But when has lucas been known to pick people for their acting skill? Wasnt ford picked to do solo because his father was friends with lucas? The problem with leo isnt his ability to act, its that he doesnt fit the role. Maybe he would be able to pull off a medium-aged anikin falling in love, but could he pull off a medium aged jedi falling towards the dark side? Star Wars has always been a thing of images.. how many times have you heard somebody do a vader-breathing impression or a yoda saying 'do or do not, there is no try'? That was one of TPM's major problems.. it didnt have any memorable lines like that.. all they did was rehash things already said and done. Even the battles were rehashed. What it comes down to is do you really want to see leo in a lightsaber fight and since our facial features are pretty set by the time we're in our teens, can you really see leo behind the mask in IV - VI? (not to mention they'd probably have to bring him back to do III since it'd be rather odd that he looked severely different between the two movies)
As i replied to the other post, i didnt mean All southerners. I AM a southerner, i live in columbia SC and have for years. I meant the particular subset of southerners known as Renecks, which is why i SAID rendnecks. I clarified the word redneck for those people who havent heard the term. I have a number of friends in other countries who have never heard the word. I even have talked to a few people as close as new york who didnt know what a redneck was. But if you say 'southerner' it tends to conjure up the same image. As for bigotry, hundreds of books, movies, and casettes have been made on the subject of "You might be a redneck if..", all of which were okay, yet my pointing out the same things is bigotry? Whatever. Dreamweaver
Actually, i AM a southern american. i was talking about a specific subset of american southerns, otherwise i would have just said 'anybody from south of virginia'. Dreamweaver
Cant say as that i've seen that one, but it doesnt sound that impossible. There are sub-sub-atomic particles (in protons and neutrons anyway. Quarks, gluons, muons, and a whole host of other neutrinos). Heck, IBM managed to write out the letters IBM the size of a molecule and have been developing a HD that writes data in the same fashion for years. Last month i read about a research team (i forget where it was) that had found a way to alter the waveform of an electron to that of another electron. Why could you not come up with a plotting strategy based on the relative positions of electrons in an atom and then use a binary-like language to 'write' on them by making all the electrons' waveforms resemble one another closely enough to differentiate between two sets. Heck, if your technology was advanced far enough to do this accurately, you could write the contents of an entire book on the molecular structure of any of the long-chain particles used in modern fertilizers and plastics by creating a 'character' set of a few thousand individual waveforms, each representing a word rather than spelling out letters.
As for the 'technobabble' what else would they do? The shows all take place on board extreamly complicated constructs and the characters are (usuallaly) high-trained individuals. Go read the transcript from a space shuttle launch and tell me a little bit of tech-talk isnt normal by people who have been using the stuff for years and years in every day conversation. Saying that trek is bad because they use words like 'warp core', 'plasma conduit', or 'tricorder' is like saying Home Improvement is a bad show because they use words like 'engine block', 'piston', or 'power drill'.
So emotions should be held above logic and reason? Well, lets look at it logically (sorry to have to resort to cold, inhuman thought, but you really cant examine an idea emontionally and get any usable information):
The three things that probably generate the most emotional response in any form and under any circumstances: Sex, Violence, and Drugs. The three things generating the most intellectual response: Philosophy, Technology, and Psychology. (Why psychology? Because the only other one i could think of that would be in the top 3 was theology, and it tends to generate more emotional response than intellectual).
Now, lets apply these to people. Possibly the least intellectually oriented people on the surface of the earth: Rednecks (american southerners for those of you not familiar with the term. see also: trailer trash, hick). Now, i'm pretty sure none of us want to be such, so lets examine their motivations. What's one of the most abundently made fun of tendencies of said people? Their propensity for having hordes of children (*ticks off the box next to Sex). Second in line: their love of hunting and 'wrastlin' (ticks off Violence). And lastly, their vast consumption of alcoholic products beer, whisky, moonshine, you name it (ticks off Drugs).
So the penultimate human, according to you, is a redneck? A person driven so entirely by their persuit of emotional fullfillment as to disregard logic (that having a dozen kids when you're on welfare is a bad idea, that drinking causes all sorts of disorders, or that violence is, generally, a bad thing). Well, perhaps it makes me inhuman but i think i'd rather debate philosophy with socrates and plato, physics with hawking, or psychology with junge and freud than go out huntin' with bubba and a six pack.
