Including, for example, just random genetic drift.
What do Mongolians and Northern Europeans have in common ? They live farther up north than most other people. What does this have to do with lactose tolerance ? That's a fairly interesting detail.
However, Inuits live even further north than Mongolians and Europeans, but do not have lactose tolerance. On the other hand, Inuits and Mongolians have evolved enzymes to make their own vitamin C, and do not require vegetables for nutrition. Europeans still need vitamins to survive. Inuits and Mongolians do have access to edible plants with vitamins, so the trait may have evolved randomly, rather than having survival value.
I am getting my PhD in statistical genetics.
Does lactose tolerance reflect a lack of civilized sources of food? Northern Europeans and Nilo-Saharans were relative latecomers to civilized life. As recently as a thousand years ago, Northern Europeans were still a bunch of cannibals running around with stone axes, and drank milk from animals. In East Asia, Mongolians are lactose-tolerant, but they were less civilized than other countries in the region which acquired agriculture thousands of years ago. Similarly, Westerners are alcohol-tolerant because they did not know how to boil water to sterilize it until about 150 years ago, so they added alcohol to their water all the time.
Incidentally, genetics do not tell the whole story. Lactose tolerance is also affected by gut flora. Lactose intolerance is increasing in Western countries as bacterial diversity in our environment is decreasing from excessive hygiene. Many differences in phenotype between different ethnic groups, long assumed to be genetic in origin, have turned out not to be so. As Japanese nutrition standards have improved, their average height is now taller than some European countries. African-Americans were long assumed to be genetically more susceptible to cardiovascular diseases, but white Russians in Finland have rates of cardiovascular disease far higher than African-Americans. Race-based susceptibility to diabetes is also under question -- groups such as Pima Indians with high diabetes rates also eat huge amounts of fry bread and other unhealthy foods.
They had articles like this ten years ago, that some grad student somewhere simulated an "actual bacterium" on a PC.
The topic is useful primarily as a graduate student's thesis topic, along with "robotic simulations".
Again, few people in the developed world live in close proximity to pigs and chickens anymore. Even in developing countries, modern farming methods are reducing close contact. While WW1 had large numbers of young adults living in squalid bunkers, accounting for the large numbers of young people killed, such conditions are rare in the developed world today. Throughout the world today, there exist a large number of relatively simple public health measures that prevent outbreaks from growing too large, which were not present in 1918.
More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished -- 799 million of them live in the developing world.
Malnourishment was a serious problem in "developed" countries until the mid-20th century, but it is largely unheard of today. Today, we produce enough food to feed the world several times over. The only issue is logistics. As infrastructure improves in the developing world, hunger/malnutrition is also declining.
In the case of pandemics, technology actually works the opposite. Faster, and easier, worldwide travel means a more widespread communication of viral or bacterial agents in a smaller time frame. In present day, Influenza takes more time to show symptoms that would cause enough alarm to effect quarantine. In 1918-19 worldwide travel was still via ocean vessels, which took considerable time to get from point A to point B, yet that pandemic was responsible for 20-40 million deaths.
Yet, we have not had pandemics of fast-acting illnesses since WWI. The advances in technology to treat diseases have outpaced their ability to spread faster.
In the case of AIDS, while you seem to think it's in "long-term decline," the numbers from the CDC for the years 2000-2004 (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/At-A- Glance.htm) show that for this time the cases of AIDS diagnosis and people living with AIDS increased each year, and this is just in the US. Admittedly, certain segments have had declining new cases... prenatal transmission, and injection drug users.
Short-term blips are to be expected, but public paranoia over AIDS makes it unlikely to see vast surges in the developed world again.
Some things you mention are fairly obvious... suggesting there will be a flu pandemic is a no-brainer, we've had them before, and we'll have them again.. it is just a matter of time.
The Western World regularly had famines throughout its history, yet we haven't had them for at least 50 years, and nobody is expecting them any time soon. Advances in agricultural technology have made famines in developed countries a moot issue. Would it be a stretch to argue that advances in basic hygiene have made pandemics a moot issue in developed countries? Only AIDS poses a credible threat, but advances in public awareness have also caused its incidence to go on a long-term decline.
You observed a single glacier that is said to have retreated 1.5 km in 60 years. Then what about this list of glaciers that is growing?
http://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glacier s.htm
The rate of 1.5km in 60 years is quite slow compared to the rate at which other glaciers are growing larger, e.g. a glacier in Greenland growing at the rate of 11.5 km per year, or Argentina's Perito Moreno Glacier (the largest glacier in Patagonia), which is advancing at the rate of 7 feet per day.
Do you think that this is just a coincidence? It is good to question authority. It is healthy, normal, and a trait that should be encouraged. But when the evidence is staring you in the face, and you still deny it... Then you're delusional.
