lemur

so the elephants were attacking the rhinos purely out of adolescent aggression?

Both polyandry and prostitution allow women to maintain relationships with multiple men. In polyandry, husbands are often brothers or otherwise view and treat each other with respect and love as family. While this may not be the case in prostitution, the prostitute has more control over which men she keeps in her clientele with no risk that her mates will bond together to criticize her, etc. So while both forms of heterosexuality allow women to have multiple relationships, they may have different consequences for men, women, and children. What are your thoughts?

I have a seafood addiction, i see food and i want to eat it! It's more difficult to stop eating once it gets out of hand than many people seem to realize. I eat late at night for some reason but seldom during the day, addiction is weird, hard to understand unless you have been there.

I only noticed my alcoholism after many years of freely drinking with the belief that I was just playing at overdrinking but that in reality I was totally in control of my alcohol use. So I would guess that many people understand addiction although they don't realize it because they are in denial.

Yes but it would be an incredibly trivial amount, just a few hundred kilos, at most, of hydrogen fused would be enough to power the entire USA power grid.

In the short term, it would be negligible. But I would assume that if fusion power plants were sustainably operational, cheap abundant power would become the norm and the global economy would continue to grow for many millennia as well as all sorts of space-colonization projects being undertaken, so to avoid ending up like a waterless Mars, development of conservative consumption norms still seems first priority to me.

The idea that power plants use water in a way that make it unusable by anyone else is simply not true, not true by any stretch of the imagination.

If hydrogen fusion plants were made practical, those would convert water into helium and oxygen, though, wouldn't they? I assume he was talking about fission, in which case you're right, but I thought maybe he had read something about fusion using up hydrogen derived from water and gotten that mixed up with fission, which doesn't use up water.

Not antagonize the Jewish hierarchy for one and just keep his mouth shut for another.

Scripture shows, with his knowledge of Judas' forthcoming kiss, that he would be arrested. He had lots of time to get out of town.

I always take the bait and respond to your posts but I am starting to think that you just post things to be provocative. I don't think you have any constructive points to make besides generating controversial verbiage. Isn't that just trolling?

Any addiction that makes people less truly human and more like pure, unthinking machines is profoundly unattractive. People who compulsively gamble often seem glassy-eyed and robotic in their pursuit of the empty adrenalin rush they get from taking risks whose potential downside is typically much worse than any potential gains from their success. The general rule would then be that addictions which make people less critically self-aware are most ugly.

 

Using this as a criterion, drug addiction and drunkenness seem to be among the worst addictions, while sex obsession and a preoccupation with chess are not. A math Ph.D. I know once told me that when he is doing math "there is only math going on in the space where I exist, but no self-awareness." However, in cases like this, the potential to return to self-awareness when socially necessary is more available than in the case of drunkenness and drug addiction.

Interesting but then why is it that more people initiate contact at bars than at math/chess conventions?

attractiveness is a subjective measure. It will vary from person to person.

 

for instance, if you and I were comparing ideal partners you'd likely have a very different set of attributes to maximise attractiveness to you. it is even possible that our differences in what we find attractive means that i would find your epitome of attractiveness quite repulsive.

 

also, i wouldn't call OCD an addiction. thats outside of the definition you proposed.

I realized that this was a subjective question. I posted it in the lounge because I was just hoping people would give their general subjective impressions regarding cultural tastes. I think you could say that beyond individual subjectivity, there are cultural-taste factors that influence what people find attractive/unattractive. E.g. alcohol use is generally consider less unattractive than use of harder drugs, although addiction is generally considered unattractive regardless of the substance. OCD may not be an addiction, but it falls into the same general range of personality traits that involve control-problems.

Haha.

The bladeless fans work by shifting a relatively small volume of air at high speed and using that to move lots of air.

Doing so is not very efficient (and an inefficient fan warms the air more that necessary which is not what you want.

Could such a fan best be positioned in a window or elsewhere to blow warm air outside and create air-movement inside via the resulting pressure-decrease?

"Mathematics is the study of any kind of order that the human mind can recognize" -- Pasquale Porcelli, Professor of Mathematics.

