There was reason to believe that Armitage was willing to be the fall guy for an orchestrated attempt from the administration to "out" Plame to punish a political thorn in their side. That would be directly related to the crime in question and I would sure hope that Fitzgerald would pursue the possibility of a criminal conspiracy, even if it reached the highest levels of government - that was his job as a special prosecutor. Libby then fell on his sword to protect Cheney with the understanding that medical insurance would be available for any sword cut bills. Now he and his buddies are whining that there were co-payments.
My prediction is that Libby will be fully pardoned in December 2008, after the election results are in.
Actually it's not at all clear that Alger Hiss was guilty of all the spying attributed to him based on the Intercepts. His name in those Intercepts was substituted for a code name that one analyst thought might fit. That was based on the analyst's interpretation of one message with that code name describing circumstances that narrowed down candidates to about 5 people, including Hiss. This was carefully researched and exposed by Kai Bird. I learned about it on Alterman's Altercation column a few months back, or you can look at the article by Bird himself. I would have used the MSNBC article link Alterman provided but for some reason it's been removed (as have all of Alterman's columns once he moved to MediaMatters).
So Hiss isn't the best case used to prove your point because if that information had been made public earlier, the problems with it might have been exposed sooner.
If for some reason, you claim that the US government exerts more control, then you have lack of perspective.
"Free Speech Zones" at Party Conventions. Oops, I meant hundreds of meters from the sites of Party Conventions. 'Mericans at Guantanamo. Brown vs. Board.
Thin edge of the wedge. Slippery slope. I guess you'll only notice when they cart you or one of your relatives away.
So, starting a few wars and vacuuming up our tax dollars (and China's own dollars through the US treasury bonds they keep buying) via companies like Bechtel, Haliburton and a thousand others sucking at the teat of the war machine seems to be the way they've chosen to do their gettin'. Yeah. That's like the guy who has completely mortgaged his house, car, and everything he owns saying "Boy, I sure screwed over those banks and credit companies!"
If you could find a source that's more fair and balanced, like Fox News, then you'd have my attention.(end sarcasm here)
Just remind them that "Fair and Balanced" in the Fox sense, would mean giving equal time to Satan and God in a talk show, even though Satan's business card says "Prince of Lies". In addition, the moderator would present them as equally interested parties, spending time in the introductions lauding Satan for all he's done as a Devil's Advocate and harassing God over the 30 Years War and all the other wars of religion.
Exactly. So the problem is that they have picked a weak verification algorithm for use over the Internet when stronger ones are available. So why the heck is that their customer's problem?
What is different about this? Just as you look out for you own security for your wallet, keys, bankbooks etc, you look out for it online.
Actually, the bank is responsible for checking the validity of transactions if they are done in person. If somebody steals my chequebook and forges my signature, the bank is liable, not me, as long as I can prove it's not my signature. They also can require my PIN if I identify myself with my bank card.
If the security of user/passwords is insufficient for the Internet, then the bank should move to two-factor authentication with USB-capable cryptographic smartcards that can easily be used in any computer that's less than 5 years old. However that costs money in infrastructure setup and management overhead and it's a lot cheaper for the banks to just shift the risk to customers if the courts are stupid enough to let them get away with it.
Until the courts do force the bank to accept that responsibility, no bank will be willing to take the competitive disadvantage of that overhead to give me the choice to have that greater security in banking with them.
Hmm. I think you have made some good points and I would amend my previous statement to "sometimes sugar can cause hyperactivity".
I remember hearing about some research decades ago where they had done studies of infant reaction to stimuli and how it later correlated to child and adult behaviour. Infants that quickly became overstimulated and upset by crib activity centres grew up to be introverts, whereas infants who actively played and were fascinated by the colours and sounds of those activity centres became more extroverted.
So I can see how a child's natural susceptibility to stimulants would affect their response to sugar. An introverted child would be more likely to get overexcited by sugar and become troublesome, whereas an extroverted child might need extra stimulation and sugar might help provide it it somewhat and decrease their need to seek it out in other ways, making them less disruptive.
