silkworm

True, multimillion dollar athletes are far from the norm, as well as a professional athlete in general. But you have to admit that the number of multimilliondollar athletes far exceeds the number of multimillion dollar professors and scientists, both now and historically. The problem lies in the priorities of the masses and the fictional value of money.

Thanks for mentioning Sagan and Hawking, but as you can see they are far from the norm. I suppose you could also throw in Bill Nye. I wonder how much Hawking makes a year? Being that I have my priorities straight and that I live in the universe and not the NFL, I'd rather more of that sort of money being thrown at science, education, and healthcare. I mean, I see the cause, but it's a shame. Fictional or not, money is what we use to symbollically respresent resource allocation, someone's worth really.

Time warp.

Hey, more communists, come on board. It gets more offensive when you look at how much "musicians," actors, and other "artists" make when compared to the actual work they do compared to athletes. The problem isn't society in the case though, not really, it's money and the math behind it. These people make that much money because they have millions of people willing to pay the littlest bit to watch them do what they do. And regularly. Essentially, they make it because they earn it. That is really what they're worth in this world of money over merit. Professors make so little because they only have a few people to pay them a moderate amount of money to watch them do what they do, and it's normally a one time gig. Two possible remedies: 1. People begin valuing knowledge over getting fat comfortably and there becomes superstar professors that teach mass audiences or 2. If we stopped believing in money, it would no longer exist, and we wouldn't have this problem. And as a side note, some professors are worth far less.

You'd have to be more specific on what type of strike on most of that, but what the tree said about how to measure it is pretty much how it's done when you're dealing with punches, except they have all kinds of knick knacks attached to it. The other stuff is too varried to get in to, except with running you'd only have to know your mass and your acceleation. Also, when stricking something, the most amount of damage is done when all of the force is on a concentrated area. That's why nightsticks look like they do. When cops need to hurt someone they poke hard, if they're just trying to shut them up they hit you with the broad side. By the way, it only takes 1400 N of force to break a human skull.

Water molecules are physically closer together as a liquid than a solid. Meaning that if you had a glass of water and a glass with the same volume of ice there would actually be more water molecules in the glass of water than the glass of ice. Liquid water is more dense than ice, that's why ice floats. It's because the organization of the lattice structure of ice uses up more empty space than do a collection of water molecules. Also, here's another well known tidbit. If you're at a freshwater lake that is frozen at the top, the water at the bottom of the lake will be 4'C because that's the temperature at which water (in any form) is its most dense.

I was thinking about a similar thing a little over a year ago. We had this serial killer here that's been around for 30 years pop up out of nowhere after a 15 year silence so he could continue taunting the police. We had the guy's DNA (though I don't know how well perserved it was, cops here aren't very sharp) but we didn't know what he looked like. I was thinking that we could develope a program and plug in the DNA to grow the man virtually to simply have an idea of his overall appearance. There's actually a forensic scientist, I think in Florida, who uses a method he developed to predict the ethnicity of offenders based solely on DNA.

Are you serious? It's me when I busted out of my cocoon. I was so happy that I wasn't boiled alive that the picture turned out great. Since then I've been slowly but surely starving to death because I have no working mouth parts, but that's the price I pay to give the ladies more comfortable and flowing underwear. Yeah, don't let staff be nominated so I can clean house.

Hey, I took a look. It doesn't really apply to me because I have no idealogy (and I didn't like how categorizing it was, but I understand why it is), but I think it may do the world some good by giving these whackos a chance to actually think about what they think. Thanks for posting it.

I would say 8 billion as long as everyone starts being more responsible with their consumption and there are 2 billion more women than men. This planet gets uglier every day. Of course, if we get better at human space travel we can continue with manifest destiny and keep our numbers here regulated while populating other planets. I can't wait.

How about we have a Best Post of 2006. Like the best post of any thread. It's admiring the art and not the artists, seeing actors on TV ruins movies for me, know what I mean? Best Thread of 2006 would work well too. And how about, Best Scientist in Real Life. That could be used a recruiting tool to get more working scientists to the board. Thanks for the nomination Martin.

