overtone

Tree height and mass are not carbon limited now in any tree taxon I know of (water transport and other nutrients, mechanical loading, rather), so unless there was some quite different type of large plant growing back then probably CO2 concentration made little or no difference to the maximum sizes of the plants. Unnecessary - atmospheric levels would be governed by the rate of supply vs the rate of removal, and as the photosynthetic biosphere kicks into gear plants and microorganisms remove CO2 and supply oxygen faster than the newer oxygen breathers or combustion/chemical combination remove oxygen and supply CO2, until a new equilibrium is reached.

Insulation is normally an indication of endothermy - even in insects you only see insulating type hair when they need to keep heat in to fly or something like that. As far as climbing trees or similar things, although velociraptors don't look to me as though they are specifically adapted that wouldn't mean they didn't ever climb - I've seen foxes in trees, and woodchucks. And climbing is not restricted to trees: there are at least two quite different hypotheses for the origin of flight, and one of them involves traction for climbing cliffs and steep slopes. Intriguing features of the the steep slope notion include that it involves "arm" flapping in juveniles using down feathers and lends itself to cliff nesting - both features of natural Darwinian paths to flight starting with a bipedal ground dwelling animal.

The Constitution is not a record of anything. It is the formal, legal, official, structure and bound of the legislative powers of government in the US. Noting that the Constitution forbids entire categories of law that might otherwise be employed to control guns in the US is not circular.

You continue to confuse philosophical and ideological stance with politics. They are only temporarily and contingently aligned. The current Court is the most politicized we've seen in a while, but there are specific reasons for that - it's not in the nature of the Court to be so.

Let's get as literal and decontextualized as possible. Wouldn't "the right to bear arms" mean the right to carry a gun around? Airports are looking pretty unconstitutional right about now. You can gin up all kinds of problems by taking quotes out of context and pretending to be simple about it. So? Mostly, you can't. It's called living with other people. The Constitution does much more than that, true, but that's part of it. We are not using it to justify carrying guns. We are using it to prevent the government's disarming one's neighbors preemptively, by refusing to allow said government to violate said Constitution.

You are confusingreason, philosophy, and ideology with politics, and legal determination with political opinion. The Supreme Court is not a mere authority, but a partial determiner, of what the Constitution legally means.

The language is not particularly vague. There are a lot of people these days, when we have a standing Army and a National Guard and hundreds of Police forces with more firepower than the British Army in 1812, when we have no frontier or self-defending territories or towns far away from each other, who don't know what militias are (or how they come to be "well-regulated" in 1780 language), is the problem. At least, that's the source of the "vagueness". The "problem" may be more that a lot of people simply don't like what it says. They don't like the idea of their neighbors keeping and bearing militia caliber weaponry, and they don't want to read a sentence in the Constitution that guarantees those neighbors that right. They never do. 1) not necessarily 2) likewise when one assembles with people to petition the government for redress of grievances. There is no Constitutional right to shoot people. There is no Constitutional right to immunity from mishap or accident. One can blame the careless and improvident, even regulate against carelessness and improvidence, but not legally define gun ownership itself as careless.

The judges are not, of course, independent of their own personalities, ideologies, and so forth. But they are expected to justify themselves by reason, in public, formally with reference to the Constitution and precedent and so forth, informally as well a large body of philosophical and related writings that found Western intellectual civilization. That's not as low a bar as it sounds, despite the behavior of the current Court. And being influenced by their own leanings and ideologies does not make them politically captive toers of lines: in real life, partisanship and political faction has no such consistency, and a judge deciding according to their reasoning from a deep and well-founded ideology or philosophy will make decisions at odds with the political needs of any given Party or power faction. So will a judge overruling their own inclinations by reasoning from principles according to their assumed obligations and sworn oaths. So the independence of the Court rests ultimately in their learning, profundity, and wisdom, which we have insulated from power and threat and temptation as well we can in order to obtain the maximum benefit. So the Achilles heel in the US system is not the fact that politicians can install judges who "agree with them" on the causes of the day, but the fact that certain political factions and forces gain long term and general benefit from stupidity and shallowness of thought on the Court. No politician can appoint a Justice who will "agree with them" in the details of future political catfights - but if a political faction benefits more than others from meanness,incompetence, and stupidity on the Court, that can be arranged.

