As much as I am skeptical that there is any fundamental moral right for private individuals to own land, given the ease with which local governments can be stacked with corrupt officials, this seems like a step in the wrong direction.
On the other hand, this sets an interesting precedent. If private individuals can be forced to sell their land to other private individuals, then conceivably a group of working class families could stack a local government with officials sympathetic to their cause and force shopping malls to sell their land to working class families at reasonable prices for private homes.
bias: a partiality that prevents objective consideration of an issue or situation
FWIW, I would define bias in a news outlet as: Do the viewers have their facts wrong in a way that systematically influences their opinions about liberal or conservative policies?
A specific test for bias would be to take viewers who had conservative or liberal opinions and look at whether the "facts" they used to form their opinions were, in fact, correct.
I suspect that viewers of FOX would be basing their opinions on more incorrect "facts" than people who relied on more academic/liberal news source like PBS or NPR but it would be an interesting study - I could be in for a surprise.
Because, no matter how you cut it, freedom==responsibility.
Scientifically, a hypothesis can only be meaningfully verified if it has one specific unchanging interpretation and "freedom==responsibility" is about as vague as it gets.
However, I think what you saying is the more a government provides for its citizens, the more its citizens will have to give up their freedoms. While this may be what some governments want people to believe, it is by no means a natural law.
For example, the Bush administration wants people to believe that the only way to be safe from having hijacked planes flown into buildings is to hold people without trial and torure them. Obviously, however, there are whole variety of ways to prevent planes from being hijacked and flown into buildings that don't involve depriving people of freedom or basic rights.
More relevant to the article, the Bush administration already has more than enough power to identify and arrest spammers and other internet criminals who are in the USA and cracking down on people living outside of the USA primarly requires greater international cooperation (as opposed to restricting American's freedom).
Of course, some governmant enforced standards could help too, for example, a huge dent could be put in domestically generated spam by establishing a uniform "not-spam" attribute for email and imposing a penalty of $20 per incident for including the "not-spam" attribute in spam email. But, even then, preventing false advertising isn't really taking away freedom.
The basic idea in science, is to compare hypotheses against experimental data. Typically, there will be several hypotheses under consideration and each different hypothesis will fit different aspects of the data well and other aspects of the data only with excuses. Furthermore, as more data is collected, inconsistancies will arise between the new data and some of the hypotheses that no amount of excuses can explain away.
If, however, the correct hypothesis is stumbled upon, then, almost like magic, not only will there not be a need for excuses to fit existing data but no matter how much new data is collected, no inconsistencies will be found. In summary, then, the mark of a correct hypothesis is that no excuses need to be made to fit the data.
Excuses come in two basic types. The first type of excuse violates Occam's razor in that more and more new hypotheses are addded to the original hypotheses in order to account for accumulating inconsistancies with the data. The second type of excuse relies on a vaguely defined hypothesis and interprets the hypothesis in different ways to fit different data.
The mark of a correct scientific hypothesis, then, is that it is simple and that it is precisely defined. On the other hand, in the humanities it is considered entirely valid to "prove" a hypothesis by using clever language to redefine the hypothesis and add complex excuses to the original hypothesis.
Back to the question at hand, while it could, in fact, be true that there is a sickle cell like "set of genetic traits" that occur in certain "Jewish" people that confers some sort of "intelligence", I am troubled that the authors fail to provide a precise and simple definition of their hypothesis.
In the case of sickle cell anemia, for example, there is a single precisely defined mutation that confers a specific and well defined advantage (malaria resistance) to people whose ancestors lived in regions with high incidence of malaria. In the present study, however, the authors postulate that a range of genetic conditions confers some sort of vague "intelligence" based selective advantage to people whose ancestors have a very complex and varied history.
I'm not necessarily saying the authors of the present study are wrong but their paper reads more like a humanities paper where the goal is to use clever language to argue a particular point of view than a science paper where the goal is to decide whether or not a specific precisely defined hypothesis is consistent with experimental observation.
...any intelligent alien life would likely be similar to us. There is a reason man evolved the way they did.
Even if intelligent life evolved to be similar to humans initially, it is likely that at least some members of the species would choose to assume very different forms once they had the technology to do so (transferring their consciousness to computers, for example).
Matter: maybe required. Atoms: probably not required. Carbon based molecules in water solution : definitely not required.
