Moontanman

Of lice and men: An itchy history By Emily Willingham Ponder the louse. Consider its plural, lice. Try now not to scratch the multiple itches that have just populated your head at the very thought of these near-microscopic insects crawling around in that forest of hair follicles, laying eggs, sucking blood, and generally creeping you out. The thing is, your head may not be the likeliest place to feel the itch. After all, we’re home not only to the louse, but to lice, plural. As in two genera of lice, and three different kinds. One of those, the pubic louse, appears to trace back to contact between the Homo lineage and the gorilla, but more on that in a bit. http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=of-lice-and-men-an-itchy-history-2011-02-14&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_EVO_20110214

I knew I was an asshole baby....

I'm not worried about cancer from mobile phone use but all that blood that rushes out of the opposite ear when I talk on the phone is annoying....

Rigney, are you sure you ain't my daddy? Better at what exactly?

In layman's terms? The electric Universe is pseudo-science at best but mostly BS, I've read quite a bit about it and it really sounds cool. But it fails in many areas, i won't confuse you with my own layman's terms (BS) and I'll let someone else who is more knowledgeable cut this one up in pieces. When i first encoutered it i was quite taken by some of the ideas but even if you don't have the math you can see quite a few areas that simply fail. http://www.electricuniverse.info/Introduction Black holes are a big problem for the Electric Universe theory, it says they don't exist and we know they do....

Where I live it's getting to be that a great many brands of liquor are sold in plastic bottles, I try to avoid them, it makes the tequila taste bad.... well worse....

I have no idea what the first mushroom is but the second is very similar to this one. http://americanmushrooms.com/coolest.htm Yellow-orange Fly Agaric (A. muscaria var. formosa) I think I would avoid it... I used to pic wild mushrooms when I was a teenager, I cooked them and sold some of them occasionally to the local farmers market, looking back it's probably a miracle i didn't kill my self or someone else but I was very conservative in what mushrooms I picked, oyster and coral mushrooms were my favs.

If you think living someplace else and hearing about people like our all knowing political extremists or or one of our wonderful evangelicals or some other purveyor of political or religious (or both) superiority and pride is frustrating (I won't bother with a list of these idiots, I'm not sure my key board could stand that much typing and most would not agree to who they are anyway, everyone has their own list) you should try living where these people are coddled by the government to the point of it becoming down right incestuous. I could name a few who's early abortion would have been their finest hour but fortunately these types are few, most are just annoying, or that is what many people tell themselves and as long as none have control of the tiller of state we will continue to just be annoyed but the possibility of one extreme getting real control is always a real danger. I understand your frustration, we consistently hear how other countries are going to shit because they have things like socialized institutions and we must fight to prevent any possibility of socialism as though pure capitalism will do better. It's always a fight between extremes here, always a drive to demonize the opposition instead of real facts and figures. In the USA politics is so intimately entwined with religion it's impossible to really have anyone who is politically independent of any religion. The problems with the school system is that the worst of the fundamentalists make a point of getting on school boards to influence school curriculum's and the pulpit is used to promote these stupid ideas, it comes mostly from the bottom up not the top down... The squeaky wheel always gets the grease... Religion has a huge influence in the USA, often this causes lots of problems at the level of individuals in small towns but that is getting better, several years ago (about 25) a woman in my State was arrested for performing fellatio on her boy friend, they were seen by someone who was window peeping. The woman was charged, she lost her job with the sheriffs department but neither the boy friend or the peeping tom was charged with anything. It resulted in that law being struck from the books in that town and was hugely embarrassing for the woman involved, she never got her job back, but lots of odd laws prompted by religious bans on sexual things remain on the books on many small and sometimes even large cities or states. Religion has Americans by the short hairs and most of us have no idea.... Sadly you are correct, I see people all the time protesting our nuclear power plant or the new Cement plant, but the local coal fired power plant seldom gets a quick glance even though coal power plants actually release more radioactivity by several orders of magnitude (not to mention heavy metals) into the atmosphere than all the nuclear power plants in the world combined. The local Cement plant is being protested due to possible mercury release even though it exceeds all emission laws by quite a bit, people are just nucking futs. I know people like that, sadly they are few and far between here and are constantly being told by their peers (not to mention billboards, signs, TV shows, commercials and the pulpit) that they need to come over the fundamentalist side so they won't burn in hell. The more fundamentalist drive the actions of the less fundamentalist via guilt and fear, many people in private will profess they have their doubts about the need to believe absolutely but the guilt and fear are difficult to beat in a society that worships religion it's self more than the actual practice of it. "They" were at my door this morning wanting to know if I had heard the good news, I told them yes the Moon Goddess has answered my prayers, they have no sense of humor... (I started to ask them if they would come in and pray and lay on hands me to help my impotence but...) While I disagree, your stance is yours and as long as you don't aggressively proselytize me with your view I see no reason why I or any reasonable person shouldn't support your right to believe. Sadly most major religions do not take the stance of live and let live, their holy books actively say we have to be converted, the nature of that conversion changes over time but it has ranged from threat of death to extra taxes to guilt and fear of a horrible "after life" (isn't that an oxymoron?) to just treating anyone who disagrees with you as somehow less than human. Actually in some places those broad brush strokes do work and that would be ok if those people believed in live and let live but they know they cannot do that. Religion can only exist if it brings in more members and money (religion is much like a parasite on society, it mirrors biological parasites very closely in my view) and the few or the many who are indeed fundamentalist are the most dangerous people in the world. As for the OP, I think science and religion and government were once all the same thing, one guy who told the best explanations for the natural world and the things that happened both good and bad was the leader. Eventually this job split up into a leader and a shaman or priest and most of the time they backed each other up. it took a long time for science as we know it to come about but it has been so successful because it is so successful at describing the natural world, religion and or government are not so good at anything but BS. Now to be fair, there have been off shoots of science (or sometimes real science has been an off shoot) we call them pseudo-science but they were real attempts to explain the reality around us, It's quite possible that some things we think of as real science might one day be thought of as our "astrology" or "alchemy" or "religion" but if so it will be because we investigated them and found out ourselves if it was real or not, it won't be because some guy who hears supernatural voices and requires everyone worship something totally outside our experience of the real world.

