Unless they vastly improved their methods, in vitro fertilizations means artificial fertilization of a number of eggs. A part is then placed in the uterus (where most simply die off) the rest is frozen for some time to see if they are needed and end in the trash after that. Mass murder.
Yup--at least the bunch which end up in the trash. I wouldn't agree for the bunch which simply fail to implant: they're like the vast majority of naturally-created embryos which just don't make it.
Now if you're not one of the pro-life pet-scientists you should agree that consciousness before about week 20 is ridiculous.
I don't think anyone is arguing that consciousness exists that early. Why is consciousness the arbiter of life, though? Are you not alive when you sleep? Perhaps you argue that a sleeping man will wake up--but a man in a coma may not; is he not alive? Perhaps you argue that the man in the coma was once conscious--I don't see that there is any mystical life-endowing property to having once been awake.
For that matter, a mushroom is no less alive for not having a mind. It seems to me that immediately after conception there is a human being: one without a brain (or any other organs), but a human being nonetheless. He's certainly not a very useful one, but given enough time he will grow to be. This new thing is not his mother; he's not his father: he's genetically no different (modulo mutations) now then he will be in 70 years. There will never be some instant at which he changes: every change from that first cell division until his heart stops beating will be slow and gradual: a cell springs to life here; a cell dies there; nutrients are absorbed here; waste is excreted there. There is no magic point at which the brain starts functioning, as you admit; there is no magic point at which any of the organs function, or at which the limbs appear as normal.
Heck, the same applies to everyone. Is there some magic point where one hits puberty? Nope--it's a slow and gradual process. There's no dividing line, no single instant one side of which one is a physical adult and the other side of which one is a child. Likewise, there is no single instant one side of which one has a brain, or a heart, or legs--it all happens slowly.
The only single instant one side of which one is one thing (actually, two things) and the other of which one is something utterly different is conception. Everything else is slow and gradual, and no argument I know of which justifies treating an embryo as less alive than a foetus, or a foetus less alive than an infant, cannot also be used to justify treating an infant as less alive than a child, or a child as less alive than an adult.
Now, some people (e.g. Singer) are intellectually honest enough to admit that their arguments apply to infants and small children, as well as to adults. They may be despicable, but at least they are honest.
Did you even bother reading the links I provided? A sperm is not human; an egg is not human. Among other reasons, they haven't the right number of chromosomes, and they do not develop. But there are very good reasons to consider an embryo human. Once the sperm and egg have united, there is a thing which will--provided the right energy and nutrient--will grow, and grow, and grow until it is an old man. There is no magic line separating an old man from a middle-aged one: they are the same person, but one has lived longer and has deteriorated. There is no magic line separating a middle-aged man from a young man: they are the same person, but one has lived longer and changed. There is no magic line separating a young man from a boy: he has changed a lot, but each change has been gradual and slow. There is no magic line separating a boy from an infant, no instant on one side of which there is a baby, and on the other side of which is a walking, talking, running-around-and-breaking-things boy.
Likewise, there is no magic line separating the embryo from the infant, no instant where there is radical change. Sure, an infant has been born: what mystical property is imparted by passing through the birth canal or being cut from the womb? Sure, an infant has fully-developed organs: but they didn't just appear fully-developed; it was a slow and gradual process.
There is one 'magic line': that of conception, when two expendable things join and become something quite a bit different, something which given the right conditions will someday be an old man with grandchildren on his knee--and every step from zygote to coffin is a slow and gradual building on what went before.
Now this is all from the scientific end--there are religious reasons to think that perhaps life doesn't begin at conception, but slightly later. Some religions might actually make a good case for life not beginning until birth, or one's first sentence. But law should never be based on religion, no?
No, there's lots of hope: adult stem cell research is doing remarkable things, much more than embryonic stem cell research has done--and what's more, it doesn't require killing human beings to achieve.
Embryonic stem cell research is not fundamentally different from the Chinese practise of executing prisoners for their organs, nor from researching hypothermia by freezing human subjects. That is, when oen realises that the embryo is as human as Kerry, Bush or Michael Jordan.
Since researching it involves killing human beings, no.
