Mr Skeptic

While most animals will react immediately when provoked, some also know how to bear a grudge.

I think this could be accomplished by carfully aiming a laser beam so gravitational effects of several stars or black holes bend it until it comes back (technically, if your aim was really good you should only need one black hole). Not what I was thinking of though. So light travels instantly but there is a delay? I guess that works. What happens if your lightbeam gets sent along a large equilateral triangle (via reflection)? Of note is that all points on an equilateral triangle are equidistant from each other.

Well if you are lacking something you can probably boost your immune system from where it is now by getting the right quantities of various vitamins and minerals. I hear lots of both good and bad things about vitamin and mineral supplementation. Vitamin C however, take as much as you like since it is water soluble and any excess will be filtered out of your body shortly. It is however possible to boost your immune system. One good method is playing a lot in the dirt, which works best and feels most natural when you are a kid. While exposing yourself to lots of germs is a good way to get sick, it also trains your immune system to recognize the germs. However, this can also backfire: check out influenza immunities for a good example. Another way to boost your immune system is via drugs called adjuvants. Yet another way to boost immune response, locally, is to wound yourself and invoke the inflammation response. Of course if your immune system is overactive with nothing to fight I hear it might decide to attack your own cells, so you might earn yourself an autoimmune disease for your efforts.

I give him the benefit of the doubt because as you've made abundantly clear, being responsible for the deaths of many people won't make him look good nor further his agenda (unless his agenda is to get himself killed).

Yes especially at the start. But odds are it wouldn't fit on the phylogenetic tree -- we'd have no trouble mixing and matching proteins from distantly related species, like we do now adding Green Fluorescent Protein everywhere. And if projects like Folding@Home progress well, we can start designing our own proteins or optimizing existing ones.

Sort of, and yes it is more complicated. Consider: why do people do things they consider wrong? People have a sense of pleasant and unpleasant, which is slightly different than their sense of right and wrong. There is some hardwired component, especially for the former, and some socially learned component, especially for the latter. So for example, sugar is good (mostly hardwired via taste) but you know it is unhealthy in large quantity (social learning) so it is wrong to eat a lot of it. But in general pleasant things are good -- food tastes good and we need food to survive, and good quality food tastes better than poor quality food. If it weren't for processed foods this would match up even better. But as it is we eat things that are bad for our body because they taste good or are cheap and convenient. Morality is slightly more social and idealized a thing, slightly toward selflessness and efficient society, so that if you ask someone what "a person" should do, it is often different than what that person themselves would do.

Some of each, but mostly people should learn and work in the areas they are most capable. Unless they prefer to do something they are worse at for other reasons. And I think hiring practices should reflect competence and other relevant aspects, not try to do some balancing act. The only reason to encourage hiring someone that is less qualified because of their gender (or race) would be if the differences were social and it was desirable to remove those differences. Yes, but I think there's a reason that most of the army is male. Not that I approve, but sometimes violence is necessary.

My answers (as an utilitarian) are thus: 1.1) I'm responsible for this decision by having the choice. My choice is to deflect the train, and this choice will save 4 lives. One person would die, but the person who tied them to the tracks bears the blame for that -- all I did was save 4 more lives. 1.2) The lesser of two evils would be to sacrifice the fat man and taint myself to save the 5. However now I would be directly responsible for his death. Not sure if I could actually go through with this. 1.3) This time I see no problem sacrificing the villain to save 5 people from his attempted murder. 1.4) Same as 1.2 1.5) I'd deflect the train toward the selfish coward. The person willing to die in the place of another is a better person, and so a more valuable member of society than the selfish coward. 1.6) If their life expectancy were about 5 years each I would be uncertain which to do. 1.7) Similar to 1.2, but now with a tremendous breach of the doctor's code as well, especially if he got paid for it. Interestingly, my brother had exactly the same answers as me.

I am fairly confident that aliens also do plays.

So is this just not thinking or is there some other explanation you have for the extremely high correlation between genes and homosexuality? Or is yours an "I don't believe research" kind of position?

