And psychologists and endocrinologists are responding to that by saying, "If you knew this, then show us the data you have correlating testosterone response to a near identical stimulus in varying social situations."
I wasn't aware that there were people out there studying anthropological endocrinology. Feel free to link to the studies upon which they base their knowledge. Because otherwise, this "common knowledge" had not yet been established as data, and history shows many examples of common knowledge failing in light of actual empirical observation.
Even if this particular study isn't complete or perfect (I haven't read the actual paper, but only the abstract, so I cannot say), it is a start at establishing data and helping us gain an empirical understanding of how we function.
Can I be the first to say:!*(&^$*&^@!(&*)%&*)%&*1!@& For the love of DEITY$ when will researchers stop doing stupid research!
Am I the only one that hopes you are also the last to say that? You know, for a "News for Nerds" site, there seem to be quite a few people who pop up for stories like this that seem to be against research for the sake of research. You'd think such a thing would be valued on this site. These are people trying to figure out what makes human beings tick, and this research seems to be showing a correlation between the intensity of an unconscious physiological response (hormonal, in this case) to nearly identical behavior (i.e. the game) in differing social situations. That may not be a big deal to you, and in the long run it may turn out to be a very small thing in our understanding, but it still helps to expand our body of knowledge and possibly provide directions to be looking in future research. How can you call such a thing "stupid"?
And here I thought nerds were the type of people who would support the seeking of knowledge and the establishment of data.:-/
GPP is completely wrong and the parent post has it mostly right, with one small exception:
It wasn't until Oni and Halo that they shifted development to Windows-first and then Windows only.
Not quite correct. What happened during that time is that Bungie was working on Oni (and maybe Myth III?) and starting development on Halo. As far as I know, all were supposed to be simultaneous Mac and Windows releases. But, then Microsoft made the deal to buy them to develop Halo for the XBox, so Bungie (West) finished up Oni and sold it via "Gathering of Developers", MacSoft, and Rockstar Games (for the three platforms it was released on, Windows, Mac, and Playstation respectively). Bungie sold the Myth franchise to Take Two to develop Myth III. Ever since, Bungie has been exclusively developing for the XBox, and then others have come up to port Halo and Halo 2 to other platforms.
I also miss the old Bungie. But I am also fairly happy with the new Bungie.
Durrr... sorry to double comment on the same post, but I wanted to address this.
Some things count as so obvious as to not require scientific inquiry. Hot women give get males wood. You don't need to publish this to claim it, end of story.
Yes, and for centuries it was so obvious that no scientific scrutiny was required that the sun went around the earth, not the other way around. It was also completely obvious that a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter object. It was also obvious that things would get cold because the cold of the surroundings would flow into them. It was also so obvious that time passes at a constant rate, regardless of our perceptions and reference frames. It was also so obvious that humans are the only organisms to experience emotion and pain.
Obviously there are a great many things that are so obvious as to not require scientific inquiry.
Point being, a great many things are so obvious. A great many of those obvious things also turn out to be correct in light of empirical data. However, we are not allowed to treat those scientifically and draw scientific conclusions from them until they are established as empirical data. This is one of the fundamental requirements for science, and I would think people on a "news for nerds" site would get that. Taking the obvious for granted as true is exactly the kind of mentality that brings about pseudoscience. Science requires empiricism, even for the bleedingly obvious.
Evolution, my friend. If a reproductively desirable female doesn't arouse you, your genes have come to the end of their otherwise long and successful run.
I think you misunderstand what I meant by "physiological mechanisms". Just saying "evolution, my friend" does not explain anything about what is happening in the brain and body at the cellular and molecular level. Yes, we know that females arouse us. This study suggests data that brain processing for other things is inhibited. Now, what I am curious about at least, it would be interesting to know how and where (in the brain) and by what physiological mechanisms the processing is being shunted.
There is more to understanding biology than just saying, "Oh that's naturally evolved behavior." Some of us want to know exactly what has evolved and been selected for at the cellular and subcellular level.
It's embarrassing is what it is, to be turned into a drooling moron and then realise later just how stupid you sounded.
Anecdote is not, nor ever will be, the singular of "data". Sure, everyone may know this. Sure, the outcome may seem obvious to everyone. However, it is not empirical fact until it is studied and established as such. How many common sense "truths" have turned out to be not so true when properly analyzed over the history of human scientific endeavor? In the case of this study, anecdote and assumption about human behavior has now become data, and can be used as such in psychology and sociology to continue to study and describe how and why we are the way we are.
