In the meantime, NASA has done quite a bit of research [spacedaily.com] into the matter of gender differentiated responses to long duration space travel, and they haven't found anything remotely conclusive.
I'm just saying it's too quick to decide to rule out sending women, since there's not enough data to warrant it.
Re:i believe this outdates previous records
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Faces from the Ice Age
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Well, to some extent, I pulled it out of my ass. To a different extent, my ass is particularly qualified: I'm on my way to a PhD in archaeology. I believe there is a geologic table in Merriam Webster that has dates of these periods, but I"m not positive. Regardless, I know when the boundary between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic are, and I know what the currently accepted (though, as always, subject to revision) theory as to the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens is.
By "not 'people' as they are today" I mean that, prior to the Upper Paleolithic, there was very little differentiating our ancestral hominids from other (modern or ancient) nonhuman primates. They could make tools more specified, but still were barely capable of more than a modern chimp using an anvil to crack a nut or a twig to "fish" for termites. There has been no indication of any ability to think symbolically.
Toward the end of the Middle Paleolithic (about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago) we begin to see three very important things: 1. displacement of materials over very large distances, 2. intentional human burials, and 3. evidence of collective planning and coordinating, especially in regards to hunting meat. Materials being displaced over large areas that share no boundaries indicates a capacity for symbolic displacement, or the first necessity for language. Perhaps some sort of protolanguage arose during this time. Intentional burials are the first evidence we have for any sort of symbolic act. These things all indicate the very beginnings of symbolic thought. You must admit that, since we're talking about the very beginnings of symbolic thought (and that we, currently, are capable of language and symbolic thought far beyond this level) it's only appropriate to remind everyone here that these are not "people" we're talking about as we are people today.
So, with the capacity for symbolic thought emerging 40,000 to 35,000 years ago, the appearance of something so complex as a representation of a human face at 30,000 years ago would tell us a lot. For quite a few thousand years after that point, all we currently have are uniform-looking fertility figures and stick-figures hunting elaborate animals painted on walls (yes, the limits of what we've found in the archaeological record.) Regardless, somewhere on the border between Middle and Upper Paleolithic (and where do you think these borders come from?) something changed dramatically in hominids' perceptions of the world. They gained capacity for symbolic thought-- they perhaps became capable of drawing a face and recognizing a drawing. Additionally, it is just at this time (beginning of the Upper Paleolithic) that Neanderthals go extinct, and that our own forerunners are left to dominate the hominid line. (Before this extinction, technology and art and symbolic things like burials were associated with neanderthals as well-- not just our own ancestors.)
What I got out of the article is that caves with paintings of animals in them date back nearly as far as the end of the Middle Paleolithic and beginning of the Upper. Given the faces on the floor of one of these caves, it is possible that there are others in the other caves mentioned-- the ones that date back 30,000 years. Given that possibility, we could learn quite a lot about the development of early hominids.
no, I only wrote down half of it; you have it just as backwards as I. We are uniquely suited to one another. That's what I was trying to illustrate. All of these views are one side of a coin. We are here because, of everywhere in the universe, here is where we can be best. If the earth wasn't as it is, we wouldn't Be. If we weren't as we are, the earth wouldn't be able to host us.
Re:i believe this outdates previous records
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Faces from the Ice Age
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's not about when we come across it. It's about when they were capable of it. That early, people were not "people" as they are today. When did they have the physiological capability and the tools to draw? When did they have a sense of the symbolic and representational enough to draw people? What are the implications of drawing people at all, when previously the cave paintings weren't thought to contain any detailed pictures of people, merely of animals? Further, were the people they were drawing real (ie, a friend or family member or...) and if not, what are the implications of drawing imaginary people?
It seems that capacity for symbolic representation began in the Upper Paleolithic. That's before 15,000 years ago, but just around 30,000 years ago (the dates in the article.) The earlier and more complex the art that we find, the more we learn about long-gone cognitive processes that preceeded our own.
The rationale for there being life elsewhere in the universe often goes like this:
1. There's life here
2. Well, we seem pretty normal and possible to me!
3. The universe is a many-splendored thing. There must be other neat planets like this out there.
4. Since we seen pretty easy to please, there must be life on those other planets!
People don't realize that it actually works the other way around. If there was going to be intelligent life just one place, well, wherever it was would have the intelligent life! To rephrase: just because we're intelligent and here doesn't mean that there are other intelligent beings elsewhere. That we're intelligent and here means that we've got good conditions for that, here. We (the intelligent life) are here and not on another planet because this planet is uniquely suited to us. About the other potential places that could harbor life-- well, who knows? The universe may be inhospitable. It may be hospitable. The fact of the matter is that we've just managed to find out whether one of our nearest neighbors has water on it. What do we know of the rest of the galaxy, really?
