padren

Is it not far more easily corrupted though? In such a case, I'd argue that the ease with which other systems are corruptable means that by comparison only a greater reason to avoid such a system as this. As it stands in this country, the economy is a big factor in politics and approval. Here, its a giant mess of a blame game, and if it were not for the natural market forces we'd really be screwed. There will always be politics, and I think economics will only be treated as a science by those who are in it for money, and as a popularity contest by those who seek a public position. You'll just hear lots of "stay the course" rhetoric, and the placing of blame with predecessors and opponents. Its so easy its sad. You only have to be overruled once, and you can use your idea that did not get approved as the scape goat for all the ideas and concepts you have that subsequently fail - blame it on the lacking keypin motion that was not approved...only if your ideaology was fully embraced things would be on track. By the time your career goes south, it will be time for someone else just as bad to step up, and blame their failures on the aftereffects of your own actions. In short, why would you have faith in an "accountable" institution when our current insitutions are supposed to be both accountable and transparent, yet fail so badly much of the time? Just a bit about my perspective: After graduating highschool, I never went on to further education. I am now a self taught web designer and software programmer, and make a decent living at it. I've spent more than my fair share of time suriving on a "very sub quota" standard of living for years (never a penny of social assistance however), to get where I am today. If I was in a system where others got to tell me what to do, and how I should make my choices, I'd be working towards the erosion of that system constantly. I would hate it and be fighting it on a daily basis. Such a system would have to deal with millions of people like me, and it would take a police state to do so effeciently enough to maintain the system. Secondarily, I don't think its very healthy for the human mind to be treated like a domesticated beast of burden. The next question is the purpose of the state in general. My general take on it, is that the state exists to try to protect the individuals' ability to live life the ways they want. We know some people, living the way they want to, will want to interfere with the way others live their lives (armed robbery, slavery, exploitation, etc) and as such try to maintain a consensus on the rule of law to protect individual liberties to the extent that they are not at the expense of other people's liberties. Likewise an armed forces exist to ensure other nations don't try to either. To a lesser degree, some taxes help provide a general safety net for the society with welfare and (in all 1st world nations except one - can you guess which one?) healthcare, but these are all far far less intrusive than living under a marxist system. The state provides a few additional programs that are desired by the public that could not be achieved effectively in free enterprise, such as NASA and such but again it doesn't interfere with how people live their lives to any real extent. I really don't think a well engineered state where the mass population is a cog in the system serves any great purpose at all, other than to satisfy leaders that lust after large state projects or hyper effecient production lines - which I still contend would be less effecient. The things I enjoy in life the most are abberations when evaluated with common sense. I like hiking, large quantities of booze, kayaking and tinkering on far fetched projects in programming that are liable to never pay out. The other argument is that survival of the fittest systems are unfair to the poor, but I am not against high taxes or effective welfare. I think though that whether a heavily capitalist society, or a marxist socialist society, the problem is not the system but how much the people within the system actually care about those who are less fortunate, and sadly most societies are very apethetic. Those that are not though, I think have to do more with the people and less with the system. Sorry for rambling, my main points are I'd be fitting the system if I lived in one that required such confirmity, as would enough people to heavily erode the effectiveness of such a system. I also don't see why an institution would be assumed to be able to be held accountable more easily, or be less corruptable. Lastly, if you could pull off such a system effeciently, what would the cost to the society in terms of what it means to enjoy being human?

We are still in a transition from a supersitious to a rational system of survival. How many people learn to use the computer by utilizing a series of proceedures to achieve a result without understanding why those proceedures net that end result? Often its a misconception of how things work, that just happens to lead to the best net result, that is the concept that propogates and is retained as the means to remember the proceedure. I recall an article about Eskimos failing to perform a traditional ritual on a hunt and dying after eating bad meat. It turned out the ritual by complete coincidence performs a number of tasks important to proper food preservation. But if people live better due to a positive result from an arcane ritual it will be passed on, even when the science behind the more positive result is completely unknown.

If I recall you can burn coal very effeciently at the right temperature and with additional processes.

