the positives for manned space exploration. can you think up any more? your list is rather meager
now, do you want me to trot out the list of positives for unmanned exploration a third time?
compare and contrast, arrive at the obvious superior solution. however, it seems you have a mental block on what should seem obvious, so here's a thought experiment for you:
why is the us military using unmanned drones above waziristan?
could they use piloted aircraft instead? why aren't they then? make a list of the positives and negatives of both scenarios. work it out in your head. if course its not 100% analogous to space exploration, but if you begin to understand why unmanned drones driven by guys in cubicle farms in nevada is superior, then will at least begin to understand the simple truth about the obvious superiority of unmanned space exploration too
and it is obviously fucking stupid to send a meatbag into space instead of 100 probes for less money
i'm angry because i am seeing less scientific discovery in my life time because some macho posers have boyhood astronaut fantasies
i think my anger is justified: are you passionate about space exploration? then why aren't YOU angry at this stupid obsession with meatbags in space?
YOU are seeing less space science in your lifetime for the sake of a chest thumping conceited vanity, so get angry if you care about space exploration and science
a probe is merely an extension of a human's senses
if you send a probe, a human being is still evaluating, deciding, and learning, just as if he were standing on an alien surface
yes, with a time delay for radio signals. as if whatever a meatbag is learning, deciding, and evaluating on an alien surface isn't also time delayed when being relayed back to earth! and how much more does it cost to send the guy instead?
think of the military guys sitting in a cubicle farm in nevada killing al qaeda assholes remotely from predator drones. why do you need those actual guys sitting in the actual drones? YOU DON'T! what are you gaining by doing it remotely? what are you losing by doing it remotely? THINK! drones are the model for space exploration in our lifetime: more bang for the buck, very little is lost, plain and simple
and what of the massive price reduction? sending 1 meat bag to mars=sending 100 probes around the solar system. why don't you see that the tradeoffs between meatbags and probes obviously and overwhelmingly balance out in favor of unmanned probes?
think of sending probes as the same as sending astronauts, but the astronaut is sitting in a room in cape canaveral using a probe to see, hear, feel, and touch FOR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS MONEY
why don't people see this? because of fan boy sci fi fantasies, that's why. everyone wants to be an astronaut. 5 out of the 5 million who want to be astronauts will actually get the chance. but with drones, 5,000 out of 5 million who want to be astronauts get to do real space science... remotely instead. so think of what your boyhood fantasies and your mental deathgrip on the "need" to send meatbags into space is costing you in terms of your real chances, in your lifetime, to do real space science
the fan boys have inculcated star wars and star trek as the only cognitive model that makes sense to them. you adhere to the idea of astronauts out of passion, not logic and reason. SOMEDAY, we'll go into space. and our probes will have, in the meantime:
1. decided the best place to go 2. made massive strides in science and technology 3. even set up the infrastructure and facilities waiting for our arrival
compare that with the emotional but expensive and impractical and limited idea of actually going there in person first. its poor strategic thinking
face facts: we only have extremely primitive spacefaring technologies. work with what you got, and resign yourself to the fact that firefly is centuries from now, and will never occur in your lifetime
you get probes instead. work with what you got. if you instead waste your resources on investing in the idea of meatbags in space instead, you will satisfy some sort of atavistic fantasy life, but you will also see far less discovery and far less science in your lifetime, because the simple truth is that your financial and technological resources are limited
it really is a no brainer: no more astronauts. stop wasting your time and money on that conceit, please
we do what we can afford. and if we can send out 100 probes, or 1 meatbag to mars, for the same price, its a no brainer to send out the probes, and to hell with the meatbag
and those probes can do the science and find where to go and set up the facilities that will be needed to support humans when we finally DO get humans out there
"But that doesn't mean we sit on our butts and expect the technology to magically appear."
what the hell is that supposed to mean? sending out astronauts is the only way to advance technology? what of all the science the probes will be doing, at much greater quantity, at much less cost?
