Mokele

I'd like to note that this is actually what I've done, to an extent. I still eat a lot of meat, but switcheing from fast-food burgers and the like to chicken subs and such has already brought about noticable health benefits. Moderation and watching the diet are definitely the key. *Anything* in excess can cause problems, and anyone's dietary habits can have negative consequences (especially if they don't pay any attention to what they eat). Mokele

It applies to both, as well as wide range of insects. They're not exactly bright animals. Wrong, it's perfectly valid. Pain =/= nociception. Pain is a much more complex response, requiring a level of neural complexity that simply is not present in many arthropods. In fact, technically the insect 'brain' is merely an enlarged ganglion, much like the other ganglia throughout their bodies. Mokele

Ok, this is just moronic. Closed before the bullshit level gets too high.

How do they know it 'counts', as opposed to just moving at a constant speed and recalling how long it has been moving? Such an experiment can't distinguish between this possibility and counting. If you cut an ant's head off, they do just fine, only dying due to dessication or starvation. So that would be a big 'no'. Mokele

Um, no, it has none of the old foam. It's not even the same tank. The space shuttle and solid rocket boosters are re-usable, but the external tank is disposable, breaking up over the Indian Ocean. There's a new tank every launch. No thoughts on my idea of specially modifying the foam so it comes off in predictably smaller (therefore harmless) chunks? Mokele

Some simplifications and modifications are inevitable. For instance, if I talk about 'lite' beer, you know what I'm talking about. But I doubt it'll spread to *all* words. Now, what I *am* interested in is if 133t, or aspects of it like 'b4' will ever enter common useage, given the ever-growing prevalence of the internet. Mokele

Yeah, Duesberg, the guy who thinks AIDS is caused by drug use. The pushers must be working overtime if they've got all those fetuses shooting up already. His opinion is as worthy of discussion as that of Behe. He's a crank. Mokele

Hey, look, the moronic thread has ended! It's a MIRACLE!!

Oh, yes, plants contain protien, and some contain quite a lot. The difference is that muscle is mostly protien, even compared to other cells, and eggs and milk both have lots of protien since that's what the baby animal needs to develop. So it's not so much that there's no protien in plants as that there's just not as much of it, gram for gram, as in meat. Mokele

Not really, no. But it's at least amusing.

Has it occured to you that stuff that occurs at the quantum level has nothing to do with evolution? The 'lowest level' that evolution is concerned with is mutation, which is basically random. Even if there's some sort of quantum reason, it's still 'random' because it affects bases without regards to their role in the genome. Hell, we know the chemical mechanisms behind many mutations, but they're still classed as 'random' from an evolutionary standpoint, because the mechanisms do not specifically improve or damage, but rather have essentially random effects. So basically, by appealing to QM, you've made the entire arguement irrelevant to evolution. Mokele

Tried it, didn't work. But because it was just a dead mime, the judge let me off anyway.

What if they take the reverse approach, and make it *more* likely to fall off, but in smaller chunks? Kinda like how tempered glass breaks into little cubes rather than big sharp shards. If the foam is designed to fall off in small bits that can't do any damage, the problem is solved, possibly with little if any weight penalty. Mokele

The major error is assuming that just because we can't see the interval, we can't know what happened. In fact, we can often do this by examining the effects of the process that occured, beyond simple A->B. For instance, the being that can only percieve on a 5 billion year interval would see a dead world, then the modern world. Not just humans. They would see people, apes, monkeys, prosimians, reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc. They'd see all the similarities in the genetic code, and see all the fossils left in the earth. Think of it like chemistry. I mix some ingredients, and one of the resulting products is cool, but I can't actually *see* the atoms interacting. However, I can see all the *other* products, and by looking not just at the products of interest, but also at the by-products, I can hypothesize about the reaction mechanism. Just because the exact process is unobservable for some reason doesn't mean it's unknowable. Inferring these processes from known outputs is actually a big part of science (of course, you then have to test this inference, but that's a different matter). Mokele