 

Your problem is that, like most people who are ignorant of mathematics, you fail to recognize what mathematics really is. Very little of mathematics is equations. Logical qualitative arguments ARE mathematical arguments.

 

No one has said that you are an idiot. You have admitted to being ignorant of mathematics. Ignorance and idiocy are not the same thing. One might, however, be of the opinion that proclaiming understanding while simultaneously admitting ignorance is a bit idiotic.

 

Mathematics and physics are two completely different things. But mathematics is the language in which physics is expressed. It is illogical to think that one can understand a subject while remaining illiterate in the language in which it is developed and recorded. Your "10%" is illusory.

 

"To summarize , I would use the words of Jeans, who said that 'the Great Architect seems to be a mathematician'. To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. C.P. Snow talked about two cultures. I really think that those two cultures separate people who have and people who have not had this experience of understanding mathematics well enough to appreciate nature once." – Richard P. Feynman in The Character of Physical Law

My shortcoming is in decoding the meaning of equations expressed in variables and symbols. Simple formulas like W=FD, F=MA, Power=WT, acceleration=speed change T, P=MV, etc. are just shorthand for expressing analogical relationships in my mind. I do think about relationships between such things in a quasi-mathematical way, but I don't think in exact relationships between variables in the sense of processing a mathematical proof. For example, I get confused when thinking about the relationship between energy, power, work, force, time, etc. because I am simultaneously trying to think in terms of empirical situations and logical relationships between terms. I suppose you could say I think mathematically in a way, but I just don't respect my own 'mathematical' thinking the way I respect people who can explicitly represent and manage their thought-process in terms of precise balances between two sides of an "=." However, instead of giving up completely, I try to maintain the more constructive attitude that my methods of thought aren't totally worthless and so I enjoy thinking about physical/mechanical issues in my way and discussing what I come up with with people who think using more formal mathematics or other approaches. I view diversity of thought-approaches as a constructive process, although in practice it does sometimes lead to confounding miscommunication. I do have to admit that I usually get more out of discussions with highly math-literate people than with math-illiterates without rigorous reasoning abilities. Some of the most interesting thoughts can come from such people, or those with some reasoning, but such people are an elite among many more people who are just playing in sandboxes trying to develop rigorous reasoning. Of course, it's also important for them to develop so I can't denigrate their efforts too much.

Outside of debates about what really constitutes an addiction or not, let's just assume that all forms of excessive usage of pleasure-inducers is addiction. In that case, which addictions do you think would be considered more unattractive than others? Is a sober chain-smoker less attractive than an alcoholic non-smoker or vice-versa? Is a healthy non-user sex addict (think Tiger Woods) more attractive than a smoking, drinking, drug-user who is faithfully committed to monogamy? Is food-addiction and obesity preferable in a partner to other forms of addiction? What about obsessive-compulsive cleaning or other work (OCD) addiction?

should this topic be for the lounge instead of philosophy, btw?

The best fan is a ceiling fan.

For best comfort, speed is not good. What you want is a large volume of air displaced at moderated speed. so you need a very large fan in diameter working at low speed (and at low noise). Generally speaking.

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Haha, now i looked at what you bought. Exactly the contrary.

your lasko looks like a hair dryer.

He could probably position such a fan in a way that would make a nice breeze. It's just a question of distance, isn't it? His fan might even be better because it will be further away, along with the noise it makes. I like ceiling fans for the quiet but they do blow warm air back down. Box fans are my favorite but any fan that generates a horizontal breeze is good, imo. I think a little air-speed (pressure) is good, too. After all, it is the wind-chill effect you're going for. It just becomes a problem when your hair and papers start blowing around.

Strictly speaking, I think we do acknowledge how much of science involves non-mathematic ideas and concepts. It's a small amount. I don't see a single scientific concept in this thread that isn't mathematical in nature. What I do see are several misunderstandings presented where math comprehension is lacking.

