Curiosity Rover Finds Dry Streambed on Mars

The history of Mars may have been more Earth-like than is commonly held. The early solar system had much more water-ice drifting around and Mars may have been saturated had a much thicker atmosphere. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.

The curiosity rover examined a dry streambed in the Gale crater and water-transported rocks.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/27sep_streambed/

Scientists believe that most life on Earth was rubbed out about 560 million years ago. It is possible that the entire Earth was covered by a mile deep glacier and that the iceball Earth epoch ended with Volcanic eruption breaking through while deep sea plate margin vents with water emerging as much as 1000 degrees kept a third branch of life alive (such as those large worms).

Because there were many collisions from more meteors and comets then some Martian rock may have been blasted off that planet into space and since Mars is farther from the sun than the Earth, gravity might have made that rock with Martian microbial life inside cracks drift over to Earth orbit and reach this world over time. Life on Earth may have a Martian as well as an  Earth origin. That is an interesting point about Martian exploration.

I should stipulate that though life on Mars may have grafted onto or even comprise land life on Earth with the seafloor vent worms being the surviving life form that evolved here (or not), that hasn't any effect on interpretation of the Biblical book of  Genesis as I see it for a number of reasons involving the literal time values of Genesis, the composition of Genesis as a record of the earliest human pre-historical general history acts of society in the Middle East  etc. I suppose one could find some context in which Eden was on Mars f(as improbable as that seems) from which humanity was locked out in a theistic evolution criterion.

One cannot be certain of ancient name-meaning values applied to particular geographic referents. In the day many nouns were actually used as verbs that linguistically ossified over time.

If one prefers one semantic value paradigm over others without Petrine values of a day to God being equal to a thousand years for mankind an determines the lifespans of the pre-Noah patriarchs the time values is near that of the appearance of Eukaryotic life on Earth .

image credit of Hottah streambed : N.A.S.A.

Tuesday's Foggy Debate Tactics

The debate between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney next Tuesday could bring explanations of why another five trillion dollars of federal debt, a balanced budget in a decade, a resurgence of Al Qaeda in the Middle East, the 'new' Syrian war and leadership to global economic brinksmanship rate another 4 years to develop.

Os bin Laden is dead yet Pakistanis chant 'We are all Osamas' . Debate tacticians will develop the main line for millions of unemployed discouraged from looking for a job and essentially ignore their existence to plump up the political picture for the campaign. The next four-year term will bring more rational economic and environmental plans to fruition.

Perfection in Moral and Political Philosophy

Perfection in moral and political philosophy, or rather, theories of, rated an entry today in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Having just completed reading a fiction book named 'Litigation' about some Chicago lawyers I thought I would comment on the topic.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perfectionism-moral/

For one thing, the phenomenon of developing a formal philosophy of moral perfection with the accompanying political system that perfectly develops human society toward an ideal good requires an objective construction. Some brilliant Spartan long ago developed a political philosophy to create perfectly moral individual citizen-warriors in the ideal civil structure, or believed he did and so Socrates and Plato built their own version of that system synthesized with the good, such as existed in the Athenian democracy they sought to overthrow, in the little book named 'The Republic.

Today we tend to regard the Athenian democracy as racist, quaint and for short-lived people supported by slaves and the Republic as fascist. In America the unexamined life is regarded by some as the perfect moral synthesis with political philosophy united with copious public deficit spending that can be repaid later by the rich or by uneducated immigrants or transferred in some way offshore through perhaps, quantitative easing and various extra-dimensional fiscal perfection of making pure profit on paper without making anything physically for trade. Of course I am a little skeptical about the idea of perfection in political or moral philosophy myself.

We know that if one is fundamentally opposed to business and supportive of government expansion, business may move offshore to China and production decline in the U.S.A. It is important to reform business with intense public support in politics of business and of its reform-perhaps downsizing it too so it doesn't develop further as a a tool of blind historical determinism to the detriment of individualism and life on Earth.

