Weight Loss

So I was thinking about dieting and the like a few weeks back (thinking in the philosophical sense, not the "I need to implement this" sense), when I started wondering: how do we lose weight? I didn't mean in the sense of "exercise and eat well", I meant what is the physical mechanism for losing the mass (the opposite mechanism is all too obvious). After some thought, I ruled out waste excretion, since clearly not all of what we eat is wasteful, and exercising doesn't make us go use the restroom more often than not exercising. Then I thought back to 9th grade biology, and it all became clear.

The most basic form of cellular respiration essentially takes oxygen from outside the body and glucose from inside the body and produces carbon dioxide, which we breathe out, water, and energy to phosphorylate ADP into ATP. If we treat the body as a black box, then we input oxygen and output carbon dioxide. In other words, we breathe.

You lose weight by breathing. Breathing out, specifically. Am I the only one that finds that really cool?

Carnivale!

Welcome to the 59th weekly Objectivist Roundup! This is my first time hosting this fabulous enterprise, and I hope to be able to do it justice.

In order to add a bit of my own touch to the excellence that is this blog carnival, I've made two changes to the standard format. First, you get my personal commentary after each submission, so you can know what I think about something in order to help you decide what you should think :^P. Second, I've added a section at the end for blogs that I know of that didn't submit to this week's carnival but still had quality posts this week. Hope you enjoy!

First off, Amy Mossoff presents The Original Sin posted at The Little Things. This post analyzes pride and contrasts it with arrogance and conceit within the context of Olympic sports. I think it hits on one of the key reasons Americans like sports so much.

Gideon Reich presents If there is no God (Part I) posted at Armchair Intellectual, saying, "A four part critique of Dennis Prager's recent op-ed "If there is no God"". Reich tackles four common arguments made by theists, and shows just how absurd they are. A solid post.

Ari Armstrong presents Churches Should Keep Out of Politics, Poll Says posted at AriArmstrong.com, saying, "A quick summary of poll results showing that Americans are somewhat more leery of injecting religion into politics." After two years of worry, this post gives me a slight reassurance that this country might not actually be sliding back into the dark ages.

Andy Clarkson presents Great Men And Their Contributions posted at The Charlotte Capitalist. This post briefly outlines the achievements of 18 men which indirectly led to the possibility of his company.

Doug presents Read My Book Reviews on Amazon.com posted at Dark Waters Blogs. I myself have read a few of Doug's book reviews, and I recommend you do the same!

Gus Van Horn presents Bush's Statist Legacy posted at Gus Van Horn, saying, "Bush's failure as a president has not been because he wasn't conservative enough, it has been because conservatism is antithetical to individual rights." This post clearly and succinctly analyzes, in typical Gus fashion, a RealClear Politics article about the legacy of Bush's presidency. Strongly recommended!

Paul McKeever presents An Objectivist on a Life Boat posted at Paul McKeever, saying, "I think the too-often-heard argument that "ethics does not apply in life boat scenarios or other emergencies" is, in fact, inconsistent with Objectivism and with the Axiom of Identity. Here's my analysis, in both written and video formats (the written is, largely, a transcription of the extemporaneously-made argument in my video)." This presents an extremely thought-provoking reconsideration of the typical response to a life-boat scenario. I'm not quite sure I agree, but it's definitely interesting. You might even see a response from me in the future...

PC presents Time for an Olympian razor posted at Not PC. A convincing argument for the standards of what should be considered an Olympic sport is laid out. As someone who has always wondered about the line between sport and game and about which sports should be included in events like the Olympics, this was very interesting to me.

Myrhaf presents It Can Happen Here posted at Myrhaf. He writes a fairly convincing (and fairly terrifying) warning about the extent to which Obama represents the coming of Fascism to America.

So that's that for the submitted posts. What follows is a list of posts that I thought were worthy for inclusion, but for some reason or other were not submitted to the carnival. Be aware that the following authors did not choose to affiliate themselves with the Objectivist carnival, though some have done so in the past, and treat my list for what it is: a recommended-reading list.

Galileo Blogs presents Adults Have the Right to Drink Alcohol posted at Galileo Blogs. Using the recent declaration of 100 college presidents that the drinking age should be lowered to 18 as a starting point, Galileo Blogs argues that very point on the grounds that 18 year old's should be legally treated as adults.

Diana Hsieh presents Faith-Based Politics is a Losing Strategy posted at Politics without God. This is a media press release chastising the Democrats for further embracing faith as having a role in government.

Liriodendron presents Hello From Jesusland posted at Spark A Synapse. This is a scary look at three reasons to be worried about the state of Nebraska.