Current scientific theories, at least those popular in America, say that our genes are programmed for obesity because we experienced frequent famines as cavement. Corollary to that, are we genetically programmed to believe in impending doom? Doomsday predictions have been present throughout the world's civilizations, throughout history.
Scientists have been giving the doomsday sales pitch for a long time in order to scare up funds. Scientists used to insist in the 1970s that we are "on the cusp of a new ice age", that we will run out of food by 2000 AD and billions of people will starve to death, that nuclear holocaust is a certainty, that black clouds of killer bees will take over America, that leaded gasoline and paitn will give birth to billions of babies with birth defects, that asteroids from space will destroy us, that the flu pandemic is supposed to kill 300 million people, SARS will do the same, that the Y2K bug will cause nuclear meltdowns all over the planet,... did I miss anything? Every time, questioning these claims caused one to earn the label of "reactionary", "fascist", and "ignorant". Today, the public is equally fanatical in its belief of the Greenhouse effect, and one can literally get his teeth knocked out in public for saying that they don't believe it. The rabble continue to buy into doomsday prophecies, as they have done since thousands of years ago.
Can't open the article link, don't know if this bug is mentioned on there. Even when I check the "open links in new window" option, 2.0 unpredictably creates pop-up links in a new tab, rather than a new window. I also hate the glossy Macintosh-wannabe look of the new buttons. It also creates popup windows on some sites, where the older browser did not.
So what we have are a bunch of whiny apologists who can't get real jobs back home. If American shops put out signs saying that foreigners are only allowed in the company of an American, Filipinos aren't allowed, would people be as passive?
I've talked to Westerners on the net who defend the "right" of Japanese establishments to put up signs forbidding foreigners from entry. You could become the spineless conformists like them.
100 years ago, scientists used to say autism was caused by "poor parenting", and pointed fingers at mothers. Today, there is overwhelming evidence that autism is a genetically based disorder. This study seems well beneath Cornell's dignity. Autism incidence is known to be higher in wealthier counties that have facilities to treat autistics; it is a well known phenomenon among epidemiologists.
Don't people who travel abroad have to fill out all those "customs forms" on the airplane anyway? It asked me for a lot more than my gender, birthday, and address.
Are Europeans upset at having to answer as many questions as other nonwhite travellers to the USA?
Ok you convinced me, I won't fly to the USA. I don't see any reason why a goverment should be allowed snoop in my private life "just to make sure I'm not a terrorist".
Are you sure EU governments do not surreptitiously collect data on passengers anyway? The EU has a longer history, going back to the 1970s, of placing gendarmes or carabinieri with automatic rifles at airports. The NSA's best customers are European intelligence agencies who purchase the data to snoop on their own citizens. The US makes the mistake of being too open about their intelligence operations.
Do they think terrorists are dumb enough to say "No, please only one way tickets and I don't need a method of leaving the airport. And please only a light meal, I don't want to blow myself up with a full stomach. But first I'll clear out my account and donate everything to a well-know extremist organistion."
As a matter of fact, most terrorists in Europe are extreme amateurs -- 18-year-old losers with fantasies of becoming a mujahedeen. They boast to the whole world that they will carry something out, and get arrested at the stage of trying to buy weapons.
They've been trying to build optical computing chips since the 1980s. I did a summer internship in Japan in 1990, when they were making custom batches of exotic rare-earth crystals for fiber-optic relay stations.
Osaka built the world's first sports stadium with a movable roof, which malfunctioned shortly after inception, and the company that made it went bankrupt. The roof has been stuck for the past 5 years. Incidentally, the stadium was built on rubbery landfill, so whenever audiences jump up and down during rock concerts, it causes earthquakes in the neighborhood.
Osaka also built a new airport on an artificial island that is sinking into the sea, so it may become the world's first underwater airport.
Seoul has had various engineering disasters also, including a department store that collapsed and killed hundreds of wealthy housewives.
"Keyhole surgery" generated some fanfare a few years ago, but the reality is that it is more dangerous than open surgery, requiring greater skill. How the hell do you operate on something you can't see, digging around under flesh?
I'm just wondering, won't these things become a lightning magnet? You say it can be grounded, but what happens when these things stretch into higher parts of the atmosphere with more ions flying around?
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No, it can reflect a number of things.
Including, for example, just random genetic drift.
What do Mongolians and Northern Europeans have in common ? They live farther up north than most other people. What does this have to do with lactose tolerance ? That's a fairly interesting detail.
