How are you sure that you are the same you that you were five minutes ago?
Or: how do you know that the person that goes to bed tonight is the same as the one that wakes up tomorrow? The two share the same memories, but that's about it; they surely don't share the same atoms or brain structure. For all practical purposes, you will die tonight, and a copy will be resurrected tomorrow morning.
Given that Firefox's javascript cannot detect whether a given element is allowed to be displayed by the Adblock extension or not, the only method open to you is to block all people who refuse to click on ads. You may find yourself with few readers.
If this number keeps rising, I'm going to use ad-blocker detection code and disable the primary features for users who block the ads.
In that case we will of course simply instruct adblock to download the ads but to not display them. In other words, you have just increased your bandwidth costs.
an application which allows users to add comments to any web page
Now, is there a firefox extension which does this? I would like to add postit notes to web pages, and also somehow exchange them with (selected) other people.
Retroviruses use a certain well-known enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT) to translate their RNA genome into DNA so that it can be inserted into the host cell's genome. All known retroviruses use essentially the same RT, and no other known organisms use it. There is a nice little biochemical test to detect whether a given sample contains RT.
To set the stage: a number of retroviruses were known before HIV: a virus that causes cancer in chickens (found by Duesberg), a virus that causes leukemia (cancer of the white blood cells) and AIDS-like symptoms in cats, and two human viruses HTLV-1 and HTLV-2, both associated with some form of leukemia. All these viruses can be grown in cell cultures, we have electron micrographs of them (they all look pretty similar), and we have specific antibodies for each of them. (If you inject a virus into a rabbit, it will produce antibodies [certain proteins that attach to the virus] which you can then isolate from the rabbit's blood.)
Gallo knew that the AIDS virus probably attacks immune cells, because the immune system is weak in AIDS patients and doctors had found that they have a low CD4-T-cell count. CD4-T-cells are a certain type of white blood cells that can be effectively separated from the other white blood cells. You want to grow the virus in a cell line, but of course it will kill the CD4-T-cells, so what do you do? It so happens that we have several "immortal" CD4-T-cell lines, that keep multiplying forever; they are slightly unnormal, probably cancerous, that's why they keep multiplying. Now by experimenting with different such cell lines and different conditions, Gallo was able to take blood from AIDS patients and infect the CD4-T-cell lines with it, and the cells didn't die, but the virus grew in them!
He knew that a retrovirus was growing in the cell line, because his RT test said so (the non-infected cell line doesn't show RT activity, nor does a cell line "infected" with the blood of healthy people). Then he used the antibodies for the known retroviruses HTLV-1 and HTLV-2: they wouldn't bind to the infected cell lines, so it must have been a new retrovirus. This new virus he called HTLV-3 and nowadays we call it HIV.
He produced several such infected cell lines from different AIDS patients. These cell lines are still going strong and are producing HIV to this day; if you're a scientific laboratory, you can order such a cell line in the mail, to test drugs, or HIV tests, or vaccines, or whatever.
They then took electron microscope pictures of the infected cell lines and saw virus particles that looked similar to the already known retroviruses. Electron microscope pictures of the uninfected cell lines do not show such virus particles.
If you take CD4-T-cells from a healthy person, put them in culture, and add the juice from your infected cell line, the CD4-T-cells will die. If however you add the juice from an uninfected cell line, they won't die. So HIV, or some product of HIV, kills normal CD4-T-cells.
Now there's still the possibility that the virus in the cell line didn't come out of the AIDS patient, but was the result of some contamination after the fact. So what you do is to take the fluid from the infected cell culture and filter it so that you only have virus particles left (they are much smaller than cells, which we know from the electron micrography). You break open these viruses and pour the viral proteins on a slab of gel and separate them by size (by applying a voltage). Then you pour the patient's blood over it. You of course expect that the patient, just like the rabbit, would have antibodies against the viral proteins, and that's exactly what you find: the antibodies stick to the spots where the viral proteins are. And that's not just true for the original patient: other AIDS patients exhibit the same antibodies! Most healthy persons however don't. You have just created a screening test for HIV-antibodies. It's called Western Blot and is used every day.
