lemur

In my view, schizophrenia is a label for a bouquet of effects that result from increasing social alienation. As you may or may not have noticed, most psychiatric disorders are labels for non-conformist behavior. This is partly valid, since social interaction increases the liklihood of positive feelings, which relax individuals and cause them to experience less anxiety and coping-cognition. On the other hand, psychiatry tends to reinforce the idea that normal behavior is equivalent to sanity or mental health, which it is obviously not. Schizophrenia symptoms like psychoses and word-salad are somewhat logical consequences of social isolation. Psychoses: because so much of human life involves imagination in the first place; thus people who believe in God, watch TV/movies, listen to the radio, etc. do not see their experiences as psychotic because they are normal and shared, while someone who believes they are listening to God on the radio inside their heads would be considered psychotic. The only difference with the psychotic person is that they are generating their own media content in their imaginations whereas "normal" people are receiving theirs from external sources. Word-salad, I believe, is the result of people trying to explain their complex imaginary constructions to others who fail to understand and are often impatient and irritated at having to listen to them try. If the person is really devoted to trying to explain, they will continuously attempt to seek new words for what they are trying to express and this would result in "word-salad." It is sad to say, but I think schizophrenia is mostly a side-effect of cognitive conformity, which causes "normal" thinkers to become alienated from the natural spectrum of cognitive diversity possible among individuals. If mass-media and other forms of homogenizing cognitive standards were not available for most people to conform, communication would become much more difficult and most people would appear to each other as schizophrenics appear to them now, imo.

I have the sense that VR has the effect of stimulating interest in physical reality. This new video game system that uses motion-sensors to allow you to control the animated figures with your body-movements: It is intriguing at first because of the virtualilty being that much more sophisticated than its predecessor. However, once the technology loses its newness, the underlying urge to use your body to interact with an environment remains. So VR seems to keep pulling people in the direction of active physical interactions. Ultimately, physical horizons/frontiers never disappear; they just become culturally coded as old news so people get bored with them for a while as they pursue textual/virtual frontiers instead. Media portability is the technological evolution that really stimulates nomadism. People like laptops, smart-phones, GPS tracking, etc. because it enhances their mobility. Currently, however, mobility is limited by costs and other limits of driving and other mechanized transit. Also, motorized transit has the effect of causing people to feel relatively disempowered on foot or bicycle. The other factor is relatively inflexible institutional scheduling in jobs and schools. People get just enough free time to drive or take a flight or train to somewhere interesting and get back in time for work/school without wasting more of their precious vacation in transit than is necessary. What would happen if IT was used to create nomadic work scheduling where people could work en route through multiple destinations? Imagine that instead of working 50 weeks at Walmart to get two weeks to travel, people could work at one Walmart on monday and work at another one 30/50 miles up the road on wednesday and spend tuesday hiking or biking? This would open up a pandora's box of issues but it would be very appealing in terms of "seeing the world" without having to invest loads of savings, wait for retirement, etc. If everyone lived like this by car or air-travel, the traffic would be a nightmare, but if people were hiking or cycling it would be manageable. To me it would be great if the culture to do this opened up tomorrow but realistically it is more like something that would make sense in a very distant future in which energy-costs and infrastructure overloading make it necessary for most people to do most things by foot or bicycle. At that point, nomadism has the benefit of keeping people healthy and warm while in transit to new destinations, and it also solves the problem of seasonal migration between warm and cold climates, which will become increasingly more attractive as heating costs continue to rise.

non-science would be nutritional beliefs that do not rely on scientific terminology such as "enzymes," "vitamins," "exact temperatures in degrees," etc. An example might be like someone I heard saying that he drank an ounce of aloe vera juice each day and the doctor told him he was exceptionally healthy. Pseudoscience used scientific language and scientific-type logics and concepts without actually being subject to critical empiricism, observation, testing, etc. It is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from true science until you attempt to subject claims to critical scrutiny and find that proponents are more interested in propagating their claims and obfuscating/averting critical discussion. True science is open to critical discourse and seeks information and tests that would call its knowledge into question or shed further light on the subject. Not everyone who believes in the health benefits of raw food is open to studies that would find otherwise. Maybe this is because they don't trust "science" or maybe it is because they are generally dogmatic and recoil at the idea of having their dogmas questioned.

Any reasoning to go with this?

I don't think a star that far away would be bright enough to be visible to "the naked eye," would it? However, is this phenomenon noted by astronomers with telescopes strong enough to view such stars at such distances? Do they notice intermittent stars that appear only every 50 seconds or so?

