He was on his back, he'd had a large laceration to the back of his head from falling and/or being pounded on the concrete. Those are two things which if taken alone, would already warrant the use of escalated force.
Two problems there. There was no large laceration visible on the police video. Also, if Martin was actually above Zimmerman when he shot him, why was Martin's blood not on Zimmerman?
What if the security guard changes into plain clothes with a gun strapped on and follows you as you walk home. You panic because some strange person is following you and you run and hide and you watch them get out of their vehicle and walk around looking for you. When you confront the security guard about why they were following you, the security guard does not say: "I'm a security guard at the mall and I want to check your receipt", but instead lies to you, then turns their back and goes for their gun (or at least it looks like they are, since they're obscuring their actions by turning, but in reality they're going for their cell phone). Under the Florida law people keep claiming exonerates Zimmerman, that pretty much does give you the right to assault the security guard, since you have very good reason to believe he's about to kill you.
Except for the part about it being a security gaurd (neighborhood watch instead), the above is Zimmerman's story for what happened. By his own admission, he created a dangerous, threatening situation and then he shot Martin as a consequence. That's at least manslaughter.
Injuries do take time to show. The copious amounts of blood that should end up on you when you shoot someone directly above you while you are lying on the ground show up right away, however. This tends to lend credence to the idea that Martin was essentially executed rather than being killed in the heat of combat.
IMO, there's no arguing that Zimmerman shouldn't have confronted Martin. Martin wasn't doing anything wrong. If Martin jumped Zimmerman, this is clear self defense. If not, it's murder. Which was it? I have no idea. Good luck, jury. I hope you get it right.
There's no arguing that Zimmerman shouldn't have confronted Martin, true. There's also no argument that Zimmerman forced the confrontation by chasing Martin. If Martin jumped Zimmerman, it was clear self defense, and I don't mean Zimmerman shooting Martin was clear self-defense, I mean Martin jumping the armed lunatic chasing him was clear self-defense. I think many people see a false dichotomy in this. As far as I can tell, even if everything Zimmerman said about the incident is exactly true, it was still at least manslaughter. Negligent and unsafe actions leading to death.
So much misinformation here. I'm sure you're one of the people who criticize the media for using old photos of Martin when he was younger and more innocent-looking. That is a valid criticism. By the same token, calling someone who hadn't been on a football team for years a football player is also deceptive. The strength and conditioning you get from a sport can go away pretty quickly once you stop playing it.
Also, based on the up-to-date (before his death, of course) pictures I've seen of Martin, as tough as he was trying to look, he was a stick insect. Comparing him to Zimmerman, who was a bouncer (unclear how recently since the events where he worked as a bouncer were illegal and he's not likely to want to admit to profiting from an illegal enterprise), I'm pretty sure Zimmerman could have broken him in half in any protracted fight.
Zimmerman has always articulated from day one that he shot to stop the active attack. That he only got out of his car to give the relevant information to the 911 dispatcher of Martin's whereabouts. That Martin came back to confront ZImmerman, threw a punch and continued to beat him while he was supine on the ground. Being on the ground with an attacker actively slamming your head into the concrete pavement is reason enough for using deadly force to stop and attack.
He's also said from day one that he was chasing Martin, and that when Martin approached him, he didn't identify himself to Martin and lied about whether he was following him. He also was wearing a gun and clothing that would have left the gun obvious. He also says that he turned away from Martin and went for his phone. He has also stated publicly, although I'm not sure it was in his statement immediately after the killing, that Martin tried to grab his gun, which shows that Martin was aware of his gun. Anyone capable of envisioning the situation at all and putting themselves in Martin's place should be able to see that, even if Zimmerman's story is exactly true in every detail, Martin was very likely to have believed that Zimmerman was about to pull his gun and shoot Martin. This makes Martin's actions self-defense under the "Stand your ground" law and makes Zimmerman's actions that created the situation manslaughter at least.
Martin can only be the aggressor if you edit the timeline of the event so that it starts with Zimmerman standing on the street and ends with Martin dead on the ground, and even then only if you believe Martin's side of the story exactly. Otherwise, all the facts and Zimmerman's own statements start with an armed, grown man in a vehicle chasing a teenage boy through the streets and cornering him, then lying to him about whether he was chasing him, then acting in a way that might lead Martin to think he was about to be shot. It was unwise and uncalled for and led to a confrontation that left the unarmed teenager dead. Zimmerman's actions were foolish and irresponsible and someone is dead as a result. This is at least manslaughter.
Well, Zimmerman admitted to chasing Martin, so I think we can be pretty certain who initiated the confrontation. He was carrying a gun and, when Martin approached him, I'm pretty certain Zimmerman's story is that he turned away from Martin and went for his phone. If Martin saw that he was carrying a gun, which is very likely given the clothing Zimmerman was wearing, he would have had very good reason to think that Zimmerman was going for his gun.
it's possible he was a bad kid trying to assault someone,
Even based on Zimmerman's version of events that's not very likely. Or at least not very likely in the particular situation that led to Martin's death.
But since defending yourself with your body against someone attacking you with a gun is also not excessive force, there's a bit of a problem here. Zimmerman was hunting Martin down and was armed with a gun. Martin clearly felt his life and safety were threatened by Zimmerman. So, you have two people committing an act of self-defence against each other. So, then you have to ask how the heck this situation happened and could it have been foreseen. I think that a violent confrontation is a foreseeable consequence of hunting someone against police advice. So, when someone dies as a result of foreseeable consequences and their own negligence, it's generally considered to be at least manslaughter.
