Posts by Octagon
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1)
Message boards :
Politics :
Middle East is in Crisis Again #2
(Message 405935)
Posted 25 Aug 2006 by  Octagon
Post: Of course it's possible...you just need to stop them bombing the crap out of each other and get them talking. It's the only way that will actually work. There are a couple theories on how this could work. There are some parties to the conflict who will accept nothing short of Israel's utter destruction. Israel finds this unacceptable, to put it mildly. Therefore, no one solution is going to satisfy everybody. By the end of the conflict, Israel will either exist or it won't. The only way that the conflict can end is if one of the "impassioned" sides wins and the other loses. The vast majority of the Arab community is agreeable to some kind of settlement with Israel with a nebulous constellation of agreements. The sticking point is that small minority who will not stop so long as Israel exists no matter what the regional governments do. For one side to lose, it has to be rendered incapable of geopolitical action. Since burying them all up to their necks in concrete is impactical, they need to be killed. This entails "bombing the crap out of them." It is a necessary step. No common ground exists for diplomacy. EDIT: formatting |
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Message boards :
Politics :
Middle East is in Crisis Again #2
(Message 405891)
Posted 25 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: As evidence of the Israelis engaging in "institutional anger" as opposed to "cultural hatred," it is fairly routine for an Israeli hospital to transplant a donated Israeli organ into a Palestinian patient. The reverse has happened as well. Organ donation is generally an act of altruism (a word that gives Robert the heebie-jeebies). It happens both ways without regard to religious affiliation, demonstrating that at a deep level both sides realize that human life is human life, and that said human life is precious. Now if the governments and subnational groups in the area would simply respect internationally recongnized borders, the "Arab-Israeli Conflict" would run out of steam pretty quickly. But because those fighting the conflict see it is as "Ismlamic homeland versus the outsiders" and illogically assign the Jews to the outsider group, international borders are seen as a British and French ploy to make the Muslims play by European rules of diplomacy. There is no requirement for the majority-Islamic countries to be members of the UN or to sign treaties with other nations. Since shortly after World War II they've been recognized as independent nations that can make their own foerign policy decisions. These nations choose to be in the UN and choose to sell their oil to foreign nations. Making these choices obligates them to operate within accepted norms of behavior, but no one seems to be willing to press them on the point. At least we know that individual Muslims believe that individual Jews are human and (at least functionally) equal. That shows that a peaceful settlement is possible in principle. EDIT: spelling |
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Message boards :
Politics :
Middle East is in Crisis Again #2
(Message 405855)
Posted 25 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Chuck, Israel was shooting back at people who started shooting at them. In general, they don't have "intense hatred" of anybody except the ones the ones dooing their pathetic best to murder Israeli civilians. And even then, it's a rather situational hatred based on the fact that, as small as Israel is, all of their families are threatened by Hezballah missiles. When they have completed their orders to destroy the munitions aimed at Israel and kill the people responsible for firing them, they will gratefully return to stand-down life without a glance back. As evidence of the Israelis engaging in "institutional anger" as opposed to "cultural hatred," it is fairly routine for an Israeli hospital to transplant a donated Israeli organ into a Palestinian patient. The reverse has happened as well. |
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Message boards :
SETI@home Science :
8 planets finally- General Assembly has concluded
(Message 405289)
Posted 24 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Now we have to memorize "Dwarf Planets", of which there'll be more and more as time goes on? Ceres was considered a planet when it was first discovered. Doesn't it get honorary status? And 2003 UB313 is the first celestial body named after a TV character, so it needs an honorary title, too. And by now you've caught on that I'm just being silly. School kids will still learn about Pluto. It just won't be one of the Eight Planets. |
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5)
Message boards :
SETI@home Science :
8 planets finally- General Assembly has concluded
(Message 405276)
Posted 24 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Pluto was actually 'promoted' from number 9 to number 1 in it's category... ;) "You're no longer a Junior Vice President of the company, but look at it this way... now you're a senior bottle-washer!" :-) In all seriousness, this was the most logical decision since there are likely thousands of Pluto-like KBO's in the outer solar system. Had the IAU gone ahead with its original plan, within ten or twenty years little school kids would be trying to memorize "The Sun's Family of 72 Planets" or some-such nonsense. To simplify things they'd coin a term like "major planet" and end up with the same eight we have today. EDIT: typo |
