Given that they then kicked out the science educators and bragged about it on their twitter feed (see remark below), I'm pretty sure that this wasn't satire on their part.
If there were any doubts about ICP's attitude on this matter, one of the ICP members brags about how they had their security get rid of the scientists on their twitter feed http://twitter.com/bigviolentj/status/15541954268
Corp, Dougie & Sugar Slam ran those scientist haters off and we had a fuckin' amazing ass concert. 2500 Los rocked the building's foundation
In almost any other context I would have thought that the phrase "scientist haters" would mean people who hate scientists, not scientists who are haters. Ah well.
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
That's unambiguously anti-science. Any attempt to say they weren't being literal is simply stupid. Insane Clown Posse is stupid and supports willful ignorance. Pretending otherwise to try to get a small amount of science education done might help a tiny bit but at the end of the day, let's not kid ourselves about what this crap band stands for. The fact that when the band found out about this event they tried to actively prevent it shows what they really care about. These are the worst sort of ignorant fucktards possible, the sort of ignorant fucktards who not only take pride in their own ignorance but actively prevent other people from trying to educate. The fact that then had their security goons try to take away the camera is simply one more aspect of how absolutely despicable ICP is.
OK. So the claim made about the water is that the entire Earth was flat so it wouldn't need nearly as much water. And what mechanism allowed a completely flat Earth? And why did tectonics start up afterwords? You can't just construct hypotheses to to fit your pet model.
Fossils, by definition, must be buried quickly. It might be surmised that most fossil deposits are actually a mark of a global die off and the reason for many might be Noah's Flood.
Rubbish. First, don't use "by definition" when something isn't a definition. That's' a terrible abuse of the English language. Moving on from the nitpicking,mMany fossils have zero to do with flooding at all. Many are fossilized after exposure to volcanic ash, or falling into lakes or riverbeds. They look different. If there were a global flood, we'd see the signs of that in the types of rocks that fossils were found and the dating of the rocks and fossils. We don't see that.
On the other hand, this is actually what you would expect if the earth was ~6000 years old and Noah's Flood was real. A thorough grasp of Genesis indicates animals and humans were created for diversity and adaptation which, it would seem natural, they were made such because they had to populate the earth from a relatively small number. So, you would not expect a genetic a bottleneck. All creatives had all the genetic information with which to propagate and create the variations we see today.
That's nonsense. First of all, as someone who can read Genesis in the original Hebrew, nothing in the text says anything at all about humans being created for diversity and adaption. So how you are getting that from there is beyond me. Second of all, that doesn't work. There's far more genetic diversity in even just the human population then what you would get from about a dozen people on a boat 5000 years ago, even if if every single one of them had very different genetic backgrounds.
Different view points will give different responses to the same facts. Secular people assume evolution and millions of years. Creationists look at your interpretation of the data, see that it disagrees with their assumptions, and attempt to see how the facts can logically be interpreted to support them. This is actually a tribute to creationists: They have to put more effort into their research and theorizing in order to think of a reasonable solution that the majority are unable to think of.
No. This isn't a tribute to creationists. This is a classic example of bad reasoning. I don't know where you get the idea that "secular people assume evolution and millions of years." Evolution and and old earth are both *conclusions* reached by the evidence. In 1750 almost everyone was a Young Earth Creationist, by 1850, almost no geologist was a young earth creationist. They were still almost completely religious Christians but they didn't believe in a young earth. Why not? Because the evidence didn't support it. The model that fit the evidence best was an old earth. This is well before Darwin even came up with his theory of evolution. The geology alone doesn't allow people honestly looking at the evidence to reach any other conclusion. The creationist behavior isn't a tribute to them: What they are doing is constructing defensive hypotheses after defensive hypothesis to protect cherished beliefs. Instead of saying "This is a convoluted set of mutually contradictory hypotheses, maybe we're wrong" they construct claim after claim that (like the claim about mountains or the attempt to deal with the bottleneck issue) generally have no plausible mechanism and don't actually even completely handle the problem other than at a very superficial level.It is important to be creative when doing science. But it is far more important to be able to admit when you are wrong and when the evidence doesn't fit your hypotheses. Scientists have accepted an old earth and evolution because of the evidence. Claiming that scientists are making "assumpti
If Verizon doesn't want to sell these options to customers why are they even offering them? Why not just withdraw these options for new customers and only include them for people grandfathered in and already have them? What am I missing here?
