Yes, that's pretty much what I expected. What you're doing is projecting. I point out that simply saying that people should abstain from sex is not a practical solution to the problem of HIV, and you behave as if I were somehow making excuses for myself rather than making an observation on other people. Observing that it's impractical to expect everyone to abstain from sex is not a moral failing on my part, it's just being realistic.
Now, I asked you if you could provide a link to the discussion you were talking about to see if you were being attacked for being a religious zealot or for being a twit. I don't think the link is necessary any more, I think you've probably answered the question for us here.
You might have to expand on your example. Maybe a reference to the research you're talking about. This sounds to me like you're asking why a car doesn't run when you pile a bunch of car parts in a heap rather than assembling them according to the design of the car.
Yes, but there are so many feedback mechanisms in that. Consider all the adaptations that exist solely as mating displays. An adaptive advantage there increases the survival of a successful individuals genes within the group, but is probably not actually good for the group or the individuals themselves. The survival advantage for believers could be limited to not being stoned to death by other believers in the same species and still be a survival advantage.
If there are two genes, identical in terms of base pairs but with some form of activation that makes them express differently, and that difference is inheritable, then I would contend that they are, in fact, two different genes for the purposes of evolution. Genes, after all, were a concept that was understood well before the structure of DNA was understood or even before DNA was discovered. We decided that genes meant particular sequences of DNA due to better understanding of DNA. With even greater understanding DNA, we should simply expand our understanding of what a gene is rather than deciding that inheritable factors outside of simple DNA sequence are somehow extra-genetic.
I once proposed here that not having sex is a pretty good way to stay clear of HIV and was immediately bashed as a religious zealot.
I'm going to guess that the discussion was probably around practical ways to prevent the spread of HIV and you came out with some trite statement about abstinence that essentially boils down to "you can avoid HIV by not catching HIV" and you were bashed for being a twit rather than a religious zealot. Simply suggesting that people practice abstinence is not practical. Suggesting a practical way to encourage abstinence might be a useful contribution to the conversation, but simply saying something that people already know isn't. I'm imagining you coming in spouting this off to the people in the discussion as if it were their own debauched lives responsible for the epidemic when the people in the discussion were actually discussing the plight of people they had no practical way of influencing.
I'm just guessing, mind you. If it's not the case then this is, after all, Slashdot. Discussions are archived. Provide a link to the thread in question and we can make up our own minds based on the evidence.
The laws of thermodynamics are convenient aren't they? They're so poorly understood by most people that it's easy to claim that things are impossible due to the laws of thermodynamics, even when they aren't, and people have a hard time arguing back. The best part is, you don't really need to understand the laws of thermodynamics yourself in order to claim that they make something impossible.
The universe isn't a perpetual motion machine - it needs something outside itself to come into existence.
A. The universe may, in fact, be a perpetual motion machine. It depends on a number of factors, such as whether or not the laws of conservation of matter and energy are true and exactly how you define motion (for example, do photons move?). Understand that the heat death of the universe does not mean an entire universe at absolute zero, it just means an entire universe in which you can no longer exploit energy to do work. B. Why would a non-perpetual motion machine need something outside itself to come into existence, and how do you resolve the obvious paradox of how that something itself came into existence?
Something outside of space and time - therefore something immaterial and eternal - and powerful. I'm speaking of space-time itself and even the laws of physics. Particles can't come from a void without physical laws.
It's curious that you say that particles can't come from a void without physical laws. It seems that you're strongly suggesting that whatever the universe arose from is governed by some sort of physical laws. If that's the case, you've just offloaded the mysteries of the universe onto a mysterious extra-universal thing which itself must have some sort of origin governed by some sort of physical laws. This sort of thing either requires an infinite series of creative forces: creator, then meta-creator, meta-meta-creator and so on, or it requires that, somewhere along the chain, something simply came into being or somehow created itself. If you can believe that about some sort of extra-universal creator, then why can't you believe it about the universe itself?
Also, if you need another reason - the anthropic principle. There are not enough sub atomic particles in the universe for there to be a life-possible planet statistically - the numbers will blow your mind if you look at them.
Oh please. We don't have the kind of information to realistically calculate those statistical odds. Even with the size of the universe truly known, depending on your base assumptions, the estimates can be off by hundreds of orders of magnitude. Even if we actually had some clue on those base assumptions, we don't even have any real clue how big the universe is. We are pretty sure that the universe is so big that there are parts of it expanding away from us so fast that the light from them will never reach us though. If the universe actually is infinite, then that means that statistical probabilities of life evolving are meaningless and it simply has to happen somewhere. If it's not infinite, it's still of mind-boggling and unknowable size so we can't realistically ever give the odds of life springing up somewhere. The fact that it sprang up on Earth rather than somewhere else is meaningless statistically. Wherever you go, there you are.
Anyone with an open mind will see that God is really the only rational, logical explanation
What about pantheons of gods? Cosmic eggs? Various kinds of heavenly cow? Flying spaghetti Monsters? Unfathomable cosmic horrors from beyond the gulfs of space and time? Ascended lower life-forms from the far future travelling outside of time to create their own past? The universe being sneezed into existence by the Great Green Arkleseizure? Self-transforming machine elves? It's all just a simulation (hey look, another explanation that just shifts the question to where did the m
Well, if you consider the fact that all communicator calls in TOS went through what basically amounted to a traditional phone switchboard operated by Uhura, it was more like a wireless phone (but not cellular since the only base station was generally the NCC-1701 herself) with a manually switched back end.
