Mr Skeptic

This thread is for people to post ethics dilemmas or answers to others' dilemmas. Just for fun, although it might be interesting to see how people believe and how close answers are. I suggest if you post several scenarios you number them first with your post number, then a dot and then a list number. 1.1) A mad philosopher ties 5 people to one track and 1 person to another track, and sets a train going toward the 5. You are at a location where you can switch the train from the track leading toward the 5 to the track leading toward the 1, but will be unable to save everyone. Do you switch the train towards the 1 person? (this and others are the Trolley Problem, or based off of it) 1.2) A mad philosopher ties 5 people to a track and sets an empty train going toward them. The train does not have the cow-catcher at the front and so could be derailed by a heavy object. You are standing on a bridge over the tracks and a very fat man is next to you. He is the only object you can reach that would derail the train, but you are certain you could successfully throw him over and derail the train, saving the 5. Do you? 1.3) Same as 1.2, but the fat man standing next to you happens to be the mad philosopher that tied the 5 to the tracks. 1.4) A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people tied to the tracks. You can divert its path by colliding another trolley into it, but if you do, both will be derailed and go down a hill, and into a yard where a man is sleeping in a hammock. He would be killed. Should you proceed? 1.5) A mad philosopher ties 5 people to the middle track and 1 person to the left track, and 1 person to the right track, and sets a train going toward the 5. You've met both the two individuals, and they'd been discussing what they'd do if they saw someone in danger. The person tied to the left track had mentioned that if there was any danger to himself he wouldn't risk his life to save someone in danger, and the person tied to the right track said he'd be willing to help someone even if he knew he would die in their place. You can switch the train to either of the two other tracks, or leave it going toward the 5. Which do you do? 1.6) As with 1.1, but the 5 people are terminally ill, and the one person is a healthy 20 year old. If your answer depends on how long they have to live, at what life expectancy would you be unsure which to do? 1.7) A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor, and he is certain he can save each of his 5 patients if he sacrifices the one. Should he?

Yes! Blog seems like an excellent place for a long-term paddlefish thread. The staff have been wanting to get more people using and visiting the blogs.

I don't think anyone who can reach the moon would want to worship it. An omnipotent deity is well-suited to an advanced civilization since the more limited gods are much easier prey for science. On the other hand an emperor god is the other likely alternative, and that would be very inconvenient. Other than that, I think we'd have a god that more or less matched one of theirs. This is not necessarily a good thing, as being seen as worshiping the correct god improperly would be heresy which is often considered worse than disbelief.

Ah, I forgot the other alternative: dismissing it because it is inconvenient. Do you really believe 1 specific single nucleotide mutation cannot happen simply because they would produce functional proteins? Really? I know you did not say so because you know how likely said scenario would be to go as described, but you might as well have since otherwise it doesn't matter whether it happened or not. I'm somewhat disappointed here. Ah, but the same applies to randomized genes (with a copy of a promoter sequence). They too are transcribed and translated, and their information can be extracted independent of the material it is coded on. They too have semantics and syntax. They too are functional, even if their function is to make a protein which no one sees any use for. The protein produced is a real product. Very well, no need to quibble over most of these numbers -- it only changes the result by a few million. However, I'm going to have to insist on the little question of whether you would consider a change similar to one of the more average of the 10,000 changes you called "substantiative", to be "substantiative" when applied to your request of 4 substantiative changes. Just confirming that you're using the same standard for both, to save some time in case you don't. We know evolution creates new function and has done so in controlled experiments. It does so in the easiest way possible, which is usually to modify existing function. In fact I am not aware of any single evolutionist who would expect a new function to arise in any other way -- while I'm sure it's possible, it is the more unlikely path. Because of this, you dismiss example of new function as being modifications of existing function (which is what we expected). Yes, we really disagree on this. I think it is best to start a separate thread on information. I'd start one for you but I'd like you to have the chance to choose the title and the contents of the first post in it. Just link to it here for others to follow. Feel free to copy/paste to save time. No, I am saying that any string of data could be useful information or not, and whether it is or not depends at least equally on the context or on the data. For communication purposes, any string could be in the context of a one-time-pad encryption, for example, in which by choosing context one can change its meaning to anything wished for. Similarly one could change the rules of transcription so that any given DNA could translate to any given protein. The point is that there is no way to know by looking at a string of data itself whether it is information or not, and that there is always going to be some context in which it is useful information. Thus, all data must be considered potentially useful information, unless it can be shown that in every context that exists in actuality that the data is of no value.