If we look at tree kangaroos and similar examples of comparison, we can get an idea of the kinds of modifications that abet tree climbing in terrestrial bipeds - we don't see them in velociraptors, particularly ( that one terrestrial bipedal dinosaur with nearly opposable thumbs intrigues). There's a speculation that the juveniles of them and several other too-large terrestrial dinosaurs might have climbed trees, a safety feature of many terrestrial animals now. Trees were different then. btw: Humans are quite well adapted for getting around in shallow water and shoreline environments, with a variety of suitable modifications abetting breath control, diving and swimming, wading, grasp of underwater objects, suitable behaviors and preferences, etc. But that's another thread.

That makes no sense. Militias are raised from the general citizenry, who generally bring their own weapons, or perhaps some supplied by their neighbors and local community, when they show up. To provide for that, the personal "keeping" of arms adequate for use in a militia should the occasion arise is specifically guaranteed as a right. Among an unarmed citizenry militias cannot be raised at need. Now this leaves most hot button gun regulation out - militias, and home defenses generally, have little or no use for handguns, for example. Neither is the citizenry guaranteed secrecy in their ownership - gun registration is in theory Constitutionally fine, and certainly of non-militia weapons such as handguns. But in pursuit of sane gun regulation in the US, the fact of political polarization is far more important than anything else. It is perhaps the one public issue in which the canard "both sides do it", "both sides are to blame", is a fair discription. On the one hand the bizarre fantasies of home defense against bad guys or governments imagined as behaving like movie dinosaurs and the like, on the other a willingness to sucker for any ignorant and ill-considered justification or abuse of reason in support of having one's government step on a faction of people regarded as violent and irrational. The second hand seems to need more attention here, so let's point out that the Scientific American article quoted is an example of a reputable publication lending its imprimature to some statistical reasoning quite obviously flawed, invalid at an elementary level it would not accept in other contexts. The fact that actually shooting people is more common in crimes and accidents than in defense against crimes, for example, has little bearing on the value of a gun in self defense. If guns worked better, the ratio of good guys shot to bad guys shot would be even higher - a hundred to one, more. When guns work well in good guy self defense, such as reducing the rate of burglary of occupied dwellings, nobody gets shot, see? And so forth - the article is pretty easy to pick apart, but to little consequence. I've seen more decent politicians get knocked out on gun control than on abortion, and it's not worth it - if we have a country in which a kid is more likely to get shot than die of disease, malnutrition, or other accident, then let's just celebrate that fact and focus our concerns elsewhere for a while, eh?

I was not. You have me confused with somebody else. Machete amoking is directly relevant to the point I was making, which had nothing to do with swords in particular - people run amok, in the cultures in which they do (not all cultures enjoy that feature), with the weaponry of their culture. The phenomenon is not created by the presence of guns. The short term benefit of "preventing lots of deaths" is not a good motive for amending the Constitution. The main purpose of a Constitution is to prevent that kind of reasoning from being used to justify authoritarian intrusion and governmental oppression of the citizenry. And the people who wrote it were well acquainted with that problem, just as we face it today - there is nothing new about a government justifying the disarmament of its citizens as for their own good, as a safety precaution, as preventing accidents and crime and irresponsible misuse, as for the public safety and benefit. Hence the 2nd Amendment - written in to prevent that.