Arrgh. Wrote a detailed response to this and Slashdot swallowed it because I started it then came back later to finish it. I'm just going to summarize rather than retype it.
For starters. Regarding pressure, congratulations for knowing so much about it. Trying to change what I said, then disagreeing with your modified version of what I said isn't very honest. I didn't say anything about the tube being "at surface".
You try to insult me by basically claiming that I'm not just stupid, but dangerously stupid. Without providing one example, you claim that I know nothing about anatomy or physiology. In my original post that I lost, I wrote out a list of the 11 things I could find in the post in question that I stated about anatomy or physiology. None of them seemed to be wrong. The ones that were speculation were speculation. I'm not going to do your work for you again. If you want to call me an idiot, you're going to have to do more than just declare everything I say wrong.
Major blood vessels do leave marks on bones. Despite that, I challenge you to find any evidence on bones that tells you that any sauropod even had a heart let alone where it was located.
Palaeontology is a science where rampant speculation is very much constrained by the evidence present
Not going to bother being polite on this one. You're a condescending, hypocritical sophist with no humility and apparently little respect for real science. _You_ are the one speculating wildly without evidence about the capabilities of long-extinct animals. You not only speculate based only on unsupported weak modeling (you're using the underwater capabilities of a _human_ for your model, for crying out loud), but you then declare your speculation to be absolute fact. Somehow, despite this, I have to be held to a higher standard in my own speculation? And my speculation is only to find what ifs that throw your theory into doubt. I'm not at all trying to claim that any of my speculation is the way things actually were. I think that some things are sadly probably unknowable and the truth of bottom dwelling sauropods is probably one of those things (although we can probably be 99% confident that the truth is that they didn't live that way). There just isn't enough evidence left to ever decide conclusively. We can say with very good confidence that all evidence is that they didn't live that way, but we can't say with any scientific honesty that it was impossible, based on the evidence.
Oh that... poor choice of terms (I'm tempted to call it a "lie", but that would imply deliberate misleading which I don't think was present).
And here you're saying that I'm either an idiot or a liar, but you're going to be the bigger man and just call me an idiot. How fair and reasonable of you.
Some (but only some) dinosaurs
Such as brachiosaurs, which are one of the large sauropods we're discussing.
show evidence of a swelling (a "ganglion") in the lowermost spine, which in the 1870s or 1880s was described occasionally as a "secondary brain". And the name has stuck.
Yes, the name has stuck and now it's pretty much traditional. Thus my use of it along with notations to indicate that I'm fully aware it's not a brain.
You've got a similar ganglion spread through your sacral vertebrae and lowest spine, and proportionately it's not much smaller
Wow, you talk down to me as if I'm an idiot and then you come out with garbage like this. "proportionately it's not much smaller". What meaningless nonsense. Proportionately, the neck of a baby sauropod with a 10 centimeter long neck is the same length as the 10 meter long one from our discussion. So, by your reasoning above, if that baby sauropod can stand on the bottom with just its head above water and breathe then the adult can do. You know, because it's "proportionately" the same thing.
Well that's just Reagan vs Carter all over again. Iran knew Carter wouldn't bomb them if they didn't release the hostages. Reagan pretty much promised to. Iran released the hostages the moment Reagan was elected.
Umm. Didn't they release the hostages because the US, under Reagan, agreed to sell them weapons through proxies?
Your disproof of the bottom-walking sauropod model in flawed
It wasn't my disproof, just the one I'd been exposed to which was simple, elegant, and clearly wrong. As I said, the bottom-walking sauropod theory was based on a fallacious "proof" that adult sauropods wouldn't have been able to support their own weight out of the water in the first place. But the reasoning behind disproving it based on pressure issues also seems to be pretty flawed. The original explanation I remember from my dinosaur loving youth was clearly ridiculous. I also have some issues with your much more reasonable explanation. Either way, I think it's pretty unlikely that sauropods actually did walk around on the very bottom of lakes with just their heads sticking above water. Quite aside from the question of why they would even want to, there's the bigger question of why they wouldn't just be able to swim. Actually declaring it impossible, however, seems ridiculous.
Now, you made some very good points, but I'm not going to start out with the points you made, I'm going to start out with dragons and planes. The proof about dragons being unable to fly essentially boils down to the idea that nothing that big could possibly fly. That, however, immediately runs into the problem that we have planes weighing up to 640 tons (with a cargo capacity of 250 tons, so we're talking about.89 kilotons), which means that back of the envelope calculations about weight and wing surface area have to either take a back seat to proven reality or they have to model the real world a lot better to be taken seriously. For your proof about the impossibility of bottom-walking sauropods, I'm going to start with surface-fed diving. It works and the divers don't die (ok, sometimes they do, but not _all_ the time). So, right off the bat, we have a living thing that's not at all adapted to standing on the bottom and breathing through a long tube to the surface nevertheless standing on the bottom and breathing through a long tube to the surface. The principle is obviously sound, even if the implementation is different.
The big problem isn't in the throats. Or in the intercostal (between-rib) muscles. It's the blood pressure.
