foodchain

Yes but they are national averages for homicide, and again just from firearms, which for the U.S can be over 20,000 for a year. That’s twenty thousand people killed in one year in the U.S from firearms in a manner consistent with the definition of homicide. That means in a decade that well over one hundred thousand people will die in the U.S from firearm related homicide. That’s a pretty big number, it also does no include any other cases of homicide, such as vehicular manslaughter or what not. In comparison to Iraq four years of such conflict have not produced U.S casualty above five thousand, for the entire nation. In fact a decade of the U.S in relation to just firearm related homicide is greater then the number of U.S casualties produced during a decade of the Vietnam war. Socially I don’t understand why this occurs, as is evident in the very conservative state of Alabama crime is pretty rampant there, to very multi cultural California which has had murder capitals attributed to cities, so I will not try to define the why, just that its a big killer in regards to people. I think it stays consistent with the thread in the aspect of natural population control, or population density basically. If the OP does not happen to agree with me of course I will listen to him or her, but we don’t have that yet.

I don’t know if this exactly what you want but here is a link that might help. http://www.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/mathphys/subsection2_1_4.html

I compressed your post to save space on a server somewhere, so don’t think of it as rude on my part, it was not my intention. I don’t look at viruses like that. Such is bit from the Gaea hypothesis, which I am interested in myself. I look at viruses as something that came about basically through natural selection. I also tent to wonder about there involvement in endosymbiosis. My basic perspective on the virus is just that, its life in some particular method of survival as produced over time within the scope of natural selection operating on organisms, or in this case something that blends the line between what’s alive and what’s not. Humans for the most part have become there own natural predator really, or something that thins the heard if I might say. In America alone the nation averages 15,000 homicides from just firearms alone, that’s not to count for homicide by other means. Basically that makes living in America more dangerous the living in Iraq by a good magnitude. That being said I don’t know how human interaction with the virus will play out. Conventional means seem to support more resistant stuff over time, so I imagine at some point bioinformatics and such related fields like genetics or molecular biology might develop more intrinsic means biologically speaking to combat the spread of disease, in which case who knows how such will play out evolutionarily speaking.

Thinking on environmental issues a few big ones come to mine. First of all the science behind environmental change is not widely dispersed and is poorly misrepresented or poorly understood. It would be a good decision in my opinion to make a general environmental awareness class part of any undergraduate education and such should be dispersed though all levels of public education or a K-12 model. Understanding such would be key in making generations more aware and or even more green. The next big issue is lifestyles, of which is a composite of many different issues collectively coming to bear. Such as use of resources in the varied amount of ways that occurs. Why would a person buy a set of long lasting low energy use light bulbs vs. regular ones? How do you get people to commit actions as such like buying greener technology? The market for such will never really take off until its financially backed by say popular use amongst a populous. The more people will pay for and use greener products the more research and subsequently the larger a variety of greener products will become available. I would say as this ripples out through a industrial economy that prices of such technology would also go down as it becomes more widespread in use, for it would align the companies themselves with producing more efficient ways of manufacturing such technology, be it a car or a “green” microwave oven for instance. I would not so much as say an affinity but more or less a real understanding of biodiversity also needs to be basically attached to modern human thought regardless of culture. I would think the best way to go about this is basically to show in terms a culture can understanding the importance biodiversity has in regards to simply human fitness and survival, such as what would happen if marine life was brought close to extinction, or even how much money the U.S would have to pay constantly if all the bees went on strike. I think such an angle could at least be a forerunner in getting not only just people in general but companies behind greener policies if not regulatory safeguards. Trying to compress ecology into a commercial though I think would fall short, so again I see it more or less as something that needs to become part of regular education, or public education. We can see the impact such has had with raising literacy levels alone, to simply having a populous capable of doing mathematics. Another big issue is population size and density in relation to lifestyles. I would hope that humanity regardless of culture would through understanding be able to recognize the responsibility they have through education of protecting and sustaining the environment. The point is that none of that would really matter if human populations continued to increase. Going from the most basic aspects of science energy cant be created nor destroyed, it can however change in form. The idea of a world in which hundreds of billions of humans requiring a certain amount of energy for all basic purposes for a standard of living I think is a fallacy that could only end in really some traumatic horror that we can prevent. The reality of such is easily visible today with climate change and far then normal extinction rates for various species. Such also ties into global issues that can underline war or in general peace and conflict within our own species. Again, to me a real way to combat such would be regular education that can allow an individual to understand what the environment is in all its phases and or pieces and what the importance of the environment ultimately is. The last issue I would like to bring up is simply going global. My thoughts on the issue are pretty basic. Environmental issues overall cannot be solved by one state, nation and or government. It surely also cannot be solved by one company and or group of people. Environmental issues have both macro and micro problems that need to be addressed, but one the most major hurdles would be global cooperation on a sustainable environment. Without this I think most all progress would really be nothing but a waste all on its own. The reality of this problem touches on so many contemporary issues with focus in other directions that even an issue as large as global climate change can be marginalized if not basically ignored for the most part. Not to evoke an aspect of the Gaia hypothesis, but I feel if we cant evolve and or adapt to the reality of the environment, that such would surely mean our own extinction. Environmental understanding can be easily grounded is the basic sciences or natural sciences. It can be demonstrated and understood in the logical language of math, and its evident in the world today. Education on a regular basis is probably the best bet to combat such, more so on a global scale, but really I don’t see to much effort currently in this direction. I think this leads to situations in which the scientists and policy or law makers of such often encounter obstacles they cannot overcome in just about every facet of society, simply because the ignorance of the environment is really quite staggering. Environmental educations last impact and lasting impact I would think is innovation towards sustainability, for simply put if such was achieved in all areas of human culture, world wide, environmental problems would cease to exist. None of this though will occur in my opinion without regular and acute education on the subject.