Most cosmological models actually say there Is an edge, but not the sense that we normally define an edge because the object itself is infinite. In any case, the problem with speculating what's on the 'outside' of the universe is that there isnt one. Sure, there may well be space on the outside, but it's impossible (by modern physics anyway, who knows what they'll come up with in another 20 years) to get there. The universe expands at the speed of light for a reason.. light moves at the speed of light. The actual objects (stars, galaxies, black holes, aliens etc) dont define the edge of the universe, the continually expanding light does it. So in order to be 'outside' the universe, you'd have to go faster than light obviously. Now assuming you could actually Do that, you still couldnt get out because You would be expanding the universe. As you travel outward and pass the expanding wavefront of the universe, it'd expand with you rather than you passing some barrier. I didnt explain that very well.. but it's an odd concept anyway. The basic point being that even were we to find a way to get to the other universes stipulated by quantum dynamics we Still wouldnt know what's "in between" them, assuming they're arranging in some way in some unimaginable superspace 'outside' our universe. (and i say unimaginable because it would be.. 90%+ of humans cant even picture objects in 4 dimensions much less the 0-infinity that'd be outside our universe.
Okay, i have to amdit it: i have no idea what the point of the prime number search is. It's relatively obvious that no matter how many orders of magnitude you go out to, there'll always be one or more prime numbers for it. So you're not going to prove anything by fining one. Perhaps knowing a prime number with more digits than there are bits in this message would be helpful.. but danged if i can think of how. As for the whole encryption thing: do you need to break a lock to tell it's strong? If i take a padlock and slam it with a sledgehammer a few times and it doesnt so much as dent it, do i need to keep hitting it until it breaks? Another poster mentioned the encryption project is only at 8.5% after 577 days of running. Considering nobody's going to be going to the trouble of writing a distributed client to crack the encryption on my various transactions, i think we've proven it's plenty strong already. Then you get the seti-at-home project.. it's kinda out there, there's no proof that it'll ever produce a signal.. but the whole point is 'what if it does'? Even if the senders have been dead for a billion years and we get the alien equivalent of the I Love Lucy show, which is really more imporant? The completely un-marketable and utterly useless in a practical sense knowledge that intelligent life isnt a) a fluke or b) the will of 1 or more gods, or proof that an ecryption key is strong enough that some kid wont be able to crack it on his pc for at least a couple dozen years? Dreamweaver
I think the point here isnt that the new characters are just as annoying as the old characters, but that the old characters werent static. ObiWan in this movie is an interesting character, the untested jedi.. but he starts out that way and ends that way. His experiences dont change him except that he seems slightly more rebellious at the end, which doesnt make any sense considering the circumstances. ObiWan in SW started off as some crazy old guy and slowly evolved into the wise role model for luke. Anakin started off in this movie as a little kid who cared about little kid things. At the end he's going to become a jedi, but he's still the same little kid.. i mean he asks obiwan what's going to happen to him at a funeral. how immature is that? Luke started off the whiney, immature kid in SW. By the end he's matured alot and rather than being a farmer dreaming of flying a ship, he's dreaming of becoming a jedi like his father.. who he didnt even know about at the beginning. Leia and chewie were pretty static, but then again one was a plot device and the other was basically an extra with lines (if you want to call them that). Maul, palpatine, and the trade federation guys in this movie start out bad guys and end up being foiled bad guys. Vader started out as the lurking presence in black and ends up being the foiled lurking presence in black.. pretty static except that we find out that he's some kind of weird evil version of obiwan and that he's not even the real bad guy. Qui gon starts out the rogue jedi, ends up the dead rogue jedi. heck, he doesnt even dissapear. Han starts out the reckless, brash, greedy pilot. Ends up realizing that maybe there's something that's almost if not as important as money and even starts on the beginnings of a romance.