Now that we have established the phenomenon (doot dooo do-do-doot) as data, perhaps we can look into the actual physiological mechanisms which control it.
I would think that above all else, the type of people who read a "news for nerds" site would appreciate research for research sake.:-/
This leads to speculation that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.
How about the even more simple explanation of just being distracted by the beautiful woman and imagining her naked with her legs wrapped around you is taking up all of your resources? "Trying to impress" doesn't need to come into it at all (and likely doesn't because usually having your mind so completely occupied that you become a dumbass doesn't really impress people), and seems like a stretch of a conclusion to come up with. Far more likely that thought of sex have simply completely taken over the brain and body, as they so often do..
Like the old joke says, men have a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to operate one at a time.;)
Would that really require calculations to 2.5 trillion significant figures? No, seriously, I'm curious. Would anything in the universe require that degree of precision?
I text "x just won!" A red light comes on in an operations room at the NSA. ~SNIP~ (a lot of time consuming stuff) ~SNIP~ They get the alert, containing my seat number. They rush to the seat not only to find it empty but the entire stadium empty because "x just won!" and the game is over so everyone has gone home.
"Hmmmm. Maybe we haven't thought our cunning plan entirely through.:-/ "
That's a bit harsh. What kind of math are we talking about? I only ever studied math as far as algebra and geometry, so am I a subhuman?
Depends. Do you need a calculator or a cash register to tell you how much change you should get back when you pay for a total of $9.78 with a $10 bill? Do you need a calculator to figure out how many pennies you should add to that $10 bill so that you get a single quarter ($0.25 for those not accustomed to American coins) back as change? Are you amazed when a customer gives you the $10 bill and pennies and ends up with a single quarter and you don't understand how they could do that without the register telling them their change?
If your answer to any or all of those questions is "yes", then probably fall under Heinlein's definition of "subhuman".
Seriously, I've had cashiers look at me like I'm some sort of magician because I can hand them a certain amount of bills and coins to ensure that I get the least number of coins back as change. No, I don't think they are subhuman, but their inability to do simple math without a calculator boggles my mind just as much as my ability to do so boggles theirs. YMMV.:-/
I think that is "neat" and also makes me curious on how contaminated things like our blood and urine must have been to require 2 kidneys and other "non-essential" organs
Remember that kidneys aren't only for filtering waste, their other primary functions are salt and bicarbonate recovery, pH balance (getting rid of excess H+ ions using phosphates and NH3 from the glutamine -> glutamate reaction), and water recovery. In fact, with the elongated Loop of Henle, one could argue that water retention in arid environments is one of the primary functions of the human kidney. They are very good at concentrating and getting rid of nitrogenous wastes while retaining important water, salts, and bicarbonate. This is probably a product of evolving in Eastern Africa.;)
Point being, having two kidneys is probably less due to toxicity of blood and more due to efficient water and salt recovery as organisms moved from aquatic to terrestrial environments. Just sayin'.:)
Nuclear subs are just one huge Faraday cage, right? Right? No really, they are... aren't they?
Radio waves don't propagate far under water, as it absorbs those frequencies. If an enemy is close enough to detect your wifi or bluetooth, they are close enough to have already found you on passive sonar.
It worked fine here. Safari Version 4.0.2 (5530.19), MacOS X 10.5.7. However, like you said, it showed nothing until the fonts were downloaded. At least in FireFox3.5, it showed the text using generic fonts until the special fonts downloaded and loaded, though this did make reading the text a bit jarring until all of the fonts loaded.
There's a great deal of science that's not currently or possibly ever falsifiable.
Please give examples. And remember, falsifiable simply means "can be proven false", not must or will be proven false. If we can set criteria by which a proposition can be proven false, then it is falsifiable, regardless of whether or not those criteria ever actually happen.
For example, the Theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection and Genetic Variation is falsifiable. There are many ways to falsify it. Spontaneous generation would falsify it. Lamarckian evolution would falsify it. A lizard giving birth to a chicken would falsify it. Finding the bones of a human among the bones of a dinosaur both being radiologically dated to 65 million years ago would certainly falsify it. etc. (note well, if any of these things were to happen, the theory would be modified to try to account for it, but the modifications would also be falsifiable). However, the statement "An omnipotent being exists" is not falsifiable, because there is no criteria by which you can prove it false, as it, being omnipotent, can always alter the rules of the game.
