I started wondering if the childhood obesity phenomenon couldn't partly be traced to daycare; at an early age, if given the opportunity, the staff will use food the way they probably use it themselves -- as a way to soothe and manage anxiety.
I would believe that the association between food and comfort/attention can start quite young. It could also be that putting a child in daycare makes it harder to continue breastfeeding, which is thought to have a protective effect against obesity. (BBC news article.)
I was also a female physics major at MIT... The number of girls in my classes had probably dropped to about 10% after the first two years. It made me wonder why, since I never saw any evidence of overt bias. I think at least some of the effect is cultural - in my experience, smart girls are nore likely to be encouraged by family and teachers to go into a "people-oriented" field like medicine. No one ever said to me, "did you ever think about going into physics?", so I didn't think of it as a possibility until after my first year of college.
Canada has a strong multi-party system. Look at the results from Monday's election: Conservatives won 124 seats, Librals 103, Bloc Quebecois 51, New Democratic Party 29, with the Green party not winning any seats but getting nearly 5% of the vote. Granted, only the Conservatives and Librals have actually won an election, but the other parties form a very strong opposition, especially when the winning party does not actually have a majority.
There is also more variation between these parties than between the US Democrats and Republicans, even discounting the Bloc, which is essentially a separatist party. I think the multi-party system encourages more variation, because if two parties become too similar in their agendas, other parties are there to fill in the void.
I always find it strange when people accuse academia of unfair bias. When the majority of the best and brightest in the country all lean towards a particular political philosophy, what should that tell you? (Hint: It's not that they were brainwashed and indoctrinated...)
You can argue that academics are too detached from reality, but I think that's wishful thinking from bitter people. All the people I know in academia are well-informed, widely-read, and thoughtful voters. A lot of universities also have many international scholars, which contributes to a wider perspective on politics. They tend to take a less simplified view of things, and to be more open to ideas coming from Europe and elsewhere. And if all that taken together leads one to a more socialist stance, that view should be taken seriously.
Now, if a professor were to mark down a student for expressing a different view (assuming they were able to defend their reasoning), that would be beyond the pale. But the things this group is talking about hardly rises to that level. There's nothing wrong with talking about your opinions in a university class where everyone is assumed to be a rational adult.
I think that slashdot is stylistically more akin to a mailing list or blog than to the NYT or WSJ. We are informal. Which is what I want Slashdot to be. Casual.
There are differences between casual and formal writing that go beyond spelling and grammar. When I write a journal entry, it's strictly casual, but I still go back and correct typos and look up the spelling of words I'm not sure of. It's informal without being careless. What you are talking about seems more like the difference between casual and sloppy - and I am surprised if "sloppy" is really the impression you want people to have of Slashdot.
I'm used to mailing lists, bulletin boards, quickly jotted emails, badly written comments in source code etc etc. This is a stylistic decision.
This attitude honestly baffles me. It is one thing to excuse the occasional mistake - it is another entirely to think mistakes make the site better or friendlier in any way... It seems to represent a kind of anti-intellectualism I come to Slashdot to avoid.
I have one question - does anyone read the email sent to the daddypants address before stories go live? I used to occasionally send emails pointing out the worst mistakes, but often they weren't fixed, so I stopped bothering. At one time, I remember there even being a text box so that subscribers could submit comments to the editors without having to send an email, which seemed like a great way to get quick feedback from people who actually read the site and care. My suggestion would be bring that back, and you won't have to pay for a copy editor.
Maybe the definitions of "law" and "theory" have changed over time. My understanding is that a law describes observations, while a theory explains them. A theory can be supported by overwhelming evidence or very little, so just calling something a theory isn't necessarily making a judgment about its validity.
At one point last year the plots started to feel a little formulaic (person nearly dies, repeat until 5 minutes before the end of show, then House figures it out and saves the day) but they have been getting better about that this season. The thing that really makes it a great show is the acting and the snappy dialogue. Also, unlike LOST and 24, the other 2 shows I watch, each epsiode actually has a satisfying resolution instead of unending cliffhangers. (A cliffhanger once in a while is fun, but when it's every week it gets annoying!)
If marriage is not about money, why do women compare engagement rings?
I don't know - I told my fiance not to buy me an engagement ring. There are women to whom ostentatious displays of wealth are not the most important thing. If you are only willing to look, you would find them.
