BaalChatzaf

Human consciousness is primarily inside the skull (some is in the glands). For those who doubt it they should see a real-time PET scan or MRI scan of the brain while the subject is thinking. I just got through participating in a neurological psychological study of Old Fogies which is going on at Rutgers University. I have seen myself think. Every sublime thought, every abstraction I have had is neurons a-popping. It is all material, every last bit of it. Democritus was right: everything is atoms moving in the void. There ain't nothing else. Maybe you guys have a mind, but I -know- I have a working brain. The MRI and the PET scan did not reveal a non-material mind. It just ain't there inside my body. I am just like Data of ST:TNG except that I am organic. Existence is physical and material. We are meat. Proof? Our corpses stink just like animal corpses after death. None of us live in exception to or beyond the scope of Nature. There are no souls or spirits. There is just live tissue operating according to its nature. Ba'al Chatzaf

This is a continuation of a very old literary tradition -- the Eutopian or Utopian mode. One imagines a perfected world and contrasts it to the world that is. Thomas More did that long before Ayn Rand. In modern times we also have Alternate History or What-If. What-If the Union had lost the battle at Gettysburg. What consequences might flow from that? Etc. etc. Also Science Fiction (so-called) is a variant and may be Eutopian or Dystopian. Thus we have post apocalypse stories; the world after a Big War and how it might be. Counter-factual fiction is also a platform for satire. Jonathan Swift and -Gulliver's Travels- come to mind. Ayn Rand was not the first to write an alternate history of the United States (-Atlas Shrugged-) nor will she be the last. A Eutopian/Dystopian fiction is really a kind of gedanken experiment. It is a way of deriving -possible- situations and consequences from a counter-factual premise. Ba'al Chatzaf

The Sun is halfway to its ultimate burnout (it is too small to become a nova or supernova). However it will burn very hot when the hydrogen is used up and the oceans will evaporate. This will occur much sooner than the Sun's final death as a white dwarf then a cooled down cinder. Life on this planet will have a very hard time a billion years up the road. Human life will probably cease on this planet. That means we will be extinct by that time or we will have moved to a more hospitable place. I rather suspect the former than the latter. Ba'al Chatzaf

Please read the following article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomplex_numbers I assume you are aware that is the dimension of the hypercomplex algebra increases, various algebraic properties are lost. For example the quaternion field is non-commutative. The octonian algebra is non-associative etc. From the above article: "Quaternion, octonion, and beyond: Cayley-Dickson construction All of the Clifford algebras Cℓp,q® apart from the complex numbers and the quaternions contain non-real elements j that square to 1; and so cannot be division algebras. A different approach to extending the complex numbers is taken by the Cayley-Dickson construction. This generates number systems of dimension 2n, n in {2, 3, 4, ...}, with bases \{1, i_1, ..., i_{2^n-1}\}, where all the non-real bases anti-commute and satisfy i_m^2 = -1. The first algebras in this sequence are the four-dimensional quaternions, eight-dimensional octonions, and 16-dimensional sedenions. However, satisfying these requirements comes as a price: each increase in dimensionality introduces new algebraic complications. Quaternion multiplication is not commutative anymore, octonion multiplication additionally is non-associative, and sedenions do not form a normed space with multiplicative norm. Because quaternions and octonions offer a (multiplicative) norm similar to lengths in four and eight dimensional Euclidean vector space respectively, these numbers can be referred to as points in some higher-dimensional Euclidean space. Beyond octonions, however, this analogy fails since these constructs are not normed anymore." Have you derived any results that are not already in the literature which can be gotten for free? If I may offer you some advice: if you are going to do mathematics you should first research the area you wish to work in so you do not 1. you do not repeat stuff that is already there 2. you do not miss stuff that you ought to know. This is simple basic scholarship. Ba'al Chatzaf

The Earth has warmed and cooled many times through the ages. And without any help from the humans. The Little Ice Age ended in the 18-th century and it has been warming since. At some time in the future the world will cool down again. There are natural cycles at work. Eventually (in a billion and a half years or so) the hydrogen in the Sun will be exhausted and it will begin to fuse helium into carbon. Then things with -really- heat up. The oceans will evaporate and the place will begin to look like Venus. Ba'al Chatzaf

