The paper suggests the mechanism towards the end. I'm not a physicist, but here's my summary (I'm sure full of errors, but I think this is roughly what they're proposing):
The paper attributes development of this engine to developments along the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as opposed to the Copenhagen interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg, which is more generally accepted. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory. Einstein, for instance, never accepted Copenhagen.. famously saying God doesn't play dice). Their approach is called the "pilot-wave" hypothesis (nice simulation here https://youtu.be/nmC0ygr08tE), where a wave and a particle are both epiphenomenon of certain resonant frequencies (Chladni patterns/Faraday waves) in a more complex base wave (as in the video). This base wave is a normal acoustic wave in the "medium", but it wasn't understood for a long time what that medium could be. After all, the "ether" of the 1700-1800s had been rejected. Now, they're saying the medium is quantum foam, which is some electron-positron bubbling that it seems just permeates space (also responsible for zero-point energy/casimir effect), and that's what is responding to the photons in the chamber. The chamber reflects microwaves (photons of a certain frequency) back and forth, and in one direction they "push" harder than the other, due to expansion and contraction controlled by the shape of the chamber. By analogy, it's like paddling in water; you put the paddle in the water in one direction, and move it back through the air in the other; in both directions you're moving through a medium, but you control it so that you impart more momentum in one than the other. Except instead of paddle in water and air, here the momentum transfer is from the microwave photons to the electron-positron foam permeating space. That's why no propellent is needed.. it's pushing against something that's really there, in the chamber and all around. So, space isn't empty and we can row our space boats through it.
Hmm.. Language learning could as well be within-species. Sounds more interesting here that dolphins and orcas can communicate spontaneously given close quarters.
surprisingly no references between Adami and England.
"Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids."
I wasn't raised to be religious and was so interested in science that I adopted a kind of default atheism. I saw religion as one of many strange things some people in my community did. To later find out how varied and yet concordant in their cores the religions are, of people long-separated.. it's reminiscent of multiple experiments that support the same hypothesis. But what was the hypothesis? Then, I started reading.. Houston Smith's The World's Religions first, and then trying original texts from each. I ended up reading the Old Testament and found it a great source of enlightenment on the human condition. Then again with Greek Mythologies, ancient mystery religions. The Eastern tradition the same. I find it impossible to separate the study of psychology and history from a deep appreciation of the religions. The whole situation recurses with prehistorical religions and cultures and the mentality our ancestors had.. here I found Ken Wilber's Up From Eden essential for framing.
To call religions right or wrong is to me a categorical mistake. They were pragmatic and serviceable for their day and they are part of our history. They are in conflict just like we are in conflict. The existence of two cultures in and out of conflict and peace with each other is not a demonstration of their non-existence or non-relevance, but the opposite.
The magnetic fields goes out of the atmosphere.. if the spider for some reason can't control its ascent, I'd guess it goes all the way up? Sounds like a new micro-satellite technology!
Compare to Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature, which: "meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics" (Amazon).
(Deacon's book is good, though has been criticized as drawing heavily from prior work: "This work has attracted controversy, as reviewers[2] have suggested that many of the ideas in it were first published by Alicia Juarrero in Dynamics of Action (1999, MIT Press) and by Evan Thompson in Mind in Life (2007, Belknap Press and Harvard University Press) yet these works were not cited or referenced by Deacon." (Wikipedia))
Or compare to Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order, which Deacon cites (and it seems the two are in communication). Kauffman's notion is that there are implicit geometries to energetic forms which in the situation of excess total energy can locally channel a system towards structure and shape that bias, and perhaps belie, the notions of random variation and natural selection being the primary drivers for the creation of structures in living beings.
Article says predecessors may have evolved around the predecessor star to our Sun, but given the time spans involved why just our sun? If early bacteria were ejected into space by vulcanism, solar wind would accelerate them outwards to ~400km/s, or about.1% speed of light. At that speed, you could cross the galaxy in a scant 100 million years.
Depends on what happens to low-weight particles at the heliopause though, especially if they've become ionized during travel.
I run mine open to the public with my SSID set to some site I want people to look at, including things running on my local server, so http://192.168../
Especially happy to do this when out in a cafe and tethering
That's not really what the author claims, rather that the skeletons she has looked at do support it, but can't just be supposed to be representative of the whole population.