And let's not forget the benefits of being single. Completely aside from not being tied to any single woman, my money is my own to spend.
This I find a kind of selfish observation. The value of money is in its use, and lots of people clearly feel that using their money to raise a family is money well spent. If you don't feel that way, that's ok, but there's no reason to imply that one choice is better than the other.
You also seem to underestimate the number of working wives and mothers - I hardly know anyone who was a stay-at-home mom. The stereotypical housewife arrangement from the 50s was a bad idea all around, not least for all the smart, educated women who gave up any hope of a career to become mothers. (That includes both my grandmothers, who had postgraduate degrees in science and later became unhappy housewives.) Being a full-time-parent is also a valid choice, but the emphasis is on the word choice - both partners need to agree that it's what they want to do.
Anyway, I agree with your basic point that prenups are a good idea, mostly because it is always a good idea to have a clear backup plan. My own parents had a messy and angry divorce, and I feel that anything to smooth the way would have been a good thing. What I don't agree with is that marriage itself is not a good value for the money.
Consider it this way: A man gets nothing concrete out of a marriage (assuming the "average" man who is making a living for himself, not some freeloader who marries a rich wife). There are some benefits, but you're much less likely to find a woman today who will follow the three-Fs: feed me, fuck me, and fold my laundry. Women, on the other hand, stand to gain a lot. Assuming she plays her cards right (again, staying away from the freeloading losers), she can basically get a free ride, quit her job (assuming she had one in the first place), bloat up, cut her hair, and not have to do one lick of work around the house (that's what maids are for!).
So what you're saying, basically, is that a selfish, loveless single life is better than a selfish, loveless marriage? Wow, go figure! That is not the kind of relationship that the grandparent post was referring to, however.
That to me seems like the most ridiculous state, to be a dogmatic atheist or militant atheist. That's like saying, "I'm a die-hard believer in absolutely nothing!" Or, "I'm going to die for my belief in no greater purpose!"
Actually the great thing about lack of belief in an afterlife is that instead of saying "I'm going to die for my belief in X", you say, "I'm going to devote my LIFE to making the world a better place, since that's all we've got."
What do you do, and when's the last time a game developer decided to let you know how you were doing it wrong and what you should fix?
I'm working on cosmic ray research. If game developer wanted to read the papers and give me feedback, sure, I would take it under consideration. What's wrong with giving feedback about a product or service? How else will the company know what demand is really out there?
Telling game designers they offend you for creating a mass-market product that would sell less if the women were plain or ugly isn't sensical. It's just silly.
You don't seem to understand the difference between "realistic" and "ugly". There are a lot of drop-dead gorgeous women who are not shaped like Lara Croft et al. What's wrong with stating a preference for female characters who are both attractive and realistic?
What if the chick wants to be "falling out of her clothes" because IRL she cannot get any guy to look at her because shes ugly. On the PC your just a voice. I know quite a few chicks who play WoW and go on vent, and are absolutely fawned over by everyone.
That's her choice, but I'm just saying it wouldn't be mine. As long as there *is* a choice of female avatars to choose from, I'm happy. But I get annoyed when every option looks like a gross caricature of a porn star, because it assumes that it's what every girl wants to imagine herself as and what every guy wants to see. More choice, and especially more realistic choices, can hardly be a bad thing.
(Side note: a lot of people seem to be interpreting the word "realistic" as ugly. I don't mean it that way. There are lots of real people who aren't ugly, but don't have F-cups either.)
I'm willing to bet that if every "inappropriate" image vanished out of every game tomorrow, you'd be hard put to find the change in society the day after.
Of course, but that's not the point. All of the small, subtle biases that surround people add up to an overall influence that is non-negligible. Just because something is not THE most pressing problem in the world doesn't mean it's not worth doing anything about.
Society will change and women will be treated differently when they demand such treatment and accept nothing less!
Certainly. And pointing out negative images of women where they exist is part of that. It's not a matter of "blaming" video games for all that is wrong with the world, it's a matter of standing up and saying "I'm not going to spend my money on product which makes me feel objectified and is therefore not fun to play."
It seems to me that this is stating the obvious: the over-sexualized female avatars in games are there to attract male players, not women. If game makers want to draw in a female audience, they need to have characters that women want to play - and that means strong, complex, and capable... not falling out of her clothes.
