Mokele

Shit, you want proof mercury doesn't cause autism, I've got it first hand: me. You know how they say don't bite the thermometer? Well, I did, got a mouthful of glass and some weird slick metal liquid down my throat. Yes, it was a mercury thermometer. Am I retarded yet? No. Here's a quarter, go buy a real point of view. Mokele

Nope. Scientists make predictions, and they make them clear and concise. Every paper I've ever read has had a nice bit at the end of the intro stating "and we expect to find precisely X Y and Z." Behe has stated such a prediction. He has claimed that a particular trait cannot be explained by evolution. The fact of the matter is that we actually have evidence of the steps it took. Even if we're wrong, it proves that there is a plausble method, thereby refuting his claims. The point is that scientists lay out their hypotheses and predictions in an explicit manner so that anyone reading the paper can say "yep, the data supports them" or "no, the data doesn't". If I saw a paper with a hypothese full of weasel words, which they could claim wasn't rightly understood when faced with evidence, I'd reject it for publication outright. That's not how science is done; leave that shit to the philosophers. If I have empirical data that directly contradicts his arguement, yes, I can and do call it bullshit, for such it is. Empirical data is the end-all-be-all, and if you cling to a theory in spite of it, you're a crackpot, period. See above for specific hypotheses and predictions, too. Belief is irrelevant. Only data matters. If their theory doesn't fit the data, it's garbage, period. If they refuse to let it go, they're a crackpot. It's that simple. That's what data is for. If your data supports you, there's nothing they can do. Mokele

Exactly, I try to emphasize that when I talk about something. I find it makes them a lot more receptive. On the other hand, I also like to illustrate points with colorful examples, like particularly extreme examples that will catch their interest. Also, colorful phrases. Rather than say "and these thin connections between the retina and eye are fragile, leading to the possibility of failure and blidness due to detacted retinas", I say "and these thin connections between the retina and eye are fragile, which is why if you beat someone in the back of the head with a pool cue, they can get detacted retinas and go blind." Mokele

Because if the hypothesis that thimerosal is the causative agent of autism is true, then *any* vaccine using it will show effects. Or are you suggesting that a simple compound is somehow "different" between vaccines? Yeah, and? These could be adjusting for something like Downs syndrome of traumatic brain damage. Just because something is adjusted doesn't mean it's invalid; if it were, it would not have made it through peer review. Actually, that's not what it says. Furthermore, those results are extremely damning to this thimerosal BS. Think about it: You're claiming that vaccines containing this compound cause autism. If that were true, there should be a *VASTLY* elevated risk, like 70% increase, or even 20% increase. But what do we see? Not even 1%, and I strongly suspect that 1% is due to those who've heard this ridiculous theory getting their vaccinated kids tested (uncovering low-level autism that would have otherwise gone unnoticed). Any condition with is present in a spectrum *must* have a cut-off point in order to be even definable. What you're saying is equivalent to saying "Well, they were studying dwarfism, but they didn't include kids who may be just a bit taller than the clinical definition." Annecdotal evidence is worthless. How do you know he wouldn't have improved on his own? How do you know the treatment (rather than some other recent change such as in diet) is responsible? The *ONLY* way to address these issues satisfactorilly is expansive studies. Oh, but you don't like science, nevermind. Worthless conspiracy theories. Let's look at the first slide:3 papers on the same topic, in the same top-tier journal, by closely linked research groups. OMG, CONSPIRACY WTF!! Wait, I'm noticing something: In the past few years, there have been numerous high-level papers in the same journals by closely linked research groups (including mine) on lizard locomotion. OMG, THERE'S A GLOBAL CONSPIRACY TO CONCEAL THE TRUTH ABOUT LIZARD LOCOMOTION!! It's a topic of interest, and so labs run by people who have similar training (the training needed to evaluate the issue) all take a swing at it. Gee, who'd've thought scientists aren't all totally isolated from each other. You do know that most scientists are on a first-name basis with other major people in their field, right? Shit, I've seen pictures of a great name in fish locomotion naked in the shower (he's got a kickass lamprey tat on his right shoulder). The allegations of industry ties are similarly worthless; *ALL* scientific papers are evaluated for this potential issue. I won't waste my time with the rest. If it's true, why isn't it in a peer-review journal? Another OMG CONSPIRACY?! That only applies to opinions that have factual support. Yours does not, and you have failed repeatedly when asked to provide it. Sure, no problem: Proof that your OMGWFT CONSPIRACY is a load Yes, it's the same article. Since you utterly failed to offer any reason these results are in any way flawed, it stands as evidence, as much as you may wish it didn't. I swear, if I didn't know autism was incommunicable, I'd think your son had spread it to you. Mokele