So, with that in mind, please provide examples of science that are not falsifiable.
The irony of statements like this is that much of science starts as a hunch - - a belief that something is true, which then gets tested.
Incorrect. Science starts with observation. Then, it follows observation with a question, usually something along the lines of "Why/How is this happening?". Then it follows the question with possible, testable answers to that question (a good scientist will try to think of more than one plausible hypothesis). Then it follows the possible answers with a test, trying to control as many variables as possible. It then either rejects or tentatively accepts those answers pending further data. It then repeats the process.
The longer an answer goes without contradictory evidence coming to light, the stronger that answer is. Now, notice that, in the entire method, there is no place for believing something is "true". The only thing science says is "This explanation, which CAN be proven false, has not yet been proven false." There are no assumptions of truth anywhere (except for the most basic assumption of science, which is that empirical observations are representative of reality, and belief in that assumption is not requisite to use science)
Science only acknowledges what it can prove is either true or false.
No. Science cannot prove anything true. This is impossible, because it is impossible to observe every possible factor that affects an observation. The best science can do is reduce the likelihood that a hypothesis is false, or it can prove a hypothesis false. That is, science does not prove, it only supports or refutes.
Oh, and as for the GPP, the empirical observations that science starts with are known as "facts".
A newborn is not "self-sustaining". Hell, I know a few 30-year olds that are not "self-sustaining". What about premature babies that require incubation? They are not "self-sustaining". Are they available for experimentation?
Also, embryos in a petri dish can survive outside the womb about as long as newborn.
I suspect that the GPP was saying "self-sustaining" as in "able to survive without being directly attached to the mother's life support". A newborn can obtain oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide and other metabolic waste without having to be connected via an umbilical to the mother. One's take on that kind of alters the scape of your other questions. A premature birth can survive, grow, and develop without being directly attached to the mother's life-support. An embryo in a petri dish cannot, as we do not have the technology or knowledge to artificially replicate a womb.
significant nervous system complexity (somewhere between 9 to 20 weeks).
9 to 20 weeks is a big range. I'm guessing you are setting it so broad because you don't know.
Again I am assuming the GPP used such a big range for a number of reasons: different individuals will develop at different rates, different people will disagree what constitutes "significant nervous system complexity", etc. Therefore your example using an exact time measurement is inapplicable.
What happens in 20 years if we find out that embryos can feel pain without a nervous system? My point is that too many times, we've thought "things" couldn't feel pain or were labeled as not or less-than human with horrific results. We should have learned by now that man is not perfect enough to decide who deserves basic rights or what is human.
This is a nonsense question. To "feel pain" you need three things: 1.) a sensor to detect damage, 2.) a transmission system to send that information to 3.) a processor to interpret that data. In mammals, this requires a nervous system. It is part of our biology. No nervous system, no pain.
May I ask a question: are you against In Vitro Fertilization? In such situations, as has been mentioned numerous times, several eggs are fertilized, a select few most viable embryos are selected for implantation, while all others which may or may not be viable are destroyed. Is this murder in your eyes? I'm not trying to jump on your case, I'm just trying to gauge your consistency.
I was under the impression that the Earth's water precipitated out of the original accretion disc as the early earth cooled. That is, everything accreted, and then as the molten rock and surrounding gases cooled to form a sold surface, the water that became the Earth's oceans and such also cooled and condensed, and basically rained down on the planet over time.
Has there been some reason to doubt this? i.e. evidence that refutes this hypothesis?
Because what happened in Honduras was legitimate by their constitution (the president was committing TREASON according to article 4 of their constitution, therefore it was legal for the Honduran Supreme Court to vote to remove him and for the military to execute that). It is not exactly a military coup, because once the president was removed, the next in line was legally put in his place to serve out the remainder of the term until elections next year.
So, in Iran, you have a corrupt government trying to steal the election from the people and implement their own de facto dictatorship. The people are standing up against that. In Honduras, you have a president defying the law and committing treason by trying to set up a way for himself to become a dictator, and then being legally removed from power by the government he was trying to betray. Very different situations.
