The case is regarding items manufacturered in foreign countries and intended for sale in those countries. NOT items manufactured in foreign countries intended for sale in the United States. At issue is having someone buy things cheaper overseas and resell them cheaper here in the US than the manufacturers intended US price.
That's still horrible - but not nearly as bad as the article summary would have you believe.
It's not necessarily horrible, as Wiley may be using profits from US sales to allow them to subsidise prices in third world countries so that people can get their books who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford them.
However, it's an object. If you choose to trade it at a certain price, it's no business of yours what happens to it from there. As long as US import duty gets paid, there is zero reason that Wiley should even have a case.
"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded" is a Terry
Pratchett quote. So it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and may have even represented the opinion= of a character ; I can't remember.
Another option, and I think this would help more than mandating helmets: Mandate day-glo yellow, reflective clothing and bike lights for cyclists. I don't wear a helmet that often, but I always make myself as visible as possible. I'd rather have a better chance of avoiding being hit by a car in the first place than have a better chance of living on, possibly as a paraplegic, after having been hit.
It used to be worse than that about 15 years ago. I remember seeing a "feature" on the front cover of Cosmo UK on "Controlling your Man (or something similar) - How well-placed tears can win any argument". I lost my faith in womanhood at around that time.
Scary socialist thought experiment: If the CEO and the board all got paid eight bucks an hour and janitors got paid six figures, which group would end up being full of complete, abject pieces of shit in the end? I'm not arguing with you, just wondering what would win in a fight between money and power.
Well, if we're talking histone modifications there are a few more types (phosphorylation, ubiquitylation, sumoylation, biotinylation). I was talking about direct methylation of the DNA molecule, though, not histones. Have a read of the link in my last post.
I was just being pedantic - I couldn't help pointing out that the epigenome isn't just RNA and protein; epigenetics sometimes does involve chemical modification of DNA itself mainly in imprinting. It wasn't really that relevant to the point you were making, which was a very good one!
Awesome metaphor! You're generally spot on - DNA base sequence is untouched / nothing happens to the phosphate backbone / epigenetics is all about controlling which genes are made into proteins - but to be nitpicky, an important epigenetic phenomenon which is probably also operating here is DNA methylation. DNA is directly modified in a way which alters the pattern in which genes are expressed, is fairly long-term for the cell and is heritable by future generations of cells in the organism (i.e. epigenetically).
So the story title is very misleading, but technically correct.
Christianity doesn't have to fall as a philosophy if Christ wasn't resurrected/ the son of God. He could have just been the only prophet with the right idea ("Dudes! Be excellent to each other!") and everything he said would still be valid enough to follow, just as a philosophy, not a religion. Which would be a good thing, as it seems that religions can't help but become organised, and organised churches have a tendency to get infected with a bunch of douchebags who don't practice, encourage or even care about what their prophet actually preached.
His purpose is not to save everyone regardless, it is to offer a reward to only those who seek him and do what he requires. To everyone else who chooses to ignore it, God chooses to ignore them. They are left to themselves. Not a punishment per se - just that the reward is only offered to those who really want it.
Sounds like you're still fully under the thumb to me. You should read up on ancient Norse, Slavic, Greek & Roman religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism, Voodoo/ Santeria... if you'd like to get some perspective. They're all full of great stories, and can be vessels for encouraging moral / cultural attitudes, and for inspiring great (or at least extreme) deeds in their followers, but when you know about the alternatives you might come to question whether the Abrahamic god is any more valid than all the others that exist / have existed. To put it more tritely
I'm not an atheist, and I'm not saying there's no God(s), just that we shouldn't presume to know anything about him/it/them just because we've only been exposed to one set of ideas about him/it/them. Ideas which are in all likelihood those of a human being.
You're thinking of the iPlayer streaming service on the website. If you have the iPlayer program on your computer it'll download programmes you're interested in to your PC and keep them for a month. It's not perfect, but it gives you a lot more of a chance to actually watch them.
Although something exists through the first several months of pregnancy, and it is certainly alive and it is certainly human (what other species is it, if not human?)
This is just a fact, not an argument. An argument would be if I were to then introduce another premise--like, "And no human entity at any stage of its life-cycle should ever be killed for any reason"--and then drew a conclusion from that. That would be an argument.
The ordinary, uncontroversial fact that a human in the early stages of its life cycle exists immediately after pregnancy, and that entity is destroyed in the course of an abortion, should be the grounding for any argument on the morality and legality of abortion.
I'd say it is controversial, and it's definitely controvertible. You're conflating 'genetically human' with 'being a human'. Individual cells can be human, but they aren't 'a human'. Blastocysts (early stage embryos with the potential to become a human) aren't 'a human'. People consider them to be human, but that's an irrational emotional reaction which comes from us feeling protective of our unborn offspring even before they would be recognised by us as 'a human' (or even be visible to the naked eye).
The way you can tell it's irrational is that we're all hypocrites on this point: No one gives a toss about all the spontaneously aborted embryos produced when a couple are trying to conceive and failing. Implantation can take up to 7 days after fertilisation, and where there's a failure to implant, or an embryo's not compatible after implantation the embryo gets flushed. There are lots of embryos 'wasted' in this way, but no one considers this to be a tragic loss of human life. These things are fertilised, growing balls of cells, and if human life begins at conception, why are people ignoring their rights? All over the world, couples trying to become parents are creating and killing hundreds of thousands of human souls a day, right? In that light, the Catholic Church's opposition to contraception is pretty monstrous.
