Misc. Science Topics

[labelwench]

Having raised chickens, I have a pretty good idea why, but I'm not telling........lol.......enjoy!


WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?


Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration,
as a chicken which has the daring and courage to
boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom
among them has the strength to contend with such a
paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the
princely chicken's dominion maintained.

Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its
pancreas.

Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered
within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and
each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial
intent can never be discerned, because structuralism
is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!

Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment
would let it take.

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road
gazes also across you.

Oliver North: National Security was at stake.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its
sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a
fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while
believing these actions to be of its own free will.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt
necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at
this historical juncture, and therefore
synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself,
the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the
objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came
into being which caused the actualization of this
potential occurrence.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed
the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-
nature.

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing
events to grace the annals of history. An historic,
unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt
such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to
homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from
the trees.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus: For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken
was on, but it was moving very fast.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored)
reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

Ronald Reagan: I forget.

John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the
transportation, so quite understandably the chicken
availed himself of the opportunity.

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Mr. T: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!

Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow
out of life.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Molly Yard: It was a hen!

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.

Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.

Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.

The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.

Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.

Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.

Othello: Jealousy.

Dr Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have,
you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the
Need to resist such a public Display of your own
lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.

Mrs Thatcher: This chicken's not for turning.

Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.

Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in
town ought never expose one to such barbarous
inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a
road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the
chicken in question.

Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade
insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.

Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome,
filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume
to question the actions of one in all respects his
superior.

Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.

Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness.

Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter)

Hamlet: That is not the question.

Donne: It crosseth for thee.

Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.

Constable: To get a better view.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

Having raised chickens, I have a pretty good idea why, but I'm not telling........lol.......enjoy!

Ah yes, Rhetoric__So then, we are back to Vico, the world's deepest rhetorician__And to bring him up to date, one must pass through C.S.Peirce, R.G.Collingwood and Nicholas Maxwell, and end with Hayden White__The Historical Immagination In 19th Century Europe__Metahistory...

Rhetoric allows 'The Generality of Genericity', I've written so much about...

Peirce's necessity of 'play' is his definition of rhetoric in his 'pure law of liberty...'

'Rhetorical Abduction' allows it all to fit soundly together... Link Link

[labelwench]

Ah yes, Rhetoric__So then, we are back to Vico, the world's deepest rhetorician__And to bring him up to date, one must pass through C.S.Peirce, R.G.Collingwood and Nicholas Maxwell, and end with Hayden White__The Historical Immagination In 19th Century Europe__Metahistory...

Rhetoric allows 'The Generality of Genericity', I've written so much about...

Peirce's necessity of 'play' is his definition of rhetoric in his 'pure law of liberty...'

'Rhetorical Abduction' allows it all to fit soundly together...

Actually, the chicken was displaying 'avoidance behavior' and would have crossed any obstacle it was physically capable of to avoid the object of it's concern........not unlike human beings at times.

The chicken was not proceeding toward a goal, it was fleeing from a situation.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

The chicken was not proceeding toward a goal, it was fleeing from a situation.

And just how does one truly know the difference...? Pre-suppositions...? Looks like rhetoric to me...

[labelwench]

And just how does one truly know the difference...? Pre-suppositions...? Looks like rhetoric to me...

The chicken had escaped it's enclosure. I was in pursuit.

The above are the observed facts of the case.

The following is an example of 'rhetoric'.

Having never been outside it's pen, I do not assess that it could have had a goal in mind, but I conceed that the chicken could have been an extraordinary tactician for it's kind.

Playful little dickens today, aren't you, Lloyd.......

[austintorn@aol.com]

Penrose’s “Many Places” Experiment

Sir Roger Penrose
Has though about something
For a very long time,
Ever since Paul Dirac told him in class about:
“…the superposition principle,
Whereby very tiny objects could be
In two places at the same time.”

This blurry flux even allows
An “infinite” number
Of locations simultaneously.

Yes, quantum mechanics works perfectly;
But, what leads to the world
At ordinary scales?

What collapses the quantum wave function?

Penrose believes he has
Identified the secret
That keeps the quantum genie
Bottled up in the atomic world,
A secret that was
Right in front of us all along.

It is gravity.

The flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation
That collapse is due to “observation”
Is that it has no basis in theory.

