Hey Mr. History, Canada didn't become a nation until 1867.
You are sort of right in the sense that Britain did send troops from its colonies into the neighboring US as part of a border dispute in 1812.
Also, as evidenced by its very name, the war of Texas Independance occured prior to Texas being part of the US- as such, the US not directly involved, and no troops invaded land that was part of the US at the time.
The Grand Old European tradition of war reparations bleeding Germany dry after World War I was a contributing factor leading up to WW2; the US reversed that and paid money to rebuild Europe after the war. Similar money was spent by the US to rebuild Japanese infrastructure.
You raise some good points, but mostly they're effects rather than causes. The quality differences primarily result from regulation rather than market forces.
1. is correct. The 10kHz band per station allotted to AM stations versus a 200 kHz band alloted per station in the FM does mean worse fidelity, but the decision of to amount of bandwidth to allocate per station was imposed by regulations and the FCC, not with any inherent property of the modulation method or radio wavelength... or with market forces.
1a. Allowing a wider band to use per station inherently implies that the current assigned slots for stations would have to be allocated differently. If each station were allowed, to use your example, a 50kHz band we could no longer allocate stations 10 kHz apart. Yes, this would require either a larger total band allowed to AM radio or a lowering of the number of stations. Lowering their broadcast power has little to do with this.
The decisions of how to allocate radio frequencies are complicated. You're right that at this point it wouldn't be worth it to allow larger bandwidth to AM stations, as FM Stereo has filled that niche... but the post I was responding to claimed the failure of AM Stereo radio as an example of a market-driven phenomenon where it was in fact a regulation-driven phenomenon.
1b. A combination of power output allowed? AM stations are allowed less power (50kW) than their FM counterparts(100kW)- which is in turn caused by their interference with one another, which is in turn caused to the small bands they are allocated by the FCC. Again, the quality differences are imposed from the FCC, not inherent to the modulation.
2) is a good point, and is the principal disadvantage of the wavelengths used for AM radio. It would probably not be as bad on hypothetical wider band AM stations operating at power levels similar to FM stations, but it would still be a problem. Where I grew up, thunderstorms only happened maybe once a year, but not everyone lives in a desert and I hear that in other areas they're slightly more common.:-)
Yep, you're quite right. I started to try to make that point in the first paragraph by saying it was about frequency and bandwidth rather than modulation method, but by the end I was referring to things as "AM" and "FM" rather than frequencies. Two letters is faster to type than a frequency range...
The quality of a signal is related to how much data you can reliably transmit on it. The physics of this don't inherently make it obvious which is better, AM and FM are side issues, it really comes down to selection of frequency and bandwidth assigned to each.
AM radio as currently broadcast is inferior to the FM radio as currently broadcast because it's almost inevitably in mono for the reasons mentioned above, and because the FCC gives individual AM stations a narrow bandwidth (10 kHz) versus an FM radio station's 200 kHz. AM Radio quality is currently poor for the same reasons that compressing a sound file at a low data rate makes a poor quality recording- but that's not a property of AM radio but a result of the choices for bandwidth allocation the FCC has made. The allocation of radio frequencies is a complicated issue, and there's some chicken and egg issues here... sound fidelity on AM radio is bad, so talk radio tends to be the best use of it, and since most of AM radio is talk radio, there's no need to up the bandwidth as talk radio doesn't need high fidelity.
The principal advantage of AM radio to FM radio is that it's longer range, particularly at night- which (unlike bandwidth differences) is due to physics rather than regulatory decisions. In areas of high population density this may actually be a disadvantage, but for those living in the middle of nowhere AM radio has inherent advantages... which it hasn't taken advantage of because of regulation. Now there are better satellite and internet options, but I guess some of us are still bitter. Regardless of which is superior, the failure of Stereo AM Radio after its late introduction should certainly not be used as an example of how a free market works, as the market for it was anything but free.
The AM stereo radio example contradicts your point. Stereo AM radio failed not because of market forces, but because it was banned by the FCC from its invention in the late 1950s until the the early 1980s. This was done specifially to encourage the less popular (at the time) FM radio option... by the time the ban on AM stereo was lifted the roles were reversed and FM radio was very dominant over AM in the US. Stereo AM radio was never able to become established because by the time it was allowed everyone (transmitters and recievers) already had adequate FM Stereo equipment.