There really is a stage at which the embryo becomes 'a human', but it's not realistically considered to be conception by anyone, or we'd be mourning the wasted blastocysts. It's pretty debatable exactly when an embryo does become a human being. Is it when it has all the tissue layers found in a foetus (week 3)? Or when it has developed something that looks roughly like a brain, but as a whole the embryo looks a lot like a kidney bean (week 4) and exactly like the embryo of a chicken, dog, cow, or many other large multi-celled animals at an equivalent stage ? Or when it has developed a brain that has started to take the shape of a human brain (around 7e^7 cells, at 6 months), or when its brain is about 100x larger than that (around 1e^10 cells, just before birth)?
I don't disagree with you otherwise, and I may even be more pro-life than you, from what you're saying, but this attitude that any human embryo (which is not the same thing as a foetus) is 'a human' isn't right. I think a lot of pro-lifers think of all embryos as little people curled up and sucking their thumbs in the womb, when for at least the first month they're nothing like that. It's difficult not to get emotional about abortion, and I would if it were a child / implanted blastocyst of mine, but there should be no moral issue with having an abortion before 6 weeks.
Thanks for the link, I just read all the depressioncomix stuff - it's brilliant. Spot on. I'd recommend it to people who've never been depressed as a way of gaining some understanding of depression. Or least the understanding that it's not the same thing as being "sad", and it's not something that the depressed person is capable of overcoming on their own. I don't agree with the artist's depiction of people who are trying to help "just not understanding" - yeah, maybe they don't understand, but much as you don't want to hear it, they're right when they say you should come outside in the sunshine, smile and get some exercise. When I was suicidally depressed a few years ago, I was offended by people telling me I should just "snap out of it" (the depressive's typical response: "if I knew how to do that, don't you think I would have done it by now?!"), but I've now got a no-nonsense kind of girlfriend, and I'm convinced that as a depressive, what you need is to have someone who will dismiss your attempts to feel sorry for yourself and force you to get out and do things. Someone who will cheerfully and supportively tell you to shut up your whinging and drag you out of the house. Someone who can give you some perspective and show you how life should be done. It may not have helped me when I was depressed (I don't know, I didn't know her then) but it's sure as hell stopping me from getting depressed now.
While I was depressed I took SSRIs for a few months - they didn't do a damned thing for me, positive or negative. My step-dad was depressed a long time in the past and took tricyclics. For him, it was like flicking a switch from suicidal to super-happy and motivated. So much so that the realisation that his "personality" was the result of a bunch of biochemicals (and always had been) scared the bejesus out of him. He stopped taking antidepressants in fairly short order after that, but they gave him a perspective on his depression that allowed him to overcome it.
IANAMD, but I would recommend you talk to your MD about getting on antidepressants RIGHT NOW (it'll be at least a month before they kick in, in any case) just so you can see if they work for you. If they don't, change to a different type to see if that works. Then, once they have kicked in and you're capable of functioning again have a read of this book. Don't read it before you're out of the depression, as it probably won't help get you out of it - it made me feel even more hopeless when I was depressed - but it should help with getting some perspective on the patterns of thinking of the depressed. Once I had dragged myself out of the pit, it helped me to stop beating myself up over everything, all the time, quite so much.
Good luck, dude. Don't give up hope. It really does get better, and one day you'll be able to look back on how you were and think: "Thank god I'm out of that! I never, ever, want to go back!"
I'm not saying none of them can be blamed, I'm saying don't tar them all with the same brush. Islam is diverse. Yes, there are a lot of regimes, organisations and individuals that are mad if not downright evil, but in the same countries there are often a lot of normal people who are just trying to live their lives. Just because someone is a Muslim doesn't mean they'll be stoning people to death every five minutes - you hear about the worst stuff in the news because it's the worst stuff. The Muslims living in the West are not all plotting to destroy it... again, a lot of them are just trying to get on with their lives and be nice to people (as the Qu'ran tells them to be).
What I was saying about the Sunnis and Shia are that these guys are oppressing the shit out of each other, they're not just picking on non-Muslims. That said, I'm with you in thinking that on the whole Islam is a shitty, messed up, medieval religion that's horribly sexist, partisan, xenophobic and frighteningly expansionist and has next to zero respect for human life, particularly that of non-Muslims. You're dead right, I can't give you an example of a Muslim government who hasn't oppressed and murdered non-Muslims. I would say the current Turkish government, but they're not there yet in terms of equal rights, and the Armenian genocide wasn't all that long ago. I was just having a knee-jerk reaction against what I perceived to be unreasonable prejudice against all Muslims in your comment and others I've read on Slashdot, and trying to get you to see it from the point of view of some Middle Eastern states, which is seeing non-Muslims and Westerners as the enemy because that's all they've ever been to them.
I can't argue against the facts of it, cos factually you're 100% right.
You're oversimplifying slightly. Non-Muslims are often better off under westernist (muslim) governments, but they're often so much better off that you can see why islamists hate them. I think of Islamists as equivalent to the uneducated racist masses who support nationalist parties in the west - they see foreigners as the source of their problems. Islamists have much more justification for thinking this, though, and not
just because of the carpet bombing and military occupation a lot of them have been subjected to, but because most of these West friendly governments were instated by the West (US) and are working against the interests of either half their own people or all of them. "Muslims" are not all the same, either. In the mid East there are Sunnis and Shias, two main tribes who hate each other, and when regimes change, generally it's not just non-Muslims up against the wall, the Shia government and population get it in the neck too. I'm not condoning any of it, but don't portray all Muslims/Islamists as unreasonable savages just because you can't be bothered to learn the nuances of their history and politics.
