Mr Skeptic

Yes, sadness is part of human nature but so is happiness. Many people find a way to be happy even in depressing circumstances. Being always sad can make you non-functional, which means that eventually if you can't fix yourself you need to be fixed. Depression is real, and treatable -- but I do agree that it is probably over-diagnosed. The fact that the treatment often involves giving mind-altering drugs is also worrisome.

Thanks Ringer. Their organization of the material does make things a little easier.

Minimum wage is both a problem and a solution. As a solution, it can if high enough it can prevent a form of pseudoslavery where people have to overwork themselves just to live, with the wages not high enough to support them and their family. With goverment aid, it would simply mean that other people are subsidizing the low wage. On the other hand, the minimum wage makes jobs disappear. Overall, if you examine the quality of the jobs lost because minimum wage is too high, I think you'll find that there is little reason to mourn the loss of those jobs. With the advent of robotics, many of those jobs will be and are being done indirectly (and with a lot more dignity) by highly paid workers making robots to do our dirty work for us.

What you can do however is look at the latest (newest) post. The link with the arrow and the date of the last post will take you directly there.

Well, you have to also consider whether people were of sound mind when deciding to commit suicide. The people in the WTC towers definitely fit this, but in normal situations people who try to commit suicide are often depressed, which can be treated. For them, suicide is an extreme solution to a temporary problem. You also have to consider that many people who survived a suicide attempt go on to live normal lives instead of continuously trying to end theirs. So I'd say that it is overall worth it to prevent at least the first suicide attempt, and maybe "protect them from themselves" for a month or a year. But I also think that we should help people who want to commit suicide to do so as painlessly as possible. Also, one thought I've had on suicide is that people could be given the opportunity to become organ donors -- which can save more than one life at the cost of one life, and also provide an opportunity for counseling.

I need to memorize the 20 amino acids, preferably by Monday, or failing that sometime within the semester. Also the matching 1 and 3 letter codes. I suppose I could just keep writing them down until I remember them, but I was hoping there's an easier way. Maybe an online quiz? Oh, and also the 5 nucleic acids, but I more or less have those memorized already.

The first way an idea can fail to be a theory is if it is unfalsifiable (equivalent to making no real predictions). An idea that fails at that point would never have been considered a valid hypothesis nor a theory. "God did it" is an example -- it "makes sense" but does not make predictions. Once an idea has survived the initial rounds of attempt to falsify it, and has made the correct predictions, then it gains the status of a theory. At this point, the theory can be set in stone by limiting the range and accuracy to within certain limits, as we have done with Newtonian gravity, treating it as an approximation rather than "the truth". Most people however will consider the theory to implicitly attempt to describe the entire universe with impeccable accuracy. In this case, experiments can be done in newer, more extreme situations, or with greater accuracy, and might show that the theory fails in one of those regards. A theory can also "fail" when a competing theory makes more precise predictions with the same accuracy, or less premises. A failed theory might be either discarded entirely or modified so it correctly predicts within the new data range.

I think it wouldn't work. As you said, they could have anything, and also there would have to be an automatic way to understand which people were saying they have flu. And furthermore, you can't assume that people who don't mention it don't have the flu either.

A lot of people think we humans are the "pinnacle of evolution", the "highest life form", etc. I blame hubris and also those evolution posters that show a linear progression toward humans. Anyhow, most biologists will typically reply that we're all equally evolved since we've all been around for as long. However, I think that bacteria are the most evolved. First, we need to define "most evolved". There are a few possibilities 1) Most changed from the original life-form. 2) Most acted upon by evolution. 3) Most fit (and how you measure it). The winner for 1) could be found by genetic analysis, and might be the archea. Determining a winner for 3) would be difficult since knowing adaptability would require knowledge of the future. The one I'd go with is 2), since comparing evolution to a genetic algorithm the best result would not be the one that took the longest to calculate, but rather the one with more generations and a more efficient algorithm. We humans have very long life cycles, so that we can do in 15 or so years what bacteria might do in as many minutes, or half a million times faster. On the other hand, we reproduce our DNA 1000 times less accurately, so that we have more mutations (new material). Also, we recombine our genes which as well as helping with adaptability, adds efficiency to the evolution process. For one thing, crossover can occur within a gene potentially forming a new chimeric allele, which has greater than usual odds of being functional. Another way recombination increases efficiency is by allowing the separation of beneficial and deleterious mutations in our genomes. On the other hand, bacteria have high levels of horizontal gene transfer and also plasmids. This horizontal gene transfer makes the whole domain more or less one species. Anyhow, it seems to me that the evolution process in bacteria proceeds the most efficiently, both due to their rapid reproduction and horizontal gene transfer. So given that we have all been around as long, that would make them the most evolved. What do you think?

