and it's all designed to kill as many of us (and our co-passengers) as possible
It's not designed to do anything. Things happen according to the laws of physics with absolutely no motivation or plan. The universe is indifferent to us and will extinguish our existene without any awareness of our existence.
Some people find the indifference of it all to be threatening.
There is good correlation between "killer impacts" and location of the sun in the galaxy (yes it moves around). We are starting to enter a higher risk region (transition to edge of arm) and perhaps the fundamental distribution is changing.
There is a lot of talk about there being a correlation. Raup and Sepkoski have been banging on this drum for 40-odd years, but their deduced cyclicities keep on changing from one publication to the next. While it is genuine science, they certainly have not convinced the entire geological community of their argument. It's a controversy, not a settled piece of science.
Statistically, what percentage of impacts are from objects originating in the outer solar system? Is that even possible to determine?
We don't know, and it's unlikely to be easy to determine.
When an impactor makes it to the surface at interplanetary speeds (minimum 11km/s, typically more like 25-30km/s), the kinetic energy is sufficiently high that the overwhelming majority of the impactor is vaporized and blown back out of the crater. While this material does fall back to earth, it's very dispersed and extremely metamorphosed. I was out on a field trip last year with John Parnell from Aberdeen to examine a putative impact ejecta sheet from a billion years ago in NW Scotland. Mineralogically, it's not convincing (in hand specimen), but the field relations are quite puzzling, and do fit with John's model that it is an ejecta sheet, and not the (extremely peculiar, and solitary) volcanic deposit that it has been mapped as for the last century and a bit. Out in the field things are not necessarily cut and dried (it is geology, after all).
What would distinguish an outer solar system impactor from an inner solar system impactor? There would be a lot of ices in the outer solar system impactor, but they'd simply disperse in the impact ; there might be an isotopic signature in the oxygen composition (but we'd need a verified outer solar system object to calibrate against). There are likely to be some silicate grains, though they'd probably have been vaporized and re-condensed, or at least melted to glass (and after a billion years, devitrified to clay minerals). But the same is going to be true for most inner solar system impactors too (nickel-iron impactors aren't terribly common).
To be honest, counting the damned things up in the sky is going to be a lot more accurate than counting the broken bits on the ground. Mind you, looking would be more interesting than drilling holes in the ground for oil.
With 60-odd infrasound detectors, if the nearest ones were saturated, then the next one on a particular azimuth from the epi- (or hypo-) centre should have picked it up. Considering that Chelyabinsk is and was one of the major industrial centres where the Russian nuclear arsenal was built, one would rather expect it to have pretty fair coverage.
if it had arrived a few hours later and exploded over that region
Earlier, surely? Last time I looked, India and Pakistan (and their mutual border) were east of the eastern Mediterranean.
Is the latitude right? I think it's a bit too far north. [Checks] It could have just clipped into Jammu and/ or Kashmir, which would have been... very troubling.
Implying that you think that seismologists are incompetent.
Seismologists have been doing this since the early 1950s. It isn't rocket science, and it is comprehensively automated. If the NTBTO thinks they're airbursts, not earthquakes, then it's very likely that they're airbursts, not earthquakes.
One of the characteristics that is used to differentiate an airburst (or other large explosion) from an earthquake is the distribution of first motions. For an explosion, all detecting stations will have a first motion away from the epicentre (or hypocentre). For an earthquake though, in one quadrant you'll have "forward" motion, in the next quadrant "away" motion, then forward, then away again. Page 4 of this PDF gives you a diagram. Getting your head around the resulting "beach ball" diagrams is an early part of your introduction to seismology course, if you go into geology.
Back when I had a smart phone, I'd typically use between 1 and 2 % of my monthly data allocation on my phone. I'd use more on my tablet, because I'd got a keyboard for that.
However, nowhere in Corning's official literature do they ever indicate ANY Mohs rating for it.
Moh's scale was designed as a quick and dirty estimate of hardness which could be carried out in the field. That's why it uses common minerals (talc, gypsum, calcite, fluorite/ fluorspar, apatite, feldspar, quartz, topaz, corundum, diamond) which any mineral collector or geologist should be able to acquire pretty rapidly.
Vickers hardness testing is a precisely defined engineering test, requiring substantial equipment to perform. (Brinell hardness is a similar test, though less common.)
"Gorilla glass" is an engineered material, so the Vickers test is the appropriate one.
