Sayonara

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

Who is this human meat brain, and why should I believe or not believe that he is a fraud?

Nessie go sleep now.

That's a bit of an odd name to give the link when the part you quoted from it is about happenings in Nigeria Or rather, the choice of quote is odd. Bearing in mind the thread is about society in Saudi Arabia, not Islam.

Not to mention the biotechnology aspect. If you create an organism that quickly and cheaply catalyses a notoriously difficult reaction, you have created a new desirable product, and can set the price however you like.

Made me laugh at work.

So... many... good... jokes... nggghhh

Few people log in more than once a day. Be patient.

That's what you get for posting in a thread about erections.

Maybe so, yet that's not the counter-position to the one I took.

Don't encourage him.

Dror, please stop using the code tags in place of the quote tags. It creates semantically incorrect HTML, and forces the page to expand beyond the right margin of visitors' web browsers.

"The page cannot be found".

Stop reproducing the work of other media outlets here. We didn't invite it, and the author(s) certainly didn't. [edit] Thread re-opened.

I'm not sure which plant you mean. Afaik, vitamin B12 can only come from various animal sources. Vegetarians taking multivitamins or "natural" supplements as a means of replacing the shortfall are eating ground-up pig livers (or whatever they make it from). I am aware that there is a microbial product on the market, but I recall reading that the vitamin they produce is optically inverted. Eating less meat is one way to go if society wants to reduce animal suffering (in agriculture anyway), but it will only work large scale. One person here or there isn't going to make much difference, unfortunately. The discussion on consciousness in animals that took place before you joined the thread may prove useful (although, at best, it will always be "inconclusive"). Nobody has been able to supply one yet. We'll see what happens I guess. But what I'm saying that it's totally subjective for you to decide how much is too much. Likely true, but that's not really related to this discussion other than to point out that the same could hold true for livestock, which we already accept as being a possibility. I'm sure some experiments are badly designed, leading to inaccuracy and unnecessary suffering. But I'm also certain many of them (if not most) take place under strictly controlled conditions. Even falling back to the most basic reasoning, it's not efficient or helpful to conduct experiments on subjects that keep plopping down dead due to your crappy methods. It was more to highlight the role of reductionism in any given approach to this problem. Cows may have consciousness, but we have no evidence for it, and there is no reason to assume that behaviour will automatically lead to consciousness, or that it has done so in cows. It's not that simple though. Companies exist to make a profit, and they aren't going to do that if their product killed the first round of human testers, maimed the second round, and turned out okay in the third. This:

Not you. Note the identical post times.

Welcome back! We missed you.

If you don't understand, stop trying to tell people how it works.

You aren't supposed to catch the spanners before they get into the works

This is going around in circles now. I think you'll agree that it's all a load of balls. I'm going to cop out and say it is equally spherical and blue, since there are good arguments for each under a variety of conditions.

No, I mean why would we want to turn gold into a non-reactive powder?

Until your liver depletes its store of B12. I'm not really looking for "mights, maybes and perhaps". I'm looking for an inherent lack of ethics in the act itself. I was actually going somewhere with that when I originally asked the question, and it now escapes me altogether There are of course plenty of situations in which I would consider the killing of a cow to be unethical. But that would be due to the specifics of the situation (i.e. factors that are not a product of the act itself), and is therefore not admissable. I really don't see how you can judge someone to be acting unethically just because you consider them to have "enough" money, "enough" food, or "too much luxury". You could not make those judgements objectively without a lot more information even if you had not made up the conditions. No, it is. We do know for sure. We do have absolute facts. 'Pavlovian' (I enclose the word with inverted commas because - as with most things behavioural - it's not quite that simple) responses are very well tried and tested. True, but then it doesn't really mean much if we're talking about pigs. The fact that one species reacts to stimulus Y in fashion X does not mean that another given species will, which is the basis of this discussion. The default position then is "we don't really know, so do what you think is best". Some people think that civilisation having access to lip stick, toilet cleaner and ibuprofen is more important than a few hundred thousand animals. Others don't. Personally I think 6 billion stinking, ugly and sick humans is a more repugnant thought than bunny rabits wearing blusher, but I'm all for any reasonable efforts to reduce animal suffering in a non-preachy fashion. It wasn't required to. It simply shows the basic route to that behaviour in cows. We know that our behaviour is modified by numerous other factors because we have the ability to think about processes going on in our own brains. We don't have a window into the brains of cows, and empiricism requires that we don't make shit up about what goes on in there just because we like the idea of it. Apparently it would be illegal. I'd love to know precisely why.

I understand the meaning of "scariness" in us.2u's question. I think perhaps he simply chose the wrong word. Certainly it concerns me that humanity could be wiped out by a catastrophic event, but I do not lose any sleep worrying about it, and it does not scare me. Being scared of something, concerned about something, and worrying about something are all different things.

Maybe it makes sense in your head, but it's still a non sequitur.

I got one too. Going to phone my friend and check at a more sociable time (i.e. in about 10 hours).