The unexamined life shot out of a cannon in Chicago has unreflective fat persons mass consuming and producing without regard for making philosophical considerations of the ideal way for humans to live. Mortimer Adler could do the moral and political agonizing for Chicagoans while the rest could take pills to stay alive and litigate about everything. Lifestyle of the masses in that context can adjust its moral and political criteria for perfection to impulsive, dedicated-even passionate consumption continuing until one drops dead and is outsourced to the Zen oblivion beyond the edge. Politically one might quantitatively ease the left and right fringes or advance radical adjustments in allocation of resource-yet it's all regarded as the phenomenal political acts of apostles of existential throughput for whom all things must pass.

In perfect moral and political actualization of phenomenalism the transcendence of the mass political gestalt is accomplished is implicit metatheoretically by the economic engine of history. We may view the city amidst the former stockyards and meat processors from a distance with a neo-cynical view influenced by Paul Tillich however we can be sure that actual moral and political reform is probably much simpler than developing a theory about it.

Creation of a perfectly moral paradigm with political reason would need to embody a Kantian synthetic a priori social judgment about the environment and mankind's relation to it-the kingdom of God lies within the soul and manifest as it relates perfectly to the environment without including the body for oneself and for-others.

In the midst of the rush of mass civil society with billions of souls toward a moment of eclipse of their own experience on Earth by the biological destiny all human beings share the reifying drive toward elevation socially is something of a way of avoiding the existential or even empirical facts of life that everyone shares. Recognizing the facts of life and deriving the most efficient and free political method to secure the maximal possible efficient free state for every citizen is the paradigm for shaping political actualization toward perfection.

Perfection is of course only relative. God confers with grace whatever could be regarded as perfection about anything inclusive of consciousness. Yet the networking of physical structures that could be a billion versions of maximally efficient individual dome dwellings synergistically allocated with nature's simultaneous own best interest as a free biosphere evolving for-itself might simple detach like stitches after construction. (alternatively it could be living a Fibonacci series like progress through realms of absolute spirit, conservation and rightness with God so far as possible etc.) For space-time allows no ossification of effort or end to be reached that is not surpassed by subsequent moments and the ongoing effort to correct the course of politics toward moral perfection requires liberty as well as discipline to comprise a continuum.

A world set with troubles

given unto created beings with things

like clouds and rain, dreams and plains

rumbling, crumbling across the first person narrative of experience

amidst buildings and ossified constructions

dumped upon nature's destruction

that too few understand

with galactic lenses of several dimensions

shaping gravity's paradox

that it works at the speed of light as if it were massless

like a photon following curved space-time

through four dimensions held together a little

As a field with variegated contents of probability entanglements

Universe (1) is a net without a cause

for plausibility enough waterfalls flow

somewhere with time this place one knows

given a few of infinite dimensions

restricted to hues of mathematical uncertainties changing

forms of orbital selections

viewed from Earth.

Turkey Looking for Partial Restoration of Ottoman Empire in Syria?

Much has been made by Turkey's President Gul and other partisan advocates for the termination of the Assad Regime and the Alawite rule of Syria of some overspill of Syrian artillery fire upon rebel sanctuaries just over the border in Turkey. Civil wars are not good things, yet no one believes that Syria has the slightest intention of invading or conquering Turkey. The saber rattling by Turkey and its copious shelling of Syria in retaliation hasn't any need of escalating to anything beyond the fringe friction of a civil war.

Turkey as a N.A.T.O. ally would receive full European and U.S. support if it is needed to defend Turkey from conquest by Syria. Yet we know that Syria has plenty of troubles surviving as it is from the full Sunni reinforcement of the rebels in Syria.

Turkey is a hot and cold participant in N.A.T.O. They were excellent allies during the cold war yet were also allies of Germany in the first world war and only neutrals in the second because they were not able to do anything else. Turkey has not been a continually participating nation in the war to spend a lot of money and drive out Al Qa'eda from Afghanistan, and treat out Middle Eastern Allies in Israel with a little rudeness.

The Obama administration has dome much to encourage the development of rebellion in Syria the past year with condemnation of the Assad government followed by lamentations over the civilian casualties that only occurred because the rebel movement continued to grow along with  the reaction by the Syrian government against it. It probably would be a mistake for the Syrian rebels to think that the Obama Government or N.A.T.O. will actually send troops or aircraft to hand the victory to the rebels. Neither should Turkey believe that it might persuade N.A.T.O. to green light a Turkish invasion of Syria. Restoration of the Ottoman Empire in part is not in the interests of N.A.T.O. or the United States.