The stereo AM radio story actually illustrates the reverse of your point- the market was forced into FM stereo by legal restrictions, and the market had inertia to stay there even after the ban was lifted.
If the US Government bans the sale of a specific product, like Stereo AM radio, it can and has resulted in a market demanding an inferior but established product (FM Stereo) instead of a superior product which is unestablished due to government interference (AM Stereo.)
The parallel to HDTV is clear: if alternative products of similar quality are unavailable for long enough due to FCC interference, people will settle on HDTV as the de facto standard just as they settled on FM stereo.
Judging a legal system only by the cases bizarre enough to make international news isn't a good idea...
As to the German legal system, if I look only at cases which get international press, I'd think badly of it because of a few cases like how killing and eating a person isn't considered murder and conclude that the German legal system is 'bottom of the rung' in your words.
If you were to point at something general such as the ludicrously high US incarceration rate you could make some excellent points about the US legal system, but claiming that a particular case shows that the "US system" is flawed is like using an anecdote to 'prove' something about the whole.
I suppose that everyone generalizes from a single example. I know I do.
Okay, I checked out pricewatch.com, and you're wrong about the 8 processor machines (requiring Xeon MP rather than Xeon DP processors) which the article and grandparent post talked about.
No Xeon MP as fast as 3.0 GHz or with the 4MB cache is available via pricewatch.
The fastest Xeon MP processor available they list is 2.8 GHz with 2MB cache, for $3788
A single Opteron 848 processor costs $1469
Oh, lookie, the AMD processor is less than half the price of a Xeon product inferior to the one that article benchmarked it against. Retract your lies.
Safer? The most killed at school due to a deliberate murder was not at Columbine, but was 77 years ago in Bath, Michigan where about 45 people were killed by a bomb. The largest loss of life from a single incident at a school was 67 years ago when the New London, TX school exploded, killing about 298. This is believed to have been accidental, and was the initial reason why a chemical is added to most natural gas(methane) to give it a distinctive smell- pure methane is odorless.
Yes, schools and kids are objectively much safer than they used to be. This does not make for exciting news coverage, however, so this fact is rarely mentioned.
The fact is that the Waco loonies killed themselves, the Ruby Ridge guy was responsible for everything that happened and Elian Gonzalez should be back with his father. Castro is almost 80, not many dictators make it to 90 and are still in power. By the time Elian leaves school Castro will be dead. But I can see why a bunch of right wing cranks who talk big about the importance of family would think it would be better that he is kidnapped by a bunch of his relatives looking to exploit him for political purposes than grow up with his father.
The fact is that the Federal government used flammable military tear gas soon before the fire in which 80 people died, and then lied about doing so consistently for six years after the fact. The fact is that the FBI section chief in charge of an internal investigation on the Ruby Ridge incident pled guilty to obstruction of justice, admitting he'd ordered all the FBI's on-scene accounts of the actual incident destroyed. (The Ruby Ridge incident occured during Daddy Bush's term, anyhow) On the other hand, I agree for the most part with the government's actions in the Gonzalez case.
The existence of right wing cranks is not proof of abuse, but it is also not proof of innocence on the part of the FBI.
So, there exist three Hollywood movies which are horrible, only one of which was adapted from a work by an Englishman, and none of which are comedies. What does this have to do with the topic? It's not as if there are no horrid British films made. (e.g. Johnny English, which was allegedly attempting to be a comedy)
I'll admit I agree that the odds of it being good are lower in Hollywood than I expect they would be in Britain, but I think writing it off as doomed now based on where it's being produced and the fact that one of the actors once did some hip-hip recording is quite premature.
Darn, those silly space travelers should have talked to their kids occasionally. Or, given the high-tech nature of the spacecraft, used some futuristic device to transfer knowledge from one generation to another... like books, or a computer nework message board.
Can you provide a model that reproduces the observed global cooling trend from 1938 to 1977 given the observed increase in CO2 during that period, but where the cooling occurs IN SPITE OF the increased CO2 and associated radiative forcing?
Why was the earth hotter 125000 years ago than it is now, given that there was no significant anthropogenic CO2 at that time?
If those results do not naturally result from your model, perhaps you might consider that the grandparent post is correct that we don't understand the process perfectly.
As a scientist, I would hope that you are aware that correlation does not imply causation.
