Delta1212

If I knew then what I know now, I would have had a much harder time enjoying myself. A certain level of ignorance is part of the joy of being young. (I'm still young, of course, but old enough to know what it is like not to be as young as I was).

We don't want our cheap Mexican labor escaping?

We do talk face-to-face, though. There's even an app for that.

Although, frankly, (and this is one of the reasons I favor classifying viruses as life even though they generally aren't) how discretely autonomous any life really is is up for debate. All life exists within an environment outside of which it is incapable of performing the necessary functions of life. We rely on plant life to do the necessary metabolizing of sunlight in order to create the raw materials we require to stay alive. Organisms that rely on sexual reproduction are not equipped to reproduce themselves discretely and males, like viruses, even inject their DNA into a host in order to reproduce themselves. Life is less discrete autonomous organisms and more like waves in the ocean: the water that makes up the wave doesn't move, only the pattern does, discarding and incorporating water molecules as it goes, at once a part of and distinct from its watery environment. But that may be getting a little more philosophical even than the topic already calls for.

I did not say anything negative about your friend. I pointed out that your proposed definition of life potentially excluded sterile individuals. I was not asking if someone is not alive if they are sterile. I was trying to see whether you saw a problem with excluding those who cannot reproduce from your definition of life. Clearly you do. StringJunky is correct. There is no hard and fast dividing line between life and non-life. This any definition of life is going to be blurry, somewhat arbitrary and to an extent subjective. That means you have to be especially careful about how you build a robust definition of life and any attempt at making a very simple definition is going to carry with it a host of potential problems that need to be considered. You can't dismiss the entire subject as being easy because it is not.

Strange already explained that statement. There is no particular reason to expect aliens to use the specific molecule that Earth life uses to store our genetic code, especially when there are other potential molecules that we are aware of, such as RNA, that are capable of serving an analogous purpose. And when I made that statement I was responding specifically to the post where you said "having DNA" would make for an adequate requirement, not "DNA or something similar. Now, if DNA does not qualify as life, but meets the entirety of "having DNA or something DNA-like and reproducing itself" but, according to you, is not a form of life, then your definition is faulty. A good definition of any category includes everything that is in the category and excludes everything that is not. If you have a definition that does not cover something that should be considered life, or that includes something that is not life, it is not a good definition of life.

Alright, then here is a question: Is a DNA molecule alive? DNA replicates itself and "has" DNA. So does DNA, all by itself, qualify as being a form of life?

What qualifies as a hypothetical carrier? You can't handwave a definition, so you need to define what a carrier molecule is, specifically. And then you are again precludin the possibility of certain hypothetical forms of life. What if we come across something that replicates itself some way other than through a centralized carrier of genetic information? Something whose morphology creates a matching form for its "offspring"? Prions aren't really considered alive. They'de just proteins, but prion disease is caused by proteins that are folded in such a way that that they cause other proteins to replicate the same fold. So it's certainly possibly to replicate a shape in a complex molecule without any kind of carrier. Perhaps given time and opportunity, some kind of complex life could grow out of that process. And what about viruses, which do have a carrier of genetic information, RNA, but around which there is quite a bit of debate about whether they truly qualify as life since they don't reproduce themselves but inject their genetic code into cells which they begin producing viruses. And if the sole criteria of life is that it reproduces and has DNA (or equivalent), does that preclude sterile individuals from qualifying as alive? This can be a concern even with traditional definitions of life, but at least there are a range of different characteristics taken into account so there is a bit of wiggle room for individuals that miss one or two traditional categories for one reason or another.

Of course, such a definition is fairly likely to exclude the possibility of alien life existing.

Is that field of view without moving your head or eye, though? I had assumed based on the airplane example that this was a case where the object was traveling laterally along your field of vision at some fixed distance until it became too small to see, rather than entering your field of vision on one side and exiting the other as you remained still. That would require determining how far away, based on size and illumination, an object needs to be before it becomes invisible to the naked eye, and then figuring the straight line path it would need to travel within a circle with a radius of that size in order for the time between crossing into the circle of visibility to crossing out of it is at least 20 seconds. 20 light seconds is a bit over 3.7 million miles, so assuming that the object is traveling at almost light speed and takes a path that cuts straight through the middle of the circle and blows right past you, you'd need a circle with a radius of at least 1.9 million miles -ish. Then you just need to work out what size/illumination is visible out to 1.9 million miles. If you want to be able to watch it travel the full distance without having to turn around, or want it to remain a set distance away from you, that can be worked out based on what you want. Converting over to the same units as studios, it looks like you'd need an object whose size/illumination allows it to be visible at least out to 3-5 million kilometers depending on how much you want to have to turn in order to watch the object from the time it enters visibility to the time it leaves your visibility, with 3 million kilometers allowing you to watch for 20 seconds if you turn completely around and 5 million kilometers allowing you to watch it for 30, seconds without moving. Although, actually, studiot, is your calculation assuming a curved path traced around the edge of a circle of visibility 5 million kilometers in radius? Because if the plane is traveling in a straight line, then the outer edge of the circle would need to be farther away than that, since a secant line cutting through the circle perpendicular to your field of view would need to have the distance you used for the arc length. I suppose a lot of this depends on the parameters of the problem needing to be better defined. How much can you turn to watch the object travel, if at all? Can the object follow a curved path or must it travel in a straight line? How much light is being given off/reflected by the object. Given those three variables, I think you should be able to pin down a specific size and distance.

