mistermack

Yeh yeh yeh, the old tactic of "change what he said, and then disagree with your own version of it". I'm talking about first impressions, and the reason why they don't get spectators. I'm speculating as to why that is. Maybe you have some golden insights to offer on that score, instead of putting your words in my mouth. Do you think someone should tell these people ?

In most cases, it's the official US version, that you greedily gobble up, that turns out to be the fiction. And it's been happening for a very long time, since the days of an undercover government push to exterminate the "redskins", long before they became "native Americans". Usually, the truth only trickles out after thirty to fifty years, in dribs and drabs, unless somebody really messes up, like Ollie North. When the Ukraine was taken over by force, by a non-elected criminal gang, it was clearly being orchestrated by the CIA in the background. Nobody ever found out who started the shooting, but witnesses at the time spoke of mysterious Americans lurking just before, and that the shooting could not have come from the direction of the government forces. In about forty years time, you will probably find out that it was orchestrated and initiated by Agents of the CIA. Probably with a sprinkling of former Ukrainians. It seemed pretty obvious at the time, but now, the record seems to have been effectively wiped, and everybody repeats the official line. If you swallow the official US line on any of these events, you are being incredibly gullible.

What you ignore, is that the vast majority of women on the planet sexualise themselves by choice, when they put on women's clothes, and apply women's makeup, and get their hair styled in a clearly female way. Women soccer players are way out on the limb of exceptions, I'm the one who's just suggesting that they dress in a way that's more like what the other three billion females do. IF, that is, they want to play in front of a reasonable crowd. I don't personally care what they wear, I don't particularly like the gear that women's beach volleyball players wear. I'm not suggesting going to those lengths. Just normal female kit, not the male replica stuff. Some things just don't look right : When I tried to watch some of the women's world cup matches, the first and overall impression was how bad they were. They looked chubby, slow and not very good. It was only after a while that I realised that I was subconsciously judging it like a men's game, and the reason was, that from a distance, that's what they look like. It's only football that comes across like that. I don't watch women's tennis, and think how bad they are. It's visually obvious that it's women playing women, and you are conscious of that straight away so you take it for what it actually is, two top players trying to win a match.

Having a complete guess, I imagine an animal that searched the leaf litter for food, using it's electrical sensing apparatus in it's nose at night, rather than it's eyes or sense of smell. It's not much of a step, to start including shallow water trickles in the search for invertebrates, and gradually evolving more aquatic features and moving up to shallow streams and rivers. It's closest relatives, the Echidnas, actually evolved back from a Platypus-like aquatic animal to a dry land ant and termite eater. Evolution has no sense of direction. It just flows like water, in whatever direction is more favoured at the time.

Definitely different. Otters are of the weasel family, related to stoats, mink, martens and ferrets etc. Seals and Sea lions are more closely related to bears. Whales are most closely related to Hippos, even the fish and meat eating Dolphins and Killer Whales. And way out on it's own you have the Duck-Billed Platypus which lays eggs, has poison spurs, and has electrical senses, and is as far apart from you and me as a mammal can get.

It takes me back to 1971 on Long Beach, Vancouver Island. I lived at a hippy settlement there for a while, and everybody made log cabins out of drift logs. ( Back then, the beaches were STACKED with tree logs at the high tide mark, lost logs from the logging camps would wash up in storms. When somebody new arrived we would all get together, and build them a cabin without any sort of nails or building materials, just using the weight of the logs. It was a fabulous time. My cabin was actually cut off from the land on an island, at high tide, but you could walk to it most of the time. It was all really far out, groovy, cool man. Great parties.

Barak Obama kicked off all these "Arab Spring" confrontations with a nod and a wink from the CIA to malcontent groups in the various countries. Like loads of people around the world, I was really impressed when he won the Presidency, but he's been a disaster and the direct cause of mayhem and slaughter around the middle east. The ISIS creation evidence leads straight back to his door. His administration is at the root of the disaster that is Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and the more recent violence in Iraq. And the only place where the Arab Spring actually went anywhere is Tunisia. And after encouraging and supplying opposition groups, and stirring up a hornets nest, the US has walked away from the people who they talked into rebelling, virtually everywhere. In a lot of ways, Trump has got it right when he says "we shouldn't be involved". Shame he wasn't there instead of Obama.

It's not the era of crowds at women's football matches either. You can't force people to pay to watch football. You have to "attract" a crowd. And what they are doing now is definitely not working. Do you think women are acting like tottie, when they choose to dress differently to men? It's a pretty widespread free choice that women make, all over the world. I don't know why women footballers, out of all sports, try to dress like the men. Maybe they are working on the flawed logic that crowds won't turn out to watch women, so they should try to look more like men. I'm just saying that I think they have it completely the wrong way round.

No criticism was intended of the project, it just occurred to me how the world in general projects it's own preconceptions on the god business. Of course, kids wouldn't know what to make of the type of structure that I posted, I wouldn't actually suggest trying it for a nativity crib. Unless you were deliberately trying to make an historical point. You get a similar effect in portraits of Jesus and Mary. Artists use familiar faces, including Anglo Saxon blue eyed Jesuses. It's just artistic licence.

The same argument applies in reverse to the opponents. They can argue that it's fine to take out our leaders, it gets the job done. Maybe that's true as well. In reality it's a grey area. Sometimes it has the desired results, sometimes the opposite, as in the case of the Easter Rising. And it's unpredictable, what the outcome will be. Watching soldiers go in makes great television, so that's why you're seeing it happen. Nothing to do with care for civilians. It's all about votes from morons.

How active have the IRA been, since the Good Friday Agreement ?

I'm still betting it would have actually looked more like this :

Bin Laden didn't control any territory. He still took out Manhattan.