That would certainly give confusing results, and a double blind study with random children might tend to indicate that sugar is calming since a higher percentage of the population is extroverted. However, my question is, are a substantial portion of the children diagnosed with ADHD introverts on a sugar high? I haven't yet had time to look at that study you referenced and hope to do so later, but how were the children for that sugar study selected? Were they all diagnosed with ADHD or were they a random sample of the general population? Because I know how I would select them if I wanted to improve my chances of a certain outcome.
No matter what the answers to those questions, there's gotta be more healthy ways to keep extroverted children stimulated and participating in and outside of school than feeding them sugar.
Oh, you're into voodoo magic. I guess there's no reasoning with you, especially considering your instant response to my scientific refutation of your anecdotal evidence was to clam up into defensive mode and sling more anecdotal evidence my way.
No, I'm not into voodoo magic; you're thinking of my sister who, while probably smarter and definitely more creative than me, is nowhere as skeptical and discerning. I'm into finding solutions to a problem based on personal empirical observation. If the medical advice I get isn't working or downright counter-productive, then I look at alternatives and I judge them for reasonableness and whether I can think of a viable physical mechanism for how they function. I don't blindly accept concepts like "chi"/energy flows, body meridians, etc. at face value. However I also don't ignore the possible health benefits from Tai Chi, meditation, and other mind/body integration techniques can have in controlling and relieving stress and reducing stress hormones that can reduce the body's recovery mechanisms, regardless of whether the underlying "theories" behind those techniques are badly flawed.
When I got sick with CFS, the widely accepted "medical" judgement was that it was a psychosomatic illness. I rejected it because it did not correspond to the pattern of symptoms that I was observing in my body. I love cheese and butter and was certainly not happy with having to cut them out of my diet. There wasn't much of a "placebo effect" in having to cut it out when reintroducing it caused gas, diarrhoea, decreased my night sleep cycle from 6 hours to 4 hours, and caused daytime quasi-narcoleptic symptoms.
I also don't see how removing sugar from my diet could have been a "placebo effect" when a) I didn't realize it was being done because I was to young and b) I wasn't told about it until about 30 years later. Besides, placebo effects happen when you are given a sugar pill to make you believe that you've been given medication, not when sugar is taken away.:-)
So if my personal scientific observations conflict with those of scientists who either have a large egotistical involvement in their pet theory (as did the psychologists and psychiatrists promoting the psychosomatic theory of CFS, many of who carefully selected their test subjects to match their theories and ignored more recent micro-array genetic expression test results) or whose research is sometimes paid for by industrial groups with large monetary interests in the results, well I'll trust my small scale science, thank you.
Yep, although to be fair, the malpractice insurance they need to pay in the US is through the roof. That's because the lawsuits a doctor can be subject to sometimes award outrageous sums in punitive damages. And punitive damages and insurance costs are aggravated because the AMA protects and and fails to adequately discipline doctors with numerous lost malpractice suits who should no longer be practising, but instead let them move to another state and continue to ruin more lives like a pedophilic catholic priest. Responsibility for a major part of this whole racket can be laid at the feet of the AMA not for their constricting entry into the field but for failure to appropriately remove the licence to practise. There is one exception and that is in obstetrics.
Problems with baby deliveries happen to the best doctors. Even when the doctor is clearly not at fault in a baby's impairment, parents will sue the doctor and the hospital since it's the only way for them to pay for the lifelong support and care that will be required. The parents (and the jury) assume that the insurance company will pay and there will be no consequences. The consequence is that obstetric malpractice insurance costs are going through the roof and the field is become much less attractive to potential candidates.
Increasing efforts to keep ever-younger premature newborns alive, in spite of the frequent lifelong health impacts and costs only aggravate this situation. That said, my wife and I may be trying to have a baby fairly late in life and I would be very unhappy to have to let it just die if a rare chance at a child ended up with a 6 month-old premie. So my being part of a generation which is tending to have babies later admittedly is also part of the problem with obstetrics.
Sure, so I guess my parents' personal observations of my behaviour are crap. Never mind that my mother and father were scientifically trained as a pharmacist and an engineer.
Your response is kind of like the one I got from my doctor who assured me 5 years ago that a flu immunizations couldn't have aggravated my chronic fatigue and that milk products couldn't possibly be a factor either. The latter was after I had seen a naturopath who had put me on a reduction diet and I had had repeated direct observations of the negative effects of reintroducing milk products in my diet.