I concur. I had a friend back in high school, years ago of course, into the whole anarchist cook book deal, he managed to make some pretty impressive stuff along with basically getting both his hands and a good percent of his arms covered with serious burns. Reactions can be rather instant, like boom instant! With that being said proper understanding and care should be taken with this stuff just for the reality that its rather real, the outcome of such, its not as if you made a mistake on you math homework or what not. The other idea is not just toxicity of elements to our particular chemistry but the reality that say having high velocity shards of glass to a multitude of other realties that can come about as a product of unknowing actions. Some poisons only become such through long periods of absorption also, so you would not even know you are harming yourself. Now that I have taken the thread off track I will make apologies and hope all is well as I go on my merry way:D

"In December 1997, a chemistry professor, Karen Wetterhahn, working at Dartmouth College in the United States spilled a drop of dimethyl mercury on her latex glove. She began experiencing the symptoms of mercury poisoning within 5 months of the exposure and, despite treatment, died a few months later." This and more in the link. The post being overboard or not, I don’t think its bad that maybe hobby chemists or such develop a more broad understanding of what they may play and or work with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning

I don’t know if it pertains to the subject but somewhere I read that the pattern to a Siamese cat for instance is due to differentiation temperature wise if memory serves impacting certain chemicals really. I would doubt that save for natural selection there is no real universal mechanism to why certain species display certain phenotypic characters overall. As for the movement of energy in a terrestrial or aquatic or etc type of ecosystem some of the more standard though biologically speaking can be found in the following websites. http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/slide01.cfm?q=%22ecology%22&dpg=10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_chain

Well, the question firstly is loaded really. Humans at large combat the idea of placing themselves in the context of the animal kingdom, this can be evidenced in a myriad of ways, such as the combating of evolution, to the idea that evolution applied to human behavior is hard fought. So to ask peta to do something that modern humanity for lack of better words across the planet will never accept is sort of a fallacy. Second, humans have millions of social institutions to basically represent humans. Organizations that look out for the welfare of animals are quite dismal and tiny in comparison numerically speaking. So again to burden such groups with taking on human problems is probably a bit out of scope. Lastly, the extinction list of animals is growing, and rapidly growing is the list for endangered species, which if you take the time to look never really even breaks into prime time news, it may be some back story on a newspapers website if you happen to get lucky. Humanity at large does not concern itself all to much with the welfare of other organisms, other forms of life or biodiversity in general. This is probably related to the overall lack of concern environmental speaking people hold for the environment at large. I could easily make a valid statement that in large humanity just does not care about the environment in general. So to think that peta is displaying a double standard for not including abortion on its list is a misnomer of what peta is about I would think. I also would think that if it did most likely peta would receive in large a social backlash for such, for already what it already receives for trying to portray and protect other life from simple human abuse that can be avoided easily is truly not necessary.

Yes, but then that’s to denote that everyone who goes into accepting that QM is a natural aspect of the reality around us in relation to nature then accepts that QM must have some impact on brain function, that’s my route. The simple aspect of photons interacting with matter is a QM subject or property off, similar to vision I would think in some regard. The idea of free will and QM is something I never really thought about when making my statement on the subject actually, and personally I don’t know what the definition of free will even implies in context of human thought really, I think its one of those vague terms even more watered down with subjectivity then intelligence or consciousness is overall.