What most people don't realise about hardness is that it varies with crystallographic orientation. For a glass, that shouldn't be a problem - they should be isotropic (unless they're strained during manufacture). But for crystalline materials it can be an issue. There is a mineral called disthene from the Greek di- (for "two) and sthenos (for "strength") which has a Mohs hardness of 5 on it's long crystallographic axis and 7 perpendicular to that axis. (It's better known as kyanite, on account of it's typical sky-blue colour. It's actually very pretty.) The difference in (Vickers) hardness between (IIRC) the {111} and {001} directions of diamond is comparable to the difference between corundum and talc.
It occurred to me that we're arguing about the details while agreeing on the whole,
Yeah, it's no biggie.
The dissolution of the "nuclear family" is happening. I'm neutral on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing - I'm not in the breeding game ; it's a "someone else's problem".
But that was a shift of parenting within a family unit, which was nuclear family throughout most of human history.
Hmmm, that's an assertion. For most of written history, yes, the nuclear family is common. It's not the only solution - a lot of hunter-gatherer societies are not nuclear family models. But for written history... I'll agree that the nuclear family is the commonest solution.
Looking at the houses at Catal Hoyuk, they'd not be inappropriate to a nuclear family. But on the other hand, the iron age roundhouses found all over western Europe would accommodate 20-30 people easily. Which doesn't sound like a nuclear family.
Stepping back through the rest of history and archeology... groups as small as a "nuclear family" seem smaller than what we have in the way of sites. There might be multiple families living together, possibly related. But it doesn't look like a nuclear family in the way people use the term these days.
Going to our closest living relatives, chimps, bonobos and gorillas - none of them use a nuclear family. Which suggests to me that the nuclear family is not the basal situation for primates.
Horror for politicians : one of their shibboleths might not actually be terribly important. Oh noes!
On the other hand, I wonder what you mean by 'very popular claim?' Do you mean a claim made often by non-scientist?
It's something that I hear a lot on things like Discovery channel. I do spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to keep up with the literature, and I don't see such claims being made or repeated there.
Moon's theorized role in Earth's evolutionary process
from the stabilization of the axis,
to the early tilde affects on Earth's magma (when the Moon was much closer)
decreasing the amount of asteroid and comet hits we take,
to regulating ocean tides, etc
From the top... stabilisation of the Earth's axis? Yes, the Moon does stabilise the Earth's axis, but how important is that. Mars does suffer considerable excursions of it's axial tilt, but even so it only moves at around a degree per megayear. The rate of movement of climate zones resulting from global warming is much faster than that. Yes it's an efect, but is it fundamentally an important one? We need more examples (i.e. planets with life) to address that question.
early tide effects? Shrug. When the Earth was a magma ocean, it was probably a bit early for the development of life. By a couple of hundred million years later, there was a solid crust with liquid water cycling on it (the oxygen isotope data from the Jack Hills zircons tell us that). So... the magma ocean phase wasn't significant. And I'm still not sure how "tidal effects" would have changed the origin and development of life.
decreased asteroid and comet hits? Meh. The decrease would be very small, if anything. The Moon covers only a tiny fraction of the sky. It might actually increase the number of hits. However some work about 4 or 5 years ago showed that for most impacts - up to a 100km or so impactor, which are rare - the deep basins of the oceans don't get boiled dry, so again, it's really a "Meh" in terms of it's effects on OOL.
regulating ocean tides? Again, Meh ; the intensity and frequency of tides have changed, greatly, since the origin of life (we don't know exactly how much ; the coupling between Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit is quite sensitively dependent on the amount of shallow seas and the orientation of coastlines, to change the position of the oceanic tidal bulge with respect to the Earth-centre to Moon-centre line. That affects the torque that the Earth applies to the Moon and vice versa. We don't have enough information (because plate tectonics is destructive of information about previous continental arrangements) calculate the exact trajectory of orbital parameters and Earth's rotation. We aren't even really sure if the Moon originally formed at the Roche limit, or significantly outside it. Or even if the Moon formed in one go, or by the merger of several moonlets in the few decades following the Giant Impact. Indeed, while the "Giant Impact" is by far the consensus for the origin of the Moon, it is turning out to be hard to get it to work exactly correctly.
Given all of these issues, I wouldn't attempt to defend the proposition that "a large moon is necessary for the origin of life". It may be a true proposition, but I don't think that the state of knowledge at the moment allows one to claim it as a fact.
It may be becoming more common and/or cheaper these days, but it's not anything fundamentally new.