Today the chronic fatigue is in remission and under careful maintenance because I ignored the advice of that doctor. There also is increasingly more clinical evidence that chronic fatigue is often tied to an immune system malfunction. So, could flu shots, which heighten the immune system response, negatively affect someone with chronic fatigue? Damn straight.
Do I trust my father and mother's personal observations that cutting sugar out of my diet made a big difference in my behaviour? Yeah. It may not be the case for everyone (I've also always been very sensitive to most stimulants and am even more susceptible after getting CFS), but it sure is the case for some.
a) how does working around these bugs affect Intel Core Duo's performance? b) I WAS thinking about buying a Core Duo so this information comes just in time.
Mutations may occur in one generation and only be expressed in another, or depend on activation by many later, "innocent" mutations. Or they may only have minor effects on fitness but in aggregate cause a later drastic change in fitness.
I'm simple minded? That's too funny. Again, I said X isn't a scalar. It also doesn't have to be a one-dimensional vector. It can be a multidimensional matrix that expresses all permutations of the genetic code for a species at a particular generation (or time period without new genetic variations).
So whether your mutations are hidden or not doesn't matter. They are part of Xn.
F is a combination of a mutation function on a species' genetic code with a fitness function of the species in a particular environment. So, yes, it includes a lot of other variables such as all the ones you mentioned above, and many more.
Perhaps you might prefer X(n+1) = F( M( Xn ) ) where the fitness function and the random mutation/permutation functions are separated? You can keep on adding more terms, more functional breakdown, and making the equation more detailed until you have over a million terms and a comparable number of sub-functions (good luck with modelling climate change and human habitat impact). When it really comes down to it though, that simple recursive function is a mathematical representation of the essence of the theory of evolution.
P.S. The other thing that baffles me, particularly as someone who is allergic to milk protein, is why the heck lactose and whey get added to so many things that you wouldn't expect them in.
Why, for instance is the Plain/Salt & Pepper potato chip flavour often the only type of potato chip that doesn't contain whey? Why the heck does Miss Vickies put whey in Jalapeno or Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar potato chips? Come on!
On second thought, it's probably like sugar, something that triggers an accelerated digestion process so that you wind up eating more (and thus buy more).
The comparison to ADHD is false. In many cases I have seen, "hyperactivity" is simply the result of having a smart, energetic kid in a classroom where an authoritarian teacher refuses to let them excel.
And a large portion of the other time, it's kids who are hopped on refined sugars because its a substantial ingredient to all the off-the-shelf packaged meals fed to them by their working parents.
Apparently I was quite hyperactive when I was a kid. Then my parents cut out sweets and pop and I became a lot more manageable without any setback to my intellectual or physical development. To this day, most frozen prepared foods or desserts taste too sweet to me. They get prepared with lots of sugars and MSG because they are cheaper than real spices for making something taste less bland. I also can't stand the chemical after-taste from most "sugar-free" drinks and foods; that's probably not a bad thing.
Some people wonder why the western world has an epidemic of diabetic and obese people, but it's not a big mystery to me. Some form of sugar is in most things you buy pre-packaged: frozen dinners, hamburger patties, spaghetti sauce, most other sauces, salad dressings, etc. Go back to basics and cook with spices and simple ingredients. If you only have time to by pre-packaged meals, refuse to buy any with sugars in it (sucrose, fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, etc.). Wean your kids off sugar and, in the long run, they'll thank you, though your dentist probably won't.
Well, another way to look at it is that evolution is half of a proof by induction where you have X(N+1) = F(X(N)) but you are missing X(0).
Scientists say the induction step has meaning because evidence supports it for many N in (long ago to now), and when new X(N)/X(N+a) value pairs are discovered, they appear to follow the induction step.
Religious fundamentalists say that because you have no idea what X(0) is, then the induction step must be wrong. Thus they claim either a God created all X(0) and X(N) is a mere subset, or else they claim that X(N+1) = God(X(N)) for some, but not all, N.
While the scientific approach is far from a complete proof, it does have a lot of evidence that supports it. In contrast, a lot of counterexamples exist for the first religious fundamentalist approach, and the second religious fundamentalist approach has no elegance.
And well, if the rest of the Universe is anything to judge by, I think that's it's pretty unlikely that a Creator would create life through an inelegant process.