"The Imperial period [in Rome] is pretty special - we've got people with lead levels up to 30 mg/kg, which is 30 times higher than modern recommendations! In fact, this level is three times higher than the level the WHO considers "very severe lead poisoning.""...
"Did lead poisoning cause the fall of the Roman Empire? Probably not. Yes, there was increased lead production in the Roman Empire, which we know from histories, ecological sources (like ice cores from Greenland and peat bogs in Europe), artifacts, and now skeletons. But the data - few as they are - simply don't support a conclusion of high lead concentration in the entire population."
Judge John Rogers, in his ruling, says multiple times that the phone was emanating information that the authorities tracked, therefore no invasion of privacy. He compares it to the scent a dog uses to follow someone, or the color of a car, or the numbers on a license plate, or the location of a car when it is on a public road.
"The government used data emanating from Melvin Skinner’s pay-as-you-go cell phone to determine its real-time location." (http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0262p-06.pdf, p2, par1)
Rogers says the information the phone was emanating was just a "proxy" to this other publicly visible information. It's not clear what this "proxy" status is for the phone, but more importantly, the GPS in the phone could not have been emanating position information because that's not how client stations work in GPS. The satellites in the sky emanate position information, and the ground units just receive this and triangulate position from it. Otherwise, it would be a terrible technology for the military to use, as they would be easily located!
The judgement acknowledges that "ping" data had to be accessed from phone company, and that "pinging" the phone is an activity engaged in by the DEA agents on the suspect's phone, but somehow sticks with the emanating logic: "a federal magistrate judge, on July 12, 2006, authoriz[ed] the phone company to release subscriber information, cell site information, GPS real-time location, and “ping” data for the 6447 phone in order to learn Big Foot’s location while he was en route to deliver the drugs." (p4, par1)
(By pining the first phone and realizing it was at Big Foot's home, and not on the road with him, the DEA agents got another "authorization" for the release of the same data for a second "6820" phone.)
"By continuously “pinging” the 6820 phone, authorities learned that Big Foot left Tucson, Arizona on Friday, July 14, 2006, and was traveling on Interstate 40 across Texas. At no point did agents follow the vehicle or conduct any type of visual surveillance. At around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 16, 2006, the GPS indicated that the 6820 phone had stopped somewhere near Abilene, Texas." (p4, par3)
That's where they moved in, did a K-9 walk-around of the RV, and then arrested him.
In the judgement about the 4th Amendment violation:
"If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal."
Of course, GPS clients like the suspect's phone do not actually give of a position signal, which is why they had to ping it. Rogers' logic is most carefully stated in the following, and so perhaps this could be the grounds for a new appeal:
"This case is different from the recent Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012). That case involved the secret placement of a tracking device on the defendant’s car, id. at 948, and the Court’s opinion explicitly relied on the trespassory nature of the police action. Id. at 949. Although Fourth Amendment jurisprudence includes an assessment of the defendant’s reasonable expectation of privacy, that “d[oes] not erode the principle ‘that, when the Government does engage in physical intrusion of a constitutionally protected area in order to obtain information, that intrusion may constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment.’” Id. at 951 (quoting Knotts, 460 U.S. at 286 (Brennan, J., concurring)). No such physical intrusion occurred in Skinner’s case. Skinner himself obtained the cell phone for the purpose of communication, and that phone included the GPS technology used to track the phone’s whereabouts. The majority in Jones based its decision on the fact that the police had to “physically occup[y] private property for the purpose of obtaining information.” 132 S. Ct. at 949. That did not occur in this case." (p10, par2)
So, I think the solution process for an arbitrary system of simultaneous equations actually has a *propensity* to lead to deterministic chaos. I was just looking for a paper discussing this, but came up short; but for the background see:
Note, the way I'm interpreting this is that *solving* the system leads to iteration of candidate systems in your head, therefore there's an (hypothetical) expected chaotic dynamic. (haven't rtfa yet..:)
Is there something about the way sudoku systems are chosen, e.g. they're too simple, that excludes this?
Hm, I think you're missing my point... I wasn't supporting their claims as more correct than a gravitationally-based cosmology, just noting that they seemed to be making reasonable conjectures, albeit non-mainstream, and that they didn't deserve to be called names. I said:
"That seems reasonable; correct or not is a matter to be determined."
The same can be said about dark energy/matter. Reasonable, but correctness TBD. It is problematic for a simulation to not model all know behaviors of a system, but nonetheless, we do it all the time and often find useful models in them.
