The word ‘equality’ often requires disambiguation, which is provided by context or by an explicit modifier. For each sort of magnitude, there is at least one sense of ‘equals’ with its correlated senses of ‘is greater than’ and ‘is less than’. Given any two magnitudes of the same sort—two line segments, two plane figures, two solids, two time intervals, two temperature intervals, two amounts of money in a single currency, and the like—the one equals the other or the one (...) is greater than the other or the one is greater than the other [sc. in appropriate correlated senses of ‘equals’, ‘is greater than’ and ‘is less than’]. In case there are two or more appropriate senses of ‘equals’, the one intended is often indicated by an adverb. For example, one plane figure may be said to be equal in area to another and, in certain cases, one plane figure may be said to be equal in length to another. Each sense of ‘equality’ is tied to a specific domain and is therefore non-logical. Notice that in every cases ‘equality’ is definable in terms of ‘is greater than’ and also in terms of ‘is less than’ both of which are routinely considered domain specific, non-logical. The word ‘identity’ in the logical sense does not require disambiguation. Moreover, it is not correlated ‘is greater than’ and ‘is less than’. If it is not the case that a certain designated triangle is [sc. is identical to] an otherwise designated triangle, it is not necessary for the one to be greater than or less than the other. Moreover, if two magnitudes are equal then a unit of measure can be chosen and, no matter what unit is chosen, each magnitude is the same multiple of the unit that the other is. But identity does not require units. In this regard, congruence is like identity and unlike equality. In arithmetic, the logical concept of identity is coextensive with the arithmetic concept of equality. The logical concept of identity admits of an analytically adequate definition in terms of logical concepts: given any number x and any number y, x is y iff x has every property that y has. The arithmetical concept of equality admits of an analytically adequate definition in terms of arithmetical concepts: given any number x and any number y, x equals y iff x is neither less than nor greater than y. As Aristotle told us and as Frege retold us, just because one relation is coextensive with another is no reason to conclude that they are one. (shrink)

The adaptive significance of temperature‐dependent sex determination (TSD) in reptiles remains unknown decades after TSD was first identified in this group. Concurrently, there is growing concern about the effect that rising temperatures may have on species with TSD, potentially producing extremely biased sex ratios or offspring of only one sex. The current state‐of the‐art in TSD research on sea turtles is reviewed here and, against current paradigm, it is proposed that TSD provides an advantage under warming climates. By (...) means of coadaptation between early survival and sex ratios, sea turtles are able to maintain populations. When offspring survival declines at high temperatures, the sex that increases future fecundity (females) is produced, increasing resilience to climate warming. TSD could have helped reptiles to survive mass extinctions in the past via this model. Flaws in research on sex determination in sea turtles are also identified and it is suggested that the development of new techniques will revolutionize the field. (shrink)

In order to avoid the motor damage caused by excessive temperature rise of armature winding of the walking motor during braking of high-voltage inspection robot in complexity microgrid networks, an unpowered downhill speed and energy recovery optimization control strategy is proposed based on temperature rise characteristics of the walking motor. Firstly, the thermal equivalent circuit model of the walking motor is established, and the mapping relationship between the armature winding temperature of the walking motor and ambient (...) class='Hi'>temperature is solved; secondly, the influence of armature winding temperature on unpowered downhill speed and energy recovery control strategy of robot is analyzed; thirdly, according to the temperature of front and rear wheel walking motors and the temperature difference between them, the optimal control strategy of unpowered downhill speed and energy recovery of robot is put forward; fourthly, by adjusting the duty ratio u of the energy consumption speed control system and the front wheel feedback brake distribution factor λ, the temperature difference between the front and rear wheel walking motors is reduced. Through the experimental analysis on the simulated line, it is verified that the unpowered downhill speed and energy recovery optimization control method based on the temperature rise characteristics of the walking motor can effectively reduce the temperature difference between the front and rear wheels. (shrink)

The temperature is 90◦F The temperature is rising..

Kruja is a middle-range city located in the center of Albania. The city of Kruja dates back to its existence from the V-VI century and extends to the city around the VI and IX centuries. It becomes the first capital of Albania in the XI-th century, specifically in 1190. This paper is going to deal with only two groups of buildings that are an integral part of the historical city of Kruja, the historical dwellings (XVIII century) and the socialist ones (...) (1960-1985). This paper aims to analyze through linear regressions the relation between two parameters: moisture content and temperature of the indoor walls and floors of the historic and socialist buildings in the city of Kruja. Three types of historic dwelling and three types of socialist apartments have been analyzed, relatively uniformly oriented. The measurements with specific instruments are done on the same day, for three hours. The degree of reactivity is different for both groups of buildings. The historical buildings are more sensitive to temperature rise. They respond invers to it (as the temperature rise, the level of the moisture content decreases), with a higher coefficient than socialist ones, and appear to be more efficient in reducing the level of the moisture, despite the average moisture content being higher. This paper takes into consideration also the analysis of the materials of the construction for both categories. If the level of moisture is reduced, the buildings will be improved and the quality of life indicators of the inhabitance will be improved too. (shrink)

This book shows how the study of multi-hadron production phenomena in the years after the founding of CERN culminated in Hagedorn's pioneering idea of limiting temperature, leading on to the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma -- announced, in February 2000 at CERN. Following the foreword by Herwig Schopper -- the Director General (1981-1988) of CERN at the key historical juncture -- the first part is a tribute to Rolf Hagedorn (1919-2003) and includes contributions by contemporary friends and colleagues, and (...) those who were most touched by Hagedorn: Tamás Biró, Igor Dremin, Torleif Ericson, Marek Gaździcki, Mark Gorenstein, Hans Gutbrod, Maurice Jacob, István Montvay, Berndt Müller, Grazyna Odyniec, Emanuele Quercigh, Krzysztof Redlich, Helmut Satz, Luigi Sertorio, Ludwik Turko, and Gabriele Veneziano. The second and third parts retrace 20 years of developments that after discovery of the Hagedorn temperature in 1964 led to its recognition as the melting point of hadrons into boiling quarks, and to the rise of the experimental relativistic heavy ion collision program. These parts contain previously unpublished material authored by Hagedorn and Rafelski: conference retrospectives, research notes, workshop reports, in some instances abbreviated to avoid duplication of material, and rounded off with the editor's explanatory notes. About the editor: Johann Rafelski is a theoretical physicist working at The University of Arizona in Tucson, USA. Born in 1950 in Krakow, Poland, he received his Ph.D. with Walter Greiner in Frankfurt, Germany in 1973. Rafelski arrived at CERN in 1977, where in a joint effort with Hagedorn he contributed greatly to the establishment of the relativistic heavy ion collision, and quark-gluon plasma research fields. Moving on, with stops in Frankfurt and Cape Town, to Arizona, he invented and developed the strangeness quark flavor as the signature of quark-gluon plasma. (shrink)

> Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster. The United Nations General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference 26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of (...) nature and protect health. Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1 The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the preindustrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.2 3 Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with COVID-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions. Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory. The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established.2 Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe’. In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.4 Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.5 6 Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities and those with underlying health problems.2 4 Global heating is also contributing to the decline in …. (shrink)

The fluctuation-dissipation theorem is a central theorem in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics by which the evolution of velocity fluctuations of the Brownian particle under a fluctuating environment is intimately related to its dissipative behavior. This can be illuminated in particular by an example of Brownian motion in an ohmic environment where the dissipative effect can be accounted for by the first-order time derivative of the position. Here we explore the dynamics of the Brownian particle coupled to a supraohmic environment by considering (...) the motion of a charged particle interacting with the electromagnetic fluctuations at finite temperature. We also derive particle’s equation of motion, the Langevin equation, by minimizing the corresponding stochastic effective action, which is obtained with the method of Feynman-Vernon influence functional. The fluctuation-dissipation theorem is established from first principles. The backreaction on the charge is known in terms of electromagnetic self-force given by a third-order time derivative of the position, leading to the supraohmic dynamics. This self-force can be argued to be insignificant throughout the evolution when the charge barely moves. The stochastic force arising from the supraohmic environment is found to have both positive and negative correlations, and it drives the charge into a fluctuating motion. Although positive force correlations give rise to the growth of the velocity dispersion initially, its growth slows down when correlation turns negative, and finally halts, thus leading to the saturation of the velocity dispersion. The saturation mechanism in a supraohmic environment is found to be distinctly different from that in an ohmic environment. The comparison is discussed. (shrink)