"Did Balboa or Columbus wait for diesel-powered cargo ships to do their dangerous trips? Did Lewis and Clark wait for a transcontinental railroad to magically appear?"
no, but if they had probe technology, you would have never heard of balboa, columbus or lewis and clark, because what those guys discovered would have been discovered centuries before they were even born
non-incumbent parties have fringe ideologies. so they don't appeal to many people. that is why they fail, plain and simple
meanwhile, if a non-incumbent party actually discovers a message that DOES appeal to many people, they experience success.... a major party takes notice, and that ideology is quickly coopted by the major party... and the non-incumbent party fades again
witness ross perot in the 1990s. and witness the tea parties/ republicans now. of course, the republicans don't HAVE to adopt tea party rhetoric. then what happens is the tea party REPLACES the republicans (like how the whigs were replaced for becoming ideologically obsolete)... and then... its back to two major parties all over again. and in that future of two new dominate political parties, tea versus democratic, you will find, again, some crank like you whining in an internet post the tired, false wheeze that fringe opposition is "shut up" (when the truth is, it simply doesn't have much appeal)
folks: the fact we have 2 major dominant parties is a matter of statistical inevitability, not centralized control. if you ran the rules of politics in the usa in a computer simulation, time and again, two parties would come to dominate: one slightly to the left, one slightly to the right. its simple inevitability. there's no control going on here, its a self-emergent phenomenon
deal with this simple truth and adjust your persecution complex accordingly. thanks
and i look forward to the day when we can sustain ourselves offworld
until such a day when we have the infrastructure and cash outlay to afford that, unmanned probes will establish the science and probably build the actual facilities that will help us realize that goal
then we can worry about the next adage we need to fulfill: "keeping all your breeding pairs in one star system is a retarded way to run a species"
we need to wake the fan boys out of their star trek fantasies and the false need for putting bodies into space and get to work instead on inexpensive, rapidly deployed, unmanned probes. lots of them, quick, cheap, easy. fire and forget, lose a few who cares, crank them out by the dozens
there's lots of science to be done, a lot more cheaply and a lot more easily and faster than one pissing and breathing meatbag on mars which only achieves a vanity, not real science
when you don't have to deal with something that eats, drinks, breathes, shits, and pisses, you can get a hell of lot more bang for your buck. surely you can see this
i want to see RPI managing 5 probes on venus, i want to see lehigh managing 10 probes on the moon, i want to see northwestern managing 15 probes on titan. i want to see carnegie mellon and case western arguing over which of their probes gets to prospect the interesting block of ice on ganymede, because they both spotted it at the same time. i want to see caltech sending out an email saying they don't have enough researchers to manage their 50 probes. i want MIT sending out an email worrying about running out of places to explore. i want to see bickering about coveted slots on launch windows when mars is closest to the earth. i want traffic jams of probes in space and on other planets
hell, i want to see AP Space Exploration 101 at Stuyvesant High School, managing their mars rover with a twitter-like interface, high school students deciding where to go and how to get there. i want to see Brooklyn Tech hack Stuyvesant's mars rover and drive it off a cliff. a few red faces, and no one worries that much about the loss, because we are cranking out dozens of probes a month
AND WE CAN DO ALL OF THIS FOR FAR LESS MONEY THAN ONE OR TWO MISSIONS OF MEATBAGS TO MARS
the day of the astronaut, for the foreseeable future, is over folks
bring on the era of cheap, quick, mass produced remote probes as the dominant face of spacefaring in our lifetimes
we are in the embryonic stages of space exploration. your firefly and star trek fantasies, i'm sorry, are many centuries away. please lose the false, extremely expensive assumption that people in space is necessary for a space program. sending bags of meat into space, in your lifetime, is nothing more than a display of vanity by the rich. its not real science, and it can simply be ignored by our public entities as a valid pursuit
but if you are really, really attached to the idea of meatbags in space, then go glom yourself onto the rich assholes with space fetishes wasting their disposable income on the conceit. but for the rest of us, enough with the boyhood fixations. let's roll up our sleeves and do easily achievable mass quantities of interplanetary science the best and cheapest way possible: probes. lots 'em. right. now.
because when the day comes to send actual people into space, we will know WHERE TO FUCKING GO and everything WILL BE REMOTELY SET UP ALREADY
what do we lose? a little science about how our bones degrade? ok, i can deal with that loss of science... because we did 10,000x that amount of science in other fields for 100x less money instead!