The sport that mystifies me is women's football. (soccer) They constantly complain that the men's game gets ludicrous amounts of money ( it does ) and that they should get more because of equality. But Pro sport is all about gate and promotion receipts, and women footballers just don't attract it, in spite of being hugely promoted by the tv companies. For me, there's no mystery. Women footballers dress like men on the pitch. Huge passion-killer shorts and tops that do not flatter. Women are not particularly keen on paying silly prices to watch a sports game, whereas men do. So if they want big money, they need to dress to impress men. Female tennis players have more choice in what the wear, and they don't choose to look like men on court. And women's tennis does get people watching. Soccer women could easily do the same. Female hockey players (field hockey) dress like women, and look great. I really don't get it why footballers don't do likewise.

You might take a look at the history of the "Easter Rising" in Dublin in 1916. In Ireland at the time, few people were supporters of the independence movement. But after the British lined up the leaders and killed them by firing squad, (including one injured man, tied to a chair), the mood in the country completely changed, and Ireland eventually fought for and won it's independence. These kinds of things stick in the minds of people, whether justified or not. On the other side of the coin, how was it ok for the American generals at the end of WW2 to creep around the Japanese Emperor Hirohito like adoring groupies, when he should have been dangling from a lamp post, with his legs kicking? If ever a man deserved to die, he did. If you're going to take out the leaders, at least get it right.

Trump was originally talking about Muslim dogs. Of course, good Christian dogs are brave, loyal and strong. I don't see why it should be a bone of contention.

It's nice, but I can't imagine an American-style log cabin being used as a stable in the middle east 2,000 years ago. Having said that, I have no idea what a stable WOULD have looked like, in that time and place. Pretty rough, I would have thought. To make an anally realistic one, you would probably have to use sticks found at random in the woods. But there again, Jesus was a carpenter (allegedly) so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

We do. The hair around my groin is much more Afro than the hair on my head. It's also thicker. So much so, that we humans have evolved two different types of lice. Head lice, or nits, adapted to head hair, and pubic lice, or crabs, for the groin. Pubic lice need hair of a greater diameter to cling to, so you find them mainly on the pubes, but sometimes on the eyebrows and (I think) armpits. But they can't live on head hair, it's too thin. And it's pretty much vice-versa for the nits. DNA studies indicate that the nits colonised humans first, and that the crabs are descended later from Gorilla lice, which found a home on the thicker hair around human pubes. Like you, I'm not convinced by the sponge idea above. Trapping moisture would inhibit cooling, by preventing evaporation. Instead of cooling, the sweat is more likely to run off as a liquid. Bare skin would lose the most heat from the body. Moisture that evaporates off a hair takes more heat from the ambient air rather than the blood, whereas moisture evaporating off bare skin cools the blood. There are lots of ideas why hair grows this way or that, but nobody knows for sure. I think it's probably down to sexual selection. There is a tendency to select what you grew up with as being most attractive. But there's another tendency to be attracted to the "exotic". And having said that, sex is so strong an instinct that easily overrides such tendencies and can make them pretty irrelevant.

It's lots of factors combined, and each case is unique. In the case of otters, it seems to be pretty clear that it's about food. They are closely related to stoats and martens and mink etc, which don't seem to be under too much predator pressure. The otters ancestors were just adept at catching aquatic food, and the adaptations followed naturally. And it's easy to see seals and sea lions taking that a stage further. But of course, the predators factor is always there. The ancestors of the otters might also have got an aquatic dividend by having a rapid means of escape from predators. Looking at beavers, that looks more likely to be the dominant advantage from being semi-aquatic. Other animals, like moose, get a seasonal benefit from the water, finding a food source of aquatic plants that is a real benefit, and providing minerals that they struggle to get elsewhere (from memory). I don't think the amount of water varies enough to have an effect. There were lots of swamps, at certain times and places, which is where the coal comes from, but other areas had vast deserts, and lots of in-betweens. The dinosaurs and other reptiles did the aquatic thing, just like the mammals did so it's not unique to mammals. Even birds have done it, as in penguins and flightless cormorants etc. With them it was definitely food availability. Where the food could be reached without flying, for the lifetime of the bird, the wings became flippers.

It's a long time since I did any physics, but the problem I see with that is that the field in the two dimensional diagram is being created by the wiring on both sides. So as the distance from one wire increases, the distance from the other side decreases, so there's no reason why the field shouldn't be relatively uniform. The same works for 3d, I would have thought. Probably wrong, you would have to do the maths to get it right.

They mostly taught science in Grammar Schools. In my experience.

Firstly, it's virtually certain that such traits would come from a common ancestor. Since all members of a species have common ancestors. The only way I can think of for a trait NOT to come from a common ancestor, is if it comes from a very recent mutation. I think that a trait that is unique to a species would also be pretty rare. You would generally find it in others, maybe less developed, but still there in some form. Like language, it's tempting to regard humans as the only animal to use language, but when you look again, there is signs of it in lots of species, but less advanced. So if there is a single word for what you described, it's not going to get a lot of use. I think the way you expressed it is fine.

On the subject of hairlessness in humans, it's very relevant to view it in the context of the neoteny that our species exhibits. Basically, it means that humans, particularly males, never fully develop in the way that other apes do. We found some kind of advantage in retaining juvenile characteristics into adulthood, and our hairlessness in adulthood may be part of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny_in_humans

The fact that something passes peer review doesn't really tell you much these days. You need to look at the standing of the publication. And even that's no guarantee of quality. https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/fake-paper-exposes-failed-peer-review-38589

The idea of a parachute was cutting edge science once, when planes were new and primitive. This is one of the craziest and saddest things you will ever see on video. I still find it hard to watch.