I totally disagree. I have had friends who have had abortions, and yes, it's traumatic. Carrying a child bourne of rape? We're talking an entirely different level of traumatic here. A rape is about the worst thing a person can endure. Way worse, alone, than the guilt and emotional trauma caused by an abortion. With an abortion on top of that, it's unthinkable-- with a child on top of that, it's unlivable. Most girls would rather kill themselves than bring a rape baby to term. Most girls I know who've been raped, that is. And I know quite a few. 1 in 5 women, after all, have been there.
I understand your view of the unborn as a full-fledged person. Do you believe that an abortion is justified in the cases where the mother would be in mortal danger from the pregnancy? Because I believe that this is a similar case.
I also think that this:
If you kill the kid to rid yourself of memory of his father, then you'd be just as justified in killing your (grown) children to rid yourself of all memories of your ex who cheated on you and left you for another woman. I don't think you'd argue that's right.
is bullshit. But that's because 1) I don't feel that an embryo is a person in the same way that an 8-year-old is and 2) I wasn't talking about purging unpleasant memories. (And even if I was, rape is lightyears beyond mere infidelity.) I was talking about the ability of a rape victim to continue with her life. Having a child changes one's life, regardless of whether it dies immediately or not for many years; regardless of whether it's raised by you or by a relative or a friend or a stranger; regardless of whether you have contact with it or not. Surviving a rape is difficult enough. Surviving a rape but finding your life irrevocably changed, now, that's something I can't conceive of living thorough.
What I'm saying is that Microsoft might start taking down your "pix of doctored nudies of Graf" or banning you because that's been ruled against in Germany. Now, you wouldn't want that, would you? Their laws may not touch you directly, but if they touch the company you're leaning on, they may as well.
If this were Wisconsin I'd be worried. Who gives a rats ass about other countries. Hell if we gave a shit we wouldn't have the death penalty, Europe doesn't. Just one more case of irrelevent news for the average US reader.
If for no other reason, it makes a difference because the internet is more global than any other medium. If an ISP stops hosting some sort of content, or starts clamping down on content in general, because Germany (or France) wants them to, then no one in Wisconsin gets special privelages unless the site wants to make an exception (...but then, the exceptions might be accessed from anywhere, so it's only a matter of time before the foreign obscene content is brought up in court locally for being displayed locally.)
Be worried, give a rats ass, because the internet does not only exist in your country. Because those rulings in other countries will begin to affect the content you have access to and the freedom you have to publish whatever you'd like online.
Yes, ok, so the "New World" doesn't seem so foreign and dangerous to you on this side of the 16th century.
Look at it this way. They had a months-long ocean voyage ahead of them. A very dangrous, months-long voyage on a tiny ship on the wide ocean (an environment in which they most certainly could not live) with a destination that's very hard to find successfully because such navigation had only been done successfully a few times in the past. (Sound familiar yet?)
When they got there, they had to contend with hostile conditions (ok, so they had air, but they also had people familiar with the territory who wanted nothing more than to kill them.) And possibly nothing to eat, or new diseases... or not seeing a person besides those with which they're travelling, for months or years at a time, if you're talking about pioneers moving west or the first settlers on the coasts.
No matter how you cut it, in the 1500s people were travelling into the unknown, with dangers as real as those that would face people on a mars-shot. They may have been different dangers, but there they were. Ok, so we wouldn't be able to get there, build our little log cabin, and start farming. But most of us today don't build log cabins and farm, anyhow. What we do is work with new materials and the latest science, and that's what we'd have to do on Mars to find ways to live. Would it be dangerous? Sure. Would that stop people? Not a chance in hell. It never has. People will always want something new and different, and potentially better and grander. People would die. Possibly lots of them. But people would keep going, given a chance.
I don't know where you read your "information," unless you're extrapolating that assumptions in some sci-fi novels are scientific facts. Women do not show significantly different bone loss than men, in studies executed to date. They most certainly would be no more toothless or fragile than men. While there are many potential differences in the ways men and women cope with the stresses of a long duration spaceflight, none of these are confirmed, and to date it seems that individual responses vary much more than gender-differentiated responses.
Regardless of who is going, they are likely to suffer some damage unless some mechanism or mechanisms are in place to help them maintain their physical fittness. Don't dismiss women until you have a good reason to. In the meantime, NASA has done quite a bit of research into the matter of gender differentiated responses to long duration space travel, and they haven't found anything remotely conclusive.
