Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Why I am not voting Labor

From Independent Contractors of Australia:

In Australia we’re advancing the fine art of destroying small business entrepreneurship. In yet another attack against entrepreneurship, the Gillard government is moving to outlaw home-based business people in the clothing sector. The new law declares that self-employed clothing business people (mostly women) are employees. In this instance the death of small business is not an unintended consequence, it’s the direct stated outcome of the Gillard government’s policy.



There needs to be an allowance for a progression from home based clothing businesses, all the way to fashion warehouses. At the moment, absolutely everything in between that involves subcontracting is looked at with suspicion. Clothing businesses run from home are essentially illegal if they do work for any other businesses, or get smaller businesses to do work for them. How does any clothing business go from A (being a hobby) to B (a business employing people) legally?

The Queensland government does not directly make these rules, but determine the level of enforcement, which at this point is not doing them any favours.

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Marconomic evolutionary theory

I am trying to better form my theory such that it is intelligible and able to be judged in something approaching conventional scientific terms. I don't think I need any more working assumptions than my ten marconomic assumptions to come to my conclusions. Clearly, my last one (replacing parsimony)is the most problematic as it directly contradicts conventional scientific practice. Note that I am not multiplying parameters to "fit a camel", nor do I think that the problem is that we have assumed a spherical horse. It is completely about shifting the burden of proof from assertions that cannot be proven possible or impossible. No assertion deserves the benefit of not having to be proven. We must also look at the context of these assertions, and to what end they might serve ie. is there data to fit/not fit, or are they purely descriptive? Does contradictory data mean a tweak to the assertion and at what point do we reinstate the requirement of proof of the original assertion in the face of some contradictory data? In that sense the assumption of uniformity is different, as actual calculations derive directly from it. If the principle of uniformity was purely descriptive, and we used some other contradictory device to explain the current evolution of stars and planets, it would be suspect.

My theory of abiogenesis starts from the formation of second generation stars from remnants of supernova dust cloud intercepting a pristine Molecular cloud. Experimental evidence shows that these exist, and are likely precursors to our solar system and orbiting bodies. There is experimental evidence for molecular clouds clumping together to pristine low density snowballs. These "pristine comets" would have a density of about .2 ie. they are mainly empty space. The supernova remnant dust cloud however, would be a lot more chaotic mixture of elements. Before or after the accretion disk of the solar system formed, the border zone between the dust clouds would have had pristine comets infused with heavier elements from the supernova dust cloud. Perhaps billions of these comets would have had liquid water in them due to heat from radioactive heavier elements. Protected by a covering of snow, and kept liquid by slowly decaying elements, these "pristine comets" would have all the ingredients required for primordial soup style evolution to occur, in billions of slightly different conditions, and with mechanisms that would almost certainly exchange chemistry, collide and fragment. Every individual comet of this type would have similar probability of chemical evolution than the early Earth would. Having so many of them multiplies the probability of Precisely the right initial conditions for evolution to happen quickly.

Whether "modern comets" are anything like "pristine comets" is a matter for debate. After all, it has been 4 Billion years since we had a pristine molecular cloud near our solar system, so no matter the origin of any "modern comet", assuming it is a pristine comet relatively recently perturbed near the sun, is probably not helpful, as recent evidence appears to contradict the assertion that they are anything like pristine. The point is that early in the piece, as the solar system was still forming, lots of comet like objects had all the features required for the sorts of successful precursor evolution, and more. How far this evolution went, and where it spread from, and to, is a pertinent question to answer. There have been several successful missions to comets, and several comets have now been imaged in close detail. We have collected samples from the coma of one, a space mission will analyze the surface of another in 2014, and yet another mission will collect and return a sample from the surface of an asteroid. All observed comets have discrete jets on the surface which have stable positions from apparition to apparition. These are thought to be from fissures in the comet from which sublimating volatiles escape expelling dust out. A robot spacecraft could drop a tethered explorer into one of these fissures to look inside the comet, plausibly to a great depth, while the comet is in a dormant phase. This would generate useful information about what is happening inside the comet.