I think the statements on sensory perception are quite good. My own refridgerator can "sense" when its getting too warm and kick in the compressor, but that could never count towards being alive - its just a mechanical tripwire. I think Bascule makes an interesting point, in which we'd question, is the internet a possible environment where digital life could occur? If the internet is alive, its the single most symbiotically dependant lifeform ever to exist. I find it interesting, normally you say "Does [object] qualify as [definition]" and people debate the properties of [object] but in this case, we are pretty much in agreement about the object - its the [definition] that is getting kicked all around. Perhaps we should ask, if we are asking if the internet is alive, why we are asking about that specific thing, and not something else? What attributes make us even want to consider the internet may be alive? Its very complex, and due to a very symbiotic* relationship its gaining nodes...etc, but the complexity factor is more an indication it could be "alive with our knowledge" than a factor for being determined to be alive. As vague as the definition of life is, most of the factor requirements are vague as well. Can reproduction/growth be dependant by a symbiotic relationship with another lifeform and still count as life? *We don't need the internet to surivive, and if alive it needs us to, but by symbiotic, I mean it improves human life enough that we choose to keep it intact, so it couldn't be considered parasitical in nature.

I've always held the contention that those that support such a model would inevitably be powerless within it. But joking aside, could you go into more detail?

I've been wondering about hybrid weapon systems that fire a shell that would be made of a composite of materials that could effectively generate and pull a ball of plasma with it. Part of the concept is seperating the explosive fuel source from the round itself, and rapidly charging the projectile from a capacitor while in the barrel at the time its fired. The right shape of projectile would have a vacuum behind it, which could aid in maintaining a plasma blast. I've read around on the internet that you can make plasma in your microwave by ignoring the advice of various friendly warning labels on the thing...I'm in between medical insurance right now and haven't tried.

New Orleans is somewhat unique in that they have a levy system (I don't think Florida needs one to my knowledge) that is overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers, and as long as it is their responsibility, its a federal responsibility to ensure they perform as expected. Their requests and pleas for a budget that could cope with the threat were turned down for years, in which funding for the war in Iraq was specifically cited as a more important spending priority - and thats where Bush gets flak. Still, even in peacetime, I can't say Democrats would be really that much more likely to properly fund such a project, since its money for a "worst case" scenario people never expect to happen. No disaster prevention or evacation is ever carried out to the degree it would be if people knew for absolute certain the worst case was actually going to hit - thats just human nature. I do agree with you about the news having a bias, but you have to just accept that everything in the media has a conservative tilt these days, but it'll pass and things will get back to normal sooner or later.

There is something I don't quite get, which may be due to my rather paltry lack of education. The concept of a particle transmitting a force requires a balance of energy, such as you shine a light on a solar sail, and it pushes the sail. However, if you put another solar sail in the shadow of the first, no photon particles will hit it as they are fully obscured when colliding with the first. With gravity, if you put two small masses near a large mass, they will both fall towards the larger mass at a speed dictated most largely by the large mass, even if one is behind the other. If there is a graviton particle, either it has a huge amount of force but only a small amount of that is used as it flies through any mass, allowing it to work on many objects without being absorbed or impacted, or it radiates in some manner not consistent with 3 dimensional space, like a light source raised an inch over a flat 2D paper will shine on all objects drawn on the paper, even those behind the light source's 2D location. How does modern physics explain these characteristics, and if these characteristics are outside normal particle transmission behavior, is it safe to assume speed is consistent with other means of transmission? Personally I think it travels at c for the reasons swansont mentioned, but I don't have any first hand understanding of the force so my view is purely based on what others have observed.

Just to play devil's advocate here, if the conveyor moved at say, 4mph, and the engine was off, and you held the plane in place with a rope tied to the nose while standing and holding it on the other end beyond the front end of the conveyor, due to friction, x pounds of force would be felt on the rope. As you speed up the conveyor, more force is felt on the rope, and at some point, the speed of the conveyor will get high enough that the force on the rope is equal to the force of thrust generated by a piper cub's engine. Since the original post asked us to assume that the conveyor automatically adjusted its speed to nullify the forward speed of the plane (that is effectively what he was asking, even if it was worded ambiguously) then wouldn't via friction force this still be possible if the conveyor moved at cartoonishly high speeds? Those that said, "A conveyor will not prevent the plane from pulling through the air, so it will move forward regardless of the ground and take off" are correct because the conveyor is generally a flawed way of forcing a plane to not move forward. But, if you take the conditions set by the opening post (in which the flawed method is assumed to actually stop the plane from moving forward) then the plane could not take off. At this point its somewhat silly, since we all are on the same page and agree about the flaws in the system and the conditions of airspeed required for take off.

Personally freeloaders on my dime don't bother me. I'd rather know some people are getting help they don't deserve at my expense, than know some people who do deserve help aren't getting it because I made a big stink over a few freeloaders. Edit: PS: The people who I would suspect of getting handouts in this case are corporations getting way overpaid by the government for the services rendered. And they aren't even hard up for cash.

