The experiences of folks I know who wear glasses (I don't) has been that the lenses are not the biggest cost, it is the frames.
They must not have ghod-awful prescriptions like mine then. The lenses are still the most costly part of my eyeglass purchases.
That having been said, I have to ask the same question: Why do frames cost so much? I see non-prescription sunglasses at convenience stores -- with frames not too different from what I'd want for daily-wear glasses -- that cost less than US$20. But just try to find frames for prescription eyeglasses for under US$150. After spending upwards of $US200. for lenses, I'm not pleased about having to spend almost that much for frames so I can actually use the lenses.
It can't just be the designer names either: Designer (non-prescription) sunglasses are cheap; why can't prescription frames be priced the same?
My guess is it's because it's a captive market. If you can't wear contacts and don't want surgery, you're stuck paying their exorbitant costs. I wonder if the growing popularity of eye surgery for vision correction will drive down costs, but I'm not holding my breath.
Now, that being said, it isn't very likely that any woman would want multiple husbands.
I guess that would depend on what husbands provide for them, and whether it's any different from what a mere sex partner provides.
While some emotional and economic benefits exist for polygamy in general, the downside of jealousy is always there.
And this is different how? Would a wife be more jealous of a second wife or of a mistress? Would a husband be more jealous if his wife had a second husband or an ongoing affair? Seems there's plenty of jealousy to go around, even when the law (or economic neccessity) dictates only one spouse.
And on the sex issue, very few women have enough of a sex drive to want multiple husbands, whereas that problem is common for men.
Presumably women are getting something more than just sex from their husband(s). Else why marry the guy? They could just have an affair. With marriage they get legal recognition of their union, a father for their children, a whole extended family of inlaws, and in many societies, monetary benefits that continue even after hubby dies (retirement income, etc.). If all these things doubled when a second husband is added to the family, it's easy to see the appeal of polyandry. I'm actually sort of surprised it isn't more widespread, but then marriage is a legal institution and men have been writing the laws through most of history. But their oft-noted reduced sex drive (compared to men) hasn't stopped many women from cashing in on multiple partners, even without the benefits of legally marrying them.
No woman wants her husband to take a second wife...
Not neccessarily true. In many societies, a husband is pressured to get a second wife *by his first wife* when she feels he's wealthy enough to merit one. With two wives to share the workload, life gets easier for both women, and their husband may be less tempted to stray.
Pheromone systems like that are most likely to evolve in a colony sitution.
Yes. It seems even some mammals (naked mole rats, IIRC) follow this pattern. And they live in underground colonies, which I doubt is mere coincidence.
In a species that reproduces directly, it is harder for pheromones-communication system to evolve, since it must be in the interest of each individual to respond "correctly" to the pheromone. In other words, you could have a conflict of evolutionary interest.
Here's where I beg to differ. Worker bees, subdominant mole rats, and assorted other communally-living organisms aren't truly sterile. but most of them don't reproduce (they're mostly sterile). By putting aside their own direct reproduction in favor of helping their close relatives reproduce, they actually increase their reproductive potential. They *might* be able to successfully breed, but the chances are small. Their mother/sister/cousin/whatever, however, is a extremely successful breeder, so it's usually in their best interest to help her rather than strike out on their own. The pheromones help regulate this, as well as ensuring that, when the queen is gone, the colony's DNA can still be passed on (in bees, through the male line only). So it's in each worker's best interest to respond correctly to the pheromones.
Ants bees and termites have an advantage when it comes to social complexity though: because they have a queen (rather than the workers reproducing directly) a fundamentally different Darwinian dynamic happens, that encourages cooperation.
It's not just the Darwinian dynamic that encourages cooperation; it's helped along by pheromones from the queen bee. These pheromones inhibit the sexual development of the worker bees (who are all sexually immature females as a result).
Deprived of a queen (and her pheromones) for a sufficient time, some worker bees will stop cooperating and will begin to lay eggs. They also begin to secrete the same pheromone that queen bees secrete, inducing other worker bees to feed and groom them as though they were the queen.
