The only unbiased definition I can come up with for "more evolved" would be "having accrued a greater number of mutations over the period of its existence", which I doubt would put humans on top.
We probably would win for most adaptable, but that wouldn't necessarily mean that we are better. Being adaptable means that a species can do reasonably well in a variety of environments, but as a trade-off, that species probably isn't quite as efficient at living in any one specific environment, aside perhaps from the one they evolved in.
That is a ridiculous question. It is like pointing to a bird, flying through the air, and then saying "And a rock could not fly because..."
Sure, we have figured out possible ways that the brain is able to observe the world, and make decisions and form memories and whatnot, but we have no clue whatsoever why there is a consciousness that arises from all of that. It would work just as well without our consciousnesses hanging out in our heads... ie: just "soul-less" drones going about our business.
the point of "one persons moral code should never prevent someone else getting medical treatment." is that if you do use your moral values as the basis to prevent someone getting medical treatment, you are saying that YOU get to choose that they will suffer or die due to their condition. You get to be the judge and jury, and indirectly, the executioner. After all, you prevented a treatment from being developed that had the potential to save their life.
Oh! but the adult stem cells!
Adult stem cell research is lagging behind embryonic stem cell research by a fair bit. Many people don't have time to wait for adult stem cell research to catch up. While we argue, they die. Too bad for them I guess. God's decision right?
If you are upset about the destruction of embryos that were destined for destruction, then you should be complaining about the fact that they were created to begin with, i.e: fighting against the IV procedures that allow sterile couples to have children that would not otherwise have a chance at life.
Being that they exist, they might as well at least be used for a purpose that benefits mankind rather than be flushed down the drain.
It appears that in western society, the morality of a medical procedure that subjects significant pain or discomfort lies in whether the one receiving the procedure is aware of that pain.
There is a "anesthetic" that is used for some medical procedures in which the patient must remain awake so that they might interact with the doctor. It isn't a true anesthetic in that it doesn't actually block pain/discomfort, it instead prevents the brain from forming memories of the procedure.
In other words, you live through the procedure, the pain or discomfort of it, everything about it, but you remember none of it after the fact.
My Dad had a procedure that used it, and he was telling me about how it creeped him out knowing that he had lived through something like that, even though he doesn't remember the procedure itself.
I guess early term abortions are considered to be a similar thing. Most people don't remember a thing prior to being about two or three years old. Not that I agree with abortion.
Not exactly. The photos of these women from the 50s/60s were being compared to other women from the same generation. And they had people of that generation doing the judging. They needed to use photos from the 50s/60s because they also wanted to study the adult beauty of the children of the original participants. Whether the younger generation was rated more or less beautiful on average is not important, only the relative beauty of particular parents and children.
Except that there might be a genetic component, in that women that are generally considered beautiful tend to have more female offspring than average. That is to say that the ratio of female babies to male babies is higher among beautiful mothers.
No, it states that women that are rated as more beautiful tend to have fractionally more children than women that are less beautiful. Women rated as more beautiful also tend to give birth to children that are also above average in beauty. Thus it is implied that their children might also produce more offspring than the children of less beautiful women
In evolution, having more children (that also have more children, and so on) is the definition of success. If you have fewer children than your peers (and continue to do so in each generation), your genetic line will eventually disappear, or at least become a minority.
Talking about the freedom of an individual is tricky, because the giving a particular person the freedom to do something often deprives another person of their own personal freedom. For example, for most people in western society, having enough money to buy food, can support large families if we choose to do so. However, that drives up demand for food, thus making it somewhat more expensive. People who are at the poverty line then cannot afford as much food as before, and thus cannot support a as much of a family as before. They no longer have the freedom to have a larger family due to many others choosing to have large families of their own.
Perhaps that is the reward of financial success, and I am not arguing that the poor should go ahead and have huge families. But if we were to allow that sort of "I can, so why not?" personal freedom to go unchecked, the social system would eventually revert to a feudal system of the wealthy/powerful, and everyone else as the most successful continually take advantage of opportunities that more moderately successful people can not.
