Genecks

He has held up to the reasons I voted for him. He has held up to the way I saw how a president should handle the military, foreign affairs, the economy, and arguing against others in the government who may be corrupt or attempt to put the power back into the rich and corrupt. So, I think, on those grounds, he's doing his job. Whether or not he's doing a poor/good job? I think he's attempting to do a good job. If someone knew a sure-fire way to make things better with fairness in a shorter period of time, I'm sure he'd greatly consider it. Some of my views have changed. I think he and congress should depress national wages. Making some money is better than nothing. I rather break even than go into debt. On the state side, which the president doesn't full control... I'm truthfully sick of the state of Illinois. The state determines the minimum wage. And in a time like this, keeping minimum wage on an upward scale doesn't do too much good for those with low socio-economic status. It creates large class-division. As such, I've been contemplating my leave from this state for many years. At the age of 18, I seriously considered moving to Texas. I've always been against the war. As of late, I'm thinking we should just close down the war, save the money, and invest it back into America, perhaps in the form of grants. So, if the money went toward research, you could hire more students and they could work, complete their degrees, lead to benefits for society, and/or so forth. I think the costs of the war need to stop immediately. My opinion since this war started was to let those around the war area take care of the war area. Some people say there isn't a war anymore. Good. Then pull out the soldiers, decrease their wages, and so forth. I'm sure many soldiers would be willing to accept lower wages if they knew they were not going to be in combat each week. And you could always make them do something else. Make them fix the roads, build things, feed and clothe the poor, etc.. etc.. Maybe even do some weird lay-off system: Ask the active duty persons if they want to be reservists instead of active duty, and consider their time as reservists as part of their required time of serving.

Try breaking it down to a mnemonic. IPMAT Interphase Prophase Metaphase Anaphase Telophase These days, I've seen so many diagrams, drawings, things through microscopes, etc.. that I just know the basics of the process. It's burned into my memory. Even if I couldn't remember the terms, I'd know the basics of the process. But try building yourself a ground and working up. I think understanding and memorizing the term "IPMAT" for cellular mitosis is a good starting ground.

Special Forces manuals and Boy Scouts manuals are also good reads. My late uncle left his special forces manual he got while serving as a green beret in Vietnam. I've looked through it a couple of times. It has a lot of interesting stuff in it. I think one of the more interesting things I got from the Man vs. Wild show was how the host tied a shirt to his legs, walked through the grass as the shirt passed through the grass, and then squeezed water out of the shirt into his mouth in order to collect water. Keep in mind that digestion of fiber requires water, so if you were just eating grass, you would dehydrate. In general, you would want to attempt to avoid basic, green grass. Attempt to find bugs, non-poisonous bugs at that. Or start learning to throw rocks at birds and other small animals. That's another useful skill.

Well, foreign language relates to the areas of the brain that involve reading. So, maybe it could help. If anything, it could probably help a person better memorize unfamiliar terms and words. While learning foreign languages, I found that I could better memorize weird, complex English words. Learning a language can take a while. Maybe a few months... maybe a year or more... But without constant usage and learning, the plastic effects and benefits from plastic effects (I think) would more than likely wear off. In two months, could I improve my reading speed? Well, I suspect I could run through a variety of literature and try my hand at reading, generalizing, and recalling material more often. Some people get lazy and do something else besides read each day. But if I were to practice the skills often enough, I suspect I'd have a slight increase, as the brain would plasticize to me constantly reading and how I would go about reading. Some of my more recent views on reading, memorization, and recall relate to a person known as Kim Peek. I think it was around 2005(?) I learned about the guy and said to people on Hypography Forums that society needs to study this guy and figure out how his brain is different. He truly has a different neuroanatomy in relation to the occipital areas. NASA, I believe, gained his permission to take a look inside. The plasticity that he underwent during development gave him the ability to read fast and recall fast. He's living proof that plastic effects can have serious gains. An important note is that he was somewhat of an idiot savant in that he couldn't take care of himself that well growing up. However, if he could maintain some basic aspects of living and worked on increasing those behaviors, then plastic effects would have occurred, and he would get better at maintaining living for himself... Considering the idea of neural darwinism, the more you practice certain reading skills, the better you get at reading and understanding increasingly difficult levels of literature. As a child, I often questioned how exactly the human brain could tackle new levels of difficult material, from basic algebra to the mathematics of complex quantum physics. In the past few years, I've decided it's really neural darwinism and the benefits of plasticity caused by behavioral changes in a person (increased reading with emphasis on critical reading skills). I think what I'm trying to emphasize here is that there would be a desire to kill off the worthless cells that don't help me read better. And the cells that help me read better get activated more often, thus leading to their survival. additional reading: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_darwinism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

I meant to say I got involved with one of those group blog things. I didn't like it. I don't think people really like them. I was tired when I wrote that post. Then again, I'm in more of a sleep deficit than I was while I wrote it. Things change, though. Life moves on. Yeah, I think a mailing-list is what I would do. The other things seem like too much effort in a short amount of time. Despite mailing-lists being old school, a lot of techies still use them. I find myself using a mailing list to mail the software user group whenever the author of said software just got too lazy to make a manual for his/her software suite/program. Sometimes authors do this in order to figure out what should be included in a software manual if one is to be made based on people's questions and discussion in the mailing-list. One mailing list that I spent a decent amount of time on in the past while was the BackupPC mailing-list. Albeit the manual is somewhat decent, reading through that thing and understanding how to use its information can be cryptic at times. Mailing-lists are still useful in the 21st century. Now for something like the XORG mailing-list? I think a mailing-list has become inadequate, but people might disagree with me.