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Message boards :
SETI@home Science :
Russians are going to win race to Mars
(Message 405216)
Posted 24 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Personally, I have always thought of the space shuttle the US has as a piece of garbage as summarized by Rockhound in Armageddon. It has also proven to be a largely backward step, science experiments or no. It's like requiring a plane in a modern air force be capable of all air missions because that's what the British RAF's first effective plane, the Sopwith Camel, did. With that kind of thinking we'd never have mid-air refuelers, gigantic cargo planes, etc. EDIT: grammar |
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7)
Message boards :
Politics :
Political Thread [17] - CLOSED
(Message 405185)
Posted 24 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: There has been consistent bias against Jews in most of the nations of the world for a considerable length of time. Many of these nations now hold great influence within the UN and color its actions and non-actions. Diplomat 1: "An army is firing rockets at civilians! And they're using human shields!" Diplomat 2: "That's outrageous. We need to form a committee or something. Who are the victims of this barbarity?" Diplomat 1: "Israel." Diplomat 2: "Oh, well then there's no problem. Forget about that. But speaking of Israel, I hear that one of their mail trucks ran over a cat yesterday. We're drafting a Security Council resolution to condemn Israel." |
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Message boards :
SETI@home Science :
Question about 'Dyson Spheres?'
(Message 405179)
Posted 24 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: It should still emit heat we could detect. There's no such thing as a perfect insulator. The astronomers could just take an elevator "down" to the outer surface and have all the space they could want to set up observatories that are always in "night." The theoretical motivation to build a Dyson Sphere is to harness all of the star's output... presumably the civilization would have a use for all that energy and a means of getting rid of the waste heat. The waste heat would be the most obvious "leakage" that astronomers could look for, but there is no reason to expect it to be sent out uniformly in all directions. |
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Message boards :
SETI@home Science :
Russians are going to win race to Mars
(Message 404478)
Posted 23 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Personally, I have always thought of the space shuttle the US has as a piece of garbage as summarized by Rockhound in Armageddon. It has also proven to be a largely backward step, science experiments or no. The space shuttle program was designed for building space stations, and the original expectation is that it'd have been retired by now. It was not intended to be the "only" way for the US to get people into space, and it certainly wasn't designed to be the "all things to all missions" that NASA tried to make the Shuttle into. It's called a Shuttle for a reason. It shuttles people and material between Earth and Earth orbit. Somewhere along the way the Shuttle became The Shuttle, and any follow-on replacement had to be The Shuttle Replacement. A victim of its own success (if we define success as being able to survive endless scope creep of its mission), the expectiations on any follow-on projects have become unreasonable. No one should expect any one vehicle to do all the things that the Shuttle program currently does... because the Shuttle program wasn't designed to do all those things and somewhat-specialized vehicles would do the job much better. |
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Message boards :
Cafe SETI :
Chess Match - Beethoven v Anne
(Message 404397)
Posted 23 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: 7. Nh3-g5 I think that I would try Bf8-b4+ because it would take the initiative (although briefly) and might budge that White queen so as to get the Black knight unpinned. |
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Message boards :
Cafe SETI :
Myths Legends Conspiracies (closed)
(Message 403708)
Posted 22 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Hee Hee! It's a first for me lol I think the whole thing's a conspiracy. |
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Message boards :
Cafe SETI :
On the origins of the universe
(Message 403665)
Posted 22 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: I just settle on the position that Existence Exists and we can't do anything about it anyway. Be assured that some hi-tech nihilistic cult is working on that problem. |
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Message boards :
Cafe SETI :
Found in garden
(Message 403548)
Posted 22 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Try looking at it this way...  This is obviously an ancient Native American rendering of Thomas the Tank Engine. |
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Message boards :
SETI@home Science :