That's human mitocondrial DNA. The mitocondrial Eve is not our common ancestor, or even our common genetic ancestor. She is the most recent common ancester of all humans alive on earth today w.r.t. matrilineal descent. See the BBC explanation for further enlightenment. The existence of the Mitochondrial Eve is a mathematical fact (unless something like a multiple-origins theory of human evolution i.e. the human species arose independently in different geographically separated populations, and that the present-day ease of interbreeding is the result of a remarkable convergent evolution, is true. Few people subscribe to the multiple-origins theory, and the Mitochondrial Eve observation is a refutation of multiple-origins). Since she has been identified as well (as much as possible,) this is not a theory.
That said, the chances of mutation from breeding two related individuals may be higher than those of unrelated individuals, but they are not absolute certainties. Some degree of variation can be recovered, and while that may not be a huge amount of variation, it's more than they've currently got.
People can vote on whether or not they want their state executing criminals. But people cannot vote on whether or not they want abortion to be legal in their state.
Sure they can. It just hasn't come up for a vote, I guess. Since it's legal nationally, they can make it illegal in their state if the state tries to pass a bill making it so. Just like capital punishment being legal in the U.S., so it can happen everywhere, although some states, like Maryland have put a moratorium on it.
If a state wanted to abolish the death penalty, it could within that state. As some states have abolished alcohol on sundays or prostitution. If, however, abortion were illegal in the U.S., no state could make it legal.
Try this sacrifice: don't have sex till you're ready to be one. Take responsibility for your own actions, instead of killing someone else for them.
I agree with your entire comment (not just the italicised part above,) but feel the need to throw a note in here-- we're talking about restricting people's choices here (the larger conversation: whether abortion is Right.) You cannot restrict a choice or a freedom unless you know that there are no cases that fall outside your reasoning.
What about the case of a pregnant rape victim? Should she really be forced to bear not only the terror, pain and shame that comes with being the victim of such a crime, but also the burden of knowing that she's carrying part of her monster in her belly for nine months? Of knowing that she could give the child up for adoption or keep it; but she would always know that, somewhere out there, there's a being that is the product of her violation, that is part herself and part the person who commited the worst sort of crime against her.
I agree with your comments, but they are not an argument for outlawing abortion. I'm assuming (hoping) you didn't mean them to be. This is my concern: that people will read your post and think that since you're so right, since people should be responsible enough not to have a child where it is unwanted or cannot be cared for, and since people who have been irresponsible enough to have one anyhow can give it up for adoption, then abortion is unnecessarily cruel and should be done away with. There are exceptions to every rule. It is not always a matter of irresponsibility.
BBC News is now reporting that Sony researchers are experimenting with increased speech capacity. Here's one of the first papers about the increased-capacity talking Aibo project. This is the English/HTML translation of the French/PDF version (which seems to be unavailable for download) and so is a little messy. Unfortunately, Sony's Computer Research Laboratory seems to be down at the moment. As an anthropologist interested in the evolution of speech, I'm absolutely fascinated by this, and whish I knew where to find more of the speech recognition software specs.
My family lives in New York City. My sister was telling me that she had to submit to a full body search when she went to a concert at Madison Square Garden earlier this week, and I expressed a concern for her civil liberties. She told me that she didn't, of course, enjoy submitting to a full body search, but that she would gladly give up some of her freedoms in these "terrifying times" if it would even potentially be a deterrent to terrorists. The thing that she (and many other Americans) do not realize is that the laws that are being enacted to enable the authorities to infringe on her freedoms in these terrifying times are a slippery slope-- as stated in the Washington Post article, there is no "sunset," or expiration, date on these laws. I sent her a funny article from the Onion this week, and she was offended: this is not something to joke about, she said. "I'm scared right now. I see soldiers on the street corners and it makes me feel awful, but if that causes one potential terrorist to think twice about attacking me or mine, I'm glad to have them there." I don't know how to respond-- I'm glad, as well, if they're a deterrent, but it's really a question of how imminent the danger is, and whether we can ever really know how imminent danger of terrorist strikes is. If we don't know (and how could we?) I'd rather have the civil liberties. Failing that, I'd rather know that, when the fear dies down, we'll be able to restore all that we've lost.
I think that the real issue is not that these bills are passing, but that they're passing without expiration dates; that they're potentially part of a much longer-term loss of our civil liberties. That is a slippery slope that we cannot afford to start down.
That was/MY/ point; no two languages are fundamentally the same except in that they convey information and facilitate communication. Their form, manner and what is considered "beauty" vary widely. It is virtually impossible to grasp all of the complexities of one in the framework and context of another. Some may be similar (romance languages), but many spoken languages are dissimilar enough that transliteration is unintelligible. How can we ask a programming language to be the same? It's fundamentally not. It does, however, have a beauty and expressiveness all its own.
