overtone

The problem there is the assumption revealed by the invocation of poorly supported "intuition" and the completely unjustified adjective "faulty". The apparent discovery that sexual orientation is epigenetically influenced is interesting. The assessment that this influence is "faulty" in its normal, common, ubiquitous, and evolutionarily established workings is without support, and runs contrary to some obvious circumstantial evidence.

So I really have to go watch five hours of Fox just to find the latest specifically NRA circus act? How about we just point to that deeply and profoundly dishonest TV ad contrasting the armed guards protecting Obama's kids with an imaginary version of the recommended gun control measures. Nothing on the "other side" (deception) is any worse. No' date=' it was not. Go back and reread your own posting, which you repeated with emphasis in response to my objection. Your point was that one of the two imaginary sides you set up for this discussion is using emotional appeals and staged theatrical propaganda techniques to trump reason here, and the other of your two imaginary sides is not. You emphasized the contrast, the ethical inferiority of the one side, how it disgusts you. I pointed out that this perception, the basis of your disgust and judgment, is delusion, amnesia, and failure to perceive what is in front of your face and has been for many years now. Not only is the world not divided in that manner, but the two sides you imagine do not differ and contrast in that respect. Except that "the left" did not engage in such deluded behavior, either after 9/11 or now. (Neither did the Democrats, but set that aside for the moment). The libertarian left has never put much emphasis on gun control at all, and its first reaction after Sandy Hook included once again bringing up the matter of mental health care and single payer health care, an issue in which the Republicans and the rightwing factions generally have been irrational and emotional obstacles. The authoritarian left, and also many Democrats, did bring up gun control immediately and loudly and with objectionable but easily comprehended appeals to emotion. But even they did not bring it up as the only factor, or the only factor to be addressed by law. Meanwhile you are no help in combating the illegitimate dominance of emotion and what looks like panic, by assigning reason and rationality itself to the irrational and over-emotional appeals of the NRA, and presenting the benighted gun nuts that organization features as the spokesmen of your imaginary "side". And the position of my little corner is that disarming citizens has not been put on the table and reasonable political leverage will keep it off, so no big worry as long as we can stay alert and keep the likes of W out of office (will we get a little help there, next time? ); meanwhile those ineffective measures are also essentially harmless - there's no need to get all worked up over high capacity magazine restrictions and the like, we did fine for two hundred years without that kind of gear and who cares? There might even be some marginal gain in public safety, at essentially no cost in liberty.

But the qualification is not accurate, as I noted. People who use such displays (9/11 provided a very clear example) are currently on "both sides" (deception) of the debate - predominantly on the NRA side, actually. Which doesn't match your description - a relevant point, because the recommendations of the task force would not necessarily interfere with that Alabama woman. Hence, in part, the inability of the NRA and related wingies to employ such examples as described - they don't want to provide the opportunity for the Biden recommendations to be seen as innocuous or without serious constraint on gun owners, in such emotional and memorable circumstances. It's silly to even suggest that the people who Swiftboated Kerry are constrained in the least by propriety, integrity, scruples, etc. Yes we were, among other matters much worse, and no: what I posted there is quite true of that time. It's still true, actually. As I noted, it was very difficult to get the attention of the faction now loudest in defense of gun rights. It still is, apparently. The situation is not, as claimed, "obvious to everyone".

