Sayonara

I asked a friend who works with Amicus, the organisation which manages non-humans living and working on Earth, and the reply was along the lines of "that's not important; what's important is that the humans keep smashing those atoms." Needless to say, the shuttle is prepped.

Yes, I am positively quaking in my slippers at the prospect. Fair discussion would destroy everything I stand for and also possibly cause me to become so aghast that I drop my monocle.

So, for example, someone who has been summoned to court for a driving offence?

Would it though? Death and incarceration don't always work as threatened punishments, so why would medical testing work better? The risk of being caught AND sentenced is fairly low for many types of crime. Although, the point of my question was why specifically christiannnna decides that testing on "criminals" is more justifiable than testing on animals. I'll be interested to hear what a "criminal" is, as well.

I think it's time for some censorship. Imagine, please go and learn some physics.

For a thread which promises a new branch of physics, the delivery leaves something to be desired.

I am of the opinion that if we ever start drastically scaling back animal testing (with or without an alternative in mind), that's where we should start. Cosmetics. Why?

Not entirely accurate. MSG is manufactured and added to food products. "Glutamate" is the carboxylate anion of glutamic acid, and while it's true that this is one of the products of MSG dissolving in water, there are other sources of glutamate, which is where the confusion arises. MSG is a sodium salt of glutamic acid, produced by fermentation of carbohydrate sources. To summarise MSG specifically is not found "naturally occurring" in food products, but glutamate (or glutamic acid) is. The idea of MSG being "bad" does not come just from the fact that it's an additive, but from a strange public resistance to the results of various studies linked to the MSG Controversy.

Just to be absolutely clear on this, it is only excess dosages of the water-soluble vitamins which are harmlessly flushed from the body. Fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamins A and D can accumulate in the body if taken excessively, with toxic results.

Imagine, this approach is tiresome and fruitless. We have al lseen it before and nobody is in the slightest bit impressed or convinced. What you see as "censorship", is a system designed to differentiate between science, and unsupported ideas. And it works. If your posts fall into the latter category and not the former, that is YOUR problem. If you want to make a scientific proposal but aren't sure how it is YOUR responsibility to find out. You will not get anywhere with the "oh I am so persecuted" routine, as I have already told you.

Don't reply. If a large company wants to buy your domain, then the first contact they have with you should be by letter from their legal representatives, not an email that makes no sense from someone who cannot spell.

But you can't have your cake and eat it. In 300 years time, if all the accessible copper has been mined, that means there is a limit to what we can do with the copper that we have (regardless of recycling). And this applies to all elements, whether they are more abundant than copper, or scarce like platinum. I think we have exhausted this discussion to the point where it isn't helping the thread at all. I originally brought up the point as a caveat that humanity's dispersal throughout the galaxy might not be the simple escapade that we might like it to be. However like you Lance I don't think that it will necessarily prohibit that dispersal, so let's move on!

So why do you keep denying that humankind can use up all the available mass of a given element, if there is an "upper limit"? Isn't that pretty much what I have been talking about: the maximum potentially available mass of an element? It's perfectly conceivable that we could use a trillion tonnes of Usefullium. A big number does not mean a number which cannot be reached. "Inconsiderable" is relative, to borrow your own thinking from the end of that post. 10 million tonnes is not that much when shared among export countries in one year, and you are talking about it over 10,000 years as if it is a lot. That's 1000 tonnes a year, if you assume constant rate (which is very simplistic but let's not get too clever about this). Let's take copper as an example, seeing as it's a recurring theme in this thread, and we know it's abundant so it should robustly stand up to being mined: In 1900, we were producing half a million tonnes a year. This had risen to 15 million tonnes per year by the turn of the millenium. If you look at the current methods, we stand to run out of accessible copper in 20-60 years, depending on growth in the range 2% to 0. Do you know which marine organisms need the lithium? Because if you don't, then you can't know how changes in the concentration will affect marine ecology.

At no point in this thread has censorship been implemented. However if you continue with the persecuted genius routine there is a statistically significant probability value which says that it may well crop up.

This isn't a private message at all, is it Lance? We have a system for private messages, which is called the Private Message system. No, this was posted with the intention of it being viewed by as many people as possible. I do not doubt your ability to use logic. What concerns me - and rest assured that I am not alone in experiencing this concern - is your willingness to abuse or disregard logic in lieu of an enthusiastic pursuit of your areas of interest. You consistently denied the point being raised in that thread; that handgun suicides having a higher success rate does not mean that a lack of handgun availability will significantly impact suicide rates. Miller makes the same denial in his paper. How does he back it up? By calling the opposite claim "invalid". I can see why his approach appeals to you. A quarter of the NS article you cite is given over to the only necessary counter-argument: You have been here long enough to know the rules inside-out. Further attempts to personalise this issue or take the thread off topic will be dealt with appropriately.