This book presents a thoroughly documented, comprehensive overview of perhaps the most urgent issue closely associated with global warming, namely sea level rise.Although evidence from the geologic past points to considerable variation of the average height of the world’s oceans, sea level rise has accelerated since the late nineteenth century, and is climbing even faster during the last 20 years, paralleling the rise in global temperatures.Could future greenhouse gas-induced global warming push the Earth’s climate into an unstable mode, triggering a (...) catastrophic meltdown of the polar ice sheets and threatening the livelihood of tens of millions of inhabitants of the world’s shorelines and low elevation islands? To broach this question, Vivien Gornitz turns to a detailed examination of the historical record, the causes, and the implications of sea level rise.After an introductory chapter providing background knowledge about the oceans and the complex phenomena associated with them, the .. (shrink)

SUMMARYDuring the 1970s, widespread scientific interest in the risks of climate change prompted John A. Eddy, an astrophysicist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, to investigate whether sunspots could be used to predict future climate changes. Methodologically, Eddy’s investigations were uniquely historical in nature. By interrogating old manuscripts of solar observations since the early seventeenth century, he identified what appeared to be a correlation between the so-called Maunder Minimum – a virtual cessation of sunspots between 1645 (...) and 1715 – and severely cold temperatures during the Little Ice Age. While he could not identify the physical mechanisms that governed solar-climate relationships, this historical episode fostered his curiosity. Fortuitously, Eddy’s solar-climate research coincided with efforts to use satellites to monitor and record variations in solar energy output, which in context constituted a significant development in managing environmental and technological risk.But using the Maunder Minimum to advance the frontiers of knowledge about solar-terrestrial relationships was not Eddy’s only – or even primary – motivation. In the mid-1840s, German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe discovered what appeared to be a decadal sunspot cycle, the existence of which inspired generations of astrophysicists to more precisely estimate its length as well as determine its underlying causes. Eddy, however, came to believe that the astronomical community failed to consider the implications of subsequent evidence suggesting that Schwabe's solar cycle was not an enduring characteristic of the sun. Instead, he reasoned that evidence offered by nineteenth-century European astronomers Gustav Sporer and Edward Maunder in the 1880s and 1890s had been entirely overlooked. But rather than arguing that their evidence was overlooked in error, Eddy identified what he cast as a conspiracy of wilful ignorance on the part of a staid and conservative astronomical community. By utilizing Eddy's private hand-written notes as they appeared in undergraduate lectures, public speeches and academic talks, as well as his appreciation for the seminal views of sociologist of science Thomas Kuhn, I show that Eddy sought to rectify this injustice by proposing a contrasting vision of science as an interdisciplinary, collaborative and creative process of exploring the ignored areas between scientific disciplines. (shrink)

Rising temperatures, increased frequency and intensity of storms, and other extreme climate events clearly indicate that we are living in an era of dramatic climate change. The impacts of pollution...

Despite recent advances in the research related to air pollution and associated adverse cardiovascular events, the combined effects of air pollution, climate change, and SARS‐CoV‐2 infection on cardiovascular health need to be researched further. This Commentary addresses their impacts on cardiovascular health in the approximately 25 million people with a severe form of inherited hypercholesterolemia, called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH). The arterial endothelium in these individuals is potentially under multiple attacks caused by particles of both endogenous and exogenous origin. Thus, they (...) have a lifelong highly elevated level of circulating low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol which drives premature atherosclerosis. The high levels of LDL particles, often associated with an elevated level of circulating lipoprotein(a) particles, are both capable of inducing and maintaining endothelial dysfunction. Such pre‐existing endothelial dysfunction can be exacerbated by exposure to SARS‐CoV‐2 viral particles, by exposure to fine particulate matter generated by climate change‐associated wildfires, and by dehydration during deadly heatwaves linked to the globally rising temperatures. The external factors can severely worsen the pre‐existing endothelial dysfunction, and thereby significantly increase the risk of a cardiovascular event in the exposed FH patients. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change is causing temperature rise in temperate zones resulting in climate conditions more similar to subtropical zones. As a result, rising temperatures increase the range of disease-carrying insects to new areas outside of subtropical zones, and increased precipitation causes flooding that is more hospitable for vector breeding. State governments, the federal government, and governmental agencies, like the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of USDA and the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System of the U.S. Centers for (...) Disease Control and Prevention, lack a coordinated plan for vector-borne disease accompanying climate change. APHIS focuses its surveillance primarily on the effect of illness on agricultural production, while NNDSS focuses on the emergence of pathogens affecting human health. This article provides an analysis of the current framework of surveillance of, and response to, vector-borne infectious diseases, the impacts of climate change on the spread of vector-borne infectious diseases, and recommends changes to federal law to address these threats. (shrink)

The earth's temperature, with rapid global warming over the past 30 years, is now passing through a period of relatively stable climate that has existed for more than 10,000 years. Further warming of more than 1°C will make the earth warmer than it has been in a million years. "Business-as-usual" scenarios, with fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions continuing to increase approximately 2 percent annually for several more decades, yield additional warming of 2° to 3°C this century and imply changes (...) that constitute practically a different planet. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. The changes include not only loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale because of worldwide rising seas. Sea level will increase slowly at first, as losses at the fringes of Greenland and Antarctica due to accelerating ice streams are partly balanced by increased snowfall and ice sheet thickening in the ice sheet interiors. But as Greenland and West Antarctic ice is softened and lubricated by melt-water and as buttressing ice shelves disappear because of a warming ocean, the balance will tip to rapid ice loss, bringing multiple positive feedbacks into play and causing cataclysmic ice sheet disintegration. The earth's history suggests that with warming of 2° to 3°C, the new equilibrium sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising sea level of the order of 25 meters. (shrink)

Herring and mackerel are two of the most important pillars of Scottish fisheries. In recent years, global warming has caused a gradual rise in ocean temperatures. In order to survive and reproduce, herring and mackerel populations will migrate. This will have a huge impact on Scotland’s fisheries. Therefore, we need to predict the relocation of fish stocks in advance, make timely adjustments to the fishing range, and minimize the loss of the fishing industry. In this article, we subdivide the research (...) target sea area into 39 regions, establish the optimal SARIMA model for each region based on the collected seawater temperature time series data, and take region 13 and region 15 as examples to fit the ARIMA and ARIMA models with a period of 12. The results show that the SARIMA model fits well in all regions and predicts the temperature changes in the studied sea area from 2021 to 2050. Finally, according to the predicted sea temperature in different periods, the migration position of the fish school is predicted. (shrink)

We live in a time of crisis. Economic crisis, ecological crisis, refugee crisis. Scholars talk about the end of history, the end of politics, the end of nature, the end of the world as we know it. Racism and neo-fascism are on the march pretty much all over the Western world; Mexican children are torn away from their parents at the US border; temperatures are rising everywhere ; islands of microplastic accumulate in the Pacific, and the latest news: Europe’s (...) taxpayers have been swindled of €55 billion, as revealed by the so-called #CumExFiles.1So the old question bears repeating: What is to be done? Or, perhaps more accurately... (shrink)

In the first section of this paper I present the measurement-theoretic fallacy of 'over-assignment of structure': the unwarranted assumption that every numeric relation holding among two (or more) numbers represents some empirical, physical relation among the objects to which these numbers are assigned as measures (e.g., of temperature). In the second section I argue that a generalized form of this fallacy arises in various philosophical contexts, in the form of a misguided, over-extended application of one conceptual domain to another. (...) Three examples are given: (i) the reduction of arithmetic into set theory, (ii) the ascription of full-blown intentional states to (at least some) non-overtly intentional creatures, such as Wittgenstein's builders, and (iii) the analysis of some modal notions as involving quantification over possible worlds (or their substitutes). The discussion of the third example gives rise to a novel account of possible-worlds talk. (shrink)

