guess that is an abstract situation, though, which distracts from your valid point that temperature would measure the average kinetic energy of a system of interacting particles, not the behavior of any single or subset of those particles. Although, would it be possible to say that a certain percentage of an object, e.g. a meteoroid, could be at absolute zero as its heat migrates around its atoms? I.e. is there any validity in talking about patterns of heat-transfer within an object in terms of temperature differentials? I.e. can temperature refer to various parts of an object/system or must the system be unified by some natural logic?

I'm no expert but you could imagine numerous bodily processes that require energy (measured in calories), from cognitive-emotional activity to muscle activity to hormone production. Surely there are many, but you should think carefully before implementing any. If you take steroids to increase your muscle mass and burn more calories that way, you could experience negative side-effects of that. If you take amphetamines and accelerate your metabolism that way, you could upset your nervous system's normal functioning. Anything you ingest can have short-term and/or long-term side-effects. I am amazed every time I see some lawsuit advertised on TV about a drug that I remember gaining popularity. Then I always think how glad I am not to be suffering that problem instead of being on the phone to get my payoff. I'm sure some people think the opposite, though, and look for experimental drugs to take as a way to gamble on a future payoff if the drug turns out to be detrimental. Personally, I don't think your health is worth a lump of money.

Meaning you are insincere? Or you have some other reason for expressing ideas you disagree with? Why aren't you explicitly critical then? Who said anything about comparing the value of you acts with anyone else's, let alone God? Isn't that egoism, the original sin of Satan? What do you interpret the relevance of any of this to be? Imo, all sinners sin and we're all sinners. The issue is that sin has to be redeemed instead of met with shame. The logic of Jesus dying for sins has a double meaning, imo. 1) Jesus was persecuted and killed by human sinners sinning against him and 2) he accepted his personal sacrifice without resentment as a means to end the viscous cycle of revenge. I don't see "the lake of fire" as a punishment to be averted through acceptance of Jesus. I see acceptance of Jesus' message as itself therapeutic within a life of sin. I.e. Your life of sin is headed for misery and through comprehension of the story of Jesus, you can redeem yourself from that misery, which would nevertheless not be irreversible. Good point, but that's why I brought it up as an implicit issue. I.e. can a weak soul be tempted? By one definition, a weak soul would be weak precisely because it is especially susceptible to temptation. But what I mean by a "weak soul" is one that is simply relatively ambiguous to temptation or anything else. It would be like someone on a powerful anti-manic-depression cocktail who is excessively level and doesn't struggle much if any in any direction. What would the role of such people be in "the war of Armageddon?" Do you assume that your interpretation of the bible is anything less that "worldly judgment?" I tend to think of any application of scripture by living humans as "worldly" but maybe I'm overextending the term.

What kind of harshness is this? Why can't everyone be a sinner and still have their righteous acts count toward their redemption from evil? Why can't people become stronger souls through the trials of temptation and resistance (or temptation and succumbing)? What does any of this have to do with the social status of the pope or how someone's "spiritual death" is viewed by others? Ultimately it comes down to each individual's direct relationship with God, or not? What do worldly judgements ultimately have to do with God's judgement?

Typically I think of resource conservation and profiteers as being opposed to one another. After all, more commerce logically results in more material consumption, which entails more resource utilization. However, it just occurred to me that both positions are oddly related to one another in a fundamental way. I.e. both rely on scarcity as a basis for valuation of their respective values. So while conservationists are concerned with using less resources to avoid running out of them, profiteers seek to drive up the prices of the same resources and the products that are dependent on them to make more money, which is achieved by creating artificial (speculative) scarcity. So are these two seeming opponents in fact on the same team? And if so, who is their opponent? People who want to consume more for less? What about people who want to consume less for less and allow population to grow as a result?

How can anything have zero kinetic energy when everything travels along geodesics that are stationary in themselves and have a velocity relative to anything they are framed together with? Still, in the period while they are waiting to collide with something else, they could be relatively motionless within their own inertial frame, or not?

Ok, but any transmission, automatic or manual, adds weight and mechanical complexity. Assuming acceleration and top speed are not issues (only efficiency), why not design a vehicle with a top speed of @40mph and accelerate it using auxiliary power, e.g. pedaling (think Flintstones)? It would basically be a bicycle with long-distance capability by engaging the motor at @20 (top human-powered speed, I think). I think this would involve all horsepower and no torque, and require maybe 10-20hp for a 500-1000lb vehicle, no? Such a vehicle could be handy for moving large amounts of vegetables around town in some extreme future devoid of all but minimal fuel availability.