That's the crux of the matter. If the embryo is human, killing him to get cells is no different from the Chinese executing convicts to harvest their organs; if the embryo is not human, then it's no different from killing a dog or a cat for medical research.
One must also consider the fact that adult stem cell research is proving much more promising. Given that there are not infinite funds, would you spend money on less-hopeful research or more-hopeful research? To put it in other terms, would you rather invest $100 in an investment with a 6% return or one with a 37% return?
I loathe most sports, but I rather like baseball. Why? Because one needn't actually watch the game: you go to the stadium with a bunch of friends, drink beer, eat hot dogs and have great conversations. Every once in a while something cool happens on the field, and you can cheer, then get back to your conversation.
Other sports are too noisy to enjoy--they're just as boring, but with less chance to talk.
Split infinitives are perfectly grammatical English. What they are not is proper Latin (it's impossible, actually), which for a long time was considered to be the gold standard of tongues. Idiot grammarians tried to squeeze a good Germanic tongue into a Romantic mold, and invented all sorts of foolish rules.
Don't even get me started about the bias against double negatives, which date back to Anglo-Saxon...
North Korea is one of the reasons why we went into Iraq. Why? Because due to inaction on the part of the US and the rest of the world, NK is now untouchable: it can raize Seoul with conventional weapons, and now has enough nukes to be a severe pest. We can't deal with NK militarily anymore precisely because we didn't deal with it militarily when we'd the chance.
Iraq was believed (by everyone, even France & Germany) to be headed in the same direction. The disagreement was in how to head it off. One approach favoured continuation of the containment policy which worked so well with NK; the other approach called for destroying Hussein while he was still easily destroyable.
Now, it currently appears that the consensus of the world's intelligence agencies was incorrect, and that Hussein's WMD programmes were illusory, or at most far less advanced than any serious analysts believed. Still, IMHO the Iraq action was defensible based on what we knew at the time.
Regarding NK, there's just not much we can do. If we make the first move, they can annihilate a few million South Koreans. If we let them make the first move, they'll probably annihilate a few million South Koreans. It's a nasty situation.
The editors should really start using Coral when linking. This applies especially to small personal sites, but also to the larger ones which probably don't much appreciate the spike in their bill.
The one bad thing about Coral is that it would tend to mislead Google--but certainly Google is smart enough to know how to interpret Coralised URLs.
Re:Charts are great, but where's the parameters?
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Cooking for Engineers
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· Score: 1
As I note in my blog entry on the subject, there's a site called Recipezaar which has the ability to scale its recipes. It doesn't really do the massive-scale stuff (e.g. it won't convert 1/2 cup of flour to pounds when scaling from 4 to 240 diners; it won't even convert to pecks or bushels, but leaves everything in cups), but it's still pretty clever.
Oh, certainly. Having recently started driving at exactly the speed limit (rather than 20-30 over on highways and 5-15 over elsewhere), I have found that the limits are set absurdly low. It takes more than a third again as long to travel somewhere at 55 mph as it does at 75 mph, and on an interstate there is no safety difference (in fact, in this town everyone travels at 75 in the 55 sections anyway).
The speed limits are set lower than the majority of drivers for two reasons: to generate revenue and to give the police reason to make drug & alcohol stops. It's illegal for a cop to point a gun at you and take your money, but it's perfectly legal for him to ticket you for an infraction of a lunatic traffic rule; it's illegal for him to stop your car to search it without a warrant, but perfectly legal for him to search it with a loosely-defined probably cause after having stopped you for an infraction of the above-mentioned lunatic traffic rule.
Fortunately, I neither use nor carry drugs, so the latter doesn't affect me--but it's annoying nonetheless the way traffic rules are manipulated to over-ride little things like freedom from search and seizure.
Well, reasonable folks differ on what sci-fi is and should be (the ones who get really peevish about it write 'SF' instead of 'sci-fi'...). I agree with you: it should be literature enabled by the technology its author postulates (e.g. there's no way to have planet-hopping mercenaries without interplanetary travel). I'd go further, and state that one of the requirements of good sci-fi be that it presume that most problems are amenable to solution. esr wrote (somewhere I cannot find atm) that sci-fi which doesn't believe that its heroes' problems can be solved rationally is either horror or fantasy; I'm not sure that I'd go that far--the real world is not entirely rational, after all--but that faith in reason is one of the prime characteristics of sci-fi.