However... these egg-laying worker bees have never mated. Indeed they can't mate; they never developed the required anatomy. So they lay only unfertilized eggs, which, due to a strange quirk of bee biology, develop into male bees (male bees all come from unfertilized eggs - they have no fathers and no sons!). A hive with laying workers is soon teeming with males, who do no work and cannot even feed themselves, but who CAN mate with queen bees (from another hive - remember this hive's queenless) and thus carry on the bee's genetic legacy.
Worker bees aren't truly sterile; they're just *mostly* sterile.
That's if they're wrong. Exceptions don't disprove stereotypes -- they are noteworthy because they are exceptional.
That's as may be, but times change. Yesterday's "accurate" stereotype (i.e. there were exceptions but the conventional wisdom was still largely true) can quickly become today's inaccurate one.
The stereotype of the technophobic female is an example of this process. Once (back in the June Cleaver days?) it might have been largely true, but today it's less so and tomorrow it will be largely false. But it's been my experience that facts change faster than stereotypes. Even as women become more tech-savvy (possibly even more tech-savvy than men) the *perception* will persist that they are airheads.
If it's not caused by man, then there's not much we could do to stop it anyway.
WTF? Lots of things that are caused by things other than man can stopped (or adapted to, or modified) by man.
example: Dog bites man. This was not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can devise a muzzle to stop it.
example: The river floods the village every spring. Not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can build a dam or construct a levee so that the river does not flood the village every spring.
Why should global warming be any different? Humans have been messing with their environment since before they were humans. Some of the results have been good. Some have been bad. Most have been both, depending on where you sit. If global warming is destroying us or things important to us (whether they be our livelihoods, our health, or fuzzy little animals) then it makes sense to at least try to do something about it. Even if we didn't start the problem (and there's a heap of indicators say we did).
A friend of mine frequently uses the old adage "It doesn't matter whose fault it is. It only matters whose problem it is." Never has it been more true.
...as for expensive, the number of zeros in a figure mean nothing.
They do if it's MY money, pal.
If they're willing to spend it, it must mean that it's worth it.
WTF?!?!
Regardless of the validity (or not) of your underlying argument, you totally blew it with that one line. Someone pays a gazillion bucks for a doodad that some movie star once wore, or a ball that a sports hero once played with. And this proves it was "worth it"? No. It proves nothing. Except maybe that some people have more money than sense.
Back (closer anyway) to the argument at hand, if someone spends a gazillion dollars (of your money and mine) to clean up a toxic disaster, it MAY mean that it was worth that high price to protect the environment, people's lives and health, whatever. It DOES NOT FOLLOW that the process that made the mess in the first place was economically sound.
Nuclear power may be economically feasible. Or it may not. But one must consider the costs of disposal and cleanup (which may be artificially high as a result of ill-advised cost-cutting to keep initial cost estimates artificially low) when determining whether it's economically viable.
Not playing with genetics is obviously just as dangerous.
The same thing could be said about not playing with fire. "Not playing with fire is just as dangerous as playing with fire! If humans didn't play with fire, they might freeze to death!"
While that's true (and I'm very glad that our ancestors played with fire) it's still a good idea to be careful when playing with fire (you don't want to burn your house down). Same holds true for genetics, although the consequences might be more severe than a charred and ruined house.
Sure there are some people who are flat-out opposed to *any* genetic modification of *anything* (maybe their ancestors were opposed to playing with fire) but there are a lot more who might be in favor of it if proper precautions are observed, and who fear that such precautions will not be taken (thus far it's uncertain what precautions will be adequate) in the constant push for more profits faster.
...one thing's for certain. The gene can't jump from one organism to another, unless you mean by the natural process of reproduction within the species.
And that's going to be tough to do if they're all male.
I've read a couple of articles on the semi-exception that the top predator on the planet (Homo sap) seems to be a partial exception. This is generally explained as an artifact of our recent conversion to predation.
It might also be explained by the fact that, alone (AFAIK) among the predators/omnivores, humans cook most of the meat that they eat. Cooking effectively kills most food-borne pathogens. This would go a long way toward preventing food-borne illnesses, and might explain the relatively poor defenses human have against such illnesses.