It's hard to be well informed when nearly all major news outlets are providing partial or complete disinformation.
Case in point, the reporting on the incompetency of the Bush administration in its first 4 years prior to the 2004 election. I wasn't fooled, but apparently more than half the American public was, although it helped that they wanted to be fooled because the so-called liberal media were marketing or white-washing a right-wing nightmare as a seductive pipe-dream.
you're going to have to build more nuclear power plants.
why?
Because the USA's industrial and residential power demands far outstrip what can be produced from reliable renewable resources without causing substantial environmental damage that the Greens find no more acceptable than nuclear power. That power demand is increasing, not decreasing, and failure to meet it will, as we saw in California a few years ago, cause brown outs, rotating black outs, and, eventually, deaths in the most vulnerable segments of society.
That said, the US has a power industry which encourages consumption, not careful use. It should have much more widespread programs for encouraging replacement of energy-inefficient appliances in the residential sector. However such programs are not in the interest of the US power conglomerates, and slavish political devotion to "small government" and "market forces" means programs similar to BC Hydro's Power Smart are rarely implemented in the USA.
While primarily composed of cellulose, paper has a number of other organic binding components in a complex composite macro-structure which degrades as part of the recycling process. It is also created from relatively simple, cheap easy-to produce biological source materials (raw wood or hemp fiber). The problem with paper production isn't as much its production as its volume in disposal. The relatively low cost of production of paper is what makes profitable recycling difficult.
In contrast, lithium is a fairly rare and expensive, volatile "metal" and is combined in lithium-ion batteries cathodes with other moderately rare elements from simple raw molecules through chemical and mechanical processes. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the process for recycling lithium-ion batteries would be substantially more productive, lucrative, and worthwhile.
Apples, oranges.
Plastics are somewhere in between the two. They are often created from a finite non-renewable resource (for which cost is increasing, but nowhere near the cost of lithium) but based on moderately long complex molecules using processes which usually aren't easily reversible. So often, like with paper, you can't go back to the source materials you used to create the plastic. Thus, as the price of oil increases through greater scarcity, plastic use will substitute with types or plastics that can be created without oil (and hopefully which also can be broken down more easily), or substitution will occur with other products that can be more cheaply produced or recycled (aluminium, cardboard, tinfoil hats...)
In the long run, the increasing price of oil will be good for the environment, although it will cause a lot of pain on the way as economies adjust to increasing average costs for energy.
Slashdot Mirror
There was reason to believe that Armitage was willing to be the fall guy for an orchestrated attempt from the administration to "out" Plame to punish a political thorn in their side. That would be directly related to the crime in question and I would sure hope that Fitzgerald would pursue the possibility of a criminal conspiracy, even if it reached the highest levels of government - that was his job as a special prosecutor. Libby then fell on his sword to protect Cheney with the understanding that medical insurance would be available for any sword cut bills. Now he and his buddies are whining that there were co-payments.
My prediction is that Libby will be fully pardoned in December 2008, after the election results are in.
Actually it's not at all clear that Alger Hiss was guilty of all the spying attributed to him based on the Intercepts. His name in those Intercepts was substituted for a code name that one analyst thought might fit. That was based on the analyst's interpretation of one message with that code name describing circumstances that narrowed down candidates to about 5 people, including Hiss. This was carefully researched and exposed by Kai Bird. I learned about it on Alterman's Altercation column a few months back, or you can look at the article by Bird himself. I would have used the MSNBC article link Alterman provided but for some reason it's been removed (as have all of Alterman's columns once he moved to MediaMatters).
So Hiss isn't the best case used to prove your point because if that information had been made public earlier, the problems with it might have been exposed sooner.
Well, if one of his creditors is called Luigi "the hammer", that day of reckoning may come sooner than he expects.
If for some reason, you claim that the US government exerts more control, then you have lack of perspective.
"Free Speech Zones" at Party Conventions. Oops, I meant hundreds of meters from the sites of Party Conventions. 'Mericans at Guantanamo. Brown vs. Board.
Thin edge of the wedge. Slippery slope. I guess you'll only notice when they cart you or one of your relatives away.