Yes I do. How do they know that the Hepatitic C virus exists, or Herpes, or the flu, or Ebola? It's the same procedure for all viruses. You'll learn it in your microbiology class.
And no, I won't tell you any more. Some things require hands-on learning. Once you have isolated your first virus and grown it in culture, you'll understand. It's interesting, and a lot of fun. And I believe you owe it to your family and friends.
How do we know that HIV exists?
How do we know that HIV causes AIDS?
I have to assume that these are rhetorical questions, since we have already established that you feel certain enough of your answers to base medical advice on them. (Though not certain enough to start a business, surprisingly.)
If you are genuinely interested however, I'd recommend to supplement your virusmyth.net education with a decent microbiology course, and preferably also molecular biology. There you will learn all the techniques we commonly use in these situations. In-depth understanding of the operation of retroviruses down to their every single gene, comparison of RNA sequences of various retroviruses, and hands-on experience in growing a virus in culture are really invaluable.
There's little I can tell you here that you wouldn't learn in those classes, but there's a lot that you'd learn there that I couldn't tell you here.
I have no interest whatsoever in conspiracy theories of any type
Ok, if it's not a conspiracy, i.e. a willful and coordinated distortion of the facts, then we must be dealing with a global delusion, right? Nobody, not the world's scientists, governments, nor even the health insurers who have a solid financial stake in the matter, nobody can see the lack of evidence as clear as you do, right? That state of mind is otherwise known as megalomania.
Why don't you try just answering my god damned questions and stop attacking me?
Like I said before, I have no interest in changing your deeply held beliefs. If you're honest, you know as well as I do that nothing I could possibly say would change your mind. In a world where 90% of people believe in a god and almost as many believe in astrology and alien abductions, I can live with a couple half percent believing in a world-wide HIV-AIDS conspiracy that encompasses the medical profession, the governments, the drug companies and the insurance companies. Though I find it a bit sad that, given your established half-education, you believe to be in a position to give important medical advice to your loved ones.
Anyway, keep up the lobbying against HIV screening of blood donations. A good cause if I ever knew one.
If someone close to me had an HIV test, then they would have already have disregarded my advice. I have told all of my loved ones that they should never, under any circumstance, have an HIV test. Your question is idiotic in the light that a "positive" result is first interpreted by the tester. If the person is in a "high-risk" group, then it's a "true positive." If the person is in a "low-risk" group, then it's deemed a false positive. So it may very well happen that a person who was close to me had a "positive" result, but the person in question was in a "low-risk" group so the tester gave a "negative" result.
I am confused now. Are you saying that people deemed as "low-risk" will never be given a positive test result by the tester? This doesn't quite accord with the fact that only "low-risk" people are allowed to donate blood, and the standard screening tests find plenty of positive results every day.
In any event, since you apparently advise your loved ones against blood, bone marrow and kidney donations, how about if, as a result of a needle accident in a hospital, an HIV test of you or a loved one is ordered, and the result is judged as "positive". What is your advice?
Already in this short discussion, several of your deeply held beliefs became evident:
"AIDS priests [can] NOT answer how HIV causes AIDS"
"no lives have been saved"
"The HIV tests are completely meaningless."
"You have no evidence"
I myself have not made any attempts to change your beliefs, to which you are entitled, or to explain mine.
you keep trying to change the subject.
From the very start, the subject was: if your beliefs are correct, then by offering a life insurance policy to people who have been diagnosed with HIV and refuse to take any anti-AIDS medications, you can become rich, you can prove your theory, and you can save lives. You only gave the weak cop-out "the government won't allow it", without being able to supply supporting evidence. Nor has anyone else from the HIV/AIDS critic camp ever considered this straighforward strategy. You will understand that you find me perplexed.