I heard somewhere that average brain size has increased by something like 30% since the middle ages. I'm not sure if that is evolution, or nutrition. But anyway, If it is true and related to economic success, I'm not sure that it will hold-up in the future. It seems that in modern western societies, successful people now tend to have fewer children than unsuccessful people. In other words, we are now selecting for people with less success.
Don't even get me started on what happens to the national electrical grid is over say a 10 year period of time significant upgrading of home power circuits come on line. The capital outlays for such an increase in generation capacity will nearly bankrupt the country, and can't be met entirely or even substantially from "green" energy production (discounting nuclear energy sources).
If cars are charged using off-peak power, then the current electrical system is more than sufficient. Baseline off-peak electrical usage is a fraction of peak usage during the middle of the day, so the electric companies would love to take on more usage at night... it would mean that they wouldn't need as many costly peak power generation facilities (they could use cheaper baseline generation instead)
+ insulation (which would have to be thick in order to account for wear and tear that would occur at a charging station) so you would have two wires that would be closer to 3cm in diameter each.
Do mechanic shops have to have specialized equipment to work on this vehicle?
Possibly, but I imagine that the automakers who sell these cars will see to it that their dealers have access to the tools they need.
Do I have to wait days to weeks for a battery pack to come in? Hybrid batteries have a longer lifetime than the 1 year expected life of a laptop battery, but the lifetime is definitely finite until supercap technology is able to be mass produced.
I'd be surprised if the batteries didn't last more than 100k miles of driving. By the time that you are shopping for a replacement, I imagine that they will be relatively easy to get a hold of, but who knows. As I understand it, replacement batteries for the Prius were originally rather expensive, but have now dropped to around $2,500. Something similar would probably happen with these.
How difficult and expensive will it be to get parts like bumpers, quarter panels, and other stuff that sometimes needs replaced due to drivers drunk or on cellphones?
Well, Ford's first electric car will just be a Focus with an electric drive-train... so body parts will be easy to get a hold of in that case, and the same prices as any other focus. If you are talking about a telsa... that's a high-end car with high end prices.
How often does the vehicle need serviced? Newer cars only need taken in for oil changes pretty much. However, there are some older foreign cars which require a complete engine rebuild every 25,000 miles.
My understanding is that electric cars have significantly reduced maintenance requirements. The motor itself requires very little servicing. You would still have to replace tires and brakes. The latter much less often due to regenerative braking. I imagine that you will need to change the transmission fluid once in a great while. All in all it would be MUCH less maintenance than with a gasoline engine car.
I would hate for "everyman" to be working with 14kv electrical lines. Particularly up here in the north where they spread salt on the roads in the winter, which then gets all over the car. 14kv + salty water all over the car and ground = lots of accidents waiting to happen. Plus how do you make sure that the sizable layer of insulation on these 14kv lines stays in good shape? one crack in the insulation and you have a dead person laying on the ground at your filling station.
10 min charging stations? with what? 4 inch thick bus bars to transfer the power to your car? If the connection was not perfect their would be an explosion... go look-up "arc flash". 10 minute charges are NEVER going to be practical.
Exactly! I can't believe how many people ignore the fact that you just can't get that much power into a car that quickly in any sort of practical way.
Even if you had some sort of energy storage system in your garage that was capable of dumping say, 50kwh into your car in 10 minutes, you would still need something like a massive multi-inch cross-section bus-bar in order to get that energy into the car without causing an explosion. Even then it would still be incredibly dangerous. Not to mention the fact that if there were ever a short in your energy storage system, you can kiss your garage goodbye.
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I know that the above is a crude joke, but with appropriate hormone supplements, men actually can develop working, ie: milk producing, mammary glands.
Ouch.... that joke was so bad it hurt.
The only unbiased definition I can come up with for "more evolved" would be "having accrued a greater number of mutations over the period of its existence", which I doubt would put humans on top.
We probably would win for most adaptable, but that wouldn't necessarily mean that we are better. Being adaptable means that a species can do reasonably well in a variety of environments, but as a trade-off, that species probably isn't quite as efficient at living in any one specific environment, aside perhaps from the one they evolved in.