You can't have a tense standoff with nuclear weapons unless at least one party believes another party will use them. So, to have tense standoff, at least one side has to be crazy or reasonably believable as crazy.
I've always assumed that avoiding cracks, or only stepping on the blue tiles, etc. is programmed compulsive behaviour with survival value and we make games out of it to rationalize why we do it. Of course, those games feed back into the behaviour as well.
I don't really believe there is such a thing as "my" or "your" theory, though I Iike to think there might be such a thing as "our" reality. Scientific investigation isn't like some kind of horse race where you bet on the one you like the most or think most likely to win, and until something has been proven I think it is important to admit what you don't know. The religious fanatics who would deny all knowledge are truly a horror, though the purported scientists who lie and misrepresent (or simply botch) what is known (also with their own agendas) aren't much better. In fact, they are worse, because the should, and, indeed, are basically licensed to know better.
There is such a thing as "our" reality, and the goal of science is to understand and model it as well as possible. You misunderstand scientific investigation a little though. Nothing is ever completely proven in science. Every "proven" theory is really just the front-runner. The test for a theory is if it holds up to scientific investigation. If it doesn't, you either modify it, or you completely scrap it in favor of some other theory which more accurately describes reality(sometimes you supersede it, but still keep it around for rough work like with Newtonian mechanics). When you don't actually have some other theory with better predictive power, you keep the best working theory you have and patch it as appropriate while you dig into those exceptions in search of fresh enlightenment.
Sometimes I do get to feeling a bit put upon by this whole (ie. "human"/life) situation. Take, for example, Okkam's Razor, which is generally extremely sound for nearly all of the natural universe, though I more prefer Heraclitus' "latent structure is master of obvious structure" when it comes to human experience and perception.
I'm not a huge fan of Ockham's razor. The serious flaw with it is that, in many cases, recognizing which explanation is truly "the simplest" is an extremely difficult task. Unfortunately, it's also one of those extremely difficult tasks that many people think they can accomplish easily. "Simple explanations" are often superficially monstrously complex. "Latent structure is the master of obvious structure" is, indeed, better.
Cells have no will. They must be regarded as dumb machines. Where does all the info reside telling them to extend here or to retract there (eg. all the dendrites in the brain)? How many points of manipulation must that be? And all that on a single strand composed of a modest number of repeat units? Evolution definitely appears to have something (truly profound) to it, though there still seems to be some major pieces missing.
Whether or not cells have will depends on how you actually define will. If you define it only in terms of sentient will, then they have no will. If you just put it in terms of wants and needs, then cells do sort of have will. For example, a sperm cell "wants" to find an egg cell and be the first sperm cell to enter it. It only acts in terms of simple stimuli and, as an individual cell it has no memory and doesn't itself learn from success or failure. But, in a sense, the genes it carries do over multiple generations via natural selection. So, individually, the cells are dumb machines but the overall process involves a lot more than just the one cell.
As for where the information telling them where to go, what to do, etc. resides, it seems to be pretty certain that it's mostly in the DNA in the cell nucleus. The human genome contains gigabytes of data. That's a lot. Data storage on modern computers may make it seem like that's not a lot, but it really is. And everything in the organism is procedurally generated. The instructions in DNA don't say where every little cell or blood vessel should go. They just lay out rules that lead to the blood vessels distributing themselves. Maybe I'm more comfortable with the notion because of a background in computer science. Have you ever seen visualizations of
I'm still not sure what your alternative theory is for how organisms form if it's not from the information in their DNA and other molecules. Please tell me it's not that all are actually formed from some mystical external force? I had thought that most educated people by now, regardless of their religious beliefs, actually understood that biology is real and functions.
Anyway, when you have an already existing cell, new cells are formed by mitosis or meiosis, so you don't really have to address the problem of how cells form from the ground up from "simple" molecules when considering how cells form in an existing organism. Cells form from cells, they grow, then split. Similarly, you don't have the problem of how tissues form from just DNA, because they don't, they form from cells under the guidance of instructions in DNA. We don't have all the chemical signalling and lots of other fine details figured out, but we've observed the process enough to have a pretty good idea. A single cell splits repeatedly to form a ball of cells, once a critical mass of cells is reached, some cells start to differentiate and migrate and the ball becomes a tube and so on and so forth. Gross ontogeny we get. As for how cells know where they are in order to differentiate and migrate and so forth, it's going to be mostly by chemical signalling and sometimes by physical conditions of the structure. I don't really know enough about the process to tell you what chemical signals are actually involved, but it's obvious that, even in a homogenous group of cells, some cells would be able to "know" that they're in the center or on the outside layer based on concentrations of whatever the cells are secreting. Cells of various types have all kinds of receptors for various chemicals which can trigger various parts of their DNA based on concentrations of one or more chemicals. Once certain thresholds are reached indicating number of cells, the cells that "know" they're on the outside are triggered to differentiate and secrete new things and ditto for the cells in the center. Then the cells near them start to differentiate and divide at different rates based on the chemical signals they're getting from either side. Some sort of virtual coin toss decides which direction for it to start elongating and a feedback effect locks that in. All the various sub-regions that have differentiated themselves split into sub-regions and differentiate and grow. Over millions of years, evolution refines and adds to the process introducing all sorts of error correction (but only to a certain degree, since too much error correction also stops evolution, so anything too static probably gets out-evolved). The fine details are not all pinned down, as I've said, but actual concept is easy to grasp.
