lemur

I think this question should be simplified to what is the lowest possible speed that people can land on a ski-slope from an aircraft without a parachute. Then the question should go to a skiier, snowboarder, or someone with experience in wintersports to ask how dangerous it would be to ski/sled/slide at that speed. Then the operative question would become how dangerous it would be to JUMP at that speed, as jumping requires landing. Sorry for circumventing the physics here but I think this question would be more effectively answered in terms of practical approximations/comparisons based on comparable vectors/speeds of landing.

I've heard this logic regarding both metabolism and economics. It makes sense to me in terms of a fire, which consumes more as it burns hotter and consumes far less as it burns colder. I don't think the economics analogy works as well, at least not in the sense of a high-spending economy being more efficient because unlike a healthy individual with coordinated organ systems, the global economy consists of multiple individuals engaged in a variety of local and trans-local interdependencies. So while these interdependencies can increase efficiency of resource-usage in some ways, they can also result in unnecessary resource-expenditures in others. And unlike an individual with essentially limitless food-resources, the global economy has to deal with various forms of scarcity. If you were actually starving for lack of food, you probably wouldn't want to cycle 15 miles/day. Instead you'd probably be working on sitting still and burning as few calories as possible to fast in a way that would lead to health-problems as slowly as possible. You'd be happy with your extra weight/body-fat because it would be extra time on your countdown to starvation.

I have heard this answered in terms of experimental/observational results confirming the exact number, but I still don't understand how it was measured. Logically, it makes sense to me that if light has mass, nothing with mass could travel as fast because mass requires energy to change speed. Also it is logical that, without mass, light would not change speed because it doesn't have any mass/inertia to cause it to resist changes in speed. Then, if light has a fixed speed limit, it makes logical sense that more distant objects take longer to reach than closer ones. I would think you would have to measure the actual speed by triangulating light-events in some way, but I don't know how that would be possible from just Earth if you were trying to measure the speed of light across interplanetary or larger distances. Maybe someone else can explain exactly how light speed is empirically measured over interplanetary distances, if at all (or why it's unnecessary).

How can at atom or multiple atoms have energy > 0 and not emit ANY radiation? Doesn't energy ALWAYS express itself one way or the other. Maybe the question is what continues longer, particle vibration/momentum-tranfer or EM emission. Transfer makes more sense because every particle is always in motion to something else, so it could be completely cold and still eventually collide with something else and raise its energy-level as a result.

If someone takes very good care of their things in a way that causes them to last longer and require less maintenance, they end up spending less money for repairs and maintenance, which could reduce GDP growth. However, this lack of growth is compensated insofar as less money is needed to repair/replace well cared-for things. The problem, imo, is that someone who takes good care to live efficiently ends up putting a strain on those that live less efficiently but reducing the GDP-growth they need to pay for their low-efficiency lifestyles. On the other hand, bailouts and other redistribution that prevent bankruptcy of inefficient consumers and businesses unduly burden those who take the effort of consuming and managing businesses efficiently. So, generally, yes I think it does BUT no, I don't think this equates it with other GDP-killers such as, say, mass-death. This is because efficiency increases utility of existing productivity whereas mass-death, inefficient production resulting in lower productivity, etc. lower GDP while ALSO lowering utility. In other words, their is no economic metric for utility because it is so situational; whereas GDP can be measured in units of currency transfer. If utility per unit GDP-growth were measured, some economic situations with low revenue or GDP would be doing better than some with high revenue or GDP just because they are getting more out of the growth they have.

Right, but even if you had a piece of iron at 1K in deep-space, wouldn't it emit SOME amount of radiation, although it would be ultra-low frequency and presumably very intermittent for various atoms?

Generally I would agree with the post about trying to bike uphill without gears. However, if you were wanting to build an extremely light, high-efficiency car I could imagine building it with an engine and clutch but no gear box to save weight. That way, you could just have the engine tuned to optimum efficiency and sacrifice acceleration. You could release the clutch slowly enough to prevent the engine from stalling and then slowly reach target speed and then avoid braking, e.g. highway travel. This also seems like a good idea for rail transit, though I know nothing about how such vehicles accelerate and manage power in terms of gearing.