So, starting a few wars and vacuuming up our tax dollars (and China's own dollars through the US treasury bonds they keep buying) via companies like Bechtel, Haliburton and a thousand others sucking at the teat of the war machine seems to be the way they've chosen to do their gettin'.
Yeah. That's like the guy who has completely mortgaged his house, car, and everything he owns saying "Boy, I sure screwed over those banks and credit companies!"
Woops, I meant:
:-)
lauding Satan for all the "pro bono" work he's done as a Devil's Advocate
If you could find a source that's more fair and balanced, like Fox News, then you'd have my attention.(end sarcasm here)
Just remind them that "Fair and Balanced" in the Fox sense, would mean giving equal time to Satan and God in a talk show, even though Satan's business card says "Prince of Lies". In addition, the moderator would present them as equally interested parties, spending time in the introductions lauding Satan for all he's done as a Devil's Advocate and harassing God over the 30 Years War and all the other wars of religion.
Exactly. So the problem is that they have picked a weak verification algorithm for use over the Internet when stronger ones are available. So why the heck is that their customer's problem?
What is different about this? Just as you look out for you own security for your wallet, keys, bankbooks etc, you look out for it online.
Actually, the bank is responsible for checking the validity of transactions if they are done in person. If somebody steals my chequebook and forges my signature, the bank is liable, not me, as long as I can prove it's not my signature. They also can require my PIN if I identify myself with my bank card.
If the security of user/passwords is insufficient for the Internet, then the bank should move to two-factor authentication with USB-capable cryptographic smartcards that can easily be used in any computer that's less than 5 years old. However that costs money in infrastructure setup and management overhead and it's a lot cheaper for the banks to just shift the risk to customers if the courts are stupid enough to let them get away with it.
Until the courts do force the bank to accept that responsibility, no bank will be willing to take the competitive disadvantage of that overhead to give me the choice to have that greater security in banking with them.
Hmm. I think you have made some good points and I would amend my previous statement to "sometimes sugar can cause hyperactivity".
I remember hearing about some research decades ago where they had done studies of infant reaction to stimuli and how it later correlated to child and adult behaviour. Infants that quickly became overstimulated and upset by crib activity centres grew up to be introverts, whereas infants who actively played and were fascinated by the colours and sounds of those activity centres became more extroverted.
So I can see how a child's natural susceptibility to stimulants would affect their response to sugar. An introverted child would be more likely to get overexcited by sugar and become troublesome, whereas an extroverted child might need extra stimulation and sugar might help provide it it somewhat and decrease their need to seek it out in other ways, making them less disruptive.
That would certainly give confusing results, and a double blind study with random children might tend to indicate that sugar is calming since a higher percentage of the population is extroverted. However, my question is, are a substantial portion of the children diagnosed with ADHD introverts on a sugar high? I haven't yet had time to look at that study you referenced and hope to do so later, but how were the children for that sugar study selected? Were they all diagnosed with ADHD or were they a random sample of the general population? Because I know how I would select them if I wanted to improve my chances of a certain outcome.
No matter what the answers to those questions, there's gotta be more healthy ways to keep extroverted children stimulated and participating in and outside of school than feeding them sugar.
No, I'm not into voodoo magic; you're thinking of my sister who, while probably smarter and definitely more creative than me, is nowhere as skeptical and discerning. I'm into finding solutions to a problem based on personal empirical observation. If the medical advice I get isn't working or downright counter-productive, then I look at alternatives and I judge them for reasonableness and whether I can think of a viable physical mechanism for how they function. I don't blindly accept concepts like "chi"/energy flows, body meridians, etc. at face value. However I also don't ignore the possible health benefits from Tai Chi, meditation, and other mind/body integration techniques can have in controlling and relieving stress and reducing stress hormones that can reduce the body's recovery mechanisms, regardless of whether the underlying "theories" behind those techniques are badly flawed.
When I got sick with CFS, the widely accepted "medical" judgement was that it was a psychosomatic illness. I rejected it because it did not correspond to the pattern of symptoms that I was observing in my body.
I love cheese and butter and was certainly not happy with having to cut them out of my diet. There wasn't much of a "placebo effect" in having to cut it out when reintroducing it caused gas, diarrhoea, decreased my night sleep cycle from 6 hours to 4 hours, and caused daytime quasi-narcoleptic symptoms.