The licence is compulsary for any device capable of receiving broadcast media. That includes Internet, TV and radio.
Also not true - the license is only compulsory for devices capable of receiving live broadcast TV.
You don't have to pay for radio, ever, and not for having an internet-capable computer, either. You can even watch streamed content on the BBC iPlayer website without a TV license, as long as it's catch-up TV (i.e. not live-streamed). What you can't do is a) use the iPlayer program without having a valid TV license, as they make you declare that you have a TV license in a EULA when you download / run it, or b) watch live BBC TV, streamed from the BBC website or iPlayer.
I expect it's the attitude of the lefties at the BBC that if you're a UK resident you should still be able to watch the BBC even if you can't afford a TV license, and they get around their licensing restrictions by not publicising the fact that watching streamed catch-up TV content is 100% legal for people in the UK. I did this for ages before we finally succumbed and bought a TV (at which point I got a license, as the Beeb totally deserves the cash).
So which do you reckon is going to come first? Being able to get hold of a £25 raspberry pi and ICS for it, or an official ICS update coming out for my £200, 1-year-old Desire HD? I'm going to be puh-retty annoyed if its the former...
The mechanism is supposedly: Caffeine inhibits DNA damage checkpoint kinases, allowing cells with DNA damage to slip through the checkpoint mechanism which normally stops them dividing when damage is present (the G2/M checkpoint). So they progress to mitosis where they might divide into two new cells. The DNA structures formed by this damage, often caused by DNA replication which has stalled because it can't get past the damage, either cause the cells to die at this point (mitotic catastrophe) or may be dragged along into the new daughter cells. Assuming the damage isn't so bad that the cells die of mitotic catastrophe they may then be stopped at the restriction point or G1/S checkpoint before they make the decision to divide again. At this point they can be made senescent, meaning they will never divide again. If they do get through this checkpoint they can run into a separate G1/S DNA damage checkpoint which can also cause them to die if the damage is really bad.
One model of the mechanism is that damage caused before the cells divide (before the G2/M checkpoint) is made worse by the process of mitosis (which causes mechanical stress on the DNA) or by failed attempts at repair, so the G2/M checkpoint is there to prevent this damage getting worse by allowing time for the cell to untangle its DNA either by bypassing or repairing damage. So when caffeine treatment allows cells to get around the G2/M checkpoint, the chromosomes are pulled apart and the knotty structures mean DNA is torn and ripped, the damage gets much worse and the cells then have to be "put to sleep" by later checkpoints. Without caffeine cells would stop at the G2/M checkpoint, unknot the damage and may then survive with mutations in their genomes. These mutations could later progress to full-blown cancer.
Another model is that the DNA damage isn't made that much worse by mitosis, it's just that the G1 checkpoints are more hardcore than the G2/M checkpoint and will either cause the cell to stop growing, permanently, or will kill the cell, where the G2/M checkpoint will only stop it temporarily to allow time for damage repair or bypass. So again, caffeine allows the cell to skip the G2/M checkpoint, and carrying damage through the G2/M checkpoint is bad for a cell's prospects of survival, but good for the organism as the cell is put out of its misery by the more stringent G1/S checkpoints.
A lot of work has been done on cells in vitro which shows that caffeine does "help kill damaged cells" here's an example. Some work has also been done which shows caffeine can help cells to survive at lower levels of damage, presumably through reducing checkpoint activation, allowing them to survive or grow faster. This is supposedly the mechanism for why caffeine treatment (done right, not the silly caffeine shampoo, which probably does bugger all) can prevent male pattern baldness. You make a very good point and I totally agree with you; I don't believe this study either, but the groundwork to support this proposed mechanism is there.
I'm definitely no expert on this, but I've heard from people who claim to know what they're talking about that PTSD has nothing to do with being freaked out by killing others, and everything to do with the fear of your own death or the fear of a loss of control over your own life. Not sure how the two things can be separated, but apparently they can, and no one seems to have any problem with killing, as long as they feel it's justified . It's the immediate exposure to death that makes you think of your own mortality, leading to PTSD. Allegedly.
So Europeans will get to consume American medical exports like quick, cheap sequencing technology. Evolution in action.
Ha! You know the original, and still the most popular method of DNA sequencing (chain-termination/Sanger sequencing) was invented in Cambridge in the UK, and wasn't patented, so anyone could use it, right? And Solexa sequencing, currently the biggest name in next-generation sequencing, was also invented in Cambridge, UK (though they do charge for that, and it has now been bought by Illumina, a US company)?
The US seems to always be the best at successfully commercialising things, but it's not the only place innovation happens!
Affirmative action is divisive in the short term, but it's often a response to past and present discrimination. If the field of candidates for a job is ten white guys and a black guy, you're a white interviewer and your workplace is 100% white you might be prejudiced against the black guy thinking 'he won't fit in'... well he may well not fit in, but with that attitude he never will because your company will remain 100% white.
It's all very well saying "you should pick the best candidate", but if your applicants' qualifications and experience are roughly equivalent, who's the best candidate? The one you get on well with, right? And if you're white you're more likely to feel like you'll get on better with a white guy than a black guy, especially if that black guy comes to interview expecting not to get the job because he has it in his head that all the opportunities go to white people and all white people are against him.