For reproduction, females must spend far, far more resources than males do
Not necessarily true. In general, females invest more directly in the rearing of the young, but males often have a considerable investment in courtship and in keeping rivals away from their mate. They may even have special structures (antlers, horns and the like) or coloration that serves no other purpose than to attract a mate and/or intimidate rivals. If that's not investment in reproduction, I don't know what is.
...as my old ecology prof used to say, 'sperm are cheap'.
That may be, but getting them to do their job (i.e. procreating) successfully can be very expensive.
The fact is that reproduction is costly, regardless of whether one is male or female, and regardless of whether that cost is paid before or after the young are born/hatched/whatever.
Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.
Perhaps this is because women tend to be less aroused by visual stimuli than men are.
No I don't have a source for this except for anecdotal evidence, but that anecdotal evidence is rather persuasive. Visual porn is overwhelmingly designed with the male (gay and straight alike) in mind, while tactile stimuli (sex toys, vibrators, etc.) are marketed primarily to females. I don't think this is by accident.
Perhaps if the women were asked to make those rational decisions while being massaged by a skilled masseur, their decision-making ability would be found to be impaired in a similar way to the males' impairment when confronted with visuals of attractive women.
When a man chooses a partner, he chooses to invest a lot of energy into rearing her offspring.
This applies to human beings and to very few other species (except among bird species, where it's quite common). Males of most species provide little to their offspring other than genetic material.
Overall, the best behaviour for your genes is to get furious at anyone who tries to mate with your woman, not with your woman.
Strangely enough, this would seem to apply across the board, whether a male invests directly in his young or not. There are costs associated with breeding, whether applied to the rearing of young or to the courtship. So the male *does* have a considerable investment in his offspring, it's just in many species it's invested before they're even born/hatched/whatever.
...they don't even stay curren on the happenings in Soviet Russia like slashdot does.
I didn't think I'd ever again see the words "current" (okay, "curren") and "Soviet Russia" in the same sentence. Is there a time warp here that I dont know about?
Sexual reproduction evolves species that fights microorganisms (i.e. pathogens) better.
It has been verified by experiments and is a widely-accepted theory.
That's as may be, and it may 'splain why sexual reproduction has worked out so well for much of life (though many microbes continue to reproduce the old fashioned way - without sex - and have managed to survive despite pathogens), but it still doesn't 'splain why the gametes have to be so wildly dimorphic. Why huge eggs and tiny sperm? It makes sense for algae, but near as I can tell it doesn't seem to make much sense for the rest of us. So why does life stick with that plan? Where's the selective advantage? Genetic recombination (and accompanying resistance to pathogens) would seem to work just as well for organisms that combine two more-or-less same-sized gametes as for those that combine one big egg with one (or more, as in some plants) small sperm.
Imagine how much simpler if we didn't have the division between sexes?
That's different than sex not existing though. Sex exists for earthworms; the difference is that both partners can get pregnant (well, get their eggs fertilized) as a result.
Less pronouns to remember! We already have artificial wombs,
We do?
...so we'll just evolve into a being that doesn't reproduce.
Um... why? The world may be overpopulated *now*, but it would quickly be underpopulated if humans stopped reproducing entirely. Humans need to start limiting their reproduction in order to live within the carrying capacity of their planet (and still have nice things like clean water, someplace to put their waste besides on their neighbors, and some wilderness for the other living things to, well, live on) but stopping human reproduction completely is more than even a "population nazi" like myself would ask for.
But imagine if we had stayed like earthworms, both male and female.
Back to the biology side of things... I've often wondered what's the draw of having two different sexes instead of one. IIRC sexual dimorphism first appeared among marine algae (different male and female parts on the same creature, like earthworms) in part to facilitate reproduction at a distance (tiny motile sperm were needed to cross vast oceanic distances, while large resource-rich eggs were still required in order for the young to survive) but for species where fertilization is internal (no vast distances for sperm to have to traverse) it would seem to make more sense for there to be one kind of medium-sized gamete instead of large eggs and tiny sperm. Yet even earthworms follow the latter plan. And I can't see why. What's the selective advantage? Dr. Tatiana?