I was also under the impression that electron motion is always responsible for black-body emissions, even at increasingly lower temperatures. I had the idea that it was just a question of energy-level probability in a bell-curve. I.e. even if the vast majority of electrons in a substance are cold (i.e. at their lowest and most stable state), there might still be a small minority that have still retained a higher energy-level, which could drop and emit a photon. I always have to warn that I could be wrong though, because as hard as I try to learn this stuff, there's always some gap for me between the explanation I read and my intuitive understanding, which makes me prone to making mistakes when relaying what I have learned to others, I think.

Plus, the problem is that once you start assuming that Satan is lying in the mythology, the question becomes why he was narrated as thinking a lie without the narrator explicating that it was a lie. Presumably the writers were trying to tell the readers all relevant information for them to decode the theological storytelling. Well, as I said this might be too off topic to not start a new thread, but with religious discussion I don't think the administrators care as much. Anyway, I can only tell you that I look at theology as a form of primitive psychology mixed with philosophy/ethics. So when the Christian gospels talk about being reborn and death being the wages of sin, I see this as referring to something similar to a nervous breakdown or some other radical consciousness-shifting experience. I think that shame can result in such an experience, and shame imo is a defining condition of sin as a subjective/reflective experience. I.e. if someone doesn't view their deed as a sin, they don't feel shame and thus no spiritual dying occurs but when they doubt their faith that their deed was righteous, they may grow ashamed and their spirit dies a little as they lower their head, become closed/secretive, avoid others, etc. This self-isolation (or sometimes people get socially isolated for their sins as well) results in a form of social death, which can result in spiritual death as well UNLESS people are "square with God" in the sense that they've prayed and felt forgiveness, etc. Christianity, doesn't give this forgiveness for free, though. You're supposed to dedicate your life to following Christ (i.e. becoming part of the body of Christ, etc.) I think that sort of jumps ahead so something else you said. Like I said, I think burning is a metaphor that just happens to work really well for describing sin, both the pleasurable/addictive aspects AND the painful spritual/dying aspects. I forget which book it is where the writer says that people should better get married than "burn," and I think this refers to burning with lust, which if you think about it is a form of torture (i.e. intense yet unquenchable sexual desire). It always reminds me of the Johnny Cash movie but I think there's some general logic in it that probably applies to all other sins. Right, I agree, but what about weak-hearted indifferent people. I'm talking about people who aren't even strong-spirited in their cyncism/sarcasm about their own indifference. People who are just complacent and don't care one way or the other. Can such people either become passionate about God, some form of goodness, OR evil? Would they have any interest in tempting others into falling from grace, etc.? Or are they just sedated spiritually be some unknown cause?

Valid point about contextualism in weed-identification, but weeds also tend to be weeds because they grow and spread easily, often managing to harness resources better and faster than neighboring plants, which allows them to grow fast and eclipse sunlight. Grass is the worst because it's blades come up quickly as the rhizomes let it spread laterally without blooming and seeding. I have some wheat-grass seeds that I keep forgetting to plant, and the juice is delicious and supposedly very healthy. I really doubt that I won't have to do a lot of weeding to keep the other grass from weeding it out, though.

Rationally, I would agree with you. But I'm just always looking at how a politician is going to completely break a mold by going completely against traditions/norms, etc. This worked for Obama in his approach to leveling about issues in ways that were thought to be "not done" by many. This is a negative effect of popular media, imo, where basically anyone who does anything shocking gets viewed as essentially brave and innovative for having done so. Isn't there some similar examples of politicians cursing, e.g. didn't Biden say the F-word at some point; and what about all the blatant accusations of "liar!" that seemed to be flying around? In general, I think the public is hungry for this sort of thing. The tension with it is that there's a whole other critical segment that uses public disdain as an impetus for social/self-control by politicians. So, e.g., what you said that blatant attacks doesn't win you points with moderates COULD cause many voters to dislike Palin for doing something distasteful. I think there are just different publics where values of taste and decorum are concerned. Some like them and some like them broken and "in your face." Right, but again I think there is a large public in support of people who don't pander and sweet-talk and kiss media butt. Of course this is somewhat fake, because the rebellious stances such politicians take are always relatively mainstream. Imagine a radical politician taking this approach with an extremely unpopular view. They would be branded a terrorist or who knows what. However, when someone takes pretty mainstream ideas and pursues those like a radical extremist, the public eats it up. It's like the reason they hate terrorists so much is because their jealous of their energy level and tactics (and of course they're afraid of people being that committed and energetic about something they're not for). Too many people embrace the tactic of power by repressing difference instead of embracing and engaging it as a means to progress through dialogue. You're right. Conservative candidates don't have the high expectations put on them as democrats do because the democratic party is viewed as a strong government party, so people expect a leader of structural insitutionalism. A conservative/republican candidate, on the other hand, is supposed to be more of a deconstructionist of government, so their main function is to stand up against pro-government politics and represent various aspects of popular thought in order to be criticized for it. It's almost as though republicans would put her in the hot seat just to draw anti-government criticism from the left, because this is a way they can get more people fed up with authoritarianism and government, which puts people on their side. Yes, there are many people who favor conservatism/republicanism but can't quite escape the lure of authoritarian structure and strong-government, but those people usually get what they want via military funding, which the republicans never seem to cut because it fits their logic of protecting freedom instead of structuring it from within. Anyway, I see the logic in the politics even though it all boils down to people developing their politics in dialogue with what they see representatives and others doing via the media. I really don't think actual governing has much to do with democratic (central) governance. It is more about representing the idea of government to the people so they can formulate stances and approaches to self-governance.