To be much more pedantic, that is the contrapositive of Clarke's Third Law(1973), the popular axiom to which the grandparent referred.
Clarke's Law(1962), which was later renamed Clarke's First Law, reads:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
It is perhaps relevant given the misattribution to Asimov earlier and the corollary reference of the grandparent to also mention Asimov' Corollary to Clarke's First Law (1978):
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion --
the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
liquid CO2? That makes little sense, CO2 sublimates(goes directly from solid to gaseous state) at atmospheric pressure- in the solid form it's commonly referred to as "Dry Ice". CO2 can be made liquid given the right temperature and pressure, but it wouldn't be easy or efficient to put mines under high pressure just to make CO2 liquid.
Whoever made that suggestion didn't know much about chemistry.
Ice melting at the north pole would have minimal effects on the Earth's rotation for exactly the same reason that it wouldn't effect sea levels- the same total mass of H2O will be present at equilibrium over any given point whether it's floating ice or liquid. Given that the same mass of water would therefore be stored at the pole, this change by itself would have no direct effect on the water level at the equator.
It is true that the (slightly) less dense ice is somewhat taller, so it might effect the Earth's moments of inertia- but the changes (and they would be very subtle ones, as it would be same mass there but slightly flatter) near the rotation axis will have minimal effect on the relevant moments for rotation of the whole earth. Only as you get away from the rotation axis can you have angular momentum, which is what the Earth's rotation is really all about.
Re:One of the questions in the article
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Comic Book Physics
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Note also that a blob of water levitates in that strength of magentic field (see the same page he linked to). That frog isn't levitating because of the 'iron in its blood', it's levitating because it's mostly water! (and other diamagnetic chemicals)
Diamagnetic systems are weakly repelled by magnetic fields. Most things you'd not normally consider to be 'magnetic' are diamagetic... like water. You just have to go to very very powerful magnetic fields to see much of a repulsive effect. The 'iron in the blood' explanation for magnetically moving people is still nonsense.
Given that the whole case is about changing a single letter, the McIntosh apple variety for which Apple computer presumably named that product line is relevant... it's even pronounced identically to Macintosh, unlike Lindows and Windows.
A decimal(metric) system of money was first used in the United States in 1792, and a decimal system for other measurements was actively discussed in the US at that time, inspired in part by the French but prior to their adoption of the Metric System.
Now all countries' currencies are decimal and the US, long ago a pioneer in going decimal, is the last holdout for non-Metric measurement.
At my American public school we discussed the Civil War in a lot more detail than you seem to be implying. Less than everything (it was a high school course and all), but there was a considerable amount of discussion of the economic and constitutional issues involved.
A precious few of we Americans also learned a few things about that most mysterious of punctuation marks, the apostrophe.(That link is thanks to a certain Canadian cartoonist.)
That statement is deceptive- though it's derived from a real study, that study didn't make that claim. The phrasing of the question and method of selection of those to be questioned are critical for such questions, so that should be included in the description. Here's where the numbers are coming from:
In 1916, James Leuba sent a survey to 1000 scientists (500 biologists, 250 mathematicians, and 250 physicists/astronomers) drawn randomly from the appropriate sections of the 1910 edition of American Men of Science. Leuba broke his data up between all scientists and "greater" scientists, based on labels of "greater" as listed in his edition of American Men of Science.
Section A had three options, requesting the responder to choose one:
1. I believe in a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind, i.e. a God to whom one may pray in the expectation of receiving an answer. By "answer" I mean more than just the subjective, psychological effect of prayer.
2. I do not believe in God as defined above
3. I have no definite belief regarding this question.
(There was a B question regarding beliefs in "Personal Immortality" or afterlife I'm not going to elaborate on)
Leuba found 41.8% of all scientists responding answered 1 (belief), 41.5% answered 2 (disbelief), and 16.7% answered 3 (doubt)
Leuba found 27.7% of the "greater scientist" group answered 1, 52.7% answered 2, and 20.9% answered 3.
In 1997, Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham published in Nature ("Scientists are still keeping the faith") a survey of scientists intended to be similar to Leuba's- a survey of 1000 people drawn randomly from American Men and Women of Science in similar disciplinary proportions using the same question that Leuba used.
