bombus

if your talking about the general population, then brown doesn't need to inherit blairs animosity, as he has plenty of his own.

 

the quite common oppinion is that, as chancellor of the exchequor (not sure if you have this in the US: he's basically in charge of economic stuff, taxation, budget etc) he's introduced lots of stealth taxes, unpopular taxes like inheritance tax, widened the gap between rich and poor, done away with student grants, and all the stuff the tree said.

 

not sure how fair those critisisms are, but they're the common ones.

 

Inheritance tax has been around for decades - over 50 years! Gordon Brown is the first chancellor to raise the ceiling ( a good thing!). And stealth taxes were not invented by Gordon Brown you know, they've been around forever. At least he never increased VAT from 8 to 17.5% like the Tories did!!

 

I'm not a fan of New Labour, but get your facts right please!

Urm yes. The Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most seats in Parliament. Gordon Brown, as well as being the Chancellor at the moment, is the most likely guy for the Labor Party to chose as their next leader. Although judging by the recent council elections, Labor wont have much time in power anyway.

 

I think Tony will be remembered as the guy that was Bush's crony, broke the NHS, sold the House of Lords and completely screwed with education, education and education.

 

Broke the NHS? You are young so perhaps don't remember how bad the NHS was under the Conservatives. It was Labour who invented the NHS, and the Conservatives will destroy it if they get in as it is against their political ideology - they've always hated the NHS.

 

Blair has been too right-wing with the NHS (PFI etc) but to say he broke it is a gross misunderstanding, and plain wrong.

 

And while I'm on the subject, to blame Gordon Brown for the 'raid on pensions' is nonsense. Big businesses were getting a free ride, and money was needed for improving public services so he closed a loophole. The companies were supposed to make up the shortfall (and had ten years to do so) but chose to make huge profits instead. The tax changes Gordon Brown brought is actually only a small part of the pensions story anyway. The whole 'raid on pensions' thing is just Tory spin.

Yes, consciousness involves "seeing into the future", in the form of prediction.

 

The primary functions of consciousness really boil down to two activities:

 

1) Remembering

2) Predicting

 

These two functions form a continuous feedback loop. We remember what we predict, and predict from what we remember.

 

You seem to be on a completely different tangent though. By "seeing into the future" I mean using only what you remember to make predictions.

 

I stuck "computational" into my post for a very important reason. I think consciousness is computational (or possibly hypercomputational, although I seriously doubt that).

 

This means I believe consciousness can do no more or less than what can be done with any universal computer (or possibly hypercomputer)

 

Is there not a well established argument that consciousness cannot be replicated by a computer programme however complex? Something to do with a chap called Godel?

 

However, I think the human mind is equivalent to many computers all networked and monitoring each other, so maybe Godel's theory doesn't apply anyway.

I was wrong, but my gist was correct. Fusion does produce some nuclear waste, but as one is combining rather than splitting atoms, the waste is less dangerous:

 

Waste management

 

The large flux of high-energy neutrons in a reactor will make the structural materials radioactive. The radioactive inventory at shut-down may be comparable to that of a fission reactor, but there are important differences.

 

The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Furthermore, there are fewer unique species, and they tend to be non-volatile and biologically less active. Unlike fission reactors, whose waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, most of the radioactive material in a fusion reactor would be the reactor core itself, which would be dangerous for about 50 years, and low-level waste another 100. By 300 years the material would have the same radioactivity as coal ash. [2]. Some material will remain in current designs with longer half-lives. [3]

 

Additionally, the materials used in a fusion reactor are more "flexible" than in a fission design, where many materials are required for their specific neutron cross-sections. This allows a fusion reactor to be designed using materials that are selected specifically to be "low activation", materials that do not easily become radioactive. Vanadium, for example, would become much less radioactive than stainless steel. Carbon fibre materials are also low-activation, as well as being strong and light, and are a promising area of study for laser-inertial reactors where a magnetic field is not required.

 

In general terms, fusion reactors would create far less radioactive material than a fission reactor, the material it would create is less damaging biologically, and the radioactivity "burns off" within a time period that is well within existing engineering capabilities.

Sorry, but evolution does NOT apply to the formation of life itself. That is chemistry. Once you get life, then you can look to see IF that life is such as to be able to evolve and be the object of natural selection.