With the advent or ability of humans to modify or understand genetic code, and such a code being responsible in large for the physiology of an organism what will the future truly hold for such an ability. I personally view genetics of course having to be able to operate basically in the reality that is physics and chemistry overall, that being said what would be available in a reality of total understanding of genetics. Will people be able to modify humans that can live in the vacuum of space, will we have people that are more akin to characters in the X-MEN comic book series for instance? IT sounds far fetched and even laughable, but the reality of understanding how to perfectly control genotypes and phenotypes via genetic engineering I see only as a medium in which such could occur. I don’t want to spin complete science fiction but within genetics we already have spider silk compounds being produced in goats milk to a myriad of other "innovations" that one hundred years ago would have sounded more outlandish at large then what I am posting here. For instance, UV vision, or to be able to see in such could be part of a GMO human, what would be the upper limits of such overall as understanding of the natural world is incorporated into genetic engineering? Could we see in time evolution being primarily nothing more then a product of artificial selection?

I have no idea what you were drinking, but I would think you hit some saturation point in your bloodstream though:D I have mixed drinks with vodka and everclear in them, along with some caffeine, its quit a kick but it does not taste very strong so you have to be careful really. As for a good drink mix, I would think sprite or 7up along with grape juice does nicely with vodka overall, though its been sometime since I had such. If you wake up the next day and happen to still be drunk, odds are you went a little overboard. I don’t like to drink really save for the purpose of getting drunk also, but really not to act as a overbearing communist but you really probably had a little to much:D

Well I don’t really want to give you advice because I cant know for sure your environment or really how you look at things, that being said I will try to offer in a different view maybe. I think what you need to look at is where you want to go I guess. I mean you say its a lab that studies cognition, which I am assuming is from a biological perspective. Is that something you would want to do for say a period of time, over a year or such? IN your free time do your interests take you to such? For me personally that’s the killer, as in I cant stand economics and personally it shows in my grades for such. As in your desire to reach med school or any particular aspect of it, such as a clinical laboratory scientist or what not, I have no clue also, but I imagine diversification of study/knowledge could not hurt in that regard. I think the real thing to me would be going for it, then finding out say six months later for example that you just are not happy with the results of such a decision, but in that I guess you cant really know until you do such for the most part. Personally as someone with diverse interests I find it hard to stay on track, as in environmental protection is where I would like to be employed, but so much else I would also like to work with, I guess it comes down to finding some realistic medium in which to balance it all, if that’s anything close to any problems you may have in regards to decision making at all. Well anyways, I hope this helps.

I agree. I think its because of the time thing again in evolution for one and lacking any real ability to transmute if you will what the randomness means. You cant study evolution in terms of phylogenics and say hey, it was bacteria to intelligent species in one single series. If not for the extinction of the dinosaurs for instance I doubt mammalian evolution would be anything that it is today for instance. You cant combine natural selection and artificial selection into natural selection, for organisms to pick and choose or have visibility say for a bacteria to know how to evolve somehow inside of it into anything would be artificial selection, and it would be the decider, obviously this is not the case I would hope. If things were not random every mutation would be in a micro and a macro sense then nothing but beneficial. So would be the relationship in the genotype/phenotype area. Evolution by the reality of it implies that life does not know how to for instance always save itself from extinction, or such again would not exist, evolution would be perfect and I doubt for it to have taken so long to even occur. People with understanding of such can conduct artificial selection, but that is artificial selection and even in that such is not perfect because you cannot foretell perfectly what a mutation will be and or where it will occur within absolute precision. Its akin to QM really in that regard, or an uncertainty principle really. Naturally then whatever mutations in time that conduct advantageous traits over time survive longer in a particular gene pool, but whatever those happen to be really is naturally selected. I don’t know if its a good example of convergent evolution really but the duckbill platypus I think is a good example of traits that are beneficial being selected naturally.

Right but does trigonometry for instance apply via its axioms to any particular number of dimensions or is it primarily functional really in three dimensions.

Is sin(t) for x,y,then z or is the t for time? See that’s what I am asking, I think:D , is that are we using functions for say 3D or 2D for xD dimensions? I mean going from what I understand of GR you can’t linearly apply things all the time, can whatever axioms that say sin comes from or operates from relate to whatever axioms that GR for instance implies, or string theory for that matter? More so in the context of more then 3 or 4 dimensions?