Oh, of course, but my point is that those on vegan diet (or really any restricted diet) need to be extra-careful and pay attention to things that others can take for granted. I've not heard of lemon-juice thing (probably because citrus is bad for reptiles, and that's where I've learned about feeding herbivores from). Kale is excellent, as are collard and mustard greens; those three are the basis of just about any good herbivorous reptile chow, and are probably similarly good for humans. Mokele

Vitamin B12 is the first thing that comes to mind; it's technically produced by bacteria, and is really only availible through meat, eggs, and milk. Various purported algal sources don't have a bioactive version. Vegans would need to find a chemically synthesized version as a supplement. Also, as with any restricted diet, one has to pay attention to the amount of various minerals and vitamins (though it's nothing that can't be dealt with by supplements) as well as ensuring adequate fat, protien and carbs (though the latter isn't really a problem for vegans). Basically, it's the reason I'll keep monitor lizards but not iguanas; when feeding exclusively veggies, you need to spend a fair bit of mental energy and time ensuring the proper foods are eaten and in the right way. I swear, I've fed 150 carnivores/insectivores in the time it takes to make one bucket of iguana chow. Edit -- I just checked on this, and it is the same for humans as iguanas: spinach isn't a great idea. The oxalates in spinach bind to calcium and prevent it's absorbtion, though I think humans don't have as many problems from it as iguanas. This just goes to show how you need to be more careful when on a vegan diet, as such effects as swamped when feeding omnivores, but can be a problem with herbivores. Mokele

A lot of fiction, especially science fiction, uses metaphor to comment on current events and states, political or otherwise, without drawing ire by naming names and calling certain groups evil. It's a very valuable tool. Mokele

Well, personally, I hold censorship as a one of the worst things that can happen to a supposedly free country. Frankly, I think all official censorship (such as the FCC's role in such) should be abolished. If people get offended, they need to realize that's the price of freedom. Mokele

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Most of the article was OK (not exactly thrilling), but the condemnation of some people who were merely excessively hyperbolic in thier criticism reeks of strawman, and condemning the NYT for exposing how the government has been spying on it's own citizens and seriously infringing civil liberties is just nothing more than pathetic whining about having been caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing anyway. Sure, there's a noble purpose. But the ends do not justify the means, no matter how badly the author wishes it were so. Mokele

However, such correlations are often the first clues as to the mechanisms, and give us an idea of where to look. Mokele

Well, it's my impression, yes, but I've not actually read the papers themselves. Of course, but it should be pointed out that without addressing this statistical issue, we can't know if the results are actually significant or not. What if the results are not significant when analyzed using logistic regression? That calls the who study into question. Basically, all of the methods are statistical in this paper, so this issue does mean that you have to be a bit more skeptical. Mokele

Oh, even that's overkill; you don't need chemicals if you've got skill.

I'm not sure they did the statistics right. On one hand, they used a scale of sexual orientation, rendering it a continuous variable, which means that linear regression was appropriate. However, at the end of the methods section, it's noted that the vast bulk of the respondants characterized themselves as at one of the extremes of the scale. I'm no statistician, but I'd think this would adversely affect the results, since you've essentially got two lines. Personally, I'd be a lot more convinced if they'd at least said "and then we divided the subjects up into gay, straight and bi categories and performed logistic regressions, and here are those results", since then I'd know that they aren't just picking the analysis method that gives the best results. I do think they have a good point, but given that the paper is almost entirely statistical, I would at least expect a bit more complexity than "we did an assload of linear regressions". Mokele

Any preserved specimen won't have a good quantity of DNA. Skins are tanned, bodies are boiled or fed to bettles to skeletonize, then often treated with whitening and sealing agents. Teeth don't have that much DNA in anyway. Preservation in alcohol or formaldehyde will similarly mess up the DNA. Add on that DNA decays fairly rapidly except under remarkable conditions while most specimens are kept at room temperature (hence the preservation). Basically, any method of preserving animal bits involved getting rid of the bits that rot, and DNA is a bit that rots. You'd find traces, of course, but never a whole genome. Mokele

Oh, that's nothing; Pacific giant octopi have been filmed catching, killing and eats small sharks when kept with them in aquaria.