Indeed. This is the primary reason I have never used Pandora and why I did end up using Last.fm. Pandora has never been accessible to me from where I've been in the world. With Last.fm no longer being free to listen on, options are limited, though, if you continue using scrobbling, you can still use Last.fm to find some decent recommendations to check out. Then you can turn to other sources to sample that music.
Though it isn't the same thing, in that you have no control over what you listen to, I'm going to go ahead and give a shout out to Triple J Radio, a radio station out of Melbourne, Australia that plays a wide range of music and very little top-40 crap.
If anyone is looking for legal free music, it is worth surfing around Archive.org and/or LegalTorrents. There are a lot of good independent artists out there giving their music away.
Yes. Yes I would. Absolutely, without a doubt. Where do I sign up?
Spending all the money fixing this world does nothing to get all of our eggs out of the basket, and if anything harms that basket, then we are screwed. To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction. You may not care about the long term survival of the human species (or any other species), but some of us do, and the best way to increase our chances of survival is to spread out. We aren't going to do that by spending all of our money and resources here. We aren't even going to do that by pussy-footing around sending only robotic explorers to other places (as much as admire these feats of engineering and the data they bring back). We are only going to do that by getting out there and doing it ourselves. And it will only become cheaper, easier, and safer as we do it more and more and more.
So, one way ticket to Mars? Titan? Points outward? HELL YES. I wouldn't hesitate to accept such an opportunity, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
Only hemoglobin transports oxygen to the tissues, it does not transport CO2 in any way shape or form. CO2 will influence the affinity oxygen has for hemoglobin, and in the presence of higher concentrations of carbonic acid, hemoglobin more readily releases oxygen to the surrounding tissues.
Not true. A hemoglobin can carry a single CO2 molecule (as opposed to the 4 molecules of O2 it can carry). However, since cellular respiration has a 1:1 ratio of O2 and CO2, the other 75% of the CO2 is carried as carbonic acid / bicarbonate. Anyway, the bonding of protons and a CO2 to hemoglobin decrease its affinity for O2, causing it to release the O2 in the capillaries near body cells where the pH will be lower due to the constant production of CO2 from respiration. A.K.A. the Bohr Effect.
Usually my sense of smell does but one thing: annoy me.
I highly doubt that. You just don't realize what your sense of smell is doing for you. For example, about 70% of what you think of as "taste" when you are eating food comes from your sense of smell. Without a sense of smell, your food will taste rather bland and you probably wouldn't be able to appreciate the more subtle flavors (and definitely the aromas) of various foods. Try it yourself. Next time you are stuffed up with a cold, try eating one of your favorite foods and see if it is still as full of flavor as you remember.
While humans don't use pheromones as actively as other animals, the sense of smell still plays a big part in arousal (and in stopping arousal, to be fair). Good smells make sex better. You do want to have better sex, don't you? (insert the "oh wait, this is slashdot" quips here).
And finally, all those things that annoy you about sense of smell are probably also helping to save your life. It lets you know that something is wrong (bad air, bad food, bad place, etc).
So, for a person's overall quality of life, I'd say that the loss of the sense of smell is a pretty big deal. It is not one of the senses I would want to lose. I'd rather lose my ability to hear.
Fair enough. However, to that point, I can only ask this: If Apple is in the same level of security and security vulnerabilities now as Microsoft was in 1998, then where are the exploits in the wild? So far, we have only seen a few trojans in the wild which dupe the users into typing in their own passwords (something that was notably absent in Win98 and Me...i.e. the need to dupe the user into typing in a password to exploit the system) to install the Trojan. What we did see in Windows in 1998 (and beyond) were viruses that would self-propagate through weaknesses in the email clients, worms that would exploit open services, and trojans that would dupe the users.
If Apple is now where Microsoft was, then where are all of those? They simply aren't there. You can count the exploited weaknesses of MacOS X on one hand, while you would need the hands of the entire population of a reasonably sized town to count the exploited weaknesses of Windows in 1998.
So, again I say that Apple is not now like Windows was in 1998 from a security standpoint.
Now, is this because of low marketshare? Or lack of available exploits? Or more difficulty in getting users to fall for those exploits? Or something else? I can't say. However, no matter how you paint it, Apple is certainly not in the same position as Microsoft was in 1998, even at least in the level of desire to exploit the system.
Slashdot Mirror
And psychologists and endocrinologists are responding to that by saying, "If you knew this, then show us the data you have correlating testosterone response to a near identical stimulus in varying social situations."
