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Re: 66 remarkable dazzling detailed slides apply new Widom-Larsen paradigm for low energy nuclear reactions via weak force re anomalies in many fields, including geology, meteors, comets, impacts: Rich Murray 2012.05.22

Owen Densmore — 2012-05-23T15:18:38

Could you give us a brief tutorial on LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions)?
 Apparently there is a theory (Widom-Larsen theory) that somehow
drives/steers low energy nuclear reactions to an eventual stable state/atom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion has some info, mentions the LENR
community and weak-force processes:

In May 2006, Allan Widom and Lewis Larsen published a theory of a four-step
process involving weak force beta decay, as a form of Low Energy Nuclear
Reaction .[158] This has become known as Widom-Larsen theory.


But I wouldn't mind a Cliffs-Notes overview.

   -- Owen

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 12:43 AM, Rich Murray <rmforall-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

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66 remarkable dazzling detailed slides apply new Widom-Larsen paradigm for low energy nuclear reactions via weak force re anomalies in many fields, including geology, meteors, comets, impacts: Rich Murray 2012.05.22

Rich Murray — 2012-05-23T06:43:49

66 remarkable dazzling detailed  slides apply new Widom-Larsen
paradigm for low energy nuclear reactions via weak force re anomalies
in many fields, including geology, meteors, comets, impacts: Rich
Murray 2012.05.22

http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2012/05/21/fascinating-reading-larsens-latest-on-lenrs-and-gold/

http://www.slideshare.net/lewisglarsen/lattice-energy-llc-lenr-transmutation-networks-can-produce-goldmay-19-2012
#

What's interesting for me is that in 1995 and 1996, before I became a
pragmatic skeptic about cold fusion research, I spent a lot of time at
many science libraries, finding and zeroxing research from 1900 to
1940 about nuclear transmutations in electric sparks, electrically
exploded wires and a variety of chemical systems -- I had a hunch that
early research probably would have found possible anomalies without
having the power to clearly prove them -- but I didn't have the
technical skills to reach any strong conclusions, so last year gave
several boxes of the  papers to Michael H. Ba

Re: Petition The White House RE research publications

Steve Smith — 2012-05-22T17:31:38

OK... I feel like a lazy, unengaged idiot.   I knew there was a 
whitehouse.gov and I might have guessed there was even something like 
their "We the People" but nearly 4 years into an administration that I 
generally like and support (especially in contrast to the alternative) 
I'm appalled that I really didn't know of this system in place.

I'm curious how others here feel about it.  Just 4 and then maybe even 
20 (think early WWW) years ago all the technorati and unwashed 
technophilic masses (I think most of us qualify for one or both) were 
hooting about how the internet was going to 
lubricate/accelerate/facilitate more direct democracy.

Here we are in 2012 and it looks to me like at least this current 
administration, up to their real motivation and ability to make change 
and represent the people that elected them (and those who opposed them 
too!) in the execution of our laws and as a check/balance against the 
Legislative and Judicial, is trying their darnedest to do just that.  
"We the People" s

Re: Petition The White House RE research publications

Owen Densmore — 2012-05-22T16:02:22

Thanks Tom, just did it.

Everybody: Just Do It .. takes very little time and is kinda nifty to see
the government website, its pretty effective.  You do need to create an
account but it takes near zero time and hopefully you'll be using it for
quite some time.

Then pass it on to another email group.

   -- Owen

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Tom Johnson <tom-oqEsW8Q3u6eaMJb+Lgu22Q< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

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Re: Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, says StatCounter | The Verge

Gillian Densmore — 2012-05-22T15:59:35

Chrome and Safari are also tops for standards compliance.

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 9:29 PM, Owen Densmore <owen-xSFmhqVIi1eBYrYycbcsJg< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

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Petition The White House RE research publications

Tom Johnson — 2012-05-22T04:19:51

Who knows if it will do any good, but it can't hurt.

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/#!/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

-tj
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Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, says StatCounter | The Verge

Owen Densmore — 2012-05-22T03:29:42

I wonder what percent we'd see amongst ourselves:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3033566/chrome-most-popular-browser-weekly-may-2012


As far as I can see, Firefox, IE and Chrome are about tied and the regional
differences were quite interesting.

For me chrome has some lovely hidden gems like syncing bookmarks and
extensions across computers.  And for development, its as good as it gets.

   -- Owen
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Re: preprint from Stu Kauffman

Russ Abbott — 2012-05-21T19:08:16

I just ran into the same problem (on a smaller scale) in another context. I
want to evolve a strategy for what's called "combat" in the AI Challenge
<http://aichallenge.org/>contest from last Fall. (It's over now, but I'm
using it in a class.)

The problem is that combat is between two (or more) teams (of ants). How
well a combat strategy does depends on the strategies of the other team(s)
at the time of the evaluation. I want to evolve all strategies against each
other, but it's not clear how to take into account the dependency of a
fitness value on the population in existence at the time it is calculated.
I don't remember if a good approach to that has been developed. I couldn't
think of anything very clever.

