CDarwin

I haven't read all of the responses so I might be talking off conversation, but... I think there should be partisan and non-partisan (or less so) parts of government, and that's legitimate. Executives, by and large, should be non-partisan. Departments and agencies less so still. But I have no problem with partisan legislatures. Factions will form in any event, and at least while those factions are under the aegis of party politics, their functionings are clear and transparent and they are forced to adopt and support a reasonably consistent platform to present to their constituents every election. They also provide a framework (the whip) to coordinate politicians with possibly differing interests toward productive goals. Less would get done in Congress (or Parliament, or the Diet, or whatever) without parties.

The issue here is an interesting one, and it's over the status and use of public space. Not public property mind you, but public space. And there are legitimate perspectives on both sides. Paranoia, I would wager, and the law as well incidentally, hold essentially that public space is an illusion and that private property has the only reality. You could also, however, honestly hold that private property is the construct and that public space should be open to works of artistic value. Our society already implicitly supports this notion with thinks like public statues and even zoning regulations, which impose upon private property a particular aesthetic to what might be called an 'artistic' end. So I don't know as there's much point letting into each other. These are worldview differences.

I'd have taken the Huckabee comment as just a joke. And a pretty good one too. I mean that one was Biden-worthy. I wouldn't analyze too seriously.

Conventions put everyone is such a bad mood. Geez. Can't we just appreciate the pretty lights and bright colors?

I don't know if iNow meant this, but it seems that you could make the argument that education shouldn't be a democracy (based on the popularity of ideas) but a meritocracy (based on their quality). Again, I don't know if that's what he meant, but it's just what came to my mind as I was thinking about his post. EDIT: Aha, it seems what came to my mind was basically what was in his. Not that that totally avoids the central issue of who gets to decide if ideas have merit: the society as manifested in state education, or the individual parent. It's the same issue that PZ Myers can't avoid when he talks about "reality." Who decides reality? The liberal-rational norms of public society, or the personal beliefs of parents? Personally I tend toward societal sovereignty, because ultimately isn't it our society that's decided that parents have power over their children anyway? In many cultural traditions, extended families will raise children and have authority over them as great or greater than one or both of the parents. If our public society has decided that a nuclear family is relatively inviolate, shouldn't it be able to decide when it can be violated? But, I see Paranoia's argument of how that fails to allow for principled parents to teach their kids unpopular but 'right' (to our modern reckoning) positions like abolition. On an unrelated note, I just learned something today that I hadn't realized earlier that I think underlines Palin's relative inexperience compared even to Obama. It's beating a dead horse, but, oh well. Alaska has a population of 683,478 people (smaller than the city of Charlotte, for example). And more relevantly, Barack Obama's district in the Illinois State Senate covers 781,037. So Barack Obama has actually been responsible for more constituents (albeit in a non-executive capacity) in his much maligned state senate experience than Sarah Palin has in her entire career.

Lunar month, actually.

I got What Evolution Is from home. I was referring to Box 6.1, here on Google Books (where I should have just looked in the first place):

I think iNow hit on something. This gives Bush and Cheney an excuse not to show up now, which allows the convention to be pointedly focused on McCain without playing into the Democrats' strategy of associating him with Bush. You know any endorsements of the former by the latter at the convention would wind up in dramatic voice-over in some Democratic attack ad. I don't think Bush could do much of anything for McCain with an audience as broad as the RNC's at this point. You just can't exclude a sitting US President of your party from speaking at a convention.

But Palin's is ridiculously less... Obama worked in public service for years beyond his political career and has also held corporate and academic posts that themselves would seem to add up to Palin's entire local service in Wasilla. And being governor of a state for 20 months really only proves that she's a talented (and probably connected) enough politician to get elected to that post with such sparse background.

Seriously, this has escalated a bit. I don't think anyone would say that Barack Obama just stood up and lied to us for an hour, but the man's a politician giving a political speech. He manipulated what he said to make his points the most forceful way possible. Like Pangloss has been saying, these conventions are essentially marketing, and that's what Obama's speech was too.

You know, the scenario is a bit fanciful, but after looking up some things, your chronology doesn't seem horrible. Although I still want to point out that consuming meat of any kind and hunting large game are two very different things that almost certainly didn't happen at the same time. But the latest ice age started up around 2.6 million years ago, in the Pliocene, and by 2.5 million we see the Oldowan industry of stone tools, which show the first solid evidence of humans processing at least some meat from sources large enough to need processing with choppers (i.e. bigger than a squirrel). The origin of big game hunting is somewhat more controversial, but it is certain that it was a typical human trait by at least the time of the neanderthals, in the late Pleistocene. Basically, more open forests and scrubland = fewer edible leaves = a need to include more meat in the diet for the protein and also probably the calories.

I think you would probably spend more money trying to collect that tax than it would be worth.

Median is a kind of average (along with mean and mode), or at least that's how it was taught in my math classes. But really good website.

