Isn't leprosy still on the "uncurable" list? Is it even on the "containable"; i.e., halt it where it is, point? akin to tuberculosis.
Um, leprosy hasn't been "uncurable" for quite a while. It's actually pretty easy to cure, if you have access to modern medicine (i.e. don't live in a third world country).
From Wikipedia:
Today, leprosy is easily curable by multidrug antibiotic therapy (MDT). The main challenges in the eradication of Hansen's disease are in reaching populations that have not yet received multidrug therapy services, improving detection of the disease, providing patients with high-quality services and affordable drugs, and fighting social taboos about the disease where patients are considered to be "unclean", or "cursed by God" and outcasts.
You have a choice to accept email or faxes. Those costs are ones you choose to accept by connecting to the system. Should we limit free speech to make it more convenient for people?
Great, I'll be spray painting advertisements on the side of your car this evening. That's the price you choose to accept by parking it on the street.
I also accept postal mail. That does not mean that marketers are welcome to send me their advertisements postage due, much as spam does. I also accept telephone calls. That does not mean that marketers can call me incessently at 3 am, when I am certain to be home, to sell me V1agra.
The Supreme Court has long ruled that commercial speech can be much more heavily restricted than political speech. I reject your implication that restricting spam is the first step down the line toward an authoritarian police state.
This means that everyone has the right to express themselves. EVEN IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, THEY STILL HAVE THE RIGHT. Spam is a great example defining whose responsibility is it to determine what you hear?
Spam isn't a free speech issue. Spam forces the burden of the cost onto the receiver, rather than the sender. It is exactly analagous to junk faxes, which cost very little to send but a great deal to receive.
Marketers are welcome to send emails to those people that have given their permission. Spammers abuse a private resource.
PS the Page Up / Down and Home keys work too, as well as your scrollwheel.
Except that it used that damn, motion-sickness-inducing "smooth scrolling" function. Once I stop moving the scrollwheel with my finger, I darn well expect the text on the screen to stop moving, not keep scrolling for half a second.
Once you realize it is not a scrollbar and actually try it a bit you'll see hwo cool it is.
It's not "cool," it's aggravating. Ugh. After going down to about search result #80, to get back to the top, I had to drag the scrollbar up to the top where I had to hold it and wait while the display slowly scrolled up to the start. The flashiness or "coolness" of the interface should never take a back seat to its ability to perform its function.
...is in fact explicitly made by the research: If the amount of time spent, the amount of money made, and all other factors remain equal, the child raised in a single-parent home is at a disadvantage compared to a child raised in a home with a mother and a father.
It is an interesting conclusion if true, but I'm not sure if I buy it. A single parent household is going to have stresses put on it that a two-parent household simply won't have. If nothing else, there is a built in support system if something catastrophic happens to one parent.
I still think it is much too much of a leap to suggest that it logically follow from this that children in two-parent, same sex households will have the same disadvantages as in the single-parent household. The disadvantage to the child may spring from the single-parentness not from the single-sexness.
Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.
A second mom can love her daughter very dearly, but (unless the difference between genders is far more superficial than commonly-accepted evidence seems to indicate) she can never be the girl's father.
I've heard this sort of argument before, usually from religious conservatives in the press explaining why gay marriage will end the world as we know it. But one thing that never seems to get explained is what, specifically, the child won't get or won't learn in such an environment. It's always some dangerous-sounding vagueness about how they are demeaning "the importance of fathers" or some such.
It seems to me that the reason for this is that this argument basically boils down to a desire to enforce traditional gender roles. Daddies are the ones that play catch and change the oil, while Mommies are the ones that bake cookies and clean the bathroom. The notion of Mommy changing the oil in the Subaru throws this all out of whack.
Absence is a particularly interesting one. That bastion of hard-core conservativism, The Atlantic, reported a while back that children raised without both a male and female role model in the home are at a significant disadvantage compared to those who do not (subscription required). Now that was comparing single-parent relationships to two-parent relationships, so it is extrapolation to suggest this applies to homosexual relationships.
I can't get to your linked article, but I'll comment anyway.
