Cold and black

For some odd reason instead of being asleep in the wee hours of the morning I was thinking about how we often label as opposites what are really lesser and greater quantities of the same thing. The best examples I could think of were temperature and light.

In temperature we refer to hotter and colder but the quality 'cold' really doesn't exist outside of ourselves. It's purely a subjective relationship. Heat is a measure of how much kinetic activity there is in something. It can vary quite a bit. From zero (absolute zero) activity to the top end in plasma where all normal characteristics of a substance are lost. What we refer to as 'cold' is just a range on that continium. Similarly black isn't a color. It's just the absense of light. Light can appear in colors depending on how it's being filtered. White is merely all the colors combined. But pure black only exists in the absense of any light.

I guess it's mostly semantics...

Comments

Anonymous said…
Fights over semantics have caused wars. I know people that will argue all day long over semantics. You are most correct in your position, however. There is no cold, only absence of heat. There is no black, only absence of light.
12:02 PM
Anonymous said…
Sure thing,we're just talking about comfortable heat,as we talk of the amount of light necessary to our eyes to see arount us. No heat at all or no light at all: we never had.
in a crowded universe hard to reach point zero.
9:06 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nitroflex at home

Image
I mentioned a few days ago that I'd purchased off of Craig's List an exercise machine. A Nitroflex, to be more specific, for the grand sum of $75. The boxes you see to the left were bought by the seller as discontinued merchandise over a year ago and stored in his back yard storage shed. You might be able to see some of the bugs and such that had made their homes on these boxes. I left them out on my deck for a few days before opening them to allow the insects to leave gracefully or die in the sun. The picture to the left is the pieces from the box, unboxed, and up in one of my upstairs bedrooms. For the most part it wasn't difficult to move it around though two pieces were heavy and a number of them were kinda long and bulky to be wandering about the house with. Surprisingly, this kit didn't require any extra tools. There were two allen keys and one combo wrench included in the boxes and that was all it took to put it together. The whole thing only took about half an h...
Read more

ankle update

S ince a few people object to seeing my feet --poor misdirected souls--I have the two pictures below hidden behind links. Behold them at your own risk! *evil laugh* Actually they're not scary though the first one is a little colorful. T he first picture shows my ankle and foot from the side, as labeled. You can see a lot of general edema of the entire foot. There's also a good bit of discoloration of the ankle area and to a lesser degree the top of the foot all the way down to the toes. The side view is a lot worse in this regard than the top view. T he second picture shows the two feet from the top so you can compare the somewhat normal looking right foot to the injured left foot. There's not much abnormal color on this view but you can see the "sausage like" swelling of the left foot. It's this swelling that is causing my main problem--I can't get the foot into my boots and I need the boots to support the ankle. Damn Catch-22. Side view, looking inward ...
Read more

Ostrich poop found here

Image
I took these pictures last Fall while visiting the NC Zoo. On the left you can see what appears to be a nice polite ostrich just wandering around. This impression soon turns out to be false when her dowdy tail feathers raise up and reveal a puckered anus. Ewwww! If you look carefully, you can see that she's made a deposit on the ground. More ewwww! Feel free to click on the image to make them bigger. Details can make all the difference in these shots. In other matters, aren't those really bony legs they have? And couldn't they have a little more color?
Read more