I've been predicting the appeal of a republican "soccer mom"-identity presidential candidate as the next step in presidential identity politics. Yes, now she's establishing herself as tough and not too compromising to rally conservatives who favor a strong stance against liberals. Once she begins to emerge from republican competitors, though, she will most likely begin to show her softer mothering side and this will appeal to moderates who are sick of party-standoffs and uncompromising men. Obviously her campaign planners will profit by building up to this point, since it will become her main criticism by the time of high-campaigning that she and conservatives generally are so uncompromising. At that point, she will unveil the secret weapon of bipartisan-appeal with feminine compromise/balance diplomacy. This will then become her cross to bear in office, since it usually seems to be the case that whatever a president gets elected for gets deconstructed by public critique. Then, by the time her term(s) are over, the public will be completely sick of feminine compromise/balance diplomacy and they'll be clamoring for a leader who isn't driven by compromise.

I read about some researcher levitating frogs electromagnetically but his research was not too warmly received, as I recall. If you google "levitating frog," there are some youtube videos and a wikipedia entry among other things. Maybe one day there will be levitation chambers at county fairs, but I believe this experiment used enormous amounts of energy so the price of the ride might be high even after they pay off the cost of the machine.

I wish there was more information about various edible wild plants for various locations. I tend to think it's better to err on the side of caution with ingesting anything. Certainly I've heard you should avoid all mushrooms and fungus unless you are absolutely an expert in distinguishing between like-appearance varieties where one is completely poisonous and the other is edible. If such databases of wild plants were available, you would expect some nutritional analyses to be given as well. I know you can look this up for most domesticated vegetables.

Can't electrons vibrate at ever higher relativistic speeds given ever-increasing energy? I would assume that they would thus emit ever-shorter wavelengths of radiation, but maybe there is some limit such as the plank unit of smallest energy-unit?

Then how could it even be imagined to facilitate time-travel?

A few years ago, I heard of plans for a tunnel near Amsterdam somewhere that involved having a tunnel whose air flow could be controlled to have tailwind in both directions. I don't know how this would work, since it seems like the pressure differential between the two ends of the tunnel would depend on the weather of the moment, but the idea sounded good. Maybe some kind of fans were involved. I've tried googling this with no success, though. Such tunnels would be handy for connecting cities with their surrounding residential areas for CO2-less commuting.

Ok, so "spin" refers to motion of the electron that causes an electric current, only one that doesn't move through a series of electrons/atoms? So when the spin of many electrons is aligned in a bar magnet, they are not moving current in the sense of linear current but rather many atomic-sized circuits? What causes this "current" to "flow" continuously around the nucleus? Momentum? Usually I think of a (DC) current as stopping once the positively charged pole is reached. Is the spinning electron like a microscopic AC current that keep oscillating due to its own momentum or something?

