lemur

This would not be a reason to argue against exploring alternative models. All you're saying is not to throw out models with some utility, even if they turn out to be fundamentally flawed. If electromagnetism instead of gravitation turned out to be a more influential force in the universe, scientists would not wish to deny that for the sake of maintaining popularity of existing modeling. The idiocy in debates between competing models is that people choose sides and favor one side while opposing the other instead of just trying to come up with testable deductions about both. This is a good example of constructing such a testable deduction.

what do you mean by "thermodynamically favored?"

Is there a difference between a chemical change that occurs through heat (vibration of the atoms/molecules) and one that occurs specifically due to absorption of photons and the associated change in energy-state/level?

Ad hominem justice, interesting. What you're basically asking is whether valued (or just financially successful) people should be given better protection from false conviction. Theoretically, any sentence is supposed to constitute full repayment of one's "debt to society," so really former prisoners should be regarded the same as other non-criminals. The bigger question, imo, is whether it is fair for successful people who haven't ever been formally convicted of crimes they've committed to be treated as if they are completely innocent of any wrong-doing in life. When Jesus said, "let the person without sin cast the first stone," everyone dropped their stones.

Why can't insects just swarm on the surface, with some getting caught by waves? Wouldn't this produce the conditions that would reward insects that survived being submerged, for example by being able to swim more quickly to the surface with wings that were better adapted to swimming? In time, couldn't this result in swimming ocean insects?

I'm no expert, but I think you should look at the relationship between electricity- and heat-transfer through a conductor. Heat is caused by vibrations that include the atomic nuclei, I believe, whereas electricity leaves the nuclei relatively immobilized (cold) while energy necessarily transfers through the electrons. When photons hit atoms, they only have limited options of how to dissipate their energy: 1) they can generate heat by vibrating the nuclei 2) they can generate electricity by vibrating the electrons without that energy transferring to the nuclei to generate heat 3) they can be absorbed and re-emitted by the electrons as new photons. Are there any other options? Maybe passing through the atom without striking any particle? Maybe resulting in direct re-configurations of particles in the form of chemical changes? I can't think of anything else.

I think the trick would be to get all the energy to result in linear motion of the object instead of the electrons absorbing it. How could you prevent photons from resulting in either heat or re-emission? Maybe the key is low-frequency waves since higher frequency ones seem to get absorbed by particles similar in size to the wave, which seems to result in small scale energy transfers like heat and re-emission of radiation.

I have heard of people becoming multimillionaires due to lawsuits. I think people should be treated well who have to spend the rest of their lives suffering because of someone else's mistake, but I'm afraid rewarding such injuries too lucratively leads to a general culture of longing for victimization because of the prospective fortune associated with it. If anything, a rich person should be sufficiently penalized for their negligence, by issuing a large fine or preferably a reasonable prison term or redemptive labor sentence. Then the person wronged should receive disability-compensation according to functionality-lost. The problem is that there are so many examples of extreme prosperity that it seems natural for someone to go from rags to riches because of pain and suffering.

Does it ever occur to you how unnecessary any of this work is that you (ewmon and skyhook) suggest is? I initiated this thread with the point that if the recession would get to the point that basic necessities like food and shelter were unavailable, people could produce them using volunteer labor. I was not talking about using volunteer labor to keep morale up and give people something to put on their resumes so they would appeal more to future employers. That is the stuff of economic over-abundance and if unemployed people have the luxury of spreading the word of God door to door, then why is there talk of economic problems in the first place? In a legitimately productive economy, volunteer work would reduce the need for fiscal stimulus because economic needs could be sufficiently fulfilled without the use of money. In a post-industrial economy (why not just call it "post-productive" actually?), however, I think the money-distribution aspect of employment is actually more significant that the productivity. You could pay people for sitting in an office checking other people's files and the fact that those people are getting paid and spending money would stimulate other businesses' revenues and create other jobs. For this reason, fiscal stimulus makes sense - only the big picture of it is so disconcerting that people long to get back to a productivity economy when they see that money as become its own means and ends. Plus, who wants to be the person working in food-service whose job was "created" by giving someone else stimulus money? I'd rather people fry their own french fries and not have a job created for me in fast food, wouldn't you?

