lemur

Perhaps what's never been thought of before? What does it matter whether it's been thought before or not? If it has and it was discarded as irrelevant, then no one remembers it. If it was validated as relevant, someone will recognize it from their personal genealogy of knowledge. When it was thought of is less relevant that whether there is validity in it.

I understand the data and reasoning that supposedly conclusively undermine planetary atomic modeling but I still think it's the best qualitative/mechanical model for how electrons and protons interact. The fact that electrons jump around relatively unpredictably and inexplicably could have a number of reasons/causes, but why does it necessarily mean that the model as a whole is 100% worthless? I am willing to discuss the flaws in my understanding of both orbital mechanics and atomic structuring, but I suspect you aren't. You just expect to emphasize insistently that I'm wrong and then cite history as your reason for not having interest or patience for discussing the matter. For you, science is a closed history book and you find it perfectly legitimate to throw it at anyone who refuses to self-censor their own studies of atomic structuring. On what basis can/do you prove that premises are faulty? Thanks, but why is it necessary to differentiate between particles and the waves that they appear to generate in another frame of reference? To me an electron is a point-centered field whose manifest form seems to change according to the context of its motion. If it was still it could be a sphere but since it moves, its contours change according to ??? parameters. Yes, I know but I don't think it's completely inexplicable in terms of mechanics. An vehicle moving between Earth and Mars, for example, could trace myriad different paths and basically continue intersecting with Earth's gravitation in one way or another causing it to "tend" to harmonize with Earth's orbit. However, once it reached a certain proximity to Mars, it would shift to being focussed on Mars in its solar-orbit tendencies. If you would speed this process up with multiple orbits per second, I would think it would appear as if the vehicle "jumped" from one orbit to the other as a probability-coincidence of it increasing solar-distance and therefore increasing probability of experience Mars-gravity attraction to influence its solar-orbit behavior.

People tell me this whenever I so much as suggest there is any similarity between the two types of systems. Despite this, I continue to see something very fundamental in the way an orbiting body remains in motion as a result of the satellite's inertia while simultaneously generating a more or less stabile trajectory. I see this as the basis for the volume of matter, though I continue to wonder why electrons wouldn't fall into the nucleus or continuously deteriorate in orbital level due to energy losses via radiation. To me it seems like electrons may orbit like planets, except that the electrons undergo a lot more external "trajectory-bumps," including as a result of same-charge repulsion from other nearby electrons. This could account for the "cloud-like" nature of electron orbits, no? Right, but there must be some reason why. I would guess that reason has something to do with complimentary orbital patterns that form as a result of inter-electron same-charge repulsion. They probably have certain margins of orbital-shape variation that can occur before they "snap" out of one orbital-level into another. Right, but if there were lots of other satellites influencing its motion on a regular basis, it might tend toward certain kinds of patterns, no?

I'm pretty familiar with various legitimations for nationalism, but I can't really discuss/debate them without identifying specific practices. The claims you make are very general and vague and therefore not practically debatable. I don't know if you realize this but would rather avoid subjecting them to critical scrutiny or if you just generally accept these logics validating nationalism because you view it as dominant culture. The only one of your claims that I'm pretty sure isn't true is the need to prevent sub-cultural formation to be successful. Certainly this makes sense within the logic of monoculturalism, but monoculturalism is biased in favor of monopolization of power and institutional domination of individuals. There are others who would claim that this approach to cultural power tends to be de-stabilizing by provoking opposition/resistance and more successful social relations occur when people are able to negotiate cultural differences and plural identities democratically. A culture that regards multiple cultures as a threat is more apt to have civil strife than one that recognizes cultural multiplicity as fundamental and negotiation of conflict/difference as a relatively non-violent part of everyday life. You think European diaspora is "done?" Actually, globalism continues growing though the visibility is obscured somewhat by the evolution of nationalist (false) consciousness as the tendency to promote the idea that national regions have separate economies, histories, etc. So, in fact, the rise of nationalism enhanced the power of globalism and, imo, has become more of a hinderance/threat than a benefit, although it still has some benefits arguably. The problem is that the trend toward detaching ethnic-culture/identity from national culture/identity has been met with substantial resistance from those who want to use national identity/culture/governance as a method of asserting ethnic dominance of some people over others. Eventually, I think that national governance will become just a method of regulating local/regional economies; and that ethnicity and migration will be more or less completely liberalized, but some economic reforms may need to occur before the hostility of resistance diminishes.

