geoguy

Get out of Iraq NOW!

What a bizarre discussion. The war is LOST. The emperor has no clothes. The Democratic leader should keep the lies going? Play the ostrich game? What a friggin joke the USA has become.

There are numerous 24 hour seven days a week news services that need material to fill otherwise anemic on-air time. Events become circuses...blonde white daddy's girl killled in Aruba...Janet Jackson's nipple...Imus's one liner. It's the nature of the media beast. A legitimate news story evolves into ratings generating ball of brain-dead fluff. The new story of the virginia tragedy has morphed into a thousand reporters salivating to find some angle they can squeeze another dropof blood out of. The reporters act 'shocked' but are akin to vultures waiting for the horse in the desert to drop dead. So what if 30,000 other Americans are killed via firearms every year...many in their teens? Not as many angles to milkas the Virginia shooting. Twice as many Americans were killed today by firearms than in the shooting but what the heck... no juice to squeeze from it.

Electric heat (via a light bulb or other source) is always the most efficient even though usually the most expensive. Do a search on energy eficiency. If one is concerned about the environment then the least polluting energy in the home is electric generated by nuclear power sations. In most jurisdictions the least expensive is natural gas.

Depends if one is part of the cult or not of global warming. No need for rational debate if one 'believes'....is filled with the warm glow of absolutism.

Thumbs up. Words of wisdom. A scientific mind at work on a Science forum.

The global warming ideologues remind me of Creationists. They 'believe' rather than think. Global warming? Who knows? The whole discussion is so full of hysterics and exaggeration that the baby may get tossed out with the bathwater. As a geologist I'd give the science of global warming an 'F'. It's unfortunate that science is now determined by polls and political correctness.

Scientific methodology is not about truth but knowledge. 'Truth' isn't a scientific concept. As stated in a posting above, science is self adjusting and based on evidence. There is no end game.

We have about half of these in the house. Just a note, though, if you live in a climate where houses are heated. The energy 'lost' in an incadescent bulb as heat energy is not lost at all. It warms up your home and thus reduces the use of other heat sources. It's a positive to use these bulbs but the energy savings can be exaggerated.

Where we live the world has been turned upside down. Every store, business, service is crying out for workers. If you have a pulse you can get a good quality job. The police department goes to England to recruit..national parks are short of rangers...ski hill have no staff...the city can't get bus drivers... Folks pour into Alberta but thousands are gobbled up by the energy sector. 20 year olds earning over a hundred thousand a year and all types of daily allowances and perks on top of that. Crazy. At least 9 out of 10 businesses will hire you in an instant. You can set your own hours...part time...full time...over time. There's even cash incentives to sign up. One restaurant gives the workers an extra week long vacation to Mexico if they stay for a year....most just give continued cash incentives at six month intervals. What a contrast to when I was a struggling student years ago. I'd knock on doors seeking a couple hours work doing anything. Now workers go from employer to employer seeking out the best offer.

There's a paleontologist I met on and off over the years who had some type of disorder I never understood. He'd get fixated on a subject and research it to death..eat and sleep it and then, wham, drop it completely and fixate on something else. When he button holed you at a meeting he would talk on about his current subject and, no kidding, if you were to stick out your tongue and cross your eyes, he wouldn't notice. He seemed to have no reaction to human feedback. I could walk away from him talking to me and he wouldn't be the least bit upset or offended. Now, having said this, he was a fascinating fellow and and a lot to contribute to a subject once he latched on to it. I could have said 'I think you're ugly and and idiot but could you explain brachiopid calcium phospate shell structure to me again' and he wouldn't have even noticed the personal half of the comment but move onto giving an excellent analysis of the second. But, if I met him a year later on he was on another tangent he would only focus on his new subject matter. He was quite functional in every other aspect. He could drive a car, do his finances and everything most of us do day to day. I don't know if this was some subset of autism or some other syndrome. Regardless, the fellow made great contributions to outherwise somewhat dry areas of research.

I have no experience in the psychology field but I would think that 'empathy' would be the single most important variable in being a psychologist. Isn't empathy what some autistic people lack or have difficulty with? Humans are social animals. If one has developmentalproblems and is unaware of what it is to be a healthy mentally and social functioning human then how could one help achieve it in others? it would be like asking a person on a tropical island who has never worn or seen shoes to design comfortable high heel shoes for women. The tropical islander might be a whiz at lots of other functions or occupations but not one of which he has no basic understanding. There was a fellow student in first year university who was what today we would call autistic. Back then we called Paul 'a bit wierd'. He became a math teacher and didn't last a year. The issue wasn't math but he couldn't relate to his students. He didn't even mind when he became an object of ridicule...he just couldn't relate to the human emotion. I have no idea what happened to him but hope he found an occupation he could channel his energy into. On a scale of one to a hundred his suitability in psychology would be a 1.

I was in the Canadian military and it's a myth re the name, rank, etc. What is the reality is that soldiers obey orders. The chain of command is not dissolved or diminished because of captivity. If the senior rank in the situation tells the others to co-operate then that's what they have to do. I'm guessing that the senior rank weighed the siituation and made the judgment that there was no vital information that could be revealed and told the troops to go along with what was asked of them. His/her concern was for the safety of the troops and this trumped keeping silent for the sake of it. It's called leadership.