Oh, I see. You're one of the people who takes our most important laws literally. Um, taking a plane is voluntary and in order to take the plane you must consent to be searched. Oh, and apparently you can't just leave the airport if they do decide to search you, cause I guess that's suspicious or something.

Cancer cells are your own cells gone rogue. This is going to have to be due to some sort of mutation. A successful cancer is going to need two mutation types: one to disable restrictions on cell reproduction, and a second to eliminate cell aging. Cancer cells are for the most part indistinguishable from healthy cells, and also are unique to each individual. There are some differences, the most notable one is that they reproduce faster. Thus, killing fast-reproducing cells will preferentially kill cancer cells -- but also your hair, sperm, etc. cells and make you feel very very sick (which you will be with all those cells dying) -- and this is the purpose of chemo and radiation treatments. A bonus of radiation treatments is that they can be focused so that the cancer part gets far more radiation than the rest of your body -- but it will still kill plenty of healthy cells.

There are websites that allow you to publish things and they are time-stamped, so that people can publish and point there saying when exactly they published it. Post your idea to one such site, and then ask a scientist friend, or a forum, or just anyone, to help you work it out. Remember though, ideas are a dime a dozen. Working out the maths of a problem is the real science, and if you intend to hog all the credit to yourself you are unlikely to find any help. While an idea may seem like it is valuable, without the maths it is too vague to be of any use to anyone, and also it is likely that there are infinitely many equations that could be fitted to said idea. Though I think there are some ideas that can be directly translated into math, but I've only seen that sort of thing with geometry-maths. Ah, well, turns out this sort of thing happens all the time. Not sure I've ever heard of someone who revolutionized physics without being very good at either math or experimentation. But plenty of people think they have. I've had plenty of great ideas myself; some were wrong and others correct but already discovered. Like you, I did realize how unlikely it is that I got a revolutionary idea, and yet feel compelled to work it out just in case. If the predictions are exactly identical, then you do have the maths (same as the other maths), and yes it makes it an interpretation/model. Models are nice but not necessarily useful, although they can be inspiration for future progress and they do feel nice. Quantum mechanics could definitely do with a nice model, and some people would like a different model of relativity too. To expand on the time-stamp idea, for 40 cents this website will provide a time-stamped signature of a file. So long as you retain the original file without edits, this signature is proof that you had the file as-is at that time. Well, unless people believe that a website who's only source of income is being reliable lied about it.

Is that 10 base 10, or 10 base 2, or 10 base 5, or 10 base 1403893838? Regardless of how many numbers in our base system, in its own system it will be the base 10 system, 10 being the first two-digit number in it.

Also I think you'll find that in the mouths of most rivers, the fresh and salt water mix rather quickly.

And yet I've heard a story of people who did indeed hide Jews but with the condition that they would not lie to hide them. When asked they offered to tell the Nazis where they had hidden them, but since hiding Jews would have been a capital offense, apparently the Nazis thought they were joking and didn't go check. Don't know if it is a true story or not, and I couldn't find it just now when I searched for it. Ever go around telling people true things on April Fool's Day? It's great fun.