fuck the idea of astronauts for the foreseeable future. 100% serious
i welcome all the budding dr. nos out there. if you have a lot of cash to blow, go ahead and do it on a space fantasy. what the hell do i care?
however, my comment has to do with what nasa does with our public money, and a national program of unmanned space probes certainly makes the most sense, for many reasons, not least of which is that it can be really cheap: lots of science bang for very little buck
there's no reason to give that up because some rich dude has a space fetish
for every astronaut we send up into LEO, we can probably send 40 cutrate probes all over the solar system. hell, as the predator drones in afghanistan show, not even the military needs pilots anymore
the point is: the days of needing pilots and astronauts is over. everything can be done remotely for orders of magnitude of less cash outlay, for much greater amounts of quality science
instead, send probes, hundreds of them. send 20 to saturn. send 40 to jupiter. lose a few. who cares? get them up there fast and keep cranking them out. fire and forget. FOR FAR LESS MONEY, ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, THAN A MANNED SPACE PROGRAM TO THE MOON. do quality science remotely. do it on a giant scale
to hell with sending men to the moon, to hell with sending women to mars, enough of that pointless cold war chest thumping. let india and china play that idiotic nationalist game of who has the bigger penis now. sending human beings into space, for the foreseeable future, is a vanity, a conceit, a waste of money and time, like a rich guy buying a ridiculously expensive car just because he can
lets give up the puerile boyhood scifi fantasies, and start doing real interplanetary on a massive scale... for far less money!
now, having its economy dominated by China, it is apparently more like a Southern outpost of the Middle Kingdom. funny though how Chinese cultural understandings of centralized thought domination and control has proven so quickly popular in Canberra
we need to keep an eye on New Zealand, make sure down there all alone in the Antipodes that cabin fever doesn't make it lose it's marbles like Australia obviously has. plus New Zealand has that domestic situation with Mordor being inside its borders
the young of mammals instinctively go out of their way to eat their mother's dung in the first hours or weeks after birth. the survival advantage is that the bacteria that therefore colonizes them is maximally attuned to the guts of others of its own kind
what you refer to is an infection after an invasive surgical procedure. hardly a valid lesson on what is natural
an uncolonized digestive tract is pretty much an open space for all sorts of opportunistic bugs to move in. given random chance, many of them are probably not very healthy for you, and for a newborn, perhaps deadly. eating mom's shit takes out the random chance: you automatically receive, first and foremost, before anything more harmful can get in and colonize, the most ideal bacteria flora for you
only a precolonized digestive tract, colonized with gut bacteria from mom, evolved to live in stasis with its host (and even provide it with essential nutrients, as in homo sapiens, b vitamins and vitamin k i believe) can protect a newborn from harmful bacteria by exerting an "outward pressure": no open spaces to colonize. microbes evolved to grow in each species' gut probably grow with maximal efficiency in only that species' gut. such that it simply outcompetes microbes less specific to that host (and most probably more harmful, whether by simply increasing diarrhea, or worse, such as with certain cow e coli strains that damage human kidneys)
i bet there are thousands of deaths worldwide every year from people who take antibiotics, and don't need them, killing everything in their gut, and then exposing themselves to being recolonized with less specific bacteria flora. perhaps e coli from a hamburger, or something from an insect's gut. the effect could be harmless, it could be temporary, or it could be deadly
maintenance of gut bacteria, especially after diarrhea or changes in diet, should be on everyone's personal healthcare regimen. in fact, i see a business opportunity: sell people yogurt precolonized with their own gut bacteria when they feel at maximum health, for use after feelings of unhealth, periods of diarrhea, poor diet, antibiotic use, etc. seriously, someone could probably make millions off that idea. and unlike lots of health quackery, its a personal healthcare idea with solid science "behind" it (pun intended). the... details of the business might prove repellant to potential customers, however
feel free to capitalize on this idea, just give me a shout out after your first million of selling people yogurt colonized with their own shit
if you artificially make the birthing process clean, you are not adequately inoculating your baby's digestive tract with the mother's gut flora
perhaps setting the kid up for opportunistic infection in the first days of life, inadequate digestion, malformed immune system (allergies), etc.
