I was going to write about Formalism. I thought that one beer would be relaxing, get me in the mood, as it were. Two beers, it turns out, make me sleepy. I never noticed that before because I usually have one beer, or many, many beers.
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While my wife is away schmoozing with music bidness types for her band, and the boy is in Ohio with Grandma - it's just me and the girls. And since they can be distracted with Dora the Explorer, I actually have a moment to think.
I thought I'd clear out a backlog of interesting stuff I've seen.
Giving women the right to vote really was a bad move:
Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?
Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws. We were also able to deal with questions of causality by taking advantage of the fact that while some states voluntarily adopted suffrage, others where compelled to do so by the Nineteenth Amendment. The conclusion was that suffrage dramatically changed government in both cases. Accordingly, the effects of suffrage we estimate are not reflecting some other factor present in only states that adopted suffrage. [...]
More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes.
Yes, women’s suffrage really did herald the end days of America. The result of giving women the vote has been an ever-increasing nanny state funded on the backs of increasingly sex-dispossessed betas (dispossessed from banging women during their prime years). The elevation of diversity as a moral value and the flooding of the country with incompatible third world immigrants has no doubt been a secondary consequence of suffrage for women, who naturally bring their feminine sensibilities, for better or (more usually) for worse, to the polls. This is why I have argued that the next step in this national devolution toward mindless compassion is the creation of armies of cads. Men want sex, and will do whatever it takes to get it, whether that be good or ill for society.
Hmn.
I'm also thinking about Formalism but more on that later, after I go have a beer.
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My daughter grabbed the basket that the wife was using this morning to pick mountain berries. She put two stuffed animals in it, and told me, "I'm picking cats."
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has a new hobby. And a good one.
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From the Oatmeal, source of all kinds of awesome. Like, Seven Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur off Crack Cocaine. And How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? Or after Kicking a Bear in the Balls? And then there is the mighty, Motherfucking Pterodactyl.
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It's things like this that make me want to agree with Aretae.
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ISS Astronauts, not having any real purpose in furthering our conquest of space, took some time off for photography. Given their privileged vantage point, something like this was bound to come into view eventually.
And that is a pretty amazing something.
Kristian Birkeland, Norwegian physicist and discoverer of the electric currents that bear his name was the first to suggest an electrical explanation for the aurora. He spent months in the far north, in the deep cold observing and measuring the aurora and divining their nature. His theories were for decades ignored in favor of the theories of the English mathematician Sydney Chapman, finally being proven right after the advent of space travel. Birkeland is something of a hero to the plasma cosmology types - he is an archetype for them - brilliant, nominated for the Nobel, dismissed for decades in favor of ideas that were later proved wrong.
The idea that electrical currents connect the various bodies of the Solar System is central to the plasma cosmologist's conception of the universe. Birkeland was the first in the chain. In the write-up for that picture, there's this:
This particular aurora is unique in the sense that it was spotted fairly far away from the South Pole over the southern Indian Ocean, likely as a result of a large ejection of energy that burst from the sun on May 24. The photographer is looking south toward Antarctica, though you can't see the southernmost continent in the photograph.
Interesting, no? We admit that there are electrical phenomena throughout the solar system - Earth and Jupiter's magnetic fields, the braided electrical currents discovered trailing Venus in her orbit, the aurora - seen on many planets, sprites and elves seen above thunderstorms and shooting into space, the coronal mass ejections and numerous other phenomena on and around the sun and their proven effects on Earth - yet there is evidently great resistance to viewing these as a part of a larger, connected whole. Gravity is all.
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Overheard on the Penguins of Madagascar episode my kids were watching a minute ago. Truer words were never spoken.
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Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing has a review of The Upside of Irrationality, The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and At Home. A snip:
...there are sections in which the science of irrationality is readily converted into practical techniques for living better, and these really shine. My favorite is the section on adaptation, that is, the way in which both terrible pain and incredible delights fade down to a kind of baseline normal over time. Ariely points out that adaptation can be slowed or even prevented through intermittent exposure to the underlying stimulus -- that is, if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force.
Here's where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from those things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure -- a great dessert, the delight of furnishing your first real apartment after graduation, a wonderful new relationship -- you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain -- an unpleasant chore, an awful trip -- you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.
This is so true. My mom has successfully managed to do this with books - she is able to read a good book over a period of weeks, parcelling it out into bite sized nibbles. Me, I can't. The better the book, the faster I read it, and - as I've long suspected, I get less enjoyment out of it. I'm better at the miserable experiences, I'll plough right through 'til it's done.
I wonder if the author has any advice for procrastination - once I start a painful job, I'll finish it, but my problem is starting it. The pain of knowing you're avoiding something that needs to be done is real, but it's less in the short term than starting the thing.
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This article in wired describes the efforts of some scientists to grapple with perhaps the biggest problem in modern physics - the total disconnect between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Both are immensely successful theories - tested and confirmed to the limits of accuracy each within their respective domains. Both provide useful theoretical predictions, and in the case of the latter, are the basis for literally the entirety of our modern technology.