I wasn't aware that there were people out there studying anthropological endocrinology. Feel free to link to the studies upon which they base their knowledge. Because otherwise, this "common knowledge" had not yet been established as data, and history shows many examples of common knowledge failing in light of actual empirical observation.
Even if this particular study isn't complete or perfect (I haven't read the actual paper, but only the abstract, so I cannot say), it is a start at establishing data and helping us gain an empirical understanding of how we function.
Can I be the first to say:!*(&^$*&^@!(&*)%&*)%&*1!@&
For the love of DEITY$ when will researchers stop doing stupid research!
Am I the only one that hopes you are also the last to say that? You know, for a "News for Nerds" site, there seem to be quite a few people who pop up for stories like this that seem to be against research for the sake of research. You'd think such a thing would be valued on this site. These are people trying to figure out what makes human beings tick, and this research seems to be showing a correlation between the intensity of an unconscious physiological response (hormonal, in this case) to nearly identical behavior (i.e. the game) in differing social situations. That may not be a big deal to you, and in the long run it may turn out to be a very small thing in our understanding, but it still helps to expand our body of knowledge and possibly provide directions to be looking in future research. How can you call such a thing "stupid"?
And here I thought nerds were the type of people who would support the seeking of knowledge and the establishment of data. :-/
GPP is completely wrong and the parent post has it mostly right, with one small exception:
It wasn't until Oni and Halo that they shifted development to Windows-first and then Windows only.
Not quite correct. What happened during that time is that Bungie was working on Oni (and maybe Myth III?) and starting development on Halo. As far as I know, all were supposed to be simultaneous Mac and Windows releases. But, then Microsoft made the deal to buy them to develop Halo for the XBox, so Bungie (West) finished up Oni and sold it via "Gathering of Developers", MacSoft, and Rockstar Games (for the three platforms it was released on, Windows, Mac, and Playstation respectively). Bungie sold the Myth franchise to Take Two to develop Myth III. Ever since, Bungie has been exclusively developing for the XBox, and then others have come up to port Halo and Halo 2 to other platforms.
I also miss the old Bungie. But I am also fairly happy with the new Bungie.
Durrr... sorry to double comment on the same post, but I wanted to address this.
Some things count as so obvious as to not require scientific inquiry. Hot women give get males wood. You don't need
to publish this to claim it, end of story.
Yes, and for centuries it was so obvious that no scientific scrutiny was required that the sun went around the earth, not the other way around. It was also completely obvious that a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter object. It was also obvious that things would get cold because the cold of the surroundings would flow into them. It was also so obvious that time passes at a constant rate, regardless of our perceptions and reference frames. It was also so obvious that humans are the only organisms to experience emotion and pain.
Obviously there are a great many things that are so obvious as to not require scientific inquiry.
Point being, a great many things are so obvious. A great many of those obvious things also turn out to be correct in light of empirical data. However, we are not allowed to treat those scientifically and draw scientific conclusions from them until they are established as empirical data. This is one of the fundamental requirements for science, and I would think people on a "news for nerds" site would get that. Taking the obvious for granted as true is exactly the kind of mentality that brings about pseudoscience. Science requires empiricism, even for the bleedingly obvious.
Evolution, my friend. If a reproductively desirable female doesn't arouse you, your
genes have come to the end of their otherwise long and successful run.
I think you misunderstand what I meant by "physiological mechanisms". Just saying "evolution, my friend" does not explain anything about what is happening in the brain and body at the cellular and molecular level. Yes, we know that females arouse us. This study suggests data that brain processing for other things is inhibited. Now, what I am curious about at least, it would be interesting to know how and where (in the brain) and by what physiological mechanisms the processing is being shunted.
There is more to understanding biology than just saying, "Oh that's naturally evolved behavior." Some of us want to know exactly what has evolved and been selected for at the cellular and subcellular level.
I could have told you that.
It's embarrassing is what it is, to be turned into a drooling moron and then realise later just how stupid you sounded.
Anecdote is not, nor ever will be, the singular of "data". Sure, everyone may know this. Sure, the outcome may seem obvious to everyone. However, it is not empirical fact until it is studied and established as such. How many common sense "truths" have turned out to be not so true when properly analyzed over the history of human scientific endeavor? In the case of this study, anecdote and assumption about human behavior has now become data, and can be used as such in psychology and sociology to continue to study and describe how and why we are the way we are.