I disagree. I think that nothing is lost; simply translated. What is beautiful in English cannot be translated word-for-word into Japanese while at the same time retaining the same type of beauty, or certainly even the same form. Someone with an understanding of code as deep as his or her understanding of English (or Japanese) might be able to create a turn of phrase (or line of code) in the other language that is just as beautiful and has the same general content. This would be a translation, not a transliteration. Translation is what we're talking about. Code cannot be expressive when written with someone who barely knows the basics, just as a good, traditional haiku is an unlikely product of someone who can barely speak Japanese. Part of what makes code beautiful is its elegance. Part of the elegance of code is derived from finding a solution to a problem. Getting from point A to point B is the driving force behind scripting, the purpose for writing in code. Elegant code requires a function. Like decryption, for instance. Whether or not you use the code for its intent is beside the point. Do we appreciate "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou are more lovely and more temperate." because it makes our partners swoon?
I kind of see this as though it could be a positive step in the way of promoting the idea that fetuses are not people. Once they have been brought to term, theoretically these people should have the same rights as any identical twin, with or without medical complications. The idea of importing frozen fetuses that have been created through cloning overseas is, I think, what the government is scared of. Such distinctions are not, however, made in the bill, and they're precicely the distinctions policitians like to avoid. So we'll see.
According to the bill: "A person shall be considered to have engaged in a human cloning procedure for purposes of subsection (a) if the person transfers the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed.
somatic cell
Function: noun
Date: 1888
: one of the cells of the body that compose the tissues, organs, and
parts of that individual other than the germ cells
ANY human cell cannot be used in a cloning procedure. This means stem cell OR any specialized cell. No organs.
The bill is online. This isn't just "dangerous copies of humans"... there is research into alternatives for people who are unable to have children any other way. "It shall be unlawful for a person to engage in a human cloning procedure with the intent of implanting the resulting cellular product into a uterus." This is current research that will not go forward, funding or no funding. "A person shall be considered to have engaged in a human cloning procedure for purposes of subsection (a) if the person transfers the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed." This will be interesting.
John Glenn was trained as a NASA astronaut. He was trained for emergency situations on the shuttle and was also there as a mission specialist performing experiments as any other astronaut who's not a pilot or involved in some other specialized task might be. Tito, on the other hand, is not NASA trained to be of assistance if there is an emergency situation. If there is an emergency situation in orbit, there are very few people and there is very little space to maneuver. It's very important that everyone who is able knows exactly how to deal with that situation. Astronauts and cosmonauts alike are trained exhaustively for all sorts of bizarre possible scenarios. Tito was trained to visit MIR. He wasn't even given full cosmonaut training. If he is given the kind of extensive training that Glen had for the shuttle, or (more appropriately) the kind of training that the Alpha team has had before visiting the station, then more power to him. I think it's a tremendous breakthrough for a civillian to go to the ISS-- but I think it's a terrible risk to take unless he's properly prepared. He's paying for an incredible vacation, but this vacation necessarily comes with responsibilities. Lives are at stake, even if we discount the time, energy, and money that have gone into getting the ISS this far.
There are studies that differentiate between gang-related assaults and all others. In addition, the POINT of doing your own research is so that you yourself can decide which homocides are worth considering bad. If you don't want to call "gang related" killings in the same category as all other school violence, you have that perogative when you do your own statistical analysis of the data. And yes, the kind of sensationalism the media engages in is contagious.
"Citing CDC stats" is only useless if you're not sure where the subject set is coming from. The CDC does not issue statistics. It issues the results of surveys and other research it's done. This is a huge ascii file that you can make statistics out of. And make them useful and relevant. Being informed is an important prerequisite for criticizing sources.
Gun violence has been a problem throughout history. Violence among young people, and school violence in particular, is not really on the rise. The severity of school violence may be (as in, some of the shootings in the past several years have been real masscres, something that was more rare in the past) but the frequency of the incidents is not. It's just been picked up by the media and become a flash point for heated discussion.
The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (where I work) has data collected by the U.S. government and by private researchers. It's free and available to the public, and you can look at it and see (if you do the statistical analysis yourself) that this is the case. This includes the CDC data that the statistics in the article above come from. I'm not denying that this is a major problem, and one that should be addressed immediately and with a great deal of energy. I am getting tired, however, of reading about this is a new phenomenon. Every time that people say that this is a new phenomenon, they link it to other new phenomena like the Net and video games and too much cheese in one's diet.
Don't just swallow the sound bytes whole-- look into the sources and decide for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you forgot to read this part of my post:
In the meantime, NASA has done quite a bit of research [spacedaily.com] into the matter of gender differentiated responses to long duration space travel, and they haven't found anything remotely conclusive.
