Triagonal, hexagonal, tetrahedronal stacking, our universe's version of the strongest and most efficient engineering geometry, recurs in nature in contexts of static non growth. Think bubbles, marbles, organism cells, diamond crystal. Phi frequently recurs in contexts of growth, where there is something new that has to be found a place for, but that place cannot be where the originator or the originating population already is. Phi might be called growth stacking (in contrast to static stacking). The growth stacking that results in the physical shape of the Nautilus is an elaboration of the stacking hexagon of, say, a turtle’s shell. Keep in mind that it does this, not because it’s programmed to (unless you are absolutely helpless to believe that God programmed it), but because it is following the path of least resistance and highest efficiency, just like triangle stacking. If it recurs in various places like the face, I would argue that it merely exhibits the universe’s fairly inevitable deployment of a basic proportional toolset for making the most efficient use of limited resources. Obviously you don’t want your eyes too near your mouth where you might fork them, nor your ears too near your nose where you might place the q-tip incorrectly, nor your etc etc ad infinitum. Phi is the universe being efficient. Why would G O D have to be efficient? Isn’t he made of, like, Zeus-bolts? But if one doesn’t believe in God, one must acknowledge the local universe as finite in energy and matter. I would argue that Phi is the universe’s, quantum mechanics’, Newtonian physics’, and evolution’s equivalent of making a welfare check stretch. We only happen to have called it beautiful because we happen to be fond of living, but at base it’s nothing so miraculous.
Posts by rmt1
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9A question about Phi
by forsharry into those atheists and scientist-ies out therewhat explanation do you have for the divine proportion (phi) in relationship with the non-proof/proof of some kind of divine presence?
do you believe it is simply coincidence or is it a questionable aspect of the physical realm that might point to something higher than simply evolutionary roulette?
i ask this because it is one of my niggling questions that separate my belief that were either a.
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35
Do you watch satanic movies or ghost shows?
by ButtLight ini remember when i was younger, and flipping through the channels, and seeing the girls head on the exorsist spinning around.
i freaked and turned it of really quick.
i thouhgt a demon was going to come out of the tv!
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rmt1
"Ninth Gate" with Johnny Depp is a guilty favorite of mine. It's slow and sumptuous, so there's your warning.
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Dont be so hard on satan
by gringojj ini think people forget that satan was a creation of god, just like all of us and everything else.
obviously god had a purpose in creating satan.
god has love for everyone and everything, including satan.
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rmt1
Crash course in worldly wisdom for ex-JWs pondering (+/-) Satan and divine power dialectics: Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, Machievelli's The Prince, Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, Melville's Moby Dick. The movie "Devil's Advocate" is a good introduction to Paradise Lost.
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14
An Old JW friend has just pissed his life away...
by Sam the Man inwell, a few of you are aware of my situation.
for those that are not, basically i more or less admitted to my wife that i no longer believe (after being raised a dub, bethel 'service' etc) and that led to altercations with her and the elders.
i had a friend in the congreation who, after also being raised a jw, had done none of the things i had, even not been baptised (thats right, not in 30+ years!!!
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rmt1
Sorry to hear that his baptism was precipitate. I left a good/deep/best friend in the 'truth' ( huh... I never eat water chestnuts...), but not before a long drag-out tearing away of our mutual pretensions. I had never believed the 'truth' since at 14yo my brain had hit the minimum critical mass for thinking beyond parents, and he was perfectly straight with me that even if the 'truth' was a chimaera, it was where he belonged - with his wife, with his family, with his circle of associates. Now, this he didn't enunciate, in the way that powerful people know how to say-not-say a thing, but as a male he would have access to huge amounts of power vis a vis underlings per education level we're talking about. So in that evolutionary respect, I cannot fault him as much as if he was staying in it purely out of faith or something non-quantifyable. The _power_ that an elder has over minions has got to be so emotionally immense that it compensates for being a JW in the first place. {Ex-Elders care to correct me? - I'm talking before you're jaded.} Of course, this power is restricted to males, and to those particular females who have access to such males. My friend and his sparky little pioneer wife were on a trajectory for such a dynamic of power, and his decision is fine with me, even though I'll never see him again. I understand and sympathize if this anecdote cannot help, and you're far more human than I am if you try to keep some minimal contact. At 30+ he didn't get baptized because of cognative delusions - it was something deeper in the limbic system, fear of losing human warmth. Some are not leaders, some are not followers.
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Is "Perfection" really desirable?
by JH inimagine the new system where "everybody" is perfect...... people with no faults.... this sounds almost dull to me !!!
i find that there is something attractive about imperfect people, imperfect actions, .
huey lewis lyrics.
