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Private discrimination includes lynching, which is very definitely not government-mandated

That statement implies that your moral problem with lynchings is that they are discriminatory. Apparently, lynchings would be alright with you if they had been applied equally to poor whites and poor blacks! In fact, the moral problem with lynchings is that they are murder, regardless of the race of the victim.

The Republican "southern strategy" was a deliberate attempt to draw racists into the Republican Party

Oft repeated, but false.

Your claim that unions sought to oppress blacks because they feared competition from cheap black labor doesn't pass the smell test: if they wanted to reduce the competition, they'd have organized the blacks and brought them into unions

That's indeed what Democrats and unions started doing in the 1960's, when they found out that they couldn't use racism to their political advantage anymore and instead started exploiting economic divisions for political gain. Since unions were dominated by Democrats, it's not surprising that they underwent the same kind of shift. But the racist history of unions and minimum wage laws is not debatable; it's historical fact.

From what I've been able to tell, the uneducated and working class are the more racist members of society.

What I said was that "Racism and racist laws in the US (and in most other places) weren't driven by the prejudices of the uneducated or working class (who generally had and have a lot of contact with minorities), they were driven by educated, progressive elites." That is, significant portions of the working class may have been quite racist (after all, lots of them were unionized and Democrats, so a lot of those people were certainly racist), but they didn't drive racist laws or racist public policies; racist policies were the responsibility of educated elites. That's not subject to debate or interpretation, it's documented fact.

Look, I understand where you are coming from. I used to be a progressive myself. I just picked up history books and started reading, and it turns out that a lot of the propaganda used by Democrats and progressives is false.

Slave labor has built many societies. /cough Pyramids?

Slave labor indeed built the infrastructure of many societies. Strangely enough, though, not the pyramids (despite the persistent myth).

The pyramids were, basically, a work project to keep people employed during the non-planting months.

  https://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html

  https://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/01/12/egypt-new-find-shows-slaves-didnt-build-pyramids

I wonder whether, in today's climate of tearing down statues of famous slavers and imperialists (Jackson, Rhodes etc), people would advocate tearing down the pyramids which, for all their architectural genius, were built at a cost of thousands of lives. They're like Qatari football stadia x1000.

Perhaps people died, which happens even in modern times on modern construction projects, but there is evidence they were not slaves. Maybe you weren't trying to infer that, but that's how your post came across to me given the Confederate reference.

https://harvardmagazine.com/20...

the sea level rises for everybody equally, no matter which country is at fault.

This is not true, interestingly.

The large ice masses have a gravitational pull that influences the sea level around them, which leads to quite wildly varying effects on sea levels when they melt; in some places the sea level actually drops as a result of the ice masses melting:
- http://sealevelstudy.org/sea-c...
- http://harvardmagazine.com/201...

"Carthago delenda est."? Why even revert to Latin if you don't even know your quotes? Where is this from, Asterix? I mean, Cato the Elder's stock ending was famous enough that its start "Ceterum censeo" is almost better known than the rest: "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam."

Before you go on a rant about how someone else misuses an ancient language, you might bother to make sure you know what you're talking about.

As even the Wikipedia article explains, the phrase was actually never quoted in an ancient source directly in the TWO forms it is generally quoted in today. (If you want to see many of the various paraphrases of the form actually found in ancient sources, Wikipedia has some of them.) One form being your longer indirect speech version, and the other generally being "Carthago delenda est."

This isn't an "Asterix" version -- it's a well-known version of the phrase that has been commonly cited by English-language scholars for the past couple centuries. Just to show you how long people have been quoting the phrase as "Carthago delenda est" -- The form was common enough to even be parodied in the well-known account of a Harvard professor opposed to academic music study in the 1870s who supposedly ended faculty meetings after the first appointment of a music professor with the phrase "musica delenda est" (i.e., music must be destroyed).

It's true in other modern languages that the "ceterum censeo..." version is perhaps more common, but English-language scholars very frequently cite the phrase as "Carthago delenda est," which is as close to the actual ancient quotations as any.

Without the "Ceterum censeo", a Classic Latin speaker would drop the redundant "est" anyway and just state "Delenda Carthago."

Actually, wrong again. "Delenda" is a gerundive and by itself is only a passive participle. Saying "Delenda Carthago" could mean something more like "Carthage is to be destroyed." Adding a form of the Latin verb esse (i.e., to be) turns the construction from a naked gerundive into a passive periphrastic, which connotes an element of necessity. That is, it alters the meaning from "Carthage [is] to be destroyed" to "Carthage MUST be destroyed."