And all the "both sides do it" rhetoric is laid aside, in the rare case where it would be accurately employed. Can you remember back even a little ways, and hear the faint echoes of "911! 911!" during the largest expansion and overreach of Executive Branch power since Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War? I can. That's how I know that this: is complete bullshit. I was there, when we were trying to talk about that and far worse, and it wasn't some advisory panel meeting in public and handing recommendations in either. And it was not "obvious to everyone" - you couldn't get the gun rights advocates to pay the slightest attention to it, or see the obvious right in front of their faces. They're living with an executive branch their guy set up (actually, a far more competently run and moderate version) while they cheered and voted and sneered and spit on the hippies - and they sure don't like it now, but it's hard to sympathize. We're still wiping the spit off, from when we tried to warn them. Baloney. The reason you don't see that kind of stuff is because there isn't any available - those are imaginary, presumed, and hypothetical circumstances, not real life events that anyone has on record. The NRA and their rightwing support has no honor, and no honesty, no integrity, and no principles - look at the last few years of political ads. But never mind - we're still here, still willing to pick up the rock again if we can get some hint of cooperation from you guys. But you hae to quit saying stupid shit like this: Neither Obama nor gun control is a favorite of the left wing, in general. We keep telling you that, and you keep not listening. And when you do finally get that through your thick skull, you will understand how offensive it is to describe this situation as "we are divided right down the middle". "We" are not the problem here. Look, this isn't some President suspending habeus corpus and setting up black site torture prisons for people who say the wrong words on their tapped phones. Before we get too hot and bothered about the looming jackbooted tyranny of Joe Biden's advisory task force, let's see the actual laws, eh?

Yep. Especially since the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine, the Limbaughs and Gregories and Becks and Brooks and Humes and Kourics and on and on have been taking over the media and promoting themselves - you can't even call a fascist a fascist any more, on TV, let alone deal with deluisional, illogical, rabidly vociferous and terminally lunatic minorities like the "Tea Party" and "conservative" and "family values" and "prolife" and so forth (why does the mainstream media confine itself to that kind of PC crap vocabulary?) folks in plain language. But back to the guns in classrooms general area of interest: the point was what?

There is some indication of sex-linked infertility (the presence of nuclear code but absence of mitochondrial code in the current human inheritence) in the hypothesized Eurasian/Neandertal cross, which would support a chromosomal number mismatch. The carbon (and some of the hydrogen) comes from the air - that's where the photosynthetic beings get it, and we get it from them ultimately. As far as getting it "wrong", the literal readers of any version of the Bible (believers or not) are not the ones getting the words wrong. There they are.

It would need thick fur and smaller ears, smaller bones and different teeth, and modified digestion etc - also, the trunk would probably have to be elimiinated. You'd get much the same animal in a miniature goat, one of the hornless types - and probably less pugnacious, less apt to bite. Elephants derive much of their estimation of safety etc from their automatic comparison of size - this is likely to be a fearful and high-strung little guy. The book Jurassic Park recounts a toy sized elephant created by the genetic engineers, used in sales pitches to raise investment money. It had behavioral problems - Crichton did get some of the science down plausibly.

"Regardless of which"? Maybe - a theoretical possibility for which we have no evidence. A generality, not applicable here. Fine generalities, carefully phrased to avoid naming the drunken Party at fault for a generation, the benighted fraction of the country's people at fault for two centuries, the financial backing for all that, and therefore the overwhelmingly dominant source of the comic and nonsense-ridden partisan politics that have become "usual". It's not a theoretical issue. The people who did this in real life have yet to even acknowledge their role, eh? Which brings us to the topic: And the rise of the neo-Confederacy. And a corrupted Supreme Court, a fascist-damaged system of Executive Branch checks and balances, a Congress hung by a Party petard while trying to refight the Civil War. So as much as I think an older and wiser wariness could inform a glossary of terms (an "Appendix of Troll Curb" to go with the "Bill of Rights"), maybe a better setup of the electoral college two-step in light of the one man one vote principle, I would not want to see a rewriting of the Constitution under current circumstances. The guys who wrote this one were of a different caliber than the ones circling the prospect these days, methinks.

Momentum is conserved (basic principle) - a sound wave is a transferal of momentum, and in a gas (to reasonable approximation) there are no inter-molecular bonds to carry any of it - the only transfer is massXvelocity at successive impacts. So lighter gas molecules have to move faster or collide more often to transfer a given amount of momentum.

