Russia-Georgia conflict will raise oil prices

Russia invaded georgia. I've expected Putin to go expansionist for some time. When he installed Medvedev, long-time Putin-crony, as president, this was fairly clear. You don't start shifting your own position in government until you are absolutely sure that your domestic political security is assured.

Anywho, the war in georgia is going to affect you at the tank. Oil from the Caspian runs through there. or did. I doubt that it will continue to run for long. So, start hoarding fuel and food my friends. As the chinese would say, our lives are about to get interesting.

Heaven Hotter than Hell

Everyone has seen the first calculations, they can be found on google fairly easy.

The temperature of heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26 reads, Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days. Thus, heaven receives from the moon as much radiation as the earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven (forty nine) times as much as the earth does from the sun, or fifty times in all. The light we receive from the moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the sun, so we can ignore that. With these data we can compute the temperature of heaven: The radiation falling on heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation. In other words, heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation

(H/E)⁴ = 50

where E is the absolute temperature of the earth, 300°K (273+27). This gives H the absolute temperature of heaven, as 798° absolute (525°C).

The exact temperature of hell cannot be computed but it must be less than 444.6°C, the temperature at which brimstone or sulfur changes from a liquid to a gas. Revelations 21:8: But the fearful and unbelieving... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone [sulfur] means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, which is 444.6°C. (Above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake.)

We have then, temperature of heaven, 525°C (977°F). Temperature of hell, less than 445°F). Therefore heaven is hotter than hell.

But I, at least, have never seen a response published in the same time-period.

In Applied Optics (1972, 11 A14) there appeared a calculation of the respective temperatures of Heaven and Hell. That of Heaven was computed by substituting the values given in Isaiah 30 26 [1] in the Stefan-Boltzman radiation law, so that (H/E)⁴ = 50, where E, the absolute temperature of the Earth, is 300ºK, whence the temperature of Heaven, H, is 798ºK or 525ºC. This is hard to find fault with.

The assessment of the temperature of Hell stands, I suggest, on less firm ground. As authority we use the data provided in Revelations 21 8 [2], so that the temperature of Hell seems to be 444.6ºC–the temperature at which liquid sulfur is in equilibrium with its vapour–a temperature indeed which is sufficiently reliable to be used in the secondary calibration of pyrometers.

Now this last reckoning fails to follow the argument through. 444.6ºC is the temperature at which liquid sulfur is in equilibrium with its vapour at normal atmospheric pressure. Have we any data as to the pressure likely to be found in Hell?

The answer is "Yes". A nineteenth century mathematician has already provided the groundwork for Us [3] and we may feel confident that by the year 2000 the total number of the damned will be at least 29,422,641,251,519,917,000 souls. Yet the area of the valley of Gehinnom [4] is only 7,000,000 square meters.

We can now apply these figures in the Ideal Gas Equation to calculate what the pressure will be in the valley of Gehinnom. Since surely some souls must have been damned since 1877 [5], the pressure can only have increased since these calculations were made and the equilibrium point on the phase diagram of sulfur must have shifted still further, so that if we can show that at a temperature of 525ºC sulfur would still be liquid at the pressure calculated (which is a minimum value, remember). Hell (Gehinnom) is now cooler than Heaven.

Certain corrections must be applied first, however.

1. Neiht based his calculation on a date of creation of 1658 + 2326 - 1877 = 2107 BC (minimum). Counting generations in the Bible gives a date for the Creation of 4004 BC. However, atomic dating has shown that Olduvai man is at least 2 × 10⁶ years old [6].

2. We should use a Fibonacci series for the expansion, not a simple doubling series. [7] The ancient Jewish laws against inbreeding also act in the same direction. [8]

3. By a fortunate coincidence, the effects of 1 and 2 cancel each other exactly. [9]

4. The human body is not an ideal gas, but

5. A good deal of it is gaseous at 525ºC, and in any case,

6. It could well be that at very great pressures the external pressure may well exceed the pressure of electromagnetic repulsion, when different "gas" laws would apply. This merely explains how the Lord works in fitting so large a number of damned souls into so small a space [10] and it need not be quantitative.

In the calculation the following assumptions are made:

1. The average height can be taken as one meter. This seems a fair figure between the newborn babe and the fullgrown man.

