I only ever have religious feelings, like I used to have when I was a kid, at one time, and that is during epileptic seizures. Along with a lot of other inappropriate emotions. Some nuclei in the limbic system get fried by the synchronized currents. Of course I'm always pretty out of it at that point, but that's about what you'd expect.
If someone told you they created a solid state device that could convert light energy directly into electrical energy would you believe them? Yeah, probably, because you have seen these in action already. They are on just about every calculator out there now. But there was a time when they were just an idea and the topic of fiction. The notion of using heat is so different? Surely the technology is quite different I'm sure, but I would not be quite so quick to be skeptical.
The Earth receives high energy, low entropy photons from the sun. It reradiates low energy, high entropy photons back into space. These reradiated photons are not very useful in a 300 K environment, which is in thermodynamic equilibrium with them. This is similar to how you'd find it much harder to extract work from sunlight if you were on the surface of the sun, an environment in thermodynamic equilibrium with that light. (Yes I know everything would melt you nitpickers but the point remains.)
The reason those calculators work is because they are exchanging energy with the sun's surface and they are not in thermodynamic equilibrium with it. On the earth's surface, if you try to make a solar cell to catch low infrared from objects on our own planet, you'll find that your cell radiates away the photons you are trying to capture, just by being at room temperature.
Ha ha, dream on. You're going to get Hobbit Returns, The Hobbit's Revenge, and Hobbit Resurrection.
Sam is also going to get his own spinoff movie, Samwise (the Legend of Sam Gamgee). They'll also make Gandalf in Love.
And then, and then, just to piss everyone off and make some more money, they're going to hire a bunch of unemployed crap writers to produce a novelization of each of these movies, regardless of whether each film is already based on a Tolkien work or not. Just like that novelization they produced of Planet of the Apes, a movie already "loosely based" on the novel by French author Pierre Boulle.
Hasn't this been done a million times before? Wouldn't it be easily performed with any sort of sound recorder?
Like the scene in Wargames when Broderick's character asks the dumb guard to let him go to the bathroom and he uses a microrecorder to record tones from the keypad.
The kid in Terminator 2 used a similar technique to rip off an ATM. Even Hollywood understands man-in-the-middle attacks.
My wife and I use only open source sexual positions. We get them from a community where people experiment with new positions and publish the ones they find so that free, unfettered access to quality sexual positions can be enjoyed by all.
Now with my mistress, I have to stick to the LGPL, or Limited GNU Public License, since that's a more discreet relationship and I can't require her to divulge all her private information. The LGPL only requires documentation of who she is, how other guys can get in touch with her, and the details of how I "link" her.
More a duty than a right, actually: The duty to help establish the rule of law. Sure, the trial was a circus, and that's because the defendants decided to use it for one last round of grandstanding and trying to look important. Saddam knew the jig was up and all he could hope for was to stall as long as possible.
So basically they got the announcement out in time for the U.S. elections that he's going to die. In a few days they'll have the charges ready, i.e. for what.
Even though the verdict won't be ready for a couple days, the death sentence just had to be announced Sunday, for some reason.
these days the US government is far more careful to see to the legalities of a situation.
The melting of the ice sheet floating in the Arctic Ocean will not change sea level.
Not true- the water is salty. The effective meltwater contribution per kg of meltwater is not 100% by weight as it would be with ice melting on land, but it's not 0% either as it would be with ice floating in fresh water. It will be 2.5% because ocean water is 2.5% denser than fresh water. For more information here is a Slashdot comment on ice melting in salt water that I wrote a year ago.
This is a lot better than 100%- but it still means you can take the total volume of the floating Arctic ice, divide it by 40, and get the weight of Greenland ice that will raise sea levels by a similar amount by melting. Or another way to look at it- choose a sliver of ocean 9 degrees of longitude wide, and consider all the ice floating in there. For purposes of sea level calculation, you can effectively disregard the meltwater contribution of the rest of the Arctic ice if you consider the ice floating in that sliver as contributing 100% by weight, since 9 degrees is 1/40th of 360. (Assuming the ice cover in your longitude range is representative. etc.) If you correct for ice thickness, which I'm too lazy to do, you can determine the area of the "Greenland" that is melting.
So, gassing hundreds because they are against you politically is completely on the same level as providing evidence, having a trial, finding guilty, sentencing said man?