The gerundive itself can carry that connotation a bit informally, but if Cato were speaking formally and wanted to emphasize his feeling that it MUST happen, he likely would have added a form of "esse" (as you can see is found in multiple actual quotations and references from Latin sources as seen in the Wikipedia article).

Actually, I think the latter is the Asterix version so Goscinny still beats Zuckerberg, Harvard be damned.

Yes, I believe Asterix actually uses the form you mention, which is abbreviated and less formal. And I really can't believe I'm actually defending Zuckerberg here... but his version was perfectly acceptable.

This letter from Harvard Magazine suggests you are mistaken:

In light of reporting in the July-August issue on Harvard’s position on fossil fuel divestment, we wrote Messrs. Paul J. Finnegan and James F. Rothenberg [members of the Harvard Corporation, and Treasurer and past Treasurer, respectively], expressing the perspective summarized below.

Harvard currently holds substantial investments in fossil fuel. The past is no longer prologue for this asset class.

The scientific community—including Harvard’s distinguished climate-related faculty—assert the world must hold global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees C above the preindustrial figure. Governments agree. And, yet, we have already gone half the distance to this ceiling, and are actually accelerating our rapid approach to it. We face an existential planetary threat.

By investing in fossil fuel companies that cling to the outdated business model of measuring success by discovery of new reserves, Harvard is encouraging (and expecting to profit from) the search for more fossil fuel—which will become unburnable if we stabilize global temperatures at levels necessary to sustain life as we know it. When the lid is put on, and carbon emissions are severely limited—as they must be—Harvard will be left holding stranded and devalued assets that can never be burned. (Proven reserves are three to four times what’s needed to transition to renewables by 2050.)

Across the country, hundreds of student organizations work to persuade their institutions’ endowments to divest. Sooner or later, as in the case of companies doing business in apartheid South Africa, divestment from fossil fuel companies will occur. Harvard should be among the first to do so. There are strong, independently sufficient arguments beyond the financial one of stranding to justify divestment. They include the moral (it is repugnant to profit from enterprises directly responsible for carbon emissions or to allow shareholder funds to be deployed in searching for more fossil fuel), the practical (a well-led institution should not wound itself by permitting endowment holdings to demoralize faculty and students, with adverse effects on quality of education, enrollment, and campus environment) and, in Harvard’s case, the unique opportunity (and corresponding duty) it has, as one of a handful of world leaders in education, to lead on this planetary issue.

We support these other arguments for divestment. However, we wanted to bring the financial argument, in particular, to Harvard’s attention. Over the past three years, equities in the coal industry declined by over 60 percent while the S&P 500 rose by some 47 percent. Coal, we submit, is the “canary in the oil well.” Disinvestment now, before this opinion becomes commonplace, is just sound, risk-averse investment judgment, fitting well within the duties of a fiduciary.

Bevis Longstreth, J.D. ’61
Retired partner, Debevoise & Plimpton; former member, Securities and Exchange Commission

Timothy E. Wirth ’61
Former U.S. Senator, president of the United Nations Foundation, and Harvard Overseer

http://harvardmagazine.com/201...

In light of reporting in the July-August issue on Harvard’s position on fossil fuel divestment, we wrote Messrs. Paul J. Finnegan and James F. Rothenberg [members of the Harvard Corporation, and Treasurer and past Treasurer, respectively], expressing the perspective summarized below.

Harvard currently holds substantial investments in fossil fuel. The past is no longer prologue for this asset class.

The scientific community—including Harvard’s distinguished climate-related faculty—assert the world must hold global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees C above the preindustrial figure. Governments agree. And, yet, we have already gone half the distance to this ceiling, and are actually accelerating our rapid approach to it. We face an existential planetary threat.

By investing in fossil fuel companies that cling to the outdated business model of measuring success by discovery of new reserves, Harvard is encouraging (and expecting to profit from) the search for more fossil fuel—which will become unburnable if we stabilize global temperatures at levels necessary to sustain life as we know it. When the lid is put on, and carbon emissions are severely limited—as they must be—Harvard will be left holding stranded and devalued assets that can never be burned. (Proven reserves are three to four times what’s needed to transition to renewables by 2050.)

