mistermack

Karma doesn't exist. Someone made it up. Like all the other silly religious and semi-religious hoo ha. It was invented at a time when everything was mysterious, and there was very little scientific knowledge. You can understand people inventing these things, when there is nothing better on offer. People still hold to some of it now, through wishful thinking, and indoctrination.

As much as anything, I think it was a numbers game. Neanderthals had a culture of settling in favoured places, and not moving much. Places like gorges, where migratory game got squeezed, and hunting was easy. Modern man was more mobile, and followed herds instead of waiting for them to show up. When the ice age got really severe, Neanderthals had starved to death and disappeared over much of Europe, so that when it ended, they didn't have the numbers to repopulate, and modern humans just drifted in from the South, following game, and absorbed the remaining Neanderthals by interbreeding. (that's my best guess, based on the various versions and theories I've read).

I'm sure that's right. But a lot of it is related to culture, not inherent intelligence. There's so little evolved difference, it's pretty certain that you could take a baby modern human from 50,000 years ago, before even the bow and arrow was invented, give it a modern education, and it could get a good degree in physics. So there were people walking around 50,000 years ago, with that much potential, who were using flint stones for blades, and unable to even boil water.

I had to look them up. Wikipedia says " These fish are also known for having large brain size and unusually high intelligence." but it also says " the cerebellum (part of the brain) is greatly enlarged, giving them a brain to body size ratio similar to that of humans (though other sources give the brain/body proportion as 'similar to that of birds and marsupials'; Helfman, Collette & Facey 1997, p. 191). This is likely to be related to the interpretation of bio-electrical signals. " They are a bit freakish, and the extra brain matter appears to be related to the electrical systems. The body/brain mass ratio is only a rough guide anyway, there are other factors in human intelligence, including the folding and the frontal lobes of the cerebrum.

The absolute mass of the brain isn't the indicator of intelligence. It's the RATIO of brain mass to body mass that is a guide to the intelligence of the animal. Our ratio is way more than that of elephants. It seems that body mass demands brain mass, just to keep it functioning. The ratio of brain to body mass of a neanderthal was very close to our own. There is a slight difference in layout, modern humans having slightly more frontal lobe, neanderthals having a longer brain case. But the differences are extremely minor. I doubt if you can conclude much from the lack of construction evidence. That's a cultural thing, there are hunter-gatherer societies of modern man who leave no constructions, and if they used wood instead of stone, that would most likely leave no evidence. And the population size of neanderthals were surprisingly small, so that restricts the amount of evidence.

Are the words "is" and "infinite" actually compatible? "is" implies a finite state at a finite instant in time to me. Could there "be" an infinitely long pencil at an instant in time?

I think a lot of people underestimate the intelligence of Neanderthals. I can't provide a reference, but the impression that I've accumulated over the years is that their intelligence levels would be pretty much on a par with people you meet today. Obviously, they didn't have a culture that involved significant building in stone, otherwise we would have evidence of it. I would love to know what kind of shelter they used. I think they were generally sedentary, with settlements around places that provided favourable hunting opportunities, in contrast to modern man, who were more mobile and tended to follow herds. It shouldn't really come as any surprise that Neanderthals should build a dam though. (if that's what it was). They would have seen beavers doing the same thing on a daily basis, and it wouldn't take much brain power to copy a beaver.

A bouncer I used to know used to explain action and reaction to troublemakers in a simple way. "If you don't behave, we are going to have one hit each. I hit you, and you hit the floor! "

It's my mum. She's the only person I know.

Nice. That gives me a huge advantage from the start.

Probably meant Somerset and Cheddar. Back in those days, slavery was everywhere and involved every race. There have always been varying degrees of it, and still are. It was only with the discovery of America that black people were singled out, with a particularly nasty version.

You mean Manchester United have played Taunton ? Edit : On the OP, John Lennox makes a habit of misquoting people, and using their words out of context. I've seen Richard Dawkins on Youtube complaining when Lennox did just that, after a live debate with him. Lennox will take a phrase that you said, remove the context, and bend it's meaning, once he's no longer face-to-face with you.

