Mokele

I vaguely recall it being the 21st, actually, but I'm not totally sure either. Inbreeding basically decreases the heterozygosity of a population, driving it toward being exclusively homozygotes (which might be good or bad for you, depending on what you're homozygous for) at all loci. So, if the population already has some Downes alleles, you'll get a lot more expression of them in an inbred population. If there's no alleles, it won't show up at all until mutation creates it (and, for small populations, that's not very likely). Mokele

my radioactivity destroys all film and CCD displays near me. But there are many fine films of me destroying Tokyo and fighting other giant monsters.

Why should we care about either of these? As I just showed above, both are horribly flawed and thus should not used as a litmus test of the desirability of this or anything else. Mokele

I would post my residence and vehicle, but secret underground lairs don't look like much from outside, and you'll all see the giant spider robots soon...*very* soon... BWHAHAHAHAHA!

Yes, but that's why in most places you have to go outside to smoke. To be honest, the vaporous products are the only real gripe I have about cigs. Aside from the possible pollution of my air, there's no reason people shouldn't be allowed to poison themselves, if they wish. Mokele

I've been poking around recently about asteroids and, more specifically, what happens when one hits us. Cratering is fairly obvious, but much of what I read concerned asteroids 'exploding' in the atmosphere, and indicates that it's fairly frequent. What I'm a bit fuzzy on is exactly how an large lump of fairly inert rock can 'explode'. The first idea that comes to my head is that it's like when a piece of material under force loading finally breaks; the sudden failure produces a pressure wave which, when it reaches our ears, if percieved as sound. So, is the explosion of an asteroid in the atmosphere basically a big version of the same principle, just under a lot more force and producing a much more powerful shockwave when it finally breaks under the forces it's experiencing? Mokele

Very interesting stuff, thanks! However, I have a less technical, more historical question: I know that 'vitamin' comes from 'vital amine', because they thought, early on, that all vitamins were amines, but what's the etymology of 'hormone'? Mokele

Interesting, but, in my opinion, flawed. I, personally, think the first guideline is useless, as I don't believe there is any absolute morality (unless it refers to the person's individual ethical/moral code). The second means that working out at the gym is immoral, since the pain and effort are undesirable, but are tolerated in order to aquire the desired effect. The third guideline also falls afoul of that example. The fourth seems less like a moral/immoral guideline and more like an index of "are you wasting your time doing this?" But isn't that the naturalistic fallacy? Just because it's found in nature, or our natural course of action, it's good? Murder comes very naturally to some people, does that make it good for those individuals to murder? Infanticide also appears to be an instinctual reaction, triggered by certain stimuli, as can be seen by it's widespread practice. Does that make it acceptible? A thousand other things, like selfishness and mate-stealing, are also natural instincts. But would it, necessarily? If it's legal only when x number of physicians along with a few psychologists have gone over the person's case, then that should prevent anyone but the genuinely terminally ill who make the decision while in sound mind from receiving PAS. Also, would the slippery slope really be that bad? The ending would just be making suicide legal, and why is that such a bad thing? Sure, people will make mistakes and kill themselves over things like their girlfriend dumping them, but freedom connotates freedom to err, even if that error has lethal consequences. ----- I just find it slightly hypocritical that a society can say "You are free to live your life as you wish (providing that it doesn't infringe on the rights of others to do the same)", but then turn around and say "But you aren't free to end your life on your own terms in accordance with your own wishes, even if doing so does not infringe the rights of others." Freedom to do something how you want logically includes the freedom to not do it at all, even if the "something" is "living". Mokele

Friendliness does not denote intelligence, but does make it more accessible. There's plenty of animals what are quite smart, but would sooner turn you into dinner than be your friend. Possible, but even that doesn't generalize to animals which are ambush hunters, who's natural reaction to prey is to freeze and wait for the prey to come to them. See, this is the problem, for every solution, there's an exception. Here's another interesting issue: is speed of problem solving really the best index of intelligence? What about how effectively they solve it? Is a fast but mostly rote answer truly comparable to a slow answer that demonstrates what appears to be genuine understanding of the underlying concepts? Yep, I've got omnipresence down, now to work on omnipotence. I'm like a geeky god with no life and too much spare time. Mokele