Across the country, hundreds of student organizations work to persuade their institutions’ endowments to divest. Sooner or later, as in the case of companies doing business in apartheid South Africa, divestment from fossil fuel companies will occur. Harvard should be among the first to do so. There are strong, independently sufficient arguments beyond the financial one of stranding to justify divestment. They include the moral (it is repugnant to profit from enterprises directly responsible for carbon emissions or to allow shareholder funds to be deployed in searching for more fossil fuel), the practical (a well-led institution should not wound itself by permitting endowment holdings to demoralize faculty and students, with adverse effects on quality of education, enrollment, and campus environment) and, in Harvard’s case, the unique opportunity (and corresponding duty) it has, as one of a handful of world leaders in education, to lead on this planetary issue.

We support these other arguments for divestment. However, we wanted to bring the financial argument, in particular, to Harvard’s attention. Over the past three years, equities in the coal industry declined by over 60 percent while the S&P 500 rose by some 47 percent. Coal, we submit, is the “canary in the oil well.” Disinvestment now, before this opinion becomes commonplace, is just sound, risk-averse investment judgment, fitting well within the duties of a fiduciary.

Bevis Longstreth, J.D. ’61
Retired partner, Debevoise & Plimpton; former member, Securities and Exchange Commission

Timothy E. Wirth ’61
Former U.S. Senator, president of the United Nations Foundation, and Harvard Overseer
http://harvardmagazine.com/201...

Actually, the biggest problem with reporting on sea levels is that the significant effects of gravity are often omitted:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/gravity-of-glacial-melt?page=0,0
http://www.cicero.uio.no/fulltext/index.aspx?id=8912

Life is unfair, and who will have the biggest issues with rising sea levels seems in line with that.

I can't think of a worse possible tribute to open web supporter and RSS pioneer Aaron Swartz than this. Nice one Google, why don't you take a shit on his grave while you're at it.

As Khan Academy, at least in my exposure to it, is about listening to someone talk watching writing on a board, do you think that this is teaching good pedagogy? Do you think it reinforces the idea that visual learners are the smartest people, the people who deserve to be educated? Is there any plans to expand the current format ot include other learning styles. For instance, I am not one of those that thinks manipulative have to be used in math, but I do think a math classroom with no manipulative is not as reaching to as broed a learner base as it could be. Or having an interactive element where a formative assessment might be conducted during the video?

I read someplace that significant number of people

What constitutes significant? Compared to automobile deaths?

shot are friends and family either from "moments of rage"

Given how few people die from firearms each year, I can't imagine this being that many. Perhaps it is a significant proportion of accidental shootings. The statistics are clear here: guns save lives. Arguments to the contrary are based on emotion, hearsay, conjecture, and fearmongering.

I'd call the 30,000 people killed in 2001 in the US by firearms fairly significant. Source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/09/death-by-the-barrel.html

Lots of other interesting statistics in that article as well. I'm not going to point-by-point argue with you because I'll never convince you that I'm right and you're wrong, but I feel that a lot of the reasons people want to own guns are based on "emotion, hearsay, conjecture, and fearmongering" just as anti-gun arguments are based on the same thing.

FWIW I have no problems with guns, I learned how to shoot while in Boy Scouts, would enjoy the chance to try hunting at some point, and I find target shooting fun, but I don't personally own a firearm as I don't feel I need one to be safe.

Some places could actually experience dropping sea levels as a result of melting ice.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/gravity-of-glacial-melt

You should look into sea level, it's really pretty interesting. There are all sorts of regional effects. For instance the gravitational attraction of mountain ranges like the Andes and the Antarctic Ice Sheet make sea level adjacent to them higher than it would be otherwise. The Antarctic Ice sheet increases sea level around the continent by as much as 30 meters (damn, that's a lot). Here's a paper on the subject but since that's paywalled, here's an article on it.

I wouldn't hire you because you want to remain ignorant. I would think you were afraid to be challenged, and content to live with your prejudices.