I just did a little search, and there are two different classes of portable machine. One is the evaporative cooler, or swamp cooler, and the other is a so-called portable AC unit, which is actually a compressor type like a wall or window unit, but it's on wheels, and has one or two pipes that have to be fitted to a window, so they're not really portable in the true sense. Neither get a very good rating, from the journalists who test them. The swamp coolers seem to be best for dry areas, with low relative humidity, as has been pointed out by others. The portable AC units have various drawbacks, including not being very effective, not being very portable, and being noisy and expensive to run. I reckon the future will be in cooled blankets and even cooled clothes. Far more efficient than cooling an entire room.

No, it wasn't in that class at all. If you stood three or four feet in front of it, it was quite nice, but anything more and you couldn't really feel anything. And yet, it changed the humidity very noticeably throughout the entire hall, which had about 12 to 15 full size snooker tables. I would imagine, without doing any research, that it wouldn't be so bad in an environment that was already close to 100 percent humidity. Can you actually raise the humidity, if it is already at maximum? If not, then you wouldn't notice any extra humidity from it, but would get the benefit of the cooling. But in a dry atmosphere, the difference would be striking, as we experienced.

On the same topic, you can buy portable air conditioning units, that work like a standard air conditioning unit, except that instead of dumping the heat to the outside atmosphere, like in a fixed AC unit, they dump it by evaporating water. They are the most awful excuse for AC that you will ever come across. Yes, they do produce cool air. But the price is a massive increase in humidity. So unless you are standing right in front of it, you actually feel far hotter and more uncomfortable, as soon as it's switched on. I used to play snooker in a very large snooker hall, and on hot nights, they would turn one on. You could tell within minutes that they had done so, because you would start to sweat twice as much as before. Just one unit in a huge hall was enough to make everyone suffer. Needless to say, as soon as we worked out what was happening, we complained loud and clear, but the management took some convincing that a unit that was blowing cool air was making everyone sweaty. They're still on sale now. Terrible things.

That's interesting, about the blood pressure drop on rewarming. I was going from memory, and I have no idea where I read about hypothermia and the possible danger of rewarming. So I did a quick check on wiki, and it says the following : Rewarming Shock (also known as rewarming collapse) has been described as a drop in blood pressure following the warming of a person who is very cold.[1] The real cause of this rewarming shock is unknown.[1] There was a theoretical concern that external rewarming rather than internal rewarming may increase the risk.[2] These concerns were partly believed to be due to afterdrop, a situation detected during laboratory experiments where there is a continued decrease in core temperature after rewarming has been started.[2] Recent studies have not supported these concerns, and problems are not found with active external rewarming.[2][3] The bit about afterdrop is roughly similar to what I remembered, it seems that recent studies are not so certain. As someone who has used motorbikes all his life, I can say that I've been incredibly chilled on a few occasions, and warmed up in a hot bath when I got home, but I'm still here. On the point of learned behaviour, of course nobody's disputing it's importance. But equally, instinctive behaviour also exists, and it's not easy to be certain which is which. I tend to think that if the whole world follows a certain trend, it's likely to have an inherited instinctive root, or at least a component. But with a rapidly globalising culture, you can't even rely on that.

I don't know anything about dogs and ice cubes, but I do know that something along those lines applies to humans and hypothermia. If someone is seriously hypothermic, you should never give them a hot bath or shower to warm them up. What can happen is that the body is "fooled" into thinking that it's too hot, and sends inner blood to the extremities, to lose heat. This has the effect of pumping cold blood from the extremities straight back to the heart and can and does cause heart attacks in healthy people. The advice is to warm up hypothermic patients gradually, not rapidly, and give them hot drinks so that the heat goes internal, not to the outer extremities.

That's not the point though. It's how your brain INTERPRETS the difference which is taste. If warmer water was incredibly good for you, and safer by far to drink, then the exact same molecules at the same temperature would taste really nice to you now, after millions of years of evolution. Of course it's right that we learn from our parents to avoid certain foods as well, (in the wild). That goes for chimps as well as humans, they learn by sticking close to their mother and watching what they do. But taste is a blunt instrument, that gives you a start in learning what to eat and what not to.

It could be some kind of early signs of epilepsy, or something similar, but below the threshold of actual fits. When I was in my early teens, I had odd episodes that were set off by lying on my back and looking at the light bulb in my bedroom. I would get a kind of aura, and it was the smooth curves of the lightbulb shape that instigated a rather horrible feeling of sliding sideways on ice, and the lightbulb shape would contort and twist as the feeling got stronger. I would always snap out of it, at that point, but it was a really horrible feeling, that I was losing control. Just once, it became so horrible, that I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, and found myself shaking in the living room, before I got out of it. I suppose it could have been a recurring dream, but I would have sworn at the time that I was fully conscious the whole time, although obviously a different state of consciousness. But whatever it was, it was very scary and unpleasant, and I'm glad that it faded and didn't persist.