Now that we have established the phenomenon (doot dooo do-do-doot) as data, perhaps we can look into the actual physiological mechanisms which control it.
I would think that above all else, the type of people who read a "news for nerds" site would appreciate research for research sake. :-/
From TFSummary:
How about the even more simple explanation of just being distracted by the beautiful woman and imagining her naked with her legs wrapped around you is taking up all of your resources? "Trying to impress" doesn't need to come into it at all (and likely doesn't because usually having your mind so completely occupied that you become a dumbass doesn't really impress people), and seems like a stretch of a conclusion to come up with. Far more likely that thought of sex have simply completely taken over the brain and body, as they so often do..
Like the old joke says, men have a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to operate one at a time. ;)
640 tonnes of lift capacity ought to be enough for anyone. ;)
Would that really require calculations to 2.5 trillion significant figures? No, seriously, I'm curious. Would anything in the universe require that degree of precision?
I text "x just won!" A red light comes on in an operations room at the NSA. ~SNIP~ (a lot of time consuming stuff) ~SNIP~ They get the alert, containing my seat number. They rush to the seat not only to find it empty but the entire stadium empty because "x just won!" and the game is over so everyone has gone home.
"Hmmmm. Maybe we haven't thought our cunning plan entirely through. :-/ "
T, FTFY. ;)
That's a bit harsh. What kind of math are we talking about? I only ever studied math as far as algebra and geometry, so am I a subhuman?
Depends. Do you need a calculator or a cash register to tell you how much change you should get back when you pay for a total of $9.78 with a $10 bill? Do you need a calculator to figure out how many pennies you should add to that $10 bill so that you get a single quarter ($0.25 for those not accustomed to American coins) back as change? Are you amazed when a customer gives you the $10 bill and pennies and ends up with a single quarter and you don't understand how they could do that without the register telling them their change?
If your answer to any or all of those questions is "yes", then probably fall under Heinlein's definition of "subhuman".
Seriously, I've had cashiers look at me like I'm some sort of magician because I can hand them a certain amount of bills and coins to ensure that I get the least number of coins back as change. No, I don't think they are subhuman, but their inability to do simple math without a calculator boggles my mind just as much as my ability to do so boggles theirs. YMMV. :-/
I think that is "neat" and also makes me curious on how contaminated things like our blood and urine must have been to require 2 kidneys and other "non-essential" organs
Remember that kidneys aren't only for filtering waste, their other primary functions are salt and bicarbonate recovery, pH balance (getting rid of excess H+ ions using phosphates and NH3 from the glutamine -> glutamate reaction), and water recovery. In fact, with the elongated Loop of Henle, one could argue that water retention in arid environments is one of the primary functions of the human kidney. They are very good at concentrating and getting rid of nitrogenous wastes while retaining important water, salts, and bicarbonate. This is probably a product of evolving in Eastern Africa. ;)
Point being, having two kidneys is probably less due to toxicity of blood and more due to efficient water and salt recovery as organisms moved from aquatic to terrestrial environments. Just sayin'. :)
Nuclear subs are just one huge Faraday cage, right? Right? No really, they are... aren't they?
Radio waves don't propagate far under water, as it absorbs those frequencies. If an enemy is close enough to detect your wifi or bluetooth, they are close enough to have already found you on passive sonar.
It worked fine here. Safari Version 4.0.2 (5530.19), MacOS X 10.5.7. However, like you said, it showed nothing until the fonts were downloaded. At least in FireFox3.5, it showed the text using generic fonts until the special fonts downloaded and loaded, though this did make reading the text a bit jarring until all of the fonts loaded.
was the one who tagged this on drugs? hardware? power?
It's because the cats are drilling. (watch from about 1:24)
There's a great deal of science that's not currently or possibly ever falsifiable.
Please give examples. And remember, falsifiable simply means "can be proven false", not must or will be proven false. If we can set criteria by which a proposition can be proven false, then it is falsifiable, regardless of whether or not those criteria ever actually happen.
For example, the Theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection and Genetic Variation is falsifiable. There are many ways to falsify it. Spontaneous generation would falsify it. Lamarckian evolution would falsify it. A lizard giving birth to a chicken would falsify it. Finding the bones of a human among the bones of a dinosaur both being radiologically dated to 65 million years ago would certainly falsify it. etc. (note well, if any of these things were to happen, the theory would be modified to try to account for it, but the modifications would also be falsifiable). However, the statement "An omnipotent being exists" is not falsifiable, because there is no criteria by which you can prove it false, as it, being omnipotent, can always alter the rules of the game.