I do believe I understand your position. I was caught in the very same web of deceit and faith before I saw the truth. The trick is that whoever controls the context of a string of data controls whether it can be considered useful information or not. Thus, since there are some rather convenient rules in communications theory (random processes do not create message-information but destroy message-information), the trick is to convince people to apply this message-information concept and the way it works, to cells. But if you think about it, you realize that cells couldn't care less how surprised you or anyone else is about their genome. They convert coding DNA to proteins, whether the protein has an obvious function or not. Other bits of DNA have some function as well, and some appear to have no function other than perhaps as a spacer. But, if we're not looking at how surprised people are at the DNA, it becomes obvious that mutations can create information as well as modify or destroy it. I shall now give the example I thought of, that would result in an organism evolving a series of 4 new functions each dependent on the previous new one, with a population and timeframe amenable to a science experiment, the example I said you would not accept. It is thus: take an organism, and identify within it a series of 4 proteins in a metabolic pathway that is important but not vital. Ideally, each protein provides a useful function even without the following proteins. Next, identify a location where a single nucleotide mutation will disable each of the proteins. With this as the starting organism, place several colonies of them in a growing environment and let them evolve. Several colonies are needed to be certain this works, as it is chance based. I have no doubt that they will evolve to gain 4 new abilities each dependent on the previous. Now, you will dismiss the above, claiming I "cheated" by inserting the information ahead of time. However, think about this some more. Are you going to say that a functional protein has just as much information as a useless protein? Are you going to say that evolution added some information, but not very much? Or are you going to say that getting 4 specific mutations among trillions of tries is unlikely? The truth is, DNA contains zero communication-information, and evolution cannot add any more communication-information but could destroy some if it were there. Nobody cares. The context of the data on the DNA is cell mechanisms, not communication. Hm, no, that is old and I think universal. In any case, I'm not familiar enough with any metabolic pathways and their DNA and genetic history, to be able to answer your question. Several things. First, bacteria have less DNA and a lower mutation rate than humans (1000 times less DNA with mutation rate 1000 times lower). Second, you're not counting the human's rate of death before birth, which is fairly high in the past but also plays a role in evolution, so the population is somewhat higher than you expect. Third, can you give me an example of one particular substantiative difference of that 10,000 (and not a multi-gene difference). I ask because I had understood your demand to be significantly different than this sort of difference. Fourth, there were several additional differences in the Lenski experiment bacteria, some of which could be noticed by Lenski himself and some which would have been invisible to him, as Cap'n noted. Ah, well what Jesus said didn't have an expiry date, so it should still be true should it not? The point is not that history can tell us what happened, but rather that evolution predicts this historical data and the probability of making consistently correct predictions on such a large dataset is absurdly small -- and so the probability of the theory being correct is taken to be very large. This is little different than in other fields, although in this case the larger dataset is historical and fresh data can only be gotten slowly. Ah, well if evolution is the best theory we have, then we can't really abandon it now can we? I'm not sure why you find any of this surprising, or evidence against rather than for evolution. Think about the function of histone: how specific a sequence does it have to be to use it as a little ball to wrap DNA around? What happened to the copy-cat God that likes to reuse stuff rather than re-invent? Yet one exception in no way disqualifies a rule, especially since there is another rule also derived from evolution: the more a string of DNA can be mutated without changing its function, the more likely it is to differ species to species. This however is more specific to each gene and generally can't just be guessed at but rather must be measured. What remains however, is that you gave an example of how evolutionary theory correctly predicts DNA patterns over many species. As for ultra-conserved regions, it would follow from evolutionary theory that these must have a high importance and/or are likely to become non-functional when mutated. You would have to determine whether this is true or not before using it as evidence for or against evolution. From this article, it seems that many of them do indeed follow this pattern. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/05/040507080649.htm: Nevertheless, most of the 481 ultra-conserved elements appear to be associated in some way with genes, if not overlapping them then residing near genes or in the noncoding portions of genes. Furthermore, they tend to be associated with parts of the genome that are involved in regulating the expression of genes in various ways. ... More than half of the ultra-conserved elements that overlap coding regions are associated with genes that take more than one form, depending on how they are transcribed to RNA. Through a process known as alternative splicing, different parts of a gene may be spliced out under different circumstances, so that a single gene can produce several different proteins. Bejerano thinks the association of ultra-conserved elements with alternatively spliced genes is significant. "It's a cautious hypothesis that these elements may cause some type of interaction to determine what part of the gene will be spliced out," he said. The ultra-conserved elements that do not overlap with any coding region tend to be found in regions of the genome that are associated with gene regulation, the transcription of DNA to RNA, or the binding of regulatory proteins to the DNA. While we're at it, I might as well mention another rule that is also independent from the other two I mentioned. Some regions of DNA tend to mutate more quickly. As modified by their importance and the likeliness that mutations would break it, the regions with more mutation are expected to be more different in different species. Yet information has consistently been on the increase, both in our society and genetically by looking at the number of species, in the latter only being reduced during periods of mass extinction. I'm not buying it. To which experimental analysis are you referring? No, I'm not talking about my own mind but rather of context. I intend to show that given a certain context, any data string could be significantly valuable information, whereas in another context it may be worthless. Thus, communication-information depends not on the data but entirely on its context -- and as such, it is impossible to measure for anyone who isn't omniscient, and worthless as a measure of information without assuming things about the context.