If the initial batch of plants is a cross between tall and short plants, and they are all tall, then tallness is a dominant trait and shortness is recessive, so only double-short plants will be tall and everything else will be short. If T is tall and t is short, all of the first generation of plants are Tt. Crossed with each other, you will get a mix of TT, Tt and tt. Only tt will be short. You can figure out exactly what the percentages are with a basic Punette square. Just divide a box into four parts. Since all of the offspring are the result of a cross between a Tt plant and a Tt plant, label one column T and the other t, and one row T and the other t. Wherever a T and a T intersect, you get TT. Where T and t intersect you get Tt and where t and t intersect, you get tt. Each part of the total box represents 25% of the total population for that generation, so you should get the total for each of TT, Tt and tt. As a sanity check, you know that only tt will be short and that there are seventy short plants and 210 tall plants in this generation (that will be a mix of TT and Tt). Once you have the numbers for each possible combination, you can make three more diagrams. You know the final generation is crossing the previous one with short plants, and short plants are always tt. So you can set up Punnett squares to cross tt with TT, Tt and tt plants. Then assign each of the four boxes in each Punnett square a number representing 25% of the value that you got for that combination in the previous round, add all the like combinations together and you should get the totals for TT, Tt and tt in that generation. Then just remember that tt is short and Tt and TT are tall, and you should be able to answer the question.

If you truly are suffering from untreated depression, perhaps you should seek treatment for depression as a first step?

The distance at which something is visible depends on how big it is and how much light it gives off/reflects. How big it needs to be to see it depends on how far away it is and how much light is coming from it. There's no single value for either of those things because they each depend upon the other, plus illumination.

Modifying your DNA, especially as an adult rather than in utero, is far more likely to give you cancer than it is to repair your organs. I think I'll pass.

So they're simultaneously half-dead and radioactive?

Bob did.

Perhaps you only exist in the sparrow's mind.

We're assuming this based on what?

I think part of my problem is that when I was very little, I assumed certain things just naturally happened as you got older, and that's not how it works. Things don't usually just happen to you, you have to put in some effort to make things happen. So, you want a scientific reason why you do not have a girlfriend? On the macroscopic level that we live in and deal with day to day, you do not get an effect without a cause. For whatever reason, it seems mostly out of fear, you are unwilling to cause anything to happen. No cause, no effect. That's more or less it. Edit: Seconding the attractive girls with unattractive guys comment of MigL's, by the way. The most attractive girl at my high school, in any grade, while I was there was in a long term relationship with an overweight guy that didn't do any athletics or anything. I heard many an "alpha male" express confusion over that in the locker room for years. And that was high school. The older you get, the more people take other factors than just pure looks into account. You may insist that you could never be attractive to anyone physically, and I can't effectively argue with you on that point because I have no idea what you look like, though based on the totality of your comments, I expect you inflate the difficulty you have in that respect at least somewhat in your own mind because you seem to have a habit of doing that in general, but other things, like temperament, social skills, personal interests and skills, and so on, are all things you can work on to improve. They are all learnable. They can be developed by anyone who wants to put the effort in. It will probably make you happier to develop those things even without them leading to any kind of relationship with anyone else. And those are all extra factors that are entirely capable of making you a more attractive person to others than you would assume just based on looks. Your first step is that you need to stop assuming that because it hasn't happened for you yet, that it can't happen and that you are somehow inherently the opposite of what everyone else in the world wants. Because to a greater or lesser extent, that is a choice that you make. You can't completely choose what you look like, but you do have some degree of choice over who you are, the things you do and how you treat other people. And you have a choice about whether to interact with other people. The less you do, the less likely you are to meet people who genuinely like you, and the less likely you are to develop any more than a superficial acquaintanceship with someone who may potentially be able to feel more if they knew you better. Just remember, lack of past success is no guarantee of future failure.

Yeah, I used to think that too. I was wrong. Incidentally, a quick Google search puts the percentage of 25 to 29 year olds in the US who are virgins at about 5% for both males and females. So it's less "few to none" and more "one in twenty." Edit: also, 20-24 year olds it was close to 15%. So rough guesstimate, I'd say it's probably in the 7-9% range for 25-year-olds specifically.

While that broadly may be the reasoning behind split-gendered sports, the rule does not split things up by hormone level. It splits it up by gender. For what you are describing to be a relevant situation, we would need to split up events by hormone level, like weight classes in boxing. Then you'd get a mix of men and women competing against each other in different events depending on how much testosterone they have. That's not what the rules are as they stand, though, and so should have no bearing on the people who have and continue to compete under the current divisions.

Get blocked by soundproofing?

