lemur

"Accurate results" predicting what? measured how? Can you give an example, please? Thanks.

I think that if the experiment was legitimately intended to falsify evolution, it would be embraced by people who dislike evolutionary theory. The question is why verification research should continue if most evolutionists are convinced it has been more or less proven. The point is that science is supposed to focus on seeking out falsifying tests for existing theories or, of course, creating new ones to be falsified (at least according to Karl Popper). Endlessly verifying established theories doesn't serve any purpose, really. As long as they're accepted, their veracity proceeds under its own momentum.

Your analogy could be valid if, in fact, the "wood-shavings" of the universe have somewhere to go after all matter has been converted into energy. The other possibility is that once matter stops generating new radiation, the radiation that exists will begin to coalesce under its own weak gravitation. The more it does, the greater its density will become until it condenses into a very small volume with extremely high density. At that point, another big bang could be the result. The issue is whether radiation produces sufficient density to accomplish this and, more importantly, whether radiation can proceed indefinitely away from its origins through "spacetime" except insofar as that "spacetime" exists in the form of intersecting gravitation fields. Do you believe that "spacetime" transcends gravitation? If so, why/how would it?

This explanation makes sense, but the idea I've been contemplating lately is that the early universe was so dense that gravitation would be indistinguishably intense from other kinds of force, including strong and weak. Thus, I have been wondering if the development of the universe is not characterized by a differentiation of forces early on, and how this progression of force-differentiation could have taken place. I realize that this idea is quite different from the theory that energy first coalesced into small particles and the small particles fused into larger ones later due to gravity. My sense is that the extreme density of the early "soup" was such that all force was unified and that it eventually expanded to the point where fission became possible, which would accelerate the expansion and push the fragmenting force-fields to the point where they could actually move relative to each other insofar as gravitation differentiated from the electromagnetic force that would have governed the earliest particles as they separated. Probably you will just dismiss this as deviating from consensus, but if you have any rational reasons my thinking is flawed, I'd like to hear them. Before you totally dismiss my logic, however, please just consider one question: why would energy coalesce first into small particles and only later fuse into larger ones if it was extremely dense to start with? Wouldn't heat and pressure levels higher than the largest star cause it to fuse at a level that would far exceed iron due to the excessive levels of energy-density present?

The main things I remember from the book I read was that microwaves penetrate the surface of food, unlike infrared waves created by conventional ovens, and that they do not penetrate the atmosphere. It seemed like there was also something about water since microwaves are also used for doppler radar to scan for clouds. I also figured this had to do with why they don't penetrate the atmosphere. It's been a while since I read that book, so I thought I'd post my empirical data regarding my hot plastic bowls and see if someone with clearer knowledge could help.

Ironically, if research was properly falsificationist, projects dealing with evolutionary theory would be geared toward asking questions that would prove the theory wrong. Such research would serve the scientific function of strengthening the validity of evolution while satisfying the public desire to disprove it. So why is there a conflict of interests?

I think the answer lies in whether gravitation defines spacetime expansion or whether gravitation can dissipate completely without the residual EM energy re-collecting itself due to its own gravity.

At what point, then, would the primordial energy begin to differentiate into gravity wells and why?

I don't know what these bowls are made of except that they are plastic but when they come out of the microwave, the bowl is hotter than the food. I thought I had read that microwaves are only absorbed by water and pass through or are reflected by other materials, which is why they penetrate the food and heat it evenly instead of from the outside inward as with conventional/infrared ovens.

Interesting, I wonder if such endothermic fusion was prevalent in the energy-dense early universe and the formation of iron+ heavy atoms contributed to the formation of spacetime between early stars by causing condensation around the endothermic reaction-centers.

