Mokele

Did you see the cartoons iNow posted? This guy has made a 'career' out of disparaging minorities, and most of his cartoons are FAR less ambiguous than the one this thread is about. This latest one is merely a drop in the overflowing crap-bucket.

Fire the cartoonist. Not just because of this, either. Part of the broader context of this is that this particular cartoonist has a *long* history of cartoons which overtly make fun of minorities of various sorts. This is actually better than his usual, simply because in the others, there's *no* ambiguity. First, nobody is saying "what he really meant was", but merely that there is an obvious alternate interpretation that he should have been aware of, and that as a consequence, it reinforces existing inequalities. See Clerks 2 for Randall's accidental racism - it doesn't have to be intentional or conscious to be offensive. That 'extra information' is so prevalent that it should be astonishing more people *didn't* add it. Whether *you* found it 'easy' or not is irrelevant - empirically, a lot of people do, otherwise there wouldn't have been such an outcry. Just because you can't see the racism/sexism/homophobia/whatever of something doesn't mean it's not there, and just because those who experience discrimination see what you don't doesn't mean they're being oversensitive or 'trying to see it'. Mokele

Depends on what you mean by "a physical problem". My field is at the macroscopic interaction of biology and physics, and we solve problems such as "how animals walk/run" and suchlike, often much better than robotics could do alone. And of course, there's biologically-inspired design, such as trying to create a material with similar dry adhesion capabilities as gecko toe-pads.

Whether it's mis-interpreted or not is besides the point - it pulls on racist imagery and is readily and easily interpreted as racist. Right or wrong, that interpretation reinforces the existing inequalities and perpetuates stereotypes. That the author was too ignorant to see the obvious double-meaning does not make the result any less offensive.

No, we can't replace genes and we don't have nanobots. We're close on each, but both are nowhere near actual implementation. Wrong. Cells age due to damage accumulated via metabolism - there is no possible way to stop or cure it.

Oh, for f***'s sake.... Have we not learned that this thread inevitably devolves into flaming?

Therein lies the problem - because of Obama's involvement in the stimulus bill, the interpretation of the ape representing him is *far* from unusual. That's what I first thought of, and I was familiar with the rampaging chimp incident prior to viewing the cartoon. The fact that this highly prevalent "black men = apes" concept did not occur to many readers is itself a manifestation of the inherent privilege that comes from being white and therefore either not being exposed at all to the concept or having the luxury of forgetting it or not paying attention. Strawman. It's about the context. In order to invoke these negative associations, there has to actually *be* an association. For instance, if on a TV show, one character calls another "Big-nose", the insult takes on a totally different meaning if the insultee is known to be Jewish. Ditto for 'greasy' if the insultee is Italian, or a hundred other possibilities. It's not the word itself that' bad, it's when there's a clear connection to an existing discriminatory stereotype. Remember, language is not mind-reading. We encode our thoughts into a clumsy and sometimes ambiguous communication system, and the receiver must *actively* decode what we say, based on their own knowledge and understanding. When the result of that decoding is a message that the minority listener is somehow inferior or unwelcome, the message has reinforced the discriminatory nature of society towards this individual and perpetuated it. Even if ambiguous, the statements need to be called out, because if they are not, that silence creates the impression that it's OK to make such statements even if you *do* mean them in a racist way. Remember, it's not just African Americans who saw this cartoon as the cops shooting the President, and not all of the white people who saw it that way were outraged - some probably thought it was hilarious. It *must* be challenged, if only so that those idiots will keep quiet and know their views are not acceptable in civilized society.

Intent is irrelevant. From one of my favorite blogs, a post on this at Shakesville:

As much as it pains me to say it, Tango *does* have a point - dark matter has never been directly observed, and the evidence for it is circumstantial, leaving open the possibility of some alternative explanation. Maybe it's the biologist in me, but I don't trust something we haven't directly detected (otherwise, I'd believe in Bigfoot).

Clearly you don't understand how science works: what happens if your theory is only wrong on *some* things, but right on others? Correct answer: you modify the theory so it accords with experimental results. After all, there's not some sort of rule that you have to get everything right on the first try. Shit, look at genetics - we've come a long way from Mendel, but everything is just additions, modifications, and special cases.

Answers In Genesis is a creationist website. They've put outright false information up there, and basically everything on that site is bullshit. If your ideas agree with anything creationists say, it's time to re-evaluate your ideas.

Honestly, I have no idea. If you have any concerns, though, I'd bring them up ASAP with your physical therapist (I'm assuming you have one, due to the nature of the injury).

Correct, but only due to the properties of muscles. A robot would notice no such difference.

