Sayonara

It is not necessary to repeatedly ask for replies. If people can help, they will. But it takes time for everyone to see every post. Did you look at the page Skye posted? One of the first link resources on there is "Structural Engineering: Basics".

Good luck Blike!

From what I've read, Dune had the biggest impact.

http://www.rinkworks.com/said/kidscience.shtml My favourite: "When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions."

Argh, I got it backwards. How embarassing.

What browser are you using?

Well, you people took our language and messed about with it, so I'm going to say "no" to that

Well, a line obviously has been drawn by whichever body is the authority presiding over the events in question, so what would be helpful to the discussion is if we could get hold of some material that goes into the reasoning.

Exactly. That's a better explanation

I think what ATM is trying to say is that it's the level playing field at the start (i.e., nothing 'added' to the atheletes as it were) that allows the sporting or athletic event to correctly identify which of the participants has developed their innate skills the most.

See, the living material that makes up the trunk of the tree is near the 'core' - the rings are really separate layers of columns of dead xylem and phloem vessels. The trunk grows from the "inside", as it were, and older material is always nearest to the bark. When the lightning hits the tree, it superheats the living matter which explodes violently, "bursting" the outer layers open.

No, black is a colour. Colours are just labels. What it isn't is a colour of light.

Arrrrgghhhhhhh you don't 'catch' AIDS. It's a syndrome which may result from being infected with an immunodeficiency virus.

With respect to trees, the force comes from the sudden expansion of super-heated vapour when the lightning instantly boils the sap.

From man's point of view, it would still very much be a factor in his evolutionary success. It doesn't matter if individuals in a species are defending themselves with immune responses or a Super Whacking Stick 3000 with gold trim and optional blood rinser - it's still going to result in natural selection if there's ever a threat to those individuals without that defence.

It's not the writing itself, it's the content. In the first bit of the original post (the one I replied "what?" to) you seem to be using evidence of natural selection in humans to demonstrate there's no evolution in humans. I'm not sure yet but I get the feeling you might be assuming that evolution is a single means of functional improvement in a species, which it isn't. Then in the last bit you seem to be asking me what kind of evolutionary path humans would take in the future if there were absolutely no changes to the "profile" of abiotic or interspecific pressure on humans, which would not halt any of the reasons why evolution occurs. Evolution as a concept can be simply described as the sum of changes in species. These changes are mainly due to adaptation, which comes about mainly due to selective pressures. Selective pressure has several root causes: - Interspecific competition (between species); - Intraspecific competition (within species); - Migration; - Changing habitats; - Changing climate; - Abiotic factors (everything from natural disasters to cosmic rays); - Divergence toward speciation; - Behavourial ecology; - External ecology; ...and so on. The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium is not a model of directional force in evolution, nor can it be used to properly quantify net change in a species. It describes one tiny piece of a vast mechanism. It also fails to apply fully to gene migration, genetic drift, non-random mating, assortative mating, or to mortality/fecundity selection with respect to Natural Selection. In the instances you provided of what you termed "specific evolution", these are examples of adaptation to a local habitat. This Gregory R. Smith character is only an example of 'evolution in action' in the same way that you are I are products of evolutionary change - an individual can't evolve. He's certainly better adapted in some respects but this is (1) hardly an example of adaptive radiation, and (2) not really an example of imminent speciation. Your question regarding the near-future of human evolution sets the stage in a useless fashion. We know perfectly well that the ecology of the planet is undergoing and beginning vast changes; some of which we are causing, others which happen anyway. We're also due for some high-influence abiotic factors during the period you've specified (for instance, we're overdue for a large meteor strike). I would offer some thoughts but you have omitted assumptions I'd need in order to do so. The rate of population change will be a massively important factor, as will the rate of advancement in technology. It also occurs that even if there is no major change to human physiology, ecology, behavourial biology, intellect or what have you within the next 100,000 or even 1,000,000 years, this does not mean that evolution is not occuring. It simply means that the rate of evolutionary change during that period has been negligible. You might take the example of sharks, which at first glance have changed little in millions of years. However the conditions when sharks first emerged are very different to what they are now, so we are clearly not going to claim that no evolution has occurred. In some random small slice of their evolutionary history (say, 10 centuries for consistency), you'd be hard-pressed to find significant change even if you had specimens right in front of you in a big habitat simulator. Yet there would still be clear points where speciation occured, where effect A led to adaptation B, where significant pressure meant selection towards particular changes etc. Evolution doesn't stop as such. It's a non-directional force with no goal; there is no plan or blueprint for any species. Likewise it's completely arbitrary to claim that one set of adaptations is superior to any other, as that can change in the blink of an eye.

To be honest I'm not sure whether or not the geology of Mars would allow for that. The fact that methane breaks down in a very short time in the Mars atmosphere suggests that if it is from volcanic activity, then that activity is ongoing.

It doesn't matter which syllabus you apply it to; it's just a name for a process.

Like I said before; NO we can't.

Revision as in "systematically looking over everything studied as part of the syllabus and condensing it into the important bits".

I think it was from Google image search...

Well, the absence of light is black.

Why? Also, what does "technically" mean in this context?

After my abortive affair with Redhat before Christmas, I've now gone back to Linux. I'm dual-booting between Windows (yuk) and Mandrake 10 (yay). Anyone know of any "must have" software? I'm quite impressed at Bluefish so far, but I would like something that's a closer analogue of Dreamweaver MX (for the excellent validation alerts and syntax highlighting, etc). Also is the Gimp the best PS analogue, or are there better packages?

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32genkya.html Is that the one? I've had similar experiences but in the opposite direction (IE sophos picked things up when nothing else did.) I'm not sure if there's an industry-standard way of writing identities, but it seems to me that a lot of alerts for small files like keygens might be deliberate false positives. A kind of insurance policy for AV vendors.