The way you "control" your erection is to think sexy thoughts or think unsexy thoughts (and good luck trying to do the latter if Scarlett Johansson is in front of you). You're not directly controlling it; as the GP says you're indirectly controlling it.
Well, where I come from, control is control: You make a conscious decision and cause something to happen. There is no sharp separation between 'conscious' and 'unconscious' - or between autonomic or somatic, for that matter. Even the functions under conscious control go through indirect routes, so it is only a matter of degree. And control is control, however indirect.
Many studies are often tweaked to show results, where there are non, because in our society a result with "no, there is nothing new here" is considered a failure. Anybody seen a Paper with the headline: "We failed at [...] and thats why?" Or "Our Colleges are right at [...]"
I don't know where you get that from - but I'm pretty sure it isn't from reading scientific publications. You won't find this in the popular science mags, but scientific research is full of corrections and rectifications of previously published results; it is one of the main drivers of scientific progress. And I think you would be hard pressed to find anything less sensationalist than serious research papers - perhaps the annual report from the auditors of a small company would be less startling. Contrary to popular expectation, by far the most scientific research is routine, and the resulting papers go into excruciating detail that does not make for exciting reading, exactly. And finding that "there is nothing new here" is very common - why do you think they keep re-measuring fundamental constants, using the same, old methods, for example? I doubt it is because they expect them to suddenly change; it has more to do with accumulating sample sizes, if anything.
Believe it or not, it is completely impossible for a male to control whether or not he has an erection and thus can even have intercourse. It truly is an involuntary function, much like your heartbeat.
I'm a man, and I can control whether I want to have an erection just fine, which puts a bit of a dent in your claim, I think. I suppose it is a comfortable excuse for not trying to control you behaviour, claiming that you have "no control", but that is all it is. I think the truth is that it is all too easy to persuade some men that they want to have sex - but somewhere along the line, there is a voluntary act: you accept that you want to.
Yes, yes, the Chinese are thieving bastards who can't develop anything original - and on the same note, the Jews are greedy usurers without conscience, and the Americans are gun-slinging hicks with size 20 mouth in a size 10 head. Seriously, reality has never agreed with this sort of simplistic jingoism, so let's move on a bit, OK? I mean, I have been hearing this same nonsense about Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, India,... - and it has never been as simple as that. Once it was true about America too, and even you guys moved on and became world leaders for a while. It seems that emerging nations learn, in the beginning, from the more developed nations and then they move up to join the club of more mature contributors. China are already ahead of the West in some areas - which is why there is a tendency to see the newest gadgets in East Asia before they come to America and Europe. We can still teach them things, but we can certainly learn one or two things from them as well.
As to the brain, the porcine skull can't hold anything close to a human brain
I doubt we will ever want to replace whole brains in the way we would a kidney or liver - the personality or 'soul' seems to mostly reside in the brain in the form of 'software' or 'firmware', whichever is the most appropriate analogy. Also, the brain is actually a large collection of distinct organs, some of which have functions not necessarily closely associated with mental processes. It may be viable to replace or augment a person's brain with smaller parts, which could then be integrated into and trained by the existing personality - but then it might actually make more sense to use a non-organic computer for this purpose. When, if ever, we have become advanced enoug to actually replace parts of a brain and wire it up correctly, we will probably be able create implantable computer units like that too.
I guess you have to start somewhere, but this is pretty much how every international business in the world dodges taxes.
Indeed - and Google isn't the first corporation to be put through the EU wringer either; remember Microsoft? It is the right thing to do, and once they are on a roll, more and more countries will follow suit.
Us humans are just another test run of this life.exe program
- and given our experiences with Windows (.exe, see?), we have little scope for optimism. Also, it shows that God is more a managerial type than an engineer, which explains a lot.
From what I hear rumbling in the undergrowth, I get a feeling that there is a growing feeling of unease with the way big corporations gather data and with the purpose of doing so; this is obviously just another element in this. To readers of/. I suppose it is already blindingly obvious that Google don't do this simply because they are excited about 'science' and would love to share the experience with everybody, but people in general have been rather more trusting - but I think it is changing.
The question is - what sort of backlash are we going to see? Will the smartphone market collapse eventually because people don't trust the companies and their intentions?
Also, the claim that smallpox can only infect humans is naÃve. It can, in fact, infect other primates.
Smallpox, like several other, serious, epidemic viruses, probably originated in animals (rodents, according to Wikipedia). There no reason to think that it cannot happen again.