Agreed, this is better termed Plasma Cosmology, not Electric Universe as that appears to be commercially co-opted; maybe you're reacting more to that; I was reading more of the folks they cited than the.info website. More:
That the shapes and spins of galaxies can be shown in simulation by collapsing parallel electric filaments ("pinch" effect), p. 26.. In contrast, from what I understand, you have to introduce a majority of dark matter & energy into such a simulation to get a stable galaxy if the stars interact otherwise with only gravity.
It runs an N-body particle solver using gravitational interactions, to run the cosmic microwave background "forward" to see what kind of modern universe it should develop. This produces the pictures of the filamentary large-scale structure of the universe that I've become accustomed to seeing in recent years, but it turns out you can use the same software to model both radiative and magnetic coupling effects. Here's a variation showing how radiation changes stellar evolution:
It wasn't just Paul Baran, of course, but the main concepts were invented/discovered in his series of papers from RAND at a time before anyone else was talking about such a thing (late 50s, early 60s):
- distributed mesh network of cheap, heterogenous component parts (the topology is analytically derived as optimal for retaining connectivity after possible partition events), supporting wired and wireless links
- mail-like asynchronous address/packet-based routing of
- digitally encoded fixed sized data blocks (inspired by "Morse's code"))
- adaptive topology based on flood-filling neighbor/connectivity information throughout the network.
This was shelved for 5-10 years for being thought a bad idea by the AT&T engineers that DoD listened to at the time (they were designing progressively more monolithic hierarchical networks with very expensive switching equipment requiring very profitable professional administration), and was picked back up in the later 60s, when it was ironed out and then re-invented by many of the names now famous for it:
Here's an excellent discussion about this between Baran and Stewart Brand:
Motivation:
- Insolation changes and CO2 ecosystem feedbacks have been identified as the main causes of climate variability for the past million years (by citation).
- However, global climate models are either too short to or don't attempt to integrate longer-term or low-frequency insolation changes, which might mean they're mis-estimating temperatures and temperature changes.
- and while tree ring records should be affected and are important and widespread, a suitable long-term record that accounts for insolation changes hasn't been developed.
- so, let's make one...
Methods:
- measures tree ring width in Scandinavia for the past 2k years among ~580 trees, both living and dead.
- fits a regression model between the tree ring width and "instrumental" measurements back to 1812, so that an observed tree ring width for a given year can be used to compute a temperature for that year, with some statistically measured error.
- extrapolates temperatures before 1812 using the observed tree ring widths as inputs to the temperature regression model
- derives a trend on these temperatures that shows a small, slow cooling for the past 2k years *in Scandinavia*.
Analysis:
- notes that this slow downward trend/signature is missing from global published models
- deduces that global temperature estimates for previous eras may then be *underestimated*, which implies that they could have been warmer and so today may not be as relatively warm as short-term models indicate.
However, they don't offer a reason how/why Scandinavian temperature trends should track global trends, or alternatively establish how/why orbital forcing should be accounted into global models? These both seem like reasonable expectations, and it seems the reasonable next step is to reproduce this project for other forrest areas to see if it holds.
They don't read like crackpots to me. Name-calling alternative perspectives is something more indicative of religion than science;p Also, this is the interwebz; there are actual crackpots in abundance.
From their site:
"... theories tend to harden into ‘facts,’ even in the face of mounting contradictions. Astronomer Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was published a quarter-century ago. At that time, some questions were still permitted. On the issue of redshift, Sagan wrote: “There is nevertheless a nagging suspicion among some astronomers, that all may not be right with the deduction, from the redshift of galaxies via the Doppler effect, that the universe is expanding. The astronomer Halton Arp has found enigmatic and disturbing cases where a galaxy and a quasar, or a pair of galaxies, that are in apparent physical association have very different redshifts....” - p 20. http://www.thunderbolts.info/EU%20Intro%20and%20Chap1.pdf
They're overall arguing that electrodynamics can better explain many astronomical observations than gravitation + dark matter, dark energy and modifications to cosmological constants.
That seems reasonable; correct or not is a matter to be determined.
Dark matter, dark energy, etc. are the first examples I give to friends who are skeptical of big bang cosmology or even science in general, showing it as an example of how science is full of bad "working" theories, but we know it and keep chipping away. I hope I'm not wrong.