Thymine is more stable than Uracil

From a purely physical standpoint, the energy input and output (as well as the power) must be the same, otherwise the lever would create or destroy energy. From a biological standpoint, a lever system that minimizes displacement and velocity will require less metabolic energy, because the efficiency of converting metabolic energy to mechanical energy goes down the faster and greater magnitude the muscle contraction.

Yeah, if only we had people whose sole job was to read and debate these bills, while representing our interests. Also, I strongly disagree with "sneaking" it in - it's no more a 'sneak' than the sections of the bill giving tax cuts or funding roads and bridges. It's within the purpose and purview of the bill, namely providing economic stimulus, albeit via an unusual route.

I think the public had every right to know, and easily could have known simply by looking up the bill, even without anyone making an issue of it. I think it should have been funded, but I also think it should have been more widely known, as I think it would have been kept if it was - it was a comparatively tiny sum and the public is generally supportive of the sciences. So, to summarize: I support transparency regardless of whether the item is something I agree with or not, and I fail to see any evidence of trickery or concealment with regards to NSF funding in the stimulus bill.

Sorry, I'm just not convinced. The stimulus bill is, by it's nature, just a long list of expenses and tax cuts - things are no more 'hidden' than eggs are 'hidden' in my grocery list. In contrast, budgeting for less than you'll actually pay doctors for medicare services, then simply paying them the full amount, that's a sleazy way to make the numbers look good.

How on earth does that have anything to do with transparency? You're talking about concealing motives, I'm talking about concealing actual costs. We can bicker about which is worse, but they are indisputably different. Let's say I'm selling you a car. There's a big difference between trying to sell you the sunroof option for an extra $150, and me selling you the car for $15k, then charging you $17k for it via hidden costs and accounting tricks. The former is just sales, the latter is outright theft. You're verging on strawman here by trying to lump these two highly dissimilar things together. Transparency is about revealing what the government *does*, not motive. The only way to assess motive is to require 24/7 fMRI scans of everyone in Congress.

I guess I'll resurrect this thread to give a good answer: The human body is actually mostly 1st and 3rd class levers. Consider your elbow. Hold your upper arm against your body, and bend your elbow 90 degrees. Your triceps is acting as a 1st class lever (the in and out forces are on opposite sides of the fulcrum), while your biceps is a 3rd-class lever (the forces are on the same size, with the muscular in-force closer to the fulcrum). A second-class lever in your body would be your jaw at the molars, which function just like a nutcracker. The effects of switching to second-class levers would be increased force, but decreased range of motion. However, there's a lot more to it than simple physics - anatomy and muscle physiology come into play. For instance, most muscles cross more than one joint (in the limbs, 2 joints is pretty typical), which means their function, when active, depends upon the function of other muscles around those joints. Your Biceps can function as an elbow flexor, an extremely weak shoulder protractor, and a suppinator (rotates the forearm), and which it does depends upon which other muscle are active, holding certain joints locked while allowing movement at others. Muscle physiology comes in as the length-tension curve. Muscle can only change in length by about 30%; any more and they rip or just generate no force. More importantly, the force isn't constant. See the graph here at wikipedia. Beyond a narrow region of optimal length, the force a muscle can generate at maximal recruitment declines, often sharply. However, we can't simply assume where this region of optimum length is, because detailed experiments have shown that the combination of changing effective lever arms during contraction and changing length can result in optimum torque at an angle different from what would be predicted from either muscle physiology and lever arms alone. So basically, it's very complex.

How do those quotes support your claim? *Nothing* in this thread or the original article is about completely concealing the existence of a spending source, only about concealing it's magnitude from the people. Honestly, I don't know where you're getting this. The topic of the thread, and the original article, was about accurate cost representation for *known expenses*, not about completely concealing the expense.

First, it's not the presence/absence of the item, but the cost. Bush's accounting gimicks concealed the cost and made it appear lower. Second, you're skirting some seriously fallacious territory by telling me what I would and wouldn't do in response to an analogous situation. Mokele

No, but only because I don't care. If I did care, I could go look it up.

What was not transparent about including NSF funding in the stimulus bill? Everyone knew exactly what was in that bill, and especially so because the contents were debated so vigorously. Hell, Wikipedia lists what was in it, and if that's not transparency, I don't know what is.

Well, amino acids can generally be sorted into 4 categories - non-polar, polar, acidic and basic. The problem is that one AA doesn't necessarily differ much from another with the same properties, so if you substitute, the enzyme will still function. So if you're looking for why one AA and not a similar one is used, the answer is mostly just luck. However, the whole enzyme has multiple regions that do different things, like bind to the substrate or attach to another enzyme, in addition to the region that does what you're studying. Those different regions need different properties, so, for instance, the active site may need all acidic AAs, but the portion bound to the cell membrane (if that's the case) would have all non-polar AAs. Mokele