*-- Russ Abbott*
*_____________________________________________*
***  Professor, Computer Science*
*  California State University, Los Angeles*

*  Google voice: 747-*999-5105
  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
*  vita:  *http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
*______________

Re: preprint from Stu Kauffman

Roger Critchlow — 2012-05-21T18:25:59

2012/5/21 Owen Densmore <owen-xSFmhqVIi1eBYrYycbcsJg< at >public.gmane.org>

No, I can't seem to read anything these days.

But the paper on the neural networks evolving strategies to play the
prisoners' dilemma with each other was very much a comment.

The fitness of an inherited strategy is defined entirely by the population
of strategies it is born into, so you cannot evaluate the fitness of a
neural network independent of the environment in which it plays.   The
environment in which it plays is determined by the fitness of the
strategies in play in the last generation of the game and random number
generators.  The entire system is deterministic, you can integrate from any
initial state by running the simulation.  You can generate an ensemble of
outcomes by varying random number seeds and running simulations.  Now,
having run as many simulations as your budget allows, what do you know
about the laws governing the system?

You know that the "organisms" evolve larger neural networks even though
size is penalized

New open source journal from Springer

Robert Holmes — 2012-05-21T16:13:10

http://www.epjdatascience.com/
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Re: preprint from Stu Kauffman

Owen Densmore — 2012-05-21T16:11:50

Either of you finish the paper?  Comments?

   -- Owen

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Carl Tollander <carl-U+KGyegBD4tBDgjK7y7TUQ< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

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Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

ERIC P. CHARLES — 2012-05-20T04:32:08

I don't think this posted before, apologies if it is a duplicate:

I'm pretty sure the cause of this physics tangent was my
assertion that psychology is no worse off than any of the hard sciences in the
"unsolved problems" department. Hence, if we think physicists and chemists and
biologists have solved scientific problems, then psychologists have done so as
well. In any of these sciences you can push to the point of the unknown, but
you need to wade through a lot of well established stuff to get there.


One big problem for psychology as a field is that psychologists still
have massive physics envy, while not seeming to have any idea how physics
actually works. This is much like the young girl who hates social functions and
public scrutiny, but desperately wants to be a princess; she has bought the
storybook/kids vision of princesshood, and has no idea what the job is really
like. There is plenty of work in psychology that has answered questions through
the scientific process as definitively as any other fi

Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

Bruce Sherwood — 2012-05-20T02:16:32

Thanks, Owen. Yes, it is indeed the case that in the modern
perspective of quantum field theory, forces are replaced by the
interchange of ("virtual") particles. I didn't want to make my
comments unnecessarily complicated by talking about this aspect of
field theory, but you're right.

I'd like to mention an amusing aspect of the contemporary physicist
concept "interaction". There are two ways to blast through a cement
wall. The crude, inelegant way is to throw lots of material at high
speed at the wall, and depend on the rather strong electric
interactions between the projectile and the wall to break through.
Clumsy. Inelegant. Crude.

The elegant way to get through the wall is to throw neutrinos at the
wall, and they go right through. Neutrinos have no charge, so they do
not undergo electric interactions. They are in a family ("leptons",
which includes electrons) that does not participate in the
strong/nuclear interaction that protons and neutrons engage in.
Gravity is intrinsically an extremely weak inter

Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

John Kennison — 2012-05-19T20:05:39


Nick,

In college, I majored in Math and minored in Physics. My guess is that your points about how warped space is presented are basically right but obviously Bruce can respond much more authoritatively.  

On magical thinking, I think that before scientists can start testing out hypotheses, they need to set up a vocabulary in which to state these hypotheses. One approach to geometry uses Euclid's vocabulary of point, line, angle and distance. Euclidean geometry is a mathematical theory, with axioms and logical consequences, expressed in this vocabulary. To see if this is of any help in navigating the physical world, we have to say precisely what we mean when we talk about points, lines, angles and distances in the physical world. Once we do that, we can begin to test to see if the conclusions of Euclidean geometry are true in the physical world. 

In some sense, before we start talking abstractly about geometric points, it would be nice if we first stated precisely what concrete evidence will be taken as

credible expert concern re 460 tons spent uranium fuel rods in storage pool 3 and 4 floors high in weakened 7 floor roofless building at Fukushima #4: Rich Murray 2012.05.19

Rich Murray — 2012-05-19T17:34:15

credible expert concern re 460 tons spent uranium fuel rods in storage
pool 3 and 4 floors high in weakened 7 floor roofless building at
Fukushima #4: Rich Murray 2012.05.19

Hard to assess what is reasonable concern, given all the cross
currents of vested interest obfuscation vs alarmist exaggeration...


http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/u-s-senator-tours-fukushima-warns-situation-worse-than-reported-urges-japan-to-accept-international-help-to-stabilize-dangerous-spent-fuel-pools.html

http://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Secretary-Chu.pdf

2 page letter May 16, 2012


http://www.alternet.org/health/155283/the_worst_yet_to_come_why_nuclear_experts_are_calling_fukushima_a_ticking_time-bomb?page=entire

