Is is disgusting that the middle nail on our dominant hand grows faster than all others? This is a holdover from our times digging in the dirt for roots and such.
Is it disgusting that we flinch or our heart races when we are at a high-octane movie with light and sound effects? We know it's not real, so we shouldn't be affected by it.
There are many remnants of a harsher lifestyle that exist in our bodies that affect our physiology and behavior. While not socially acceptable, it's perfectly natural, to feel revulsion for someone who's deformed. Times have changed, true, but instincts take a much longer time than society to catch up.
Our reaction to a deformity is based on our understanding of it. If you see someone with burn scars, then you might feel a bit shocked, but not true revulsion, as the person is not sick, or infections, and will not damage the 'tribe'. Instead you would pity the person because you know the cause of the deformity. Even certain in-born deformities are accepted now (Downs Syndrome) because we understand it and society can handle it.
But when it comes to Telomeres, it is possible that people don't understand how they perceive the difference (if they can at all, remember all this is just speculation) and if we can't tell HOW we know what we know, then we can't tell how to overcome it as a society.
It is much more likely that we have the ability to detect a person with damaged Telomeres and the instinct is to shun and try to drive away the deformity, than it is likely that the Telomeres themselves are affected by the abuse. To properly (scientifically) test this would require testing all newborns and then following them through their lives (secretly) and checking back up on them in 20 years, check their Telomeres again and see if:
a) were there children born with abnormal Telomeres? ai) what proportion of these were abused/bullied? b) of the children born with normal Telomeres, what proportion were bullied/abused c) did any children change from normal to abnormal Telomeres during development and what proportion of these were victims of abuse/bullying
Simply saying we found a lot of people who have abnormal Telomeres and it turned out that they were bullied/abused as children must mean that they were changed as a result is a classic example of correlation !=causation.
I'm quite happy that we have outgrown our animal and spartan ancestors, but that doesn't mean that instincts and impulses that we are not aware of don't exist just because we want to think so well of ourselves.
I hate to roll out a battered meme, but correlation...etc.
Monkeys with better immune systems are stronger and healthier and rise to the top, weak and sickly ones fall to the bottom and get bullied.
Perhaps humans have an instinctive ability to detect others with short Telomeres and try to drive them out of the pack to stop them breeding and weakening the stock?
Unless they had a control group, or got a selection of healthy kids, measured their Telomeres, subjected them to a regime of abuse then measured again, then you can't tell that the abuse was not brought on by being a good target (weak and sickly).
Yeah, but if you are firing a nuke to someone on the other side of the planet, slinging it around the moon gives you plenty of time to get to the target so you can see the look on their face as the nuke hits!
Of the whooping cough cases, 81% were fully vaccinated, 11% were partially vaccinated, 8% were not vaccinated. If more than 8% of the population was not vaccinated, then you could start down the path to building a case against vaccination.
This looks like the vaccine increased the chance of getting the disease.
What would be interesting is to see the figures for vaccination, are 81% of people fully vaccinated, 11% partially and 8% not at all? If so, then I'd say that this strain of Whooping Cough spread indiscriminately, and has no correlation with whether or not the children were vaccinated.
If >81% of people are vaccinated, then you can say that it had some effect. if 81% of people are vaccinated, you could argue that the vaccine increased the chance of infection.
Either way, the fact that any people who were vaccinated, got the Cough, means that it fits the GP's comment.
I'm not saying that the solar wind causes the sun to lose mass. The solar wind acts as a force upon Earth. A weaker sun blows weaker wind. As the sun grows the wind strengthens, thus pushing the Earth into a higher orbit.
When, in a few billion years, the nuclear reactions in the core cause the sun to weaken and die, the wind will slack off and our orbit will reduce, this will bring us closer and thus put off my death due to the Earth cooling down.
I bet this would have been a hot topic of discussion around the Triceratops carcass. Which came first, the Dinosaur or the Egg? Who knew the T-Rex was such a philosopher.
Probably came about from pondering why the fuck they were born with such short arms.
Seriously, at some point, the oceans will be as realistic as they can be, the HDR will be spot on, the reflections won't affect performance, the model detail will be high enough for ANYTHING.
You think this is limited to games?
A novice director put together a trilogy of movies back at a time of limited special effects, always thinking that his other trilogy couldn't be made as he envisaged it, because he didn't have the technology. Finally the time came when the tech was available and we ended up with Jar Jar.
Another director got his hands on absolute state of the art 3D movie making technology and decided to remake Pocahontas.
Don't blame the people developing the technology, blame the directors who get their hands on it.
Well it's worse than that. You make a comment that get's voted up, and now I'm wondering what you replied to that got you voted up, so now I am forced to read the parent who'd been filtered out at -1.
