foursixand2

I remember hearing of a chemical, a neurotransmitter to which THC is an analouge of. It was called anadamine or amandamine or amide or something. I have tried looking up all of the variations of what i thought it was, but im not getting any results so i must not have the name right. So thats all im wondering is does anyone know the name, or does it even exist

I do not believe there are any autotrophs with nervous systems, but is there any reason why they couldnt develop them? or would it be possible to stimulate, or genetically fabricate such a mutation? The reason i wonder is, because if it is possible, would not autotrophs quickly become the most intelligent species, surpassing us by far? for example in the state i live in within this land so called The United States, lives the largest known organism (by weight, not volume, if i recall the trophy for volume is for a fungus in oregon) named Pando, a single male Quaking Aspen of 6615 tons. As mobile heterotrophs we are restricted to a brain we can carry in our skulls without unreasonable effort exerted. If Pando were capable of growing a brain he would have no such limitations. Not to mention what kind of wisdom Pando may have aquired given his age of 80,000 yrs. Pando would consider us as mentally limited as we might regard aphids.

not much. I am very interested in science, and consider myself scientifically minded, however i did not apply myself in high school, and alas i am currently employed as a convenience store clerk at a gasoline station. Which obviously does not provide me time and money for further education, beyond my internet connection. So for now wikipedia and scienceforums are closest i come to college. Not that you wanted to hear my sad story but there it is anyhow.

so the two d lattices are basically variants of triangles and squares, making the hexagonal/equaliteraltriangle lattice the most unique one, being the only 2D lattice based on a triangle. thanks for the assistance goodfellows.

Sorry i wasnt very specific originally. I wasnt meaning to ask why one or the other was called negative versus positive. I presumed it was arbitrary. What i want to know is what is the fundamental principal that makes them opposites. I think Gilded comes closest to answering that, though i need to do some reading to understand what all that means. I guess i'll look up the Dirac monopole too.

square and hexagon are two. what are the other three?

a very simple, possibly stupid question. What makes an electron negative, a proton positive? Why do they oppose each other?

It is so damn hot. And i probably dont have any right to cry, relative to Arizonans, Nevadans, or anywhere else where its similarly sweltering. I cant help but think this heat ought to be doing something. There must be some way to harvest energy from this heat, is there a system like this in use? Maybe it would just be solar energy, i dont even know how that works though. What im thinking of is like fields of metal rods, painted the blackest black absorbing all the heat, making energy, and then routing it back to me, running an AC. All this heat can be put to work, i know it. Tell me how so i can make one.

i disagree. Probably only with your particular word choice, not what you actually mean. There is no need to respect anyone elses illogical beliefs. I think i would be wise not to critisize certain peoples religions, within close physical proximity of fundamental adherents. But that goes no further than an issue of concern for my personal well being. For example, i would not go into the hood of any particular gang, flashing symbols of rival gangs, to make any sort of point. The reason for this decision is purely the desire to not be capped, it absolutely does not mean i have a shred of respect for that gang in my choice to refrain from threatening them. What i do believe we should have respect for, is the psychology behind a fundamentalist. We need to come to the logical realization that religious indoctrination is a sort of developmental disorder. Only a negligible minority of extremists, consciously chose to follow the path they do. There is nothing essentially different from these people compared to a healthy human. Their parents drove these ideas into their innocent minds practically from birth. The same ideas their parents drove into their childhood. Indoctrination is incurable in most cases, and no one is to blame, except us for not having discovered a solution to the problem.

Apologies if this has been covered anywhere, but im not going to read the entire thread. John makes a very interesting assertion but gives no explanation. Is there one?

As a sleep aid is my current use of it, so mainly the comparison i am wondering about. An OTC pill called Sleep Md incorporates Salicin from White Willow, as well as Valerian and Passionflower. Sleep Md used to work very well for me, but i think ive built a tolerance, so ive been experimenting with different amounts of the various herbs, as seperate supplements. I found that Aspirin is a similar compound to Salicin, so i am just wondering if there is much difference between the two if i am making my own sleep cocktail from the individual chemicals. Information about other effective sleep aids is welcomed of coarse. But I dont find Diphenhydramine particularly effective for me : of coarse it knocks me out, but then it gives me cotton mouth from hell, which usually wakes me, this is even at the lowest possible dosage . . . . isuppose i am sensitive to it or something.

