someguy

you could travel to a distant galaxy if you don't mind the fact that your colony will need to live out the first really alot generations on the way there. a motivation would be to get away from earth and design a society that lives under a different philosophy, which you cannot really do on earth without the rest of the population directly affecting you and likely the philosophy of your colony as well unless you censor a bunch of stuff and that's just plain dangerous. -I- you couldn't share awareness between galaxies instantly because no matter what your method of sharing is it can't move faster than light. also i'm not really sure if you could distinguish your thoughts and experiences from someone else's if you were linked that way, the problem is that the thing of you that is aware is inseparable from the thing of you that thinks, if you add another thing that thinks now you've got mental problems of voices in your head and split personalities. I don't think you can be aware of two things at once, so you couldn't concentrate and be aware of your current surroundings at the same time as someone else's so you'd basically need to borrow only their senses, maybe control their body or just their eyes. but you can do this with a robot that you control with current technology. but still not instantly only at a minimum delay of the speed of light.

actually i've heard that before that particles can sometimes appear out of nowhere. but how can this be possible. I understand that this has probably been observed that particles seem to pop out of nowhere but wouldn't observing that particles seem pop out of nowhere and particles actually popping out of nowhere be a different thing? the uncertainty principle though i think i understand for particles but these links talk about uncertainty principle of space time. what do they mean by that exactly? can't i know exactly where i am in space-time at any given moment? unless space-time is moving around me. I guess I could see how space could be doing this and if the universe is expanding, i think it must be, but isn't time pegged to my rate of change of position? and is only relative, therefore, in order for it to mean anything i must be able to locate two objects in space accurately or else i can't really say that they are relative. perhaps the motion of space is only significant for quantum size materials? if so, then uncertainty of space must mean uncertainty of time. but maybe i'm just way off here. i'll stop talking now.

do you know of a non spherical coordinate equation that describes say the probability clouds of electrons for hydrogen? where you could plot density relative to r and also find the total mass of the system. the equation doesn't need to contain the number of electrons in it and whatnot and instead could just be a separate equation for every scenario. or does what you gave already reduce to exactly that if i enter the proper scenario. it doesn't look to me like it does.

How come it's impossible to make a perfect vacuum? what's that QM issue you alluded to?

I don't see how believing in creationism can qualify someone to be insane. it just makes them wrong. i think that in order to be insane there must be a physical defect in the brain. perhaps believing in creationism could be a symptom of insanity but it is not sufficient. everyone is subject to illusion and everyone is wrong or believes something that is false. i think the majority of us today that don't believe in creationism would believe in it if we were in another period of history all other things being equal, therefore, if we call people that believe in creationism insane i think we would need also concede that all those that would have believed in creationism back in the day are also insane and therefore the majority of mankind is insane, which cannot be pretty much by definition. insane is a loaded word anyways, it doesn't really mean anything. mental disorder i think would be a better term. in order to prove creationism false all you need to do is prove the existence of a god as false. and I am confident that in this day and age that can be done. if not then everyone who doesn't believe in god or creationism is guilty of the same error as those that do, simply believing at random or pleading to popular belief or believing simply the same as certain others you wish to be the same as or maybe something else whatever it may be, but not logic based. and in that case if you believe that believing in creationism qualifies you as insane and you also believe that disproving creationism is impossible then you must also believe that all human beings are insane.