Unconscious bias/prejudice is a part of the problem, because everyone's a little bit racist, and to overcome this so that the work environment reflects the balance of sexes/races in society, sometimes affirmative action/positive discrimination is necessary. With a lot of jobs it's not necessary or sensible where gender is concerned, and there's an obvious reason why the balance of sexes is the way it is (it's particularly obvious in I.T., and I've often thought the reason women are over-represented in HR is that they're much better at being callous and heartless (joke!)) but there's several possible reasons that the balance of races in a large company might not reflect the balance of races in the local population, and for at least one of these there's an obvious reason for affirmative action.
If there's a cultural bias in people of the race in question (e.g. black guys being too macho to train to be nurses, as a totally unsupported, racist stereotype) there's not much you can do about it, but if there's a hiring prejudice or an educational bias meaning members of a particular race haven't had the same educational/work opportunities then it's not unreasonable for society to try and correct this inequality, especially if it's the root cause of racism - e.g. a lot of black people are poor, therefore a lot of them do drugs/steal/commit violent crime, therefore a lot of white people prejudge black people as more likely to be criminal, when on an individual basis this is totally unfair. I'm thinking of South Africa when I say this - people I know there are massively racist because they see black people committing all the crimes; I keep asking them the question "is it because they are black or is it because they are poor?", and they can see exactly what I mean, but it doesn't stop them feeling fear and being prejudiced. In the short term, affirmative action in South Africa caused (and is still causing, I think) huge racial tensions, and the way it was approached was too drastic - it should have been done over a longer period - but the racial inequality in the US doesn't seem to be being addressed at all... my point is, sometimes affirmative action is justified from the point of view of society, if society really wants equality.
No worries, sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and I have massive respect for you for admitting error when the main problem here may well be me misinterpreting your mention of breeding as being about sex when you quite possibly meant somatic cell proliferation and I got the wrong end of the stick. I'd give you some references for my above claims, but sadly I have only heard them through my PhD supervisors, who I trust to be right (or at least supported by the opinion of someone someone they approve of) as they've worked in the field of DNA repair for 15+ years; and a review or two. Somatic cells do survive and continue to perform their normal role with fairly massive damage to their genomes, but whether they're then capable of being converted to viable stem cells or not is a gap in my knowledge... Probably a gap in the literature too. People look at the teratomas formed by stemming-gone-wrong and theorise about how they arise, but I don't think they actually know (i.e. have confirmed) the reasons. It would be an interesting question to answer, and pretty easy to do, potentially.
Yeah, I was talking about somatic mutation, such as that caused by any form of ionising radiation, reactive oxygen species, etc. etc. Also, I already said they were working towards limiting the oncogenes issue, but it wasn't yet in wide use, and finally, I wasn't saying stem cells are more susceptible to damage than somatic cells, I was saying somatic cells can take a higher load of DNA damage before detecting it. And yes, that does mean that they can survive better in the presence of more DNA damage (i.e. DNA damage is left in the genome without being dealt with) whereas in stem cells the same level of damage is either repaired or the cells die or senesce. Somatic cells can survive in the presence of more damage. I don't know what you think I argued as your grammar makes no sense at that point, but where I said damage is not likely to be well tolerated in sex cell progenitors I meant that damage will not persist in these cells - they will either repair it or die, unlike somatic cells which sit around with damaged genomes until you convert them to stem cells, carrying all that damage through the stemming process.
I'm not being funny, mate, but what you think is a bone of contention from my original post isn't - in fact I was saying essentially what you're now saying in rebuttal. Read it again!
I'd agree about the imperfect stemming/heart cell conversion thing, but not with this:
Propagating genetic errors is certainly a concern here, but the same concerns exist for genetic transfer in breeding generally.
They're not exactly the same concerns. 'Normal' somatic cells, cells of the body which aren't stem cells, have a much higher capacity for surviving with DNA damage in their genomes than stem cells. This is because they have stopped growing & proliferating and hence stopped replicating their DNA, and a major method by which DNA damage is detected in the cell is by "testing whether DNA replication can occur". When DNA replication fails or is particularly difficult there's a good chance a proliferating cell (i.e. stem cells) will activate DNA damage checkpoints and die or senesce (stop growing permanently).
The methods used to make "stemmed" cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) usually involve introducing some oncogenes which ultimately mess up activation of the DNA damage checkpoints. Also, the genes that are introduced during the process of "stemming" are randomly scattered into the genome, potentially inserting into and knocking out the cell's tumour suppressor genes, so cells which may already be in a DNA-damaged state can be further damaged while being deliberately converted to a highly proliferating state. The process selects for cells which can proliferate even when damaged, which is not ideal as far as preventing cancer is concerned. New methods, using drugs and not the introduction of oncogenes, have been produced, but I don't think they're commonly used yet (correct me if I'm wrong, someone).
I don't pretend to understand what's unique about how DNA damage is dealt with during sex to prevent mutations being propagated to the next generation. I'm not sure that much work has been done on it, but germline sperm and egg-producing cells are stem cells, so damage isn't likely to be that well tolerated in them, and if sperm is very damaged it's likely to be inviable and won't lead to conception. I had to go off and research this to have something to say about it, during which I found the following tidbit: having sex/ spanking off once a day gets rid of damaged sperm and seems to be a way of maintaining a bloke's fertility in tip-top condition. So blokes are probably biologically programmed to masturbate, in case you needed an excuse!