An urgent account of the state of our oceans today--and what we must do to protect them The ocean sustains life on our planet, from absorbing carbon to regulating temperatures, and, as we exhaust the resources to be found on land, it is becoming central to the global market. But today we are facing two urgent challenges at sea: massive environmental destruction and spiraling inequality in the ocean economy. Chris Armstrong reveals how existing governing institutions are failing to respond to (...) the most pressing problems of our time, arguing that we must do better. Armstrong examines these crises--from the fate of people whose lands will be submerged by sea level rise to the exploitation of people working in fishing to the rights of marine animals--and makes the case for a powerful World Ocean Authority capable of tackling them. A Blue New Deal presents a radical manifesto for putting equality, democracy, and sustainability at the heart of ocean politics. (shrink)

This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition has (...) attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power ; expertise ; and participation. (shrink)

Atmospheric physicists show us that rising concentrations of certain greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere should raise the temperature of the planet at rates, times, and places that are consistent with recent observations of ongoing climate change—that is, global warming. The unfolding impacts of this climate change will affect human habitation, health, and economics, and the persistence of various species in natural ecosystems during the course of this century. Much debate stems from what to do about these impacts, focusing (...) on the cost of changing our energy infrastructure that is now dominated by fossil fuels. Alternative futures exist, but it will take great leadership to guide us to a sustainable future before we experience huge destructive impacts on the environment of our only planetary home. (shrink)

COVID-19 did not disappear in the third year (2022) of the global pandemic. On the contrary, the number of infected people several times exceeded the highs of previous years, but the greater morbidity was not accompanied by a relatively comparable number of deaths. Some studies showed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus impact, e.g. in CEE EU countries, characterizes the seasonal intensity as temperatures fall or rise in relative humidity. All researchers agree that the number of COVID-19-infected people is only an estimate (...) based on the volume of tests performed and that the true numbers are usually much higher. The implementation of spatial interaction modeling could potentially aid in the control of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the inherently spatial nature of its diffusion. The gravity models used in this investigation to simulate the regional spread of the COVID-19 epidemic are based methodologically on previous empirical studies. The proposed methodology uses techniques for modeling spatial interactions due to the epidemics described above, which are a direct result of the number of contacts between individuals. The COVID-19 pandemic can be studied regionally using spatial diffusion methods as well as population potential models (spatial interaction models) and visualized using geographic information system software. Empirical verification and geovisualizations are based on available recent population and pandemic statistics that are possible to acquire from national health services. Methodologically, this type of modeling and simulation aimed at reconstructing a factual situation can be defined as abductive chorological inferring. (shrink)

A growing number of authors argue that states which are responsible for global temperature rise owe reparative obligations to offer asylum to climate refugees because their decisions have led to the severe harms which climate refugees suffer. The validity and significance of reparative obligations as ideal moral requirements notwithstanding, this paper argues that, in practice, relying on causal responsibility to determine who is owed asylum is likely to produce morally objectionable outcomes. This problem results from a specific attribution problem, (...) namely, the probabilistic reasoning and inherent uncertainties involved in establishing causal responsibility within the complex causal scenario of climate-related refugee movements. Because of this attribution problem, determining who is owed asylum is likely to be both under- and over-inclusive. Both under- and over-inclusion lead to unjustified deprivations of basic rights for some climate refugees. (shrink)

It is shown that the matrix models which give non-perturbative definitions of string and M theory may be interpreted as non-local hidden variables theories in which the quantum observables are the eigenvalues of the matrices while their entries are the non-local hidden variables. This is shown by studying the bosonic matrix model at finite temperature, with T taken to scale as 1/N, with N the rank of the matrices. For large N the eigenvalues of the matrices undergo Brownian motion (...) due to the interaction of the diagonal elements with the off diagonal elements, giving rise to a diffusion constant that remains finite as N goes to infinity. The resulting probability density and current for the eigenvalues are then found to evolve in agreement with the Schroedinger equation, to leading order in 1/N, with hbar proportional to the thermal diffusion constant for the eigenvalues. The quantum uctuations and uncertainties in the eigenvalues are then consequences of ordinary statistical uctuations in the values of the off-diagonal matrix elements. Furthermore, this formulation of the quantum theory is background independent, as the definition of the thermal ensemble makes no use of a particular classical solution. The derivation relies on Nelson's stochastic formulation of quantum theory, which is expressed in terms of a variational principle. (shrink)

In the last decades, the environmental conditions of our planet have dramatically worsened. Consider that, for instance, due to the enormous increase of human made CO2 emissions (by about 90% since 1970), the planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.5 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, with most of this warming occurring in the last 35 years. As many scientists have noticed, this has hastened the melting of the glaciers and therefore brought about a rise in the sea (...) level; e... (shrink)

Climate policy decisions are decisions under uncertainty and are, therefore, based on a range of future climate scenarios, describing possible consequences of alternative policies. Accordingly, the methodology for setting up such a scenario range becomes pivotal in climate policy advice. The preferred methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be characterised as ,,modal verificationism"; it suffers from severe shortcomings which disqualify it for scientific policy advice. Modal falsificationism, as a more sound alternative, would radically alter the way the (...) climate scenario range is set up. Climate science's inability to find robust upper bounds for future temperature rise in line with modal falsificationism does not disprove that methodology, rather, this very fact prescribes even more drastic efforts to curb CO2 emissions than currently proposed. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism, which conceived the natural world as consisting of substances which are metaphysically composed of matter and form, is ripe for rehabilitation in the light of quantum physics. I begin by discussing Aristotle’s conception of matter and form, as it was understood by Aquinas, and how Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism was ‘physicalised’ and eventually abandoned with the rise of microphysicalism. I argue that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, and the emergence of (...) irreducibly macroscopic phenomena in finite temperature quantum systems, have given us good reasons to doubt the truth of microphysicalism. In support of my argument, I show how to construct a hylomorphic interpretation of the de Broglie-Bohm theory that posits a single Cosmic Substance. I then show how to construct a hylomorphic interpretation of an alternative ‘contextual’ wave function collapse theory (recently proposed by the physicists Barbara Drossel and George Ellis) which posits a plurality of thermal substances. Both of these neo-Aristotelian ontologies reject the microphysicalist dogma that nature consists solely of some set of microscopic constituents. (shrink)

Imagine you live in 1823 and you are about to design an advanced course on the theory of heat. About fifty years ago, Lavoisier and Laplace had posited caloric as a material substance—an indestructible fluid of fine particles—which was taken to be the cause of heat and in particular, the cause of the rise of temperature of a body, by being absorbed by the body. No doubt, you rely on the best available theory, which is the caloric theory. In (...) particular, meticulous and knowledgeable as you are, you rely on the best of the best: Laplace’s advanced account of the caloric theory of heat, with all its sophistication, detail and predictive might. You really believe that the best science teaching should be based on the best theories that are available. But you also believe that the best theory that is available is not really the best unless it has a claim to truth (or truthlikeness, or partial truth and the like). For what is the point of teaching a theory about the deep structure of the world unless it does say something or other about this deep structure? The course goes really well. Your notes are impressive. They are soon turned into a textbook with lots of explanatory detail and fancy calculations. Alas! The world does not co-operate. There are no calorific particles among the things there are in it. Heat is destroyed when work is produced. The advanced theory is challenged by alternative theories, anomalies and failed predictions. There is agony, but in your lifetime, the caloric theory gets superseded and is left discredited in the wasteland of false theories. Decades come by. You are not around anymore. Your grandchildren go to school and.. (shrink)

Although the UN and EU focus their climate policies on the prevention of a 2 8C global mean temperature rise, it has been estimated that a rise of at least 4 8C is more likely. Given the political climate of inaction, there is a need to instigate a bottom-up approach so as to build domestic support for future climate treaties, empower citizens, and motivate leaders to take action. A review is provided of the predominant top-down cap-and-trade policies in place (...) – the Kyoto Protocol and EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) – with a focus on the grandfathering of emissions entitlements and the possibility of offsetting emissions. These policies are evaluated according to two criteria of justice and it is concluded that they fail to satisfy them. Some suggestions as to how the EU ETS can be improved so as to enable robust climate action are also offered. (shrink)