Notice the lack of anything resembling force in that. "Teach" rather than "subjugate."
Indeed. Unfortunately, people through the ages have seen nothing strange in taking this to mean 'subjugate'; the sword seems often to be the preferred, pedagocical tool. Likewise, whatever the Qur'an may or may not say about the subject, there have been many Muslim rulers who have not felt compelled to force their religion on others. What this tell us is that these things are open to interpretation, and in the end it comes down to what kind of people do the interpretation. All religions, even the most nominally peace loving and tolerant, have been used to excuse whatever their followers were doing. So, don't blame the religion, blame those who do the deeds. Of course, once you realise that the specific religions are not to blame, it potentially brings the criticism so much closer to your own back yard.
Heh, yeah, I'm a leftist: someone who disagrees with you.
How many Syrian refugees have Islamic countries taken in?
I remember something about several millions by Turkey, something similar for other neighboring countries in the region. But look up your own statistics, they can't be hard to find.
What is *with* the left-wing alliance with Islamists?
Who knows? It's the first I've heard of it. Can you provide details? Sorry, I shouldn't be sarcastic, I know. What I do know is that there is some cooperation between Neo-Nazis in Denmark and Islamist terrorists - it is only natural I suppose, since both groups tend to be anti-semites.
Why is there always one to jump right up and defend them?
Perhaps it is because people like you are always being generic, uninformed and unfair in your criticism? There is nothing wrong with criticising things based on a sound understanding of the situation, but you are intellectually lazy and default to generic attacks with no real insight.
You know they execute homosexuals and legally allow spouse abuse?
Do they? I know Uganda, a mostly Christian nation AFAIK, practise some draconian laws against homosexuals, and I have heard Daesh execute gay men, but then they seem to revel in the most bestial brutality they can think of. This is the kind of things that happen when religion or ideology becomes more important than real human beings: you start using it as an excuse for living out whatever filth is in your mind. There are Muslims that do this, but it is not a specifically Muslim trait - Christians do it too, and just as much. Think Catholics and child abuse: same thing.
You call me a 'leftist'? Please do - to me it is badge of honour, that means I think critically.
It's not, or at least it's aimed at the wrong people.
I'm not saying the target for their anger is well chosen - but there is a very real injustice that is prevalent in the Western societies, among others, and it is very reasonable that young people become very angry, when they grow up knowing that whatever they do and however hard they work, they are always going to be worthless. The support for Trump, the Tea Party and to some extent Bernie Sanders are symptoms of pretty much the same: People are sick of the way things are, and they seriously want it to stop, so they follow anything that looks like it might be better - or at least different. Don't you feel the anger yourself, sometimes? I do - I was lucky enough to make it past those hurdles and made it to adulthood and established a family; but it could have ended differently.
Well, not exactly. There's several books by Arabs, Moslems, etc. who point out that there really is an Islamic ideology which aims to take over the world.
You mean, a bit like this (Matthew ch 28):
18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
You know there's a youtube video called how to kill a human being where the pro death penalty guy is against nitrogen asphyxiation because it literally isn't gruesome enough.
Exactly - to all appearances, the American penal system is not primarily about justice or rehabilitation, but revenge and control. I don't remember how many times I have heard that "jail isn't supposed to be a holiday, it is supposed to feel like punishment". This fails to take into account several things - firstly that punishment to effective as a means of correcting behaviour must be accepted by the person punished as being reasonable and fair. Vindictive punishment causes resentment, which counteract any beneficial effect it might have had.
Secondly, many offenders don't have a lot of education or self-esteem, and they may not realise that they could lead a much better life if they learned to do the right things. I think most young offenders fall into this category - they don't wat to be criminals, drug addicts, violent or anything like that, but all they have learned tells them that they are worthless. They haven't done well in school, perhaps because the teachers are crap, perhaps because their home environment doesn't support learning; what hope do they have? Crime can seem so easy in that situation. And then we punish them vindictively, which confirms that they are worthless to society, and that they might as well carry on - at least it feels a little like getting back at a smug and overbearing society.
America is supposed to be one of the most religiously devoted countries in the developed world, but there seems to be little evidence of a willingness to forgive and get the best out of people. Perhaps this is because "religious" means "believing in holy scriptures rather than havingreal faith"; whatever the case may be, it is shameful.
Second generation Muslims are the ones getting radicalized.