Slashdot Mirror
The case is regarding items manufacturered in foreign countries and intended for sale in those countries. NOT items manufactured in foreign countries intended for sale in the United States. At issue is having someone buy things cheaper overseas and resell them cheaper here in the US than the manufacturers intended US price.
That's still horrible - but not nearly as bad as the article summary would have you believe.
It's not necessarily horrible, as Wiley may be using profits from US sales to allow them to subsidise prices in third world countries so that people can get their books who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford them.
However, it's an object. If you choose to trade it at a certain price, it's no business of yours what happens to it from there. As long as US import duty gets paid, there is zero reason that Wiley should even have a case.
"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded" is a Terry Pratchett quote. So it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and may have even represented the opinion= of a character ; I can't remember.
Another option, and I think this would help more than mandating helmets: Mandate day-glo yellow, reflective clothing and bike lights for cyclists. I don't wear a helmet that often, but I always make myself as visible as possible. I'd rather have a better chance of avoiding being hit by a car in the first place than have a better chance of living on, possibly as a paraplegic, after having been hit.
It used to be worse than that about 15 years ago. I remember seeing a "feature" on the front cover of Cosmo UK on "Controlling your Man (or something similar) - How well-placed tears can win any argument". I lost my faith in womanhood at around that time.
Scary socialist thought experiment: If the CEO and the board all got paid eight bucks an hour and janitors got paid six figures, which group would end up being full of complete, abject pieces of shit in the end? I'm not arguing with you, just wondering what would win in a fight between money and power.
Well, if we're talking histone modifications there are a few more types (phosphorylation, ubiquitylation, sumoylation, biotinylation). I was talking about direct methylation of the DNA molecule, though, not histones. Have a read of the link in my last post.
I was just being pedantic - I couldn't help pointing out that the epigenome isn't just RNA and protein; epigenetics sometimes does involve chemical modification of DNA itself mainly in imprinting. It wasn't really that relevant to the point you were making, which was a very good one!
Awesome metaphor! You're generally spot on - DNA base sequence is untouched / nothing happens to the phosphate backbone / epigenetics is all about controlling which genes are made into proteins - but to be nitpicky, an important epigenetic phenomenon which is probably also operating here is DNA methylation. DNA is directly modified in a way which alters the pattern in which genes are expressed, is fairly long-term for the cell and is heritable by future generations of cells in the organism (i.e. epigenetically).
So the story title is very misleading, but technically correct.
Christianity doesn't have to fall as a philosophy if Christ wasn't resurrected/ the son of God. He could have just been the only prophet with the right idea ("Dudes! Be excellent to each other!") and everything he said would still be valid enough to follow, just as a philosophy, not a religion. Which would be a good thing, as it seems that religions can't help but become organised, and organised churches have a tendency to get infected with a bunch of douchebags who don't practice, encourage or even care about what their prophet actually preached.
His purpose is not to save everyone regardless, it is to offer a reward to only those who seek him and do what he requires. To everyone else who chooses to ignore it, God chooses to ignore them. They are left to themselves. Not a punishment per se - just that the reward is only offered to those who really want it.
Sounds like you're still fully under the thumb to me. You should read up on ancient Norse, Slavic, Greek & Roman religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism, Voodoo/ Santeria... if you'd like to get some perspective. They're all full of great stories, and can be vessels for encouraging moral / cultural attitudes, and for inspiring great (or at least extreme) deeds in their followers, but when you know about the alternatives you might come to question whether the Abrahamic god is any more valid than all the others that exist / have existed. To put it more tritely
I'm not an atheist, and I'm not saying there's no God(s), just that we shouldn't presume to know anything about him/it/them just because we've only been exposed to one set of ideas about him/it/them. Ideas which are in all likelihood those of a human being.
Probably not. There are just too many other candidates.
You're thinking of the iPlayer streaming service on the website. If you have the iPlayer program on your computer it'll download programmes you're interested in to your PC and keep them for a month. It's not perfect, but it gives you a lot more of a chance to actually watch them.
Although something exists through the first several months of pregnancy, and it is certainly alive and it is certainly human (what other species is it, if not human?)
This is just a fact, not an argument. An argument would be if I were to then introduce another premise--like, "And no human entity at any stage of its life-cycle should ever be killed for any reason"--and then drew a conclusion from that. That would be an argument.
The ordinary, uncontroversial fact that a human in the early stages of its life cycle exists immediately after pregnancy, and that entity is destroyed in the course of an abortion, should be the grounding for any argument on the morality and legality of abortion.
I'd say it is controversial, and it's definitely controvertible. You're conflating 'genetically human' with 'being a human'. Individual cells can be human, but they aren't 'a human'. Blastocysts (early stage embryos with the potential to become a human) aren't 'a human'. People consider them to be human, but that's an irrational emotional reaction which comes from us feeling protective of our unborn offspring even before they would be recognised by us as 'a human' (or even be visible to the naked eye).
The way you can tell it's irrational is that we're all hypocrites on this point: No one gives a toss about all the spontaneously aborted embryos produced when a couple are trying to conceive and failing. Implantation can take up to 7 days after fertilisation, and where there's a failure to implant, or an embryo's not compatible after implantation the embryo gets flushed. There are lots of embryos 'wasted' in this way, but no one considers this to be a tragic loss of human life. These things are fertilised, growing balls of cells, and if human life begins at conception, why are people ignoring their rights? All over the world, couples trying to become parents are creating and killing hundreds of thousands of human souls a day, right? In that light, the Catholic Church's opposition to contraception is pretty monstrous.