So, with that in mind, please provide examples of science that are not falsifiable.
The irony of statements like this is that much of science starts as a hunch - - a belief that something is true, which then gets tested.
Incorrect. Science starts with observation. Then, it follows observation with a question, usually something along the lines of "Why/How is this happening?". Then it follows the question with possible, testable answers to that question (a good scientist will try to think of more than one plausible hypothesis). Then it follows the possible answers with a test, trying to control as many variables as possible. It then either rejects or tentatively accepts those answers pending further data. It then repeats the process.
The longer an answer goes without contradictory evidence coming to light, the stronger that answer is. Now, notice that, in the entire method, there is no place for believing something is "true". The only thing science says is "This explanation, which CAN be proven false, has not yet been proven false." There are no assumptions of truth anywhere (except for the most basic assumption of science, which is that empirical observations are representative of reality, and belief in that assumption is not requisite to use science)
Science only acknowledges what it can prove is either true or false.
No. Science cannot prove anything true. This is impossible, because it is impossible to observe every possible factor that affects an observation. The best science can do is reduce the likelihood that a hypothesis is false, or it can prove a hypothesis false. That is, science does not prove, it only supports or refutes.
Oh, and as for the GPP, the empirical observations that science starts with are known as "facts".
A few things:
A newborn is not "self-sustaining". Hell, I know a few 30-year olds that are not "self-sustaining". What about premature babies that require incubation? They are not "self-sustaining". Are they available for experimentation?
Also, embryos in a petri dish can survive outside the womb about as long as newborn.
I suspect that the GPP was saying "self-sustaining" as in "able to survive without being directly attached to the mother's life support". A newborn can obtain oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide and other metabolic waste without having to be connected via an umbilical to the mother. One's take on that kind of alters the scape of your other questions. A premature birth can survive, grow, and develop without being directly attached to the mother's life-support. An embryo in a petri dish cannot, as we do not have the technology or knowledge to artificially replicate a womb.
significant nervous system complexity (somewhere between 9 to 20 weeks).
9 to 20 weeks is a big range. I'm guessing you are setting it so broad because you don't know.
Again I am assuming the GPP used such a big range for a number of reasons: different individuals will develop at different rates, different people will disagree what constitutes "significant nervous system complexity", etc. Therefore your example using an exact time measurement is inapplicable.
What happens in 20 years if we find out that embryos can feel pain without a nervous system? My point is that too many times, we've thought "things" couldn't feel pain or were labeled as not or less-than human with horrific results. We should have learned by now that man is not perfect enough to decide who deserves basic rights or what is human.
This is a nonsense question. To "feel pain" you need three things: 1.) a sensor to detect damage, 2.) a transmission system to send that information to 3.) a processor to interpret that data. In mammals, this requires a nervous system. It is part of our biology. No nervous system, no pain.
May I ask a question: are you against In Vitro Fertilization? In such situations, as has been mentioned numerous times, several eggs are fertilized, a select few most viable embryos are selected for implantation, while all others which may or may not be viable are destroyed. Is this murder in your eyes? I'm not trying to jump on your case, I'm just trying to gauge your consistency.
I was under the impression that the Earth's water precipitated out of the original accretion disc as the early earth cooled. That is, everything accreted, and then as the molten rock and surrounding gases cooled to form a sold surface, the water that became the Earth's oceans and such also cooled and condensed, and basically rained down on the planet over time.
Has there been some reason to doubt this? i.e. evidence that refutes this hypothesis?
Because what happened in Honduras was legitimate by their constitution (the president was committing TREASON according to article 4 of their constitution, therefore it was legal for the Honduran Supreme Court to vote to remove him and for the military to execute that). It is not exactly a military coup, because once the president was removed, the next in line was legally put in his place to serve out the remainder of the term until elections next year.
So, in Iran, you have a corrupt government trying to steal the election from the people and implement their own de facto dictatorship. The people are standing up against that. In Honduras, you have a president defying the law and committing treason by trying to set up a way for himself to become a dictator, and then being legally removed from power by the government he was trying to betray. Very different situations.