I think speed reading is a form of critical reading that is often dependent on one's ability to quickly summarize and condense information (while having the summary keep the material's original meaning), sort through irrelevant material, and ability to create what I call "abstraction points." These abstraction points are generalizations that allow you to generate associative facts from a base ground in order to recall greater detail about things discussed in the reading material. That's my view, though. Speed reading is nice, but the real emphasis is on recall. I've found that sometimes it does me good to speed up my reading pace for some materials. I have this habit of keeping the same pace. But sometimes I'll notice that I can actually rush myself in certain materials and recall large amounts of information while not being under stress. Otherwise, I'll probably read at a "normal pace" without thinking that I could just as well read faster and remember the same amount of material in a shorter amount of time. I think the more a person builds such critical reading skills, the easier it becomes to apply them and reap the benefits they are suppose to provide. The brain plasticizes around the method. That's my theory for the time being. I think if there have been tests on reading speed, they would relate to cognitive science. I know of one professor who is currently attempting to understand how people go about reading scientific texts and retaining/understanding the material. This professor received a $1 million USD grant, so I'm going to assume that perhaps not as much research as people would like to be in existence is out there. This isn't really reading speed. http://tigger.uic.edu/~jwiley/eyelab.html Now, I've met some people who will "speed read." And by that, they do just that. They move their eyeballs along the page and try to remember as much as they can while trying to keep their page-scanning eyeball movements at a decent pace. It's like force-feeding your brain. One guy I knew always carried a gym bag full of fiction books with him. That's another form of reading. He would speed read through fiction. This doesn't necessarily mean a person with such a technique can recall all the details. But such a person may get the gist of the story line and so forth. So, you have to decide what your goals are during reading. I think for a non-fiction reader, it would be memorization. additional reading: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining

I often wonder this question, because I am starting to find organisms that I think should be model organisms. I'm not going into detail, as I might actually use such an organism to do a graduate thesis, but still... I'm surprised that for some species when they have such fascinating phenotypic aspects, they are not used for scientific research. For instance, why zebrafish? Why not some other kind of fish that might have outstanding phenotypic charactistics that make it a prime topic for study? Why have people compiled so much literature on just zebrafish? So what really defines something as a model organism?

Some people argue that new ideas can be created. But perhaps that falls in the realm of metaphysics.

How about setting up a mail-list instead? Or maybe something on Telnet... create a telnet BBS server... A mail-list is probably seriously simple and faster. Here is something BBS-wise: http://www.synchro.net/ Double K's suggestion is somewhat new fashion. I saw it come about in the past 7 years or so... I don't think too many people really that way of communication, though. I think a mailing list would be far superior. I think I got involved with one of those once. From what I remember, I didn't like it. Maybe you can get away with finding a website that will allow you to make a mailing list. Maybe sourceforge? I don't know.

Someone once told me that an electron can move from one body to another. And those two bodies can be constantly exchanging electrons. I don't think the name for this phenomenon is "electric slide." Does anyone know the name of this phenomenon? In general, the person said that from my body (human body with clothes, etc..) to that other person's body, electrons move back and forth between us.

Well, explosives is a tricky word. Sure, if it's producing a fuel, that could immediately be used as an explosive. But if it's making some kind of time-delayed explosive that will only be set off by some kind of condition, such as a large temperature drop? I'm not sure how that would be pulled off. I think such a microorganism would be useful. I think if there were a limit to bacterial synthesis, then it would be related to size or complexity of the molecule being made. Synthesis is primarily dependent on those things, I think. But then again, I've often questioned the limit, and I would have to say whether or not it's worth it to develop a bacterium to do something. Let's say we could actually build bacteria that can build a car (insane, I know). Somehow we've mastered that ability. But it would only be worth to have something like that if it would be cost-efficient. In the example of a car? I don't think people would want to put forth the time and money to do something like that. Furthermore, I think people would be more interested in nanotech (or some tiny robots) for something like that. And then there is rapid-prototyping using machinery. So, for making molecules, maybe we'd use microorganisms. For building machines? Probably something mechanic to build something mechanic. What would the microbes feed on? That would depend on the metabolic and synthesis activities of the microbe. If you can find a way to get it to use ATP, great. I guess energy source would depend on the kind of molecule you're synthesizing and how you developed it. Some people have electric cars, and some people have cars that run on gasoline.