Larson & Witham found 39.3% of the 'scientist' group answered 1 (belief), 45.3% answered 2 (disbelief), and 14.5% answered 3 (doubt)
In 1998, Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham published in Nature ("Leading scientists still reject God") a followup survey of "leading" scientists- in this case, all 517 members of the (US) National Academy of Sciences at the time were sent the survey.
Larson & Witham found 7.0% of the NAS respondants answered 1, 72.2% answered 2, and 20.8% answered 3.
I don't expect a particular bias either way (either of believers being less likely to respond or of nonbelievers being less likely) but it's possible. An argument could be made for either bias.
The 7% figure of the parent post is taken from the second survey, but its description of the body being surveyed as "scientists" would be more valid to use 1997 study. Larson and Witham's estimate for the percentage of scientists(given the limits of their study) who are believers was 39.3%, not 7%. This, however, is still not the "most" claimed by the grandparent.
There are, of course, other explanations for "God"'s behavior.
Stan:
Why would God let Kenny die, Chef? Why? Kenny's my fr-f-f-friend. Why can't God take someone else's f-f-friend?
Chef:
[sighs] Stan, sometimes God takes those closest to us, because it makes him feel better about himself. He is a very vengeful God, Stan. He's all pissed off about something we did thousands of years ago. He just can't get over it, so he doesn't care who he takes. Children, puppies, it don't matter to him, so long as it makes us sad. Do you understand?
Stan:
But then, why does God give us anything to start with?
Chef:
Well, look at it this way: if you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop. Then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then it would have nothin' to cry about. That's like God, who gives us life and love and help just so that he can tear it all away and make us cry, so he can drink the sweet milk of our tears. You see, it's our tears, Stan, that give God his great power.
In Britain, there are two types of gull which appear to be different species, a white herring gull and a lesser black-backed gull. They are quite different in appearance and do not (directly) interbreed. They are currently considered one species, though, because they share genetic material indirectly. The white gulls breed with the North American gulls and the black-backed breed with the northern European gulls... which, as you go around the world's northern edge, gradually change characteristics to become the other. Each local population occasionally breeds with its adjacent areas' slightly different gulls, and these small changes add up, until around the Alaska/Siberia area the gulls are roughly intermediate between the two types of gulls as found in Britain. There's no clear place to draw the line separating the spectrum between the two ends of the ring to separate those ends into two species.
If all the herring gulls in North America and/or Asia were to die due to some natural disaster (or to human interference), the white herring gull and lesser black-backed gull in Britain would become different species. In a sense this is a situation where the gulls have in most ways already evolved into two species, and could readily become two species given particular natural events. This type of species is called a ring species.
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You are sort of right in the sense that Britain did send troops from its colonies into the neighboring US as part of a border dispute in 1812.
Also, as evidenced by its very name, the war of Texas Independance occured prior to Texas being part of the US- as such, the US not directly involved, and no troops invaded land that was part of the US at the time.
The Grand Old European tradition of war reparations bleeding Germany dry after World War I was a contributing factor leading up to WW2; the US reversed that and paid money to rebuild Europe after the war. Similar money was spent by the US to rebuild Japanese infrastructure.
Perhaps you'll also interpret this Canadian editorial from 1973 as spin.
1. is correct. The 10kHz band per station allotted to AM stations versus a 200 kHz band alloted per station in the FM does mean worse fidelity, but the decision of to amount of bandwidth to allocate per station was imposed by regulations and the FCC, not with any inherent property of the modulation method or radio wavelength... or with market forces.
1a. Allowing a wider band to use per station inherently implies that the current assigned slots for stations would have to be allocated differently. If each station were allowed, to use your example, a 50kHz band we could no longer allocate stations 10 kHz apart. Yes, this would require either a larger total band allowed to AM radio or a lowering of the number of stations. Lowering their broadcast power has little to do with this.
The decisions of how to allocate radio frequencies are complicated. You're right that at this point it wouldn't be worth it to allow larger bandwidth to AM stations, as FM Stereo has filled that niche... but the post I was responding to claimed the failure of AM Stereo radio as an example of a market-driven phenomenon where it was in fact a regulation-driven phenomenon.
1b. A combination of power output allowed? AM stations are allowed less power (50kW) than their FM counterparts(100kW)- which is in turn caused by their interference with one another, which is in turn caused to the small bands they are allocated by the FCC. Again, the quality differences are imposed from the FCC, not inherent to the modulation.