Bear in mind that "everyday observations" can mislead you. For example, you may have learned to accurately identify a particular group of signals linked to sex drive in women, but at the same time you could be missing similar signals in men.

Can we see some compelling evidence that "most drugs fail when they are tested in humans" is actually a fact? I suspect that it is true, if only for biochemical reasons, but it is good to get into the habit of evidencing such claims on a site like this. Bear in mind that the anti- side needs to find a reason, any reason, to support their objection. The pro- side needs no such reason because the system works, and is constantly improving. When I say "the lesser of two evils", I am using the common English phrase. Perhaps I should have said "the lesser of two not brilliant choices" to remove ambiguity. I do not think that testing on non-humans is inherently evil; such an attribute can only be applied to intentions, not to mechanisms. We are not discussing vivisection, despite your repeated claims that we are. I have already warned you about this and the next infraction (in the thread, not in this post) will result in warning points. My reply to the above, substituting vivisection with "animal trials", is that you cannot validly make those same claims for all experiments across the board. That change in the law came about as a result of the rational discussion of new and more informative medical data. It was not changed on a subjective whim. I would respectfully suggest that if you are going to argue about how laws are formulated and applied, then you will suffer a crushing defeat on that front, given that the subject is a major aspect of my career. And that is just your opinion. Funny how "just an opinion" is good enough for you, but not good enough for the pro-stance. What you have to realise with regard to that kind of scenario is that there is no absolute moral position. Stating that your moral outlook is the only right one is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. I don't think that was in dispute. I take it from the rest of your posts that you find this wasteful. I don't particularly think that stance is limited to the anti-testing group; certainly nobody sets out in the medical research business because they want lots of bunnies to die. It's generally better for business, research, and bunnies if the test media are not lethal. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no. Yes, that on its own is true. But it does not mean that you can take a propaganda term and apply it to something which it does not mean in order to colour your opponent's arguments. Pretty sure you did earlier on. It was a week or more ago though so I can't point to a specific post. I should have quoted at the time. If you CAN provide evidence, do it at the time that you make the claim. The onus is on you to do this; it is not the convention to wait for people to ask you to back up your own points. They really are. Arguing by analogy is notoriously difficult to pull off well though, so I would not stress over it. No, they are not. I strongly suggest that you abort that approach. I don't understand how you expect your opinion to make any difference to the reader if you truly believe that stating "laws are opinions" somehow invalidates what they state. That is not internally consistent. Unfortunately true. It does mean spending a lot more time finding your sources, but of course the payoff is more reliable information. I am glad to see that you are not blind to that; it can cause real problems when corporately supported studies (or at least, those which ARE biased) slip through the net. Fortunately it does not happen as often as people might think, because there is no profit to be gained by spending billions on a research project which was green-lighted on the back of self-delusion. That doesn't make a comment on what you should believe, because it only represents what you have chosen to read. And now you know that vivisection is not really anything to do with drug testing. Hallelujah! You can stop wasting your time on fiction. If by "free speech" you mean using an incorrect word which has very negative connotations in common language, then yes. Although I have to add that I would also qualify that by pointing out that you would also be using your own definition of "free speech". Your reasons for making up the definition of vivisection don't go any way towards justifying it on any level. None of those are euphemisms - they have precise meanings. That is a product of your imagination, not the words themselves. Additionally, if you truly object to this phrase on those grounds, then by choosing to use "vivisection" instead (which evokes images of animals carved up and plugged in), then surely you are just being a complete hypocrite? And in certain technically-minded conversations, that is a word which is used. However in the common language it isn't, because people who are talking about their new tattoo or their floral deftness don't talk like medical dictionaries. Those changes can't be crow-barred in by an agenda which wishes to equivocate with completely different topics. Let me make this absolutely clear: you are not going to fool anyone here on this point, and if you genuinely believe it, then you need to have a long hard think about why. You using a word incorrectly and someone making a statement you disagree with are not equivalent. The idea is that you listen to the arguments and decide if the evidence supports them, and then you are able to apply the differences to your opinion. By iteration you shift your opinion closer to representing the true state of affairs. Believe me, sufficiently compelling evidence will swing people's positions. People who consistently fail to be swung from the pro-testing to the anti-testing camp are not just being stubborn or difficult: in actuality they are simply not being given any compelling