Well-paid is relative. Why would you land a poorly-paid position unless others who do similar work to yours get paid less on average or your field gets decimated and a large proportion of you can't find work doing what you do? For one, I don't see them as mutually exclusive. The industrial revolution and the technological and labor advances that have evolved from it should not be seen is a definitive economic structure for society but as simply a collection of available technologies and techniques that can be applied in various situations. The leisure time, access to goods, and educational access have all become more constrained due to consumer demand. Many people have to work 40 hours or more, their "free time" is spent engaging in institutionalized consumption or just driving or standing in lines, they have access to a fraction of the goods they desire, and they don't really care about knowledge because they've come to see education as a means to more money and nothing more. I think that the ideology of meritocracy has promoted a belief that things are just the way they are and all you can do is plug into a job and get rewarded for doing your small part to make "the system" keep doing what it does, even if its generating lots of problems and dissatisfaction. This is an assumption that is insistently maintained by a reactionary political stance. Basically what you're saying is "life is good and to keep it nothing should be changed." The problem with that is that things are getting changed all the time for the worse because of the view that there is no change going on as long as people are reacting against change. You could call this reactionary status-quo progressivism. Specialization and practice certainly benefit skill and efficiency. It just depends on the nature of each particular type of work how much specialization/dedication is needed. A surgeon might perform optimal surgery working, say, 30 hours/week, due to burn-out or other over-working stresses if she does more hours of surgery than that. Why shouldn't that person do other labor during their off-time, though? Instead of the argument you're making, it sounds more like what you want to say is that people who provide a great deal of benefit with their work (such as doctors/surgeons) should be compensated with lavish lifestyles that liberate them from doing their own housework, contributing to their own food supply, etc. No, you're creating a false dichotomy to make equity seem like a necessary cost of efficiency. If you recall, my position wasn't about equality anyway. It was about interdependence and disempowerment through meritocratic economic structuring. It may actually be the case that consolidating various forms of labor by allowing people to develop multiple specialties and avoid monotony of working constantly in one by switching back and forth between more than one, they would actually perform more efficiently. What's more, if you compare different approaches to agriculture: 1) local community farming for produce with consumer-participation 2) local community farming for produce with dedicated specialists 3) distant farming with all production done by dedicated specialists, including transport/distribution; #2 would probably generate the most yield with the least resources, #1 would come in second, and #3 would be the least efficient in terms of resources and, more so, it generates the most free-time which results in an even greater resource-drain as consumers use their free-time to consume more goods and services because they have nothing else constructive to do. I don't think people would have to work long hours to keep community farms planted, fertilized, mulched, and weeded if it was planned/organized well. I think a little labor could be divided among a large number of people (like jury duty is, for example) and people would spend a weekend a month (like the army reserves) or something similar contributing to local sustainable farming. Anyway, agriculture is just one example since there are many other ways people could become less economically dependent, thus increasing economic efficiency generally, while giving them more of a dense of democratic voice in the overall structuring of their economies than does meritocracy.