On the origins of the universe
(Message 402964)
Posted 21 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: I started this thread in Cafe Seti and have had a good response however some posts suggest it should be here in the science forum. Therefore, here are my ideas. I think a bit of your confusion comes from terminology. Black holes (according to General Realtivity theory) have a singularity in the middle and the edge of a black hole is called the event horizon. Any known form of matter or energy that finds itself inside the event horizon can never escape to outside the event horizon again. What goes on inside the black hole is actually a mystery to us, and most are uncomfortable with the predictions of General Relativity. In short, a black hole and a singularity are not quite the same thing. All black holes are predicted to contain singularities, but it is possible for some kind of singularity to exist that doesn't involve a black hole. If the Universe is "closed" (that is, expansion will halt one day and everything will fall back inward) then the Universe can be accurately described as a gigantic black hole with an event horizon radius somewhat beyond the maximum radius of the Universe. All future world lines lead back to the singularity (the "Big Crunch"), just as all future world lines within a typical black hole lead to the black hole's singularity. If the Universe is "open" then the Universe started from a singularity but it is not a black hole. The leakage and explosion you described is Hawking Radiation. I hope that you can find a good source about it because I'm still a bit fuzzy on the details. Briefly, Hawking described a virtual particle: a charged partical orbiting nothing in particular but with an orbital plane that had an X axis in normal space and a Y axis in line with time. We would see such a particle emerge from nowhere, move a short distance, fall back to the original location, and disappear again. That same particle would then travel along the other half of the circle going backward in time. We would see it as an antiparticle (antiparticle = opposite spin) appearing from the same origin as the normal particle, travelling a route of equal length but opposite direction, and disappearing at the same point as the normal particle. With me so far? The origin point in endothermic: it leaches energy from the surroundings. The endpoint is exothermic: it radiates energy back to the surroundings. To an outside observer moving normally in time, the energy seemed to randomly organize itself in a particle-antiparticle pair that moved away from each other, captured each other by electrical attraction, and annihiliated one another (by the way, some posit that the entire physical Universe appeared as such a random organization, but that's not where I'm going here). To an outside observer who could see time as a fourth dimension much like the first three, it would appear to be a particle orbitting nothing in particular, happy to remain in a brief slice of time. What has this got to do with black holes? When a happily circling virtual particle is run over by a black hole, it usually falls in. However, if the virtual particle is just "winged" by the edge of a black hole, one of the pair may get sucked in while the other barely escapes. The change in direction of the escaping particle (or antiparticle) leeches a tiny amount of angular momentum from the black hole, a tiny amount of energy (which is interchangeable with mass) leakage known as Hawking Radiation. For a large black hole, only a small fraction of the virtual particles escape and the net effect is very minor. On a small black hole, the net effect gets more and more noticeable (the Hawking Radiation gets more intense) and eventually the event horizon radius (determined by the mass of the black hole) drops below a critical value and the mass is no longer a black hole. Now subjected to physical laws that we understand, a (small?) supernova is the most likely result. The important bits for our discussion are that small black holes are inherently unstable, that large black holes do leak but at an incredibly slow rate, that from the inside of a black hole the outside world is completely inaccessible, ant that inside a black hole the total amount of energy visible to the observer could change (from infalling mass or outgoing Hawking Radiation). Let us assume, for the moment, this idea is true. We might then consider that if one singularity created our universe then other singularity's must also have created other universes which I call the multiverse. If we are on the inside of a truly massive black hole, the energy for the mysterious inflationary acceleration could be derived from infalling material from a "containing" Universe. Conversely, it brings up the interesting point of what is actually going on inside of stellar mass and galactic mass black holes. Probably not entire Universes (there isn't enough mass), but something more active than a point-mass. It is reasonable to assume therefore, that the multiverse consists of practically an infinite number of universes that have been created through the collapse and explosion of black holes. These mini-Universes might be modelable (is that a word?) by physicists putting the initial Big Bang mass on the order of magnitude of a stellar black hole and a galactic mass black hole. Would they "explode" at