Limitless Fire

Criteria for segmenting consumers by lifestyle, attitudes, beliefs, values, personality, buying motives, and/or extent of product usage. Psychographic analyses are used like geographic (place of residence, or work) and demographic (age, income, occupation) criteria to describe and identify customers and prospective customers and to aid in developing promotion strategies designed to appeal to specific psychographic segments of the market for a product. For example, the market for soap may consist of various psychographic segments described by their primary purchase motives (beauty, health, grooming), usage styles (daily, weekly, salon-only), or lifestyle (frequent travelers, parents).

The psychographic characteristics of the market affect advertising copy, packaging (travel size, child-proof, decorator pump), and channels of distribution (supermarkets, pharmacies, specialty stores, internet).

Psychographic data can be gathered firsthand through personal interviews, focus group interviews or questionnaires, or purchased from research companies in the form of list overlays for direct marketers or market profiles for general marketers.

OBSERVATION: Establishing limits, and quantifying social strata are tools utilized by advertisers working to expand markets. Through the careful collection of personal data, this information can be extrapolated into expected cause and effect, or decision making strategies of consumers as potential customers for products and services.

In the grand scale, marketers, such as Edward Bernays applied psychographics combined with advanced psychological theories regarding control of social masses to expand marketing potentials. In contemplating these ideas, we can clearly see the complexity of modern society in terms of individual purpose, decision making, and the desire for businesses to collect data regarding these behaviors. Consumers, for the most part, are probably unaware of the means employed in extracting personal psychological profiles (extrapolated as larger scale demographics) utilized in creating advertising, marketing, public relations, and other social-political strategies.

Conventional vs. Unconventional Superconductors, Michael R. Norman

“To appreciate these issues, we need to first understand what superconductors are all about, and how unconventional ones differ from their more conventional counterparts. Superconductors are not only perfect conductors (their electrical resistance drops precipitously to zero below a transition temperature Tc), but also exhibit the so-called Meissner effect (6), where they expel magnetic fields. As noted by Fritz London (7), this implies that electrons in superconductors behave in a collective manner. Bosons, which have integer values of a fundamental property known as ‘spin’, can behave in this fashion, whereas electrons, which are fermions that have half-integer spins, typically do not. This apparent contradiction was resolved by Leon Cooper in 1956 (2) who demonstrated that the presence of even an arbitrarily small attractive interaction between the electrons in a solid causes the electrons to form pairs. Because these ‘Cooper pairs’ behave as effective bosons, they can form something analogous to a Bose-Einstein condensate. Rather than being real-space molecules, however, Cooper pairs consist of electrons in time- reversed momentum states and consequently have zero center-of-mass momentum. Because a pair of identical fermions is antisymmetric with respect to the exchange of one fermion with another, the spin and spatial components of the Cooper pair wavefunction must have opposite
exchange symmetries. Thus these pair states are either spin singlets with an even parity spatial component, or spin triplets with odd parity. The spin singlet pair state with an isotropic spatial component (s-wave) turns out to be the one realized in conventional superconductors (3). Despite the fact that electrons repel each other because of the Coulomb force, at low energies there can be an effective attraction resulting from the electron-ion interaction. To understand this, note that a metal is formed by mobile electrons detaching themselves from the atoms that
form the crystalline lattice (these atoms then become positive ions). Such a mobile electron attracts the surrounding ions because of their opposite charge. When this electron moves, a positive ionic distortion is left in its wake. This attracts a second electron, leading to a net
attraction between the electrons. This mechanism works because the ion dynamics is slow compared to the electrons, a consequence of the fact that the ions are much heavier than the electrons. However, the interaction at shorter times becomes repulsive because of the Coulomb
interaction between the electrons; this retardation is what is responsible for limiting Tc (8). Up until the discovery of cuprates, the highest known Tc was only 23K.”

OBSERVATION: We must be thankful to all great thinkers who inhabit our planet. Questions arise when pondering ideas about materials that redefine what we know about matter. What are the limits of the physical? We live in an era of great scientific expansion, and the future will allow us to observe the abstract nature of the human imagination in retrospect. The known, the unknown, that which will be known…………………

Krishnamurti, The Flame of Attention, Harper & Row, 1984.

p. 15: “Thinking is a process born out of experience and knowledge. Listen to it quietly, see if that is not true, actual; then you discover it for yourself as though the speaker is acting as a mirror in which you see for yourself exactly what is, without distortion; then throw the mirror away or break it up. Thinking starts from experience which becomes knowledge stored up in the cells of the brain as memory; then from memory there is thought and action. Please see this for yourself, do not repeat what I say. This sequence is an actual fact: experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action. Then from that action you learn more; so there is a cycle and that is our chain.”

p. 22: “The word ‘discipline’ comes from the word disciple, the disciple whose mind is learning-not from a particular person, a guru, or from a teacher, or preacher, or from books but learning through the observation of his own mind, of his own heart, learning from his own actions. And that learning requires a certain discipline, but not the conformity most disciplines are understood to require. When there is conformity, obedience, and imitation, there is never the act of learning, there is merely following. Discipline implies learning, learning from the very complex mind one has, from the life of daily existence, learning about relationship with each other, so that the mind is always pliable, active.”

OBSERVATION: Neural plasticity: As thinking beings we are always challenged with this process of observing our own thought process. Krishnamurti points out that we must exhibit personal discipline, and personal responsibility for this process of learning, and that we must be careful to not defer this reponsibility to other persons, or materials. Through the proper application of direct processes, we have the capacity to act upon learning, and while some of these processes are automatic and unconscious, others are precisely calculated conscious processes.