It would be more correct to say that disfranchised, young people in deprived areas are the ones that get radicalised. At the moment this group includes a large proportion of Muslims, but there is no reason to equate the two, for many reasons:
- We have historically seen this happen many times; in the beginning of the 20th century, we saw large numbers of Fascists, Communists and, yes, Conservatives in organised street fighting, we have seen the Suffragettes, and so on - every time there has has been a large proportion of young people who felt they had nothing to lose, and that they had to do something. Religion may have been the excuse sometimes, or idealism of one sort or another. This time there are many Muslims, because that particular group has recently contributed large numbers of migrants into Europe, and it is very hard to grow up as a teenager in between cultures. But it has nothing to do with their religion.
- Although there are many extremists at the moment, who self-identify as Muslims, they are not the only ones; we also have nominally Christian extremists (how absurd is that: 'pro-lifers' committing terrorism offences), there are some that call themselves 'Communists', 'Maoists' or Neo-Nazis. Whatever their ideology or religion, this is only an excuse they use to justify their atrocious actions to themselves.
I think, if we always point the finger of blame away from ourselves, we miss the opportunity to address the very real issues that cause this to happen. We have to accept that the anger that fuels radicalisation is, in fact, very justified, and we need to face up to the fact that we play a big part in creating these injustices. And then we need to fix the problems.
Can't use anything but Outlook? Seriously? How massively incompetent are you? You should be fired for being such a useless moron. No one so pathetic and pointless in their job should be employed.
Perhaps you should have read more carefully - with a view to understanding - before you started calling people morons:
...peoples inability to user any other mail application besides Outlook.
To me, that suggests he is talking about about somebody other than himself. I expect you will now be considering your own position, if in fact you are employed.
If you claim that Israel is a racist country by the mere fact that it is a Jewish state, you are doing exactly that: denying Jews the right of self-determination.
I would like to hear the details in that argument - I don't see how criticising the state of Israel for allowing illegal settlements (not to mention actively building them) or practising what looks increasingly like apartheid means that you are calling Israel racist by "the mere fact that it is a Jewish state", or how that logically leads to the conclusion that Jews have no right to self-determination. I am willing to let you convince me - with logical arguments, please,
As for whether Judaism is inherently "racist", I'll let other judge; the three religions that have sprung from the tradition of Abraham have in common the idea, that their followers are God's chosen people, and all others are pagans and inferior to the in crowd. It certainly sounds a lot like the things coming out of racists. But you should judge people on their own, individual merits, not on their lineage, skin colour or choice of life-lie; that's what I do. And even Jews can sometimes be idiots, sadly.
Torture is used because the people who use it believe, perhaps entirely sincerely, that the person they are torturing knows something that the people who are performing the torture either want to or need to know, and the importance of them knowing this is of more importance to them than the personhood of the person they are torturing.
Torturers always have ways of explaining away their actions. It is for their country, their faith, the truth or liberty - for the greater good. The goal justifies the means. You should read up om Himmler's speeches to the SS top; all torturers think like that, whether it is the Spanish Inquisition and their "We cause you suffering in this life, so your time in Purgatory will be shorter", Daesh's burning and stoning of innocent people - or the waterboarding og suspected terrorists by the Americans. Good people don't do this, not just out of regard for the victim, but because they have chosen not to lower themselves to the same level as the terrorists and their sadistic torturers.
Of course. it has precisely zero effectiveness if this belief is mistaken.
It has no value whether their belief is true or false, we already know that. A person who undergoes torture is focused entirely on escaping the mistreatment, not on giving accurate information. When you are tortured, your trust in the torturer and in people in general is fundamentally destroyed, and you don't believe that you are not going to be tortured again, soon, whether you tell the truth or not, so you only want the hell you are in right now, to stop; so you say anything they want to hear. At least it may buy you a few hours or even days before it starts again.
In order to gather reliable evidence, you absolutely must establish some sort of trust - you make promises, then keep them, you respect the individual, and gradually they may change their minds and cooperate. You reward cooperation, but not in a way that makes them feel they are being paid off for being traitors. And so on. It isn't really difficult.
Well said. We should not close our minds to the good things, even if there are many things we may dislike about a specific nation or culture. However, it we also have to allow legitimate criticism, and it is obviously wrong to dictate how people choose to look or dress, whether it is making it mandatory to wear headscarves or banning the same. This is wrong simply because it runs against the diverse nature of people; some women clearly feel more comfortable with a headscarf or other traditional dress items, and others don't want it - it is wrong to impose something that causes discomfort to individuals, unless there is very good reason to do so.