My understanding of math currently is somewhat limited so if this offends anyone it was not my intention. Do say functions exist like sin or cos for 4D problems? OR do such functions still apply in such dimensions with no problem? What I got this from in reading up on string theory and the 10D facet it presents. I know we have a lot of math for working 2D and 3D problems, but I guess my question is do such operators or functions exist for say 7D math problems for example, or 8D and so on.

You are going in all kinds of directions really. If what you are looking for is science making a goat breed in a few seconds into a boar or something, no, science cannot do that as of yet... Macro and micro evolution get confused a lot with the simple term bauplan. I think thats what most of the creationist arguments go into in that regard. The bauplan is not that differentiated along evolutionary lineages though. Such as our skeleton as humans compared to other primates, or the bones for that matter which make up your hand in comparison. More evidence on fossil records in action can be found with whales, as they still retain in some degree vestigial bones which serve absolutely no purpose at all, such as having bones that would relate to a leg, or legs, or being on all four limbs. Micro and macro evolution truly can be viewed in regards to advantageous traits in a sense of time. Such as in a human sense going directly to work and not college could be advantageous in the short term but in the long term not work out to well for the individual, such as in successive generations. Evolution also has evidence in the form of homologies from a genetic, or molecular sense. IN which evolution used as the backbone of such studies has offered in the ability to gain more understanding of biology, if evolution were not anything such endeavors would produce null results. What science can do is force evolution to occur in a laboratory. In which for ethical reasons bacteria is used. IN which the same population of bacteria exposed to a medium which is not nice to the health of the bacteria will induce the bacteria to change via natural selection from mutations. In order mutations that favor survival in this medium become more prominent while other traits which are not as successful reduce in appearance. This can lead to easily visible changes in the appearance of the bacteria also. Its also unpredictable really, in that amount of mutants, type of mutations, and many other variables will be different on each test group, some groups don’t even make it. Also, genes, the parts in which lead to genotypes and phenotypes that get worked on by natural selection can have varying degrees of conservation, and or rate that mutations impact them. Also how gene flow in species or populations works can vary. The bottom line is that natural selection can be shown in a lab, its just science cant make a temporal laboratory that can run say 50 million years of evolution in a few seconds. The last point I would like to make is that you really have to know about evolution and biology in general and all its nifty fields before you can really digest creationist arguments. Its a simple fact that they lie and distort data to fit a mold. They have been caught doing this trying to debunk how old the earth is, and famous ones in there ranks will say certain bodies of data don’t work or exist even while books are being published on the subject on a regular basis. They hold a great deal of bias, and should not be looked to really in order to engage science on some debate why something might be wrong or not completely right. A basic example would be evolution as a math equation, in which not all the variables are known yet. Science in regards to evolution goes about trying to figure out what it is, those variables. Creationist means would basically insert god into the unknown variables and call it good. Its hardly science, its hardly honest and basically its a lie. ITs like the entropy argument and plants using photosynthesis, personally I don’t think they even go outside really.

Well you can look at the effects of exposing organisms to various types of radiation, or the idea or concept that you yourself are composed of atoms basically in some particular format working from various physical laws and or parameters that seem to be universal. I mean the keys on my keyboard were occupying a certain position in space and time until I altered such by pressing them, being its all physical in that sense I had to have then ultimately physically interacted with such keys to generate this post. Also it would seem if physical interaction were impossible in the implied sense I get from this post evolution as in organic evolution probably would have never occurred.

Within chemical bonds and the nature of you find that reactions within certain aspects of the periodic table seem to work towards a "stability". Now I am not speaking directly of say the octet rule but really why elements seem to bond towards and affinity with stability. I have no idea actually why this occurs save what is stated. What I am basically getting at is that reactions with the elements will take place with what seems the reactions leading towards a stable structure in regards to say electronic configurations for instance, or what the octet rule itself might come from or applies. At first I pictured a see saw effect basically stemming from conservation of energy on what seems to be the easiest route to fulfill the octet rule, but after more study it seems as if the elements themselves seem to react as to reach possibly an inert state or really the configuration of other stable elements. Its seems as far as I can understand such that such in itself seems to be a constant. So I guess my question really is what does this phenomena come from overall, and is such a constant universally regardless of environment?