Implicit in your argument is the idea that the reason these children are disadvantaged is because they do not have a role model for one sex. That's a massive oversimplification of a complex problem. A parent in a single-parent household will probably be less able to spend as much time with their child, so he will get less parental attention. For that same reason, he might not be able to get as much help with schoolwork, and might not get as good an education. Or, because single parenthood tends to correlate with lower incomes and younger parents, one of these factors might be what's causing the poorer outcome.
Jumping to the conclusion that (e.g.) children in a lesbian household do poorly because they won't have a male role model is a major jump to a conclusion, not a simple extrapolation. All the studies I'm familiar with say that children raised in two-parent, same-sex households do just as well as their heterosexually, two-parented friends.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, can be produced readily in a power-plant type fashion.
Except that there are no hydrogen wells on the planet. The only economically feasible method of generating hydrogen at the moment is the burning of methane. Electrically breaking down water requires more energy than you later get from burning the hydrogen.
Remember, hydrogen is really only an energy storage mechanism, not a fuel source.
How about fact that this suggestion effectively make abortion unavailable to the poor in the state of Texas?
Gosh, I'm sure that never occured to him.
His website is great, though. Much of the text appears to have been written by someone with no more than an 8th grade education. He particularly does not seem to understand the correct use of CAPITAL LETTERS or "quotes,"
ISLAM is NOT a religion but a Virus
The ATHLETIC BOARD shall set minimum Physical fitness work out programs for all TEXAS SCHOOLS with 2 hour minimum P.E. daily classes for all students.
Fact is we need to STOP TAKING ANY MORE APPLICATIONS for immigration into the U.S. for at least the next 10 years. We need to "clean house" before we need any more immigrants.......if ever. Any new applicants inside our borders need to go home.
This will solve the issue of "I didn't know it was a child who signed up for my mailing list"; the punishable offense would simply be sending such an email unflagged, rather than worrying about who you're sending it to.
Unfortunately, there are already laws (in the US) that already outlaw spam. (No, they're not perfect, I'm not even sure they're good, but they exist.) You can see how well reduced the flow of spam. How often do you see an acutal V1agra spam with the full name and address of the sender in it?
More laws won't help stop people that are already breaking the law.
SPAM = USPS advertising that clutters up your mailbox.
No. Spam = A guy with a loudspeaker standing out front of your house shouting advertisements at 3 am. One that won't leave if you ask him to. And the cops are too busy to make him leave, even if you call them.
And just as a gentle reminder, it's spam, not SPAM.
Hmm.. Seems to me that sometimes religion helped form the basis of our country's values and beliefs.
Really? I don't remember God being mentioned in the Constitution at all, let alone Jesus. You'd think that if religion was so important to the Founding Fathers, they'd have at least brought it up. Many of the Founders were not Christians, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Our government is entirely a-religious, which is what they intended.
It is one thing to respect religious belief. It is another for the government to promote one, even the one dominant among its citizens, above others.
Yeah, it makes ya feel good doesn't it? Let's tear down all the crosses at Arlington too! THE PEOPLE already expressed the viewpoint, that's why these things are there in the first place! You get ONE GUY who doesn't like it, and everyone else suffers. That makes sense... Not.
There are no crosses at Arlington.
When even Einstein admits that there's an underlying 'glue' to the universe, how can it be bad to at least acknoledge that there might be more to our universe than particles and atoms? Oh.. But we can teach the kids about the possibilities of alien life?! What's the difference there?
Maybe because there is no basis or evidence for your assertion that there is more to the universe than "particles and atoms." When you can provide evidence for such, science will embrace it as being a more correct worldview than the one it holds now. Until then, it is baseless superstition. And why teach about the possibility of alien life? Because it is a reasonable extrapolation from our own observation. We have one data point, the Earth, and it is reasonable to speculate about other, similar places. If you have similar data about a different plane of existence, I'd love to hear about it.
You are also misrepresenting Einstein's views. If you are talking about his famous "God does not play dice" comment, he was talking about quantum mechanics, not God. He also said:
My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.
Show me someone that observed the Revolutionary War. Then I might believe this "theory" people seem to have that the US is independent of Great Britain.