I found it ridiculous and frustrating that even in a golf game there were no realistic female avatars to choose from. It's hard to get into a sports game when you're playing a character who wouldn't be able to see past her boobs if she were real. It makes it harder to suspend disbelief and to feel like you're actually in the game.
I think the kind of over-sexualized images you see in games has a negative effect on society's attitudes towards women, but that doesn't have to be the motivation to change it. If game makers would go with the demand and sell games women want to buy, I think the market would take care of itself. The problem arises when there's a kind of feedback loop: games have so far been mostly targetted toward men, and therefore men are the main consumers, therefore there is little incentive to make them more appealing to women. I suspect there are a lot of guys who would prefer having more realistic women in their fantasy senarios - isn't it more fun to fanasize about something that is potentially possible? - but what do I know...
Regulation of games is pointless
on
The ESRB Gets An 'F'
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The call to issue more AO ratings has little to do with rating accuracy, and more to do with NIMF's real agenda, which is to destroy the commercial viability of games it deems objectionable.
Sounds likely to me.
While it seems to me that an objective rating system could be a useful tool to parents, I am wary that it is probably the first step in restricting the sale of "violent" games to minors.
It just doesn't make sense to me to try to regulate the sale of video games. I am fine with legal age limits on movies, cigarettes and alcohol, which people often try to compare it to, but there are a few key differences:
1.) Movies, cigarettes and alcohol are relatively cheap. The ten or twenty dollars a teenager might have can go a long way. But what teenager has the $300 for a game console plus $50 per game without getting the money from his parents, which I would interpret as implict approval of their use? (And if a kid does earn that kind of money on his own, he is probably already sufficiently independent of his parents to make it a moot point.)
2.) Cigarettes and alcohol are relatively easy to consume on the sly, and short of never letting a kid out of the house, parents can't directly control what movies they see in theatres with friends. Games, on the other hand, pretty much require a setup that is going to be used at home, where presumably there is usually someone around to supervise. It's not like kids can sneak out after school and hang out in the woods playing GTA with their friends.
Anyway, my point is that the "protect the family" groups fundamentally misrepresent the danger posed to kids by violent games. And it seems especially hypocritical to claim to be "protecting the family" by undermining a parent's authority to have the final say in what is acceptable for their children... The regulation of games serves no purpose except to create the perception that these games are bad and thereby push one people's set of values on another.
Suspect is a weasel word which means "it's wrong, but we're too afriad to say it outright".
Talk about logical fallacies... if you're going to change the definition of words to suit your purpose then no argument is ever going to convince you. Why don't I define calling something a "weasel word" to be a way of escaping from a otherwise sound logical conclusion you don't happen to agree with?
In any case, your position still makes no sense, either from a logical or a scientific standpoint. Every study has the potential to be skewed by bias, and every possible source of bias should be considered when weighing the results. Bias doesn't invalidate the conclusions; it informs them. By insisting that people ignore the motivations of the people behind the study, you make it harder to interpret the results.
I don't know how any of what reflects on my comment.
Ok, I will try to explain more clearly. The original poster said (and I agree):
From what I've seen the process looks very much like the process of evolution - starting with a non-living self replicating molecule, or group of molecules - and then through good old fashion variation and natural selection - viola life! If that's not evolution - what is?
You say: You can liken it to whatever you want, but--unlike what the OP wrote--Evolution is not, nor even close to, poof! now there is life.
I read what you're saying as "You can draw the comparison, but they are not the same." In fact I disagree. It is a meaningful comparison to make.
My comment had nothing to do with him comparing Evolution to abiogenesis.
The post you were replying to compared Evolution and abiogenesis. You replied that he was wrong:
Than you completely misunderstand Evolution. Nowhere does The Theory of Evolution say, "viola life!" It has nothing to say about the transition from non-life to life. It talks about life changing and adapting to its environment.
I read that to mean you think that it is ignorant to compare evolution and abiogenesis. I disagree.
So, I do not get your point.
My point is this: your claim that the parent poster "completely misunderstood Evolution" is unfounded.
I think the other poster was saying the processes of abiogenesis are like those of evolution, not that it is evolution.
I think it's a very reasonable observation. For abiogenesis, we have: molecules exist in many naturally occuring variations; some last longer than others; some are better able to create copies of themselves than others; the best "adapted" become dominant and the process continues. It's a selection process through which the molecules "evolve".
