bascule

Well, just saw Cheney's apology. He took full responsibility. That was awesome.

I'd say our loss of hair comes from a number of factors, sexual selection and the uselessness of body hair after the advent of clothes being two of the biggest. Hair on the head serves two purposes, first as a sort of peripheral warning system for if we're about to hit our head on something, and secondly hair, especially long hair, is useful in tool/basket/craftmaking.

Some limits are fine, but growing human tissues inside of animals for the purposes of biomedical research should not be banned, especially due to religious objections.

Using cat will not produce a valid MPEG bitstream. You should really use a program designed to combine multiple MP3 files into a valid MPEG bitstream, such as this one: http://www.mp3waveditor.com/

And here's just the kind of editorial the DailyKos article predicted: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021401783.html

Let's try this again: consciousness is a thalamocortical process. Your neocortex comprises 80% of your brain. Therefore, at least 80% of your brain is devoted to consciousness. No, that's just fixed action patterns being executed by your cerebellum. Your neocortex still comprises 80% of your brain. Consciousness needs a lot of computing power. Can you please give up already? You're wrong, and no matter how you want to worm your way around it, we use our entire brains, and at least 80% of our brain is devoted to consciousness.

About a month ago I left the dome light on in my car. The next morning my battery was dead. I got my roommate to jumpstart my car, and it's been working ever since, but it's been sluggish to turn the engine over. As time wore on, it seemed to do worse and worse, with the starter motor struggling more and more to get the engine to turn over. Last week, in bitter cold the day after it snowed, my car simply would not start. I got it jump started again, and drove home, and had the same sluggish engine turnover problems that I had before. I was certain I needed a new battery. Monday morning, again my car would not start. So I rode my bike to work, and did this again yesterday, having failed to go get a new battery on monday night. So I got my roommate to jumpstart my car again... Except, whoops, I hooked my battery up to my roommate's truck in reverse polarity! The jumper cables shot off huge sparks when I hooked them up, which was my first clue something wasn't right. I opened my car door and noticed the dome light wasn't on. I put the key in the ignition and tried to start my car, finding it completely dead. I guessed then that the polarity was incorrect. A small amount of smoke was visible in the area directly in front of my battery. I unhooked the cables, reversed the polarity, and my dome light came on. My car started just fine. I thank my roommate and took off for an auto parts store. I drove up to the door, saw there was an open sign in the window, and shut off my car then got out. However, when I went up to the door it was locked. Dread crept through me... I had foolishly left both my jacket and my cell phone at home, and it was starting to snow. After seeing the small amount of smoke rising off my battery, I was certain it was destroyed. I got into my car fearing the worst, and attempted to start it. Much to my surprise, not only did the engine turn over, but turned over rapidly without struggle just as it had before I had left my dome light on and apparently damaged the battery. I drove to another auto parts store which did turn out to be open, and spent about 20 minutes trying to pick out the correct model of battery for my car. I noticed they charge an extra $20 if you don't exchange your old battery for the new one, and I didn't really want to have to stand out in the snow without a coat removing my current battery just to save $20. I decided to see if my car would start again. Just like before it started instantly as if my battery were completely aproblematic. I decided I'd just see if my battery continued to perform like this, and drove home without replacing it. This morning the ground was covered with a thick blanked of snow, and once again it was bitterly cold and snowing just like the night when my car would not start before. I hopped in my car fearing the worse, but once again my engine turned over without a struggle. This is the first night my car has lasted after getting jumped when I got in in the morning and it started without struggle. Somehow, hooking up my battery to my friend's truck with reverse polarity fixed it. I asked an electrical engineer friend of mine about it and he said he was surprised the battery didn't explode. What did I do? Why did this seem to fix my battery?

I liked this. Revprez will have a fit over it, but that's why I keep him on ignore: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/2/13/23432/4110

Here's the correct URL. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4668320.stm I think it's ridiculous to ban "animal human hybrids". This includes, among other things, creating mice with a small percentage of human neurons for the purposes of Alzheimer's research. What's the moral dilemma with that? The real moral dilemma lies in using mice for biomedical experimentation in the first place, but in that case, I lean towards the side of performing biomedical research and thus improving public health.

NO, READ: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.htm Than who? Okay, so who gets the short end of the stick here? If you think you only use 10% of your brain, chances are you just might.

I shoot at targets, not animals.

For the record I own a .308 rifle and a single-shot shotgun... I went shooting last weekend, and am going to go again this weekend. Maybe I'll even post photos!

Let's have a look at the NRA's gun safety rules! http://www.nrahq.org/education/guide.asp

The most indestructable substance? Out of control von Neumann machines, i.e. "grey goo" Anything they come in contact with they just turn into more copies of themselves...

Ignoring the First Rule of Hunting is a good start.