The textbook definition of explosion is a exothermic chemical reaction that propagates through the precurser material material with a speed greater than the speed of sound in that material.
According to the Wikipedia entry,
An explosion is a sudden increase in volume and release of energy in a violent manner, usually with the generation of high temperatures and the release of gases.
Deflagrations are subsonic; detonations are supersonic
Most explosives are chemical in nature, of course. By your definition, a nuclear bomb isn't an explosion since it doesn't involve a chemical reaction.
If there was a huge rupture of the tank the hydrogen would simply escape as one giant ball of gas rather than a continuous stream of gas if there was a leak.
There are two different issues to consider here. Either hydrogen or gasoline as a fuel source can burn, and obviously that would be bad. But the hydrogen is also almost certainly being transported as a pressurized tank of gas. (It's not clear from TFA.) Regardless of whether or not the hydrogen ignites after a collision, the rapid expansion of the gas from a ruptured cylinder is itself a hazard.
I work with standard 3000 psi compress gas cylinders, and one place I do not ever, ever want to be is near one of those things if it falls over and the nozzle breaks off. It becomes, quite literally, a rocket motor. If they hydrogen is stored in a liquified state, that's some ridiculously high pressure, I think in excess of 10,000 psi. A high enough pressure that you can't use standard steel tanks to contain it, and I think they use carbon-fiber-wrapped tanks. I imagine that carbon fiber wrapping is rather brittle. Brittle things don't do well in collisions.
Of course the whole hydrogen thing as environmentally friendly is bunk anyway, until we discover a hydrogen well and can get free hydrogen from somewhere.
The gas would expand quickly...
By the way, a rapid expansion of gas is the textbook definition of an explosion.
First of all, Newton's explanation of the behaviour of gravity is no longer a theory, but a law. To a scientist, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has survivied experimental tests sufficiently to be adopted, employed and taught by the scientific community. Whereas a "law" is a theory that has withstood these tests for such a long time and has been so successful at explaining phenomena that there is little active interest in challenging it with further tests.
In my experience, "theory" is used in science to describe a framework that can be used to explain data, such as the Theory of Evolution and the Theory of Relativity. The term "law" is usually applied to a short, very useful, mathematical formula that describes some physical phenomenon. For example, Ohm's Law (V=IR), Bragg's Law [n*lamba=2*d*sin(theta)], Maxwell's Laws, etc. These are not necessarily funamental, unquestionable laws of the universe. For example, Ohm's Law doesn't hold true at very high current densities, but it is still invaluable when building a circuit. I'm not sure how true the idea of "theory is untested, a law has been proven" is.
We also have Newton's Theory of Gravity, but Newton's Laws of Motion. I'm not sure why one is considered a theory and the other a law.
It doesn't matter if the dogma is religious dogma or scientific dogma. If you can't question it and get reasonable answers back, it's just dogma. And, unfortunately, too much of science is that way.
Science is the exact antithesis of what you've described. Science welcomes questions. (Well, except for stupid ones.) What you can't do is make wild claims without significant evidence or some other support for your ideas. Evolution has that support. ID doesn't. If ID can make scientific arguments and predictions and test for its claims, then it can get published in scientific journals. But it can't, so it resorts to publishing books and videos and marketing to the scientifically-ignorant public.
nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe
There are numerous refutations of Behe out there. Behe's argument basically boils down to, "It looks really complicated. It must be magic!" See, for example: http://talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html. Here's a good refutation of Behe's recent testimony in the Dover trial.
ID makes no predictions, observations, or has any supporting evidence. Just vague claims of "it's complex" or "it looks designed". The only reason it's getting the attention that it is getting is because it dovetails nicely into fundamentalist Christian theology. And don't doubt that Behe's "irreducible complexity" is anything other that Christian creationism in fancy clothing.
Behe said "the designer is God" and that "I concluded that based on theological, philosophical and historical facts." [Note: none of these things are science.] So he has admitted that his conclusions are not scientific, and therefore do not belong in the classroom.