I understand that the floor has to be clean for the surgeon to perform surgery. What I don't understand is why these salaries have grown so much to promote high levels of consumption among such a large number of people that the resulting consumerism creates a standard of living that requires a great deal more labor hours that would be needed in a relatively simple economy where most labor is devoted to providing basic necessities like food, water, shelter, and clothing. For this reason, I don't see why people shouldn't have the choice to contribute only to a level of consumption that they find necessary, instead of to a level that is only normalized because so many people get caught up in the belief that it's better to live that way. So if the high-consumption economy is too unsustainable to survive without government intervention, why should government force people to contribute to it? If government wants everyone to contribute to an economy that generates a certain standard of living for everyone, then they should also have a say in what is produced AND people shouldn't have to economically contribute to particular forms of consumption if they have no interest in those. E.g. if I only eat fast food once every month or two and I'm fine to make my own lunch the rest of the time, why should I have to contribute to an economy of people who feel the need to go out to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all the time? That costs a lot more money (and ultimately labor and other resources) that I personally wouldn't want to get stuck providing. So when the government is redistributing taxes to create jobs that pay a salary sufficient to keep loads of fast food restaurants and other consumption venues that not everyone uses operating, that ends up producing jobs that not everyone wants and it is not fair to people who are for economic reform and sustainability. I personally work with people who are trying to get better jobs than fast-food and having to go back to fast-food is their nightmare, but I have to tell them that as long as people have the income and desire to go out to lunch everyday, a LOT of people have to work in fast-food. So I don't think the government should be stimulating an economy that generates such high levels of income. Instead it should produce meager income for efficient methods of producing basic necessities and let people have some of their time back to make their own lunch so not as many people have to work in drive-thru's and other dead-end service jobs.

I think you're using insulting language because you are lumping me together with every other person who doesn't give a crap about the poor and wants to let the rich pay less taxes so they can get richer. That's really not who I am, though. I'm a person who deeply believed in the re-distributive logic of progressive taxes and social spending. The only thing that changed my perspective was when I started looking at the consumerism that generates jobs from the spending of employed people. This consumer economy creates dead-end job in retail and other services that people get stuck doing because no government is ever going to create good jobs for everyone. The reason is that jobs are created by what money is spent on. So if you raise the incomes of the middle-class, it creates more jobs but they are crappy, dead-end jobs. Now add that to the fact that the gap between rich and poor GROWS by stimulating consumerist job-creation and you get a really ugly economic system: i.e. one where the rich and middle class expand their own economic power by using redistributive-government to increase spending-dependency of the poor so that they have to accept undesirable jobs that service the indulgences of the middle and upper-classes while not getting any richer by doing it. Dead-end job = your stuck in it; and someone else is profiting off the sacrifice you're making not because of your own interest but because you got lured into by the spoils of consumerism you got a taste of because of the social programs that raised your spending levels above your means. I have no problem with welfare if it was for things that would increase self-sufficiency instead of more consumerism and income-dependency. Draft people to spend a certain amount of their free time helping people build community farms that supplement their diets with fresh vegetables. Provide free basic low-cost ingredients like rice, pasta, oatmeal, etc. and draft people to teach cooking-classes using them. Why can't social services be performed by draft, with little or minimum monetary compensation? Is it really necessary to inject ever more money into circulation? Could people at least be paid in savings bonds instead of disposable income? Yes, but he does it by hiring more people to dig more ditches at minimum wage AND by promoting greater spending of existing incomes, which raises the cost of living and makes the poor poorer relative to the middle-class. Face it, GDP growth INCREASES the gap between rich and poor as the middle class gets more to spend, and the working class and poor get the least share of the growth. That's my whole point that growth should be slowed, or at least not stimulated. Allow the wealthy to keep their wealth IN SAVINGS. Discourage spending by raising sales tax. Then use government to stimulate LABOR practices that are as accessible to the poor as to other classes. Gardening, cooking, and many other basic services can be performed with relatively little skill and minimal tools. The more people can do for themselves, the less they need to cry for constant economic growth to provide them with more income. Ideally, people should be immune from recession. Making money should be a voluntary activity for personal enrichment; it should not be a necessity of basic survival.

I used to see things this way, but at some point it occurred to me that if the government helps the rich spending their money on the poor, it's still the rich making money to spend on controlling the people they pay the money to; just government acts a an intermediary and manages the poor in the interest of the rich. This seems like a very pro-capitalist form of government to me. Since I believe in free-capitalism more than control-capitalism, now I think it's better for the poor to be as independent of the rich or anyone else as possible because otherwise they are more subject to control. Have you ever thought about these issues or do you just assume that it's great for everyone to get as much money as they can by any means possible? You don't think progressive taxation also increases the gap between rich and poor (perhaps even more so) because the more economic growth is created, the more the most prosperous will increase their income relative to people less prosperous. I don't think GDP growth usually gets distributed in favor of poor with less money going to the middle class and rich. I.e. GDP growth is not a distributed in a way that equalizes wealth-differences, is it? I don't know, but I think many of the problems faced by poor and otherwise disenfranchized people are not that expensive to fix. I would say the most significant improvements in low-income lives are achieved by inexpensive, though often labor/discipline intensive efforts. Part of this is addressed by investing in education, but the problem is that education becomes its own fiscal stimulus project where students get more fixated on the relative prosperity of educators than on attaining the means to live well with relatively little, which is how many educators manage to live well in the first place.