So, once you already have cellular life, the formation of tissues and differentiation into different types of cells is sort of a no-brainer. For a simple example, look at slime moulds. An even simpler example is bacterial plaques. Simple single celled organisms develop methods of sticking together that helps them stay where the food is or collect it more efficiently. They're working together, but still competing as well, and they build up in layers and the layers underneath die because they're choked out beneath the upper layers, but, over time, the groups where slight changes to the way the cells operate keeps the lower layers alive are more successful because they don't break off and float away, so they develop ways to differentiate. These become more and more complex and you end up with thinks like stromalites and more and more complicated colony creatures until you get to full-on multicellular life.
If you don't understand how the above occurs with cells as the base unit, I'm not sure what to tell you. If you do understand it, then I take it that your question is more about how you bootstrap from molecules to cells. Some study has gone into that since it's a question of interest, but not nearly so much as has gone into, for example, cancer research. Still, there
Time-traveling post-humans as the source of UFO encounters? Works for me:) They can work as the basis for many religious experiences too. Outside of creative fiction, I'm going to have to go with the theory that most reports of these experiences stem from either hallucinations or lies. I have met, for example, several high-school age people in my life who are amazingly Navy SEALs/CIA agents and drive a classic car they restored themselves with more horsepower than any other car in existence, only you can't see it right now because they totalled it in a 200 mph crash just last week, but fortunately they were thrown clear which is why they don't have a scratch on them, oh and they have a multi-million dollar trust fund waiting for them for when they turn 18... And those are just the hopeless ones who are easy to see through. There seems to be a long, long history of lying about religious experiences. For example, there seems to have been a tradition for greek poets to claim to have been visited by muses. Hesiod seems to have jumped the shark and pretty much claimed to have had the whole lot of them as neighbors, borrowing his lawnmower and so forth. Before Hesiod wrote about them, the muses probably didn't even have names in mythology, but he gave them some.
So, given the number of liars, crazy people, and otherwise sane people who can have hallucinations or experiences they can't otherwise explain, it seems likely that the majority of UFO sightings (of alien origin anyway) and religious experiences are explainable that way. Even if there are real ones, they would be drowned out from the noise from all the fake ones.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this consumes far more energy than it "creates".
How is this insightful? This is an energy _storage_ system, not an energy generation system. The point is that it creates fuel that works in all kinds of legacy equipment like gasoline cars. Since all the material it uses can come from the atmosphere, the eventual burning of the fuel it creates is carbon-neutral. Since it can be created in situ anywhere using electricity, the infrastructure that transports petroleum around can go away, reducing the number of spills. Same for drilling accidents and spills. We still have to wait and see how efficient this can be in large scale production, of course, but mis-characterizing what this represents isn't helpful.
Oh, mystery substances with the properties necessary to make otherwise impossible things work have been around since antiquity. The oldest I can think of offhand is Adamant, but I'm sure there are even older ones. Referring to them as unobtainium started somewhere, however. I don't know exactly where, but the term seems to have been around for at least 60 years.
Think of it in terms of scale. Sodium and chloride ions, and even regularly shaped protein globs, or cannon balls for that matter, stack very nicely to make a regular, 3-d repeat ("crystal") structure, and that same principle (ie. essentially "things stacking nicely") is posited to explain how biomolecules (eg. dna-encoded proteins) eventually join together to form anatomical (or even cellular-level) structures.
However, if you move very far way, for example, 1000 feet over a (regularly arranged) swimming pool full of bowling balls, it will look like just a glob. In fact, the only macroscopic products of large crystals which come to mind would be fracture planes, which are visible to the eye, though quintessentially simple (ie. a plane) in structure.
Well, the very first thing that occurred to me from your first paragraph was The Giant's Causeway, but you sort of addressed that with your comment about fracture planes. I think though that you might want to look into quasicrystals. Maybe also at the patterns that frost forms on a window. When you add to that the fact that we're dealing not just with crystals of one particular chemical, but an entire host of different things synthesized by DNA and governed by feedback mechanisms as someone else mentioned, of course you can get complex macro-scale structures out of it.
Quite frankly, your question is a bit astonishing. I can certainly understand wanting knowledge of how all the little processes interlock to create an organism, but your question seems to be instead to be doubting that it even happens. It's been pretty clearly demonstrated time and time again. Knock out a particular gene and get a version of an organism with jelly-like bones, or bones all fused together, or without some particular part of its brain, or missing cones in its eyes, etc. Or add a gene and get fluorescent cells of a particular type, or spider silk in milk, or insect chitin in mammal hair, etc. Researchers do this sort of thing all the time, and it's pretty amazingly good evidence that what evolutionary theory "assumes" about "genetic encoding of proteins leading to structural determination of organisms" is.
I would be very interested to hear what your alternative explanation is.
There isn't an easy answer. That's the point. CubicleZombie pretty clearly hopped into a conversation and piously informed everyone with some statement like: "Abstinence is the only 100% sure way to avoid HIV" to which people replied something like: "Well duh. Come back when you have something useful to say", then CubicleZombie cried "I'm being attacked for my religious beliefs!". Now, I just made all of that up based on the small amount of information I have. Since CubicleZombie could refute it with a link to the conversation in question, but chose instead to write: "It's called Personal Responsibility. That seems to be a foreign concept here where everybody wants the government to come in and take care of them." I'm going to guess that my take on the situation is pretty accurate. Attacking other people for their supposed lack of personal responsibility is all well and good and surely boosts CubicleZombie's self-righteousness score, but it doesn't address the real world at all. It also unfairly projects the problems that people observe with human nature onto the character of the observer.
