Mokele

Are you still in greece? IMHO, the best bet would be the entomologist at the local museum. There's millions of species of beetles, so IDing any particular one is going to be very, very difficult without knowledge of the local fauna.

I think there's a bit more difference between "got a BJ and lied about it" and "massive civil liberties infringement, torture, and willfully lying to lead us into a war". I do agree with the need for caution, but we can't let the mere possibility of partisanship dissuade pursuit of justice. That's why we have bi-partisan commissions, and why we should investigate thoroughly before even bringing any charges. On the other hand, what good will prosecuting and throwing these folks in jail *really* do? The real damage they fear, the real punishment, is damage to their reputations, and all you need to do for that is just release all their secret memos and documents. Let everyone see their actions and judge for themselves. If it's that bad, they'll be condemned to a place of infamy in history, simply based on their actions.

I actually recall a funny experiment done with regards to 'Out of body experiences' or 'near death experiences'. A lot happen in hospitals, for obvious reasons, so a surgeon put a huge smiley face on the top of one of the lamps in the OR. Everyone who claimed to have 'looked down on the surgery' somehow missed the giant smiley.

Well, once we accomplish it in the lab, repeat the experiment with various parameters, both slight variations of the sucessful one and more dramatic variations based on the geochemistry of planets we know of (hopefully by this point we'll have better information about the exoplanets we've found so far). This could give a good estimate of how likely it is. More directly, in the far future once we're out in the void playing Star Trek, we can count up the planets with life versus those without, then discount any planets which gained life from elsewhere, either via panspermia or actual colonization by other spacefaring races. Of course, this means we can't know *now*, but the same thing can be said for a lot of issues in science, and there's still plenty of interesting work to be done on the subject until then.

I've got a landline because it's *way* cheaper to pay for the landline and get their plan for international calls than to pay the exorbitant rate of cell phones for international calls.

1% of the population has a supernumerary kidney (third kidney). And technically all humans have 6 kidneys, 3 on each side, but two of the three wither away and never become functional. The first of these kidneys, the pronephros, is the functional kidney of the fish. The second is the kidney of amphibians and reptiles. Both wither away, leaving only the opisthonephros as our functional kidney. So, unless we evolved from earlier life forms, can you explain why we transiently have fish and frog kidneys? Fish already have "legs" - legs are just modified fins. We actually know the developmental basis for the switch, too. Nope. Look at frogs of genus Xenopus. They're undergone multiple whole-genome duplications. You and I have 2 copies of each gene. Species of Xenopus can have 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, or even 12 copies of each gene. Whole-genome duplication appears to be relatively common in ectothermic vertebrates.

Blah blah blah, more of your typical dodging of the question. You asserted, and I quote "I feel the President (Govenors) are in some manner above the law, let me clear this up now; YES" Can you actually offer up any defense of this, or any response to our objections? Because so far, you've failed utterly to do anything but dodge the question. Justify your position.

Agreed, but there is just as much, if not more, danger in the other extreme, which asserts that the government or executive branch are above the law entirely.

No, but we cannot rule them out on the basis of lack of current taxa. That doesn't mean they existed. It doesn't even mean that if they did exist, they were anything but a dead end. But it also means we cannot simply assume they did not. By analogy, we have no fossils of definitively arboreal dinosaurs (at least outside of birds), but we cannot rule out the possibility that they existed and have either not been found or not been preserved. An entire sub-field of paleontology relies on this, specifically the claim for 'trees-down' evolution of flight in birds. False dichotomy. Something can happen more than once and not be 'inevitable'. Consider powered flight: it's happened 4 times (5 if you count our use of technology), but it's hardly an inevitability (I strongly doubt we'll ever see flying turtles).

Yes, even after being told about gene duplication and even polyploidy (whole genome duplication).

Yes, but there are limits. What you argue for is unlimited power. Our entire system of government is based on the idea that the government is answerable to the people. Any government which is *not* answerable to the people is inherently tyrannical, and should be overthrown, violently if necessary. Flat-out wrong. Read a history book. Which is why we should put them on trial. If they were justified, then the trial will find that. Cry me a freaking river. Soldiers are not robots - they have the ability to refuse an order they consider unethical or illegal. By your logic, the individual Nazis bore no responsibility, when in fact the willful capitulation of the populace is what allowed the atrocities in the first place. "I was just following orders" isn't just a worthless defense, it's a complete disavowal that they even are a person, or anything more than a meat-robot.

I suspect it was something more reasonable, like 30-40 lbs, and possibly not in a standing position, but over the years, the story became exaggerated.

This is beyond wrong - this sentiment is absolutely contrary to every aspect of a free and just society. If the President is so cowardly and weak that they cannot stomach the thought of being held responsible for their actions and orders, they should be thrown out, immediately. A fundamental principle of our society is that YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS. It doesn't matter if those actions affect 1 person or 100 million, if you decide and act (or give orders to act), you are responsible for that decision. How far do you extend this twisted logic, jackson33? Should a CEO who knowingly issued orders to market products they knew to be unsafe/dangerous not be held accountable? OMG, that might make the President's job, like, Hard and stuff! If you want an executive branch without accountability, you want a dictatorship.

Exactly, but for it to still be on the books almost 60 years later? Either there's enough support for it to make removal politically unfeasible (which is pretty bad), or they're just *really* lazy about updating rules (which makes me wonder if they still have immigration quotas for the Holy Roman Empire).

Yes and no. There is a general set of rules, but this in turn generates a specific list of individuals who are denied entry due to breaking those rules. US immigration & customs is an odd place, and frequently operates on "guilty until proven innocent" for anyone with a foreign passport. And some of the rules are *weird*. My wife recently went through the interview to become a permanent resident, and two of the questions were "Have you ever been involved in espionage against the US?" (answer: "yes, I'm the worst spy ever because I tell anyone who asks") and, a bit more disturbingly, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?". I'm serious about the last one, it was actually legitimately asked, meaning that we also discriminate about who we let in on the basis of ideology.

