Mokele

One good question is "why is it even *necessary*"? Is there some niche not being filled, or is this just some pipe dream fueled by too many Jetsons cartoons. IMHO, there's no point, no real benefit beyond a marginal increase in speed, even setting aside all the major downsides. And given how major those downsides are.... Mokele

I know it's OT and I said I wouldn't reply in this thread, but I must correct this: dinosaurs were strictly terrestrial, with the exception of those on their way to becoming birds. Pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and the other giant reptiles of the Mesozoic weren't actually dinosaurs, just other reptiles of various sorts (pterosaurs are thought to be quite close to dinosaurs, but plesiosaurs aren't, and mosasaurs appear to have evolved from proto-monitor-lizards). Basically, unless it walked on land and/or had feathers, it's not a dinosaur. Mokele

Meh, the music sucks and the animation is shoddy. There's no clear story, nor intelligible lyrics. Let's hope deccha1981 has a backup career.

I actually had to wade through a lot of the primate locomotion literature while writing my first paper, and the article above isn't wrong, but it's not really right, either. Basically, we've known for a long time that other primates will use bipedalism while in trees, sometimes for just moving about on level, wide branches, but also for reaching fruit and the like. This probably set in place the basic neurological motor patterns to allow bipedalism, but it wasn't really a hugely important mode of locomotion at the time - bipedalism in trees in extant primates is still very rare, vastly outweighed by lateral-sequence quadrupedal walks. Based on anatomy and fossil evidence, as well as some modern experiments, it's likely that humans did have a chimp-like, knuckle-walking ancestor who, upon entering the savannah, switched to bipedalism (a recent study in nature shows that even modern chimps gain a small benefit in terms of calories per meter by switching to bipedalism). However, the world of primate locomotion studies is....weird. They've spent the last ~20 years obsessing over the fact that primates walk with a *slightly* different gait from terrestrial mammals, while ignoring many other issues that are, frankly, much more interesting and fundamental. And they spend an inordinate amount of time defending very absolutist hypotheses ("THIS is the reason primates became upright, and NOTHING ELSE!"), when in reality they're just squabbling about the relative important of different factors. Basically, anything you hear about primates, turn down the rhetoric about halfway and you're probably about at where it should be. Mokele

Technically, they're just hairs, not cilia. Cilia are the microscopic hair-like organelles on the surface of some cells, such as those that line the trachea. Similar purpose, but massively different scale. Actually, it's the reason we mammals have noses and breathe through them. Every time we inhale, we bring in dry, cold air that needs to be 'conditioned' by flowing over the warm, wet ridges and folds of the nasal passage. When we exhale, these same ridges and folds (called turbinates) serve to reclaim heat and water from the air before it escapes. You can actually see the nasal turbinates in any mammal skull - they look like a bizarre, complex foldings within the nasal passage, and are much more well-developed in species that live in cold areas, dry areas, or live at sea (all situations where reclaiming heat and/or water from the air is a big benefit). Unfortunately, the price of this reclamation is reduced airflow, both in rate and absolute volume, so when we need lots of air, we have to switch to the mouth and pay the price in terms of heat and water loss (but hopefully avoid being eaten by the bear chasing us). Probably a function of increased lung volume (due to working out a lot) and generally increased cardiovascular fitness (ditto). Well, it can if you concentrate on breathing, but it should go OK if you just forget it and focus on something else. And you may not have been drawing enough in just because you were outside of your aerobic scope (which is limited by your capillary beds, rather than your lungs). Mokele

Well, Xmas is over, and predictably, we have a huge surplus of styrofoam packing peanuts. I'm pretty sure the local recycling pickup only covers paper, glass, and metal, but I don't want to waste huge amounts of trash space on these things. I recall seeing an episode of Mr. Wizard as a kid where he dissolved them in acetone, leaving only a small residue. So, am I remembering this right? And what will the residue be? Is it just depolymerizing it, or is there a chemical reaction beyond that? Would the residue be safe to throw out? Mokele

I thought "laws" had to be axiomatic, which is what distinguishes them from theories, even well-supported theories like evolution or the Big Bang?

Are we wrong in viewing Newton's First Law as a scientific hypothesis? Couldn't it also be seen as a definition - that any movement produced must be a result of a force? It's also testable in the sense that it predicts anything which moves objects will have the same character - whatever force will, so long as it is constant and the object is of constant mass, constantly accelerate the object. It's entirely possible to find some external influence which doesn't have this effect - perhaps something that's dependent upon the object's speed, or for which mass has no effect? After all, a hypothesis can still be considered falsifiable even if the falsification isn't by designed experiment but by potential future discovery (see paleontology for many examples). Also, remember that you don't always *need* two opposing hypotheses for science - it could sometimes be as simple as "I suspect things work this way, but if the experiment shows something different, clearly I'm wrong." This is common in animal behavior, where there's just so many possibilities of what an animal *could* do (ranging from plausible to ridiculous) that you cannot enumerate or test them all, but rather simple test to see if your one prediction is right or wrong. Mokele

Speaking only of the US educational system, I'm not aware of any extant system where IQ plays a role, though obviously others may know of such. Testing to get into upper level classes, etc, has always been handled by means of standardized tests that more resemble the SAT and ACT style tests than IQ tests, in my experience. Do we even use IQ for much of anything anymore? I can't think of anything I've encountered. Mokele

Ahh, there's not much cellular material in tendon at all - it's mostly just collagen protein, with a handful of cells around to heal it from minor stuff. In the case of a complete rupture, without surgery, it would probably entirely depend upon your leg remaining immobile. It's basically the same process and a bone break - the cells inhabiting the area go into overdrive and start laying down new collagen at each end of the rupture, and eventually they meet up. Like bone, tendon does remodel itself, so once the ends are fused, the union will be 'cleaned up' by the cells (removing stray fibers of collagen that aren't in the right orientation, etc). Mokele

It's because the 'rupture' wasn't a complete break, otherwise surgery definitely would have been required. It was more likely that only a portion of the tendon tore, and healed back together while your leg was inactive. Mokele

But does the fact that IQ has been used in the service of racism invalidate it? Remember that eugenics folks mis-used evolution to promote their ideas, but that clearly doesn't invalidate it. There are plenty of legit issues with IQ, but that it's been mis-used in the past (and to some extent in the present) isn't one of them.

