Glider

You are not comparing like with like. Abortion = choice Nuclear weapons = choice Death penalty = choice Vivisection = choice Your examples all involve choice. People can choose whether or not to have abortions, whether or not to develop more powerful weapons, whether or not to have a death penalty and whether or not to perform vivisection. With the factors that form the bases of much discrimination, people do not have a choice: Gender - No choice; Sexuality - No choice; Race - No choice; Disability - No choice. To blame/penalise/discriminate/disparage or to make negative value judgements regarding a person/people based on factors for which they are not responsible and over which they have control, and ultimately for factors which are not relevant to their worth as a person, is spurious reasoning. In short, being anti gay is based upon the same reasoning as being anti anybody based on an irrelevant variable that happens to be different to the same comparable variable in you (e.g. skin colour/sex/hair colour/sexuality/height/eye colour/shoe size, etc., etc..).

Probably not with hospital solution. It's only something like 2% or 0.2% (can't remember which). It fizzes up on contact with blood, but doesn't sting at all and it's not even strong enough to bleach the hairs on your hand.

True. Having said that, they only use it as a first step in cleaning dirty wounds, road-rash, bites, sloughy wounds, that kind of thing. After it's done its job, it's rinsed off with normal saline, and the wound is dressed with something like betadine. I saw a rocket car at Santa Pod that ran on hydrogen peroxide. That looked a lot more fun than cleaning wounds.

No, probably not a good idea.

Hospitals use weak peroxide solution as an antiseptic. It's used to clean wounds. It foams and bubbles on contact with with the wound, which looks quite impressive. It's quite good on sloughy wounds though. Cleans them up nicely. The bubbling releases oxygen, which also inhibits any anaerobic bacteria than may be present.

Sigmund Freud

The brain is very delicate. However, as long as the inner meninges are intact (duramater and piamater), you can touch the brain (gently) without doing any damage. Neurosurgeons do it all the time. However, if you were to poke your finger into it and wiggle it about, you are likely to do some damage. The regions of the brain responsible for life processes are low down, below the cortex; mid-brain/hind-brain and brain stem. If they were exposed during trauma, the person would be dead anyway. The brainstem perhaps. Even then, it would have to be poked quite hard. Most of it. As I say, surgeons touch the cortex all the time without doing any damage. They lay grids of microelectrodes on the surface of the cortex to gain high-resolution direct EEG when searching for generator loci in epileptic patients. However, the cortex is really the only structure you can access. There is a way that touching the cortex can kill. If you press gently down, although you won't damage the cortex, you will cause 'coning'. This happens when people get an intracranial bleed. The increased intracranial pressure, although causing no direct damage to the brain, forces the brain downwards, this causes the brainstem to be forced into the foramen magnum (the hole in the base of your skull that the spinal cord passes through). This is known as coning. The pressure on the brainstem, which contains structures necessary for life processes; the pons and medulla oblongata, will kill a person very quickly.

Oh yeah. Tom Baker, sweaty, stinking of smoke, unshaven and very, very tetchy. lol. Be worth watching I think.

63 hours. I was working as security at a large hospital, and there was an arsonist. Fires kept starting up all over the place. They said to us, "stay as long as you can; we need all the cover we can get until this person is caught". It was funny in a way. after the first two days, ward sisters put up signs to the nurses saying "If you lose your locker key, do not call security. They have lost their sense of humour". We caught all the fires befor they got a grip, but patrolling carrying extinguishers was tiring. We caught the person after a fire in the doctors' office on the renal unit. The person was very clever. Whilst in the sisters' office with police and fire officers, discussing ways of reducing risk to patients, the person lit a fire in the doctors' office and covered it with a blanket so it would burn through slowly and by the time oxygen got to it and it flared up, they would be in company and have an alibi. However, this person was the only one to have left the sisters' officce during the meeting (ostensibly to make tea) and no other member of staff had left the ward during that period. Setting fire to a building you know contains people counts as attempted murder. Hospitals always contain people. This person went to jail and is still there as far as I know.

You are travelling East, so the impact of jetlag is likely to be greater. Try to begin to live to UK time a couple of days before you leave. That will help the adjustment greatly. Buying tickets: The later you leave buying your tickets, the more expensive they are likely to be. If you are reasonably confident in your passport system, buy your tickets as early as possible. Travel insurance: It's entirely up to you. If you do, buy only what you need (covering loss of luggage and stuff). Don't be bullied into buying what you don't need. It always seemed weird to me that airline companies advertise flying as the safest form of transport, and then insist on selling everybody insurance. I would insure your luggage though, if you are carrying anything of value. Other than that, relax, have fun and enjoy the wedding.