This passage in particular presents a different way at looking at the correlations in the Kane and Mertz study:
"Creativity may be another example of gender difference in motivation rather than ability. The evidence presents a seeming paradox, because the tests of creativity generally show men and women scoring about the same, yet through history some men have been much more creative than women. An explanation that fits this pattern is that men and women have the same creative ability but different motivations.
I am a musician, and I’ve long wondered about this difference. We know from the classical music scene that women can play instruments beautifully, superbly, proficiently — essentially just as well as men. They can and many do. Yet in jazz, where the performer has to be creative while playing, there is a stunning imbalance: hardly any women improvise. Why? The ability is there but perhaps the motivation is less. They don’t feel driven to do it.
I suppose the stock explanation for any such difference is that women were not encouraged, or were not appreciated, or were discouraged from being creative. But I don’t think this stock explanation fits the facts very well. In the 19th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output. There were no great women composers, no new directions in style of music or how to play, or anything like that. All those female pianists entertained their families and their dinner guests but did not seem motivated to create anything new. Meanwhile, at about the same time, black men in America created blues and then jazz, both of which changed the way the world experiences music. By any measure, those black men, mostly just emerging from slavery, were far more disadvantaged than the middle-class white women. Even getting their hands on a musical instrument must have been considerably harder. And remember, I’m saying that the creative abilities are probably about equal. But somehow the men were driven to create something new, more than the women."
Slashdot Mirror
The paper suggests the mechanism towards the end. I'm not a physicist, but here's my summary (I'm sure full of errors, but I think this is roughly what they're proposing):
The paper attributes development of this engine to developments along the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as opposed to the Copenhagen interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg, which is more generally accepted. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory. Einstein, for instance, never accepted Copenhagen.. famously saying God doesn't play dice). Their approach is called the "pilot-wave" hypothesis (nice simulation here https://youtu.be/nmC0ygr08tE), where a wave and a particle are both epiphenomenon of certain resonant frequencies (Chladni patterns/Faraday waves) in a more complex base wave (as in the video). This base wave is a normal acoustic wave in the "medium", but it wasn't understood for a long time what that medium could be. After all, the "ether" of the 1700-1800s had been rejected. Now, they're saying the medium is quantum foam, which is some electron-positron bubbling that it seems just permeates space (also responsible for zero-point energy/casimir effect), and that's what is responding to the photons in the chamber. The chamber reflects microwaves (photons of a certain frequency) back and forth, and in one direction they "push" harder than the other, due to expansion and contraction controlled by the shape of the chamber. By analogy, it's like paddling in water; you put the paddle in the water in one direction, and move it back through the air in the other; in both directions you're moving through a medium, but you control it so that you impart more momentum in one than the other. Except instead of paddle in water and air, here the momentum transfer is from the microwave photons to the electron-positron foam permeating space. That's why no propellent is needed.. it's pushing against something that's really there, in the chamber and all around. So, space isn't empty and we can row our space boats through it.
Yeah, got me thinking.. I remember it as about half-way through college, which was '97. Didn't get an account for a while though.
I'm a long time user (mid-90s?) and happy to see the site breathing a breath of fresh air!
Hmm.. Language learning could as well be within-species. Sounds more interesting here that dolphins and orcas can communicate spontaneously given close quarters.
Related work:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.1179
surprisingly no references between Adami and England.
"Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids."
Interesting.. the reverse for me.
I wasn't raised to be religious and was so interested in science that I adopted a kind of default atheism. I saw religion as one of many strange things some people in my community did. To later find out how varied and yet concordant in their cores the religions are, of people long-separated.. it's reminiscent of multiple experiments that support the same hypothesis. But what was the hypothesis? Then, I started reading.. Houston Smith's The World's Religions first, and then trying original texts from each. I ended up reading the Old Testament and found it a great source of enlightenment on the human condition. Then again with Greek Mythologies, ancient mystery religions. The Eastern tradition the same. I find it impossible to separate the study of psychology and history from a deep appreciation of the religions. The whole situation recurses with prehistorical religions and cultures and the mentality our ancestors had.. here I found Ken Wilber's Up From Eden essential for framing.
To call religions right or wrong is to me a categorical mistake. They were pragmatic and serviceable for their day and they are part of our history. They are in conflict just like we are in conflict. The existence of two cultures in and out of conflict and peace with each other is not a demonstration of their non-existence or non-relevance, but the opposite.