Here's the view of the Harvard faculty ( http://harvardmagazine.com/breaking-news/general-education-gains )

"The essential purpose of a liberal education, as we understand it, is not to instill competency and confidence, or to flatter the presumption that the world students are familiar with is the only one that matters. It is, on the contrary, to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, and to disorient young people and help them to find ways to re-orient themselves. Liberal educators aim to accomplish this by challenging assumptions, by inducing self-reflection, by teaching students how to think critically and analytically, by exposing them to the sense of alienation produced by encounters with radically different historical moments and cultural formations and with phenomena that exceed their, and even our own, capacity fully to understand. These are things that professional schools do not do, employers do not do, even academic graduate programs do not do. Those institutions deliberalize students, train them to think as professionals. The historical, theoretical, and relational perspectives that liberal education provides can be a source of enlightenment and empowerment that will serve our graduates well for the rest of their lives. We expect that every course offered in general education will be taught in this spirit.

I finished optimistically in my Masters in physics in 2005. I was going to take a few months off before starting my PhD to look for jobs and accept one because I was undecided about doing a PhD. I discovered that no employer was really looking for a physics education and I returned to the PhD program bitter. Being a graduate student eventually ends and ultimately, that education needs to be translated into sustainable work. Otherwise, it's just lost income opportunities by consuming time to get an education. Being able to start a family matters and being able to settle down and buy a house matters. And the people saying that science education is so valuable and so important to do aren't making those sacrifices themselves. They're the ones with their own house and vehicle and starting their family life. I ended up retraining as an accountant but I then realized I was incredibly bored after six months, so I took computer science instead and I discovered I liked it a lot more. And the material is interesting to read even outside of class. And I get job interviews too. I still think it's a challenging market as a programmer in Saskatchewan, but there's still more demand for it than in physics or engineering. Other friends who stuck it out for the PhD are now discovering that things are going awry for them. They can't find jobs and they don't have the income they thought they would. There was an article http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy basically explaining that jobs that are safe are jobs that can't be shipped over the wire. The trades and the health sector seem to fit that category. There just isn't a demand for science and I cringed when I heard that the Liberals have education tax credit plans for university students. it just seems to be flooding the market with more university majors without employer demand for the degree.

I'd like to see the citations for your numbers.

I live in an area where gun collecting, clay shooting, sport course shooting, still target shooting, hunting, and just putting ammo into cans are common hobbies. I remember far more deadly beating around here than accidental gun deaths.

Accidental deaths tend to be in the form of cars, motorcycles, ATVs, boats, and farm machinery. Accidental gun deaths are caused when people with no respect for the power and utility of firearms pick them up at the corner shop without sufficient training.

About 30% of Americans polled by Gallup own firearms personally and 40% say they have a gun in their home. 47% of men in some demographic groups personally own at least one firearm.

In 2001, 800 to 900 gun deaths were accidental in the US. About 11,000 were homicides, and the biggest number -- about 58% of all gun-related deaths in 2001 -- were suicides. Other sources have higher numbers, but I didn't find anything higher than 1,500 annually in a quip that sounds extremely anti-firearm in a top-ten list of accidental deaths.

Now, since there are around 300 million people in the US and around 300 million firearms, I'd say less than 1000 accidental deaths is much better than the situation for accidental death for motorists and passengers in cars (33,040 of whom died in 2005) or bicyclists (of whom 784 died in 2005, but at 3 to 11 times as many deaths per mile as those in cars).

About 5,000 people die from food poisoning each year in the US, with about 1,800 of those dying from known pathogens. Seventy-five percent of those known pathogens are strains of just three pathogens: Salmonella, Listeria, and Toxoplasma.

Remember that top ten list I mentioned? Firearms accidents were listed at #7, although if using other sources for the number they would have fallen possibly at #8 or #9.

Death by gases (poisoning and asphyxiation) are in the same neighborhood as accidental gun deaths. Suffocation (choking blocking the respiratory tract or asphyxiation just due to lack of oxygen and not some other gas getting in its way) is double or more, as are fire-related deaths and drownings.

Roughly double the items in the previous paragraph to find 8,600 people per year lethally poisoned by solids or liquids including truly poisonous foods but not foods contaminated by infectious food-borne pathogens like salmonella.

Almost double that again to find that nearly 15,000 people plunge to untimely deaths each year.

Motor vehicle crashes (accounting for over 43,000 fatalities per year according to their unnamed sources) lead by a huge margin. That's more than suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths by gun put together.

I guess it's time to tell people about the dangers of letting their loved ones around ladders, stairs, food, and especially cars.

I thought that the claim that slaves built the pyramids was placed in serious doubt recently.

in the "what are you going to believe, your own eyes?" department...