In grad school, we actually have this sort of thing all the time, in the form of discussion groups. There's a mix of profs and students, but everyone's on equal footing, and everyone takes turn presenting papers on their expertise, and everyone learns from them. Mokele

Test it on animals. Teach a mouse a maze, teleport it, see if it still knows the maze. How is that not you? Remember, your body is *not* constant. Every 7 years, it's a whole new you. Within 7 years, ever cell or molecule in your body has been shed, died, excreted, etc and replaced with a new cell or molecule. You 7 years ago has no atoms in common with you now. Mokele

While respect is useful, I think you're missing the point. It's one thing to be open to dissenting viewpoints. The problem arrises when someone just will *not* let go of an idea, no matter how thoroughly and completely it's proven wrong. For instance, Behe is a crackpot who espouses creationism/ID based on various grounds, every single arguement of which has been *empirically* shown to be totally worthless. There are stacks of textbooks 3 feet high full of data refuting his points, yet he never even adressses this data. He just keeps on spouting the same bullshit, even though it's been disproven. How is that *not* worthy of being labeled a crackpot. It's one thing to have a dissenting opinion. It's another to continue harping on about it when any reasonable examination of the data shows it to be absolutely ludicrous and/or flatly contradicted by reality. Mokele

Not actually, the nose is full of elastic cartilage that provides more than ample support to prevent this. Actually, mammals are incapable of directional smell. Although there are two nostrils, the airstreams fuse and intermix in the nasal cavity. Yes, though that's not really relevant. Mokele

It's a leftover, a developmental relic. Originally the "nose" was simply a pair of pits on each side of the snout, containing chemoreceptors. In early lungfish, the pits became tubes connecting to the inside of the mouth. In synapsid reptiles, the pits moved to the back of the mouth and, eventually past the pallate, resulting in the mammalian condition. IIRC, several defects of bilateral development result in (non-viable) fetuses with only a single nostril. So basically, it's not there because it's an adaptation, it's there because it's a developmental consequence of our evolutionary history. Mokele

Seriously, the vaccine-autism link has been so thoroughly debunked that clinging to it, even out of misplaced hope, is just pathetic. Look at the site you linked to: a crappy webpage for a society with *no* peer review pubs to back up it's ludicrous claims. Hang on, give me 3 hours and I can whip up a site claiming scientific evidence that autism is caused by exposure to cross-eyed turtles. Better keep the kids away from the ponds! I appreciate that your son's condition is hard on you, and you badly wish there was a way to fix it, but clinging to obsolete conspiracy theories will get you nowhere and give you nothing but false hope. Mokele

If there's evidence for this other cause, where is it? References, please.

Ok, my computer is a relatively old desktop, a Dell Dimension 4300 (about 5 years old at this point). I'm considering upgrading it to allow my fiancee to play World of Warcraft and for me to use SecondLife, but I want some advice on whether it's actually feasible to drag this machine, kicking and screaming, into 2006. First, the system requirements/recommendations WoW: 800MHz (min) 1500MHz (rec) 512MB RAM (min) 1024 MB (rec) 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA® GeForce™ 2 class card or above (min) 64 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA® GeForce™ FX 5700 class card or above (rec) SecondLife: 800MHz (min) 1600MHz (rec) 256MB RAM (min) 512 MB (rec) nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4mx, or better OR ATI Radeon 8500, 9250, or better (min) nVidia GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 6600, or better OR ATI Radeon 9600, X600, or better (rec) So, those are the mins and recs for the relevant programs. Here's what I have: 1800MHz 256MB RAM 32 MB Rage Fury Pro (4X AGP) (350 MHz DAC, whatever that means) Obvious the RAM and video card need to be udgraded. I can get more RAM, but I can only push it up to 512MB (my motherboard won't recognize any more). The big question is the video card. I've got my eye on this one or something similar, as it's not too pricey, but still seems to exceed the system requirements and recommendations for both. My motherboard's AGP can go up to 4x, and this one is compatible with 8x or 4x AGP slots. So, my questions are: 1) Am I missing some crucial detail that will bugger this whole thing up, some bit of technical jargon I don't know about? 2) Will this video card be enough to compensate for only 512 MB of RAM? 3) Is it even possible to upgrade a heap this old to a level where it can run both games, or is there always going to be something slowing it down? Mokele