I am just going to say the same thing i always do in this sort of argument. The whole idea is a confusion of definitions. That time does not exist is only true if by time you mean our subjective perceptions and methods of measuring it. This is among the simplest of speculations that can be made and really isnt worth anyones time. The simple way to realize time is this : An object travels from point A to point B. Another object travels this same distance at twice the speed. What do you call this phenomenon? The other object traveled the same distance in less time than the first. Motion takes place over time. If we wanted to more precisely measure this event, or any event in the real world that involves time, obviously we would have to create a subjective system of measurement. We are man and thus this system would be manmade. The system measures time, which exists independently of man. I dont understand what else there could be to discuss. Its just silly. Time is real. Holy poop on a stick, lets move on to something more interesting. Now that is an interesting tidbit and mostly unrelated to the original silly premise of the thread. Why do we process audio quicker though light is much faster than sound?

I do assume it would i just dont know anything about the process, i'd like to know more about how it does, which hopefully ill learn from reading that article

I dont think that could be true. Even light takes time to travel a distance, for example the light of our sun reaches our planet within 8 minutes. So are you saying rather you could travel anywhere within that 'beam' of light? that makes more sense . . . maybe. I'd just want to know the reason behind that statement also what would be the definition of light here? Is not light electromagnetic radiation? and if that is the case isnt there a difference in speed from sonar, to radio, infrared, visible, ultrasonic, ultraviolet (thats probably not the right order but you understand the principal of my question)

do you have more details about that study at that university that i could read up on?

I am familiar with the fallacy, i may be mistaken is called irreducible complexity? Its the idea that certain things could not have evolved because their intermediates would be useless, thus requiring a god or supernatural force to have come into existence at all. Examples would be eyes, wings, and disguises. I know explanations to disprove the fallacy at least for those examples. The simplest one: any type of eye is better than none, from being able to simply tell light from dark, to constructing crude shapes and shades, to more accurate visual equipment. Precursors to a wing may be a flap of skin that produces some amount of air resistance. An individual with this precursor to a wing would be able to survive a fall from a certain height, while its contemporaries would not. Its descendants would be driven by the benefit of any improvement of this flap that would make, being able to fall from higher heights, eventually being able to glide, eventually having a sophisticated flying mechanism. A chicken might not be able to really fly, but it can escape the ground for a few moments, thus potentially escaping certain predators. Though if i remember right a chicken is technically not the proper example since its ancestors technically were capable of true flight? Finally a disguise, no matter how crude is better than none. An insect that resembles a leaf from a certain distance, could fool a predator at this distance, surviving undetected, while its brother or sister, not quite as much resembling a leaf from the same distance, would be more likely to be eaten. This individuals genes are passed on, and some descendants will resemble a leaf at an even closer distance, driving the gradient toward eventual perfection of the disguise. Sorry to bore anyone with a principle you may already understand, i was just illustrating that i understand it also. I am no silly creationist. So finally to my question. Enzymes are complex protein constructs capable of metabolizing various specific compounds. At first glance it may seem these interactions are too complex to have arisen from simpler forms. So please demonstrate otherwise!! As another note i am an avid Dawkins reader, i would not be surprised if he covers this dilemma somewhere in his works, nor would i be surprised if ive even read it and do not recall at this moment. If you know of where he might cover the issue, please direct me there, i probably own whichever book it might be. and if i dont, i should, and will. Thanks for the help science forumers

Is in our nucleic acids, proteins, and neurotransmitters. How do they get there? nearly 80% of the atmosphere is nitrogen, is this the origin of the amino stuff in our bodies? What is the process of a plant to harvest this nitrogen? How do we digest it from plant matter? trying to find the answer elsewhere because i am impatient, wikipedia tells me amines are derivatives of ammonia. So i can change my question to, where does the ammonia come from, and how does a plant process it?