I don't know if the power to "determine" which issues gain public attention is that deterministic. I think that there are discourses that are established in individual minds/consciousness and that new issues are negotiated in terms of familiar ideologies. I believe this called "frame alignment." Still you're right that there are a number of ideological tactics to trivialize or raise the importance of particular issues and these are the ammunition constantly deployed in media channels and political rhetoric. As for the war on terror, I have come to see it as an epic approach to authoritarian-ideology that actually preceded 9/11. It is an interesting discursive tactic because what it does is basically take the authoritarian view that power comes from above and critically challenges it on various levels. So, for example, centrally-controlled organized military forces become replaced with decentralized relatively autonomous "cells." The comforting belief that national governments are headed by strong leaders who protect and serve their "loyal flocks" gets replaced by the idea that such leaders are power-hungry dictators who should be ousted from their position. And generally, all the fear that is installed by an effective centralized top-down strategy of governance is pushed to its limits and thus deconstructed in public and individual consciousness. So, for example, shadow threats of governance such as spying (wire-tapping), torturous interrogation, etc. which are traditionally kept alive in the hearts of citizen-subjects by promise of protection or "that only happens elsewhere so you're safe at home" - these "absent presences" are recoded as presently-occurring events. This causes an initial outpouring of emotion as the public gets confronted with the arrival of fears previous used to contain them, but as they become desensitized from it they become liberated from the fear of absent-yet-potential danger. This is and was ultimately the purpose of having warfare itself, as I recall, since GWBush once explained that it's not possible to have peace without war (Mao said the same thing, btw). Many people are still at war with war-itself in their hearts/minds, but I believe they are more at peace with their personal anti-war war than they were at the time war began. Do you disagree?

There are some interesting points here. However, my point was on the idea of "status quo" as an idea separate from any underlying materiality that may or may not validate its being called that. Take another example of a popular media trend: "globalization." People have been traveling around and trading for all of history but suddenly when the media started talking about "globalization," an "anti-globalization" backlash was created. People were suddenly bothered by the "transnationality" of "multinational" corporations, media, culture, etc. This, in turn, promoted the idea that national isolation was a status-quo to be defended. See the pattern?

Good metaphors/analogies, but the real basis of economic life is not game-playing or fighting but rather producing what is needed and wanted. People do fight over "the means of production" as Marx calls it, but labor ultimately comes down to using those means of production to produce what you need and want (and deem morally/ethically good to produce and consume).

I don't see what is strawmanning about it. If government is about providing certain services and using taxation to evenly distribute the burden to the public, that could be viewed as a reasonable method of preventing costs for public goods/services from falling disproportionately on the people who take the initiative to invest in something non-private. However, when the point of government spending is to stimulate economic growth by increasing spending, it is nothing more than mandatory spending; i.e. not fair compensation for a reasonably-priced service from the lowest bidder, etc. So it really does basically amount to saying, "one way or another you are going to devote a certain amount of your budget to injecting fiscal stimulus by paying it to other people. If you don't do it voluntarily, we'll help you do it by mandate." Is the right of private individuals to manage their own spending conservatively a target for elimination? Should people be no longer allowed to save their money because that money is needed for someone else to pay off their debt? Personally, if it was me I would not want to default on my debts and declare bankruptcy either, but wouldn't it make more sense for the government to mitigate the relationship between the debtors and creditors instead of spreading around money to artificially stimulate opportunities to "earn" the money to pay to the creditors and then billing people for the stimulus through taxation? Good post, but what do you do when the schoolboy's father, who packs his lunch, turns out to be getting the food for his lunch from the bully too?

That's a broad and vague implication that there is a dominant global standard for the developed world. Can you give some specific examples?

I have nearly no knowledge about nerve tissue but just a guess: the skull? Does an exoskeleton count as "connective tissue?"