As ETA and the IRA showed, it is far more effective to plant a bomb to show you can, warn the locals to get away, and then detonate it to cause disruption w/o loss of life. You send 2 messages. One is that you have the means. Two is that you have the will of the public on your side. If you start to desensitize the public and then blow up a lot of civilians then you will get turned into the police by your neighbours, who have seen you bringing in fertiliser into your basement and seen shifty people coming and going at odd hours of the night.
ETA and the IRA only worked as they were fighting on their own soil (for the most part) against an occupier. The threats in the US, though, are an invasion. So the terror tactics of invaders will not match up with those of guerrilla forces. Either way, there's no need to desensitize the public, you should simply bomb them, or use a threat to distract (threat of bomb in building, real bomb in evacuation area).
You do it to show you could, if you wanted, detonate the bomb without warning and cause massive loss of life. If you are fighting a war on your home soil, where many of the civilians probably know who you are, or know other people in the resistance movement, then you don't kill their family or friends. Presenting a credible threat to the government you are trying to fight, without harming the civilians, helps for you to be taken seriously.
The IRA frequently sent warnings before it bombed.
The IRA had a rapport with the media and the Gardaí. They had a codeword to confirm the bomb threat was legit. That doesn't mean that other bomb threats were ignored, but just that the IRA never gave fake threats, and almost always gave time to evacuate. The IRA was always very disciplined and often adhered to ceasefires and supported the political process. This is evidenced by the fact that they stopped when they felt that it was no longer necessary to continue their campaign.
A lot of people would have said that the IRA were just thugs getting revenge for the Black & Tans, or other injustices perpetrated by the British, but they were very well organised and lead and were achieving a specific goal. They were the stick to Sinn Féin's carrot. The 'political wing' of the IRA were always pushing for a peaceful solution to the NI crisis, but were often not heeded, or not taken seriously.
I think that while some of the things they have done are unforgivable, they were definitely understandable, and never random. I think things in Ireland would be so much worse now if the IRA weren't a level headed as they were and if the political process that operated in tandem wasn't as effective and wanted as it was.
The problem with the US's war on terror, is that: a) The terrorists are not taken seriously. When your 'defense' against terrorism is the TSA all but violating the general public, then you are not securing your people against terror attacks, and thus leave yourself open to the "Bomb in the crowd" attack. b) The US has little or no interest in a political solution, they are treating it like a war and chant "USA USA USA" when they kill a figurehead of the terror movement, instead of trying to resolve the differences and problems that invariably they themselves created, when they traded arms to the very people not committing these attacks.
The UK saw the IRA as a very real and serious threat, and recognised Ireland bid for freedom as legitimate. The problem was and always will be the 6 counties that don't want to leave the UK. It has been seen that the UK is mature about it's sovereignty when it gave back Hong Kong as agreed, because that is what most people there wanted. I'm certain that if the 6 counties all wanted to leave the UK and merge with the republic, then it would happen. Personally, I think that ship has sailed.
So, there's a fine line between simple terrorism, and pursuing a guerrilla war on your home soil. You plant a bomb, and inform the media and police force and then detonate (or not, the threat is often enough). Because what you really want to say is "We could, at any time, detonate one of these without warning" So a serious terror/guerrilla group will not send hoax calls, as that serves them nothing.
I thought the rule was anything containing mass could be accelerated past the speed of light. The whole point of entangled atoms, was that the state of one atom was changed, the state of the entangled pair changed to match, and that this change was instantaneous. If the 2 atoms could be moved lightyears apart then you could have (even if it's primitive Morse code) instant transfer of information. Because the information has no mass, you are not breaking the light barrier.
That's the basis of the Ansible in Ender's Game (and others)
That's the Sci-Fi version. In this experiment the 'entanglement' was caused by a photon emitted by one atom, down a fiber line to the other atom. So one could argue that it's not classical entanglement, and that the transfer of information between the atom pair is still limited by the speed of the photon (light).
Slashdot Mirror
Is is disgusting that the middle nail on our dominant hand grows faster than all others? This is a holdover from our times digging in the dirt for roots and such.
Is it disgusting that we flinch or our heart races when we are at a high-octane movie with light and sound effects? We know it's not real, so we shouldn't be affected by it.
There are many remnants of a harsher lifestyle that exist in our bodies that affect our physiology and behavior. While not socially acceptable, it's perfectly natural, to feel revulsion for someone who's deformed. Times have changed, true, but instincts take a much longer time than society to catch up.