Research in Phenology (the study of the seasonal changes of plant and animal life) shows significant advances in spring activity at points across the globe.

http://www.scienceonline.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;324/5929/887
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15592880
http://www.seaturtle.org/PDF/Parmesan_2003_Nature.pdf

These are supplemented by anecdotal evidence - particularly in higher latitudes - that things are changing rapidly, and that surroundings are changing with in a generations living memory.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/11/the-great-global-experim.html

I didn't "quit"[*] because I was afraid my data was being leaked to my phone. I "quit" because it was being leaked across the whole goddamn Internet. This move is beyond worthless, and shows just how Zuck doesn't get it.

  [*] No one really quits. They just "deactivate," while facebook keeps all your data. Remember when Facebook said that users owned their own data, yet never provided a way to completely delete it, nor export it? Talk is cheap. Platitudes even cheaper. Code is law.

Yeah, those darn leftist professors.

I'm sorry, you thought I was spouting a talking point? Sorry, no. You'll have to make do with facts and well thought out arguments. Citation needed? Here you go.

Like how the students in Iran that protest their government are doing so because they're incited by "leftist professors". Or students protesting against the communists in Soviet Russia or during Ukraine's "Orange Revolution".

Oh my! You mean fighting an oppressive government isn't a hallmark of the left, even when they're not even when they're not actually being oppressed? Yes, I'd say exactly like that. I just happen to agree with them in those cases. Not having thought out your argument worth a damn doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong, e.g., Sean Hannity. Sean's so stupid it hurts to listen to him. Even when he's right in his position it's for completely the wrong reasons.

How about all those students protesting against the Iraq war in the USA and the UK?

Yes. Again, exactly like that. The students protesting that war almost certainly sacrificed little or nothing to the war effort. They protested on behalf of an Iraqi public whose opinion on the matter they didn't care to know and on behalf of the soldiers who volunteered to fight the war. Well thought out, yeah?

Was that a "left-right" issue.

Absofuckinglutely. Unless I missed it where all kinds of conservatives were shouting out against the war? I discount the buyer's remorse crowd because it means they were either sheep, too stupid to thoroughly consider their opinion beforehand, or simply saying whatever it took to get elected. In none of the previous cases are their positions of any strength or value whatsoever.

What exactly is "impressively stupid" about protesting any of the examples I gave?

See Iraq War protesters. Protesting for a group that you don't have any idea if the majority of that group agree with you (the Iraqi people) is impressively stupid. Protesting on behalf of a group that is overwhelmingly opposed to your viewpoint (members of the US military) is more along the lines of astoundingly stupid.

Or indeed protesting censorship laws that have been mis-represented to the public which is what the GP was talking about?

GP(now GGP) was not speaking to the censorship laws or protesting thereof, he was speaking in defense of his hypothesis that being college-aged is not a bad thing. GGP(now GGGP) fired off a trolling snark at college students and said nothing at all on censorship. OP was the one speaking of censorship laws and the protests thereof and I happen to agree with him. This entire argument is a troll-feeding tangent with little to do with TFA. Fun though.

As mentioned by the previous post, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is an active area of research, although some of it flaky.

More cogent to your case, however, MRI itself has been rigorously shown to have anti-depressant effects and also relieve bi-polar disorder. The MRI used was an EP-MRSI. It would be interesting to find out if this is the kind your wife experienced.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/05/magnetically-lifted-spir.html

To continue this path, what happens to the dissolved CO2 at those depths:

"Another process, called "the biological pump," transfers CO2 from the ocean's surface to its depths. Warm waters at the surface can hold much less CO2 than can cold waters in the deep. "This is the 'soda bottle on a warm day' effect," says Agassiz professor of biological oceanography James McCarthy, "and is not unique to carbon dioxide; it applies to all gases dissolved in water. There is a higher capacity to hold a gas with a lower temperature than with a higher temperature." This means that when deep ocean waters rise to the surface as part of normal ocean-circulation patterns, the water heats up and actually releases CO2."

from here,
http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/11/the-ocean-carbon-cycle.html

So this is a temporary storage solution and the fertilizer might speed up the process but the CO2 is at best dissolved it seems.

I guess CO2 storage could be really helped by dumping CaOH or something like that into the ocean just where this should come from I wonder.

Dog bite fatalities in the US in 2007: 35. Total number of coyote-attack fatalities in recorded history: 1, 27 years ago. Compare to 800-900 accidental shooting deaths in 2001, and I'll take my chances.