It is only a matter of time (a thousand years or so) before people transfer their conscious to something like light (or at least electron) based computers. As patterns of light (or electrons) transiting a series of switches they won't exactly look very "human".
The more interesting possibility is that intelligent patterns might develop in something like contained plasma. Given how little is known about chaos theory it's difficult to assess how likely that is though.
7 out of 10 Americans think the intelligent life forms on other planets would be similar to humans
Given the age of the universe, intelligent life on other planets would be thousands or even millions of years more (or less) advanced than on earth.
Less advanced life might be similar to humans (cell based, certain symmetries in cellular organization such as two eyes, etc.) but more advanced life wouldn't even be recognized as intelligent life by most people - for example, patterns of energy experiencing pure happiness.
At the end of the year, see which group has been most productive, has the highest standards of living, has the happiest people, or whatever other yardstick you choose to measure by.
But can science tell you what yardstick to measure by? Specifically, can you prove scientifically that just because people want something that they should have it?
An interesting question for science is whether it is possible to make people want to be nice to each other without negating the benefits of niceness.
Suppose that in the "all are nice to each other" group almost everyone tries to distrubute resources as fairly as possible but in such a way that everyone has enough of the basic necessities like food, health care, and education. Now suppose there are a few people in the group who behave shitty and don't try to be fair or make sure that everyone has enough of the basic necessities. Instead, they take as much as they can for themselves. At the end of the year the few shitty people are going to have a significantly higher standard of living, etc. than everyone else.
So the question for science is whether it's possible to design a system where the shitty people don't end up with more - a system where it's always in everyone's best interest to be as nice and as fair as possible. Or is it always possible to cheat the system and the only way a nice system will work is if people are nice out of a desire to be "good" people.
If we had more money, then we wouldn't have budget problems!
Ah, but those who have less money have to pay money to those who have more money (that is, debtors have to pay interest to lendors) so things are effectively cheaper for those who have more money and things are effectively more expensive for those who have less money.
If the Voyageur program were (effectively) cheap enough then it wouldn't need to be cut.
5% annualized returns: I believe at the moment they are all less than 2%.
OK, so change increase the $40 trillion surplus to $100 trillion and invest in the stable bonds with 2% returns and you're back in tax free territory.
The interesting point about interest rates is that they fluctuate. If the USA's national debt got up to, say, $15 trillion (from the $7 trillion it's at now) and then interest rates went up to 13% then the entire United States budget of $2 trillion would go to paying interest on the debt.
As it is, about 15% of the USA' budget goes to paying interest on it's debt. So someone with an adjusted gross income of $40,000 paying $5,000 in taxes is paying $750 just on interest on the USA's national debt.
That leaves precisely zero (0) countries.
The USA is always going on about how great capitalism is. Rather than investing in government bonds they could invest in appropriately "capitalist" companies in other countries (or even in the USA - it wouldn't help the trade deficit but it would get the taxes paid). Instead of tax breaks for industries the USA wants to support (ie. hydrogen energy) the USA could do investments.
If, instead of having a national debt of roughly $7 trillion, the USA had a surplus of $40 trillion then it could loan the money out to other countries at a rate of 5% which would generate enough interest to pay for its entire $2 trillion yearly budget.
People in the USA wouldn't have to pay taxes and they could also buy as much as they wanted from other countries without having to worry about a trade deficit creating a surplus of US dollars abroad causing devaluation of the US dollar.
And, they wouldn't have to cut Voyager's budget either.
"Energy cannot be created nor destroyed" is the First law of themodynamics and can be credited to James Prescott Joule and Hermann von Helmholtz NOT Newton. He wrote the laws of motion!
Not to beat the issue to death but, the First Law of Thermodynamics is based on statistical consideration of the idea that the sum of the potential and kinetic energy for an isolated system of particles will be constant which was expressed classically as Newton's Laws.
To put it another way, the kind of energy that can not be created or destroyed is the same kind of energy that is referred to by Newton's Laws (as opposed to something like "Gibb's free energy" which has no such restrictions).
The problem isn't a lack of energy in the sense of total kinetic and potential energy, the problem is that the kinetic and potential energy gets evenly distributed over all the atoms in the system and can't be used to do anything useful.