That's what character development is about.. characters changing and growing as we watch.. not the character coming in, wandering around, and leaving. Dreamweaver
Yeah, but what about after the apprentice is done with his training? Either the apprentice would then have to kill the master (which isnt really likely.. i mean the master is the master for a reason. sure, some would get luckey, but eventually you'd run into a master who keeps killing his apprentices) or else the apprentice would then become a master (like a regular jedi) and go off on their own to find their own apprentice. This especially doesnt work if you consider that jedi could easily fall to the darkside without the intervention of another jedi. Could not a dark jedi hear about the sith and one way or another get in contact with the current master? Assuming the sith want revenge, the master would likely be quite happy to take a newly fallen jedi under his wing while placing his current apprentice off on some far-flung planet on a time-consuming mission. Dreamweaver
This is going off of what a friend of mine has told me (he's one of those SW fans that's like a walking lexicon of all the SW books ever written): The Sith are an organization (i've no idea about the race part, he never mentioned it) of dark side jedi who practice said dark side in a specific manner as opposed to regular dark side-ers who are just regular jedi that grew too power hungry..rather like the difference between ninjutsu and streetfighting. And the word Darth is an honorary like Lord or Master. Dreamweaver
I think you all rather missed the point.. if mitochondria contain a genetic pattern that is (as a number of you said) completely unrelated to the rest of the organism, what difference does that make? So far as the human host is concerned (and you're not a host anymore, since if the things were ever independent life-forms they arent anymore) they might as well contain none. Specifically toward the comment beginning "Fuck No", whether or not mitochondrial dna is passed down from the mother or father doesnt really matter, since the things in question (midi-whatsits) Arent mitochondria. If they were, the amazingly badly phrased line that will ring out through the next X years until something in Episode II tops it, would have been "I heard you talking about Mitochondria. What are Mitochondria anyway?". As for what exactly makes the difference: Things Midi-whatsits and Mitochondria have in common: They start with the letter M. They apparently live within human cells. They may or may not be or have been symbiotic independent life at some time.
Things that Midi-whatsits and Mitochondria Dont have in common: Whatever their previous existence, Mitochondria are now benegien little organelles that are about as mystical as an amobea (actually, less so.. amobeas are neat). Midi-whatsits are apparently at least semi-intelligent (or maybe planning and implementing the birth of a child without need of a father is something all single-celled organisms can do?) Midi-whatsits have no apparent biological function. (just imagine what would happen if you had ten+ times as many mitochondria pumping away in each cell as you're supposed to) Mitochondria are specific to Our cellular types. Now this one's speculation, but hell, the whole argument thread is about an imaginary organism, so i think i can get away with it. Assuming that the 'Mitochondria were once independent life' theory is correct, why in the heck would yoda have them? Or wookies, or the thousand+ other races of the star wars universe? They would have evolved their own ways with their own cell-structure and their own organelles. So now, you ask, why do they all have midi-whatsits? Well, one of three reasons spring to mind: 1) If midi-whatsits are, as seemed implied, intelligent, they would have spread into the various populations of other races as they encountered them. I dont read the star wars books, so maybe i'm wrong and everybody always had them.. but i know enough from what i've heard to know that some races are immune to the force which would imply an obvious lack of midi-thingies. 2) Convergent evolution. The force is an aspect of the universe as a whole, like gravity. Only so many possible configurations could be used in apparently carbon-based oxygen-breathing races and after tens of thousands of years of inter-connected life, they would have grown even closer to being the same thing. 3) Like number 1, but rather than one race developing alongside midi-whatsits, the midi-whatsits came first. Way back in the beginning days of the universe these things evolved and, given that they're apparently in tune with the force, spread pretty quickly. Afterall, which would survive in a fight: a regular cell or a single-celled organism that can crush the other cell's..er..feeding orifice?
In any case, belaboring the piddling little details of a movie where the creator probably never even thought of 90% of the questions asked is silly. That's why i never liked literature classes.. too much about symbolism and suchlike that the author probably never even realized was there. Write a story and people will dig all sorts of things out of it. Case in point, i saw a book (a book mind you, published and everything) discussing the likeness of Spock with Jesus.. i mean, come on.
Okay, similarities between midi-whatsits and mitochondria: they're microscopic organisms that live in cells. they start with the letter M. they are, in some way, beneficial to humans. --End similarities.
