Mokele

Practice, of course, is essential, especially practice in front of other people. Aside from giving you feedback of presentation-related stuff like tone and volume, they may also be able to help with places in the presentation where you haven't explained things as clearly as you thought.

yes, yes, you look young, bravo for you, doesn't prove a thing. You may have been this way regardless, due to genetics alone. And websites and "nutrition" books are dubious sources at the very best - you can find ones that advocate drinking your own urine for health. Can you cite a peer-review scientific paper on this topic, conducted using a high N and double-blind protocol?

How do you know you wouldn't still be that way without vitamins? My MS advisor never bothered with vitamins, and is still *very* fit and healthy in his mid-fifties (as in "bikes 20 miles a day, resting pulse rate of 40" fit). You cannot conclude anything based on a single individual. A valid experiment has more than one replicate, ESPECIALLY in biology, and especially when it's not ammenable to repeated measures analysis. You are reporting an anecdote, nothing more. In order to conduct a *valid* experiment on megadosing vitamins, you'd need at least 500 people in both the control and experimental groups, and a proper double-blind system. It would be even better to try it on a group of lab rats which are as genetically homogeneous as possible. One individual's experience doesn't even come close to being reliable or informative.

Thanks!

Seconded. You cannot assume the effect is linear, and that if 10 mg improves things by X amount, 100 mg will result in 10X improvement. In fact, such simple, linear relationships are incredibly rare in biology.

He's made a critical error in scale - at the scale of most cells, inertial and gravitational forces are completely swamped out by fluid forces. If you shrunk to the size of a large eukaryote cell, you'd feel like you were swimming through syrup. If you shrunk to the size of a bacteria, it'd feel like swimming in tar. Given that cells are almost the same density as the surrounding medium, there's not really much force flattening them. I also wonder how much of a role his model of the cytoskeleton plays compared to osmotic pressurization caused concentration gradient.

Science is about explanation, but prediction is what makes us take an explanation seriously, and what makes it useful.

The air that fills the cells mostly remains, creating a pressure gradient at the cell opening that functions to direct air past it almost as if something solid was in the way. It is indeed pressurized as a result. The flexible membrane also helps, generating a cambered wing, increasing lift. This is actually a big part of how bats fly, and probably played a role in pterosaur flight too.

The problem is that even those definitions are rather vague. A true scientific test requires something a bit more specific, that leads to very specific predictions. But why? What about the definiton leads to the prediction of those capabilities? Why wouldn't you predict otherwise? That's what I mean about the vagueness of the description - it doesn't lead to definite predictions. At most, it can lead to vague implications. There is the opposite approach, though - if we can successfully replicate the 'out of body' or 'near-death' experience via stimulation of certain areas of the brain, that is strong evidence that the experiences are purely neural in origin.

The problem is that 'the soul' is not amenable to testing for several reasons, mostly due to its incompatability with the scientific method. I don't mean "It's dumb because we can't poke it with a stick", but rather that it can't be legitimately tested. In order to test "the soul", you need: 1) A definition of "the soul" - properties, capabilities, etc. Just try to get a universal definition of a soul from a Catholic, Buddhist, and tribal animist. 2) Predictions of the soul's capabilities, thing it should always or never be able to do. Same difficulty as above. 3) Falsification criteria - what results will lead to the conclusion that there definitely is no soul? This is a persistent problem with religious concepts, as any negative result can be explained as "God didn't want it to be detected" or "well my definition is different". Of course, this leaves aside the problem of brain vs. soul. Pretty much everything a person of the street, or even a clergyman, will describe the soul as exists in the brain. Memories, senses, personality, emotions, empathy, all are brain functions. Physical damage has resulted in defects in these aspects of injured humans, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to make a legitimate claim that the physical injury "damaged their soul". But if you take all of these as brain functions, what's left of the soul? Even if it is an "animating energy", how can the animating energy in me which lacks my memory, personality, emotions, etc. be considered "me" in any meaningful way? You may as well say my body's ATP and sugar reserves are "me".

A paraglider cannot hover, because it cannot generate thrust. All forms of gliding, technological and animal, have no thrust, but instead harness the energy of falling. The person or animal jumps off a high point, and they begin to fall. This generates airflow past the wings, which in turn generates lift. The lift reduces gravity, and eventually, all the forces balance out at a fixed angle of descent. More lift = shallower descent.

Except the two systems would be incompatible. Birds have major developmental differences from humans that would render such a fusion lethal very quickly.

Technically, not all theories *need* mathematics, though it can enhance their utility. Consider the Germ Theory of Disease. Or the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Evolution, when first proposed, didn't rely on math at all (it was later found to be useful, once we discovered genes).