Mars seems more likely than Ceres. Ceres has such a low escape velocity that it isn't clear that one gains much from having a space elevator there. While you are correct that it would be easier to do on Mars that would require massive infrastructure there which we don't seem near to having at all.
Unfortunately, when they say that the protostar phase is short they mean on astronomical timescales. The protostar phase lasts on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. So it is unlikely that we are going to be able to have the opportunity to watch a protostar become a star.
atmospheric escape? metal oxidation? ejection? Recent science says the moon's crust contains lots of water.
Do you have a mechanism for this atmospheric escape or metal oxidation? If not, why should this be considered at all likely? As to the last one, how would the water get from the Earth to the moon? Moreover, the orders of magnitude are all wrong. The amount of water we are talking about on the moon is at most on the order of the great lakes (or maybe an order of magnitude or two more). That's not nearly enough. Think about it this way: Let's say the entire moon was covered in a.1 kilometer of water (a massive, massive overestimate). How much water would that be? The moon has a mean radius of around 1700 km, so a quick calculation of
4/3Pi(1700.1 km ^3 - 1700 km ^3) is about 3*10^7 km ^3. The Atlantic Ocean according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_ocean has a volume of 323,600,000 which about 3*10^8 km ^3. So even if we make ridiculous overestimates for the amount of water on the moon, we're still ending up with about a 10th of the amount of water in the Atlantic Ocean. That's nowhere near the water level necessary to flood the Earth. There's a lesson here: Instead of just throwing out something that seems vaguely plausible to defend a pre-existing belief, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if it is at all reasonable. In this case, it clearly isn't.
That's like saying WWII was not a global war because we saw no evidence of it in Ireland and Portugal.
No it isn't. Unless by global flood you now mean "most of the globe" or "a large chunk of the globe." Is that the claim being made? Because from a reading of the Biblical text it doesn't seem like that.
Um, the article is about the largest amount of evidence ever found!
You mean for a die-off connected to a flood? If that's the case then that's pretty weak evidence. This isn't a mass species die-off at all. First, this a tiny flood (a few square kilometers of land, again orders of magnitude matter) and all of these are species that lasted for millions of years after the flood event in the article. So tiny flood and no mass-die off. How did that becomes evidence for a global flood?
So the upshot? I think there is plenty of validity to your facts. Enough to make me question mine, but your arguments require just as much faith as I already have. Don't be so hard on religion, You obviously believe in lot's of things you don't understand too.
Excuse me, but what faith is there at all in any of the arguments? Data with basic estimates isn't "faith" last I checked. This is about evidence, pure and simple. There's a good reason that in 1730 most scientists (such as they were) believed in a global flood and by 1830 almost none of them did. For the simple reason that has nothing do with faith: the evidence doesn't support a global flood. There's no way to get it to work given geology or physics. This has nothing to do with things that I "don't understand" but simple evidence. Please don't project your faith-based epistemology onto the rest of us who use evidence.
I'll bite. What disproves - not Biblically speaking, but just the simple idea - the idea that there was a global flood? Because it seems like a lot of fossils are created during "great floods." Nobody seems to ever even suggest the idea that there was a global flood... every other idea is proposed (numerous "great floods," meteors hitting the earth, etc) but why is a global flood not proposed?
Many different reasons:
First, there's not enough water on Earth. So if it did occur, where did the other water go?
Second, we don't see in the geological record evidence for a flood all at the same point in history. We see at different levels in the geologic column floods in different locations and some with no floods at all. If there were a global flood we'd see a universally dated flood (much as we see a universal iridium layer at the major asteroid impact 65 million years ago). This by itself should be enough.
Third, and related to the above, we don't see any global die off that is closely connected to flood deposits.
Fourth, we don't see the genetic bottlenecking that would have wiped out that many species. The genetic diversity of many species shows us that a global flood could not have occurred in the last 50,000 years at least, on genetic evidence alone.