Put your sauropod on the bottom of a lake, it's lungs at 10m below air surface (for a number). The purpose of breathing is to oxygenate (and de-carbon-dioxide-ate) the blood. To achieve that, you've got to have blood circulation. which means that the absolute blood pressure will be (say) 2.15 atmospheres (= 1 atm for the atmosphere + 1 atm for the water depth + 0.15 atm differential pressure from the heart's pumping effort (114mm Hg, approx)) . Meanwhile, the absolute atmospheric pressure inside the alveoli will be around 1.00001 atm. So, the pressure differential across the alveoli lining is 2.14999 atm.
Divers who have (inadvertently) been exposed to such pressure differentials, die. Their lungs either grossly rupture, or so much fluid seeps from the blood into the lungs that the diver drowns in his own pulmonary oedema. That starts to happen at a differential pressure of around 0.2atm (people vary) in humans. In whales, it is less studied, but their lungs are rarely more than 5-odd m deep when they're in-/ex-haling, suggesing a limit for them of around 0.5 atm. (Incidentally, some ichnofossils of sauropods prove that they did enter water and swim ; but that does not require that their lungs were much more than 3-4m below the surface.)
I'm focus here on the fact that we're talking about an animal with a ten meter long neck. It's easy to "prove" that an animal with such a neck will die from the pressure differential just from raising or lowering its head even outside of the water based on comparisons with other animals such as humans and whales and their tolerances. In fact, it's easy to prove the same for an animal with a 2-meter long neck. Such an animal simply couldn't possibly exist, but giraffes nevertheless do. Similarly, bipedal humans above
I didn't actually see that anywhere in the article. It did say that some fired shards of plastic or failed to inflate fully during testing. They don't say how well they actually compare to other airbags which very well may experience the same kinds of problems in some tests.
Yes, the article is pretty careful not to say anything at all about the physical, mechanical or electronic aspects of the counterfeits, just that they're re-manufactured from core parts from deployed airbags.
On the other hand, the only legitimate reason for the existence of trademarks is consumer protection. Protected trademarks ensure that, when a customer buys a product, they know who actually made it and can presumably count on that companies procedures, materials, quality control, etc. being used in the manufacture of the product. So, "counterfeit" products are bad because they pull a fast one on the consumer and they don't get what they expect. Of course, the way most companies commoditize their trademarks flies in the face of this. When companies will simply swap out the underlying internals of a product willy nilly and slap on the same outer casing and trademarked logo, it sort of defeats the purpose. Ditto for companies who will simply rent out their trademarks to anyone as long as they can pay.
Cars, and presumably car safety parts are a pretty safety-critical industry, however. If car parts are being distributed with the OEM's logo added to them (if they're sold specifically as "remanufactured" and have the logo from the original core part, I consider that another story), then it implies that the product has been through that companies safety testing and produced to the same standards as all its original parts. In that respect, that kind of counterfeiting can harm the consumer (in a very literal way).
On yet another hand, car safety systems are presumably a regulated industry, with certain safety and certification requirements. That being the case, it's a bit disturbing that the big deal being made about this is "counterfeiting" rather than distributing uncertified and untested parts. Since nothing about this is mentioned, does that mean that it's just poor or biased reporting, or does it mean that no sort of safety testing or certification are actually required for these parts, or does it mean that these parts are actually fully tested and certified, but are just having an OEM logo stamped on them when they aren't OEM?
Living things are constantly copying their DNA, yes. But that's irrelevant here unless you have some examples of living cells copying DNA as a replacement for the DNA in that cell's nucleus rather than copying it in the process of producing a new cell. As for repair, that is relevant. The question is if that repair is actually able to deal with the kind of self destruction the article is talking about. As far as I know, most such repair mechanisms correct errors during replication. Are there any repair mechanisms that will actually fix DNA strands that basically just break, or do they just fix the kinds of problems that would still leave the DNA perfectly readable, just with a slight error?
DNA repair mechanisms I'll grant you, although none of the repair mechanisms I've heard of seem like they'd be able to deal with the kind of destruction the article talks about. As for the "living cells do not last 40 years" statement, I have to ask just what you're smoking? While the brain turns out to be more capable of regeneration than once believed, most of the cells in the brain do, in fact, last you a lifetime. Also, plenty of women are capable of having children well past the age of 40. Since women possess their full complement of ova from before their own births and they don't generate more during their lifetimes, how exactly can a woman have children after age 40 if what you say is true. Then there's the specific example I gave of the long neurons in the spinal cord. They grow with you throughout your life to their great length. They're essentially stretched into place. Your body can no more replace one of those cells than it can re-attach a long tendon that's been completely dislocated. If they didn't last more than 40 years, everyone over 40 would be paralyzed.
It's been about 147 years since the thirteenth amendment. That puts the era of slavery outside living memory, true. However, if we consider a lifespan of about 80 years, that means that there can certainly still be people alive today who are only one generation removed from slavery. So, the era of pre-thirteenth amendment slavery may be history, but it's a long way from being dead history.
Add to that the fact that the thirteenth amendment hardly fixed everything. For starters, it didn't actually ban slavery. The amendment quite clearly left the door open for slavery as a punishment for crime. This does stop hereditary slavery, but otherwise leaves pretty much every other element of slavery open to continue (except for the nebulous protection of the eighth amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause) for anyone convicted of a crime. Convicting poor, black, illiterate (nearly always, since it was a crime to teach slaves to read in most slave states) former slaves of crimes was pretty easy in the former slave states. For example, most former slaves were pretty much instantly guilty of vagrancy. Chain gangs and forced prison labor persisted well until... well, now actually.