I also don't see how removing sugar from my diet could have been a "placebo effect" when a) I didn't realize it was being done because I was to young and b) I wasn't told about it until about 30 years later.
Besides, placebo effects happen when you are given a sugar pill to make you believe that you've been given medication, not when sugar is taken away.
So if my personal scientific observations conflict with those of scientists who either have a large egotistical involvement in their pet theory (as did the psychologists and psychiatrists promoting the psychosomatic theory of CFS, many of who carefully selected their test subjects to match their theories and ignored more recent micro-array genetic expression test results) or whose research is sometimes paid for by industrial groups with large monetary interests in the results, well I'll trust my small scale science, thank you.
Yep, although to be fair, the malpractice insurance they need to pay in the US is through the roof. That's because the lawsuits a doctor can be subject to sometimes award outrageous sums in punitive damages. And punitive damages and insurance costs are aggravated because the AMA protects and and fails to adequately discipline doctors with numerous lost malpractice suits who should no longer be practising, but instead let them move to another state and continue to ruin more lives like a pedophilic catholic priest. Responsibility for a major part of this whole racket can be laid at the feet of the AMA not for their constricting entry into the field but for failure to appropriately remove the licence to practise. There is one exception and that is in obstetrics.
Problems with baby deliveries happen to the best doctors. Even when the doctor is clearly not at fault in a baby's impairment, parents will sue the doctor and the hospital since it's the only way for them to pay for the lifelong support and care that will be required. The parents (and the jury) assume that the insurance company will pay and there will be no consequences. The consequence is that obstetric malpractice insurance costs are going through the roof and the field is become much less attractive to potential candidates.
Increasing efforts to keep ever-younger premature newborns alive, in spite of the frequent lifelong health impacts and costs only aggravate this situation. That said, my wife and I may be trying to have a baby fairly late in life and I would be very unhappy to have to let it just die if a rare chance at a child ended up with a 6 month-old premie. So my being part of a generation which is tending to have babies later admittedly is also part of the problem with obstetrics.
Sure, so I guess my parents' personal observations of my behaviour are crap. Never mind that my mother and father were scientifically trained as a pharmacist and an engineer.
Your response is kind of like the one I got from my doctor who assured me 5 years ago that a flu immunizations couldn't have aggravated my chronic fatigue and that milk products couldn't possibly be a factor either. The latter was after I had seen a naturopath who had put me on a reduction diet and I had had repeated direct observations of the negative effects of reintroducing milk products in my diet.
Today the chronic fatigue is in remission and under careful maintenance because I ignored the advice of that doctor. There also is increasingly more clinical evidence that chronic fatigue is often tied to an immune system malfunction. So, could flu shots, which heighten the immune system response, negatively affect someone with chronic fatigue? Damn straight.
Do I trust my father and mother's personal observations that cutting sugar out of my diet made a big difference in my behaviour? Yeah. It may not be the case for everyone (I've also always been very sensitive to most stimulants and am even more susceptible after getting CFS), but it sure is the case for some.
a) how does working around these bugs affect Intel Core Duo's performance?
b) I WAS thinking about buying a Core Duo so this information comes just in time.
I'm simple minded? That's too funny. Again, I said X isn't a scalar. It also doesn't have to be a one-dimensional vector. It can be a multidimensional matrix that expresses all permutations of the genetic code for a species at a particular generation (or time period without new genetic variations).
So whether your mutations are hidden or not doesn't matter. They are part of Xn.
F is a combination of a mutation function on a species' genetic code with a fitness function of the species in a particular environment. So, yes, it includes a lot of other variables such as all the ones you mentioned above, and many more.
Perhaps you might prefer X(n+1) = F( M( Xn ) ) where the fitness function and the random mutation/permutation functions are separated? You can keep on adding more terms, more functional breakdown, and making the equation more detailed until you have over a million terms and a comparable number of sub-functions (good luck with modelling climate change and human habitat impact). When it really comes down to it though, that simple recursive function is a mathematical representation of the essence of the theory of evolution.
P.S. The other thing that baffles me, particularly as someone who is allergic to milk protein, is why the heck lactose and whey get added to so many things that you wouldn't expect them in.