Your critique is essentially saying that since we do not have an absolutely perfect description of reality, and we are not omniscient (we cant view everything everywhere all the time) that there is no such thing as truth. Not at all. There is partial truth, the kind associated with observing the phenomena. And all we ever see is a finite subset of what is Out There to see. Then there is the Whole Truth, i.e. what the Cosmos is right down to Ground Level. Since we are quite far removed from Ground Level, and we never see ALL of it, we are not at the Whole Truth. So we do what we can with partial truth. One does not have to know everything to know something. We manage to get from birth to death with only partial knowledge so it can't be all that bad. And so it goes..... Bob Kolker

-The Fly- (1958) version. Hellp meeeee! Hellp meeeee! To this day I cannot watch it. It scares the bejesus out of me. Ba'al Chatzaf

I am sick and tired of the phrase "carbon footprint". Whenever any one says it I have an urge to reach for my semi-automatic fire extinguisher and let go a major blow of CO2. Hiss. Take that, you eco-phreak! Ba'al Chatzaf

This part of your post, sadly, is wishful thinking. It is just a matter of time before the fatwa is issued, and the lime pits are dug. If she becomes famous, what happened to Rushdie will happen to her. Rushdie is still alive. However he leads a guarded existence. Laleh Bakhtiar's experience indicates there may be a "protestant reformation" of Islam in a thousand years. Perhaps even eight hundred years. One can always hope. Yodah says: Hold not your breath until reforms itself Islam does, else blue turn you will. Ba'al Chatzaf

As Pontius Pilate asked: what is truth.? There is the truth as revealed by the phenomena and there is the truth of what is beneath the phenomena as they are currently known. Our best instruments still leave us fifteen orders of magnitude from Planck Length. All science is based on hypotheses which explain the phenomena. The predictions of a theory are empirically tested in the realm of the phenomena. Not only that we have a finite and limited set of observations to go on. Have we observed ALL of the cosmos? No we haven't. Are there things Out There which we have not (yet) encountered. Most very likely yes. Given that, one can hardly say a theory that accounts for the phenomena, as currently known, is guaranteed to work under every circumstance, particularly circumstances not yet encountered. For 200 years it was believed that Newton's Law of Gravitation was true (or True). Observations revealed that the motion of the planet Mercury were not fully accounted for by Newton's Law. We now know that Newtonian Gravitation as given by Newton's Law is a first approximation to a more complete law of gravitation as set out in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. And even with this we run into anomalous motions of stars which are currently accounted for by a type of matter that is not observable (or not yet observable), so-called Dark Matter. So our best scientific theories, while verified as far as they go are not likely to be complete. At thus juncture we do not have a single theory that accounts for both quantum phenomena and gravitation. What we have are theories that account for what has been (so-far) observed and have not been empirically falsified. Is this truth? Yes. It is part of the truth about the cosmos. Is it all of the truth. Not likely. We are in for some surprises yet. Ba'al Chatzaf

How is art a recreation of reality (i.e. the world external to will and consciousness)? I would say art is representation of the reality, not recreation. As to value judgments is is surely the case that an artists selects those aspects of the world that he/she wishes to represent, so there is either an overt or implicit value judgment as to what is important (to the artist) and what is not. How can an portrait artist (for example) working in a four dimensional space-time manifold literally recreate in two dimensions what exists in four? At best the artist can put down a two dimensional cross-section of a three dimensional scene. This is not recreation. Too much is lost in the process. A two dimensional construct cannot be a recreation of reality unless somehow we could live in Flatland. Bob Kolker

Most likely, Fermat did not have a correct proof of his theorem (it was actually a conjecture until Wiles nailed it down). It is highly unlikely that mathematical proposition that required some very high powered techniques would yield to elementary methods (Fermat did not even have analysis or calculus). To this day, no one has come up with a valid elementary proof of FLT. Bob Kolker

I should add also that Tycho Brahe's, failing to observe any steller parallax after his decades of observations, believed in fact that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Quite so. However his numbers on the orbit of Mars were sufficiently good to give Kepler the material he needed to work out a good first approximation to the kinematics of Mars. Tycho's observations were good to within two degrees and that turned out to be precise enough for Kepler to conclude that fitting to circular orbits would not work. Kepler's work was very fortunate. It give Newton a hint. Kepler's three laws taken together hint at an inverse square law for gravitation. Ba'al Chatzaf