It's an achievement of the last couple of decades that people who work in linguistic semantics and people who work in the philosophy of language have arrived at a friendly, de facto agreement as to their respective job descriptions. The terms of this agreement are that the semanticists do the work and the philosophers do the worrying. The semanticists try to construct actual theories of meaning (or truth theories, or model theories, or whatever) for one or another kind of expression (...) in one or another natural language; for example, they try to figure out how the temperature could be rising compatibly with the substitutivity of identicals. The philosophers, by contrast, keep an eye on the large, foundational issues, such as: what's the relation between sense and denotation; what's the relation between thought and language; whether translation is determinate; and whether life is like a fountain. Every now and then the philosophers and the semanticists are supposed to get together and compare notes on their respective progress. Or lack thereof. (shrink)

The contents of Scala Graduum Caloris are described, supplemented by unpublished material. Both temperature measurements by his linseed oil thermometer and those based upon his law of cooling are shown to be reasonably accurate to 300°C, but above that value they are much too low. The apparent agreement and the deviation are explained by the differences between the assumptions that Newton made in deriving his law of cooling and the conditions in which he used it. Newton's attempts to link (...) terrestrial and celestial science in applications in the Principia are shown to fail from his confounding the concepts of temperature, heat and radiant intensity and his ignorance of most factors affecting the temperature rise of irradiated materials. Other comments on varied aspects of heat, mainly published in the Queries, are set out and analysed. His originality is assessed. (shrink)

(This is for the series Elements of Decision Theory published by Cambridge University Press and edited by Martin Peterson) -/- Our beliefs come in degrees. I believe some things more strongly than I believe others. I believe very strongly that global temperatures will continue to rise during the coming century; I believe slightly less strongly that the European Union will still exist in 2029; and I believe much less strongly that Cardiff is east of Edinburgh. My credence in something is (...) a measure of the strength of my belief in it; it represents my level of confidence in it. These are the states of mind we report when we say things like ‘I’m 20% confident I switch off the gas before I left' or ‘I’m 99.9% confident that it is raining outside'. -/- There are laws that govern these credences. For instance, I shouldn't be more confident that sea levels will rise by over 2 metres in the next 100 years than I am that they'll rise by over 1 metre, since the latter is true if the former is. This book is about a particular way we might try to establish these laws of credence: the Dutch Book arguments (For briefer overviews of these arguments, see Alan Hájek’s entry in the Oxford Handbook of Rational and Social Choice and Susan Vineberg’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia.) -/- We begin, in Chapter 2, with the standard formulation of the various Dutch Book arguments that we'll consider: arguments for Probabilism, Countable Additivity, Regularity, and the Principal Principle. In Chapter 3, we subject this standard formulation to rigorous stress-testing, and make some small adjustments so that it can withstand various objections. What we are left with is still recognisably the orthodox Dutch Book argument. In Chapter 4, we set out the Dutch Strategy argument for Conditionalization. In Chapters 5 and 6, we consider two objections to Dutch Book arguments that cannot be addressed by making small adjustments. Instead, we must completely redesign those arguments, replacing them with ones that share a general approach but few specific details. In Chapter 7, we consider a further objection to which I do not have a response. In Chapter 8, we'll ask what happens to the Dutch Book arguments if we change certain features of the basic framework in which we've been working: first, we ask how Dutch Book arguments fare when we consider credences in self-locating propositions, such as It is Monday; second, we lift the assumption that the background logic is classical and explore Dutch Book arguments for non-classical logics; third, we lift the assumption that an agent's credal state can be represented by a single assignment of numerical values to the propositions she considers. In Chapter 9, we present the mathematical results that underpin these arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editor’s Introduction: The State of Movement—or, Unassuming TheoryErik DoxtaderMotion [kinēsin], then, is both the same and not the same; we must admit that without boggling at it.—Xenos (the stranger), Plato’s SophistThe only answer is that we trace a path.—Walter Benjamin, “The Metaphysics of Youth”Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?—Lisa and Bart (from the backseat)The state of movement is a question—of movement, in theory.What (...) is movement, a movement, perhaps not least as the condition of arrival, an “original” beginning? Where does it come from? How does it work, in better and worse ways? To what does it lead—and why? If these standing questions remain open, there is also a chance that they are not questions at all, that they remain in some basic way beyond inquiry, precisely as they beg the question, as Giorgio Agamben has contended, of how “movement” remains “our unthought,” of the way in which “movement” presents us with the puzzle of an unconceived concept, the tension of a word whose work demands forgetting the “defeats and failures” of its use in the name and at the edges of democracy, and getting around the aporia of its necessary power without end (2005, 1). Perhaps we can only boggle—and perhaps we should. To inquire into the “state of movement” may be less a struggle for answers than the condition of question-ability itself, a movement of movement that appears in theory.Inspiring gesture. Endless stasis. Myriad advances. Countless retreats. Emerging hopes. Multiplying panics. Forced dislocation. Involuntary relocation. Indefinite incarceration. Sovereign and disciplinary borders crossed, closed, and blurred. Speech acts—in action. Moving words—gone [End Page 54] sideways. Gathering judgments. Calling out and compounding injustice. Cancelling the show. Incursions, attacks, invasions. History’s (always) incoming storm. Recalling, extending, and setting aside law’s precedent. Blown away, in a gust and a measure of time. Rising sea levels, receding forests, spiraling temperatures. Rustling aspen trees at altitude. Getting back on the bike. Staying put for the planet. Finding, instilling, and following desire. Unbounded discovery. Undue appropriation. Undoing what’s been done. Bodies at work, play, and ecstasy—and in decay, duress, and internment. Swept off the streets—and the quad. Vectors of transmission and expression. Breaking quarantine—and cliché. Soft landings and winding supply chains. Streaming words. Tropes turning into (intelligent) algorithms—and back again. Bullets flying... in homes, hospitals, classrooms. Struck by the light of a nebula and a sky full of kinetic kill vehicles. Populist uprising—progressive overreach. Equal and opposite reactions. Runway culture. Throwaway sociality. Publicity’s collapse. Privatization’s disclosure. Hopes for stillness and repose. Travel bans... for life. Packing the U-Haul for a better life. Generations letting go—and digging in. Rounds of chants. Days of marches. Cycles of emergency. Revolutionary aspirations in the avenues. Circling the leader, demanding commands. Running resistance. Caught out. Making way—and away.Asking after the state of movement may be less about the pause of cataloguing than the open that appears with being still, making a way of moving without movement, for a moment—to reflect on our understanding of the modes, manners, grammars, and vocabularies of movement and to speculate on the experience and so, in some basic sense, the assumption of movement, the line between those movements that remain in the background, out of view and taken for granted, often in the name of being able to simply get on with things, and those that provoke, invite, and disturb inquiry. If, for instance, the sort of movement named a “journey” is a long-standing and basic feature of the human condition (one can think variously, of better and much worse instantiations, from the Odyssey to the bloody quests for “salvation” that might have but mostly didn’t hinge on the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow to the Trail of Tears and Middle Passage to the moon shots), what’s happening in an American culture currently besotted with the idea of “being on a journey”—of discovery, fitness, creativity, acceptance, recovery, parenthood, leadership, home ownership, and so on and so forth. One wonders... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What, Exactly, Does the Madperson Lack?Sofie Jeppsson, PhD (bio)Justin garson has already received well-earned recognition for his Madness: A philosophical exploration (2022), in which he distinguishes the view of madness as a dysfunction from madness as a strategy—a distinction that cuts across traditional distinctions between, for example, biological/neurological and psychological/social views. On the dysfunction view, going mad might be comparable to something like having an asthma attack or, more (...) long-term, developing type 1 diabetes. If the trachea closes up and prevents air from passing through, that is a dysfunction in the breathing apparatus. If the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas cease to produce insulin, making the person dependent on insulin shots to stay alive, that is a dysfunction. On the strategy view, going mad is rather like getting a fever when already infected with some pathogen. Given that you have the pathogen reproducing inside you, a rising body temperature provides a strategy (although not, of course, something the ill person chose) to keep the reproduction rate down, thus giving the immune system a better chance at vanquishing the infection. That does not mean that fevers are harmless—if a fever becomes high enough, it might itself do damage to the body. Still, it is a strategy, not a mere dysfunction. Analogously, on the Madness as strategy view, going mad might help a person deal with old traumas or an ongoing terrible situation, even as the madness may also be damaging in itself.In this paper, Garson introduces us to another interesting distinction: between seeing madness as a lack of reason, or as a perversion of or difference in reason. Garson writes that present-day psychiatry tends to see madness as a lack, whereas the late modern thinkers conceived of it as a perversion of reason. The late moderns clearly saw madness as something negative, but if we retain something like their basic view, merely change our evaluation from the negative perversion to the more neutral difference, we have a better basis for regarding Madness as a complicated and problematic but still cherished identity, and for Mad Pride.This is another interesting distinction well worth calling attention to. I’m uncertain how well the J.C.A. Heinroth example works—the text cited seems to show that he had a Madness as strategy view, but is it a Madness as a different kind of reason view?—but the other examples work better. Nevertheless, I want to push back a little against the claim that present-day psychiatry and philosophy of psychiatry tend to regard madness as a lack of something whereas the early moderns saw it as a difference. (Just a friendly little push, mind you, but still.)Arthur Wigan’s description of two brains, one functional and one dysfunctional, still seems to posit a lack of proper function in one of them. Sure, he does not say that the madperson lacks as much as the [End Page 313] idiot, who has two dysfunctional brains whereas the madperson has one functional and one dysfunctional. Still, there’s a lack. This two-brain picture also has its modern analogues: It brings to mind (albeit in a less biologically concrete and reified form) much psycho-educational material on, for example, how to live with bipolar disorder, according to which a supposed sane and rational part of the psychiatric patient’s mind should learn to handle and control the other, mad part (e.g., Miklowitz, 2012).According to John Locke, madpeople reason just fine, but they start from false premises. Is not this, too, something that madpeople are supposed to lack? Correct and realistic premises to start from? Locke writes that madpeople have “taken their fancies for realities,” but “make right deductions from them.” Moreover, Locke’s theory is reminiscent of modern bottom-up theories like Brendan Maher’s (1999)—madpeople have bizarre experiences on the basis of which they form bizarre beliefs, but we need not postulate that they suffer from any problems with, for example, reasoning and drawing inferences to explain why they believe what they do. Theorists who instead argue for a top-down or two-factor account of why madpeople stick... (shrink)