However, Inuits live even further north than Mongolians and Europeans, but do not have lactose tolerance. On the other hand, Inuits and Mongolians have evolved enzymes to make their own vitamin C, and do not require vegetables for nutrition. Europeans still need vitamins to survive. Inuits and Mongolians do have access to edible plants with vitamins, so the trait may have evolved randomly, rather than having survival value.
I am getting my PhD in statistical genetics. Does lactose tolerance reflect a lack of civilized sources of food? Northern Europeans and Nilo-Saharans were relative latecomers to civilized life. As recently as a thousand years ago, Northern Europeans were still a bunch of cannibals running around with stone axes, and drank milk from animals. In East Asia, Mongolians are lactose-tolerant, but they were less civilized than other countries in the region which acquired agriculture thousands of years ago. Similarly, Westerners are alcohol-tolerant because they did not know how to boil water to sterilize it until about 150 years ago, so they added alcohol to their water all the time. Incidentally, genetics do not tell the whole story. Lactose tolerance is also affected by gut flora. Lactose intolerance is increasing in Western countries as bacterial diversity in our environment is decreasing from excessive hygiene. Many differences in phenotype between different ethnic groups, long assumed to be genetic in origin, have turned out not to be so. As Japanese nutrition standards have improved, their average height is now taller than some European countries. African-Americans were long assumed to be genetically more susceptible to cardiovascular diseases, but white Russians in Finland have rates of cardiovascular disease far higher than African-Americans. Race-based susceptibility to diabetes is also under question -- groups such as Pima Indians with high diabetes rates also eat huge amounts of fry bread and other unhealthy foods.
They had articles like this ten years ago, that some grad student somewhere simulated an "actual bacterium" on a PC. The topic is useful primarily as a graduate student's thesis topic, along with "robotic simulations".
Again, few people in the developed world live in close proximity to pigs and chickens anymore. Even in developing countries, modern farming methods are reducing close contact. While WW1 had large numbers of young adults living in squalid bunkers, accounting for the large numbers of young people killed, such conditions are rare in the developed world today. Throughout the world today, there exist a large number of relatively simple public health measures that prevent outbreaks from growing too large, which were not present in 1918.
More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished -- 799 million of them live in the developing world. Malnourishment was a serious problem in "developed" countries until the mid-20th century, but it is largely unheard of today. Today, we produce enough food to feed the world several times over. The only issue is logistics. As infrastructure improves in the developing world, hunger/malnutrition is also declining. In the case of pandemics, technology actually works the opposite. Faster, and easier, worldwide travel means a more widespread communication of viral or bacterial agents in a smaller time frame. In present day, Influenza takes more time to show symptoms that would cause enough alarm to effect quarantine. In 1918-19 worldwide travel was still via ocean vessels, which took considerable time to get from point A to point B, yet that pandemic was responsible for 20-40 million deaths. Yet, we have not had pandemics of fast-acting illnesses since WWI. The advances in technology to treat diseases have outpaced their ability to spread faster. In the case of AIDS, while you seem to think it's in "long-term decline," the numbers from the CDC for the years 2000-2004 (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/At-A- Glance.htm) show that for this time the cases of AIDS diagnosis and people living with AIDS increased each year, and this is just in the US. Admittedly, certain segments have had declining new cases... prenatal transmission, and injection drug users.
Short-term blips are to be expected, but public paranoia over AIDS makes it unlikely to see vast surges in the developed world again.
The Western World regularly had famines throughout its history, yet we haven't had them for at least 50 years, and nobody is expecting them any time soon. Advances in agricultural technology have made famines in developed countries a moot issue. Would it be a stretch to argue that advances in basic hygiene have made pandemics a moot issue in developed countries? Only AIDS poses a credible threat, but advances in public awareness have also caused its incidence to go on a long-term decline.
You observed a single glacier that is said to have retreated 1.5 km in 60 years. Then what about this list of glaciers that is growing? http://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glacier s.htm
The rate of 1.5km in 60 years is quite slow compared to the rate at which other glaciers are growing larger, e.g. a glacier in Greenland growing at the rate of 11.5 km per year, or Argentina's Perito Moreno Glacier (the largest glacier in Patagonia), which is advancing at the rate of 7 feet per day.
Do you think that this is just a coincidence? It is good to question authority. It is healthy, normal, and a trait that should be encouraged. But when the evidence is staring you in the face, and you still deny it... Then you're delusional.
Current scientific theories, at least those popular in America, say that our genes are programmed for obesity because we experienced frequent famines as cavement. Corollary to that, are we genetically programmed to believe in impending doom? Doomsday predictions have been present throughout the world's civilizations, throughout history.