The legal paradigm for a Turkish invasion of Syria isn't plain. Turkey is giving sanctuary to Syrian rebels who likely do a good deal of insurgency organization from there. The Nixon administration sent a South Vietnamese division into Laos and the plain of Jars without good results during the Vietnam War to try to eradicate rebel sanctuaries. The result was not good.

The principle danger to expanded conflict in the region as the current narrative goes is not Syrian aggression toward Turkey, but the problem of the 'friends of Syria' finding some way to send a large conventional military force into Syria so they can have their own way in actualizing a post-Assad Government. The tragedy is that so many civilians are dying because the 'friends of Syria' are determined to drive the non-Sunni Government from power no matter the cost to others living in Syria.

One needn't like or 'approve' of the Assad Government to believe that national self-determination is a fundamental right of nations.

 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-syria-crisis-turkey-idUSBRE8970J320121008?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Boze-Einstein Condensates, Absolute Zero, Mass, Energy and Singularity (an unscientific comment)

The convertibility of mass and energy means that at some point all of mass in the Universe might be regarded as energy. Mass is a steady-state form of energy. So when mass is frozen down to very low temperature-near absolute zero-that temperature is -459.67 below zero Fahrenheit-perhaps within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero, it behaves strangely.

Einstein and S. Boze developed the idea that when atoms are lowered to that temperature in a clump-instead of acting like individual atoms they would act like one large atom. The Boze-Einstein condensate is an interesting thing to ponder.

Atoms have electrons that orbit a nucleus made of a proton and neutron generally (that are in turn made of other particles or quarks). Just so many electrons can be in particular orbits at a time-the Pauli Exclusion principle means that electrons cannot share simple nuclei. More complex nuclei can have different numbers of electrons in various orbits increasing with complexity. I guess that's why heavy elements such as uranium and thorium radiate fairly easily.

Electrons are fascinating particles-waves. An electron has a wave like orbit with its frequency varying along with it's energy. Sinusoidal wave analogies of electron orbits with peaks and troughs let one regard a peak or trough as a particle value if measured at the right time. One can't get some of the information about the electron when determining its observation at a particular location.

So electrons of Boze-Einstein condensates must have virtually no activity-well, a little because they are not at absolute zero-just close to it.

Stars have potential temperatures of billions of degrees-in other words they have a lot of energy. Human beings live at very low temperature on the Universal scale from hottest to absolute zero-less than about 600 degrees above absolute zero. Human mass though short lived from out point of view is reasonably stable for such complex organic structures.

Could electrons ever be reduced to absolute rest at absolute zero? Absolute zero indicates the non-presence of energy?

Gravity always acts upon mass and so confers a certain energy to it. One would think that gravity traveling at the speed of light across space-time would give up some of its energy to space, for gravity must have some energy if it is to interact with mass at all. Neutrinos with nearly no mass interact very little with mass.

One wonders if gravitational energy would slow down at absolute zero, or if it would have its energy ossified? Boze-Einstein condensates with mass ought to have gravity acting upon that mass and therefore have energy implicitly lifting it slightly above absolute zero.

Reading through a book named 'A Matter of Degrees' explaining the history of physics on the theme of temperature I thought of these several points about gravity and its status at absolute zero that I assuredly can't answer. Yet they are for myself at least interesting points.

If gravity is also a particle-wave or something like an electro-magnetic field of vast size on might wonder if it has some sort of natural form such as a sphere that it returns to in space-time, and if its extent is altered by relativity itself in a kind of recursion based on its composition, or if absolute zero would 'freeze' gravity too.

Another derivative concept I wondered about was the conjecture about infinities in Einstein's general field equations that are said to be at the logical singularity in time=0 of the universe's  history. The equations (that I couldn't process if I spent the remainder of my days upon them) might function toward infinities, yet the actual content of mass and energy fed into them representing the actual amount of mass in the actual Universe probably would be finite. Even with infinite compaction it would logically that with a finite amount of matter to start with there would bee a finite limit to the reduction of a singularity.