Yet, they don't match up. At all. What these intrepid researchers are doing is dropping a Bose-Einstein condensate - a gas so cold that it acts as a single particle, and thus behaves with all the quantum strangeness we've come to know and love. So far, they've just been doing proof-of-concept drops, to reassure themselves that the only thing acting on the condensate in the test capsule is gravity. Soon, though, they hope to start poking at relativity.
What interested me, aside from the general peachy-keenness of the idea, was the implications in terms of the whole plasma cosmology idea. The basic concept that Wal Thornhill, one of the plasma cosmology bigwigs, has outlined is this:
What is Gravity?
Sansbury argues that gravity is due to radially-orientated electrostatic dipoles inside the Earth's atomic nuclei, with the inner pole more positive and the outer pole more negative [36]. The force between any two aligned electrostatic dipoles varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance between them and the combined force of similarly aligned electro-static dipoles over a given surface is squared. The result is that the dipole-dipole force, which varies inversely as the fourth power between colinear dipoles, becomes the familiar inverse square force of gravity for extended bodies. The gravitational and inertial response o f matter can be seen to be due to an identical cause.
Sansbury struggled with a cause for the initial and sustained electrical polarisation within celestial bodies. The initial cause is due to the birth o f stars and planets (see later) in powerful plasma discharge events. Once established, gravity itself provides a weak radial atomic polarisation by drawing the heavy nucleus away from the centre of each atom toward the centre of a planetary body. The resulting radially-orientated dipoles form an electret in the non- conducting minerals of the planet. Surface charge on the planet contributes to the strength of the orientated-dipole electret. This global 'electret' may provide the radial electrostatic field required by Sansbury's model. The electrical model may explain the anomalous gravity readings taken down mineshafts, where Newton's constant, G, was measured to be 1.7 - 3.9% lower than in the laboratory [37]. Rather than invent a 'fifth force' or 'modified Newtonian dynamics' (MOND) [38] to complicate things, it seems we simply need to understand the electrical nature of matter and gravity.
There is another important effect of the orientated-dipole model of the interior of a planet to consider. At some depth where pressure ionisation becomes significant and conductivity increases, charge separation will occur as electrons drift up towards the electret inner boundary. Like charges repel and tend to offset the gravitational compression within celestial bodies. Therefore, changing the surface charge on a celestial body may have a significant orbital effect.
Antigravity?
Conducting metals will shield electric fields. However, the lack of movement of electrons in response to gravity explains why we cannot shield against gravity by simply standing on a metal sheet.
If gravity is an electric dipole force between subatomic particles, it is clear that the force 'daisy chains' its way through matter, regardless of whether it is conducting or non- conducting. Sansbury explains:... electrostatic dipoles within all atomic nuclei are very small but all have a common orientation. Hence their effect on a conductive piece of metal is less to pull the free electrons in the metal to one side toward the center of the earth but to equally attract the similarly oriented electrostatic dipoles inside the nuclei and free electrons of the conductive piece of metal. '[40]
This offers a clue to the reported 'gravity shielding' effects of a spinning, super-conducting disc [41]. Electrons in a superconductor exhibit a 'connectedness', which means that their inertia is increased. Anything that interferes with the ability of the subatomic particles within the spinning disc to align their gravitationally induced dipoles with those of the Earth will exhibit antigravity effects.
Despite a number of experiments demonstrating anti-gravity effects, no-one has been able to convince scientists attached to the theory of general relativity that they have been able to modify gravity. This seems to be a case of turning a blind eye to unwelcome evidence. Support for antigravity implicitly undermines Einstein's theory [42].'Instantaneous' Gravity
A significant fact, usually overlooked, is that Newton's law of gravity does not involve time. This raises problems for any conventional application of electromagnetic theory to the gravitational force between two bodies in space, since electromagnetic signals are restricted to the speed of light. Gravity must act instantly for the planets to orbit the Sun in a stable fashion. If the Earth were attracted to where the Sun appears in the sky, it would be orbiting a large empty space, because the Sun moves on in the 8.3 minutes it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth. If gravity operated at the speed of light, all planets would experience a torque that would sling them out of the solar system in a few thousand years. Clearly, that doesn't happen. This supports the view that the electric force operates at a near infinite speed on our cosmic scale, as it must inside the electron [43]. It is a significant simplification of all of the tortuous theorising that has gone into the nature of gravity and mass and I believe Einstein's postulates to be wrong [44]. Matter has no effect on empty space. Space is 3- dimensional - something our senses tell us. There is a universal clock, so time travel and variable aging is impossible - something that commonsense has always told us - but most important, the universe is connected and coherent.
If all that, or something like it is true, poking at the quantum behavior of elements in free fall could shed some light. I'd be interested to see if differently charged condensates behaved differently - especially considering that since they're acting as a single particle, that dipole effect might not apply, or not in the same way.
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