Fantasy, OTOH, is about belief & emotion rather than reason & logic. Neither is sufficient, of course (which is IMHO why Enlightenment thinkers were always blathering on about pastoral things, and why the Enlightenment foolishness led to the Gothic silliness), and that's why readers of one tend to be readers of the other: they need both to get their fix.
What would be cool is literature which handled both well, but I'm not sure if it could be done with much success.
So what? If that other guy is willing to work 70/wk for the same price you're willing to work 40/wk, doesn't your employer have every right to choose the lowest price? Put another way: if Safeway has apples at 35c/lb. and A&P has apples at $12/ea., don't you have the right to choose the cheaper apples?
When you buy apples, you are an indirect partial employer of the cashier, the store manager, to stock boy, the truck driver who delivered the apples, the crew of the ship who carried them across the sea, the guys who picked them, the farmer who grew them, the fertiliser company, the water company, the fellow who designed the irrigation system and so on & so forth ad infinitum. Why should you have more freedom in your employment of those fellows than your boss has in his employment of you?
If someone is willing to do more work for less, he deserves that job more than someone who wants to do less work for more pay.
Exactly. My kid brother works at a fast food joint, and he gets $9 and change an hour--that's really good money for grilling meat! His employer isn't forced by the law to pay that much, but by the market.
So, have your employer's profits risen 35%? I doubt it. How will he pay for you and everyone else who just got a 35% raise? Perhaps he'll need to lay a few folks off--that would hardly be a good thing, no?
A 35% raise does no good when one loses the job entirely.
I was one of those: I was running Linux on a campus which supported Windows & Mac OS (this was some years ago). When asked which OS I used, I'd say 'Linux'; when I wasn't able to say that, I'd claim Mac OS (on the theory that some alternate OS is better than none); I just snarfed the IP address and subnet info off of the instructions and put them in, based on instructions from the HOWTO.
Add to that, the "intelligent" users are the worst. People who know exactly what they are doing somehow manage to trash their machines routinely.
Knew they what they do, they would not trash their boxes. Those aren't intelligent users--those are a sub-breed of power users. At least at my school, campus IT was not expected to clean one's messes up anyway.
As for blocking needed ports--that's a bad thing. Forcing all communication to travel across ports 25, 80 and 443 is Just Wrong. Don't firewall me if I don't wish to be firewalled (certainly, hold me responsible if my host should be breached and damage is caused to others).
What y'all should do is have 'dummy' support and 'intelligent' support. The dummy support would be for Windows users: those big printouts with screenshots telling them where to enter IP address, DNS servers and the rest. The intelligent support is a single sheet of paper with the pertinent info: any experienced Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris or FooOS user will know how to get his box working from that data.
When it's time for the "3rd American Revolution", if the bulk of the military isn't on your side, _your_ little pop-guns aren't gonna do diddly-squat except annoy a few soldiers.
That wasn't the case in Vietnam...
I don't argue your larger point, but the fact that folks have been able to drive off far better-equipped soldiers is quite well-documented in history,
You're ignoring the point. Say the police are trying to catch a murderer. Witnesses say it was a heavyset white man in his late 40s or early fifties wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Should the police be looking for a black teenage girl wearing a prom dress?
They have a profile of the standard courier of guns or drugs (gotten, perhaps, from truly random stops which found drugs); they are looking for drug and gun runners (which I disagree with--both should be legal--but that's the way it is for now); you suggest that they should ignore it?!?
So far as picking on poor minorities instead of white college kids, I know that at college the white college kids seemed to spend a lot more time being harassed by the cops than our neighbours did (the school was surrounded by poor folks). Why, next door to the frat house I hung out at there was a black guy who was stoned just about all day long, and the police never bothered him--but they were always stopping by the frat house.
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Yup--at least the bunch which end up in the trash. I wouldn't agree for the bunch which simply fail to implant: they're like the vast majority of naturally-created embryos which just don't make it.
Now if you're not one of the pro-life pet-scientists you should agree that consciousness before about week 20 is ridiculous.
