Thermodynamics and Spontaneity

Religious behavior and neuroticism, spontaneity, and worldmindedness.

To determine the relation of religious behavior to certain areas of personality, such as neuroticism, spontaneity, and worldmindedness, dimensions of personal and religious behavior were isolated by factor analysis and interrelated by canonical analysis. Characteristics of religious behavior and personalityreligion interaction differ among Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Baha'is, and non-affiliat...

Time Travel and the Reality of Spontaneity∗

Contrary to the informed consensus, time travel implies spontaneity (as distinct from chance) so that time travel can only be of the second kind. ∗A preliminary version of this paper was presented at a Seminar on ‘Reality in Physics and Philosophy,’ S. N. Bose National Centre for the Basic Sciences, Calcutta, 24-25 Feb 1996. †Present address: Centre for Computer Science, MCRP University, 222 M....

Spontaneity and Delay Considerations in Distributed TV Productions

During the online edition of video material for television over data networks a major concern is the accumulation of delay over the production chain. Before a video signal of a camera arrives at a remote studio to be edited live, it travels over video adapters and analog/digital converters to codecs which in turn compress the signal to comply with small bandwidth constraints. This technical pro...

Spontaneous Reporting Systems: Achieving Less Spontaneity and More Reporting

Chaos as the Inchoate: The Early Chinese Aesthetic of Spontaneity

Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we clean up our houses, we cultivate good habits, we discipline our children, we govern our polities all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reig...