Sayonara

Ah. Perhaps 50% density would have been better. It only begs the question if we are using the retarded definition of mating season. Again, it depends on the life history of the species. You can't apply the same definition of mating season to humans as you would to, say, wasps - as such you certainly can't expect the same distribution pattern. Why Gaussian, by the way? Specifically I mean. You chose it so you must have applied reasoning.

Newbi would have you believe that their rights are not being trampled on, because gay Americans are free to marry someone of the opposite sex, as are heterosexual people. And of course that isn't a sick mockery of the principles behind marriage, hell no sireeee.

Muah ha haaa.

Why is that setting the bar low? Where do you think the bar should be, and more specifically, why? Whether the mating period is 10 months or two days should not matter. That's kind of the point I am trying to get across here - that the use of the word "season" in mating season is an unfortunate choice. Ideally you would analyse as much data as possible, to remove or reduce the effect of fluctuations - like you would with any other observation involving stats. I don't see why that should be a special problem in this case.

How is it rude? You know perfectly well that is not completely true. There is no problem with that. None is implied by me asking a general question about something else entirely - I did not actually refer to your post in any way.

I was just asking a reasonable and civil question, so you can ditch the attitude. You're on your own with this one.

Did you read the rest of that post?

The US and Russia are planning to launch a solar sail spacecraft. Check it out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1283828,00.html

It took you a whole month to come up with that?

Hold on a sec... I just managed to confuse myself so the above is not really going to help. Argh, thinking back to what I originally meant all that time ago is not good When I said that ebola would not utterly destroy its host if it were capable of notions of self preservation, my assumption was that this is the only variable that changes. In the case of humans it would certainly not be the only variable to consider.

Posts #23, #48 and #49 are relevant. Yakuzi's reply made me wonder because he seemed to be equating the lack of consideration for one factor with the lack of consideration of any factors, regarding human reproduction in some countries. This could be seen as analagous to an ebola infection, which has no means of considering anything, but it is clearly not the case that no consideration will be involved where humans are concerned, even if that consideration is of little consequence. ...if you follow me. I should really have come back to the original post at the time, and didn't. Post #23 should have included the explanation that it is not the destruction of the host per se that smacks of a lack of self-preserving notions, but the manner in which the destruction takes place (hence the term "utterly destroy".)

I meant in the way that you related the ebola thing to the human thing. Doesn't really matter I suppose. Are you sure that is who.int? Browser says it can't be found.

I would consider "mating season" to be the period of time in which more than half of the mating takes place. Before anyone goes off on a "that's too simple" crusade, understand that the term will apply differently to different species (for any definition we choose) because of the differing life histories. A univoltine (one generation per year) insect species, for instance, will not have a mating season that can be compared easily with non-univoltine species. lol

I think you might find that the crux of most arguments is that the term "inappropriate relationship" is not justifiable when discussing homosexual couples, so I would dispute that special pleading is in action.

Following on from the "how many sides does a sphere have?" thread, I thought it might be interesting to see how people react when asked to describe Klein Bottles. How many (a) sides, (b) surfaces, © edges, (d) contained volumes do they have?

There are plenty of online impact calculators. Find one, stick the parameters in (from the article), see what happens

The circumstances may well be different, but I think AL's point was along the lines of "one rule for some and another rule for others" is, by definition, discriminatory. How would you go about re-wording that quote for bestiality?

Yes, we do know. We already did this bit.

Where did you get that from? I think that has more to do with you not understanding the application of the word "considering".

No offence intended to any other involved parties, but this is a discussion between a physicist, a chemist, an engineer and a couple of school kids. One might reasonably expect the biology graduate to have a better understanding of population dynamics. In fact this discussion was so banal earlier the only other biologist to comment only bothered to point out the most obvious fact in the universe (that humans are animals), and that was because - as I have commented - the direction the debate was taking indicated a belief that we weren't subject to the forces that govern animal life. Well then how the **** (pardon my language) do you plan on demonstrating the presence or absence of a biological influence? Shame doesn't come into it. Anywhere. Would you care to explain how that applies to, oh, say salmon? Or how about birds? What about insects? Would you care to point me in the direction of conclusive, peer-reviewed studies that rule out any such interactions between male and female humans? Would you care to explain why - with our ability to communicate in great detail - you would limit your argument to only include "smelling"? Are you blind? That is what I am trying to establish, using data. I think we're all pretty much agreed there is no mating season in humans in the same way that there is in many (read: not "all") other animals. The point of all this is to establish the cause of the known bias in the seasonal distribution of human births. Bollocks.

That's because the vast majority of people producing HTML documents have no idea what they are doing, not because the functionality to deliver fonts does not exist.

OK, righty-ho then. So do we agree that having a lot more data would be a nice place to start from?

A pdf should not be considered a part of a web site though - it's a separate resource. It's no different to linking to an mp3 or some other object, and any format can be mis-used.

It's only a failed star in the same way that any other planet is a failed star. Perhaps this came from somebody who read 2010: Odyssey Two and got a bit confused.

Well, quite. The reason HTML overtook pdf is because it is simple, versatile, cross-platform and free - the only ingredients most web pages require. PDF would be overkill for 99.999% of the documents that make up the web.