Sisyphus

You can "prove" anything if you're willing to break the rules, which you would have to do to prove 4>5.

I believe he's making fun of those who call anyone who criticizes Bush a "patchouli wearing, pot smoking, Capitalism-hating, anarchosyndicalist liberal hippie."

Not all conservatives or Republicans feel the current leadership's massive spending, contempt for internal debate, brushing aside of civil liberties complaints, cowboy foreign policy, and various unholy alliances are particularly true to their party. There are still some who think of it as the party of Eisenhower, and of coolheadedness, restraint, liberty, classical virtue, etc.

Nobody has really said why the supposed moral consequences of cloning would be so terrible. I'd be interested to hear why those who consider it inherently immoral do so. My theory is still that it's just the "mad scientist syndrome," where pop culture has been exploiting it for so long in inaccurate forms that people have a kneejerk reaction that it must somehow be unnatural and immoral. I suspect that other nations will pursue this research ahead of us, and the U.S. will fall behind in biotech, which could well be the most important science of the next century. In a few decades people will be used to the idea, and wonder why the hell everybody was so against it now. BTW, I agree that biotech can have potentially dangerous and ethically questionable consequences. But a blanket ban on fairly arbitrary criteria is quite silly, IMO, even if it were possible to hold back science indefinitely, which it isn't. It seems like either Bush hasn't had anybody qualified explain the issues to him, or he has, and he's just pandering to his base at the expense of long-term national interest.

He is right, though. It's pretty incredible...

Ever hear of the paradox where, in order to go some distance, first you have to go half, and then half of the remaining half, and then half of the half of the half, and so on to infinitity, and thus you'll never actually get there? That's like an infinite sum with a finite total. You keep adding terms of 1/(2^n), and the sum as n approaches infinity is finite: one. BTW, an analogous integral would just be the integral of f(x)=1/(2^x), from 0 to infinity.

But a black hole big enough not to immediately decay, say to last for a few seconds, would fall straight through the Earth, gaining mass by absorbing the immediately surrounding matter and thereby delaying its decay, and continuing back and forth through the center of the Earth like a pendulum, gaining mass until the planet is consumed. Of course, the earthquakes would kill us all long before that happened. The end result would be an Earth-mass black hole occupying Earth orbit.

This site answers your question perfectly: http://www.digipro.com/Trials/moon.html

Seems like east/central Asian peoples and American Indians would fall into that category. But then again, maybe they're relatively recent newcomers to their respective regions...

Here's a good link that explains pretty well what we know: http://anthro.palomar.edu/earlyprimates/early_2.htm

black hole + Bermuda triangle = a marble-sized black hole and no more Earth

It's not so much that I disagree with his position. I don't even understand what he's talking about. What's wrong with cloning? I get the feeling he's catering to the crowd which is automatically against it because it sounds all "mad scientist" like, largely as the result of a pop culture which doesn't understand it but is often willing to use it as a lame plot device. See "The Island," etc. We should just call it something else instead of cloning, like non-simultaneous identical twins.

I can't testify as to whether or not the man is a moron, but couldn't he just be joking?

Come on, yourself. Nobody is saying any serious offense was commited. Relax, already. I wasn't "denigrating the Vice President, hunters, and Republicans." I was poking fun at how your kneejerk and humorless need to defend your partisan gods against any and all perceived threats leads to saying pretty ridiculous things. In case you haven't noticed, you're the only one here making a big deal out of this.

Ok guys, just give up. Clearly, when you're hunting quail, it's not important to look at what you're shooting, as any real hunter would know. Not only wasn't there anything done with anything but the best intentions, but Cheney didn't act irresponsibity. In fact, he didn't make a mistake! In fact, neither has any other Republican, ever!

Hey, those slow-moving, pen-raised birds happen to be highly dangerous. You see a movement out of the corner of your eye, you turn and shoot, or IT might get YOU! Another Cheney hunting story that while fairly irrelevant, is also fairly hilarious: http://www.billingsnews.com/story?storyid=8452&issue=188

I definitely wouldn't go so far as to call it a cover-up. They couldn't honestly have thought they could keep it a secret for very long, and it doesn't appear that they tried. I'm sure they would have covered it up if they thought they could have, but that's neither here nor there. That they delayed disclosure for the time they did to keep it out of the Sunday talkshows seems the most likely explanation, and I don't think it's a terrible crime, even if it wasn't really the right thing to do. As for whether we have a "right" to know, I'd say in this case we do. When the Vice President shoots somebody, it pretty clearly has moved beyond what could be defended as a purely private matter, and there ought to be no secrets about the incident or the circumstances thereof, even if it's perfectly innocent. (For how else would we know it's innocent?) I don't think demanding that is at all unreasonable, and I don't think it's akin to demanding 100% personal exposure about all things.

Answers to questions in order they are asked: I imagine life would be very very different for different people. For one thing, many, many people just wouldn't be able to handle living forever. We've built up so many coping mechanisms to deal with the fact that we grow old and die, like ideas of afterlife and the "natural balance of things" and whatnot, that many people would find the idea very offensive. As for myself, I'd probably become a lot less ambitious, since there's all the time in the world to accomplish whatever I have in mind. I'd probably work a career long enough to build up the funds to get an entirely different education and start over to avoid boredom. I'd lock myself in libraries for years at a time. I'm not really comfortable with that particular version. I'd probably still consider that dying unless there was a direct transfer of consciousness. Ultimately they would have to have their own rights, because in the end it's undeniably a person. There would probably be a intermediate period of bullshit about souls and stuff, but that would go away as people got more used to the idea. Creating a duplicate, if it were suddenly possible today, would definitely be illegal for a long, long time. Look at the people who are up in arms over human cloning, calling it unethical for some reason, even though it's basically just having an identical twin born at a different time. You may have inadvertantly punned here. It's astronaut, meaning "star sailor," not astronaught, meaning "star nothing." But if they don't exist during the journey and are reproduced at the destination, that might just be appropriate... Computing power many orders of magnitude better than what we have, and the ability to precisely manipulate trillions of atoms directly (instead of a few at a time indirectly, like we have now).

Um, not to blatantly plug my namesake, but have you ever read The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus?

It's true about the small objects thing, but I really don't see the protection part. It's the other side of the fingers and toes which actually touch stuff, and I don't cry out in pain every time I take a step or type. It's got to be the claw remnant thing.

So they're unhealthy because of the amount of saturated fat in them' date=' not because they're made of disgusting parts. I'm guessing what you find most revolting is more the "asshole" part rather than the "fat" part, which we instinctively crave. I don't like them either. But I already didn't like them before I ever knew how they were made. The taste doesn't change.

I think there is a reaction, but since HIV attacks the immune system specifically, the body loses the ability to "recognize" and destroy the virus.

We would probably know exactly where everything they had was, and could bomb anywhere precisely and with impunity, so I imagine we'd pretty much destroy destroy their whole offensive military before they even got to fire a shot. That is, until they figure out to hide in urban areas and rely on guerrilla tactics, in which case it would get very, very messy. Pretty much like Iraq, actually, except even worse.