This is a dishonest comparison. You are leaving out the fact that even having this trial at all required a military intervention that resulted in at least 45,000 civilian deaths.
Plus, one has to consider that this is a show trial, of a country's former leader, in a court of a puppet government with no political legitimacy, staged by an invading foreign force, in order to influence their elections at home, with a guaranteed death sentence because of his political resurgence once that foreign force leaves. It's not on the same level as gassing a hundred Kurds, but that means nothing. This is surreal on plenty of levels.
Remember, it only has to do with living long enough to have lots of babies. After that, you don't really matter to evolution.
Worker bees and worker ants don't have babies by definition. Don't bees and ants evolve sophisticated worker traits? How can the workers not "matter to evolution"?
Enough with the BS political scare stories. Yes, you Americans want to get all excited about your coming election, but can you spare us the drama?
Oh yeah? Saddam Hussein, a former head of state, is about to get sentenced to death just in time for our election.
Just tell me who's gotten a death sentence right before the elections in your piddly little country! Certainly no former foreign heads of state I'll imagine!
"When fat loads like Rush Limbaugh and hysterics like Sean Hannity have long been forgotten, when harpies like Ann Coulter and the ugly bigotry of Michael "Weiner" Savage are long behind us, history will remember the Presidency of George W. Bush as a danger to America and a near-disaster."
...or as the great saviour of the American people. History is written by the winners, after all.
I think you're referring to introns which are, in effect, taken out of the equation as DNA replication only looks at the exons.
Actually I'm not sure that introns, since they are intergenic, fall under the rubric of what has been called "junk DNA" at all. Notice I'm putting it in quotes to avoid a dozen posts from nitpickers whining about the term "junk DNA".
However I wouldn't call them junk as they might do something -- otherwise what's the point of keeping them around? Maybe they are like a versioning control system so that different older DNA patterns aren't tried again.
Introns are an unavoidable side effect of the way evolution works with respect to DNA. When we simulate evolution and natural selection using genetic programming in computers, our algorithms are plagued with a profusion of introns as well. It's very difficult to evolve successfully without them. If the "instruction set" supports a JMP of some sort, then evolution can experiment with putting the JMPs in various places just like other instructions, so that you jump over sections of "code" which might turn out to not really be needed anyway right now. DNA has a clumsy JMP mechanism, it works more like/* and */ around introns.
Then again maybe they do do something, like control gene regulation.
They are known to be involved in gene regulation. They create splice variants, different versions of mRNA for a single gene. For example sexual differentiation in Drosophila is regulated by a protein called sex-lethal or sxl. During embryological development in females, a repressor protein covers a splicing signal sequence (the */ bases) at the start of one of the middle exons in sxl, hiding it from the spliceosomes. This prevents the exon from making it into the finished mRNA after the other exons are spliced together (the exon gets junked along with the two introns on either end of it). The repressor protein is not present in males and so they create an mRNA strand for sxl that includes the exon- the presence of which renders the finished protein inactive.
What about TERT??? Dont we use reverse transcriptase for telomere repair?
Well that's not the same kind of "reverse transcriptase".
TERT has the job of making DNA molecules longer after replication (telomere lengthening). It appends a sequence of 5'-TTAGGG (a telomere) over and over to the 3' end of a chromosome. To do this, it has an RNA template molecule inside itself with a sequence complimentary to TTAGGG, offset and repeated twice: 3'-CAAUCCCAAUC-5'. The left end of the template aligns to the end of the chromosome and hybridizes to the TTAGGG on the end. Then a new TTAGGG hybridizes to the second half of the template, is bound to the chromosome, and TERT disengages to repeat the process with another TTAGGG chunk. It's a pretty clever implementation actually. You could probably have it repeat any six base monomer other than TTAGGG by changing the RNA template molecule that it uses. Some other species use a different six base sequence for their telomeres.
This technically counts as converting RNA to DNA, so the enzyme is called "telomerase reverse transcriptase". But it's not appending any coding DNA, it's just adding TTAGGG over and over again to give structural integrity to the chromosome. Usually "reverse transcriptase" refers to a family of enzymes with a viral origin that share ancestry and work by converting viral coding RNA into DNA with no proofreading mechanism and a high rate of error.
