Sisyphus

I'll say it as many times as I have to. CORN is not a viable source of biofuel. It is in use for extremely cynical political reasons. I agree with most of the arguments in that article, but it only addresses the current situation (which is stupid) and not the viable alternatives (which still make use of biofuel). Other alternatives which ARE viable, like algae-based farms, do exist, and the whole equation is redrawn.

I don't know whether it's plausible that there would be significant overall genetic differences, but I am pretty sure such differences would be almost impossible to demonstrate. lucaspa sums it up pretty well. "Intelligence" is only extremely vaguely defined, first of all. (Are some people "smarter" than others? Sure. But what does that mean, exactly? We don't know.) Thinking we can accurately test diverse populations for it as if it were some substance that is present in greater or lesser amounts is fairly ridiculous. Comparing "intelligence quotients" of people living in nearly identical circumstances is already borderline pseudoscience. Comparing such from people from wildly different cultures and life experiences is just hopeless, especially if you think you're going to learn about the genetic component, when so many other factors are at work.

I've heard this idea a few times. Before that I even had the idea in a kind of half-serious way. What it comes down to is not whether it will work (it will), but whether it will be cost efficient compared with other methods. Also remember, it would necessarily make it more difficult to walk (every step would be a step up), and people would probably find that annoying.

Yes, it's cool, but what would really be a good find would be liquid water, with it's possibility of life. That is what is rare.

Yeah, for absolute optimal nutrition, you need to either eat some meat or consciously keep track of that sort of thing. Like I said, we're omnivores. But you won't die without it or anything.

I agree, mostly. We're evolved to be versatile omnivores, able to survive on plants or meat if need be. However, obviously we CAN be vegetarians quite easily, and nature doesn't penalize us for it. We could also survive on JUST meat, though probably not nearly as healthily. The "natural diet" is probably less than 5% meat, with great flexibility. (Just for context, I do eat meat, so this isn't a "political" statement or anything, it's just fact.) I'm not so sure about that. "Supporting a vegetarian lifestyle" takes LESS land, not more, so that part of the statement is just a red herring. The way you phrased it made it sound like an argument against vegetarianism, when in fact it's the opposite. That was my main point. The valid question remaining is, "is there enough land to meat our energy needs through bio-fuels?" I really don't know the answer, though the current situation is misleading. I wasn't being hyperbolic when I was talking about the extreme inefficiency of corn and soy, the current primary sources of biofuel. Algae is 30 times more efficient even than palm oil, which is the next most efficient source of biofuel per acre. So biofuel can be produced far, far, more efficiently and in much greater quantities than it is currently while still using LESS land. But I'm still curious about the source of that statement. Is anyone actually in favor of 100% biofuel energy? The advantages of biofuel - renewability, lack of foreign dependence, relatively low environmental impact, etc., apply just as much if not more to the other "alternative" fuels. So maybe a better question would be, "If we make room by cutting down on meat production, is there enough land to produce enough biofuel to take up the slack from solar plants, wind farms, etc.?"

I've seen police on them in a few towns and in airports. They do seem ideally suited for large airports, actually. I still think they're generally impractical and overpriced for what they offer, though.

You mean something that requires more precision than is possible? Or something fundamentally unquantifiable maybe?

If you're on the receiving end? BTW, Pangloss:

Raising livestock uses far more land, because the animals have to eat, and most of the energy is lost each step up the food train. In other words, it takes much less cropland to feed people as it does to feed the animals raised to feed people. You are right about seafood, though, unless ocean plants become a significant foodsource. As for bio-fuel and whatnot, it can actually be produced much more land-efficiently than it generally is now, by a couple orders of magnitude. Corn and soy, for example, are ridiculously inefficient compared to algae, but corn and soy are grown currently, and farmers are politically powerful...

It's probably a mistake to go near this, but what if the animal enjoys it?

Why would you even want to have sex with a machine?

I was talking about the OP, which expressed bewilderment about masochism but didn't mention its counterpart (sadism), unintentionally implying that it didn't seem strange, which I found amusing. Although your hilariously Victorian attitudes are pretty funny, as well. "Love is so out?" Really? So only repressed squares who have sex through a hole in a sheet can love each other?