There is no such analogy, and the confusion is dangerous. Human culture is not hardware, and a policy of regulating its features by physical force as if they were hardware is tyranny itself. Setting this up as a full scale military vs citizenry issue misleads. When a society falls into an internally generated authoritarian abyss, it does not begin with the tanks rolling in - it begins with death squads, paramilitary organizations clandestinely associated with local authorities, organized crime, gangs and sects and packs coalescing against the rest of the population or some part, etc. Key to that is the vulnerability of the general citizenry to informal violence. The Jim Crow and Klan era in the US ended, to the extent it actually ended, less than a generation ago. The abuse of the disarmed along the Mexican border is ongoing. Organized criminal control of metropoliltan areas in the US has a long history and almost certainly some current examples. The crazy wing of the gun rights advocate faction is largely the perpetrating faction of deliberately oppressive violence against disarmed and vulnerable groups in the US. They know from personal experience and acquaintanceship how that is done: the cooperation of local police and sheriffs as "one of us", the importance of the target being disarmed in advance. And they do not want to be that target. They have a point, there, no? In places where machetes are the common weapon, they do. The word "amok" comes from the language of a place where cutting weapons were the common choice.

At least you aren't studying number theory - that's something they did in second grade. My own response, back in the day, was to agree that I should have paid better attention in sixth grade or whenever. That had the advantage of being both true and not high-handed. But another response (and this works for a variety of subjects and social contexts, if your field of study is an honest one and you are dealing with social gamesmanship of the simple kind) might be to say what you are actually, specifically working on at that moment - which would not be the general label of the large topic, but something like "the eigenvalues of finite dimensional rotation matrices". And there's a side effect: being able to say clearly what you are doing at the present time can be informative, even enlightening, for oneself.

Nobody is talking about education. Imagine for a sec what would be involved in a Federal enforcement of whatever law you have in mind, sufficient to actually prevent the situation. Yes, that is breaking the law. And in countries where such common practice isn't breaking the law, it doesn't have the consequences it has in the US. Imagine a Federal enforcement effort sufficient to actually prevent people from giving their kids alcohol, for example. And, being reasonable, they don't prevent the numerous accidental injuries or even occasional death. It would take an unreasonable law, and onerously intrusive enforcement, to do that.

A serious, Federally `enforced attempt at a level of gun control that would have prevented that killing might set off civil war in the US. And it would be justified. The government that would be used to do this on that example of idiotic child raising would be the same one that mandated - mandated - air bags and child safety seats in cars, air bags that would (and did) seriously injure or even kill anyone under 55" tall sitting in the front seat while adding little or no safety to anyone wearing a proper seat belt, child seats that directly contributed to at least half a dozen children being seriously injured or killed by being left in overheating vehicles. I would use the example of lawn mower deaths and injuries in communities that mandate mowed lawns, but such laws are not Federal. The point is: that kind of example is no part of an argument for gun control. That already happened - right after the US elected a black man to the Presidency, ideologically a center-right conservative and an expert in Constitutional law, with no new gun control laws proposed or even suggested by him, gun sales and ammo sales and formation of paramilitary groups organized around firearms boomed. We had ammo shortages on the shelves of my local outdoor stores, some of them within a mile of major ammo manufacturing plants. That was especially true in the States of the former Confederacy and sympatheitc Western territories, already saturated with firearms though they were. If you want some clues as to the mindsets involved here and the politics of this matter, that's maybe one of the clearest. Gun control is tangential.

The people making the biggest hoo-ha are the same ones most publicly worried about increased government control - so maybe if they would shut up and behave reasonably, they would have fewer worries? But the concern is well supported in recent history - if we consider the huge expansion of government size and intrusiveness in the few months after 9/11, with an authoritarian as well as incompetent executive branch extending its reach and damage in almost unprecedented fashion (matched only by major wars), we can identify the forces and factors we need to be wary of in US politics.

Tyranny is always a potential reaction to threat. A government given permission to monitor and punish all exchange of information that could be used to build a bomb would be given the keys to serious oppression - crude bombs in all their wide variety really are very simple, after all, and closely tied to all kinds of ordinary and pervasive technology and employments. The censorship involved would be of necessity pervasive and intrusive in ordinary life. The usual consequence of this kind of approach is arbitrary enforcement against the government's perceived enemies - like the laws against encouraging "hooliganism" we see so often in authoriatarian settings. One could easily jail, for example, anyone who exchanged clear information concerning the safe handling of oxyacetylene welding equipment, or anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, or shotgun shell loading setups, or household drain cleaner. Hooliganism is bad and harmful behavior, many people are harmed by it (many more than are harmed by simple bombs), but laws against encouraging it are worse. Which is one reason no one I know of has even suggested restricting information about the workings of firearms, when attempting to regulate guns.