Kurzweil cheats. The most obvious flaw is the way he lumps multiple events together as one to keep the distribution linear. For example, one "event" is "Genus Homo, Homo erectus, specialized stone tools", and another is "Printing, experimental method" and "Writing, wheel". If those were treated as separate events, they would have inserted major downward deflections in his chart a million years ago, and about 500 to a few thousand years ago.
...not only is the chart an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion, but what it actually represents is the proximity of the familiar. We are much more aware of innovations in our current time and environment, and the farther back we look, the blurrier the distinctions get. We may think it's a grand step forward to have these fancy cell phones that don't tie you to a cord coming from the wall, but there was also a time when people thought it was radical to be using this new bow & arrow thingie, instead of the good ol' atlatl. We just lump that prior event into a "flinging pointy things" category and don't think much of it. When Kurzweil reifies biases that way, he gets garbage, like this graph, out.
Why not? Because it's MY body, not theirs. And if I want to take pictures of myself dancing naked with a banana in my ear, "I am the Lizard King" painted on my body, and take pictures of that, it's my right to do so. I am a morally autonomous individual. What I do with my body is up for me to decide, not the Christian Coalition or the Family Research Council or Rick Santorum or Alberto Gonzales.
Notice how conservative are always railing on about anything non-right-wingers want, and how it creates a "nanny state" to take care of us? That is, until it becomes a "moral" issue and they become the final arbiters of what we can do with our lives.
(Yes, I realize you were being sarcastic. Just felt like ranting.)
Oral and anal sex are illegal in many US states. Same with gay sex
Just to nitpick, since Lawrence vs. Texas, any laws outlawing private homosexual conduct are unconstitutional. According to the Wikipedia entry, this probably applies to heterosexual sex as well.
Since some of the more radical conservative judges on the Supreme Court do not believe Americans have a right to privacy, and with two judges needing replacement by the Bush administration, this may not be the case too much longer.
Would a judge not side with the police getting stats on drug users to see where they congregate and what kinds of drugs they prefer?
The ironic part about what you said is that the police would be collecting statistics on how to better deter drug use, while the RIAA is collecting statistics on how to better provide the very thing they are complaining people are getting illegally.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, leprosy hasn't been "uncurable" for quite a while. It's actually pretty easy to cure, if you have access to modern medicine (i.e. don't live in a third world country).
From Wikipedia:
Great, I'll be spray painting advertisements on the side of your car this evening. That's the price you choose to accept by parking it on the street.
I also accept postal mail. That does not mean that marketers are welcome to send me their advertisements postage due, much as spam does. I also accept telephone calls. That does not mean that marketers can call me incessently at 3 am, when I am certain to be home, to sell me V1agra.
The Supreme Court has long ruled that commercial speech can be much more heavily restricted than political speech. I reject your implication that restricting spam is the first step down the line toward an authoritarian police state.
Spam isn't a free speech issue. Spam forces the burden of the cost onto the receiver, rather than the sender. It is exactly analagous to junk faxes, which cost very little to send but a great deal to receive.
Marketers are welcome to send emails to those people that have given their permission. Spammers abuse a private resource.
PS the Page Up / Down and Home keys work too, as well as your scrollwheel.
Except that it used that damn, motion-sickness-inducing "smooth scrolling" function. Once I stop moving the scrollwheel with my finger, I darn well expect the text on the screen to stop moving, not keep scrolling for half a second.
Once you realize it is not a scrollbar and actually try it a bit you'll see hwo cool it is.
It's not "cool," it's aggravating. Ugh. After going down to about search result #80, to get back to the top, I had to drag the scrollbar up to the top where I had to hold it and wait while the display slowly scrolled up to the start. The flashiness or "coolness" of the interface should never take a back seat to its ability to perform its function.
It is an interesting conclusion if true, but I'm not sure if I buy it. A single parent household is going to have stresses put on it that a two-parent household simply won't have. If nothing else, there is a built in support system if something catastrophic happens to one parent.
I still think it is much too much of a leap to suggest that it logically follow from this that children in two-parent, same sex households will have the same disadvantages as in the single-parent household. The disadvantage to the child may spring from the single-parentness not from the single-sexness.
