East Meets West Logic...

[Lloyd Gillespie]

I'll have to re-read these on the flip-side, Lloyd. I've done run out of time, although I did spend some time earlier in the day assisting Antonio with new wardrobe ideas, LOL.... Will check back here in the morning.

Any thought as to the long term effects on ecology and economy from the Gulf oil situation and the recent China oil spill? Perhaps I am too far removed from the mainstream to have an accurate picture of these disasters, yet it seems we are not paying enough attention to the appropriate things. The media coverage feels as though it has been stifled. That amount of oil isn't just going to vanish without a trace? Just my opinion. What do I know.....

These opinions are as good as mine, Lorrina:

Two oil pipelines exploded Friday in the Chinese province of Liaoning beginning China's worst oil spill; nearly a week later 400,000 gallons of oil have spread over 166 square miles, according to China’s state media. The pipeline has since been fixed and is operating again. While the spill is small compared to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—which currently covers nearly 3,000 square miles with approximately 100 to 200 million gallons of oil—its impact regionally will likely be very large.

Fishing, important to the region, has been banned for the rest of the summer; local aquaculture farms have been polluted; nearby beaches have been emptied leaving tourism businesses dry; and China is still struggling to contain the oil before it enters international waters.

Already one life has been lost in attempting to clean up the spill: 25 year old firefighter Zhang Liang, drowned after being coated in oil. Greenpeace-China, which is on-site monitoring the spill, captured dramatic photos of another rescued firefighter from the oil.

Media outlets have reported that clean-up workers have been forced to use only gloved-hands, rakes, plastic bags, straw mats, and chopsticks to attempt to remove oil from the water.

While some Chinese officials have promised the spill will be cleaned up within days, others have stated it will take much longer. The effects of the oil spill on the environment, according to Greenpeace-China, won’t be known for a long time.

"The damage done by every oil spill is irreversible and long-lasting," reads one blog entry by Greenpeace-China.

China is the world’s second largest consumer of oil after the US. In 2007 China consumed over 7,578,000 barrels of oil daily: almost one-third (36 percent) of the US's oil consumption.

Related articles

The Gulf oil spill in context: US oil consumption

(05/31/2010) The US government has now confirmed that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the United States' largest oil spill and perhaps the nation's worst environmental disaster. While poor government oversight and negligence by oil giant BP certainly contributed to the disaster, the fact that the US is drilling over a mile below the surface in one of its most important marine ecosystems is directly related to US consumption of oil: the highest in the world.


Who's to blame for the oil spill?

(05/04/2010) America, we deserve the oil spill now threatening the beautiful coast of Louisiana. This disaster is not natural, like the earthquake that devastated Haiti or tsunami that swept Southeast Asia in 2006; this disaster is man-made, American-made in fact, pure and simple. So, while in the upcoming weeks and months—if things go poorly—we may decry the oil-drenched wildlife, the economic loss for the region, the spoiled beeches, the wrecked ecosystems, the massive disaster that could take decades if not longer to recover from, we, as Americans, cannot think smugly that we are somehow innocent of what has happened. You play with fire: you will get burned. You drill for oil 1,500 meters below the surface of the ocean, you open up oil holes across the surface of your supposedly-beloved landscape, sooner or later there will be a spill, and sometimes that spill will be catastrophic.

[labelwench]

If there’s one lesson we must learn; “It’s the lesson of paying attention to the positive hope, for the new actionable and directional intelligence futures, that may be offered by all beings, living or dead, all throughout history, since hope springs eternal, in the human soul, if one but looks__It's the all pervasively important path to follow and or lead…”

Originally posted by Lloyd Gillespie

My mind is mush today, and that was before spending a few minutes at the chat box agitating the water cooler crowd. In over my head at work, gone lame, so has my horse, popping Motrin and planning on strolling down label lane tonight and offer the devil himself a glass of ice-water.

Hubby came to work this morning and reminded me that this was our anniversary.

Now that's a shock, lol......

I need to regroup.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor...

George Lakoff

"Do not go gentle into that good night." -Dylan Thomas
"Death is the mother of beauty" . . . -Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

Introduction
These famous lines by Thomas and Stevens are examples of what classical theorists, at
least since Aristotle, have referred to as metaphor: instances of novel poetic language in
which words like mother, go, and night are not used in their normal everyday senses. In
classical theories of language, metaphor was seen as a matter of language not thought.