Rajesh is pretty awesome - he just has these snappy comebacks out of nowhere, and he's so blunt. "Am I allowed to call him my assistant? Where I come from we just call them untouchables." Mokele

Skeptic is probably right - the entire human population is so large that to spread a single good gene through it would take thousands of generations, while active manipulation of the genome is probably a generation away at most. Of course, there are limits, too, such as those imposed by our basic chemistry or developmental processes.

My guess is that it's for cells that are "leaky", like neurons are with potassium. They transport it one way, but it leaks back out/in. As for determining Vmax, you could probably calculate it from the relative concentrations - once it levels off, you can calculate the rate stuff would leave a permeable membrane at that concentration, and the transporters must be equal to that if the concentration gradient is constant over time. However, take this with a grain of salt - I'm a morphologist, not a molecular biologist. Mokele

Let's not drag the whole "IQ" thing into this thread, too. It's already got one thread, so keep the discussion there and let this thread proceed without diversion.

Physical grinding can usually break up the cell walls perfectly well.

No intelligible response, just more whining that you can't support? Good, argument over.

Gemma and I love it.

"Double hard" isn't entirely true - in most programs, there's a large overlap in classes, especially in terms of the crap 'general education' stuff.

Really? It's a good thing I used the word "do" instead of "think" in the prior post. Read the post before you reply. This just makes you look careless and sloppy. Read any history book. Seriously, any of them. Look up anything on the history of spousal abuse. Really? Because you've been committing it since the beginning of this thread, by insisting that the old morals about homosexuality are somehow part of the definition of marriage. Which is it? Are morals not part of the definition, in which case the objection to gay marriage is bunk? Or are morals part of it, in which case we've changed the definition multiple times, so your objection is moot? You're wrong either way. Wrong. Find me a written definition of marriage in the US constitution. Huh, there isn't one, just in state laws, like VIRGINIA, which explicitly forbade miscegenation. And it took the SC to overturn it. Getting tired of being wrong? See above, or take high school history class. And, by your logic, "marriage" means "a ceremony uniting people into a single legal entity". So all this other crap is just baggage, including the restriction to man+woman. Thanks for conceding the argument so easily. Yes, how dare they change the definition of "voter" to something other that white male! Oh, did you need that argument to prop up your crumbling belief system? Sorry. Wow, so all laws made before 1980 are void when applied to the internet, since that wasn't around back then. Sorry, but the courts have repeatedly overturned prior understanding in the service of a much more important goal - freedom. Ahh, persecution, the last cry of those losing an argument. How many posts of yours have been edited? How many warnings have you been given? How many times have you been banned from the forum since the inception of this thread? Oh, that's right, ZERO. Face up the the fact you're getting PWNED with some semblance of dignity. Yes, ruling from the bench. Which is exactly what the courts are for - protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority. In case you didn't notice, the laws are what defines the words. That's WHY there've been all these laws 'defining marriage' - because there IS NO LEGAL DEFINITION that restricts it to opposite-sex couples in many states. Do you think words were magically handed down to us on granite slabs from God? No. They're human inventions, and they change meaning. And the definitions are part of the law - change the law, change the definition. Oh, I know the consequences of that - stagnation and death. It seems the founding fathers agree with me, since they provided for 'amendments' to alter things after the fact. PWNED. Mokele

Have you considered double-majoring, or finding a university with a biochemistry major?

I don't suppose you know what the rationale for it was originally? I mean, the state constitutions were explicitly written and designed, IIRC all were written after the US Constitution, so someone must've said at some point "Let's make it possible to amend the state constitution with a 50% popular vote". Furthermore, they must've had some reason behind it in order to convince the other people who were writing it. I'm just curious what that reasoning could have been. Mokele

The same could be said of modifying the external aspects of the body - either way you go, you have to learn to control a new body. Plus, the brain seems to do well in this regard, and displays quite a bit of adaptability. I'm also not *really* suggesting transplating the human brain into a bird body, but rather using the example of such a procedure to show how incredibly difficult the alternative would be. Mokele

Is that different from what we do? What do you do when playing chess (especially online, where there are no social cues to use)? I'm an awful chess player, but I at least *try* to think through options, like "Ok, if I attack with my rook, that'll leave my queen open to attack, so I can't do that. If I use my queen, I can take his knight, but then he'll probably use his bishop to check me." etc. I'm not sure what we do when playing chess is really any different, except in the volume of computations and the possibility of irrational moves due to being pissed the other player took your queen. I don't support you could explain a bit more? I found that link pretty incomprehensible from the get-go. Part of the reason it seems odd is that, well, we are simply circuitry. If we could map every neuron in the brain, invent some electronic device or segment of code to simulate a neuron, and put them all together in the known map, why wouldn't that create a human-like intelligence? Mokele