StringJunky

This snippet seems to support - as one of the possibilities - what I was saying about sheer numbers being the determinant; they are there but very rare. The whole article is worth reading. it's one of the references in the Wiki article I linked earlier.

No, they take the gamete out and put it in another donated oocyte that has had its gamete taken out. mtDNA then is from the egg donor. Edit; Xposted with Endy This Wiki is quite interesting.

It's probably just a simple numbers game of one statistically overwhelming the other. In an egg there are 100 000 - 500 000 mitochondria vs 700 - 1200 in sperm. They are there but it's a needle-in-a-haystack job finding them.

Yes, I know what you mean.

Blame Fred.

If decay is random, why are the half-lives different between elements? What defines the limits of randomness between them to give their half-life values? In my ignorance, they should all be the same; yet they are not.

It bemuses me how you denigrate Einstein, on the one hand, via your Father's thoughts:: Then use him as a pillar of wisdom on the other: What's going on there?!

Only a scenario with an infinite possible number of outcomes could be described as truly random; is that correct? Given a limited set, there must be a limited number of permutations. Once one exceeds the number of possible outcomes in a limited set, a pattern must develop eventually ...therefore, not random.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

AFAIK the ratio of oxygen stays the same at whatever altitude, there is just less total molecules available higher up. If it's going down here, it will go down in the proportion same up there. I don't know if the total oxygen level is going down or not.

Indigenous high-altitude people happily live in oxygen concentrations down to about 11%. (16 728ft altitude). The longest anyone can survive at 7% (26 000ft) is about 48 hours. With appropriate acclimatisation people can be quite hardy.

Yes, that's true, they did extrapolate from the expansion but it doesn't necessarily follow that the universe began from the smallest point; it could have just been the beginning of a new epoch or phase in its evolution. The eternal nature is thus still preserved. I don't think the modern consensus is that the universe began with the big bang; the infinitesimal nature of the result suggests Relativity has broken down. I'm suggesting eliminate the simplest one first.

I concur. I don't buy 'parallel universes' either because: a) Occam's Razor - it's not the simplest idea and b) It falls into the "..turtles all the way down" argument/trap, as mentioned; this is also a fault of intuition imo. The simplest solution is that the universe has always been here.

Put two 12-18 month old children to play together with a few toys, will they share? Kind people are made, selfish is the natural state. This proactive intelligent behaviour modification in our offspring from their 'natural' behaviour is a major part of what defines us a species.

I don't think of SFN as a live-in-the-moment chatroom, like Facebook etc, so I don't feel any rush to respond. I treat its pace more as an enduring repository for people's answers and considered thoughts. Notice how many times people bring up long-dead threads.

Type in the Search box a member's username, then where it says 'This Topic' click on that and choose 'Members' in the dropdown list. Hit the green button. Click on the name and you should see when they were last active under their username, top left. To find your own just click your username...you can do that for other members as well in-thread.

I read it and I agree that the traditional way is obfuscating, tiring, and easy to lose your place. There's no natural stopping places to have a quick chew on the cud before continuing.

A lot of people only support what they want to hear and that random crackpot is giving them it. It's a bit like the current economic denialism by the Greek electorate; the truth is too painful what needs to be done, and that situation is a storm-in-a-teacup compared to climate change

Yes. I thought so.

Connecting N-S with no gap between - magnetically attracted and in contact

I thought so. That makes it clear that friction holds them in position on paper. If you stick two magnets together N-S end-to-end, and did the iron filings again, what would be the field configuration? Would it be like one magnetic field or two distinct fields, in some other pattern where they join?

So, if we were in a zero-g environment with a floating magnet in front of us and it drifted through a cloud of filings, would they all just stick to the magnet or would we see the field expressed via some of them?

I think 99% of the time, if a post is clearly negged unjustly it will be reversed by other members and mods, so the ones that stick are, in general, appropriately given. If I really thought the trend was clique-y and conspiratorial between certain 'elite' members I'd have been gone from here within days of joining in 2009.

Right. So, the onion configuration is still there but much more tightly packed in the absence of filings?

Is the magnetic field, as expressed by the filings, still present in those dimensions and form in the absence of those filings?