Mokele

Actually, it's always transmitted by saliva, but in some cases, there's sufficient aerosolized saliva to transmit it. It's not unique to humans.

I strongly disagree with jeremy. I did precisely what you recommend many years ago, doing an assload of research and building my own machine with kickass specs. At the time, I definitely had the technical know-how to do it, along with ample support from a several very knowledgable CS major friends. It was a total, dismal failure. It *never* worked properly, was horribly buggy, and eventually got to the point that it basically could not work for more then 3 hours, at which time it would shut down on its own. I suspect that something was wrong with the motherboard, but by the time I'd figured that out, I'd spent about 6 months fuming over this thing. I chucked it in the trash and bought a Dell. That same Dell has only recently started being buggy more than 5 years after I bought it, and these bugs are mere annoyances; it's still not only functional, but with a minor upgrade in RAM and video card has become able to run World of Warcraft. IMHO, the single most valuable part of a computer, bar none, is the warranty. With that, everything else can be fixed. Without that, the slightest problem can result in having a $1400 paperweight. Mokele

I'm unconvinced QM is even relevant to 'free will'. Even if quantum events are stochastic rather than deterministic, does that actually affect things at the scale of a whole neuron, or does all that probability just 'cancel out' to give a nice average value by the time you get to the scale of a whole cell? Remember, neurons don't operate on a quantum scale; they're actually fairly sizable cells, and some particular ones have axons so large they can be seen with the naked eye, such as the squid giant axon or Mauthner nerves. Mokele

Actually, it's less the expansion (cells are quite elastic), and more that ice crystals are these long, pointy shards that slice up the cell membrane and organelles.

Leaving aside that my fiancee and I are childfree, I actually left HS only about 10 years ago, so I do know how things are in the US public school system. In fact, I probably have an even less sunny view than you, since I went to school in the 2nd and 10th *worst* states for public education in the entire US at the time. If you ever want to feel better about your kid's education, go visit some schools in the Deep South. I agree with the former, but not the latter; at 14, most kids don't have the maturity necessary to independently apply themselves to classes. I think a better approach would be to condense as you suggest, but then add the freshman and sophomore years of college coursework onto HS, so they've already had what is now college level physics, biology, chemistry, english, etc. You're looking at the wrong segment of society; we can't judge an educational system by the peak, we have to judge by the mean. Some individuals, either by luck or their efforts to independently educate themselves, can rise to the top of even the worst system. Also, how much of what lead these people to make great discoveries was HS and below, and how much was college and grad school. I know that personally, my advisor has done more to train me as a competent scientist than all of my prior education has. I dunno, I think the tide might be turning; kids seem people like those behind Google, Youtube, Amazon, and microsoft raking it in, proving that being the smartest can mean being the richest. Geeks are the new wave of success. Definitely a national difference, then. The US's educational standards have been falling for a long time, in large part because we have this view that every HS diploma is the same, so if a school drops their standards, their graduate rates rise and everyone congratulates them for educating the kids better. Oh, you would not *believe* (or maybe you would) the level of bitching I hear in Anatomy & Physiology (the freshman level anatomy course) when all we ask is that they spell words correctly. It's not even for a lab report or paper, just a 'practical' where they name the parts. If you can't learn to spell 'brachioradialis', you don't belong in college and you *certainly* don't belong in the nursing program. I waver about what to do. The hardass in me wants to just mark wrong everything spelled wrong and knock assloads of points off the grade of every lab report with attrocious spelling and grammer, but on the other hand, is it fair to punish them because the educational system has failed them up until now, given that they may actually know the material. But then again, we can't just keep letting them pass by on it; at some point, they have to be held accountable and forced to fix it, or we'll have illiterate college graduates. Maybe I'll just be nice until I get tenure, then come down on them like a ton of bricks once I can't be fired for doing so.... Mokele

I think they'd still be able to mate. Because it's a fusion, no genetic material is either lost or duplicated, and also, because they just fused at the ends, the fused chromosome would be able to line up with the un-fused ones during meiosis, allowing viable gametes to be produced.