Scientists have been giving the doomsday sales pitch for a long time in order to scare up funds. Scientists used to insist in the 1970s that we are "on the cusp of a new ice age", that we will run out of food by 2000 AD and billions of people will starve to death, that nuclear holocaust is a certainty, that black clouds of killer bees will take over America, that leaded gasoline and paitn will give birth to billions of babies with birth defects, that asteroids from space will destroy us, that the flu pandemic is supposed to kill 300 million people, SARS will do the same, that the Y2K bug will cause nuclear meltdowns all over the planet, ... did I miss anything? Every time, questioning these claims caused one to earn the label of "reactionary", "fascist", and "ignorant". Today, the public is equally fanatical in its belief of the Greenhouse effect, and one can literally get his teeth knocked out in public for saying that they don't believe it. The rabble continue to buy into doomsday prophecies, as they have done since thousands of years ago.
Can't open the article link, don't know if this bug is mentioned on there. Even when I check the "open links in new window" option, 2.0 unpredictably creates pop-up links in a new tab, rather than a new window. I also hate the glossy Macintosh-wannabe look of the new buttons. It also creates popup windows on some sites, where the older browser did not.
So what we have are a bunch of whiny apologists who can't get real jobs back home. If American shops put out signs saying that foreigners are only allowed in the company of an American, Filipinos aren't allowed, would people be as passive?
I've talked to Westerners on the net who defend the "right" of Japanese establishments to put up signs forbidding foreigners from entry. You could become the spineless conformists like them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCeK0Trz9E0
If Tibet became "free" by Chinese withdrawal, would the Dalai Lama want you to see these images? He is holding the hand of Shoko Asahara, the cult leader who gassed a bunch of people on the Tokyo subway with sarin. http://www.angelfire.com/ego/sinzinrui/photo4/rama 2.jpg
http://www.angelfire.com/ego/sinz inrui/photo4/rama3.jpg
100 years ago, scientists used to say autism was caused by "poor parenting", and pointed fingers at mothers. Today, there is overwhelming evidence that autism is a genetically based disorder. This study seems well beneath Cornell's dignity. Autism incidence is known to be higher in wealthier counties that have facilities to treat autistics; it is a well known phenomenon among epidemiologists.
The fraudulent "discovery" at LLNL was made by a visiting Russian scientist, too. The LLNL link is too polite to say so.
Don't people who travel abroad have to fill out all those "customs forms" on the airplane anyway? It asked me for a lot more than my gender, birthday, and address. Are Europeans upset at having to answer as many questions as other nonwhite travellers to the USA?
Ok you convinced me, I won't fly to the USA. I don't see any reason why a goverment should be allowed snoop in my private life "just to make sure I'm not a terrorist". Are you sure EU governments do not surreptitiously collect data on passengers anyway? The EU has a longer history, going back to the 1970s, of placing gendarmes or carabinieri with automatic rifles at airports. The NSA's best customers are European intelligence agencies who purchase the data to snoop on their own citizens. The US makes the mistake of being too open about their intelligence operations. Do they think terrorists are dumb enough to say "No, please only one way tickets and I don't need a method of leaving the airport. And please only a light meal, I don't want to blow myself up with a full stomach. But first I'll clear out my account and donate everything to a well-know extremist organistion." As a matter of fact, most terrorists in Europe are extreme amateurs -- 18-year-old losers with fantasies of becoming a mujahedeen. They boast to the whole world that they will carry something out, and get arrested at the stage of trying to buy weapons.
Laser keyboards have a high rate of false key presses, because your fingers have to pass over other keys, and you can't feel the keys.
They've been trying to build optical computing chips since the 1980s. I did a summer internship in Japan in 1990, when they were making custom batches of exotic rare-earth crystals for fiber-optic relay stations.
Darwin himself had never heard of Mendel's theory of genetics. He proposed that offspring are a "mixture of fluids" from the mother and father.
Why not call it the Crabapple? Choke Cherry? Sumac?
Osaka built the world's first sports stadium with a movable roof, which malfunctioned shortly after inception, and the company that made it went bankrupt. The roof has been stuck for the past 5 years. Incidentally, the stadium was built on rubbery landfill, so whenever audiences jump up and down during rock concerts, it causes earthquakes in the neighborhood. Osaka also built a new airport on an artificial island that is sinking into the sea, so it may become the world's first underwater airport. Seoul has had various engineering disasters also, including a department store that collapsed and killed hundreds of wealthy housewives.
Heh, a stereotyped techie response. A little camera's limited view will not let the surgeon see everything, despite his macho confidence.
"Keyhole surgery" generated some fanfare a few years ago, but the reality is that it is more dangerous than open surgery, requiring greater skill. How the hell do you operate on something you can't see, digging around under flesh?
I'm just wondering, won't these things become a lightning magnet? You say it can be grounded, but what happens when these things stretch into higher parts of the atmosphere with more ions flying around?