Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

Jan 9, 2020, 3:52 PM Hydrocarbons are from dead organic material – and you need an astonishing set of circumstances to make oil out of these things and preserve them. First, you’ve got to concentrate them somewhere where they’re not dispersed or oxidized – which means in swamps, marshes, lakes or something like that. (See “Peat Marshes” and “Bog Bodies”.) Then you’ve got to heat them up slowly over a long, long period to cook them up to make oil. And then, when they make oil and start to ‘ferment’, you’ve got to have some way of trapping the liquid and the gas. All these things, it turns out, happen on the margins of continents. Sediments just get washed in, and all those dead things get buried deeper and deeper and gently get cooked for a long time. So, the circumstances for making oil are very good on the margins of continents. Especially the margins of oceans that aren’t on a plate boundary – because there are no earthquakes there. Now, what happened in Saudi Arabia is that that happened to be on the margin of a huge ocean which separated Asia from the southern continents. So, a hundred million years ago, Africa, India and Arabia were all a long way further south from where they are now and they’ve all moved north and bashed into Asia. One of those places is [what is now] Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. And what’s happened is the margin of that ocean, with the margins of Arabia, and Africa and India, have all just popped up above sea level from the pressure of colliding together. Millions of years ago, most of the Middle East was covered by what scientists call the Tethys Ocean (aka Tethys Sea). Rivers flowing into the ocean gave rise to trillions of microscopic organisms and other marine plants and animals. The corpses of these organisms on the ocean floor is where oil (and natural gas) comes from. This is why they are called fossil fuels. Over millions of years, this decomposing organic material became covered by miles of new organic matter and also the sand and salt flowing in from the rivers and streams. Yes, salt flows into the ocean from freshwater rivers and streams. Anyway, these layers became more and more packed as newer layers formed on top of the previous layers. The pressure and heat from these upper layers change the buried organic matter into a sludgy substance of hydrocarbons and other compounds that constitute what we know as crude oil. Theoretically, as long as marine life keeps dying, oil will keep being created So it’s not that there is more oil in the middle east than anywhere else. There’s loads of oil on the other continental margins – but that’s all underwater. It’s hard and expensive to get out. Whereas in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq it’s popped up nicely above sea level and also in. So it’s actually extremely easy to find, an cheap to take out. It’s just more that it is conveniently situated than anything else. (Source: From an interview with James Jackson from the University of Cambridge and other sources on the internet, map from paleomap project)

Jan 9, 2020, 3:52 PM Hydrocarbons are from dead organic material – and you need an astonishing set of circumstances to make oil out of these things and preserve them. First, you’ve got to concentrate them somewhere where they’re not dispersed or oxidized – which means in swamps, marshes, lakes or something like that. (See “Peat Marshes” and “Bog Bodies”.) Then you’ve got to heat them up slowly over a long, long period to cook them up to make oil. And then, when they make oil and start to ‘ferment’, you’ve got to have some way of trapping the liquid and the gas. All these things, it turns out, happen on the margins of continents. Sediments just get washed in, and all those dead things get buried deeper and deeper and gently get cooked for a long time. So, the circumstances for making oil are very good on the margins of continents. Especially the margins of oceans that aren’t on a plate boundary – because there are no earthquakes there. Now, what happened in Saudi Arabia is that that happened to be on the margin of a huge ocean which separated Asia from the southern continents. So, a hundred million years ago, Africa, India and Arabia were all a long way further south from where they are now and they’ve all moved north and bashed into Asia. One of those places is [what is now] Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. And what’s happened is the margin of that ocean, with the margins of Arabia, and Africa and India, have all just popped up above sea level from the pressure of colliding together. Millions of years ago, most of the Middle East was covered by what scientists call the Tethys Ocean (aka Tethys Sea). Rivers flowing into the ocean gave rise to trillions of microscopic organisms and other marine plants and animals. The corpses of these organisms on the ocean floor is where oil (and natural gas) comes from. This is why they are called fossil fuels. Over millions of years, this decomposing organic material became covered by miles of new organic matter and also the sand and salt flowing in from the rivers and streams. Yes, salt flows into the ocean from freshwater rivers and streams. Anyway, these layers became more and more packed as newer layers formed on top of the previous layers. The pressure and heat from these upper layers change the buried organic matter into a sludgy substance of hydrocarbons and other compounds that constitute what we know as crude oil. Theoretically, as long as marine life keeps dying, oil will keep being created So it’s not that there is more oil in the middle east than anywhere else. There’s loads of oil on the other continental margins – but that’s all underwater. It’s hard and expensive to get out. Whereas in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq it’s popped up nicely above sea level and also in. So it’s actually extremely easy to find, an cheap to take out. It’s just more that it is conveniently situated than anything else. (Source: From an interview with James Jackson from the University of Cambridge and other sources on the internet, map from paleomap project)

