ashennell

They did not say that one did. Thats just speculation. From the link I posted previously : WTC 5 and 6 are much smaller buildings with fewer floors. I don't see how a comparison between them and wTc 7 is useful. Furthermore there is this from the website i linked to before (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=5&c=y) Assuming this is true, how does it support your conspiracy theory? Was part of the plan to deliberately make the whole think look unbelievable?

Ok, I agree. Well, he should wait for the investigation before he follows blindly the conclusion drawn by the conspiracy nuts.

Why would I want to criticize it? I am confused, maybe a misunderstanding. Who was your initial suggestion aimed at?

Is anyone seriously expecting the outcome of the investigation to indicate that WTC7 was deliberately demolished as part of a secret goverment plot?

I think there is a difference between something exhibiting intelligent/motivated behaviour and being alive. I would go with something like Bascules second definition. I'm not completely happy with it but I'm not sure how I would improve it either. By the way, i don't think 'extropy' denotes the opposite of entropy. I've never seen it used in this context and I think it has some other wierd meaning anyway.

here is another poll: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm 48% percent said that evolution provided the best explanation for the origin of species. That is quite a chunk of the population but I'm suprised that it isn't higher. Data that would be useful to answer this question would be a poll that is subdivided into different age groups. It would interesting to see if the general trend is for a higher percentage of younger people to believe in evolution.

Ermm... we already have most of the qualities, charactersitics and similarities of our recent ancestors. As a few people have pointed out, any such changes would not be considered de-evolution as the concept doesn't make sense. To answer your queston properly I think some clarification is needed. Do you want to :- 1. make some changes to DNA so that we are more like what we think are direct ancesters were, or more like monkeys, apes, etc. e.g. hairy everywhere except our behinds. OR 2. actually use some process on our DNA that reveals our true genetic ancestor. Effectively reversing what happened over our recent evolution and hence the temptation to use the term de-evolution. I think there is a difference between these two processes. The first approach is plausible in prinicple but we would need to work out each change that needed to be made to the genome. Something we can't do at the moment. The second approach I am skeptical about. It would require the generation of an inverse model that spanned this period of evolution. I think techniques similar to this are being used in evolutionary biology but I doubt they are intended to serve this purpose. If you want to get to a common ancester of humans and apes it would be easier to start from apes than from humans, I would guess. It's a strange idea though so I may be writing a load of rubbish. Probably true. I wonder if there any crazed trekkies who have tried to have themselves officially declared Klingon. Genome size differs considerably between speices. I found this page that lists the number of chromosomes for a few different species: http://morgan.rutgers.edu/morganwebframes/level1/page2/ChromNum.html I'm not entirely sure what you mean by building a human from a mouse. Do you mean, actually make a living mouse change into a human?

Here is a pretty good page from the cdc website: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts/msm.htm There is also this information from a UK AIDS/HIV charity website: http://www.avert.org/aidsyounggaymen.htm I'm sure there's a lot more if you look.

That is not true. Differences in sexual behaviour can make a huge difference. Men who have sex with men are considered to be a high risk group for sexually transmitted diseases. There are plenty of studies that support this. This is not a useful statistic. What about normalised values? The percentages of each group that have HIV/AIDS. The rapid transmission of HIV through the gay community is a plausible hypothesis with some evidence to support it. Do you believe that researching this possibility is pointless and grounded on negative cultural biases? If people wish to use this to support their prejudices against the gay community then they are misusing the information in my opinion. Do gay people care less about getting HIV? Do they care less about spreading it to others? NO, of course not. However, information about transmission of HIV/AIDS and the risks associated with different behaviours is important for raising awareness about HIV and reducing it's prevelence.