so you reacted to the ugliness of getting shat upon by your mother at birth, but your delicate sensibilities are not the issue: for millions of years, getting shit on at birth has meant we evolved with the timing of the introduction of the full spectrum of the mother's gut bacteria at time of birth. meaning a delay in that timing could be unhealthy for normal immune function, normal digestion function, etc.
we talk about how antiseptic living has increased allergies and other diseases. a clean birthing room might be a part of that constellation of problems. perhaps in the future, healthy child birth will consist of the doctor shoving his finger up the mother's ass and sticking it in the newborn's mouth to ensure full spectrum inoculation. this may sound disgusting to you, but it may be the healthiest thing you can do for a newborn's normal development
the mother shits and pisses all over the child as she births it (you try squeezing out something the size of a basketball without losing your bowel control)
soon after the baby is screaming, mouth agape, inhaling and swallowing its mom's shit and piss
seems to me to be the most likely scenario for gut flora transfer
specifically, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a civil engineer are arguing about what kind of engineer god is
the mechanical engineer begins: "god is clearly a mechanical engineer, from the valves in the heart to the interplay of bone and muscle, god is a sublime genius of mechanical engineering"
the electrical engineer retorts: "no, god is clearly an electrical engineer. that the mind's wiring can interplay so deftly between sight and sound and touch and reaction exalts electrical engineering into an art form"
finally, the civil engineer speaks up: "sorry guys, but god is clearly a civil engineer: who else but a civil engineer would run waste pipes through a recreation area?"
Slashdot Mirror
the positives for manned space exploration. can you think up any more? your list is rather meager
now, do you want me to trot out the list of positives for unmanned exploration a third time?
compare and contrast, arrive at the obvious superior solution. however, it seems you have a mental block on what should seem obvious, so here's a thought experiment for you:
why is the us military using unmanned drones above waziristan?
could they use piloted aircraft instead? why aren't they then? make a list of the positives and negatives of both scenarios. work it out in your head. if course its not 100% analogous to space exploration, but if you begin to understand why unmanned drones driven by guys in cubicle farms in nevada is superior, then will at least begin to understand the simple truth about the obvious superiority of unmanned space exploration too
and it is obviously fucking stupid to send a meatbag into space instead of 100 probes for less money
i'm angry because i am seeing less scientific discovery in my life time because some macho posers have boyhood astronaut fantasies
i think my anger is justified: are you passionate about space exploration? then why aren't YOU angry at this stupid obsession with meatbags in space?
YOU are seeing less space science in your lifetime for the sake of a chest thumping conceited vanity, so get angry if you care about space exploration and science
a probe is merely an extension of a human's senses
if you send a probe, a human being is still evaluating, deciding, and learning, just as if he were standing on an alien surface
yes, with a time delay for radio signals. as if whatever a meatbag is learning, deciding, and evaluating on an alien surface isn't also time delayed when being relayed back to earth! and how much more does it cost to send the guy instead?
think of the military guys sitting in a cubicle farm in nevada killing al qaeda assholes remotely from predator drones. why do you need those actual guys sitting in the actual drones? YOU DON'T! what are you gaining by doing it remotely? what are you losing by doing it remotely? THINK! drones are the model for space exploration in our lifetime: more bang for the buck, very little is lost, plain and simple
and what of the massive price reduction? sending 1 meat bag to mars=sending 100 probes around the solar system. why don't you see that the tradeoffs between meatbags and probes obviously and overwhelmingly balance out in favor of unmanned probes?