Time is not a substance. It is simultaneity of energy-motion in different clocks (i.e. moving systems) within the same context of spacetime dilation. There is/are no such thing as time except the physical laws that all matter-energy tends to conform to in its behavior. It is these physical regularities that cause clocks of similar construction to run at the same speed in the same gravitation and velocity. Likewise, it is consistency in the effects of energy on matter that cause a minute to be the same length today as it was yesterday. If the behavior of matter-energy changed, time could elapse differently. Maybe it would speed up, slow down, and sometimes stop or go backwards. Maybe events would happen in totally random order. Maybe 1kg would suddenly weigh 1g and fall toward the moon instead of the ground and the sun would orbit around venus while the Earth orbits around the sun. All these things seem implausible and even ridiculous because physics has interpolated regularities of motion and physical behavior. It is these regularities that cause different events to be comparable in terms of standardized motion increments described by the word, "time." The reason multiple clocks can be synchronized is because of physical regularities, not because there is some unifying force called time propelling them.

So, at how many light years r does the number of photons per cm^2 drop low enough that the star will only appear intermittently to the observer due to photon sparsity?

So 1g of matter is convertible to 25,000 kwh of electricity at 100% efficiency, regardless of what type of matter it is? So a fusion reactor that would convert hydrogen to helium would only deplete 1g of mass per 25,000kwh generated? So how would you figure out how much mass is lost in the conversion? Is this also explained by E=MC^2 or does that require attention to the internal structure of the atoms in question?

So the same chemical properties of the bowls that cause them to heat up faster than the food also means that the material is breaking down and shouldn't be microwaved? That's annoying. They're my favorite bowls! Back to the real point of my post, though: what is it that causes some materials to absorb microwaves while others do not absorb them?

Humans use energy for transportation and to keep warm. Walking from place to place takes longer but it keeps you warm and satisfies the desire for mobility. I believe that in the distant future, pedestrian nomadism offers the prospect of keeping people warmer, healthier (from the exercise), and satisfies their urge to travel. "Unwashed?" I said that hot showers were not the biggest waste of energy. When did I say the poorest should have a poorer diet? You think vegetarianism is less healthy than eating meat? I would not advocate any lifestyle that I wouldn't choose for myself. I actually usually find that more efficient living turns out to be healthier and liberating once you get over the initial culture shock of giving up the usual poisons/indulgences that addict people to mediocre health. Poverty is the distance between the floor and the ground, if you get that metaphor. In other words, abundant cheap energy stimulates economic activities that widen the gap between normal consumption and abject poverty. Westerners are prone to interpreting images of poor Africans eating white mush and swatting flies as painfully sad. Meanwhile, cassava-flour "mush" is actually pretty tasty and filling, especially when mixed with local greens, which grow plentifully when there's no drought. Flies are annoying but fly-control does not require abundant clean cheap energy. I have nothing against abundant cheap clean energy, but I would still use it as conservatively as possible to avoid over-dependence since anything more than renewable sources like solar, wind, tides, etc. are subject to depletion in the long-term. Funny, I thought I packed a lot of insight into succinct explanations. Which one(s) did you think sounded like empty sound-bites, because they really were simple explanations of valid insights, imo.

I'm far from an expert in any of this and it's probably b/c of this fact that I come across as tenacious compared to your meek submissiveness. Imo, you can ask for information/knowledge from people who have it but you have to make sense of it on your own. Otherwise all you're doing is parroting authority. Why does the seemingly perpetual motion of a solar system baffle you? Can't an object feasibly orbit at the same speed and distance if its mass fits that distance and speed relative to the mass/gravitation of the thing it's orbiting? If either mass were different, or if the speed was more or less than it is, etc. the Earth or other satellite would either spiral off or fall into the sun in so many years, right? What are trying to get at, that the coincidence is proof of divine perfection? If so, don't bother. I am already a theist for my own reasons, which have nothing to do with the Earth's perfect orbit. I consider seeking proof of God in materiality devil-worship because it basically implies that you would not have faith if creation was proven false by science. It's a meaningless debate to me.

Ok, thanks, I think I'm getting it. So if I use m/sec for C, which is 300k, then I should use 1/1000 for 1g. 90000k/1000=90000 joules, which would convert to kwhours by 90000/3600000, which is 0.025. That doesn't sound like much energy though. That's 25 watt-hours, which wouldn't even run a cfl lightbulb for two hours. Did I do something wrong?