On a different level, outsourcing looking after the kids to granny has been going on more widely and for much much longer ; there are reasonable arguments that the whole menopause thing and an extended lifespan are an evolutionary consequence of granny being able to increase her gene's representation in the population by looking after the kid's kids.
11. Can I snort it? We have seen comments about goofballs wanting to snort it. Don't do it! It is not a responsible or smart way to use the product. To take precautions against this action, we've added volume to the powder so it would take more than a half of a cup of powder to get the equivalent of one drink up your nose.
Screw the responsibility question. But making it a half-cup by volume for one drink! Stupid.
It's a solution (if you'll pardon the pun) in search of a problem.
you use an anodized aluminum bottle with a plastic/rubber screw top stopper,
To be honest, I always use plastic, not aluminium. It collapses down when it's not needed, so you don't need to waste volume in your rucksac. Taking a plastic bottle of beer on the walk in, and then using that bottle as your day bottle for the rest of the trip works perfectly well and costs essentially nothing. Throw the bottle into a bin when you come down out of the mountains and start to hitch hike back home (or back to where you left your car, if you're doing it that way).
Palcohol can be transported in your luggage without the fear of bottles breaking.
and you say
and there is the whole breakage concern.
In nearly 40 years of hiking and mountaineering, taking weeks worth of food (and booze) into the mountains in a rucksac, and not being gentle with them, I've never once had a bottle break on me. Even when I've been transporting mountaineering metalwork in the same body of the rucksac. Just making sure that there's a layer of fabric around the glassware is sufficient.
A part-used bottle - yeah, I could see that being a concern, leaking through the lid. So drink the whole bottle, and if it's a multi-day trip, take multiple smaller bottles rather than one big one. Or decant it into a proper re-sealable bottle, as I describe up-thread.
According to the site, Phillips came up with the idea because he is an "active guy" and wanted a way to enjoy an adult beverage after long hours hiking, biking or camping without having to carry around heavy bottles.
Which makes a sort of sense. Carrying bottles into the mountains - and then having to carry the empty bottles out - is a deal of a pain in the butt. Which is why we used to decant the whisky or vodka into an accordion bottle and carry that in and out. They're perfectly good for daytime water bottles too.
(Actually the one that I use is nearly 30 years old and was originally intended for 24-hour urine collection for medical tests. It's amazing the things you can find in the store rooms of hospitals. Several kilos of explosives in that attic room too.)
Nowadays many parents view that parenting like many other business tasks can be outsourced.
Why the "nowadays"?
People have outsourced parenting to wet nurses, nannies and servants for the whole of recorded history. Whenever they could afford it, they've done it.
It's a splitting axe, not a general purpose axe.
on
Reinventing the Axe
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· Score: 1
Splitting axes have their uses - i.e. splitting. All very well and good if splitting logs is what you need to do. Most of the axe work I have had to do has been much more varied - felling trees that are wind-blown and hung up, snedding, maintenance of rides, coppicing - involving much more varied work. In particular, this axe is "handed", probably right-handed, so it would be hard to use left-handed or for striking left-to-right.
It's probably very good for splitting. But I've only ever done a couple of weeks of regular splitting, and a standard felling axe was perfectly good for that, and could do other jobs too. I'll stick with a standard axe, or for close and varied work, a billhook.
That's a very popular claim - that the presence of a large Moon was necessary to the origin of life/ complex life/ civilisation - but I've only heard it made by popular science journalists. I've not heard a serious scientist make that assertion and then defend it.
It may be true, but I wouldn't make that claim, because I wouldn't like to try to defend it.
Since nobody was around billions of years ago, many assumptions have to be made about conditions on earth at that time.
So you look at proxies. For example, you might ask how we know that there was liquid water on the Earth's surface 3.5 billion years ago, as there were no people to witness it. But there WERE rocks to witness it. In particular, there were pebbles and sand grains that were being transported by the water, and their shape and grain size distributions match the shapes of modern water-transported sediments, so we deduce the presence of water.
These assumptions are cross-correlated. They link together to produce self-consistent models.
for example, carbon monoxide is poisonous because it neutralizes your red blood cells,
Wellll... actually, what CO does (NB : CO not CO2) is bond onto haemoglobin within the red blood cells and NOT release. So that molecule of haemoglobin becomes effectively useless. Oxygen will cycle onto and off the haemoglobin every couple of minutes (circulation time from lung to capillary and back to lung). CO will take hours on average to be released by the haemoglobin.
so you die even though the % is so low that it doesn't impact O2 %
My diving text books when I was learning quoted that a cigarette with 0.5% CO would knock out between 5 and 10% of your haemoglobin. So don't smoke before a dive. (Yes, people have died to learn this lesson.)