Maybe. I know in biology, there's certainly a level of 'diminishing returns'. Once we understand a given system, it's very likely that most other systems are similar due to common descent. As a result, it becomes less and less likely that any new data from previously unexamined organisms will really alter the overall picture. Consider my current field, frog jumping. Once we understand how it works in a few specially selected exemplar species, we've got it mostly nailed down. Adding in 200 more species will give us a bit more resolution and let us examine some more subtle intricacies. But after adding another 1000, even that's pretty complete. Will anything we learn from the remaining 4000 species of frogs really change the picture?

But, while they are composed of people, they *aren't* people, and can never really be treated as such. A big difference is in the effects of laws. If I, as an individual private citizen, dump toxic wastes into the groundwater, resulting in numerous cases of birth defects, cancer, early death, etc, I will go to jail for a very, VERY long time, and in some states might be executed. If a corporation or business does the same, who goes to jail? Sure, they may pay a fine, but it's likely small compared to their profits. The government cannot say "As a punishment, we're taking every single dime of profit you make for the next 30 years", but they can easily send an individual to jail for 30 years, depriving them of a lot more than mere money and property. I'm not trying to say "OMG teh ebil companys!!1!", only to illustrate that a conglomerate, simply by *being* a conglomerate, is fundamentally different from a person, especially in terms of what it can and cannot do, or what can or cannot be done to it. Just as a bee hive is considered a 'super-organism', rather than just a complex organism with multiple bodies, a coglomeration of people of any sort has different properties from an individual. Also, does this mean you support extending corporate law to cover any group of humans, ranging from hobby clubs to trade unions? IMHO, we can't treat them the same, and we collectively need to take a step back and re-adjust our methods of dealing with corporations to ensure it's fair, effective, and realistic, especially the a modern world of instantaneous global commerce.

I don't really have much math in my talks, but I convert all of my graphs and such to image files (usually PNG files) for the same reason. My biggest headache is video - I do animal locomotion, so video is pretty much essential, and causes endless compatibility issues. I usually just turn up an hour before talks start to make sure mine works and/or use my own computer.

Never, EVER use special transitions in Powerpoint (like where the words appear in flames or something). Pick your colors so that colorblind people in the audience can still understand. Back up graphs with different line colors by also having different symbols for the data. Don't talk to the screen, and DON'T just read what's on the slide. For powerpoint, never use text smaller than 18 points. Bullet points are a waste of time and space. If you can use an image, do so. It'll keep the audience's attention much better. And of course, don't forget the best scientific conference presentation ever: Chicken: chicken chicken

But what about the investigation needed to uncover the evidence? That suffers from the same problem: it's politically beneficial justice to one side, and a political witch-hunt to the other. Without the evidence, you can't tell which is right, but without the investigation, you can't get the evidence.

IMHO = In my humble opinion

That got shot down? I remember it from when I was younger and Clinton used it, but then it sort of dropped off the radar.

The great thing about the Founding Fathers is that there were enough of them who lived long enough and wrote enough that you can find a quote for ANYTHING. Quote-mining the FF is practically a national pastime. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedOh, and because this is perfect for this thread:

And? How do you prove your claim? And how do I prove mine? The only way is to keep trying. Maybe I'm right, and that effort will lead to success. Maybe you're right, and that effort will come to naught. But right now, there's not sufficient evidence for either of us to be considered right, so all we can do is keep trying. Well, I say 'we', but I really mean 'people other than me, who don't fall asleep the moment a lecture drops below the whole-organism level'. I dunno, we're persistent little bastards, like mammalian cockroaches.

Another point worth considering is that we've already made substantial progress in robotics and neural interface of computers. Not nearly enough, but it's a very active field.

So does the fact that some bodily functions (let's say circulation, to keep it clean) are moving parallel to his direction of motion and others moving perpendicular matter?

In lobe-fin fish they still do. Ray-fins (most fish) have secondarily lost much of the fin structure. Seriously, go look at the anatomy of the fin of a coelocanth or an Australian lungfish. You'll see a humerus, a radius & ulna, carpals, etc, with nerves and blood vessels in the appropriate places. Sorry, you don't get to disbelieve it. Open any text on human embryology, go to the chapter on urogenital development, and you'll see it, clear as day. Or, get some embryos yourself, human or mouse, dissect them, and see for yourself. You have a microscope, go do it. Then there is no point in continuing this thread. Either you are here to learn, or you aren't. Your unwillingness to face evidence is counter to the very basis of science. If you want to ask questions, you can PM me, but you should not pollute any more evolution threads with your willful refusal to listen to evidence.