2. The average space needed is about 30 cm × 20 cm. It seems unlikely that any closer packing could be achieved. Neiht uses a figure of 1/20 cubic meters per person, which is nearly identical with my independent assessment. Mine allows a neat cancellation, later.

3. I have assumed that not more than two layers of damned persons can be accommodated, since otherwise those in the middle layers would escape the full rigours of Hell.

So that,

The volume available in Gehenna is 60 × 10⁶ × 2 m³ and

The original volume of the damned is 0.06 × 29.422641 × 10¹⁸m³

Then, at constant temperature (which we assume, taking equilibrium)

P₁V₁ = P₂V₂ or P₂ = P₁V₁/V₂

Substituting,

(1)

P₂ = [29 × 6 × 10¹⁶] / [2 × 6 × 10⁷] = 14.5 × 10⁹ atmospheres

Now let us see what pressure is needed to liquefy sulfur vapour at 525ºC.

We have, using the Clausius-Cleypeyron equation in its integrated form,

Log P = 7.43287 - 3268.2 / T

where P = pressure in mm Hg

and T = the elevated boiling point in ºK,

so that

Log P = 7.43287 - (3268.2/798) = 3.3373813

whence,

(2)

P = 2174.607 mm Hg = 2.86 atmospheres

(1) is so much greater than (2) that Revelations 21 8 indicates a temperature very considerably higher than 525ºC.

Thus, Hell is hotter than Heaven (which remains deucedly hot).

The math does check out, and most of the assumptions are reasonable. Unfortunately, even though he sticks to the point for the most point, he seems to assume that sinners bodies, rather than one's incorporeal soul go to hell. But, unless we've been burying a heck of a lot of saints, sinners bodies tend to stay in the ground where they are buried. So the whole argument is based on the assumption that the intangible soul can change the pressure in a given volume, which, unfortunately, is indemonstrable.

Nice try, good luck next time!

io9

http://io9.com/

An excellent site for all you SF fans out there, with SF literature, TV, movies, art, and all manner of space news. I check it everyday. For inordinate amounts of time, because there are a crapload of stories on there every day.

Gawker owns th site, so expect an ironic bent to most stories. Its Cool Beans.

Jon Stewart

... is the highlight of my day. Is that sad? Some people look forward to seeing their family, or friends, or having a drink at the pub after work. The only brightspot in the majority of my days is to sit and watch an angry little man eviscerate smaller, angrier little men with his verbal prose.

And I just realized the this man is probably much smarter than me. It sounds arrogant, but I don't see that often. He truly is a man of great vision, clarity, and elegant speech (and childish pranks and giggling, but hey, no one is perfect). I watch him wishing that Man of the Year was real, because I know that unlike Robin Williams, Jon Stewart would do that right thing and not pussy out towards the end.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


Also, I saw the new Republican slogan on there tonight. The Change You Deserve. And its true. America, being a hopeless cesspool of ignorance, relgious ignorance, and a morass of political inequality, I think that when, not if but when, the Republicans win the election, Mcainb will give you all the change you deserve. By driving America straight into the ground where it can rot in peace and stop bothering the rest of us.

Hehe

Via Bad Astronomy

15-Year-Old Defeats Science

Yep. Its true. Go see for yourself.

"I don't remember how old I was when I started getting into global warming," Kristen says. "In middle school I remember everyone was like: 'Global warming! The world is going to end!' Stuff like that ... so I never really believed in it."

Wow. She actually had us on the ropes when she was, what, 12 or 13? Impressive.

On the March afternoon I visited, there was still snow on the ground in Maine, and Kristen padded around the house wearing green furry slippers.

Ooo, sounds chilly and not warm at all! A mortal wound!

Her Web site includes charts of temperature records, El Nino indexes, isotope measurements. Skeptics loved it: A 15-year-old attacking the mainstream scientific view.

Of course the Climate-Change deniers loved it. Free Publicity without actually having to produce any credible evidence - Every Deniers wetdream! What that, she got this bit wrong? Oh well, she's onlt 15. I assure you that our models and theories are bulletproof, even if they are alternately vigoursly torn to shreds or ignored by mainstream science.

So it came as somewhat of a surprise when Chrissy piped up to say she disagreed with Kristen on climate change.

"I think it's partly because of humans," she says. Asked why she believes that she says she doesn't know. Kristen chimes in: "She just believes what everyone else is making her believe."