Indeed. Darwin wasn't stupid, he came to the same conclusions that many of his contemporaries quickly did as to the meaning of his ideas in the intellectual context of the 19th Century, namely eugenics and what would be called Social Darwinism. But where these others were excited by the potential, he himself was appalled by the moral consequences. Darwin was rather famously humane. He even spoke before Parliament against vivisection on one occasion. http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/DonEug.html This page has some quotes. There's another one that I couldn't find that made my point better, I think, but alas.

No, that's an embryo chart. This one lists the various sources for the observations and inferences that went into natural selection.

It might have been done before controlled fires were made, on an opportunistic basis. I don't suppose there's anyway to possibly know.

That would work better if Venezuela was a US ally and if Mexico not only bombed, but actually invaded and tried to seize control of it. You could compare it, I suppose, to China invading Tibet after it tried to succeed and India intervening. Of course the relative power of the nations involved in that example doesn't quite work, but I think the response in the West would pretty clearly be different.

There's some weird stuff on that program. Apparently you'll get a $2,776 tax cut if you're single with no dependants and make $200,000 a year but "will probably not get an Obama taxcut" if you make $100,000 - $125,000. Not horribly progressive. I don't think many people are single and make that much money, though.

They already did it in 2006. The vote was over 90% for independence, but some of the region's ethnic Georgians were probably discouraged from voting. Not that there are many of them left there now, we're beginning to see. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6140448.stm

Nutritionally, it's the same stuff, but I would doubt that sequence. Early humans (which is an admittedly vague category) probably did scavenge bone marrow before they started consuming, say, ungulate flesh in large quantities, but before even that I'd say they were exploiting the various small mammals and lizards and birds they discovered while foraging for other foods. It's what chimpanzees, for example, do.

My mental picture Biden gently scolding Obama over something in a strategy room. "Remember the ICJ position on the Western Sahara, Barack..." or something like that.

Why humans eat meat is relatively simple. How and when is generally where it gets complicated. It comes down to protein.There's no such thing as a truly 'frugivorous' primate, one that only eats fruit. All primates must consume either animal matter or leaves for the protein. Now, below about 500g, called Kay's Threshold, you can get away with just insect matter, but above that, it's principally leaves. However, once you reach a certain size, like that of apes, there's a choice to make in order to get enough protein. Go the gorilla direction of intensive folivory, or supplement your diet with meat, as chimpanzees and to some extent orangutans do. The bigger your size, the more meat you need, and the fewer leaves in your environment, the more meat you need. Now, early humans were at the same time getting larger and moving into relatively more open (less leafy) environments, both of which would require a greater concentration of animal protein to replace the lost leaves. Meat is also a wonderful source of calories, but that's probably just a bonus to the necessary protein it provides. I wouldn't call primate's teeth those of a "herbivore," though, by the way. For one thing, the term is most precisely applied to grass-eaters, and only one kind of primate, the gelada, does that. But even if you just take to mean "vegetarian," primates are, as a group, generalists. We have pretty all-purpose dentition. They also get high cholesterol really easily and develop heart problems. They do eat insects and occasionally birds eggs and the like, though.

There's a really good chart in (the very good book) Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is. I would try to reproduce it or something if I had it with me, but I left it at home. If you go try and find it somewhere, perhaps in a library if you don't feel like buying it, it would reward reading.

Mark Warner gave a good speech, I think. Substantive and all. He's an example of why I like Southern Democrats. They're good pragmatists who know how to work with people. You're not hearing any of this spiteful Clinton crap from any Warners or Bredesens. Other than that, yeah, a lot of marketing.

In the mean time... Russia has recognized the independence of S. Ossetia and Abkazhia and the West is condemning it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7583164.stm I think NATO is just dead wrong on this one. This is the only thing that could possibly stabilize the Caucuses now. The status quo, and all trust between Georgia and the break-away republics, is totally dead now. NATO and Georgia are just blocking progress by thinking that S. Ossetia and Abkazhia will now quietly return to the unofficial-semi-autonomy-under-threat-of-arms they won in the 90s. The most valid criticism is that the Russians might have done it too soon, but it needed to be done eventually (yet again, Russia botches a move, that could have been presented as a necessary and noble positive, by appearing imperialistic). Just on an interesting note, both the Russian Duma and the Federation Council voted unanimously in support of this recognition of independence. That includes parties other than United Russia, most prominently the Communists, which are its strongest rival. I think that shows some of the unity of resolve in Russia over this issue. This isn't, for Russians, just Putin's Machiavellianism. Russians are bitter over Kosavo, they're bitter over the eastward spread of NATO, they're bitter over their treatment in history and probably a thousand other little slights, and pro-Russian minorities in the Caucuses seem to have taken on a special national purpose. It's sort of a mix of "Here we draw the line against the West" with "We need all the friends we can get down there" with "Here, at least, we are loved, we must stand by them." Whether Putin and Mendvedev feel the same way or are just using the sentiment for their own gains, who can say?