There really is a stage at which the embryo becomes 'a human', but it's not realistically considered to be conception by anyone, or we'd be mourning the wasted blastocysts. It's pretty debatable exactly when an embryo does become a human being. Is it when it has all the tissue layers found in a foetus (week 3)? Or when it has developed something that looks roughly like a brain, but as a whole the embryo looks a lot like a kidney bean (week 4) and exactly like the embryo of a chicken, dog, cow, or many other large multi-celled animals at an equivalent stage ? Or when it has developed a brain that has started to take the shape of a human brain (around 7e^7 cells, at 6 months), or when its brain is about 100x larger than that (around 1e^10 cells, just before birth)?
I don't disagree with you otherwise, and I may even be more pro-life than you, from what you're saying, but this attitude that any human embryo (which is not the same thing as a foetus) is 'a human' isn't right. I think a lot of pro-lifers think of all embryos as little people curled up and sucking their thumbs in the womb, when for at least the first month they're nothing like that. It's difficult not to get emotional about abortion, and I would if it were a child / implanted blastocyst of mine, but there should be no moral issue with having an abortion before 6 weeks.
Thanks for the link, I just read all the depressioncomix stuff - it's brilliant. Spot on. I'd recommend it to people who've never been depressed as a way of gaining some understanding of depression. Or least the understanding that it's not the same thing as being "sad", and it's not something that the depressed person is capable of overcoming on their own. I don't agree with the artist's depiction of people who are trying to help "just not understanding" - yeah, maybe they don't understand, but much as you don't want to hear it, they're right when they say you should come outside in the sunshine, smile and get some exercise. When I was suicidally depressed a few years ago, I was offended by people telling me I should just "snap out of it" (the depressive's typical response: "if I knew how to do that, don't you think I would have done it by now?!"), but I've now got a no-nonsense kind of girlfriend, and I'm convinced that as a depressive, what you need is to have someone who will dismiss your attempts to feel sorry for yourself and force you to get out and do things. Someone who will cheerfully and supportively tell you to shut up your whinging and drag you out of the house. Someone who can give you some perspective and show you how life should be done. It may not have helped me when I was depressed (I don't know, I didn't know her then) but it's sure as hell stopping me from getting depressed now.
While I was depressed I took SSRIs for a few months - they didn't do a damned thing for me, positive or negative. My step-dad was depressed a long time in the past and took tricyclics. For him, it was like flicking a switch from suicidal to super-happy and motivated. So much so that the realisation that his "personality" was the result of a bunch of biochemicals (and always had been) scared the bejesus out of him. He stopped taking antidepressants in fairly short order after that, but they gave him a perspective on his depression that allowed him to overcome it.
IANAMD, but I would recommend you talk to your MD about getting on antidepressants RIGHT NOW (it'll be at least a month before they kick in, in any case) just so you can see if they work for you. If they don't, change to a different type to see if that works. Then, once they have kicked in and you're capable of functioning again have a read of this book. Don't read it before you're out of the depression, as it probably won't help get you out of it - it made me feel even more hopeless when I was depressed - but it should help with getting some perspective on the patterns of thinking of the depressed. Once I had dragged myself out of the pit, it helped me to stop beating myself up over everything, all the time, quite so much.
Good luck, dude. Don't give up hope. It really does get better, and one day you'll be able to look back on how you were and think: "Thank god I'm out of that! I never, ever, want to go back!"
Here's another interesting link for you. I wouldn't be surprised if Gorillas do eat monkeys, cos chimps do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZhsM9OzeEo
I'm not saying none of them can be blamed, I'm saying don't tar them all with the same brush. Islam is diverse. Yes, there are a lot of regimes, organisations and individuals that are mad if not downright evil, but in the same countries there are often a lot of normal people who are just trying to live their lives. Just because someone is a Muslim doesn't mean they'll be stoning people to death every five minutes - you hear about the worst stuff in the news because it's the worst stuff. The Muslims living in the West are not all plotting to destroy it... again, a lot of them are just trying to get on with their lives and be nice to people (as the Qu'ran tells them to be).
What I was saying about the Sunnis and Shia are that these guys are oppressing the shit out of each other, they're not just picking on non-Muslims. That said, I'm with you in thinking that on the whole Islam is a shitty, messed up, medieval religion that's horribly sexist, partisan, xenophobic and frighteningly expansionist and has next to zero respect for human life, particularly that of non-Muslims. You're dead right, I can't give you an example of a Muslim government who hasn't oppressed and murdered non-Muslims. I would say the current Turkish government, but they're not there yet in terms of equal rights, and the Armenian genocide wasn't all that long ago. I was just having a knee-jerk reaction against what I perceived to be unreasonable prejudice against all Muslims in your comment and others I've read on Slashdot, and trying to get you to see it from the point of view of some Middle Eastern states, which is seeing non-Muslims and Westerners as the enemy because that's all they've ever been to them.
I can't argue against the facts of it, cos factually you're 100% right.
You're oversimplifying slightly. Non-Muslims are often better off under westernist (muslim) governments, but they're often so much better off that you can see why islamists hate them. I think of Islamists as equivalent to the uneducated racist masses who support nationalist parties in the west - they see foreigners as the source of their problems. Islamists have much more justification for thinking this, though, and not just because of the carpet bombing and military occupation a lot of them have been subjected to, but because most of these West friendly governments were instated by the West (US) and are working against the interests of either half their own people or all of them. "Muslims" are not all the same, either. In the mid East there are Sunnis and Shias, two main tribes who hate each other, and when regimes change, generally it's not just non-Muslims up against the wall, the Shia government and population get it in the neck too. I'm not condoning any of it, but don't portray all Muslims /Islamists as unreasonable savages just because you can't be bothered to learn the nuances of their history and politics.