The few, the proud, the Christian...
I thought that pride was a sin...
...Just sayin.
Right, but eventually the AI will have learned all of your standard tactics, and you will have to get more creative. Which I think is the whole point.
That is a ridiculous question. It is like pointing to a bird, flying through the air, and then saying "And a rock could not fly because..."
Sure, we have figured out possible ways that the brain is able to observe the world, and make decisions and form memories and whatnot, but we have no clue whatsoever why there is a consciousness that arises from all of that. It would work just as well without our consciousnesses hanging out in our heads... ie: just "soul-less" drones going about our business.
The silly part of this argument is that while we have at it, both people with diseases and embryos are dieing every day regardless.
the point of "one persons moral code should never prevent someone else getting medical treatment." is that if you do use your moral values as the basis to prevent someone getting medical treatment, you are saying that YOU get to choose that they will suffer or die due to their condition. You get to be the judge and jury, and indirectly, the executioner. After all, you prevented a treatment from being developed that had the potential to save their life.
Oh! but the adult stem cells!
Adult stem cell research is lagging behind embryonic stem cell research by a fair bit. Many people don't have time to wait for adult stem cell research to catch up. While we argue, they die. Too bad for them I guess. God's decision right?
Killing is wrong. Nobody is allowed to do it. ...says us and our army.
:-)
HEY! you killed that guy! How dare you!
Me and my 30million friends are coming to kill you now!
I feel much better now that we righteous folks killed that evil killer.
If you are upset about the destruction of embryos that were destined for destruction, then you should be complaining about the fact that they were created to begin with, i.e: fighting against the IV procedures that allow sterile couples to have children that would not otherwise have a chance at life.
Being that they exist, they might as well at least be used for a purpose that benefits mankind rather than be flushed down the drain.
It appears that in western society, the morality of a medical procedure that subjects significant pain or discomfort lies in whether the one receiving the procedure is aware of that pain.
There is a "anesthetic" that is used for some medical procedures in which the patient must remain awake so that they might interact with the doctor. It isn't a true anesthetic in that it doesn't actually block pain/discomfort, it instead prevents the brain from forming memories of the procedure.
In other words, you live through the procedure, the pain or discomfort of it, everything about it, but you remember none of it after the fact.
My Dad had a procedure that used it, and he was telling me about how it creeped him out knowing that he had lived through something like that, even though he doesn't remember the procedure itself.
I guess early term abortions are considered to be a similar thing. Most people don't remember a thing prior to being about two or three years old. Not that I agree with abortion.
Not exactly. The photos of these women from the 50s/60s were being compared to other women from the same generation. And they had people of that generation doing the judging. They needed to use photos from the 50s/60s because they also wanted to study the adult beauty of the children of the original participants. Whether the younger generation was rated more or less beautiful on average is not important, only the relative beauty of particular parents and children.
Except that there might be a genetic component, in that women that are generally considered beautiful tend to have more female offspring than average. That is to say that the ratio of female babies to male babies is higher among beautiful mothers.
No, it states that women that are rated as more beautiful tend to have fractionally more children than women that are less beautiful. Women rated as more beautiful also tend to give birth to children that are also above average in beauty. Thus it is implied that their children might also produce more offspring than the children of less beautiful women
In evolution, having more children (that also have more children, and so on) is the definition of success. If you have fewer children than your peers (and continue to do so in each generation), your genetic line will eventually disappear, or at least become a minority.
Ok, so YOU go buy a boat and live on the ocean.
Talking about the freedom of an individual is tricky, because the giving a particular person the freedom to do something often deprives another person of their own personal freedom. For example, for most people in western society, having enough money to buy food, can support large families if we choose to do so. However, that drives up demand for food, thus making it somewhat more expensive. People who are at the poverty line then cannot afford as much food as before, and thus cannot support a as much of a family as before. They no longer have the freedom to have a larger family due to many others choosing to have large families of their own.