I've heard this sort of argument before, usually from religious conservatives in the press explaining why gay marriage will end the world as we know it. But one thing that never seems to get explained is what, specifically, the child won't get or won't learn in such an environment. It's always some dangerous-sounding vagueness about how they are demeaning "the importance of fathers" or some such.
It seems to me that the reason for this is that this argument basically boils down to a desire to enforce traditional gender roles. Daddies are the ones that play catch and change the oil, while Mommies are the ones that bake cookies and clean the bathroom. The notion of Mommy changing the oil in the Subaru throws this all out of whack.
I can't get to your linked article, but I'll comment anyway.
Implicit in your argument is the idea that the reason these children are disadvantaged is because they do not have a role model for one sex. That's a massive oversimplification of a complex problem. A parent in a single-parent household will probably be less able to spend as much time with their child, so he will get less parental attention. For that same reason, he might not be able to get as much help with schoolwork, and might not get as good an education. Or, because single parenthood tends to correlate with lower incomes and younger parents, one of these factors might be what's causing the poorer outcome.
Jumping to the conclusion that (e.g.) children in a lesbian household do poorly because they won't have a male role model is a major jump to a conclusion, not a simple extrapolation. All the studies I'm familiar with say that children raised in two-parent, same-sex households do just as well as their heterosexually, two-parented friends.
Yeah, and we all know how thorougly and accurately the Iraq WMD research was carried out.
Except that there are no hydrogen wells on the planet. The only economically feasible method of generating hydrogen at the moment is the burning of methane. Electrically breaking down water requires more energy than you later get from burning the hydrogen.
Remember, hydrogen is really only an energy storage mechanism, not a fuel source.
Gosh, I'm sure that never occured to him.
His website is great, though. Much of the text appears to have been written by someone with no more than an 8th grade education. He particularly does not seem to understand the correct use of CAPITAL LETTERS or "quotes,"
ISLAM is NOT a religion but a Virus
The ATHLETIC BOARD shall set minimum Physical fitness work out programs for all TEXAS SCHOOLS with 2 hour minimum P.E. daily classes for all students.
Fact is we need to STOP TAKING ANY MORE APPLICATIONS for immigration into the U.S. for at least the next 10 years. We need to "clean house" before we need any more immigrants.......if ever. Any new applicants inside our borders need to go home.
At least he's a mildly entertaining nut.
Unfortunately, there are already laws (in the US) that already outlaw spam. (No, they're not perfect, I'm not even sure they're good, but they exist.) You can see how well reduced the flow of spam. How often do you see an acutal V1agra spam with the full name and address of the sender in it?
More laws won't help stop people that are already breaking the law.
No. Spam = A guy with a loudspeaker standing out front of your house shouting advertisements at 3 am. One that won't leave if you ask him to. And the cops are too busy to make him leave, even if you call them.
And just as a gentle reminder, it's spam, not SPAM.
Really? I don't remember God being mentioned in the Constitution at all, let alone Jesus. You'd think that if religion was so important to the Founding Fathers, they'd have at least brought it up. Many of the Founders were not Christians, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Our government is entirely a-religious, which is what they intended.
It is one thing to respect religious belief. It is another for the government to promote one, even the one dominant among its citizens, above others.
There are no crosses at Arlington.
Maybe because there is no basis or evidence for your assertion that there is more to the universe than "particles and atoms." When you can provide evidence for such, science will embrace it as being a more correct worldview than the one it holds now. Until then, it is baseless superstition. And why teach about the possibility of alien life? Because it is a reasonable extrapolation from our own observation. We have one data point, the Earth, and it is reasonable to speculate about other, similar places. If you have similar data about a different plane of existence, I'd love to hear about it.
You are also misrepresenting Einstein's views. If you are talking about his famous "God does not play dice" comment, he was talking about quantum mechanics, not God. He also said:
Show me someone that observed the Revolutionary War. Then I might believe this "theory" people seem to have that the US is independent of Great Britain.
According to the Wikipedia entry,
Deflagrations are subsonic; detonations are supersonicMost explosives are chemical in nature, of course. By your definition, a nuclear bomb isn't an explosion since it doesn't involve a chemical reaction.
