hackenslash wrote:He can't. David's got you cornered, because you're relying on a distinction without a difference. Power is simply usable energy.

Sorry you are saying that power is a form of energy that is usable? Is that correct?

Pretty much, yes. For more, see here.

hackenslash wrote:He can't. David's got you cornered, because you're relying on a distinction without a difference. Power is simply usable energy.

No I'm not.

Sendraks started it - where is he, the punicious bugger? Can we get back to bees before the penny drops and there's a huge groan at my increasingly huge inability to be funny. Don't worry, I'm not planning a career in it...

Ah, my comedy gland often fails to fire when I'm sufficiently inebriated.

Carry on.

hackenslash wrote:Ah, my comedy gland often fails to fire when I'm sufficiently inebriated.

Carry on.

Have you got it, or are you faking?

Neither.

hackenslash wrote:Neither.

Oops.

[Makes mental note: must avoid false dichotomies even when drinking.]

Sorry. I was drinking.

Topcat, you are using words that are in normal use in physics, but you evidently have your own definitions of them. Eg, in physics, "power" = "rate of use/conversion/dissipation of energy", not simply "ability". Eg, One unit of energy is the Joule, and one unit of power is the Watt (= Joules/second).
Thus, hack's definition seems to be the everyday usage (power = abiity).

Ok, I can't be arsed to prolong the joke any longer, so I'll explain it. As with all such, it will lose a lot in the explaining, and I daresay I'll be accused of giving the game away about the bees too, but given that several people had been goading JayJay into dropping himself in the shit by talking amusing bollocks about how humans and bees see flowers, I imagine he went and looked it up.

It was in that context that when Sendraks said this:

Sendraks wrote:But, but, but what about the bees JayJay?
Tell us about the bees, humans and how they choose flowers. Tell us JayJay.

I commented that

TopCat wrote:I can feel a real anticlimax coming on...

This prompted a short exchange of puns, and Sendraks obviously got my comment about beauty being in the eye of the beeholder (albeeit with a very small second 'e'), Because he said this:

Sendraks wrote:I wonder how beholders view the world. You know, shortly before they disintegrate something.

His use of the word 'disintegrate' was incongruous enough to catch my attention. I wondered what he meant by disintegrate, and although I'm often not that quick, I noticed that substituting 'differentiate' for 'disintegrate' (like in maffs, innit) made perfect sense of his sentence, in the context of what the bees are up to.

So we had a couple more puns based on light frequencies, and then I changed his meaning of differentiation, in my following ones. I even tried to give it away by referring to Sendraks as PUNicious (pernicious).

Differentiate (dis-integrate) energy wrt time, get power. Geddit now?

Sorry, as I said, it loses a lot in the explaining. It seemed funnier when I was pissed.

Carry on...

hackenslash wrote:Pretty much, yes. For more, see here.

Not interested in any links. Definitely interested in your view of power.

Sorry, can I confirm your view, "power is a form of usable energy", is that correct?

Can you give the SI unit of usable energy?

Can you give an example of unusable energy?

Are you able to give the SI unit of unusable energy? Is there a name for unusable energy?

colubridae wrote:

hackenslash wrote:Pretty much, yes. For more, see here.

Not interested in any links. Definitely interested in your view of power.

Sorry, can I confirm your view, "power is a form of usable energy", is that correct?

Can you give the SI unit of usable energy?

Can you give an example of unusable energy?

Are you able to give the SI unit of unusable energy? Is there a name for unusable energy?

He's got you there, hack!

colubridae wrote:Not interested in any links. Definitely interested in your view of power.

Then you should have followed the link, which was me explaining it.

Is there a name for unusable energy?

Yes, entropy.

DavidMcC wrote:He's got you there, hack!

Many have thought so in the past.

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:You express exasperation with my position but you fail to take into account the obvious point that ecologists aren’t paleoanthropologists. I’m not criticizing the scientific method or all scientists; I’m pointing to peculiarities in some particular narratives- e.g. that of Treves and Palmqvist in their reconstruction of hominin-predator interactions.

And how much influence do such people have on biology in general?
Seriously, I don't think I had facial hair before the speculative nature of anthropology was pretty clear to me, and the fact that opinions meaningfully differ at any point in time and change over time in itself points to how reliable they might be, even to someone not aware of how limited the amount of evidence is.
And personally, It makes very little difference to me what someone may think the precise order of tool use, fire use or the expansion of brains was. I'm far more interested in history from around the the point where fully-modern humans existed.

Particularly, you seem determined to misunderstand biology and biologists based significantly on a few anthropologists, who clearly are working at the speculative end of things, as they have always been.

And just as ecology is not a subset of biology, neither is anthropology.

I thought I had seen Ratskeps use every tactic imaginable, then I find you diminishing the weight of arguments that I was criticizing.

Lets look at your notion that Treves and Palmqvist are just a few anthropologists, who clearly are working at the speculative end of things, as they [anthroplogists?] have always been.