Then of course as mass is compacted it increases in energy, and the turbulence of mass as energy perhaps reduced to its most basic form as a one-dimensional membrane makes one think of the opposite super-cool Boze-Einstein condensate acting as a single atom something like a perfect crystal matrix with everything including electrons frozen.

The singular might have one-dimensional membranes acting like a Boze-Einstein condensate. I wonder when or how the most energetic components of the Universe become as inactive as the most cool,  and how the gravity holding the singularity together would be exempt be able to keep enough energy to 'infinitely' compact the entire mass a Universe within.

I wonder if the extension of the special theory of relativity beyond the speed of light as was recently proposed by physicists with two new transformations besides the Lorentz transformation with objects traveling at c still reaching a singularity would apply in a low temperature environment or high temperature equally well? 

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-physicists-special-relativity.html

Dirtocrat Demolition of Democracy Failing to Employ the Unemployed

If workers cannot find work and exhaust their saving eventually they will end up on some kind of federal relief like as not. It would be far less costly to taxpayers if employers were encouraged more to provide at least part-time jobs so single people would not need to use food stamps.
A good society comprehends the real needs of individuals economically speaking an actually takes the bull by the horns and discovers innovative ways to provide employment for all.

Yes one might drastically reform society to make the economy more egalitarian and less stratified. One could cap the annual salary for any American at a million dollars and tax at 90 % over that. Inheritance taxes on more than a million dollars could be 50%. etc. No individual could own shares in more than three corporations, and no corporation could employ  more than 5000 persons. Quality rather than quantity and increased opportunity for competition would follow. Yet few Americans would regard humanizing the scale of business as anything less than whatever archetype of the collective political unconscious they believe exists as a good or bad mythic form.

The present godless atheist Democrats seem to be quite vicious in contrast to prior eras in public discourse. Some seem to have more antipathy toward Christians than Al Qa'eda of Iraq or radical Moslem elements and communists that have expelled to imprisoned the elect. Dirtocrats seem to have no value for the public debt as if it were fiction or a Republican lie to ignore. Neither have they found a way to encourage employers to hire those without a job for the longest time first.

Discouraged workers aren't counted in the D.O.L statistics for the unemployed those are people that haven't looked for a job in the last 4 weeks. Neither are the 'marginally attached' counted in the unemployment stats. Those are people that have looked for and can't find a job the past 12 months. There are 2.5 million of those.

There were 8.6 million people working part time in September that couldn't find full-time work. The stats are fairly simple, and Romney is correct that the real number of people is higher than 7.8%

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

It isn't just the stark numbers and the lack of adequate progress at reducing unemployment alone that is of concern. It is the poor way of managing the economy of the Obama administration that makes the need for top-level change desirable.

The administration has relied on Fed Reserve printing money to buy bonds and deepening of public debt while making little progress on reducing unemployment that has the unemployed hoping to swap out the President. If they can't fix it in four years the non-decadent public needs to put a new President to the task. The Obama administration seems to be leading toward a series of national financial crises in 2013 that a guy better at business might deal with better.

The Democrats seem to have forgotten so many fundamental governing principles of Executive leadership that they appear to rely on natural economic equilibria helped by Goldman Sachs & Harvard Alumni to pass on pearls of wisdom to the genuflecting President. The Congressional Democrats may be bold on transitioning toward queerocracy yet on the economic concerns they are timid and far away from being capable of any sort of significant reform.

That is not what America was about. The founders weren't timid or shy about reform. There are several reforms possible that would make free enterprise work again yet Democrats have become dirtocrats rather than innovative leaders. Independents must look elsewhere for actual democracy with respect for individual rights and American traditional values.

Reckless, Unconcerned Humans Are Basic Cause of Whale Deaths

An interesting article in Scientific American reported on the human cause of whale death despite some protections. There are only 460 Atlantic right whales still alive.