evidence. That is hardly their fault, is it? The thread is not about vivisection, and the meaning of that word is not a product of your opinion. Depends if they are using the comment as a strawman or not, obviously. You don't call a logical fallacy based on the inherent sequence of a particular group of words; you call it based on either the intention behind the statement or erroneous reasoning which it contains. Support this or don't make the claim. That depends on whether or not you have the brain capacity to be aware of concepts such as freedom and slavery, and to be able to see further than the bowl of delicious bunny food that is magically refilled each day, and to have a sense of temporal expanse comparable to that found in humans, and to have some kind of prior knowledge of your death and an appreciation of what this means for you as an existent consciousness, and so on. Or to put it more simply, Mandy Rice Davis makes an argument based in anthropomorphisation, which is just plain stupid. Well you have some problems here. First, you have already stated that this is your opinion (others share it, but this is beside the point). Second, you have made the contention that "just an opinion" means that a principle can be ignored if one does not believe in it. So any effort to use the above quote as a basis of argument is fundamentally contradictory. Also, it is not a matter of people "not understanding" what is right and wrong, as if there were some absolute and ineffable compass. It is a matter of people being capable of making value judgements. How many rabbits do you think a human life IS worth? Will the number change if you know the rabbits won't be killed? As I stated before in a reply to you, this is not an issue. We know (most) animals can feel pain. The issue is in how their experience of suffering compares to ours, which is orders more difficult to establish. This is not something that is used as an "excuse" to allow people to continue doing their evil and pointless experiments on animals. If compelling evidence emerges that animals share the human experience of suffering in terms of torture, then you can rightly expect a swift and robust response from the bodies regulating animal testing. I don't think that is generally true at all, certainly not without expert command of very specific training which is not general fare for most people. No proof, sure. No evidence, wrong. It does rather depend on what species you are considering, granted, but we do know a great deal about endocrine and neurological systems in many animals used as test subjects. Your personal lack of knowledge on the subject does not qualify as a rebuttal. That the definition you pick out of a dictionary and the common usage term do not correlate to the proper scientific meaning for the thread context should not come as any great surprise. And none of that provides evidence either for or against any animals having a humanlike experience of suffering. I don't know what sort of experiments you are imagining, but there are not many I can think of where the objective is to deliberately inflict pain, distress, or fear. Perhaps you might give some consideration to arranging a visit to an animal testing lab to see with your own eyes exactly how animals are treated? Yes, it is all about back-handers and labelling groups, and nothing to do with helping save lives and improve the health of people. Well done, you have fixed humanity. This is not in dispute. I think you would find it very hard indeed to find anyone actively involved in animal testing who was opposed to those statements. I sincerely doubt it, but then she seems like she might have a notion of what the word actually means. True in itself, but not justification for pre-supposing that at some point in the future a similar situation will unfold for animals, and that therefore your views should be forced onto all the people who will die without medical aid. That is neither here nor there. We do not level sanctions against everyone in the country because a minority break laws - this is because you cannot judge and convict everyone following the rules based on the actions of those who aren't. To do so is utterly irrational. That is not the way it works. You make a claim of fact, you post the evidence (or link to it) there and then. Waiting to trip people up is intellectually dishonest, and simply belies a belief-driven agenda. I don't particularly disagree that any of this can or does happen, but unfortunately for you it is not an argument against the conventionally regulated system of animal testing which is in place. I'm sure it will come to you if you think about it. To be honest, you don't have to understand. Only people seeking to enhance their objective viewpoint by reading this thread need to. No, it COULD be cruel in either case. What determines if an act is cruel is not the reason for the act being performed, but the intentions of the person carrying out the act. I suppose you could say it is like the legal concept of mens rea.

Why does that have to be the case? Many historical human societies have been similar enough to generate the same kinds of myths about common and essentially identical events occurring in different locations. There is no reason to suspect that stories about floods all refer to the same specific flood, unless you pre-suppose that two things are accurate: 1) That this was a global flood, 2) That the stories originated with people who could have qualified that such a flood was global. Do you think that either of those suppositions are likely in any way whatsoever?

But the meaning of the word as it pertains to the actual physical treatment of animals has not changed. Online dictionaries are not technical resources. You cannot expect a middle-of-the-road common usage guide to words to have the precise scientific definition. This is not news to most people. I guess that means you missed the point then.