It's probably fair to say that most people — even those who have strong opinions about global warming — couldn't make a strong scientific argument for why they believe what they believe.

Agreed. 'Chrissy' and people like her are idiots, even if they do provide some support for the Climate Change movement. Which is why most people should keep their mouths shut about science that it takes years of education and experience to understand. Listen to the experts for once. Believe me, they know what they are talking about.

I get a serious Ben-Stein-of-Climate-Change vibe from this young women. Lets hope we don't hear of any poorly made nazi-made-global-warming shockumentaries anytime soon.

Carnival of the Godless

The New CotG is up, over at Life Before Death. No fanacy gimmicks or frills this time around, just a sampling of each article. A few stand-outs this time around, particularly Greta's.

The little blurb that Felicia used for Greta's post tweaked my brain a little.

“If there is no God and no soul, and everything we are is comprised of physical things and the relationships between physical things… then when you change those physical things, the self changes as well."

Since we are, obviously, just physical things, we don't really have free will of any kind, do we? Essentially, we are all just enormously complex chemical reactions. And chemical reactions, no matter how complex, are predictable. So, in actual fact, we, as in our 'selves' are actually just byproducts of a system seeking to 'balance the equation'. We are an intermediary on the way to universal stability, that being the future (Depressing) state where everything in the universe is a few degrees above absolute zero and there are no stars left anywhere in the sky.

The fact of the matter is, we know how the end of the equation looks, and we have a fairly good idea of the beginning. Both of those thing indicate that the middle part, the intermediary, us, are part of the calculation, and thus have an inherently predictable outcome.

Sorry about that. I just felt an inexplicable urge to type nonsense, then share it with a small number of people over the internet. Sorry.

At least I didn't also ramble about the equally scary idea that after we hit the Singularity, will the Machines be able to predict us? (Will they eventually have the capacity to know what we are going to do, based on the data that they can collect through observational data? I shudder to think! Damn, I'm doing it again...)

Blah blah blah. Picture!

:0

So frightfully true... I really, really hate my dreams.

The cake.

It's A Lie.

Damn.

After reading most of her blog, I've determined that Kelly Gorksi is far more intelligent than I. You should probably go read her instead. She definitely makes my "above the blog-roll" list.

------------------------------------------

Also, I've begun looking for one or two people who'd join the terminal atheist team, and help keep the posting nice and consistent. So if you read my blog, and have an interest in politics, videogames, religion, books, or have the ability to string together sentences (sensical or nonsensical, your preference) by mashing keyboard buttons, drop me a line.


Aaaaand, I"m done for the night!


ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Warrior Cultures in Speculative and Fanatasy Literature I

I've always been fascinated by warrior cultures in books, ever since I was very young. Whilst i don't subscribed to any formalized honor system myself, the idea is interesting, even entrancing, to a nostalgic romantic such as myself. So I'm going to be posting short little blurbs on my favorites as time goes by, purely for my own enjoyment. I've decided to cover something fresh in my mind, since the author is recently deceased after haivng nearly completed the series.

---

Aiel - The battle-hardened, incomprehensibly honorable denizens of the Aiel Waste in the Late Robert Jordans Wheel of Time series.

Their culture is the deformed, unrecognizable descendant of the the followers of the Way of the Leaf, a society which preached, and practiced, absolute non-violence. A vestige of this is the cultural impetus regarding swords, that they are the weapons of cowards and cannot be touched.

Their honor system is based on the persons balance of toh, which is honor-debt. Doing something shameful is the eyes of Aiel earns oneself toh. Methods of redress are based on the amount of toh incurred, and usually are paid off via physical testing of the offender. This has bred a hardened people, as the weak do not long survive the harsh climate of the desert like Waste.

Toh can be great enough to make physical redress an impossibility. In cases where this is true, the Aiel in question is made gai'shain, they becomes the property of the person to whom they owe toh for "a year and a day". In this tine, they willingly become meek. It is forbidden to touch a weapon, even in owns defense. To do so incurs toh great enough that exile may be the clans only recourse.

All Aiel belong to a sect of the stratified society, regardless of their clan affiliation. Most belong to one of the multiple warrior societies. However, any woman warrior must be a part of the Maidens of the Spear, an odd contrast in regard to the rest of the cultures gender-equality. Other members belong to the clan chiefs, the Wise woman, the Blacksmiths, or herders. Interestingly, warriors sharing a warrior society will not fight one another, even if their clans are at war.

