In philosophy, metaethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, and ethical statements, attitudes, and judgments. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being ethical theory and applied ethics. Metaethics has received considerable attention from academic philosophers in the last few decades.

While normative ethics addresses such questions as “What should one do?”, thus endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others, metaethics addresses questions such as “What is goodness?” and “How can we tell what is good from what is bad?”, seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.

Some theorists argue that a metaphysical account of morality is necessary for the proper evaluation of actual moral theories and for making practical moral decisions, however others make the reverse claim that only by importing ideas of moral intuition on how to act can we arrive at an accurate account of the metaphysics of morals.

A second area of metaethics involves the psychological basis of our moral judgments and conduct, particularly understanding what motivates us to be moral. We might explore this subject by asking the simple question, “Why be moral?” Even if one is aware of basic moral standards, this does not necessarily mean that one will be psychologically compelled to act on them. Some answers to the question “Why be moral?” are to avoid punishment, to gain praise, to attain happiness, to be dignified, or to fit in with society.

Agapism professes that love  should be the sole ultimate value and that all other values are derived from it, or that the sole moral imperative is to love. Theological agapism holds that our love of God is expressed by loving our fellow man. As the ethics of love, agapism indicates that we should do the most loving thing in each situation, letting love determine our obligation rather than rules. Alternatively, given a set of rules, agapism indicates to follow those rules which produce the most love.

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce used the word agapism for the view that creative love is operative in the cosmos. Drawing from the Swedenborgian ideas of Henry James, Peirce held that it involves a love which expresses itself in a devotion to cherishing and tending to people or things other than oneself, as a parent may do for offspring, and as God does especially for the unloving, whereby the loved ones may learn.

Peirce regarded this process as a mode of evolution of the cosmos and its parts, and he called it agapism, wherein: “The good result is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose.”

Comfort noise is artificial background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the silence in a transmission resulting from voice activity detection or from the audio clarity of modern digital lines.

Some modern telephone systems such as wireless and VoIP use voice activity detection, a form of squelching where low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In digital audio transmissions, this saves bandwidth of the communications channel by transmitting nothing when the source volume is under a certain threshold, leaving only louder sounds such as a speaker’s voice to be sent. However, improvements in background noise reduction technologies can occasionally result in the complete removal of all noise.

The result of receiving total silence, especially for a prolonged period, has a number of unwanted effects on the listener, including the following:

• The listener may believe that the transmission has been lost, and therefore hang up prematurely.
• The speech may sound choppy and difficult to understand.
• The sudden change in sound level can be jarring to the listener.

To counteract these effects, comfort noise is added, usually on the receiving end in wireless or VoIP systems, to fill in the silent portions of transmissions with artificial noise. The noise generated is at a low but audible volume level, and can vary based on the average volume level of received signals to minimize jarring transitions.

In modern VoIP products, users may control whether they want comfort noise enabled or disabled. During the siege of Leningrad in 1942, the beat of a metronome was used as comfort noise on the Leningrad radio network, indicating that the network was still functioning.

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a form of synesthesia in which an individual’s perception of numbers and letters is associated with the experience of colors. Like all forms of synesthesia, grapheme-color synesthesia is involuntary, consistent, and memorable. It is one of the most common forms of synesthesia, and because of the extensive knowledge of the visual system, one of the most studied.

One recent study has documented a case of synesthesia in which synesthetic associations could be traced back to colored refrigerator magnets. Despite the existence of this individual case, the majority of synesthetic associations do not seem to be driven by learning of this sort. Rather, it seems that more frequent letters are paired with more frequent colors, and some meaning-based rules, such as B being blue, drive some synesthetic associations.

These experiences have led to the development of technologies intended to improve the retention and memory of graphemes by individuals without synesthesia. Computers, for instance, could use artificial synesthesia to color words and numbers to improve usability. Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia rarely claim that their sensations are problematic or unwanted. In some cases, individuals report useful effects, such as aid in memory or spelling of difficult words.

Synesthetes often report that they were unaware their experiences were unusual until they realized other people did not have them, while others report feeling as if they had been keeping a secret their entire lives. Many synesthetes can vividly remember when they first noticed their synesthetic experiences, or when they first learned that such experiences were unusual. Writer and synesthete Patricia Lynne Duffy remembers one early experience:

“One day, I realized that to make an R all I had to do was first write a P and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line.”

The paradox of hedonism, also called the pleasure paradox, is the idea in the study of ethics which points out that pleasure and happiness are phenomena that do not obey normal principles. First explicitly noted by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics, the paradox of hedonism points out that pleasure cannot be acquired directly, it can only be acquired indirectly.

As an example, suppose John likes to collect stamps. According to most models of behavior, it is believed that John likes collecting stamps because he gets pleasure from collecting stamps. Stamp collecting is an avenue towards acquiring pleasure. However, if you tell John this, he will likely disagree. He does get pleasure from collecting stamps, but this is not the process that explains why he collects stamps. It is not as though he says, “I must collect stamps so I can obtain pleasure”. Collecting stamps is not just a means toward pleasure. He just likes collecting stamps.