 

As an example, look at this discussion of protocells:

 

"The ease with which such protocell units arise under possible primitive Earth conditions has been abundantly documented, especially in the elegant experiments of Sidney Fox and his collaborators on the proteinoid microspheres. .. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that preformed primitive polypeptides (proteinoids) have properties enabling them to aggregate spontaneously to form remarkably uniform spherical units of bacterial dimensions which contain complex internal morphology including a double wall, exchange materials with the ambient medium, grow, cleave in two, fuse, exhibit weak catalytic activiity, and move when ATP is added to the medium. Protocells containing both proteinoid and polynucleotide have been shown to carry on a primitive kind of protocoding activity (27,29) The proteinoid microsphere is a compelling model for the high-probability prebiotic origin of discrete individual units of evolving organic mattter which could conceivably compete with one another and thus provide the basis for a primitive selection process." Dean H. Kenyon, Prefigured ordering and protoselection in the origin of life. In The Origins of Life and Evolutionary Biochemistry, ed. Dose, Fox, Deborin, and Pavlovskaya, 1974, pg 211.

 

I think you should read the above again:

 

The proteinoid microsphere is a compelling model for the high-probability prebiotic origin of discrete individual units of evolving organic mattter which could conceivably compete with one another and thus provide the basis for a primitive selection process.

In the RNA world, you could envision a self-replicating molecule but it could not evolve. This ribozyme would be such that one and ONLY one base sequence could synthesize an identical base sequence. Any variation would destroy the ability to self-replicate. In that situation, you would have a self-replicating molecule (what you call "life"), but it could not evolve by natural selection because there could be no competition.

 

What about mutation?

 

For natural selection you need:

1. Functional variations among individuals.

2. Selection by a competition for scarce resources.

3. Inheritance.

 

No. 2 is not always required. The challenges of the abiotic environment is just as good.

Consciousness might be part of space-time. It has been suggested that brains merely utilize consciousness in the same way that eyes utilize light, ears utilize sound etc. It may not come from within at all!

 

The last time I lost consciousness was like the posts above. Coming round was not at all like waking from sleep. It was like my mind came back online. Like reality condensing from chaos. Really really wierd, and interesting!

Ok let me ask another question: Which race was first? Black, white or asian.

They may have all emerged at about the same time from the ubiquitous Homo erectus. This is the alternative to the 'out of Africa' theory. Although the most 'primative' physical design of human can still be seen in the Ainu of Japan, the Australian Aborigines and a group of people from the Urals (don't know they're name).

 

I do not think it is black because animals are albino when take away the fur right?

What!???

 

What is the epicanthic fold in the eyes for? Do it protect against cold wind?

That's one theory. It could just be a neotenic trait resulting from the other adaptations. Mongaloid people are probably the most neotenic humans - one could say the most advanced (physically).

 

Does darker skin really give better protection? What about yellow skin, what does that do for you?

Already been answered.

 

Do people who live in the hotter regions tend to be bigger? If so then how did the african pygmies come about, and what about the amazon natives? They tend to be small also.

Not really, but the bushmen of the Kalahari and the Zulus are relatively tall and slim. It may be due to heat loss adaptations, but it could be due to lots of things. Pygmies and Hottentots are forest floor dwellers, and presumably, being small was advantageous.

 

Also the nordic people are tall but they live in cold climates.

 

They may be taller than Inuits and other mongaloids but Laplanders may well be shorter than Danes. The classical Nordics might not be the original humans and may have arrived from, say, Germany relatively recently (or at least, tall genes did at a time when the environment was less of a selector). Also, there may be other things going on selecting for height (competition from more southerly neighbours - who knows?). Norway/Scandanavia is also quite different from Mongolia/Siberia remember.

It really, really, really does not.Sorry about that, but it just doesn't, nor is it really concerned with it.

 

Evolution by natural selection applies to species really, but the principle is applicable to the formation of life itself. It just depends what you consider life to be - at what point do chemicals become alive. Are prions alive? What about viruses? Life began when certain chemicals began to self replicate. That's all life is really.

where did conservation laws go in all of this. The return on anything nuclear is still minimal overall also, and the byproducts of anything nuclear on a massive or growing scale currently have no real programs or acceptable means in which to deal with the byproduct of nuclear/toxic waste. Hanford Washington is a perfect example of this, and moreover they basically look for areas currently less then inhabited by people in which to basically dump or bury such stuff.

 

I think there are no problems with fusion as it creates non-radioactive waste. Correct me if I am wrong!

Anyway, education decreases fertility, so I'm not sure our carrying capacity will be such a problem for future generations.

 

Actually its wealth, but education tends to increase wealth. If you are really poor your children are your only asset, so you have as many as you can. As wealth increases the need for lots of children decreases in general.

I thought France was already building a nuclear fusion plant.

 

Yup, they are.

Why hasn't this been able to happen? What would it do if we could do this?

 

I think the basic problem is containing such high temperatures. You can't contain the stuff in conventional materials because it would just melt the container. There are ideas of containing it in magnetic fields, but currently the energy needed to do this is more than the energy created by the fusion reaction itself.

 

If we could crack fusion we would have (more or less) unlimited energy. Energy is what life is all about. We are just starlight and stardust. Energy is the limiting factor. Unlimited energy means no limiting factor...

Cloning?

