Dr. F.
Big Wall climber
SoCal
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2013 - 07:44pm PT
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WBraun
climber
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That one above is very beautiful.
You obviously put a lot a of love into your work.
And it shows.
Thus proves "the scientist is more important then the science".
You know the science very well.
But with out you, in the environment you put those species in, they would not survive.
Another crude example ......
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Yes very beautiful Dr. You could say it is perceived therefore you are.
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Malemute
Ice climber
the ghost
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appearing on toast ... that must be a third rate amoeba
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MH2
climber
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Don Paul,
I would be careful about interpreting brain scans. Very local activity may be missed, stuff below the resolving power (in time or space) of the method. Decreasing activity in one part of the brain is often accompanied by increased activity in other parts because an inhibitory influence has been removed. Simple pictures of brain function as increases or decreases of activity in a particular region don't do justice to the complexity of the connections.
Humans are susceptible to experiences that we call religious or spiritual or transcendent. When I was a kid I got a whiff of gasoline and had the strangest feeling that it was trying to reveal an all-encompassing secret to me. Later when I heard where gasoline came from I had a secondary strange feeling that the critters who died to make the fossil fuel were trying to tell me something.
How or why natural selection would come up with that kind of weirdness I have no idea. It may just be noise in the system or it may be a signal from beyond our mundane existence. I do know that many other people have had powerful experiences that escape easy explanation. Such experiences can be induced by drugs, by traumatic events, by shamanistic exercises in deprivation and suffering, and also by quiet meditation or coming into the presence of beauty in nature.
I like this account by William James from 1874
I myself made some observations on . . . nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
Unfortunately, like psilocyborg, William James was unable to carry any actual revelation back into ordinary reality. For an example of what he did write down under the influence see
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96may/nitrous/nitrous.htm
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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editing...
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Hey Base, what does the industry chatter and your Zendo say about eastern Nv. All dry holes or pay zones to come?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Largo: ...they have a limited understanding of what true is.
The boldest statement Largo's made so far - very Braunian in scope.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Ed, how much of the math in QM is non-linear?
not sure this is what you are thinking, but...
theories in which the field quanta have self-couplings are nonlinear, that would be Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and Gravity.
The problem with gravity is that at very high energies space-time is affected by the gravitational dynamics, so it is difficult (impossible) to decide what the "background" is... for quantum electrodynamics the energies are low enough so that the space-time is flat, and unperturbed by the interaction... similarly for the weak interactions and even the strong interactions described by QCD.
But at the spatial dimensions that quantum effects are important for gravity, the energy scales are very large, and the distortion of space-time are also large, so the successful theory has to have some way of addressing these scales.
The first way we learn how to do field quantization is to construct canonical operators, one is the field itself, the other, the time derivative of the field, is it's canonical partner with which it observes the appropriate commutator relationship.
Then you have a dispersion like Schrodinger equation relating the second space derivative of the field to the field itself and the time derivative... we run into trouble if space and time coordinates we differentiate with depend on the field... that's nonlinear... and that will happen for gravity.
This is a problem physics has been grappling with for a long time... not quite 100 years, and there still is quite a ways to go to get to a solution that can be challenged experimentally (or observationally at least).
The problem of the non-linearity of QCD, in which the gluons can interact with each other is a solved problem, but results in a theory that is not solvable by analytic means (at least not yet). While string theory has some ideas regarding how this might be done, a large amount of work goes into computational techniques to solve QCD on a lattice (thus lattice QCD = lQCD). There are many technical hurdles to jump to do this, but in the end the results are at least encouraging if the method lacks in "elegance."
In my mind QCD and lQCD are theories that still have difficulty addressing some aspects of particle physics, in particular where the QCD couplings, which are energy dependent, are large making the theory non-linear. This happens at low energy, which is the regime I've always been interested in, that is, particle spectroscopy. The degrees of freedom allowed by QCD don't seem to be present in the observed zoo of elementary particles. And worse, there are no good reasons why, at least none that I know of.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Ed, doesn't this QCD and lQCD business also have something to do with discrete vs. analog and with there being issues trying to 'place' things on a lattice (and pardon me if that is instead complete jibberish)?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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there is a whole technology of taking continuous space-time onto the discrete space-time lattice... I'm not an expert, but I believe that the experts have figured out a way of doing it... and have been productive.
my main concern isn't with that technology, but with the mismatch in our observations of the particle spectroscopy and the degrees-of-freedom allowed by QCD.
For instance, if protons are composed of three quarks and the gluons binding them together, is it possible to have a particle state where the gluons are excited? it would seem that this is possible, yet it is not observed in spite of decades of looking. Our simple model of the spectroscopy suffices, a model that predates the Standard Model by a decade...
There is no physical picture of why these degrees-of-freedom seem to be "frozen out" even though we "know" the correct theory, QCD... lQCD doesn't help, either... the calculations of the particle spectroscopy of unobserved particles has been a pretty dismal failure.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Found the [paywalled] SciAm article I had read ("Is Quantum Reality Analog after All?") and it was apparently related to the inability to place [some? / all?] chiral fermions on a lattice...???
