Thought this might be of some interest:
“The crack is the surface component of a continental rift forming as the Arabian and African plates drift away from one another. It began to open up in September 2005, when a volcano at the northern end of the rift, called Dabbahu, erupted.”
And it happened in a few days, apparently.
“…Ebinger says it could continue to widen and lengthen. “As the plates keep spreading apart, it will end up looking like the Red Sea,”‘
Possibly in 4 million years.
I’m a non-scientist, so this is probably partially understood, somewhat accurate, and certainly dated:
Here is a well-done video from the Sprites Project at the University of Alaska:
During what is normally a cloud to ground lightning strike during a thunderstorm, there is occasionally a discharge of energy above the cloud, high up in the atmosphere. These phenomenae are called blue jets, red sprites, and elves. They are faint, require a dark background against which to view them, and also require that you be far enough away to see the storm from a distance (preferably from aircraft or a mountain overlooking a plain).
From Christopher Paul Barrington-Leigh’s abstract here, found at the Conjugate Sprites Project (where I got most of this information) page:
“Sprites are highly structured discharges lasting 5 to 100 ms and extending from 40 to 85 km altitude which result from intense electric fields following a major redistribution of electric charge in the troposphere — usually a positive cloud-to-ground return stroke.”
The Runaway Breakdown thesis here’s a quote from wikipedia by Nikolai Lehtinen:
“In the upper atmosphere, cosmic rays striking air molecules within thunderstorms can supply the relativistic electrons which trigger a breakdown in “runaway” mode. The breakdown region is a conductive plasma many tens of meters long, and it can supply the “seed” which triggers a lightning flash.”
An interesting possibility…
For a philosophical friend, with similar doubts:
“Space, it follows from the Kantian analysis is empirically real; that is to say, it is real ‘with respect to everything which can be given to us as an external object’. It is also transcendentally ideal; which means, in Kantian nomenclature, that ‘ with respect to things…considered in themselves ‘ space is not real. Time, too, in which all perceptions are situated, is empirically real, that is to say it is real ‘with respect to all objects which could ever be given to our senses; and it is transcendentally ideal. ’Once we abstract from the subjective conditions of perception it is noting at all and cannot be attributed to the things is themselves.”
S. Korner ‘Kant’ Pg 39 Pelican Books 1955.
So, why follow Kant out to such a limb…on his mission to put metaphysics on a more sure footing (when even greater minds can’t put the epistemology of mathematics on such a sure footing, though mathematics is an a priori and synthetic form of reasoning ((by Kant’s analysis)) and Kant’s metaphysics doesn’t even reach that standard)?
I am stuck with the contradiction of saying that objects are really there, and exist as I perceive them by my senses and by my reasoning…. but then also saying that I can not ever know them as they really are, and may never be able to know them.
Why should these be the limits by which I pursue knowledge?
Also On This Site: A Few Responses To Kant’s Transcendental Idealism…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper: The Objectivist Attack On Kant…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
Where mysticism, metaphysics and heresy meet?
“In this system, there were three main ideas:
“heliocentrism”
“an infinite cosmos, consisting of innumerable heliocentric worlds”…
and…
“that the universe was a vast, wheeling, unknowable thing, and that all theories about it, including his own, were not descriptions but merely approaches—“models,” as we would call them today.“
None of his ideas were completely original, apparently, but they were advanced, and woven into a metaphysical system that directly challenged chruch doctrine. The church was not pleased. In her review, Acocella also claims:
“Whatever else Bruno was, he was wild-minded and extreme…“
This also seems to have contributed to the church’s decision to burn him at the stake.