Would you volunteer to trade places with someone sentenced to 30 years due to false accusation? If not, and you were required to anyway, despite it being "not your fault," you might feel upset that you spent your life serving out this sentence and that no one managed to exonerate and set you free despite your innocence. That feeling could be defined as "bitterness."

I'd be bitterly cynical about the fact that a justice system supposedly designed to find innocent by default except when the smallest "shadow of doubt" is overcome with evidence could generate false convictions and that it would take so long to prove it. Who exactly should this person forgive, btw?

Since reading that Obama is urging congress to help get jobless people to work, I was wondering whether volunteer labor could be sufficient to sustain people until the economy is generating the kind of revenues/incomes they seek. My general impression is that volunteer labor is plentiful but that it's not typically used very efficiently or productively. I have the impression that it's more of a social affair to participate in hobby-, beautification-, or charity- type projects. If you would design a volunteer-labor driven company, what would you produce?

Cyborg evolution is very interesting because it involves the development of hybridizations and connectivities between embodied "flesh and blood" humans and their machine technologies. I haven't seen Tron yet, but I have been using my friend's mobile phone with web-browser and I've noticed that in just a few days, I adjusted my memory to rely more heavily on the internet. This may seem insignificant but it is effectively shifting brain-memory to electronic memory. My brain is liberated by relying on portable electronic storage. It's getting ever closer to direct brain-implants. The question is whether cyberspace and virtual-realties will host cultural developments that foster sustainable changes in non-virtual culture and economics. I hope so because this economy is stagnating in its own status-quo-ism.

If you budgeted some of your salary to pay for a PhD, and you could afford to discipline yourself and your family members to tighten their belts to shoulder the budget cuts, you would eventually reap the reward of increased income relative to your expenses when your degree got paid-off, assuming your salary level remained the same.

Did you mean to say "bare knowledge?" "Bear knowledge" sounds like it means very robust, strong knowledge because bears are big and strong.

Masochism may produce pleasure for some people because hurting them excites their partner and the partner's excitement turns them on.

I've been criticized for saying this, but I think it makes sense: a rotating planet can be described as having a certain centrifuge effect, which can be considered to reduce its net gravity. Think of what would happen if the Earth accelerated in its rotation. At some point, objects would start to be pulled from the ground and flung into outer space. Prior to that, they would be losing weight due to decreasing gravity. So, from another point of view, any object that appears to be standing still on the ground is actually "falling" together with the rest of the ground, whose "fall" is impeded by all the other ground underneath it. The rotation of the planet is the net rate of the whole "traffic jam" trying to fall together. Again, if it were falling totally unimpeded, it would be a swirling dust-cloud instead of a ball of condensed solid matter. So the kinetic energy of, say, a tree is the motion it expresses by rotating along with the rest of the matter that makes up the planet. Its potential energy is how much it would accelerate if it could continue to fall through the ground unimpeded (if, for example, the ground was suddenly a swirling dust-cloud).

I have also read that Newton described gravity, and I think force in general, as net force. What I don't understand is why I don't usually get the feeling that force fields are viewed in terms of interactions and overlaps. It seems as though force-fields are always treated as a context in which some other object expresses the force. Yet isn't any object influenced by a field of force itself constituted of force-fields? Thus, an electron traversing Earth's atmosphere is intersecting/interacting with Earth's gravitational and magnetic fields (correct?) along with the various EM fields of other particles it encounters and all radiating energy. So don't all these forces together and their overlaps/interactions determine an overall topography of spacetime-curvature at any given moment?

It seems like gravity-field modeling fails to pay attention to interactions between/among conflicting/competing gravitation. What I mean by this is that we know, for example, that gravity cancels itself at the center of the planet but outside of the center, that effect is not really considered. I think it is called a lagrangian point where two gravity-fields interact to produce a zero-gravity point not drawn into either gravity-well, but shouldn't every point in every gravity well be determined by all interacting fields present in the region? Likewise, shouldn't all energy be taken into account in describing/defining a given gravitational field-topography?