Then there's the civil rights situation. Despite the passage of the 13th amendment (ratified by Mississippi in 1995), Jim Crow laws persisted until 1965 and anti-miscegenation laws weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967 and weren't all repealed until Alabama finally did so in 2001. So, there are plenty of people alive today who experienced active legal discrimination in their lifetimes.
Given all that, it's ridiculous to claim that the past racial discrimination of the US is just a "crutch or excuse" for social problems. The kind of effects that sort of thing produces can persist across numerous generations.
As for people starting with nothing then rising to great success, that certainly is possible, but those are statistical outliers. If you're going to consider people en masse then those born to disadvantaged circumstances are going to stay disadvantaged and pass it on to their children and their children's children.
But cancer is generally caused by carcinogens. Viruses and all kinds of nasty chemicals that we get in our bodies as a result of being alive, moving around, breathing, eating and touching things. If DNA under preservative conditions suitable for fossilization has a half-life of just 512 years, then, in a human body exposed to all these things the rate of DNA destruction (sometimes leading to cancer, but mostly just to cell death) should probably be a lot higher than our survival rate suggests.
Given this half-life of 521 years for DNA preserved in fossils, I have to wonder about the half-life of DNA in living things. Specifically in us. Based on that figure, after 40 years, a little over 5% of the DNA in anything would have self-destructed. Although it turns out that we do, after all, grow new cells in our brains, some of our cells, such as the really, really long ones in our spinal cords are there for life, are pretty vital, and are not replaced. If the DNA in those cells spontaneously destroys itself, then they die. So, the question I have is, how many of them can we lose before we're paralyzed. Also, the 521 years seems to be some sort of averaged upper limit. The kinds of conditions they suggest will destroy the DNA are far, far more common in the human body, so being in a living human body should push that half-life way way down. By the reasoning they're using in this story, it seems like a human body would necessarily have to stop functioning within a timeframe much shorter than an average lifespan.
Now, I think it probably is pretty unlikely that dinosaur DNA could last until modern times. But I've seen enough of these back of an envelope calculations by people with some sort of axe to grind against some pet peeve of theirs. In this case, the pet peeve being the idea that DNA could survive tens of millions of years. Lots of ridiculous ideas about living things, especially about dinosaurs, have been "proven" this way in the past. The proofs never seem to hold up to actual real-world evidence. One of my favorites is a double-whammy. It was once "proven" that large sauropods couldn't have spent their lives walking around on the bottom of lakes and swamps with their heads held up to the surface to breath because the pressure at those depths would have crushed their throats. It sounds like a pretty good theory when you apply a pressure of about one extra atmosphere to something like a garden hose. When you apply it to a sauropods neck, which is a construction of bone and cartilage and muscle, thicker at the base than a human is tall, it's clearly ridiculous. If they were adapted to live walking around on the bottom of bodies of water, the throats of sauropods would have been able to suck air down against the pressure. The double whammy part is that the theory that useless "proof" was disproving was itself based on a similar ridiculous "proof". The theory in question was that large sauropods had to spend their lives in water because their legs clearly couldn't have taken the strain. The problem is, the assumptions that went into that "proof" also would have disallowed all kinds of other large animals, including other large dinosaurs who clearly didn't live in water and probably modern elephants as well. So, it was one ridiculous proof to disprove another.
Similar logic has disproven all sorts of things, such as kangaroos and sturgeon (which have both been calculated to not exist because they supposedly did not consume enough food to provide all the energy they use). Bees and other insects have been proven incapable of flying, etc. I remember an example in a math magazine in school when I was very young which explained that dragons couldn't fly because their wings couldn't generate enough downward thrust to counter their weight. Quite aside from the large number of assumptions needed to actually get any figures for imaginary animals, the article completely ignored the fact that there's almost nothing in nature that flies by directly countering its weight with downward thrust. It also ignored the existence of winged flying machines in excess of 300 tons.
So, I take anything like this with a huge grain of salt. It very probably is the case that dinosaur DNA hasn't been preserved (except in their descendants), but the "proof" is a pointless mathematical game. They might as well be counting the letters in bible verses to find hidden codes.
Of course Wi-Fi is just a stupid trademarked marketing name mashed up from the word "wireless" and the term Hi-Fi. I wouldn't get so wound up over protecting it's integrity.
But the scientists producing the research and the institutions employing them are, as far as I can tell, seldom (never?) compensated by scientific journals for articles. Peer review is done by scientists, not the journals themselves. The journals just publish. It seems that scientists are more likely to have to pay to be published than the other way around.
There is this neat electric grid thing we have where you can get power produced elsewhere delivered to you.
Also, the Banqiao dam wasn't only for electric generation, it was also for flood control (which it obviously failed catastrophically at during a bad typhoon). It probably would have existed, and subsequently still failed, even if it hadn't been used for hydroelectric. It's also hard to determine exactly which deaths would and would not have been caused by the typhoon if the dam hadn't been built.
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Yes, that's pretty much what I expected. What you're doing is projecting. I point out that simply saying that people should abstain from sex is not a practical solution to the problem of HIV, and you behave as if I were somehow making excuses for myself rather than making an observation on other people. Observing that it's impractical to expect everyone to abstain from sex is not a moral failing on my part, it's just being realistic.