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right." --Gandhi

What exactly are these two things? IMHO, having a right to live your life as you please (basic freedom) also incorporates a right to end your life as you please. Mokele

There's no really simple was to explain the dependency on velocity. Ok, air, water, any fluid is viscous. Some fluids, like gasses, have very low viscosity, others, like syrup, have very high viscosity. Basically, in crude terms, viscosity is a measure of how "sticky" the particles/molecules are, both to each other and to other surfaces. When any object is moving in a fluid the molecules that touch it's surface are "stuck", and don't move. Those molecules slow down other fluid molecules, almost but not quite to a stop. The next layer is slowed a little less, and so on until you get to no slowing at all. This slowed-down layer is called the boundary layer. Now, if you think about it, the faster the object is moving, the farther away the fluid will be that's not slowed down (in other words, the faster you go, the thicker the boundary layer gets). This means there's a greater mass of air that's "tagging along" as speed increases. A ball that's moving through fluid has a certain amount of kinetic energy. If there were no viscous forces at all, there would be almost no drag (not entirely true, but the non-viscous drag forces can be ungodly complex, so I'll ignore them here). But, with a viscous fluid, you have a boundary layer of slowed fluid. In order to slow something down, you have to exert a force on it, and do work on it. This work comes from the kinetic energy of the ball, slowing it down, and goes into the boundary layer. If you think about it from the perspective of the still air, this thing comes zooming through, and both forces molecules out of the way, but also grabs some and imparts velocity to them, thereby decreasing the object's velocity. Mokele

Yes, and the same for gravel. However, both need to be sterile, or mostly so, to prevent unwanted bacteria. You can buy the right bacteria at a fish store in a bottle. Either sand or gravel works, but I prefer gravel, because I can use an under-gravel filter to draw water through it, improving the effectiveness of the bacteria.

The plain fact of the matter is there is little consensus among those studying the subject of what constitutes intelligence and how to define it in an experimental (or non-experimental) setting without falling victim to numerous biases. Memory tasks obviously can't be used. Learning? Some species might form associations quickly, but do they really understand them? How do you truly test understanding? How do you design a test that's suitable for comparisons between species that isn't biased by their different behavioral tendencies and mental priorities? How do you reliably differentiate between complex bheavior and intelligent behavior in a way that can be generalized across species? Then, of course, you have the worst part: trying to get the animals to do what you want them to do in the experiment, as opposed to what *they* want to do. If I'm testing monitor lizard learning, I obviously won't get anything from the lizards that insist on doing nothing but trying to bite me, but is eliminating them from the test biasing the sample? How do you account for that possible biasing? It's even more complicated by the fact that inteligence doesn't appear to fall out neatly in broad phylogenetic lines. Octopi are smart (or seem to be), but as best we can tell, squid are pretty dim. Skinks are pretty dense too, but monitor lizards display some astonishing feats of learning and understanding, even problem-solving, providing the context involve either food or hurting their keeper (yes, guess what I have a scar from). And from what I've heard, sea lions are rather clever, but seals aren't terribly great. Crocodiles can make their distant cousins, birds, look mentally retarded. Actually pinning down animal intelligence is pretty tricky, and even the brain-body ration, while seemingly ok for mammals, fails horribly in many cases, such as racoons or, in non-mammals, some snakes (the common water moccassin displays some astonishing levels of learning in captivity, providing the learning is associated with food). There's also the problem of annecdotal evidence. Animals can do one thing that seems very smart, but when you try to test it or get repeatability (especially in different individuals) it either doesn't work or take so much time that it's not worth it. On top of that, we have observer bias. We look into a dog's big-eyed, mammalian visage and see inteligence, even if this is the same animal that repeatedly tried to eat wasps last summer, in spite of being stung many times in the mouth. But we look at a crocodile, and dismiss it as slow and stupid, which, as any keeper or handler with attest to, myself included, they are anything but. So, as of yet, there's no indisputible way to say one animal is smarter than another. In fact, to quote Douglas Adams, "...on planet Earth, man had always assumed he was more intelligent than dolphins because he achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars, and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons." Mokele

Yes, though their final speeds would be different if both had the same shape, since the force of gravity depends on mass, but the force of drag depends on surface area and velocity. Oh, and drag = air resistance

Of course, sand without bacteria is useless, but very particular bacertia is needed. But you can buy those at any fish store. However, why screw with the sand when you can just buy aquarium gravel and dump it right in?