all? What sorts of physical laws would dominate? Would Universal "constants" be different? Could a human in a space-ship survive a trip into such a mini-Universe (even though we are reasonably certain he could never return)? It would seem that a lot of people on this planet believe there is some kind of an omnipotent being who looks over us and is a father figure if you will. It might be interesting to consider, if such a creature does or did exist, then what would such an omnipotent being be like in another universe or would there even be one. Most monotheistic faiths would posit that there is one God ruling over everything. Presumably, this God would appear in ways consistent with the physical laws of each Universe (just as the same beam of light travels straight in a vacuum, deflects in a liquid, and splits into a rainbow in a prism) but would at the very least understand that there is "more than one way to do things" and act with knowledge unavailable to an observer within any given Universe. |
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15)
Message boards :
Politics :
Middle East is in Crisis Again #2
(Message 402888)
Posted 21 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Looks like you have your wish Octagon. Israel has been allowed it's bunker-bustersIsrael to get bunker buster bombs. Looks like business as usual, although Israel seems to be going through a little soul searching today on the success or not of their invasion of Lebanon. That story was dated a month ago, and I'm not sure if they ever arrived in time to make a difference. In Israel there is a tradition that partisan sniping during a conflict is unheard-of. Now that the conflict is over, Olmert is being assailed from the right and the left. Seems to be variations on "if you started it you should have been willing to finish it." EDIT: spelling |
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16)
Message boards :
Cafe SETI :
Robert Brooke is UOTD @ Chess960!!
(Message 402831)
Posted 21 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Congratulations, Robert! |
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17)
Message boards :
Politics :
Middle East is in Crisis Again #2
(Message 402825)
Posted 21 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: And these really "eeeevil people" are the good guys. They work for you and me. In the case that I linked to, the cluster bombs were from the US. The UK has facilitated the delivering of weapons to Israel. Cluster munitions are used to deliver a number of small explosives in an area where the attacker wants to make sure the people in the area are neutralized (that would be the santized word for "killed or wounded badly enough that they stop fighting"). The US used to sell such munitions to Israel without question because, although in the wrong hands they can be used as "terror weapons" (imagine one going off in a market), there was never any indication that Israel would use them as such. Lately, Western nations in general have gotten phobic about civilian casualties, and the US has been hesitant to sell cluster munitions to Israel precisely because Israel's enemies tend to hide among civilians. I don't quite follow the logic in this case... let's make Israel's job harder, and that will lead to a reduction in terror attacks??? The US State Department is still chock full of functionaries from the previous administration, and they have their own agendas that often diverge from the President who is supposed to be their boss. The one munition that Israel either does not or cannot acquire is ground-penetrating ("bunker-buster") bombs. Because merely posessing such weapons would make Israel a threat to Syria, someone made the decision that Israel would not have bunker-buster munitions (either a dovish Israel government or a squemish US government). Hezbollah knew this and built their entire war strategy around it. I hope that ground-penetrating munitions are either already in Israel or on their way. This would make the inevitable follow-on conflict a lot shorter and a lot less bloody. |
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18)
Message boards :
Cafe SETI :
Myths Legends Conspiracies (closed)
(Message 400854)
Posted 18 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: SANE...??? "Sane" is a legal term meaning that you (assuming you are of legal age) can bind yourself in a contract using your own signature without having to get the approval of a guardian. "Neurotypical" is the word you're looking for. |
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Message boards :
Cafe SETI :
On the origins of the universe
(Message 400683)
Posted 18 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: This whole thread might get a more thorough beating if it was in the Science forum. For one, the premise that the Universe started from a "cosmic egg" that inflated into the contemporary Universe would be challenged. And then it would get really interesting :-) |
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Message boards :
Politics :
Middle East is in Crisis Again #2
(Message 400680)
Posted 18 Aug 2006 by Octagon
Post: Is anyone now unclear about this status now? Are we done with definitions now? Anyone who can slip with word 'epistemology' or 'teleological' into a stand-up act has a true talent :-) |
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