Oh, God. This sounds like it's turning into another award show. Anyway, I'd like to denominate Pangloss and nominate myself. Is that legal? And also, as a suggestion for Martin's post, instead of "Who I'd most like to go out with" I think a more appropriate category would be "Who would most like to go out with me."

You mean on December 26th, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar? Well, it is 4 seconds off now, right? Actually, if another regime like this one finds a way to get itself elected in 2008, I'll be surprised to be alive in 2012.

I've been thinking about this all day and just wanted to post this image. I think it's interesting how it sort of looks like a semi-aquatic tree shrew.

I'm currently in a linear algebra class and we are doing a massive amount of proofs, something that is foreign to me. Every time I'm asked to do a proof my effort turns into a narrative argument, and my problem isn't knowing why something is true or not. I piece it together in my mind and can argue it, and if I had to teach somebody whether or not something is true I have faith in my abilities to do so, but I'm having difficulty providing any type of valid mathematical proof. What's lost on me appears to be the logic behind the language of proofs and what assumptions can be made when doing them. A lot of proofs make perfect sense to me when I read them, but sometimes it appears as though the proof is only manipulating symbols instead of what the symbols mean. What I'm asking for here is a clue to the nature of proofs. I'm sure the shortcoming is my own and not that of mathematics. How would you explain how to do a proof and how are valid assumptions in proofs are made? Thank you in advance.

Hydroflouric acid is not a strong acid because the HF bond is so strong it does not disassociate readily in aqueous solution. However, if you got HF and cement (which forms through a complicated series of chemical reactions) some of the F may break the HF bond and react with the cement, but that's not you're HCl eating through paper type of reaction. That's F, an extremely reactive element, reacting with cement and H most likely leaving as gas, unless there's something else there it would rather combine with. If your teacher told you that HF is a strong acid, he's a boob. Note: You can't keep flourine in glass because it reacts with it. In fact, flourine is very hard to store because of its reactive nature. Vinegar is a diluted solution of acetic acid, which is an organic (carboxylic) acid. You can put some iron outside and leave it alone. When it gets rusty, there's your Iron oxide.

No I like it. The IDers are now criminals because they're inciting rational people to hate religion. Throw em all in the hole.

I don't have time right to research this myself, but I've been curious. What exactly does that mean? Biology is not my thing right now, but I am curious about it.

Thanks for the link, but I'm already very well aware of methane's stature on the hierarchy of greenhouse effectiveness. What I was responding to there were earlier comments about how planting was not economically sound, but with all of the other benefits I mentioned earlier even a rotting log can give us natural gas to use as fuel. It is true that burning it would release more CO2 into the atmosphere, but the new plants will trap it and convert it to oxygen. Essentially people, our debt that we're experiencing by this increasing presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is not only from the contribution of combustion reactions, respiration, and taphonomonic processes, but also because we're cutting short the natural and well proven contributor to eliminating these greenhouse gases, plants. It's a cycle people, and it's pretty basic. As a sidenote, termites contribute more methane than cows because their numbers are great right now with all of the food provided by abandoned houses.

Taking carbon out of the ecosystem is dangerous (through polymerization, not burying which would cause decay even underground), being that it is fundamental to all organic molecules, although taking CO2 out of the atmosphere may be beneficial (as long as we don't get keep oxygen content below the point where lightning becomes very dangeous), and using energy to change it to some polymerized form takes energy, and guess what is the result of the most popular form of energy production? Going along with that argument that you and Edtharan are supporting, if we use solar energy or anything else the energy cost in producing the apparatus that produces the solar energy we could use to make polymers to trap carbon would make paralysis the best option. Planting and harvesting is the best option because it produces oxygen and raw materials, without having to spend energy ourselves to trap the carbon. Outside of CO2, many of these plants even take other gases out of the air. The best way to clean the air is through the use of the warriors who have done it on Earth for a very very long time, plants. And since eliminating all CO2 would be ridiculous because it would kill us all, the exchange of CO2 coming back into the atmosphere is good, because even while they rot, their existence and the fact they have substantial mass shows that is has made progress, done more good than harm, at eliminating CO2 even as it rots and the gases it release will be food for other plants so we don't end up killing all of the plants, and thus the lower part of the food chain, by not having food for them. Hell, we can even use rotting wood to make methane (natural gas) if we store the rotting wood in such an environment with termites and let them break down the wood and trap the gas they produce. ANOTHER raw material and viable economic benefit of simply planting. Actually, because you're implying rainforrest destruction for ranching, I'll have to ask you to take note that under my avatar it says Location:Kansas. If my state were a nation, it would be the third leading beef producing nation in the world behind the UK and Argentina. I know where beef comes from. The problem in Brazil is that a substantial portion of this rainforrest destruction is caused for a need for farm land, crops not animals. But they destroy their topsoil and need to destroy more, so they don't get much time on the land they clear. They're not getting much bang for their buck. And, a note should also be made, that the oxygen, and CO2 taken out, produced by cutting down mature rainforest to plant new crops is substantially diminished by the activity. It's an idiotic activity that is slowly but surely screwing us all.