Our reaction to a deformity is based on our understanding of it. If you see someone with burn scars, then you might feel a bit shocked, but not true revulsion, as the person is not sick, or infections, and will not damage the 'tribe'. Instead you would pity the person because you know the cause of the deformity. Even certain in-born deformities are accepted now (Downs Syndrome) because we understand it and society can handle it.
But when it comes to Telomeres, it is possible that people don't understand how they perceive the difference (if they can at all, remember all this is just speculation) and if we can't tell HOW we know what we know, then we can't tell how to overcome it as a society.
It is much more likely that we have the ability to detect a person with damaged Telomeres and the instinct is to shun and try to drive away the deformity, than it is likely that the Telomeres themselves are affected by the abuse. To properly (scientifically) test this would require testing all newborns and then following them through their lives (secretly) and checking back up on them in 20 years, check their Telomeres again and see if:
a) were there children born with abnormal Telomeres?
ai) what proportion of these were abused/bullied?
b) of the children born with normal Telomeres, what proportion were bullied/abused
c) did any children change from normal to abnormal Telomeres during development and what proportion of these were victims of abuse/bullying
Simply saying we found a lot of people who have abnormal Telomeres and it turned out that they were bullied/abused as children must mean that they were changed as a result is a classic example of correlation !=causation.
I'm quite happy that we have outgrown our animal and spartan ancestors, but that doesn't mean that instincts and impulses that we are not aware of don't exist just because we want to think so well of ourselves.
I hate to roll out a battered meme, but correlation...etc.
Monkeys with better immune systems are stronger and healthier and rise to the top, weak and sickly ones fall to the bottom and get bullied.
Perhaps humans have an instinctive ability to detect others with short Telomeres and try to drive them out of the pack to stop them breeding and weakening the stock?
Unless they had a control group, or got a selection of healthy kids, measured their Telomeres, subjected them to a regime of abuse then measured again, then you can't tell that the abuse was not brought on by being a good target (weak and sickly).
Perhaps the Spartans had it right all along?
The problem with counting on your fingers is that things get messy when you start using fractions.
I'm reserving judgement of Mayan mathematical prowess until late December.
No, no, I assure you. The math is good. The math is good!
Yeah, but if you are firing a nuke to someone on the other side of the planet, slinging it around the moon gives you plenty of time to get to the target so you can see the look on their face as the nuke hits!
!"£$ you, yank.
Of the whooping cough cases, 81% were fully vaccinated, 11% were partially vaccinated, 8% were not vaccinated. If more than 8% of the population was not vaccinated, then you could start down the path to building a case against vaccination.
This looks like the vaccine increased the chance of getting the disease.
What would be interesting is to see the figures for vaccination, are 81% of people fully vaccinated, 11% partially and 8% not at all? If so, then I'd say that this strain of Whooping Cough spread indiscriminately, and has no correlation with whether or not the children were vaccinated.
If >81% of people are vaccinated, then you can say that it had some effect.
if 81% of people are vaccinated, you could argue that the vaccine increased the chance of infection.
Either way, the fact that any people who were vaccinated, got the Cough, means that it fits the GP's comment.
I'm not saying that the solar wind causes the sun to lose mass. The solar wind acts as a force upon Earth. A weaker sun blows weaker wind. As the sun grows the wind strengthens, thus pushing the Earth into a higher orbit.
When, in a few billion years, the nuclear reactions in the core cause the sun to weaken and die, the wind will slack off and our orbit will reduce, this will bring us closer and thus put off my death due to the Earth cooling down.
Hail to the King, baby.
I always thought it was the solar wind. Sun gets hotter, wind blows stronger. Slowly, over perhaps a billion years, it will alter Earth's orbit.
It should buy me a little time when the Sun starts dying, as the wind slacks off. Earth should then start falling closer.
I bet this would have been a hot topic of discussion around the Triceratops carcass. Which came first, the Dinosaur or the Egg? Who knew the T-Rex was such a philosopher.
Probably came about from pondering why the fuck they were born with such short arms.
Seriously, at some point, the oceans will be as realistic as they can be, the HDR will be spot on, the reflections won't affect performance, the model detail will be high enough for ANYTHING.
You think this is limited to games?
A novice director put together a trilogy of movies back at a time of limited special effects, always thinking that his other trilogy couldn't be made as he envisaged it, because he didn't have the technology. Finally the time came when the tech was available and we ended up with Jar Jar.
Another director got his hands on absolute state of the art 3D movie making technology and decided to remake Pocahontas.
Don't blame the people developing the technology, blame the directors who get their hands on it.
This wouldn't surprise me, considering most Americans would believe that they could infect an alien ship with a 'cold' using a Mac.
And when you tweek with one of the genes, leaving the other 5 alone, you get Giraffes.
