Mokele

Actually, I'm atheist at the moment, and, while I've been religious in the past, it's never been a judeo-christian religion (or even a monotheistic one), and not only am I *not* offended, I actually *like* Christmas quite a bit! It's fun! It combines the Greed and Envy of birthdays (presents) with the Gluttony of Thanksgiving and not to mention how christmas shopping gives you a good dose of Wrath. Lust is in there too, but that has more to do with the contents of my presents to my GF. Mokele

It's a good post, but I'll move it to politics, if you don't mind, as it's more dealing with the political end than the scientific.

Thanks for the info, Cap'n!

Quite alright, do you remember which issue or have a link?

Some Europeans are immune to some strains of HIV, as a side-effect of the black plague. Both use the same cell surface receptors, so individuals with mutations that reduced the number of or eliminates these receptors were resistant or immune to the Plague. As a result, these mutations were selected for, and, while they've undoubtedly declined in the past several hundred years, the gene frequency is still appreciable. It's the CCR5 receptor/gene, and googling that will bring up lots more info. Of course, now there are versions of HIV that use a different receptor, and which would therefore affect those individuals just as badly. Mokele

Death is part of life, two sides of the same coin. Without death, there can be no life, and vice versa. Just one of the many advantages of dating a theology major whose list of favorite gods includes Kali and Shiva.

Actually, not entirely, as it highlights one of the most important principles in biology, namely geometric scaling relations. If you shrink an animal to half it's normal length, all surface areas (muscle cross section, skin area, etc) will be 1/4 and all volumes (mass) with be 1/8th. This means, gram-for-gram, an half-sized animal has twice as much muscle power. So technically, it's an accurate analogy, and merely illustrates the vast difference a bit of scaling can make in proportional capabilities. Mokele

We don't own Arabia, and therefore have no say in it. At least not yet.

And that's why this thread is in psuedoscience: because appart from the first two sentences, it's nothing but baseless speculation without a single scrap of evidence to support it. Could it have happened? Sure. Lots of stuff *could* have happened and left not trace. But what matters is *did* it happen, and given the lack of any evidence at all, there's no reason to presume it did. Well, first, life has been around for 3.8 billion years of Earth, and only became multicellular about 500 mya. For the vast majority of the history of Earth, it was all unicellular organisms. Another planet may have made the transition faster, but we have no a priori reason to expect it to. Second, evolution isn't just governed by natural selection; there's a lot of randomness, especially in terms of surviving mass extinctions, an this can dramaticly alter what the biota of a planet looks like down the line. The chances that *anything* on another planet would resemble Earth life is tiny. Third, intelligence isn't a definite outcome of evolution. Remember, life has been on earth 3.8 billion years, multicellular life for over 500 million, and warm-blooded life for around 250 million, yet a civilized spcies only appeared in the last 200,000 years? We're a fluke, an oddity. I'd place large sums of money on us finding plenty of planets teeming with life (when we do get out there), but few with any intelligent/civilized life. Impossible, no. Unsupported speculation, yes. Mokele

Another important point is that CO2 isn't just waste gas fo our bodies; it reacts with water in our body to form bicarbonate, which acts as a buffer to keep our acid-base balance just right. If you lose or keep too much CO2 (altitude changes, hyper/hypoventilation), you can suffer from serious and fatal imbalances in one way or the other. Mokele

Yes, we don't tolerate racism in any form here.

Actually, for a while I was moving any explicitly creationist thread (like "where are all the transitional fossils") to psuedoscience automatically. These seemed more religious and less crackpot, plus I've been busy. Mokele

Perfect place for it! Now to figure out the terms to be used.

Ok, we *really* need a freaking sticky that specifies an agreed-upon terminology for this stuff. This is, what, the 6th time in a week that problems have arisen because of one person defining "creationism" as "a divine creation of the universe/life/humans, probably via naturalistic mechanisms" while another defines it as "the moronic idea that evolution isn't real". Seriously, did we learn *nothing* from the Darth Tater episode? No debate can proceed productively unless the definition of terms used by both sides is identical. Mokele

Nah, I've never been to antartica. And actually, penguins, various fish offshore, and such live there. It actually *used* to be tolerable, with a climate not much different from the UK.