The weapon of choice among the Aiel is the spear. They use a modified, shorted spear, more suited to close combat slash-and-stab techniques. Often, one is wielded in either hand. They have no aversion to full-scale combat, but they are also trained from a very early age in hand-to-hand combat and stealth. Very few people, and no specific culture, can match an Aiel in stealth, and fewer can track them.

The philosophical outlook of the Aiel reflects several other similarly isolated people whose cultures are derived from before the Breaking. THey view life as a dream, and beleive that death simply allows them to awake. THus, there is little fear of death among the Aiel, and what little there is is internalised and never shown, as to do so would incur toh.

Going with the trend

Well, I'm a longtime fan of xkcd, and since this one has been making the blog rounds, I figured I'd better throw it up too.

Carnival of the Godless #85

Theres a Clean Version and a Dirty Version. I like the dirty version, if only for giving me a few old sexy sci-fi books to track down. Nothing really caught my eye this week, but an overall good haul this time around.


-----------------



On a side note, I'm going to try and get at least four blog posts up in between carnival updates. thats about two per week, which works for my schedule. And it'll maybe brighten the place up a bit as well.

Tired

I'm tired. Now I'm going to go into detail why. I know my readership pool is small, so I"m essentially talking to myself, but here I go anyway.

I'm from Alberta, Canada. For you non-Canadians, that means I live in Conservative Party HQ. The chances that the Conservatives won't control the government in Alberta for the entirety of my lifetime is not 100%, but it is considerable higher than 99%.

Thus, I was raised, quite appropriately, to vehemently oppose anything Liberal simply out of principal. To Be fair, after a decade and a half of a Liberal Federal government the West has good reason to despise them. So I've been a Conservative Party Member since I turned sixteen. And its served me in good stead. But I've come to realise over the last few months, something so utterly alien to my brain, I refuse to accept it emotionally.

I'm a Liberal.

A money-grubbing, welfare-supporting, government-interference-advocating piece of Liberal trash.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I don't back the current government. The Conservatives are using their Minority effectively. And the Conservatives are doing great things in Alberta. Currently, we are the only debt-free province. And they sent me (And every other Albertan) a check for $300 a while back because they had an enormous surplus. Which bought my vote.

But they are all a bunch of- well, I'm not going to use the language I'd like. But they are all christians. I worked as staff at a supper in my small town here, back in November, when the premier, Ed Stelmach, came to visit. There were five hundred people there, roughly half the town, all Conservative Party members. When the prayer was said before the meal (*shudder*) I was the only one, in the entire room, who did not bow my head. THat started this train of thought.

Then a little while ago, Harper got rid of the Science Advisor. Not the Person. The Position. I thought to myself Jesus (yes, I still use those phrases in my head) what the hell is he thinking? I mean, with issues like Global Warming, which he at least acknowledges exists, bouncing around, how can the leader of the nation make sound decisions without any scientific expertise?

Ah well. I may be a dirt Liberal, but in keeping with their Canadian tradtion, I'm going to be hypocritical, and keep on supporting the Conservatives. And hey, at least I can still hate the NDP with no conflict on conscience. Thats always a plus.

Spore!

Spore, the Soon-To-Be-Widely-Recognized-Greatest-Game-Ever-Made-That-Is-Definitely-Not-Vapourware Game has some news our recently. Mainly its launch date. September 7th. Of 2008. Which is great, since that is 12 days before my birthday. Plenty of time for my three readers to pool their money, buy it, and ship it to me free of charge in time for me to be surprised by it.

Anywho, heres the hands on: BitNet

Carnival of the Godless

# 84


I enjoyed several of the posts this time around, which is unusual. I always read them all, but alot of them are repetitions of the Carnivalia of Days gone by, and nuggets of newness are always a delicious treat.

Canada increasingly Atheist - Feminism at fault?

So sayeth Michael Valpy of the Globe and Mail.

Women — the traditional mainstays of institutional religion — in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church's patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive "angels in the house" with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.

Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings.

As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics.

It seems that our young women are less and less enthralled by their god-ordained role as objects worth 20 silver sheckles. I can't imagine why.

Update: It seem PZ has this before me. Damn him and his articulate sarcasm. I notice he quoted the same portion as me though,.... Great minds think alike?