This is the part that's funny to me: that research spending can be justified because it enhances infrastructure, facilities, education, partnerships, etc. It's like saying, "research snot patterns in used tissues is useless but it creates partnerships between different research centers interested in snot-patterns, gives students something to learn and get paid to do when they get good grades in snot-studies, plus it helps fund the super-snot image-scope that analyzes the snot using state-of-the-art technology. It's funny that the public and/or grant selectors would cut research because it doesn't have a social impact, even if it has potentially interesting scientific value. Basically, this is just more reason for science to become independent from tax-funded government. As long as science is at the mercy of funding, it will be abused to get access to that funding, imo. Too bad that's so much easier said than done.

Why would genetic similarity correlate positively with sociality? Symbiotes are the ultimate social-cooperative systems precisely because they divide labor through combining radically different functions. Good point, though I think they probably do when the traffic volume gets heavy. I'm not sure if that's intelligence or just necessity because they have to walk behind someone going in the same direction to move forward.

That's a good open attitude appropriate to doing research, imo. That may all be true and even make sense from practical standpoint of managing the energy you put into discourse and what you put your time into. However, from another standpoint it is the difference between rational and traditional authority. Yes, the application of rationality has generated traditional knowledge, but there is still a fundamental difference between approaching knowledge as traditional, received dogma than there is with approaching it critically/rationally. I'm not arguing that traditionalism is always negative and I don't want to get into a debate about the relative value of each approach to knowledge. I just find it important to point out there is a difference and that traditionalism shouldn't be taken as critical-rationality, even if the tradition is based in science. Right, but my issue is that people feel the need to defend or attack science as a social group, i.e. "scientists." To me, what scientists do is a separate issue from what science is ideologically. All scientists could be corrupt and that wouldn't prove that science is a corrupting ideology. All it would prove is that corruption spread to the point of social totalitarianism. Yes, science is designed to remove errors and bias but one it has terrible trouble removing is the will to objectivity and rationality itself. Because of this will/desire, scientists tend to become emotionally invested in their identities as a good or bad scientists and therefore will tend to become emotionally invested in defending against critique of potential bias. This is because they are human and often because their professional status and even their income depends on their maintaining a good reputation. So that is a bias built into the system, even for people who are tenured. "Stupid" can be a very subjective label, though, although I agree with you subjectively. I get annoyed reviewing academic writing of people who are sensitive to critical discussion because it's their life work. When you treat someone's MA or PhD thesis like any other article and you see them longing to just hear you praise it as being well done, there's no real scientific value in that. I'd rather read a forum post that is just a summary of an idea and discuss it critically than get into a social dance where the person I am questioning is potentially the leading expert on "their" topic, etc. Blind peer-review is good for this reason, but totally blind forum discussions are even better, imo. Although it annoys me when ppl make fundamentally math-ignorant claims, I am also aware that higher math is used to weed people out of popular academic programs. Thus there is a lot of math that seems more functional as a challenge for people to prove their math sophistication than it has actual applicability-value. That said, I am biased because I have less patience for math than many people with my level of interest in science, so I am more prone to overlook the value of such math in many cases. That may be true, but it doesn't really prove that social-cultures of subjective bias don't form in prestigious discourses. Besides, my point was not that good work isn't always good, though it may not always be. My point was that if good work was published in an online forum using unprestigious language by someone claiming to be an amateur, it would attract more bullying by amateurs or disgruntled professionals who feel better by pecking people 'lower' than them because they get pecked from 'above.' Yes, it is logical that a jumbled post will just be ignored because it's hard to read. But sometimes they are hard to read because the poster is using an amateuristic language that seems foreign yet contains interesting unorthodox ideas. You're right, though, that it's hard to filter through them and see the value when they're not closely resonant with discourse that's familiar to you.