Math does what it does. Dealing with specific issues/questions determines what is relevant, whether math or other forms of reasoning. The issue of potential energy involves the concept, imo, that energy can be differentiated into active expressions and inactive (potential) expressions. The primary method is to look at a mechanical system and identify what energy is doing in that system, the paths it takes, and where/how it becomes inactive until a later moment in which it is once again activated. This is qualitative reasoning/description, but I believe it explains the basic logic behind dividing energy into kinetic and potential variations. I'm not arguing that it's useless to measure energy quantitatively or that various types of mathematical modeling don't allow you to describe and predict mechanical systems in a more accurate way. I'm just saying that when people are confused about why potential energy is different than kinetic energy, or what constitutes potential or kinetic energy, that it makes sense to analyze and identify what energy is and what makes it kinetic or potential in the first place, at a qualitative level. I'm not in competition with math. I lament my lack of math skills and I try to understand math-references when I can. I just don't appreciate being told that I'm an idiot and nothing I think can be grounded or have truth-value without math. It's just not the case. There is more to physics/science than just math. The ration of math to non-math is also irrelevant. 90% of science can be math but that doesn't mean that the other 10% is any less important. It comes down to specific questions/issues and what is specifically necessary to address them.

Instead of expanding your theory immediately in the most general possible way to account for everything in a completely unfamiliar way, you should start with specific mechanisms that clearly support your more general ideas.

It has been explained to you several times, by several people, precisely why you are wrong. I have no intention to continue to attempt to explain physics to someone who is so blatantly proud of his state of ignorance and who refuses to learn either the subject itself or the language (mathematics) in which it is spoken.

Why is it so hard for people who like math to acknowledge how much of science involves non-mathematic ideas and concepts?

The conflict the Jews had with Greeks and then Romans, and each other, is much more worldly than concerns about Holy Spirit issues. I don't think authority can tolerate rebellious groups committing acts of violence and piracy. Authority is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact it is necessary for our shared protection and progress. You don't get to molest the Greeks because you don't like them selling birds in front of the temple. This is Rome, a multi cultural civilization with freedom of religion, and an ingenious legal system for handling disputes between people of different cultures. If the Jews can not live in peace with others, they need to leave Rome. Jesus threatened everyone, by acting out. His misbehavior on a day when everyone was coming to celebrate passover, and the Romans were on guard against trouble, should not be taken as a separate event, but in context with the ongoing conflict between Jews, Greeks and Rome.

This reminds me of my favorite line from the movie, The Passion of Christ, where Pontius Pilate says to his wife something like, "he talks of truth, what is truth?" She says something like that he knows what truth is, to which he replies something like, "the only truth I know is that there is a mob of people out there who is going to rebel if I let this innocent man go." So you can take sides with authoritarian claiming innocent victims just because the masses are rising up against an individual or minority, but that doesn't make it right. If Pilate found Jesus innocent, he should have protected him regardless of the political consequences. It may be inconvenient to go against an angry mob, but Pilate and his soldiers could have subdued the uprising easily, I think. Being true to the Holy Spirit would have meant that Pilate listened to his own truth that he found no fault in Jesus. Instead he betrayed his better judgment and chose for political expediency. That may create tranquility in the short-term, but ultimately it creates a precedent for the injustice to reverberate and multiply.

I don't understand why you would say that capitalism hopes that people will reduce consumption to increase savings, since it depends on its ability to sell things in order to make profits. Why is capitalism so eager to spend money on advertising to stimulate demand and offer credit so as to increase borrowing to buy more goods if it really wants people to reduce consumption and save? The goal of capitalism is to make profit for those with capital to invest; the common good is not strictly a goal of capitalism, though that may be an acceptable by-product of the generation of profits.

I'm talking about the original ideals of capitalism as it evolved from protestant ethics (the Max Weber view). The logic of capitalism as an ethically virtuous economic system made sense in the sense that saving was the individualist equivalent of Marxist communism's devotion to the collective good. For Marx, good communists take little and give a lot. Good capitalists do the same, only the mechanism motivating them is making more money and saving it instead of spending it. You're right that capitalism has been usurped by all sorts of deviation from the original protestant ethics. People use it as a free-for-all to milk as much money as they can out of anyone for any reason in any way and lots of people have lost the saving ethic, although it persists in terms of things like 401k retirement accounts, insurance, etc. Yet, wherever there is a big pool of money, there seems to be a flock of vultures trying to kill it and consume it instead of allowing it to survive as savings.