I think this also ties into a wider issue about tolerance and its limits. Here in UK we had a brief bust-up about alleged anti-semitism in the Labour party; as an outsider to the political parties I found the whole argument rather strained. I think it was already obvious that none of the mainstream parties were hotbeds of racism in any form. But it has to be possible to criticise Israel, even in strong terms, without automatically being called 'anti-semitic'. It isn't anti-semitic to be against Zionism - one of the arguments I heard, in a rather shrill voice, was the "the Jews have a right to self-determination"; well of course they do, but so do we all, including the Palestinians. And the Iranians, not least. If you want to criticse others and be listened to, you have to be willing to receive criticism as well.
A link to their thesis, in it's simple beauty: arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0601127v1.pdf (yeah, I was being slightly sarky).
I used to study these things in a previous eon, and my main problem back then was (and still is) that physicists seem too reluctant to explore what might explain quantum mechanics; or perhaps that is just the way it looked to a student who kept asking annoying questions:-) We keep trying to guess a solution, but there has for a long time been a strong reluctance against questioning the basic assumptions of the great masters; and the probing that there has been seems to have been mostly of GR rather than QM. It is only very recently I have even heard of alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation, despite it being frankly a bit ludicrous - I think we have to be far more daring in challenging the great theories; just think of the quantum leap, if you'll forgive the pun, from classical mechanics to GR and QM.
In seeking to understand what happens to gravity in terms of QM, we are probing what happens to space and time as we approach zero - we can't really do that without having a much clearer idea of what exactly they are and why they appear to be fundamentally different. And the same goes for concepts like particle, mass, electric charge etc. Defining these in terms of the current theory merely pushes the ball around, it doesn't bring us into new territory. And fields, of course - do we actually know much about what a field is, other than a mathematical tool that describes the behaviour of certain phenomena? Do we know why the vacuum speed of light is what it is and why it is the same for all observers? And so on - to unify GR and QM, we need to go beyond both, and to do that, I think we need to answer questions like these.
Just like clockwork...... introduces features like "the OrangeFS distributed file system,...
Just as I thought! I think we all has our suspicions, that Linux was an evil plot by the government, but here we see the proof: "Clockwork Orange"!!! Soon we will be forced to submit to the Ludovico Technique! Run for the hills.
I don't really have the time to look things up properly, but if I remember correctly, the mitochrondria are only responsible for the kind of energy production that requires oxygen, and all eukaryotes still have the capacity to use fermentation to some extent. It is far less efficient, which is one of the main reasons why acquiring mitochondria was such a huge leap forward for life. We can experience the process when our muscles need energy faster than our blood is able to deliver the necessary oxygen: lactic acid accumulates, and the muscles start telling the brain to stop it.
That makes the interesting question, how did microbes lose them? Or are they descended from per-mitochondrial eukaryotes? And even, if we're feeling tangential, why are mitochondria so common in the first place?
The last question is obvious, in a sense: mitochrondria are the most efficient design that has evolved so far, so the cells that have them are superior to all the ones that had another design. As to why this design is actually better - that is lined up for a Nobel Price, I suspect.
Maybe they didn't lose them - I think there is another, possible explanation. The question is whether eukaryotes arose gradually, acquiring mitochondria slightly later in the process, or were they the result of the sudden (in evolutionary terms) inclusion of a bacterium, which could produce ATP or something similar, and which would be able to cooperate with it's host cell? My bets are on the gradual process: microbes learned long ago to live in biofilms, which are surprisingly intimate communities. In this environment they may have learned to copperate, exchanging useful chemicals, becoming symbiotes. Initially living as individual cells, but things like cell nucleus, endoplasmatic reticulum etc could have evolved as structures that served some useful functions in a close knit community like this, and mitochondria could have been a species of bacteria that exchanged ATP or a precursor with something else, which turned out to be so useful that it got invited inside, so to speak. The ability to produce energy by oxidation would probably have released so much energy that it would be far too much to be an advantage to a single bacterial cell, but could have given a major advantage to a biofilm community. Only speculation, of course, since I don't have the means to test the hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
The way you "control" your erection is to think sexy thoughts or think unsexy thoughts (and good luck trying to do the latter if Scarlett Johansson is in front of you). You're not directly controlling it; as the GP says you're indirectly controlling it.