For the record, here again is a link to their chapter in a book Primate anti-Predation Strategies Reconstructing Hominin Insteractions with Mammalian Carivores (6.0-1;8Ma)

This isn’t strictly a peer reviewed article, its authors were doubtless invited on the basis of their track record. Their reference list gives some idea of that. Here are the entries where they were first authors:
Adrian Treves”
Treves, A. (1997). Vigilance and use of micro-habitat in solitary rainforest mammals. Mammalia,
61: 511–525.
Treves, A. (1999a). Has predation shaped the social systems of arboreal primates? Inter.
Jour. of Primatol., 20: 35–53.
Treves, A. (2000). Theory and method in studies of vigilance and aggregation. Animal
Behaviour, 60: 711–722.
Treves, A. (2002). Predicting predation risk for foraging, arboreal monkeys. In L. Miller
(Ed.), Eat or be eaten: Predator sensitive foraging in nonhuman primates (pp. 222–241).
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Treves, A., and Chapman, C.A. (1996). Conspecific threat, predation avoidance and
resource defense: Implications for grouping in langurs. Behav. Ecol. and Sociobiol., 39:
43–53.
17. Hominin Interactions with Mammalian Carnivores 381
Treves, A., Drescher, A., and Ingrisano, N. (2001). Vigilance and aggregation in black
howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra). Behav. Ecol. and Sociobiol., 50: 90–95.
Treves, A., Drescher, A., and Snowdon, C.T. (2003). Maternal watchfulness in black howler
monkeys (Alouatta pigra). Ethology, 109: 135–146.
Treves, A., and Naughton-Treves, L. (1999). Risk and opportunity for humans coexisting
with large carnivores. Jour. of Human Evol., 36: 275–282.
Treves, A., and Pizzagalli, D. (2002). Vigilance and perception of social stimuli: Views
from ethology, and social neuroscience. In M. Bekoff, C. Allen, G. Burghardt (Eds.),
The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition
(pp. 463–469). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Paul Palmqvist:
Palmqvist, P. (2002). On the presence of Megantereon whitei at the south Turkwel hominin
site, northern Kenya. Jour. of Paleontol., 76: 923–930.
Palmqvist, P., and Arribas, A. (2001). Taphonomic decoding of the paleobiological information
locked in a lower Pleistocene assemblage of large mammals. Paleobiology, 27:
512–530.
Palmqvist, P, Martinez-Navarro, B., and Arribas, A. (1996). Prey selection by terrestrial
carnivores in a lower Pleistocene paleocommunity. Paleobiology, 22: 514–534.
Palmqvist, P., Arribas, A., and Mart´ınez-Navarro, B. (1999). Ecomorphological study of
large canids from the lower Pleistocene of southeastern Spain. Lethaia, 32: 75–88.
Palmqvist, P., Mart´ınez-Navarro, B., Toro, I., Espigares, M.P., Ros-Montoya, S.,
Torregrosa V., and P´erez-Claros, J.A. (2005). A re-evaluation of the evidence of human
presence during Early Pleistocene times in southeastern Spain. L’Anthropologie, 109:
411–450.
Palmqvist, P., Grocke, D.R., Arribas, A., and Farina, R.A. (2003). Paleoecological reconstruction
of a lower Pleistocene large mammal community using biogeochemical (δ13C,
δ15N, δ18O, Sr: Zn) and ecomorphological approaches. Paleobiology, 29: 205–229.

Of course this isn’t their full publishing record; Palmqvist has at least 90 articles published. Their chapter’s reference list has about 170 entries, so they aren’t building on their own “speculations” either, as you put it. I couldn’t easily have found a more apposite target to test my argument that atheist ideology has influenced the understanding and presentation of evolution.

In this case, I argue that their conclusion: We propose that the adaptive solution to the higher predation pressure of the end Miocene and Pliocene was a social adaptation that preceded any elaboration of material culture…is a presentation of human evolution in terms of self-creation, where the adaptation is driven within the species. It continues the fashion started by Darwin, who told the story of human evolution foregrounding sexual selection- this form of selection depends, not on the struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex

I need to present the case that Treves and Palmqvist’s conclusion is the opposite of the truth, that’s what ideologies do, they don’t just ‘bias’ standpoints, they turn them upside down. I’m trying to show that the small canines of Australopithecus shows that they had swopped the biting defense that primates are generally excellent at, for a defensive weapon use and the adaptive direction that imposed was towards rapid use of weapons. : So I propose that the adaptive solution to the higher predation pressure of the end Miocene and Pliocene was a physical adaptation that preceded any elaboration of material culture

Turning to your passage: “And personally, It makes very little difference to me what someone may think the precise order of tool use, fire use or the expansion of brains was. I'm far more interested in history from around the point where fully-modern humans existed.”, that’s also defense by attaching low weight to the issue you need to be defending, but it’s interesting in other ways as well. You don’t appreciate that if one dates weapon use before general “tool use” then it turns out that the man didn’t make the tool, the tool made the man (or, the hyena made the man etc, it’s an issue of exterior agency). Or at least, the weapon made the tennis player. And the big payoff; the weapon and the hyena made the stage for the talking primate. That’s a really interesting revisionist reading and if you are truly interested in modern man then like me, you should be very interested in why that particular obvious revisionist reading is only expressed by a creationist in a modern internet chat room.

One more thing, on where you say “And just as ecology is not a subset of biology, neither is anthropology” that’s a bit uncertain innit? Just look at the list of journals Treves and Palmqvist have published in.

Fenrir wrote:I will add that I spend much of my working life with surveyors and they would laugh themselves silly at JayJay.

Unless he provided beer.

Scratch that, even if he provided beer.

Surveyors don't stop laughing when we get our hands on a beer. Put your money where your mouth is, ask a surveyor buddy his or her opinion about Surveyor's Theory. It's really an observation more than a theory. It's that a dog has a physical problem in responding to a pointed stick. it can't crash through the stick to get at you and it can't easily get around the stick either. Not if there is a surveyor holding the stick.

Bees?
C'mon JayJay.

Sendraks wrote:Bees?
C'mon JayJay.

Seriously?

Yes, I'm super serious.
JayJay made a passing claim about how humans and bees choose flowers. I await with not-so-baited breath, for JayJay to expand on this.

So yes, bees.
Always, bees.