Gravity is the only one
Of the fundamental forces
That physicists have been unable
To explain in quantum terms,
Einstein trying for 30 years,
This perhaps being a clue that
Physicists are on the wrong path.

How would gravity affect
An object small enough to exist
In the borderland between
The quantum world of atoms
And the human world of visible objects?

There should be such a place where
The quantum approaches the classical.

An object about the size
Of a spec of dust might
Provide the perfect test.

At this scale, an object is small enough
To be strongly affected
By the rules of quantum mechanics
But large enough to observe directly.

If there was a way to observe the spec
Without disturbing it, we would see
Quantum strangeness laid bare:
A macroscopic thing
Sitting in two places at once.

Quantum theory is incomplete
Because it ignores the effects of gravity.

Gravity is so weak on atomic
Or subatomic scales
That most physicists leave it out,
But tiny objects should,
By Einstein’s theory,
Produce space-time warps, too.

If a dust spec is in two locations at once,
Each one should produce its own
Distortions in space-time,
Yielding two superposed
Gravitational fields;
Yet, it takes energy
To sustain these dual fields.

The higher the energy required
To sustain a system,
The less stable it is,
So, over time,
It tends to settle back
To its simplest, lowest, energy state,
That is, to just one object
Producing one gravitational field.

If Penrose is right,
Gravity yanks objects,
Perhaps above a certain size,
Back into a single location,
Without any need to invoke
Observers or parallel universes.

What is the degree of instability, though?

Electrons, atoms, and molecules
Are so small that their gravity,
And hence the energy,
Is negligible, and so they
Can persist that way “forever”.

Very large objects,
On the other hand,
Create such significant
Gravitational fields
That the duplicate states
Vanish almost at once.

For a dust spec,
The process takes nearly a second,
Long enough that it may be measured.

Is there an experiment?

Instead of a spec of dust,
Penrose would use a tiny mirror,
Bouncing radiation off it
To see if it was in one
Or two locations at the same time.

If Penrose is right,
The mirror would maintain
A dual existence for no more than a second
Before gravity chained it to a single location.

He initially wanted to use
An x-ray laser mounted
On a platform in outer space.

It would shoot photons
Towards a tiny target mirror
Tens of thousands of miles away.

A half-reflective mirror,
Called a beam splitter,
Would separate each photon
Into two states
So that it would follow two paths
At the same time.

On one path,
The photon strikes the tiny mirror,
Moving it slightly;
On the other,
It is reflected away
From the target mirror,
So the mirror does not move.

In the prevailing quantum view,
Both events occur simultaneously:
The mirror moves
And remains in place
A the same time.

On its return path,
The duplicate photon that struck the mirror
Hits the same mirror again,
Returning it to its initial position.

Since there is fundamentally
No way to tell which path
The photon took,
The two photons interfere with each other
And recombine into a single photon
That is always reflected along a path
Back toward the laser;

Thus, no x-ray photons
Can ever follow a path
That leads them to a detector
Which would be sitting off of
The first half-reflected mirror.

However, if as Penrose expects,
It forces the tiny mirror
To either remain at rest or move,
But not both,
Because gravity anchors
The tiny mirror to a single state;

Consequently, each photon
Will follow one path only.
So it cannot interfere with itself;
Half the time leading it to the detector.

Thus, the quantum duplicate
Of the mirror must have disappeared,
And so Penrose’s view of reality
Would be the correct one.

Well, there is too much expense
In performing the experiment in outer space,
So Dirk Bouwmeester
Has devised a way to bring
Penrose’s experiment down to earth.

A visible light source is to be used
Instead of an x-ray laser,
Giving it the same kick
By reflecting the light photons
Back and forth between
Two mirrors a million times.

They are past buckyballs now,
Soccer ball-shaped carbon molecules,
in size, up to an organic molecule
Called azobenzene,
Although the tiny mirror
Would be a billion times bigger.

They are working on ways
To shield the experiment
And students are creating the mirrors.

Stay tuned for a few more years.

[austintorn@aol.com]

An evil spirit is on the loose…

Satan Is in the Vatican, Catholic Exorcist Says

David Knowles
Writer
AOL News

(March 10) -- The Rev. Gabriele Amorth, the man who has served as the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years, says the signs are there: The devil has infiltrated St. Peter's.