think of sending probes as the same as sending astronauts, but the astronaut is sitting in a room in cape canaveral using a probe to see, hear, feel, and touch FOR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS MONEY
why don't people see this? because of fan boy sci fi fantasies, that's why. everyone wants to be an astronaut. 5 out of the 5 million who want to be astronauts will actually get the chance. but with drones, 5,000 out of 5 million who want to be astronauts get to do real space science... remotely instead. so think of what your boyhood fantasies and your mental deathgrip on the "need" to send meatbags into space is costing you in terms of your real chances, in your lifetime, to do real space science
the fan boys have inculcated star wars and star trek as the only cognitive model that makes sense to them. you adhere to the idea of astronauts out of passion, not logic and reason. SOMEDAY, we'll go into space. and our probes will have, in the meantime:
1. decided the best place to go
2. made massive strides in science and technology
3. even set up the infrastructure and facilities waiting for our arrival
compare that with the emotional but expensive and impractical and limited idea of actually going there in person first. its poor strategic thinking
face facts: we only have extremely primitive spacefaring technologies. work with what you got, and resign yourself to the fact that firefly is centuries from now, and will never occur in your lifetime
you get probes instead. work with what you got. if you instead waste your resources on investing in the idea of meatbags in space instead, you will satisfy some sort of atavistic fantasy life, but you will also see far less discovery and far less science in your lifetime, because the simple truth is that your financial and technological resources are limited
it really is a no brainer: no more astronauts. stop wasting your time and money on that conceit, please
we do what we can afford. and if we can send out 100 probes, or 1 meatbag to mars, for the same price, its a no brainer to send out the probes, and to hell with the meatbag
and those probes can do the science and find where to go and set up the facilities that will be needed to support humans when we finally DO get humans out there
"But that doesn't mean we sit on our butts and expect the technology to magically appear."
what the hell is that supposed to mean? sending out astronauts is the only way to advance technology? what of all the science the probes will be doing, at much greater quantity, at much less cost?
"Did Balboa or Columbus wait for diesel-powered cargo ships to do their dangerous trips? Did Lewis and Clark wait for a transcontinental railroad to magically appear?"
no, but if they had probe technology, you would have never heard of balboa, columbus or lewis and clark, because what those guys discovered would have been discovered centuries before they were even born
non-incumbent parties have fringe ideologies. so they don't appeal to many people. that is why they fail, plain and simple
meanwhile, if a non-incumbent party actually discovers a message that DOES appeal to many people, they experience success.... a major party takes notice, and that ideology is quickly coopted by the major party... and the non-incumbent party fades again
witness ross perot in the 1990s. and witness the tea parties/ republicans now. of course, the republicans don't HAVE to adopt tea party rhetoric. then what happens is the tea party REPLACES the republicans (like how the whigs were replaced for becoming ideologically obsolete)... and then... its back to two major parties all over again. and in that future of two new dominate political parties, tea versus democratic, you will find, again, some crank like you whining in an internet post the tired, false wheeze that fringe opposition is "shut up" (when the truth is, it simply doesn't have much appeal)
folks: the fact we have 2 major dominant parties is a matter of statistical inevitability, not centralized control. if you ran the rules of politics in the usa in a computer simulation, time and again, two parties would come to dominate: one slightly to the left, one slightly to the right. its simple inevitability. there's no control going on here, its a self-emergent phenomenon
deal with this simple truth and adjust your persecution complex accordingly. thanks
and i look forward to the day when we can sustain ourselves offworld
until such a day when we have the infrastructure and cash outlay to afford that, unmanned probes will establish the science and probably build the actual facilities that will help us realize that goal
then we can worry about the next adage we need to fulfill: "keeping all your breeding pairs in one star system is a retarded way to run a species"
for coming around to the superior approach
spread the word, evangelize with me