I would even go farther and say that there is not a hard and fast line dividing "life" and "non-life". Is a virus alive? A prion? A self-replicating molecule? I think they exist on a continuum, and the broadest principles of evolution apply to all of it.
My arguments summarized: 1. The Big Bang cannot be true as it contradicts the First Law of Thermodynamics. 2. Evolution cannot be true as it contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Big Bang theory doesn't contradict the first law of thermodynamics because it says nothing about the origin of the energy which has since been expanding to form the universe.
Evolution doesn't contradict the second law of thermodynamics because that law applies to closed systems, and the biosphere is not. You could equally well argue that life in any form disobeys the 2nd law because animals are ordered systems... but they maintain that state of orderedness by taking in chemical energy (food) and expending heat, thereby increasing the entropy of the universe as a whole.
From this page it looks like the two telescopes in combination have a resolution 10x that of Hubble. Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 m in diameter compared to the LBT's 8.4 m (but atmospheric distortion lowers the resolution of ground-based telescopes). The main advantage to the dual-telescope set-up is not the increased resolution, but the ability to do optical interferometry: cancel out the signal that you don't want, or select for the signal that you do.
The Keck Telescope in Hawaii is also designed to do optical interferometry, though I'm not sure what kind of results they have gotten so far.
That sounds like they were growing neurons from stem cells in a lab. When it comes to humans, my understanding is that some parts of the brain can grow new neurons from stem cells (the hippocampus and the olfactory bulb) but the outer part (the cortex) cannot. Individual neurons can grow and change their connectivity with other neurons, but I don't know of any evidence that new cells can appear.
Sigh. The brain do grew new ones. Quite old knowledge. If the brains stop doing them, you get a depression. Exercise increases the rate. Google, or something.
I did: see No evidence of new neurons in adult primate neocortex, among others. The general consensus seems to be that some areas of the brain have some capability to generate new neurons, but there's no evidence that it can happen in the neocortex, which is a pretty critical part... Though if you can point me to more recent research that contradicts this, please do.
Slashdot Mirror
I started wondering if the childhood obesity phenomenon couldn't partly be traced to daycare; at an early age, if given the opportunity, the staff will use food the way they probably use it themselves -- as a way to soothe and manage anxiety.
I would believe that the association between food and comfort/attention can start quite young. It could also be that putting a child in daycare makes it harder to continue breastfeeding, which is thought to have a protective effect against obesity. (BBC news article.)
I was also a female physics major at MIT... The number of girls in my classes had probably dropped to about 10% after the first two years. It made me wonder why, since I never saw any evidence of overt bias. I think at least some of the effect is cultural - in my experience, smart girls are nore likely to be encouraged by family and teachers to go into a "people-oriented" field like medicine. No one ever said to me, "did you ever think about going into physics?", so I didn't think of it as a possibility until after my first year of college.
Appearances notwithstanding, I do in fact know how to spell "Liberal"... I blame lack of caffeine due to pregnancy. Sorry!
Canada has a strong multi-party system. Look at the results from Monday's election: Conservatives won 124 seats, Librals 103, Bloc Quebecois 51, New Democratic Party 29, with the Green party not winning any seats but getting nearly 5% of the vote. Granted, only the Conservatives and Librals have actually won an election, but the other parties form a very strong opposition, especially when the winning party does not actually have a majority.
There is also more variation between these parties than between the US Democrats and Republicans, even discounting the Bloc, which is essentially a separatist party. I think the multi-party system encourages more variation, because if two parties become too similar in their agendas, other parties are there to fill in the void.
I always find it strange when people accuse academia of unfair bias. When the majority of the best and brightest in the country all lean towards a particular political philosophy, what should that tell you? (Hint: It's not that they were brainwashed and indoctrinated...)
You can argue that academics are too detached from reality, but I think that's wishful thinking from bitter people. All the people I know in academia are well-informed, widely-read, and thoughtful voters. A lot of universities also have many international scholars, which contributes to a wider perspective on politics. They tend to take a less simplified view of things, and to be more open to ideas coming from Europe and elsewhere. And if all that taken together leads one to a more socialist stance, that view should be taken seriously.
