Sisyphus

You don't need any weapons to rob a bank. You just have to say you're robbing it. Bank employees are instructed to do what a robber asks, and only alert the police after the robber has left. The idea is always to minimize the chance of violence. The banks don't care about the money, because they're insured against robbery anyway. A "smart" bank robber (relatively speaking, of course) is as low key as possible. [/trivia]

Apparently, relative hormone levels influence both face shape and personality traits. Testosterone, estrogen, serotonin, and dopamine are the ones to look into. More quantifiable than all this Jungian stuff.

Everybody thinks their system is "designed by knowledge and logic." Declaring an objectively right solution and then demanding that everyone agree is called totalitarianism.

I wonder if that's really possible. Most Congressional elections basically have two viable candidates, which for most people are "our guy and their guy," both of whom are basically appointed by their respective party leaders. "Our guy" might be a an eyeroll-inducing slimeball, but it's not like I can vote for "their guy!" Realistically contentious primary elections are ridiculously rare.

Prostitution is illegal in many if not most places, though, and there is usually a thriving black market.

Orbits, like the Earth's around the Sun, have two parts: gravity and inertia. Inertia is what makes everything keep moving in a straight line at the same velocity forever unless something stops it. Gravity is what accelerates objects with mass towards one another. Take the Earth, put it some distance away from the Sun, and give it a push at a right angle to the direction of the Sun. The gravity of the Sun will pull it in, but because the Earth is already moving sideways, the direction of the gravitational pull is constantly changing. The result is a curved, and eventually circular path. The Earth is constantly falling towards the sun, it just doesn't get any closer because the direction of "falling" is constantly changing. Kind of like how if you have a weight on a string and spin it around, you have to pull on it to keep it from flying away. If you let it go, it would fly off in a straight line in whatever direction it was moving when you let it go. That "pulling" is gravity in an orbit. What makes it fly off in a straight line is inertia. As for how it got started in the first place, that's a whole other question. Basically the whole solar system was formed when a huge cloud of gas collapsed in on itself because of gravity, and the slight spinning of that cloud was magnified by conservation of angular momentum (the same reason that a figureskater can spin faster by pulling their arms and legs closer to themselves). Part of that spinning cloud formed the Earth, and there has been nothing to stop it spinning since.

That's at least superficially true. But then, where does the complexity of the nervous system come from? It's a pattern emerging from the "rules" dictated by the genome. So in a sense the complexity is already there, just in "compressed format." While in a single-celled organism, I guess everything is expressed all the time, and the genome has to do things that in a multi-celled organism would be done by emergent macrostructures?

That math is incorrect. Or rather, you're using the wrong math. Think about what those numbers represent, and if the equations and the eventual answer make sense. Think of a simpler example: you and I work at the same rate, and together we can accomplish a given task in 2 days. The way you have it set up (you + me = 2), either of us could finish that task in 1 day. Obviously that doesn't make sense. It would take one of us twice as long to finish as both of us, not half as long. Check out my first post in this thread (#6), where I explain the answer in words.

Yeah, it's something like that. I was just making the point that "the criminals" are not a group that you can make coherent statements about, because basically, "they" are us. Sometimes these discussions go as if there are groups of supervillains' henchmen roaming the streets.

Fair enough. Still, why the assumption that animals are inherently more complex than plants? Plants can be bigger than us, they've been around longer, they vastly outnumber us, they can survive just fine without us but we can't survive without them, etc. I don't know enough about it, myself, but from what I gather from botanists, plants in general are actually much more sophisticated in a lot of ways than animals. Although I suppose a botanist would be biased, and, as has been said a lot, there is no objective measure of complexity or sophistication.

Um, anyway. Some thoughts: 1) You're still stuck on thinking of humans as the most complex organisms. Until you realize that's not true (or only true according to one highly specific definition), I predict a lot of things aren't going to make sense. Stop thinking anthropocentrically! 2) Clearly (right?) there's a lot more variation in amoebas than in humans, though most of it isn't immediately obvious. 3) The amoeba in question is one giant cell (giant for a cell, that is), and all metabolic function has to be controlled somehow. 4) It seems like more DNA would mean more mutation, which would mean faster (and better?) adaptation to changing circumstances. 5) Amoebas are, in a sense, a whole lot "more evolved" than us, because they've had so many more generations since our common ancestor in which to evolve. 6) Amoebas are wildly successful, evolutionarily speaking. Large animals like us come and go, but they were here long before us and they'll be here long after us, and they vastly outnumber us.

What do you mean by that? You can't sell illegal drugs to a non-criminal, by definition.

Anything can be a gas. Get solid copper hot enough, and it will melt. Get it hotter still, and it will boil. What keeps it from happening at lower temperatures are the molecular bonds, specifically metallic bonding. As for electrical conductivity, metals generally lose a lot (about half) when they become liquids, and pretty much don't conduct at all as gases. As plasma, everything conducts electricity.

A few things: 1) Complexity is not as easy to define as it might seem. Plants tend to be more complex than animals, for example. And an amoeba has 200 times the genetic information as a human. 2) Per #1, humans are not the most complex organisms, by most standards. 3) Complexity, however defined, is not always an advantage. See #2! 4) Per #3, "more evolution" does not mean more complexity. Microbes reproduce millions of times faster than humans, and so have had far more generations in which to evolve. There are still microbes because, evolutionarily speaking, a microbe is a highly advantageous thing to be.

There are no ads.

Twitter, that brilliant marriage of self-absortion and short attention spans, is now valued at $1 billion, quadrupled since February, despite having a revenue of exactly $0 and no (public) plan to raise that number. There's no possible way this isn't a sound investment. (Also: Is it 1999?)

Sherlock, that link doesn't work for me. (I'm behind a workplace filter.) But Obama doesn't support blanket local bans. Here's a quote from a speech he gave when the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia handgun ban:

A council of Taliban leaders decided that Americans shouldn't have guns?

Well, not necessarily. Until you commit a crime with a gun, you aren't a "gun criminal." And in order to commit a crime with a gun, you need to procure one beforehand (when you aren't yet a gun criminal). As far the black market, I'm not as interested in the end user as I am in how guns end up on the black market to begin with. Unless they're homemade or the manufacturers are crooks, at some point somebody necessarily bought them legally.

I guess we're pretty much all criminals then. Has anyone never jaywalked?

Short answer: yes, within reason. And really that's all anyone can say without invoking absurd implications, like arguing for the right to own and use your own nuclear missiles. I don't think so, but that's kind of a fuzzy question. Define "criminals."

Human genome: 2.9 billion base pairs. Amoeba dubia genome: 670 billion base pairs. Just thought I'd toss that in the mix.

I wouldn't agree with that description. Whether organisms are the way they are "on purpose" is a question I think most beginning students of biology wonder, just from a common sense "watch needs a watchmaker" perspective. However, they learn how it happens, and teleology just never enters into it. It's not actively excluded, it's just irrelevant. It's "carefully avoided" in certain contexts just because everyone knows it's a common misunderstanding, like having to clarify that black holes don't "suck things in." Are these things inevitable, though? I'm not aware of anything to indicate they are. Perhaps "under the right conditions, on an indefinitely long timeline." But you could say the same thing about winning the lottery. Does it? If there was an end goal, it's true that there would be no reason to think that we're it. But even assuming a direction, does that imply an end goal? I don't think so.

The Kamasutra recommends against union between a hare and a she-elephant.

But it deals with discrete entities, right? I mean, there is such a thing as a photon, for example, right? Also, would another way of saying "observer dependent" be to say that entities have indeterminate properties until they interact with something?