With an incandescent light bulb, for example, if kinetic energy could be extracted from light bulb's surroundings to heat the filament then the heat and light radiated from the light bulb back to the surroundings would exactly match and there would be no change in the net energy of the whole system but the light would still work.
The whole problem is that there is no way to build a device that separates atoms either by position or by velocity without "un-separating" more atoms according to that criteria in the process (the Maxwell's demon/atomic one-way door paradox).
Re:Jealous vs. Envious
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
What got me thinking about it was that last night some BBC travel program (that I was watching while on vacation in Indonesia - I'm actually American) quoted a bunch of Americans saying they thought that people in other countries were mostly jealous of the United States.
Also, the usual reason given in the United States for why "they hate our freedom" is that "they" are "jealous".
Jealous vs. Envious
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Americans frequently claim that others are "jealous" of their freedom.
It's interesting that they use "jealous" rather than "envious" because "jealous" implies a limited resource (two women wanting to date the same man, for example) whereas "envious" implies an unlimited resource (envying your friend's new computer - new computers are available to anyone who wants to buy one).
There seems to be a subconscious fear in the United States that if the rest of the world gets "freedom" or "wealth" that the United States will somehow lose it.
There is no reason the whole world can't have high levels of freedom and a high standard of living and high levels of education.
The fear that the United States is preventing other countries from having these things seems to lead to the fear that if other countries get these things then the United States will lose them.
Of course, depsite what most Americans seem to think, the United States doesn't come in first in most measures of quality of life (freedom of press, per capita income, education level, etc.) anyway so it's not clear what they are so worried about.
Actually, I would argue that your definitions are still quite vague.
Radical Muslims, the ones training the suicide bombers (although not always the bombers themselves) hate us because we do not live under Sharia, and are therefore worthy of death. I'd say this qualifies as "hate".
Are you saying that the "they" in "they hate out freedom" is anyone who observes Sharia law or anyone who trains a suicide bomber because depending which definition you choose "they" could be either millions of people or hundreds of people.
Also, you are playing fast and loose with whether they hate "us" or "our freedom" or perhaps "our behaviour". Another plausible definition of "our freedom" (besides non-observance of Sharia law) is "our foreign policy that affects the Middle East" which gives an entirely different meaning to "they hate our freedom".
Finally, you suggest that the reason "they" hate "our freedom" is because of jealousy. Usually, one is jealous of a scarce resource: someone else is in possession of a particular object so the person who is jealous is unable to possess the object. Non-observance of Sharia law isn't a scarce resource - it's not like there is a limit of three hundred million people who can be non-observant of Sharia law and after that everyone else in the world has to observe Sharia law.
I would agree, however, that saying "people who train suicide bombers want to impose Sharia law on the United States because they are jealous" is a vast improvement over "they hate our freedom" and, in fact, by interviewing "people who train suicide bombers" one could establish the fraction of those people for whom the statement was correct. Personally, I think that the fraction would turn out to be substantially less than one.
There are some issues that both the left and right agree are important but they have different opinions about the issue. There are other issues where the disagreement is on the importance of the issue. The paradox is that, in order for the importance of the issue to be discussed, Slashdot has to concede that the issue is important enough to appear as a story.
The issue in this story is the role of the rule of law in international relations. The right would aruge that as long a country has a good leader with strong convictions then only nominal compliance with the rule of law is required. The left would argue that regardless of the qualities its leader a country must always comply not only with the letter of the law but also with the spririt of the law.
Specifically, if congress (or the United Nations for international law) is supposed to approve a decision to go to war then is it enough to point to some technical aspects of a conditional authorization in an old resolution or does a new resolution have to be passed immediately prior to invasion directly authorizing the the invasion?
I fail to understand why it should matter to me John Q. Britisher would rather I voted Democrat.
I agree that what is good for the rest of the world may not be good for the United States but the United States needs to realize that what is good for the Unites States may not be good for the rest of the world.
Specifically, Republicans who think that the rest of the world wants the United States to bring the world "freedom" and "democracy" aren't exactly basing their world view on reality.
Isn't it more likely that shaking simply improves the likelihood of soluble proteins coming into contact with the aggregated clumps? I think this it is less an issue of protein- and hydro-dynamics and more one speeding diffusion.
Kind of the opposite of dissolving sugar, but a similar root cause.