Well, where I come from, control is control: You make a conscious decision and cause something to happen. There is no sharp separation between 'conscious' and 'unconscious' - or between autonomic or somatic, for that matter. Even the functions under conscious control go through indirect routes, so it is only a matter of degree. And control is control, however indirect.
Many studies are often tweaked to show results, where there are non, because in our society a result with "no, there is nothing new here" is considered a failure. Anybody seen a Paper with the headline: "We failed at [...] and thats why?" Or "Our Colleges are right at [...]"
I don't know where you get that from - but I'm pretty sure it isn't from reading scientific publications. You won't find this in the popular science mags, but scientific research is full of corrections and rectifications of previously published results; it is one of the main drivers of scientific progress. And I think you would be hard pressed to find anything less sensationalist than serious research papers - perhaps the annual report from the auditors of a small company would be less startling. Contrary to popular expectation, by far the most scientific research is routine, and the resulting papers go into excruciating detail that does not make for exciting reading, exactly. And finding that "there is nothing new here" is very common - why do you think they keep re-measuring fundamental constants, using the same, old methods, for example? I doubt it is because they expect them to suddenly change; it has more to do with accumulating sample sizes, if anything.
Believe it or not, it is completely impossible for a male to control whether or not he has an erection and thus can even have intercourse. It truly is an involuntary function, much like your heartbeat.
I'm a man, and I can control whether I want to have an erection just fine, which puts a bit of a dent in your claim, I think. I suppose it is a comfortable excuse for not trying to control you behaviour, claiming that you have "no control", but that is all it is. I think the truth is that it is all too easy to persuade some men that they want to have sex - but somewhere along the line, there is a voluntary act: you accept that you want to.
Yes, yes, the Chinese are thieving bastards who can't develop anything original - and on the same note, the Jews are greedy usurers without conscience, and the Americans are gun-slinging hicks with size 20 mouth in a size 10 head. Seriously, reality has never agreed with this sort of simplistic jingoism, so let's move on a bit, OK? I mean, I have been hearing this same nonsense about Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, India, ... - and it has never been as simple as that. Once it was true about America too, and even you guys moved on and became world leaders for a while. It seems that emerging nations learn, in the beginning, from the more developed nations and then they move up to join the club of more mature contributors. China are already ahead of the West in some areas - which is why there is a tendency to see the newest gadgets in East Asia before they come to America and Europe. We can still teach them things, but we can certainly learn one or two things from them as well.
As to the brain, the porcine skull can't hold anything close to a human brain
I doubt we will ever want to replace whole brains in the way we would a kidney or liver - the personality or 'soul' seems to mostly reside in the brain in the form of 'software' or 'firmware', whichever is the most appropriate analogy. Also, the brain is actually a large collection of distinct organs, some of which have functions not necessarily closely associated with mental processes. It may be viable to replace or augment a person's brain with smaller parts, which could then be integrated into and trained by the existing personality - but then it might actually make more sense to use a non-organic computer for this purpose. When, if ever, we have become advanced enoug to actually replace parts of a brain and wire it up correctly, we will probably be able create implantable computer units like that too.
I guess you have to start somewhere, but this is pretty much how every international business in the world dodges taxes.
Indeed - and Google isn't the first corporation to be put through the EU wringer either; remember Microsoft? It is the right thing to do, and once they are on a roll, more and more countries will follow suit.
Us humans are just another test run of this life.exe program
- and given our experiences with Windows (.exe, see?), we have little scope for optimism. Also, it shows that God is more a managerial type than an engineer, which explains a lot.
From what I hear rumbling in the undergrowth, I get a feeling that there is a growing feeling of unease with the way big corporations gather data and with the purpose of doing so; this is obviously just another element in this. To readers of /. I suppose it is already blindingly obvious that Google don't do this simply because they are excited about 'science' and would love to share the experience with everybody, but people in general have been rather more trusting - but I think it is changing.
The question is - what sort of backlash are we going to see? Will the smartphone market collapse eventually because people don't trust the companies and their intentions?
Also, the claim that smallpox can only infect humans is naÃve. It can, in fact, infect other primates.
Smallpox, like several other, serious, epidemic viruses, probably originated in animals (rodents, according to Wikipedia). There no reason to think that it cannot happen again.
Notice the lack of anything resembling force in that. "Teach" rather than "subjugate."