In other news, the United States has been officially canine rabies free for over a year.

Oh, I wish I had the awesome health care system you have there in the US, rather than my poorly managed government health care here. Then we could have the great results you have.

There are thousands of "free" fonts to be found on the web.

But the truth of it is that type design and typography on the professional level is as a ratified a skill as you will find anywhere:

Times New Roman dates from 1931. Baskerville from 1757. Bruce Rogers and His Centaur

Expecting the first-tier foundries like Monotype to make a free gift of their most artful and significant designs is simply not realistic.

"the dehumanizing effect of anonymity. It is twofold: first it is easy to dehumanize the person you are hating-on because they are obscured in a metal box, second it is easy to let go of your social common sense because you are obscured by your metal box"

I really doubt this personally, online people can be who they REALLY ARE and say what they what they REALLY feel, certainly this allows for more hot-headedness and stupidity as well that we regret later, but more or less people get to be another side of themselves who they really are and is really a part of them.

All internet does is bring down the barriers on human nature and the immature asshole inside everyone. The truth is 1000's of years ago we would kill and enslave people who disagree'd with us, just look at human history! It's filled with people getting killed over arguments over what they believed in and their personal values and view of the world, and not just religion either.

If you doubt this: Just look at the cold war, and how many americans can't have a conversation about helping others without being labelled 'socialist' or 'commie' or 'pinko'. It's ridiculous, people think they know more then they actually do, and they prefer to defer to themselves because you can't convince someone who thinks they know everything.

The average person does not have the heart of a philosopher or scientist, below is one of my favorite quotes from Ibn al-Haytham (11th century islam scientist).

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/09/ibn-al-haytham.html

(quote from above article below)

Ibn al-Haytham articulated some remarkably sophisticated statements on the practice of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. In a critical treatise, Aporias against Ptolemy, he asserts that "Truth is sought for itself"--but "the truths," he warns, "are immersed in uncertainties" and the scientific authorities (such as Ptolemy, whom he greatly respected) are "not immune from error...." Nor, he said, is human nature itself: "Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

Except you don't. You pull it from the oceans. Both from upper & lower layers.

So the oceans aren't a carbon sink? According this article the oceans adsorb 25% carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the atmosphere. And because of all the CO2 the oceans are aborbing they are turning acidic.

But the oceans contain MUCH more carbon than the oil fields, and that *will* be brought up, because algae NEED co2 (like every single plant does)

And like every other plant algae takes CO2 from the atmosphere and give off oxygen.

and for plants more co2=better

While this is true for some plants, such as poison ivy "Climate Change Surprise: High Carbon Dioxide Levels Can Retard Plant Growth, Study Reveals".

So I do believe the poster was right. Nobody tell the green nuts, okay ?

Have you read what science says?

A few scientist suggest that hydrocarbons are produced by non-biological chemical reactions. The organic aspects of hydrocarbons in the earth are the result of microbes eating the stuff. I've even read that a steady supply of underground hydrocarbons could have provided the conditions for the origin of life.

"combined three abiotic (non-living) materials -- water (H2O), limestone (CaCO3), and iron oxide (FeO) -- and crushed the mixture together with the same intense pressure found deep below the earth's surface. This process created methane (CH4)"

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/03/rocks-into-gas.html

Autism symptoms don't develop at 2 months, the time when the first vaccine is mandated.

Or, heck, even at birth, now that Hep-B shots before leaving the hospital are all the rage.

With "factual analysis" by morons like you backing them up, it's little wonder crap statistical analyses like "this doesn't cause Autism" is the major focus, when spending the money on finding out what *does* cause it would be real science, but that ain't happenin'.

If you had half a brain cell to rub together, you might also be interested in this article, which has not been refuted by anyone.

I will just awesome you are ill informed because it was proven long ago that it was not slaves who did most of the work on the pyramids. Not paid well and not paid are not the same thing are they? The apprentice system was for sure a paid system. They took the children and then paid for their room and board. In some cases the parent might pay to get the child in with a particular person or note, For sure the master was being paid for his art or he would not be the master. What do you think Verrechio was doing with that workshop that Da Vinci apprenticed in? Not getting paid? I was an assistant for many many year getting paid poorly. Again paid poorly is getting paid. So the BS about Not taking pay for your art is just fucking stupid and is usually said by people that are not talented artist or are not dedicated enough to there art to have to get paid for it. I make my life my art. Its not a side hobby its is my life and soul and people pay me for my time to create art for them or to buy my creations.