There are much more interesting things to do. Participating is much more interesting than watching. I would rather play baseball than watch a game on t.v.. Ba'al Chatzaf

Chavez' right wing successors (who will be in power after his regime collapses) are more likely to read Milton Friedman. Chavez is another Alliende, mark my words. If I were a sentimentalist I would weep for Venezuela. Ba'al Chatzaf

No. Argentina has never recovered from Peron. When Peron took over, Argentina was the richest country in South America in terms of GDP and Income per capita. Now it is a basket case. This is sad, since Argentina is richly endowed with arable land well fit for raising crops extensively and cattle raising. Argentinians have never gone without meat, no matter how bad things were otherwise. Argentina also has vast mineral wealth, which is why the country is named after silver. Argentina has a unique cultural endowment as South American countries go. It is the most "European" of the South American countries. It should be an economic powerhouse, but it is not. Political corruption has drained its strength for over 60 years. As to Chavez: Hugo Chavez is a commie/socialist thug. No, he is no Stalin. But he will drive the economy of Venezuela into the ground. What worries me is that the Chinese are going to be their to "help" pick up the pieces. In short, China is going to get a direct pipeline(sic!) into Venezuela's oil reserves. This will help to drive up the per bbl price of oil. When one considers that we import over sixty percent of the petroleum we use, this bodes ill for our economy. Ba'al Chatzaf

I got the same rating. Bob Kolker

Or you might modestly assert that you believe such and such to be the case and present the reasons for your belief. The things we -know- are mostly what we believe to be the case or accept to be the case. We may have good reasons for our belief. Or maybe we have no good reason to believe the opposite. In any case, the only things you truly KNOW are those you know first hand and by your own witness or experience. Anything else is a kind of hearsay. Most of what we say we know, is really received from others. This is not as bad as it sounds. If we were restricted strictly to what we know at first hand, we would know damned little and we would have no access to the experience of others. It would be as if we were cut loose in the world as soon as we could physically survive by ourselves. We would be in the position of hermits on a desert island. Our lives would be nasty brutish and short. Living in society and mostly trusting in the word and judgment of our fellows gives us a reach into the world we otherwise would not have. Ba'al Chatzaf

Maybe yes, maybe no. For example Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (so-called) is so complex that it had to be vetted by a committee of top notch number theorists and group theorists. Wile's first version of the proof was found to be defective but so far no one has found a defect in his latest proof. But when a proof runs hundreds of pages in length there is always a chance something is being overlooked. So I would say it is highly likely, but not absolutely certain that FLT has been proven to be true. Ba'al Chatzaf

I read somewhere that AR liked tap-dancing. Perhaps Ms. Brandon could verify this. Ba'al Chatzaf

What is a Cato Constitution? Ba'al Chatzaf

Aristotle dissected biological specimens and studied both their insides and their outsides as carefully as could be done without a microscope (lenses were not invented then). That makes Aristotle a biologist. Aristotle wrote on weather and the atmosphere. That makes Aristotle a meteorologist. Aristotle proposed hypotheses accounting for motion. That makes him a physicist. Aristotle gets an A for going to look at the world. He gets a C minus for checking his hypotheses empirically. Ba'al Chatzaf

No. No. No. Empirical disproof of a logical consequence of a theory discredits the theory. If a prediction is empirically false, one of the underlying premises of the theory must be false. Good old Modus Tolens, formulated by Aristotle. As Ayn Rand often said to do but Aristotle did not often enough do: check your premises. And how do we check our premises? By seeing if their logical consequences are empirically supported. Contrary facts kill theories no matter how logical the theory seems. That is why Phlogiston, Caloric and Aether have been purged from physics and Vital Essence from Biology. Ba'al Chatzaf

Very good! I agree. Ba'al Chatzaf

Grim. The story is too much for a motion picture of reasonable length to bear. Look at what Peter Jackson had to do with -Lord of the Rings-. He mucked up the story line and left out a lot of important material. Is this what you want to see happen to -Atlas Shrugged-? One of two outcomes: a. the movie is not made b. the movie is made, but it is dreadful. Admirers of the book will gnash their teeth. Ba'al Chatzaf