This paradox is often spun around backwards, to illustrate that pleasure and happiness cannot be reverse-engineered. If for example you heard that collecting stamps was very pleasurable, and began a stamp collection as a means towards this happiness, it would inevitably be in vain. To achieve happiness, you must not seek happiness directly, you must motivate yourself towards things unrelated to happiness, like the collection of stamps. The hedonistic paradox would mean that if one sets the goal to please oneself too highly then the mechanism would in fact jam itself.

Politician William Bennett has stated, “Happiness is like a cat, If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you’ll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.”

The Quince is a small deciduous tree native to warm-temperate southwest Asia. It is related to apples and pears, and has a fruit which is bright golden yellow when mature. The fruit can be eaten cooked or raw and is an excellent source of vitamin C.

Cultivation of quince preceded apple culture. Among the ancient Greeks, the quince was a ritual offering at weddings, for it had come from the Levant with Aphrodite and remained sacred to her. Plutarch reports that a Greek bride would nibble a quince to perfume her kiss before entering the bridal chamber.

Quince was later introduced to the New World, but has become rare in North America due to its susceptibility to fireblight disease caused by the bacterium Erwinia amylovora. Almost all of the quinces in North American specialty markets come from Argentina. In Latin America the gel-like, somewhat adhesive substance surrounding the seeds was used to shape and style hair.

In South America, the membrillo, as the quince is called in Spanish, is cooked into a reddish jello-like block or firm reddish paste known as dulce de membrillo. It is then eaten in sandwiches and with cheese, traditionally manchego cheese, or accompanying fresh curds. The sweet and floral notes of quince contrast nicely with the tanginess of the cheese.

In the Canary Islands and some places in South America a quince is used to play an informal beach toss-and-swim game, usually among young teens. When mixed with salt water a mature quince will turn its sour taste to sweet. The game is played by throwing a quince into the sea. All players race to catch the quince and whoever catches it takes one bite and tosses the quince again, then the whole process gets repeated until the quince is fully eaten.

An interobject is a phenomenon of dreams, in which there is a perception of something that is “between” two objects. Interobjects differ from typical dream manifestations in which two objects are fused into one. Instead, the object is incomplete. An example from the literature on dreams includes “something between a record player and a balance scale.” Interobjects are new creations derived from partially-fused blends of other objects.

Interobjects, like disjunctive cognitions, would sound bizarre or psychotic as perceptions in waking life, but are accepted by most people as commonplace in dreams. They have implications for both the theory of dreaming and the theory of categorization. Interobjects show the dreaming mind grouping items together whose connection may not be apparent to the waking mind. “Something between an aqueduct or a swimming-pool” reveals the category of “large man-made architectural objects that contain water.” “Something between a cellphone and a baby” reveals a category combining a relatively new piece of technology and a live infant: both make noise when you don’t expect it, both are held close to your body, and both can give you a feeling of connectedness.

Most adults tend to regularize interobjects when discussing them in waking life. Children are better able to sustain interobjects in their original form. A child told his father a dream in which he was in trouble at sea and a seal swam up to them. They thought it was just a seal, but then they looked and under the water it was a whole boat, it was huge, so they climbed onto the seal/boat, and it brought them to the shore of the mainland. When the boy told his father the dream in the morning, the father, speaking like an adult who cannot tolerate contradictions, said to him: “So really, it was a boat, a big, safe boat.” The child, holding fast to the integrity of his dream, said, “It was a boat, but it was still a big, friendly seal.” This child had not yet learned to regularize his perceptions to fit the way the world works. Adults may learn to reject interobjects in waking life, but still retain them in their dreams.

Interobjects may have an elementary function in human thought. By transgressing the normal mental categories described by Eleanor Rosch, interobjects may be the origin of new ideas that would be harder to come by using only fully-formed, secondary process formations. They may be one example of “Oneiric Darwinism” in which new thought-mutations are created during dream-life and rejected or retained in waking life depending on their usefulness.

When Europeans first encountered wild turkey in the Americas they incorrectly identified them as a type of guineafowl, also known as Turkey fowl from their importation to Central Europe through Turkey, and that name, shortened to just the name of the country, stuck as the name of the creature. The domesticated turkey is attributed to Aztec agriculture, which addressed one subspecies local to the present day states of Jalisco and Guerrero.

The use of the turkey in the USA for Thanksgiving precedes Lincoln’s nationalization of the holiday in 1863. Alexander Hamilton proclaimed that ”no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day,” but turkey was uncommon as Thanksgiving fare until after 1800. By 1857 turkey had become part of the traditional dinner in New England.

Because turkey is the most common main dish of a Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving is sometimes colloquially called “turkey day″. In 2006, American turkey growers were expected to raise 270 million turkeys, to be processed into five billion pounds of turkey meat valued at almost $8 billion, with one third of all turkey consumption occurring in the Thanksgiving-Christmas season, and a per capita consumption of almost 18 pounds.

The range and numbers of the wild turkey had decreased at the beginning of the 20th century due to hunting and loss of habitat. Game managers estimate that the entire populations of wild turkeys in the United States was as low as 30,000 in the early 1900s. Game officials made efforts to protect and encourage the breeding of the surviving wild population. In 1973 the total U.S. population was estimated to be 1.3 million, and current estimates place the entire wild turkey population at 7 million individuals.

The name given to a group of turkeys is a rafter, although they are sometimes incorrectly referred to as a gobble or flock.