EM radiation. I.e. photons, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, x-rays, and gamma-radiation. I don't think I left out any forms of radiant energy.

Raising prices on meat wouldn't be a bad idea since producing meats require a great deal more energy and water than vegetables. Taking short, hot showers doesn't consume that much energy compared with keeping a sizeable indoor air volume at a comfortable temperature. You'd be better off taking a 5-15 minute hot shower every day or two and wearing warm clothes indoors than taking cold showers and then lounging at 70-75F. Curing the disease involves cultivating relative energy-independence. This means substituting energy-expensive activities and goods with energy-cheap activities and goods. This is called "conservation." I just forwarded this paragraph to the coal company along with your CV;) Except for that's not how people/industry is using fossil-fuel. They're using it to maximize profit and leisure and very little else. I wasn't blaming oil companies or their management. If anything, I would blame oil-consumption interests, i.e. consumers. I don't know if electric cargo vessels would be ultimately more efficient than sailing ships. Sailing ships are awfully simple and low tech. They might take a long time to arrive, but they get there - and with the improved food-storage technologies, IT, and medicine available today, I think sailing ships would be much less dangerous than they were in the days of slaving. Why not, but I don't think this is a mass-transit solution. What about a pedestrian bridge between Alaska and Russia and global pedestrian nomadism? Don't ask me how people would weather the cold but some combination of good planning and igloo-building might make it possible.

I don't think this is even about esp. There could be information-exchange taking place between nervous systems and it could be completely sub-conscious. The issue is whether nervous-system tissue has the capacity to generate EM waves that extend beyond the body and whether it is the capacity to receive such wave-information. If so, the question becomes how such waves would be interpreted when they interfered with body-internal signals. Maybe it is the case that your nervous system is subject to low-level sympathetic resonances from other people's nervous system activity. If so, does that really register as concrete thoughts, as if you can hear their thoughts, or might it just be something as simple as feeling when other people are nervous because they broadcast their nerves being on edge?

This link shows a simple drawing that explains how gravity wells work: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://lh6.ggpht.com/_EePmDw6v-Nk/SzxGdS6kpaI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/UJ7prwIFEQ4/gravity_wells5.png%3Fimgmax%3D800&imgrefurl=http://www.habitationintention.com/2009/12/gravity-wells.html&usg=__VxDCa31uzGldi1dYDF-_upFRjXY=&h=321&w=735&sz=122&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=MiJL-jimVEcUOM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=196&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsolar%2Bsystem%2Bgravity%2Bwells%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Den%26biw%3D1240%26bih%3D569%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=512&vpy=184&dur=3853&hovh=148&hovw=340&tx=76&ty=73&ei=9__6TKTAKIK6sAOdrJj3DQ&oei=w__6TJmcIoz0tgP1pMj2DQ&esq=18&page=1&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0. A gravity well is basically the "hole" that matter falls into when it approaches a planet, star, black hole, or other gravitational field. I don't know what "anti-energy" would mean, except maybe being another work for gravity. I think you're using physics questions when what you really want to be exploring is philosophy or metaphysics. As for whether energy released in a quasar explosion or LHC ends up being absorbed by other matter/atoms, the answer is yes unless it somehow manages to proceed indefinitely away from matter. Personally, I don't think it can do that, though, b/c space(time) is curved due to gravitation, which I interpret to mean that energy/radiation ultimately remains within a closed area. There may be other who say that radiation-energy can expand space(time) without limit.

