bascule

In response to some of these other threads floating about, specifically in the case of incestuous marriages they have many of these rights already, because they're family. They don't have to worry about hospital visits, for example.

Lots of people choosing Java. Nothing wrong with that, but the cited benefits aren't particularly unique to Java. For example, Python is likewise platform-independent (and for that matter, can run on top of the Java Virtual Machine using Jython). Python also blows past the rather brittle and frustrating type system found in Java, using a dynamic type system instead. This, combined with higher level OO features like metaclasses and metaprogramming make Python a much easier and more powerful language to program in versus Java. So why not learn Python instead?

I'm confused by these graphs. Any reputable reconstruction will include all of them. Is the plot on the left leaving 4 of them out, and the plot on the left the 4 which were left out of the other plot? If so, what is this attempting to prove? For what it's worth, both plots exhibit the same "hockey-stick" trend, one just more sharply so than the other, which I guess is what happens when you cherry pick the top four and show "oh gosh, the top 4 are more than the following 19 combined!" Would you agree that we are seeing arctic warming at a historically unprecedented rate?

Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: their architecture is appalling.

What if you included the total information included in a species' "extended" phenotype?

Of particular importance is the advent of natural languages with the expressive power of context-free grammars. That is, symbol ordering had importance and was used to extract a tree-structure of represented meaning at various levels of abstraction, rather than just an arbitrarily ordered sequence of symbols. I believe this arose in the early ancestors of mankind, after they had speciated from the Neanderthals.

I wholly buy into the idea that Stone's prediction of "vertical" tasting events will come true.

What is socialism, and why do you think it sucks?

As a passionate gun owner and user, I am not concerned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO DEMO is a power plant whose conceptual design is set to be completed in 2017 (following lessons learned from ITER) and construction set to complete some time around 2033. The goal of the power plant is to continually produce approximately 2 gigawatts of electricity, and demonstrate the practical feasibility of fusion power as an energy source.

Behold, the Julia set:

Who here is making that specific argument? Not me. For what it's worth, I'm not opposing incestuous marriages, just trying to provide a secular rationale for doing so. That is the topic of the thread. I think it's fairly safe to conclude that pretty much all incestuous relationships are unhealthy, and many are abusive. I will certainly entertain anecdotes of an actual healthy incestuous couple though; that would be interesting to read about.

There are what Richard Dawkins calls "watershed events", things like the advent of the DNA-based lifeforms, the eukaryotic cell, multicellular life, neurons, brains, tetrapods, mammals, humans, etc. There's no real teleological thrust to it, the process was merely meandering about on its own, permutating through the various possibilities when it happens upon something pretty awesome, and these watershed events pile upon each other to form increasingly complex forms of life.

Yes. That is not the case in America right now. I'd also be happy if they separated "marriage" from any sort of legal definition, with civil unions being the only legal entity recognized by the state.

What will happen in 2012? Drinkin' time!

Which is likely the case... totalitarianism/libertarianism and conservatism/liberalism are orthogonal.

Sorry, couldn't help myself...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/science/earth/23climate.html?_r=1 Opened yesterday, with the US and China being the two biggest figures involved in the talks but not presently part of any international agreement to limit emissions. The two countries together emit 40% of the world's anthropogenic CO2. What do you think? Is this meeting going to be productive, or a waste of everyone's time? I'm glad to see a less recalcitrant US involved in these sorts of discussions, as the previous administration shrugged off and actively stifled research into climate change.

Never heard of it... that's pretty cool. I have great hopes for space exploration in the form of unmanned probes, and perhaps when we have self-replicating nanotechnology we can create useful probes the size of a head of a pin, or smaller. Those would be a lot easier to get traveling near light speed than anything a human can occupy. And once they reach their destination, they could build a TeleClone machine, and we could start sending whatever we wanted there at the speed of light

Would you say the overwhelming majority are abusive? I'd say the overwhelming majority of incestuous relationships are abusive. Or perhaps people would've said something similar when they were going off gut reactions before the matter was studied by the psychological community.

Sounds like you're describing something like SoftICE

I think in most cases incestuous relationships are psychologically unhealthy, whereas gay individuals can have just as healthy relationships as typical heterosexual couples. Any trepidation I have towards giving my seal of approval on incestuous marriages stems from this concern.

Not really. Just don't try to slippery slope me into saying supporting gay marriage means I should support incestuous marriage, marriage between people and animals, etc.

I don't know about that. For example, I'm a liberal (perhaps call me a liberaltarian) who supports and exercises gun rights. In fact Showtime is making a series about a gun club I've attended (albeit not regularly): http://www.sho.com/site/locknload/home.do I think you'll find guns less passionately opposed by most liberals than you will abortion passionately opposed by conservatives.

To reiterate my point from the other thread, in almost all cases resulting from physical causes (e.g. disabilities, race, gender, sexual orientation) America has sought equal rights. It falls under the auspices of what Americans at least call "civil rights".