The big secret in life is that all of those people who seem like they have a much better idea of what they are doing, are much more experienced and generally happier in their lives simply aren't. Everyone is stumbling around in the dark. Some people are a little more fluid about it because of practice, but every interaction with a new person is just taking a wild stab at things and hoping for the best. That's why things like complicated etiquettes and societal manners develop: it gives people a rule book for social interaction because left to their own devices, nobody really has any idea what they're doing and it can be rather terrifying. The only trick is learning to tamp down that fear of taking the plunge and getting yourself to just dive headfirst off the cliff again and again and hope the other person is willing to catch you, and to try your best to catch others when they initiate contact with you. I guarantee you are not the only inexperienced person your age in the entire world. You're not even as rare as you seem to think you are in that respect, I think. It's true that there are some people who are turned off by inexperience, but there are also people who find that attractive. And, ultimately, that is also something that you can actually do something about, even if it doesn't seem like it. (And as a somewhat late bloomer relationship-wise, I can relate to how difficult taking the first steps are and how deep the insecurities can run that tell you you'll never find anyone and that you're falling behind your peer group in experience and that it's all a self-reinforcing cycle of doubt that will keep you alone forever). The main thing you need to do is force yourself to interact with people. You've already given evidence in this thread that you can interact with people and be pleasant and make a connection. The important thing is not to get fixated on that as the only connection you can make, or on the idea that if that connection doesn't lead anywhere deeper that you have somehow failed. If you've done it once, you can do it again. And again. For a good while, I was very socially isolated and that made everything much worse. When you feel like you have no real friends and barely even any pleasant social acquaintances it makes it very difficult to see yourself as someone anyone else would want to interact with on any deeper level beyond that. Eventually, I got myself to stop worrying quite so much about that. I got some friends who shared some of my interests and started expanding my social circle, and concentrated more on things that interested me and just being friendly with people, and a lot of things just fell into place at that point that I had not really expected to. I'm still not really an overly social person, but I've gotten to a point where most people I know have no idea that I've ever had any real social anxieties. They've never gone completely away. Meeting new people, especially in situations where I want or need something from them, still freaks me the hell out, but I've learned how to cover that up so nobody knows the difference. That's a completely learnable skill. It just requires practice. It's putting yourself in situations where you're forced to practice that is hard, at least initially and it took me years to push myself in that regard, but it was the best thing I ever did for my mental well-being. I think you need to build up with some low-stakes interactions. Just make friends with people without expecting it to lead anywhere. Building a larger social circle without actively persuing anyone for more is probably the best thing you can do for yourself. My parents were set up on a blind date by mutual friends. My current girlfriend and I were just friends for a year and started dating after she broke up with the guy she had been going out with at the time. Focus on doing things you are interested in, being friendly with people and putting yourself out there with them as a potential friend and generally work on yourself. Offering yourself up as a friend is both lower stakes in general than a romantic partnership, so getting blown off doesn't sting quite as much because your hopes aren't as high, and rejection is also simply much less likely. Getting yourself an interest or two (I don't know if you're involved in anything) makes you more interesting and often provides more opportunities to meet people. And people who have stuff they enjoy going on in their lives just tend to be happier in themselves. And as someone with experience in this area, I can see all the same signs that tell me that your biggest problem really is your self-esteem issues. If you can find ways to tackle those, and again, I know how much easier that is to say than to actually do, I think you'll have a much easier time of things in general. With the benefit of hindsight, I had a lot of advantages growing up that I simply did not recognize. I was sure that other people were better than me, more confident than me, more attractive than me and new how to interact with people where I didn't. I can see now that the vast majority of what was holding me back was not any inherent unlikeability, or inexperience or unattractiveness, it was my inability to recognize the things that I had going for me instead of focusing on everything going against me. It felt like I had no advantages when I had many, I just wasn't using any of them because I refused to see that they were there. Because I didn't really belief I was a worthwhile person. Once I stopped stressing about that so much and focused more on things I liked to do, improving those aspects of my behavior that were getting in the way of doing things I wanted to do for myself, and really just focusing on me, some of that weight started to lift and it became a lot easier to connect with others and build up the relationships needed for a social existence. I didn't magically transform into a new person free from the doubts and fears that I've always had, I just learned to see myself in a new perspective that allowed me to take advantage of my strengths when interacting with other people, and get the practice necessary to find out what my strengths actually are. And you are just as capable of doing the same things.

There are lots of athletes with biological advantages over "normal" people. Frequently that is how the stand out athletes got to the top of their sport. Not because they didn't work hard, but because the ones who work hard and have a biological advantage are going to beat out the ones who only have the biology or who only work hard. At what point do we decide that Usain Bolt's stride or Michael Phelp's body shape or any of the dozens of other advantages top athletes make use of is unfair to everyone else? Some people get more results from the same amount of execerise. Is that an unfair advantage over the people who have to work harder for the same results? Does someone with a novel mutation that increases their red blood cell count have to be banned from competing in any sports to make things fair for people with a different biology? How do you draw a line and say "No, you are not allowed to compete because you are too naturally good at this and it isn't fair to others"? What about the people who are naturally not good at these things? Do we draw the line above them so that they have a chance? You aren't allowed to compete in Olympic sprinting unless you have asthma, because allowing people without it gives them an unfair advantage over asthmatics who wouldn't be able to compete?