So the upshot? No global flood in the last 50,000 years just by easy genetic evidence. No global flood at all given lack of water. No global flood at all based on the geologic columns. If it turned out there had been a global flood anytime in the last billion years, we'd have to be so wrong about so much of basic science that it is difficult to find a good analogy for how wrong we'd have to be. We'd have to be about as wrong as it turning out that Julius Caesar never existed.
In the context, I suspect he'd mean draw nasty caricatures. But if you prefer we can just go say fuck Bhumibol Adulyadej. Fuck Bhumibol that fucker. Fuck him for now having his people change the laws. He might look all magnanimous occasionally pardoning someone for insulting him after they've done time or suffered long court cases but that just indicates how much of a problem there is. If he were really serious and couldn't get the law changed he'd just preemptively pardon everyone every single day. So fuck Bhumibol. Fuck his monarchy. Your royal highness Bhumibol Adulyadej, go fuck yourself and your censorship.
The Game of Life is one of the first cellular automata discovered that had simple rules but complicated behavior. The rules very roughly mimic bacterial growth. One has an infinite lattice grid, and some starting set of cells on the grid are designated as alive (every cell on the grid is either alive or dead). Each new generation is made by the following four rules: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies. Any living cell with more than three live neighbors dies. Any living cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation. Any dead cell with three live neighbors (exactly) becomes a live cell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life
The Game of Life is mathematically interesting because it can be shown to be Turing complete. That is, if you have a process that tells you whether any given starting configuration will eventually dieout then you can answer whether any given computer program will eventually halt. In general, there's a theorem known as the Turing Halting Theorem which says that no general procedure exists to do that for all programs.
Prior to the work in TFA, there were known configurations called "gliders" which could replicate themselves as they moved across the grid, but they only left the same number of copies. There were also configurations which could spawn gliders (called glider guns). However, no configuration that was actually self-replicating in the sense of spawning more copies of itself was known. This work by Andrew Wade shows how to make configurations that do self-replicate. His original announcement is at http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 and the actual configuration can be found at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9e96aFfebqqZmY5NjBkYjctY2ViNi00NmJlLTgwZDAtNmU5OTQwYjc1OWQ0&hl=en&pli=1 Thus, this very simply system is still showing itself to have surprising and interesting behavior 30 years after the fact.
Space Elevator. Now..... I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already.
Dammit, I can't believe this keeps coming up. Because it DOES NOT EXIST! It's a science fiction fantasy. Will never work without massive leaps in technology that no one knows even how to approach solving. Might as well research magic at this point.
That's an unfair characterization. The technological hurdles are large but they are well-understood. There's an excellent 2002 report by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/521Edwards.pdf which discusses the technical problems in great detail. The primary issues preventing a space elevator are related to the tensile strength of the ribbon/line. Carbon nanotubes are in theory strong enough, but they need to be able to be manufactured at a much larger scale, with higher quality (especially in regards to average tube length) and need to be placed in a reliable matrix. The reason that it looks like there isn't much space elevator research is really because there's very little that would need to be researched that specifically about space elevators. The primary issue is carbon nanotube research and that's happening now at a quick pace because carbon nanotubes have lots of different applications. The technologies necessary for a space elevator are already being developed for other applications.
We don't know if the capsule from Hayabusa does contain material yet. Also note that a sample-return mission to Mars will be much more difficult than a sample-return mission to an asteroid. The gravity of an asteroid is negligible. But Mars has gravity that is around a third that of Earth. That's a lot. So a sampling robot would need to land on Mars and then return fighting against the large Martian gravity well. It would probably need to carry its fuel with it which means it would need to have a lot of mass to start with and which would make a safe landing even more difficult. We'll probably have successful sample-return from Mars before a human mission their but the technical difficulty with even a sample-return mission is immense.
"Videos"? I'm sorry, when did "video" become a verb?
Well, "video" is actually a verb to star with. It is a Latin word that means "I see." I don't know where you are, but to use "video" as a verb meaning to record a visual image seems common here in New England. I suspect that it is a shortening of "videotape" as a verb. The transition to "video" makes sense both as a shortening and as a response to the fact that most modern video cameras don't have tapes.
What I've been wondering for many years now, is that the Space Shuttle is on a predicted flight path, so they know where it is and at what time. Why hasn't it's re-entry been filmed properly?
