Tsuyoiko

I agree. It makes me uncomfortable to draw an arbitrary line between what I will and won't eat. But since I'm not comfortable eating animals, and I have to eat something, I draw it between plants and animals. I take some small comfort from the recognition that I am a hypocrite! As John5476 says, we do it (in part) because we feel for the whale. I'm not clear on why you think superrationality doesn't extend to our treatment of animals. It's pretty well-established that cruelty to animals is correlated with violent crime. Being kind to animals makes sense because it makes for a generally kind person. I think another sensible reason is that it makes us feel good. I don't think you've given any good reasons yet why we shouldn't be kind to animals.

Abortion is acceptable because it is done for good reasons. The same thing goes for animal testing. Can you think of a good reason not to avoid treating animals poorly?

We have a natural drive to care about the happiness of humans close to us because that affects our own happiness. We care about other humans who are not close to us because we see them behaving like the humans who are close to us. And we care about animals because they behave in some measure like humans. I think the reason some people care more about animals than others is because their ability to see (or imagine) these similarities is more developed, or because they have made a conscious decision that cruelty is wrong, or simply because they respect life. I'm a vegetarian, I don't swat flies, and yesterday I cried because I accidentally stepped on a woodlouse. I know, I sound like a crazed hippy, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I got here through the same physical processes as that woodlouse. It had been crawling across the ground, maybe looking for a good place to hide, maybe looking for food; acting according to some biological drive analogous to the drives we experience, so its death moved me.

I think your accent's really convincing. You sound like a middle class university student who's trying to sound less posh I have one of the most difficult British accents: Potteries. We have our own dialect that is almost impossible even for many locals to understand. And our accent is difficult even for Brits from other areas. I grew up in a small village where most of the older people spoke in dialect, my grandad included. This video has a mix of the accent and the dialect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06nbSiv1ZN0

I will watch this, but I really don't like the title. The word "creation" conjures up quite opposite ideas to Darwin's in my mind. But perhaps they're trying to trick creationists into watching it in the hope they'll be convinced they're wrong

Indeed, contrary to Haeckel's fraud, ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny

I'm reading Ulysses by James Joyce at the moment. It's insanely intellectually stimulating. I need two study guides to help me understand it (Gifford's Ulysses Annotated and Thornton's Allusions in Ulysses). The underlying storyline is easy enough to follow, and although the writing style is difficult at first, you do get used to it. Although I can spot some of the allusions, I need the study guides to help me understand most of them. You could read it without worrying about the allusions, but I think it's worth attempting to understand them to get the most out of the book. Plus, you learn a lot about mythology, literature and early 20th century Ireland, which has given me a few ideas about what to read next. Only recommended if you want to spend the whole summer reading a single book

As long as there are still books to read I want to live. If I go blind I'll listen to audiobooks, if I go deaf I'll learn Braille. If my fingers drop off, then hopefully there'll be some method by then of downloading the texts straight to my brain I'm surprised that you think 65 years is enough, particularly since that's no age these days. I think some old people get bored with living, but not so soon as 65! My grandma died when she was 86, and believe me, she fought tooth and nail to stay alive right up to the end. Until her last few months she lived hard. She loved travelling, reading, films, partying, drinking and ordering her family around. At the end she was bedridden, couldn't feed herself or speak, but she knew when we were there, and the simple presence of her family gave her the will to live. Don't write yourself off, and don't forget you're not the only one who cares if you stay alive. Even if you do get bored of life, you might want to stick around for the sake of your loved ones.

Mathematician by education, computer "scientist" by career.

This is a pretty good site, with all kinds of info on sleep: http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/

Thanks for your reply. In the end I did it by defining a Concatenate function in VB. The code is here: http://tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=4233

I scored 34. Not really a surprise.

I don't think this is true, at least I can't find any evidence for it. I think it's a confusion based on the way an eight hour period of sleep works. Apparently, when we are awake our alertness is maintained by our biological clock, in particular by something called the 'circadian alerting system'. As the day wears on, these signals increase, as does the 'sleep drive'. Eventually, the alerting signals will start to drop off and the sleep drive will become overwhelming so that we fall asleep. The first four hours of sleep are maintained by the sleep drive, but since this is declining over this time, the absence of the alerting signals isn't enough to maintain sleep any longer. So the function of the biological clock now changes to sending signals that promote continued sleep. More info here: http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/science/how/internal-clock So it looks to me as though the idea of two periods of four hours comes from the way an eight hour sleep period changes halfway through.