I don't think anyone is arguing that consciousness exists that early. Why is consciousness the arbiter of life, though? Are you not alive when you sleep? Perhaps you argue that a sleeping man will wake up--but a man in a coma may not; is he not alive? Perhaps you argue that the man in the coma was once conscious--I don't see that there is any mystical life-endowing property to having once been awake.
For that matter, a mushroom is no less alive for not having a mind. It seems to me that immediately after conception there is a human being: one without a brain (or any other organs), but a human being nonetheless. He's certainly not a very useful one, but given enough time he will grow to be. This new thing is not his mother; he's not his father: he's genetically no different (modulo mutations) now then he will be in 70 years. There will never be some instant at which he changes: every change from that first cell division until his heart stops beating will be slow and gradual: a cell springs to life here; a cell dies there; nutrients are absorbed here; waste is excreted there. There is no magic point at which the brain starts functioning, as you admit; there is no magic point at which any of the organs function, or at which the limbs appear as normal.
Heck, the same applies to everyone. Is there some magic point where one hits puberty? Nope--it's a slow and gradual process. There's no dividing line, no single instant one side of which one is a physical adult and the other side of which one is a child. Likewise, there is no single instant one side of which one has a brain, or a heart, or legs--it all happens slowly.
The only single instant one side of which one is one thing (actually, two things) and the other of which one is something utterly different is conception. Everything else is slow and gradual, and no argument I know of which justifies treating an embryo as less alive than a foetus, or a foetus less alive than an infant, cannot also be used to justify treating an infant as less alive than a child, or a child as less alive than an adult.
Now, some people (e.g. Singer) are intellectually honest enough to admit that their arguments apply to infants and small children, as well as to adults. They may be despicable, but at least they are honest.
Likewise, there is no magic line separating the embryo from the infant, no instant where there is radical change. Sure, an infant has been born: what mystical property is imparted by passing through the birth canal or being cut from the womb? Sure, an infant has fully-developed organs: but they didn't just appear fully-developed; it was a slow and gradual process.
There is one 'magic line': that of conception, when two expendable things join and become something quite a bit different, something which given the right conditions will someday be an old man with grandchildren on his knee--and every step from zygote to coffin is a slow and gradual building on what went before.
Now this is all from the scientific end--there are religious reasons to think that perhaps life doesn't begin at conception, but slightly later. Some religions might actually make a good case for life not beginning until birth, or one's first sentence. But law should never be based on religion, no?
Embryonic stem cell research is not fundamentally different from the Chinese practise of executing prisoners for their organs, nor from researching hypothermia by freezing human subjects. That is, when oen realises that the embryo is as human as Kerry, Bush or Michael Jordan.
That's the crux of the matter. If the embryo is human, killing him to get cells is no different from the Chinese executing convicts to harvest their organs; if the embryo is not human, then it's no different from killing a dog or a cat for medical research.
Since there are good , scientific reasons to believe that the embryo is a human being, then there is a strong case to be made against embryonic stem cell research.
One must also consider the fact that adult stem cell research is proving much more promising. Given that there are not infinite funds, would you spend money on less-hopeful research or more-hopeful research? To put it in other terms, would you rather invest $100 in an investment with a 6% return or one with a 37% return?
Other sports are too noisy to enjoy--they're just as boring, but with less chance to talk.
Is there a legible version somewhere?
Coralised (mirror) version. Although Coral itself seems to be down atm, which is ironic.
You too? My hockey-related Google-hate is that my last name is the same as a hockey league's initials. Grrr...
Don't even get me started about the bias against double negatives, which date back to Anglo-Saxon...
Iraq was believed (by everyone, even France & Germany) to be headed in the same direction. The disagreement was in how to head it off. One approach favoured continuation of the containment policy which worked so well with NK; the other approach called for destroying Hussein while he was still easily destroyable.
Now, it currently appears that the consensus of the world's intelligence agencies was incorrect, and that Hussein's WMD programmes were illusory, or at most far less advanced than any serious analysts believed. Still, IMHO the Iraq action was defensible based on what we knew at the time.
Regarding NK, there's just not much we can do. If we make the first move, they can annihilate a few million South Koreans. If we let them make the first move, they'll probably annihilate a few million South Koreans. It's a nasty situation.