The magnetic fields goes out of the atmosphere.. if the spider for some reason can't control its ascent, I'd guess it goes all the way up? Sounds like a new micro-satellite technology!
very cool to see more empirical work on this!
I used the basic resonance model to figure this out for humans.. seems to work well:
https://sites.google.com/site/pablomayrgundter/mind
Cheers,
Pablo
Compare to Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature, which: "meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics" (Amazon).
(Deacon's book is good, though has been criticized as drawing heavily from prior work: "This work has attracted controversy, as reviewers[2] have suggested that many of the ideas in it were first published by Alicia Juarrero in Dynamics of Action (1999, MIT Press) and by Evan Thompson in Mind in Life (2007, Belknap Press and Harvard University Press) yet these works were not cited or referenced by Deacon." (Wikipedia))
Or compare to Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order, which Deacon cites (and it seems the two are in communication). Kauffman's notion is that there are implicit geometries to energetic forms which in the situation of excess total energy can locally channel a system towards structure and shape that bias, and perhaps belie, the notions of random variation and natural selection being the primary drivers for the creation of structures in living beings.
Neat to see this coming to the east coast/MIT.
Article says predecessors may have evolved around the predecessor star to our Sun, but given the time spans involved why just our sun? If early bacteria were ejected into space by vulcanism, solar wind would accelerate them outwards to ~400km/s, or about .1% speed of light. At that speed, you could cross the galaxy in a scant 100 million years.
Depends on what happens to low-weight particles at the heliopause though, especially if they've become ionized during travel.
I run mine open to the public with my SSID set to some site I want people to look at, including things running on my local server, so http://192.168../
Especially happy to do this when out in a cafe and tethering
That's not really what the author claims, rather that the skeletons she has looked at do support it, but can't just be supposed to be representative of the whole population.
"The Imperial period [in Rome] is pretty special - we've got people with lead levels up to 30 mg/kg, which is 30 times higher than modern recommendations! In fact, this level is three times higher than the level the WHO considers "very severe lead poisoning."" ...
"Did lead poisoning cause the fall of the Roman Empire? Probably not. Yes, there was increased lead production in the Roman Empire, which we know from histories, ecological sources (like ice cores from Greenland and peat bogs in Europe), artifacts, and now skeletons. But the data - few as they are - simply don't support a conclusion of high lead concentration in the entire population."
"the team found that none of the Maryland monkeys that started calorie restriction when they were young have developed cancer."
Judge John Rogers, in his ruling, says multiple times that the phone was emanating information that the authorities tracked, therefore no invasion of privacy. He compares it to the scent a dog uses to follow someone, or the color of a car, or the numbers on a license plate, or the location of a car when it is on a public road.
"The government used data emanating from Melvin Skinner’s pay-as-you-go cell phone to determine its real-time location." (http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0262p-06.pdf, p2, par1)
Rogers says the information the phone was emanating was just a "proxy" to this other publicly visible information. It's not clear what this "proxy" status is for the phone, but more importantly, the GPS in the phone could not have been emanating position information because that's not how client stations work in GPS. The satellites in the sky emanate position information, and the ground units just receive this and triangulate position from it. Otherwise, it would be a terrible technology for the military to use, as they would be easily located!
The judgement acknowledges that "ping" data had to be accessed from phone company, and that "pinging" the phone is an activity engaged in by the DEA agents on the suspect's phone, but somehow sticks with the emanating logic: "a federal magistrate judge, on July 12, 2006, authoriz[ed] the phone company to release subscriber information, cell site information, GPS real-time location, and “ping” data for the 6447 phone in order to learn Big Foot’s location while he was en route to deliver the drugs." (p4, par1)
(By pining the first phone and realizing it was at Big Foot's home, and not on the road with him, the DEA agents got another "authorization" for the release of the same data for a second "6820" phone.)
"By continuously “pinging” the 6820 phone, authorities learned that Big Foot left Tucson, Arizona on Friday, July 14, 2006, and was traveling on Interstate 40 across Texas. At no point did agents follow the vehicle or conduct any type of visual surveillance. At around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 16, 2006, the GPS indicated that the 6820 phone had stopped somewhere near Abilene, Texas." (p4, par3)
That's where they moved in, did a K-9 walk-around of the RV, and then arrested him.
In the judgement about the 4th Amendment violation:
"If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal."