Essentially, yes.
We need to, while we're at it, identify a gene that predisposes people to keep off my lawn.
I know, it's crazy. What you really want is some sort of Open Source operating system that's modular, whereby you can put together the parts you want.
Or if that's a little too complicated, you could have people who build pre-made packages and distribute them to users based on their needs.
Pity nothing like that exists.
Well it's worse than that. You make a comment that get's voted up, and now I'm wondering what you replied to that got you voted up, so now I am forced to read the parent who'd been filtered out at -1.
Thanks for ruining my lunch.
You are absolutely correct.
As ETA and the IRA showed, it is far more effective to plant a bomb to show you can, warn the locals to get away, and then detonate it to cause disruption w/o loss of life. You send 2 messages. One is that you have the means. Two is that you have the will of the public on your side. If you start to desensitize the public and then blow up a lot of civilians then you will get turned into the police by your neighbours, who have seen you bringing in fertiliser into your basement and seen shifty people coming and going at odd hours of the night.
ETA and the IRA only worked as they were fighting on their own soil (for the most part) against an occupier. The threats in the US, though, are an invasion. So the terror tactics of invaders will not match up with those of guerrilla forces. Either way, there's no need to desensitize the public, you should simply bomb them, or use a threat to distract (threat of bomb in building, real bomb in evacuation area).
You do it to show you could, if you wanted, detonate the bomb without warning and cause massive loss of life. If you are fighting a war on your home soil, where many of the civilians probably know who you are, or know other people in the resistance movement, then you don't kill their family or friends. Presenting a credible threat to the government you are trying to fight, without harming the civilians, helps for you to be taken seriously.
The IRA frequently sent warnings before it bombed.
The IRA had a rapport with the media and the Gardaí. They had a codeword to confirm the bomb threat was legit. That doesn't mean that other bomb threats were ignored, but just that the IRA never gave fake threats, and almost always gave time to evacuate. The IRA was always very disciplined and often adhered to ceasefires and supported the political process. This is evidenced by the fact that they stopped when they felt that it was no longer necessary to continue their campaign.
A lot of people would have said that the IRA were just thugs getting revenge for the Black & Tans, or other injustices perpetrated by the British, but they were very well organised and lead and were achieving a specific goal. They were the stick to Sinn Féin's carrot. The 'political wing' of the IRA were always pushing for a peaceful solution to the NI crisis, but were often not heeded, or not taken seriously.
I think that while some of the things they have done are unforgivable, they were definitely understandable, and never random. I think things in Ireland would be so much worse now if the IRA weren't a level headed as they were and if the political process that operated in tandem wasn't as effective and wanted as it was.
The problem with the US's war on terror, is that:
a) The terrorists are not taken seriously.
When your 'defense' against terrorism is the TSA all but violating the general public, then you are not securing your people against terror attacks, and thus leave yourself open to the "Bomb in the crowd" attack.
b) The US has little or no interest in a political solution, they are treating it like a war and chant "USA USA USA" when they kill a figurehead of the terror movement, instead of trying to resolve the differences and problems that invariably they themselves created, when they traded arms to the very people not committing these attacks.
The UK saw the IRA as a very real and serious threat, and recognised Ireland bid for freedom as legitimate. The problem was and always will be the 6 counties that don't want to leave the UK. It has been seen that the UK is mature about it's sovereignty when it gave back Hong Kong as agreed, because that is what most people there wanted. I'm certain that if the 6 counties all wanted to leave the UK and merge with the republic, then it would happen. Personally, I think that ship has sailed.
So, there's a fine line between simple terrorism, and pursuing a guerrilla war on your home soil. You plant a bomb, and inform the media and police force and then detonate (or not, the threat is often enough). Because what you really want to say is "We could, at any time, detonate one of these without warning" So a serious terror/guerrilla group will not send hoax calls, as that serves them nothing.
"American beer is like making love in a canoe, it's fucking close to water" - Eric Idle.
Burning up usually turns 'live' mass into 'dead' mass though.
I thought the rule was anything containing mass could be accelerated past the speed of light. The whole point of entangled atoms, was that the state of one atom was changed, the state of the entangled pair changed to match, and that this change was instantaneous. If the 2 atoms could be moved lightyears apart then you could have (even if it's primitive Morse code) instant transfer of information. Because the information has no mass, you are not breaking the light barrier.
That's the basis of the Ansible in Ender's Game (and others)
That's the Sci-Fi version. In this experiment the 'entanglement' was caused by a photon emitted by one atom, down a fiber line to the other atom. So one could argue that it's not classical entanglement, and that the transfer of information between the atom pair is still limited by the speed of the photon (light).