It's most commonly used by retroviruses along with integrase (used by viruses to splice crud into your DNA) but retrotransposons also use it to jump around. These are genetic parasite sequences that can move around in the genome and use reverse transcriptase to make copies of themselves. LINE (long interspersed element) is a retrotransposon about 5000 bases long that inserts copies of itself all over the place. The human genome now has about 900,000 copies of LINE- fully 21% of the genome. Another 11% of the genome is SINE (short interspersed element) elements. SINE is a 500 base or less sequence. LINE has actual coding DNA in it for something that works like integrase and reverse transcriptase. That lets it copy itself along with its adjacent sequence, and insert the copy in some random place in your DNA. SINEs don't have any coding DNA- they hitch a ride along with the LINEs when they get copied, so they're parasitizing the parasites.
"Only 3% of the genome is genes, the rest is junk DNA..." Based on what? We only JUST mapped out the 3% that encodes protiens (the genes). Science does not know what the rest of the DNA does or does not do. There is certainly no study that I can find that offers proof that it is unused. It's the furthering of the trend of treating ignorance as if it were knowledge. If they had intellectual honesty, instead of proclaiming DNA 97% junk, they'd proclaim themselves 97% ignorant. Labeling of it as "junk," especially in our infancy, or rather fetushood, of understanding DNA, is the absolute pinnacle of scientific arrogance. Maybe next they'll look up at the sky, and seeing clear proof of life around one star, and none around the others, declare all the rest "junk stars."
Dude, I'll just refer you to the Wikipedia page on Junk DNA (the bold tags are mine):
In molecular biology, "junk" DNA is a collective label for the portions of the DNA sequence of a chromosome or a genome for which no function has yet been identified. About 97% of the human genome has been designated as "junk", including most sequences within introns and most intergenic DNA. While much of this sequence is probably an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some may function in ways that are not currently understood. In fact, recent studies have suggested functions for certain portions of what has been called junk DNA. Moreover, the conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function. Some consider the "junk" label as something of a misnomer, but others consider it apposite as junk is stored away for possible new uses, rather than thrown out; others prefer the term "noncoding DNA" (although junk DNA often includes transposons that encode proteins with no clear value to their host genome).
And I didn't even edit that on Wikipedia before replying either.
You can call it something else if you're offended, but the DNA itself won't have its feelings hurt if you call it junk.
Only 3% of the genome is genes, the rest is junk DNA which has a lot of interesting stuff like alternate versions of genes, commented out ideas, and coded critters like this one that sit in your DNA like "sunken ships". There are like 200 copies of reverse transcriptase in the human genome, different versions, all in this junk DNA. Reverse transcriptase has absolutely no legitimate purpose in a eukaryote. It can take a segment of RNA (usually viral RNA), convert it into DNA, and stich it into your genome. Only viruses need to do that. The RNA itself has code for reverse transcriptase, and we see it in our chromosomes all over the place, this gene that is useful to viruses and no one else. It's the most common gene in your body.
Viruses have a lytic cycle where they express nasty genes and build capsids inside you, and a lysogenic cycle, where they adopt a different strategy- they get into your DNA, become part of the junk DNA, and they replicate during normal cell division along with all the rest of your DNA.
Junk DNA has all sorts of nasty critters in it. One trick your body uses is to carpet especially infectious regions with methyl groups via cytosine methylation. Basically the idea is that the methyl groups jam up the machinery that comes along to express proteins, so if the proteins are viral, you can "comment them out" that way. When a cell divides, both strands of its DNA have methylated cytosines in the same regions. After the DNA replicates you have two methylated daughter strands, each coupled with a brand new complimentary strand. This complimentary strand has no methyl groups on it. So a clever enzyme comes along, DNA methyltransferase. It has a regulatory domain and a catalytic domain. The regulatory domain runs across the DNA feeling it for methyl groups. If it finds them on one strand, the catalytic domain deposits methyl groups on the other strand. That way, the stretch of DNA can be marked as "bad news" in a way that is heritable, despite the fact that no actual DNA sequence is being "inherited". As far as where the initial methylation signal came from, that can probably be put down to natural selection.
If it's just a dichotomy between zero and nonzero amounts of regulation, then one might ask what's wrong with sufficiently small amounts. If the economy isn't "free" unless it has absolutely zero state participation, then this is some definition of "free" that isn't very interesting.
My theory on homosexuality is that it is a natural population control mechanism when an environment begins to exceed it's carrying capacity. I would suggest that is real study were done, you'd find less homosexuality in environments where there are plenty of resources and a small population. Contrary to that, I think you'd find abundant homosexuality in ares where resources are scarce and overpopulation is a problem.