Hi Bettina Long thread, but worth the read. I think this thread deserves to be in this section because the discussion is an attempt to explore a condition in a scientifically grounded way, and when people post "New Age" concepts they tend to be sidelined in favor of seeking more grounded advice. I have a limited experience with empathy, more so than most but less than I would characterize yourself or others I know. I was almost angry at the person who told me to see Titanic because of my rather strong and draining reaction, and only a few times have I every imo "lost it" and been unable to recover quickly. At this point, I can intentionally "flip" a switch and decide how much I want to feel, when I choose to flip it on I am sometimes unprepared for the resulting wash. In reading the thread, my thinking has been fairly consistent with Spiths, but I have some ideas and suggestions, though I may ask a few questions. One, I personally think of emotional reading and instinct this way: over the evolution of humans, instincts arose from making subconscious observations about our surroundings, and generating a "feeling" in our gut, etc, that when acted on leads to increased chances of survival. For instance, you may feel in your gut someone is dishonest - you may not know consciously, that you are reacting to his shifty eyes, tension in his tone of voice, or tons of other factors, but you can pick up on body language and react. The yawn, is thought to spread, because humans would do it when stressed (like how a deer flicks its tail when its worried) and since we are genetically wired to repeat the act (just as a deer flicks its tail involuntarily when it sees another deer doing such) it conveys a need to pay attention because something is amiss throughout a group. How we feel emotionally, is quite heavily communicated by body language, and being able to turn those cues into an emotion one can feel helps us understand what the other feels, is something that is a survival advantage in a social group, and grow by natural selection. With those elements, in your case you really strongly empathize and have a rare ability to really immerse yourself in those emotions. I can't help but to wonder that, even if you consciously would rather not be bothered by such things, if you deep down wish to understand the source of why people feel such pain. Even if you know in your mind a murder is a senseless act, that emotionally you want to understand why something so horrible had to happen a defenseless child or animal. I say that because for me, I am most lost in emotional pain, when emotionally I want to "burn through" what I feel until I can reduce it like a logical equation (which doesn't work so well). I can be mentally ready to move on, but unless I am emotionally, I am not free of it. I know this is different than your case, because my experiences are not so vivid, but I wonder if the need to understand drives it at all. A couple questions: 1) Do you see other people in general, how "head strong" they are, do you feel like others have stronger convictions and more "forward" personalities than yourself? 2) Do you have strong convictions on how the world should be and how you want to enact change, or have a strong feeling of what you want to do with your life, a firm sense of purpose? If you feel "yes" to 1, and "no" or "kind of but less than most others" to 2, you may have a sort of "pure observer" sense of self, which is more prone to being emotionally overwhelmed. Please don't be offended if I am way off or feel like I am trying to size you up with some insta-assumptions, I'm taking stabs in the dark in hopes something rings. 3) When you visually loose yourself in a scene, do you hear yourself thinking you'd like to stop this, or are your thoughts consumed by the event? As for ideas that could help, I'd like to recommend some possibly. Without going all new age on you, I'd like to recommend some meditation type stuff, not because I think it will have metaphysical effects, but because it can be a useful part of emotional management skills. If you are being overwhelmed by immersive emotional and sensory feelings, practicing meditations that take volitional control of these sorts of things can help. For instance, practice visualizing a scene, maybe a natural scene, and add a butterfly, then add another, and try to visually keep track of much vivid detail as you can. For emotions, try practicing feeling emotions of your choice. I've found if I focus on feeling my body right around the center of my ribcage on my chest, I can spontaneously (takes a few moments sometimes) invoke a feeling of joy without much effort, and taking conscious control of my emotions have helped me deal with a number of things in life. The last intellectual exercise I can recommend of this nature (may only help if overall you are an optimist), is try think about the world as a whole. At any moment, there is a lot of death and suffering, but also a lot of joy, a lot of people holding their new children and such, at any given moment, the worst of the worst is mushed in with the best of the best. Personally, I get an overall good feeling about the world as it is at any given second, so the sense that the worst thing I can observe close up is still a small part of something that I can't help but to overall feel good about. Just like we try to keep logical perspective of things (when a plane crashes, we comfort ourselves by saying its statistically rare) it sort of helps keep emotional perspective by being able to know that feeling well and being able to summon it at any moment. I hope that is helpful, I don't know if it will be, and I am sure you've had to separate a lot of chaff in your search for wheat, and I wish you well and hope you find what you need.

Airspeed, specifically over the airfoils is what dictates lift. You can have a plane on the ground completely stationary, and a strong wind (100+mph or whatever is equal to liftoff speed) will cause it to lift - though, it will soon start to move backwards due to air resistance, and its relative airspeed will slow until it stalls and crashes.