There are two different issues to consider here. Either hydrogen or gasoline as a fuel source can burn, and obviously that would be bad. But the hydrogen is also almost certainly being transported as a pressurized tank of gas. (It's not clear from TFA.) Regardless of whether or not the hydrogen ignites after a collision, the rapid expansion of the gas from a ruptured cylinder is itself a hazard.
I work with standard 3000 psi compress gas cylinders, and one place I do not ever, ever want to be is near one of those things if it falls over and the nozzle breaks off. It becomes, quite literally, a rocket motor. If they hydrogen is stored in a liquified state, that's some ridiculously high pressure, I think in excess of 10,000 psi. A high enough pressure that you can't use standard steel tanks to contain it, and I think they use carbon-fiber-wrapped tanks. I imagine that carbon fiber wrapping is rather brittle. Brittle things don't do well in collisions.
Of course the whole hydrogen thing as environmentally friendly is bunk anyway, until we discover a hydrogen well and can get free hydrogen from somewhere.
By the way, a rapid expansion of gas is the textbook definition of an explosion.In my experience, "theory" is used in science to describe a framework that can be used to explain data, such as the Theory of Evolution and the Theory of Relativity. The term "law" is usually applied to a short, very useful, mathematical formula that describes some physical phenomenon. For example, Ohm's Law (V=IR), Bragg's Law [n*lamba=2*d*sin(theta)], Maxwell's Laws, etc. These are not necessarily funamental, unquestionable laws of the universe. For example, Ohm's Law doesn't hold true at very high current densities, but it is still invaluable when building a circuit. I'm not sure how true the idea of "theory is untested, a law has been proven" is.
We also have Newton's Theory of Gravity, but Newton's Laws of Motion. I'm not sure why one is considered a theory and the other a law.
It doesn't matter if the dogma is religious dogma or scientific dogma. If you can't question it and get reasonable answers back, it's just dogma. And, unfortunately, too much of science is that way.
Science is the exact antithesis of what you've described. Science welcomes questions. (Well, except for stupid ones.) What you can't do is make wild claims without significant evidence or some other support for your ideas. Evolution has that support. ID doesn't. If ID can make scientific arguments and predictions and test for its claims, then it can get published in scientific journals. But it can't, so it resorts to publishing books and videos and marketing to the scientifically-ignorant public.
nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe
There are numerous refutations of Behe out there. Behe's argument basically boils down to, "It looks really complicated. It must be magic!" See, for example: http://talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html. Here's a good refutation of Behe's recent testimony in the Dover trial.
ID makes no predictions, observations, or has any supporting evidence. Just vague claims of "it's complex" or "it looks designed". The only reason it's getting the attention that it is getting is because it dovetails nicely into fundamentalist Christian theology. And don't doubt that Behe's "irreducible complexity" is anything other that Christian creationism in fancy clothing.
Kevin Drum responded to this about a week ago.
PZ Meyers also has a pretty good response:
The real downside to fusion engines is that they are also very fictional.
Why not? Because it's MY body, not theirs. And if I want to take pictures of myself dancing naked with a banana in my ear, "I am the Lizard King" painted on my body, and take pictures of that, it's my right to do so. I am a morally autonomous individual. What I do with my body is up for me to decide, not the Christian Coalition or the Family Research Council or Rick Santorum or Alberto Gonzales.
Notice how conservative are always railing on about anything non-right-wingers want, and how it creates a "nanny state" to take care of us? That is, until it becomes a "moral" issue and they become the final arbiters of what we can do with our lives.
(Yes, I realize you were being sarcastic. Just felt like ranting.)
Just to nitpick, since Lawrence vs. Texas, any laws outlawing private homosexual conduct are unconstitutional. According to the Wikipedia entry, this probably applies to heterosexual sex as well.
Since some of the more radical conservative judges on the Supreme Court do not believe Americans have a right to privacy, and with two judges needing replacement by the Bush administration, this may not be the case too much longer.
So, does this mean that they're going to prosecute people for taking pictures of adults doing things that are perfectly legal to do?
So we can DO it, we just can't LOOK at it?