Now, if a professor were to mark down a student for expressing a different view (assuming they were able to defend their reasoning), that would be beyond the pale. But the things this group is talking about hardly rises to that level. There's nothing wrong with talking about your opinions in a university class where everyone is assumed to be a rational adult.
I think that slashdot is stylistically more akin to a mailing list or blog than to the NYT or WSJ. We are informal. Which is what I want Slashdot to be. Casual.
There are differences between casual and formal writing that go beyond spelling and grammar. When I write a journal entry, it's strictly casual, but I still go back and correct typos and look up the spelling of words I'm not sure of. It's informal without being careless. What you are talking about seems more like the difference between casual and sloppy - and I am surprised if "sloppy" is really the impression you want people to have of Slashdot.
I'm used to mailing lists, bulletin boards, quickly jotted emails, badly written comments in source code etc etc. This is a stylistic decision.
This attitude honestly baffles me. It is one thing to excuse the occasional mistake - it is another entirely to think mistakes make the site better or friendlier in any way... It seems to represent a kind of anti-intellectualism I come to Slashdot to avoid.
I have one question - does anyone read the email sent to the daddypants address before stories go live? I used to occasionally send emails pointing out the worst mistakes, but often they weren't fixed, so I stopped bothering. At one time, I remember there even being a text box so that subscribers could submit comments to the editors without having to send an email, which seemed like a great way to get quick feedback from people who actually read the site and care. My suggestion would be bring that back, and you won't have to pay for a copy editor.
Maybe the definitions of "law" and "theory" have changed over time. My understanding is that a law describes observations, while a theory explains them. A theory can be supported by overwhelming evidence or very little, so just calling something a theory isn't necessarily making a judgment about its validity.
I agree, House is my favourite show on TV.
At one point last year the plots started to feel a little formulaic (person nearly dies, repeat until 5 minutes before the end of show, then House figures it out and saves the day) but they have been getting better about that this season. The thing that really makes it a great show is the acting and the snappy dialogue. Also, unlike LOST and 24, the other 2 shows I watch, each epsiode actually has a satisfying resolution instead of unending cliffhangers. (A cliffhanger once in a while is fun, but when it's every week it gets annoying!)
If marriage is not about money, why do women compare engagement rings?
I don't know - I told my fiance not to buy me an engagement ring. There are women to whom ostentatious displays of wealth are not the most important thing. If you are only willing to look, you would find them.
And let's not forget the benefits of being single. Completely aside from not being tied to any single woman, my money is my own to spend.
This I find a kind of selfish observation. The value of money is in its use, and lots of people clearly feel that using their money to raise a family is money well spent. If you don't feel that way, that's ok, but there's no reason to imply that one choice is better than the other.
You also seem to underestimate the number of working wives and mothers - I hardly know anyone who was a stay-at-home mom. The stereotypical housewife arrangement from the 50s was a bad idea all around, not least for all the smart, educated women who gave up any hope of a career to become mothers. (That includes both my grandmothers, who had postgraduate degrees in science and later became unhappy housewives.) Being a full-time-parent is also a valid choice, but the emphasis is on the word choice - both partners need to agree that it's what they want to do.
Anyway, I agree with your basic point that prenups are a good idea, mostly because it is always a good idea to have a clear backup plan. My own parents had a messy and angry divorce, and I feel that anything to smooth the way would have been a good thing. What I don't agree with is that marriage itself is not a good value for the money.
Consider it this way: A man gets nothing concrete out of a marriage (assuming the "average" man who is making a living for himself, not some freeloader who marries a rich wife). There are some benefits, but you're much less likely to find a woman today who will follow the three-Fs: feed me, fuck me, and fold my laundry. Women, on the other hand, stand to gain a lot. Assuming she plays her cards right (again, staying away from the freeloading losers), she can basically get a free ride, quit her job (assuming she had one in the first place), bloat up, cut her hair, and not have to do one lick of work around the house (that's what maids are for!).
So what you're saying, basically, is that a selfish, loveless single life is better than a selfish, loveless marriage? Wow, go figure! That is not the kind of relationship that the grandparent post was referring to, however.
That to me seems like the most ridiculous state, to be a dogmatic atheist or militant atheist. That's like saying, "I'm a die-hard believer in absolutely nothing!" Or, "I'm going to die for my belief in no greater purpose!"