Indeed. Unfortunately, people through the ages have seen nothing strange in taking this to mean 'subjugate'; the sword seems often to be the preferred, pedagocical tool. Likewise, whatever the Qur'an may or may not say about the subject, there have been many Muslim rulers who have not felt compelled to force their religion on others. What this tell us is that these things are open to interpretation, and in the end it comes down to what kind of people do the interpretation. All religions, even the most nominally peace loving and tolerant, have been used to excuse whatever their followers were doing. So, don't blame the religion, blame those who do the deeds. Of course, once you realise that the specific religions are not to blame, it potentially brings the criticism so much closer to your own back yard.
A leftist
Heh, yeah, I'm a leftist: someone who disagrees with you.
How many Syrian refugees have Islamic countries taken in?
I remember something about several millions by Turkey, something similar for other neighboring countries in the region. But look up your own statistics, they can't be hard to find.
What is *with* the left-wing alliance with Islamists?
Who knows? It's the first I've heard of it. Can you provide details? Sorry, I shouldn't be sarcastic, I know. What I do know is that there is some cooperation between Neo-Nazis in Denmark and Islamist terrorists - it is only natural I suppose, since both groups tend to be anti-semites.
Why is there always one to jump right up and defend them?
Perhaps it is because people like you are always being generic, uninformed and unfair in your criticism? There is nothing wrong with criticising things based on a sound understanding of the situation, but you are intellectually lazy and default to generic attacks with no real insight.
You know they execute homosexuals and legally allow spouse abuse?
Do they? I know Uganda, a mostly Christian nation AFAIK, practise some draconian laws against homosexuals, and I have heard Daesh execute gay men, but then they seem to revel in the most bestial brutality they can think of. This is the kind of things that happen when religion or ideology becomes more important than real human beings: you start using it as an excuse for living out whatever filth is in your mind. There are Muslims that do this, but it is not a specifically Muslim trait - Christians do it too, and just as much. Think Catholics and child abuse: same thing.
You call me a 'leftist'? Please do - to me it is badge of honour, that means I think critically.
It's not, or at least it's aimed at the wrong people.
I'm not saying the target for their anger is well chosen - but there is a very real injustice that is prevalent in the Western societies, among others, and it is very reasonable that young people become very angry, when they grow up knowing that whatever they do and however hard they work, they are always going to be worthless. The support for Trump, the Tea Party and to some extent Bernie Sanders are symptoms of pretty much the same: People are sick of the way things are, and they seriously want it to stop, so they follow anything that looks like it might be better - or at least different. Don't you feel the anger yourself, sometimes? I do - I was lucky enough to make it past those hurdles and made it to adulthood and established a family; but it could have ended differently.
Well, not exactly. There's several books by Arabs, Moslems, etc. who point out that there really is an Islamic ideology which aims to take over the world.
You mean, a bit like this (Matthew ch 28):
18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
You know there's a youtube video called how to kill a human being where the pro death penalty guy is against nitrogen asphyxiation because it literally isn't gruesome enough.
Exactly - to all appearances, the American penal system is not primarily about justice or rehabilitation, but revenge and control. I don't remember how many times I have heard that "jail isn't supposed to be a holiday, it is supposed to feel like punishment". This fails to take into account several things - firstly that punishment to effective as a means of correcting behaviour must be accepted by the person punished as being reasonable and fair. Vindictive punishment causes resentment, which counteract any beneficial effect it might have had.
Secondly, many offenders don't have a lot of education or self-esteem, and they may not realise that they could lead a much better life if they learned to do the right things. I think most young offenders fall into this category - they don't wat to be criminals, drug addicts, violent or anything like that, but all they have learned tells them that they are worthless. They haven't done well in school, perhaps because the teachers are crap, perhaps because their home environment doesn't support learning; what hope do they have? Crime can seem so easy in that situation. And then we punish them vindictively, which confirms that they are worthless to society, and that they might as well carry on - at least it feels a little like getting back at a smug and overbearing society.
America is supposed to be one of the most religiously devoted countries in the developed world, but there seems to be little evidence of a willingness to forgive and get the best out of people. Perhaps this is because "religious" means "believing in holy scriptures rather than havingreal faith"; whatever the case may be, it is shameful.
Second generation Muslims are the ones getting radicalized.