I interpret "spiritual death" as meaning that you become mired in shame and (self)doubt because of sin, which causes you to either tread through life as a robot or more or less paralyzes you from making affirmative choices, because you have no sense of faith in goodness of any choice. I think you're right that testing people involves doubt which is someone oppositional to faith, but God doesn't simply accept sin because he loves the sinners either. So there's a logic of self-improvement. Anyway, this might be getting to much into theologizing to be welcome by everyone using this forum, idk. Another good post. I think "lake of fire" is somewhat metaphorical for the destructiveness of sin and its snowballing nature. So Satan theoretically is interested in seeing people boil-over, so to speak, like with Job Satan would have wanted to see him lose his resilience and "curse God to his face." I think beyond the anthropromorphizing of these philosophical ideas, there is a concept of seeking seeds of good in the bad so as to recognize the positive instead of getting defeatist about everything going to shambles, so to speak. So bringing that back to the OP, can people with a "weak soul" be just as effective in causing things to go to shambles as strong-spirited people with a will to destroy. I.e. would Satan put extra effort into demonizing the weak souled people as the strong ones or would he just not bother with them and concentrate on potential recruits with more prospects for "firestarting," so to speak (reminds me of the Prodigy song, btw, powerful spirited music btw).

You have theological insight! This stuff interests me. What about the Lord's prayer about "lead us not into temptation." How else could Satan tempt beings with free will EXCEPT temptation? He can't force them to do his will. I suppose you're technically right about the serpent not lying, since he told Eve that she would not die if she took the fruit and she didn't - at least not right away. I think they were supposed to have eternal life in Eden, though. It's funny, anyway, that you call "half-truths," "nothing but the truth." If half-truths were nothing but the truth, what would the other half be? Still it's interesting about knowing the whole picture as making them like God and at the same time tempting them to explore both sides. How did this cause spiritual death, though, iyo? I have my own ideas about it but I'm curious if yours are different. Hatred is oppositional to God in that it is destructive. God seems to get angry a lot but he doesn't get destructively hateful except during Noah's flood, and he repents to himself after that and promises not to do it again. Indifference is a good opposition to love, but I think it's related to hatred in that having to tolerate someone you're indifferent to ultimately leads to hatred. It you cared enough about someone to want to save them (even if you were wrong about what would save them), you would be angry and not indifferent or hateful. It's when you give up on "lost souls" that you become indifferent, and you can eventually grow to hate them out of your own sense of powerlessness to deal with them constructively (I think). Selfishness is not so much the perversion of Satan as egoism, I think. Supposedly, Satan became inamoured by his own beauty as God's best servant that he came to worship himself. This is supposedly what drove him to oppose God, which is logical in terms of wanting to claim a distinct identity for yourself to differentiate yourself from your competitor. Satan just wanted a niche and the only niche he could create that was different from God's creative power was destructive power, I think. It's really just a logic of dichotomy through opposition with creation. The interesting part, imo, is how the egoism (self-pride) of serving God became the temptation to oppose God. In a way, it fits into the logic of "go forth and multiply" except it multiplied destruction from creation by opposition and evil from good, also by opposition, along with separation from oneness of everything (and perhaps beauty from function but that is maybe debatable). It is an interesting approach to maybe very simple/basic (yet pervasively relevant) philosophical ideas.

Given that the speed of light is fixed, frequency and wavelength would be linked values. But frequency literally refers to the number of waves in a given distance, I think, whereas wavelength literally refers to the length of the wave. What I don't get is what the relationship between the photon and EM wave is. Is one photon = one EM wave? Is 1 photon = to a sequence of electric and magnetic fields including positive and negative oscillations? If so, I would say that each photon consists of 4 waves in total, unless you count the oscillations as peaks and troughs of the same wave, in which case it would be two waves (1 electric and 1 magnetic). I don't really get it though since it seems like the two terms are used in different contexts.

Does a photon have frequency or does it constitute a wave together with other photons that have frequency together? A single wave can't have frequency - though it can have wavelength.