See Also: A poem about Bruno by American poet Heather McHugh: What He Thought by Heather McHugh
There is a world out there, and your senses do give you an impression of it which yields genuine knowledge of empirical objects, according to Kant, but what empiricists fail to take into account is the apparatus that we depend upon to make sense of that world:
“Kant thought that Berkeley and Hume identified at least part of the mind’s a priori contribution to experience with the list of claims that they said were unsubstantiated on empirical grounds: “Every event must have a cause,” “There are mind-independent objects that persist over time,” and “Identical subjects persist over time.” The empiricist project must be incomplete since these claims are necessarily presupposed in our judgments, a point Berkeley and Hume failed to see. So, Kant argues that a philosophical investigation into the nature of the external world must be as much an inquiry into the features and activity of the mind that knows it”
As mentioned, The American thinker W.V.O Quine has a dispute with the way in which Kant arrives at his answer to that problem.
From a paper by Arthur Sullivan here:
“There do not exist two distinct types of reality in the world which require two distinct modes of expression. This leads Quine to conclude that the analytic-synthetic distinction is a purely logical convention that is ontologically unnecessary and empirically superfluous. In this respect, Quine agrees with the radical empiricism of Mill, with its claim that there is no a priori knowledge. The fact that something is the case, or even the fact that something seems to be necessarily the case, does not imply the reality of a priori truths. Quine goes so far a to refer to the notion of a priori knowledge as a “metaphysical article of faith.”
Of course, so also did Schopenhauer have a problem with Kant (wikipedia summary here).
This quote was found here:
“Empirical concepts are ultimately based on empirical perceptions. Kant, however, tried to claim that, analogously, pure concepts (Categories) also have a basis. This pure basis is supposed to be a kind of pure perception, which he called a schema. But such an empiricist analogy contradicts his previous rationalist assertion that pure concepts (Categories) simply exist in the human mind without having been derived from perceptions. Therefore they are not based on pure, schematic perceptions.”
Just some thoughts on a Sunday, as it was requested by a friend. If you can refer me to a more comprehensive critique, I’d appreciate it.
A response to Richard Lindzen at Watts Up With That on Climate Change and the data that supported the gas pedal analogy.
See Also: From Watts Up With That: Richard Lindzen On Positive Climate Feedback
A quick visit with Diamond. I should point out that I’m not familiar with much more than Guns, Germs, And Steel which I read a while ago. One of the primary ideas motiviating Jared Diamond’s writing is that man’s relationship to nature is vital (I don’t suppose I disagree). However, he also makes some assumptions about that relationship with which I disagree.
There’s also an idea of moral equivalence between cultures in his work (and some kind of deep extension of humanism that is morally compelling), but it clearly this has its limits as well, and I suspect some roots in moral relativism, which of course is yet another Western idea.
Anyways, here’s a review of his Collapse.
***If you have more information about the New Yorker Lawsuit, and are not an interested party (or perhaps are), please respond should you feel inclined. I’m still inclined to give Diamond the benefit of the doubt.
Also On This Site: From Savage Minds: More On The Lawsuit Against Jared Diamond…From The Chronicle Of Higher Education: Jared Diamond’s Lawsuit…and: Jared Diamond: “Vengeance Is Ours” In The New Yorker
From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: “Gaia In The Light Of Modern Science”
Trying to at least keep the global-warming crowd in Great Britain honest…and keep politics, money and pressure away from the science.
See Also: Bjorn Lomborg On His Book: ‘How To Spend $50 Billion To Make The World A Better Place’
The moral idealism of the ecologically inclined (the earth must be saved at all costs, for all of our sakes) will continue to meet the political and economic realities of the developing world…
“…the world has far more immediate and scarier problems than climate change to address right now.”
See Also On This Site: Bjorn Lomborg has been saying this for a long time now: Bjorn Lomborg On His Book: ‘How To Spend $50 Billion To Make The World A Better Place’
Where objectivism and Kantian transcendental idealism meet…
For those who are interested.
See Also On This Site: A Few Thoughts On (Absolute) Idealism, Both Religious And Political/Philosophical…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper: The Objectivist Attack On Kant…From Reason’s Hit And Run: What Kind Of Libertarian Are You?
chr1