bascule

That quote sucks, seriously. The density of the human cerebellum is much higher than the neocortex too, even though you can live without a cerebellum but certainly can't live without a neocortex. There's many reasons why the neocortex has a lower neuron density: Cortical neurons, especially pyramidal cells, are huge, some of the largest neurons known to nature. Cortical neurons are also densely interconnected. The amount of volume needed by cortical connections lowers the overall density of neurons. The human neocortex is still contains the most complex neuron interconnection structure in all life systems, and cortical neurons are densely interconnected albeit not densely packed. Bees have less than one million neurons, whereas the human neocortex contains over one million neocortical columns, collections of cells that act like time-sensitive Bayesian classifiers. I am going to go with the human neocortex is way more impressive than a bee's brain, despite the incredibly stupid parallels this article is trying to draw.

I have no issue with nudity and think America is unusually uptight about it.

Are you still so dense to fail to understand that my issue with Fox News is that they're organizing and promoting anti-government protests? I don't like Fox News is a news organization because they sponsor and promote events like this: lUPMjC9mq5Y If you'd like to continue your Fox News apologism perhaps you can actually focus on what I'm arguing.

To reiterate for the hundredth time, I'm referring to this: http://www.the912project.com/ And this, at the bottom of 912project.com: In case you weren't aware, the 9.12 Project was behind this protest in Washington: lUPMjC9mq5Y

Am I missing something? Was there some mention of MSNBC organizing anti-Bush protests in that article?

One of them gets tens of thousands of people to attend their anti-government protest in Washington, DC. I can just keep repeating myself until you acknowledge it. That's a strawman, by the way. In the course of this discussion I've called Fox is a policy advocacy organization and a political action committee. As an aside, I think that dichotomy may be valid. I don't think you can simultaneously be a news organization and a propaganda machine. Was Cold War era Pravda a news organization? In that regard, it's not a false dichotomy. I will passionately argue the point that you cannot be a news organization while creating news by staging events like anti-government protests. At that point you are not covering the news, you are creating the news. You can't do both at the same time.

If I really had to say what I thought the Daily Show was, I'd call it something like meta-news. You will derive a certain degree of news value from it, but at the same time it flips the camera back around on the media themselves, especially cable news, and exposes fluff, incompetence, bias, mis-reporting, and basically everything wrong with the news media today. Of course, it does the same thing with politicians' media appearances as well. If the show is anything besides a comedy, it's a statement on the media themselves. However, the meat of the program isn't Jon Stewart's goofy news-laced monologue. It's the interviews at the end that really count. Depending on the subject, I can see the interview segments of the Daily Show as actual news material. Jon Stewart does a really good job with them, and while they can be lighthearted and gimmicky, often times they're rather heated and serious.

Not trying to single out A Tripolation here, I think it's an interesting question. Can we call any outlet of content that contains newsy informational value a news program? If so, would The Daily Show, Comedy Central's newsical comedy program count as a news program? (Edit: Wow, this thread sho could use a poll!)

I found this interesting, especially it's in Britain, where the "Britain's 20 Most Dangerous Drugs" had physicians citing a 1/4 chance of developing schizophrenia from habitual cannabis use: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/health/drugs-chief-alcohol-more-dangerous-than-ecstasy-lsd-and-cannabis-14544981.html I was beginning to wonder if there was some sort of genetic predisposition to schizophrenia in the British population or something...

Hate to dredge this thread up again, but... In 20/20 hindsight, I think starting with a limited public option that could, over time, grow into a fully fledged single payer system makes the most sense now. I've talked an awful lot about how much universal single payer healthcare would rock, but I think starting with a smaller program that lets us work out the kinks and grow it over time is a better way to build the system. The US is huge, and rolling out a federal program on that scale has far more challenges than it does in European countries whose populations are a fraction of the size.

Holy crap, they just invented John Galt's limitless free energy coil from Ayn Rand's classic work Atlas Shrugged! Now all they need to do to turn it into electricity is to attach it to an electric motor... whose shaft is tied to an electric generator! Then it will make electricity! BRILLIANT!

I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth trying to educate Fox News apologists. It seems like no matter how many times I repeat the fact that Fox News is deliberately and unabashedly organizing and promoting anti-government protests, and that's the reason they're not a news organization, the response is always "You just hate Fox News because they're conservative!"

I believe in magic, as in prestodigitation, the art of fast fingers. Penn & Teller perform it all the time.

It's not like they even try to hide it. At the bottom of: http://912project.com/ You will find: Syntho-sis, I'd ask if your opinion of MSNBC would change if you went to MoveOn.org and at the bottom you saw "Brought to you by MSNBC", but it seems you hate MSNBC enough to begin with, enough to claim they're not a news organization. Yet apparently you think FOX is a news organization, when it's actively promoting conservative advocacy, protests, and political events. There's a word for that: hypocrisy.

Short answer: not much

You're arguing that Fox is a news organization (according to your vote in the poll), but that MSNBC is not. At the same time you're making statements like: And...

I popped open my copy of The Ancestor's Tale and found the section on the correspondence between brain mass and body mass in placental mammals. Page 78 begins the section on this subject, and shows that placental mammals generally adhere to the following ratio: 3 * log(brain mass in mg) : 4 * log(body mass in kg) The page includes a plot of various mammal species and how close they come to the 3/4 line. Humans and dolphins are definite outliers.

I voted yes. It's no different from how people can simultaneously believe in the validity of the four fundamental forces of quantum mechanics and qi/chi, the undetectable life force that has nebulous and multifaceted effects on all living organisms, except under controlled conditions.

I would say the same is true of any minds running on a faster "substrate" than the human brain. If you can speed up the rate at which the brain operates, you'll see a corresponding increase in the rate at which the mind perceives time (or rather, relative to the observer, time would seem to slow down)

Yo momma so fat photons can't escape her local gravitational field

You've never heard of grey goo?

My problem with the material is when they cover anti-government protest they themselves created. Fox News may have started out as a news organization, but they have since become little more than a public policy advocacy group and political action committee with their own TV channel. Perhaps you should turn this lens back on yourself and ask why you don't consider MSNBC a news organization.

Black holes emit Hawking radiation, duh!

Wonder how long until people start worrying that these "black holes" might destroy the earth

I dunno. What would you make of a courtroom where the court reporter was also the prosecutor? Do you think it really makes sense for one person to fulfill both those roles? Yes, they also call themselves fair and balanced... Bill O'Reilly calls his program the "No Spin Zone" and "No Ideology Zone"... just because you call yourself something doesn't make it so.