The problem of capitalism is that it is trapped in the cycle of investment-production-and profit that it creates. There is no point in investing and risking capital unless it can produce a profit by selling items for more than their true value and employing people for less than the true value of their labor to produce things. This process generates, over and over again, ever larger profit accumulations. These accumulations have to be profitably invested, since otherwise they become dead capital and are eaten up by inflation.

The accumulation only occurs because of insufficient competition to continually drive down profits. If that occurred, everyone would be so impoverished that the bar for new enterprises would be pretty low. Anyone would start anything to make money instead of restricting their investments to the highest CAPs, PERs, etc.

But since there is now more capital for investment than before, more goods have to be produced -- and purchased by the public -- to generate sufficient profit to meet the increased return demanded by that additional capital.

Hence mass-markets characterized by wealthy elites (and their managerial class aristocracy) vs. poor masses, more reminiscent of the middle ages than what you would expect from a true free-market. There's nothing wrong with mass-production really, since it's efficient, but it's odd that free market competition doesn't push profits down to levels that prevent capital accumulation among investors and managers.

Yet at each turn of this cycle, the fact that goods are sold for more than they are worth, and workers produce more value than they are paid -- with the difference soaked up by the capitalists as profit, the profit and the wealth of the capitalists grows faster than the buying power of those who have only their labor to sell.

Yes, I see that you subscribe to Marxist economic naturalism where capitalism is concerned. But if you would read about ideal free market behavior, you would see that workers aren't supposed to get disenfranchized of everything except their labor because anyone is supposed to be able to gain competitive access to markets, which undercuts capitalists' ability to maintain exclusive ownership of the means of production. There are numerous deviations from pure competition that cause workers to accept their subordination to capital, which is the means by which the capital-owners avoid competing with ingenuous workers starting their own businesses. High wages, benefits, conveniences of not having to be accountable for one's labor, high liability and corresponding insurance costs, etc. all keep workers deferring their productivity to corporate authority.

Thus in 1960, real wages in the U.S. made up 52% of GDP, while by 2005 they had fallen to only 46% of GDP. In 1985, the richest 5% of Americans controlled assets worth 2.05 times the total GDP; in 2010, they controlled 2.74 times the total GDP. With workers whose incomes were making up a smaller proportion of GDP than ever, how were these even wealthier captalists going to find sufficiently productive investments for their surplus wealth?

They do it by implementing redistributive policies that fuel a new investment competition so they can go on betting against each other for relative supremacy. Tax policies that target the rich are like requiring an ante at the casino to stimulate the rich to start betting and getting the cash flowing. Otherwise capitalism would quiet down significantly and make room for grass-roots market activities to emerge.

No. That would be thread hijackin, lemur.

 

 

 

 

Stick to the ACTUAL subject of this thread, please.

I just mentioned it as a potential application of this topic. I'm not interested enough in it to post a thread on it. If there was a thread on photoelectric fabric, I would mention sailboats - not to hijack, just to indicate prospective relevance.

If it can be settled, let alone with an observation is it really a philosophical dispute?

Everything that involves reason and logic is philosophizing. You may be using a different meaning of the word that I am. I am just talking about conceptual processing, the application of logic, etc..

No, but if it disagrees with the experimentation or the maths, it doesn't need to be explained; it can be ignored as it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much the lack of apparent simultaneity and rejection of absolute space and time violate philosophical ideals, the theories that correctly model the universe show these things to convenient human-scale crutches that are incorrect in cosmological terms.

You are making philosophical claims when you make the arguments you are making. I could take your bait and philosophize with you about whether philosophy is necessary, but I would be proving myself right by engaging in a philosophical discussion with you about it in the first place.

in post-modern discourse analysis this would be a highly debated point. You might be interested in foucauldian work on discourse - ie the Archaeology of Knowledge. It is a bit weird and disjointed in places - but a great, if difficult, read.