TFA says that it looks like the capsule is intact. However, we still don't know if there's even anything in the capsule. The original plan called for the probe to fire pellets at the surface to stir up dust for sampling, but the pellet firing failed. We don't know if there's any substantial quantity of dust in the capsule. The probe also had other problems, including difficult with maneuvering which required deviations from the original mission plan. Still, the entire project seems like a very impressive success, to send a probe to an asteroid and then return that to Earth even if the returning sample is very small.
The only way releasing classified information on foreign policy gives aid and comfort to a nation's enemies is if it exposes some egregious wrongdoing on the part of the nation having its information leaked, in which case moral obligation to expose unlawful practices comes into play
Really? There are no other ways releasing documents could do that? It couldn't for example have details of spies within enemy groups, or details of surveillance techniques, or details about the resolution of spy satellites and their orbits. There are lots of very damaging things that could be here that have no moral problems associated with them at all.
This is what happened with my little brother who has a related disease and had very nasty side effects from Reglan and is now on Domperidone. However, the background behind the issues with domperidone in the US are a bit more complicated than you describe. Domperidone was brought to the FDA as a lactation aid for nursing women. However, there were (and remain) serious concerns about the safety of that use (See for example URL:http://news.scotsman.com/childsaltpoisoningtrial/English-case-paves-way-for.2829892.jp). That matter has gotten domperidone tied up for approval for other things. So the real problem here is that the US system has trouble saying about a drug "This use is ok but this use is not." We have ways of doing that but they are slow and get tied up easily. So there are problems here but there's very little evidence that it has to do with lobbying. Indeed, note that Domperidone's primary manufacture is owned by Johnson & Johnson which is a very large company and which has lots of lobbyists. If this were just about lobbying, the would have won by now.
The paper discussing this work is http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.2033. They appear to be using a pretty standard neural network approach (disclaimer: I don't have much background in neural nets at all. I'm just going off of how they were described in the last class I took that discussed them.) This is part of a very general pattern where programs have done a lot of work that we would think could only be done by people. Other examples include the computerized proof of the Robbins conjecturehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_conjecture. TFA lists a few examples as well which are in more applied areas.
Why is aging not a disease? A common definition of disease is a condition that impairs bodily functions, with specific symptoms and signs. Aging fits that bill easily. Indeed, many results of aging we are already willing to label as disease. Most humans will get some form of arthritis as they get old, and that is a disease. Now, maybe you can argue that aging is a collection of diseases rather than a single disease, but that's a completely different claim. And yes, curing aging is going to be very difficult. I doubt it will be cured in 50 years, but it will happen. We've developed the medical technology to deal with many common ailments that were seen as inevitable. Child birth is not nearly as dangerous as it once was. In the developed world, yellow fever, polio, and cholera are all non-existent. Even minor things like bad eyesight can be corrected for. There's no reason not to make aging go the way of all of these.
Most of these people are cranks or con-artists. Some of these stem-cell clinics are not even using actual stem cells. However, we should keep in mind that none of this is a reason to not think that stem cells will not in the future be a viable method of disease treatment. Also, while the comment in the top-post about aging is in quotation marks, in the long run, it is good to view aging as a disease. Aging is not a good thing and is the root cause of many different problems. Unfortunately, aging is not a single disease but rather caused by a variety of different things which we don't fully understand. However, regarding aging as something to be eventually cured is a productive attitude.
We don't know that. We know that once life gets going it seems to be very resilient and manages to find a lot of different environments to colonize. But we don't know how easy it is for life to start. If life starting is really difficult, then it may be that Titan and Mars are completely barren. What this sort of thing does mean is that if there ever was life on Mars, there's a decent chance that there's still some.
Sadly, the first thing in my mind was, "I thought Beatrix was a Malfoy."
Er, that's Bellatrix, and she's not a Malfoy, she's Bellatrix Lestrange. She's one of the Black siblings but marries a Lestrange. Her sister Narcissa is the one who marries Lucius Malfoy. (And yes, I know this remark has zero redeeming value)
I'm not arguing that the Democrats didn't screw the pooch on this one. But budgets are always political compromises, and when the President pushes repeatedly for cutting funding of somethings, he's going to end up getting some of those funding cuts.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that they then kicked out the science educators and bragged about it on their twitter feed (see remark below), I'm pretty sure that this wasn't satire on their part.