I've wondered about the idea of mixing increasing the number of protein-protein interactions. With dissolving sugar, the disolved sugar molecules have to get away from the solid sugar particals where they originate to the far reaches of the solvent. The micro-currents created by mixing carry them much faster than they would diffuse.
On the other hand, in a protein solution that is starting to form aggregated clumps, the individual proteins will be evenly distributed unless the formation of the aggregated clumps is so fast that
individual proteins are depleted in the vicinity of the clumps faster that they can be replaced by diffusion (the reverse of suger dissolving).
For the systems of "amyloid" protein aggregates that I studied, the aggregated clumps of protein formed on a time scale of days so I always assumed that diffusion maintained a uniform concentration of unaggregated individual proteins. It would be interesting, though, if the formation of the agregated clumps was actually limited in some cases by the rate at which the individual proteins could diffuse to the clumps.
Back when I was doing research on how individual proteins clump together to form the "amyloid" type of deposits found in diseases like Alzheimer's and diabetes, I had results from looking at the deposit formation in test tubes suggesting that deposit formation was promoted by shaking.
The guy in charge of the project wasn't interested in pursuing the results because the intersection of protein dynamics and hydrodynamics wasn't somewhere he wanted to go.
It will be interesting to see if they can develop anything more than handwaving explanations for how the shaking is causing the prions to change structure. Standard molecular dynamics simulations of proteins don't model mixing behavior of the water molecules surrounding the protein. Part of this may be due to the different time scales of the two phenomena.
Notice that the only specific topic defined is sexual content. The rest can almost be applied to anything. Where does our obsession with Sex come from? Is it better to present children with violence, death and war?
Most people would prefer that their children beat each other up on the playground than have sex. Unfortunately, this leads some adults to conclude that sex is worse than beating people up.
During the Clinton years it was all what you could do (technical innovation, getting rich, fooling around with interns, etc.). It was a fun time to be a nerd.
Now it's all about what you can't do (be lazy, be unpatriotic, let the foreigners beat us, etc.).
Some of the most interesting people I know are people who would be judged to be lacking by the current administration so I think people should get back to that whole "land of the free" thing and live their lives however they want.
The question I have is this: Is there any change from the book that actually bothers people?
1. What I liked about Tolkien's LOTR (and the orignal Star Wars movie) was that the plots involved ordinary people who get caught up in a great battle determining the fate of everything and the ordinary people then turn out to great enough to win the battle. It's very important to this plot that Merry finds the great and ancient sword in the barrow downs and then turns out to be great enough to wield it against the witch king.
2. In a time when the USA is divided over whether it's possible to be both "with us" and "against us" at the same time, the underlying idea in LOTR that those most able to oppose Sauron had both the resolve to fight and the desire to avoid fighting is particularly relevant. The book version of Faramir was a key figure in this respect. Eowyn, for example, recognizes that even though Faramir could match any of the Rohirrim in battle he tends more to compassion than scorn. This gets lost, though, when Peter Jackson uses Faramir to reinforce the point that the ring is bad news.
Once the population becomes skewed toward males, the ability to father female offspring will become a big selective advantage. I'd be a lot more convinced by the article if they discussed results of actual population simulations.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I am skeptical that there is any fundamental moral right for private individuals to own land, given the ease with which local governments can be stacked with corrupt officials, this seems like a step in the wrong direction.
On the other hand, this sets an interesting precedent. If private individuals can be forced to sell their land to other private individuals, then conceivably a group of working class families could stack a local government with officials sympathetic to their cause and force shopping malls to sell their land to working class families at reasonable prices for private homes.
FWIW, I would define bias in a news outlet as: Do the viewers have their facts wrong in a way that systematically influences their opinions about liberal or conservative policies?
A specific test for bias would be to take viewers who had conservative or liberal opinions and look at whether the "facts" they used to form their opinions were, in fact, correct.
I suspect that viewers of FOX would be basing their opinions on more incorrect "facts" than people who relied on more academic/liberal news source like PBS or NPR but it would be an interesting study - I could be in for a surprise.
Scientifically, a hypothesis can only be meaningfully verified if it has one specific unchanging interpretation and "freedom==responsibility" is about as vague as it gets.
However, I think what you saying is the more a government provides for its citizens, the more its citizens will have to give up their freedoms. While this may be what some governments want people to believe, it is by no means a natural law.