Actually I think organisms do learn to learn by learning. That is to say, as an animal develops various habits, those habits become more practices and form the basis for learning new behaviors. E.g. there must be something about the way parrots learn to imitate sounds that cause them to be able to imitate human speech. I doubt they are just born able to imitate speech without practicing, just like a baby has to practice different sounds before putting them together into words. Right, and you've just tapped into the big issue, which is how to define what constitutes a particular society or group and what is defined as "social." Is a person's relationship with their hands or a computer "social," for example, or only relationships between separate individuals with separate bodies? Likewise, this gets into the politics of who has the authority to define the boundaries of a particular group/society. If my parent tells me I'm part of a social unit called "the family" because I bear some physical resemblance, etc. and I disagree, who is to say my culture is wrong and my parent's is right? As I said, defining and territorializing individuals as parts of groups is itself one type of culture. Thus to be reasonably objective you have to use a definition of culture that is not biased toward the culture of group-identification. Culture is, therefore, any socially learned knowledge or technique for doing something (thinking, feeling, or acting) where individuals' relationships with themselves are also defined as social. E.g. if you experiment with food and come up with something you like and then right down the recipe so you can repeat it later, you have just institutionalized your own culture and practiced it by sharing it with yourself socially.

I guess you're more interested in affirmation than discussion then.

If a star phase existed and was not known, how would anyone be able to know it to answer the question?

Well, I wonder if the probabilistic aspect of the orbitals couldn't be caused by the fact that the electrons would randomly repel each other into slightly altered orbital trajectories. Anyway, are you sure the magnets couldn't be arranged and fixed in such a way that they would exhibit south-polarity uniformly outward so as to repel each other. The distance wouldn't matter; it's just that they need to repel each other when they get sufficiently close in their orbits.

I don't even see why the expansion of the universe even has to be thought of in terms of volume-increase. Why can't it just be that the universe as it existed at the moment of the big bang is degenerating from dense and dominant nuclear force into dense and dominant gravitation/electromagnetism peppered with clusters of atomic nuclei? Spacetime can be seen as a function of force-intensity, no?

I was talking more about when people adopt an authoritarian attitude about themselves as followers so that they can attribute responsibility/accountability to the people they choose to follow. The economic socialism you're talking about is related to that attitude, I think, but not directly. A lot of people just look at the level of productivity and efficiency that has been developed in modern mass-production industrialism and question why anyone should have to go without when such abundance is the product of so much automation and labor-saving efficiency. Yes, they should think that if they want an ipod, they should develop and build it from scratch themselves, but since they've resigned themselves to not being able to do that, they whine about getting more money from the economy so they can buy it. Basically, everyone should just be free to build their own house out of sticks, mud, and/or rocks and then they should be able to keep and live in whatever they built without having to lose it because of tax-debt or mortgage-debt, etc. Since they're not allowed to do this, though, they whine for jobs or money by whatever means to live comfortably from the bounty that has been achieved by the economy.

Picture a "star" made of several bolts welded together so that they form a radial pattern in all directions. Then thread the flat round magnets onto the bolts through their holes so that they are in fixed position. Would the fields reconfigure to align even if the magnets were bolted to prevent them from flipping around?

I don't know if this would be a very accurate way to model the motion of electrons but I'll explain it and see what people think about it: First, think of taking 6 or so round magnets with a hole in the center and connecting them so that all the same poles are facing outward. Basically this would give you balls that would repel each other in all directions. Next. attach two or more of these balls to a "nucleus" that gets them revolving around a center-point, maybe using connecting rods. Now, if the two repellant balls were orbiting and could freely change direction to follow any path through the surface of the sphere they are confined to, how would their repellant force affect their orbital paths/patterns? They would inertially resist each change of direction from a straight orbital path, I would think, but each time they were pushed into a new path by the other ball, they would continue in a straight orbital path until the next meeting with the other ball, right? If you could build more than one such "atom-simulator" and you pushed the two toward each other until the "electron spheres" intersected each other, would they organize into complimentary orbits in a way that would "bond" the two "atoms" as in a chemical bond?

