Mokele

No worries, it's always a good idea to report potential glitches.

It only looks like a fish to you because you first saw it as a fish. Re-write the program so it shows these equations flipped 90 degrees, show them to other people, and I guarantee they'll see different things from you. It's nothing more than a sophisticated Rorschach (inkblot) test. Show someone a symmetrical image, and they'll find something it looks like. That you can come up with images that look like animals is basically irrelevant, testifying to little more than the inventiveness of the human mind and the prevalence of bilateral symmetry in animals. There's a few serious questions that need to be addressed here: 1) Why, prior to even running the program, would you expect there to be any resemblance? 2) Why would this have any great insight, considering that actual fractal patterns in nature are the exception, not the rule. Most organisms display *no* level of fractal organization. 3) Is there any underlying basis to numbers/variables that you claim produce "animal-like" shapes? Or are you just running numbers until the shapes look right? 4) What about numbers/variables that don't give you the desired results? 5) Is it even possible to produce a pattern that doesn't look like some animal somewhere, especially considering the vast diversity of past and present shapes? 6) How similar does a shape have to be in order to be consider "resembling" a given animal? 7) If you're considering even broad similarities as meaningful, how do you distinguish between similar animals (ie a snake vs a worm vs an eel vs a blade of grass). 8) What is your basis for discarding IDs are fungi or plants? 9) Does the whole organism have to be present, or do you accept 'organs', such a flowers or fruit? However, most important by far: 10) The CORE of the scientific method is falsification of hypotheses. Every scientific theory must have criteria which will invalidate them if found to be true. What are your criteria? 11) The primary application of the scientific method is testing hypotheses, often against competing hypotheses. How would you test your hypothesis (that these fractals are somehow informative) against mine (that they're the human mind applying patterns to random symmetrical images). My hypothesis predicts that a viewer would be able to find *something* in the natural world for *any* fractal, and would additionally be able to do so for any bilaterally symmetric inkblot, but that this would fair when the constraint of symmetry was removed. What is your prediction, and how would you test it? Remember 10 & 11 are science. All of it. Anything which cannot answer those is not science. Also, lest you think I'm being too harsh, this is how science works. I've gotten and given reviews far harsher than this on legitimate scientific papers that had solid backing and no serious methodological flaws. It's a harsh world, and you have to be prepared to have every aspect of your work scrutinized in microscopic detail.

Ok, there are aspects of this post that are right, and aspects that are wrong. Firstly, yes, there is a level of mathematical logic behind organism forms, and in some cases, a level of 'recursion' which can yield fractal-like forms, particularly in the forms of plants and flowers, which tend to have relatively simple, repeated developmental programs. However, the "fish" is, at best, illusory. You see a fish because your mind is specifically programmed to find patterns - the same reason many optical illusions work. The outlines of scales, muscles, nerves, blood vessels all do not exist (a dead giveaway is that your 'fish' is symmetrical about the horizontal axis, while real fish are highly asymmetrical about this axis, especially internally). I've dissected a fair few fish in my day, and can assure you that nothing in that picture actually resembles the true anatomy of a fish. The pectoral and pelvic fins are entirely absent, the tail shows a diphycercal morphology seen only in lobe-fin fish, the gills and complexities of the skull are missing, and there is a large amount of extraneous 'stuff' around the posterior end of the "fish". Actual musculature of fish bears at best a superficial resemblance to your image, and your nerves and blood vessels do not correspond to any anatomical locations. So, sorry to disappoint, but it's really nothing more than a pattern that your brain has forced to fit into the 'fish' shape. A 90 degree rotation makes it a fountain or a mushroom just as convincingly. It doesn't really tell us anything about fish, or biology as a whole.

Well, in my browser (Firefox), the 'approve' button cannot be unselected. Can it in yours?

Nyquil is all palliative ingredients - they stop the symptoms, not the disease. If it's allergy-based, the antihistamines might actually stop the root cause, but that's about it. It shouldn't affect the length of time it takes to get well in either way, though it may help your immune system function better by reducing your stress level and letting you get a good night's rest. But that's about it.

Pretty much. It's been suggested before, but there's never really been enough demand or enough threads to make it worthwhile.

Cite references, please. Diseases are caused by pathogens, not poor soil. So the spores are going to get us? FYI, spores are dormant, not dividing. What "mutant spore loop"? Please, cite some sources for your claims.