For example, the Bush administration wants people to believe that the only way to be safe from having hijacked planes flown into buildings is to hold people without trial and torure them. Obviously, however, there are whole variety of ways to prevent planes from being hijacked and flown into buildings that don't involve depriving people of freedom or basic rights.
More relevant to the article, the Bush administration already has more than enough power to identify and arrest spammers and other internet criminals who are in the USA and cracking down on people living outside of the USA primarly requires greater international cooperation (as opposed to restricting American's freedom).
Of course, some governmant enforced standards could help too, for example, a huge dent could be put in domestically generated spam by establishing a uniform "not-spam" attribute for email and imposing a penalty of $20 per incident for including the "not-spam" attribute in spam email. But, even then, preventing false advertising isn't really taking away freedom.
The basic idea in science, is to compare hypotheses against experimental data. Typically, there will be several hypotheses under consideration and each different hypothesis will fit different aspects of the data well and other aspects of the data only with excuses. Furthermore, as more data is collected, inconsistancies will arise between the new data and some of the hypotheses that no amount of excuses can explain away.
If, however, the correct hypothesis is stumbled upon, then, almost like magic, not only will there not be a need for excuses to fit existing data but no matter how much new data is collected, no inconsistencies will be found. In summary, then, the mark of a correct hypothesis is that no excuses need to be made to fit the data.
Excuses come in two basic types. The first type of excuse violates Occam's razor in that more and more new hypotheses are addded to the original hypotheses in order to account for accumulating inconsistancies with the data. The second type of excuse relies on a vaguely defined hypothesis and interprets the hypothesis in different ways to fit different data.
The mark of a correct scientific hypothesis, then, is that it is simple and that it is precisely defined. On the other hand, in the humanities it is considered entirely valid to "prove" a hypothesis by using clever language to redefine the hypothesis and add complex excuses to the original hypothesis.
Back to the question at hand, while it could, in fact, be true that there is a sickle cell like "set of genetic traits" that occur in certain "Jewish" people that confers some sort of "intelligence", I am troubled that the authors fail to provide a precise and simple definition of their hypothesis.
In the case of sickle cell anemia, for example, there is a single precisely defined mutation that confers a specific and well defined advantage (malaria resistance) to people whose ancestors lived in regions with high incidence of malaria. In the present study, however, the authors postulate that a range of genetic conditions confers some sort of vague "intelligence" based selective advantage to people whose ancestors have a very complex and varied history.
I'm not necessarily saying the authors of the present study are wrong but their paper reads more like a humanities paper where the goal is to use clever language to argue a particular point of view than a science paper where the goal is to decide whether or not a specific precisely defined hypothesis is consistent with experimental observation.
Even if intelligent life evolved to be similar to humans initially, it is likely that at least some members of the species would choose to assume very different forms once they had the technology to do so (transferring their consciousness to computers, for example).
Matter: maybe required. Atoms: probably not required. Carbon based molecules in water solution : definitely not required.
It is only a matter of time (a thousand years or so) before people transfer their conscious to something like light (or at least electron) based computers. As patterns of light (or electrons) transiting a series of switches they won't exactly look very "human".
The more interesting possibility is that intelligent patterns might develop in something like contained plasma. Given how little is known about chaos theory it's difficult to assess how likely that is though.
Given the age of the universe, intelligent life on other planets would be thousands or even millions of years more (or less) advanced than on earth.
Less advanced life might be similar to humans (cell based, certain symmetries in cellular organization such as two eyes, etc.) but more advanced life wouldn't even be recognized as intelligent life by most people - for example, patterns of energy experiencing pure happiness.
But can science tell you what yardstick to measure by? Specifically, can you prove scientifically that just because people want something that they should have it?
An interesting question for science is whether it is possible to make people want to be nice to each other without negating the benefits of niceness.
Suppose that in the "all are nice to each other" group almost everyone tries to distrubute resources as fairly as possible but in such a way that everyone has enough of the basic necessities like food, health care, and education. Now suppose there are a few people in the group who behave shitty and don't try to be fair or make sure that everyone has enough of the basic necessities. Instead, they take as much as they can for themselves. At the end of the year the few shitty people are going to have a significantly higher standard of living, etc. than everyone else.