I'm just saying it's too quick to decide to rule out sending women, since there's not enough data to warrant it.
Well, to some extent, I pulled it out of my ass. To a different extent, my ass is particularly qualified: I'm on my way to a PhD in archaeology. I believe there is a geologic table in Merriam Webster that has dates of these periods, but I"m not positive. Regardless, I know when the boundary between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic are, and I know what the currently accepted (though, as always, subject to revision) theory as to the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens is.
By "not 'people' as they are today" I mean that, prior to the Upper Paleolithic, there was very little differentiating our ancestral hominids from other (modern or ancient) nonhuman primates. They could make tools more specified, but still were barely capable of more than a modern chimp using an anvil to crack a nut or a twig to "fish" for termites. There has been no indication of any ability to think symbolically.
Toward the end of the Middle Paleolithic (about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago) we begin to see three very important things: 1. displacement of materials over very large distances, 2. intentional human burials, and 3. evidence of collective planning and coordinating, especially in regards to hunting meat. Materials being displaced over large areas that share no boundaries indicates a capacity for symbolic displacement, or the first necessity for language. Perhaps some sort of protolanguage arose during this time. Intentional burials are the first evidence we have for any sort of symbolic act. These things all indicate the very beginnings of symbolic thought. You must admit that, since we're talking about the very beginnings of symbolic thought (and that we, currently, are capable of language and symbolic thought far beyond this level) it's only appropriate to remind everyone here that these are not "people" we're talking about as we are people today.
So, with the capacity for symbolic thought emerging 40,000 to 35,000 years ago, the appearance of something so complex as a representation of a human face at 30,000 years ago would tell us a lot. For quite a few thousand years after that point, all we currently have are uniform-looking fertility figures and stick-figures hunting elaborate animals painted on walls (yes, the limits of what we've found in the archaeological record.) Regardless, somewhere on the border between Middle and Upper Paleolithic (and where do you think these borders come from?) something changed dramatically in hominids' perceptions of the world. They gained capacity for symbolic thought-- they perhaps became capable of drawing a face and recognizing a drawing. Additionally, it is just at this time (beginning of the Upper Paleolithic) that Neanderthals go extinct, and that our own forerunners are left to dominate the hominid line. (Before this extinction, technology and art and symbolic things like burials were associated with neanderthals as well-- not just our own ancestors.)
What I got out of the article is that caves with paintings of animals in them date back nearly as far as the end of the Middle Paleolithic and beginning of the Upper. Given the faces on the floor of one of these caves, it is possible that there are others in the other caves mentioned-- the ones that date back 30,000 years. Given that possibility, we could learn quite a lot about the development of early hominids.
no, I only wrote down half of it; you have it just as backwards as I. We are uniquely suited to one another. That's what I was trying to illustrate. All of these views are one side of a coin. We are here because, of everywhere in the universe, here is where we can be best. If the earth wasn't as it is, we wouldn't Be. If we weren't as we are, the earth wouldn't be able to host us.
It's not about when we come across it. It's about when they were capable of it. That early, people were not "people" as they are today. When did they have the physiological capability and the tools to draw? When did they have a sense of the symbolic and representational enough to draw people? What are the implications of drawing people at all, when previously the cave paintings weren't thought to contain any detailed pictures of people, merely of animals? Further, were the people they were drawing real (ie, a friend or family member or...) and if not, what are the implications of drawing imaginary people?
It seems that capacity for symbolic representation began in the Upper Paleolithic. That's before 15,000 years ago, but just around 30,000 years ago (the dates in the article.) The earlier and more complex the art that we find, the more we learn about long-gone cognitive processes that preceeded our own.
The rationale for there being life elsewhere in the universe often goes like this:
1. There's life here
2. Well, we seem pretty normal and possible to me!
3. The universe is a many-splendored thing. There must be other neat planets like this out there.
4. Since we seen pretty easy to please, there must be life on those other planets!
People don't realize that it actually works the other way around. If there was going to be intelligent life just one place, well, wherever it was would have the intelligent life! To rephrase: just because we're intelligent and here doesn't mean that there are other intelligent beings elsewhere. That we're intelligent and here means that we've got good conditions for that, here. We (the intelligent life) are here and not on another planet because this planet is uniquely suited to us. About the other potential places that could harbor life-- well, who knows? The universe may be inhospitable. It may be hospitable. The fact of the matter is that we've just managed to find out whether one of our nearest neighbors has water on it. What do we know of the rest of the galaxy, really?