well its been a week or so since ive been here and i come to find that there is a new format, and my first impression is i do not like it. Perhaps i am a wee bit retarded, but is there anywhere you can click to take you directly to the forum index? i found i can navigate by visiting a recent thread, clicking the section in the path of the thread, and then at the bottom of this page is the forum jumper tool. Example : bioelectricity, is in general biology, in biology. So i click that forum, and then i have the forum jumper. This works fine, but isn't there a more straight forward way to navigate the forums? The new-fangled bloggery deal does look neat though. i'll have to check it out soon.

seriously? so you cant afford to put a second 'd' in didnt or the 'h' of wen, etc, but you can throw 'lol' at the end of every sentence (none of which having any humorous value to inspire me to laugh out lound)? notice you are making an unnecessarily addition of three letters, but mysteriously must skimp various other words out of only one?

i guess i'll look up those terms to see what their pertinence to my post are. I did find some information that may confirm my insight as valid, rather than misguided. Red is 625–740 nm and Violet 380–420 nm when indigo is recognized, or more commonly 380–450 nm. Thats from wikipedia. So the measurement system of spectral color is inverse to the systems of audio frequency. Sound frequency per something of the wavelength, and nm is the length of the wave. The very middle of normally perceivable red is 682 and half. So an octave above it is 341 and a fourth. a shorter wavelength than is perceptible to our eyes. So my conclusion is i should have labeled this thread 'indigo included?' (and my answer is no) and the rest was more or less a waste of words. All i needed to set out to find out was if our perceivable section of the spectrum either grossly exceeded or fell short double the wavelength of red. It does not so it appears my analogy of colors to notes can stand. Except to be a more fitting representation the traditional division of notes would need alteration, because i do conclude indigo obsolete. It is just bluish-purple. So im now off to found the anti-indigo society. Try and stop me.

Or violet, i dont think there is a major difference, but the former term allows an alluring alliteration. So i realized something very simple, which makes me wonder, but i am not a physicist so i fear the assumptions i make may be inaccurate. And i know there are differences in mixing colors of tangible substance, such as paint, and mixing or splitting colors in light. Purple comes from a mixture of red and blue. Now the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to our optic equipment goes ROYGBIV. My interpetation of this : there are three primary (or indivisible) colors : Red, Yellow, Blue. Orange is the blending of Red and Yellow, Green is the blending of Blue and Yellow. Im not sure why indigo would be distinctive, so i guess thats another question but not the main one im concerned with in this thread, what is the physical definition of indigo? Is it just an anomoly in our perception? an expanded sensitivity to the section between blue and violet? Assuming it is just that (its the simplest solution, but correct me if im wrong, thats why i create this thread) i'll throw it out of the set for my purposes. This section of the spectrum becomes R OYG B. I also subtracted violet from the set because according to my reasoning it is merely a blend of the first and the last primary, indivisible colors. Now i submit my insight derived from this realization : perhaps our system of visual perception is analogous to our system of audio perception. An 'octave' is double the frequency of a note. In our ears they are perceived as similarly resonating, we consider doubles and halves of any audible frequency to be the same note. So if we could extend our perception of the electromagnetic spectrum might we perceive each octave as red? If A is Red, would G be violet? And then that includes eight notes, (seven distinctive, until you return to A-Red) thus including indigo, again raising the question, what is indigo and why does it have a place? I suppose this post could have been boiled down to a question of the correlation of frequencies of the colors of the spectrum. I guess thats all i have to say on this subject until some sheds more light on my ponderings.

my reply comes without reading the other posts in this thread, but i intend to momentarily. My answer to the question, taking it in its literal sense, no. But this question infact requires clarification and is probably carrying the baggage of several other questions. The reason i answer no to the literal question is some very simple logic: an object MOVES from point A, to point B, Whilst another object travels this same distance with greater speed than the first object. Perhaps is was only a small measure in the lead, or maybe it traveled the distance twelve times over before the other object arrived. By this example i can see no other conclusion than that time is inherently an inextricable element of any type of motion. One object traveled a distance in less time, while the other took more time. And i cant think of any more viable definition of time. But the baggage the question is carrying pertains to our perceptions. If you strip it down to essential simplicity this issue becomes philosophically boring. Of coarse our perception of time is superficial, subjective, relative, etc, etc. That speaks of nothing more than any arbitrary measurement. No matter how you measure it, time is an actual phenomenon. Some things move faster than others, thus some things make motion in space, requiring either more or less time relative to other objects. Any more speculation is a waste of time.