So the question for science is whether it's possible to design a system where the shitty people don't end up with more - a system where it's always in everyone's best interest to be as nice and as fair as possible. Or is it always possible to cheat the system and the only way a nice system will work is if people are nice out of a desire to be "good" people.
Ah, but those who have less money have to pay money to those who have more money (that is, debtors have to pay interest to lendors) so things are effectively cheaper for those who have more money and things are effectively more expensive for those who have less money.
If the Voyageur program were (effectively) cheap enough then it wouldn't need to be cut.
OK, so change increase the $40 trillion surplus to $100 trillion and invest in the stable bonds with 2% returns and you're back in tax free territory.
The interesting point about interest rates is that they fluctuate. If the USA's national debt got up to, say, $15 trillion (from the $7 trillion it's at now) and then interest rates went up to 13% then the entire United States budget of $2 trillion would go to paying interest on the debt.
As it is, about 15% of the USA' budget goes to paying interest on it's debt. So someone with an adjusted gross income of $40,000 paying $5,000 in taxes is paying $750 just on interest on the USA's national debt.
That leaves precisely zero (0) countries.
The USA is always going on about how great capitalism is. Rather than investing in government bonds they could invest in appropriately "capitalist" companies in other countries (or even in the USA - it wouldn't help the trade deficit but it would get the taxes paid). Instead of tax breaks for industries the USA wants to support (ie. hydrogen energy) the USA could do investments.
People in the USA wouldn't have to pay taxes and they could also buy as much as they wanted from other countries without having to worry about a trade deficit creating a surplus of US dollars abroad causing devaluation of the US dollar.
And, they wouldn't have to cut Voyager's budget either.
Not to beat the issue to death but, the First Law of Thermodynamics is based on statistical consideration of the idea that the sum of the potential and kinetic energy for an isolated system of particles will be constant which was expressed classically as Newton's Laws.
To put it another way, the kind of energy that can not be created or destroyed is the same kind of energy that is referred to by Newton's Laws (as opposed to something like "Gibb's free energy" which has no such restrictions).
The problem isn't a lack of energy in the sense of total kinetic and potential energy, the problem is that the kinetic and potential energy gets evenly distributed over all the atoms in the system and can't be used to do anything useful.
With an incandescent light bulb, for example, if kinetic energy could be extracted from light bulb's surroundings to heat the filament then the heat and light radiated from the light bulb back to the surroundings would exactly match and there would be no change in the net energy of the whole system but the light would still work.
The whole problem is that there is no way to build a device that separates atoms either by position or by velocity without "un-separating" more atoms according to that criteria in the process (the Maxwell's demon/atomic one-way door paradox).
What got me thinking about it was that last night some BBC travel program (that I was watching while on vacation in Indonesia - I'm actually American) quoted a bunch of Americans saying they thought that people in other countries were mostly jealous of the United States.
Also, the usual reason given in the United States for why "they hate our freedom" is that "they" are "jealous".
Americans frequently claim that others are "jealous" of their freedom.
It's interesting that they use "jealous" rather than "envious" because "jealous" implies a limited resource (two women wanting to date the same man, for example) whereas "envious" implies an unlimited resource (envying your friend's new computer - new computers are available to anyone who wants to buy one).
There seems to be a subconscious fear in the United States that if the rest of the world gets "freedom" or "wealth" that the United States will somehow lose it.
There is no reason the whole world can't have high levels of freedom and a high standard of living and high levels of education.
The fear that the United States is preventing other countries from having these things seems to lead to the fear that if other countries get these things then the United States will lose them.
Of course, depsite what most Americans seem to think, the United States doesn't come in first in most measures of quality of life (freedom of press, per capita income, education level, etc.) anyway so it's not clear what they are so worried about.
Radical Muslims, the ones training the suicide bombers (although not always the bombers themselves) hate us because we do not live under Sharia, and are therefore worthy of death. I'd say this qualifies as "hate".
Are you saying that the "they" in "they hate out freedom" is anyone who observes Sharia law or anyone who trains a suicide bomber because depending which definition you choose "they" could be either millions of people or hundreds of people.
Also, you are playing fast and loose with whether they hate "us" or "our freedom" or perhaps "our behaviour". Another plausible definition of "our freedom" (besides non-observance of Sharia law) is "our foreign policy that affects the Middle East" which gives an entirely different meaning to "they hate our freedom".