I totally disagree. I have had friends who have had abortions, and yes, it's traumatic. Carrying a child bourne of rape? We're talking an entirely different level of traumatic here. A rape is about the worst thing a person can endure. Way worse, alone, than the guilt and emotional trauma caused by an abortion. With an abortion on top of that, it's unthinkable-- with a child on top of that, it's unlivable. Most girls would rather kill themselves than bring a rape baby to term. Most girls I know who've been raped, that is. And I know quite a few. 1 in 5 women, after all, have been there.
I understand your view of the unborn as a full-fledged person. Do you believe that an abortion is justified in the cases where the mother would be in mortal danger from the pregnancy? Because I believe that this is a similar case.
I also think that this:
If you kill the kid to rid yourself of memory of his father, then you'd be just as justified in killing your (grown) children to rid yourself of all memories of your ex who cheated on you and left you for another woman. I don't think you'd argue that's right.
is bullshit. But that's because 1) I don't feel that an embryo is a person in the same way that an 8-year-old is and 2) I wasn't talking about purging unpleasant memories. (And even if I was, rape is lightyears beyond mere infidelity.) I was talking about the ability of a rape victim to continue with her life. Having a child changes one's life, regardless of whether it dies immediately or not for many years; regardless of whether it's raised by you or by a relative or a friend or a stranger; regardless of whether you have contact with it or not. Surviving a rape is difficult enough. Surviving a rape but finding your life irrevocably changed, now, that's something I can't conceive of living thorough.
What I'm saying is that Microsoft might start taking down your "pix of doctored nudies of Graf" or banning you because that's been ruled against in Germany. Now, you wouldn't want that, would you? Their laws may not touch you directly, but if they touch the company you're leaning on, they may as well.
If this were Wisconsin I'd be worried. Who gives a rats ass about other countries. Hell if we gave a shit we wouldn't have the death penalty, Europe doesn't. Just one more case of irrelevent news for the average US reader.
If for no other reason, it makes a difference because the internet is more global than any other medium. If an ISP stops hosting some sort of content, or starts clamping down on content in general, because Germany (or France) wants them to, then no one in Wisconsin gets special privelages unless the site wants to make an exception (...but then, the exceptions might be accessed from anywhere, so it's only a matter of time before the foreign obscene content is brought up in court locally for being displayed locally.)
Be worried, give a rats ass, because the internet does not only exist in your country. Because those rulings in other countries will begin to affect the content you have access to and the freedom you have to publish whatever you'd like online.
Yes, ok, so the "New World" doesn't seem so foreign and dangerous to you on this side of the 16th century.
Look at it this way. They had a months-long ocean voyage ahead of them. A very dangrous, months-long voyage on a tiny ship on the wide ocean (an environment in which they most certainly could not live) with a destination that's very hard to find successfully because such navigation had only been done successfully a few times in the past. (Sound familiar yet?)
When they got there, they had to contend with hostile conditions (ok, so they had air, but they also had people familiar with the territory who wanted nothing more than to kill them.) And possibly nothing to eat, or new diseases... or not seeing a person besides those with which they're travelling, for months or years at a time, if you're talking about pioneers moving west or the first settlers on the coasts.
No matter how you cut it, in the 1500s people were travelling into the unknown, with dangers as real as those that would face people on a mars-shot. They may have been different dangers, but there they were. Ok, so we wouldn't be able to get there, build our little log cabin, and start farming. But most of us today don't build log cabins and farm, anyhow. What we do is work with new materials and the latest science, and that's what we'd have to do on Mars to find ways to live. Would it be dangerous? Sure. Would that stop people? Not a chance in hell. It never has. People will always want something new and different, and potentially better and grander. People would die. Possibly lots of them. But people would keep going, given a chance.
I don't know where you read your "information," unless you're extrapolating that assumptions in some sci-fi novels are scientific facts. Women do not show significantly different bone loss than men, in studies executed to date. They most certainly would be no more toothless or fragile than men. While there are many potential differences in the ways men and women cope with the stresses of a long duration spaceflight, none of these are confirmed, and to date it seems that individual responses vary much more than gender-differentiated responses.
Regardless of who is going, they are likely to suffer some damage unless some mechanism or mechanisms are in place to help them maintain their physical fittness. Don't dismiss women until you have a good reason to. In the meantime, NASA has done quite a bit of research into the matter of gender differentiated responses to long duration space travel, and they haven't found anything remotely conclusive.