intelligence and knowledge are not the same. and yes i don't consider farmers to be intelligent in the way i am speaking. it's all relative of course. all humans are smarter than the majority of animals. but in the way i meant the large majority of human beings would not be intelligent. only a small minority would be. the ones responsible for all of our knowledge. if you think about it, were it not for others and language and books sharing the knowledge from generation to generation how much really would we know? pretty much nothing. just inventing language was a huge leap. look at plato and socrates and stuff they were some smart dudes but look how little they knew. now think of how little everyone else knew. and language had been around for a while already by then, and they had a fair amount of know-how in construction and stuff like that. most of the people i would deem to be intelligent of the caliber i was referring to are people to which pretty much every body knows their names for precisely the reason that they brought knowledge to our specie. I don't care what your job is i don't care about technology. i don't judge value by looking at the price tag. but you don't need to be smart to be a farmer. In China the smartest people worked for the government and the others did manual labour. our hunter gatherer ancestors were just as not smart as we are. from what i know about washington he didn't need to be smart. but i don't know much about him so i could be wrong but jefferson was pretty smart. if he lived in China at the time he wouldn't have been a farmer, i would guess he would have worked for a provincial government, or maybe a teacher, teachers were really valued too but i think they may have been of the lowest of government but i'm not sure exactly where teachers fit in. wealth was not prestigious, only knowledge was. I would define 3 sections of intelligence, but with varying degrees between them. so, it would be a smooth progression between each section with some nice gray areas but still 3 separate sections. the first would be incapable of comprehension like most animals and insects and stuff. next would be comprehension, and next would be invention. when i said intelligent i meant invention. so you're right i used an ambiguous word and i should have defined it better.

to seek power for the sake of power is greed. to seek power in order to exploit those with less power is greed. to take power as it is your responsibility since you are best equipped to serve the public is somehow more respectable, more sweet, don't you think? it's different. you assume that man is naturally greedy for power and therefore any society must work towards getting power. but if you look at the the europeen kings who had huuuuge palaces full of gold and hats of expensive and sticks of expensive just to show off their wealth (not unlike kip hop today) and then you look at the asian ones, simple wood and paper, still large of course the whole government lived there. but they were more reserved and did not seek possession and consumption. power for the sake of using it for the people and power for the sake of using for yourself is different. near the end when the british came over to china and did things like getting them addicted to opium so that the Chinese would finally trade with them, a greedy concubine took power of the throne and this you can see clearly is how things happened in europe. usually people who seek power are the least deserving of it. the most deserving would do it out of duty. Plato wanted this, Jesus wanted this, regardless of whether or not there is a god, there was a jesus, and if there was no god he knew that for sure, and that means there must have been a reason for inventing god, and that reason would be to get people to live a healthy lifestyle, to make the world a better place. he did not do it for greed, not for power, for duty for people. religions were pretty muc hall this way they all promote moderation and avoiding greed. In asia the religions took hold at a good time and i think influenced the societies in a great way. the asians have a great community culture they are or at least were much safer, and they all have a great work ethic. and captialism is brand new to them. they had the work ethic first. for jesus capitalist style living was already strong money and greed already the driving force of society. he advertised living opposed to what the state wanted, since they had the money and power and wanted to keep it. they finally found him and killed him. and then constantinople change dthe religion slightly republished the bible and made christianity the law. then, the church and the state became the same thing and the church became the greedy entity it was originally designed to destroy. that's why asia and europe are different. religion.

ya i don't deny that there have been intelligent people that existed in europe. and great technological feats and things like that. for a while they were kept completely silenced hence the renaissance but what i meant that was society was not geared towards intelligence being the guiding force of society. in europeen societies what was the governing force has been pretty much only money. he who became the next ruler was the relative of the king rich guy with all the power, or someone who killed him and was sneaky and backstabbing or something. in the middle ages anyways before that it was more like now and right after also but still money ruled. even now when we have democracies where the media influences us and we are under the impression that we decide who rules when really we are convinced of who to choose like commericals to buy dishwashing powder or something. we are manipulated. maybe we should leave the efficiency of democracy for another time though. but similar to what plato wanted, in China the government was selected according to how well people would do in exams basically the smartest ones would get the government jobs and the lesser would do the manual labor and that was pretty much all there was. they listened strongly to confucious and buddah highly intelligent individuals that taught them alot. in europe jesus was killed by the wealthy ruling elite and later constantinople took the bible changed a little and made christianity mandatory.The Chinese society was geared towards intelligence ruling rather than the destructive freedom of the market place that is consuming everything and destroying our planet and causing wars and all that good stuff. ya i agree the eastern world is really being flooded with western philosophy, even religion wise. and this really frustrates me and pisses me off.. great technology and great monuments and great objects are not really signs of a intelligence based society i don't think, not in the sense i mean anyways. but we are always told that we are helping people when we are giving them technology when that is not the case. signs of a enlightened society are things more like refinement and expertise in simple things only the necessary things and the practice of moderation. but greed style can be really good at winning wars because it makes good weapons. you see in asia they devised great complex fighting techniques. in europe they made metal armor to protect the wealthy and fought battles by using large numbers of expendable peasants. and that's stil lwhat happens but the weapons get much better in the name of saving more peasants... there aren't really any europeen fighting styles appart for those devised for sport or with strict rules. like boxing or fencing. europe was greed asia was enlightened now we are all becoming greed but it won't last forever.

