CDarwin

That's fair.

I always thought of the nucleus as more of a warehouse than anything else. The actual "controlling" of the cell is done by the genetic material, be it prokaryote or eukaryote. If you want something analogous to the "brain," I'd say that would be it. In any event, you certainly shouldn't think of the brain as having evolved from any part of a cell. "Brains" in that sense are purely multicellular phenomenon. Hence the term "analogous" and not "homologous."

It wouldn't be an act of war, but it would be shooting a missile into space to blow up a satellite. If it raised my eyebrows, it might raise someone else's, or erode the United States' credibility in criticizing China for it's anti-satellite missile tests. I don't really know. Space politics isn't a particular area of expertise.

Hopefully Russia won't go invading Germany for Serbia this time around. Is it possible that Russia might use it's hard stance as a bargaining chip to gain some ground on issues like the ones Putin alluded to in the former USSR? I'm sure he'd like some kind of UN pressure on Georgia over South Ossetia.

Might this have any political implications, though?

I remember Mokele, the herpetologist fellow. I miss him, he stopped posting just about as I started.

I feel I should note that domesticated hogs themselves can do quite well in the wild on their own. In the southern Appalachia, pigs would be allowed to wander the countryside and feed themselves, and not only did they do just fine (until they were hunted down and baconized, of course), many escaped and formed wild populations. You shouldn't think of "pig" as just being the big, fat, pink things we have now. Those are a relatively recent innovation even within the course of domestication. The pigs that were first brought to America, for example, were much smaller, furrier, and meaner.

This is something I've been noticing McCain doing throughout this campaign; trying to get the votes of people who won't vote for him anyway by alienating those who might. It's unfortunate really.

Apparently the Serbians still aren't happy, though, nor is Russia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7244333.stm

The US is planning to shoot down it's failing spy satellite. Is that really as stupid as it sounds? Because it looks to me like the U.S. military is set to turn a single, compact object that probably wouldn't do any harm into a cloud of debris that could potentially do a lot of harm, particularly to other satellites and to US stances on the demilitarization of space and criticisms of China's satellite killer. Physics isn't my forte, though, so maybe I'm misinterpreting.

Didn't a hardliner just get through getting elected President in Serbia, though?

It's a little late, but to all a happy and adaptive Darwin Day! Woohoo.

What is this, 24?

Actually, the wording of the pledge inadvertently makes an interesting theological argument. "One Nation Under God Indivisible." Is the nation indivisible or is God indivisible? The latter would be Unitarianism, not exactly an orthodox position in Christianity. I never noticed that before, ha.

So is there a reason Ron Paul is still in at this point? I mean, I never expected him to drop out, but I was wondering if he's actually given some sort of justification. Making a point?

I think I can do Alonzo one better. "White nation" is a loaded phrase, which is unnecessary to make the point. What if the words were "liberal nation" (referring specifically to the American political faction). Would that be acceptable? Fundamentally, it's government endorsing a specific point of view and presenting it in a coercive manner to school children. Now the government does that on a variety of issues other than theism. The Pledge also coercively supports the idea of a unified state. Maybe some people disagree with that. That makes the issue of "under God" fundamentally constitutional. So, on a rhetorically level, Alonzo's proposal is a valid argument. But it misses the constitutional point, which makes "under God" potentially even worse. I hope that made sense.

I'm sorry but I find it just a bit hard to care. Talk to me when someone actually goes to jail, but I don't think that prestigious Canadian scientists' rhetoric holds legislative power. I think this is a good example of the partisan affinity for scouring the press looking for any tiny thing to make a cause out of.

A lot of scientists don't even like the holocene, they put us still in the Pleistocene. I don't see us splitting again after only 10,000 years. It's dubious that future geologists would even be able to discern such a short time period.

Aha! Thank you.

Aw, my blog disappeared. the address just directs to SFN now. Did I anger the blog gods?

But don't many more things about the primary system do that already? Take candidates dropping out for example. 99% of the Democrats in the United States never got to vote for Chris Dodd because he dropped out after Iowa. I never got to vote for Joe Biden. If you really want to hold the system up to the standards of fairness of the national election, then there are more endemic inequities than disqualified voters in two states.

I've been recently struck with a respiratory illness which seems to involve quite a bit of blowing of the nose, and it has gotten me thinking. Is this an innate behavior or something we learn to do culturally? Do all cultures blow their noses? Do any other animals? Is it something that would had to have evolved with fabrics, or would a leaf or just your hand do?

I don't know that say, Stanford, is any better than somewhere like Duke or Case Western Reserve, or even a lot of public schools. UNC Chapel Hill, for example. And those are all big research schools. You could have just as good or better an experience at a small school.

That list is a tad arbitrary, but I suppose any list would be. You should consider Duke or Vanderbilt. Get yourself some southern-fried learnin' . I voted Oxford. No particular reason other than abstract Anglophilia.

People just don't realize how crucial human scientific capital is, and makes science an easy target for spending cuts. Expensive pure research seems esoteric and unnecessary, but beyond its real intrinsic value it attracts the best scientists. Those scientists are the capital that are going to train the next generation of researchers in all fields, both the fundamental and the "practical" and applied. Serbia provides a good example. It used to be a scientific powerhouse, now it's teaching Creation Science in its high schools. It's because all the great scientists left or died and there wasn't another generation to pick up where they left off. The Balkans is a backwater now.