Cap'n Refsmmat

What if I make an embryo with only a mother? It's possible with the right equipment. If I didn't use birth control, I'd probably have a kid who'd go on to live a life. If I had gone further that one night, there'd be a kid who'd probably go on to live a life. Why do you draw the "probably" line at having an embryo instead of anywhere else? But why not? Both sperm and egg are alive; both contain their own DNA and so on. Both come from something that is alive. Why does the "life" begin only when they unite? Morality can be based on logic.

I live on a college campus and I have had nothing similar occur to me. The worst that happens is someone bumping into you in the street, or people begging for change. I don't even see very many drunk people staggering around.

We have lowered the requirements for entry to Philosophy and Ethics to those of Politics -- thirty posts and ten days of membership. The Religion requirements will stay at 100 posts for now, although we will consider lowering them in the future.

I wonder what terrorism sales meetings are like. "Now, we also have the Triple Explosion Package, for when your fanatical ideology demands nothing but the best!"

I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere deep in the NASA archives is a poorly exposed image from the Moon, with the lunar landscape bright white and washed out and stars clearly visible. They were manual cameras operated by guesswork, so they probably screwed up a few images. We only get to see the nice ones.

Abraham in Genesis. "Would you destroy the city if there were fifty good men in it?" "No, I would not destroy fifty good men." "How about forty-five?" "Well..."

And we require tact. Civility is a condition to the continuing existence of this part of SFN, and your continuing participation in it.

Looking good, guys. However, you should head over to the test board: http://area51.scienceforums.net/index and visualize how your logo would fit in. We may want to lighten the blue at the top so the look is right, so you'll want to base the colors in your logo off that. We can always adjust once your logo is selected, of course. tomgwyther: Could you share where you found that brain image? I like the concept and I think there's a lot that could be done with that. Also, a reminder that the PSD for the current logo is available and someone can try adapting it to IPB as well: http://xyloid.org/sfn.psd

This might be what happened: http://phun.physics.virginia.edu/demos/double.html

"Natural selection is going to be unusually rapid this morning. Take cover."

Okay. How would you start this? We're not going to just give you the answer. How would you start, and where do you trip up?

Would plywood withstand a tsunami?

Go further. Suppose I perfect an amazing technology that lets me extract a cell from an adult, turn it into a stem cell, then an egg cell, all while preserving the original DNA and encouraging it to grow. It doesn't even have to be fertilized, since it keeps the original DNA. It's a clone, basically. At what point in the procedure is destroying my miracle cell murder?

We will be sure to preserve the layers of dust when we migrate accounts.

Yes.

Sounds like a good subject for a thread in our new Philosophy forum.

Wait. What's wrong with twins?

Excellent. I highly recommend it.

And remember, it's up to you guys. If you don't make it hard on us to moderate, we'll keep the forums around. If Religion or Philosophy or whichever becomes a melee of anger, we're getting rid of it. We can keep the good ones around, of course, but there's always some "leakage" between forums. We'll try our best to keep the forums civil.

There's some interesting legal precedent for this. http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2007/2375.html In that case, a forum owner was sued for the identities of posters who had posted libelous material. The forum owner deferred to the court, letting a judge decide what identities should be released. The judge ruled that only a few identities should be released, since most of the libel wasn't really libelous, and said: If we act in good faith in running the site, we are not liable for libel posted here, but we are obligated to help find the people writing the libel. However, this must be done through court, not just through a threatening legal letter. Libel laws in the UK are very annoying, since the defendant is essentially presumed guilty. I'm not sure about the legal aspect of which country the plaintiff and defendant must reside within, however. The Data Protection Act also prevents us from releasing information to countries outside of the European Economic Area unless appropriate restrictions on its use are made, so we cannot easily release information to the US. This is partly why we created this policy; it spells out the cases in which we will release such information, such as "to tell your ISP you're abusing the system, even if you live in another country." We will not take information release lightly, and will always respect privacy unless we believe we have a genuine legal obligation not to.

It's listed because I noticed it in the Data Protection Act as one of the occasions in which we could disclose information. It's really only necessary if, say, someone sues us for libel over claims posted on SFN, so we deflect it by revealing the identity of the person who made the libelous comments. I think in most cases we would defer to the first point, and wait for a court to order us. These conditions all apply under our discretion, of course.

I've been trying to find that at the university library but most of the copies are "being searched." Hrmph. Nine million books and they don't have the one I want...

Hmm. Agreed. We have to grant embryos special status as "humans" for the probability argument to work.

Yes, but an embryo's probability of becoming a human is high, whereas a young girl's probability of becoming pregnant is significantly less. The chance of forming a human becomes much higher once you already have an embryo involved.

Indeed. Many states have a shortage, and they're commonly paid better than humanities/social science teachers.