Corp, Dougie & Sugar Slam ran those scientist haters off and we had a fuckin' amazing ass concert. 2500 Los rocked the building's foundation
In almost any other context I would have thought that the phrase "scientist haters" would mean people who hate scientists, not scientists who are haters. Ah well.
Fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don't wanna talk to a scientist Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
That's unambiguously anti-science. Any attempt to say they weren't being literal is simply stupid. Insane Clown Posse is stupid and supports willful ignorance. Pretending otherwise to try to get a small amount of science education done might help a tiny bit but at the end of the day, let's not kid ourselves about what this crap band stands for. The fact that when the band found out about this event they tried to actively prevent it shows what they really care about. These are the worst sort of ignorant fucktards possible, the sort of ignorant fucktards who not only take pride in their own ignorance but actively prevent other people from trying to educate. The fact that then had their security goons try to take away the camera is simply one more aspect of how absolutely despicable ICP is.
Fossils, by definition, must be buried quickly. It might be surmised that most fossil deposits are actually a mark of a global die off and the reason for many might be Noah's Flood.
Rubbish. First, don't use "by definition" when something isn't a definition. That's' a terrible abuse of the English language. Moving on from the nitpicking,mMany fossils have zero to do with flooding at all. Many are fossilized after exposure to volcanic ash, or falling into lakes or riverbeds. They look different. If there were a global flood, we'd see the signs of that in the types of rocks that fossils were found and the dating of the rocks and fossils. We don't see that.
On the other hand, this is actually what you would expect if the earth was ~6000 years old and Noah's Flood was real. A thorough grasp of Genesis indicates animals and humans were created for diversity and adaptation which, it would seem natural, they were made such because they had to populate the earth from a relatively small number. So, you would not expect a genetic a bottleneck. All creatives had all the genetic information with which to propagate and create the variations we see today.
That's nonsense. First of all, as someone who can read Genesis in the original Hebrew, nothing in the text says anything at all about humans being created for diversity and adaption. So how you are getting that from there is beyond me. Second of all, that doesn't work. There's far more genetic diversity in even just the human population then what you would get from about a dozen people on a boat 5000 years ago, even if if every single one of them had very different genetic backgrounds.
Different view points will give different responses to the same facts. Secular people assume evolution and millions of years. Creationists look at your interpretation of the data, see that it disagrees with their assumptions, and attempt to see how the facts can logically be interpreted to support them. This is actually a tribute to creationists: They have to put more effort into their research and theorizing in order to think of a reasonable solution that the majority are unable to think of.
No. This isn't a tribute to creationists. This is a classic example of bad reasoning. I don't know where you get the idea that "secular people assume evolution and millions of years." Evolution and and old earth are both *conclusions* reached by the evidence. In 1750 almost everyone was a Young Earth Creationist, by 1850, almost no geologist was a young earth creationist. They were still almost completely religious Christians but they didn't believe in a young earth. Why not? Because the evidence didn't support it. The model that fit the evidence best was an old earth. This is well before Darwin even came up with his theory of evolution. The geology alone doesn't allow people honestly looking at the evidence to reach any other conclusion. The creationist behavior isn't a tribute to them: What they are doing is constructing defensive hypotheses after defensive hypothesis to protect cherished beliefs. Instead of saying "This is a convoluted set of mutually contradictory hypotheses, maybe we're wrong" they construct claim after claim that (like the claim about mountains or the attempt to deal with the bottleneck issue) generally have no plausible mechanism and don't actually even completely handle the problem other than at a very superficial level.It is important to be creative when doing science. But it is far more important to be able to admit when you are wrong and when the evidence doesn't fit your hypotheses. Scientists have accepted an old earth and evolution because of the evidence. Claiming that scientists are making "assumpti
If Verizon doesn't want to sell these options to customers why are they even offering them? Why not just withdraw these options for new customers and only include them for people grandfathered in and already have them? What am I missing here?