It's difficult for me to understand how this would work as a selective pressure. If resources are scarce, it isn't a winning strategy to stop competing for them. That's a recipe for extinction; as more straight people also compete for these resources, the gayness would disappear from the world rather quickly.
The presence of homosexuality in a population may or may not enhance the probability of its survival. The reason we see gay people could just be related to the fact that for centuries societies forced people to get married and procreate regardless of their sexual orientation. Ordinarily homosexuality would be considered a genetically fatal trait in animals, but not if social pressures replaced sexual orientation in directing people's reproductive behavior. This could be tested by looking at cultures around the world and their histories of social attitudes to marriage. Personally, I suspect you wouldn't find anything because it seems these gay people are everywhere and no ethnic population has failed to produce them, despite all protestations to the contrary. But I don't really know.
It may just be that no matter where you live, being gay doesn't really prevent you from procreating at all- there's usually much more pressure for a gay person to have straight sex than the other way around in any culture, and if you ask gay people if they've ever done it, most of them have, and it's normal for them to successfully procreate even if it costs them money. So we may be incorrectly assuming that this homosexuality is going to be a fatal genetic trait in whatever individual gets it, just because of our mechanistic thinking. Everybody gets drunk one night, etc. and gay people have children regardless of our assumptions simply because there are motives for procreating that have absolutely nothing to do with one's sex drive. One might need a tax dodge, for example.
It also may be that the presence of homosexuals in a population enhances its chances of success. Even though this can be a fatal trait on an individual basis, on a collective basis it can present a survival advantage. If you express the genes, as an individual, you obviously are less likely to procreate. But it may be that if you carry them without expressing them, or they run in your family, your reproductive fitness is enhanced over that of someone who doesn't carry them at all because nobody in their group does.
The presence of childless people in your population is usually a good thing for you. They are unencumbered by their own children and can help you with yours. Or they can handle odd careers particularly suited for the childless, like those in the military, or the priesthood. From a survivalist perspective, if someone in your group is going to take care of some weird job that needs doing, and he is not going to be having kids of his own because of it, you certainly don't want him snatching up and "wasting" one of your women- that means fewer wives for you. YOU are more likely to survive and pass on your genome if you carry genes which do not have a high probability of being expressed but that do trigger homosexuality when they are expressed.
If that were the case, then the selective pressure here would be operating via kin selection, which directs the evolution of worker bees and worker ants, where expressing a phenotype doesn't enhance your reproductive success, but does enhance it for people related to you with genotypes similar to your own. This may be partly why the genes involved in determining homosexuality do not appear to follow simple rules of heritability.
Our American Testosterone is being STOLEN BY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS who come to this country and take all our testosterone away from our middle class. As usual, whenever things get worse for the middle class, it is because the illegal aliens are benefitting somehow.
You might think that 700 mile fence is going to help, so that you can confiscate the testosterone from the illegals at the border and return it to where it belongs: American middle class testicles. Well the joke's on you. They don't carry it out of the country with them. They stay here to live and work, and they put the testosterone in envelopes and mail it home to their impoverished effeminate families in the Third World.
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Did anyone else read that as "the masturbation angel"? (I need some coffee...)
Which shoulder does the "masturbation angel" sit on, the left or the right?
What is the angel on your other shoulder wanting you to do?
If my hands were soon going to be unable to grab things, I wouldn't be wasting my time with video games.
In 20 years stem cell technology will have progressed so that you can grow a brand new Wii controller right in the palm of your hand anyway.
I've been an atheist since college.
I only ever have religious feelings, like I used to have when I was a kid, at one time, and that is during epileptic seizures. Along with a lot of other inappropriate emotions. Some nuclei in the limbic system get fried by the synchronized currents. Of course I'm always pretty out of it at that point, but that's about what you'd expect.
If someone told you they created a solid state device that could convert light energy directly into electrical energy would you believe them? Yeah, probably, because you have seen these in action already. They are on just about every calculator out there now. But there was a time when they were just an idea and the topic of fiction. The notion of using heat is so different? Surely the technology is quite different I'm sure, but I would not be quite so quick to be skeptical.