we need to wake the fan boys out of their star trek fantasies and the false need for putting bodies into space and get to work instead on inexpensive, rapidly deployed, unmanned probes. lots of them, quick, cheap, easy. fire and forget, lose a few who cares, crank them out by the dozens
there's lots of science to be done, a lot more cheaply and a lot more easily and faster than one pissing and breathing meatbag on mars which only achieves a vanity, not real science
when you don't have to deal with something that eats, drinks, breathes, shits, and pisses, you can get a hell of lot more bang for your buck. surely you can see this
i want to see RPI managing 5 probes on venus, i want to see lehigh managing 10 probes on the moon, i want to see northwestern managing 15 probes on titan. i want to see carnegie mellon and case western arguing over which of their probes gets to prospect the interesting block of ice on ganymede, because they both spotted it at the same time. i want to see caltech sending out an email saying they don't have enough researchers to manage their 50 probes. i want MIT sending out an email worrying about running out of places to explore. i want to see bickering about coveted slots on launch windows when mars is closest to the earth. i want traffic jams of probes in space and on other planets
hell, i want to see AP Space Exploration 101 at Stuyvesant High School, managing their mars rover with a twitter-like interface, high school students deciding where to go and how to get there. i want to see Brooklyn Tech hack Stuyvesant's mars rover and drive it off a cliff. a few red faces, and no one worries that much about the loss, because we are cranking out dozens of probes a month
AND WE CAN DO ALL OF THIS FOR FAR LESS MONEY THAN ONE OR TWO MISSIONS OF MEATBAGS TO MARS
the day of the astronaut, for the foreseeable future, is over folks
bring on the era of cheap, quick, mass produced remote probes as the dominant face of spacefaring in our lifetimes
we are in the embryonic stages of space exploration. your firefly and star trek fantasies, i'm sorry, are many centuries away. please lose the false, extremely expensive assumption that people in space is necessary for a space program. sending bags of meat into space, in your lifetime, is nothing more than a display of vanity by the rich. its not real science, and it can simply be ignored by our public entities as a valid pursuit
but if you are really, really attached to the idea of meatbags in space, then go glom yourself onto the rich assholes with space fetishes wasting their disposable income on the conceit. but for the rest of us, enough with the boyhood fixations. let's roll up our sleeves and do easily achievable mass quantities of interplanetary science the best and cheapest way possible: probes. lots 'em. right. now.
because when the day comes to send actual people into space, we will know WHERE TO FUCKING GO and everything WILL BE REMOTELY SET UP ALREADY
what do we lose? a little science about how our bones degrade? ok, i can deal with that loss of science... because we did 10,000x that amount of science in other fields for 100x less money instead!
fuck the idea of astronauts for the foreseeable future. 100% serious
i welcome all the budding dr. nos out there. if you have a lot of cash to blow, go ahead and do it on a space fantasy. what the hell do i care?
however, my comment has to do with what nasa does with our public money, and a national program of unmanned space probes certainly makes the most sense, for many reasons, not least of which is that it can be really cheap: lots of science bang for very little buck
there's no reason to give that up because some rich dude has a space fetish
for every astronaut we send up into LEO, we can probably send 40 cutrate probes all over the solar system. hell, as the predator drones in afghanistan show, not even the military needs pilots anymore
the point is: the days of needing pilots and astronauts is over. everything can be done remotely for orders of magnitude of less cash outlay, for much greater amounts of quality science
instead, send probes, hundreds of them. send 20 to saturn. send 40 to jupiter. lose a few. who cares? get them up there fast and keep cranking them out. fire and forget. FOR FAR LESS MONEY, ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, THAN A MANNED SPACE PROGRAM TO THE MOON. do quality science remotely. do it on a giant scale
to hell with sending men to the moon, to hell with sending women to mars, enough of that pointless cold war chest thumping. let india and china play that idiotic nationalist game of who has the bigger penis now. sending human beings into space, for the foreseeable future, is a vanity, a conceit, a waste of money and time, like a rich guy buying a ridiculously expensive car just because he can
lets give up the puerile boyhood scifi fantasies, and start doing real interplanetary on a massive scale... for far less money!