Now, I asked you if you could provide a link to the discussion you were talking about to see if you were being attacked for being a religious zealot or for being a twit. I don't think the link is necessary any more, I think you've probably answered the question for us here.
You might have to expand on your example. Maybe a reference to the research you're talking about. This sounds to me like you're asking why a car doesn't run when you pile a bunch of car parts in a heap rather than assembling them according to the design of the car.
Yes, but there are so many feedback mechanisms in that. Consider all the adaptations that exist solely as mating displays. An adaptive advantage there increases the survival of a successful individuals genes within the group, but is probably not actually good for the group or the individuals themselves. The survival advantage for believers could be limited to not being stoned to death by other believers in the same species and still be a survival advantage.
If there are two genes, identical in terms of base pairs but with some form of activation that makes them express differently, and that difference is inheritable, then I would contend that they are, in fact, two different genes for the purposes of evolution. Genes, after all, were a concept that was understood well before the structure of DNA was understood or even before DNA was discovered. We decided that genes meant particular sequences of DNA due to better understanding of DNA. With even greater understanding DNA, we should simply expand our understanding of what a gene is rather than deciding that inheritable factors outside of simple DNA sequence are somehow extra-genetic.
I once proposed here that not having sex is a pretty good way to stay clear of HIV and was immediately bashed as a religious zealot.
I'm going to guess that the discussion was probably around practical ways to prevent the spread of HIV and you came out with some trite statement about abstinence that essentially boils down to "you can avoid HIV by not catching HIV" and you were bashed for being a twit rather than a religious zealot. Simply suggesting that people practice abstinence is not practical. Suggesting a practical way to encourage abstinence might be a useful contribution to the conversation, but simply saying something that people already know isn't. I'm imagining you coming in spouting this off to the people in the discussion as if it were their own debauched lives responsible for the epidemic when the people in the discussion were actually discussing the plight of people they had no practical way of influencing.
I'm just guessing, mind you. If it's not the case then this is, after all, Slashdot. Discussions are archived. Provide a link to the thread in question and we can make up our own minds based on the evidence.
Because of the laws of thermodynamics.
The laws of thermodynamics are convenient aren't they? They're so poorly understood by most people that it's easy to claim that things are impossible due to the laws of thermodynamics, even when they aren't, and people have a hard time arguing back. The best part is, you don't really need to understand the laws of thermodynamics yourself in order to claim that they make something impossible.
The universe isn't a perpetual motion machine - it needs something outside itself to come into existence.
A. The universe may, in fact, be a perpetual motion machine. It depends on a number of factors, such as whether or not the laws of conservation of matter and energy are true and exactly how you define motion (for example, do photons move?). Understand that the heat death of the universe does not mean an entire universe at absolute zero, it just means an entire universe in which you can no longer exploit energy to do work.
B. Why would a non-perpetual motion machine need something outside itself to come into existence, and how do you resolve the obvious paradox of how that something itself came into existence?
Something outside of space and time - therefore something immaterial and eternal - and powerful. I'm speaking of space-time itself and even the laws of physics. Particles can't come from a void without physical laws.
It's curious that you say that particles can't come from a void without physical laws. It seems that you're strongly suggesting that whatever the universe arose from is governed by some sort of physical laws. If that's the case, you've just offloaded the mysteries of the universe onto a mysterious extra-universal thing which itself must have some sort of origin governed by some sort of physical laws. This sort of thing either requires an infinite series of creative forces: creator, then meta-creator, meta-meta-creator and so on, or it requires that, somewhere along the chain, something simply came into being or somehow created itself. If you can believe that about some sort of extra-universal creator, then why can't you believe it about the universe itself?
Also, if you need another reason - the anthropic principle. There are not enough sub atomic particles in the universe for there to be a life-possible planet statistically - the numbers will blow your mind if you look at them.
Oh please. We don't have the kind of information to realistically calculate those statistical odds. Even with the size of the universe truly known, depending on your base assumptions, the estimates can be off by hundreds of orders of magnitude. Even if we actually had some clue on those base assumptions, we don't even have any real clue how big the universe is. We are pretty sure that the universe is so big that there are parts of it expanding away from us so fast that the light from them will never reach us though. If the universe actually is infinite, then that means that statistical probabilities of life evolving are meaningless and it simply has to happen somewhere. If it's not infinite, it's still of mind-boggling and unknowable size so we can't realistically ever give the odds of life springing up somewhere. The fact that it sprang up on Earth rather than somewhere else is meaningless statistically. Wherever you go, there you are.
Anyone with an open mind will see that God is really the only rational, logical explanation
What about pantheons of gods? Cosmic eggs? Various kinds of heavenly cow? Flying spaghetti Monsters? Unfathomable cosmic horrors from beyond the gulfs of space and time? Ascended lower life-forms from the far future travelling outside of time to create their own past? The universe being sneezed into existence by the Great Green Arkleseizure? Self-transforming machine elves? It's all just a simulation (hey look, another explanation that just shifts the question to where did the m
The UAC can't even keep demons from overrunning their Mars base, how are they going to keep your equipment free of viruses?