According to most contemporary scientific theories, consciousness is a thalamocortical effect: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Consciousness_studies:_Table_of_theories Given that the neocortex comprises 80% of the brain's mass (which I stated and cited earlier), at LEAST 80% of the brain is devoted to consciousness (since that 80% figure doesn't include the thalamus)

http://www.web-books.com/GoodPost/Articles/Gravitation.htm I'll be the first to LOL

Did the White House downplay Cheney's stupidity and the injuries the guy received? Yes. Does it matter? No. Does it count as a cover-up? No. Would you expect Scott McClellan to get out there and talk about how the dude's body was ravaged by bird shot to the point that some wound up in his heart? It's kind of silly for them to get out there and talk about how he only received flesh wounds, but that doesn't count as a coverup.

Consciousness seeks to create purpose-driven order. If we conclude there is no purpose, what motivation do we have to do anything? The solution is to find the purpose, which for an atheistic existentialist must ultimately be self-defined.

THANK YOU! That's been my most hated myth. Neocortical columns comprise 80% of your brain (by weight) [so sez Wikipedia (gasp' date=' insert ad hominem here!) and the Blue Brain Project] The neocortex ballooned substantially in humans, to the point that our brains are 6 times as large as we would expect them to be for our body weight with the set of all mammals as the baseline. This got to the point that natural selection had to come up with clever contrivances so that we could be born with a head large enough to house such a massive brain (using a system of skull plates which fuse after birth) and still fit through a mother's birth canal which had to be designed so its owner could still run fast enough to escape predators using a newly discovered bipedial gait. It was all part of the price humans had to pay to have such enormous brains, but they've certainly served us well. Would natural selection really go to all that effort for us to have such massive brains if we only used 10% of them?

Well, a new report explains what you should do: http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1 From the Boingboing coverage: "Would you like to be happier? Become a rich, married, religious, Republican, white person from the Sunbelt, says this Pew research report." This is why I'm glad to say that pursuing my own personal happiness is not my most important life goal (although I suppose it can be argued that my pursuits are vicariously for my own happiness) Ultimately, underpinning all of my beautiful, teleological, goal-directed pattern seeking nature is atheistic existentialism. From this the core of my belief can be summed up as: I'm a random fluke in the universe. I have no particular purpose except to compute into the whole in the same way that rocks, dirt, and driftwood compute into the whole. There's no supereme being that loves me. There's no divine force trying to preserve me and I could be wiped out at any time by a random fluke. When I'm dead the overwhelmingly most likely scenario is that the emergent effects of my consciousness will vanish from the universe forever. 20 years after I'm dead no one will care. I try to look for reasons to believe otherwise, but those are the conclusions of my inner skeptic, and by far the most rational position I can espouse based on the evidence I've encountered to date. And how bleak that all sounds! No wonder I'm either completely unemotional or melancholy most of the time. But that's how I prefer to have it, because I hate believing lies. I hate what misinformation does to people. I would prefer to be a melancholy liberal atheist than a religious southern conservative, because from my perspective that person is happy from the placebo effect derived from a lie, and I prefer truth to happiness. What about yourself?

Well, a new report explains what you should do: http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1 From the Boingboing coverage: "Would you like to be happier? Become a rich, married, religious, Republican, white person from the Sunbelt, says this Pew research report." This is why I'm glad to say that pursuing my own personal happiness is not my most important life goal (although I suppose it can be argued that my pursuits are vicariously for my own happiness) Ultimately, underpinning all of my beautiful, teleological, goal-directed pattern seeking nature is atheistic existentialism. From this the core of my belief can be summed up as: I'm a random fluke in the universe. I have no particular purpose except to compute into the whole in the same way that rocks, dirt, and driftwood compute into the whole. There's no supereme being that loves me. There's no divine force trying to preserve me and I could be wiped out at any time by a random fluke. When I'm dead the overwhelmingly most likely scenario is that the emergent effects of my consciousness will vanish from the universe forever. 20 years after I'm dead no one will care. I try to look for reasons to believe otherwise, but those are the conclusions of my inner skeptic, and by far the most rational position I can espouse based on the evidence I've encountered to date. And how bleak that all sounds! No wonder I'm either completely unemotional or melancholy most of the time. But that's how I prefer to have it, because I hate believing lies. I hate what misinformation does to people. I would prefer to be a melancholy liberal atheist than a religious southern conservative, because from my perspective that person is happy from the placebo effect derived from a lie, and I prefer truth to happiness. What about yourself?

Perhaps a cracker is a better vehicle for that kind of flavoring. I just remember them being chewey and gross and tasting of oil. But I haven't eaten a McNugget, much less eaten at McDonalds, in nearly a decade.

There's been several instances where I've seen a web site featured which our crappy local FOX affiliate refuses to name. However the images they show are high resolution enough that I can usually type whatever boilerplate is visible into Google, click I'm Feeling Lucky, and be there. I don't really have a specific answer to your question, but I think if you really want to remove all qualms about leading your viewership/readership to a questionable site, you can't display anything about it.

Regarding the OP, I suggest you watch the "Exercise vs. Genetics" episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! As for consciousness exceeding genetic potential, I was thinking this was going to be a thread about intelligence amplification