if we say freedom of will is your choice. then the problem lies in defining "your" what is that "your". what is that you what is that thing making the choices. your brain is material and functions under the laws of physics. physics is only possible due to the fact that nature functions predictably though in some somewhat random way, predictable randomness. your brain must also function predictably randomly. therefore to say that truly you have freedom of choice beyond that predictable randomness implies that you have a soul, some sort of non-material thing, that is you, the "your" we are talking about, that is capable of acting upon the physical world and this i don't think is possible. just the proposition of a non-material soul itself I don't think is scientifically sustainable, let alone that it can act upon the physical world.

personally i don't believe in free will. i don't believe in random, and I don't believe in fate or the possibility of foreseeing the future. even if lacking freewill means that theoretically you could build a computer model of the universe and plot all of the actions of every individual. if you did such a program and predicted say what would happen in two weeks and you read the prediction of the computer after the two weeks had expired it could predict accurately. but if you read about your future first the computer model could not possibly have taken you reading the result into account in the prediction. if it tried, then that one didn't take into account reading the new prediction, so on and so forth so your computer would be stuck in a loop forever. hence you can't foresee the future. if i believed in freewill, then i feel i would need to believe in my own ability to change my own intelligence. my intelligence is the thing that thinks for me and decides what to do based on my memories. if i can't change that thing that decides for me, then i don't feel i can call my decisions freewill. i think that freewill implies that my awareness is the thing making the decisions, but i think its more like my awareness is watching the decisions happen to me, otherwise i could decide independently of intelligence, which nobody can, intelligence is the tool that decides. that's what i think anyways.

i think it does. but for one thing human beings due to language and our capacity to invent and share knowledge don't evolve conventionally anymore. we don't grow fur in order to cope with cold, we invent heaters and coats. in order for human society to be "smart" as a whole you only need a few of these inventors as our social construct will share any new technology with anyone, so there is no advantage for everybody being smart from an evolution point of view. but there is in being able to understand language and in having a few inventor types that invent things, discover stuff and write books and stuff about them. other than that the human race is more and more evolving with "defects" more and more people are needing glasses, being blind is fine little people will continue to grow in numbers stuff like that. (btw i don't mean those are defects of people or that these kinds of people are worse in some sort of absolute sense, just that in the case of if we were in the wild without technology those things might cause you to die early) so unless being smart as an individual gives you a better advantage to survive over other traits, which in our case it doesn't, the proportion of highly intelligent people should remain roughly the same though perhaps the absolute values may differ. so the bell curve would remain roughly the same shape but the smartest person in the world may get smarter as time marches on. and for intelligence as far as i know there is no limit an individual could evolve to but for lack of intelligence there is a certain limit, and being too unintelligent could easily get you killed at a young age, so i think the bell curve would eventually warp very slightly. so basically the maximum can increase but the minimum will remain fixed.

IQ tests are still not adequate though and still to some degree rely on what you have learned. for example certain questions are easier with a good understanding of math. IQ tests are not really tests of intelligence. they are feats that generally intelligent people are better at doing. being tall is very good for playing basketball but you wouldn't measure how tall people are based on how they perform in a basketball game. though often you'd be right that the taller players do better, and so testing that way wouldn't be completely useless but still not very precise. it would be much better to use a ruler to measure height.