This seems really odd. There are quite a few cars available in the UK that get way over that: http://www.fuel-economy.co.uk/stats.shtml The best available here gets over 80 mpg, with quite a few diesels getting well over 60 mpg. I did a similar search for US and apparently even a Toyota Prius only gets 45 mpg. A Toyota Prius here gets 65 mpg. Weird.

Sorry my thread title isn't very specific. I'm working on a table in Access, here's an extract: I want to eliminate duplicates in the Module_Code field, and merge the data in the UserText1 field, so I end up with something like this: Any suggestions on a query or series of queries that could do this would be much appreciated. Thanks in anticipation.

I find Daniel Dennett's view of free will very plausible. In his book Freedom Evolves he tries to show how free will and determinism are both true and compatible. His version of free will is the ability to make decisions by anticipating likely outcomes, and predicting which course of action will lead to favourable results. Dennett argues that this really only makes sense in conjunction with determinism, because it's determinism that gives us the ability to make predictions. This interview gives a good overview.

Anything by Dostoevsky; my personal favourite is Crime and Punishment

I suffer from sinus problems occasionally. I take a herbal remedy called plantago to relieve the congestion and paracetamol to kill the headache. I get plantago from the health food shop as a tincture, which you take in water. It tastes foul but after a couple of doses it starts to clear. Inhaling eucalyptus oil works quite well too. I also find it helps to lie down in a darkened room with a cold flannel on my head. I know how crappy you must feel, so I hope you feel better soon

It's already been done and has proven that not only does the soul exist, it weighs 21 grammes: http://www.lostmag.com/issue1/soulsweight.php

I don't smoke or do drugs. I drink in moderation, but a little too much at special occasions. It doesn't take that much for me to count an occasion as special I don't get enough exercise - I walk home from work three days a week, about 35 minutes at a brisk pace. That's the only exercise I ever get. I don't eat too unhealthily most of the time. I'm vegetarian, but I guess I eat too much cheese, and I do have a weakness for nachos and sour cream. My worst habit is the amount of time I spend playing video games. I clock about 2-3 hours an evening and maybe 10-12 hours over the weekend. My eyesight is buggered and the joints of my hands and arms are shot.

There's a tree just like this in the street where my parents live. It's a graft, because you can see where the two trunks are intertwined. If you look closer, maybe you can tell if that is the case with this tree too.

JohnB: I think I misunderstood your earlier post - I thought you were saying there's no point trying to find out if ghosts exist because they won't cooperate and that's why any experiments will fail. I see now that you're saying that particular approach will fail, and I think your suggested experiment is sound enough. Or, perhaps the believers don't really want proof. Perhaps they're afraid that if they carried out the long term, meticulous experiments you suggest they'd find nothing. If they did carry them out and found nothing, what do you think their conclusion would be? Would they concede that there's no evidence to support the claim that ghosts exist? There are people like that. But say you carried out your experiment and something consistently showed up on the tapes. I'm sure you could find a scientist somewhere who would be willing to review them. The reason it hasn't happened yet is because, as you point out, no-one has conducted the initial experiment. If the believers won't do it, why hasn't a sceptic? I guess because they have better things to do with their time.

I don't think so. I can't necessarily see a difference between these two situations: a) A is crying, therefore I assume she feels sad. If I pat her hand and say "there, there" she will stop crying. b) The petrol gauge in my car is pointing to zero and the car won't start, therefore I assume it is out of petrol. If I put petrol in the car it will start. In both cases I have observed some phenomena, come to a sensible conclusion and postulated a plausible solution, which may or may not be effective.

I think I got this right. Genes cause particular traits by coding for particular enzymes. If someone has two copies of the same allele (homozygous) they will exhibit the trait caused by the enzyme that that allele codes for. If someone has two different alleles (heterozygous), one of which is dominant, they will exhibit the trait of the dominant allele because any amount of the enzyme produced by that allele is sufficient to cause the trait.

As iNow says, we get other conscious entities to participate in repeatable experiments easily enough. Why would a ghost be less likely to cooperate than a living human being?