Delta1212

The expansion appears to be accelerating rather than slowing.

I don't need to prove that it does have a survival advantage in order to point out that the fact that it is caused by a mutation is not evidence that it doesn't, which you seem to be claiming.

Again, leaving aside what the factual basis of the claim is or isn't, you keep speaking as if being derived from an albinism-related mutation and being an environmental adaptation were mutually exclusive. Not only is that not accurate, the two things have nothing to do with each other.

I think saying that faster-than-c travel is allowed because they are in different frames of reference is misleading. Everything that is moving is in a different frame of reference.

Let's imagine for a moment that you are shrunk down to 1/10th your current size. As you shrink, everything around you looks like it is growing and, by extension, getting farther away from you. A chair that was a foot away from you now appears to be 10 feet away from you from your new, smaller perspective. A wall behind the chair that was 10 feet away now appears to be the equivalent of 100 feet away. Now, as you were shrinking, all of the stuff seemed to grow and move away from you. But the chair seems to have moved from 1 foot away to 10 feet away in the same period that the wall seems to have moved from 10 feet away to 100 feet away. It looks as if the wall moved 90 feet in the time it took the chair to move 9 feet. And tree out the window beyond the wall would have moved farther still. So the farther something is away from you, the faster it would appear to have receded as you shrank, and the farther away it ultimately would have ended. Of course, none of it was actually moving. The apparent distance simply changed. That is, essentially, what happens metric expansion of space, except instead of you shrinking, it is the distance that is growing and all of the "stuff" remains the same size. The effects are otherwise the same. The farther something is from you, the faster it appears to recede because the rate at which the distance grows is directly proportional to how much distance there is between you and it to begin with. And likewise, those things that are receding are not actually moving, as such, it is simply the distance between you that has increased. That is how things that are very, very, very far away can conceivably recede at speeds greater than the speed of light, even though nothing can move that fast through space. It's a bit of a mind-bending concept to really wrap your head around, but that's more or less how it works.

That's what I mean, though. Without some kind of context, any probability that you assign to anything is meaningless. You can't project single occurence events backwards or forwards. You can't talk about how many times they happened in the past or how many times they will happen in the future. So you need to define the context more strictly because we can't assume a lot of things about the problem that we could with, for instance, a coin toss.

I'd say the probability that it has the exact makeup that it has is 1. The probability that it was now going to have that exact makeup as of one second ago may be slightly lower. And the probability of it currently having that exact makeup as of a billion years ago is lower still. You can't assign a probability to something happening without some sort of context.

"Shell shocked" was called that because it was believed to be caused by physical trauma to the brain from being around exploding shells. As we now know that isn't the case, it's a rather inaccurate term. So less "political correctness" and more just "correctness."

First off, 8% of humanity is over half a billion individuals. That's a huge population. Secondly, if you're claiming that it's the result of founder effect derived from an initial population made up entirely of albinos, you're positing a rather major population bottle neck. The generally accepted number for a minimum viable breeding population is in the neighborhood of 500 individuals of moderately diverse genetics. I'm not sure where you're getting 500+ mostly unrelated albinos as a starting population with no or very few "melanin rich" individuals mixed in. That's not nearly a common enough mutation for that situation to arise randomly. Which brings us back to the possibility that it provided some kind of selective advantage that allowed the mutation to spread throughout the population.

Well that's just lazy. If you were willing to put in only a tiny bit of effort, you could find a place that delivers.

Why would nature select for the genes that lead to malformed red blood cells in people from tropical/equatorial regions when it leads to higher rates genetic disease like sickle cell anemia? The answer is that it also confirms a resistance to malaria, which is a major concern in those regions and ultimately winds up being a far deadlier killer than the genetic disease that comes along as a side effect of the resistance, at least if you live in a malaria-prone area. Move away and that advantage suddenly becomes a bigger problem than the one it is solving. You keep saying that the pale skin is the result of an albinism-associated mutation "rather than" an adaptation, and that it comes with lots of health problems instead of some environmental advantage. But that latter bit actually seems to imply that it does, or at least did, hold some adaptational advantage that offsets the associated problems. Traits generally don't spread and become fixed in a population if they are deleterious, especially not very large populations. Either they confirm some advantage (which may also come with some disadvantages that the advantage simply offsets, as in the case with sickle cell) or they are basically neutral and just random walked their way into the wider population without being good or bad in terms of survival. Either way, nothing is ever a mutation "rather than" an adaptation, and something that is an adaptation in one environment or population may also be considered a disease in another environment or population, but the fact that something is a mutation doesn't "prove" that it's one or the other. All genetic diseases are the result of mutations and all environmental adaptations are the result of mutations.

Well, that wasn't really my question. My question was why you seem to think the fact that it is caused by this mutation means that it isn't an adaptation. That seems more like a non-sequitur than a relevant piece of evidence one way or the other.

To cold or something else, I'm just confused about why you think the fact that it is the result of a specific mutation proves that it isn't an adaptation of some sort.

Er... Why would you think that a mutation that spread throughout an entire regional population has been proven not to be an adaptation just because it's a mutation? That's where adaptations come from: mutations.

America's smallest problem is Trump's understanding, his hands, his... whatever.

This is something I have very rarely heard said by anyone who was correct.

Used to do what?

I mean, really, he doesn't have to acknowledge that time is "actually" doing anything, so long as he acknowledges that it behaves as if it's following the rules laid out in relativity.

A lot of Holmes's deductions in general either don't make sense upon closer examination or else are based on facts which aren't true, either because Conan Doyle was mistaken or because science marches on. You have to take the books on their own terms which sometimes means accepting that Sherlock knows what he's talking about and pretending that the books are set in an alternate reality where the world actually works the way it was generally portrayed in Victorian fiction.

Who is the "we" in this sentence? Because I'm fairly sure you're currently taking to exactly the kind of people who do think about that fairly regularly. As far as infinity existing, I suppose it depends on what you mean by "existing." The concept of infinity certainly exists. It definitely has an existence as a mathematical tool. There are relationships in nature that appear to be accurately described by methods that involve infinities. Whether it has any "real" existence outside of a tool that we came up with to help us describe aspects of nature, I don't know. But I can say the same thing about the number 2.

The assumption that a guilty person won't take the test but an innocent person will relies on both of them trusting that the test is accurate. An innocent person who believes that a lie detector test will implicate them even though they are innocent will not want to take a lie detector test despite being innocent.

I realize I'm now flipping sides on this discussion, but I don't think that's the best example of how lie detectors can be problematic in implementation. Even under ideal circumstances, a polygraph doesn't measure the objective truth of your statements, it measures the likelihood that you believe that you are lying. If you understood the question such that you believe the answer is "no" then saying "no" isn't going to register as a lie, even if you could technicality your way into pointing out that the answer is obviously yes in reality. There are ways you can trip people up on a lie detector test, but I don't believe that pedantry is one of them.

There are a lot of reasons that I don't think Clarence Thomas is a good Justice, but lie detector tests are extremely unreliable and I have trouble faulting anyone who doesn't want to take one. (For that. I can find plenty of fault with them for other reasons and do in this particular case).

Not like that.

This was my very first thought, and was covered in the article: The article says that they determined that it didn't start near the center of our own galaxy. The article then extrapolates this to mean that it did not originate near a supermassive black hole, even though this does not appear to be something that was said, and seems plainly wrong. It could have been flung out of another galaxy by a supermassive black hole there and merely been caught by the Milky Way. I'm sure there are other possibilities as well, but there is at least one right there that doesn't break any established physics.