Phi for All

Everyone loves to complain about the roads. If they’re not full of potholes, they’re under construction. When they’re under construction, 80% of the guys are standing around while 20% do the work. It seems like when the end of a stretch of road is finished, the potholes start to appear at the beginning again. For drivers, there is a very small window of pleasurable driving experience after a road has been resurfaced. It doesn’t have to be this way. In Germany, home of the Autobahn (which is no different in concept than the Interstate Highway system in the US), they use asphalt just like most countries, yet they spend a fraction of what we pay per mile on road maintenance. They also have glass-smooth roads that last for many years without needing costly repairs. What’s their secret? They let the asphalt cure for 3 months before they let anyone drive on it. They divert traffic and drivers are made aware of alternate routes. After the asphalt cures it wears like iron and is pure heaven to drive on. On one hand, road maintenance employs a ton of people, from the workers to the asphalt manufacturers. Letting us drive on fresh asphalt means less time waiting for our favorite roads to become available again. But we pay a lot in taxes and get terrible roads in return. On the other hand, letting them cure would mean a huge savings in taxes. We’d also spend less on vehicle maintenance due to fewer potholes. And we’d have better roads to drive on. But we’d have to detour longer. No matter how this is presented, it would quickly become a political issue. Which is more important in this matter, more jobs or better roads?

Some web searches brought up quons in combinations with gluons and muons, as well as a reference to "anyons as quon particles", but the pages they referred to were in a Slavic language and couldn't be opened by my computer. Edit: Found a pdf at this link in English: http://www.fu.sav.sk/aps/acta01/articles/175.pdf

I can't believe I didn't see this thread earlier! Phi is indeed the most beautiful number. Take the ratio of your whole arm to the elbow to fingertip bit, you get 1.618 to 1. The same for your legs and knees to toes. Elbow to fingertip, wrist to fingertip the same. Your face has lots of these phi ratios, like from top of the head to chin, middle of the eyes to chin is 1.618 to 1. In nature, spirals found in shells and seed clusters are always the same ratio. Take the width of a sunflower's center to the length of its petals and you get phi to 1. A dolphin's total length to its tail to dorsal fin ratio is phi to 1. The pentagram was considered a magical symbol because ALL of its lines bisect each other in this same ratio. Many artists and architects take advantage of this naturally occuring ratio. It was named after the Greek sculptor Phidias. The Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan and the Great Pyramid at Ghiza both use it in their designs. Raphael, DaVinci and Michaelangelo all believed it evoked special emotions from humans and used it to proportion all their human subjects.

I own a handgun and a couple of rifles. I don't think they would be my first line of home defense, though. My five-year-old is too inquisitive to have them accessible. I say yes to guns, no to assault rifles and the like. Remember, in the US the Constitution grants the right to bear arms... to form an effective militia. I'm a believer in the Broken-Window defense. Most violent crime happens in areas that are run-down, graffitti-covered and dirty. If a place looks like no one cares, people are more apt to commit crimes there. So if someone breaks a window, fix it. If someone tags your fence with spray paint, clean it off. Always show that you care & crime will move on to areas that don't.

I wanted some engineering input, actually, before I put this up as a new thread under politics. It seems more of a political topic, but there could be something about German road engineering that is different. I seem to remember that they have like seven layers of grading beneath the asphalt as well. Any German road engineers out there? Konnen Sie mir helfen, bitte? I know concrete is a lot more costly, but it also doesn't need to be replaced nearly as often. I believe it has other problems, like the temperature can't get too low while the concrete dries or ice causes it to fracture. It's smooth to drive on but tire traction in bad weather is not as good as asphalt.

Do you feel the roads hold up better? After they repave & let it cure, is it several years before they have to repave again?

They do in Germany. Provisions are made, detours are set up, and the people are just used to it. The money they save in road budgets and vehicle repair makes it well worth it.