2) is a good point, and is the principal disadvantage of the wavelengths used for AM radio. It would probably not be as bad on hypothetical wider band AM stations operating at power levels similar to FM stations, but it would still be a problem. Where I grew up, thunderstorms only happened maybe once a year, but not everyone lives in a desert and I hear that in other areas they're slightly more common. :-)
Yep, you're quite right. I started to try to make that point in the first paragraph by saying it was about frequency and bandwidth rather than modulation method, but by the end I was referring to things as "AM" and "FM" rather than frequencies. Two letters is faster to type than a frequency range...
AM radio as currently broadcast is inferior to the FM radio as currently broadcast because it's almost inevitably in mono for the reasons mentioned above, and because the FCC gives individual AM stations a narrow bandwidth (10 kHz) versus an FM radio station's 200 kHz. AM Radio quality is currently poor for the same reasons that compressing a sound file at a low data rate makes a poor quality recording- but that's not a property of AM radio but a result of the choices for bandwidth allocation the FCC has made. The allocation of radio frequencies is a complicated issue, and there's some chicken and egg issues here... sound fidelity on AM radio is bad, so talk radio tends to be the best use of it, and since most of AM radio is talk radio, there's no need to up the bandwidth as talk radio doesn't need high fidelity.
The principal advantage of AM radio to FM radio is that it's longer range, particularly at night- which (unlike bandwidth differences) is due to physics rather than regulatory decisions. In areas of high population density this may actually be a disadvantage, but for those living in the middle of nowhere AM radio has inherent advantages... which it hasn't taken advantage of because of regulation. Now there are better satellite and internet options, but I guess some of us are still bitter. Regardless of which is superior, the failure of Stereo AM Radio after its late introduction should certainly not be used as an example of how a free market works, as the market for it was anything but free.
The stereo AM radio story actually illustrates the reverse of your point- the market was forced into FM stereo by legal restrictions, and the market had inertia to stay there even after the ban was lifted.
If the US Government bans the sale of a specific product, like Stereo AM radio, it can and has resulted in a market demanding an inferior but established product (FM Stereo) instead of a superior product which is unestablished due to government interference (AM Stereo.)
The parallel to HDTV is clear: if alternative products of similar quality are unavailable for long enough due to FCC interference, people will settle on HDTV as the de facto standard just as they settled on FM stereo.
As to the German legal system, if I look only at cases which get international press, I'd think badly of it because of a few cases like how killing and eating a person isn't considered murder and conclude that the German legal system is 'bottom of the rung' in your words.
If you were to point at something general such as the ludicrously high US incarceration rate you could make some excellent points about the US legal system, but claiming that a particular case shows that the "US system" is flawed is like using an anecdote to 'prove' something about the whole.
I suppose that everyone generalizes from a single example. I know I do.
No Xeon MP as fast as 3.0 GHz or with the 4MB cache is available via pricewatch.
The fastest Xeon MP processor available they list is 2.8 GHz with 2MB cache, for $3788
A single Opteron 848 processor costs $1469
Oh, lookie, the AMD processor is less than half the price of a Xeon product inferior to the one that article benchmarked it against. Retract your lies.
Yes, schools and kids are objectively much safer than they used to be. This does not make for exciting news coverage, however, so this fact is rarely mentioned.
This is sort of a higher-powered version of a nova, which is hydrogen fusing at a white dwarf star.
The existence of right wing cranks is not proof of abuse, but it is also not proof of innocence on the part of the FBI.
So, there exist three Hollywood movies which are horrible, only one of which was adapted from a work by an Englishman, and none of which are comedies. What does this have to do with the topic? It's not as if there are no horrid British films made. (e.g. Johnny English, which was allegedly attempting to be a comedy)
I'll admit I agree that the odds of it being good are lower in Hollywood than I expect they would be in Britain, but I think writing it off as doomed now based on where it's being produced and the fact that one of the actors once did some hip-hip recording is quite premature.
Darn, those silly space travelers should have talked to their kids occasionally. Or, given the high-tech nature of the spacecraft, used some futuristic device to transfer knowledge from one generation to another... like books, or a computer nework message board.
Century 2: Arrive at destination, Great-great-great grandchildren colonize planet.