So my question, is CO2 really poisonous or does it just cause suffocation?
CO2 does a number of things : it increases the blood's acidity, which messes up a lot of things including the ability of haemoglobin to pick up oxygen. AND it acts as an asphyxiant (suffocates you). Plus, it's rarely the only thing going on at the time. Most people who are exposed to excessive CO2 do so in the case of fire, when there's a lot going on. We use CO2 floods as a fire-fighting system at work, and the alarm systems are really serious about getting the fuck out of the area if the CO2 flood is going to be released.
A basic biology class will tell you that CO2 is poisonous to a great many things... like everything that breaths oxygen.
Probably the majority of life on Earth needs or can tolerate the presence of oxygen, if you measure it by tonnage of organisms. However if you measure by disparity (number of species and variety of metabolic processes) it's a much more balanced picture.
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It's not designed to do anything. Things happen according to the laws of physics with absolutely no motivation or plan. The universe is indifferent to us and will extinguish our existene without any awareness of our existence.
Some people find the indifference of it all to be threatening.
What we don't need is to move to somewhere. We, as a species, need to disperse.
There is a lot of talk about there being a correlation. Raup and Sepkoski have been banging on this drum for 40-odd years, but their deduced cyclicities keep on changing from one publication to the next. While it is genuine science, they certainly have not convinced the entire geological community of their argument. It's a controversy, not a settled piece of science.
We don't know, and it's unlikely to be easy to determine.
When an impactor makes it to the surface at interplanetary speeds (minimum 11km/s, typically more like 25-30km/s), the kinetic energy is sufficiently high that the overwhelming majority of the impactor is vaporized and blown back out of the crater. While this material does fall back to earth, it's very dispersed and extremely metamorphosed. I was out on a field trip last year with John Parnell from Aberdeen to examine a putative impact ejecta sheet from a billion years ago in NW Scotland. Mineralogically, it's not convincing (in hand specimen), but the field relations are quite puzzling, and do fit with John's model that it is an ejecta sheet, and not the (extremely peculiar, and solitary) volcanic deposit that it has been mapped as for the last century and a bit. Out in the field things are not necessarily cut and dried (it is geology, after all).
What would distinguish an outer solar system impactor from an inner solar system impactor? There would be a lot of ices in the outer solar system impactor, but they'd simply disperse in the impact ; there might be an isotopic signature in the oxygen composition (but we'd need a verified outer solar system object to calibrate against). There are likely to be some silicate grains, though they'd probably have been vaporized and re-condensed, or at least melted to glass (and after a billion years, devitrified to clay minerals). But the same is going to be true for most inner solar system impactors too (nickel-iron impactors aren't terribly common).
To be honest, counting the damned things up in the sky is going to be a lot more accurate than counting the broken bits on the ground. Mind you, looking would be more interesting than drilling holes in the ground for oil.
With 60-odd infrasound detectors, if the nearest ones were saturated, then the next one on a particular azimuth from the epi- (or hypo-) centre should have picked it up. Considering that Chelyabinsk is and was one of the major industrial centres where the Russian nuclear arsenal was built, one would rather expect it to have pretty fair coverage.
Earlier, surely? Last time I looked, India and Pakistan (and their mutual border) were east of the eastern Mediterranean.
Is the latitude right? I think it's a bit too far north. [Checks] It could have just clipped into Jammu and/ or Kashmir, which would have been ... very troubling.
Fr. Ockham is ready to give you a shave now.
Implying that you think that seismologists are incompetent.
Seismologists have been doing this since the early 1950s. It isn't rocket science, and it is comprehensively automated. If the NTBTO thinks they're airbursts, not earthquakes, then it's very likely that they're airbursts, not earthquakes.
One of the characteristics that is used to differentiate an airburst (or other large explosion) from an earthquake is the distribution of first motions. For an explosion, all detecting stations will have a first motion away from the epicentre (or hypocentre). For an earthquake though, in one quadrant you'll have "forward" motion, in the next quadrant "away" motion, then forward, then away again. Page 4 of this PDF gives you a diagram. Getting your head around the resulting "beach ball" diagrams is an early part of your introduction to seismology course, if you go into geology.