To hell with looking it up, direct experimentation is always best. Lots and lots of direct experimentation.... ;-)

Actually, we've known that other reptiles use parthenogenesis for a long while. Specifically, there are several species of whiptail lizards in the western US that reproduce solely by parthenogenesis (100% female species), and one species of snake that does so (a tiny, blind burrowing snake). What's interesting is that we've never recorded it in any monitor lizard before, and because of their mode of sex determination, it yields a males rather than females. Mokele

Bullshit. We have no control over the HS curriculum, and furthermore, we have no control over which hare-brained ideas become popular. Furthermore, educational psychology is actually a *real* field, which basically tells us none-too-surprising things. $20 says the ideas you mention derive solely from popular authors with no psychological training and are *not* mainstream opinions in *real* educational psychology. Your argument is like saying that I can't complain about the number of creationist students we get, because a handful of those idiots managed to get advanced degrees to help them promote their BS. As for John and Mary Public, there's the same idiots who insist that standards be lowered so Billy Public will be able to graduate. The only silly teaching method that's been a problem was the move away from European Classical Education, which placed a high value on debate and logic rather than memorization and trivia. Given that happened over a century ago, I doubt you can blame psychobabble that came around a decade ago. Besides, does any school actually *USE* the disparaged methods in question, or are they just some idea that everyone got pissed about and never got implemented. Mokele

The URL posted didn't work for me, but this one did: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0612150315dec15,1,6644357.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed That said, I think it's stupid to paste the end-test of a functional educational system onto a broken enducational system. I don't know about the rest of Europe, but I've had a lot of chats with my British fiancee about education here vs there. According to her, she had calculus back in HS, and it was on the tests she had to take. The kicker: she was a theater student. IMHO, the problem is twofold in the US educational system: 1) The information and skills kids need to know to graduate from high school compares poorly with that of Koko the signing gorilla. I'm not kidding. Koko knows grammar and can produce meaningful sentences, while I've seen lab reports that indicate we have college students who cannot. NO educational reform will be worth a damn if we don't address this. 2) Critical thought and logic. Currently, there is nothing even approaching this in US schools. IMHO, in order for a student t be considered educated, they should be required to have formal courses in logic as well as a strenuous test. Of course, this will never happen, because politicians don't want voters who can actually think. Mokele

I think it used to be called that; nowadays everyone just calls it 'stimulating', at least in the papers I've read. Mokele

A lot of it is just progressively more sophisticated experiments, and poisons. Figuring out that muscles cause movement is pretty easy; they bulge when we move, and injuries to them hamper movement. Dissection shows nerves going to them. We know from accidents with electricity that electricity causes muscles to contract/convulse. Given that and an appropriate model (usually a frog gastrocnemius), we can remove a muscle from a living organism, place it in a special solution to keep it alive (basically saltwater) and stimulate it to contract. By trying different levels and patterns of stimulation and measuring forces, we can determine things like muscles only exert tensile force when contracting. By selectively using poisons that do things like bind calcium or other elements, or block particular neurotransmitters, we can figure out what's involved. X-ray crystalography and other methods showed the structure of actin and myosin, and shortly thereafter, Andrew Huxley (grandson of the great Thomas Henry Huxley) proposed the sliding filament model. The same can be seen in nerves or other tissues. Looking at the experiments in historical order can really help you see the chain of reasoning that lead to the current knowledge of a particular phenomenon or system, both in biology and other fields. Mokele

Even *mentioning* banning a game or restricting it is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's been such a big issue in computer games that it'll arouse instant controversy and debate that spreads all over the net, becoming free word-of-mouth advertising and massively boosting the game's sales because everyone wants to see just how bad it is for themselves. Even if you *did* ban it, I can count on one hand the number of seconds it would take to appear on Limewire or some other file-sharing network. If you want to kill this game, kill it by referencing the only major review of it, here:http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/leftbehindeternalforces/review.html Mokele

Well, in Wal-Mart's case, it's simply asking for consistency, since, IIRC, Wal-Mart has banned/removed numerous magazines and games it considers objectionable. With regards to this game as a whole, I've read a scathing review that basically says that between a poor storyline, horrible gameplay, and more bugs than a plague of locusts, the religious content is actually the least of the game's problems. Apparently it's something a tiny group put together without much serious work or testing, and it *really* shows. Even the most crazed fanatic won't be able to tolerate how crappy it is. Mokele

This popped up on the LJ scientists community, and someone with more endocrinology background basically ripped it to shreds. Basically, studies of the effect of soy on hormone balances and development have been done, and all of them found jack shit. Mokele

True, but does 'based on' really mean that much? IMHO, sci-fi isn't that different from fantasy: both invent new, strange worlds (or variants of the current world), only with different explanations. A character teleports, and in one it's because of magic, while in the other it's due to a machine, and neither pay attention to the fact that it's impossible in the real world. A consistent setting is important, but I think it's a mistake to confine oneself to what is scientifically plausible by today's knowledge; after all, 200 years ago, it would be ridiculous to speculate about wireless global communication networks and directly altering organisms' genetic material. Clarke himself said 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Mokele