The licence is compulsary for any device capable of receiving broadcast media. That includes Internet, TV and radio.
Also not true - the license is only compulsory for devices capable of receiving live broadcast TV.
You don't have to pay for radio, ever, and not for having an internet-capable computer, either. You can even watch streamed content on the BBC iPlayer website without a TV license, as long as it's catch-up TV (i.e. not live-streamed). What you can't do is a) use the iPlayer program without having a valid TV license, as they make you declare that you have a TV license in a EULA when you download / run it, or b) watch live BBC TV, streamed from the BBC website or iPlayer.
I expect it's the attitude of the lefties at the BBC that if you're a UK resident you should still be able to watch the BBC even if you can't afford a TV license, and they get around their licensing restrictions by not publicising the fact that watching streamed catch-up TV content is 100% legal for people in the UK. I did this for ages before we finally succumbed and bought a TV (at which point I got a license, as the Beeb totally deserves the cash).
So which do you reckon is going to come first? Being able to get hold of a £25 raspberry pi and ICS for it, or an official ICS update coming out for my £200, 1-year-old Desire HD? I'm going to be puh-retty annoyed if its the former...
The mechanism is supposedly: Caffeine inhibits DNA damage checkpoint kinases, allowing cells with DNA damage to slip through the checkpoint mechanism which normally stops them dividing when damage is present (the G2/M checkpoint). So they progress to mitosis where they might divide into two new cells. The DNA structures formed by this damage, often caused by DNA replication which has stalled because it can't get past the damage, either cause the cells to die at this point (mitotic catastrophe) or may be dragged along into the new daughter cells. Assuming the damage isn't so bad that the cells die of mitotic catastrophe they may then be stopped at the restriction point or G1/S checkpoint before they make the decision to divide again. At this point they can be made senescent, meaning they will never divide again. If they do get through this checkpoint they can run into a separate G1/S DNA damage checkpoint which can also cause them to die if the damage is really bad.
One model of the mechanism is that damage caused before the cells divide (before the G2/M checkpoint) is made worse by the process of mitosis (which causes mechanical stress on the DNA) or by failed attempts at repair, so the G2/M checkpoint is there to prevent this damage getting worse by allowing time for the cell to untangle its DNA either by bypassing or repairing damage. So when caffeine treatment allows cells to get around the G2/M checkpoint, the chromosomes are pulled apart and the knotty structures mean DNA is torn and ripped, the damage gets much worse and the cells then have to be "put to sleep" by later checkpoints. Without caffeine cells would stop at the G2/M checkpoint, unknot the damage and may then survive with mutations in their genomes. These mutations could later progress to full-blown cancer.
Another model is that the DNA damage isn't made that much worse by mitosis, it's just that the G1 checkpoints are more hardcore than the G2/M checkpoint and will either cause the cell to stop growing, permanently, or will kill the cell, where the G2/M checkpoint will only stop it temporarily to allow time for damage repair or bypass. So again, caffeine allows the cell to skip the G2/M checkpoint, and carrying damage through the G2/M checkpoint is bad for a cell's prospects of survival, but good for the organism as the cell is put out of its misery by the more stringent G1/S checkpoints.
A lot of work has been done on cells in vitro which shows that caffeine does "help kill damaged cells" here's an example. Some work has also been done which shows caffeine can help cells to survive at lower levels of damage, presumably through reducing checkpoint activation, allowing them to survive or grow faster. This is supposedly the mechanism for why caffeine treatment (done right, not the silly caffeine shampoo, which probably does bugger all) can prevent male pattern baldness. You make a very good point and I totally agree with you; I don't believe this study either, but the groundwork to support this proposed mechanism is there.
I'm definitely no expert on this, but I've heard from people who claim to know what they're talking about that PTSD has nothing to do with being freaked out by killing others, and everything to do with the fear of your own death or the fear of a loss of control over your own life. Not sure how the two things can be separated, but apparently they can, and no one seems to have any problem with killing, as long as they feel it's justified . It's the immediate exposure to death that makes you think of your own mortality, leading to PTSD. Allegedly.
So Europeans will get to consume American medical exports like quick, cheap sequencing technology. Evolution in action.
Ha! You know the original, and still the most popular method of DNA sequencing (chain-termination/Sanger sequencing) was invented in Cambridge in the UK, and wasn't patented, so anyone could use it, right? And Solexa sequencing, currently the biggest name in next-generation sequencing, was also invented in Cambridge, UK (though they do charge for that, and it has now been bought by Illumina, a US company)?
The US seems to always be the best at successfully commercialising things, but it's not the only place innovation happens!
Affirmative action is divisive in the short term, but it's often a response to past and present discrimination. If the field of candidates for a job is ten white guys and a black guy, you're a white interviewer and your workplace is 100% white you might be prejudiced against the black guy thinking 'he won't fit in'... well he may well not fit in, but with that attitude he never will because your company will remain 100% white.
It's all very well saying "you should pick the best candidate", but if your applicants' qualifications and experience are roughly equivalent, who's the best candidate? The one you get on well with, right? And if you're white you're more likely to feel like you'll get on better with a white guy than a black guy, especially if that black guy comes to interview expecting not to get the job because he has it in his head that all the opportunities go to white people and all white people are against him.
