Accept disgrace willingly

Accept misfortune as the human condition.

What do you mean  by "Accept misfortune as the human condition?"

Accept being unimportant.

Do not be concerned with loss or gain.

This is called "accepting disgrace willingly."

What to you mean by 'accept misfortune as the human condition?"

Misfortune comes from having a body.

Without a body, how could there be misfortune.

Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.

Love the world as you love your own self; then you can truly care for all things.

Tao Te Ching  (Ch-13)

And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth." And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

GENESIS I (V-14-19)

Acamus, one of my favorite bloggers noted this during a discussion of the earth at 6,000 years:

In all seriousness: that God put them there to test our faith. Just like he is doing with the light from stars: do you believe those scientists about how many thousands of light-years it has traveled to get to our eyes? God the trickster.

In physics, the speed of light (usually denoted c) refers to a fundamental physical constant, the speed at which light and all electromagnetic radiation travel in a perfect vacuum, which is 299,792,458 metres per second (about 1,079 million kilometres per hour or 671 million miles per hour). The speed of light is of significant importance in the understanding and study of relativity, spacetime, astronomy, space travel, and other fields.

You wish to know a constant in the universe?  Time is relative. Space is twisted.

But there is one constant, the speed of light. Now because of relativity, you can easily state hey, if time is not a constant, how the hell would you know how fast you are traveling in the first place?

And my mind has trouble grasping certain concepts. Try this one.

I am traveling on a freeway at 55 miles per hour, a car coming towards me is traveling 55 MPH. Ok, we are surely coming at each other at a speed of 110 mph? There is no doubt about this. Are we assuming things not in evidence? Have the speedometers been recently gauged? What is the variance factor? That is, just because my speedometer says '55mph' does not mean 55 mph absolutely.

There would be some variance between mile 1 and mile 2 for both vehicles. Wind factors change, humidity changes, road conditions change.....

In the end, who the hell cares? I mean the two objects are approaching each other at 110 mph.

Q was talking about (or shall I say ranting) that he can only trust those with IQ's under 90 or between 150 and 160. hahahaha.

Well I am under that 150 threshhold and I have the damnedest time attempting to grab hold of the thought experiments of Einstein or the thousands who understand what he was getting at in most of his theories.

But we are told that if a train is traveling at the speed of light and another train is coming in the opposite direction at the speed of light and one train has a light directed in front of it and the other train has a light source directed in front of it, the first train will view the light coming towards it as traveling toward it AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT.

Now we do not have planes, trains, automobiles or space ships that even approximate this speed so who the hell cares?  But the mystery of light? Wow. I love the mystery of light; and the mystery of light speed.

Do I pretend to understand this? No.  I know from the children's shows I see on the history channel that it is all about perspective.

But we DEPEND upon the speed of light being a constant. Oh yes we do. When I pushed 'submit' for this blog, the info traveled at the speed of light. And, for every piece of technology bridging this pc to the TPMC blog, there are mathematical equations.  And I do not care if we are discussing INTELL implants, satellite signals, receptor stations, cable installations,,,,,they all have underlying mathematical equations that led to their manufacture. That is, they could not have been manufactured without underlying mathematical equations. And EVERY SINGLE ONE of these equations contains C, the constant for the speed of light or the mechanism would not work.

And our radios, our televisions, our Atari games, well...none of them would work without C. None of them.

We, the entire human race relies upon the speed of light being a constant. Now there are variances of course.  What might effect the speed of light at any given time?  Well the environment in which the light is traveling. After all, there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum.

Those materials with large indices of refraction are called optically dense media. (A medium is just a fancy word for a type of material.) Materials with indices of refraction closer to one are called optically rare media. Being naturally lazy creatures, we generally drop the word "optical'' and talk about dense and rare materials. Just be careful not to confuse dense and rare in the optical context with mass density!

Notice that the index of refraction of air differs from the index of refraction of vacuum by a very small amount. For applications with less than 5 digits of accuracy, the index of refraction of air is the same as that of vacuum, n= 1.000.  You will probably not encounter a situation in which the difference between air and vacuum matters, unless you plan a future in precise optics experimentation.

Even though light slows down in matter, it still travels at an amazing speed, even through a dense material such as lead still travels at an amazing speed.  (Although light does not travel far through lead before being absorbed, high-energy gamma rays can travel a centimeter or so through lead at the speed calculated here.)  Using the definition of n, we can find the speed of light through lead:   http://www.rpi.edu/dept/phys/Dept2/APPhys1/optics/optics/node4

Light travels at a slower speed in water or in our atmosphere for that matter. The speed of light is affected by gravity.  But the variance is so small that it is meaningless except within certain boundaries of 'precise optics experimentation.' And any variance is measurable. Any variance is predictable.

If the speed of light is a constant, then the universe as far as our astrophysicists can tell must be billions and billions of years old. Period. There is no exception. You see?

Well some of these 'theologians' went to college and stuff and took more courses than Jesus On Dinosaur Back. And if these demagogues cannot get past the speed of light as a constant, they are sunk; because they must admit the EXTREME age of the universe.