It would be more correct to say that disfranchised, young people in deprived areas are the ones that get radicalised. At the moment this group includes a large proportion of Muslims, but there is no reason to equate the two, for many reasons:
- We have historically seen this happen many times; in the beginning of the 20th century, we saw large numbers of Fascists, Communists and, yes, Conservatives in organised street fighting, we have seen the Suffragettes, and so on - every time there has has been a large proportion of young people who felt they had nothing to lose, and that they had to do something. Religion may have been the excuse sometimes, or idealism of one sort or another. This time there are many Muslims, because that particular group has recently contributed large numbers of migrants into Europe, and it is very hard to grow up as a teenager in between cultures. But it has nothing to do with their religion.
- Although there are many extremists at the moment, who self-identify as Muslims, they are not the only ones; we also have nominally Christian extremists (how absurd is that: 'pro-lifers' committing terrorism offences), there are some that call themselves 'Communists', 'Maoists' or Neo-Nazis. Whatever their ideology or religion, this is only an excuse they use to justify their atrocious actions to themselves.
I think, if we always point the finger of blame away from ourselves, we miss the opportunity to address the very real issues that cause this to happen. We have to accept that the anger that fuels radicalisation is, in fact, very justified, and we need to face up to the fact that we play a big part in creating these injustices. And then we need to fix the problems.
Can't use anything but Outlook? Seriously? How massively incompetent are you? You should be fired for being such a useless moron. No one so pathetic and pointless in their job should be employed.
Perhaps you should have read more carefully - with a view to understanding - before you started calling people morons:
...peoples inability to user any other mail application besides Outlook.
To me, that suggests he is talking about about somebody other than himself. I expect you will now be considering your own position, if in fact you are employed.
If you claim that Israel is a racist country by the mere fact that it is a Jewish state, you are doing exactly that: denying Jews the right of self-determination.
I would like to hear the details in that argument - I don't see how criticising the state of Israel for allowing illegal settlements (not to mention actively building them) or practising what looks increasingly like apartheid means that you are calling Israel racist by "the mere fact that it is a Jewish state", or how that logically leads to the conclusion that Jews have no right to self-determination. I am willing to let you convince me - with logical arguments, please,
As for whether Judaism is inherently "racist", I'll let other judge; the three religions that have sprung from the tradition of Abraham have in common the idea, that their followers are God's chosen people, and all others are pagans and inferior to the in crowd. It certainly sounds a lot like the things coming out of racists. But you should judge people on their own, individual merits, not on their lineage, skin colour or choice of life-lie; that's what I do. And even Jews can sometimes be idiots, sadly.
... "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report ...
A genuine "The dog ate my report", then? Amazing, you would have thought adults could do better.
Torture is used because the people who use it believe, perhaps entirely sincerely, that the person they are torturing knows something that the people who are performing the torture either want to or need to know, and the importance of them knowing this is of more importance to them than the personhood of the person they are torturing.
Torturers always have ways of explaining away their actions. It is for their country, their faith, the truth or liberty - for the greater good. The goal justifies the means. You should read up om Himmler's speeches to the SS top; all torturers think like that, whether it is the Spanish Inquisition and their "We cause you suffering in this life, so your time in Purgatory will be shorter", Daesh's burning and stoning of innocent people - or the waterboarding og suspected terrorists by the Americans. Good people don't do this, not just out of regard for the victim, but because they have chosen not to lower themselves to the same level as the terrorists and their sadistic torturers.
Of course. it has precisely zero effectiveness if this belief is mistaken.
It has no value whether their belief is true or false, we already know that. A person who undergoes torture is focused entirely on escaping the mistreatment, not on giving accurate information. When you are tortured, your trust in the torturer and in people in general is fundamentally destroyed, and you don't believe that you are not going to be tortured again, soon, whether you tell the truth or not, so you only want the hell you are in right now, to stop; so you say anything they want to hear. At least it may buy you a few hours or even days before it starts again.
In order to gather reliable evidence, you absolutely must establish some sort of trust - you make promises, then keep them, you respect the individual, and gradually they may change their minds and cooperate. You reward cooperation, but not in a way that makes them feel they are being paid off for being traitors. And so on. It isn't really difficult.
Well, as we all know, if it is legal, then it is moral, and if you aren't found of, then it must have been legal. (That was sarcasm, by the way).
Well said. We should not close our minds to the good things, even if there are many things we may dislike about a specific nation or culture. However, it we also have to allow legitimate criticism, and it is obviously wrong to dictate how people choose to look or dress, whether it is making it mandatory to wear headscarves or banning the same. This is wrong simply because it runs against the diverse nature of people; some women clearly feel more comfortable with a headscarf or other traditional dress items, and others don't want it - it is wrong to impose something that causes discomfort to individuals, unless there is very good reason to do so.