You're awesome! Somebody mod up the parent... and if you don't know the original poem, read it. :)
That's human mitocondrial DNA. The mitocondrial Eve is not our common ancestor, or even our common genetic ancestor. She is the most recent common ancester of all humans alive on earth today w.r.t. matrilineal descent. See the BBC explanation for further enlightenment. The existence of the Mitochondrial Eve is a mathematical fact (unless something like a multiple-origins theory of human evolution i.e. the human species arose independently in different geographically separated populations, and that the present-day ease of interbreeding is the result of a remarkable convergent evolution, is true. Few people subscribe to the multiple-origins theory, and the Mitochondrial Eve observation is a refutation of multiple-origins). Since she has been identified as well (as much as possible,) this is not a theory.
That said, the chances of mutation from breeding two related individuals may be higher than those of unrelated individuals, but they are not absolute certainties. Some degree of variation can be recovered, and while that may not be a huge amount of variation, it's more than they've currently got.
People can vote on whether or not they want their state executing criminals. But people cannot vote on whether or not they want abortion to be legal in their state.
Sure they can. It just hasn't come up for a vote, I guess. Since it's legal nationally, they can make it illegal in their state if the state tries to pass a bill making it so. Just like capital punishment being legal in the U.S., so it can happen everywhere, although some states, like Maryland have put a moratorium on it.
If a state wanted to abolish the death penalty, it could within that state. As some states have abolished alcohol on sundays or prostitution. If, however, abortion were illegal in the U.S., no state could make it legal.
Try this sacrifice: don't have sex till you're ready to be one. Take responsibility for your own actions, instead of killing someone else for them.
I agree with your entire comment (not just the italicised part above,) but feel the need to throw a note in here-- we're talking about restricting people's choices here (the larger conversation: whether abortion is Right.) You cannot restrict a choice or a freedom unless you know that there are no cases that fall outside your reasoning.
What about the case of a pregnant rape victim? Should she really be forced to bear not only the terror, pain and shame that comes with being the victim of such a crime, but also the burden of knowing that she's carrying part of her monster in her belly for nine months? Of knowing that she could give the child up for adoption or keep it; but she would always know that, somewhere out there, there's a being that is the product of her violation, that is part herself and part the person who commited the worst sort of crime against her.
I agree with your comments, but they are not an argument for outlawing abortion. I'm assuming (hoping) you didn't mean them to be. This is my concern: that people will read your post and think that since you're so right, since people should be responsible enough not to have a child where it is unwanted or cannot be cared for, and since people who have been irresponsible enough to have one anyhow can give it up for adoption, then abortion is unnecessarily cruel and should be done away with. There are exceptions to every rule. It is not always a matter of irresponsibility.
BBC News is now reporting that Sony researchers are experimenting with increased speech capacity. Here's one of the first papers about the increased-capacity talking Aibo project. This is the English/HTML translation of the French/PDF version (which seems to be unavailable for download) and so is a little messy. Unfortunately, Sony's Computer Research Laboratory seems to be down at the moment. As an anthropologist interested in the evolution of speech, I'm absolutely fascinated by this, and whish I knew where to find more of the speech recognition software specs.
Do androids dream of electric sheep yet?
My family lives in New York City. My sister was telling me that she had to submit to a full body search when she went to a concert at Madison Square Garden earlier this week, and I expressed a concern for her civil liberties. She told me that she didn't, of course, enjoy submitting to a full body search, but that she would gladly give up some of her freedoms in these "terrifying times" if it would even potentially be a deterrent to terrorists. The thing that she (and many other Americans) do not realize is that the laws that are being enacted to enable the authorities to infringe on her freedoms in these terrifying times are a slippery slope-- as stated in the Washington Post article, there is no "sunset," or expiration, date on these laws. I sent her a funny article from the Onion this week, and she was offended: this is not something to joke about, she said. "I'm scared right now. I see soldiers on the street corners and it makes me feel awful, but if that causes one potential terrorist to think twice about attacking me or mine, I'm glad to have them there." I don't know how to respond-- I'm glad, as well, if they're a deterrent, but it's really a question of how imminent the danger is, and whether we can ever really know how imminent danger of terrorist strikes is. If we don't know (and how could we?) I'd rather have the civil liberties. Failing that, I'd rather know that, when the fear dies down, we'll be able to restore all that we've lost.
I think that the real issue is not that these bills are passing, but that they're passing without expiration dates; that they're potentially part of a much longer-term loss of our civil liberties. That is a slippery slope that we cannot afford to start down.
That was /MY/ point; no two languages are fundamentally the same except in that they convey information and facilitate communication. Their form, manner and what is considered "beauty" vary widely. It is virtually impossible to grasp all of the complexities of one in the framework and context of another. Some may be similar (romance languages), but many spoken languages are dissimilar enough that transliteration is unintelligible. How can we ask a programming language to be the same? It's fundamentally not. It does, however, have a beauty and expressiveness all its own.