Edward Cline presents A Fateful Forgiveness posted at The Rule of Reason. This post analyzes another in the growing list of legal victories for Islamists. Appeasement abounds.

Paul Hsieh presents Is Sleep Essential? posted at GeekPress. As someone who wants to end the need for sleep within his lifetime, this is an extremely intriguing article.

Kim presents School in Full Swing--Curriculum and No Curriculum posted at Kim's Play Place. An in-depth look at what an actual homeschooling curriculum looks like

C. August presents Classical Music Request posted at Titanic Deck Chairs. The meat of this post is in the comments.

K.M. presents Culture posted at Applying Philosophy to Life. This post takes a stab at analyzing the meaning of the often-hazy concept of "culture", and does a very good job at it.

Adam Reed presents InLine Activism: A University Policy on Free Expression posted at Born to Identify. This is an excellent example of both inline activism and of a proper speech policy at a University.

Darren Cauthon presents Man With a Plan posted at Darren Cauthon. A short and sweet analysis of the fundamental nature of Obama's "plan" for America.

Ari presents Republican Majority for Choice posted at Free Colorado. This post tells of a group that can hopefully push the Republican party back in the right direction.

Noah Stahl presents Enforcing 'Constructive Behavioral Change' posted at The Undercurrent Blog. An insightful look at how and why almost every political discussion/debate completely misses the mark

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Final(ish) Fall Semester Schedule

So, after a week of discussions with professors, advisers, and administrators, I think I've finally found my final schedule for this fall. I'm gonna have so much fun!

Fall Semester Schedule - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Fall Semester Schedule

Moved In!

So I'm all settled in to my dorm at the U. of R... Turns out time to do the little things like sleep or write blog posts are very limited, even before classes start.

Establishing Negative Scientific Claims

Some of the more famous (and more important) of the laws of science involve a statement of what could not happen. For example, thermodynamics states that no substance could ever go below a certain temperature, and special relativity states that nothing could ever move faster than a certain velocity. As far as I know, however, there is nothing in Dr. Peikoff's induction theory that can deal directly with these cases (his theory deals with establishing positive causative connections). How, then, should these claims be reached?

Following Dr. Peikoff's pattern, let's look at the history of science for a clue. According to Wikipedia (which I am going to assume is correct for this post, since the particular historical facts aren't fundamental here), the first person to come up with the idea of an absolute zero in temperature was Guillaume Amontons. Amontons established (using the methods already outlined by Dr. Peikoff) a positive (in the mathematical sense) relationship between pressure and temperature, which would later be be shown to be a linear relationship. He then realized that this relationship, if it held true at extremes, implied a limit to temperature because pressure would eventually reach zero. If pressure were allowed to reach below zero, that would have to mean that somehow decreasing temperature causes the pressure around the containter to increase beyond the air pressure at that point, which would be absurd. Thus, the idea of a minimum temperature is necessary.

I think this example opens the door to answering my initial question. In this case, and I think in all such cases, a relationship between two factors was established a la Peikoff (not explicitly a la Peikoff, of course), and then, as an implication of the relationship established, a certain condition of one of the factors was shown to lead to a contradiction or an absurdity in the other, thus necessitating a limit on the first factor. Any condition which would theoretically cause some quantity to become actually infinite, or some scalar quantity to become negative, would therefore have to be thrown out. An important precondition of using this method is apparent: the relationship established must be correct even in the context of the extremes being discussed. If, for example, Newton's laws seemingly led to a contradiction in one of their terms near the speed of light (I don't think they do, but as an example), then there would still be no necessity to limit one of the other terms since Newton's laws do not apply at such speeds.

If this method is correct, how was the speed of light as an upper limit established? What contradiction would be reached if something exceeded that speed?

Motorcycle!

I'm off for an intensive, two-day course in riding motorcycles. It's going to be awesome, but also not very conducive to blog posting. See you tomorrow evening!

Entities!

Yesterday, I intended to write a post posing various questions about entities, but I decided to do some research first and came upon an intensely valuable discussion in the appendix of the second edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The discussion is entitled "Entities and Their Makeup", and it will be referred to in a future post (probably Wednesday's), so get reading!