If so, do you understand what the reason would be? I.e. basically you're saying that mandatory spending is more effective than voluntary spending at creating revenues. You might as well send police around to escort people into stores and force them to make purchases at gun-point. I understand the perspective that human welfare is more important than absolute protection of private property; HOWEVER I don't understand why it is necessary to use monetary/fiscal governance to ensure economic welfare. Why not leave the free market free and use some other means to provide people with opportunities to sustain themselves when GDP-growth, revenues, jobs, etc. are waning. By using fiscal stimulus to create jobs and revenues, you are basically just propping up a dying system by integrating more people into it, which creates that much more pressure for it not to do what it is prone to do anyway, i.e. fail. Since that last sentence sounds extremely pessimistic, let me qualify it by saying that the "dying system" is not the same thing as total economic collapse. There are actually a multitude of economic systems occurring globally and the US nation does not have only one economic system either. In fact, each business has its own system, which is constituted out of numerous sub-systems derived from external sources. The problem is how to empower the various businesses to manage, negotiate, and restructure their sub-systems in a way that increases their viability without contributing to cost-inflexibility that is sustaining recession. This should allow them to survive without fiscal stimulus money circulating but also help other businesses to do so by lowering their prices and costs. Then, of course, something needs to be done about unemployment because without any income or utility, people are unhappy and expend all their energy searching for an employer instead of employing themselves. Ideally, existing jobs should have their work-week hours cut to create more jobs, but many people would take a second job, defeating the purpose. Maybe there is some way to create incentives to limiting hours spent on wage-labor employment. That way, people would have their basic expenses covered and be able to spend their unemployed time on other pursuits than pouring money and resources into seeking employment.

I think you have to distinguish between induction and deduction. Seeking patterns in data is inductive research. Once you become conscious of such a pattern, this is the beginning of theory-building. The pattern itself is not an empirical fact just because you have synthesized it from systematic observations of empirical facts. It is just a stepping stone toward building a more rigorous, falsifiable theory. The theory should explain the observed data and make predictions about new data on that basis. It should contain testable hypotheses that detail reasons why/how the theory could be false or require modification. The goal of science is to shed light on HOW knowledge is misconstrued by identifying indefensible claims/ideas/concepts/etc. Science is not meant to be used to build up knowledge to a level of efficacy that falsifying it becomes unfathomable. That would be verificationism. It's also generally the difference between any single piece of data and the statistical population it is identified as belonging to. If the population you are studying is "weather events that support dominant climate trend perceptions," then every dry day could be taken as evidence that your climate is predominantly dry; unless you regard your climate as predominantly rainy in which case every dry day would be exceptional. It's basically like doing the glass half full/empty debate instead of just saying there's a glass with 30cl of water in it.

Agreement among all the kings of the universe together with all their subjects (including everyone working in every university everywhere) wouldn't be enough. Science does not build truth by consensus. You state that "[your] position is that . . ." but that doesn't really matter either, without reason to back it up. Proof comes when you have a detailed enough theoretical position to deduce tests that are repeatable, for instance by reference to commonly observable empirical facts of nature.

I think this post is nonsense, (uh, I mean BS of course). Is it a joke or are you really full of it?

This is an interesting perspective and one that could have implications for explaining the relationship between electromagnetism and light, imo. If an object accelerates toward the sun, it would experience graviton blue-shift, right? If it accelerates away from the sun, it would be red-shift? The blue-shift may be able to build up to the point of creating a gravity-wave, just as a descending electron could build up to create a photon-emission. There must be some reason why a number of EM or gravitational waves compressing 'spill over' into a moving wave that transports that energy at C. How could the orbiter ever catch up to its own wake if the wake was moving at C? Wouldn't the distance between the orbiter and wake always be increasing?

True, macroscopically apparent homgeneities between relatively distinct macro-substances imply that discrepancies among the particles of the respectively differentiated conglomerates are eclipsed by the difference between them. E.g. If a cloud of steam would ascend to a solid ceiling at 25C, the variation among individual particles would be eclipsed by the entropic effects of contact between the two macro-aggregates, steam and ceiling. Nevertheless, it doesn't mute the empirical fact that some of the steam particles will be vibrating at a lower energy than some of the ceiling particles and vice-versa. Furthermore, by focussing on only the macro, you could miss some micro-emergent phenomena that are not immediately apparent at the macro-level, I think. This may not be so in all cases, but certainly the macro-level is reductive, to say the least.

Presumably, revenues are still expected to remain higher in the US; otherwise expensive doctors would move away. Personally, I don't know if it's worth maintaining such high insurance costs to sustain the high revenue-expectations of US doctors and pharmaceuticals. Maybe the US should harmonize its health-care prices with a global standard.

