Glider

Then shave a gorilla and compare. Gorillas are primates too. These are the bushmen of the kalahari. They are thought to have the longest unbroken genetic lineages of all humans on earth (i.e. have had to contend with almost no external interference by other peoples), and have remained largely unchanged in their ways for millenia. Unfortunately, they are in danger of extinction due to modern interference and the spread of farming (as are so many other things). In physical characteristics, they are short, and as you mention, have a variety of skin tones. However, they are thought to have migrated South from Eastern Africa at about the same time as other people migrated North. As they have an unbroken lineage back to that time, they may be regarded as most closely resembling our common ancestors, but in their own way, they have changed as over the thousands of years too, and they share with everybody else the common lineage originating in Eastern Africa.

Not real? What are you saying!??

So it's apparent why you want the oil so badly. What's your point?

Both the above are correct. However, unlike most drug effects, you don't need to increase your intake of nicotine to achieve the same effect. This is why most long-term smokers are still on around 20 per day. Nicotine has a dose dependent biphasic effect. This is to say that it exerts different (opposite) effects, depending on the dose. As mentioned above, nicotine acts as an ACh antagonist. However, the initial effect of nicotine intake is agonistic, i.e. it exites nicontinic ACh receptors, thus small bolus doses of nicotine act as a stimulant. Higher doses act as a sedative (as the nicotine begins to block nicotinic ACh receptors). Smokers make use of both effects and this behaviour can be observed. A bored smoker will take small 'nips' of the cigarette, providing themselves with the stimulant effect. The same smoker, whilst for example, waiting for an interview or otherwise generally anxious will take large regular draws at the cigarette, making use of its sedative properties. The fact that the same drug can be used for two purposes is a significant part of the insidious nature of nicotine addiction. Whilst physical withdrawal symptoms are due to the increased number of ACh receptors formed in compensation, resulting in increased excitability of nicotinic ACh systems in the absence of nicotine , there are also strong psychological symptoms, i.e. an impaired ability to cope with both stressful and boring situations.

My old XL Ironhead sportster must have been an antimatter bike then. Those bastards!

I don't know Sayonara³, and have no vested interest, but I too would say that his rebuttal of some of the wilder conjecture was reasoned and well thought out.

Capitalism may work, but it is far from perfect. Don't you think that the government has any responsibility towards the people it (allegedly) represents? Is backing industry, the main objective of which is profit, the same as backing education, the main objective of which is to educate the future captains of industry (not to mention medicine, science and government)? If the government wants to lead a healthy and productive country, then isn't backing the education of the next generation of doctors, business execs, scientists, and indeed educators a sound investment? Or, is education only the right of those who can afford it, regardless of merit? Is it the underlying principle of capitalism, that irrespective of your intelligence or latent ability and potential, money comes before all? That you have the right to an education (only if you can afford it), you have the right to health (only if you can afford it) you have the right to the persuit of happiness (only if you can afford it)? Is it a sound philosophy to open the doors of Universities to people based only on their bank balance? Wouldn't this result in an occasional situation where Universities are put in the position of attempting to educate an idiot because he/she can afford it rather than an individual with great potential who can't? In my opinion, money is not a valid factor for deciding who has the right to an education. Individual merit, on the other hand, is.

As far as I remember, Deja Vu is thought to occur when input from the sensory short-term memory (STM) undergoes processing prior to being laid down in long-term memory (LTM), but is then accidentally recalled. This results in the feeling of 'remembering' the situation, even though you may never have been in that situation before. Deja Vu is a common phenomenon in people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy, where the generator loci (areas of unstable cells in which the seizures originate) are situated in the medial tempoaral lobe. The condition affects the hippocampus and amygdala (both associated with memory processing). The hippocampus doesn't store memories per se, but is best thought of as a kind of 'printing press' which 'formats' the information for LTM storage. As incoming information from the STM is processed, the aberrant firing of cells in the medial temporal lobe results in this information being sent back into STM as opposed to being laid down in LTM, but it contains the LTM 'tag' as it were. Thus it generates the feeling that it is being recalled from the past, even though it has only just been processed by the short-term memory (11-15 seconds). Not particularly short, but largely to the point. I hope it helps.

Some of it is, some isn't. There is a lot of research going on to evaluate the claims of homeopathy and other 'new age' approaches. Many of the claims of homeopathy are collapsing under the scruitiny of scientific method, and can be filed in the hippy crap bin. e.g. the homeopathic principle of the 'memory of water'. This is where it was claimed that an infusion of a herbal remedy would impart its theraputic properties into the water, and these properties would remain in the water, i.e. that the water would 'remember' the properties, even when it was diluted to the equivalent of about 5ml in the Atlantic. This was recently tested rigorously, and failed miserably to support its claims. However, some claims concerning plant based therapies are yeilding interesting results and warrent further investigation. For example, the active ingredient in St. Johns wart (used as a herbal therapy for depression) is now known to have an effect on 5-HT (serotonin) levels, though (as far as I know) the mechanism of function is not fully understood. The problem with the homeopathic preparations is that the concentrations vary massively between different preparations from different manufacturing outlets (thus would have unreliable and unpredictable effects), and in many cases the concentrations are too low to have any significant impact anyway. The short answer is that the results aren't all in yet and it's still up to the individual to evaluate the evidence provided in support of many of these herbal therapies.

That's a good point.