Specifically, Amorth cites recent sexual abuse and pedophilia scandals as well as what he deems a cover-up in the shooting deaths of two of the Vatican's Swiss Guards and one of the guard's wives as proof that the Catholic Church's most famous site is less than pure.

"When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms, it is all true -- including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia," Amorth was cited as saying by The Times of London. The smoke of Satan references a phrase coined by Pope Paul VI.

The Vatican, according to Amorth, was also home to "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon."

Many of Amorth's claims are made in a new autobiography, titled "Memoirs of an Exorcist."

Amorth, who is the founder and president of honor of the Association of Exorcists, became an official exorcist in the Catholic Church in 1986, The Times reports. But Amorth's diagnosis may not mean that the church is preparing a Vatican exorcism any time soon.

Saying that Amorth had "gone well beyond the evidence" for Satanic possession of the Vatican, Rome-based exorcist the Rev. José Antonio Fortea Cucurull told The Times, "Cardinals might be better or worse, but all have upright intentions and seek the glory of God."

In an interview in 2002, Amorth was asked what defines an exorcism.

"Exorcism is a public prayer of the church done with the authority of the church," Amorth replied. "Because it is done by a priest name by the bishop; it is a prayer for the liberation from the demon, from the evil influence of the demon or of the evil provoked by the demon."

Popular conceptions of the practice are largely based on the 1973 film "The Exorcist," which Amorth called "exaggerated," but also praised for presenting an accurate picture of the possessed.

In the past, Amorth has attributed events ranging from fires in Sicily to the business woes of the airline Alitalia to the workings of Satan.


[How about that humans are human and that celibacy is an unnatural state].

[austintorn@aol.com]

The single, rare events model for speciation… ?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...om.html?page=1

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Mythbusters of Psychology

a book review by Dr. Harriet Hall, MD

KARL POPPER WROTE: “SCIENCE MUST BEGIN WITH MYTHS and with the criticism of myths.” Popular psychology is a prolific source of myths. It has produced widely held beliefs that “everyone knows are true” but that are contradicted by psychological research. A new book does an excellent job of mythbusting: 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and the late, great skeptic Barry L. Beyerstein.

I read a lot of psychology and skeptical literature, and I thought I knew a lot about false beliefs in psychology, but I wasn’t as savvy as I thought. Some of these myths I knew were myths, and the book reinforced my convictions with new evidence that I hadn’t seen; some I had questioned and I was glad to see my skepticism vindicated; but some myths I had swallowed whole and the book’s carefully presented evidence made me change my mind.

The authors start with a chapter explaining how myths and misconceptions arise.

1. Word of mouth. If we hear something repeated enough times, we tend to believe it.
2. Desire for easy answers and quick fixes.
3. Selective perception and memory. We remember our hits and forget our misses.
4. Inferring causation from correlation.
5. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.
6. Exposure to a biased sample. Psychologists overestimate the difficulty of stopping smoking because they only see patients who come to them for help, not the many who stop on their own.
7. Reasoning by representativeness — evaluating the similarity between two things on the basis of superficial resemblance.
8. Misleading film and media portrayals.
9. Exaggeration of a kernel of truth.
10. Terminological confusion. Because of the etymology of the word schizophrenia, many people confuse it with multiple personality disorder.

The authors discuss our susceptibility to optical illusions and other cognitive illusions, our propensity to see patterns where they don’t exist, the unreliability of intuition, and the fact that common sense frequently misleads us. They characterize science as “uncommon sense” — it requires us to set aside our common sense preconceptions when evaluating evidence. They cover 50 myths in depth, explaining their origins, why people believe them, and what the published research has to say about the claims. Everything is meticulously documented with sources listed.

(more another time)

[austintorn@aol.com]

Scientific Revelations

Ongoing scientific investigations discover
What’s behind the happenings,
Such as that we can feel other’s states
Through empathy via mirror neurons
And that we can even further
Make models of other’s minds;

While non-science dogma
Decides its arbitrary information all at once.

Science may well disagree, through proof,
With some higher mammal’s wishes
For how things ought to be.

Science does not then,
Entail “magic”, “physic powers”, superstition,
Special creation in lieu of evolution,
Wishes, beliefs, interdimensions of ETs,
“Soul”, or other such invisible claims;

But, it can explain the reasons
Behind these erroneous modes of thinking,
And, in addition, if say,
That something like brainwaves
Could be picked up by another,
Then science would find the natural basis.