Long story short, I don't think that I'm smarter than everyone else, but I do think that CubicleZombie was being a bit of a twit in this particular situation. Maybe in some other context CubicleZombie can be quite intelligent and we could have an interesting conversation. Here and now, CubicleZombie is unconvincingly play acting at being persecuted for religious views.
Avatar didn't invent "Unobtainium". The precise origin is unknown, but it goes back at least to the 1950's and has been traditionally used as a stand in for any material that has all the desired properties for an application (strength, weight, heat resistance, etc.) but that doesn't actually exist. So it's not called "Unobtainium" because it's virtually unobtainable, but because it just plain doesn't exist. Movies seem to have picked it up as a MacGuffin. It was used for the magical material the drill was made of in _The Core_ for example.
I would agree, but that methylation can be removed, resulting in the original genotype, thus the phenotype was selected for not the genotype.
Yes, but if you think of the methylation being removed as simply another form of mutation then it's no different than the gene being altered in some other inheritable way.
An even more interesting question to me along those lines is if we had such a machine, could we skip abortions altogether and just transplant fetuses into a uterine replicator and put them up for adoption when they come out? How would that change the abortion debate?
Also, although we can't bring fetuses to term artificially, we certainly can create them in vitro and do so frequently in quite large numbers. The entire embryonic stem cell debate seemed to kind of skirt around the fact that, harvested for stem cells or not, the embryos that they were actually talking about were pretty much entirely extras from fertility clinics and are all doomed to eventual sanitary disposal whether harvested for stem cells or not.
I don't see much in the way of a decent philosophical answer to problems like the abortion question. I much prefer decent technological solutions and responsible behaviour. The technological solutions might include uterine replicators and fetal transplantation, but mostly would consist of effective contraception, which already largely exists. As for responsibility, that needs to start with parents. They need to make sure that their children are properly educated about sex and make sure that they're provided with effective contraception. Parents and the organizations that actively oppose proper sex education and contraception seem to me to be the primary root cause of unwanted pregnancies.
Yep, we have yet to find any life anywhere. I look around the room I'm in and I just don't see any. It's possible that there might be some behind the cat.
Just poking a little fun. Obviously you meant that we have yet to find any anywhere else in the universe other than Earth and the stuff we've found in space that hitched a ride on our spacecraft. We haven't found other life in the solar system, true, but our actual efforts to find it have, thus far, literally only scratched the surface. Most of the methods we've used wouldn't have reliably found life in many environments on Earth itself.
You have to have a planet that has a stable orbit in just the right spot around its star, with the right chemical composition, and quite possibly may need something to cause tidal forces to mix the chemicals.
But we don't even know that you "have" to have that stuff. We theorize that such conditions were helpful or even necessary for the development of life on Earth, but we really don't have enough data to really conclude that. It might turn out, for example, that loose disks of debris and gas around a star are an excellent environment for life to develop. We actually have to do some real exploration of what's out there to have any sort of real clue of the probability of life, and we might not have any real answers for millions or billions of years ("we" being very subjective here).
Evolution is a well tested theory that has so far held up exceptionally well, but evolution doesn't explain life's beginnings. If you know of any decent theories that explain its creation, I'd like to read about them.
There are a lot of theories, but all of them are a bit hard to test. The size of an experiment that might prove them and the length of time the experiment would need to run is enormous. Not to mention that anywhere you might run the experiment at present is going to be contaminated with living things and organic molecules left over from living things. Presumably, any sort of proto-life is going to be hopelessly outmatched by any modern life, so we can never observe the origins of life happening again in nature on Earth.
I find it odd that so many believe without doubt that there is extraterrestrial life despite no indication that there is (note, I think there there probably is, considering how many planets there must be, but accept that this rock may possibly be the only one alive), yet are just as certain that God doesn't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary.
There are plenty of witnesses to extraterrestrial life as well. They're probably as reliable as the witnesses to God. The same psychological phenomena may actually explain both kinds of witnesses. In any case, I think extra-terrestrial life of some kind is quite probable simply because, over billions of years, panspermia, with Earth as the source has probably taken place. Even if there isn't now, if we can last a few million or billion years without dead-ending ("we" being once again pretty subjective) panspermia is almost guaranteed with our technology as the underlying mechanism.
The reasoning is the same if there are 4 googol suits and 12 googolplex possibilities for numbers or faces on the cards. If you pull an Apprentice Sub-Lieutenant Vice-Jack of the order of the daffodil third class of small bronze thimbles card, you can reflect on the monstrously small odds of pulling that particular card. The point is that there's nothing improbable about it at all. If you'd asked someone to guess a card and they picked that card, then you pulled a card at random and it was that one, _then_ there would be something remarkable about the odds. Unless you did it 24 googol googolplex times and it happened once or even a few times.
I think you meant to reply to the post I was replying to rather than mine. That was my point exactly. Depending on factors we do not know for sure and may not be knowable, the universe may be a perpetual motion machine depending on the definition of motion. This may be the case even without repeated expansion and contraction.
The latest thinking seems to be expansion forever. But it's not expansion into empty space, but rather expansion of the space itself. It gets pretty confusing.