The Earth receives high energy, low entropy photons from the sun. It reradiates low energy, high entropy photons back into space. These reradiated photons are not very useful in a 300 K environment, which is in thermodynamic equilibrium with them. This is similar to how you'd find it much harder to extract work from sunlight if you were on the surface of the sun, an environment in thermodynamic equilibrium with that light. (Yes I know everything would melt you nitpickers but the point remains.)
The reason those calculators work is because they are exchanging energy with the sun's surface and they are not in thermodynamic equilibrium with it. On the earth's surface, if you try to make a solar cell to catch low infrared from objects on our own planet, you'll find that your cell radiates away the photons you are trying to capture, just by being at room temperature.
How about not making the Hobbit at all?
Ha ha, dream on. You're going to get Hobbit Returns, The Hobbit's Revenge, and Hobbit Resurrection.
Sam is also going to get his own spinoff movie, Samwise (the Legend of Sam Gamgee). They'll also make Gandalf in Love.
And then, and then, just to piss everyone off and make some more money, they're going to hire a bunch of unemployed crap writers to produce a novelization of each of these movies, regardless of whether each film is already based on a Tolkien work or not. Just like that novelization they produced of Planet of the Apes, a movie already "loosely based" on the novel by French author Pierre Boulle.
Hasn't this been done a million times before? Wouldn't it be easily performed with any sort of sound recorder?
Like the scene in Wargames when Broderick's character asks the dumb guard to let him go to the bathroom and he uses a microrecorder to record tones from the keypad.
The kid in Terminator 2 used a similar technique to rip off an ATM. Even Hollywood understands man-in-the-middle attacks.
It just says that on the Wikipedia page because I'm going to edit it in the future in such a way that the edits appear in previous versions.
My wife and I use only open source sexual positions. We get them from a community where people experiment with new positions and publish the ones they find so that free, unfettered access to quality sexual positions can be enjoyed by all.
Now with my mistress, I have to stick to the LGPL, or Limited GNU Public License, since that's a more discreet relationship and I can't require her to divulge all her private information. The LGPL only requires documentation of who she is, how other guys can get in touch with her, and the details of how I "link" her.
(That was a joke! Hi honey!)
More a duty than a right, actually: The duty to help establish the rule of law. Sure, the trial was a circus, and that's because the defendants decided to use it for one last round of grandstanding and trying to look important. Saddam knew the jig was up and all he could hope for was to stall as long as possible.
:P
The full verdict, a document of several hundred pages, explaining how and why today's judgment was reached was not released. U.S. officials said it should be ready by Thursday. So why issue the verdict today? U.S. court advisors told reporters today it was delayed mainly for technical reasons.
So basically they got the announcement out in time for the U.S. elections that he's going to die. In a few days they'll have the charges ready, i.e. for what.
Even though the verdict won't be ready for a couple days, the death sentence just had to be announced Sunday, for some reason.
these days the US government is far more careful to see to the legalities of a situation.
Yeah, it really shows.
Not true- the water is salty. The effective meltwater contribution per kg of meltwater is not 100% by weight as it would be with ice melting on land, but it's not 0% either as it would be with ice floating in fresh water. It will be 2.5% because ocean water is 2.5% denser than fresh water. For more information here is a Slashdot comment on ice melting in salt water that I wrote a year ago.
This is a lot better than 100%- but it still means you can take the total volume of the floating Arctic ice, divide it by 40, and get the weight of Greenland ice that will raise sea levels by a similar amount by melting. Or another way to look at it- choose a sliver of ocean 9 degrees of longitude wide, and consider all the ice floating in there. For purposes of sea level calculation, you can effectively disregard the meltwater contribution of the rest of the Arctic ice if you consider the ice floating in that sliver as contributing 100% by weight, since 9 degrees is 1/40th of 360. (Assuming the ice cover in your longitude range is representative. etc.) If you correct for ice thickness, which I'm too lazy to do, you can determine the area of the "Greenland" that is melting.
Plus, one has to consider that this is a show trial, of a country's former leader, in a court of a puppet government with no political legitimacy, staged by an invading foreign force, in order to influence their elections at home, with a guaranteed death sentence because of his political resurgence once that foreign force leaves. It's not on the same level as gassing a hundred Kurds, but that means nothing. This is surreal on plenty of levels.
Just tell me who's gotten a death sentence right before the elections in your piddly little country! Certainly no former foreign heads of state I'll imagine!