Im not sure how the denizens of scienceforums look upon such activities, so i will be vague and omit the reason i would want to extract LSA (ergine,d-lysergic acid amide, d-lysergamide, LA-111), and what i plan to do with the product. The reason i would want to extract the LSA is to get a more concentrated compound, thus having to consume less of it for the effects. A VERY brief overview of the extraction process: Grind Ipomoea seeds. Soak grounds in nonpolar solution. Filter out (then throw out) bulk of liquid, evaporate remainder. Soak in polar solution (ethanol), throw out grounds, evaporate ethanol, and you have your product. My issue is, im not a chemist. My concern is the nonpolar solvent is poison. In what i read this phase is to extract the 'bad stuff'. The first time i experimented with Ipomoea i drank the grounds straight, so im not too concerned about whatever the nonpolar solvent is supposed to take out. The undesirable effects (nausea, headache) arise from chemicals in the husk. When the grounds are put in water the husks settle in the bottom as sludge. I simply didn't drink that part. Problem solved, and im sure i could figure out other ways to sift the innards of the seed separated from the husk. As i understand it is the ethanol that extracts the actual drug. Ethanol will be evaporated, but even if im not thorough enough it is not poisonous. My idea is that i can avoid messing with petroleum ether, and just extract LSA from the grounds (minus the husks) using ethanol. Is there any reason why this wouldnt work?

Researching more i am now convinced diabetes is not my condition. Normal fasting blood glucose level is between 70 and 110 g/dl. Fasting is considered to be going 8 hours without consuming calories, however people without diabetes are able to return their glucose to fasting level within three hours of eating. My measurement of 111 was between two and three hours after eating a decent sized meal. It is apparent i do not have a problem processing sugar. My girlfriends mother (i might as well start calling her my mother-in-law) told me of a clinic i can go to that is for people without healthcare. I dont know the whole extent of the services they provide there, but they can do all sorts of testing that is fairly inexpensive. So sometime in the near future i will make an appointment, they should be able to test my urine to find more information. on another note i do like the shift this thread has gone in the direction of discussion of health care. My philosophy is that some type of access to healthcare is far better than none. Even if socialized medicine tends to be of somewhat lower quality than the American system (i have however heard from several sources this is not the case, i suppose it varies from country to country), people who would be uninsured would definitely benefit by having any service available. I think the trump of this argument is Denmark. Happiest people, highest taxes. If you dont know about it look it up.

there is so much i would like to say to that, but i just sigh and refrain, because i know it is probably a waste of breath. Bur i will in brief detail recount my journey away from God, perhaps it will strike curiosity in this, or some theist, to explore similar avenues. i feel i owe people, who think like this some sympathy, because of my background. I was raised christian, and thus creationist. I always had interest in science, and i think i owe more to certain teachers than myself, for my continued interest. Probably particularly a teacher i had in seventh grade who took interest in me because i always got the second highest scores on tests (and the other kid actually studied). Not that seventh grade is something to brag about now, but it was my activity there, and the teacher who recognized my ability that made the distinction in my mind that this was something i had some natural affinity to that i should continue to cultivate. In my next year of school i learned about natural selection, realized it made a damn lot of sense, had the ability to explain life that rendered God unnecessary. At that time the revelation only scared me, made me feel empty and without purpose or meaning, so i wrote it off as an idea implanted by the devil to cause despair. Then in eleventh grade i checked out two books from the city library : A River Out of Eden and Unweaving the Rainbow. I couldn't put them down. I was more inspired by the things i learned, than by anything from my religious life before. That moment is so far the most profound and 'spiritually' moving experience of my life. A couple quotes explain this phenomenon better than i can. First, the quote of my signature from Douglas Adams, and this one from Carl Sagan : In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed!”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” If you see the logic of evolution, you have one foot in the door, and all i can do is hope you will continue to honestly search for the truth, and not be afraid to do that. Just for a few moments, indulge in imagining the world outside the box of the superstitions of your parents. But if im wrong and there is a God, you shouldn't feel threatened to experiment, you'll always find your way back to the truth.