1937 I'd say that was a reasonable prediction of the internet.
Provided you're employing RFC 1149
Well, if you consider the fact that all communicator calls in TOS went through what basically amounted to a traditional phone switchboard operated by Uhura, it was more like a wireless phone (but not cellular since the only base station was generally the NCC-1701 herself) with a manually switched back end.
Arrgh. Wrote a detailed response to this and Slashdot swallowed it because I started it then came back later to finish it. I'm just going to summarize rather than retype it.
For starters. Regarding pressure, congratulations for knowing so much about it. Trying to change what I said, then disagreeing with your modified version of what I said isn't very honest. I didn't say anything about the tube being "at surface".
You try to insult me by basically claiming that I'm not just stupid, but dangerously stupid. Without providing one example, you claim that I know nothing about anatomy or physiology. In my original post that I lost, I wrote out a list of the 11 things I could find in the post in question that I stated about anatomy or physiology. None of them seemed to be wrong. The ones that were speculation were speculation. I'm not going to do your work for you again. If you want to call me an idiot, you're going to have to do more than just declare everything I say wrong.
Major blood vessels do leave marks on bones. Despite that, I challenge you to find any evidence on bones that tells you that any sauropod even had a heart let alone where it was located.
Palaeontology is a science where rampant speculation is very much constrained by the evidence present
Not going to bother being polite on this one. You're a condescending, hypocritical sophist with no humility and apparently little respect for real science. _You_ are the one speculating wildly without evidence about the capabilities of long-extinct animals. You not only speculate based only on unsupported weak modeling (you're using the underwater capabilities of a _human_ for your model, for crying out loud), but you then declare your speculation to be absolute fact. Somehow, despite this, I have to be held to a higher standard in my own speculation? And my speculation is only to find what ifs that throw your theory into doubt. I'm not at all trying to claim that any of my speculation is the way things actually were. I think that some things are sadly probably unknowable and the truth of bottom dwelling sauropods is probably one of those things (although we can probably be 99% confident that the truth is that they didn't live that way). There just isn't enough evidence left to ever decide conclusively. We can say with very good confidence that all evidence is that they didn't live that way, but we can't say with any scientific honesty that it was impossible, based on the evidence.
Oh that ... poor choice of terms (I'm tempted to call it a "lie", but that would imply deliberate misleading which I don't think was present).
And here you're saying that I'm either an idiot or a liar, but you're going to be the bigger man and just call me an idiot. How fair and reasonable of you.
Some (but only some) dinosaurs
Such as brachiosaurs, which are one of the large sauropods we're discussing.
show evidence of a swelling (a "ganglion") in the lowermost spine, which in the 1870s or 1880s was described occasionally as a "secondary brain". And the name has stuck.
Yes, the name has stuck and now it's pretty much traditional. Thus my use of it along with notations to indicate that I'm fully aware it's not a brain.
You've got a similar ganglion spread through your sacral vertebrae and lowest spine, and proportionately it's not much smaller
Wow, you talk down to me as if I'm an idiot and then you come out with garbage like this. "proportionately it's not much smaller". What meaningless nonsense. Proportionately, the neck of a baby sauropod with a 10 centimeter long neck is the same length as the 10 meter long one from our discussion. So, by your reasoning above, if that baby sauropod can stand on the bottom with just its head above water and breathe then the adult can do. You know, because it's "proportionately" the same thing.
S
They sold directly to Iraq and indirectly to Iran through proxies.
Well that's just Reagan vs Carter all over again. Iran knew Carter wouldn't bomb them if they didn't release the hostages. Reagan pretty much promised to. Iran released the hostages the moment Reagan was elected.
Umm. Didn't they release the hostages because the US, under Reagan, agreed to sell them weapons through proxies?
Your disproof of the bottom-walking sauropod model in flawed
It wasn't my disproof, just the one I'd been exposed to which was simple, elegant, and clearly wrong. As I said, the bottom-walking sauropod theory was based on a fallacious "proof" that adult sauropods wouldn't have been able to support their own weight out of the water in the first place. But the reasoning behind disproving it based on pressure issues also seems to be pretty flawed. The original explanation I remember from my dinosaur loving youth was clearly ridiculous. I also have some issues with your much more reasonable explanation. Either way, I think it's pretty unlikely that sauropods actually did walk around on the very bottom of lakes with just their heads sticking above water. Quite aside from the question of why they would even want to, there's the bigger question of why they wouldn't just be able to swim. Actually declaring it impossible, however, seems ridiculous.
Now, you made some very good points, but I'm not going to start out with the points you made, I'm going to start out with dragons and planes. The proof about dragons being unable to fly essentially boils down to the idea that nothing that big could possibly fly. That, however, immediately runs into the problem that we have planes weighing up to 640 tons (with a cargo capacity of 250 tons, so we're talking about .89 kilotons), which means that back of the envelope calculations about weight and wing surface area have to either take a back seat to proven reality or they have to model the real world a lot better to be taken seriously. For your proof about the impossibility of bottom-walking sauropods, I'm going to start with surface-fed diving. It works and the divers don't die (ok, sometimes they do, but not _all_ the time). So, right off the bat, we have a living thing that's not at all adapted to standing on the bottom and breathing through a long tube to the surface nevertheless standing on the bottom and breathing through a long tube to the surface. The principle is obviously sound, even if the implementation is different.
The big problem isn't in the throats. Or in the intercostal (between-rib) muscles. It's the blood pressure.