Slashdot Mirror
He was on his back, he'd had a large laceration to the back of his head from falling and/or being pounded on the concrete. Those are two things which if taken alone, would already warrant the use of escalated force.
Two problems there. There was no large laceration visible on the police video. Also, if Martin was actually above Zimmerman when he shot him, why was Martin's blood not on Zimmerman?
What if the security guard changes into plain clothes with a gun strapped on and follows you as you walk home. You panic because some strange person is following you and you run and hide and you watch them get out of their vehicle and walk around looking for you. When you confront the security guard about why they were following you, the security guard does not say: "I'm a security guard at the mall and I want to check your receipt", but instead lies to you, then turns their back and goes for their gun (or at least it looks like they are, since they're obscuring their actions by turning, but in reality they're going for their cell phone). Under the Florida law people keep claiming exonerates Zimmerman, that pretty much does give you the right to assault the security guard, since you have very good reason to believe he's about to kill you.
Except for the part about it being a security gaurd (neighborhood watch instead), the above is Zimmerman's story for what happened. By his own admission, he created a dangerous, threatening situation and then he shot Martin as a consequence. That's at least manslaughter.
Injuries do take time to show. The copious amounts of blood that should end up on you when you shoot someone directly above you while you are lying on the ground show up right away, however. This tends to lend credence to the idea that Martin was essentially executed rather than being killed in the heat of combat.
IMO, there's no arguing that Zimmerman shouldn't have confronted Martin. Martin wasn't doing anything wrong. If Martin jumped Zimmerman, this is clear self defense. If not, it's murder. Which was it? I have no idea. Good luck, jury. I hope you get it right.
There's no arguing that Zimmerman shouldn't have confronted Martin, true. There's also no argument that Zimmerman forced the confrontation by chasing Martin. If Martin jumped Zimmerman, it was clear self defense, and I don't mean Zimmerman shooting Martin was clear self-defense, I mean Martin jumping the armed lunatic chasing him was clear self-defense. I think many people see a false dichotomy in this. As far as I can tell, even if everything Zimmerman said about the incident is exactly true, it was still at least manslaughter. Negligent and unsafe actions leading to death.
So much misinformation here. I'm sure you're one of the people who criticize the media for using old photos of Martin when he was younger and more innocent-looking. That is a valid criticism. By the same token, calling someone who hadn't been on a football team for years a football player is also deceptive. The strength and conditioning you get from a sport can go away pretty quickly once you stop playing it.
Also, based on the up-to-date (before his death, of course) pictures I've seen of Martin, as tough as he was trying to look, he was a stick insect. Comparing him to Zimmerman, who was a bouncer (unclear how recently since the events where he worked as a bouncer were illegal and he's not likely to want to admit to profiting from an illegal enterprise), I'm pretty sure Zimmerman could have broken him in half in any protracted fight.
Zimmerman has always articulated from day one that he shot to stop the active attack. That he only got out of his car to give the relevant information to the 911 dispatcher of Martin's whereabouts. That Martin came back to confront ZImmerman, threw a punch and continued to beat him while he was supine on the ground. Being on the ground with an attacker actively slamming your head into the concrete pavement is reason enough for using deadly force to stop and attack.
He's also said from day one that he was chasing Martin, and that when Martin approached him, he didn't identify himself to Martin and lied about whether he was following him. He also was wearing a gun and clothing that would have left the gun obvious. He also says that he turned away from Martin and went for his phone. He has also stated publicly, although I'm not sure it was in his statement immediately after the killing, that Martin tried to grab his gun, which shows that Martin was aware of his gun. Anyone capable of envisioning the situation at all and putting themselves in Martin's place should be able to see that, even if Zimmerman's story is exactly true in every detail, Martin was very likely to have believed that Zimmerman was about to pull his gun and shoot Martin. This makes Martin's actions self-defense under the "Stand your ground" law and makes Zimmerman's actions that created the situation manslaughter at least.
Martin can only be the aggressor if you edit the timeline of the event so that it starts with Zimmerman standing on the street and ends with Martin dead on the ground, and even then only if you believe Martin's side of the story exactly. Otherwise, all the facts and Zimmerman's own statements start with an armed, grown man in a vehicle chasing a teenage boy through the streets and cornering him, then lying to him about whether he was chasing him, then acting in a way that might lead Martin to think he was about to be shot. It was unwise and uncalled for and led to a confrontation that left the unarmed teenager dead. Zimmerman's actions were foolish and irresponsible and someone is dead as a result. This is at least manslaughter.
Well, Zimmerman admitted to chasing Martin, so I think we can be pretty certain who initiated the confrontation. He was carrying a gun and, when Martin approached him, I'm pretty certain Zimmerman's story is that he turned away from Martin and went for his phone. If Martin saw that he was carrying a gun, which is very likely given the clothing Zimmerman was wearing, he would have had very good reason to think that Zimmerman was going for his gun.
it's possible he was a bad kid trying to assault someone,
Even based on Zimmerman's version of events that's not very likely. Or at least not very likely in the particular situation that led to Martin's death.
But since defending yourself with your body against someone attacking you with a gun is also not excessive force, there's a bit of a problem here. Zimmerman was hunting Martin down and was armed with a gun. Martin clearly felt his life and safety were threatened by Zimmerman. So, you have two people committing an act of self-defence against each other. So, then you have to ask how the heck this situation happened and could it have been foreseen. I think that a violent confrontation is a foreseeable consequence of hunting someone against police advice. So, when someone dies as a result of foreseeable consequences and their own negligence, it's generally considered to be at least manslaughter.