I'm not sure I see the difference. What is propaganda beyond selling a concept and providing misleading, incomplete and biased information in order to back it up? What is the difference between (for example): 1) Selling the idea that drinking alcoholic beverages is very cool and likely to get you laid and result in a significant elevation in your social status by association, whilst conveniently neglecting to mention in any obvious way the real reasons they think you should drink it (to increase their income), and the facts concerning the number of deaths, diseases and destroyed families that occur as a direct result of drinking. 2) Selling the idea that a war (that as yet the majority don't want) is just and righteous and necessary and likely to result in a significant elevation of your international status by association (with the winning side) whilst conveniently neglecting to mention in any obvious way the real reasons why they think we should have a war (probably to increase somebody's income) and the facts concerning the numbers of deaths and destroyed families that occur as a direct result of fighting a war (remember the disparity in reported deaths that occurred as a result of bombing last time?). Personally, I have nothing against having a beer or nine of an evening, but you could just as well substitute eating contaminated beef, or subjecting your child to the MMR vaccine, or the building of that damned millenium dome, or any number of half-arsed government endorced courses of action which place economics and/or political expedience over the welfare of their own (or other) people. The government want to achieve something, but before they can take direct action, they have to sell the concept to the people first. In order to do this, they have to decide which angle 'the public' are likely to be most sympathetic to, identify with and support. So in each case, a bunch of people have to sit around and decide exactly what (of all the information that exists on a topic), gets reported to the public and what doesn't. That sounds exactly like marketing to me. If political propaganda and marketing are that different, then it must have been simply a stunning coincidence that members of the Thatcher government employed Saatchi & Saatchi to handle their propaganda.

As was once said (can't remember by whom) "There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics". The problem with statistics is that they can be made to say (or strongly imply) whatever you want them to. The media know this, and use it to maximum effect. It's a way of implying whatever you want, without actually lying. By the way, did you know that over 90% of people in high security prisons are bread eaters? Moreover, the same proportion of criminals caught for committing a violent crime were found to have eaten bread earlier the same day?

I like ether...smells like victory-V's....and the dreams!

Personality is one thing, social status is another. Social status is certainly not an hereditory factor. Factors defining social status change much faster than evolution can adapt. More and more, social status seems to be defined by money. Specifically, how much of it one has. Whilst money may be in a certain sense hereditory, it is not gentetic.

Reminds me of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The answer to life the Universe and everything = 42. So, if the answer here so frequently appears to be 11, what was the question?

Congratulations! Nonetheless, I'm guessing that you weren't born with a congenital understanding of chemistry and so at some point, you still had to put the study time in.

Perfect sense. The short answer is this, if the person isn't insulted, then the insulter has wasted their time and effort. The way I see it is this: In the delivery of an insult there are only two people involved; the insulter and the insulted. The majority are therefore irrelevant. They are not being insulted, nor can they decide for the insulted party what he or she should feel about it. All they can do is decide how they would feel if the insult were aimed at them and whether or not they would get upset about it is their choice. How the insulted party actually feels about it is still his or her own choice. Another way of looking at it is that to take offence at an insult is a bit like loading the gun that someone else is pointing at you. Their aim is do denegrate you, to devalue or undermine you in some way, to make you in some sense feel less than you are, and ultimately, to piss you off. The key factor is that they can't do that without your help. They say a few words, but it's up to you to feel denegrated, devalued, undermined and pissed off. If you fail to do so, then they have failed to insult you. As for bystanders, it depends who they are. If they are your friends, well then they should know you well enough to be able to evaluate the validity of an insult for themselves and you won't need to defend yourself to them. If they are complete strangers, then by definition they don't know you and thus, are not in a position to make judgements.

yeah...I see it sometimes too. People dropping out of Uni for nothing much. It's always bad to watch it happen.

Not at all. Here, have another go: In other words, anybody who thinks they are too clever to have to put any time and effort into the study of a subject they want or need to understand is a fool, whether or not they are intelligent. The 'naturals' to whom you refer, generally fall into this category. To summarise: Nobody is born 'imprinted' with knowledge. All knowledge must therefore be learned. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, this requires some time and a degree of effort. The wiser realise this and tend to apply themselves (this includes the 'naturals'). The fools tend to think they are too clever to have to put in time or effort to such a menial task as learning, thus, regardless of their intelligence they remain ignorant. It is the waste of such potential that is foolish.

See what happens when the nerds are your potential employers reading your CV.

On the topic of insults, the thing about them is they're only effective if somebody feels insulted by them. My point is that a little knowledge about the language can help moderate that. I'm not sure I'd feel too insulted on being called a human being (maybe a little at being called a Christian). Although it seems that people are more than ever prepared to use insults indiscriminately, it also seems that people are more than ever seeking the slightest excuse to find offence in the things other people say, whether or not it was intended or even exists. This confuses me, as it basically translates as people lookng to have their day ruined. It seems to me that people were wiser around 1,990 years ago: "If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. This seems to me to be saying that "an insult is only an insult if you feel insulted by it, and that's entirely your own choice". Clever emperor.

True. What's your point?

An understanding of the use of language may also help in the appropriate use of insults. For example Cretin: A term originating in the late 18th century from the French 'Crétin' and the Swiss-French 'Crestin' (Christian) from the original Latin 'Christianus'. This term originated as meaning 'human being', as a reminder to less charitable or tolerant individuals that although deformed, those suffering from cretinism (mental underdevelopment and physical deformity due to congenital thyroid deficiency) are human and not beasts.

Hmmm...in my experience, the real fools are those who believe they know too much to have to study. I think the really clever ones are those who realise that however clever they are, they still have to put the time in.

Oh, I don't know. I think it might impress the tutors at a business school if a prospective student could at least spell the word 'business'.