Unconscious bias/prejudice is a part of the problem, because everyone's a little bit racist, and to overcome this so that the work environment reflects the balance of sexes/races in society, sometimes affirmative action/positive discrimination is necessary. With a lot of jobs it's not necessary or sensible where gender is concerned, and there's an obvious reason why the balance of sexes is the way it is (it's particularly obvious in I.T., and I've often thought the reason women are over-represented in HR is that they're much better at being callous and heartless (joke!)) but there's several possible reasons that the balance of races in a large company might not reflect the balance of races in the local population, and for at least one of these there's an obvious reason for affirmative action.
If there's a cultural bias in people of the race in question (e.g. black guys being too macho to train to be nurses, as a totally unsupported, racist stereotype) there's not much you can do about it, but if there's a hiring prejudice or an educational bias meaning members of a particular race haven't had the same educational/work opportunities then it's not unreasonable for society to try and correct this inequality, especially if it's the root cause of racism - e.g. a lot of black people are poor, therefore a lot of them do drugs/steal/commit violent crime, therefore a lot of white people prejudge black people as more likely to be criminal, when on an individual basis this is totally unfair. I'm thinking of South Africa when I say this - people I know there are massively racist because they see black people committing all the crimes; I keep asking them the question "is it because they are black or is it because they are poor?", and they can see exactly what I mean, but it doesn't stop them feeling fear and being prejudiced. In the short term, affirmative action in South Africa caused (and is still causing, I think) huge racial tensions, and the way it was approached was too drastic - it should have been done over a longer period - but the racial inequality in the US doesn't seem to be being addressed at all... my point is, sometimes affirmative action is justified from the point of view of society, if society really wants equality.
No worries, sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and I have massive respect for you for admitting error when the main problem here may well be me misinterpreting your mention of breeding as being about sex when you quite possibly meant somatic cell proliferation and I got the wrong end of the stick. I'd give you some references for my above claims, but sadly I have only heard them through my PhD supervisors, who I trust to be right (or at least supported by the opinion of someone someone they approve of) as they've worked in the field of DNA repair for 15+ years; and a review or two. Somatic cells do survive and continue to perform their normal role with fairly massive damage to their genomes, but whether they're then capable of being converted to viable stem cells or not is a gap in my knowledge... Probably a gap in the literature too. People look at the teratomas formed by stemming-gone-wrong and theorise about how they arise, but I don't think they actually know (i.e. have confirmed) the reasons. It would be an interesting question to answer, and pretty easy to do, potentially.
Yeah, I was talking about somatic mutation, such as that caused by any form of ionising radiation, reactive oxygen species, etc. etc. Also, I already said they were working towards limiting the oncogenes issue, but it wasn't yet in wide use, and finally, I wasn't saying stem cells are more susceptible to damage than somatic cells, I was saying somatic cells can take a higher load of DNA damage before detecting it. And yes, that does mean that they can survive better in the presence of more DNA damage (i.e. DNA damage is left in the genome without being dealt with) whereas in stem cells the same level of damage is either repaired or the cells die or senesce. Somatic cells can survive in the presence of more damage. I don't know what you think I argued as your grammar makes no sense at that point, but where I said damage is not likely to be well tolerated in sex cell progenitors I meant that damage will not persist in these cells - they will either repair it or die, unlike somatic cells which sit around with damaged genomes until you convert them to stem cells, carrying all that damage through the stemming process.
I'm not being funny, mate, but what you think is a bone of contention from my original post isn't - in fact I was saying essentially what you're now saying in rebuttal. Read it again!
I'd agree about the imperfect stemming/heart cell conversion thing, but not with this:
Propagating genetic errors is certainly a concern here, but the same concerns exist for genetic transfer in breeding generally.
They're not exactly the same concerns. 'Normal' somatic cells, cells of the body which aren't stem cells, have a much higher capacity for surviving with DNA damage in their genomes than stem cells. This is because they have stopped growing & proliferating and hence stopped replicating their DNA, and a major method by which DNA damage is detected in the cell is by "testing whether DNA replication can occur". When DNA replication fails or is particularly difficult there's a good chance a proliferating cell (i.e. stem cells) will activate DNA damage checkpoints and die or senesce (stop growing permanently).
The methods used to make "stemmed" cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) usually involve introducing some oncogenes which ultimately mess up activation of the DNA damage checkpoints. Also, the genes that are introduced during the process of "stemming" are randomly scattered into the genome, potentially inserting into and knocking out the cell's tumour suppressor genes, so cells which may already be in a DNA-damaged state can be further damaged while being deliberately converted to a highly proliferating state. The process selects for cells which can proliferate even when damaged, which is not ideal as far as preventing cancer is concerned. New methods, using drugs and not the introduction of oncogenes, have been produced, but I don't think they're commonly used yet (correct me if I'm wrong, someone).
I don't pretend to understand what's unique about how DNA damage is dealt with during sex to prevent mutations being propagated to the next generation. I'm not sure that much work has been done on it, but germline sperm and egg-producing cells are stem cells, so damage isn't likely to be that well tolerated in them, and if sperm is very damaged it's likely to be inviable and won't lead to conception. I had to go off and research this to have something to say about it, during which I found the following tidbit: having sex/ spanking off once a day gets rid of damaged sperm and seems to be a way of maintaining a bloke's fertility in tip-top condition. So blokes are probably biologically programmed to masturbate, in case you needed an excuse!