Mokele

Actually, funding the NSF is among the best ways to get economic stimulus. You give grants to scientists, who will promptly spend *all* of it in 3 years or so on lab equipment, personnel, supplies, post-docs, and plane tickets for fieldwork and conferences, thereby giving that money to the employees of the lab equipment companies, the lab techs and post-docs, the airplane company employees, etc. And most of those people are middle to lower class of income, and thus will spend it on food, rent, car payments, etc. How does it differ for paying for bridge of be built? Same principle - get something done and employ people to do it.

AFAIK, the current method of water purification isn't boiling, but rather filtration and adding chemicals (which should actually be *more* energy efficient than electricity).

No falsification criteria, no experimental test = not science. Enjoy ban-ville.

Stephen, this is your last chance - explain the criterion for falsification and testing of your idea.

That's actually what antibodies do - they flow freely through the bloodstream, binding to any viri they find, labeling them as something to be destroyed by the rest of the immune system.

The author of the video has no clue how science actually works. He sits there, jabbering pointlessly, and accomplishes nothing. Science isn't about talking, or making a good argument. It's about experimental evidence. If he's really so sure about his claims, then he should design an experiment to test them. No experiment, no argument. Either point to an explicit experimental test, or this thread will be closed.

Stephen Mooney, here's a simple question - what evidence would prove your idea wrong? No dodging - this is the single most important question in any scientific discussion. All science relies on testing falsifiable hypotheses, and if you cannot lay out criteria that would lead you to reject your idea, it's not science, period.

Well, this thread has utterly failed to do anything but further degenerate in the given 24 hours. Closed.

It's important to consider history, and this particular cartoonist has a long, bad history of cartoons which make fun of individuals based on sex, race, disability, and sexuality. Even if we ignore that he's an established jackass, there is a long history of derogatory references to African Americans as apes, something that cannot possibly be compared to "well they compared lincoln to one once, and a few times with Bush". It's like those kids in Louisiana hanging a noose from a tree that the black students ate under - even if they weren't aware of the racist overtones, that doesn't invalidate the racism present. Mokele

Due to degenerating conditions, this thread is on 24-hour suicide watch.

As you get older, basal metabolic rate decreases, so you burn less energy just sitting around than before. Since, as mammals, this represents most of our daily energy expenditure (burning energy to keep our bodies warm), this results in a noticable decrease in your daily calorie burning, and if you don't reduce input calories similarly, the result in weight gain.

This is ridiculous bullshit. The brain does NOT control the genes. Want proof? Google 'anencephaly' (preferably on an empty stomach). It's a birth defect where the brain forms outside of the skull and never really activates. However, aside from some associate abnormalities of the head, the rest of the body is normal - normal organs, normal limbs, etc. Oh, and the 'golden ratio' is also BS - I can pick any random number and find at least a dozen occurrences in nature. Sorry, but this is just a waste of text.

Well, it helps to have a generally-agreed-upon 'marker', even if it's not really very accurate. Same as with the voting or drinking age - different people mature at different speeds, and have different views of maturity, but we all sort of came to a compromise at a good ballpark figure. Also, since people who place the 'personhood' marker earlier are free to simply not abort, there's no real reason for society to interfere. But what about the mother's rights, including to life? Rights aren't absolute, and have tradeoffs. My right to freedom of religion doesn't overrule your right to life if I want to make you a human sacrifice. The problem I have is that the debate is being dishonestly framed as simply about the moment of 'personhood' and the associated rights, rather than what it's *really* about, namely a tradeoff between the rights of the mother vs the fetus (with people occupying all points on a sliding gray-scale between two extremes). It's not so much 'intellectual inferiority' that's objected to as the sense that it's not about intellectual debate but about a deeper agenda. When the loudest voices for pro-life are also voices calling for women to stay home and be subservient to their husband, it's hard not to suspect that the issue for them is less about philosophy and more about controlling women.

It's not that they never review, it's that they don't *always* review. The way is see it is this: a fundamental law of human output is Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crap". Politics, art, forum posts, all are mostly crap. The peer review process doesn't make everything non-crap, but merely reduces the level of crap to, say, 40%, which is a huge improvement. One of my most reliable sources for new developments is a weekly posting of new articles on a mailing list for my field, done out of the kindness of the list owner's heart. Also, much of what is done to an article by the journal is just layout. And while some journals are more lax than others, all have some level of formatting standards. So why not just ask that the article is laid out (according to guidelines) in PDF form prior to submission? Then reviewers could comment on the science, the writing, the graphics, the layout, etc, and once it's all done, it's just posted online.

If they could leave North Dakota, why would they still live there?

The two are utterly inseparable. By expanding the 'rights' of a blob of cells, you MUST take away rights from women to control their bodies. There is a tradeoff that cannot under any circumstances be separated. The attempt to frame this question *without* reference to women is disingenuous attempt to warp the discussion, just as the religious right and other forces of misogyny have always done. The issues are inseparable, and even attempting to separate them is sexist.

One of these days, I'm going to get ahold of some spare embryos from a fertility clinic and do 'embryo-shots', just to illustrate the point. Remember, it's not just about drawing a line for a lump of cells, it's about the rights of a woman to control her own body. Even if the embryo is a 'person', we cannot simply assume it's rights supersede those of the woman.

A small, technical note - this would not result in any 'mixing' of genes - the egg would only contain the genetic material of the egg-mother and the sperm-donor, with no genetic influence from the womb-mother. As to the broader topic, another point worth considering - maybe there *is* no selective advantage, either through kin selection or anything else. Maybe it's a spandrel, a by-product of other adaptations which simply occurs because of "the way things fit together" in the organism. Mokele

The last person to skip the animal model was Dr. Josef Mengele, of Auschwitz death camp. There is absolutely no ethical justification for skipping the animal model - it would result in the massive sacrifice of human lives in exchange for a few mice. I've thought about this extensively, and debated it several times. Not only is there absolutely no way around animal models, I have *never* found an objection to it which wasn't superficial, purely emotion, ultimately contradictory or rooted in deeply flawed philosophy. Mokele

Why does this sound like the essay question from someone's homework?

Ahh. I knew about the Giant Impact hypothesis, but didn't know things had been that extreme. Would conditions have be as extreme almost a billion years later, when life arose? What little I know of the physics of these sorts of things leads me to suspect there wouldn't be a simple linear trend over time. Mokele

Looks like the History channel was wrong, as usual: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v320/n6063/abs/320600a0.html Basically, the rate of change of Earth-Moon distance is not constant - the moon's position was much more stable initially. Currently, the moon is ~60 Earth-radii away, while 2.5 billion years ago, it was ~52. Closer, but nowhere near close enough to cause the effects you suggest. Actually, there is a strong possibility, newly suggested in the abiogenesis community, that life *did* originate around thermal vents. We don't (and probably can't) know for sure, but it's a very real possibility.

What makes you think it was so close? Or so fast? Or that life originated on the coast rather than around deep-sea vents?

Really? Both of the journals I've published in haven't charged me a dime (though they would have for color figures). Mokele

I don't think any virus could do that, other than by hiding inside the body's own cells, which would hide it from anyone, human or superhuman. Yes, that's how snake anti-venom works. However, just like with anti-venom, there's a possibility of an allergic reaction. The latter is much more within the purview of what a virus actually *does*. The former is more like a endotoxic bacteria. Mokele