Perhaps that is the reward of financial success, and I am not arguing that the poor should go ahead and have huge families. But if we were to allow that sort of "I can, so why not?" personal freedom to go unchecked, the social system would eventually revert to a feudal system of the wealthy/powerful, and everyone else as the most successful continually take advantage of opportunities that more moderately successful people can not.
I heard somewhere that average brain size has increased by something like 30% since the middle ages. I'm not sure if that is evolution, or nutrition. But anyway, If it is true and related to economic success, I'm not sure that it will hold-up in the future. It seems that in modern western societies, successful people now tend to have fewer children than unsuccessful people. In other words, we are now selecting for people with less success.
Don't even get me started on what happens to the national electrical grid is over say a 10 year period of time significant upgrading of home power circuits come on line. The capital outlays for such an increase in generation capacity will nearly bankrupt the country, and can't be met entirely or even substantially from "green" energy production (discounting nuclear energy sources).
If cars are charged using off-peak power, then the current electrical system is more than sufficient. Baseline off-peak electrical usage is a fraction of peak usage during the middle of the day, so the electric companies would love to take on more usage at night... it would mean that they wouldn't need as many costly peak power generation facilities (they could use cheaper baseline generation instead)
Electrolysis? yeah I know it isn't perfectly efficient, but it works just fine.
1.8cm not including insulation. (which would need to be thick so that wear and tear can occur) so closer to 3cm each (two cables)
+ insulation (which would have to be thick in order to account for wear and tear that would occur at a charging station) so you would have two wires that would be closer to 3cm in diameter each.
Do mechanic shops have to have specialized equipment to work on this vehicle?
Possibly, but I imagine that the automakers who sell these cars will see to it that their dealers have access to the tools they need.
Do I have to wait days to weeks for a battery pack to come in? Hybrid batteries have a longer lifetime than the 1 year expected life of a laptop battery, but the lifetime is definitely finite until supercap technology is able to be mass produced.
I'd be surprised if the batteries didn't last more than 100k miles of driving. By the time that you are shopping for a replacement, I imagine that they will be relatively easy to get a hold of, but who knows. As I understand it, replacement batteries for the Prius were originally rather expensive, but have now dropped to around $2,500. Something similar would probably happen with these.
How difficult and expensive will it be to get parts like bumpers, quarter panels, and other stuff that sometimes needs replaced due to drivers drunk or on cellphones?
Well, Ford's first electric car will just be a Focus with an electric drive-train... so body parts will be easy to get a hold of in that case, and the same prices as any other focus. If you are talking about a telsa... that's a high-end car with high end prices.
How often does the vehicle need serviced? Newer cars only need taken in for oil changes pretty much. However, there are some older foreign cars which require a complete engine rebuild every 25,000 miles.
My understanding is that electric cars have significantly reduced maintenance requirements. The motor itself requires very little servicing. You would still have to replace tires and brakes. The latter much less often due to regenerative braking. I imagine that you will need to change the transmission fluid once in a great while. All in all it would be MUCH less maintenance than with a gasoline engine car.
I would hate for "everyman" to be working with 14kv electrical lines. Particularly up here in the north where they spread salt on the roads in the winter, which then gets all over the car. 14kv + salty water all over the car and ground = lots of accidents waiting to happen. Plus how do you make sure that the sizable layer of insulation on these 14kv lines stays in good shape? one crack in the insulation and you have a dead person laying on the ground at your filling station.
10 min charging stations? with what? 4 inch thick bus bars to transfer the power to your car? If the connection was not perfect their would be an explosion... go look-up "arc flash". 10 minute charges are NEVER going to be practical.
Exactly! I can't believe how many people ignore the fact that you just can't get that much power into a car that quickly in any sort of practical way.
Even if you had some sort of energy storage system in your garage that was capable of dumping say, 50kwh into your car in 10 minutes, you would still need something like a massive multi-inch cross-section bus-bar in order to get that energy into the car without causing an explosion. Even then it would still be incredibly dangerous. Not to mention the fact that if there were ever a short in your energy storage system, you can kiss your garage goodbye.