At this point I feel I should apologise for broaching my thoughts with such commonplace elements, however I should point out that (a) these elements are still finite, and (b) the expenditure of extraction will eventually prohibit that extraction no matter the magnitude of need. It seems to me that you are not prepared to predict this because you are either making claims which rely on very specific chemistry without proposing any chemical basis, or suggesting that man's future will rely heavily on alchemy. In the rest of your post you have again re-stated the position that extraction techniques will diversify and/or improve. I do not dispute this, and I applaud both your research into the topic and your optimism for man's future. But as I have stated and explained it is not a counter-argument to my point. When we need to turn to progressively more extreme methods to obtain resources, we can be assured that demand is outstripping supply and that expense is skyrocketing (pun not intentional). I would like to be more optimistic about mankind spreading across the galaxy, but I am not prepared to ignore reality in favour of "insert magical step here" thinking. Needless to say, I should not have to point out that predicting possible problems and being pessimistic are not the same thing.

Afaik it is still handled by the flash plugin before being outputted.

Alternatively, it simply points out the phase in human history in which a large but ultimately localised flood, stretching as far as the naked eye could see, constituted "the world" being covered in water. As i_a says, we don't know the synchronicity of the myths. If they all matched up, now that sure would be interesting.

Clearly then you don't understand my position. I am making the argument that our technology relies on, and will in the future increasingly rely on, a very wide spectrum of elements and compounds, many of which are in such short supply that they will become problematic to source despite advances in extraction technology. I have already given examples of rare precious and transition metals which you chose to ignore. The argument that such materials can be substituted is fallacious and seems to entirely disregard fundamentals of chemistry, for example the source of chemical properties. I don't have a problem with the idea that some extraction and refining techniques will improve dramatically. Not at all! In fact I agree, despite the fact that you simply state this as a given without even a passing reference to any possible chemical processes which we aren't currently exploiting. However this is not only entirely beside my point, it supports it. If demand for a material is so great that we have to develop new technologies to source it, and possibly even cross the economy break-even point in order to do so, then all this shows is that accessible stocks of that material must be running out at that time. That is not so problematic if you assume that something like copper is being extracted from seawater, because there is quite a lot of it as you pointed out. A finite amount, to be sure, but lots and lots of finite. However in the case of something like platinum, which occurs in the crust in a proportion of about 3 parts per trillion (1012), it certainly is a problem. You can disagree all you want, but the basic summary of your counter-argument so far seems to be that plentiful titanium can be substituted for lead and therefore we will never run out of any vital materials, which is hardly an internally-consistent or rationally deduced position. You only have to look to your previous post to see the argument from incredulity: Again, desperate measures to extract denote a desperate shortage of the resource. And how does your optimism apply to rare materials? Well, not at all. That's how. You started off by saying: This is an approach you have taken in other threads, and it is not strictly true. As you did in those other threads you have strayed into the area of the speculation where the answers are still wrong. In the same post you talk about humanity spreading to the stars in a large number of populations. How do you think resource splits will be managed? I'd love to hear how the planet's stocks of tellurium - fairly crucial to modern and emerging space technologies - will be divvied up between the fleet and those societies remaining on the Earth. Of course if spacemen of the future will be using phase change memory and solar panels and IRs/compound semiconducters based on lead or copper or maybe wood, there will be less of a concern, but somehow I think that is unlikely.

Is anyone else finding my point difficult to grasp?

No apology necessary. You are quite right to point out the relative abundance of copper, and any increase in the figures is surely a bonus. The thing is, there is a difference between the metal being extractable, and being economically viable to extract. Assuming that technological advances will result in more lead (or copper, for that matter) becoming available from lower grade ores or seawater tells us nothing if we do not have an adequate picture of (a) how pressing the need is to extract from those sources, or (b) whether the benefit outweighs the cost. This is sort of my point, in that we can be assured that demand will increase while the total number of available atoms stays the same. So price will rise, even if increased extraction/recycling efficiency comes at no cost (which is in itself unlikely). Although price is an issue, it is not the most on-topic aspect I was trying to consider. In the context of the thread, "what will man become", there is a real risk that metals and minerals vital to space technology will physically become so difficult to source that they may turn into a significant limiting factor should we decide to start reaching out to other star systems. Of course cost will play its part too, but there is no point worrying about the cost of something unless you know it is available.