I wonder to what extent scientists might be affected by this (outside their field of expertise).

Just be aware that clincker can contain high amounts of toxic metals.

No one has been able to get a bare quark of any kind. You can get your quarks in quark-antiquark pairs or triplets of either quarks or antiquarks. Recently I've even heard of getting a combination of the above. But I haven't heard of any lone quarks. The reason for this is that the binding energy for the quarks is bigger than the quark mass, so anything that would have enough energy to separate a quark from his buddies would have enough energy to make a quark-antiquark pair instead.

You got it pretty much right, except that you have no way of using these particles to transmit information. Yes, the wavefunction collapse is instantaneous, but it is also random -- you can't choose what your particle nor your partner's will be measured as. Of course, scifi writers don't need to follow the laws of physics, at least not strictly. But maybe you could use tachyons instead. Tachyons are hypothesized to go faster than light and remain theoretical, and so far the only use for them is scifi magic. There's supposed to be something that prevents tachyons from transmitting information, but I don't know what it is.

A flame test. You can make green fire by sticking a copper wire in a flame. Ingredients: 1 Bunsen burner or candle, and some copper wire. The copper wire can be gotten from any broken electrical appliance. Small and cheap.

Right, but the spooky action at a distance won't transmit information. Sure, you'll know that your partner at the other end has the opposite result as yours, and you can use this as a basis for a code, but even this information is transmitted at or slower than light, because the particles had to be transmitted. The same information could be transmitted at the same or faster speed by sending a stream of unentangled photons.

... You are seriously missing something about the scale of this. It's much easier to kill living creatures than it is to melt a planet.

I think there would be some limit to genome size, but not any arbitrary limit. Eventually it would become too much to handle, but before that such an organism would be straining to live and reproduce with such a large genome. However, I don't think any organism is even close to that limit.

I think the biggest variable you're forgetting is that when the bag turns out to be unscannable security will pretty much be forced to hand-search it. Most likely they will search it very carefully and pass each of the items individually through their detector. That and they'll be very upset at you.

Here, have at it. http://www.gimp.org/features/

I vote for the "drill baby drill" option, but I am in no hurry. I don't mind if we are a bit slow to exploit our own oil reserves and end up being one of the few countries with oil when it starts running out. Still, a moratorium seems like an overreaction to me, and making BP pay for it (the moratorium) seems rather rude. I think a more interesting solution would be to temporarily place some rabid environmentalists as safety inspectors, rather than the moratorium.

Evolution doesn't "care" whether "its subjects" believe in the truth or not. If knowing the truth helps them reproduce they will evolve towards knowing the truth, but if believing a lie helps them reproduce, they tend to evolve toward believing a lie. And example where the latter is the case is people's opinion of their own sexual prowess.

Some of the more doomsayer folks are suggesting that global warming could exterminate humans or collapse civilization. Personally I think that's ridiculous. Anyhow, global warming is but one symptom. We humans are greedy and messy and don't care much for future consequences, especially uncertain consequences. We're doing our fair share of habitat destruction and pollution as well, and using up resources as fast as we can exploit them. Still, I think we survive any mess we're likely to make. Other species won't be so lucky, what with the ongoing mass extinction that we are causing.

I think I know what you are talking about. A child on a swing changes their moment of inertia, and uses this plus an energy input from their muscles to amplify their swing without having an obvious thing to push off from. However, doing this does require energy. In your case, you are going to have to change the length of the arms for buoyant and heavy objects, and this is where your energy is going to be spent, nullifying your attempt at perpetual motion. Add in the energy required to change the arm lengths, and your machine becomes a non-perpetual friction machine, as required by the laws of physics.