Back when I had a smart phone, I'd typically use between 1 and 2 % of my monthly data allocation on my phone. I'd use more on my tablet, because I'd got a keyboard for that.
Moh's scale was designed as a quick and dirty estimate of hardness which could be carried out in the field. That's why it uses common minerals (talc, gypsum, calcite, fluorite/ fluorspar, apatite, feldspar, quartz, topaz, corundum, diamond) which any mineral collector or geologist should be able to acquire pretty rapidly.
Vickers hardness testing is a precisely defined engineering test, requiring substantial equipment to perform. (Brinell hardness is a similar test, though less common.)
"Gorilla glass" is an engineered material, so the Vickers test is the appropriate one.
What most people don't realise about hardness is that it varies with crystallographic orientation. For a glass, that shouldn't be a problem - they should be isotropic (unless they're strained during manufacture). But for crystalline materials it can be an issue. There is a mineral called disthene from the Greek di- (for "two) and sthenos (for "strength") which has a Mohs hardness of 5 on it's long crystallographic axis and 7 perpendicular to that axis. (It's better known as kyanite, on account of it's typical sky-blue colour. It's actually very pretty.) The difference in (Vickers) hardness between (IIRC) the {111} and {001} directions of diamond is comparable to the difference between corundum and talc.
Yeah, it's no biggie.
The dissolution of the "nuclear family" is happening. I'm neutral on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing - I'm not in the breeding game ; it's a "someone else's problem".
Hmmm, that's an assertion. For most of written history, yes, the nuclear family is common. It's not the only solution - a lot of hunter-gatherer societies are not nuclear family models. But for written history ... I'll agree that the nuclear family is the commonest solution.
Looking at the houses at Catal Hoyuk, they'd not be inappropriate to a nuclear family. But on the other hand, the iron age roundhouses found all over western Europe would accommodate 20-30 people easily. Which doesn't sound like a nuclear family.
Stepping back through the rest of history and archeology ... groups as small as a "nuclear family" seem smaller than what we have in the way of sites. There might be multiple families living together, possibly related. But it doesn't look like a nuclear family in the way people use the term these days.
Going to our closest living relatives, chimps, bonobos and gorillas - none of them use a nuclear family. Which suggests to me that the nuclear family is not the basal situation for primates.
Horror for politicians : one of their shibboleths might not actually be terribly important. Oh noes!
It's something that I hear a lot on things like Discovery channel. I do spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to keep up with the literature, and I don't see such claims being made or repeated there.
From the top ... stabilisation of the Earth's axis? Yes, the Moon does stabilise the Earth's axis, but how important is that. Mars does suffer considerable excursions of it's axial tilt, but even so it only moves at around a degree per megayear. The rate of movement of climate zones resulting from global warming is much faster than that. Yes it's an efect, but is it fundamentally an important one? We need more examples (i.e. planets with life) to address that question.
early tide effects? Shrug. When the Earth was a magma ocean, it was probably a bit early for the development of life. By a couple of hundred million years later, there was a solid crust with liquid water cycling on it (the oxygen isotope data from the Jack Hills zircons tell us that). So ... the magma ocean phase wasn't significant. And I'm still not sure how "tidal effects" would have changed the origin and development of life.
decreased asteroid and comet hits? Meh. The decrease would be very small, if anything. The Moon covers only a tiny fraction of the sky. It might actually increase the number of hits. However some work about 4 or 5 years ago showed that for most impacts - up to a 100km or so impactor, which are rare - the deep basins of the oceans don't get boiled dry, so again, it's really a "Meh" in terms of it's effects on OOL.
regulating ocean tides? Again, Meh ; the intensity and frequency of tides have changed, greatly, since the origin of life (we don't know exactly how much ; the coupling between Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit is quite sensitively dependent on the amount of shallow seas and the orientation of coastlines, to change the position of the oceanic tidal bulge with respect to the Earth-centre to Moon-centre line. That affects the torque that the Earth applies to the Moon and vice versa. We don't have enough information (because plate tectonics is destructive of information about previous continental arrangements) calculate the exact trajectory of orbital parameters and Earth's rotation. We aren't even really sure if the Moon originally formed at the Roche limit, or significantly outside it. Or even if the Moon formed in one go, or by the merger of several moonlets in the few decades following the Giant Impact. Indeed, while the "Giant Impact" is by far the consensus for the origin of the Moon, it is turning out to be hard to get it to work exactly correctly.