Please don't change the subject again and ask me for evidence for claims I supposedly hold. Again, I am not interested in changing your beliefs. If I remember correctly, the last time I tried, it became apparent that you lack the basic educational background: you had never heard of HIV-2, you didn't know that viruses can cause cancer and that immune cells fight off cancer.
But I have one personal question for you: suppose you or someone close to you goes to donate blood and the routine HIV test comes back positive. What do you advise? Ignore the "meaningless" test and continue to live as if nothing had happened?
I have no interest in changing your deeply held beliefs; all I'm trying to do is point out their logical consequences. There is a simple experiment which can prove your theory, and you refuse to carry it out. That tells me a lot.
What do you think would happen if I tried to set up just such a business? Do you think the government would let me get away with it?
I don't see which law you'd break. Isn't it worth a try at least? You become rich and get to prove your favorite theory at the same time.
Certainly I cannot argue with famous Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (who writes in his autobiography that he believes in alien abductions and astrology). Maybe he can join your business and chip in a couple of bucks, I hear he has money. Your distrust in the reliability of HIV tests makes the business proposal even more appealing.
I hope you won't forget me once you're a made man.
Richard Gallo announces in a press conference that he has discovered the "virus" that causes AIDS. 20 years and $150 billion later, scientists still cannot explain how HIV causes AIDS, who isolated HIV, and why no lives have been saved. Maybe scientists are, once again, barking up the wrong tree,
If you truly believe this, I have an appealing business proposal for you: offer a life insurance policy to people who have been diagnosed as HIV positive and refuse to take any anti-AIDS medications. You will be able to charge high premiums, and there's little risk that any of your customers die, right?
Pretty much all stages leading from a wolf-like land-mammal to present-day whales have been documented with fossil evidence. In fact, whales still have tiny (and nowadays completely useless) leg bone remnants buried deep within their bodies.
Generally speaking, the laws of the place where the alleged crime occurred apply. So if the sex act is ok according to UK law, you should be fine.
However, there is a federal law in the US making it illegal for US citizens and permanent residents to go abroad and have sex with a person under the age of 16 (or commercial sex with a person under the age of 18). So that law could apply in your hypothetical case.
If someone sells stolen property on ebay, do you think that the (unknowing) buyers should be considered criminals?
Of course not. But, once again, there is a consequence to your actions.
So if somebody proposes a new law, saying that everyone accepting stolen goods via ebay is subject to a penalty of no less than 3 years in prison, we would both protest this law as unjust and over the top. Your repeated "everyone is responsible for the consequences of their own actions" is completely besides the point here: we're protesting the actions of the lawmakers who created those consequences in the first place!
The case of attaching a lifelong "sex offender" label to people who unknowingly have sex with a minor is completely analogous. It's a law that's unjust and over the top.
To me, pedophiles are simply miswired. They get sexually aroused by an activity that society cannot accept. They are not to blame for that, and jailtime or satellite tracking surely won't cure it. For obvious biological reasons, the sex drive is the strongest urge. Imagine what you would do if your favorite type of sexual activity would be outlawed tomorrow.
I think the problem should be solved pragmatically: make them wear an electric belt and screw a digital camera into their foreheads. Everything they see will be monitored remotely, and whenever they try to attack someone, they receive an electric shock which sends them to the ground. Immediate conditioning. No further punishment necessary. Much cheaper and more effective than traditional methods.
In fact, it's possible that these offenders with their plainly visible cameras could become quite desirable dating material: after all, he certainly won't be able to abuse his woman, which is much more than you can say about the average guy.
for those who would like to read and edit all our articles without paying, did you know that you have access to all of them for free using MSN Search? Just run your search using the Encarta tab
This is not true. Encarta contains a premium article on "Fraud in Science", yet that article is not available for free through MSN search.
completely false information about something depending on what time of day you look at the encyclopedia.
Always read any Wikipedia article together with its Discussion and History pages. That way, you will immediately spot recent vandalisms and you might learn a lot about ongoing controversies that are not reflected in the current version of the article.