Mars seems more likely than Ceres. Ceres has such a low escape velocity that it isn't clear that one gains much from having a space elevator there. While you are correct that it would be easier to do on Mars that would require massive infrastructure there which we don't seem near to having at all.
Unfortunately, when they say that the protostar phase is short they mean on astronomical timescales. The protostar phase lasts on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. So it is unlikely that we are going to be able to have the opportunity to watch a protostar become a star.
atmospheric escape? metal oxidation? ejection? Recent science says the moon's crust contains lots of water.
Do you have a mechanism for this atmospheric escape or metal oxidation? If not, why should this be considered at all likely? As to the last one, how would the water get from the Earth to the moon? Moreover, the orders of magnitude are all wrong. The amount of water we are talking about on the moon is at most on the order of the great lakes (or maybe an order of magnitude or two more). That's not nearly enough. Think about it this way: Let's say the entire moon was covered in a .1 kilometer of water (a massive, massive overestimate). How much water would that be? The moon has a mean radius of around 1700 km, so a quick calculation of
4/3Pi(1700.1 km ^3 - 1700 km ^3) is about 3*10^7 km ^3. The Atlantic Ocean according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_ocean has a volume of 323,600,000 which about 3*10^8 km ^3. So even if we make ridiculous overestimates for the amount of water on the moon, we're still ending up with about a 10th of the amount of water in the Atlantic Ocean. That's nowhere near the water level necessary to flood the Earth. There's a lesson here: Instead of just throwing out something that seems vaguely plausible to defend a pre-existing belief, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if it is at all reasonable. In this case, it clearly isn't.
That's like saying WWII was not a global war because we saw no evidence of it in Ireland and Portugal.
No it isn't. Unless by global flood you now mean "most of the globe" or "a large chunk of the globe." Is that the claim being made? Because from a reading of the Biblical text it doesn't seem like that.
Um, the article is about the largest amount of evidence ever found!
You mean for a die-off connected to a flood? If that's the case then that's pretty weak evidence. This isn't a mass species die-off at all. First, this a tiny flood (a few square kilometers of land, again orders of magnitude matter) and all of these are species that lasted for millions of years after the flood event in the article. So tiny flood and no mass-die off. How did that becomes evidence for a global flood?
So the upshot? I think there is plenty of validity to your facts. Enough to make me question mine, but your arguments require just as much faith as I already have. Don't be so hard on religion, You obviously believe in lot's of things you don't understand too.
Excuse me, but what faith is there at all in any of the arguments? Data with basic estimates isn't "faith" last I checked. This is about evidence, pure and simple. There's a good reason that in 1730 most scientists (such as they were) believed in a global flood and by 1830 almost none of them did. For the simple reason that has nothing do with faith: the evidence doesn't support a global flood. There's no way to get it to work given geology or physics. This has nothing to do with things that I "don't understand" but simple evidence. Please don't project your faith-based epistemology onto the rest of us who use evidence.
I'll bite. What disproves - not Biblically speaking, but just the simple idea - the idea that there was a global flood? Because it seems like a lot of fossils are created during "great floods." Nobody seems to ever even suggest the idea that there was a global flood... every other idea is proposed (numerous "great floods," meteors hitting the earth, etc) but why is a global flood not proposed?
Many different reasons:
First, there's not enough water on Earth. So if it did occur, where did the other water go?
Second, we don't see in the geological record evidence for a flood all at the same point in history. We see at different levels in the geologic column floods in different locations and some with no floods at all. If there were a global flood we'd see a universally dated flood (much as we see a universal iridium layer at the major asteroid impact 65 million years ago). This by itself should be enough.
Third, and related to the above, we don't see any global die off that is closely connected to flood deposits.
Fourth, we don't see the genetic bottlenecking that would have wiped out that many species. The genetic diversity of many species shows us that a global flood could not have occurred in the last 50,000 years at least, on genetic evidence alone.
So the upshot? No global flood in the last 50,000 years just by easy genetic evidence. No global flood at all given lack of water. No global flood at all based on the geologic columns. If it turned out there had been a global flood anytime in the last billion years, we'd have to be so wrong about so much of basic science that it is difficult to find a good analogy for how wrong we'd have to be. We'd have to be about as wrong as it turning out that Julius Caesar never existed.