<img src="styrofoam_index_finger.gif"/> USA! USA! <img src="bush_flag_eagle.gif"/>
Introns are an unavoidable side effect of the way evolution works with respect to DNA. When we simulate evolution and natural selection using genetic programming in computers, our algorithms are plagued with a profusion of introns as well. It's very difficult to evolve successfully without them. If the "instruction set" supports a JMP of some sort, then evolution can experiment with putting the JMPs in various places just like other instructions, so that you jump over sections of "code" which might turn out to not really be needed anyway right now. DNA has a clumsy JMP mechanism, it works more like
They are known to be involved in gene regulation. They create splice variants, different versions of mRNA for a single gene. For example sexual differentiation in Drosophila is regulated by a protein called sex-lethal or sxl. During embryological development in females, a repressor protein covers a splicing signal sequence (the */ bases) at the start of one of the middle exons in sxl, hiding it from the spliceosomes. This prevents the exon from making it into the finished mRNA after the other exons are spliced together (the exon gets junked along with the two introns on either end of it).
The repressor protein is not present in males and so they create an mRNA strand for sxl that includes the exon- the presence of which renders the finished protein inactive.
What about TERT??? Dont we use reverse transcriptase for telomere repair?
Well that's not the same kind of "reverse transcriptase".
TERT has the job of making DNA molecules longer after replication (telomere lengthening). It appends a sequence of 5'-TTAGGG (a telomere) over and over to the 3' end of a chromosome. To do this, it has an RNA template molecule inside itself with a sequence complimentary to TTAGGG, offset and repeated twice: 3'-CAAUCCCAAUC-5'. The left end of the template aligns to the end of the chromosome and hybridizes to the TTAGGG on the end. Then a new TTAGGG hybridizes to the second half of the template, is bound to the chromosome, and TERT disengages to repeat the process with another TTAGGG chunk. It's a pretty clever implementation actually. You could probably have it repeat any six base monomer other than TTAGGG by changing the RNA template molecule that it uses. Some other species use a different six base sequence for their telomeres.
This technically counts as converting RNA to DNA, so the enzyme is called "telomerase reverse transcriptase". But it's not appending any coding DNA, it's just adding TTAGGG over and over again to give structural integrity to the chromosome. Usually "reverse transcriptase" refers to a family of enzymes with a viral origin that share ancestry and work by converting viral coding RNA into DNA with no proofreading mechanism and a high rate of error.
It's most commonly used by retroviruses along with integrase (used by viruses to splice crud into your DNA) but retrotransposons also use it to jump around. These are genetic parasite sequences that can move around in the genome and use reverse transcriptase to make copies of themselves. LINE (long interspersed element) is a retrotransposon about 5000 bases long that inserts copies of itself all over the place. The human genome now has about 900,000 copies of LINE- fully 21% of the genome. Another 11% of the genome is SINE (short interspersed element) elements. SINE is a 500 base or less sequence. LINE has actual coding DNA in it for something that works like integrase and reverse transcriptase. That lets it copy itself along with its adjacent sequence, and insert the copy in some random place in your DNA. SINEs don't have any coding DNA- they hitch a ride along with the LINEs when they get copied, so they're parasitizing the parasites.
Dude, I'll just refer you to the Wikipedia page on Junk DNA (the bold tags are mine):
And I didn't even edit that on Wikipedia before replying either.
You can call it something else if you're offended, but the DNA itself won't have its feelings hurt if you call it junk.
Only 3% of the genome is genes, the rest is junk DNA which has a lot of interesting stuff like alternate versions of genes, commented out ideas, and coded critters like this one that sit in your DNA like "sunken ships". There are like 200 copies of reverse transcriptase in the human genome, different versions, all in this junk DNA. Reverse transcriptase has absolutely no legitimate purpose in a eukaryote. It can take a segment of RNA (usually viral RNA), convert it into DNA, and stich it into your genome. Only viruses need to do that. The RNA itself has code for reverse transcriptase, and we see it in our chromosomes all over the place, this gene that is useful to viruses and no one else. It's the most common gene in your body.
Viruses have a lytic cycle where they express nasty genes and build capsids inside you, and a lysogenic cycle, where they adopt a different strategy- they get into your DNA, become part of the junk DNA, and they replicate during normal cell division along with all the rest of your DNA.