As far as rewriting the Constitution, I would take a lesson from the kinds of reasoning we've been seeing from the likes of Antonin Scalia, and include a short glosary of key terms. The word "People", for example, would be defined as referring to corporeal human beings, biologically classified as Homo sapiens. It has made a huge difference whose foot was on the gas pedal, because it also determined whose hands were on the wheel. The single most damaging political endeavor of post WWII America, and the worst political decision by a group of American politicians since Secession, for example, was a one Party one faction effort - a fairly small group of bad guys who got hold of the wheel. Corruption and collusion in the construction of a possibly unnecessary national highway system, say, is one thing. At least we get something as a nation out of it. Corruption and collusion in the launching of a full scale land war in Asia Minor is another matter entirely. And when a Federal administration actively pursues corruption and combats collusion in its administration of some large national project - as Roosevelt did in implementing the New Deal and fighting WWII - that has generally turned out to be better and much more beneficial to the country than when a Federal administration utterly fails to do that - as W in reorganizing the entire Federal bureaucracy and launching an invasion of Iraq. Dishonesty and pork barreling, even, the most widely distributed of the various political flaws afflicting us (such as incompetence, ignorance, etc) have been obviously and effectively concentrated in some political factions much more than others, for a generation now. Pretending that our current problems are equivalently attributable to "both sides" regardless of who actually did what, is a form of amnesia at best. At best.

We don't see that pattern except in gang violence and "wars" (apt metaphorical term) - which are at root products of prohibition X profit, almost universally, and probably would more easily be addressed at root than by multifaceted and complicated attempts at regulating the details of particular weaponry. The inner city neighborhoods currently suffering under waves of gun violence have generally lower, not higher, prevalences of gun ownership, for example. My childhood region - a community of family farms and small "towns" (intersections with a bar and a feed mill and some kind of mechanical shop) - had almost universal gun ownership: literally almost everybody, almost every single house and most of the male residents individually, possessed a firearm of some kind. Usually a couple of them. This was a far higher rate of gun access and possession than we see now in even the worst of the inner city slums plagued by shootings. Murder by gun was rare (and characteristically committed by strangers passing through the area), driveby shootings (of people, not road signs) unknown, even accidents and suicides less common than in these slums. So ends the digression into whether guns are a net benefit in "self defense" etc. It doesn't matter. A large fraction of Americans want to own and at desire use a firearm, for reasons they themselves consider sound and sufficient, and they are guaranteed that possession and bearing as a Constitutional right. If it isn't immediately clear and overwhelmingly evident one way or the other, for all reasonable futures and realistic situations, the kinds of impositions we can safely allow a government in pursuing the banishment of firearms from our lives (or the imposition of firearms upon our lives, although that problem is not immediate) are strictly limited - infringing on a Constitutional right is very dubious behavior, by presumption. It has to be clearly and overwhlemingly justified, generally agreed by essentially all disinterested parties, etc.

The jumping code is not necessarily or usually replacing, but augmenting, in most cases - it seems unlikely, especially given the ease with which engineers can insert big and varaiable blocks of code, that entire genomes are so tightly preserved in their exact current relationships. It seems more likely, off hand, that certain stretches of code jump more easily than others - as if made for horizontal transfer, in a sense. Which has implications for the code that is in fact made for horizontal transfer.

You are asserting cause when you don't even have correlation. The parallel with the advocacy of capital punishment is near perfect.

These Australians appear to feel vicitmized by bad politics, no? What "real solutions" would you recommend to the problem of such victimization, that are not political? And why is such a concern being posted in a thread on global warming scepticism? By posting in this venue, you seem to imply that your take on some recent Australian politics has some relevance to the existence of global warming due to the human produced boost in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Do you actually believe that? As far as skepticism re the warming and its cause, my own touchstone is the differential warming of winter nights vs summer days in my geographical area. The winter nights are significantly changed recently relative to the summer days , and I have yet to run into even a plausible hypothesis for that which does not give primacy to greenhouse gas effects. I'm willing to entertain them, but there simply are none. One of the consequences has been the notable increase in the frequency of rain in January, not matched by anything in July. What used to happen one year in seven, measured over a 180 year span, has since 1995 or thereabouts happened every single year of the past fifteen or more (I lose count) consecutive, most recently yesterday. The local politics are pretty bad (I live in Michelle Bachmann's home district), and many tax proposals are foolish here, but they don't make it rain.