If Craig Venter could model something from scratch, create new genes that don't exist in nature, and create new proteins with functions that don't exist in nature, and made it all into a functional multicellular eukaryotic organisms that can reproduce... then yeah, I'd say he's playing God. Until then, I don't think so... But keep in mind, such a possibility as I mentioned is but maybe a few decades away. I could claim that playing God would mean creating a new tree of life. And that tree of life would be separate from the current tree of life. I'm not saying that the trees of life can't cross-over, but I'm saying he needs to make a new tree of life. Now, if he wanted to humour me, he'd make silicon-based organisms. I think that would be one hell of a thing to see: Cross-over between the carbon-based tree of life and a silicon-based tree of life.

I'd have to say that a person should have a background in grammar, logic, style, and symbolic interpretation. By symbolic interpretation, I mean a background in finding ways to understand something as something else. For instance, an old man is not just an old man, he symbolizes wisdom and the passing of time. A person needs to find books that will help with critical reading skills. By beefing up one's skills in critical reading, reading becomes somewhat easier. In an academic setting, however, the emphasis is on memorization, recall, and application of read material. For the autodidact, I would say he/she should emphasize on those things, but he/she should at least emphasize memorization and recall in an attempt to prove he/she "learned" something. In general, a foundation of reading materials should be mandatory reading for anyone with an interest in reading.

My idea is testing if there would be a way to get bacteria to gather air and form N2O. Let's say they gather air and then make some N20, then they expel that and route it to the engine. Or perhaps there would be a way to get them to transfer that stuff to a tank/cannister under the vehicle; that way it continually builds up a supply until the person needs it.

I'm starting to think that nuking this thing will be the next best alternative. It's a little unorthodox, but I think it's starting to become appropriate. If this can't be solved in a month, I think using a nuclear device to seal the release would be a good idea.

I'm for this. How about a sub-board in General Discussions? Maybe titled "Exhibits and Lectures." If someone can think of a better title, then shoot away.

Math is used to attempt to model real life phenomena. You don't say, "Oh, math is real life phenomena." It's used to model things. Your line of thinking is invalid. It's similar to this: And what about John 2:18? You have 9/11 and two possible Christs (the real and the false)... 2 christs and 9+11 = 18 Oooohh. was 9/11 sign that the Antichrist is here? Oh noes?! I mean, wasn't 2001 really the mark of the new millennium according to how calendars works?

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In general, I think to explain a concept to another person would involve over-generalizations or oversimplifications if the person was not familiar with the field. It's easier to teach a person how a cell divides through one mechanisms than it is to go into the other mechanisms involved in cell division. I could talk about microtubules and chromosomes or I could discuss microtubules, chromosomes, cdk-cyclin complex, and more. There are different levels to explaining something, different levels in reduction. I also agree with John. I can't do it, since both are dead. So, I wouldn't take Einstein's saying is a good way to determine if someone is an expert, unless he/she has enough scientific knowledge to call the dead and bring them forth.

*moves his hand across his face* "Pokah faccceeeee..." I think that, despite the quality of her videos, she has some good songs included with good vocals. Even if its digitized, it sounds good. I guess I've learned to accept that many singers will digitize the quality of their voice, thus not showing a true representative voice that exists. Still, the songs are good. I think she also does show some absurdity, which is what I like. Her body movements, emotional facial displays, and more in her music videos are good. She really continues the concept of what it means for something to be a music video. Do I think she's the next Madonna? No, I do not think so. Madonna was more subtle with facial expressions and blocking, I think. Lady Gaga tends to extrapolate her movements. Nonetheless, I think she is a 21st century musician to remember.

As a note, I wasn't asking a rhetorical question. Is that white smear in the ocean the oil spill? I'm not sure what I'm seeing in the picture.

Go collect bugs and make a phylogeny tree.

I was looking at a map on Wikipedia. From a satellite picture, is the oil spill noticeable? picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Gulf_of_Mexico_oil_spill_May_17_cropped.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

Maybe it doesn't contribute to scientific progress, but I think it contributes to accessibility. I have often wondered if inserting an entire genome into a cell soup would work. But I didn't know if it was feasible. An increase in accessibility could lead to more people being able to do research. So, perhaps, the new knowledge can be fruitful... Either way, probably easier to get a Bacillus anthracis-like microbe now. In reference to the "artificial life" idea, I'm thinking the new generation of biologists are eventually going to throw away the idea. I don't know why the question is still around. Personhood in relation to sociobiology seems like a bigger issue. *shakes hands* "Ooh, should we say that the microbe he made has a soul????" Let's hope heaven doesn't have these dastardly microbes.

Do you think it would be possible to hybridize bacteria with an engine so that it constantly can use NO2 for the engine and cool down the engine, thus allowing a faster, more efficient automobile?