Ha, I find it amusing that you find the masochistic half so baffling, yet the sadism part apparently seems perfectly natural to you... Anyway, my feeling about S&M is that it is not terribly far removed from the psychology of "ordinary" sexual pleasure. Much of sex is about playing subtle games of control, and of the thrill of losing one's inhibitions and making oneself vulnerable to another. I don't think that's particularly sick. It's about the thrill of trusting your partner to such an extreme degree both physically and in letting no desire remain hidden. The thrill of letting go, in other words, which is what erotic passion is all about. The body certainly goes along with it, too. Pain receptors are greatly dulled during sexual arousal, but the pain still releases endorphins, bringing pleasure. And any act which becomes associated in the brain with sex brings pleasure as well.

Of course Harry Potter is literature. It's children's literature, and as far as that goes, I hear it's relatively good. Is it the best children's literature? No. I probably wouldn't read it to my kids, and I would think poorly of a teacher who assigned it. But I wouldn't mind in the least if they did read it. Anything well-crafted and sophisticated enough to enrapture millions of relatively intelligent (if not necessarily super-literate) adults can't possibly be ALL bad for kids, right? This, BTW, is coming from someone who hasn't read any Harry Potter books, but will fiercely defend books of comparable merit from my old childhood out of pure nostalgia. I don't think I was harmed by these books. For me and a lot of other people, that sort of thing did act as "gateway books" in a significant way. If kids don't gradually build up their literary sophistication, they lack that sophistication as adults to actually "get" literature that actually is "great," and end up thinking James Joyce is dull and Cervantes is weird and Shakespeare talks funny. This is also from someone who's almost certainly read far more "great literature" than 99% of you science nerds (how's that for smug? ).

So... no mention of how the Earth is doubling in size, creating huge quantities of mass out of nowhere? No explanation of why subduction is "impossible," beyond merely asserting it? No mention of any of the many phenomena that plate tectonics explains but this does not, like (from Wikipedia)... 1. The existence of Wadati-Benioff zones, elongated regions of high seismic activity within the crust and mantle that are explained as huge shear zones. These zones are located beneath oceanic trenches and seem to indicate a slice of crustal material is moving downward through the mantle. They form one of the best arguments for subduction but cannot be explained by an expanding Earth model. 2. 3D models of the mantle made with seismic tomography show cold zones of sinking material exactly in the regions where plate tectonics predicts slabs of crust are subducting into the mantle. 3. Petrologic research of rocks from mountain belts has yielded countless pressure-temperature-time paths. Paths for the axial zones of mountain belts (the metamorphic core) show many mountain chains went through a period of "deep burial". This is nicely explained by plate tectonics (subduction followed by obduction). An expanding Earth cannot explain the observed vertical motions, rather, it would predict mostly horizontal motions in the process of mountainbuilding. The existence of eclogite in many mountainbelts indicates material was "pushed" to depths far into the mantle (depths up to over 200 km are found). A mechanical force to push (less dense) crustal rocks to these depths is lacking in an expanding Earth model; in plate tectonics this is explained by the slab pull force which occurs at mid-ocean ridges. 4. The existence of major geologic shearzones (sutures) in most mountain belts. Paleomagnetic and mineralogic studies show the rocks that are now lying next to each other were originally thousands of kilometers apart. In other words: a piece of the crust is missing. Structural geology has shown these missing pieces of crust are not located directly underneath the shearzones or laterally. Instead, they seem to have moved along the sutures into the mantle (this is supported by shear indicators in the shear zones). This is again strong evidence that subduction took place and mountains form by the "continental collision" of tectonic plates. The expanding Earth model does not explain the deep reaching shearzones. 5. Rare earth isotope compositions of volcanic rocks that formed above subduction zones are similar to those of sediments on top of the subducting plate. If there are lateral differences in the isotope composition of sediments on subducting plates, these lateral differences are also found back in the composition of the magma that rose from the deeper part of the subduction zone. So yeah, in short, there are lots of reasons this is considered pure pseudoscience. In general, anyone claiming massive "scientific conspiracies" is almost always just a quack.

Indeed. The flame you're talking about, burning hydrogen, is nothing more than that hydrogen combining with oxygen to make water (or BACK into water, in this case), and giving off a lot of energy in the process. You can't break apart that water in the first place without putting in exactly as much energy as the fire puts out.