Of course, GPS clients like the suspect's phone do not actually give of a position signal, which is why they had to ping it. Rogers' logic is most carefully stated in the following, and so perhaps this could be the grounds for a new appeal:
"This case is different from the recent Supreme Court decision in United States
v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012). That case involved the secret placement of a tracking
device on the defendant’s car, id. at 948, and the Court’s opinion explicitly relied on the
trespassory nature of the police action. Id. at 949. Although Fourth Amendment
jurisprudence includes an assessment of the defendant’s reasonable expectation of
privacy, that “d[oes] not erode the principle ‘that, when the Government does engage in
physical intrusion of a constitutionally protected area in order to obtain information, that
intrusion may constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment.’” Id. at 951 (quoting
Knotts, 460 U.S. at 286 (Brennan, J., concurring)). No such physical intrusion occurred
in Skinner’s case. Skinner himself obtained the cell phone for the purpose of
communication, and that phone included the GPS technology used to track the phone’s
whereabouts. The majority in Jones based its decision on the fact that the police had to
“physically occup[y] private property for the purpose of obtaining information.”
132 S. Ct. at 949. That did not occur in this case." (p10, par2)
Th
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chris_Christie&diff=506340909&oldid=506335481
So, I think the solution process for an arbitrary system of simultaneous equations actually has a *propensity* to lead to deterministic chaos. I was just looking for a paper discussing this, but came up short; but for the background see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system
Note, the way I'm interpreting this is that *solving* the system leads to iteration of candidate systems in your head, therefore there's an (hypothetical) expected chaotic dynamic. (haven't rtfa yet.. :)
Is there something about the way sudoku systems are chosen, e.g. they're too simple, that excludes this?
Hm, I think you're missing my point... I wasn't supporting their claims as more correct than a gravitationally-based cosmology, just noting that they seemed to be making reasonable conjectures, albeit non-mainstream, and that they didn't deserve to be called names. I said:
"That seems reasonable; correct or not is a matter to be determined."
The same can be said about dark energy/matter. Reasonable, but correctness TBD. It is problematic for a simulation to not model all know behaviors of a system, but nonetheless, we do it all the time and often find useful models in them.
Agreed, this is better termed Plasma Cosmology, not Electric Universe as that appears to be commercially co-opted; maybe you're reacting more to that; I was reading more of the folks they cited than the .info website. More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology#Large_scale_structure
The one I looked at most closely was in the intro chapter to one of the books they linked:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/EU%20Intro%20and%20Chap1.pdf
That the shapes and spins of galaxies can be shown in simulation by collapsing parallel electric filaments ("pinch" effect), p. 26.. In contrast, from what I understand, you have to introduce a majority of dark matter & energy into such a simulation to get a stable galaxy if the stars interact otherwise with only gravity.
Something I'm looking at that's related to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Run
It runs an N-body particle solver using gravitational interactions, to run the cosmic microwave background "forward" to see what kind of modern universe it should develop. This produces the pictures of the filamentary large-scale structure of the universe that I've become accustomed to seeing in recent years, but it turns out you can use the same software to model both radiative and magnetic coupling effects. Here's a variation showing how radiation changes stellar evolution:
http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/people/mbate/Cluster/clusterRT.html
Same basic large-scale structure, but different number of "stars", different brightnesses, speeds, etc.
I've got the GADGET code running on my MacBook Air using MacPorts, etc.. should be fun, though very slow :)
It wasn't just Paul Baran, of course, but the main concepts were invented/discovered in his series of papers from RAND at a time before anyone else was talking about such a thing (late 50s, early 60s):
Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks
- http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf
- distributed mesh network of cheap, heterogenous component parts (the topology is analytically derived as optimal for retaining connectivity after possible partition events), supporting wired and wireless links
- mail-like asynchronous address/packet-based routing of
- digitally encoded fixed sized data blocks (inspired by "Morse's code"))
- adaptive topology based on flood-filling neighbor/connectivity information throughout the network.
This was shelved for 5-10 years for being thought a bad idea by the AT&T engineers that DoD listened to at the time (they were designing progressively more monolithic hierarchical networks with very expensive switching equipment requiring very profitable professional administration), and was picked back up in the later 60s, when it was ironed out and then re-invented by many of the names now famous for it:
Here's an excellent discussion about this between Baran and Stewart Brand:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html
Thanks for the sanity check :)
Here's my understanding of their reasoning.
