“…and so, when they make a wasteland, it is called peace.”
– P. Cornelius Tacitus (c. 110 CE)

A bleak, dreary, windy sort of place with a defining hollow ring — where nobody visits…

Flame must remain visible and unchanged, if only to goad the curiosity of the Seekers and promote some written response, for one of these curious Seekers may become a new Poster for the Habitable Zone and thus further enrich the board and its members with intriguing thoughts, ideas, revelations, innovations – perhaps a newer, brighter Flame.

Here is an example from the centauri-dreams.org comments page, rebuttals to an essay by J Traphagan. The essay is too long to reproduce here, but you are free to read it yourself and decide if it is indeed biased.

Thomas W Hair July 10, 2020, 14:54
While I somewhat agree with Dr. Traphagan, there does seem to be some political code talk going on in his post. The words diversity, culture and government are mentioned multiple times which leads me to believe that this post is not scientific in nature. This sounds like an agenda driven soapbox statement…sorry if my comments are too forward.

John Traphagan July 10, 2020, 15:34
Nope. No political agenda. I’m a cultural anthropologist, so it seems logical that I would use the term “culture” fairly often. Cultural anthropologists are scientists who are interested in the diversity of patterns of behavior, values, and beliefs. Thus, “diversity” seems a fairly logical term to use. And as for “government”, well as far as I know every society on our planet has a government and it’s pretty difficult to talk about the reaction of governments without use of the term “government.” No codes, just the appropriate words for the topic about which I am writing.

Doug Loss July 11, 2020, 7:49
John, your reference to “systemic racism” is a clear code word. This is a term not accepted outside of one particular ideology in our society (although that ideology is nearly ubiquitous in academia). I don’t impute an agenda to you at all, as I know you don’t intend such. But it’s important to realize that we all have implicit biases in how we view the world and society around us, and to try to recognize those biases in ourselves as well as in others.

Its funny how “systemic racism” is a codeword, but calling it a codeword, is not.

Pretty much everyone was in favor of isolating the community board. My feeling on the Flame Board was that it should remain open because many of the posts on Flame are moved there. So it would not be fair if an poster commented on a thread that was then moved to flame and they could not participate. Also, some of the very best conversations on the HZ have occurred on flame, despite the vitriol.

I haven’t gone down to the boiler room to look at how the valves are set for years now. We had some problems with registration and I don’t know how that is working now. The Space Board is supposed to be open to posting by non-registered (something I’d like to see) but I’m not sure that is working right either.

All of this is worth discussing from time to time. Now is as good a time as any. I’d like to open the Space Board to anyone, but that’s me. Robert and I like community consensus on issues like this.

We could try a thought experiment… would a flame, completely isolated from the outside world, actually be a flame?

Certainly, such a hypothetical system- deprived of contact with the outside would never be able to come to thermal equilibrium.

No matter how much heat energy is produced by the flame, the larger system would be unchanged, the heat transferred by the flame would be zero. This is clearly non-physical. In all processes the total entropy must increase, but the change in entropy is proportional to the change in heat energy divided by the temperature of the flame. If there is no transfer of heat, then the change in entropy is zero. The second law of thermodynamics would be violated.

You are – in effect- proposing to turn the the flame board into a hypothetical black hole, one where immense amount of energy could be dumped only to disappear, and you expect this will lower the disorder, the entropy, of the total system. This is, as I am sure you can now see, a physical impossibility…But such thought experiments are valuable, Vitruvius… it was by pondering precisely this question that Hawking was led to the discovery of ‘Hawking radiation’ of black holes.

If you succeed in turning flame into a black hole, you will find little flames popping into existence outside of the black hole, unpredictably and at random…

Don’t blame me, I didn’t make the rules of thermodynamics….