Now personally i think the whole midi-whatsits thing was silly, but i agree it's obviously a plot hook and a way of explaining why the kid is 'the one' but doesnt radiate the force across half the galaxy.. but as silly as it may be, the whole mitochondria thing is just stupid. Going off of what i remember from high-school biology classes and what was said in the movie i think the main and most obviously important difference, the one that just beats you over the head and says 'what the heck are you thinking?' would have to be the fact that Midi-whatsits are at least semi-intelligent. Now they may not be so individually, but they manage to communicate in a useful manner with intelligent species and they took it upon themselves to make anakin's mom (who is obviously not a force-user herself) pregnant. Now if that were a natural function of the things, you'd think it would have happened at least Once before, yet the whole council's rather stunned about it. Sounds to me more like an evolutionary mutation than a symbiotic relationship anyway.. in a symbiotic relationship both parties get something out of it. Given the description of the midi-thingies is rather short, it doesnt sound like they're getting anything out of it. Rather, given that there are races which have evolved into force-immunity (the little blue flying watto guy) the relationship between life and the force is apparently controlled by biological functions. Look around, with the exception of the nuclear strong and weak forces, there aren't any forces we know of in the universe that human sense s cant detect.. if the force existed and any race we were in contact with had access to it, we would eventually evolve to be able to do the same (unless there were faster technological solution). In any case, debating the piddling details of a movie is silly, and i'll stop now.. but i'm really just sick of the whole midi-whatsits == mitochondria thing. Dreamweaver
Hey, if linux is a religion, does that mean we all get the religious organization tax cut? Though you do have to admit linux users have a tendency to display the classical symptoms of fundimentalism.. overwhelming belief, a tendency to quote their leaders/book(s) whenever possible, and the willingness to go out and crusade against the infidels.
Linuxians Unite! Put down your mouses, take up arms, and lets bust some heads in the name of go^H^H Linus! Hail GNU!
There's a great deal of difference between paying attention and 'keeping tabs' on your child and searching their stuff. I know if my parents had read the stories i wrote, read the books i read, or just gone through my stuff in general i'd probably have been thrown in an institution. Not because i'm an antisocial freak or something, i just liked novels that would probably have been deemed 'inappropriate' for someone my age. No, they werent hardcore porn, just adult sci-fi and fantasy.. niven, foster, salvatore, various less well known authors. In keeping with those tastes, my writings were about equally mature stuff.. not sappy 'pre-teen' oriented drivel that we usually feed minors. Sure, my short stories probably werent very good, but then i was young and i've gotten better.. but i wrote about love, death, sorrow.. things we usually try to hide from our children. For some reason we, as a society, seem to think that our kids need to be sheltered from the world. That's why the internet is seen as such a horrible influence. Not because it's showing our kids things that are so horribly wrong, but because they're finding out about things that we dont want them to know. As adults we have no problems with watching violent movies, playing supposedly 'adult-themed' games, reading books with 'adult situations'.. and if you've never in your life looked at a porn mag there's something seriously wrong with you. You might not like any of the above things, but that's your person prefrence. They all exist and they all make enough money that it's obviously not just a minority that Does like them. So why do we hide these things from our children? Because when We were children they were hidden from us. But we dont remember the anger and frustration at our parents for refusing to allow us to see the movies we wanted to see etc.. we just remember what our parents drilled into our heads over and over: "Those things arent good for children to see". We have all these problems with people coming out of school not ready for the real world, with teenage pregnancy etc. perhaps the problems are because we are hiding things from our children rather than Teaching them. Dont tell your kid 'violence is awful and horrible and doesnt really happen'. Tell them the truth, it Does happen, every day. Let them see the news stories about things like the colorado killings. They wont think it's cool, they'll realize that these are real people who are losing their lives. Kids arent nearly as stupid as we seem to want to think they are. They CAN understand supposedly 'adult' concepts, but we spend so much time hiding them that we think they cant.
Any statement made has the possibility to be wrong.. I could say that there is, right now, air in my kitchen and be wrong.. it's entirely possible that by some cosmic fluke of entropy all the air in my kitchen found my livingroom to be a lower-pressure environment and vacated the kitchen (at least for a fraction or two of a second). So if faith is saying something is correct when you can't be sure, then apparently everything anybody has ever said has been entirely based on faith.. or maybe we just need a new defenition.
So, legally, fuck isnt a word? From the way you stated it, it sounds like the government just removes the 'obscene' words, and if a coherant thought is left it's okay.. But does that mean if i were to say something like 'Spob the spobing spobbers' it'd be obscene? (i'm assuming spob isnt a word here..) Dreamweaver
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But when has lucas been known to pick people for their acting skill? Wasnt ford picked to do solo because his father was friends with lucas?
