Moontanman

I was called turtle for a while, then snake, then Moondog, and now of course Moontanman...

Too bad you called me a liar when I told you I had a near death experience, it would knock your socks off...

Can you give me a link to that bit about the neanderthals, they are one of my areas of interest...

Are you experienced...

For some reason this thread keeps reminding me of Jimi Hendrix... maybe I'm channeling Hendrix...

Microbes shed blobs of DNA into the worlds oceans, this could shed light on how DNA is swapped between microbes... http://www.livescience.com/42452-ocean-bacterial-buds.html?cmpid=556100

University students searched social media for signs of time travelers by looking for mentions of two subjects before they happened... http://www.space.com/24232-time-travelers-social-media-aass223.html?cmpid=556082

Lead us not into temptation... but deliver me from Phi...

The blue crabs live in a freshwater power plant cooling lake, I've caught bushels of these huge crabs so they are not, or were not rare, the power plant has shut down so I'm not sure the same conditions prevail there now...

It might go a bit deeper as well, I know this is blind speculation but possibly our affinity to make pets or domesticate other animals might have been more pronounced in homo sapiens. Of course baboons that domesticate dogs sheds some doubt on that...

You forgot that the earth is only 6,000 years old and most importantly no matter what the evidence says you must ignore it in favor of scripture...

Damn, now I feel like the village idiot...

That is not entirely accurate...

And that is relevant why?

A citation and a motive is requested please...

I honestly don't understand why the idea of global weather change is so difficult to understand, if there some secrete pile of gold going to the scientist who proves it or something? https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro801/content/l6_p2.html Thus, when the core reaches a critical density and temperature during its contraction, it can ignite hydrogen fusion in a thin shell outside of the helium core. The helium core will also continue to generate energy by gravitational contraction, too. If you think of the Main Sequence as the “hydrogen core fusion” stage of a star's life, the first stage after the Main Sequence is the hydrogen shell fusion stage. During this stage, the rate of nuclear fusion is much higher than during the Main Sequence stage, so clearly the star cannot stay in this stage as long. For a star like the Sun, it will only remain in this stage for a few hundred million or a billion years, less than 10% of the Sun's Main Sequence lifetime.

On a lighter note, I did once believe in ghosts... for about 5 minutes... I went into my attic and was doing some work and as i started back down I noticed an old rocking chair begin to rock furiously... it stunned me, made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. If i had left it at that I would have forever been left with a mystery but I pulled up my big boy pants and started examining the chair... nothing.. then I started back down the chair started to rock again... this time I was determined to find out but again nothing... the third time i started down and the chair started rocking I heard a thump and saw my cat that had followed me into the attic swarm down the ladder ahead of me... it felt real for about five minutes...

With the avatar of one of my favorite characters in TV science fiction I checked our her profile first thing...

A little off topic but we actually have a population of semi land locked blue crabs here, they get huge, I have personally caught them more than 13" across the carapace... still taste good...

I find the "debate" to be particularly disturbing on facebook. I have more or less 500 friends but most of them repeat mindless religious claims and posts, maybe 6 out of the whole group react in a positive way to my posts about science, humanism and atheism. It's disturbing that so many of the people i grew up with are so strongly religious...

I was watching a documentary about the evolution of dogs and how humans had molded dogs but i wondered if dogs had any significant influence on the evolution of humans. According the documentary the linage of dogs can be traced back only 15,000 years at this point but Jean Auel in her fictionalized accounts of early humans indicated we might have domesticated wolves when neanderthals still existed and then there are the denisovians and recently evidence of a third unknown contribution to the humans gene pool. Could our affinity to wolves have been at least part of why we are here and none of them are?

Endy, I didn't mean to be so confrontational but i learned some new things by investigating your claims, I finally understand why modern amphibians are not ancestral in any way to modern reptiles or mammals... But the crab eating frog is not by it's name suggestive of a saline environment, we have lots of freshwater crabs in the world, even where I live... What I would like to get my hands on is a freshwater hermit crab, if I could breed them i could get rich... lol ( I am into and well versed in breeding crustaceans and fishes )