bascule

I prefer a bit more lenient approach to free speech. I respect the ACLU for defending the rights of the KKK

One of my take-aways from Greenspan's post mortem of the financial crisis that a company acting in its own best interests is not necessarily acting in the best interests of the system. I'm sure Bear Stearns made a lot of money being the proverbial whipping boy of the financial sector, until things started to go really bad systemically. Suddenly all of its customers had large amounts of toxic assets, and thus Bear Stearns died. When they died, they began setting off a chain reaction which, had action not been taken, could've lead to the collapse of AIG and with it much larger financial companies. Bad decisions made at Bear Stearns had ripple effects throughout the economy. I'm not to say they're singlehandedly to blame for the financial crisis, but because they and the other financials had the freedom to leverage themselves up the wazoo the way they did, everybody else in the entire world is worse off because of it. Is that really fair?

I think humans naturally factionalize

I think ceiling fans are a nice, energy efficient way to cool your home I have mine on right now

I was just at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas... they have a "Rainforest Cafe" with a rainbow created using exactly that method. Sorry this picture is so grainy... it was taken on my iPhone which doesn't work so great indoors: At the very center of the picture you can kind of make out the rainbow.

Biology, because that's the only way humans can understand other lifeforms well enough to help them, and also knowledge from biology is used by the medical sciences as well, so it benefits both doctors and veterinarians.

It's only a nonsensical idea if you think "free will" means "freedom from causality"

Well that goes without saying, although I'll always remember her as the evil bitch from Saving Silverman.

SCOTUS shot it down as unconstitutional (saying a constitutional amendment would be required to enable it)

Barack Obama got a regular cheesburger, extra well done, and he didn't get good old American ketchup, he got... mustard, and not just regular mustard... spicy mustard... DIJON MUSTARD. And Hannity found out: http://gawker.com/5244126/obama-orders-burger-with-elitist-european-condiment?skyline=true&s=i Enjoy your FANCY BURGER, MR. PRESIDENT! Apparently it isn't just Hannity playing up the Grey Poupon angle: http://mediamatters.org/research/200905070031 As a fan of spicy/dijon mustard, I'm not sure what the deal is, although I prefer store brand to Grey Poupon. Obama just wants a SPICY BURGER. Apparently to Fox News that's a cardinal sin.

"Democrats" were briefed meaning Nancy Pelosi? I mean, I guess shame on her, but it's certainly understandable. You didn't object to it back then, so how dare you object now! Zuh? I mean, this stuff has been dragging on for years. If Bush were a Democrat the Republicans would've been trying to impeach him back in 2006. I guess because Democrats don't have a spine that makes torture ok? I'm confused... but it's not too surprising coming from Faux News.

There's been a lot of media attention recently about Jenny McCarthy appearing on Oprah to spread pseudoscience about vaccines to the nation. Well, Amanda Peet has come out against her: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/AutismNews/Story?id=5483159&page=1 ...and well, she's so rational and articulate, not to mention well-researched! When the interviewer asks for her opinion on a complex scientific matter, she says "don't ask me, ask the experts!". There's an incredibly lulzy scene with Jenny McCarthy where she cites some numbers (which Peet at least claims are wrong) and then *bam* correlation = causation! I can understand McCarthy's frustration with having an autistic child, but obviously her blame is horribly misdirected. She then goes on to rant about how the media pays far too much attention to "controversies" where one side involves pretty much the entire scientific community and the other side involves celebrities spreading pseudoscience. I wish reporters would be more in-your-face and confrontational with pseudoscience, but sadly we can't have a Richard Dawkins do all our science reporting. Hats off to Amanda Peet for this one, she rules!

I had a land line growing up, but voted for "never had one" personally as I've always had a mobile phone for myself after leaving my parents' house.

Medicare is another one I'm surprised has been unaddressed. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act passed by Republicans in 2003 is expected to cost the American taxpayer $1.2 trillion by 2013 (or approximately $120 billion per year) This bill included provisions which were effectively a handout to pharmaceutical companies. It prevented Medicare from negotiating volume discounts by having Medicare reimburse pharmacies for drugs instead of purchasing the drugs in bulk then disseminating them to pharmacies to give to Medicare patients at a discount. This is also the reason why drugs are so much cheaper in Canada... Health Canada gets a volume discount, Medicare doesn't. Not really sure why the Democrats aren't tackling that one yet, but I think a safe assumption for the time being is they're too busy.

That's a bit of a strawman. How did the reaction to the financial crisis affect the freedoms of small businesses? Another strawman. The Atlas Shrugged-esque scenario portrayed on the "salary cap" thread was a gross distortion of the reality. There was no plan for salary caps, ever. That's exactly how I feel, however you're trying to apply those same rights to non-human entities like businesses and corporations. I draw the line at humans, sorry. I like the idea of unencumbered small business but small businesses do not deserve all the same rights as people.