Not that anything like extirpating species is meaningful to most Americans-really its not. The price of gasoline matters as well as tax cuts for the middle class so they can have the rich pay for it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=most-whale-deaths-in-past-40-years-were-caused-by-humans

I read an interesting book on temperature in the Universe and found that some scientists think that there was a great planetary freeze that killed about all life on Earth may 560 million years ago. The entire world was covered by ice before some volcanoes poked through and issued enough global warming gasses to start a huge melt and let life once again get started.

http://www.nero.noaa.gov/prot_res/mmv/Guide%20to%20reporting%20Whale%20Sightings.pdf

There is a history of global warming and cooling on Earth that is rather radical, yet few would care enough to let humanity itself have a best chance to remain alive as a species. Rats may inherit Washington D.C., yet the new Earth for the saved may follow dirtocratic Armageddons of global warming, or not of course. One should read the fine print on those prophetic, scientific and religious concerns.

image credit: N.O.A.A.

Obama Team Squeezes Out Slightly Less Than 8% Unemployed Report

Unemployment and Obamacare; the unemployment situation is still very bad. More than 40% of the unemployed are long-term unemployed.

The Obama D.O.L. revised jobs created upward 86,000 jobs for July and  August  in a revision of their first reports. They had to get that unemployment rate below 8%. I suspected they would. Its a lawyer's administration and they may think its like a legal argument for publicity purposes they can win re-election with.

For the long term unemployed and for those without good health care who are injured or sick and have lost their retirement property to pay for medical and can't find work the Obamacare  paper-improvements are of little consolation. One wants a healthy economy and not one moribund, sick and trying to stagger over the election day finish line before collapsing into recession.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57527161/job-numbers-up-but-recession-unemployment-persists

Forty-seven % is a number many can remember yet there are other employment and taxed statistics. Ones the unemployed are concerned about differ from those of Mandarin Obamanites.

According to the Depart. of Labor employment summaries released today the participation of non-institution Americans in the work force is just 63.9%-in other words 47% of non-institutionalized aren't employed and hence aren't paying taxes on work-that is a remarkable number.

Sure some of those people don't need to work, some can't find a job or aren't welcome to work facing discrimination against age or geographic origin or unpopularity with NPR (maybe), plainly though the Obama administration hasn't prioritized getting jobs for the poor and has failed to take adequate measures to assure that the poorest and out of work longest go to the front of the hiring line through tax incentives.

Good government supports realistic opportunity for all people to work at least part-time so citizens can have cash earnings instead of food stamps. Obama programs tend to work against free enterprise for the poor . Obamacare functions as a middle class bureaucratic dream scenario foisted on the poor to burden them with impossible to satisfy bureaucratic work on-line. There are many working age Americans that cannot use a computer and they will have to buy one, buy Internet service or libraries will need to have free computer numbers increase a lot as well as free instructors to train the semi-literate migrant farm workers how to use them as they go from state to state and need an exchange for insurance that isn't really located in Nigeria or Eastern Russia.

I cannot imagine what nightmarish difficulties a traveling, poor, journeyman painter or laborer will experience with Obamacare moving from state to state frequently in pursuit of work on a bicycle or motorbike. The lazy that will not travel are rewarded more than those that struggle to find work anywhere it is hiding in America. Bureaucrats expect citizens to be happy locals that move only with a Mayflower Truck and negotiations with the state department of the state they are relocating to.
Each state where he was will deny that he has a 'domicile' there because he sleeps under the stars without a pillow.

A good politician would support free walk-in public medical care for the poor in expanded VA hospitals and let the middle class pay for their own insurance from their sufficient prosperity.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

"In 2012,
employment growth has averaged 146,000 per month, compared with an average
monthly gain of 153,000 in 2011."

"Employment in financial activities edged up in September (+13,000), reflecting
modest job growth in credit intermediation (+6,000) and real estate (+7,000).

Manufacturing employment edged down in September (-16,000)"
The majority of people favor repeal of Obamacare...
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/health_care_law

In engineering, technology, economics and social sciences constructing models of systems structures is generally a better way to go than to simply build a system willy nilly. In aircraft and ship design one make construct a model to fulfill the best way of achieving particular goals. Obviously my mention of a health care system for the poor that would expand the existing V.A. system and treat all poor citizens for free is a model of a structure that would create simultaneously better health care for veterans, the poor and create a larger emergency preparedness infrastructure for national emergency. I believe it would be the most cost effective as well.