Jan 10, 2020, 4:01 PM

—“At the risk of getting you started 🙂 , what is your take on Integral politics, philosophy, or whatever?”—‎Frank Chandler

I love it that you asked the question honestly. lol. Wilber’s Integral theory, much like say, MBTI vs Big5/Moral Foundations is a pseudoscientific framework for a rather obvious empirical pattern, framed by his search through eastern philosophy upon what many mid-century thinkers perceived as a failure of the western model – but what was instead, the peak of the success of the second jewish abrahamic undermining of western civilization under marx, boas, freud, adorno-fromm, derrida, friedan et al, to replace masculine hierarchical military western order in competition with the church with a feminine monopoly pseudoscientific and sophomoric order of public intellectuals (secular priesthood) by undermining from within. Traditional western tripartism (military-law-faith and Fight-Work-Pray) was and what remains, still is, a system of cooperation between the classes and genders mediated by familial and individual sovereignty under our thousands of years of traditional customary law. So, one can take the traditional western system of cooperation and simply describe it in scientific terms. Or as we do in Propertarianism, do the same in biological and economic terms, or one can make silly stuff up like Wilber does, or the entire field of ‘pseudoscientific psychology’ that has been replaced by behavioral economics (scientific psychology), neurology, and cognitive science. This is another problem of literary empathic and sympathetic (feminine immature) vs scientific analytic and operational (masculine mature) systems of thinking which perpetuates the historical competition between Theological nonsense by external analogy, philosophical ideal nonsense by internal analogy, and scientific and empirical truth by falsifying both. But our brains evolved from the sensory to the physical to the interpersonal to the analytic, and it is understandable why the process of development is limited and therefore ability and agency by our individual distribution of ability along that spectrum – and that is why training people in physical fitness(body), stoicism(emotions), manners-ethics-morals(intuition), the grammars (measurements), and job skills (productive cooperation) is necessary to produce fully functional human beings in each of the cognitive series of development. So I view ‘that stuff’ as pseudoscientific nonsense for simpletons no matter what it is, from freud through the reformation in psychology with the “Operationalist Movement” that began in the 80’s . Thankfully the cognitive scientists branched off and and matured by 2000, and settled all this nonsense over the past twenty years.

Jan 10, 2020, 4:01 PM

—“At the risk of getting you started 🙂 , what is your take on Integral politics, philosophy, or whatever?”—‎Frank Chandler

I love it that you asked the question honestly. lol. Wilber’s Integral theory, much like say, MBTI vs Big5/Moral Foundations is a pseudoscientific framework for a rather obvious empirical pattern, framed by his search through eastern philosophy upon what many mid-century thinkers perceived as a failure of the western model – but what was instead, the peak of the success of the second jewish abrahamic undermining of western civilization under marx, boas, freud, adorno-fromm, derrida, friedan et al, to replace masculine hierarchical military western order in competition with the church with a feminine monopoly pseudoscientific and sophomoric order of public intellectuals (secular priesthood) by undermining from within. Traditional western tripartism (military-law-faith and Fight-Work-Pray) was and what remains, still is, a system of cooperation between the classes and genders mediated by familial and individual sovereignty under our thousands of years of traditional customary law. So, one can take the traditional western system of cooperation and simply describe it in scientific terms. Or as we do in Propertarianism, do the same in biological and economic terms, or one can make silly stuff up like Wilber does, or the entire field of ‘pseudoscientific psychology’ that has been replaced by behavioral economics (scientific psychology), neurology, and cognitive science. This is another problem of literary empathic and sympathetic (feminine immature) vs scientific analytic and operational (masculine mature) systems of thinking which perpetuates the historical competition between Theological nonsense by external analogy, philosophical ideal nonsense by internal analogy, and scientific and empirical truth by falsifying both. But our brains evolved from the sensory to the physical to the interpersonal to the analytic, and it is understandable why the process of development is limited and therefore ability and agency by our individual distribution of ability along that spectrum – and that is why training people in physical fitness(body), stoicism(emotions), manners-ethics-morals(intuition), the grammars (measurements), and job skills (productive cooperation) is necessary to produce fully functional human beings in each of the cognitive series of development. So I view ‘that stuff’ as pseudoscientific nonsense for simpletons no matter what it is, from freud through the reformation in psychology with the “Operationalist Movement” that began in the 80’s . Thankfully the cognitive scientists branched off and and matured by 2000, and settled all this nonsense over the past twenty years.