Put your sauropod on the bottom of a lake, it's lungs at 10m below air surface (for a number). The purpose of breathing is to oxygenate (and de-carbon-dioxide-ate) the blood. To achieve that, you've got to have blood circulation. which means that the absolute blood pressure will be (say) 2.15 atmospheres (= 1 atm for the atmosphere + 1 atm for the water depth + 0.15 atm differential pressure from the heart's pumping effort (114mm Hg, approx)) . Meanwhile, the absolute atmospheric pressure inside the alveoli will be around 1.00001 atm. So, the pressure differential across the alveoli lining is 2.14999 atm.
Divers who have (inadvertently) been exposed to such pressure differentials, die. Their lungs either grossly rupture, or so much fluid seeps from the blood into the lungs that the diver drowns in his own pulmonary oedema. That starts to happen at a differential pressure of around 0.2atm (people vary) in humans. In whales, it is less studied, but their lungs are rarely more than 5-odd m deep when they're in-/ex-haling, suggesing a limit for them of around 0.5 atm. (Incidentally, some ichnofossils of sauropods prove that they did enter water and swim ; but that does not require that their lungs were much more than 3-4m below the surface.)
I'm focus here on the fact that we're talking about an animal with a ten meter long neck. It's easy to "prove" that an animal with such a neck will die from the pressure differential just from raising or lowering its head even outside of the water based on comparisons with other animals such as humans and whales and their tolerances. In fact, it's easy to prove the same for an animal with a 2-meter long neck. Such an animal simply couldn't possibly exist, but giraffes nevertheless do. Similarly, bipedal humans above
The Chinese government has, in fact, been known to shoot people for that sort of thing.
I didn't actually see that anywhere in the article. It did say that some fired shards of plastic or failed to inflate fully during testing. They don't say how well they actually compare to other airbags which very well may experience the same kinds of problems in some tests.
Yes, the article is pretty careful not to say anything at all about the physical, mechanical or electronic aspects of the counterfeits, just that they're re-manufactured from core parts from deployed airbags.
On the other hand, the only legitimate reason for the existence of trademarks is consumer protection. Protected trademarks ensure that, when a customer buys a product, they know who actually made it and can presumably count on that companies procedures, materials, quality control, etc. being used in the manufacture of the product. So, "counterfeit" products are bad because they pull a fast one on the consumer and they don't get what they expect. Of course, the way most companies commoditize their trademarks flies in the face of this. When companies will simply swap out the underlying internals of a product willy nilly and slap on the same outer casing and trademarked logo, it sort of defeats the purpose. Ditto for companies who will simply rent out their trademarks to anyone as long as they can pay.
Cars, and presumably car safety parts are a pretty safety-critical industry, however. If car parts are being distributed with the OEM's logo added to them (if they're sold specifically as "remanufactured" and have the logo from the original core part, I consider that another story), then it implies that the product has been through that companies safety testing and produced to the same standards as all its original parts. In that respect, that kind of counterfeiting can harm the consumer (in a very literal way).
On yet another hand, car safety systems are presumably a regulated industry, with certain safety and certification requirements. That being the case, it's a bit disturbing that the big deal being made about this is "counterfeiting" rather than distributing uncertified and untested parts. Since nothing about this is mentioned, does that mean that it's just poor or biased reporting, or does it mean that no sort of safety testing or certification are actually required for these parts, or does it mean that these parts are actually fully tested and certified, but are just having an OEM logo stamped on them when they aren't OEM?
Living things are constantly copying their DNA, yes. But that's irrelevant here unless you have some examples of living cells copying DNA as a replacement for the DNA in that cell's nucleus rather than copying it in the process of producing a new cell. As for repair, that is relevant. The question is if that repair is actually able to deal with the kind of self destruction the article is talking about. As far as I know, most such repair mechanisms correct errors during replication. Are there any repair mechanisms that will actually fix DNA strands that basically just break, or do they just fix the kinds of problems that would still leave the DNA perfectly readable, just with a slight error?
DNA repair mechanisms I'll grant you, although none of the repair mechanisms I've heard of seem like they'd be able to deal with the kind of destruction the article talks about. As for the "living cells do not last 40 years" statement, I have to ask just what you're smoking? While the brain turns out to be more capable of regeneration than once believed, most of the cells in the brain do, in fact, last you a lifetime. Also, plenty of women are capable of having children well past the age of 40. Since women possess their full complement of ova from before their own births and they don't generate more during their lifetimes, how exactly can a woman have children after age 40 if what you say is true. Then there's the specific example I gave of the long neurons in the spinal cord. They grow with you throughout your life to their great length. They're essentially stretched into place. Your body can no more replace one of those cells than it can re-attach a long tendon that's been completely dislocated. If they didn't last more than 40 years, everyone over 40 would be paralyzed.
It's been about 147 years since the thirteenth amendment. That puts the era of slavery outside living memory, true. However, if we consider a lifespan of about 80 years, that means that there can certainly still be people alive today who are only one generation removed from slavery. So, the era of pre-thirteenth amendment slavery may be history, but it's a long way from being dead history.