You might want to read this about who build the pyramids. You seem to need to.
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/070391.html

1. How much was money worth in those days compared to today? Worth being determined not by the amount of worthless consumer junk you can buy, but by it's value versus common commodities.

There was a very interesting and somewhat disconcerting article in in the Harvard Magazine last year. Yes, families are earning more, but we're working more and harder for it, and running higher risks. The inflation-adjusted median income has actually gone down since the 1970s. Makes me want to whip out Quicken and stare at my financials.

Who Built the Pyramids?

Contrary to some popular depictions, the pyramid builders were not slaves or foreigners. Excavated skeletons show that they were Egyptians who lived in villages developed and overseen by the pharaoh's supervisors.

Rooted firmly in the popular imagination is the idea that the pyramids were built by slaves serving a merciless pharaoh. This notion of a vast slave class in Egypt originated in Judeo-Christian tradition and has been popularized by Hollywood productions like Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments, in which a captive people labor in the scorching sun beneath the whips of pharaoh's overseers. But graffiti from inside the Giza monuments themselves have long suggested something very different.
[...]
Generations of scholars have painstakingly calculated how many laborers would have been needed to quarry, transport, and position the stones of the great pyramids. Estimates have ranged widely--from the 100,000 cited by Herodotus to just the few thousand posited by recent assessments that allow for decades of construction time. Yet Lehner and his team were not finding enough houses to accommodate even the low-end estimates. "Where are all the people?" he wondered. His graduate studies had taught him how other scholars of Middle Eastern settlement patterns had analyzed sites in order to come up with estimates of population size. Lehner was approaching the problem from the opposite perspective. He had a sense of how many people were needed to build a pyramid, and so could infer the size of the city he would find. But there were too few dwellings. The city seemed a ghost town.
[...]
The surprises were just beginning. Faunal analyst Richard Redding, of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, identified tremendous quantities of cattle, sheep, and goat bone, "enough to feed several thousand people, even if they ate meat every day," Lehner adds. Redding, who has worked at archaeological sites all over the Middle East, "was astounded by the amount of cattle bone he was finding," says Lehner. He could identify much of it as "young, under two years of age, and it tended to be male." Here was evidence of many people--presumably not slaves or common laborers, but skilled workers--feasting on prime beef, the best meat available.
[...]
Redding's faunal evidence dealt a serious blow to the Hollywood version of pyramid building, with Charlton Heston as Moses intoning, "Pharaoh, let my people go!" There were slaves in Egypt, says Lehner, but the discovery that pyramid workers were fed like royalty buttresses other evidence that they were not slaves at all, at least in the modern sense of the word. Harvard's George Reisner found workers' graffiti early in the twentieth century that revealed that the pyramid builders were organized into labor units with names like "Friends of Khufu" or "Drunkards of Menkaure." Within these units were five divisions (their roles still unknown)--the same groupings, according to papyrus scrolls of a later period, that served in the pyramid temples. We do know, Lehner says, that service in these temples was rendered by a special class of people on a rotating basis determined by those five divisions. Many Egyptologists therefore subscribe to the hypothesis that the pyramids were also built by a rotating labor force in a modular, team-based kind of organization.

Well... some biologist do have a problem with the Bdelloid rotifers.
John Maynard Smith, not a small thinker among biologist, called these creatures "An Evolutionary Scandal".
It is true that bacteria produce asexuall, but they still exchange genetic material using conjugation.

Slaves didn't build the pyramids. That would explain the no pictograph part.

Already discussed in postings, but worth repeating: By definition, the blacker a material is, the more photons it absorbs. Ultra-black materials are particularly useful if you are making photosensitive materials (e.g. cameras) or any sort of photo collector (e.g. PV cells).

Do you think that self-discipline is especially malleable? Are you familiar with the concept of hyperbolic discounting and intertemporal bargaining?

Imagine a drug that could obviate post traumatic stress disorder and Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy. Then imagine a drug that could reduce the emotional impact of sermons about Hell you've heard or of movies you've seen -- movies like "Deliverance" or "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". It has a name and it's "propranolol".