According to the Guam Tourism Dept, mount Machao on the northern end of the island is the tallest mountain in the world. But they're measuring from the bottom of the Marianas Trench, just offshore of it.

Crayfish example: Animals *do* store calcium, you know. And find me this from a *reputable* source. Hens: Bullshit, I want to see a source on this. A *reputable* source. You cannot *possible* remove all calcium from an animal; this would kill it. No caclium, no muscle contractions, no heartbeat, no animal. If this guy claimed this, he's a liar, period. Magnesium in desert workers: Again, how about a *real* source. Without an description of the exact method, the validity cannot be determined. Probably bullshit too. Microorganisms: So why is a scientist in Japan publishing in a french journal? Ryegrass: You yourself state the seeds were not randomly selected. Also note that only means are given, not variances. This is called "shitty experimental design" and "poor paper-writing skills". Wheat and oats: Again, lack of sufficent data on methodology, an lack of sufficient information, from a source already known to be questionable (boneless chickens). Moon: Oh, you have got to be ****ing kidding me. Again, try to provide some sort of *credible* reference for this. Until then, it's just a new form of astrology. Long's experiments: You do realize that *repeatability* is part of science, right? If someone else followed this yahoo's method and got no result, it probably means Karvran either ****ed up, or flat-out lied (boneless chickens). The other experiments: Again, insufficient detail, and the fact that the author was unable to get the data means there is no reason to believe it. In fact, where did the author even learn of these experiments if he couldn't get the papers? Rats: Yeah, don't check my work, it's for the animals, really. Oh, and we didn't bother to figure out how much magnesium was in the rats to begin with, thereby totally invalidating the entire study. ----------- This is good for a laugh, but that's about it. Mokele

Just like there are carnivorous plants, there are carnivorous sponges, which trap passing prey with tentacles and engulf them, eventually digesting them. As with carnivory in plants, the sponges resort to this method in environments where their primary nutrient source (particulat matter filtered from the water) is not availible in sufficient quantities. Mokele

It was created as a location to house answers for all the common creationist objections so we wouldn't have to waste time dealing with crap like "there are no transitional fossils". Frankly, there's nothing wrong with the name, IMNSHO. Creationism (in the "evolution doesn't happen" sense) is a useless, factually incorrect and irreparably flawed concept, and the sooner it goes the way of the Humoral Theory of medicine and geocentrism, the better. Mokele

All baby armadillos in a litter are geneticly identical, derived from a single fertilized egg. Armadillos are also the only other animal which can contract leprosy.

I thought it was shown that Iraq representatives met with Al Qaeda, but there was no evidence that a relationship was pursued? No, they aren't. There's a big difference between questioning what went on and "re-writing history". The latter is a willful attempt to skew of falsify what actually happened in favor of a particular ideology with little care for intellectual intergrity. The former is attempting to actually figure out what went on in the past by thorough investigation, to be sure that the curent version of what went on *is* actually right. You cannot simply label any investigation into past events as "re-writing history" and dismiss it. Mokele

The death star was *fiction*.

He's just showing his enviro-friendly side, swansont. Soylent Burgers, anyone?

Threads merged

Well, the real atmosphere is substantially more complex (to the level that even supercomputers don't have the power to run truly accurate simulations), however, you did well with the general principle (the candle was a good idea of adding CO2 on a budget) considering the scale. One thing to watch for, though, is that the candle would also put out particulate matter (smoke), which can contribute to droplet formation. If your herps (I'm inferring from the username) eat mice, and you get them mail order, the dry ice that comes with them is pure CO2, and might be an appropriate alternative source. It's hardly conclusive, since the complexities of the actual atmosphere and ocean can have a major impact, but certainly not half bad considering your age. Of course, I'm also biased by your username, since herps are what I study (specifically biomechanics and functional morphology, currently focused on snake locomotion). Mokele