Add to that the fact that the thirteenth amendment hardly fixed everything. For starters, it didn't actually ban slavery. The amendment quite clearly left the door open for slavery as a punishment for crime. This does stop hereditary slavery, but otherwise leaves pretty much every other element of slavery open to continue (except for the nebulous protection of the eighth amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause) for anyone convicted of a crime. Convicting poor, black, illiterate (nearly always, since it was a crime to teach slaves to read in most slave states) former slaves of crimes was pretty easy in the former slave states. For example, most former slaves were pretty much instantly guilty of vagrancy. Chain gangs and forced prison labor persisted well until... well, now actually.
Then there's the civil rights situation. Despite the passage of the 13th amendment (ratified by Mississippi in 1995), Jim Crow laws persisted until 1965 and anti-miscegenation laws weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967 and weren't all repealed until Alabama finally did so in 2001. So, there are plenty of people alive today who experienced active legal discrimination in their lifetimes.
Given all that, it's ridiculous to claim that the past racial discrimination of the US is just a "crutch or excuse" for social problems. The kind of effects that sort of thing produces can persist across numerous generations.
As for people starting with nothing then rising to great success, that certainly is possible, but those are statistical outliers. If you're going to consider people en masse then those born to disadvantaged circumstances are going to stay disadvantaged and pass it on to their children and their children's children.
Indeed.
But cancer is generally caused by carcinogens. Viruses and all kinds of nasty chemicals that we get in our bodies as a result of being alive, moving around, breathing, eating and touching things. If DNA under preservative conditions suitable for fossilization has a half-life of just 512 years, then, in a human body exposed to all these things the rate of DNA destruction (sometimes leading to cancer, but mostly just to cell death) should probably be a lot higher than our survival rate suggests.
Given this half-life of 521 years for DNA preserved in fossils, I have to wonder about the half-life of DNA in living things. Specifically in us. Based on that figure, after 40 years, a little over 5% of the DNA in anything would have self-destructed. Although it turns out that we do, after all, grow new cells in our brains, some of our cells, such as the really, really long ones in our spinal cords are there for life, are pretty vital, and are not replaced. If the DNA in those cells spontaneously destroys itself, then they die. So, the question I have is, how many of them can we lose before we're paralyzed. Also, the 521 years seems to be some sort of averaged upper limit. The kinds of conditions they suggest will destroy the DNA are far, far more common in the human body, so being in a living human body should push that half-life way way down. By the reasoning they're using in this story, it seems like a human body would necessarily have to stop functioning within a timeframe much shorter than an average lifespan.
Now, I think it probably is pretty unlikely that dinosaur DNA could last until modern times. But I've seen enough of these back of an envelope calculations by people with some sort of axe to grind against some pet peeve of theirs. In this case, the pet peeve being the idea that DNA could survive tens of millions of years. Lots of ridiculous ideas about living things, especially about dinosaurs, have been "proven" this way in the past. The proofs never seem to hold up to actual real-world evidence. One of my favorites is a double-whammy. It was once "proven" that large sauropods couldn't have spent their lives walking around on the bottom of lakes and swamps with their heads held up to the surface to breath because the pressure at those depths would have crushed their throats. It sounds like a pretty good theory when you apply a pressure of about one extra atmosphere to something like a garden hose. When you apply it to a sauropods neck, which is a construction of bone and cartilage and muscle, thicker at the base than a human is tall, it's clearly ridiculous. If they were adapted to live walking around on the bottom of bodies of water, the throats of sauropods would have been able to suck air down against the pressure. The double whammy part is that the theory that useless "proof" was disproving was itself based on a similar ridiculous "proof". The theory in question was that large sauropods had to spend their lives in water because their legs clearly couldn't have taken the strain. The problem is, the assumptions that went into that "proof" also would have disallowed all kinds of other large animals, including other large dinosaurs who clearly didn't live in water and probably modern elephants as well. So, it was one ridiculous proof to disprove another.
Similar logic has disproven all sorts of things, such as kangaroos and sturgeon (which have both been calculated to not exist because they supposedly did not consume enough food to provide all the energy they use). Bees and other insects have been proven incapable of flying, etc. I remember an example in a math magazine in school when I was very young which explained that dragons couldn't fly because their wings couldn't generate enough downward thrust to counter their weight. Quite aside from the large number of assumptions needed to actually get any figures for imaginary animals, the article completely ignored the fact that there's almost nothing in nature that flies by directly countering its weight with downward thrust. It also ignored the existence of winged flying machines in excess of 300 tons.
So, I take anything like this with a huge grain of salt. It very probably is the case that dinosaur DNA hasn't been preserved (except in their descendants), but the "proof" is a pointless mathematical game. They might as well be counting the letters in bible verses to find hidden codes.
Of course Wi-Fi is just a stupid trademarked marketing name mashed up from the word "wireless" and the term Hi-Fi. I wouldn't get so wound up over protecting it's integrity.
But the scientists producing the research and the institutions employing them are, as far as I can tell, seldom (never?) compensated by scientific journals for articles. Peer review is done by scientists, not the journals themselves. The journals just publish. It seems that scientists are more likely to have to pay to be published than the other way around.
There is this neat electric grid thing we have where you can get power produced elsewhere delivered to you.
Also, the Banqiao dam wasn't only for electric generation, it was also for flood control (which it obviously failed catastrophically at during a bad typhoon). It probably would have existed, and subsequently still failed, even if it hadn't been used for hydroelectric. It's also hard to determine exactly which deaths would and would not have been caused by the typhoon if the dam hadn't been built.