I was impressed by the role serendipity has played in the discovery of sweeteners. But
In 1937, a University of Illinois grad student discovered another sweetener when he set his cigarette on a lab bench during an experiment - testing a would-be antifever drug - and then took a drag off the cyclamate-coated end.
might be taking things a bit too far. Smoking in the laboratory? My how times have changed!
Still, the cyclamates are now banned (in the US anyway), while you can still buy cigarettes in any quik-E-mart. You just can't smoke them in the laboratory! Or in most public buildings.
...why don't I see Europeans driving around in fuel cell cars even though they already pay too much in gas taxes?
Because they're riding clean, efficient European public transportation, paid for in part by high European gasoline taxes.
Now, that probably wouldn't work so well in the good old US of A even if our politicians could push through the high gasoline taxes (election-day poison) because of simple geography. European countries are quite compact compared to the wide-open spaces of America.
But while high gas taxes probably won't convince most Americans to use public transportation (it's not even available in many places) it might convince them to try alternative fuels.
I think this article says it all and says it best WRT Doctor Who.
Cheap effects, cheap costumes (where you can see the zipper or the actor's feet sticking out from under the tentacles) etc. do not detract from the true fan's enjoyment of the show.
AFAIK peanuts are the only plant that bears its fruit (i.e. the part where the seeds are) underground. This is quite an accomplishment for the peanut, because in order for pollination to occur, the plant has to flower above the ground. After it's pollinated, the plant grows downward, so that by the time it sets fruit, the seed pods are underground. Weird but true.
Slashdot Mirror
The experiences of folks I know who wear glasses (I don't) has been that the lenses are not the biggest cost, it is the frames.
They must not have ghod-awful prescriptions like mine then. The lenses are still the most costly part of my eyeglass purchases.
That having been said, I have to ask the same question: Why do frames cost so much? I see non-prescription sunglasses at convenience stores -- with frames not too different from what I'd want for daily-wear glasses -- that cost less than US$20. But just try to find frames for prescription eyeglasses for under US$150. After spending upwards of $US200. for lenses, I'm not pleased about having to spend almost that much for frames so I can actually use the lenses.
It can't just be the designer names either: Designer (non-prescription) sunglasses are cheap; why can't prescription frames be priced the same?
My guess is it's because it's a captive market. If you can't wear contacts and don't want surgery, you're stuck paying their exorbitant costs. I wonder if the growing popularity of eye surgery for vision correction will drive down costs, but I'm not holding my breath.
Now, that being said, it isn't very likely that any woman would want multiple husbands.
I guess that would depend on what husbands provide for them, and whether it's any different from what a mere sex partner provides.
While some emotional and economic benefits exist for polygamy in general, the downside of jealousy is always there.
And this is different how? Would a wife be more jealous of a second wife or of a mistress? Would a husband be more jealous if his wife had a second husband or an ongoing affair? Seems there's plenty of jealousy to go around, even when the law (or economic neccessity) dictates only one spouse.
And on the sex issue, very few women have enough of a sex drive to want multiple husbands, whereas that problem is common for men.
Presumably women are getting something more than just sex from their husband(s). Else why marry the guy? They could just have an affair. With marriage they get legal recognition of their union, a father for their children, a whole extended family of inlaws, and in many societies, monetary benefits that continue even after hubby dies (retirement income, etc.). If all these things doubled when a second husband is added to the family, it's easy to see the appeal of polyandry. I'm actually sort of surprised it isn't more widespread, but then marriage is a legal institution and men have been writing the laws through most of history. But their oft-noted reduced sex drive (compared to men) hasn't stopped many women from cashing in on multiple partners, even without the benefits of legally marrying them.
No woman wants her husband to take a second wife...
Not neccessarily true. In many societies, a husband is pressured to get a second wife *by his first wife* when she feels he's wealthy enough to merit one. With two wives to share the workload, life gets easier for both women, and their husband may be less tempted to stray.