You see, they will pshaw the contention that the bible indeed describes the earth as flat, that the earth was created before the sun and the stars.....But they will maintain the 'newness' of the earth and the universe anyway. This is exceeding stupid to me, but is eaten up by a relatively large segment of our population.

I maintain that the anti evolutionists are forced to dispute that light travels at a constant speed. These religious zealots build their entire pyramid of idiocy on the 'newness' crap. If that is taken away, they perceive that they lose the argument.  It just does not work for them to say, well God can do anything. He can change the speed of light anytime he wishes. TALK ABOUT POTENTIAL VIRAL THREATS!!!

So they spend some time thinking. How can we get past what really is God's Constant?  Well some of them just use a leap of logic. I mean: 

I am the way, the LIGHT, and the truth.

I love Christopher Hitchens. If I could choose anyone in the world to have a good brandy with, it would be CH. Oh there were times I wished to kill him. I mean his backing of Bush and the Iraqi war...

But he is sooooooooo goooooooooood at tete a tete, at argument, at debate. When he is arguing a perspective with which I agree on some subject, I am gratified. So like Twain or Bryan or Palin, Hitchens goes on the speech circuit getting paid, usually and always selling his latest book.

And if you wander through youtube you will find him debating priests, rabbis, ministers and philosophers. I had just recalled a debate he had with Dinesh D'Souza.  DD is basically a right wing prick, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinesh_D%27Souza  Dinish is caught outing gays at Dartmouth as well as denouncing the entrance policies there. Just a prick.

In the debate that I witnessed, D'Souza made an interesting comment. He stated that we really do not KNOW the speed of light.

It was queer to me because Hitchens had not been discussing it.  This Indian started going on and on about the travails of inductive reasoning.  He said that just because we have measured the speed of light does not mean we know what the speed of light actually is. He then started ranting that even if we had measured the speed of light a thousand times, nay a million times it would not necessarily prove anything.

I was struck by this.  Not just his faulty reasoning, but I was in a quandary as to why he brought up the subject at all. This must be important to him and his cause. I cannot reproduce the entire debate because of...well because of capitalism. You may purchase it here:  http://www.tkc.edu/debate/

Hitchens, disputes the suspension of the laws of physics such as the constant of the universe, the speed of light. He was forced to here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vMeAwpTW1I

Well I found an old series of essays by the conservative prick that included this gem:

So what exactly are scientific laws and what degree of certainty can we attach to them? This question was raised in a recent email I received. "My question concerns your summation of Hume's position concerning scientific laws," the writer says. In my book on Christianity, I cited Hume to make the point that "no finite number of observations, however large, can be used to derive an unrestricted general conclusion that is logically defensible."  http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/bloggers/dinesh-dsouza

So where do we get this so-called "law"? And where do we get other laws, such as Newton's inverse square law or the law that says "light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum"? Hume would argue that we have measured many humans and other life forms and found DNA and therefore we infer that all humans and other life forms are made of DNA. Similarly we have measured the speed of light frequently and from this we derive the idea that light always and everywhere travels at the same speed.

In particular, just because we have measured light at a given speed a hundred or a thousand or ten million times doesn't mean that light always and everywhere travels at that speed. How do we know that on a distant star, light travels at the same speed as it does here? In truth, we do not know. Along the same lines, if tomorrow a life form was located on, say, Mars, and this life form did not contain DNA, we could no longer hold that all life forms are made of DNA.

From this we can conclude that: scientific laws are not really "laws" but merely generalizations based on previous tries. Once we recognize this we see why miracles are entirely within the realm of scientific possibility. Since we cannot name a single empirical scientific law that is in principle inviolable, we cannot rule out deviations from these so-called laws. I'm not arguing for the validity of this or that miracle. I'm simply saying that the idea that these things cannot happen is based on an ignorance of what science shows and doesn't show.  http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/bloggers/dinesh-dsouza

This is just one in a series of posts I wish to do on this subject.  I wish here to simply point out that if you are attempting to discuss an issue related to light or the speed of light, you cannot converse with Dinesh the prick. It is a waste of time. He might give you insights as to the problems between the Hindus and Muslims in India with a decidedly conservative slant that you would have to research later. But he is an idiot in this area of conversation.

My point in this series is that  people who call themselves intelligent designers are really fundamental creationists. Their real point is to guide people into the dark ages. To put a six thousand, or eight thousand or ten thousand year age upon the earth. To put the earth at the center of universe. To undo five hundred years of experimentation and deduction.  In short, to throw reason to the winds.

Do not worry about stratifications, about levels of idiocy. That is not their aim. Some will say, hey I am not saying the earth is 6000 years old.  Yes they are. They are lying. They are liars.

And like C-Street folks, they do not feel that their 'laws' of science or religion or anything else apply to them. They are totalitarianists.  Period.

Watch this from another fascist theologian:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsJmBevvR0Y&feature=related

He calls human domestication of dogs, 'microevolution' . Lee Strobel sees a great difference between micro evolution and macro evolution. He claims that his argument places science against  science not science against religion.

People, there is a conspiracy going on here.

WE MUST NOT LOSE OUR BELIEF IN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. Ha!!!