You can't have a tense standoff with nuclear weapons unless at least one party believes another party will use them. So, to have tense standoff, at least one side has to be crazy or reasonably believable as crazy.
I've always assumed that avoiding cracks, or only stepping on the blue tiles, etc. is programmed compulsive behaviour with survival value and we make games out of it to rationalize why we do it. Of course, those games feed back into the behaviour as well.
I don't really believe there is such a thing as "my" or "your" theory, though I Iike to think there might be such a thing as "our" reality. Scientific investigation isn't like some kind of horse race where you bet on the one you like the most or think most likely to win, and until something has been proven I think it is important to admit what you don't know. The religious fanatics who would deny all knowledge are truly a horror, though the purported scientists who lie and misrepresent (or simply botch) what is known (also with their own agendas) aren't much better. In fact, they are worse, because the should, and, indeed, are basically licensed to know better.
There is such a thing as "our" reality, and the goal of science is to understand and model it as well as possible. You misunderstand scientific investigation a little though. Nothing is ever completely proven in science. Every "proven" theory is really just the front-runner. The test for a theory is if it holds up to scientific investigation. If it doesn't, you either modify it, or you completely scrap it in favor of some other theory which more accurately describes reality(sometimes you supersede it, but still keep it around for rough work like with Newtonian mechanics). When you don't actually have some other theory with better predictive power, you keep the best working theory you have and patch it as appropriate while you dig into those exceptions in search of fresh enlightenment.
Sometimes I do get to feeling a bit put upon by this whole (ie. "human"/life) situation. Take, for example, Okkam's Razor, which is generally extremely sound for nearly all of the natural universe, though I more prefer Heraclitus' "latent structure is master of obvious structure" when it comes to human experience and perception.
I'm not a huge fan of Ockham's razor. The serious flaw with it is that, in many cases, recognizing which explanation is truly "the simplest" is an extremely difficult task. Unfortunately, it's also one of those extremely difficult tasks that many people think they can accomplish easily. "Simple explanations" are often superficially monstrously complex. "Latent structure is the master of obvious structure" is, indeed, better.
Cells have no will. They must be regarded as dumb machines. Where does all the info reside telling them to extend here or to retract there (eg. all the dendrites in the brain)? How many points of manipulation must that be? And all that on a single strand composed of a modest number of repeat units? Evolution definitely appears to have something (truly profound) to it, though there still seems to be some major pieces missing.
Whether or not cells have will depends on how you actually define will. If you define it only in terms of sentient will, then they have no will. If you just put it in terms of wants and needs, then cells do sort of have will. For example, a sperm cell "wants" to find an egg cell and be the first sperm cell to enter it. It only acts in terms of simple stimuli and, as an individual cell it has no memory and doesn't itself learn from success or failure. But, in a sense, the genes it carries do over multiple generations via natural selection. So, individually, the cells are dumb machines but the overall process involves a lot more than just the one cell.
As for where the information telling them where to go, what to do, etc. resides, it seems to be pretty certain that it's mostly in the DNA in the cell nucleus. The human genome contains gigabytes of data. That's a lot. Data storage on modern computers may make it seem like that's not a lot, but it really is. And everything in the organism is procedurally generated. The instructions in DNA don't say where every little cell or blood vessel should go. They just lay out rules that lead to the blood vessels distributing themselves. Maybe I'm more comfortable with the notion because of a background in computer science. Have you ever seen visualizations of
I'm still not sure what your alternative theory is for how organisms form if it's not from the information in their DNA and other molecules. Please tell me it's not that all are actually formed from some mystical external force? I had thought that most educated people by now, regardless of their religious beliefs, actually understood that biology is real and functions.
Anyway, when you have an already existing cell, new cells are formed by mitosis or meiosis, so you don't really have to address the problem of how cells form from the ground up from "simple" molecules when considering how cells form in an existing organism. Cells form from cells, they grow, then split. Similarly, you don't have the problem of how tissues form from just DNA, because they don't, they form from cells under the guidance of instructions in DNA. We don't have all the chemical signalling and lots of other fine details figured out, but we've observed the process enough to have a pretty good idea. A single cell splits repeatedly to form a ball of cells, once a critical mass of cells is reached, some cells start to differentiate and migrate and the ball becomes a tube and so on and so forth. Gross ontogeny we get. As for how cells know where they are in order to differentiate and migrate and so forth, it's going to be mostly by chemical signalling and sometimes by physical conditions of the structure. I don't really know enough about the process to tell you what chemical signals are actually involved, but it's obvious that, even in a homogenous group of cells, some cells would be able to "know" that they're in the center or on the outside layer based on concentrations of whatever the cells are secreting. Cells of various types have all kinds of receptors for various chemicals which can trigger various parts of their DNA based on concentrations of one or more chemicals. Once certain thresholds are reached indicating number of cells, the cells that "know" they're on the outside are triggered to differentiate and secrete new things and ditto for the cells in the center. Then the cells near them start to differentiate and divide at different rates based on the chemical signals they're getting from either side. Some sort of virtual coin toss decides which direction for it to start elongating and a feedback effect locks that in. All the various sub-regions that have differentiated themselves split into sub-regions and differentiate and grow. Over millions of years, evolution refines and adds to the process introducing all sorts of error correction (but only to a certain degree, since too much error correction also stops evolution, so anything too static probably gets out-evolved). The fine details are not all pinned down, as I've said, but actual concept is easy to grasp.