now, having its economy dominated by China, it is apparently more like a Southern outpost of the Middle Kingdom. funny though how Chinese cultural understandings of centralized thought domination and control has proven so quickly popular in Canberra
we need to keep an eye on New Zealand, make sure down there all alone in the Antipodes that cabin fever doesn't make it lose it's marbles like Australia obviously has. plus New Zealand has that domestic situation with Mordor being inside its borders
in the literal sense in regards to your fictional girlfriend, and in the figurative sense of hijacking my queasy narrative
the young of mammals instinctively go out of their way to eat their mother's dung in the first hours or weeks after birth. the survival advantage is that the bacteria that therefore colonizes them is maximally attuned to the guts of others of its own kind
what you refer to is an infection after an invasive surgical procedure. hardly a valid lesson on what is natural
shortly after birth
an uncolonized digestive tract is pretty much an open space for all sorts of opportunistic bugs to move in. given random chance, many of them are probably not very healthy for you, and for a newborn, perhaps deadly. eating mom's shit takes out the random chance: you automatically receive, first and foremost, before anything more harmful can get in and colonize, the most ideal bacteria flora for you
only a precolonized digestive tract, colonized with gut bacteria from mom, evolved to live in stasis with its host (and even provide it with essential nutrients, as in homo sapiens, b vitamins and vitamin k i believe) can protect a newborn from harmful bacteria by exerting an "outward pressure": no open spaces to colonize. microbes evolved to grow in each species' gut probably grow with maximal efficiency in only that species' gut. such that it simply outcompetes microbes less specific to that host (and most probably more harmful, whether by simply increasing diarrhea, or worse, such as with certain cow e coli strains that damage human kidneys)
i bet there are thousands of deaths worldwide every year from people who take antibiotics, and don't need them, killing everything in their gut, and then exposing themselves to being recolonized with less specific bacteria flora. perhaps e coli from a hamburger, or something from an insect's gut. the effect could be harmless, it could be temporary, or it could be deadly
maintenance of gut bacteria, especially after diarrhea or changes in diet, should be on everyone's personal healthcare regimen. in fact, i see a business opportunity: sell people yogurt precolonized with their own gut bacteria when they feel at maximum health, for use after feelings of unhealth, periods of diarrhea, poor diet, antibiotic use, etc. seriously, someone could probably make millions off that idea. and unlike lots of health quackery, its a personal healthcare idea with solid science "behind" it (pun intended). the... details of the business might prove repellant to potential customers, however
feel free to capitalize on this idea, just give me a shout out after your first million of selling people yogurt colonized with their own shit
fignewtons
in proper slashdot parlance, you must:
1. translate yoctonewtons into libraries of congress units
2. contemplate a beowulf cluster of them
3. explain their significance with a car analogy
the emoticonewton
or perhaps the :)newton, 8-(newton, :-Pnewton, ;\newton, etc
this is a great idea you've had! pat yourself on the back
into a bunch of humorous suggestions for the name of units smaller than yocto
allow me to start the noble proceedings:
mosquito-newtons
eensyteensy-newtowns
feelingsofinadequacy-newtons
napoleoncomplex-newtowns
wheredididropit-newtons
2009GNP-newtons
loco-newtons
gonzo-newtons
artdeco-newtons
your turn
if you artificially make the birthing process clean, you are not adequately inoculating your baby's digestive tract with the mother's gut flora
perhaps setting the kid up for opportunistic infection in the first days of life, inadequate digestion, malformed immune system (allergies), etc.
so you reacted to the ugliness of getting shat upon by your mother at birth, but your delicate sensibilities are not the issue: for millions of years, getting shit on at birth has meant we evolved with the timing of the introduction of the full spectrum of the mother's gut bacteria at time of birth. meaning a delay in that timing could be unhealthy for normal immune function, normal digestion function, etc.
we talk about how antiseptic living has increased allergies and other diseases. a clean birthing room might be a part of that constellation of problems. perhaps in the future, healthy child birth will consist of the doctor shoving his finger up the mother's ass and sticking it in the newborn's mouth to ensure full spectrum inoculation. this may sound disgusting to you, but it may be the healthiest thing you can do for a newborn's normal development
the mother shits and pisses all over the child as she births it (you try squeezing out something the size of a basketball without losing your bowel control)
soon after the baby is screaming, mouth agape, inhaling and swallowing its mom's shit and piss
seems to me to be the most likely scenario for gut flora transfer
specifically, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a civil engineer are arguing about what kind of engineer god is
the mechanical engineer begins: "god is clearly a mechanical engineer, from the valves in the heart to the interplay of bone and muscle, god is a sublime genius of mechanical engineering"
the electrical engineer retorts: "no, god is clearly an electrical engineer. that the mind's wiring can interplay so deftly between sight and sound and touch and reaction exalts electrical engineering into an art form"
finally, the civil engineer speaks up: "sorry guys, but god is clearly a civil engineer: who else but a civil engineer would run waste pipes through a recreation area?"
with these incredibly retarded ideas about sex?
no cthulhu tag?
that you believe somehow to be correct, and without room for any other valid interpretation
why is this?
do you not see that your interpretation is no more valid, and may be less valid (actually, it IS less valid), than mine?