This simulation study is a fuzzy model-based neural network control method. The basic idea is to consider the application of a special type of neural networks based on radial basis function, which belongs to a class of associative memory neural networks. The novelty of this approach is the use of an RBF neural network controller in a model reference adaptive control architecture, based on a one-step-ahead Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy model. The objective is to control the concentration in a continuous stirred-tank reactor (...) highly non-linear system and to assure its stability by limiting the temperature rise generated from the irreversible exothermic reaction. This contribution will help to reduce environmental impact of chemical waste. (shrink)

The evolution of microstructure upon partial crystallization and its influence on the mechanical properties such as hardness, elastic modulus and viscosity in a La 55 Al 25 Cu 10 Ni 5 Co 5 bulk metallic glass alloy are studied. Specimens with various volume fractions of crystalline phases were obtained by annealing the as-cast amorphous alloy above its glass transition temperature and were characterized by transmission electron microscopy. Microscopic examination of the heat-treated samples shows short-range-ordered domains prior to nanocrystallization within (...) the amorphous matrix, followed by the growth and impingement of the crystallites. Whereas the hardness of the annealed samples increases linearly with increasing crystallinity, the elastic modulus and the viscosity both increase abruptly when the crystalline volume fraction is about 40 vol.%, with a only minor variation on either side of this range. The sudden rises in the modulus and viscosity are similar to those in the literature data on the fracture strength of partially crystallized bulk amorphous alloys that shows a steep drop in strength at 30-50 vol.% crystallinity. On the basis of the microscopic observations, it is suggested that the interaction and formation of rigid networks of crystalline phases upon the attainment of a critical second-phase volume fraction may be the possible reason for the sudden change in mechanical properties. Percolation theory is utilized in further substantiating this hypothesis. (shrink)

> Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate change The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a dark picture of the future of life on earth, characterised by ecosystem collapse, species extinction and climate hazards such as heatwaves and floods.1 These are all linked to physical and mental health problems, with direct and indirect consequences of increased morbidity and mortality. To avoid these catastrophic (...) health effects across all regions of the globe, there is broad agreement—as 231 health journals argued together in 2021—that the rise in global temperature must be limited to <1.5°C compared with pre-industrial levels. While the Paris Agreement of 2015 outlines a global action framework that incorporates providing climate finance to low-income and middle-income countries, this support has yet to materialise.2 COP27 is the fifth Conference of the Parties (COP) to be organised in Africa since its inception in 1995. Ahead of this meeting, we—as health journal editors from across the continent—call for urgent action to ensure it is the COP that finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries. This is essential for the health of those countries, and for the health of the whole world. The climate crisis has had an impact on the environmental and social determinants of health across Africa, leading to devastating health effects.3 Impacts on health can result directly from environmental shocks and indirectly through socially mediated effects.4 Climate change-related risks in Africa include flooding, drought, heatwaves, reduced food production and reduced labour productivity.5 Droughts in sub-Saharan Africa …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nuclear Power after Fukushima 2011:Buddhist and Promethean PerspectivesGraham ParkesDuring 2010 many environmentalists previously opposed to nuclear power were deciding, in the face of anthropogenic climate change from burning fossil fuels, that the only way to prevent runaway global warming would be to build more nuclear power plants after all.1 There are risks involved—though fewer than with carbon-based sources of energy.2 When one compares the detrimental effects of nuclear power (...) with those of burning fossil fuel, it is clear that the human injury and death toll (not to mention environmental devastation) resulting from the former have been nothing compared to the damage caused by the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, owing to mining accidents, oil spills, and so forth—not to mention the massive carbon dioxide emissions.On the other hand, the problem of how and where to store the growing amount of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, which remains deadly for many thousands of years, has yet to be solved. Costly security measures have to be taken to guard against terrorist attacks and theft of materials usable for nuclear devices. When full safety features are included, nuclear power plants become ever more expensive to build, and the costs of insuring them against accidents are so prohibitive that governments have to subsidize them, which they are increasingly unwilling to do.Not long after the explosions and meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in March 2011, two dismal world records were announced: in 2010 we discharged a record amount of carbon dioxide (more than 30 gigatons) into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels, and, as a direct consequence, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (as measured at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Hawai'i) reached a record level of 395 parts per million. These figures suggest that we are continuing to generate a rise in global average temperatures that is already destroying the livelihoods of millions and will soon jeopardize the lives of hundreds of millions more.As a consequence of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Japan—long a leading promoter of nuclear power—has begun to enforce some widely neglected safety regulations and is seriously reconsidering its reliance on nuclear energy. China has put construction of [End Page 89] new power plants on hold. Other nations (such as Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Thailand, and Malaysia) have decided to phase out or cancel plans to build more nuclear power stations. Yet the primary motivations remain unclear, since people's attitudes toward the dangers of nuclear radiation are anything but rational—as evidenced by the mass departure of foreigners from Japan after the catastrophe at Fukushima, when health dangers beyond the vicinity of the power station were minimal.In Europe, the reaction to the Fukushima disaster has clearly been aggravated by memories of the catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986. While Chernobyl was a more widely destructive event than Fukushima, releasing a much greater amount of radioactivity, its effects on human health continue to generate disagreement. According to the third report on the effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe issued by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), among the 134 plant staff and emergency workers who suffered acute radiation syndrome (ARS), the condition proved fatal for twenty-eight of them. By 2006 another nineteen ARS survivors died, although their deaths were not directly attributable to the effects of ionizing radiation. Although the report attributes "a substantial fraction" of the six thousand cases of thyroid cancer in people who were children at the time of the accident to their consumption of milk contaminated with iodine-131, only fifteen cases had proved fatal by 2005, some twenty years later.3 The death toll, then, was fewer than fifty.By contrast, a study by a group of scientists from Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, estimates the number of deaths attributable to the meltdown at around 980,000—almost twenty thousand times greater than the estimate by the UN scientific committee.4 What are we to make of this vast discrepancy, especially since the UNSCEAR report "was prepared in close cooperation with... (shrink)