Fun discussion. I don't know how you would be able to control for the magnetic field and know when it was ending. If Earth's magnetic field created a general margin of error in measuring magnetism within it, we would assume that the equations we had observed for magnetism were independent of the surrounding magnetic field when they were, in fact, not. So, maybe no one had ever transcended Earth's magnetic field. Maybe astronauts have only reached increasing distances within it. Hmmm, are you saying that "curved" is different than "spherical" at a distance? Are you saying that the curvature couldn't appear as a horizon with "empty space" surrounding that horizon? If Earth was flat, and it was the magnetic field making it appear curved and ultimately spherical, could "space" just be the stretched-out horizon between the distant ground/ocean and sky?

That's amazing. I would have expected the reverse, just because there are more planets beyond Earth's orbit than within it, and because those planets are further from Earth than Earth is from the sun. So much for intuitive gravitation. This does, however, aid my thinking about why electrons are prone to certain orbits/'levels and resist deviating from the level they're in. Apparently, any satellite changes the eccentricity of its orbit significantly before achieving a new consistent altitude. Could this be described as orbital elasticity?

But I really want to understand the difference between alkaline energy, lithium-ion energy, and nickle-metal-hydride energy; not to mention the difference between AC and DC energy.

Thank you for sincerely responding to my thoughts. I apologize for my insulting tone. No, that the gravity-fields are part and parcel of the particles that make up the bodies that fill the bottoms of the gravity-wells. I think/suspect that the relationship between gravity and matter is that between the gravitational fields and the EM and nuclear force that generates "matter." So it's not the matter/mass that is curving spacetime; it is that gravitation IS spacetime and gravitational fields are parallel to the EM and nuclear fields that share the same "particle" centers. So, for example, if you have a hydrogen atom, it has a strong nuclear field that is very strong but dissipates rapidly, surrounding by an EM field that is less strong but also dissipates quickly and then a gravitational field that extends beyond the nuclear and electric fields. Thus, the gravity-field functions as "spacetime" for the nuclear and EM fields once it intersects with the gravity fields of other particles. Without the ability to extend beyond their EM fields, particles would not experience "spacetime," except to the extent that nuclear force is stronger than EM force. Are you following my logic? I don't think it makes sense to think of "spacetime" as a substance independently of field-force. It's like Goethe's idea that dark has a positive existence parallel to that of light. I think "spacetime" has to consist of gravitational field-force. Where the gravity-field of one gravity-well does not connect with another, there is no spacetime route connecting them, right? Of course, this assumes that gravity can reach absolute-zero, which it may not. Still, I think you could say that when two stars are expanding away from each other at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, their gravity fields are no longer connected. Therefore spacetime between them has breached, no? I.e. spacetime only remains intact as long as gravity-wells are connected so as to allow matter to crossover from one orbit to the other.

Oh that's what EM energy means! Well, what about earthquakes and ocean waves? Should those be called seismic and hydraulic energy?

This is an issue I've been thinking about a lot lately. I don't think it makes sense to think of photons in the same sense as particles with mass because mass allows particles to lose speed as they transfer momentum to other particles during collisions. Photons are emitted and absorbed and that's it, as far as I know. They can't hit an electron and transfer some momentum and then deflect off at an angle with less momentum. When they reflect, refract, or diffract, etc. they don't lose speed. Do they lose energy by their frequency decreasing from collisions? I don't know. Personally, I think it makes more sense to think of radiation as a moving contraction of a field (either gravity-field, EM-field, or the intersection of the two). In that sense, light/radiation would not so much be a distinct/isolated particle in space as it would be a warping of the field it is traveling through. I don't know if this idea has already been explored and dealt with but it seems logical to me. So, basically, light/radiation would be a intra-(gravitational)field transfer of electron momentum across distance.

So you'd have a hard time hitting the sun. Even if you aimed at it and gave a good bit of thrust in its direction, you'd still have a good chance of flying over it if you didn't use enough thrust. That's really interesting that it's so difficult to fall into a gravity-well. You would think it would be more effort to keep from falling in, but I guess that is a terrestrial-rooted subjective bias.