I think this also ties into a wider issue about tolerance and its limits. Here in UK we had a brief bust-up about alleged anti-semitism in the Labour party; as an outsider to the political parties I found the whole argument rather strained. I think it was already obvious that none of the mainstream parties were hotbeds of racism in any form. But it has to be possible to criticise Israel, even in strong terms, without automatically being called 'anti-semitic'. It isn't anti-semitic to be against Zionism - one of the arguments I heard, in a rather shrill voice, was the "the Jews have a right to self-determination"; well of course they do, but so do we all, including the Palestinians. And the Iranians, not least. If you want to criticse others and be listened to, you have to be willing to receive criticism as well.
A link to their thesis, in it's simple beauty: arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0601127v1.pdf (yeah, I was being slightly sarky).
I used to study these things in a previous eon, and my main problem back then was (and still is) that physicists seem too reluctant to explore what might explain quantum mechanics; or perhaps that is just the way it looked to a student who kept asking annoying questions :-) We keep trying to guess a solution, but there has for a long time been a strong reluctance against questioning the basic assumptions of the great masters; and the probing that there has been seems to have been mostly of GR rather than QM. It is only very recently I have even heard of alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation, despite it being frankly a bit ludicrous - I think we have to be far more daring in challenging the great theories; just think of the quantum leap, if you'll forgive the pun, from classical mechanics to GR and QM.
In seeking to understand what happens to gravity in terms of QM, we are probing what happens to space and time as we approach zero - we can't really do that without having a much clearer idea of what exactly they are and why they appear to be fundamentally different. And the same goes for concepts like particle, mass, electric charge etc. Defining these in terms of the current theory merely pushes the ball around, it doesn't bring us into new territory. And fields, of course - do we actually know much about what a field is, other than a mathematical tool that describes the behaviour of certain phenomena? Do we know why the vacuum speed of light is what it is and why it is the same for all observers? And so on - to unify GR and QM, we need to go beyond both, and to do that, I think we need to answer questions like these.
Fraud! Physicists use radians, not degrees.
Kelvin. You mean Kelvin. Radians are for mathematicians.
Just like clockwork... ... introduces features like "the OrangeFS distributed file system, ...
Just as I thought! I think we all has our suspicions, that Linux was an evil plot by the government, but here we see the proof: "Clockwork Orange"!!! Soon we will be forced to submit to the Ludovico Technique! Run for the hills.
I don't really have the time to look things up properly, but if I remember correctly, the mitochrondria are only responsible for the kind of energy production that requires oxygen, and all eukaryotes still have the capacity to use fermentation to some extent. It is far less efficient, which is one of the main reasons why acquiring mitochondria was such a huge leap forward for life. We can experience the process when our muscles need energy faster than our blood is able to deliver the necessary oxygen: lactic acid accumulates, and the muscles start telling the brain to stop it.
That makes the interesting question, how did microbes lose them? Or are they descended from per-mitochondrial eukaryotes? And even, if we're feeling tangential, why are mitochondria so common in the first place?
The last question is obvious, in a sense: mitochrondria are the most efficient design that has evolved so far, so the cells that have them are superior to all the ones that had another design. As to why this design is actually better - that is lined up for a Nobel Price, I suspect.
Maybe they didn't lose them - I think there is another, possible explanation. The question is whether eukaryotes arose gradually, acquiring mitochondria slightly later in the process, or were they the result of the sudden (in evolutionary terms) inclusion of a bacterium, which could produce ATP or something similar, and which would be able to cooperate with it's host cell? My bets are on the gradual process: microbes learned long ago to live in biofilms, which are surprisingly intimate communities. In this environment they may have learned to copperate, exchanging useful chemicals, becoming symbiotes. Initially living as individual cells, but things like cell nucleus, endoplasmatic reticulum etc could have evolved as structures that served some useful functions in a close knit community like this, and mitochondria could have been a species of bacteria that exchanged ATP or a precursor with something else, which turned out to be so useful that it got invited inside, so to speak. The ability to produce energy by oxidation would probably have released so much energy that it would be far too much to be an advantage to a single bacterial cell, but could have given a major advantage to a biofilm community. Only speculation, of course, since I don't have the means to test the hypothesis.