In Wikipedia, always check the History and Discussion pages to find out whether anything in the current article is (or was) disputed. You'll often learn a lot about ongoing controversies that you could never find in other encyclopedias.
Seems to be that a lot of the open source movement - with it's gargantuan achievements over recent years - still relies on private support and private funding in one way or another. In some respects I might go so far as to say that the ostensible "freedom" is underpinned in many cases by the marketing and R&D departments of several large corporations.
We already had a free operating system, a compiler, a web server, a windowing system, DNS and mail servers etc. long before corporations started to support some of these efforts, long before the term "open source" even existed. Everything was created by hobbyists for the fun of it, and most of it still is. The corporations were late comers; if they go away tomorrow, nothing much will change for free software.
No chance for the placebo effect to come into play.
The placebo effect works on the experimenter and on the subject (hence double-blind studies). If the experimenters in this study were not blinded, the placebo effect could have shown up.
I haven't heard any rational thought trying to explain the origination of matter.
Then you haven't looked very hard. The standard explanation is quantum fluctuation. According to Quantum Electro Dynamics, pairs of particles and anti-particles are constantly being born out of vacuum. The real question is: where did all the anti-particles go? That question is on Baez's list of open questions.
Slashdot Mirror
Or: how do you know that the person that goes to bed tonight is the same as the one that wakes up tomorrow? The two share the same memories, but that's about it; they surely don't share the same atoms or brain structure. For all practical purposes, you will die tonight, and a copy will be resurrected tomorrow morning.
Given that Firefox's javascript cannot detect whether a given element is allowed to be displayed by the Adblock extension or not, the only method open to you is to block all people who refuse to click on ads. You may find yourself with few readers.
In that case we will of course simply instruct adblock to download the ads but to not display them. In other words, you have just increased your bandwidth costs.
Now, is there a firefox extension which does this? I would like to add postit notes to web pages, and also somehow exchange them with (selected) other people.
Retroviruses use a certain well-known enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT) to translate their RNA genome into DNA so that it can be inserted into the host cell's genome. All known retroviruses use essentially the same RT, and no other known organisms use it. There is a nice little biochemical test to detect whether a given sample contains RT.
To set the stage: a number of retroviruses were known before HIV: a virus that causes cancer in chickens (found by Duesberg), a virus that causes leukemia (cancer of the white blood cells) and AIDS-like symptoms in cats, and two human viruses HTLV-1 and HTLV-2, both associated with some form of leukemia. All these viruses can be grown in cell cultures, we have electron micrographs of them (they all look pretty similar), and we have specific antibodies for each of them. (If you inject a virus into a rabbit, it will produce antibodies [certain proteins that attach to the virus] which you can then isolate from the rabbit's blood.)
Gallo knew that the AIDS virus probably attacks immune cells, because the immune system is weak in AIDS patients and doctors had found that they have a low CD4-T-cell count. CD4-T-cells are a certain type of white blood cells that can be effectively separated from the other white blood cells. You want to grow the virus in a cell line, but of course it will kill the CD4-T-cells, so what do you do? It so happens that we have several "immortal" CD4-T-cell lines, that keep multiplying forever; they are slightly unnormal, probably cancerous, that's why they keep multiplying. Now by experimenting with different such cell lines and different conditions, Gallo was able to take blood from AIDS patients and infect the CD4-T-cell lines with it, and the cells didn't die, but the virus grew in them!
He knew that a retrovirus was growing in the cell line, because his RT test said so (the non-infected cell line doesn't show RT activity, nor does a cell line "infected" with the blood of healthy people). Then he used the antibodies for the known retroviruses HTLV-1 and HTLV-2: they wouldn't bind to the infected cell lines, so it must have been a new retrovirus. This new virus he called HTLV-3 and nowadays we call it HIV.