The 3D Prandtl fluid flow through a bidirectional extending surface is analytically investigated. Cattaneo–Christov fluid model is employed to govern the heat and mass flux during fluid motion. The Prandtl fluid motion is mathematically modeled using the law of conservations of mass, momentum, and energy. The set of coupled nonlinear PDEs is converted to ODEs by employing appropriate similarity relations. The system of coupled ODEs is analytically solved using the well-established mathematical technique of HAM. The impacts of various physical parameters (...) over the fluid state variables are investigated by displaying their corresponding plots. The augmenting Prandtl parameter enhances the fluid velocity and reduces the temperature and concentration of the fluid. The momentum boundary layer boosts while the thermal boundary layer mitigates with the rising elastic parameter strength. Furthermore, the enhancing thermal relaxation parameter ) reduces the temperature distribution, whereas the augmenting concentration parameter drops the strength of the concentration profile. The increasing Prandtl parameter declines the fluid temperature while the augmenting Schmidt number drops the fluid concentration. The comparison of the HAM technique with the numerical solution shows an excellent agreement and hence ascertains the accuracy of the applied analytical technique. This work finds applications in numerous fields involving the flow of non-Newtonian fluids. (shrink)

Sophists’ apologia. -/- Sophists were the first paid teachers ever. These ancient Greek enlighteners taught wisdom. Protagoras, Antiphon, Prodicus, Hippias, Lykophron are most famous ones. Sophists views and concerns made a unified encyclopedic system aimed at teaching common wisdom, virtue, management and public speaking. Of the contemporary “enlighters”, Deil Carnegy’s educational work seems to be the most similar to sophism. Sophists were the first intellectuals – their trade was to sell knowledge. They introduced a new type of teacher-student relationship – (...) the mutually beneficial communication on equal terms. They taught pupils how to think independently and how to persuade others, which was inseparably connected with the rise of democracy in the most advanced Greek polices. Sophists were the first to proclaim that all people are naturally equal. They put forward the idea of natural rights and social contract, working out the fundamentals of the present-day law. In addition, they developed the basics of philology, psychology, logic, and gave a scientific explanation to the origins of religions. They embodied definite positive ideals of their epoch. Sophistry flourished in the second half of the Vth through he first third of the IVth centuries B. C. The period coincides with the heyday of the entire Greek history – the so called Greek Miracle epoch. Sophists expressed some present-day concepts of Ancient Greek ideology and mentality, characteristic of its Golden Age times. The Ancient Athens of the times of Periclus were similar to the Florence of Renaissance as to the type of social structure. That is why (?) the art of eloquence (public speaking) was highly respected in Florence. The two cities had a lot of features of the present-day capitalist society, which was due to their role as the main centres of industry of their “worlds-economies”. During the subsequent Hellenic period, the Old Order was restored, based on the feudal rent recipients’ rule. The degradation of society resulted in the decline of sophistry. Sophistry represents the highest point in the evolution of Greek philosophy. It is also the most prominent school as to the novelty of its ideas. That was owing to the common propensity for innovation typical of Periclus’ Golden Age, which in its turn resulted from the establishment of the individualistic and rationalistic thinking similar to present-day mentality. Among other aspects, close attention was paid to ethnic issues; some humanistic ideas such as Master and Servant ethics and Enlightment as the primary condition of man’s freedom, received scientific grounding. The genre of philosophical dialogue was developed, as well as the rationalistic scientific gnoceology, aimed at consistently opposing any religion. Dialectics, the most outstanding achievement of the Antiquity, was also worked out by the sophists. Zeno of Helleas was one of the sophists. Democrites’ ideas were, too, quite close to dialectics. Socrates’ contemporaries regarded him ironically, as shown, for example, in the Aristophanes’ comedy “Clouds”. Nevertheless, this scholar can still be referred to as a sophist, although of somewhat weird personality. Socrates’ popularity, which came later, should be attributed to the fact that he was the first philosopher ever to have been sentenced and executed by law, rather than to any valuable scientific contributions. Sophistry as such, rather than Socrates, marks the line between pre-Socratic and post- Socratic schools. Plato, with the exception of his latest works, is considered to belong to the same philosophical school. Specifically, there are valid reasons to believe that he was paid fees by his disciples. In Plato’s Dialogues, all points of view will be proven and then disproved, so that an integral philosophical system is hard to observe. Plato’s “Idealism” is but one of the many possible theories. His ideal philosophy is a high-minded argument of wise men. As late as towards the end of his life, Plato betrayed the ideals of sophistry, turning into the world’s first proponent of totalitarianism. Sophistry is Greek classical literature. Later on, philosophy, as well as the entire Greek civilization, started to fall into decline. Over 500 subsequent years, Hellenistic-Roman scholars never came up with anything novel. The entire process of antique philosophical evolution can be subdivided into the following six stages: Phoenician (IX–VIIth centuries B. C.), archaic (VIth – the first half of IVth century B. C., classic (the epoch of sophistry: the second half of the Vth through the first decades of the IIIrd centuries B. C.), late antique (middle of the IIIrd – first decades of the VI th centuries B.C.) The fact that early in the VIth century B. C. sophistry was rejected in Athens, has a lot to do with the consequences of their defeat in Peloponnesian war, a social catastrophe. Ever since, the prevalent part of the criticism of sophistry is a criticism of sophists’ immoral ways of life and personalities, rather than the essentials of their philosophy. For instance, Aristotle’s criticism primarily concerns their pragmatism and tendency to make a profit out of teaching. However, Aristotle himself taught his disciples along similar lines, showing them how to “be able to prove both opposites”. It was Aristotle who summed up sophists’ century-long elaborations. The traditional modern interpretation of sophists as shown in Plato’s dialogues appears to be groundless. The truth of the matter is that Plato regards sophists as more serious philosophers than Socrates was. It becomes especially clear in the dialogue titled “Protagoras”, which shows the latter as gaining an undoubted victory over Socrates. Generally speaking, Plato’s works never regard sophists as weak or worthless opponents. A common opinion as to the essence of sophists’, in particular, Protagoras’s philosophy, has hitherto not been worked out. Many researchers renounce the very existence of any specific philosophical position in sophistry. The term “relativism” itself now has a bad name. However, it should be borne in mind that Protagoras doctrine emerged as a result of an attempt to get out of the ontological dead-end to which the entire Greek natural philosophy had come. To this purpose, he employed Anaxagoras’s idea about everything comprising everything, whereupon he built his physical-ontological theory, and Zeno of Helleas’s concept that all objects are such and different at the same time in the same respect. According to Protagoras’s philosophy, every object does not only seem, but is different from every other object, including human beings. Therefore, every person is his or her own measure of all other entities. The objective reality is the Ego’s relations with the outer world. Every object’s essence is defined through its interaction with ourselves. Nothing remains stagnant – every existence already contains non-existence, and vice-versa. However, the relativity of being is not to be regarded as absolute. That means, that relatively stable and therefore relatively cognizable entities do exist, among them the words we say. Doubt is not considered absolute by relativists either, which differentiates them from skeptics and agnostics. They dare to believe. Uncertainty is Godly – here, Protagoras becomes very close to the concept of apathetic theology. Gorgius shared Protagoras’s views and tried to prove them applying the same method as Zeno applied when upholding Parmenidis’s philosophy. He argued that if one accepts the opposite point of view and agrees that nothing can exist and not exist at the same time, one is bound to come to an the absurd conclusion that nothing is cognizable and nothing exists. To prove that there is a universal contradiction within the Existence itself, Protagoras and his followers in their turn put forward a number of special logical arguments, called rules of contraries, or sophisms. The most well-known of them is the Euathle’s sophism, which proves that an object can be such and different at the same time in the same respect. Generally speaking, all relationships of any entity are extraneous. The idea that all entities, including concepts, exist and do not exist at the same time, was also accepted by Plato. It should be stressed, that Plato’s philosophy as a whole is relativists’ greatest achievement. In his dispute against relativism, Aristotle put forward the main concepts of his ontology: the existence falls into the existence in possibility and the existence in reality, or substance and accidence – the ever changing “sublunary” world and the stable world of divine heavenly bodies. This division made his system self-contradictory to the point of absurd. Aristotle quite realized, that the direct disproof of relativism is hardly possible, which fact makes his criticism a mere tautology. It is very indicative in this respect that materialists, idealists and even skeptical agnostics applied the same arguments do disprove relativism. That demonstrates that the inner contradiction between any forms of “absolutism” and relativism is the most fundamental philosophical problem. Relativist ideas were repeatedly renewed throughout history, provided the social conditions were favourable. In variations, the concepts were advanced by Tzuan Tsi and ancient Chinese sophists, apostle Paul, Nicolas of Cusa, Galileo, Rene Descartes, G. Berkley, D. Hume, Ch. S. Pierce, E. Mach, A. Bogdanov, F. de Saussure, N. Bore, P. Feuerabend, U. Quain and others. However, no consistent relativist ontological system was developed after Protagoras. Meanwhile, a valid relativist theory could provide a clue to a fuller and more adequate general physical concept of the world, and to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. -/- Relativism as an ontological system of beliefs. -/- The relativist principle of relativity of all that exists is fundamental for the entire system of philosophy. Absolutely everything exists, but, at the same time, no existence is absolute. Anything is possible, but those entities only exist for us with which we interact this way or another, i. e., reality is interaction, “I interact – hence, I exist”. However, an overly close relationship between entities leads to non-existence – in other words, there is a certain existential optimum. For all of us, information, or perceptible heterogeneities, is real. Each of us is the center of a definite system of interactions with the world. If God is an endless Possibility, then the World is but the man’s dialogue with God. However, the ties that bind us with the world are of some definite kind, which predetermines our reality. The principle of relativity constrains itself, as any relativity is relative. On the one hand, that calls forth the Evil – caused by our own weakness. On the other hand, it makes our world relatively stable and cognizable. Generally speaking, the world is what we are. Everybody has an own Universe, but since people are fairly similar, our universes can be regarded as one Universe with common laws and regulations. It is possible for us to change the degree of objects’ existence in relation to ourselves and one another. It is equally important, though, to remain ourselves (keep following our “warrior’s path”). Since everything exists and no existence is absolute, the process of cognition should involve a criticism of everything but never a complete rebuttal of anything. The criterion of verity for any theory then is in its capacity to build itself upon a bigger number of diverse statements than in any other theory. Theoretically, all philosophies should ideally be complementary. The question of what in fact happened is meaningless unless we specify the “we”, the “where” and the “when”. The past can only exist as part of the present. When we change, our past undergoes corresponding qualitative objective changes, all of which are irreversible. The contemporary physics regards all objects of the Universe as existing for one another, which results in absurd conclusions. In fact, only what we interact with, exists. The so called “speed of light in vacuum” c is the maximum speed of direct interaction and direct exchange of signals. Specifically, at the oncoming speed c with a significant blue parallax the gamma-quantum is unable to interact with the matter. When this speed is reached, the gravitational mass of objects in relation to one another becomes equal to zero (imaginary), whereas their inertial mass equals infinity. Further acceleration will bring us into an entirely different Universe. That means that the Universe is an open system, which fact destroys all present-day cosmological models. Anything is possible in this world. Our reality is magic. Every bit of space contains a potentially limitless number of bits of other, however virtual, universes, as well as an infinite number of particles, which are still virtual for us (as postulated by quantum mechanics). In other words, there exists an infinity of different realities. With all the above in mind, the different levels of entities’ existence, in particular, of Life and Reason, should be taken into consideration. For example, to which extent a live system exists in relation to the inanimate forms of being is very indefinite, as what life is has to be determined by living creatures. An even greater compass of levels of existence can be brought about through interaction – that is the core idea of Godel’s theorem. As a result, the range of forms of existence tends towards infinity – the evolution of matter through super-intelligence will bring us up to God’s heights. A more generalized mathematical model of the physical world, including a universal operator of the co-existence of objects, can be developed based on the above considerations. The bonds between objects become weaker owing to 1) a high speed, 2) acceleration, 3) rotation, 4) strong gravity, 5) strong fields of other kinds, 6) the difference of levels of existence , 7) phase shifts. Yet, there always is an existential optimum. Such mathematical model is to operate certain non-transitive algebras. Relativist ontology assumes that the notion of “temperature” is relative, thus making it possible to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In its turn, that will allow for phase shifts. A perpetual motion machine of the second type will become a reality. Rotation could presumably be used to increase inertial and decrease gravitational mass, slowing down the time. An experimental research could shed light on the mentioned effects. (shrink)