Metaphorical expressions were assumed to be mutually exclusive with the realm of
ordinary everyday language: everyday language had no metaphor, and metaphor used
mechanisms outside the realm of everyday conventional language. The classical theory
was taken so much for granted over the centuries that many people didn’t realize that it
was just a theory. The theory was not merely taken to be true, but came to be taken as
definitional. The word metaphor was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression
where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its normal conventional
meaning to express a similar concept. But such issues are not matters for definitions; they
are empirical questions. As a cognitive scientist and a linguist, one asks: What are the
generalizations governing the linguistic expressions re ferred to classically as poetic
metaphors? When this question is answered rigorously, the classical theory turns out to be
false. The generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not in language,
but in thought: They are general map pings across conceptual domains. Moreover, these
general princi ples which take the form of conceptual mappings, apply not just to novel
poetic expressions, but to much of ordinary everyday language. In short, the locus of
metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in
terms of another. The general theory of metaphor is given by characterizing such crossdomain
mappings. And in the process, everyday abstract concepts like time, states,
change, causation, and pur pose also turn out to be metaphorical. The result is that
metaphor (that is, cross-domain mapping) is absolutely central to ordinary natural
language semantics, and that the study of literary metaphor is an extension of the study of
everyday metaphor. Everyday metaphor is characterized by a huge system of thousands of
cross-domain mappings, and this system is made use of in novel metaphor. Because of
these empirical results, the word metaphor has come to be used differently in
contemporary metaphor research. The word metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain
mapping in the conceptual system. The term metaphorical expression refers to a linguistic
expression (a word, phrase, or sentence) that is the surface realization of such a crossdomain
mapping (this is what the word metaphor referred to in the old theory). I will
adopt the contemporary usage throughout this chapter. Experimental results
demonstrating the cognitive reali ty of the extensive system of metaphorical mappings are
discussed by Gibbs (this volume). Mark Turner’s 1987 book, Death is the mother of
beauty, whose title comes from Stevens’ great line, demonstrates in detail how that line
uses the ordinary system of everyday mappings. For further examples of how literary
metaphor makes use of the ordinary metaphor system, see More Than Cool Reason: A
Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, by Lakoff and Turner (1989) and Reading Minds: The
Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, by Turner (1991). Since the everyday
metaphor system is central to the understanding of poetic metaphor, we will begin with
the everyday system and then turn to poetic examples.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

The All Important Speed of Light...

The speed of light, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant representing the speed at which light and all other electromagnetic radiation travels in vacuum. Its value is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 186,282 miles per second). In the theory of relativity, c connects space and time, and appears in the famous equation of mass–energy equivalence E = mc2 The speed of light is the speed of all massless particles and associated fields in vacuum, and it is predicted by the current theory to be the speed of gravity and of gravitational waves and an upper bound on the speed at which energy, matter, and information can travel.

The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials, such as glass or air, is less than c. The ratio between c and the speed v at which light travels in a material is called the refractive index n of the material (n = c / v). For example, for visible light the refractive index of glass is typically around 1.5, meaning that light in glass travels at c / 1.5 ≈ 200,000 km/s; the refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is very close to c.

Ole Rømer first demonstrated in 1676 that light travelled at a finite speed (as opposed to instantaneously) by studying the apparent motion of Jupiter's moon Io. After centuries of increasingly precise measurements, in 1975 the speed of light was known to be 299,792,458 m/s with a relative measurement uncertainty of 4 parts per billion. In 1983, the metre was redefined in the International System of Units (SI) as the distance travelled by light in vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. As a result, the numerical value of c in metres per second is now fixed exactly by the definition of the metre.

The speed of light in vacuum is a dimensional physical constant, so its numerical value depends on the system of units used. In the International System of Units (SI), the metre is defined as the distance light travels in vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. The effect of this definition is to fix the speed of light in vacuum at exactly 299,792,458 m/s.

The speed of light in vacuum is usually denoted by c, for "constant" or the Latin celeritas (meaning "swiftness"). Originally, the symbol V was used, introduced by Maxwell in 1865. In 1856, Weber and Kohlrausch had used c for a constant later shown to equal √2 times the speed of light in vacuum. In 1894, Drude redefined c with its modern meaning. Einstein used V in his original German-language papers on special relativity in 1905, but in 1907 he switched to c, which by then had become the standard symbol.

Some authors use c for the speed of waves in any material medium, and c0 for the speed of light in vacuum. This subscripted notation, which is endorsed in official SI literature, has the same form as other related constants: namely, μ0 for the vacuum permeability or magnetic constant, ε0 for the vacuum permittivity or electric constant, and Z0 for the impedance of free space. This article uses c exclusively for the speed of light in vacuum.



In branches of physics in which the speed of light plays an important part, such as in relativity, it is common to use systems of natural units of measurement in which c = 1. When such a system of measurement is used, the speed of light drops out of the equations of physics, because multiplication or division by 1 does not affect the result.

The speed at which light propagates in vacuum is independent both of the motion of the light source and of the inertial frame of reference of the observer. This invariance of the speed of light was postulated by Albert Einstein in 1905, motivated by Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and the lack of evidence for the luminiferous ether; it has since been consistently confirmed by many experiments. The theory of special relativity explores the consequences of the existence of such an invariant speed c and the assumption that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference. One consequence is that c is the speed at which all massless particles and waves, including light, must travel.

Special relativity has many counter-intuitive implications, which have been verified in many experiments. These include the equivalence of mass and energy (E = mc2), length contraction (moving objects shorten), and time dilation (moving clocks run slower). The factor γ by which lengths contract and times dilate, known as the Lorentz factor, is given by γ = (1 − v2/c2)−1/2, where v is the speed of the object; its difference from 1 is negligible for speeds much slower than c, such as most everyday speeds—in which case special relativity is closely approximated by Galilean relativity—but it increases at relativistic speeds and diverges to infinity as v approaches c.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

Another counter-intuitive consequence of special relativity is the relativity of simultaneity: if the spatial distance between two events A and B is greater than the time interval between them multiplied by c, then there are frames of reference in which A precedes B, others in which B precedes A, and others in which they are simultaneous; neither event can be the cause of the other.

