The Logic of Relativity [draft]

How can we represent relativity in logical notation? a is moving relative to b Mab b is moving relative to a Mba a and b are moving relative to each other Mab & Mba This schema is unsatisfactory because it describes the situation from an indeterminate outside perspective: a and b are moving relative to each other without regard to the observer describing the situation. Relativity applies to all the perspectives in question (with special […]

Thanksgiving post

I am blatantly stealing a post from Fark Yaralar? because it is just too cool to pass up. Go To Fark’s site and support this awesomeness. And happy Thanksgiving! ————————————– Monday, November 19, 2007 ‘das kapital’ song by Lyapis Trubetskoy Here is a song about capital & Marx by Lyapis Trubetskoy (????? ?????????) [from Belarus] translation of lyrics: For dinner I devour gold bars Diamond desert, oil cream My name is Baalzebul Owner of the […]

Why Evolutionary Principles Cannot be Used to Support Racial Prejudices DRAFT

Evolutionary principles are sometimes used to justify racial prejudices. While no rigorous scientific study has yet proven one race to be inferior to any others it should be recognized that it is in principle impossible to prove racial superiority/inferiority and hence no study ever will. Firstly a note on the meaning of ‘more evolved’ and ‘less evolved’. Every species on the face of the earth today has been evolving for the exact same amount of […]

Evolutionary Drift, revisited yet again

With my recent paper on Measuring Fitness I realize that my previous responses to evolutionary drift, though not incorrect, may have not stated the solution particularly clearly. When fitness is defined and measured as described in the aforementioned article, evolutionary drift is irrelevant. The method of measuring the fitness of an organism or species makes no reference to any mutations whatsoever. Therefore evolutionary drift is no problem for the theory of fitness described here. If […]

Design junkie

Perhaps two people know this about me but I am a design junkie. Notcot.org is my favorite blog of all time. Recently I’ve even contributed a few posts (#7106, #6974). I’m not sure what it is about design that I like so much. There is always that form/function distinction but I don’t think that is exactly what attracts me. It is more along the lines of personal engineering: with the right stuff you can do […]

Measuring Fitness

The basic premise is to measure fitness in a conceptually similar way to how we measure mass.  To measure mass we can use a scale to compare the effect of gravity on a test object to an object with an agreed upon mass, or we can compare the test object’s resistance to acceleration as compared to an object with an agreed upon mass.  These methods measure the ‘gravitational’ mass and ‘inertial mass’ respectively. Gravitational Mass […]

GroundReport: Citizen Journalism (and some Rogue Philosophy)

GroundReport.com is a website dedicated to citizen journalism that I have co-opted. But this is not something you should hold against GroundReport. Its mission is to provide ordinary people an opportunity to report on news that the mainstream media does not pick up on. For instance you can find people reporting on the major news stories of the day, local news from just about anywhere in the world, and every so often a scoop that […]