Mystery of Ascia

Jeff Wilson · 22 Jan 2011, 06:25 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:25:35 -0600
Subject: (urth) Mystery of Ascia
In-Reply-To: <5C53D0A0D39E42D585C20989B794519F@jill>
References: <SNT123-W45C15E43818C3488355001CFFB0 at phx.gbl>
	<5C53D0A0D39E42D585C20989B794519F@jill>
Message-ID: <4D3A785F.90802 at io.com>

On 1/21/2011 11:48 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>>> Gravity was discovered before more modern understandings of it were
>>> developed. Does that mean we should
>>> throw away the concept?
>>
>> This statement really is beneath you. The same sort of blunder as "the
>> sky is blue".
>
> Just because I didn't bother to remonstrate with you doesn't mean I
> accept your assertion that the sky is pink, or green, or whatever colour
> you claim it is.

Well, a bit less than half the time it's black, and a bit less than that 
it's mostly blue of some shade. The remaining time is mostly reds and 
oranges, but there are definite attested and documented times for all of 
the above.

Likewise, gravity has remained the phenomenon of most unsupported 
material objects accelerating toward the earth, but the existence of the 
force supposed to cause this has come into serious question during the 
past century. It's still treated as a force for simplicity since it 
involves acceleration of mass, but the most peculiar geometric 
abstraction behind Einsteinian gravity is unlike anything else my 
physics text calls a force.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net