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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There was a guy I worked with in New Ventures at a really big company who had a huge prospect in Nevada.
So he shows me a jar with some chunks in it. It looked sort of like black tar. Usually that means a super low API oil gravity of around 10. Good oil is around 30-40.
So I say what the hell is that? He says it is 30 gravity oil with a pour point of 100 degrees, which means that it is a liquid down at reservoir pressure. It was loaded with paraffin, which is hard to refine.
Damndest thing I have ever seen. So yeah, there is an oil prospect somewhere in Nevada. I have no idea where. Management punted it. We laughed that you could transport it in cubes.
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WBraun
climber
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Here's one for you Base 104
After Bush Era Decline, US Now World’s Top Oil Producer
Oil Output Suppressed, Lowered by Bush/Cheney/Enron Manipulation
US Oil Production Surpasses Saudi Arabia’s for the First Time in a Decade
America is now the top oil producer in the world, nearly a 45% increase today over the worst dip in production during the Bush market crash. In fact, over the entire Bush administration, oil production in the US maintained a steady decrease despite endless new areas made available to drilling, some at high environmental risk.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/03/06/after-bush-era-decline-us-now-worlds-top-oil-producer/
I don't really know what all this really means but I believe you would have a much better idea of its true reality?
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MH2
climber
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Is there any uncertainty about the degrees of freedom allowed by QCD?
Here is part of a note at the end of a chapter in Penrose:
In quantum mechanical problems there are likely to be compactness requirements on the solution space which severely restrict the allowed eigenvalues and confuse the counting of degrees of freedom.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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The U.S. is producing flat out and everyone is drilling like crazy. Onshore it is numerous competing companies, and no way are they choking back production at these prices. The only place that has enough production to control price is OPEC, and now the industry believes that they don't have enough excess production capacity to control price by dumping it on the market, which they have done in the past.
The U.S. is #2 to Saudi Arabia in terms of oil reserves. The difference is that we have already burned 190 billion bbls of it. What we have left is hard and expensive to get at. The bump in production will be hard to sustain. These new wells decline rapidly. I look at new decline curves 100 times per day.
The U.S. is not the world's top producer. We are third or fourth. I need to check because we go back and forth with Russia. Most people don't think of the U.S. as one of the world's largest producers, but we are. We just waste it. Americans use more gasoline per capita than any country in the world....by a long shot. We guzzle gas and then get pissed if it goes over three bucks. It is a classic supply and demand business if you don't consider the OPEC nations.
I have a post I'm working on. I put it up but it needs editing. Writing coherently is harder than it looks.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Thank you, Ed. I appreciate your commentary.
;>)
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Base
The U.S. is #2 to Saudi Arabia in terms of oil reserves. The difference is that we have already burned 190 billion bbls of it.
Is this how much we've extracted already ? Don't we export most (70%?) of our oil for more money than we buy the oil we use (80%?) from Saudi?
What becomes of the 190 bil. bbls. Volume of void underground?
Americans use more gasoline per capita than any country in the world....by a long shot.
Isn't our Aviation and Train industry's responsible for most (75%?) of our consumption?
With the same % contributing to "green house gases". And those fossil fuel burners are
not equipped with ANY kind of smog retention devices!
Edit: doesn't one shuttle launch produce 60,000 times more co2's than all mankind?
HaHa,Jus Kid'in!
BB
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Dr. F.
Big Wall climber
SoCal
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 8, 2013 - 01:49pm PT
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I'm pretty sure it's that we are the top producer of Refined Oil Products, not the top Oil Producer, we don't have the reserves to be top.
But:
We Refine more oil here than any where else.
It's shipped in from Saudi, Ven., Canada, etc. and we refine it, the rest of the world buys it from us Refined.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Is this how much we've extracted already ? Don't we export most (70%?) of our oil for more money than we buy the oil we use (80%?) from Saudi?
What becomes of the 190 bil. bbls. Volume of void underground?
We have already used 190 billion bbls. That is second in the world to the total reserves of Saudi Arabia.
You guys read way too much crap. I'm not going to get into a pissing match with willfully ignorant people. We don't net export. We only export refined products normally. The market for oil is geographically here. Sometimes a company may sell from the west coast to the Asian market, but it doesn't affect gasoline prices. They are high because we have peaked.
Do yourselves a favor: Go to the Energy Information Administration, which is the CIA of oil, gas, coal, whatever, statistics. They have intro articles all over the site, and it is generally the place to go to answer your questions.
I go to it quite a bit. It has reserves, consumption, whatever, on everything, going back to the fifties at least. In the whole world.
Back to Qualia and Hilbert Space and meditating for hours just to clear your mind and squinting to try to see something that is already right in front of you.
I saw that you are working with Jefe on the new Ascent, JL. JJ is probably the kindest person that I have ever met in my life. He is compulsively kind.
He's also way into Yoga and told me a little about my Buddhism books one summer. Great guy. Super guy. He ought to get a medal he is so nice guy.
He's also still a badass climber. He was always leaving the office early with a box of bolts...putting up routes every damn day.
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