I don't think there would be any generalization among all mammalian orders and anything specific in shape certainly wouldn't apply to some extinct early mammalian orders which had lesser differentiated teeth. The only thing in common is probably tooth position. Some orders have bicuspid premolars but that's probably not universal.

One issue is when 'bad' science is repeated until it becomes the accepted norm among the common populace. Often a 'throw away' comment or a speculative paper is picked up and the media runs with it. What is no more than an unsubstantiated theory can be eventually morphed into 'scientists say' or 'Experts...blah...blah'. I could see an honest fellow paleontologist getting snookered on Jeopardy if the category 'fossils' came up. Wouldn't get many points for answering: "Alex, what is damned if I or anyone else would know that one without a lot of unsubstantiated speculation"?

True: the Iranian leader has played Bush and Blair like a fish on a line. and continues to do so. Iran has zero military capabiity in the greater context. All they have is political clout. A bit like a vampire gaining strength by drinking blood...Iran isn't strong enough to take the blood by force ( a la Dracula) but is being offered a pints of it at a time by Bush and Blair on a platter. The Iranian nubar's status only comes from how seriously he is taken by the West...his status grows in the eyes of the Muslim world. It doesn't matter if Iranian military capability is destroyed. It has no value and can't be used by the nutbars. If Iran is attacked, the nutbar's status raises multifold among Muslims from Karachi to Jakarta. The 'us and them' of the Axis of Evil insane policy gives crazies more status than they could have ever deamed of.

The way I keep sane is falling back on what a prof once told us. Reality is reality regardless of what lens people look at the universe through. The Earth is not carried on the back of a tortoise, man wasn't created by a god in his image and that tsunami had nothing to do with climate change. The ignorance of man is irrelevent. What does it matter in the greater scheme of things? The physical properties of mass and energy are unaltered, the Earth orbirts the Sun and the speed of light is unchanged. Otherwise, don't sweat the small stuff. What does it matter is some folks are getting dumber? It just puts you up higher on the intelligent curve.

Yawn. Reminds me of the Bible thumpers who quote 'whatever' to prove some point and not to promote science. Anyone can run around the Internet and go crazy with the copy button. How about some original thoughts?

Why obviously?... and what consensus on what variables?

A couple years ago at the Geologic Survey of Canada we had one of those questionaires on global warming come around. Asking our opinion..etc. As one older doctor emeritus said: "%@!$ if I know". What did it matter what any of us thought? None of us were climatologists and hadn't studied anything about carbon based molecules since chemistry in first year university. No friggin idea how any of these carbon gases impact anything withouht knowing 100 other variables. If I want to know what the weather is like I stick my head out the window. Then some report comes out 'x' number of scientists agree that...blah...blah. Who cares what they think any more than the waitress in the cafeteria thinks? Any consensus agreed upon by anyone outside of the immediate discipline is meaningless. There may be a consensus of scientists but there might also be one of waitresses that has as much value. Science is about hypotheses, evidence and so on and not a popularity poll among scientists or anyone else. I don't have much of a basis to make a judgement on man's impact on global warming. I do know, however, that much of the so-called science on both sides in the debate would get an 'F' on a test. A lot of the debate takes on the absolutism of religious zeal.

I deal with U.S. geologists and U.S. science journals every day. 100% in metric. A lot of the US has switched over for decades. Then they return to that watery beer in imperial cans. An american comes to Canada and take a drink out of the beer bottle and spits it out: "Good god man, there's alcohol in that beer!"

Read the history of Iran before the religious nutbars came to power. The USA got away with a coup in Iran in the 1950's with training the Shah's death squads. The seizing of the American hostages was a response to American atrocities against the Iranian people. They didn't just wake up one morning and start screaming Death to America. It's disturbing how uninformed many Americans are of their torture-training of the secret police of countries as diverse as Iran and Chile.

lucaspa, good examples. Here's another variable. Fossil remains are rare. If we take the 10 million year span we live in today and fast forward 100 million years, there would be scant records of what has existed in our current 10 million year span. There might be no record of the unique faunas of the Arctic, the Galapagos, the Amazon raon forest, nothing of the Africa and little of continental N. America, etc. We might have two windows of viewing into the period... for arguments sake, a small area of Queensland, Australia and bits of Madagasgar. What would be concluded? Most mammals found were Marsupials and any primates that existed at the time were lemurs. (as lucaspa mentions, those lemurs didn't mean that all primates were lemurs). There might be no record of elephants, humans, bears, deer, squirrels, rats, dogs, etc. Little if any record of thousands of bird species..perhaps a few reptile and a few amphibians. The fossil record of terrestrial life is like travelling around the world and taking a couple snapshots every few million years.

Britain can't do anything without the ok and support from master George. The once proud British have voluntarily handed over their sovereignty to their former colony. It's a good thing for the British that Blair has such a high regard for his commander and chief, Bush. British action vis-a-vis Iran is up to Washington. Bush and Cheney managed to accomplish what the Spanish armada, Napolean and the German Reich failed to do. Nelson must be spinning on his column.

True. Bush would probably mix up the countries anyways. Do something dumb like attack Iraq instead...wait, already did that one.