He produced several such infected cell lines from different AIDS patients. These cell lines are still going strong and are producing HIV to this day; if you're a scientific laboratory, you can order such a cell line in the mail, to test drugs, or HIV tests, or vaccines, or whatever.
They then took electron microscope pictures of the infected cell lines and saw virus particles that looked similar to the already known retroviruses. Electron microscope pictures of the uninfected cell lines do not show such virus particles.
If you take CD4-T-cells from a healthy person, put them in culture, and add the juice from your infected cell line, the CD4-T-cells will die. If however you add the juice from an uninfected cell line, they won't die. So HIV, or some product of HIV, kills normal CD4-T-cells.
Now there's still the possibility that the virus in the cell line didn't come out of the AIDS patient, but was the result of some contamination after the fact. So what you do is to take the fluid from the infected cell culture and filter it so that you only have virus particles left (they are much smaller than cells, which we know from the electron micrography). You break open these viruses and pour the viral proteins on a slab of gel and separate them by size (by applying a voltage). Then you pour the patient's blood over it. You of course expect that the patient, just like the rabbit, would have antibodies against the viral proteins, and that's exactly what you find: the antibodies stick to the spots where the viral proteins are. And that's not just true for the original patient: other AIDS patients exhibit the same antibodies! Most healthy persons however don't. You have just created a screening test for HIV-antibodies. It's called Western Blot and is used every day.
Next you
Yes I do. How do they know that the Hepatitic C virus exists, or Herpes, or the flu, or Ebola? It's the same procedure for all viruses. You'll learn it in your microbiology class.
And no, I won't tell you any more. Some things require hands-on learning. Once you have isolated your first virus and grown it in culture, you'll understand. It's interesting, and a lot of fun. And I believe you owe it to your family and friends.
I have to assume that these are rhetorical questions, since we have already established that you feel certain enough of your answers to base medical advice on them. (Though not certain enough to start a business, surprisingly.)
If you are genuinely interested however, I'd recommend to supplement your virusmyth.net education with a decent microbiology course, and preferably also molecular biology. There you will learn all the techniques we commonly use in these situations. In-depth understanding of the operation of retroviruses down to their every single gene, comparison of RNA sequences of various retroviruses, and hands-on experience in growing a virus in culture are really invaluable. There's little I can tell you here that you wouldn't learn in those classes, but there's a lot that you'd learn there that I couldn't tell you here.
Ok, if it's not a conspiracy, i.e. a willful and coordinated distortion of the facts, then we must be dealing with a global delusion, right? Nobody, not the world's scientists, governments, nor even the health insurers who have a solid financial stake in the matter, nobody can see the lack of evidence as clear as you do, right? That state of mind is otherwise known as megalomania.
Why don't you try just answering my god damned questions and stop attacking me?
It's more fun this way.
Anyway, keep up the lobbying against HIV screening of blood donations. A good cause if I ever knew one.
I am confused now. Are you saying that people deemed as "low-risk" will never be given a positive test result by the tester? This doesn't quite accord with the fact that only "low-risk" people are allowed to donate blood, and the standard screening tests find plenty of positive results every day.
In any event, since you apparently advise your loved ones against blood, bone marrow and kidney donations, how about if, as a result of a needle accident in a hospital, an HIV test of you or a loved one is ordered, and the result is judged as "positive". What is your advice?
Already in this short discussion, several of your deeply held beliefs became evident:
- "AIDS priests [can] NOT answer how HIV causes AIDS"
- "no lives have been saved"
- "The HIV tests are completely meaningless."
- "You have no evidence"
I myself have not made any attempts to change your beliefs, to which you are entitled, or to explain mine.you keep trying to change the subject.
From the very start, the subject was: if your beliefs are correct, then by offering a life insurance policy to people who have been diagnosed with HIV and refuse to take any anti-AIDS medications, you can become rich, you can prove your theory, and you can save lives. You only gave the weak cop-out "the government won't allow it", without being able to supply supporting evidence. Nor has anyone else from the HIV/AIDS critic camp ever considered this straighforward strategy. You will understand that you find me perplexed.