Consider Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep, then. Lots of tech, but none of it explained, and all of it really about the nature of being human and sentient (spawned from Phillip K Dick's own schizophrenia). Mokele

I dunno if this is applicable, but IIRC, some neurons are continuously, spontaneously firing, and outside stimuli just increase the firing rate. These could serve to sort of 'keep things moving', maybe? Mokele

See, from my POV, that's best left to science writing. Otherwise, we're stuck writing painfully accurately, rather than simply using scientific speculation to create a compelling setting. The setting and universe should be just that, a setting. They can be marvelous and exotic and provide the challenges that characters face, but they shouldn't be the main point of the story. Wells, IMHO, is an exception simply because he was the first; if your idea is so incredibly novel that it can carry the book on its own, great, but it has to be *huge* and vastly different. People don't read sci-fi to get an education in science, they read science magazines like Discover and such. Those that *do* get their science knowledge from sci-fi are those who wind up in the Pseudoscience section. People read sci-fi for the story. Look at Star Wars. Did they *ever* explain or even hint at how any of the technology worked? No, it wasn't about the tech, it was about the characters. Star Trek used more technobabble, but it was still about the characters. Even stories with a message or commentary on current topics need good characters to run them. How many sci-fi stories ae really *about* the technology or science? The only one that comes to mind is 2001, except HAL is also a character. Aliens, Akira, Dr. Who, Farscape, X-Men, Jurassic Park, 1984, Abyss, 5th Element, all focus on characters and story, not technology. Personally, I think if technology is the main focus of your writing, it'll detract from the characters and plot, as you won't spend as much time and effort on them, and the readers will notice. I think the thing is that you can usually say there's two things a book/movie/whatever is 'about'. Jurassic Park(movie) is about the perils of biological technology and the difficulty of controlling it, but it's also about Dr. Grant getting over his difficulties with kids and Hammond learning that he can't buy control. Alien is about a horrific alien monster killing people, but it's also about how a handful of people trapped in a terrible situation deal with what they're faced with, and who comes out on top. In that sense, all sci-fi is about technology/aliens/etc and/or their effect on the world, but it needs something else to be about, a human story, that's just as important, if not more important. Without that, it's like reading a VCR instruction manual. Mokele

Ture, though keep in mind that applies to all such speculative exercises. I could probably, with a bit of thought, come up with an alternate history in which the US not getting involved in WW2 would be better. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have, only that it's impossible to fathom how all events will play out. Of course, some possibilities are more likely than others. Most scenarios involving not going to Iraq would involve a smaller budget deficit for obvious reasons. But speculation is always speculation, and that I can invent a plausible scenario that shows very peculiar results really demonstrates nothing but creativity. Mokele

Actually, IMHO, character and plot are all you need, with character taking much more precedence. If there's nothing special about the universe, it's just regular fiction. If there's just a few things special about the universe, it's in whatever category is appropriate (alternate history, fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, etc). All technology does is determine how a story is classified; it doesn't make it good or bad. Mokele

Sorry about that; I just saw crap arguements and got carried away. Anyhow, the problem with the OP's question is that it's hard to fathom all of the possibilities. Without Iraq, Bush's continued failure to find bin Laden could have tanked his approval rating and lost him the 2004 election....or, without Iraq distracting effort away from it, perhaps Afganistan would have become a perfect example of setting up a stable middle-east democracy, resulting in a surge in popularity. Essentially, it's an alternate-history speculative fiction, with all the problems that entails, plus the complication that it's so recent we remember all the details, so there's no cheating with artistic lisence. Mokele

It's not just chitin in many crustaceans; some have a calcium carbonate layer in there too, especially the big ones.

IMHO, the problem is that the very idea is *rife* with humor potential. The moment it got proposed, everyone latched onto it because they could easily make up some silly PC-term and make themselves seem witty. Pretty soon, the humorous version had more following than the reality, and that's pretty much that. Mokele

I think what the original post meant was that the time between daylight and total darkness, the duration of 'twilight' seemed different. I dunno about Las Vegas vs Atlanta, but this is something that does vary; when I was in Guam on fieldwork, it was astonishing how quickly it went from full daylight to pitch dark. My prof even made note of it, saying that the sun sets faster closer to the equator (at least in the sense that the light level changes faster). Mokele