As I have said in this thread, I think theological "theory" can be conceptualized in terms of philosophical logics/concepts. So, for example, I think you can apply the logic of sin to moral relativism, e.g. by treating what an individual experiences as sin through shame as "thus sin." If you view God and morality as subjective concepts, you can interpret "God" as that "voice" inside people that tells them things are right or wrong, i.e. as conscience (among other things perhaps). So when you say your personal moral system is incompatible with "that of God," I would be tempted to say from a relativistic point of view that you have simply interpreted God for yourself, which is (again from a relativist point of view) not that different from what Moses or anyone else does when interpreting the word of God. Maybe you are just afraid to state explicitly that you interpreted the word of God for yourself directly in the same sense as Moses and other prophets because you don't want to have the responsibility of being viewed as a prophet. Either way, the point is that you can think of sin and God and subjectively relative and thus interpret the logics of scriptural sin and its consequences as transposable. Certainly this is what every innovative theologist from Martin Luther to David Koresh has done. It's just risky to do so openly, because people still get persecuted for religious radicalism. So maybe you're better off calling your beliefs "incompatible with that of God." Back to the psychology of sin: I don't think sin results in spiritual death (and/or rebirth) unless people have true faith in its sinfulness. So if you truly experience something others call sinful as non-sinful, then why/how would you ever experience spiritual death/rebirth? I think that's a natural consequence of having had faith in the ideology. Once you learn the concept of endless forgiveness, you can basically transgress whatever boundaries to righteousness you set for yourself and always repent and accept forgiveness in order to move on to the redemption phase. Human spirits are a work in progress, I would say. The problem comes when you stop believing in the legitimacy of the process; because once you lose faith in your own forgive-ability, you have basically "blasphemed the Holy Spirit" in the sense of no longer having faith in the active process of forgiveness/redemption, so you would cease to be released from shameful feelings because you basically lost faith in forgiveness/salvation. This stuff has almost direct philosophical-psychological effects, imo, so I'm just interpreting the logic of the concepts as I see it. So it is also logical that if you would "lose true belief" that you would no longer be saved because you would no longer have faith in your own salvation. I.e. you would be susceptible to shame and thus spiritual death, which according to Christianity would bring you to rebirth anyway, but that would be more painful than simply maintaining faith in your own salvation. In other words, I'm thinking this re-birth can be interpreted as occurring as often as you lose faith in (your own) salvation.

How can atom can get arbitrarily close to absolute zero if energy is quantized? Isn't there some point where an atom emits its last photon and is done? If not, why would the "last drop" not get emitted at some point?

Since changes in a gravity field supposedly move at the speed of light, I am wondering if the same is true for changes in a (static) magnetic field (e.g. a bar magnet). First, do such magnetic fields change/ripple under any circumstances and, if so, so the "ripples" move at C. If so, are these "ripples" EM waves or something else? If not, why don't/wouldn't magnetic fields change/ripple in the sense that gravity fields are supposed to be able to?

As I understand it, the speed of light can be infinitely approached but doing so requires enormous amounts of energy-input for relatively little speed-gains. So, to give a clear but surely inaccurate example, accelerating from 0.85C to 0.95C may require less energy than acceleration from 0.95C to 0.98C (apologies if this isn't accurate examples, but you get my point). So my question is when something is accelerating at relativistic speed with decreasing speed-gain, doesn't the energy still have to be conserved? So does that energy get released as the particle or object decelerates a relatively small amount from near-C speed? If so, is or could this be related to the changing energy-levels of electrons as they absorb and emit photons, since relatively large amounts of energy could be stored as relatively small increments of speed-change, which could be so small that they become quantized? I admit this is a grand conclusion to stretch from my initial question, and if necessary I am happy to repost in speculations - though I am still interested in the application of established knowledge to this question of energy-storage in relativistic speed-increases.

So you're saying that the devil would want to prevent any soul possible from nearing God, no matter how weak. So maybe he would do this by coming up with ways to sustain that weakness? Maybe material spoils would accomplish this by causing weak souls to avert becoming stronger through facing discomfort. Still, I don't know if that would be possible considering that material comfort seems to always increase sensitivity to minor forms of discomfort, which causes people to express spiritual strength in their whining, if nothing else. I suppose if the devil could ensure an endless supply of material or other consolation that would defer spiritual-strengthening, people could be kept consistently weak until death (maybe this is why it says somewhere in the bible that it's harder for a rich person to get to heaven than . . .) Interesting. This is like the evolutionary logic of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger," but in terms of growing spiritual strength. You may have just unified creationism and social-darwinism. That also works according to the theology in question, but in Christian terms it's dealt with I think by the ultimate sacrifice of Christ as the only true son of God. So, according to that logic, anyone who rises through a church system's ranks to become tempted in the sense of Lucifer was tempted by his own beauty as God's greatest servant, still must accept forgiveness and rebirth through acceptance of Christ's death as their salvation. So maybe the highest zealots are the closest to the devil, but they would also be the most poised to receive God's forgiveness and redeem themselves through good-deeds, at least in Christianity I think. I find the concept of purgatory interesting; but I think you can see it as partial heaven and partial hell. So maybe all souls are in an eternal purgatory where they infinitely approach heaven and/or hell alternately depending on their actions, but never ultimately reach either completely or permanently.

But do ALL the atoms in a lump of intergalactic iron maintain an energy level above 0k, or do some drop to absolute zero while waiting for the energy from others to circulate around to them? I.e. can that entire lump of iron never reach absolute zero? I suppose there's always light hitting it from surrounding galaxies, but can't that amount of energy at least be so little that SOME of the atoms become completely energy-less? edit: darnit, I have been trying not to go too far off topic and I'm afraid I've done it again. Should this thread be split to one about energetic behavior near absolute zero?