I am not the best social scientist. I got a score of 99% on the CLEP General Social Sciences and History Exam and have followed U.S. politics about 50 years so my perspective on how the U.S.A. might develop a functional, practical medical infrastructure to treat the poor and veterans while keeping taxpayer costs as low as possible while delivering effective treatment is made  less expertise than some. Even so the Obamcare system seems particularly onerous and patched together with vast potential cost overruns. In fact its purpose may really be to create jobs and profits for Americans that don't manufacture anything. In the September DOL report financial sector jobs went up while manufacturing dropped by more than 10,000. The same old trends are returning.

The Obamacare program is something like Richard M. Nixon's medical program as you may know. It  followed Romneycare in Massachusetts (that state wanted it) and I would think that since Mitt's father was a 68 presidential candidate as well as Nixon that the source of Obamacare actually is Richard Nixon.

Nixon was a forward thinking guy. He didn't envision an America transformed by networking and financial schemes with computers and fiber optics, quantitative trading in Dark Pools and so forth-I think the plain practical approach of physical hospitals and clinics for the poor and veterans would be far cheaper than the convoluted vast potential for corruption of Obamacare.

Global Warming & Four Points to Support U.S. Green Energy Development

The fundamentals of global warming are well known. The Earth has three proximal cycles named the Milankovich cycles affecting the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. The 100,000 year cycle is the eccentricity of the orbit of the Earth around the sun. The 41,000 year cycle is the Earth obliquity, and the 22,000 year cycle is that of the precession of the poles.

There are other factors that warm the planet. One is radiation from the Earth's core. I wonder of plate tectonics-not just volcanism but the configuration of the continental plates in relation to the Milankovich cycles, don't also affect global heating-cooling.

I have been reading a good popular physics book on temperature recently by Segre' that is quite informative. I think the most interesting point I learned recently was that the atmospheric gases 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% argon don't trap solar radiation or infrared radiation from the Earth. Instead it is the trace elements such as Carbon dioxide that trap long-wavelength radiation warming the atmosphere.

The amount of sunlight arriving at the Earth should radiate off the planet back into space in equal measure conserving energy. If it did the Earth temperature should be 0 degrees F. It is that trace Co2 that provides the extra 60 degrees of warmth above zero that is the average temperature of the world-so if high-tech efforts to get rid of Co2 were too successful the world temperature would drop. It's a narrow, knife edge balance easy to change.

I can think of three simple legislative measures that should be done to stimulate the economics of green energy. One is to end the oil depletion allowance, second is to set a federal minimum sales price for gasoline high enough to let electric cars and other rivals have a stable mark to compete against, third is the extension of tax credits for alternative energy ten years, and forth is funding of research and development of thorium rather than uranium nuclear power. Only the last measure would cost anything directly. it is too bad the Obama administration did not prioritize these simple legislative goals in 2009 as they, more than the stimulus for government union workers, would have provided lasting economic development and a less Co2 producing industry for the United States. Simply giving large loans to particular businesses tends not to be as effective.

image credit :WillowW-GNU license

Junk Ideas On Electrical Generation With Thermal to Mechanical Energy

In reading a book on the physics of temperature I developed a couple of ideas on the topic of converting thermal to mechanical energy, or rather of exploiting that principle. Of course these are simply junk ideas since I am not a physicists however I like to write them down anyway instead of letting them just disappear back into neuron space.

Mechanical energy can be converted 100% into thermal energy yet no vice versa. Well,the sunshine is free for use in heating trapped gases that expand with heat energy input so wouldn't it be possible to expand gas in a bladder with sunshine indirectly and use the increased lift to pull on a tether attached to a generator-the gas bladder would be under the water so getting the surface heat to it would require some additional engineering.

The principle of using thermal energy to store mechanical energy should be more broadly used to generate electrical power too-even some sort of gas bags expanding and compressing some mechanical items geared over toward generating power should work.

Maybe there are many more low-tech ideas for generating electrical power converting thermal into mechanical energy that could be used.