The problem with leo isnt his ability to act, its that he doesnt fit the role. Maybe he would be able to pull off a medium-aged anikin falling in love, but could he pull off a medium aged jedi falling towards the dark side? Star Wars has always been a thing of images.. how many times have you heard somebody do a vader-breathing impression or a yoda saying 'do or do not, there is no try'? That was one of TPM's major problems.. it didnt have any memorable lines like that.. all they did was rehash things already said and done. Even the battles were rehashed.
What it comes down to is do you really want to see leo in a lightsaber fight and since our facial features are pretty set by the time we're in our teens, can you really see leo behind the mask in IV - VI? (not to mention they'd probably have to bring him back to do III since it'd be rather odd that he looked severely different between the two movies)
Dreamweaver
As i replied to the other post, i didnt mean All southerners. I AM a southerner, i live in columbia SC and have for years. I meant the particular subset of southerners known as Renecks, which is why i SAID rendnecks. I clarified the word redneck for those people who havent heard the term. I have a number of friends in other countries who have never heard the word. I even have talked to a few people as close as new york who didnt know what a redneck was. But if you say 'southerner' it tends to conjure up the same image.
As for bigotry, hundreds of books, movies, and casettes have been made on the subject of "You might be a redneck if..", all of which were okay, yet my pointing out the same things is bigotry? Whatever.
Dreamweaver
Actually, i AM a southern american. i was talking about a specific subset of american southerns, otherwise i would have just said 'anybody from south of virginia'.
Dreamweaver
Cant say as that i've seen that one, but it doesnt sound that impossible. There are sub-sub-atomic particles (in protons and neutrons anyway. Quarks, gluons, muons, and a whole host of other neutrinos). Heck, IBM managed to write out the letters IBM the size of a molecule and have been developing a HD that writes data in the same fashion for years. Last month i read about a research team (i forget where it was) that had found a way to alter the waveform of an electron to that of another electron. Why could you not come up with a plotting strategy based on the relative positions of electrons in an atom and then use a binary-like language to 'write' on them by making all the electrons' waveforms resemble one another closely enough to differentiate between two sets. Heck, if your technology was advanced far enough to do this accurately, you could write the contents of an entire book on the molecular structure of any of the long-chain particles used in modern fertilizers and plastics by creating a 'character' set of a few thousand individual waveforms, each representing a word rather than spelling out letters.
As for the 'technobabble' what else would they do? The shows all take place on board extreamly complicated constructs and the characters are (usuallaly) high-trained individuals. Go read the transcript from a space shuttle launch and tell me a little bit of tech-talk isnt normal by people who have been using the stuff for years and years in every day conversation. Saying that trek is bad because they use words like 'warp core', 'plasma conduit', or 'tricorder' is like saying Home Improvement is a bad show because they use words like 'engine block', 'piston', or 'power drill'.
Dreamweaver
So emotions should be held above logic and reason? Well, lets look at it logically (sorry to have to resort to cold, inhuman thought, but you really cant examine an idea emontionally and get any usable information):
The three things that probably generate the most emotional response in any form and under any circumstances: Sex, Violence, and Drugs. The three things generating the most intellectual response: Philosophy, Technology, and Psychology. (Why psychology? Because the only other one i could think of that would be in the top 3 was theology, and it tends to generate more emotional response than intellectual).
Now, lets apply these to people. Possibly the least intellectually oriented people on the surface of the earth: Rednecks (american southerners for those of you not familiar with the term. see also: trailer trash, hick). Now, i'm pretty sure none of us want to be such, so lets examine their motivations. What's one of the most abundently made fun of tendencies of said people? Their propensity for having hordes of children (*ticks off the box next to Sex). Second in line: their love of hunting and 'wrastlin' (ticks off Violence). And lastly, their vast consumption of alcoholic products beer, whisky, moonshine, you name it (ticks off Drugs).
So the penultimate human, according to you, is a redneck? A person driven so entirely by their persuit of emotional fullfillment as to disregard logic (that having a dozen kids when you're on welfare is a bad idea, that drinking causes all sorts of disorders, or that violence is, generally, a bad thing).
Well, perhaps it makes me inhuman but i think i'd rather debate philosophy with socrates and plato, physics with hawking, or psychology with junge and freud than go out huntin' with bubba and a six pack.
Dreamweaver
Most cosmological models actually say there Is an edge, but not the sense that we normally define an edge because the object itself is infinite.