I think undoubtedly yes intelligence can be different for different populations and yes it is inherited, but not perfectly. It depends on how your society is geared and whether or not intelligence gets highly favoured in a society. the thing is that from a specie point of view, once language has been invented you only need a few highly intelligent individuals making discoveries and inventing stuff because they can teach others and make tools for others and stuff like that. so evolutionarily it's not really necessary for an entire population to evolve to be very highly intelligent. but a certain specie of monkey in its entirety did and that made us, and that was probably due to geographical conditions. western societies were never geared towards intelligent beings, it has always been geared towards greed and money. But in at least some Asian countries it was different and i feel that because of that as a whole some of the asian countries are smarter than we are but not all of them because still some of them were farmers and stuff. basically China's society was the closest to plato's philosopher kings the world has ever seen. Japan looks like it was pretty crazy too but i don't know much about japan government.

in order for time to exist you need motion and vice versa. if there was a big bang then there must have been at least a "moment" where all energy ceased to move. in that case time did not exist as the whole universe was still. if the big bang bangs then stuff starts moving again you can have time. So looking at it that way time necessarily started at the big bang.

when you were born via evolution your body was designed to like certain things and dislike others. these were features of our previous animal state before we could "know". you would choose what to eat, not because you know of nutrition and you read the ingredients, because you think it smells good. so if you want to eat healthy all you need to do is not eat anything with artificial flavors and just trust your taste, unless your taste genes have been too modified since those animal days. you are afraid of heights because falling from high will kill you. you like sex because it makes babies, you don't like getting injured because it could cause you to die. but since we invented technology we can survive genetic "defects" that otherwise in nature would have had us killed. therefore some people like the "wrong" types of food, some people are not afraid of heights and some people like "pain". but they probably don't feel pain exactly like you do it feels different to them, it feels like something to like. just like some people hate some food you like, some of it is from eating habits that grow on you but also people perceive different flavours differently since birth. Anyways, that's one reason why we can have masochists and that's why they can like it. but probably, some, for some reason, due to some experience want the same pain you experience for example like that dude in da vinci code. but i find that more difficult to swallow when you associate it with sex. I would tend to associate at least the large majority of those instances with people that perceive pain differently than the majority of human beings. it may also be possible that certain pain gets associated with something good and after a while that specific kind of pain gets desired by association, like what happened to george on seinfeld when he started eating during sex. but still even masochists must all have a certain threshold of pain they can't bare or that they dislike because otherwise they would die and that kind of gene would get eliminated.

faster than it was before. relative to its previous speed. if the center point was everywhere then it couldn't be moving away from the center point it would always be at the center point and therefore you could not conclude that the universe is expanding. no? it seems to me that if the universe is expanding then there must be a center point from which it all came or at least a center area and you could still take that center area and find the middle of that even if the universe was never just a single point. if the universe is at least somewhat spherical or rather some 3d globby shape and all the energy in it is expanding then by calculating the mass and velocities or vectors of all the energy it consists of you should be able to extrapolate a middle point. no? I may be wrong but i think that what you mean is that the only thing that exists is universe and therefore it expanding must mean that it is just itself a middle point. it is a stretching thing rather that many tiny solids expanding in a void like marbles on a table. the actual centrepoint is sort of stretching and expanding so it is itself the middle point and you could never find it's origin in the universe because whatever spot you find used to be a smaller spot that was inside the universe when it was smaller. but still even at that i think you could calculate the middle of the universe from an energy point of view, the center of mass of the universe and you would do that by finding the "middlepoint" from which everything seems to be moving from, taking into account they speed direction and mass. but you couldn't say that that spot was the spot in the universe where the big bang took place because the point entity universe of big bang is the whole universe and therefore where it was located when the big bang banged cannot be located inside the universe. but you can still find the middle of the universe.

thanks for the link. unfortunately though it's a little beyond me. however if i understand it correctly it is using a different set of geometry to give the answer. it is positing a sphere as reference space. something like the trigonometric circle but 3d. I was thinking of something more along the lines of if say the probability cloud was a sphere then you would have an integral between to set coordinates of M/(4/3 pi r^3) where M would be some relation to r and that way you would have a mathematical formula describing the density and shape of the cloud all the way through, in this case a sphere of density unknown (at least i think that's what it is). if the rate of density can be known then for people that are good at math this should be pretty easy I think. but maybe i'm missing something.