To date, climate justice has been modeled on global justice, giving rise to such notions as ecological space, ecological debt and carbon debt. I worry that global justice fails to compel compliance and ignores hydrological systems’ role in cooling atmospheric temperatures. I thus opt to tie climate justice to hydrological justice, a form of global environmental justice that requires transparency and kinship, and proves more coercive since both burdens and targets are local. To demonstrate this view, I first distinguish global (...) justice from global environmental justice. I next show the limits of Simon Caney’s forward-looking approach to global justice, which commits diverse parties to just burdens to reach just targets in order to facilitate climate justice. I conclude by noting that modeling climate justice on hydrological justice proves compatible with the goals of the Katowice Climate Package, passed in 2018. (shrink)

Not all questions for explanation are answered by referring to a cause. Yet many answers to questions like: Why is something the case? Why does this occur? do mention a cause or are phrased as a causal explanation. Salmon seems to suggest that even functional explanations might sometimes be reformulated as a causal one. As an illustration of a functional explanation he mentions the fact that jackrabbits in the southwestern part of the United States have extremely large ears because they (...) constitute an effective mechanism for the temperature regulation these rabbits need in the hot, arid regions they inhabit. Following Salmon’s causal account of a functional explanation one could phrase the answer to the question: What is the cause of the long ears of the jackrabbits? as: The hot and arid nature of the habitat where they live. Understood in this way, it is the heat of the area that is the cause of the extremely long ears of the jackrabbits. Yet there are some problems with this kind of a cause. The causal connection between the heat and the long ears is of a different nature than the one between the heat and the rise of the body temperature. The functional explanation even rephrased as a causal one can hardly be understood just in terms of a physical cause and effect. The causal effect of heat in relation to the development of long ears depends on the goal or function they serve for the survival of the jackrabbit under the specific conditions of its habitat. (shrink)

We live in a troubled world; in truth we live in overlapping troubled worlds, and I realize we all know this truth, as CO2 levels and average global temperatures rise, and the oceans of our world w...

Long time delay before lasing in a II-VI laser diode has been observed. Due to this delay, a nominal threshold current increases as the width of applied current pulse becomes shorter. This delay is attributed to the internal Q switching caused by the balance of injected carriers, temperature rise and gain-guiding. By fitting the calculated data to the experimental ones, rates of refractive index change with carrier concentration and with temperature have been estimated.