Social Security is foremost in my mind. We all know it's doomed, the question is when someone will put their foot down and say when, defaulting on at least a portion of the payments and completely suspending the potential future payments for individuals who are younger than a certain age. I pay into Social Security now and know when it comes time to retire I won't see a dime from it. Of course, I also have a roth IRA, which is where I actually expect to get retirement money from. I'd be happy if they stopped having me pay into "Social Security" as if I was ever going to get money from it, and just raised my payroll or income tax to cover payments to existing recipients of Social Security. At least then it wouldn't be a big lie. Of course, it's the figurative "third rail of American politics"... nobody's afraid to touch it, even though it's horribly broken.

I use the quote in the context of personal liberties. Things like: being able to talk on the phone to someone in another country without the fear of the government illegally spying on you without a warrant. Being able to use the Internet without my traffic getting routed into the NSA. Being able to take hair gel on an airplane without having to pay $15 to check a bag or ensuring that my hair gel is in a one quart plastic bag. Being able to keep my shoes on as I walk through the metal detector. I'm not sure what "liberties" you think we as a nation have given up in the wake of the financial crisis. I've seen you talk about them but only in vague terms. As far as I can tell these are not individual liberties, but "freedoms" implicitly given to corporations. Unlike capital-L Libertarians, I do not collude personal liberties with the liberties of corporations. I also value personal liberties much more highly than corporate liberties. As an individual I want the government to stay out of my business unless a judge says otherwise. I think corporations require much higher levels of transparency and regulation than individuals. At the time of Franklin's quote corporations as we know them today did not exist. I think it's safe to say he was talking exclusively about personal liberties. As to what he would've thought about his quote as applied to corporations we can only speculate, and speculating about what the founding fathers would've liked or disliked is pretty silly if you ask me.

There's two solutions to that: 1) Spend less 2) Earn more I've heard this quote bandied about quite a bit by the teabaggers (specifically Glenn Beck): (yes, this coming from one of the presidents under which the debt ballooned enormously. oh, and he cut taxes) I still think one of the best ways we can fix the deficit right now is to get the economy in better shape so we have higher tax revenue, even at existing rates.

The question in your poll isn't a yes/no one, however you have yes/no answers. And by the simplest definitions of transhumanism, they already exist. My glasses correct my vision to better than what your average human can see naturally. I'm a cyborg!

http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/07/news/economy/obama_budget_details/index.htm?postversion=2009050710&eref=rss_topstories What do you think, is this a drop in the bucket, or does every dollar saved count? I think this is great, but that the general reaction from the teabagging community will be that it isn't enough.

Another difference: one of these sucks, but the other is unconstitutional. During WWII waterboarding was considered a capital offense. We executed Japanese who waterboarded Americans.

When I reference the Founding Fathers it's generally because I agree with them, things like: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

I guess I never really opined on what I actually thought of this. Yeah really, I'm kind of confused. Michael Savage is a weird and interesting guy, and no matter how much he offends me, I would never ask to ban him from my country (a metaphor which kind of fails considering he's from my country). But anyway, yeah, I really don't get this.

Our brains are made of trillions of neurons. A modern day CPU is incomprehensibly faster than an individual neuron, but they outpace modern CPUs in sheer numbers. Nature came up with very good ways of building self-similar systems, which is a problem CPU designers are only starting to focus on. As things stand, CPU designers have maxed out the transistors they can devote to optimizing sequential execution, and the new trend is to have a simpler CPU core but dedicating those extra transistors that Moore's Law affords as time rolls on to making increasing numbers of duplicate CPU cores and interconnecting them in a mesh network. As time progresses, computers are going to get a lot closer to the levels of parallelism we see in the human brain. Supercomputers will have hundreds, thousands, millions of CPU cores per logical "node", whereas today at the top end they may have 16 or 32.

A new study shows that the amygdala is substantially larger in babies with autism. The study makes no conclusions about whether the size of the amygdala is related to genetic or environmental factors (or both). The amygdala has been one of those brain structures that fascinates me. It's a very old structure which is part of our "reptilian brain" but seems to have found some novel uses inside the mammalian brain, particularly in regard to the fixation of memory. I've heard this as a "suspect" brain structure involved in autism, but this is the first scientific study I've seen demonstrating it to be abnormal in children with autism. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedGiven recent publications (on PubMed!) suggesting that schizophrenia and autism represent social disorders with a common origin but on "diametrical" ends of the spectrum I decided to look at studies on how schizophrenia affects the amygdala. I found this rather interesting article on the size of the hippocampus and amygdala (both parts of the lymbic system) in patients with schizophrenia, and their results were: Could it be that autism is linked to symmetric enlargement of the amygdala, and schizophrenia is linked to asymmetrical enlargement?