Can you provide a model that reproduces the observed global cooling trend from 1938 to 1977 given the observed increase in CO2 during that period, but where the cooling occurs IN SPITE OF the increased CO2 and associated radiative forcing?
Why was the earth hotter 125000 years ago than it is now, given that there was no significant anthropogenic CO2 at that time?
If those results do not naturally result from your model, perhaps you might consider that the grandparent post is correct that we don't understand the process perfectly.
As a scientist, I would hope that you are aware that correlation does not imply causation.
Clarke's Law(1962), which was later renamed Clarke's First Law, reads:
It is perhaps relevant given the misattribution to Asimov earlier and the corollary reference of the grandparent to also mention Asimov' Corollary to Clarke's First Law (1978):Whoever made that suggestion didn't know much about chemistry.
It is true that the (slightly) less dense ice is somewhat taller, so it might effect the Earth's moments of inertia- but the changes (and they would be very subtle ones, as it would be same mass there but slightly flatter) near the rotation axis will have minimal effect on the relevant moments for rotation of the whole earth. Only as you get away from the rotation axis can you have angular momentum, which is what the Earth's rotation is really all about.
Diamagnetic systems are weakly repelled by magnetic fields. Most things you'd not normally consider to be 'magnetic' are diamagetic... like water. You just have to go to very very powerful magnetic fields to see much of a repulsive effect. The 'iron in the blood' explanation for magnetically moving people is still nonsense.
Given that the whole case is about changing a single letter, the McIntosh apple variety for which Apple computer presumably named that product line is relevant... it's even pronounced identically to Macintosh, unlike Lindows and Windows.
Now all countries' currencies are decimal and the US, long ago a pioneer in going decimal, is the last holdout for non-Metric measurement.
A precious few of we Americans also learned a few things about that most mysterious of punctuation marks, the apostrophe.(That link is thanks to a certain Canadian cartoonist.)
In 1916, James Leuba sent a survey to 1000 scientists (500 biologists, 250 mathematicians, and 250 physicists/astronomers) drawn randomly from the appropriate sections of the 1910 edition of American Men of Science. Leuba broke his data up between all scientists and "greater" scientists, based on labels of "greater" as listed in his edition of American Men of Science.
Section A had three options, requesting the responder to choose one:
1. I believe in a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind, i.e. a God to whom one may pray in the expectation of receiving an answer. By "answer" I mean more than just the subjective, psychological effect of prayer.
2. I do not believe in God as defined above
3. I have no definite belief regarding this question.
(There was a B question regarding beliefs in "Personal Immortality" or afterlife I'm not going to elaborate on)
Leuba found 41.8% of all scientists responding answered 1 (belief), 41.5% answered 2 (disbelief), and 16.7% answered 3 (doubt)
Leuba found 27.7% of the "greater scientist" group answered 1, 52.7% answered 2, and 20.9% answered 3.
In 1997, Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham published in Nature ("Scientists are still keeping the faith") a survey of scientists intended to be similar to Leuba's- a survey of 1000 people drawn randomly from American Men and Women of Science in similar disciplinary proportions using the same question that Leuba used.
Larson & Witham found 39.3% of the 'scientist' group answered 1 (belief), 45.3% answered 2 (disbelief), and 14.5% answered 3 (doubt)
In 1998, Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham published in Nature ("Leading scientists still reject God") a followup survey of "leading" scientists- in this case, all 517 members of the (US) National Academy of Sciences at the time were sent the survey.
Larson & Witham found 7.0% of the NAS respondants answered 1, 72.2% answered 2, and 20.8% answered 3.
I don't expect a particular bias either way (either of believers being less likely to respond or of nonbelievers being less likely) but it's possible. An argument could be made for either bias.
The 7% figure of the parent post is taken from the second survey, but its description of the body being surveyed as "scientists" would be more valid to use 1997 study. Larson and Witham's estimate for the percentage of scientists(given the limits of their study) who are believers was 39.3%, not 7%. This, however, is still not the "most" claimed by the grandparent.
If all the herring gulls in North America and/or Asia were to die due to some natural disaster (or to human interference), the white herring gull and lesser black-backed gull in Britain would become different species. In a sense this is a situation where the gulls have in most ways already evolved into two species, and could readily become two species given particular natural events. This type of species is called a ring species.