And so the crazy revs up - five years of being made fools of has taught the Neo-Confederacy nothing at all about who to get their info from, who to lean on for analysis and interpretation, where to find out what's going on in the real world.

This fantasy balloon world is getting farther and farther away from solid ground. There is obviously, blatantly, in your face unavoidably, no shortage whatsoever of Americans champing at the bit to be allowed to deal righteous punishment to the deserving, and quite willing to inflict some error on a few unfortunate innocents along the way. We're awash in volunteer "bad guys", so much so that we have quite a bit of evidence regarding the real life effectiveness of their beloved punishments - they don't seem to work, at all. And their ineffectiveness seems to make no difference to the people who wish to redouble their righteous efforts. I'm still waiting for the argument that threat of subsequent execution or maltreatment effectively deters suicide, for example - or even recognition of the role such threat has played in mass murders past.

So far we've been looking at suicides, in these mass murder events. I'm not sure how much the threat of execution deters a suicide, or notoriety (extra notoriety always comes with capital crime trials) deters these kinds of psychos - one can plausibly speculate that promised execution might be an attractive reward (we have at least one case of that - a serial killer who moved his operations to Florida because it was a death penalty State. I'm of the opinion that the famiies of his Florida victims have grounds for lawsuit). We note that death penalty States show no deterrent effect for any crime of this type - the opposite, if anything. Certainly capital punishment is no substitute for, or even in the same discussion with, proposed gun control.

As a side note, in the larger think tank world the same people who assert that human production of waste heat accounts for a significant share of the melting of glaciers and warming of entire planetary atomospheres, oceans etc, are also claiming the human production of greenhouse gas is far too small to affect the climate of the whole planet, that human endeavor is puny and trivial compared with natural processes and patterns. So the problems in the public discussion are not merely those of ignorance or honest factual confusion.

The more realistic computer models of systems undergoing Darwinian evolution produce arbitrary levels of complexity from much simpler inputs in silico. That amounts to a prediction of what would happen in vivo, and the prediction is borne out (that is used to check the models, rather than evaluate the reality - the production of complexity via evolution in the real world is essentially an established fact). Historically, we started with an overwhelming complexity in need of explanation - that obscures the fact that had we started with the principles of evolution in some setting unconnected with biology we could have predicted very complex consequences of long term operation in a suitable system.

I did no such thing. Your imagination is batting zero' date=' still. Your incredible lack of self-awareness here is the important matter of interest in your posts, and only because it could inform the discussion of gun control, if (as you and others agree) personality and the like are key factors. But not if you continue to avoid following up on the generality. Not at all - you took offense, rather than delivering. As noted above, you can't lecture and bully so wide of the mark - how could i take such assertions and claims personally?

And almost inexcusable betrayal of your team' date=' your country, your friendships, your mutually understood efforts, and everything you claim to value, in other cases. Voting for W the second time, would be an example of that kind. What doesn't? One's personality and attitude toward society are fine general categories of consideration, but the devil is not in the fine generalities. The devil is in whatver prevents the independents of the Confederacy, with its population of rightwing libertarians, from rebelling against its native fascism and accepting agreement, joining cause, with the leftwing liberals, for example. That would change the gun control public discussion dramatically, eh?

Then it wasn't two 15% increases. Political palatability has nothing to do with it - you're talking about arithmetic. In the first place' date=' taking 10% of a number is just as likely to give you a fractional answer whether you subtract it or add it. In the second, you are talking about either outright fraud or fractions of the smallest coin in your system - coinage was invented to deal with fractional pricing. So you can't get from 32% to 50% of the whole price in that manner with that motive, unless you are dealing with something whose entire price is less than a couple of pennies. Again: that kind of intuition displayed will serve you poorly in assessing issues of depreciation and sunk costs, long term amortization of purchased assets, etc, and is entirely irrelevant to the issue of global warming. No, they aren't. Bad Australian politics has nothing to do with the findings of good climate science.

That's not just "plausible", but a long standing pattern of historical event - including quite recent history in the US, within the personal memory of lots of middleaged adults.