Motivation:
- Insolation changes and CO2 ecosystem feedbacks have been identified as the main causes of climate variability for the past million years (by citation).
- However, global climate models are either too short to or don't attempt to integrate longer-term or low-frequency insolation changes, which might mean they're mis-estimating temperatures and temperature changes.
- and while tree ring records should be affected and are important and widespread, a suitable long-term record that accounts for insolation changes hasn't been developed.
- so, let's make one...
Methods:
- measures tree ring width in Scandinavia for the past 2k years among ~580 trees, both living and dead.
- fits a regression model between the tree ring width and "instrumental" measurements back to 1812, so that an observed tree ring width for a given year can be used to compute a temperature for that year, with some statistically measured error.
- extrapolates temperatures before 1812 using the observed tree ring widths as inputs to the temperature regression model
- derives a trend on these temperatures that shows a small, slow cooling for the past 2k years *in Scandinavia*.
Analysis:
- notes that this slow downward trend/signature is missing from global published models
- deduces that global temperature estimates for previous eras may then be *underestimated*, which implies that they could have been warmer and so today may not be as relatively warm as short-term models indicate.
However, they don't offer a reason how/why Scandinavian temperature trends should track global trends, or alternatively establish how/why orbital forcing should be accounted into global models? These both seem like reasonable expectations, and it seems the reasonable next step is to reproduce this project for other forrest areas to see if it holds.
just reading the EU site now, http://www.thunderbolts.info/EU%20Intro%20and%20Chap1.pdf, they say it's the motion of plasmas, which are the dominant form of actually observed matter in the universe.
They don't read like crackpots to me. Name-calling alternative perspectives is something more indicative of religion than science ;p Also, this is the interwebz; there are actual crackpots in abundance.
From their site:
"... theories tend to harden into ‘facts,’ even in the face of mounting
contradictions. Astronomer Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was published a
quarter-century ago. At that time, some questions were still permitted.
On the issue of redshift, Sagan wrote: “There is nevertheless a
nagging suspicion among some astronomers, that all may not be right
with the deduction, from the redshift of galaxies via the Doppler effect,
that the universe is expanding. The astronomer Halton Arp has found
enigmatic and disturbing cases where a galaxy and a quasar, or a pair
of galaxies, that are in apparent physical association have very
different redshifts....” - p 20. http://www.thunderbolts.info/EU%20Intro%20and%20Chap1.pdf
They're overall arguing that electrodynamics can better explain many astronomical observations than gravitation + dark matter, dark energy and modifications to cosmological constants.
That seems reasonable; correct or not is a matter to be determined.
Dark matter, dark energy, etc. are the first examples I give to friends who are skeptical of big bang cosmology or even science in general, showing it as an example of how science is full of bad "working" theories, but we know it and keep chipping away. I hope I'm not wrong.
This has been floating around the net for a while.. I think I first saw it on slashdot many years ago:
http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/
Maybe a solid metallic surface would align better with low observed surface wave transfer compared to a soupy plasma.
You might find this lecture interesting:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
This passage in particular presents a different way at looking at the correlations in the Kane and Mertz study:
"Creativity may be another example of gender difference in motivation rather than ability. The evidence presents a seeming paradox, because the tests of creativity generally show men and women scoring about the same, yet through history some men have been much more creative than women. An explanation that fits this pattern is that men and women have the same creative ability but different motivations.
I am a musician, and I’ve long wondered about this difference. We know from the classical music scene that women can play instruments beautifully, superbly, proficiently — essentially just as well as men. They can and many do. Yet in jazz, where the performer has to be creative while playing, there is a stunning imbalance: hardly any women improvise. Why? The ability is there but perhaps the motivation is less. They don’t feel driven to do it.
I suppose the stock explanation for any such difference is that women were not encouraged, or were not appreciated, or were discouraged from being creative. But I don’t think this stock explanation fits the facts very well. In the 19th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output. There were no great women composers, no new directions in style of music or how to play, or anything like that. All those female pianists entertained their families and their dinner guests but did not seem motivated to create anything new.
Meanwhile, at about the same time, black men in America created blues and then jazz, both of which changed the way the world experiences music. By any measure, those black men, mostly just emerging from slavery, were far more disadvantaged than the middle-class white women. Even getting their hands on a musical instrument must have been considerably harder. And remember, I’m saying that the creative abilities are probably about equal. But somehow the men were driven to create something new, more than the women."