Yep, the good ole shifting goalposts. That's why I tend to not bother with such debates.

I vaguely recall hearing that had been done, at least in the case of Adam and Eve and Noah's menagerie, based on some calculations that you cannot form a population based solely on 2 individuals, because of inbreeding effects being so severe at that extreme. I'm not really sure if that counts as evolution disproving it though. I mean, inbreeding does violate Hardy-Weinberg, and cause gene-frequency alterations, so maybe, in a way... Mokele

Well, I *technically* have about 40 fish. I say "technically", because they exist merely as a food source for a large, aquatic amphibian, an eel-like salamander called a siren. However, the way you keep aquatic amphibians is mostly the same as fish, except for food. I'd think you can just buy fish food for it at any pet store. The major things in a fish tank are: 1) water 2) what's in the water. For water, I just buy spring water. Don't use distilled water, as that'll suck the minerals right out of your fish and kill it. As for everything else, you've got two things to worry about: Oxygen and ammonia. Oxygen is easily supplied via an air-stone with an attached pump. The ammonia is the hard part. There are only two real solutions: lots and lots of annoying water changes, or biological filtration. I use the latter, mostly because 2 foot amphibians produce *lots* of waste. The basic gist is that you have a gravel bottom (sometimes with an under-gravel filter that draws water down, through the gravel, before spitting it out on the surface), and bacteria lives in the gravel. The bacteria turn the amonia into nitrite, which another group of bacterai turn into nitrate. The nitrate can be used by any aquarium plants to fuel their growth. I resorted to pothos (a common house plant), because aquarium plants are just too delicate for my animal, but most pet stores should have enough plants for your needs. My tank needs only minimal maintenance, thanks to the biological filtration, but it took me weeks and over $100 to get it set up. Now, it won't take you anywhere *near* that, because unless you've got one hell of a big fish, your tank will be a lot smaller and the waste will be a lot less. But the effort really pays off in the long run. Mokele

Isn't that niche already taken by televangelists and lotteries? Oh, wait, my bad, I was thinking people's stupidity had limits.

two of my favorites, though neither is me: In Honors Ochem lab, I was making a particular compound, and thought I had it. So, I put some in an NMR tube, and put some more in one of those little plastic conical vials with the snap top that the TA had, so we could use it for mass spec later. So we're sitting there in the NMR room, waiting for it to work (bad OS on the computer), and I see him take a plastic vial out of his pocket and start chewing on it. I ask him, and he says he always keeps a few for that, since it beats chewing on pen caps. We think nothing more of it until we go do the mass spec. He asks me for the sample, I tell him I gave it to him already. He gets this "oh ****" expression and takes out the tube he was chewing on, and sees a few flecks of white substance. His reply: "Well, that explains the headache I got." Another one is second hand: My prof did some studies on the energetics of sidewinding, which involved putting a respirometry mask on sidewinder rattlesnakes. Basically, he's just glue it to them, and then use a solvent to remove it, without any harm to the animal, thanks to their scales. One time, however, he was gluing the mask on, and accidentally glued himself to the snake (they weren't anaesthatized, as that's a very risky proposition for herps). Fortunately, he was able to strain and reach the solvent, but there was a few moments of "Oh ****, I'm glued to a venomous snake that's in a *very* foul mood." Sadly, I don't have any stories of myself yet that aren't boring and mundane, or are basically just tales of the hazards of reptile handling. Mokele

I posted these URLs on a more political board I was on, and someone posted the following URL: County-by-county map adjusted so the size of the county reflects the population

Dog? Hey, what about those four teenagers and their shark friend, Jabberjaw? C'mon, show the shark some love.

I know, but in my experiences so far, they all tend to wind up this way, no matter how promising they start out. But that's merely annecdotal, and doesn't prove it can't happen. But it does prove I'm a cynic.

Ok, I'm guessing this would be the best place for this thread. Let's start off by saying that I, personally, don't believe in it. This is one of those "speculation as entertainment" things. If there was something in there, what would it be? A case of mistaken identity with a known species? an unknown species? a plesiosaur? an alien? What justification can you offer for your pseudo-theory? Happy speculating! Mokele