[ExI] trutherism: was RE: Social aim for Transhumanism: Better thinking about issues

spike spike66 at att.net
Tue May 18 19:46:12 UTC 2010


 

>	Thank you, Natasha for that reference.  I have good friends who are
"truthers" (of the more moderate sort), who are intelligent, well educated,
reasonable people...
	Best, Jeff Davis

Jeff I have a take on that topic you may find entertaining.  Often political
explanations are offered, but I will attempt trutherism from a vaguely
scientific perspective.

Water is the most common substance we work with on a regular basis which
regularly undergoes a phase change.  But water is an oddball substance in so
many ways.  One odd characteristic is its heat of fusion and its mechanical
properties when at its melting point.

Thought experiment: take an ice cube and leave it on a plate in the kitchen
for an hour or so.  The ice cube warms up to 0, sits there in a pool of 0
degree water until the ice cube is all melted.  Take the partially melted
ice cube and eat it.  It still crunches, even when it is right at 0 degrees,
in the process of melting, ja?  Many of us eat ice nearly every day, and it
is a treat: devour our soda, crunch the ice, aahhh, life is good.  We have
never bitten on an ice cube and have it go smoosh or mush.  It always goes
crunch.  I admire water ice for that delightful characteristic.

Since water/ice is the most common phase change we expose ourselves to, damn
near every day, we naturally imagine that this phase change is typical of
solids, but it isn't.  Water is weird stuff.  Perhaps the second most common
substance which undergoes a phase change, and we work with every day would
be butter.  We know how butter softens, we bite a piece of warm butter and
it definitely goes smoosh.

Insight: we normal proles seldom work with the phase change of steel.  But
if we did, we would all know that steel is a lot more like butter than it is
like water ice.  Understatement: steel works more like butter than butter
does, in this respect.  Steel softens *a lot* as it approaches its "melting
point."

So perhaps part of the reason trutherism got so much mileage is due to the
rumor that a fuel oil fire doesn't get hot enough to melt steel (and so
explosives must have been present.)  Technically true, but it doesn't need
to *melt* the steel, only soften it like warm butter.  A fuel-air fire sure
as hell gets hot enough to soften steel, sufficient to cause burning
buildings to collapse.  Examples are numerous.  Are your friends aware of
this?

We humans can get oddball ideas about matter because we are made up mostly
of an oddball type of matter.  We don't even realize how unusual it is.
Water is really weird stuff.

spike






	





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