May 4, 2012  Brad Jacobson

"Same Spent Fuel Pool Designs at Dozens of U.S. Nuclear Sites

So why isn't the NRC and the Obama administration doing more to shed
light on the extreme vulnerability of these irradiated fuel pools at
Fukushima Daiichi, which threaten not only Japan but the U.S. and the
w

Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

Owen Densmore — 2012-05-19T17:05:06

Bruce: Wow, very nice!  A+

I was about to mention that although the impact mass has on spacetime gives
a means for understanding gravity, it was outside of the interaction model
of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics.  In the SM, force
arises from an interchange particle exchange:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interactions
In the conceptual model <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_(abstract)> of
fundamental interactions, matter <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter> consists
of fermions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion>, which carry
properties<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_property>
 called charges <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_(physics)>
andspin<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics)>
 ±1⁄2 (intrinsic angular momentum<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum>
 ±*ħ*⁄2, where ħ is the reduced Planck
constant<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_Planck_constant>).
They attract or repel each other by exchanging
bosons<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

Nicholas Thompson — 2012-05-19T16:34:14

John,  I haven't yet digested Bruce's comments above, nor entirely what you
have written here, but I want to clarify one point.  

 

When somebody speaks of space being warped one has in mind one of those
diagrams where the Cartesian coordinates are bent, right?  In other words,
we are using our pre-Einsteinian worldview as a frame of reference to
describe the Einsteinian world.  But the Cartesian world has no reality,
right?  It's a figment.  Bent IS straight.  I suppose one could say that
Cartesian space is the space that would be there if there were nothing in
it, or if mega world and the micro-world were organized as the meta-world we
humans live in is organized.  

 

I don't know where this leaves us with the underlying question of the role,
if any,  of "magical" thinking in science.  Is Psychology in trouble because
it uses magical thinking, or is it in trouble because it uses bad magic? I
want to think about these questions as a review these posts.  I will be in
touch when I get back to Massachusett

Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

Nicholas Thompson — 2012-05-19T16:13:09

Thanks Bruce 

This obviously will require careful study.  I will try to respond when I get
to the Other Side and have had a few days to get used to living in The Bog. 

Nick 

-----Original Message-----
From: friam-bounces-OcBYW2YNzchBDgjK7y7TUQ< at >public.gmane.org [mailto:friam-bounces-OcBYW2YNzchBDgjK7y7TUQ< at >public.gmane.org] On Behalf
Of Bruce Sherwood
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2012 8:52 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology

To Nick: By the word "gravity" what a physicist means is merely "that kind
of interaction that masses have with each other, mediated by the effects
mass has on space".

The word is useful, because there are four known kinds of
"interactions": gravitational, electromagnetic, "weak" (the interaction
responsible for example for the instability of the neutron, which when
outside of a nucleus spontaneously decays into a proton, an electron, and an
antineutrino), and "strong" or "nuclear"
(the non-electromagnetic interacti

Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

Bruce Sherwood — 2012-05-19T14:51:34

To Nick: By the word "gravity" what a physicist means is merely "that
kind of interaction that masses have with each other, mediated by the
effects mass has on space".

The word is useful, because there are four known kinds of
"interactions": gravitational, electromagnetic, "weak" (the
interaction responsible for example for the instability of the
neutron, which when outside of a nucleus spontaneously decays into a
proton, an electron, and an antineutrino), and "strong" or "nuclear"
(the non-electromagnetic interaction among protons and neutrons in the
nucleus which binds them together despite the electric repulsion
between the protons). After these four kinds of interaction were
identified in mid-20th-century, a framework was discovered within
which the electromagnetic interaction and the weak interaction are
seen to be different manifestations of the same underlying type of
interaction, mediated by the exchange of photons (electromagnetism)
and "vector bosons" (the weak interaction). Then a bit later it wa

Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

2012-05-19T13:26:08

I like John Archibald Wheeler's brief description of the situation 
(which appears in print as marginalia in his book _Gravity_ with 
Misner and Thorne):  "Matter tells space how to curve.  Space tells 
matter how to move."

Agent-based modeling (with message-passing, even!), you might say.



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Re: Unsolved Problems in Psychology

John Kennison — 2012-05-19T10:58:48


Yes, I agree with this defense of the concept of universal gravitation. It may seem strange to say that objects can instantaneously exert a force on a distant object but it enables us to explain and accurately predict motions. 

I have in mind a different type of criticism of Newton's laws of motion, that apparently wasn't made but could have been. The criticism would go as follows: "The laws depend on the notion of force. Since forces are inferred by observing motions, why don't we do away with this extraneous idea and simply talk about motion. Moreover forces are not only pure fictions, they are wonderful fudge factors that explain away the many examples of how the laws of motion fail to describe the actual motion we see in the real world. For example, one of the laws says an object in motion tends to keep moving at the same speed and in the same direction. But this isn't true –a ball rolling on the ground tends to slow down and eventually stop". 

A disciple of Newton might reply, "The ball only slows