Please don't change the subject again and ask me for evidence for claims I supposedly hold. Again, I am not interested in changing your beliefs. If I remember correctly, the last time I tried, it became apparent that you lack the basic educational background: you had never heard of HIV-2, you didn't know that viruses can cause cancer and that immune cells fight off cancer.
But I have one personal question for you: suppose you or someone close to you goes to donate blood and the routine HIV test comes back positive. What do you advise? Ignore the "meaningless" test and continue to live as if nothing had happened?
I have no interest in changing your deeply held beliefs; all I'm trying to do is point out their logical consequences. There is a simple experiment which can prove your theory, and you refuse to carry it out. That tells me a lot.
I don't see which law you'd break. Isn't it worth a try at least? You become rich and get to prove your favorite theory at the same time.
Certainly I cannot argue with famous Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (who writes in his autobiography that he believes in alien abductions and astrology). Maybe he can join your business and chip in a couple of bucks, I hear he has money. Your distrust in the reliability of HIV tests makes the business proposal even more appealing.
I hope you won't forget me once you're a made man.
If you truly believe this, I have an appealing business proposal for you: offer a life insurance policy to people who have been diagnosed as HIV positive and refuse to take any anti-AIDS medications. You will be able to charge high premiums, and there's little risk that any of your customers die, right?
Pretty much all stages leading from a wolf-like land-mammal to present-day whales have been documented with fossil evidence. In fact, whales still have tiny (and nowadays completely useless) leg bone remnants buried deep within their bodies.
However, there is a federal law in the US making it illegal for US citizens and permanent residents to go abroad and have sex with a person under the age of 16 (or commercial sex with a person under the age of 18). So that law could apply in your hypothetical case.
Of course not. But, once again, there is a consequence to your actions.
So if somebody proposes a new law, saying that everyone accepting stolen goods via ebay is subject to a penalty of no less than 3 years in prison, we would both protest this law as unjust and over the top. Your repeated "everyone is responsible for the consequences of their own actions" is completely besides the point here: we're protesting the actions of the lawmakers who created those consequences in the first place!
The case of attaching a lifelong "sex offender" label to people who unknowingly have sex with a minor is completely analogous. It's a law that's unjust and over the top.
I think the problem should be solved pragmatically: make them wear an electric belt and screw a digital camera into their foreheads. Everything they see will be monitored remotely, and whenever they try to attack someone, they receive an electric shock which sends them to the ground. Immediate conditioning. No further punishment necessary. Much cheaper and more effective than traditional methods.
In fact, it's possible that these offenders with their plainly visible cameras could become quite desirable dating material: after all, he certainly won't be able to abuse his woman, which is much more than you can say about the average guy.
This is not true. Encarta contains a premium article on "Fraud in Science", yet that article is not available for free through MSN search.
Always read any Wikipedia article together with its Discussion and History pages. That way, you will immediately spot recent vandalisms and you might learn a lot about ongoing controversies that are not reflected in the current version of the article.
In Wikipedia, always check the History and Discussion pages to find out whether anything in the current article is (or was) disputed. You'll often learn a lot about ongoing controversies that you could never find in other encyclopedias.
We already had a free operating system, a compiler, a web server, a windowing system, DNS and mail servers etc. long before corporations started to support some of these efforts, long before the term "open source" even existed. Everything was created by hobbyists for the fun of it, and most of it still is. The corporations were late comers; if they go away tomorrow, nothing much will change for free software.
The placebo effect works on the experimenter and on the subject (hence double-blind studies). If the experimenters in this study were not blinded, the placebo effect could have shown up.
It's on the list. Acupuncture very powerfully and effectively maximizes the placebo effect.
Then you haven't looked very hard. The standard explanation is quantum fluctuation. According to Quantum Electro Dynamics, pairs of particles and anti-particles are constantly being born out of vacuum. The real question is: where did all the anti-particles go? That question is on Baez's list of open questions.