The global warming issue is no simple matter, clearly. This post reminded me of the fact that the ocean, not just land, is an important carbon sink. And with the warming of the oceans, more carbon will be released, think of a warm bottle of carbonated softdrink. Further, the ocean's currents work like a giant conveyor belt, to warm cold areas like Europe, or bring cool water to hot areas like California and Central America, but global warming alters the dynamics of this system. From a high-level view, the significant changes to the earth, such as greenhouse gases, impact the "buffers" available, similar to the impact of a Krakatoa exploding would have on the earth, for example - but this is something we will simply dig out of once the dusts settles, unfortunately.

So I think that one of the complexities of global warming is that there is such a tremendous amount of factors and systems (remember, supercomputers are used to model global warming), that to say "if I do x, then y", is a bit naive.

The Kyoto accord is a sham. Yea mark me as flame bait if you wish but read on... Harvard Agrees that it is a sham, though not that particular word. Quoted from the linked article, for those that are click impared,

"But the choice of 1990 immediately introduced inequities into the ensuing political process to determine who should cut how much, says Butler professor of environmental science Michael B. McElroy. That particular date "gave the Europeans a massive advantage relative to other countries," he says, because "reunification of Germany led to the elimination (for economic reasons) of a lot of dirty, polluting industry in what was formerly East Germany."

By selecting a timescale that was almost immediate--a completion date of 2008--the Kyoto Protocol mandated economically inefficient measures to achieve its targets. "The economic lifetime of a power plant is maybe 30 years," says McElroy, "and the average automobile in the U.S. is on the road for 11 and a half or 12 years. If you try to change the energy economy too quickly, you are going to have to retire equipment that is still economically productive."

Chceck this out for other Interesting Reads. And for the kicker. All nations that are pressuring America stand to beneffit from a mass redistribuion of wealth from America. Don't believe me? Well what about THIS.

I may sound a little steamed, well I AM!!! I'm tired of the tree huggin' hippes deciding to listion to only one side fo the story. I've quoted Harvard here, and they ignore it! Everyone who is on the "green bandwagon," that I have talked to, has denied this material as being fringe. I beg to differ!!! The media is a sensationlist money maker. The more sensational they sound the more money they make. I ask this question, what is more sensational than Chicken Little screaming "The Sky is Falling"? Oh wait just a second, what is more sensational than an actor with almost as much plastic surgery as Michael Jackson stating that the coasts are going to flood, or that "The Day After Tomorrow" is reality, or "The End of the World"?

We need a dose of cold reality. The Tsunami at the end of 2004 was part of it. Nature is much more dangerous than some fickle mathematics. Just think of a volcano in Antartica... Hmmm... That would do more than global warming ever could!

And yea, I failed spelling all through my elementary years.

The NJ law seems like technological overkill. If they are looking to avoid accidental shootings by children, there are simpler, more reliable technologies available. Considering that the linked article looks suspiciously like a press release, I suspect that a smart lobbyist has gotten hold of someone's ear in the state capitol.

It always amazes me to see people jump on the Kyoto bandwagon.

The US SHOULD NOT sign the Kyoto protocol. Not only does it not hold most of the worst pollution producing countries in the world to ANY standard what-so-ever, but it also puts the US at a significant disadvantage compared to not only China but the EU.

To top it off, the Kyoto protocol is estimated to have negligable impact on global warming, even with Perfect compliance by all nations ratifying it.

we didn't really have much else going for us. We weren't fast enough to catch prey

I hadn't heard that either, i just knew from other people talking about Oracle that it was supposed to be good.

By the way, here is where i've been living

The gist of the article is that much has changed in the world since the Harvard Classics were chosen, and that we shouldn't be bound by the errors of the past. Oh, and on the Harvard Magazine home page, they are collecting suggestions for what a revised, modern, list of Harvard Classics should look like.

There is a certain amount of knee-jerk political correctness in the article, but it is definately worth a read.

The gist of the article is that much has changed in the world since the Harvard Classics were chosen, and that we shouldn't be bound by the errors of the past. Oh, and on the Harvard Magazine home page, they are collecting suggestions for what a revised, modern, list of Harvard Classics should look like.

There is a certain amount of knee-jerk political correctness in the article, but it is definately worth a read.

The gist of the article is that much has changed in the world since the Harvard Classics were chosen, and that we shouldn't be bound by the errors of the past. Oh, and on the Harvard Magazine home page, they are collecting suggestions for what a revised, modern, list of Harvard Classics should look like.

There is a certain amount of knee-jerk political correctness in the article, but it is definately worth a read.