That's one way of doing it, but it's a lot of work for not much gain. In my Psych dept., many of the researchers tend to default to parametric analyses. However, in some cases I suspect this is due to a tenuous understanding of research methods and the possibility of errors when using parametric tests on ordinal data. However, those that do know their stuff tend either to use an appropriate non-parametric test, or to treat the data to ensure it fulfills the assumptions of the parametric test they want to use. In any event, if you are talking about a viva situation, then using parametric analyses on non-parametric data may be defensible, but you will be expected to do so. However, if you use the appropriate non-parametric test, you won't have to defend your position. I used a Kruskal-Wallace on the data from one of my thesis studies and didn't have to defend it beyond "it was the appropriate test for that level of data". That study was subsequently published, and again, one of the reviewers gave me some grief, saying (as reported by the editor) "why did the author present mean ranks and not means?". Again, my response needed to be no longer than "Because the mean ranks show where the effect is in a Kruskal-Wallace and means are not appropriate for ordinal level data.". The editor found this acceptable, because the point is not debatable. So, for your thesis, I would suggest running non-parametric tests where appropriate. Then you can't go wrong and you are limiting what you have to defend in your viva.

Tycho is right, novelty is the key. Trains tend to go by on a regular basis. It's the same for people who live near airports or motorways. They habituate to the noises, so they no longer register. However, phones ring at random. When you are sleeping, you will filter out all 'known' or expected (by which I mean regular) sounds, but a novel sound will trigger an alert and wake you.

True enough. It's very scary to see someone with that degree of memory impairment. As for the link between pernicious anaemia and alcohol, I'm afraid I don't know. My area is more on the effects of physiological distubance on psychology, so medical conditions are a bit outside my area. However, I do know that alcohol interferes with the uptake of many vitamins, so alcoholism is a factor in a variety of vitamin deficiency related conditions, so it seems perfectly reasonable to me that alcoholism would be a factor in pernicious anaemia. I'd have to look it up to be certain though. Yes, "Alcoholic dementia" is another term for Korsakoffs' syndrome.

More and more people are not bothering with non-parametric analyses. I do, but I think I'm in a minority. I think it comes down to understanding your data. If you understand your data, then you run less risk of abusing them. There are ways of treating non-parametric data to avoid breaching the underlying assumptions of parametric tests. For example, if the data are skewed, a log transformation tends to correct the skew. As long as the same transformation is carried out on all variables, then the underlying relationship between them remains unaffected. Most Parametric tests are quite robust and some more than others, e.g. linear regression is very tolerant of non-parametric data, as long as those data form a meaningful scale. For other tests, there is simply no non-parametric equivalent, e.g. a mixed ANOVA. In this case, the data should be treated to ensure they fulfil the assumptions of the test as far as possible. Basically though, if your data are reasonably sound, then the difference in the results between parametric and non-parametric test is so small as to make no difference. This is why many people are no longer bothering with non-parametric analyses. However, if you are a student, then you will be expected to understand the differences and adhere to the criteria for the tests. It seems to be only postgrads who get lazy.

Tell them they're welcome, as long as they sheild all electrical equipment with inert gas, don't smoke, don't use power tools etc., etc..

LucidDreamer is right. Some functions are topographically lateralized anyway. However, those functions that are not related to specific areas in one or other hemisphere exist on a continuum of lateralization; from strongly lateralized to generalized (i.e. employing both hemishperes equally). On average, females tend to be more generalized and males tend to be more lateralized. A good place to look for lateralisation would be split brain studies. This is where people with severe and life-threatening epilepsy have had the two hemispheres separated through surgical incision of the corpus callosum. Studies on these people have shown some startling insights into lateralised function and the relative contribution of each hemisphere to daily life.

No, you are absolutely right. The chemistry is the same at ATM of 3psi (155.1 mm Hg). The margin for neurological oxygen toxicity is higher, but for pulmonary oxygen toxicity, exposure to pO2 of around 0.5 ATA (Atmospheres Absolute: where 0.2 ATA is normal for oxygen) for >12 hours causes damage. However, by reducing the atmospheric pressure proportionately, this is avoided.

Dixons' saw reason. A new Tungsten tomorrow, Reload my data.

Two, to explain my absense for the last 5 days. Damned Tungsten T2. The ROM data corrupted, gone now forever. Be alert Dixon's! I know you remember me. Now I'm coming back!

Yeah, but they've taken all the good stuff out, so arguably, it isn't absinth any more, just evil green slime.

One of the requisites for life is the ability to replicate (viruses don't have this). If something is to reproduce itself, it must have some mechanism by which it can ensure that the copies it roduces are relatively accurate, and therefore viable, rather than just random combinations of the parts of the original (most of which would be inviable). DNA/RNA are, as far as I know, the only 'organic blueprints' on this planet. Personally, I don't know of any other mechanism (doesn't mean one doesn't exist though).

Our skull capacity increased to cope with the relatively sudden increase in the size of the human neocortex. This was the last 'part' of the brain to evolve and in humans, is much more developed than in other animals. Our cortex is 'pleated' to increase the overall area that can fit into our skulls (gyri = outward folds. sulci = inward folds). Between species, there is a relationship between the number of gyri and intelligence (i.e. between overall neocortical area and intelligence).

Pure oxygen is toxic to humans if given over long periods. It 'scorches' the lining of the lungs, causing the endothelieal cells of the alveoli to thicken in an attempt to reduce their exposure to it. Of course, once this has happened, it becomes very difficult to breathe at normal concentrations (although the lungs do revert in time). 'Weaning off' is one of the problems with patients that have been ventilated on high concentration O2 for a while.