Without urgent, systemic, and collective global interventions to address the emerging climate emergency, we are likely to continue to see a range of increasingly significant adverse impacts globally. Temperatures will continue to increase, ice shelves will melt, seas will rise, crops will fail, water scarcity will increase and spread, wildfires will accelerate, and food and water insecurity, violence, and the largest human migration in history will ensue. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), these climate changes will displace (...) over 1.2 billion people by 2050 at a rate currently exceeding 21.5 million people per year. This mass migration will create incredible burdens on political, legal, economic, agricultural, educational, and health infrastructures in future host countries, and we are globally unprepared. It is well-recognized that the solution to these crises lies in our collective awakening by embracing complexity and employing bold and holistic perspectives. However, theoretical and applied advancements that may meaningfully inform practical approaches to urgently address climate related threats remain scattered and insufficient. The purpose of our proposed paper is to advance the concept of adaptive polycentric meta-networks (APMNs) as a partial solution to collectively address climate crises. We draw upon key insights from works on polycentricity, complexity leadership, and meta-networks, to arrive at our integrative framework. We also discuss ways that the proposed framework aligns with the dynamics of collective mindfulness and practical wisdom, particularly to facilitate cross-sector and global collaborations, across cultures and spiritual practices, to achieve the climate change goals at a macro scale. We believe that our framework offers an important conceptual and practical pathway to tackle the complex dynamics of climate change, and to generate the needed collective sensemaking and awareness to awaken, engage, and align collective leadership where it is needed, at global, national, regional and local levels and across governments, NGOs, and corporate interests. (shrink)

The lodestone is an extremely rare form of the mineral magnetite that occurs naturally as a permanent magnet. It therefore attracts metallic iron as well as fragments of ordinary ‘inert’ magnetite. This ‘magic’ property was known to many ancient cultures, and a powerful lodestone has always commanded a high price. By the eleventh century AD the Chinese had discovered that a freely suspended elongated lodestone would tend to set with its long axis approximately north–south, and utilized this property in the (...) magnetic compass. They also appear to have discovered that this invaluable characteristic could be handed‐on to a steel needle if the latter were contacted with, or stroked by, a lodestone.The magnetism of the lodestone was scientifically investigated by William Gilbert in the sixteenth century, when he defined its ‘poles' and the well‐known rule that ‘like poles repel, unlike attract’. He also studied ‘inclination’ and ‘variation’, and means to aid the preservation of magnetic power. How to concentrate it by ‘arming’ the lodestone with caps or pole‐pieces of soft iron was discovered in the same century. These methods have been repeated, confirmed, and improved. The lodestone occupies a vital place in the history of magnetism, but little beyond Gilbert's work can be reached by historical studies because vastly improved steel or alloy permanent magnets, and electromagnets, replaced it before quantitative measurements were developed. These techniques have therefore been applied retrospectively to both museum specimens and contemporary natural lodestones. A good source of the latter was found to be the igneous complex known as Magnet Cove, Arkansas, and this material has been used as the ‘type example’. All specimens were discrete, well‐rounded, rusty brown pebbles found near the surface. Their unweathered interiors were black titanomagnetite. No significant trace element or crystallographic differences could be found between the lodestones and the magnetically inert material that always accompanied them. The magnetic moment per unit volume of the ‘as‐found’ Magnet Cove lodestones varied between 6.5 and 11.6 emu cm−3, which compares poorly with the hundreds of units characteritzing modern permanent magnets. Hysteresis loops gave a saturation intensity of 27–51 emu cm−3, suggesting that intensity has diminished since formation. This agrees with general experience of magnets, especially in the absence of a ‘keeper’. The initial volume susceptibility of Magnet Cove magnetite was about 0.18 for low fields, and always remained <1. This means that a normal terrestrial magnetic field with a maximum vector <1 Oe is unable to induce even the low magnetic moments we see today, while a field approaching 1000 Oe is required for saturation. These parameters, and the rare occurrence of lodestones as near‐surface fragments, support suggestions that they are the product of a lightning strike upon an exposure of a suitable magnetite. Transient currents averaging 30 000 A have been measured. This would give rise to a zone of potential magnetic saturation at least 12 cm in diameter, to which some of the ejected fragments would be exposed. An attempt to determine the period elapsed since formation of the Magnet Cove lodestone was made by annealing magnetically saturated specimens at temperatures up to 500°C, and measuring J v at weekly intervals for 100 days. The decay curves visually resembled exponential functions, but mathematical tests proved that they were not strictly so. Interpretation was therefore difficult, but a pragmatic procedure involving excessive extrapolation suggested an ‘age’ of about 3500 years. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Climate change increasingly impacts the resilience of ecosystems and agricultural production. On the one hand, changing weather patterns negatively affect crop yields and thus global food security. Indeed, we live in an age where more than one billion people are going hungry, and this number is expected to rise as climate-induced change continues to displace communities and thus separate them from their means of food production (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 2015). In this context, if one accepts a humancentric ethic, then (...) the focus would be on addressing impacts to agricultural production, and thus food security (Borlaug 1997; Navin 2012). On the other hand, ecological resilience is also being impacted by climate change, as species go extinct or migrate due to fluctuating temperatures and shifting weather patterns. This reduction of resilience negatively impacts ecosystem services and the ability of the natural world to support life (Palmer and Larson 2014; Urban 2015). From an environmental holist perspective, then, one could argue that the ethical path would be to focus on reducing negative impacts to species and/or local ecosystems rather than increasing crop yields. Thus, there appears to be a tension between the prioritization of crop yields and the mitigation of ecosystem impacts. While this tension is well established in the agricultural literature (Kirschenmann 2010; Noll 2018), climatezas lochange exacerbates the situation, as agricultural lands are stressed and climate-induced migrations increase already high demands for foodstuffs, thus bringing the conflict to the forefront (Macdonald et al. 2015; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2017a). (shrink)

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions has the 'co-benefit' of also reducing air pollution and associated impacts on human health. Here, we incorporate health co-benefits into estimates of the optimal climate policy for three different climate policy regimes. The first fully internalizes the climate externality at the global level via a uniform carbon price (the 'cooperative equilibrium'), thus minimizing total mitigation costs. The second connects to the concept of 'common but differentiated responsibilities' where nations coordinate their actions while accounting for different national (...) capabilities considering socioeconomic conditions. The third assumes nations act only in their own self-interest. We find that air quality co-benefits motivate substantially reduced emissions under all three policy regimes, but that some form of global cooperation is required to prevent runaway temperature rise. However, co-benefits do warrant high levels of mitigation in certain regions even in the self-interested case, suggesting that air quality impacts may expand the range of possible policy outcomes whereby global temperatures do not increase unabated. (shrink)

Climate change is expected to lead to rising sea levels, higher frequency of natural hazards, extended phases of drought, and many other negative impacts. To minimize these threats, the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in Paris agreed that the global mean temperature must be kept “well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels” (United Nations 2015). For this target to be feasible, most climate models assume not only heavy cuts in emissions but also negative emissions via the (...) large-scale capture and storage of carbon dioxide (K. Anderson and Peters 2016). This chapter investigates the considerations of ethics and justice that are relevant to the fair governance of the carbon capture and storage technologies required to produce negative emissions.1 I argue that the governance of these negative emission technologies (NETs) demands the fair distribution of the additional burdens and risks associated with them and that their ethical evaluation requires the appropriate involvement of those most directly affected. The main argument justifying these claims relies on the infeasibility of achieving justice in the governance of NETs. However, the solutions recommended for dealing with this challenge also face some feasibility constraints. I demonstrate how challenges of feasibility shape the directions of moral thinking about this area of climate action. (shrink)

Until now studies on the historical development of atomic spectroscopy have focused on three main aspects-its first applications as a method of chemical analysis, the formulation of spectral laws , and the rise of the old quantum theory. These developments of spectroscopy were based on the same assumption: the invariance of the atomic spectrum after fixing the chemical element . This paper shows that running alongside these lines of research there was another, no less important area of study based on (...) the negation of this assumption. The focus of these latter studies was the behaviour of atomic spectra as a function of different working conditions. English astrophysicist Sir Norman Lockyer played a central role in this research. While studying the effect of temperature on spectral lines and comparing stellar spectra with laboratory spectra, he discovered a new class of spectral lines . In an attempt to explain the origin of these lines, Lockyer, at the beginning of 1897 , hypothesized the 'dissociation' of the chemical elements into simplified forms of matter, named proto-elements. Lockyer's studies are mentioned by Thomson in the paper which introduces the corpuscle for the first time. In this paper we have tried to reconstruct the history of Lockyer's proto-elements and highlight the links between them and Thomson's corpuscle. Our analysis has shown that not only the famous studies on discharges in rarefied gases but also Lockyer's stellar spectroscopy played an important role in the work of J. J. Thomson, convincing him that the atom was complex and divisible. (shrink)