What is taste though? There is no such thing as intrinsically good or bad taste. It's just a way of sorting out the safe nutritious food from the dangerous. So your brain and taste cells evolved to tell you what is good to eat and drink, and what is bad. As it's the SAME water in both cases, and only the temperature is different, then it's obvious that your brain is therefor reacting to the temperature, and telling you that the cold water is good to drink, and the warm water is bad. And I would say again, that that is because in our evolutionary past, cold water was fresh running water, and warm water was more stagnant and dangerous to drink. You only have to look at a few survivalist videos to get that message. It's pointless looking at rats and mice in this context. Humans don't have the same immune system, and most animals can drink water that would kill or make a human very sick. Survivalists will tell you to be very careful what you drink, and to look for clean running water as a general guide, which of course, will be cooler than still water from a pool or puddle.

I have never seen evolution discredited. And I doubt that it ever will be. All of our instinctive behaviour HAS to be there because of evolution. I wouldn't regard a preference for room temperature red wine as instinctive. It's fashion. People are told that it's the right way to drink it, and that they are ignorant if they go against it. Peer pressure and fashion are powerful influences. They used to say the same thing about beer in England. Mainly because they didn't have chillers. Then the Americans came over for D day, and started the fashion for chilled beer. Now, brewers find that most people prefer their beer chilled. Edit : It would be pretty easy to find out if a preference for cold water was instinctive. Just do a study with chimps or bonobos, in the wild, offering them a choice of room temperature or chilled water, and see which they choose. I would be willing to bet that they would prefer the chilled, whatever the circumstances.

I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Our brains evolved a liking for some things because they helped us survive, not because they make us feel good. The reason we find things pleasurable is because we inherit genes that make it so. The temperature of the minerals in the water is irrelevant to survival, and so a taste for colder water for that reason would not be selected for. The only reason we have an inherent liking for cold water, is that it helped our ancestors to survive in greater numbers than warmer water. Most of those ancestors were tree living fruit eaters, for a big part of our recent past. They get a lot of their water from their food, so they don't have to drink water as much as some. Also, for most of the time human ancestors were rain forest dwellers, until about six million years ago, so they would have had plenty of clean flowing water to choose from, and wouldn't need to drink from any stale water source they could find, like animals on the dryer plains do. So we haven't evolved as robust an immune system as some other animals, and actually need cleaner fresher water to stay healthy.

Hot food also has an evolutionary history, it has long been a way of making food more digestible, and also kills bugs. So there really isn't a problem there. We've evolved to like hot stuff, as well as cold water. Although the cooking era is a lot briefer than what went before.

I would say that it's definitely an evolutionary hangover. As is virtually everything we do and think. Our ancestors would have preferred cold water, because in Africa, that would have meant running water, which is going to be far lower in nasty bugs and parasites. Go to Africa and drink warm water from a small pool, and you will soon find out that you made a mistake. So those ancestors who instinctively liked cold running water survived much better, over the millions of years of our evolution.

As stated above, for something to be a benefit, there has to be a purpose. There is no purpose to life, or evolution. Organisms appear to be doing their best to survive and reproduce, but it's just things reacting to stimuli. The nature of evolution means that those in the past which didn't react in a way which promotes survival and reproduction went extinct. Humans are the exception, we have a thinking brain, and can visualise dying, and picture the future. So we can dream up our own purposes. But that's all they are, human concepts. They don't mean anything outside of our own collective consciousness. Ecosystems are not really systems either, they are purposeless bits of the world. A system is a human picture of things that happen, that's all. The water of the Earth can be pictured as a system, with evaporation, clouds, ground water, rivers and lakes etc. But it's only a system in our heads. In reality, it's just how things behave, under the current conditions. So you can't benefit a system that has no purpose outside of our heads. Whatever happens, happens, and is just as "good" as any other happening. Think of the Sahara desert. It used to be green Savanna with lakes and rivers. The climate changed it to a desert. It's not a worse ecosystem. It's just different. If you introduce a human concept, that more life is better, THEN you can say that it's a worse ecosystem. But in reality, it's just a place.