Pheromone systems like that are most likely to evolve in a colony sitution.
Yes. It seems even some mammals (naked mole rats, IIRC) follow this pattern. And they live in underground colonies, which I doubt is mere coincidence.
In a species that reproduces directly, it is harder for pheromones-communication system to evolve, since it must be in the interest of each individual to respond "correctly" to the pheromone. In other words, you could have a conflict of evolutionary interest.
Here's where I beg to differ. Worker bees, subdominant mole rats, and assorted other communally-living organisms aren't truly sterile. but most of them don't reproduce (they're mostly sterile). By putting aside their own direct reproduction in favor of helping their close relatives reproduce, they actually increase their reproductive potential. They *might* be able to successfully breed, but the chances are small. Their mother/sister/cousin/whatever, however, is a extremely successful breeder, so it's usually in their best interest to help her rather than strike out on their own. The pheromones help regulate this, as well as ensuring that, when the queen is gone, the colony's DNA can still be passed on (in bees, through the male line only). So it's in each worker's best interest to respond correctly to the pheromones.
Well I've been a beekeeper since 1998, but if you don't want to take my word for it, you could look in any entymology text.
Ants bees and termites have an advantage when it comes to social complexity though: because they have a queen (rather than the workers reproducing directly) a fundamentally different Darwinian dynamic happens, that encourages cooperation.
It's not just the Darwinian dynamic that encourages cooperation; it's helped along by pheromones from the queen bee. These pheromones inhibit the sexual development of the worker bees (who are all sexually immature females as a result).
Deprived of a queen (and her pheromones) for a sufficient time, some worker bees will stop cooperating and will begin to lay eggs. They also begin to secrete the same pheromone that queen bees secrete, inducing other worker bees to feed and groom them as though they were the queen.
However... these egg-laying worker bees have never mated. Indeed they can't mate; they never developed the required anatomy. So they lay only unfertilized eggs, which, due to a strange quirk of bee biology, develop into male bees (male bees all come from unfertilized eggs - they have no fathers and no sons!). A hive with laying workers is soon teeming with males, who do no work and cannot even feed themselves, but who CAN mate with queen bees (from another hive - remember this hive's queenless) and thus carry on the bee's genetic legacy.
Worker bees aren't truly sterile; they're just *mostly* sterile.
Why make it harder to do the "dialing numbers" part of using a phone?
Dialing numbers? What is this "dial" you speak of?
-Drox (who actually has a working wall-mounted rotary-dial telephone).
That's if they're wrong. Exceptions don't disprove stereotypes -- they are noteworthy because they are exceptional.
That's as may be, but times change. Yesterday's "accurate" stereotype (i.e. there were exceptions but the conventional wisdom was still largely true) can quickly become today's inaccurate one.
The stereotype of the technophobic female is an example of this process. Once (back in the June Cleaver days?) it might have been largely true, but today it's less so and tomorrow it will be largely false. But it's been my experience that facts change faster than stereotypes. Even as women become more tech-savvy (possibly even more tech-savvy than men) the *perception* will persist that they are airheads.
I won't be here in 2050 -- but you will.
Dint'cha hear? Bush is gonna launch manned missions to the Moon! And Mars! Those young'uns won't be here in 2050 either. They'll be there.
Hope they put lotsa seats on them thar moon-rockets, kiddo.
If it's not caused by man, then there's not much we could do to stop it anyway.
WTF? Lots of things that are caused by things other than man can stopped (or adapted to, or modified) by man.
example: Dog bites man. This was not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can devise a muzzle to stop it.
example: The river floods the village every spring. Not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can build a dam or construct a levee so that the river does not flood the village every spring.
Why should global warming be any different? Humans have been messing with their environment since before they were humans. Some of the results have been good. Some have been bad. Most have been both, depending on where you sit. If global warming is destroying us or things important to us (whether they be our livelihoods, our health, or fuzzy little animals) then it makes sense to at least try to do something about it. Even if we didn't start the problem (and there's a heap of indicators say we did).