Most peoples brains can do alot more than that!! Each neuron may be slow, maybe no more than 100 calculations a second but, we have a lots. I think somewhere around 100 billion. I agree - It's pretty much impossible to compare. One way that is often used is to estimate the number of synaptic connections and use that as an estimate of the number of free variables. 5% of it's power? I'm not sure what this means - it can do things 20x faster but never bothers? It this just a variant of the old 'we only use 10% of our brains' myth? I don't know anything about QC's or qubits but I do know about brains. We don't need to look any deeper than neurons and neurotransitters to understand emotions. Emotions will eventually have a computational explanation, possibily related to grounding of internal models or enforcing some variable constraints on the heuristic processes that brain uses. Transfering data from the brain to the computer to make it have emotions is implausible. Any recorded information only makes sense in the context it was recorded - if you want to to take on the same semantics. I'm not really sure what a qubit is to I can't say more.

Unsuprisingly, this is a already a major research area. Although I think that results so far have been disappointing. http://www.face-rec.org/ - a good place to find out more.

Oh can we now! I think that rather depends on what you consider to be a calculation. Robots' date=' even those connected to supercomputers, have major difficulties performing what we consider to be simple tasks such as walking, or bending down to pick up an object without falling over let alone anything truly athletic. Surely the calculations brains perform to enable us to do these tasks would outstrip any computer? I think there is a football match planned for 2050 pitching robots against humans. I think the humans will win![/quote'] Genius. Did you bother to read nacelunks point!! You agree with him. His point - even if we could make really fast computers they won't be intelligent unless we can understand the types of calculation made by the brain.

So you are interested in the localisation of receptor subtypes with respect to the thumb areas involved in different manual tasks? I'm still not sure what the contrast enhanced images are for. I assume that you have increased the contrast because you are interested in the patterns, probably related to capillaries, that become visible. Are you expecting a some correlation between these patterns and receptor densities?

The receptors types will be distributed over the entire thumb (I would assume) just at different densities in different places. I think you will be lucky to find very detailed info on the internet. I'm intrigued though, may I ask what you want this for?

Plus there are way more than 4 neurotransmitters in the brain.

I always found "Why" -type questions difficult to answer. There is a limited capacity for storing information. A large portion of the information we recieve is useless to us over long periods. we need some heuristic that normally results in us keeping information that is usefull. Forgetting is probably just the result of trying to maintain an effective internal-model. Holding on to every peice of information is not something useful for the brain to do. It seems ot make more sense to try and answer 'Why to we remember something?" What properties of a stimulus, event ,etc., make it stay in memory for longer.

It would appear that it is you who were posting on this other forum and not not some friend.

These count as hallucinations and not as illusions.

Because the definition includes reference to the somatosensory sense: Paresthesia : a sensation of pricking, tingling, or creeping on the skin having no objective cause and usually associated with injury or irritation of a sensory nerve or nerve root. (from http://www.dictionary.com) There are lots of types of Tinnitus and many different causes. Some forms of tinnitus are casuses by similar type of nerve damage/dysfunction that are also sometimes the cause of paresthesia.

Hi, sorry I meant to quote your previous post, i.e :- There are classed as halluccinations and the definition I gave of halluccinations is brief but essentially accurate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination Parasthesia is a specific name for a somatosensory condition. I don't think you can apply it to other senses such as the olfactory system. Parasthesia, in my opinion, is neither an illusion or a hallucination. We are quite aware that the sensation is not from some stimulus in the environment but from within our own sensory system. It is not a case of misinterpretation of ambiguous bottom-up signals. So I agree with you - parasthesia is not what I would call a halluccination. I think the most important criteria is that a some external ficticious cause is created. Psychogenic sounds like terminology that is impossible to pin down.

These phenomena are classed as hallicinations as there is no sensory basis for the perception.

Some more potential smell illusions : The first are links are regarding a study of the self-perception of bad breath and indicate that in some cases this may be exaggerated in individuals with low-self esteem. Question : Is this a hallucination (complete fabrication) or illusion (exaggeration of already existing smell)? I don't know. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/is_6_34/ai_82261836 http://members.rediff.com/drkhosla/News/news69.html This is an interesting little snipped from a Criminal Psychology website: http://www.nimblewisdom.com/Criminal_Psychology/Section_103_6_The_Illusions_of_the_Olfactory_Sense There are two abstracts of studies that looked at context dependant peception of odours - one of which relys on non-olfactory information. http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/3/2/183 http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/16/4/349