I think you mean alleles, and yes, a large part of it is selection on standing genetic diversity (aided by the fact that leg length is surely controlled by many genes, rather than just one). I also simplified by leaving out sexual selection - males are highly territorial, with elaborate mating displays, so there's a very high degree of asymmetry in reproductive output. A male with a good leg length (which also helps catch prey) will grow larger and attractively colored, and mate with a LOT of females. This could conceivably amplify selective advantage and increase the speed of evolution.

I think you're considering mutation in too simplistic and Mendelian a light. Remember, there are mutations for continuous traits like height and fur color. A mutation in a gene for height wouldn't be lethal because there are many genes controlling this property - at most, it would make the individual smaller, which in some situations (islands where food is scarce, for example), would be an advantage. Two of the most popular evolutionary systems in my field rely on such continuous traits - the leg length of small island lizards of the genus Anolis, and the length of various jaw bones in Labrid fishes. You might find the lizard example helpful. Basically, throughout the Caribbean, there are these small lizards called anoles (you've probably also seen them in pet stores, often erroneously marketed at 'chameleons', or seen them in visits to FL or the southern USA). Like most lizards, they're quite fast, and run to escape predators. Leg length is a major component of speed - longer legs mean longer strides. But longer legs also interfere with movement in dense arboreal habitats. So each lizard adapts to its habitat: lizards on trunks have long legs, lizards out in the bushes and tips of tree branches have short legs. The lizards can be sorted into a handful of 'ecomorphs' - different species which inhabit the same niche of different islands, thus have the same leg length. Now here's the cool part: the evolution is repeatable, predictable and observable on human time scales (within years). You can drop any anole off on any island and accurately predict what you'll find when you get back purely based on the structure of the plant life (low scrub vs trees, etc.). And we've actually done it. We've observed singificant morphological change in just a few years, and what's more we can predict the direction of evolution for this system.

I dealt with your last posts because they were so incoherent that I suspected you were drunk, stoned, or both when posting it. Seriously, I head more coherent screeds from people too drunk to stand. This seems marginally coherent, on the other hand, so it can stay.

Actually, that doesn't change anything. Think of it like a chain - all the links are under the same force. The deltoid is the only really substantial muscle capable of abducting the shoulder joint (the supraspinatus is pretty pathetic), so logically, it must bear pretty much all of the force. If he's keeping his elbow steady with his biceps and brachialis, these two muscles must also bear all the force. Ditto at the wrist. Muscles in a limb add up in the case of work and power, but in the case of force, every joint must resist the force, otherwise, it would bend. Training can indeed affect a lot of things. But some aspects of our physiology are written into our genes, or limited by the physics of our bodies. Training can increase power, and can make muscles bigger, but cannot alter the isometric force per unit area - that's a property of the actin and myosin molecules. Even leaving aside the "links in a chain" aspect, length doesn't influence muscle force, only work and power. Cross-sectional area alone determines force. So have I, but always within the realm of known physics and biomechanics. A lot of what small guys do is precisely because of the cross-sectional area issue. If I shrink to 1/2 of my current height, my muscles are 1/4th their current CS area, but my total mass is 1/8th. That means I can bench press a higher fraction of my body weight. (I could jump higher relative to my height, but that has to do with more complex issues of scaling at the level of the muscle cells.)

I'm skeptical of the barbell story. Even if we grant him infinite muscular strength, he'd have to lean back at a very sharp angle to counterbalance. He'd also need deltoids the size of his head. Training can do a lot, but it *cannot* change the maximal force per cross-sectional area of a muscle. Not unless he had obliquely-striated muscle, and while Bruce Lee was a lot of things, I'm fairly certain he wasn't a squid. ----- Addendum: Some ballpark calculations would require his deltoid to have an effective cross-sectional area of 56 cm2. Accounting for the fact that it's a pennate muscle, that's a slab of meat thicker than a grown man's leg. Even if I'm off two-fold (unlikely), it would still require a physique which would look monstrous on the Incredible Hulk, let alone a small human.

Just because it's not around today doesn't mean it's not possible. If we judge solely by what exists today, we'd say no terrestrial animal can weigh more than an African elephant. Given than molecules don't fossilize well, we're left trying to judge the past by a paltry selection of species that happen to be currently around, which is never a good idea.

What change?

I think you're extrapolating too far from a small trend. Yes, homeschooling is increasing, but at what percentage? From 1% to 3% of kids is a three-fold increase, but you cannot extrapolate from there to 30%, because the system probably isn't linear, and you'll hit some sort of limit or carrying capacity. I honestly think the biggest limit is going to be effort and willingness. People who homeschool do so for a variety of reasons, but all boil down to that the schools suck and they want their kids to have a better education. Most people, however, don't want their kids to have a better education, not really. Oh, they say they do, and pay lip service to the idea, but time and time again we've been shown that people won't even sacrifice a 0.25% tax hike or 1 hour after school to achieve better education. If they won't make such minimal effort, why would they make the much greater effort to homeschool? You're absolutely right that it's not just the rich or the PhDs, but it is just the motivated. And you'd be surprised just how unmotivated and uncaring the vast majority of this society really is about education.

The ribosomes in rough ER only make transmembrane proteins, those proteins which cross cell membranes. The ribosomes floating free in the cytoplasm make proteins which likewise float around inside the cell. Not all viri are retroviri - most viri use DNA. The difference between retroviral RNA and mRNA is what happens to them more than structure - one is made into a protein, the other is reverse-transcribed into the cell's nuclear DNA.

Were they feeding, or just checking the spiders out?