A friend of mine frequently uses the old adage "It doesn't matter whose fault it is. It only matters whose problem it is." Never has it been more true.
...as for expensive, the number of zeros in a figure mean nothing.
They do if it's MY money, pal.
If they're willing to spend it, it must mean that it's worth it.
WTF?!?!
Regardless of the validity (or not) of your underlying argument, you totally blew it with that one line. Someone pays a gazillion bucks for a doodad that some movie star once wore, or a ball that a sports hero once played with. And this proves it was "worth it"? No. It proves nothing. Except maybe that some people have more money than sense.
Back (closer anyway) to the argument at hand, if someone spends a gazillion dollars (of your money and mine) to clean up a toxic disaster, it MAY mean that it was worth that high price to protect the environment, people's lives and health, whatever. It DOES NOT FOLLOW that the process that made the mess in the first place was economically sound.
Nuclear power may be economically feasible. Or it may not. But one must consider the costs of disposal and cleanup (which may be artificially high as a result of ill-advised cost-cutting to keep initial cost estimates artificially low) when determining whether it's economically viable.
The same thing could be said about not playing with fire. "Not playing with fire is just as dangerous as playing with fire! If humans didn't play with fire, they might freeze to death!"
While that's true (and I'm very glad that our ancestors played with fire) it's still a good idea to be careful when playing with fire (you don't want to burn your house down). Same holds true for genetics, although the consequences might be more severe than a charred and ruined house.
Sure there are some people who are flat-out opposed to *any* genetic modification of *anything* (maybe their ancestors were opposed to playing with fire) but there are a lot more who might be in favor of it if proper precautions are observed, and who fear that such precautions will not be taken (thus far it's uncertain what precautions will be adequate) in the constant push for more profits faster.
And that's going to be tough to do if they're all male.
I've read a couple of articles on the semi-exception that the top predator on the planet (Homo sap) seems to be a partial exception. This is generally explained as an artifact of our recent conversion to predation.
It might also be explained by the fact that, alone (AFAIK) among the predators/omnivores, humans cook most of the meat that they eat. Cooking effectively kills most food-borne pathogens. This would go a long way toward preventing food-borne illnesses, and might explain the relatively poor defenses human have against such illnesses.
Not necessarily true. In general, females invest more directly in the rearing of the young, but males often have a considerable investment in courtship and in keeping rivals away from their mate. They may even have special structures (antlers, horns and the like) or coloration that serves no other purpose than to attract a mate and/or intimidate rivals. If that's not investment in reproduction, I don't know what is.
That may be, but getting them to do their job (i.e. procreating) successfully can be very expensive.
The fact is that reproduction is costly, regardless of whether one is male or female, and regardless of whether that cost is paid before or after the young are born/hatched/whatever.
Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.
Perhaps this is because women tend to be less aroused by visual stimuli than men are.
No I don't have a source for this except for anecdotal evidence, but that anecdotal evidence is rather persuasive. Visual porn is overwhelmingly designed with the male (gay and straight alike) in mind, while tactile stimuli (sex toys, vibrators, etc.) are marketed primarily to females. I don't think this is by accident.
Perhaps if the women were asked to make those rational decisions while being massaged by a skilled masseur, their decision-making ability would be found to be impaired in a similar way to the males' impairment when confronted with visuals of attractive women.
How 'bout it, researchers? Design me a study!
When a man chooses a partner, he chooses to invest a lot of energy into rearing her offspring.
This applies to human beings and to very few other species (except among bird species, where it's quite common). Males of most species provide little to their offspring other than genetic material.
Overall, the best behaviour for your genes is to get furious at anyone who tries to mate with your woman, not with your woman.
Strangely enough, this would seem to apply across the board, whether a male invests directly in his young or not. There are costs associated with breeding, whether applied to the rearing of young or to the courtship. So the male *does* have a considerable investment in his offspring, it's just in many species it's invested before they're even born/hatched/whatever.
To get his attention, you'd to yell: +++
I tried that and they cut me off!
