bascule

Okay, ParanoiA, I see the problem: Absolutely not. I'd certainly like to know by what metric you define human being. A colonic tissue biopsy is closer to a human being than a blastocyst.

The Alfred E. Neuman avatar has been claimed by Martin!

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061023/full/061023-10.html Does rule by non-scientific thinkers lead to the persecution of scientists on the basis of specious reasoning?

To answer my own question: From the article:

As for me, I bought a house in a market with a moratorium on new construction. Consequently property values never go down here... ever.

Yeah, I don't want to make ARMs out as universally bad. If you intend to flip your house in less than 3 years, it's a good choice, although I'm not sure why someone would only wait 3 years before selling. I intend to live in my townhome for at least 5 before I think of selling it. The problem is, of course, the people who really shouldn't be buying homes in the first place getting an ARM because that's the only way they can qualify for a mortgage. The sort of people Pangloss is describing, who use an ARM to buy a house they can't afford, and get screwed. It's also a problem with loan officers working on commission trying to sell as many ARMs as possible, and lenders who aren't policing these loan officers, who are now going to be stuck with a lot of devalued property. And lenders don't want to be in the real estate business... It's a bad situation for everybody.

Okay, so do you want to point out the part that allows cloning?

ARMs made homebuying attrictive to people who shouldn't be buying homes in the first place, due to their financial situation, and also let them qualify for a home loan even with bad credit.

Therefore it's tantamount to cloning! Ever heard of graphite molding? It's the same process they use to make bullets. We should ban graphite molds, because they're tantamount to murder. Oh for the love of... let's try this again since you're apparently myopic: (1) No person may clone or attempt to clone a human being. Here it is again in case you missed it: (1) No person may clone or attempt to clone a human being.

I was providing context. Take it for what you will. Sounds like you understand them pretty well. People got them because they were easier to qualify for, and also because they didn't understand them. The low low low introductory rate was very alluring, now they're all getting screwed. Guess that's why you read the fine print, or at least the truth-in-lending statement. http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/27/news/economy/gdp/index.htm?eref=rss_topstories However, GDP growth was the weakest in three years

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/061026/economy.html?.v=10 Housing prices saw the largest decline in 35 years, back in the midst of the Watergate scandal. What was the cause? I'm going to go ahead and pin it on resetting Adjustable Rate Mortgages: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=2093736 Lenders have really screwed themselves with them. I'm hoping they start to see the error of their ways. Meanwhile many Americans are now losing equity in their homes, saddled with mortgages for much more than the value of their homes. Those foolish enough to opt for a sub-prime ARM are now feeling the burn of it resetting to a substantially higher interest rate, and I can only suspect many are being forclosed upon (in my homebuyer class, I found out $100m worth of property is forclosed upon in my state every WEEK!) Does this mark the end of the credit boom, when it finally comes time to pay the piper and millions are found lacking?

So ParanoiA, what's your take on Talent's statements regarding Amendment 2? http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=21226 This is a boldface lie. Amendment 2 bans human cloning. This is the very first provision of the bill: http://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/2006petitions/ppStemCell.asp Fox's remarks are a distortion. Talent's are a boldface lie. So why doesn't Rush Limbaugh come out against his lie? Well, the reasons are obvious... Rush is just trying to save face after he made false accusations against Fox for faking his symptoms. Fox is suffering one of the most debilitating diseases known to mankind, and what Rush did is one of the lowest blows imaginable. And Rush's hypocrisy continues. This is about as bad as when Bill O'Reilly continued to insist that Americans massacred Nazis at Malmady when in fact the exact opposite was the case. He got called on it but continued to press on. Rush is no different.

So, to clarify, your problem is that Michael J. Fox suggested that James Talent attempted to criminalize stem cell research when in fact, he hasn't? Or more to the point: Fox lied/overembellished when making a political statement?

Here's the actual ad: One doctor writes: "...the chorea that Michael J Fox has in that ad comes from chronic use of dopamine agonists in the context of Parkinson's. They're movements from the medicine, not the disease itself. Although he might have odd movements OFF of his meds, they wouldn't look like the ones in the ad. They'd look like the Parkinson's-like presentation of Muhammed Ali's Dementia Pugilistica. In addition, those movements are hard to imitate accurately because they stem from circuits between the basal ganglia and cortex that you can't just turn off or on. Those aren't volitional circuits. There is little chance he was acting, and if he was, he could only accentuate slightly movementse already had. In other words, this is as tragic as it looks."