In the context, I suspect he'd mean draw nasty caricatures. But if you prefer we can just go say fuck Bhumibol Adulyadej. Fuck Bhumibol that fucker. Fuck him for now having his people change the laws. He might look all magnanimous occasionally pardoning someone for insulting him after they've done time or suffered long court cases but that just indicates how much of a problem there is. If he were really serious and couldn't get the law changed he'd just preemptively pardon everyone every single day. So fuck Bhumibol. Fuck his monarchy. Your royal highness Bhumibol Adulyadej, go fuck yourself and your censorship.
The Game of Life is one of the first cellular automata discovered that had simple rules but complicated behavior. The rules very roughly mimic bacterial growth. One has an infinite lattice grid, and some starting set of cells on the grid are designated as alive (every cell on the grid is either alive or dead). Each new generation is made by the following four rules: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies. Any living cell with more than three live neighbors dies. Any living cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation. Any dead cell with three live neighbors (exactly) becomes a live cell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life
The Game of Life is mathematically interesting because it can be shown to be Turing complete. That is, if you have a process that tells you whether any given starting configuration will eventually dieout then you can answer whether any given computer program will eventually halt. In general, there's a theorem known as the Turing Halting Theorem which says that no general procedure exists to do that for all programs.
Prior to the work in TFA, there were known configurations called "gliders" which could replicate themselves as they moved across the grid, but they only left the same number of copies. There were also configurations which could spawn gliders (called glider guns). However, no configuration that was actually self-replicating in the sense of spawning more copies of itself was known. This work by Andrew Wade shows how to make configurations that do self-replicate. His original announcement is at http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 and the actual configuration can be found at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9e96aFfebqqZmY5NjBkYjctY2ViNi00NmJlLTgwZDAtNmU5OTQwYjc1OWQ0&hl=en&pli=1 Thus, this very simply system is still showing itself to have surprising and interesting behavior 30 years after the fact.
Als
Space Elevator. Now. .... I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already.
Dammit, I can't believe this keeps coming up. Because it DOES NOT EXIST! It's a science fiction fantasy. Will never work without massive leaps in technology that no one knows even how to approach solving. Might as well research magic at this point.
That's an unfair characterization. The technological hurdles are large but they are well-understood. There's an excellent 2002 report by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/521Edwards.pdf which discusses the technical problems in great detail. The primary issues preventing a space elevator are related to the tensile strength of the ribbon/line. Carbon nanotubes are in theory strong enough, but they need to be able to be manufactured at a much larger scale, with higher quality (especially in regards to average tube length) and need to be placed in a reliable matrix. The reason that it looks like there isn't much space elevator research is really because there's very little that would need to be researched that specifically about space elevators. The primary issue is carbon nanotube research and that's happening now at a quick pace because carbon nanotubes have lots of different applications. The technologies necessary for a space elevator are already being developed for other applications.
We don't know if the capsule from Hayabusa does contain material yet. Also note that a sample-return mission to Mars will be much more difficult than a sample-return mission to an asteroid. The gravity of an asteroid is negligible. But Mars has gravity that is around a third that of Earth. That's a lot. So a sampling robot would need to land on Mars and then return fighting against the large Martian gravity well. It would probably need to carry its fuel with it which means it would need to have a lot of mass to start with and which would make a safe landing even more difficult. We'll probably have successful sample-return from Mars before a human mission their but the technical difficulty with even a sample-return mission is immense.
"Videos"? I'm sorry, when did "video" become a verb?
Well, "video" is actually a verb to star with. It is a Latin word that means "I see." I don't know where you are, but to use "video" as a verb meaning to record a visual image seems common here in New England. I suspect that it is a shortening of "videotape" as a verb. The transition to "video" makes sense both as a shortening and as a response to the fact that most modern video cameras don't have tapes.
What I've been wondering for many years now, is that the Space Shuttle is on a predicted flight path, so they know where it is and at what time. Why hasn't it's re-entry been filmed properly?