Why, for instance is the Plain/Salt & Pepper potato chip flavour often the only type of potato chip that doesn't contain whey? Why the heck does Miss Vickies put whey in Jalapeno or Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar potato chips? Come on!
On second thought, it's probably like sugar, something that triggers an accelerated digestion process so that you wind up eating more (and thus buy more).
Apparently I was quite hyperactive when I was a kid. Then my parents cut out sweets and pop and I became a lot more manageable without any setback to my intellectual or physical development. To this day, most frozen prepared foods or desserts taste too sweet to me. They get prepared with lots of sugars and MSG because they are cheaper than real spices for making something taste less bland. I also can't stand the chemical after-taste from most "sugar-free" drinks and foods; that's probably not a bad thing.
Some people wonder why the western world has an epidemic of diabetic and obese people, but it's not a big mystery to me. Some form of sugar is in most things you buy pre-packaged: frozen dinners, hamburger patties, spaghetti sauce, most other sauces, salad dressings, etc. Go back to basics and cook with spices and simple ingredients. If you only have time to by pre-packaged meals, refuse to buy any with sugars in it (sucrose, fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, etc.). Wean your kids off sugar and, in the long run, they'll thank you, though your dentist probably won't.
Why not? Do you know a lot of people or animals managing to reproduce with 100 or 1000 year old cadavers?
I never said X was a scalar, and N and N+1 are in brackets because I didn't want to figure out how to do a subscript.
Well, another way to look at it is that evolution is half of a proof by induction where you have X(N+1) = F(X(N)) but you are missing X(0).
Scientists say the induction step has meaning because evidence supports it for many N in (long ago to now), and when new X(N)/X(N+a) value pairs are discovered, they appear to follow the induction step.
Religious fundamentalists say that because you have no idea what X(0) is, then the induction step must be wrong. Thus they claim either a God created all X(0) and X(N) is a mere subset, or else they claim that X(N+1) = God(X(N)) for some, but not all, N.
While the scientific approach is far from a complete proof, it does have a lot of evidence that supports it. In contrast, a lot of counterexamples exist for the first religious fundamentalist approach, and the second religious fundamentalist approach has no elegance.
And well, if the rest of the Universe is anything to judge by, I think that's it's pretty unlikely that a Creator would create life through an inelegant process.
Yeah... So, how do you explain John Howard?
It's hard to be well informed when nearly all major news outlets are providing partial or complete disinformation.
Case in point, the reporting on the incompetency of the Bush administration in its first 4 years prior to the 2004 election. I wasn't fooled, but apparently more than half the American public was, although it helped that they wanted to be fooled because the so-called liberal media were marketing or white-washing a right-wing nightmare as a seductive pipe-dream.
That said, the US has a power industry which encourages consumption, not careful use. It should have much more widespread programs for encouraging replacement of energy-inefficient appliances in the residential sector. However such programs are not in the interest of the US power conglomerates, and slavish political devotion to "small government" and "market forces" means programs similar to BC Hydro's Power Smart are rarely implemented in the USA.
While primarily composed of cellulose, paper has a number of other organic binding components in a complex composite macro-structure which degrades as part of the recycling process. It is also created from relatively simple, cheap easy-to produce biological source materials (raw wood or hemp fiber). The problem with paper production isn't as much its production as its volume in disposal. The relatively low cost of production of paper is what makes profitable recycling difficult.
In contrast, lithium is a fairly rare and expensive, volatile "metal" and is combined in lithium-ion batteries cathodes with other moderately rare elements from simple raw molecules through chemical and mechanical processes. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the process for recycling lithium-ion batteries would be substantially more productive, lucrative, and worthwhile.
Apples, oranges.
Plastics are somewhere in between the two. They are often created from a finite non-renewable resource (for which cost is increasing, but nowhere near the cost of lithium) but based on moderately long complex molecules using processes which usually aren't easily reversible. So often, like with paper, you can't go back to the source materials you used to create the plastic. Thus, as the price of oil increases through greater scarcity, plastic use will substitute with types or plastics that can be created without oil (and hopefully which also can be broken down more easily), or substitution will occur with other products that can be more cheaply produced or recycled (aluminium, cardboard, tinfoil hats...)
In the long run, the increasing price of oil will be good for the environment, although it will cause a lot of pain on the way as economies adjust to increasing average costs for energy.