It's not a question of whether it's a good read or not. Texts contain concepts and ideas that can be applied. Once you apply them, you can see whether they add any value to your analysis. This is as true of Foucault's work as it is of Einstein's, Newton's, or Feynman's.

The post-modern conception of the discourse as a normative structure designed to trammel knowledge, exclude exterior interference, protect and promote those within the discourse, and control access to, use of and understanding of information/knowledge is, of course, exemplified by the refusal of the scientific establishment to recognize non-scientific critiques.

I'm not sure what you're reading or why you're discussing it here. Are you saying that you're purely interested in excluding people from your discourse?

The fact that the philosophical model fits observation, does not mean that it has validity or predictive power; because firstly it is a philosophical model and not a scientific one (and yes I realise this is recursive) and secondly because it is not really a model but more a non-disinterested charactature.

It is not necessary to classify a model to subject it to critical rigor. However, subjecting anything to critical rigor in any way requires some level of philosophizing. Don't think of philosophy as a canonical discourse defined by a disciplinary, etc. That is "P"hilosophy. I'm just talking about the application of reason and logic, whether in the form of math or other language. It comes down to making valid arguments that hold up to critical scrutiny. Simply trying to assert validity by excluding people from criticize you doesn't strengthen your arguments or evidence for anything.

No, you don't...I think this is perfectly clear judging by your responses. Personally I think the seminal field theory is Maxwell's equations, which is really a collection of equations already proved by others. It is a blinding result of vector calculus, and I'm stumped by how such a bunch of simple equations can explain (through application) the workings of EM, but they do, and they do it very well...it gets more complicated when studying materials et.c

 

With all due respect lemur, you are asking 'big' questions, without the background to understand the responses. This is fine to a point, but it is increasingly annoying when you try to convince your audience that you do understand these concepts. I am not being rude

 

I am more than happy to run you through the basics of GR, if you fancy it...QFT is not my field (ha!) but I'm happy to explain what a field theory actually is...nobody knows what a quantum field theory actually 'is', and anyone who claims otherwise, is talking bullshit.

I don't think it is possible for many people to think logically without equations once they become accustomed to thinking in terms of equations. So if you can't relate to how I think without math, how can you evaluate my knowledge, reasoning, and how I apply logic? All you seem to know is that the math works for you and I don't know it, therefore my knowledge must be incapable of conceiving of anything relevant. All you're really doing here is discussing your impressions about me and about the nature of scientific theory as you understand it, but I really don't think you have any basis for proving anything about your point. All you can do is say that you know something I don't know, therefore you must be right and I must be wrong. Am I wrong and there's more to your reasoning than this?

He could have avoided making a scene on the day, the Roman's would have been on high alert. Jesus was a typical 30 year anarchist, pushing to see how far he go. Some Jews were more rebellious to Roman rule than others. The Rabi in the temple had too much to loose by causing the Roman's trouble, and it was their responsibility to control the trouble makers. The poor rural Jews were resentful of the wealth and privilege of the city Jews, especially the Rabi and Jews who held positions of power and privilege under the rule of Rome. Jesus took action against both when he over turned the tables on the day of Pass Over, when many would come to the city and the Romans would be on high alert. He put the high Jewish officials in the position of having to prove to the Romans that they would not tolerate trouble makers, because the Romans were ready to come down hard on all the Jews, if they caused trouble.