So, once you already have cellular life, the formation of tissues and differentiation into different types of cells is sort of a no-brainer. For a simple example, look at slime moulds. An even simpler example is bacterial plaques. Simple single celled organisms develop methods of sticking together that helps them stay where the food is or collect it more efficiently. They're working together, but still competing as well, and they build up in layers and the layers underneath die because they're choked out beneath the upper layers, but, over time, the groups where slight changes to the way the cells operate keeps the lower layers alive are more successful because they don't break off and float away, so they develop ways to differentiate. These become more and more complex and you end up with thinks like stromalites and more and more complicated colony creatures until you get to full-on multicellular life.
If you don't understand how the above occurs with cells as the base unit, I'm not sure what to tell you. If you do understand it, then I take it that your question is more about how you bootstrap from molecules to cells. Some study has gone into that since it's a question of interest, but not nearly so much as has gone into, for example, cancer research. Still, there
Time-traveling post-humans as the source of UFO encounters? Works for me :) They can work as the basis for many religious experiences too. Outside of creative fiction, I'm going to have to go with the theory that most reports of these experiences stem from either hallucinations or lies. I have met, for example, several high-school age people in my life who are amazingly Navy SEALs/CIA agents and drive a classic car they restored themselves with more horsepower than any other car in existence, only you can't see it right now because they totalled it in a 200 mph crash just last week, but fortunately they were thrown clear which is why they don't have a scratch on them, oh and they have a multi-million dollar trust fund waiting for them for when they turn 18... And those are just the hopeless ones who are easy to see through. There seems to be a long, long history of lying about religious experiences. For example, there seems to have been a tradition for greek poets to claim to have been visited by muses. Hesiod seems to have jumped the shark and pretty much claimed to have had the whole lot of them as neighbors, borrowing his lawnmower and so forth. Before Hesiod wrote about them, the muses probably didn't even have names in mythology, but he gave them some.
So, given the number of liars, crazy people, and otherwise sane people who can have hallucinations or experiences they can't otherwise explain, it seems likely that the majority of UFO sightings (of alien origin anyway) and religious experiences are explainable that way. Even if there are real ones, they would be drowned out from the noise from all the fake ones.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this consumes far more energy than it "creates".
How is this insightful? This is an energy _storage_ system, not an energy generation system. The point is that it creates fuel that works in all kinds of legacy equipment like gasoline cars. Since all the material it uses can come from the atmosphere, the eventual burning of the fuel it creates is carbon-neutral. Since it can be created in situ anywhere using electricity, the infrastructure that transports petroleum around can go away, reducing the number of spills. Same for drilling accidents and spills. We still have to wait and see how efficient this can be in large scale production, of course, but mis-characterizing what this represents isn't helpful.
So, are you pro-death penalty because you hope to get a job as executioner then?
Oh, mystery substances with the properties necessary to make otherwise impossible things work have been around since antiquity. The oldest I can think of offhand is Adamant, but I'm sure there are even older ones. Referring to them as unobtainium started somewhere, however. I don't know exactly where, but the term seems to have been around for at least 60 years.
Think of it in terms of scale. Sodium and chloride ions, and even regularly shaped protein globs, or cannon balls for that matter, stack very nicely to make a regular, 3-d repeat ("crystal") structure, and that same principle (ie. essentially "things stacking nicely") is posited to explain how biomolecules (eg. dna-encoded proteins) eventually join together to form anatomical (or even cellular-level) structures.
However, if you move very far way, for example, 1000 feet over a (regularly arranged) swimming pool full of bowling balls, it will look like just a glob. In fact, the only macroscopic products of large crystals which come to mind would be fracture planes, which are visible to the eye, though quintessentially simple (ie. a plane) in structure.
Well, the very first thing that occurred to me from your first paragraph was The Giant's Causeway, but you sort of addressed that with your comment about fracture planes. I think though that you might want to look into quasicrystals. Maybe also at the patterns that frost forms on a window. When you add to that the fact that we're dealing not just with crystals of one particular chemical, but an entire host of different things synthesized by DNA and governed by feedback mechanisms as someone else mentioned, of course you can get complex macro-scale structures out of it.
Quite frankly, your question is a bit astonishing. I can certainly understand wanting knowledge of how all the little processes interlock to create an organism, but your question seems to be instead to be doubting that it even happens. It's been pretty clearly demonstrated time and time again. Knock out a particular gene and get a version of an organism with jelly-like bones, or bones all fused together, or without some particular part of its brain, or missing cones in its eyes, etc. Or add a gene and get fluorescent cells of a particular type, or spider silk in milk, or insect chitin in mammal hair, etc. Researchers do this sort of thing all the time, and it's pretty amazingly good evidence that what evolutionary theory "assumes" about "genetic encoding of proteins leading to structural determination of organisms" is.
I would be very interested to hear what your alternative explanation is.
There isn't an easy answer. That's the point. CubicleZombie pretty clearly hopped into a conversation and piously informed everyone with some statement like: "Abstinence is the only 100% sure way to avoid HIV" to which people replied something like: "Well duh. Come back when you have something useful to say", then CubicleZombie cried "I'm being attacked for my religious beliefs!". Now, I just made all of that up based on the small amount of information I have. Since CubicleZombie could refute it with a link to the conversation in question, but chose instead to write: "It's called Personal Responsibility. That seems to be a foreign concept here where everybody wants the government to come in and take care of them." I'm going to guess that my take on the situation is pretty accurate. Attacking other people for their supposed lack of personal responsibility is all well and good and surely boosts CubicleZombie's self-righteousness score, but it doesn't address the real world at all. It also unfairly projects the problems that people observe with human nature onto the character of the observer.