Simple question. Why are human noses so oily compared with the rest of the skin? Wild and uninformed speculation welcome as always.

It should be noted that hearing IS the sensing of vibrations. What makes it "hearing" is not that it is detecting those vibrations (that is, sound), but that a particular organ is taking it in and the brain is interpreting it in a particular way. A snake can be aware of the air vibrations that we would call sound, but it experiences it differently than we do.

You need quite a bit more than 4 choices, I think. First, you need to establish what it is whose existence is being questioned. "God" or "deity" are extremely ambiguous terms that mean very different things to different people. Do universal physical laws count as "God?" Can God be synonymous with "universe?" With "continuity of existence?" Does a vague universal benevolence count? Does God have to be a conscious being? Does He have to be omnipotent? Perfect? Does He have to be the creator of the universe? Does He have to take an active role in the world, respond to prayer, etc., etc.? Once an acceptably unambiguous definition is established, there could still be lots of different answers, many of which have overlaps between them and subcategories to divide them. Insisting that everyone conform to 3 rigid categories is going to get you nowhere. For example: strong theism: "God exists." weak theism: "I think/assume that God exists." strong agnosticism: "It is impossible to know whether God exists." weak agnosticism: "I do not know whether God exists, but it might be possible to possess such knowledge." nontheism: "God? I've never heard of such a thing!" or "I'm aware of religion, etc., but I've never considered the question." apatheism: "I do not care whether God exists." weak atheism: "I do not have any belief in God." strong atheism: "God does not exist." noncognitivism: "The statements 'god exists' and 'god does not exist' are meaningless, because there is no cognitive correspondence to the word 'God'." positivism: "The statements 'god exists" and 'god does not exist' have no meaning because neither proposition is empirically verifiable." Clearly, not all of these answers are mutually exclusive, and some might even arguably be sub-categories of others. For example, weak atheism and weak theism could both be subcategories of either strong or weak agnosticism. Yet one is a "de facto theist," the other a "de facto atheist," and each would give opposite answers if limited to a "yes" or "no" reply.

Not since the 20s, actually. But it continues to be commonly misrepresented as such to this day!

It is true that there is structure on scales vastly larger and vastly smaller than our own. But those structures are different. An atom does not really resemble a solar system except in a very abstract or superficial sense. And so any sort of "being" analogous to life as we know it on those scales would have to be of a very, very, very different sort, and probably would have to violate all sorts of physical principles as we know them. For example, relativity makes the "really big" creatures impossible, and quantum mechanics makes the "really small" creatures impossible. Granted that these are acknowledged as incomplete models, but it's probably best to get that sorted out before this kind of speculation should be taken seriously. But one thing. If it really is the case that we're just one notch on an endless-in-both-directions scale, then we're NOT tiny, are we? We're miniscule compared to all the bigger beings, but unimaginably vast gods to all the smaller ones. It rather balances out, no?

I'd say that would be a misuse of the maxim. Absence of evidence where evidence would be expected is evidence of absence. As in, I can walk all around my room without encountering any sign of an elephant. I know elephants to be massive creatures who would definitely make their presence in the room known in a variety of obvious ways. Hence, I justifiably take the absence of such evidence as very strong evidence that there is no elephant present. This is as opposed to something like extraterrestrial life. We have encountered no evidence of its existence. But we do not know what evidence there would actually be aside from, as with elephants, walking up and touching it or something similar. Since we only as yet have the capability to perform that experiment on Earth and to a limited degree on the other planets of our own solar system, our lack of evidence is to be expected whether elephants exist around other stars or not. All we can do is make the best-educated guesses we can about the probability of such things, which admittedly in the case of elephants is extremely small, but in the case of anything which might be called "life" is completely unknown.

I'd say we've learned the hard way, through the now-defunct philosophy and religion subforum, that in topics relating to religion, the line at which something becomes unacceptably provocative is quite a bit easier to cross than in other subjects. Perhaps what you meant to say is, "I do not think there is a fundamental difference between weak and strong atheism." You'd still be wrong, but you'd be much less likely to devolve a simple survey into an all-out religious flame war.

Booooooo!!!!