That is precisely what I am saying!

No, that's not what i am saying, the 4D equivalent of a cube should hold an infinite number of full sized 3D cubes, maybe an infinite number of infinitely large 3D cubes.

HEY LEMUR, IS IT TRUE THAT YOU AND JUDY FROM DOWN THE STREET ARE DOING THE HORIZONTAL BOP? Or would you rather I had whispered that one?

I've often thought if dimensions this way. A line is one dimension a square is two dimensions but how many lines does the square contain? An infinite number of 1D lines side by side compose the 2D square. A cube is an infinite number of 2D squares all packed on top of each other, so this would mean a 4D cube equivalent would contain an infinite number of 3D cubes.

I almost feel like I should just say me too but y'all know better than that... Morality....What a concept, where does it come from? God? Which one? Obviously not (no matter which one you name) i think humans create our own morality as time passes that "sense" of what is moral changes not quite as often as seasons. All you need to do is go back 100 years and most of us would be embarrassed to be related to "those" people. Morality is evolving faster then we are I think this is due to democracy, democracy is one of the most powerful ideas of the humans race, go back 500 years and most of us would be hanged as witches or simply allowed to die when we couldn't take care of ourselves. No matter how Conservative you are no matter how liberal you are the reality is that humans are changing, we ride the razor's edge between the forces of conservative and Liberal only a democracy can allow this balance of power and require it. The bad thing is that as we change we can only see the past. I think we are better off now than we were, i think we will get better at being social creatures but I'm not sure where that will lead, think of 100 years from now and a person similar to me in his thinking would be labeled as a crazy right wing nut, (I can't even imagine where the liberals are by then), all i know is we will only know after we are past it

No, Darwin did not coin the word evolution, lots of things evolve, people, planets, stars, the universe, and chemical reactions. The Theory of the Evolution of life pertains to living organisms but the process that created those organisms was also an evolutionary one. It is called chemical evolution... http://science.jrank.org/pages/1387/Chemical-Evolution.html http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/index.php?page=origin03 Evolution is not restricted to life forms...

OMFG! I'm a Cheerio!

Isn't saying that evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis a little bit disingenuous? I know Darwin's theory of evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis but wasn't abiogenesis a type of evolution, the evolution of less complex chemicals into more complex chemicals resulting in organisms of some sort?

Opening a Can of Worms A father’s determination to help his son resulted in an experimental treatment for autism that uses roundworms to modulate inflammatory immune responses. Can the worms be used to treat other diseases? Read more: Opening a Can of Worms - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57941/#ixzz1DaDzYDR1

When asked.... "Why is the ocean salty?" "Snookie", of Jersey Shore Fame replied "I hate the ocean. It's all whale sperm. Everybody Google it. That's why the water is salty. From the f---ing whale sperm." I wonder how she knows whale sperm is salty?

Evidently it has happened... http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1071076/posts

Tony, i think you've hit upon something here that many people do not understand and it contributes to many of these free energy ideas. It takes power to run a generator/alternator, the more power you get the harder it is to turn, yes you can take an alternator and turn it easily with your hand but it doesn't generate much power at such low output but the more power you get out of it the harder it is to turn. I'm not sure about the exact figures but a alternator on a car takes several horse power away from the engine to generate 12v at the amperage needed to recharge the battery and run the car's electronics that would other wise be used to move the car.

It's important to remember that laws and rights of children have changed drastically over the years, a couple hundred years ago 12 years old was a good age to marry, for a girl anyway, of course women as children and as adults have always enjoyed fewer rights and privileges than us wise manly men... Of course we have to offer them our wisdom and maturity as we guide them in the right direction, between football games and pickled egg farts.

I thought the point to the top at the end was that he didn't bother to check and see if it fell over, he was finally to the point that he didn't need to see the totem.

Yes, common table salt will indeed melt ice. Most cities use coarse salt granules 1/4 inch or so, often literal mountains of it to keep the roads clear. To melt out your car will take several pounds of salt at least, I would want 25# or so... Oh yeah, if it's cold enough, the salt will not melt the ice....