Actually the great thing about lack of belief in an afterlife is that instead of saying "I'm going to die for my belief in X", you say, "I'm going to devote my LIFE to making the world a better place, since that's all we've got."
What do you do, and when's the last time a game developer decided to let you know how you were doing it wrong and what you should fix?
I'm working on cosmic ray research. If game developer wanted to read the papers and give me feedback, sure, I would take it under consideration. What's wrong with giving feedback about a product or service? How else will the company know what demand is really out there?
Telling game designers they offend you for creating a mass-market product that would sell less if the women were plain or ugly isn't sensical. It's just silly.
You don't seem to understand the difference between "realistic" and "ugly". There are a lot of drop-dead gorgeous women who are not shaped like Lara Croft et al. What's wrong with stating a preference for female characters who are both attractive and realistic?
What if the chick wants to be "falling out of her clothes" because IRL she cannot get any guy to look at her because shes ugly. On the PC your just a voice. I know quite a few chicks who play WoW and go on vent, and are absolutely fawned over by everyone.
That's her choice, but I'm just saying it wouldn't be mine. As long as there *is* a choice of female avatars to choose from, I'm happy. But I get annoyed when every option looks like a gross caricature of a porn star, because it assumes that it's what every girl wants to imagine herself as and what every guy wants to see. More choice, and especially more realistic choices, can hardly be a bad thing.
(Side note: a lot of people seem to be interpreting the word "realistic" as ugly. I don't mean it that way. There are lots of real people who aren't ugly, but don't have F-cups either.)
I'm willing to bet that if every "inappropriate" image vanished out of every game tomorrow, you'd be hard put to find the change in society the day after.
Of course, but that's not the point. All of the small, subtle biases that surround people add up to an overall influence that is non-negligible. Just because something is not THE most pressing problem in the world doesn't mean it's not worth doing anything about.
Society will change and women will be treated differently when they demand such treatment and accept nothing less!
Certainly. And pointing out negative images of women where they exist is part of that. It's not a matter of "blaming" video games for all that is wrong with the world, it's a matter of standing up and saying "I'm not going to spend my money on product which makes me feel objectified and is therefore not fun to play."
My thoughts exactly -- if you want more politically correct gender roles in video games...make your own game. Don't just whine about it to developers.
Unfortunately I already have a job... On the other hand, that means I have money to spend if anyone actually made a product I wanted to buy.
It seems to me that this is stating the obvious: the over-sexualized female avatars in games are there to attract male players, not women. If game makers want to draw in a female audience, they need to have characters that women want to play - and that means strong, complex, and capable... not falling out of her clothes.
I found it ridiculous and frustrating that even in a golf game there were no realistic female avatars to choose from. It's hard to get into a sports game when you're playing a character who wouldn't be able to see past her boobs if she were real. It makes it harder to suspend disbelief and to feel like you're actually in the game.
I think the kind of over-sexualized images you see in games has a negative effect on society's attitudes towards women, but that doesn't have to be the motivation to change it. If game makers would go with the demand and sell games women want to buy, I think the market would take care of itself. The problem arises when there's a kind of feedback loop: games have so far been mostly targetted toward men, and therefore men are the main consumers, therefore there is little incentive to make them more appealing to women. I suspect there are a lot of guys who would prefer having more realistic women in their fantasy senarios - isn't it more fun to fanasize about something that is potentially possible? - but what do I know...
The call to issue more AO ratings has little to do with rating accuracy, and more to do with NIMF's real agenda, which is to destroy the commercial viability of games it deems objectionable.
Sounds likely to me.
While it seems to me that an objective rating system could be a useful tool to parents, I am wary that it is probably the first step in restricting the sale of "violent" games to minors.
It just doesn't make sense to me to try to regulate the sale of video games. I am fine with legal age limits on movies, cigarettes and alcohol, which people often try to compare it to, but there are a few key differences:
1.) Movies, cigarettes and alcohol are relatively cheap. The ten or twenty dollars a teenager might have can go a long way. But what teenager has the $300 for a game console plus $50 per game without getting the money from his parents, which I would interpret as implict approval of their use? (And if a kid does earn that kind of money on his own, he is probably already sufficiently independent of his parents to make it a moot point.)
2.) Cigarettes and alcohol are relatively easy to consume on the sly, and short of never letting a kid out of the house, parents can't directly control what movies they see in theatres with friends. Games, on the other hand, pretty much require a setup that is going to be used at home, where presumably there is usually someone around to supervise. It's not like kids can sneak out after school and hang out in the woods playing GTA with their friends.