Long story short, I don't think that I'm smarter than everyone else, but I do think that CubicleZombie was being a bit of a twit in this particular situation. Maybe in some other context CubicleZombie can be quite intelligent and we could have an interesting conversation. Here and now, CubicleZombie is unconvincingly play acting at being persecuted for religious views.
Avatar didn't invent "Unobtainium". The precise origin is unknown, but it goes back at least to the 1950's and has been traditionally used as a stand in for any material that has all the desired properties for an application (strength, weight, heat resistance, etc.) but that doesn't actually exist. So it's not called "Unobtainium" because it's virtually unobtainable, but because it just plain doesn't exist. Movies seem to have picked it up as a MacGuffin. It was used for the magical material the drill was made of in _The Core_ for example.
I would agree, but that methylation can be removed, resulting in the original genotype, thus the phenotype was selected for not the genotype.
Yes, but if you think of the methylation being removed as simply another form of mutation then it's no different than the gene being altered in some other inheritable way.
An even more interesting question to me along those lines is if we had such a machine, could we skip abortions altogether and just transplant fetuses into a uterine replicator and put them up for adoption when they come out? How would that change the abortion debate?
Also, although we can't bring fetuses to term artificially, we certainly can create them in vitro and do so frequently in quite large numbers. The entire embryonic stem cell debate seemed to kind of skirt around the fact that, harvested for stem cells or not, the embryos that they were actually talking about were pretty much entirely extras from fertility clinics and are all doomed to eventual sanitary disposal whether harvested for stem cells or not.
I don't see much in the way of a decent philosophical answer to problems like the abortion question. I much prefer decent technological solutions and responsible behaviour. The technological solutions might include uterine replicators and fetal transplantation, but mostly would consist of effective contraception, which already largely exists. As for responsibility, that needs to start with parents. They need to make sure that their children are properly educated about sex and make sure that they're provided with effective contraception. Parents and the organizations that actively oppose proper sex education and contraception seem to me to be the primary root cause of unwanted pregnancies.
We have yet to find any.
Yep, we have yet to find any life anywhere. I look around the room I'm in and I just don't see any. It's possible that there might be some behind the cat.
Just poking a little fun. Obviously you meant that we have yet to find any anywhere else in the universe other than Earth and the stuff we've found in space that hitched a ride on our spacecraft. We haven't found other life in the solar system, true, but our actual efforts to find it have, thus far, literally only scratched the surface. Most of the methods we've used wouldn't have reliably found life in many environments on Earth itself.
You have to have a planet that has a stable orbit in just the right spot around its star, with the right chemical composition, and quite possibly may need something to cause tidal forces to mix the chemicals.
But we don't even know that you "have" to have that stuff. We theorize that such conditions were helpful or even necessary for the development of life on Earth, but we really don't have enough data to really conclude that. It might turn out, for example, that loose disks of debris and gas around a star are an excellent environment for life to develop. We actually have to do some real exploration of what's out there to have any sort of real clue of the probability of life, and we might not have any real answers for millions or billions of years ("we" being very subjective here).
Evolution is a well tested theory that has so far held up exceptionally well, but evolution doesn't explain life's beginnings. If you know of any decent theories that explain its creation, I'd like to read about them.
There are a lot of theories, but all of them are a bit hard to test. The size of an experiment that might prove them and the length of time the experiment would need to run is enormous. Not to mention that anywhere you might run the experiment at present is going to be contaminated with living things and organic molecules left over from living things. Presumably, any sort of proto-life is going to be hopelessly outmatched by any modern life, so we can never observe the origins of life happening again in nature on Earth.
I find it odd that so many believe without doubt that there is extraterrestrial life despite no indication that there is (note, I think there there probably is, considering how many planets there must be, but accept that this rock may possibly be the only one alive), yet are just as certain that God doesn't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary.
There are plenty of witnesses to extraterrestrial life as well. They're probably as reliable as the witnesses to God. The same psychological phenomena may actually explain both kinds of witnesses. In any case, I think extra-terrestrial life of some kind is quite probable simply because, over billions of years, panspermia, with Earth as the source has probably taken place. Even if there isn't now, if we can last a few million or billion years without dead-ending ("we" being once again pretty subjective) panspermia is almost guaranteed with our technology as the underlying mechanism.
The reasoning is the same if there are 4 googol suits and 12 googolplex possibilities for numbers or faces on the cards. If you pull an Apprentice Sub-Lieutenant Vice-Jack of the order of the daffodil third class of small bronze thimbles card, you can reflect on the monstrously small odds of pulling that particular card. The point is that there's nothing improbable about it at all. If you'd asked someone to guess a card and they picked that card, then you pulled a card at random and it was that one, _then_ there would be something remarkable about the odds. Unless you did it 24 googol googolplex times and it happened once or even a few times.
I think you meant to reply to the post I was replying to rather than mine. That was my point exactly. Depending on factors we do not know for sure and may not be knowable, the universe may be a perpetual motion machine depending on the definition of motion. This may be the case even without repeated expansion and contraction.
The latest thinking seems to be expansion forever. But it's not expansion into empty space, but rather expansion of the space itself. It gets pretty confusing.