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rmt1
Brooklyn bankrolled on owning the definition of "perfect". There's no Platonic ideal floating around out in the ether to which they have the T3 line of meaning. It's a case of Orwellian NewSpeak when any one central force gets to consolidate, confine, restrict a signifier's signification. That being said, here is some worldly wisdom from some utterly misled pagan pre-Christian Classical figures: Hesiod in his Theogony talks about two kinds of strife and two kinds of hope. The bad strife is negative envy of your fellowman when you don't do the work to pull yourself through; the good strife is positive envy, when you see something someone has and you say, Self, I will work hard until I can reward myself with that thing. There is the evil form of hope - false hope such as inherent to false promises; there is also positive hope which works along with positive strife: reasonable expectations for reasonable inputs. Lucretius the Epicurean spoke of various forms of pleasure: Katastematic, when you fill a need up to the point of being filled, like eating when you're hungry. Kinetic, when you partake of something not needed but pleasurable, like having a cold beer (after you're full). Ataraxia, a mental state of untroubledness because you know and feel content that your needs have been met. Chara, the pleasure of anticipation, or desiring and imagining the imminent fulfilling of a need. The "Perfection" that Brooklyn insists upon would have you operate at such a statistically median zone of pleasures (ahem, tame), and would require your brain to perform phenomenal intuitive operations that account for innumerable permutations until your conscious mind's actual decision is so Promethean AND Epimethean, 20/20, anti-climactic, in a word, unchallenging. Perfection would eliminate the struggle that our brains have evolved to interpret as pleasureable. What Brooklyn's "Perfection" REALLY is is an infantile regression to a Lacanian Pre-Mirror Stage in the Mother's lap, which is before the infant has had the traumatic discovery that the thing-out-there, (the mother), is NOT actually him/her the baby, but is an entirely different thing, object, person. And Woe when the baby discovers its own lonesome individuality amongst a confusing array of indifferent objects. Brooklyn wants you back in infancy, in the unitary perfection of all your needs being met pronto, without speech. "Perfection" as an idea of human operation is just a smoke screen for infantile imperious refusal to seperate from the Mother and use your own damn fingers to pick up your Cheerios.
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Effect or Affect???
by misspeaches ini never know the answer to this one.... please help.... .
what is the correct word in the following sentence... .
please allow one hour for the changes to take affect/effect.
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rmt1
You can't 'take affect', as an affect is something which you create from within and is subject only to your own agency. You affect to be cool, smart, hip, etc. Whether or not your 'affect' has the 'effect' on someone else of them agreeing with your affect / aka affectation, is not within your agency. That being the case, you can 'effect' things that you are actually able to make happen. You can effect a transformation, a change in habits. You can also affect a transformation.
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39
How long would it take? (Physics question, sort of. Maybe)
by AlmostAtheist inlet's say i've got a length of solid material that is one light year long.
it's just hanging there in space, between galaxies, not affected by gravity enough at any point along its length to be twisted, bent, whatever.
let's also say that it is resistent to flexing.. i'm at one end of this impossibly-existing rod, and you are at the other.
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rmt1
Thank you DanTheMan. http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae658.cfm. An attempt to summarize: As unintuitive as it is, we are not permitted to imagine that JUST because a hypothetical I-beam of pure space time (check out Greg Bear's EON) has no mass ergo no intertia, and no internal structure except one contiguous light-year long unity of length ergo no compression, that it is STILL allowed to act upon a point one light year distant from its original impulse. The structure of space time is what limits the partical-wave of light to go at "only" the speed of light, same with gravity and all EM in vacuum, and apparently the impulse of information. I think it sucks. It doesn't bode well for purchasing a Millenium Falcon (a hybrid, of course).
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39
How long would it take? (Physics question, sort of. Maybe)
by AlmostAtheist inlet's say i've got a length of solid material that is one light year long.
it's just hanging there in space, between galaxies, not affected by gravity enough at any point along its length to be twisted, bent, whatever.
let's also say that it is resistent to flexing.. i'm at one end of this impossibly-existing rod, and you are at the other.
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rmt1
DanTheMan, does that book have any sort of explanation to back up the assertion? Is it saying that space-time itself cannot accomodate the transmission of an impulse, however inflexible/incompressible the medium, that moves FTL?
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Mankind doesn't have the ability to govern himself, true or false?
by JH injeremiah 10:23.
23 i well know, o jehovah, that to earthling man his way does not belong.
it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.
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rmt1
Something is lost in translation here. There’s a disconnect between the ownership of agency and the efficacy of agency. “to direct” is an infinitive, which is a noun, in the same way that ‘way’/path is a noun. What this English translation literally says, if Brooklyn would stay out of it for a second, is that ‘man does not have ownership/possession over the verbal noun which means the directing of his own steps.’ Literally, these two sentences have nothing to do with making a judgement as to man’s pability to direct his own steps. And since Jeremiah’s statement is already premised on belief in a more powerful being, he could, for the sake of argument, be telling Jehovah in perfect irony that he acknowledges God’s right to tell man that man does not own man’s governance, without actually believing that man is incapable of governance.
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In a fear- inspiring way I am adequately made
by toby888 inwhat i have learned from evolution, heh heh.
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rmt1
Good word choice. Adequate, from pp of adaequare, to make equal to. Still, I have to admit, and creationists can get all medieval on this, but I haven't yet heard a good evolutionary explanation for the storage capacity of our brains that sometimes appears to be 'excess' to the necessity of the environment. Is it excess? adequate? wonderful? C'est l'e'ternite' dans leur coeurs? Anyway, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4251299.stm