Junk DNA has all sorts of nasty critters in it. One trick your body uses is to carpet especially infectious regions with methyl groups via cytosine methylation. Basically the idea is that the methyl groups jam up the machinery that comes along to express proteins, so if the proteins are viral, you can "comment them out" that way. When a cell divides, both strands of its DNA have methylated cytosines in the same regions. After the DNA replicates you have two methylated daughter strands, each coupled with a brand new complimentary strand. This complimentary strand has no methyl groups on it. So a clever enzyme comes along, DNA methyltransferase. It has a regulatory domain and a catalytic domain. The regulatory domain runs across the DNA feeling it for methyl groups. If it finds them on one strand, the catalytic domain deposits methyl groups on the other strand. That way, the stretch of DNA can be marked as "bad news" in a way that is heritable, despite the fact that no actual DNA sequence is being "inherited". As far as where the initial methylation signal came from, that can probably be put down to natural selection.
If it's just a dichotomy between zero and nonzero amounts of regulation, then one might ask what's wrong with sufficiently small amounts. If the economy isn't "free" unless it has absolutely zero state participation, then this is some definition of "free" that isn't very interesting.
There are two ways to conduct business: competitively, or with the help of the State.
Well that smacks of black and white thinking, doesn't it? You mean there's no middle ground between those two?
The presence of homosexuality in a population may or may not enhance the probability of its survival. The reason we see gay people could just be related to the fact that for centuries societies forced people to get married and procreate regardless of their sexual orientation. Ordinarily homosexuality would be considered a genetically fatal trait in animals, but not if social pressures replaced sexual orientation in directing people's reproductive behavior. This could be tested by looking at cultures around the world and their histories of social attitudes to marriage. Personally, I suspect you wouldn't find anything because it seems these gay people are everywhere and no ethnic population has failed to produce them, despite all protestations to the contrary. But I don't really know.
It may just be that no matter where you live, being gay doesn't really prevent you from procreating at all- there's usually much more pressure for a gay person to have straight sex than the other way around in any culture, and if you ask gay people if they've ever done it, most of them have, and it's normal for them to successfully procreate even if it costs them money. So we may be incorrectly assuming that this homosexuality is going to be a fatal genetic trait in whatever individual gets it, just because of our mechanistic thinking. Everybody gets drunk one night, etc. and gay people have children regardless of our assumptions simply because there are motives for procreating that have absolutely nothing to do with one's sex drive. One might need a tax dodge, for example.
It also may be that the presence of homosexuals in a population enhances its chances of success. Even though this can be a fatal trait on an individual basis, on a collective basis it can present a survival advantage. If you express the genes, as an individual, you obviously are less likely to procreate. But it may be that if you carry them without expressing them, or they run in your family, your reproductive fitness is enhanced over that of someone who doesn't carry them at all because nobody in their group does.
The presence of childless people in your population is usually a good thing for you. They are unencumbered by their own children and can help you with yours. Or they can handle odd careers particularly suited for the childless, like those in the military, or the priesthood. From a survivalist perspective, if someone in your group is going to take care of some weird job that needs doing, and he is not going to be having kids of his own because of it, you certainly don't want him snatching up and "wasting" one of your women- that means fewer wives for you. YOU are more likely to survive and pass on your genome if you carry genes which do not have a high probability of being expressed but that do trigger homosexuality when they are expressed.
If that were the case, then the selective pressure here would be operating via kin selection, which directs the evolution of worker bees and worker ants, where expressing a phenotype doesn't enhance your reproductive success, but does enhance it for people related to you with genotypes similar to your own. This may be partly why the genes involved in determining homosexuality do not appear to follow simple rules of heritability.
Our American Testosterone is being STOLEN BY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS who come to this country and take all our testosterone away from our middle class. As usual, whenever things get worse for the middle class, it is because the illegal aliens are benefitting somehow.
You might think that 700 mile fence is going to help, so that you can confiscate the testosterone from the illegals at the border and return it to where it belongs: American middle class testicles. Well the joke's on you. They don't carry it out of the country with them. They stay here to live and work, and they put the testosterone in envelopes and mail it home to their impoverished effeminate families in the Third World.
I wasn't even thinking about JavaScript. Try doing a Google search for Holly Hack.
Really? Well you should tell that to Amazon and let them know just how their website doesn't work in IE.
Yeah, why is that? Amazon has to put in little hacks to get IE to work just like everyone else.