While visiting Germany and marveling at the smoothness of the Autobahn, I was told it didn't have as much to do with maintenance as it did with letting the asphalt cure. When Germany lays down new asphalt, no one is allowed to drive on it for 3 months. The result is a road that remains smooth as glass and pothole-free for many years. In the US, they let cars drive on new asphalt the next day after it's laid down! This insures that the roads become uneven, potholed and in need of maintenance very quickly, usually within a couple of years. This means a lot of employment, but it also represents a huge waste of economic resources. It means people get to have their roads back fairly quickly, but it also means their cars are battered by potholes after only a year or so. Which system is better?

Gampin stipulated "if it's true". I agree that reacting at this point in such an extreme fashion would be silly, but what if the US starts having a Waco-like episode every day after the elections in November? I said it earlier, I'm sure it's a hoax but the guy had a good eye for logical progression. The main flaw is that I don't really think the US is split down the middle between Republican and Democrat. I think the myth of the two-party system of voting has us seemingly at odds. If people had a real way of being able to pre-cast their votes way before the elections (a website, fr'instance) so they could vote their hearts instead of for the two main parties, they could see that there are a lot more people who aren't Republicrats. Before civil war started, I think people would find this out before polarizing into "city dwellers" and "rural folks".

Slightly off the subject but still political, have you heard that Disney is blocking their own distribution of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary on the basis that it is too controversial to the Bush family and might jeopardize tax advantages Disney has in Florida?

Do you think it's a fair representation? Or are people dividing themselves along only two lines because that's what's offered? Or that to vote their hearts would be to throw their vote away?

I find it a shame that I'm politically aligned with Dennis Kucinich, but I feel I would be helping Bush get re-elected if I voted for him. He stood up to big business when he was mayor of Cleveland and got crucified for it, but thanks to Kucinich, Cleveland pays 40% less for energy than other parts of the country. It strikes me as a telling point that everyone except Kucinich and Sharpton are all bunched up in the same quadrant. Does that look like the two-party system fairly represents America? Republicans and Democrats are both putting business first, people second. I simply don't agree that what is good for the commerce of a country is automatically good for its people.

A few years ago, there was a case where a woman in New York City was assaulted & killed, over a period of a half hour, in front of over 30 witnesses. Someone called the police AFTER the woman was dead. It was on a residential street with high rise apartments all around. The people who saw it did nothing. The media wrote it up as just another impersonal NYC tragedy, making New Yorkers seem even more callous & uncaring. Psychologists dug deeper & identified it as a problem of context. Everyone who witnessed the assault was horrified by it, and JUST ASSUMED SOMEBODY ELSE HAD CALLED THE POLICE. Because of the sheer volume of witnesses and people available to go to this woman's aid, nobody did anything. If this had happened in an isolated area, it would have been more likely that any witness would have done something to help. I think the whole US is like that. We are so huge we just assume that somebody is doing something about EVERYTHING.

What do you think, Gampin?

Isn't this terrible? Like there could be a "small" shooting or bombing! Being insulated in the middle of my huge country, I find it amazing that tiny Israel could keep its sanity amidst so much aggression. We have lakes we could fit the whole of Israel in! How could any bombing not make everyone cringe? When you say the media plays a huge part in it, do you feel they downplay the danger? If you had our approach to media, you'd be in a bunker changing your underwear every 5 minutes! If you've seen Bowling for Columbine (I had mentioned it before) then you know the US media, given a choice between covering a dog pulling an infant from a raging river or the discovery of a cache of weapons in a local gang neighborhood, will go for the guns EVERY TIME, no question! Do you think Israel's media shelters you from the aggressions of your neighboring countries?

The present US administration calls their education program "No Child Left Behind". They proposed it, got it put through and then underfunded it by $27 billion. They promised seniors a prescription drug benefit, but then put through a bill that gave the big drug companies $139 billion and forces seniors to pay more for prescriptions. Their plan to lessen restrictions on air pollution is called "Clear Skies". Their plan to allow unrestricted logging is called "Healthy Forests". Everything this administration has done in Iraq almost seems calculated to foment as much anger from ALL the Islamic nations as possible. They bombed a mosque. They've humiliated Islamic prisoners in ways that strike at the heart of their religion. Then Bush shows his face on Arab television to apologize for it, saying "this is not the America I know", as if it is not his responsibility but OURS. When questioned about any of this, they claim they are being misrepresented by the "liberal media". They have made this into such a sound byte that people forget that the media in the US is owned by huge mega-corporations who all have a vested interest in keeping Bush in office so that the last half-century's worth of social, economic and environmental reforms can be done away with, to make big business even more profitable. This is the main reason I no longer trust US media. I learn more about what's really happening in the US by listening to the BBC.