Ah, it all makes sense now. Things make sense only when you want them to. I'm afraid you and science have a different idea of what "making sense" means.

Given that it's so common, I think it would make more sense to educate children of the dangers. Mostly that they should not inhale any and avoid prolonged exposure to the crystalline form. Oh, and come to think of it, you probably should have linked to a website explaining DHMO. Otherwise, who knows what links your readers might find if they search for it themselves.

Well, I'd have to ask what is spinning in the opposite direction. Law of conservation of angular momentum and all that.

No -- DHMO is a very valuable industrial solvent and cleaner, and the economic costs of banning it would be insurmountable.

While such marriages may have practical implications as their priority, I don't think any of them were for getting around a law. Yeah, I'm not too fond of all the stuff that our legal system has attached to marriage.

The more they're allowed to differentiate, the less different types of cells they can differentiate into. I don't know much about it, but I think they need special chemicals to keep them from differentiating. Recently, we've been able to run that process in reverse, so that we get stem cells from skin cells.

Our combat troops have withdrawn from Iraq, marking the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We still have about 50,000 troops there for training purposes, now called Operation New Dawn. So did we win? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#2010:_U.S._drawdown_and_Operation_New_Dawn

Why is gravity so weak? Why is the electron/proton mass so small? Both of those are essentially the same question.

Any and every object exerts a gravitational force. It is much much weaker than the electromagnetic force.

That's electrostatics.

Easy demonstration: lift a car with a large electromagnet. Then, try to lift a feather.

Hot plasma is less dense, less dense plasma has less fusion reactions, plasma cools off by emitting radiation, gravity compresses the plasma. It all balances out, except when it doesn't.

Diffusion is only relevant when there is a difference in concentration, so cannot function to keep the concentrations exactly equal. So, gravity pulls slightly harder on the ions than on the water, and makes a tiny tiny tiny difference, and any further difference is negated by diffusion. I doubt we'd be able to measure the difference.

Clever, but no... Not really. We're all naturally predisposed to avoid situations which threaten death. It's FAR easier to live by ones beliefs than to make a conscious decision to die because of them, especially since we hold our beliefs by choice. In short, evolution has prevented us from easily making decisions to die, but, despite my challenging of it's content, I like how your post was writ. We're predisposed to avoid death, yes, but we're also predisposed to various sins (this pretty much regardless of the religion/moral code you follow*). For every person you can show me who can do even only the things Jesus preached on the Sermon on the Mount, I'll show you 1,000 martyrs. Given the right opportunity, you only need to suppress your instincts for a few seconds to be martyred. To live your beliefs you need to suppress your instincts for decades. *Unless your moral code is to be a greedy pig that lives for the moment.

Yes, in this example, the target information exists elsewhere. That is irrelevant to the problem. If you prefer, a similar experiment can be done, with a minor change: make additional mutations to the DNA that are not relevant to the protein's function, as well as the single point mutation that will make it non-functional. In this case, the new information will not exist anywhere, yet evolution will find the functional version just as easily. Yes, this is an experiment set up to succeed (as are most experiments); it need not even be done to know that it will almost inevitably succeed. However, the functional information is not included in the experiment -- it evolves from non-functional DNA. This cannot be ascribed to the experimenter, since the information is not there and just evolves. The role of the experimenter in this experiment is nothing more than to show that this can happen, so it will happen almost instantly to the shame of all who say it cannot be done. With more steps away it will take longer, and with many steps away (especially if left slightly functional) it is likely to find another local maxima instead. Now tell me, was the information there or was it not? As I have repeatedly told you, whether information is functional or not has no relevance on whether it is information. Do you now agree? You seem to be saying that the non-functional information has the same information content as the functional one. Irrelevant. Evolution does not deal with completely random proteins, so what you say has nothing to do with evolution.

Also, it's not so much the differences as the manner of the differences. If our chromosomes got rearranged interbreeding would become problematic. Sometimes the changes that accumulate between the two populations aren't enough to prevent interbreeding. For example, the endangered species, European Wildcat, can interbreed with the common housecat (descended from African Wildcat). The species will probably go extinct due to this, although its genes won't and will instead become part of the housecat gene pool.