I disagree. I think that nothing is lost; simply translated. What is beautiful in English cannot be translated word-for-word into Japanese while at the same time retaining the same type of beauty, or certainly even the same form. Someone with an understanding of code as deep as his or her understanding of English (or Japanese) might be able to create a turn of phrase (or line of code) in the other language that is just as beautiful and has the same general content. This would be a translation, not a transliteration. Translation is what we're talking about. Code cannot be expressive when written with someone who barely knows the basics, just as a good, traditional haiku is an unlikely product of someone who can barely speak Japanese. Part of what makes code beautiful is its elegance. Part of the elegance of code is derived from finding a solution to a problem. Getting from point A to point B is the driving force behind scripting, the purpose for writing in code. Elegant code requires a function. Like decryption, for instance. Whether or not you use the code for its intent is beside the point. Do we appreciate "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou are more lovely and more temperate." because it makes our partners swoon?
I kind of see this as though it could be a positive step in the way of promoting the idea that fetuses are not people. Once they have been brought to term, theoretically these people should have the same rights as any identical twin, with or without medical complications. The idea of importing frozen fetuses that have been created through cloning overseas is, I think, what the government is scared of. Such distinctions are not, however, made in the bill, and they're precicely the distinctions policitians like to avoid. So we'll see.
According to the bill: "A person shall be considered to have engaged in a human cloning procedure for purposes of subsection (a) if the person transfers the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed.
somatic cell
Function: noun
Date: 1888
: one of the cells of the body that compose the tissues, organs, and
parts of that individual other than the germ cells
ANY human cell cannot be used in a cloning procedure. This means stem cell OR any specialized cell. No organs.
The bill is online. This isn't just "dangerous copies of humans"... there is research into alternatives for people who are unable to have children any other way. "It shall be unlawful for a person to engage in a human cloning procedure with the intent of implanting the resulting cellular product into a uterus." This is current research that will not go forward, funding or no funding. "A person shall be considered to have engaged in a human cloning procedure for purposes of subsection (a) if the person transfers the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed." This will be interesting.
IMB's Press Release, as well as a neat article at USA Today (believe it or not) and, finally, a very informative article at TechReview.com.
John Glenn was trained as a NASA astronaut. He was trained for emergency situations on the shuttle and was also there as a mission specialist performing experiments as any other astronaut who's not a pilot or involved in some other specialized task might be. Tito, on the other hand, is not NASA trained to be of assistance if there is an emergency situation. If there is an emergency situation in orbit, there are very few people and there is very little space to maneuver. It's very important that everyone who is able knows exactly how to deal with that situation. Astronauts and cosmonauts alike are trained exhaustively for all sorts of bizarre possible scenarios. Tito was trained to visit MIR. He wasn't even given full cosmonaut training. If he is given the kind of extensive training that Glen had for the shuttle, or (more appropriately) the kind of training that the Alpha team has had before visiting the station, then more power to him. I think it's a tremendous breakthrough for a civillian to go to the ISS-- but I think it's a terrible risk to take unless he's properly prepared. He's paying for an incredible vacation, but this vacation necessarily comes with responsibilities. Lives are at stake, even if we discount the time, energy, and money that have gone into getting the ISS this far.
There are studies that differentiate between gang-related assaults and all others. In addition, the POINT of doing your own research is so that you yourself can decide which homocides are worth considering bad. If you don't want to call "gang related" killings in the same category as all other school violence, you have that perogative when you do your own statistical analysis of the data. And yes, the kind of sensationalism the media engages in is contagious.
"Citing CDC stats" is only useless if you're not sure where the subject set is coming from. The CDC does not issue statistics. It issues the results of surveys and other research it's done. This is a huge ascii file that you can make statistics out of. And make them useful and relevant. Being informed is an important prerequisite for criticizing sources.
Gun violence has been a problem throughout history. Violence among young people, and school violence in particular, is not really on the rise. The severity of school violence may be (as in, some of the shootings in the past several years have been real masscres, something that was more rare in the past) but the frequency of the incidents is not. It's just been picked up by the media and become a flash point for heated discussion.
The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (where I work) has data collected by the U.S. government and by private researchers. It's free and available to the public, and you can look at it and see (if you do the statistical analysis yourself) that this is the case. This includes the CDC data that the statistics in the article above come from. I'm not denying that this is a major problem, and one that should be addressed immediately and with a great deal of energy. I am getting tired, however, of reading about this is a new phenomenon. Every time that people say that this is a new phenomenon, they link it to other new phenomena like the Net and video games and too much cheese in one's diet.
Don't just swallow the sound bytes whole-- look into the sources and decide for yourself.