Propaganda is far reaching. I also hear a lot of stories about houses either being burnt down or a tornado hitting it and the only thing left was the Bible. I think that's funny when compared to the famous native american line, "When white man came with the Bible, we had land. Now they have land and we just have the Bible." I know they're both getting at different meanings, but I just find it humorous. The history of the Bible itself is enough to invalidate it. Everyone hears those stories, but every group has a Behe. And. to be noted, I started out a christian through tradition, which is the most common cause, and it's through my maturity and value in reality that have I left it, and I did so with an open mind. How is it accurate? Have you investigated it? That sounds like a pretty faith based statement. Actually, don't answer that because I really don't care. I try to waste as little time as possible on religion or religious people. The only reason I have contributed to this thread is because the fundamentalists are threatening to destroy what is most dear to the health and advancement to all of us, science pursuing an unfictionalized version of nature. As soon as this ID movement and all others like it are squashed, and as long as christians mind their own business and not try to impose their will and not act like a lynch mob out to stop minority groups from living their free and happy lives, I don't care what they do.

This is equivocation at its whiniest. Do they count working in the medical professions as work in science? The lack of women in science is like the lack of black athletes in the NHL. The NHL never kept blacks out, like baseball did, it's just all the great black athletes focused on other sports.

I just find it interesting that christians call the Bible the word of God, and claim to hold it in such high esteem with so much value, yet take its bastardization through translation and editing (especially with the extremely popular King James' version) as on the same level of its pure form. The Bible is full of parables, and no doubt idioms. As anyone who has studied a foreign language, idioms don't translate too well, and you have to rely on the translator's judgement to make his or her best effort at conveying the meaning. It just pisses me off that these people are willing to stick their nose into other people's life based on a religious belief in a book that they don't really know what it says. It seems to me, if you really were a christian and you really believed that the Bible is the word of God that you would become fluent in the language that God dictated it in in order to understand his word directly. I think that any other approach, consider the monumental importance many christians claim that their religion is to their life, any other approach appears to me to be pretty half-assed. Really, concerning the topic of this thread, if the devil put all of those fossils there to confuse us, who says the devil didn't translate the Bible for the same purpose?

Well, I've always felt that agriculture and timber were both extremely valuble from an economic standpoint. We also must take into account that the biosphere is delicate and the Earth should be considered an isolated system, so burrying carbon and taking it out of the biosphere may, in the long run, put is in debt. And, going along with my money is fiction, but even when we apply the economic principle of opportunity cost, the effort of planting and creating oxygen, food, and raw materials is a Hell of a lot more beneficial than trapping everything. Honestly, the only thing worth trapping are the CFCs that have travelled to Antrartica, which I think can be done physically (with a little enginuity) and it's also the less dangeous than cause chemical reactions that will create salts that will raise the freezing point of the ice there and making it easier to melt.

That's the other name of it. I couldn't think of it for the life of me. You're saying that you have to eat the brain of an infected person in order to get infected yourself? How does this thing stay around? Brain eating must be alot more common than I thought. To my understanding if you ate another human being you'd have a high likely hood of suffering from kuru. Do you know if there is something similar in cows? I thought that was the deal but I've been up for a long time so everything is getting blurry.