I agree with this interpretation, but what I find interesting about it is that it says what most people seem to be unwilling to say directly to Christians: i.e. that Jesus was a trouble-maker and that he caused his own persecution and killing by provoking existing authorities and that the righteousness of himself and his teachings are really peripheral. The view is that authority should be obeyed, whether right or wrong, in the service of keeping the peace regardless of corruption or injustice. The fact that people would take sides with corrupt authorities in persecuting and killing someone just for making them look bad or preaching inconvenient truths supports the idea that Jesus died for everyone's sins - insofar as everyone has the sin of cooperating with unjust authorities against 'trouble-makers' like Jesus. This was, in fact, Jesus' main message: that blasphemy of Holy Spirit was a worse sin than blasphemy or disobedience to any worldly authority and he was persecuted and killed for putting holy authority above the authority of the secular and religious elites. So, indeed he was an anarchist who was persecuted and killed for anarchy - but would you honestly claim that persecution and killing of people in the interest of reinforcing social hierarchy is legitimate? If Jesus would have supported the authorities and cooperated with them to save his own life, wouldn't that have made him untrue to his faith? So, considering that everyone who survives authoritarianism has cooperated with it in some way, aren't we all indeed sinners responsible for Jesus' death by cooperating with the system of power that persecutes and kills people like him?

What it means for space to curve?

I think that I have a clear way of explaining what it means for space to curve, but it may be that someone corrects me: If an object moves from point A to B as a result of its own inertia/momentum, with no external force applied, it can be said to have moved in a straight line inertially. However, just because an object moved from A to B doesn't mean that the path it took was the only possible line connecting A and B. So, for example, the Earth may be at point A on January 1 and be at point B on December 1. The path between A and B is a straight inertial path within the space-curvature of the Sun but there can be other paths between the two points that are also straight inertial paths. The curvature may be different for different kinds of objects/particles moving at different velocities, I think, so light curves very little at the same distance from the sun that causes the Earth to remain in orbit at its velocity. I believe this basically explains space-curvature, but someone will probably correct some aspect of what I have said so don't take it as a perfect explanation. I just offer it as a simple basis for going further.

Hi everybody,

 

How and why does mass curve space?

 

Thank you.

Hi Anilkumar, are you asking about how mass-space curvature is explained and represented mathematically or how mass actually causes space to curve and/or what it means for space to curve in the first place?

This is a physics topic but since it is more philosophical in character, I'm posting it in philosophy. It may also be viewed as speculation, though, so please feel free to move it where appropriate.

Consider that there are four types of force and that each type corresponds with a particular scale of events. This is logical since stronger forces do more work at smaller distances.

Nuclear: Strong nuclear force holds the core of the atomic nucleus together and the weak force becomes prevalent as atomic nuclei grow beyond a certain size.

Electrostatic/Electromagnetic: Far beyond the nucleus lies the electrons which are held to together in the atom by electrostatic force and interact according to electromagnetic force. Although you could say that the nucleons also exhibit electrostatic force and that electromagnetic radiation and magnetic fields operate at every scale, I would argue that the electrons are really the central particle for this force. You could say that the electromagnetic force is what extends the nucleus of the atom outward to its electron shielding.

Gravity: Far beyond the level of the electrons/atoms, gravity becomes significant as an organizing force of large numbers of atoms.

Quantized Forces: So arguably each force can be associated with its own scale and the scales are not continuous but relatively discreet with large amounts of scales fathomable between them that do not exist. So it is almost as if physical force itself is quantized into radically disjunct levels in the same way electrons are quantized into separate orbitals with no in-between states.

Is this a meaningful analogy or just aesthetic pseudo-parallelism like comparing an orange to a basketball because they're both round, orange, and have textured skin?

When people express hate for a particular candidate or party, this hate has the potential of causing weak supporters or those who are undecided to avoid supporting or associated with the hated party because they don't want to be hated themselves. Does this make hate one of if not the most effective political tactics?

Moontanman: I agree with almost everything you say above, expect for your statement about prostitution being disapproved of socially because it takes power away from men. Were this the case, then men would be the greatest enemies of prostitution, but in fact we see that it is women who are really most upset about it. I think the reason for this is that prostitution takes power away from women, since it undermines their capacity to create an artificial shortage of heterosexual sex partners so that they become precious -- and thus socially powerful -- just for their monopoly control over relieving that shortage when their special demands (jewels, dating rituals, elaborate courtships, marriage, man playing the required father rule for children, etc.) are met.

And women are also the ones who are put in the position of aborting pregnancies and don't forget that while ideally women should be able to say no at any point of feeling discomfort or unhappiness during the act, doing so prior to male orgasm completion can be met with frustration and its reverberations.