Acchs Bio and Physics

I think the eight point deep ecology platform is a great ideological platform. I think it makes sense that it was written awhile ago when nothing of the sort had been said before. Right now, it feels like there are more people on board with these ideas, if not actually living them out in their day to day lives. If seems like a more practical list of things that people should or should not do would be more useful at this point. What companies to avoid buying from? What ways to live in cities and still foster a diversity of ecosystems? What ways to get communities involved in such efforts? etc etc. How to get the government on board? Is that possible?  Ecosystems are strong because they can adapt as a whole. Ecosystems are made of so many parts that it is like a large group of people working together - if one struggles, it doesn't necessarily mean the whole group falls apart. The whole group might not work as well, but they adapt their new circumstances. Ecosystems are also fragile ...

It is interesting to think about if all vibrations are "good." What makes something good? Everything has a vibration, and in that sense, if we determine that something is good, its vibration is good. But we have all certainly felt what we perceive to be bad vibrations - walking into a room where there has just been an argument, hearing nails scratch on the chalkboard. These things are unpleasant, but are their vibrations bad? I think it's all subjective. When we were talking about resonance and objects being destroyed when their own natural resonance is externally amplified, it made me think of interpersonal clashes I've had. I'm a double Aries, which at times has certainly been a strong vibration to have. For most of my life, I've always clashed pretty hard with other fire types, especially other aries. During our conversation, I was thinking about how maybe this is because they are holding a certain vibration or resonance that is just too close to my own, c...

My world feels pretty asymmetric at the moment. When I think of symmetry, I think of balance - what you have on one side, you have on the other - things are evenly distributed over space and time. It is challenging to have life in grad school resemble anything close to balance. It'd be lovely if I spent as much time outdoors as indoors for some symmetry, and yet, some days we rarely have the chance to leave the building. Certainly there is plenty of symmetry in my life - I don't think we'd be alive without it, but at the moment things seemed skewed to the asymmetric. A CP violation is a violation of two symmetries. C stands for charge conjugation which transforms particles into antiparticles. And P for parity change - a system reflected in a mirror. The kaon particle violates CP because when when scientists changed the charge and the parity in these particles their decay rate also changed. This means that the kaon wouldn't decay the same if time were running backwards....

Like we talked about in class, the best was to distinguish a living system from a non-living system is to determine is that system is autopoietic. Autopoiesis means that a system is capable of maintaining and reproducing itself. The system is self-referring - it is constantly making itself. Human bodies are a system which continually produces itself. Our cells are constantly reproducing to make more of us. When we burn energy in our daily activities, our system takes in food and creates more of that energy. Our bodies are constantly creating life. We can compare this to a system that does not produce itself. In a factory, raw materials come in and a different product leaves. But the factory itself is run by other elements - electricity, workers, machines. To be an autopoietic system, the factory would have to be run by the raw materials coming in - like food for the body, the sheet metal, plastics, etc would have to keep the factory running and regenerating itself. Honestly, I don...

The thing I thought was so interesting about the article, "Our common ancestor with chimps may be from Europe, not Africa," was how resistant scientists were to this idea. They cast off the idea because of a fossil they deemed was not good enough. The article said that they would be much more likely to accept this fossil had it come from Africa. It made me realize how stuck we get in our theories and how much we don't like having them challenged. Once we come up with a narrative, changing this narrative can be a real struggle for our egos. I think the Gaia Theory is becoming more and more accepted (perhaps less with our current administration though). I think people are starting to view the earth as a living system in which we all are a part of. We can see this more and more with the environmental movements. It's much easier to not take responsibility for how we treat the planet if we view it as this dead rock on which we live. Honestly, the idea that the earth is no...

E = mc 2 affects us all the time. Whenever we do anything, we release energy, which ever so slightly decreases our mass. It also explains the potential energy of objects. The more mass an object has the more energy it can also release. Think about a really huge body builder trying to move a heavy object, versus a child moving the same object. Obviously, the person with more mass will have the most energy to expend. This is a rather simplistic way to view it though. Its the idea of even immobile seemingly "dead" objects having qi. A table's qi is just more dense than our qi - but it still holds energy.  The four forces are all interactions between particles. Gravity is the easiest force for us to comprehend - its two objects attraction to one another. The earth has great mass, and so our particles are attracted to it - it keeps us on the ground. Electromagnetism holds particles with a charge together. It's what keeps objects in tact. The strong force is what holds the...