"If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies." — Jon Stewart

Cite sources for your ridiculous claims.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm suspicious that it accounts for any real differences in strength. Unfortunately, the best/easiest way to resolve it would be in-situ muscle physchiology, and I highly doubt anyone will get approval to lop off some human and chimp arms to test it.

Not for the same purpose, but: The purple pitcher plant collects rain in order to drown insects and digest them. Nepenthes ampullaria has a similar setup, but is suspected of being herbivorous, capturing falling leaves, soaking them in water, and digesting them for their minerals and nutrients. There may well be others, but these are the two that I know of. Neither use the water to keep hydrated, as both live in very damp, boggy habitats.

One thing to keep in mind that that these disorders may have *always* been prevalent, and it's only now that we either a) are getter better at detecting them, b) have effective treatment options, or c) both a & b.

For alpha and beta radiation, sure, but will they affect gamma? Probably, but simple density is part of what makes good shielding - the more atoms the radiation runs into, the more likely it'll be absorbed/blocked/whatever. True, but wouldn't it make more sense, if you're going to spend the effort to haul the counterweight up there anyway, to make it functional in some way. Then again, I guess it doesn't need to be living space to be functional - it could be just batteries, water stores, CO2 scrubbers, etc, all connected via the cable.

Assuming they're possible, yes. But, as I understand it, the former isn't really feasible (you'd need a LOT of lead), and the latter would require one of those big, wheel-shaped spinning stations like in 2001, and I highly doubt we have the money for that. Radiation concerns are actually pretty big, and IIRC, were getting some serious discussion during the whole "let's go to mars" thing, since that would involve months and months away from any sort of protection.

Read the rest of the thread. Between the physiological issues and the radiation level, no human could carry a fetus to term.

Anything that involves humans + wings is pretty much rubbish.

See here. Unfortunately, this only shows the overall animal. I recently got to speak with a guy who's worked with some of the original skeletal material who described the humerus (upper arm bone) as bigger than his chest (he was a pretty small, slender guy, but still...). Not just longer, wider too, in order to better resist the torques and bending stress. The bones were hollow, but huge.

Things to think about: 1) In order for a disorder to be sex-linked, what chromosomes must it be on. 2) Given what you know about dominant and recessive genes and the human XX-XY sex system, would it be possible for women to ever show a disease more commonly? Work through examples in your head to try it out.

Sperm are constantly replenished, at a rate of millions per hour.

Because it's under pressure - rising magma is no more mysterious than why a beer can sprays up if you shake it before opening it. Given that the core is a solid piece of metal, no. Give even one example. If there are no possible mechanisms, then a theory is worthless speculation. The *proper* way to do things is to formulate your idea, develop specific predictions that can be tested and falsified, and then test those predictions. However, that's already happened - seismology proves you wrong. If the earth were expanding, it would be hollowing out, yet seismic waves traveling through the center of the earth show *no* evidence of a drop in density due to any sort of 'hollow'. The alternative is that mass is somehow increasing, which is utterly ridiculous and lacks any sort of reasonable explanation. And we know density has remained constant, because volcanic rock has the same density now as it did 400 million years ago, and before. I know you like this idea, but part of science is being willing to let go when a concept is shown to be wrong, as this conclusively has been.

Actually, there may be a legitimate physiological difference: Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Link 4 It's far from resolved, but it's certainly an interesting study system.

Do you mean "blood diseases" as in genetic diseases which affect the blood, or do you mean blood diseases such as malaria or HIV?

This seemed fairly clear to me.

It depends on the precise focus of the topic. Morality, in the broad, philosophical sense, Good and Evil with capital letters is problematic at best. However, 'morals' can also be understood as behavior, and why humans do what they do is a legitimate scientific question, as is evaluating the hypothesis that morals are a result of our evolution as a social troop primate.

Yes and no - CA does have civil unions (termed Domestic Partnerships there) which grant almost all the rights of marriage. According to that most venerable of sources, wikipedia, there are several differences between the two, mostly minor but a few more substantial. It does make a good point that if/when DOMA is repealed, a DP wouldn't gain federal recognition, while a marriage would, and that international entities may recognize same-sex marriages but not DPs. Of course, there's also the very strong argument that the government does not have any compelling, justifiable reason to restrict the use of the word 'marriage'.