You really know a lot about ant hives. Could you also tell me about bee hills? Sorry, I couldn't resist that one. that makes sense that by branching out to make a new lane, they would just be widening the pheromone trail. I'm surprised that they don't at least have a tendency to follow each other's back-sides because that's where the pheromone comes out. If they did, you would think they would tend to form lanes/lines in different directions. I'm not so sure they like greeting each other, though. They may be hoping to run into an enemy to get a fight/meal (do they eat each other?). On the other hand, they may be totally indifferent either way.

Well, you clearly stopped reading my post after that sentence because I basically explained in terms of Freud's model how culture is a step removed from instinct. The problem with your approach is that you try to distinguish behaviors as being either instinctual or cultural but instinct is the basis for engaging in cultural activities. You instinctually communicate vocally but culture is how you learn to form utterances that achieve your goal more easily than grunting at someone until they do what you want them to. How is it "clearly not the one being discussed?" Who is to say that people discussing culture in this thread even have a rigorous understanding of what culture is to discuss in objectively in the first place? I am telling you how culture should be defined from an empirically rational standpoint instead of from some kind of groupist realpolitik. If you want to discuss whether crows distinguish themselves according to sub-species groups according to perceived cultural differences, that's a different issue. The issue was whether these crows were practicing culture, so answering that requires a valid definition of what culture is/means. What is it that you are trying to establish? Whether crows are more like humans than other animals intellectually?

Recently I noticed a line of ants going back and forth across a stretch of bike-road. I decided to take a closer look and saw that the ants made basically no effort to avoid head-on collisions by forming a new lane. They just went in opposite directions bumping into each other and then going around each other. Does it really take so much intelligence to form a new lane to avoid spending your entire trip going against traffic?

Freudianism offers a good basic model of how instincts result in the development of culture. The id has desires and it encounters restrictions/constraints/obstacles in satisfying those desires (superego) and thus it develops methods of achieving what it wants. Freud is specifically referring to ego-development (i.e. development of a coherent identity and sense of self) but this could be viewed as one culture among others that gets developed by the individual to achieve what it wants. Basically, I see culture as an analytical differentiation between the actual materiality of actions and the agential aspects of how those actions are constructed and performed. So eating, for example, is a material process of supplying the body with fuel and other nutrients but culture is the methods, meanings, perceptions, and other subjective interface by which materiality is approached and negotiated. In other words, culture is ubiquitous but it is analytically distinct from objective material processes. Now I'm rethinking my example of rust as a culture of steel and I'm thinking it would be more accurate to say that rust is a by-product of the culture of the bacteria converting the steel into rust. I.e. making rust is part of the way that bacteria lives and eats. There may be some anthropomorphism at work here on my part, though. I think groupism has gone off the deep end in trying to appropriate the concept of culture to emphasize similarities and differences among individuals to categorize them into groups. Groupism itself is a culture, as is identity, conformity, individuality, etc. All culture can ultimately only be expressed/perform at the level of individual actors so the "group-culture" ideology is misleading. It is a remnant of Durkheimian structuralist sociology (one that gets clung to as if letting go of it would spell the end of the world, btw). Individuals can approach culture in a mode of assimilation/conformity, which itself is a learned cultural behavior. This does not make culture group-based, it just means that individuals practice the culture of viewing culture as group-based as their method of approaching and giving meaning to culture. So it's actually quite biased to take a particular lay-culture of culture and elevate it to definitional status for culture universally. I try to be more empirical than that. edit: an example just occurred to me of a parrot learning to say "hello" from humans. Saying "hello" is a culture of the parrot in question although it would be impossible to call it "parrot culture" to speak human words (unless you defined the parrot's group as "pet parrots" in which case groupists would begin to think of it in terms of a group culture probably). Still, the parrot may have a culture of imitation that is partly instinctual and partly shaped through its development. Human individuals also learn culture in an individual socialization process with other individuals in various situations, but "cultural groupism" ignores this to simply assume that individuals practicing similar culture are part of the same group and individuals that are part of the same group practice similar culture. By doing this, the individuality of culture is obfuscated in favor of classifying and comparing culture at the institutional/pattern level.