MonDie

Worst: No foresight or prudence. Take pride in pollution, wastefulness, and heart disease. In some parts discrimination is a de facto recognized freedom. Best: We're highly individualistic. Empasis is placed on each person finding their own path in life.

Tell me about it. I was getting really mean recommendations while listening to music on YouTube, with it culminating when I got a Chic-Fil-A ad every time I visited the YouTube home page on, I believe it was April 1st. It finally occurred to me that somebody operating a YouTube server's firewall could have been doing this, and that they may have done it to any number of IP addresses reaching out to that server. ... Or it could have been a peculiar fluke. Who knows. I've uncovered little in the way of evidence of intrusion, although I intend to write code for a keylogger to use with a special flashdrive I still have lying around. Who knows.

Scientific papers often address ambiguity beforehand. It would be their fault if they failed to clarify.

^ Two decades ago, and per Wikipedia, it was National Geographic, the ones who made the hasty, unreviewed press release, who led the investigation exposing it as potentially being a composite fossil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoraptor#cite_note-Dalton403-7 Apparently many have "dino fuzz" instead of feathers, but both share pigment organelles called "melanosomes". http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100127-dinosaur-feathers-colors-nature/

If I recall, the problem is that feathers are rarely fossilized, and leave no observable imprints on the bones. Don't take my word for it. This looks pretty useful. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dinosaurs%20had%20feathers+site:news.nationalgeographic.com&t=canonical

Even that could be biased. The alien already knows the results of each experiment provided, and may keep opposing evidence hidden. You could avoid this by asking why—Why are your/our theories right/wrong?—then design your own experiments. Don't be fooled by crafty alien deception. Assume the alien wants to screw you.

Oddly enough, I vaguely recall reading long long ago that either Buddhism or the Upanishads has a myth about life starting in the water and moving onto land, and that this is taken as consistent with the science.

Ask him to express their wrongness on a scale from 0 to 1.

There have been many experiments based on evolutionary premises or even flat out demonstrating that the mechanisms exist. Darwin wasn't perfect, but he was approximately right beyond a doubt. Evolution doesn't negate the divine, but some stubborn Christians couldn't accept that their infallible pope made a boo-boo, or feared that a doubting society would descend into chaos, etc.

That was the idea. Even eukaryotes usually just leave the zygote inside a container with a food supply, and we already have bacterial candidates for dormant space travel. It will probably have to reproduce asexually though. The trait wouldn't be selected for at the level of the ecosystem, but it just needs to appear on one planet one time with a large enough window to make the leap, and then it will thrive in the universe at large. For all I know, something like this could have appeared on Earth at some point. Do we have any continent-hoppers here on Earth? Reptiles sit on rafts for weeks. Some seeds ride the waves. Birds & bugs fly.

I'm not sure what you mean. Almost all bacteria are visible, if only barely, under the maximum resolution possible for visible light, but you'll usually only see cocci (spheres) vs bacilli (rods) or possibly vibrio (curved rod). Maybe heterotrophic bacteria are alittle bigger. Eukaryotes, even single-celled eukaryotes, are bigger. Pertaining to bacteria, staining techniques can identify them and/or emphasize the flagellum. Agar plates can grow colonies from individuals, revealing their different division patterns.

Continued Dormant endospores have survived 34 years in a sealed tube, and possibly for 250 million years in salt crystals. 400 rad = 4 Gy ... or 4 joules radiation per kilogram ... enough to cause acute radiation syndrome.

Here's a starting point. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=psychopathy+questionnaire+site%3Anih.gov&t=canonical Found this through the citations. Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI) -Table 2 Saw this too.

Pasteur's swan-neck flasks demonstrated that microbes are air-borne and do not "spontaneously generate" within flasks... even with an air supply. Utilizing gravity only, his S-shaped swan-necks kept out microbes remarkably well. For sprouting, a breathable fabric and regular water changes are advised, but even ad hoc seed sprouters don't utilize gravity from what I can tell. Why don't they utilize gravity? Just boil the water beforehand and you won't need to change it, right?

... The toddler forces Tyson to forfeit.

Technology isn't necessary. In fact, 3.5 billion years of evolution has invented far more than humans have. Space-traveling seeds or endospores. Many Gram-positive bacteria sporulate, producing dormant endospores surrounded with two membranes and two spore coats. Endospores are resistant to extreme dryness; they'll survive in boiling water for several hours; they are alcohol-proof, bleach-proof, and antibiotic-resistant; and they can tolerate up to 400 rad of radiation; citation Robert W Bauman.

I didn't know you were a switch!

I'm listening to this ATM. It sounds like terrible-ten-year-old music, but I like it. Alas, I have appointments to set up and places to go.

A true sadist might try to keep it alive and terrified for a time. We often conflate suffering with death, but this is erroneous. Death is a loss of happiness.

i.e. the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity (including Catholicism) and Islam. Transcribe "angels" instead of "gods" and tada monotheism! Bantu religion and IMO some Hinduism variants might be considered monotheistic by those standards. This is just my personal speculation. Religion isn't clearly defined, but more important is how we define a scientific person, how much leeway we give. For example, is science something you do or something you believe, and what is believing? One might argue that faith and scientific reasoning have different functions. For example, science can illuminate the consequences of one's actions, while faith might provide some sort of subjective, emotional or "spiritual" support. However there is no room for faith unless you narrow the scope of science, e.g. by limiting it to the knowable or the ethical.

AFAIK it's not statistically establish, but has been presumed from case studies. yeah, pretty much. Should note that various animal management services around the world regularly conduct animal slaughters as well. Really ugly affairs all around though. But even those mass die offs involve natural selection. As I said, they can't adapt to bullets. What aren't I seeing?

Indeed, one guy could drive the car through while the other tosses contraband over the wall. Why can't the fricking animals just adapt to bullets? When is it ecological beneficial to hunt, excepting invasive species? More cats -> more genetic variability -> cats adapt more quickly Why can't we protect us from them and them from us? Oh right, the J curve and mass die offs.

Require town walls for all towns on the preserved landscape, preventing further expansion edit:: and keeping animals out ::edit. Check for hunting contraband at town gates. Apply progressively stricter prohibitions deeper inside until only small, self-defense guns are allowed.

Big, long walls. Let the ecosystem do its thing.

Wow long thread! Color might be used as a hybridization barrier. WT, recently diverged species may have overlapping territory, a *hybrid zone*, but it's maladaptive to make hybrid offspring because of *reduced hybrid viability*. Because each species is adapting to its new environment, a hybrid offspring is adapted to neither environment. To top it off, hybrids are often sterile. Consequently, individuals will have better reproductive success if they don't waste time courting or mating the other species, a situation which may lead to hybridization barriers. Color probably often serves as one such barrier. For example, suppose one species is more brown, so its females start picking browner males to avoid hybridization, hence the browner males get more mates, hence that species gradually becomes browner. That would be color serving as a prezygotic barrier to hybridization. By the way, some birds see ultraviolet light.