Well it has been. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK1RxQKCmCE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxGeo0ec-F4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0mP4k--H5o
TFA says that it looks like the capsule is intact. However, we still don't know if there's even anything in the capsule. The original plan called for the probe to fire pellets at the surface to stir up dust for sampling, but the pellet firing failed. We don't know if there's any substantial quantity of dust in the capsule. The probe also had other problems, including difficult with maneuvering which required deviations from the original mission plan. Still, the entire project seems like a very impressive success, to send a probe to an asteroid and then return that to Earth even if the returning sample is very small.
The only way releasing classified information on foreign policy gives aid and comfort to a nation's enemies is if it exposes some egregious wrongdoing on the part of the nation having its information leaked, in which case moral obligation to expose unlawful practices comes into play
Really? There are no other ways releasing documents could do that? It couldn't for example have details of spies within enemy groups, or details of surveillance techniques, or details about the resolution of spy satellites and their orbits. There are lots of very damaging things that could be here that have no moral problems associated with them at all.
This is what happened with my little brother who has a related disease and had very nasty side effects from Reglan and is now on Domperidone. However, the background behind the issues with domperidone in the US are a bit more complicated than you describe. Domperidone was brought to the FDA as a lactation aid for nursing women. However, there were (and remain) serious concerns about the safety of that use (See for example URL:http://news.scotsman.com/childsaltpoisoningtrial/English-case-paves-way-for.2829892.jp). That matter has gotten domperidone tied up for approval for other things. So the real problem here is that the US system has trouble saying about a drug "This use is ok but this use is not." We have ways of doing that but they are slow and get tied up easily. So there are problems here but there's very little evidence that it has to do with lobbying. Indeed, note that Domperidone's primary manufacture is owned by Johnson & Johnson which is a very large company and which has lots of lobbyists. If this were just about lobbying, the would have won by now.
The paper discussing this work is http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.2033. They appear to be using a pretty standard neural network approach (disclaimer: I don't have much background in neural nets at all. I'm just going off of how they were described in the last class I took that discussed them.) This is part of a very general pattern where programs have done a lot of work that we would think could only be done by people. Other examples include the computerized proof of the Robbins conjecturehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_conjecture. TFA lists a few examples as well which are in more applied areas.
Why is aging not a disease? A common definition of disease is a condition that impairs bodily functions, with specific symptoms and signs. Aging fits that bill easily. Indeed, many results of aging we are already willing to label as disease. Most humans will get some form of arthritis as they get old, and that is a disease. Now, maybe you can argue that aging is a collection of diseases rather than a single disease, but that's a completely different claim. And yes, curing aging is going to be very difficult. I doubt it will be cured in 50 years, but it will happen. We've developed the medical technology to deal with many common ailments that were seen as inevitable. Child birth is not nearly as dangerous as it once was. In the developed world, yellow fever, polio, and cholera are all non-existent. Even minor things like bad eyesight can be corrected for. There's no reason not to make aging go the way of all of these.
Most of these people are cranks or con-artists. Some of these stem-cell clinics are not even using actual stem cells. However, we should keep in mind that none of this is a reason to not think that stem cells will not in the future be a viable method of disease treatment. Also, while the comment in the top-post about aging is in quotation marks, in the long run, it is good to view aging as a disease. Aging is not a good thing and is the root cause of many different problems. Unfortunately, aging is not a single disease but rather caused by a variety of different things which we don't fully understand. However, regarding aging as something to be eventually cured is a productive attitude.
I don't think your comparison to the existence of God is a good one. We know life got going at least once.
Life finds a way, ladies and gents.
We don't know that. We know that once life gets going it seems to be very resilient and manages to find a lot of different environments to colonize. But we don't know how easy it is for life to start. If life starting is really difficult, then it may be that Titan and Mars are completely barren. What this sort of thing does mean is that if there ever was life on Mars, there's a decent chance that there's still some.
Sadly, the first thing in my mind was, "I thought Beatrix was a Malfoy."
Er, that's Bellatrix, and she's not a Malfoy, she's Bellatrix Lestrange. She's one of the Black siblings but marries a Lestrange. Her sister Narcissa is the one who marries Lucius Malfoy. (And yes, I know this remark has zero redeeming value)
I'm not arguing that the Democrats didn't screw the pooch on this one. But budgets are always political compromises, and when the President pushes repeatedly for cutting funding of somethings, he's going to end up getting some of those funding cuts.