The results of special relativity can be summarized by treating space and time as a unified structure known as spacetime (with c relating the units of space and time), and requiring that physical theories satisfy a special symmetry called Lorentz invariance, whose mathematical formulation contains the parameter c. Lorentz invariance has become an almost universal assumption for modern physical theories, such as quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, the Standard Model of particle physics, and general relativity. As such, the parameter c is ubiquitous in modern physics, appearing in many contexts that may seem to be unrelated to light. For example, general relativity predicts that c is also the speed of gravity and of gravitational waves. In non-inertial frames of reference (gravitationally curved space or accelerated reference frames), the local speed of light is constant and equal to c, but the speed of light along a trajectory of finite length can differ from c, depending on how distances and times are defined.

It is generally assumed in physics that fundamental constants such as c have the same value throughout spacetime, meaning that they do not depend on location and do not vary with time. However, various theories have suggested that the speed of light has changed over time. Although no conclusive evidence for such theories has been found, they remain the subject of ongoing research.


According to special relativity, the energy of an object with rest mass m and speed v is given by γmc2, where γ is the Lorentz factor defined above. When v is zero, γ is equal to one, giving rise to the famous E = mc2 formula for mass-energy equivalence. Since the γ factor approaches infinity as v approaches c, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light. The speed of light is the upper limit for the speeds of objects with positive rest mass.

More generally, it is normally impossible for any information or energy to travel faster than c. One reason is that according to the theory of special relativity, if something were travelling faster than c relative to an inertial frame of reference, it would be travelling backwards in time relative to another frame (see Relativity of simultaneity), and causality would be violated. In such a frame of reference, an "effect" could be observed before its "cause". Such a violation of causality has never been recorded, and would lead to paradoxes such as the tachyonic antitelephone.

There are situations in which it may seem that matter, energy, or information travels at speeds greater than c, but they do not. For example, if a laser beam is swept quickly across a distant object, the spot of light can move faster than c, but the only physical entities that are moving are the laser and its emitted light, which travels at the speed c from the laser to the various positions of the spot. The movement of the spot will be delayed after the laser is moved because of the time it takes light to get to the distant object from the laser. Similarly, a shadow projected onto a distant object can be made to move faster than c. In neither case does any matter or information travel faster than light.

In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, certain quantum effects may seem to be transmitted faster than c—and thus instantaneously in some frame—as in the EPR paradox. An example involves the quantum states of two particles that can be entangled. Until either of the particles is observed, they exist in a superposition of two quantum states. If the particles are separated and one particle's quantum state is observed, the other particle's quantum state is determined instantaneously (i.e., faster than light could travel from one particle to the other). However, it is impossible to control which quantum state the first particle will take on when it is observed, so information cannot be transmitted in this manner.


Another quantum effect that predicts the occurrence of faster-than-light speeds is called the Hartman effect; under certain conditions the time needed for a particle to tunnel through a barrier is constant. This could result in a particle crossing a large gap faster-than-light. However, no information can be sent using this effect.

As is discussed in the propagation of light in a medium section below, many wave velocities can exceed c. For example, the phase velocity of X-rays through most glasses can routinely exceed c,[39] but such waves cannot convey any information.

The rate of change in the distance between two objects in a frame of reference with respect to which both are moving (their closing speed) may have a value in excess of c. However, this does not represent the speed of any single object as measured in a single inertial frame.


So-called superluminal motion is seen in certain astronomical objects, such as the relativistic jets of radio galaxies and quasars. However, these jets are not moving at speeds in excess of the speed of light: the apparent superluminal motion is a projection effect caused by objects moving near the speed of light and approaching Earth at a small angle to the line of sight: since the light which was emitted when the jet was farther away took longer to reach the Earth, the time between two successive observations corresponds to a longer time between the instants at which the light rays were emitted.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

The Max Speed of Light__c In Vacuum...

[Lloyd Gillespie]

A Mirror Book...???

[labelwench]

Some awesome images you have posted in the wake of the All Important Speed of Light.

Light.

What exactly would we have, if we had no light?

Which, of course, gets one wondering as to the origin of light.

Ah well. I shall have to place my trust in the sun to rise each morning, whether in a clear or a cloudy sky. Should that cease to occur, all else will be moot, I'm thinking.

For your audio/visual pleasure, Sunshine by Aerosmith.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k775maeCoU4

[labelwench]

http://www.treelobsters.com/2010/07/...ne-to-pot.html

[labelwench]

As an auto enthusiast (big bad boy trucks as I recall), I thought the following might be of interest to you, Lloyd. Apparently, these were very rare.

http://tinyhouseblog.com/tiny-house-...ford-housecar/

Traveling east to west in style, for that era. Lots of oak used in the construction.

Cozy interior.