Anyway, my point is that the "protect the family" groups fundamentally misrepresent the danger posed to kids by violent games. And it seems especially hypocritical to claim to be "protecting the family" by undermining a parent's authority to have the final say in what is acceptable for their children... The regulation of games serves no purpose except to create the perception that these games are bad and thereby push one people's set of values on another.
Suspect is a weasel word which means "it's wrong, but we're too afriad to say it outright".
Talk about logical fallacies... if you're going to change the definition of words to suit your purpose then no argument is ever going to convince you. Why don't I define calling something a "weasel word" to be a way of escaping from a otherwise sound logical conclusion you don't happen to agree with?
In any case, your position still makes no sense, either from a logical or a scientific standpoint. Every study has the potential to be skewed by bias, and every possible source of bias should be considered when weighing the results. Bias doesn't invalidate the conclusions; it informs them. By insisting that people ignore the motivations of the people behind the study, you make it harder to interpret the results.
1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B asserts that A makes claim X because it is in A's interest to claim X.
3. Therefore claim X is false.
However, it is perfectly reasonable to substitute
3. Therefore claim X is suspect
which is what most people are arguing.
Ok, I will try to explain more clearly. The original poster said (and I agree):
You say:
You can liken it to whatever you want, but--unlike what the OP wrote--Evolution is not, nor even close to, poof! now there is life.
I read what you're saying as "You can draw the comparison, but they are not the same." In fact I disagree. It is a meaningful comparison to make.
My comment had nothing to do with him comparing Evolution to abiogenesis.
The post you were replying to compared Evolution and abiogenesis. You replied that he was wrong:
I read that to mean you think that it is ignorant to compare evolution and abiogenesis. I disagree.
So, I do not get your point.
My point is this: your claim that the parent poster "completely misunderstood Evolution" is unfounded.
I think the other poster was saying the processes of abiogenesis are like those of evolution, not that it is evolution.
I think it's a very reasonable observation. For abiogenesis, we have: molecules exist in many naturally occuring variations; some last longer than others; some are better able to create copies of themselves than others; the best "adapted" become dominant and the process continues. It's a selection process through which the molecules "evolve".
I would even go farther and say that there is not a hard and fast line dividing "life" and "non-life". Is a virus alive? A prion? A self-replicating molecule? I think they exist on a continuum, and the broadest principles of evolution apply to all of it.
My arguments summarized:
1. The Big Bang cannot be true as it contradicts the First Law of Thermodynamics.
2. Evolution cannot be true as it contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Big Bang theory doesn't contradict the first law of thermodynamics because it says nothing about the origin of the energy which has since been expanding to form the universe.
Evolution doesn't contradict the second law of thermodynamics because that law applies to closed systems, and the biosphere is not. You could equally well argue that life in any form disobeys the 2nd law because animals are ordered systems... but they maintain that state of orderedness by taking in chemical energy (food) and expending heat, thereby increasing the entropy of the universe as a whole.
From this page it looks like the two telescopes in combination have a resolution 10x that of Hubble. Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 m in diameter compared to the LBT's 8.4 m (but atmospheric distortion lowers the resolution of ground-based telescopes). The main advantage to the dual-telescope set-up is not the increased resolution, but the ability to do optical interferometry: cancel out the signal that you don't want, or select for the signal that you do.
The Keck Telescope in Hawaii is also designed to do optical interferometry, though I'm not sure what kind of results they have gotten so far.
That sounds like they were growing neurons from stem cells in a lab. When it comes to humans, my understanding is that some parts of the brain can grow new neurons from stem cells (the hippocampus and the olfactory bulb) but the outer part (the cortex) cannot. Individual neurons can grow and change their connectivity with other neurons, but I don't know of any evidence that new cells can appear.
Sigh. The brain do grew new ones. Quite old knowledge. If the brains stop doing them, you get a depression. Exercise increases the rate. Google, or something.
I did: see No evidence of new neurons in adult primate neocortex, among others. The general consensus seems to be that some areas of the brain have some capability to generate new neurons, but there's no evidence that it can happen in the neocortex, which is a pretty critical part... Though if you can point me to more recent research that contradicts this, please do.