I don't know, but if moving faster causes an object to create a more intense gravitational field then it would follow that all other things being equal there would be some vector where that gravitational field would be the smallest. and I would call that speed zero. and if i had to guess what speed that would be i would first try to plot the center point from which the universe is expanding and try to peg a speed to that. but apart for that then you can't really say how fast anything is moving or how slow because it's all relative. but still when you cause a body to move you basically inject energy into it and that changes it. you would think that you could find a speed where no part of the body's energy is allocated to motion of the whole body, and only of its parts. so if you could isolate the motion component of its energy and know that is the only thing changing about the body then personally i think it would be possible to find a slowest speed possible. but i could be wrong.

personally i always thought that this could happen because of the dilatations that occur when you approach the speed of light and they would compensate for the fact you are moving faster towards light for example and so for you, in any reference frame, light would always seem to be moving at the same rate, even if you accelerate greatly towards it. but that would mean as a third observer you could watch a ship moving really fast towards a beam of light and if you combine their speeds moving towards each other the sum would be greater that c since the speed of light compared to you is c.

well for one thing newtonian gravity can't be used to calculate how gravity bends light since light has no mass and therefore by newtonian logic is not affected by gravity. so for any calculations that have the locations of stars or something you need to use the einsteinian way. if you are allowed to be imprecise enough for what you want to do you could use the newtonian method if you want. but if you need to be more precise or you need to account for light then you need to use the einsteinian way. it looks like a win win situation to me. Personally i find that any formula that uses a constant is a little suspect, it looks kind of like a quick fix job to me for some reason.

my vote is star wars. forget the weapons, they are insignificant compared to the power of the force. it's not the size that matters its how you use it.

what's 99.9%C? there's no way to know. for all you know we are already moving at 99.9% of C, and compared to something somewhere i guess we must be. the particles accelerated are using earth as rest and then take what's left from earth's speed to light speed and move the particles at 99.9% of that. but even at that 99.9% isn't really very close in terms of trying to reach the speed of light. you can't go the speed of light because the energy required to get you there is way too great because the object increases in mass as you accelerate it. at some point getting 0.0000000000000000000000000001% faster towards the speed of light would require a huuuuge amount of energy. the closer you get to the speed of light the more energy you need to accelerate. even minuscule accelerations guzzle way too much energy. no matter how much energy you put into the object to move it there will still be room left to make it to the speed of light the only difference is you will be using much more energy to get only the tiniest improvement towards your goal. forever.

it seems to me like the world would be a better place if you don't learn how to make bombs.

I dont' know of any websites, but wikipedia says that "Biomass, in the energy production industry, refers to living and recently dead biological material which can be used as fuel or for industrial production." and since biological material is not made of only sunlight then i would not say that biomass is purely sunlight either. plants are also made of things found in the earth, like carbon (also drawn from the air) and water. if biomass was purely sunlight then you could make plants out of purely sunlight. if you look at the wikipedia website in its definition of biomass it states it as being much more than sunlight, but i think you mean to say that the energy drawn from those plants was originally sunlight and therefore biomass is nothing more than sunlight, but if that's the case then i still think that's not fully correct because plants are not just sunlight. i mean at the end of the day everything is made of the same stuff, energy, so you could say in a way that stones are just sunlight but certain types of energy don't easily transfer into others they need a complex or precise chain of events in order to do so. in order to get energy from biomass you need to take all the original materials you need to make the plants including the seed, that comes with lots of evolution included, and all of the other ingredients they need to grow and then you need to burn it or something, and that complex process makes biomass not sunlight in my opinion. by reasoning that it does you would also need to concede that fossil fuels are sunlight also since they are basically biomass that have been rotting for way too long.

hmm i don't completely understand the Schroedinger equations yet. there's prerequisites i don't really have to understand them fully plus my math is really rusty and even in its prime was not really totally sufficient. So i guess for now i'll just have to take your word for it that these adequately explain the shapes of the probability clouds for hydrogen. do you know of equations that explain their shape in density/volume? also do you know roughly how they came to figure that the clouds were this shape?