Representative government often serves the purpose of representing constituents to themselves for them to react to. It's like institutionalized self-reflection. Voters elect stupid politicians so that they can gain intelligence by witnessing how their stupid politicians publically handle their power. It's an evolutionary process of learning by critical self-reflection. E.g. "I want a strong commander-in-chief to take control . . . oh shit, THIS is what happens when a strong commander-in-chief takes control . . . revise and re-submit." Government lends money in the form of student loans and other loans that require repayment with interest. This is the same thing as saving with interest. It can also invest in savings bonds issued by other governments. This could be called "foreign aid." This would be the same thing as raising taxes on supermarkets or isp. If the only reason the government would "own" these things would be to get revenue, they might as well just extract the money they want from them in taxes. If they want to exercise control over how the businesses run, they can just create regulatory strategies. There's no reason for direct ownership when you can exercise control more effectively by keeping the people you want to control as "the owners." Depending on which aspect of government you want to contribute to, you could probably do so anonymously via paypal. I would guess the IRS has a paypal site and you could give money that way. If you wanted to contribute extra money to defense, why not give money to the defense contractor of your choice? Basically, anything you want government to do, you could probably do yourself and claim it as a tax deduction. The only thing you couldn't do would be to give money to other tax payers without it being subject to a gift-tax. This is basically already what money does. Inflation and deflation are caused by sellers setting their prices higher or lower than they were previously. Currencies increase and decrease relative to each other because one can be used to buy another. You do it whenever you travel somewhere that businesses are unlikely to accept the currency you have on hand. The money supply increases by deflation. The more prices fall, the more money people have relative to the commodities available for sale. When more money is printed, sellers increase prices as much as possible to get as much money for their sales as they can. This results in inflation, which effectively lowers the amount of money per unit consumption. If sellers would lower prices (deflation) instead of holding them constant or increasing them (inflation), the amount of money available per unit consumption would increase. That's rational but now try convincing businesses to lower their prices to stimulate the economy. Good luck! Wouldn't this encourage energy exploitation? The wealthiest people would get access to the cheapest energy and they would buy more of it, which would drive up the price. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad, since it would stimulate poorer people to conserve more - but what's wrong with stimulating wealthier people to conserve more by keeping their prices high?

By actively attempting to clarify how the equation works and flesh-out the empirical logic of the units? Ok, so I would call acceleration "rate of change of velocity where velocity is rate of change in distance." Then would force be "rate of change in momentum?" since momentum is mass * velocity? So by the same logic would energy be "rate of change in momentum through a distance?" So increasing energy means an object accelerates faster across a given distance or gains mass across a given distance of constant acceleration? Would it also make sense to say that energy results in a certain amount of mass accelerating for a certain amount of distance? So, for example, if an atom fragments into pieces and the pieces accelerate, the combined force that generates acceleration in the various particles over the distance that they accelerate before reaching equilibrium is the amount of energy liberated by fission? And likewise if two hydrogens fuse into a helium, the resulting energy will exceed the input energy by an amount equivalent to the mass lost in the reaction? So can you show the actual equation work with numbers plugged in so I can see it? Sorry to be babyish - if there's a link you can give me that shows it that would suffice. It seems that 300k m/s has to be first squared, making 90000k m^2/s^2 (or did I get that wrong already?). Then what mass do you use for, say, 1 gram of hydrogen? You can't just multiply 1g by 9000k m^2/s^2 and get 9000k gm^2/s^2, can you? If so, how do you convert that number into joules, btus, kwhours, etc.?

If it would be rape for a man to misrepresent himself as a wealthy heart-surgeon prior to sex, would it be rape for a woman to represent herself as being interested in having sex to completion and then changing her mind part way through without "sufficient reason?" I'm not saying this to argue for authorizing domination of men over women sexually in certain cases; I'm more wondering if people should enter into sexual relations without clear contractual protections for both parties. If men are uncomfortable with the prospect of being refused right-of-coital-completion once they've begun, shouldn't they be able to make an informed choice not to begin in the first place? Or are men just supposed to automatically know beforehand that they have no sexual rights except what the will of their partner permits? Imo, it's time for men to stop being so sexually weak and start resisting what they can't control. Sex should be mutually voluntary - not voluntary for women and compulsive for men.

I'm sorry, I don't know what "anti energy" would mean except for maybe another way of referring to gravitation. As conservative as you are with space and time being independent, I am skeptical of things like "anti energy" without some plausible natural system that would generate it. Explain that to me, instead of how wood-shavings can really pile up after gazillions of years and I might be able to critically think about your reasoning. I just use spacetime to refer to the fact that once you get beyond the immediacy of a local gravity well, you're basically dealing with time-relativity and space-curvature in transit between destinations. You can just call it "space" if you want. My point is whether you think that space exists as something other than gravitational field convergence? I don't think that there are sections of space that connect gravity-wells except as areas where gravitational fields converge. The best analogy I can give for how I think of this is to picture two or more gravity fields like floating balls of hot wax in a lava lamp. When two balls are close enough, they merge and their surface tension will either pull them closer together or their separate momentums will cause them to pull apart again. Once two gravity fields pull apart from each other, I no longer see them as having continuous space between them. See what I mean now when I say that space doesn't exist where gravitational fields are not connected?