Given all of these issues, I wouldn't attempt to defend the proposition that "a large moon is necessary for the origin of life". It may be a true proposition, but I don't think that the state of knowledge at the moment allows one to claim it as a fact.
Over to you.
It may be becoming more common and/or cheaper these days, but it's not anything fundamentally new.
On a different level, outsourcing looking after the kids to granny has been going on more widely and for much much longer ; there are reasonable arguments that the whole menopause thing and an extended lifespan are an evolutionary consequence of granny being able to increase her gene's representation in the population by looking after the kid's kids.
Screw the responsibility question. But making it a half-cup by volume for one drink! Stupid.
It's a solution (if you'll pardon the pun) in search of a problem.
To be honest, I always use plastic, not aluminium. It collapses down when it's not needed, so you don't need to waste volume in your rucksac. Taking a plastic bottle of beer on the walk in, and then using that bottle as your day bottle for the rest of the trip works perfectly well and costs essentially nothing. Throw the bottle into a bin when you come down out of the mountains and start to hitch hike back home (or back to where you left your car, if you're doing it that way).
and you say
In nearly 40 years of hiking and mountaineering, taking weeks worth of food (and booze) into the mountains in a rucksac, and not being gentle with them, I've never once had a bottle break on me. Even when I've been transporting mountaineering metalwork in the same body of the rucksac. Just making sure that there's a layer of fabric around the glassware is sufficient.
A part-used bottle - yeah, I could see that being a concern, leaking through the lid. So drink the whole bottle, and if it's a multi-day trip, take multiple smaller bottles rather than one big one. Or decant it into a proper re-sealable bottle, as I describe up-thread.
Which makes a sort of sense. Carrying bottles into the mountains - and then having to carry the empty bottles out - is a deal of a pain in the butt. Which is why we used to decant the whisky or vodka into an accordion bottle and carry that in and out. They're perfectly good for daytime water bottles too.
(Actually the one that I use is nearly 30 years old and was originally intended for 24-hour urine collection for medical tests. It's amazing the things you can find in the store rooms of hospitals. Several kilos of explosives in that attic room too.)
You looked it up. That's more than many people would do.
Everything is carcinogenic if you test it thoroughly enough.
But yeah, I'd expect there to be some pretty nasty chemistry there.
Why the "nowadays"?
People have outsourced parenting to wet nurses, nannies and servants for the whole of recorded history. Whenever they could afford it, they've done it.
It's probably very good for splitting. But I've only ever done a couple of weeks of regular splitting, and a standard felling axe was perfectly good for that, and could do other jobs too. I'll stick with a standard axe, or for close and varied work, a billhook.
That's a very popular claim - that the presence of a large Moon was necessary to the origin of life/ complex life/ civilisation - but I've only heard it made by popular science journalists. I've not heard a serious scientist make that assertion and then defend it.
It may be true, but I wouldn't make that claim, because I wouldn't like to try to defend it.
So you look at proxies. For example, you might ask how we know that there was liquid water on the Earth's surface 3.5 billion years ago, as there were no people to witness it. But there WERE rocks to witness it. In particular, there were pebbles and sand grains that were being transported by the water, and their shape and grain size distributions match the shapes of modern water-transported sediments, so we deduce the presence of water.
These assumptions are cross-correlated. They link together to produce self-consistent models.
Wellll ... actually, what CO does (NB : CO not CO2) is bond onto haemoglobin within the red blood cells and NOT release. So that molecule of haemoglobin becomes effectively useless. Oxygen will cycle onto and off the haemoglobin every couple of minutes (circulation time from lung to capillary and back to lung). CO will take hours on average to be released by the haemoglobin.
My diving text books when I was learning quoted that a cigarette with 0.5% CO would knock out between 5 and 10% of your haemoglobin. So don't smoke before a dive. (Yes, people have died to learn this lesson.)
CO2 does a number of things : it increases the blood's acidity, which messes up a lot of things including the ability of haemoglobin to pick up oxygen. AND it acts as an asphyxiant (suffocates you). Plus, it's rarely the only thing going on at the time. Most people who are exposed to excessive CO2 do so in the case of fire, when there's a lot going on. We use CO2 floods as a fire-fighting system at work, and the alarm systems are really serious about getting the fuck out of the area if the CO2 flood is going to be released.
Probably the majority of life on Earth needs or can tolerate the presence of oxygen, if you measure it by tonnage of organisms. However if you measure by disparity (number of species and variety of metabolic processes) it's a much more balanced picture.