In any case, the problem with speculating what's on the 'outside' of the universe is that there isnt one. Sure, there may well be space on the outside, but it's impossible (by modern physics anyway, who knows what they'll come up with in another 20 years) to get there. The universe expands at the speed of light for a reason.. light moves at the speed of light. The actual objects (stars, galaxies, black holes, aliens etc) dont define the edge of the universe, the continually expanding light does it. So in order to be 'outside' the universe, you'd have to go faster than light obviously. Now assuming you could actually Do that, you still couldnt get out because You would be expanding the universe. As you travel outward and pass the expanding wavefront of the universe, it'd expand with you rather than you passing some barrier.
I didnt explain that very well.. but it's an odd concept anyway. The basic point being that even were we to find a way to get to the other universes stipulated by quantum dynamics we Still wouldnt know what's "in between" them, assuming they're arranging in some way in some unimaginable superspace 'outside' our universe. (and i say unimaginable because it would be.. 90%+ of humans cant even picture objects in 4 dimensions much less the 0-infinity that'd be outside our universe.
Dreamweaver
Okay, i have to amdit it: i have no idea what the point of the prime number search is. It's relatively obvious that no matter how many orders of magnitude you go out to, there'll always be one or more prime numbers for it. So you're not going to prove anything by fining one. Perhaps knowing a prime number with more digits than there are bits in this message would be helpful.. but danged if i can think of how.
As for the whole encryption thing: do you need to break a lock to tell it's strong? If i take a padlock and slam it with a sledgehammer a few times and it doesnt so much as dent it, do i need to keep hitting it until it breaks? Another poster mentioned the encryption project is only at 8.5% after 577 days of running. Considering nobody's going to be going to the trouble of writing a distributed client to crack the encryption on my various transactions, i think we've proven it's plenty strong already.
Then you get the seti-at-home project.. it's kinda out there, there's no proof that it'll ever produce a signal.. but the whole point is 'what if it does'? Even if the senders have been dead for a billion years and we get the alien equivalent of the I Love Lucy show, which is really more imporant? The completely un-marketable and utterly useless in a practical sense knowledge that intelligent life isnt a) a fluke or b) the will of 1 or more gods, or proof that an ecryption key is strong enough that some kid wont be able to crack it on his pc for at least a couple dozen years?
Dreamweaver
The pink yoda with one eye was Yaddle, yoda's teacher.
Dreamweaver
I think the point here isnt that the new characters are just as annoying as the old characters, but that the old characters werent static.
ObiWan in this movie is an interesting character, the untested jedi.. but he starts out that way and ends that way. His experiences dont change him except that he seems slightly more rebellious at the end, which doesnt make any sense considering the circumstances.
ObiWan in SW started off as some crazy old guy and slowly evolved into the wise role model for luke.
Anakin started off in this movie as a little kid who cared about little kid things. At the end he's going to become a jedi, but he's still the same little kid.. i mean he asks obiwan what's going to happen to him at a funeral. how immature is that?
Luke started off the whiney, immature kid in SW. By the end he's matured alot and rather than being a farmer dreaming of flying a ship, he's dreaming of becoming a jedi like his father.. who he didnt even know about at the beginning.
Leia and chewie were pretty static, but then again one was a plot device and the other was basically an extra with lines (if you want to call them that).
Maul, palpatine, and the trade federation guys in this movie start out bad guys and end up being foiled bad guys.
Vader started out as the lurking presence in black and ends up being the foiled lurking presence in black.. pretty static except that we find out that he's some kind of weird evil version of obiwan and that he's not even the real bad guy.
Qui gon starts out the rogue jedi, ends up the dead rogue jedi. heck, he doesnt even dissapear.
Han starts out the reckless, brash, greedy pilot. Ends up realizing that maybe there's something that's almost if not as important as money and even starts on the beginnings of a romance.
That's what character development is about.. characters changing and growing as we watch.. not the character coming in, wandering around, and leaving.
Dreamweaver
Yeah, but what about after the apprentice is done with his training? Either the apprentice would then have to kill the master (which isnt really likely.. i mean the master is the master for a reason. sure, some would get luckey, but eventually you'd run into a master who keeps killing his apprentices) or else the apprentice would then become a master (like a regular jedi) and go off on their own to find their own apprentice.