(AT H0 gets you cut off too)
...they don't even stay curren on the happenings in Soviet Russia like slashdot does.
I didn't think I'd ever again see the words "current" (okay, "curren") and "Soviet Russia" in the same sentence. Is there a time warp here that I dont know about?
Sexual reproduction evolves species that fights microorganisms (i.e. pathogens) better.
It has been verified by experiments and is a widely-accepted theory.
That's as may be, and it may 'splain why sexual reproduction has worked out so well for much of life (though many microbes continue to reproduce the old fashioned way - without sex - and have managed to survive despite pathogens), but it still doesn't 'splain why the gametes have to be so wildly dimorphic. Why huge eggs and tiny sperm? It makes sense for algae, but near as I can tell it doesn't seem to make much sense for the rest of us. So why does life stick with that plan? Where's the selective advantage? Genetic recombination (and accompanying resistance to pathogens) would seem to work just as well for organisms that combine two more-or-less same-sized gametes as for those that combine one big egg with one (or more, as in some plants) small sperm.
I ask again... what's the draw?
That's different than sex not existing though. Sex exists for earthworms; the difference is that both partners can get pregnant (well, get their eggs fertilized) as a result.
Less pronouns to remember! We already have artificial wombs,
We do?
Um... why? The world may be overpopulated *now*, but it would quickly be underpopulated if humans stopped reproducing entirely. Humans need to start limiting their reproduction in order to live within the carrying capacity of their planet (and still have nice things like clean water, someplace to put their waste besides on their neighbors, and some wilderness for the other living things to, well, live on) but stopping human reproduction completely is more than even a "population nazi" like myself would ask for.
But imagine if we had stayed like earthworms, both male and female.
Back to the biology side of things... I've often wondered what's the draw of having two different sexes instead of one. IIRC sexual dimorphism first appeared among marine algae (different male and female parts on the same creature, like earthworms) in part to facilitate reproduction at a distance (tiny motile sperm were needed to cross vast oceanic distances, while large resource-rich eggs were still required in order for the young to survive) but for species where fertilization is internal (no vast distances for sperm to have to traverse) it would seem to make more sense for there to be one kind of medium-sized gamete instead of large eggs and tiny sperm. Yet even earthworms follow the latter plan. And I can't see why. What's the selective advantage? Dr. Tatiana?
I was impressed by the role serendipity has played in the discovery of sweeteners. But
In 1937, a University of Illinois grad student discovered another sweetener when he set his cigarette on a lab bench during an experiment - testing a would-be antifever drug - and then took a drag off the cyclamate-coated end.
might be taking things a bit too far. Smoking in the laboratory? My how times have changed!
Still, the cyclamates are now banned (in the US anyway), while you can still buy cigarettes in any quik-E-mart. You just can't smoke them in the laboratory! Or in most public buildings.
TDP uses heat and pressure to digest any hydorgen or carbon based organic material into it's base components + oil and gas.
Wait a minute. *I'm* carbon based!
(runs through city streets shouting) "It's people! Gasoline is made out of people!"
...why don't I see Europeans driving around in fuel cell cars even though they already pay too much in gas taxes?
Because they're riding clean, efficient European public transportation, paid for in part by high European gasoline taxes.
Now, that probably wouldn't work so well in the good old US of A even if our politicians could push through the high gasoline taxes (election-day poison) because of simple geography. European countries are quite compact compared to the wide-open spaces of America.
But while high gas taxes probably won't convince most Americans to use public transportation (it's not even available in many places) it might convince them to try alternative fuels.
I think this article says it all and says it best WRT Doctor Who.
Cheap effects, cheap costumes (where you can see the zipper or the actor's feet sticking out from under the tentacles) etc. do not detract from the true fan's enjoyment of the show.
AFAIK peanuts are the only plant that bears its fruit (i.e. the part where the seeds are) underground. This is quite an accomplishment for the peanut, because in order for pollination to occur, the plant has to flower above the ground. After it's pollinated, the plant grows downward, so that by the time it sets fruit, the seed pods are underground. Weird but true.