The editors should really start using Coral when linking. This applies especially to small personal sites, but also to the larger ones which probably don't much appreciate the spike in their bill.
The one bad thing about Coral is that it would tend to mislead Google--but certainly Google is smart enough to know how to interpret Coralised URLs.
As I note in my blog entry on the subject, there's a site called Recipezaar which has the ability to scale its recipes. It doesn't really do the massive-scale stuff (e.g. it won't convert 1/2 cup of flour to pounds when scaling from 4 to 240 diners; it won't even convert to pecks or bushels, but leaves everything in cups), but it's still pretty clever.
For those who don't use French units, that indicates that the perfect temperature to cook an egg is 149 degrees.
The speed limits are set lower than the majority of drivers for two reasons: to generate revenue and to give the police reason to make drug & alcohol stops. It's illegal for a cop to point a gun at you and take your money, but it's perfectly legal for him to ticket you for an infraction of a lunatic traffic rule; it's illegal for him to stop your car to search it without a warrant, but perfectly legal for him to search it with a loosely-defined probably cause after having stopped you for an infraction of the above-mentioned lunatic traffic rule.
Fortunately, I neither use nor carry drugs, so the latter doesn't affect me--but it's annoying nonetheless the way traffic rules are manipulated to over-ride little things like freedom from search and seizure.
Fantasy, OTOH, is about belief & emotion rather than reason & logic. Neither is sufficient, of course (which is IMHO why Enlightenment thinkers were always blathering on about pastoral things, and why the Enlightenment foolishness led to the Gothic silliness), and that's why readers of one tend to be readers of the other: they need both to get their fix.
What would be cool is literature which handled both well, but I'm not sure if it could be done with much success.
When you buy apples, you are an indirect partial employer of the cashier, the store manager, to stock boy, the truck driver who delivered the apples, the crew of the ship who carried them across the sea, the guys who picked them, the farmer who grew them, the fertiliser company, the water company, the fellow who designed the irrigation system and so on & so forth ad infinitum. Why should you have more freedom in your employment of those fellows than your boss has in his employment of you?
If someone is willing to do more work for less, he deserves that job more than someone who wants to do less work for more pay.
Exactly. My kid brother works at a fast food joint, and he gets $9 and change an hour--that's really good money for grilling meat! His employer isn't forced by the law to pay that much, but by the market.
A 35% raise does no good when one loses the job entirely.
Add to that, the "intelligent" users are the worst. People who know exactly what they are doing somehow manage to trash their machines routinely.
Knew they what they do, they would not trash their boxes. Those aren't intelligent users--those are a sub-breed of power users. At least at my school, campus IT was not expected to clean one's messes up anyway.
As for blocking needed ports--that's a bad thing. Forcing all communication to travel across ports 25, 80 and 443 is Just Wrong. Don't firewall me if I don't wish to be firewalled (certainly, hold me responsible if my host should be breached and damage is caused to others).
What y'all should do is have 'dummy' support and 'intelligent' support. The dummy support would be for Windows users: those big printouts with screenshots telling them where to enter IP address, DNS servers and the rest. The intelligent support is a single sheet of paper with the pertinent info: any experienced Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris or FooOS user will know how to get his box working from that data.
Never mind that it's based on some excellent human factors research. The Mac OS/GNOME button placement is much, much better for users: faster & safer.
Because part of the point of hunting is eating what one has caught, becoming part of the so-called 'circle of life.'
That wasn't the case in Vietnam...
I don't argue your larger point, but the fact that folks have been able to drive off far better-equipped soldiers is quite well-documented in history,
From what I understand, just about every centre-fire (i.e., not .22) rifle cartridge is capable of penetratin g a 'bullet-proof' vest.
They have a profile of the standard courier of guns or drugs (gotten, perhaps, from truly random stops which found drugs); they are looking for drug and gun runners (which I disagree with--both should be legal--but that's the way it is for now); you suggest that they should ignore it?!?
So far as picking on poor minorities instead of white college kids, I know that at college the white college kids seemed to spend a lot more time being harassed by the cops than our neighbours did (the school was surrounded by poor folks). Why, next door to the frat house I hung out at there was a black guy who was stoned just about all day long, and the police never bothered him--but they were always stopping by the frat house.