 

Great idea. I'd love a spare me I can take bits from when I need them.

He was a fool who fooled a niaive soviet public. They shouldhave stuck with Gorbachov, he was a good leader and would have ended communism slowly and steadily to the benefit of all.

 

Now we have Putin who has to be autocratic to fix the mess left by Boris.

minor point: evolution, as we currently understand it, does not explain the emergence of life from non-life.

 

Oh yes it does...

Found this...

 

http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/04_00/cat_humans.shtml

I can't find anything about that on the internet... Are you sure?

 

I am sure I heard it recently, I am sure it was on one of the Radio 4 science programmes and it made me sit up. I think the gist was that we share more genes with cats than anything else (other than primates of course) but apparently this doesn't mean we are necessarily closer (evolutionarily speaking) to them. As I said, it's apparently a quirk of fate.

 

However, it may have been April 1st!

 

If there are no references to it anywhere, it's probably nonsense...

Uhm... no. The closest orders to Primates are those in the superorder Archonta, the treeshrews, bats, and flying lemurs. We're also possibly of some relation to the rodents and elephant shrews, the systematics are kind of fuzzy, but I've never heard that cats are very closely related to the primates, at least not more than any of the other Carnivora.

 

Alledgedly it's cats by some strange quirk of fate. They are not as close to us as some other animals (cladistically speaking) but for some reason have more of the same genes than anything else.

 

Can't remember how I know this - I heard it somewhere recently, BBC Radio 4 maybe??? It wasn't in a tabloid newspaper! 'Tis true I tell you!

if you cut it down, it can carry on living as a coppiced tree and could live another 1,000 years.

 

Don't kill it!

"But please ask a real physicist, because I'm probably lying to you."

 

 

You fraud.

 

You will be hearing from my solicitors.

 

But in the meantime, have another question :

 

The thought experiment continues. You're on your spaceship returning to Earth, when you accidentally hit the "Planetary Destruct" button instead of the retro-rockets, thereby wiping out all life on Earth.

 

Assume no life exists elsewhere in the universe.

 

And sooner or later, you die too.

 

(Sorry, this isn't the most fun thought experiment in town, is it ?)

 

At the precise moment of your expiry, what happens ?

 

There are no longer any eyes for photons to go into.

 

So, does the scene change ?

 

Does the universe become invisible ? In an instant ?

 

In what sense could it be visible, if there are no eyes ?

 

What do you reckon, Cap'n ?

 

Ant.

 

As far as an individual is concerned, once you die a whole universe dies with you. When I die, you will all disappear from existence too, and the universe will end - and you won't be able to prove me wrong! Unless there is an afterlife of course...

Did you read the criticism?

 

 

Just did. I can't really comment on it as I don't know enough about it, but I'm sure Penrose and Hammeroff have answers. I think the criticism misses the point anyway. I don't actually believe that the ORCHOR theory is necessarily correct, and I don't think the microtubule idea is needed anyway. The thing is that the brain works using, among other things, electronic impulses. It would seem that by 'thinking' we are able to affect the pathways of these impulses - which is supposed to be impossible! However the double slit experiment and all that stuff suggests that conscious observation can affect reality. Well, maybe that's the point of conciousness - that's what it does!

 

 

 

I think consciousness is information evolving with time, but the information is self-referential and exists within a first-person ontology.

 

Yes, you could be right. However, I think that there is something 'wierd' about consciousness and it is fundamentally linked to the structure of the universe/reality/spacetime. It would make sense and would be an example of the pure simple beauty of nature. However, I cannot explain this in human words! Its more of a gut feeling - but don't get me into all that buddhist stuff about knowledge being available from within!

It depends on what the carrying capacity actually is! Intensive agriculture increased k far above what Malthus thought possible, but there will be a limit - unless we crack fusion. Its all energy really. We are just energy. With unlimited energy there will be unlimited humans.

 

What a horrible thought!

Good question. If not it should be.

Since I have never heard of it in any of the Global Warming literature I have ever read I can only assume that either it is not important, or it has been carelessly overlooked.

 

It has been considered. Higher temperatures means more water vapour which means more clouds which means more reflection of light.

 

BUT, its very complex as the higher the temp the less water vapour condenses - so less clouds (confused yet?).

 

Also, the melting of the ice caps and tundra means that land that was very reflective becomes less reflective, so temps increase, and as more carbon is released as frozen ground starts to decompose temperatures increase even more.

 

It'll be the carboniferous revisited! If we're really unlucky it will be the Permian revisited...

 

Although, I recently spoke to a very very clever Prof. from Oxford Uni who told me that it appears that our oceans appear to be cooling overall. Not sure what's going on there as corals are dying 'cos they get too hot. He wasn't sure either!

looks like a common frog to me, just a big old one! They can exhibit great colour variation.