The neurophysiological origin of consciousness

Quoth Rush: http://mediamatters.org/static/audio/limbaugh-20061023-fox.mp3 "[Michael J. Fox was] is exaggerating the effects of this disease. He was moving all around and shaking [...] and it's purely an act. This is the only time I have ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has [...] this is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting, one of the two." SHAMELESS? F*ck Rush Quote? That's the diametrical opposite of what he originally said. Wow, I really need to stop responding to spin in these forums. If you're going to accuse Michael J. Fox of spreading information, PROVIDE A DIRECT QUOTE, then provide reference materials for how this is a distortion. I got suckered in again. Michael J. Fox didn't spread disinformation. Rush is a f*cking asshole.

Okay, let's play that game. Problem: the spread of disinformation. So why are we going after Michael J. Fox again? How about going after the Bush administration? I mean, recently Bush declared that he and his administration have "never been 'stay the course'" when, uhh... Oh wait, Rush Limbaugh is a hypocrite who spent his whole career criticizing the war on drugs only to become an oxycotin addict. He'd rather victimize someone drumming up money for his debilitating nerve disease in the face of religious assholes who care more about unborn babies than they do about the suffering of real people.

QFT What does Rush expect, for MJS to only do ads showing his Parkinsons symptoms when he's degenerated to the point that our best medications can no longer suppress the effects? So... in other words... he should only show his symptoms by the time it's too late to help him. Uh huh. The government is funding faith-based initiatives which provide abstinance education (whose deleterious effects are extensively documented) but they won't fund stem cell research. Stem cell research is helpful. Absinence education is harmful. Here's an idea: let's take all the money going towards abstinence education and use it to fund stem cell research.

Well, on one side you have people with debilitating diseases or traumatic injuries. On the other side you have fundamentalists/evangelicals. One side wants to see taxpayer money used for research that will greatly benefit the public health. The other side objects based on solely religious concerns. When you pit human suffering against religious concerns, well... yes both sides are "guilty", it's called politicking. But one side is suffering, and the other, well, just want those suffering to suck it up and adopt that religious morals should dictate government spending. The general public is too dumb to understand the issues involved, so both sides have to play to people's emotions. That's how policy shaping works these days, particularly in regard to scientific research. I have no problem with someone suffering from a debilitating/degenerative disease saying whatever they have to to secure money for their cause. I have an enormous problem with religious people spinning lies to ensure they don't get it.

(psst, I was being facetious) If there's anything naive about it, it's trying to put a date on it like it's something you will predict. Once you start hooking brains into computers en masse, or create superhuman intelligence in a computer, everything goes nuts. It's sweeping societal change waiting for an event to set it all off... what James Burke called "the trigger effect" Kurzweil thinks it will happen before 2045, arguing that extrapolating on the present trends, that a $1000 computer will be a million times as powerful as (conservative) estimates of the combined computational power of all human brains. I dunno about that. Lots of static analysis involved in those predictions.

I hate the Singularity. Those people are full of crap.

Think of your cerebral cortex as a big pyramidal hierarchy. At the base of the hierarchy are your senses and motor systems. At the top is the brain structure which encodes long term memories, the seahorse-shaped hippocampus. The whole pyramid is built out of structures called neocortical columns, that sit around analyzing patterns, classifying them, grouping them, and feeding their conclusions up the hierarchy, through innumerable other neocortical columns, up toward the hippocampus. The higher you go, the more abstract the information the neocortical columns are dealing with. They're classifying and grouping patterns in ever-increasing levels of abstraction. Information also flows down the hierarchy, so patterns discovered in one part of the system can be relayed to others, in the form of a "Here's what the higher-ups predict, so be on the lookout if things are different." The only information that gets to the top of the hierarchy are things that weren’t caught at any other level. They are stored there, then downwards propagated through the cortex, so the system can know what it doesn’t know and use that to aid future pattern detection activities.

So what you're saying is the man is exploiting his crippling, degenerative nerve disease for political gain? Of all the things that someone can exploit for political gain, that has to rank among the least bothersome, in my book...

There is still going to be a philosophy component to these forums, right?

The "Great Firewall" is little more than a deterrent to the determined and experienced Chinese computer hacker, and back in June the specific method by which the firewall worked was disclosed: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/ignoring_the_gr.html It's obviously been changed since then, but needless to say that while the protection it offers is enough to deter your average user, it's something that can be bypassed in multiple different ways. The real question is can you do it without getting caught by the Chinese government...