This especially doesnt work if you consider that jedi could easily fall to the darkside without the intervention of another jedi. Could not a dark jedi hear about the sith and one way or another get in contact with the current master? Assuming the sith want revenge, the master would likely be quite happy to take a newly fallen jedi under his wing while placing his current apprentice off on some far-flung planet on a time-consuming mission.
Dreamweaver
This is going off of what a friend of mine has told me (he's one of those SW fans that's like a walking lexicon of all the SW books ever written):
The Sith are an organization (i've no idea about the race part, he never mentioned it) of dark side jedi who practice said dark side in a specific manner as opposed to regular dark side-ers who are just regular jedi that grew too power hungry..rather like the difference between ninjutsu and streetfighting. And the word Darth is an honorary like Lord or Master.
Dreamweaver
I think you all rather missed the point.. if mitochondria contain a genetic pattern that is (as a number of you said) completely unrelated to the rest of the organism, what difference does that make? So far as the human host is concerned (and you're not a host anymore, since if the things were ever independent life-forms they arent anymore) they might as well contain none.
Specifically toward the comment beginning "Fuck No", whether or not mitochondrial dna is passed down from the mother or father doesnt really matter, since the things in question (midi-whatsits) Arent mitochondria. If they were, the amazingly badly phrased line that will ring out through the next X years until something in Episode II tops it, would have been "I heard you talking about Mitochondria. What are Mitochondria anyway?". As for what exactly makes the difference:
Things Midi-whatsits and Mitochondria have in common:
They start with the letter M.
They apparently live within human cells.
They may or may not be or have been symbiotic independent life at some time.
Things that Midi-whatsits and Mitochondria Dont have in common:
Whatever their previous existence, Mitochondria are now benegien little organelles that are about as mystical as an amobea (actually, less so.. amobeas are neat).
Midi-whatsits are apparently at least semi-intelligent (or maybe planning and implementing the birth of a child without need of a father is something all single-celled organisms can do?)
Midi-whatsits have no apparent biological function. (just imagine what would happen if you had ten+ times as many mitochondria pumping away in each cell as you're supposed to)
Mitochondria are specific to Our cellular types. Now this one's speculation, but hell, the whole argument thread is about an imaginary organism, so i think i can get away with it. Assuming that the 'Mitochondria were once independent life' theory is correct, why in the heck would yoda have them? Or wookies, or the thousand+ other races of the star wars universe? They would have evolved their own ways with their own cell-structure and their own organelles. So now, you ask, why do they all have midi-whatsits? Well, one of three reasons spring to mind:
1) If midi-whatsits are, as seemed implied, intelligent, they would have spread into the various populations of other races as they encountered them. I dont read the star wars books, so maybe i'm wrong and everybody always had them.. but i know enough from what i've heard to know that some races are immune to the force which would imply an obvious lack of midi-thingies.
2) Convergent evolution. The force is an aspect of the universe as a whole, like gravity. Only so many possible configurations could be used in apparently carbon-based oxygen-breathing races and after tens of thousands of years of inter-connected life, they would have grown even closer to being the same thing.
3) Like number 1, but rather than one race developing alongside midi-whatsits, the midi-whatsits came first. Way back in the beginning days of the universe these things evolved and, given that they're apparently in tune with the force, spread pretty quickly. Afterall, which would survive in a fight: a regular cell or a single-celled organism that can crush the other cell's..er..feeding orifice?
In any case, belaboring the piddling little details of a movie where the creator probably never even thought of 90% of the questions asked is silly. That's why i never liked literature classes.. too much about symbolism and suchlike that the author probably never even realized was there. Write a story and people will dig all sorts of things out of it. Case in point, i saw a book (a book mind you, published and everything) discussing the likeness of Spock with Jesus.. i mean, come on.
Dreamweaver
Okay, similarities between midi-whatsits and mitochondria:
they're microscopic organisms that live in cells.
they start with the letter M.
they are, in some way, beneficial to humans.
--End similarities.
Now personally i think the whole midi-whatsits thing was silly, but i agree it's obviously a plot hook and a way of explaining why the kid is 'the one' but doesnt radiate the force across half the galaxy.. but as silly as it may be, the whole mitochondria thing is just stupid.
