Mokele

Yes, blah blah blah. All you have done is claim stuff. I can claim stuff too. Hi, I'm Elvis. I went into hiding all those years ago, and I'm really a space alien. What I want is *evidence*. Real, legitimate, properly-done medical studies that show this method has a detectable effect beyond placebo. If all you can do is trot out claims of ancient wisdom without any proof, you're gonna stay in psuedoscience where you belong. Mokele

Life cycles of parasites, and using the lengths for figure out how many of the local population are infested at any given time. That'll appeal to the innate love of the gruesome in that age range. Somethign weird and horrifying, like elephantaisis.

Damn, you got me.

Use Google Scholar and see if there's any papers on it.

But they *do* count. Many of the megafauna species (those not totally dead) require large areas to feed and hunt, and such huge areas simply are not availible in the US anymore. Sure, you *could* introduce lions and elephants, but how long before the elephants are devouring Farmer Bill's corn and the lions have figured out that the yummy pink things can't run very fast? Mokele

I can fold it dozens of times, maybe hundreds. There's a trick to it, is all.

Is there any scrap of *legitimate* evidence for this stuff? Controlled, double-blind studies and the like?

OMG, the penguins are right, I must live according to the morals of other animals! My GF and I will immediately follow the high moral example of the parasitoid wasps by injecting our young into a living organism so they can devour it from the inside, saving the vital organs for last, until they burst forth from the hollowed-out yet still living body of their host. You must all follow our righteous moral parasitoid path!

If you hit ice with a hammer, the ice breaks and the hammer is undamaged. Mystery solved.

No idea, but if this is in the context of "how do I get it off my hands?", I've found that soap and water work just fine, even after I've handled large Marine toads. Mokele

Of course, I always travel by hiding in people's luggage.

For the same reason that she has that probe-looking thing. Where do you think aliens got the idea?

You're confused. Even if it *was* the matrix, it wouldn't make science at all invalid. Science seeks to understand the observable world. Even if the observable world is not the actual world (as in the Matrix), science will still be accurate in describing it and understanding it. The whole "maybe it's all the matrix / someone's dream / whatever" is a load of psuedo-intellectual hogwash thrown around coffee shops by 1st year philosophy majors hoping to make people think they're deep, anyway. Mokele

If you weren't lazy, you'd note that only *one* of the *many* papers above deals with dogs. If you're going to make a half-assed attempt at defending a POV, don't even bother.

There's actually two levels to evolution. There's the theory, which deals with how things happen, mechanisms, and such, and then there's the observed instance, which are fact. It's like gravity: there's the fact an the theory of why we observe the fact and how it works. Is the current body of evolutionary knowldge perfect, no. Do we know, fro 100% fact, that evolution occurs? Yes. Do we know to beyond the limit of any reasonable doubt that evolution is the source of all living species? Yes. Why do people deny it? Because they don't like it, and people will deny *anything*, no matter how obviously true, if it threatens their worldview or self-concept. The personal failures of such inividuals do not have any impact on the veracity of evolution. But not to teach it in science class, where it doesn't belong. And innacurate. I know evolution to be true because I have seen countless examples of it and it's mechanisms, often personally. In fact, a large part of my thesis is *only* explainable in light of the organism's evolutionary history. I think the Bishop being quoted is saying precisely that: that Christianity does not need to exist only in the margins of science, but that certain people's warped theologies require it to, and that fact should tip them off that something is wrong with their theology. Mokele

Yes and no. Way back when, sometime around 370 mya, give or take, the amniotic egg evolved, which allowed life to reproduce on land, unlike amphibians, who needed to lay eggs in water. These first amniotes had simple, box-like skulls with only openings where they were needed for eyes, nostrils, etc, and were called anapsids. (There's a raging debate about whether turtles are surviving anapsids or not, but I'll not bother with that. However, if turtles are not anapsids, the anapsids are now extinct.) Eventually, the anapsids produced two new lineages, each of which had extra holes in their skulls, which served to lighten them and to provide additonal sites for muscle attachment. One group had a single hole, th synapsids, and they evenually became mammals. The other group, diapsids, had two holes, and these have a more interesting history. The Diapsids split again into two groups. One, the lepidosaurs, are modern snakes and lizards. The other is called the Archosaurs, or "ruling reptiles", and for good reason. This group has evolved into some of the most successful and frightening predators ever, including the rauisuchids, ornithosuchids, popsaurids (all 3 of which would best be imagined as giant, fast-running land crocodiles, often over 20 feet long), crocodiles, phytosaurs (similar to crocs, but with a nostril near their eyes rather than at the tip of the snout), pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and birds. So, technically, dinosaurs weren't lizards, but they *were* reptiles, close cousins of the crocodile and ancestors of the bird. Mokele

I'm not sure if it means something special in math, but in biology, it typically refers to systems with components that interact synergisticly to maximize the effects. The example I'm most familiar with is snake venom; any individual venom protien will have minor (or at least lesser) effects if injected into smeone, but when you combine them, they interact to heighten the lethality tremendously, far greater than you'd get from just injecting any random combination of toxins. Mokele

BATAVIA, IL—Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory physicist Laird Karmann, a noted string theorist and accused philanderer, said Monday that he can "explain everything" if his wife Elizabeth will just give him a chance. "Surely, anyone can see that, mathematically, the universe is composed of Riemann surfaces, having positive-definite metrics, across which the attached 'loops' or free 'strings' have a (1+1) dynamic topology," Karmann said. "But string behaviors are Lorentzian, meaning that they—like me—need an intense dual-phase Wick rotation now and then just to stay in rational space. I mean, it was just a blowjob." Elizabeth refused to accept her husband's theory, suggesting that he study the transformational loop dynamics implicit in her hurled wedding ring. From (where else) The Onion

I'd think so, especially with CG animation and effects placing such things within the reach of many more people.

You could, if you wanted, move at the south pole without going north. Just make a platform at the south pole that is *absolutely* flat (not curved like the earth). If you moved about on that, you'd not be getting any closer to the north pole, but still be moving.

If I wasn't poor, I'd buy it. I don't have cable, and every so often something comes on cable that I wish I could see. Also, wouldn't this open massive distribution possibilities to anyone with a camera, in effect meaning that you don't need networks or anything, just customers? Mokele

Actually, from what I've heard, he's *currently* right, and the current form has difficulty passing to humans and between humans. The problem is that a few simple mutations could overcome that difficulty, and result in improved transmission and very, very big problems. Mokele

Technically it's a chemical, namely a nasty soup of specialized protiens: I helped retrieve a venom sample from a weird little hybrid rattlesnake (cross-*genus* hybrid). Given the genera in question, and the results of hybridization, it could've produced anything from swelling and sickness to rather rapid death. It may not be explosive or acidic, but having significant portions of your internal anatomy liquify/die can be fairly unpleasant. Mokele

Well, it should be testable: if we find oil in non-sedimentary rocks, we can rule out a fossil origin for it (and I'm guessing the abiotic origin theory would or could be developed to predict which non-sedimentary rocks to look at and where to look). Similarly, the fossil fuel theory predicts it would only be found in sedimentary rocks, and if it's mostly matter from ancient multicellular organisms, that restricts it to sedimentary rocks of the last 550 million years or so. Mokele

Bachelor's degree, twice (aerospace eng, then I said to hell with money and went for my dream, biology), currently in Masters for Bio. Mokele