Spreading Knowledge and Expanding Knowledge

There's been a recent push within the Objectivist movement to direct efforts toward cultural change (OCON 2008 even had "cultural change" as its theme). While I do see the value and extreme importance in the quest to spread the ideas of Objectivism to an ever-wider audience, I'm personally much more interested in the other side of intellectual progress: expanding our knowledge further. Therefore, to the extent that this blog focuses on Objectivism qua movement, it will (mostly) focus on expansions of knowledge within philosophy, or expansions of knowledge outside of philosophy but reached through an Objectivist framework. To that end, I've come up with a list of people that I know of that are working on this aspect of progress. This list is by no means exhaustive and I'll gladly take suggestions for additions:

• Dr. Leonard Peikoff: This man is a giant. Even if we only count the work he's done since Miss Rand's death, his résumé is extremely impressive. Within the field of philosophy, he wrote the first systematic, in depth description of the entire philosophy of Objectivism, he developed the basis of the first workable theory of induction, and came up with a method of analyzing cultural trends in terms of their essential metaphysical and epistemological bases (the DIM hypothesis). In addition, he has done a lot of valuable work on the theory of education and on the development of rational thinking methods, including lectures on grammar, logic, communication, and thinking in general.
• Dr. Harry Binswanger: Much of Dr. Binswanger's work focuses around consciousness and science. He has multiple lectures on consciousness from both a metaphysical and scientific aspect, and has expanded the understanding of the nature of the subconscious through his work on psycho-epistemology and emotions. He is currently working on a book on consciousness, which I expect will integrate all of this work. He has also done some work on the philosophy of science, and wrote a book about the biological basis of concepts relating to goal-directed action (The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts). Finally, he runs HBL, a moderated email list for those serious about Objectivism.
• David Harriman: He's essentially Professor Science, which makes him my hero. He worked with Dr. Peikoff on the initial presentation of his new theory of induction, and is currently working on making it into a book (The Inductive Method in Physics). He's done a lot of other work on the philosophy and history of science (though I disagree with some of his philosophical conclusions about space), and he's worked out a curriculum to rationally teach science in a way that leads to actual understanding, rather than memorized floating abstractions. He is also a part of the Falling Apple Science Institute.
• Lisa VanDamme: Miss VanDamme's work lies in the field of education, both on the theoretical side and the applied side. While she does have a few lectures and articles on the theory of education, her most impressive achievement to me is her school, The VanDamme Academy. I could type for hours about what I love about this school, but I'll let you go to the website and find out from the source.
• Scott Powell: Mr. Powell is the history teacher you wish you could have had. In addition to his blog where he applies historical context and principles to current events, he has immensely valuable resources avaliable both to help parents teach their children history properly (History at Our House) and a four-part series for adults who didn't get a proper history education in the first place (A First History for Adults).

Expect to see more about these folks in the future!

And While Lenin Read a Book on Marx (Which One?)

This summer, I spent six weeks as a resident assistant at the Loudonville, NY site of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer program. The job essentially consisted of entertaining and dealing/interacting/living with the students when they weren't in class. I have a bunch of scattered thoughts about the experience that I haven't organized yet, so here they are in scattered form:

• The job is extremely fun, but extremely exhausting. You're always running around, you're on a fixed, full schedule, and you have to deal with pubescent teenagers with the added caveat that they're (mostly) extremely bright. If you enjoy working with kids and like the quirks that come along with being a "talented youth", then I highly reccomend the job, but be prepared to collapse the day after work ends.
• Wait until after you've had a year of college to take this job. I was the only staff member who hadn't gone to college yet, and it set me back in two respects: a. All the other staff had a common experience around which to bond/form friendships/etc., and b. there are certain interpersonal skills that I'm now convinced can only come from living and working with non-family members for an extended period of time that I simply lacked. Although my age didn't affect my work with the students that much, those two factors (along with a bad first impression on my part) made interactions with the other staff a lot more difficult.
• If you're a former CTY student yourself, make sure the emphasis is on former. Knowing how CTY worked and how the students thought was an enourmous asset to my work, but I had to constantly check myself to make sure I was keeping an appropriate boundary between myself and the students. If that boundary can be maintained, though, I think being a former student puts you in a very good position to do the job well.
• Another point from a former student's perspective: Be prepared to face some issues that you never knew existed when you were a student. Coming into the job, I expected to face issues with students, but I was unprepared for issues on the administrative side of things. As a student I always thought everything was perfectly organized and planned out and just all-around squeaky-clean on the administrative side. This is not always the case, and in addition to being able to deal with any such issues you also have to be able to keep the issues from the students, so they think everything is perfectly organized and planned out.
• As awesome as the job was, the one thing I really missed was doing anything academic. My favorite part of CTY (and of most of my life so far) was the classes, and as an RA you miss out on that side of the program, for the most part. If I do CTY again next year, it may be as a teaching assistant.

I'm sure there's a lot more to say, but after six weeks of having CTY be the only thing on my mind, I really don't want to think about it any more.

End of Summer Hiatus

So it turns out that the beginning of summer vacation is a pretty bad time to try to restart a blog. I've had a hella-busy summer, but with school just around the corner I think I'll be able to post more frequently. I think I'm going to try working a blog post into my morning routine; we'll see how that works out.