Going off of what i remember from high-school biology classes and what was said in the movie i think the main and most obviously important difference, the one that just beats you over the head and says 'what the heck are you thinking?' would have to be the fact that Midi-whatsits are at least semi-intelligent. Now they may not be so individually, but they manage to communicate in a useful manner with intelligent species and they took it upon themselves to make anakin's mom (who is obviously not a force-user herself) pregnant. Now if that were a natural function of the things, you'd think it would have happened at least Once before, yet the whole council's rather stunned about it.
Sounds to me more like an evolutionary mutation than a symbiotic relationship anyway.. in a symbiotic relationship both parties get something out of it. Given the description of the midi-thingies is rather short, it doesnt sound like they're getting anything out of it. Rather, given that there are races which have evolved into force-immunity (the little blue flying watto guy) the relationship between life and the force is apparently controlled by biological functions.
Look around, with the exception of the nuclear strong and weak forces, there aren't any forces we know of in the universe that human sense s cant detect.. if the force existed and any race we were in contact with had access to it, we would eventually evolve to be able to do the same (unless there were faster technological solution).
In any case, debating the piddling details of a movie is silly, and i'll stop now.. but i'm really just sick of the whole midi-whatsits == mitochondria thing.
Dreamweaver
Hey, if linux is a religion, does that mean we all get the religious organization tax cut?
Though you do have to admit linux users have a tendency to display the classical symptoms of fundimentalism.. overwhelming belief, a tendency to quote their leaders/book(s) whenever possible, and the willingness to go out and crusade against the infidels.
Linuxians Unite! Put down your mouses, take up arms, and lets bust some heads in the name of go^H^H Linus! Hail GNU!
Dreamweaver
There's a great deal of difference between paying attention and 'keeping tabs' on your child and searching their stuff. I know if my parents had read the stories i wrote, read the books i read, or just gone through my stuff in general i'd probably have been thrown in an institution. Not because i'm an antisocial freak or something, i just liked novels that would probably have been deemed 'inappropriate' for someone my age. No, they werent hardcore porn, just adult sci-fi and fantasy.. niven, foster, salvatore, various less well known authors.
In keeping with those tastes, my writings were about equally mature stuff.. not sappy 'pre-teen' oriented drivel that we usually feed minors. Sure, my short stories probably werent very good, but then i was young and i've gotten better.. but i wrote about love, death, sorrow.. things we usually try to hide from our children.
For some reason we, as a society, seem to think that our kids need to be sheltered from the world. That's why the internet is seen as such a horrible influence. Not because it's showing our kids things that are so horribly wrong, but because they're finding out about things that we dont want them to know. As adults we have no problems with watching violent movies, playing supposedly 'adult-themed' games, reading books with 'adult situations'.. and if you've never in your life looked at a porn mag there's something seriously wrong with you. You might not like any of the above things, but that's your person prefrence. They all exist and they all make enough money that it's obviously not just a minority that Does like them.
So why do we hide these things from our children? Because when We were children they were hidden from us. But we dont remember the anger and frustration at our parents for refusing to allow us to see the movies we wanted to see etc.. we just remember what our parents drilled into our heads over and over: "Those things arent good for children to see". We have all these problems with people coming out of school not ready for the real world, with teenage pregnancy etc. perhaps the problems are because we are hiding things from our children rather than Teaching them.
Dont tell your kid 'violence is awful and horrible and doesnt really happen'. Tell them the truth, it Does happen, every day. Let them see the news stories about things like the colorado killings. They wont think it's cool, they'll realize that these are real people who are losing their lives. Kids arent nearly as stupid as we seem to want to think they are. They CAN understand supposedly 'adult' concepts, but we spend so much time hiding them that we think they cant.
Dreamweaver
Any statement made has the possibility to be wrong.. I could say that there is, right now, air in my kitchen and be wrong..
it's entirely possible that by some cosmic fluke of entropy all the air in my kitchen found my livingroom to be a lower-pressure environment and vacated the kitchen (at least for a fraction or two of a second). So if faith is saying something is correct when you can't be sure, then apparently everything anybody has ever said has been entirely based on faith.. or maybe we just need a new defenition.
Dreamweaver
So, legally, fuck isnt a word? From the way you stated it, it sounds like the government just removes the 'obscene' words, and if a coherant thought is left it's okay.. But does that mean if i were to say something like 'Spob the spobing spobbers' it'd be obscene? (i'm assuming spob isnt a word here..)
Dreamweaver