"There have been some discoveries right here on Earth, however, in the past decade or so that suggest that this pessimistic view of the possibility of extra-terrestrial life is too rigid. Life exists on the Earth under the most "un-lifelike" conditions. Consider the forms of anaerobic life, that is, life that does not depend on oxygen. The ability to metabolize and create life-giving energy in non-oxygen environments is now understand to support life miles into the earth itself, into the rock - it is now estimated that the mass of life (primarily bacteria) beneath the Earth's crust is greater (by far) than the mass of life in and on and above the crust. Life has been found in all temperature extremes. These discoveries are showing us that life is persistent and downright stubborn when it comes to invading every possible niche on Earth. Toxic gas environment? no problem. Live in pool of acid? you got it. How about inside a rock? can do... The amazing story of Life in our Inner Space is no less wonderous than the mysteries and marvels of our Outer Space. Perhaps the Key to Life Extraterrestrial is to be found in these hidden places." http://www.resa.net/nasa/onearth_extreme.htm "Although the anaerobic metabolism of sugars took front stage early, observations that pure cultures of organisms could also grow anaerobically on single-amino-acid nitrogenous compounds such as glutamate, which was converted to butyrate, formate, and ammonia, were made in the early 1900s. But it was Stickland who opened the modern era of study of anaerobic metabolism of nitrogenous compounds in 1934 (24). Anyone who has ever grown Clostridium sporogenes cannot escape the impact of its dynamic biochemistry! By use of cell suspensions Stickland made sense out of one of nature’s strategies of anaerobic amino acid metabolism by showing that whereas single amino acids could not be metabolized, certain amino acids when added in pairs were rapidly metabolized, one amino acid being oxidized (the electron donor) and the second being reduced (the electron acceptor). Thus, for example, alanine was oxidized to carbon dioxide and ammonia, and glycine (2 mol) was reduced to acetic acid and ammonia. In the next decade these experiments were extended by others who showed that at least 15 species of clostridia could grow by Stickland reactions. The gateway to knowledge of the anaerobic metabolism of nitrogenous compounds was greatly widened by H. A. Barker’s laboratory in the 1940s and 1950s (4, 5) with the isolation of different species and strains of anaerobes that could metabolize amino acids, purines, and pyrimidines. By use of 14C-labelled substrates, the fate of each carbon atom in the substrate could be determined by chemical degradation of each product of fermentation. Similarly, specific nitrogen atoms in the substrate could be labelled with 15N and the origin of nitrogen atoms in products could be ascertained." http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=93796

That’s just the thing. I have no idea what it was. I like to view the night sky time to time and of course you come to observe human made satellites and the like. That’s all I thought this was until it, whatever it was, accelerated to a point of being a streak really. The lines basically looked like an electronic read out of a hear beat you might see in a hospital or on T.V from one of those machines, I think it was three basic zig zags before it was gone also. I am not claiming it to be anything, I just know I don’t know what the heck it was.

Having studied as a pet hobby at times neuropsychology and of course brain anatomy I don’t find it hard to consider that the time span of evolution in regards to billions of neurons concentrated into different structures incorporated into a nervous system or the overall biology of an organism as being complex is any surprise. That being said brain injury of all things or the healthcare related to such is what I put my money on as to making breakthroughs really. If QM is more then just a mathematical construct and truly represents a physical reality of the nature around as in something that applies to matter period I would suggest that QM obviously has some impact on some level in the human brain. The idea to me though is that the human brain is not just a ball of matter in itself again, or it has an architecture, which I would suggest from the reality of brain injury to such again has a large sway on why it works the way it does.

Actually its not quite like that. I have heard of this stuff before and not just from this guy. It basically equates across the board into the idea that various chemical compounds that today thanks to modern intelligence are illegal for various reasons have similar properties to neurotransmitters that allow the human brain to function the way it does. So basically what you have is some encounter with an animal that eats this stuff and obtains the effects plus so much more basically. I don’t find the idea completely wack as organisms have or can incorporate from the surroundings. What I think is wack about it is that science probably has no way if will ever have a way to test such really, so its basically pointless past being conjecture as already point out. I think if you really want to down this idea though scientifically you would have to be able to trace the evolution of the brain really, in which I am sure you would be able to end the idea that apes eating mushrooms and making gods is a bit of a myth, as in the human brain being conscious of its surroundings at a human level with no real organized system of logic that exists today for instance would on its own be a trip.

That would be it I guess. Some were larger then others also, the turns that is.

Okay, before anyone jumps the gun I have no idea what it was I observed. At first it moved across the sky like a human made satellite, but as I watched it such began to accelerate. In what was fractions of time really, maybe close to two seconds it, the dot, had become something of a line. This line did a few zig zags before it was gone, the trail did not seem to last very long either. So any input would be nice, as I have no idea what it is I observed.