I'm not seeing much difference between "direct input" and "obtaining information" as far as a willed decision is concerned. All information "obtained" via awareness is highly processed thereby, after all. And I'm not sure what you are talking about with the "watching from the pilot's seat" notion - we know that consciousness is not watching much if anything of the mind's workings. You cannot, for example,"watch yoursel" add two numbers, or watch your brain instruct your hand to make a fist. What are we thinking of as being watched, and what's doing this "watching"?

What Congressmen enjoy now is single payer coverage. If you want what Congress has, that's what you want. Obama is on record as preferring that for the rest of the country, but thinking it politically impossible due to dingbat opposition - he then adopted Romneycare (a better name for it, as Mitt Romney was the originator of this camel) as better than nothing. Obviously, as everyone knows who has looked into the matter, Romney's little gift to his insurance industry backers is an inferior plan, with many problems. But the long term and increasingly serious trend toward cutting way back on employer provided medical benefits by any means necessary is not one of them. That pattern has been with us since Reagan. We had yet another example in my area, as the Crystal Sugar corporation finally beat their union after a 20 month strike - the main issue was medical benefits, which the corporation has taken out of the union's hands now, gaining control of its terms and provider and so forth. Obamacare had little to do with it, except maybe to put a floor under how much the corporation can cut benefits.

Setting aside for the moment the somewhat mysterious term "really free", we appear to have agreement that consciousness, awareness, is a requirement for some kinds of human decisionmaking - not an irrelevancy,

Are you claiming that drug addicts have the same degree of freedom in their willed actions as those not addicted to drugs? How about those being electroshocked? Those threatened by pain or injury? Those frozen in fear (first parachute jump, say)? Are you claiming that unconscious people, or people who are acting unconsciously or unaware of what they are doing, are fully as capable of willful response and decision as those conscious of the relevant circumstances? Look: The evidence that people can make decisions according to what they are aware of, and can modify or alter these decisions according to what they are told, reminded of, or dreamed last night, is overwhelming. That such factors increase the range of possible willed decisions within a given context is immediate. In the strict engineering sense, this is properly described as freedom of the will - a greater degree of freedom of willed behavior than the unaware and unconscious person possesses.

One reason would be that the necessary means and consequences of regulating pervasive and complex and widespread information are much different than the means and consequences of regulating easily definable and impoundable particular physical items. That might help explain why gun information is not closely regulated, for example. Bombs and guns, physical objects, relatively simple; bomb and gun information, not easily definable or sequesterable or extractable from the rest of the world's information, not simple.

Of course. Is there something wrong with good judgment? They are reasoned, after all, not arbitrary. We think (for good reason) a magazine limit would reduce the hazard without affecting the use, and an obvious, reasonable choice of limit would be one already in commercial and design employment. I see no inconsistency in treating information one way, and physical objects another. This would be so even when comparing bombs themselves with bomb information, let alone something as distantly related as a firearm.

It's not completely arbitrary, simply because magazines of the necessary size are already in commercial production and weapons are designed accordingly. For whatever interaction of reasons, it seems to be a natural break point already recognized. And although the exact number is probably indefensible, keeping the magazine size under - say - 25, is probably supportable with evidence as well as common sense. We could look at whatever reasons the military has for specifying its magazine sizes, for example. So the choice of some number is reasonably supportable, and the fact that the situation is simple and hardware based makes enforcement both simple and without intrusion or widespread effects. There's no judgment call, no subjectivity, in counting rounds in a magazine. The difficulty of being arbitrary "like that" with information is part of the problem here. You can't measure the stuff, count it, assess its effects or role or even existence - are you talking about pulling every currently printed issue of the Encylcopedia Brittanica off the internet-access area of the public libraries?

There is some arena of possibility in action, some "degree of freedom" (in a sense analogous to the engineering or statistical one) in willed behavior, that a drug addict has less of - agreed?