You're suggesting a more inductive model with less deviation from direct observed facts, but that is basically what big bang theory does, except it extrapolates origins and causation from observations. If you have a vision for a better, or just another, model why don't you describe how such a model would or could work?

Calling a poster "habitually illogical" and degrading their content on this basis would be an ad hominem attack. It implies that the logic in a specific post is necessarily or probably flawed without direct reference to the flaws in the post's logic (i.e. by reference to other posts of that user). Discussing the specifics of how a post's logic is flawed with clear explanation of why/how some other logic is more reasonable is just good (i.e. constructive) discussion, imo.

I used to subscribe to the general ideology that "the gap between rich and poor" was a problem to cause all problems, but I'm afraid I became so interested in issues of economic resource distribution and social class distinctions that I'm aware of how short-sighted it is to reduce everything to a "gap between rich and poor." Then, to make a long story short, it turns out that the reason that this ideology of redistribution of money to "close the gap" is so popular is because it promotes the ability of investors to make money. If those investors are poor, the poor will get more money. Otherwise, it will not be the poor who ultimately benefit from "closing the gap." The long explanation is that when money is redistributed in any way, it becomes available as potential revenue for businesses and investors. When there are many poor people in an economy, it's like having a lot of dry sponges you can't squeeze anything out of. Then, when people with money don't really want to spend either, it causes revenues and investment income to decrease. Thus the class who has the most the gain from increasing revenues and investment income promote redistribution of money from haves to have-nots because they know that the have-nots are likely to spend instead of save it. Hence, it's not so much about alleviating poverty as it is about increasing business revenues. If poverty-alleviation was the concern, the government could simply mandate that businesses provide necessities and/or credit to poor consumers. It could also promote greater competition within the free market to cause producers to drive down their prices until prices affordable for the poor were reached. My observation is that there are really class-mindsets that chain people to their social class status. Poor or working class people, for example, tend to have a servant mentality because this is likely to get them into a position where they can earn money. Middle-class, on the other hand, tend to rely on sophisticated status-affirming cultural activities to sensitize themselves and each other to social-discomfort causes by "inappropriate" behavior and expressions. This results in a form of gatekeeping where it requires a lot of social skill and tolerance to interact successfully (i.e. make others comfortable) in middle-class social situations, including workplaces. Right, but these gaps are due to classism at the level of treatment and self-care. People take care of themselves less carefully because they don't see themselves as worth it the way middle-class people often do. I don't think food is usually so much the problem for poor people as is avoiding eviction from a rental domicile. If someone is homeless already, they can often get meals from a soup kitchen, church, or other charity, but they have to try to figure out a way to make their way to a better situation, which can be nearly impossible.

When exciting media advances occur, I believe they tend to be used to accentuate social-class differences simply because people that spend more money are the target consumers for the new technologies. Since higher social-classes tend to consume their own status by circulating ideologies of wealth-differences and how good they have it compared to "those miserable suffering masses," we tend to become more conscious of social-economic deprivation during times of media-evolution, imo. Really, the basic material conditions of the global economy don't change much. One thing that has been changing, however, is the amount of services available as automation and IT replaces industrial and managerial labor. Instead of increasing free time, investors have sought to continue maximizing profit and re-investing in consumerism, which is possible because people are willing to continue consuming more new goods and services. I don't think this increasing service-dependency makes the world a better place to live in, but people who enjoy consumerism probably believe it does.

So if the gravitational field of a star is extended beyond the majority of its matter due to radiation-density, does that "smooth" the topography of the star's spacetime-curvature? In other words, if you compared the curvature of spacetime surrounding two stars of equal mass but very different levels of energy-output, would spacetime curve more (and more abruptly) around the one emitting relatively little energy?

If light is not affected by a magnetic field, what causes aurora borealis (northern lights)? I've always heard it's due to the magnetic pole.