Finally, you suggest that the reason "they" hate "our freedom" is because of jealousy. Usually, one is jealous of a scarce resource: someone else is in possession of a particular object so the person who is jealous is unable to possess the object. Non-observance of Sharia law isn't a scarce resource - it's not like there is a limit of three hundred million people who can be non-observant of Sharia law and after that everyone else in the world has to observe Sharia law.
I would agree, however, that saying "people who train suicide bombers want to impose Sharia law on the United States because they are jealous" is a vast improvement over "they hate our freedom" and, in fact, by interviewing "people who train suicide bombers" one could establish the fraction of those people for whom the statement was correct. Personally, I think that the fraction would turn out to be substantially less than one.
What the debates need is someone who will ask the candidates what they actually mean when they say some pleasantly patriotic abstraction:
"They hate our freedom"?
Define precisely who "they" are and what is meant by "freedom" and then provide a precisely reasoned argument why it is that they would "hate" it.
The issue in this story is the role of the rule of law in international relations. The right would aruge that as long a country has a good leader with strong convictions then only nominal compliance with the rule of law is required. The left would argue that regardless of the qualities its leader a country must always comply not only with the letter of the law but also with the spririt of the law.
Specifically, if congress (or the United Nations for international law) is supposed to approve a decision to go to war then is it enough to point to some technical aspects of a conditional authorization in an old resolution or does a new resolution have to be passed immediately prior to invasion directly authorizing the the invasion?
I agree that what is good for the rest of the world may not be good for the United States but the United States needs to realize that what is good for the Unites States may not be good for the rest of the world.
Specifically, Republicans who think that the rest of the world wants the United States to bring the world "freedom" and "democracy" aren't exactly basing their world view on reality.
On the other hand, in a protein solution that is starting to form aggregated clumps, the individual proteins will be evenly distributed unless the formation of the aggregated clumps is so fast that individual proteins are depleted in the vicinity of the clumps faster that they can be replaced by diffusion (the reverse of suger dissolving).
For the systems of "amyloid" protein aggregates that I studied, the aggregated clumps of protein formed on a time scale of days so I always assumed that diffusion maintained a uniform concentration of unaggregated individual proteins. It would be interesting, though, if the formation of the agregated clumps was actually limited in some cases by the rate at which the individual proteins could diffuse to the clumps.
The guy in charge of the project wasn't interested in pursuing the results because the intersection of protein dynamics and hydrodynamics wasn't somewhere he wanted to go.
It will be interesting to see if they can develop anything more than handwaving explanations for how the shaking is causing the prions to change structure. Standard molecular dynamics simulations of proteins don't model mixing behavior of the water molecules surrounding the protein. Part of this may be due to the different time scales of the two phenomena.
Notice that the only specific topic defined is sexual content. The rest can almost be applied to anything.
Where does our obsession with Sex come from? Is it better to present children with violence, death and war?
Most people would prefer that their children beat each other up on the playground than have sex. Unfortunately, this leads some adults to conclude that sex is worse than beating people up.
Now it's all about what you can't do (be lazy, be unpatriotic, let the foreigners beat us, etc.).
Some of the most interesting people I know are people who would be judged to be lacking by the current administration so I think people should get back to that whole "land of the free" thing and live their lives however they want.
1. What I liked about Tolkien's LOTR (and the orignal Star Wars movie) was that the plots involved ordinary people who get caught up in a great battle determining the fate of everything and the ordinary people then turn out to great enough to win the battle. It's very important to this plot that Merry finds the great and ancient sword in the barrow downs and then turns out to be great enough to wield it against the witch king.
2. In a time when the USA is divided over whether it's possible to be both "with us" and "against us" at the same time, the underlying idea in LOTR that those most able to oppose Sauron had both the resolve to fight and the desire to avoid fighting is particularly relevant. The book version of Faramir was a key figure in this respect. Eowyn, for example, recognizes that even though Faramir could match any of the Rohirrim in battle he tends more to compassion than scorn. This gets lost, though, when Peter Jackson uses Faramir to reinforce the point that the ring is bad news.
Once the population becomes skewed toward males, the ability to father female offspring will become a big selective advantage. I'd be a lot more convinced by the article if they discussed results of actual population simulations.