I remember seeing Joeseph Newman years ago as Johnny Carson's guest on the Tonight show. He explained how he had discovered perpetual motion by combining a gyroscope with an electromagnet. He claimed it produced an EM field so strong it could be used to power a motor that could generate more electricity than it used to keep itself going. His unit was small and could generate power enough for individual homes and run everything on DC so light bulbs and appliances would last forever. His system was supposedly affordable and safe. I was so disappointed when he turned out to be a fraud.

1. Gain knowledge. Learn everything you can so you have at least some protection from lies.2. Be aware of systems that seem to do one thing but really do another. We think the media in the US is here to inform us. They really are here to bring advertisers to us. Just like Xerox is not in the copier business, they are in the toner & service contract business. 3. Get wise to the fact that in the US the two-party system is being used against us. Take a look at the political compass website featured in another thread in this politics area of the forum. Democrats and Republicans are all grouped up in the same corner (except Kucinich & Sharpton). They all cater to big business, with the understanding that what's good for the mega-corporations just HAS to be good for the people. I'll let others add to this list, but I will say that MoveOn.org has a wonderful book called "50 Ways to Love Your Country" that will help.

Hey, wait a minute! I get it now. YOU'RE HIS BOSS, AREN'T YOU!?!? You & Kitty were sent from the year 2095 to rewrite HIS history! I figured it out! Just a second, my doorbell is ringing....

Why do we have this penchant for wanting to believe a guy like this could be for real, but our butt puckers when we listen to his predictions? I'm with YT2095, don't give him the time of day or Nostradamus will rise from the dead.

From the little I have read about some of his predictions, or rather what he claims is true 30 years from now, he has a real grasp of logical occurance. He predicts the office of President of the United States will be split into five people representing different regions and areas of responsibility. I can tell you now, if Bush is re-elected and allows big business to rape this country for another four years, this is exactly the kind of reform that might be called for (they took the power out of the governor's office in the state of Texas after the office had been abused and misused. By the time GB Jr was governor, he didn't even have a say in his own state budget. Being the governor of Texas was a figurehead position). Since the last election in the US was so close, perhaps this would have been an easy call for this so-called time-traveler to make. I can't believe even now after plunging this country into the worst debt its ever seen & destroying economic & environmental reforms it has taken years to build, the American public still seems to be split down the middle about who to vote for.

If Bush is re-elected, I'll bet anything he tries to end our membership in the UN and make them leave our sacred soil. Can we count on Australia to liberate us then?

To me, American media is very untrustworthy because they are so obviously trying to build viewership for their corporate sponsors. Do you think they would report negatively on a certain company if that company bought millions of dollars worth of air time or full page ads in the newspapers? And they know if they prey on our fears they will keep us glued to the television or reading the papers. "Is our drinking water safe? Tune in at 10pm!" Michael Moore did a beautiful job of warning Americans about this in Bowling for Columbine. And recently I read about a study on the three major national networks that talked about how Peter Jennings of ABC was influencing voters by nodding his head and smiling more often when he was talking about Republican candidates. Also, I am sick of hearing them stir up support for the war in Iraq by talking on and on about the poor contractors who were killed and burned in Fallujah recently. They make them sound like plumbers and engineers when in fact they were mercenaries and soldiers of fortune making $120,000 a year on contract to Haliburton and other subsidiaries. Whether or not they are told to report things this way I can't say. The affect it has on the public just happens to support the present administration in a way that makes my flesh crawl. For those of you in countries other than the United States, please do me a favor. Get the United Nations to declare George W. Bush a danger to world peace. I will personally guarantee you he has weapons of mass destruction at his disposal. When the UN's foreign forces start landing on our shores to liberate the oppressed populace and take over our national resources in order to safeguard them, I am positive the American people will see our country and our media in a new light.