Interesting article. However, there is one thing that makes me uneasy: he cites several studies and then concludes the opposite that the researchers do. If you think a study is wrong that doesn't entitle you to draw your own conclusions, you'd have to find a study that supports those conclusions. That he does this leads me to wonder about the other stuff he says. Still, it does seem believable. I'm mildly lactose intolerant and have been worried about not getting enough milk. Maybe it is time I stopped worrying about it.

Horrible idea, due to the price (and energy costs) of spaceflight. On the other hand, the giant container idea isn't that bad. There's plenty of desert that could be converted into a shallow ocean if we really wanted to. Or, some desert areas are below sea level so you'd just have to dig a path for the water and it would fill on its own and you could even get hydroelectric energy from it. Of course, then you'd have to worry about poisoning the aquifers with brine.

As CharonY said, there are some qualitative differences. The most targettable one seems to be their rapid reproduction -- reproduction is a complex process with many requirements and many things that can go wrong, so it is a good target. This is why the common casualty of cancer treatment is loss of hair, since hair also reproduces rapidly.

Some people have a dominant eye, but for some they are equally dominant. If you have a dominant eye, you normally see everything from the angle of that eye. If you close that eye you then look at the object from the angle of the other eye. This will change both where the object is in your field of vision and what parts of the object you can see.

I think that we draw the line at diseases. Reducing our genetic diversity just because people don't quite like some attributes as much as others would also be a problem. Given modern technology, even people who have genetic disorders can have children without passing on the risk to them -- it just takes more effort.

Yes, you got the second one right. The first one there is more than one way to do. You could do it like you did the second one, thereby also finding the masses of each pigment, or you could find the mass of all of them at once. But you'll have to show some work before we can help any more.

There's no such thing as a one-way mirror. They are half-silvered mirrors which let about half the light through, both ways. Whoever is on the darker side can see what is on the lighter side, whereas whoever is on the lighter side gets blinded by the bright reflection. Think of it like trying to peer into a dark hole, but the hole is darker because half the light that would enter from the bright place you are instead gets overlayed over the dark hole.

If there is a god outside of our dimension, as an intelligent entity he would need time for thinking with, but there need be no relation between his time and ours. Much like if you are outside of the dimensions of an object that object's dimension of time won't apply to you (think of yourself looking at a graph with a time axis, are you constrained by that time axis?)

Well, for there to be no war humanity would have to be different. If funding and interest in science were to be the same either way, I think without war we would advance more. On the other hand, I don't think we can change human nature enough to eliminate war, so it is rather a moot question anyways.

Well someone somewhere should be rigorously skeptical of every new idea, but once several people with good credentials accept it most of us will believe them. Anything else is just too impractical. Of course its also good to have some people constantly skeptical of each idea, but I don't think there's a shortage of that.

Very good, very good, definitely better than the average crackpot. I think however that you are about a century late... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_synchronization In addition, what happens if your light does not go straight but instead returns to the original place, like with a laser rangefinder?

Not everyone uses scifi magic. The genre called "hard science fiction" follows the known laws of science to the letter, often not even touching the hypothetical/theoretical possibilities of unknown laws. These books describe things that we know for sure could happen, but of course are more limited. Star travel via generation ships, for example, pretty much means no galaxy-wide events. That doesn't necessarily make it more interesting, and the knowledge that the scenario really is possible makes it more exciting for me. In this case, having instantaneous communication might actually make it difficult to have a plot, depending on what sort of events are intended to happen in the society. Also if it is on a single solar system, the time delay for using normal light will only be a few hours.

Well, when we start designing our own life forms, then you can expect to find something that won't share half their genome with all other life.

Thanks for sharing. That was surprising and very interesting. I don't think they are comparable to mitochondria since they don't seem to provide vial cell services, but they do seem to have become vital in many species for reproduction. The most interesting example was this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia

Right, and there's even been several attempts to use these other differences for a cure. Not nearly as easy as if they had unique proteins that could be targeted though. Even though the differences could be enough for a human to tell them apart at first glance, that doesn't really help from a biochemical cure perspective.