Indeed. This is the primary reason I have never used Pandora and why I did end up using Last.fm. Pandora has never been accessible to me from where I've been in the world. With Last.fm no longer being free to listen on, options are limited, though, if you continue using scrobbling, you can still use Last.fm to find some decent recommendations to check out. Then you can turn to other sources to sample that music.
Though it isn't the same thing, in that you have no control over what you listen to, I'm going to go ahead and give a shout out to Triple J Radio, a radio station out of Melbourne, Australia that plays a wide range of music and very little top-40 crap.
If anyone is looking for legal free music, it is worth surfing around Archive.org and/or LegalTorrents. There are a lot of good independent artists out there giving their music away.
Would you want to live on titan?
Yes. Yes I would. Absolutely, without a doubt. Where do I sign up?
Spending all the money fixing this world does nothing to get all of our eggs out of the basket, and if anything harms that basket, then we are screwed. To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction. You may not care about the long term survival of the human species (or any other species), but some of us do, and the best way to increase our chances of survival is to spread out. We aren't going to do that by spending all of our money and resources here. We aren't even going to do that by pussy-footing around sending only robotic explorers to other places (as much as admire these feats of engineering and the data they bring back). We are only going to do that by getting out there and doing it ourselves. And it will only become cheaper, easier, and safer as we do it more and more and more.
So, one way ticket to Mars? Titan? Points outward? HELL YES. I wouldn't hesitate to accept such an opportunity, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
Only hemoglobin transports oxygen to the tissues, it does not transport CO2 in any way shape or form. CO2 will influence the affinity oxygen has for hemoglobin, and in the presence of higher concentrations of carbonic acid, hemoglobin more readily releases oxygen to the surrounding tissues.
Not true. A hemoglobin can carry a single CO2 molecule (as opposed to the 4 molecules of O2 it can carry). However, since cellular respiration has a 1:1 ratio of O2 and CO2, the other 75% of the CO2 is carried as carbonic acid / bicarbonate. Anyway, the bonding of protons and a CO2 to hemoglobin decrease its affinity for O2, causing it to release the O2 in the capillaries near body cells where the pH will be lower due to the constant production of CO2 from respiration. A.K.A. the Bohr Effect.
Usually my sense of smell does but one thing: annoy me.
I highly doubt that. You just don't realize what your sense of smell is doing for you. For example, about 70% of what you think of as "taste" when you are eating food comes from your sense of smell. Without a sense of smell, your food will taste rather bland and you probably wouldn't be able to appreciate the more subtle flavors (and definitely the aromas) of various foods. Try it yourself. Next time you are stuffed up with a cold, try eating one of your favorite foods and see if it is still as full of flavor as you remember.
While humans don't use pheromones as actively as other animals, the sense of smell still plays a big part in arousal (and in stopping arousal, to be fair). Good smells make sex better. You do want to have better sex, don't you? (insert the "oh wait, this is slashdot" quips here).
And finally, all those things that annoy you about sense of smell are probably also helping to save your life. It lets you know that something is wrong (bad air, bad food, bad place, etc).
So, for a person's overall quality of life, I'd say that the loss of the sense of smell is a pretty big deal. It is not one of the senses I would want to lose. I'd rather lose my ability to hear.
In fairness, the post you replied to said that
Fair enough. However, to that point, I can only ask this: If Apple is in the same level of security and security vulnerabilities now as Microsoft was in 1998, then where are the exploits in the wild? So far, we have only seen a few trojans in the wild which dupe the users into typing in their own passwords (something that was notably absent in Win98 and Me...i.e. the need to dupe the user into typing in a password to exploit the system) to install the Trojan. What we did see in Windows in 1998 (and beyond) were viruses that would self-propagate through weaknesses in the email clients, worms that would exploit open services, and trojans that would dupe the users.
If Apple is now where Microsoft was, then where are all of those? They simply aren't there. You can count the exploited weaknesses of MacOS X on one hand, while you would need the hands of the entire population of a reasonably sized town to count the exploited weaknesses of Windows in 1998.
So, again I say that Apple is not now like Windows was in 1998 from a security standpoint.
Now, is this because of low marketshare? Or lack of available exploits? Or more difficulty in getting users to fall for those exploits? Or something else? I can't say. However, no matter how you paint it, Apple is certainly not in the same position as Microsoft was in 1998, even at least in the level of desire to exploit the system.