See, I strongly disagree with that, as in every group I've ever been in, I've been faced with either doing 90% of the work myself, or letting the morons assigned to me drag my grade down. Worse still, said morons *know* I won't let them drag my grade down, so they know they can just let me do everything. *That*, IMHO, is why it seems to not adversely affect smart students, but to help 'slow' ones: because the smart ones do all the work, and the slow ones just leech off it. Mokele

I just thought I'd throw this out there: how many people agree with my proposition that a sufficiently grounded education in biology *requires* a knowledge of paleontology, at least to the level of what evolved from what? To me, it simply seems obvious; teaching biology without paleontology is like teaching politics without any mention of events that happened before 1998. Like high-level evolution courses, it should be *required* for all biology students. Mokele

If it's the dry season, they'll often cross long distances simply to find any water at all, and such movements are most common in smaller crocs. It may simply be a small animal waiting out the dry season. Mokele

Yes, but without sufficient education in the subject area, your ideas or experiments might be invalid because of some factor you don't know. To use my own field, someone might come up with very unusual results when studying byssus retractor muscles in bivalve mollusks. They might think that these results question the sliding-filament model of muscles, when in actuality we already know that these particular muscles have a 'catch' system unique to them, and thus cannot be generalized to other muscles. Again, to use an example from biology, if you do a study comparing the quantitative measurements of some trait in many animals, the uneducated will simply use normal statistics. However, normal statistics don't work for comparative biology because the data points (species) are not independent; they're all related, and with varying closeness. As such, you need to employ a very specific procedure in order to generate meaningful results from your data. You're right that lack of formal education alone doesn't make one a crackpot, but it *can* contribute to crackpottery, since they lack the proper context and conceptual/procedural tools to evaluate things. Mokele

Not necessarily; it means that only 4 women had an unbroken chain of daughters. If, in this diaspora, 200 families went, but at some point in the past centuries all but 4 had a generation of all sons, the results would be the same. It's the same reason we know the 'mitochondrial Eve' wasn't the only human female of the time. Other females existed, but at some point, all of their descendants were male, so the mitochondrial genetics were lost. Mokele

Ahh, that'd be the bird. There was a croc near the left bank, but it usually just looked like a stone, until its eyes caught the IR light of the camera. Mokele

Wait, do you mean the moving thing, or the stationary thing near the bank. The moving thing's a bird of some kind.

Th thing is, he's artificially handicapped himself by choosing a field with a very difficult tool, math. Had he looked at ecology or even genetics, he'd've probably reached contributional level knowledge by now, because the tools can be explained to him. His handicap is merely one of lacking one tool; he'd be in the predicament if it was Buddhist theology and he didn't know sanskrit or pali, but not if it was Mormom theology, which is all in english. He knows the concepts, just not the primary tool. Depends on what the questions are. Are we talking the sort of questions that need detailed, specific knowledge, or as we talking about questions that deal with the broad concepts of the field? If the latter, then yes. Mokele

It's a crocodile. You can tell by the IR eyeshine. They're in just about every permanent body of water in Africa, and are mostly nocturnal. You can hear frogs calling. Well, a frog. Mokele

So, is there evidence by anyone who *hasn't* been openly mocked on Penn & Teller's "Bullshit"?

Because then we wouldn't have anyone qualified to run for office who actually wanted the job.

Ahh, drat. Well, I've found a place online thanks to that other tread that'll get me some more easily. Mokele

Excellent, thanks! I'll be sure to post pics if I ever get around to the clearing and staining. Mokele