bascule

I found a video of a 150lb chimp tearing a car door off of its hinges... Yikes...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060203/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/rumsfeld_chavez Hmm, pot calling the kettle black? He was elected legally. Therefore, he is Hitler. Q.E.D.

Go US! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/AR2006020301577.html Also here are the original cartoons, along with an assortment of others which have been done in response: http://face-of-muhammed.blogspot.com/ I really got a kick out of this one:

Maybe they wouldn't be so offended if their beliefs were based on evidence and logic instead of superstition.

As I read more about chimps I realized how stupid my statement was, heh. Interesting...

There's only a conflict between the ludicrous idea of absolute metaphysical free will and materialism. You should read about compatibilism, specifically Daniel Dennett's book Freedom Evolves

Or, alternatively, we could identify the risks technology poses and work to avoid them.

Makes a pretty damn compelling argument against design, doesn't it?

According to many value systems, yes

Haven't only 6 requests been deferred or rejected in the history of the court? (all under Bush, but...)

Uhh, consciousness perhaps?

Well, if physics reporting is anything like climate science reporting, this article is chock full of overgeneralizations and inaccuracies. Anyone care to help me derive a little meaning from it? Sounds to me like they've discovered some kind of weird pattern in the CMBR http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article342351.ece

Who drew that picture of you?

Most of the buzz has been around replacing silicon with diamond: http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Aug/gee20030827021485.htm There was recently a thread on this: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=17457

Doesn't sound like that paper was graded very objectively... more like a teacher trying to convince himself that ID isn't a crock of shit

Dogs have dichromatic vision, meaning they only have two kinds of pigments in their retinas instead of three. Just because they're color blind (compared to us trichromats) doesn't mean they see in black and white. They can still see colors, just not all of the colors we can see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2487095&dopt=Abstract

The brilliant mathematician Roger Penrose, perhaps most famous for The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (which is an excellent book btw, at least in my layman's opinion), wrote an entire book dedicated to this subject, Shadows of the Mind. See: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195106466/ref=sib_rdr_next3_ex3/104-8421323-1959914?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00O&ns=1#reader-page As a materialist I find this absurd. Daniel Dennett wrote Consciousness Explained in which he developed an empirical theory of mind, based off a number of cognitive science experiments. He is, first and foremost, a philosopher. I don't think he particularly likes math. He's also a materialist. Well, artifical life/biomodelling will put that to rest. If we make a computational model of the human, and it exhibits all of the properties we would ascribe to human consciousness, then the door would be shut on dualist propositions forever. What is the problem?

You call us "week"... but there are innumerable animals that are weaker than we are. Rats are smaller than us and have much "smaller" mental abilities. Spiders are smaller than us and have much "smaller" mental abilities. Sardines are smaller than us and have much "smaller" mental abilities. etc. etc. WHAT? The leap to bipedalism, and the impact of substantially larger cranial capacities coupled with the need to increase the size of the birth canal (with females remaining swift enough to evade predators) combinatorially took their toll. I'm not sure how if you rank the chimpanzee among "modern apes" that we would be considered the weaker creature. I expect I could kick a chimpanzee for quite some distance... but then I am 6'3" And men aren't? We're certainly the smartest creature on the planet, and our physique really isn't that bad relative to the entire animal kingdom as a whole. There are certainly a large number of species with a better physique, especially in their native environment, but I think that's greatly outweighed by the sheer number that could never pose a threat to your average human. Okay, well, you have to start somewhere, especially if you're a savannah ape that has just been thrust into a new environment. Kay kay. I wouldn't expect chimps to be able to do that either. Inappropriate for what? The savannah apes from which we descended probably had a really hard time. Evolution looked for a way to go, and a move to bipedalism and improved tool use, coupled with improved intelligence, was the best thing it could find to do with the chimpanzee-like design in order to survive in the new environment. But that doesn't change the fact that 11,000 years ago, we were taking on mammoths. Mutualism. If you're the more agile and sensitive hunter, and you've just downed a large beast, what do you do? You can eat your fill, then leave the rest of the carcass to rot, or you can bring it back to your commrades. Not only will they feel indebted to you because you're feeding them, and may therefore help you if you ever need it in the future, but hey, it may just impress the ladies enough to get you laid. Altruism became genetically fixed in humans, because if we all help each other out, it betters the survival chances for everyone. But in the process the weaker individuals are still getting along, leeching off of the strong. So their genes are not selected out in the same manner as they would be if they were entirely self-dependent. You have to realize that one of the consequences of mutualistic societies is that weak/undesirable people can still get together and f*ck with each other, so their genes don't get selected out...

Wow. Freaks me out a little...

All I'm really saying is that global climate change forcings do not appear to be responsible for the melting of Arctic sea ice. Take that for what you will.

Well, had you bothered to click the first link: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/18/gonzales-january/

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/31/gonzales-misled-congress/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001318_pf.html

Please reread my previous post again. If climate forcings are global in extent then we should see trends symmetrically reflected in both hemispheres. According to the NCEP reanalysis data I posted there has been a progressive cooling trend in the southern hemisphere. We see a progressive warming trend in the northern hemisphere. If you disagree with this assertion, can you please tell me what climate change forcing which is global in extent could be responsible for heating in the northern hemisphere but have no effect in the southern hemisphere? And no, the answer is not CO2

We've had a very mild winter

Fainting goats were bread from an initial population of 3. They didn't naturally evolve to be that way. For more info, see this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=17316 (Ed: I guess you did already)