First, I assume by "particles" you mean fields of strong nuclear force. My question is at whether such force was distinguishable from gravitational force at the level of strength it would have had in an extremely dense early universe. In other words, I think that we typically think of gravity as a relatively weak force because of how non-dense the universe we observe is currently. If gravitation was as strong, however, as strong nuclear force in the early universe, how would strong-nuclear force-fields separate into "particles" at all? After all, for multiple particles to exist separately from each other, they have to be able to pull away from each other, and I would think this would only be possible within a gravitational field with weaker binding-force than the strong nuclear force itself. See my point? Thus, I think that all forces were basically have to be the same in the very early universe. This would basically translate into the universe existing as a single enormous particle and eventually splitting into smaller particles as gravitation became weak enough to allow for spatial separation. Then, at the still very high levels of gravity and energy-density that would have been present after initial fragmentation into smaller particles began, fusion among the particles would have been as common as fission, in that enormous amounts of available energy would have expended themselves in endothermic fusion-reactions, which could have been the first impetus for vacuum-producing densification unless expansion happened so fast as to release expansionary pressure to its full potential. I guess the question would be whether the early universe was able to expand freely or was it to constrained under its own gravity and other attractive force? My guess would be that it was too constrained, just because the speed of light is an absolute limit that would cause early matter to be very turbulent and energy-abundant as it moved forward. This energy abundance would be enough to result in a trend of endothermic fusion for some time before it cooled down enough to make endothermic reactions scarcer, no?

Coal mining has the nasty effect of leveling mountains and when it is mined from underground people get trapped and sometimes killed. More importantly, coal and other fossil fuels are non-renewable except to the extent that no more of them is harvested each year than is being created by new sunlight/biomass. Politicians have focussed on CO2-driven climate change when the real issue is unsustainable supply. Since that has been known for years, however, they were wise to try a new approach that might have worked. Rationality would dictate that if you are going to run out of something and there's no more to get after that, you would start weening yourself off of it slowly to avoid a more abrupt transition. Ideally, you would leave as much in the ground as you could just in case you might need it for an emergency sometime in the future. Global governments are, unfortunately, dealing with social-economic forces that are short-sighted and narrow-minded. If such a thing as popular rationality existed, it wouldn't be necessary to convince people to police their consumption and transit habits to begin with. They would do it voluntarily on the basis of clearly understood knowledge. Instead they focus on obfuscating knowledge that fails to promote the lifestyle(s) they desire. The only way that fossil-fuel usage is going to get curtailed is the way it has been since the first oil crisis. Political instability promotes speculation on higher prices that drives up the prices. As prices go up, consumption becomes increasingly limited to elite markets, which results in a mass-market for alternative technologies. Surely this is the economic condition that has led to pedestrian/bicycle/public-transit friendly cities in the places where they have evolved in the world. In the mean time, various governments and ngo's will attempt to maintain fossil-fuel supply markets as stable as possible, but the profitability combined with the non-renewability factor makes it almost inevitable that de-stabilizations are always just around the corner. As more and more people get tired of dealing with the fallout of such instability, they will increasingly choose for more renewable technologies and lifestyles, but it will be difficult for them to compete in an economy where fossil-fuelers are attempting to compete them out-of-business as much as possible. Eventually, however, we'll probably end up with fleets of modern sailing ships, pedestrian nomadism, and human/animal-labor agriculture. In the mean-time, however, we're going to have to keep listening to everyone who sees such alternatives as excessively primitive and will call investing time and labor in them resource-waste.

These units confuse me. Speed = distance * time makes sense to me because it is a rate of change in distance. Likewise, momentum = mass * velocity makes sense to me because a fast moving light object can transfer its momentum to a heavier object to produce a lower speed. Power = force * distance makes sense because it makes sense to define power as continuously applied force. But how do these units for energy make any intuitive sense? Why is the distance divided by time? Are they just squared to avoid having to plug a negative number into the denominator? Is there any logic to defining what energy is in a qualitative sense? To me, energy (kinetic) is particle momentum, so it should be in mv units. edit: I just remembered that force over a distance is work, not power. sorry for the mistake. no need to point out my mistake. it was just an example of an intuitively intelligible physics concept.

That makes sense, but how does C work since it's a speed? How do you multiply 1 gram by C^2? Does energy come out in force per unit distance (i.e. power)?

Has any (small) vehicle actually been used to test whether it can accelerate faster than the speed of light? I'm sure many observations have been made of particles launched with high amount of force, but I'm talking about a vehicle that can move through interstellar space at high speed, stabilize, and then accelerate again and again, etc. until it nears C without impinging electric fields, etc. to contend with.