When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution, he responded that he doesn't believe those traits would stem from evolution.
Most of those traits that your are referring to, are typically sexually selected traits. There are a plethora of examples in the animal world were traits are developed that have nothing to do with survival but everything to do with procreation.
Look at the male peacocks tail. Male peacocks - and many other bird species too - have spectacular 'tails' that are extravagantly developed. The peacock tail is a disadvantage to survival and there a specific "costs" in maintaining such an extravagant train.
All sexually reproducing species have traits that are sexually selected and result in bizarre displays such as large antlers, bright colors, hairless bodies or even musical ability.
Note: your two points on how evolution works from which your reasoning springs is flawed and incomplete. I find Dawkins gene's centric viewpoint revolutionary and provides a much deeper level of understanding to how and why natural selection works.
Life needs to find a way off this gravity well before the next "great extinction". For better or worse that burden falls on us, homo sapiens sapiens. People view earth as some permantent hospitable sustaining womb and that "we should just solve our problems here on earth first" before venturing out.
The truth is we will never solve our problems here and geological and life history tells a story with several instances of wide spread extinction of species. Life has come a long long long way and if our puny existance has any meaning at all it is spread self-aware intelligent life beyond our little neighborhood.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us, And the Wild is calling, calling...let us go....
Great! and in other news...
on
Spam Gets Personal
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Two researchers demonstrate how much more effective the AIDS virus could become if only a few basic modifications could be made to personalize the attack on the immune system.
You often hear this sentiment bantered around like it was a fundamental physical law. Companies are organizations comprised of humans, so how can it be that companies should abandon all bedrock humanist ethical principles and shape each decision on the only guiding principle of "make money".
Situational example. Lets say you own a hardware store in Rwanda in 1994 and suddenly you notice that machetes are selling like hotcakes. Is it your corporate duty to completely ignore the reasons that machetes are selling so well and be sure as hell to quadruple your next wholesale order so as not to run low? Or lets say your company manufactures a cyanide-based insecticide and suddenly the government is making huge orders do you.... Well I won't go there for fear of breaking goodwin's law. But you get the picture.
How much lower will our resolve to make peace be when the cost to ourselves in a war is insignificant?
Cost? What cost? At the start of the last war we even got a tax break. We put the cost onto our children. Thats the way to fund a war - no pain just cool video clips on the tube.
The current cost of the iraq war is sitting around $270 x 10^9. That is around a $1000 bill for each citizen or about $22,500 per tax payer! I think before the start of any war it should be a law that the cost should be projected and be paid by the current generation in a reasonable time span.
If our illustrious leader presented the case for war along with the very real financial cost and let people know that taxes will increase by $3000 for the next ten years we would have looked a little harder at the "case for the war" and the evidence presented and been a little more pissed to learn it was cooked.
Also keep in mind some citizens and families pay the ultimate price. I think every should share some of the pain and public interest in the performance of those conducting the war would be a little more critical.
They'll claim the Grand Canyon is geologic evidence for millions of years of erosion, when Mt St. Helens shows similar features which developed in a matter of minutes.
So do the Mt St. Helens deposits show angular unconformities sitting at the bottom like there is in the Grand Canyon? An angular unconformity requires:
1 Deposition 2 Lithofication 3 Metamorphis is some cases 4 Tilting 5 Erosion 6 Deposition (again) 7 Lithofication (again) 8 Metamorphis (again in some cases)
Try fitting those sequences into a few thousand years.
Also the Grand Canyon has multiple definable layers of different rock origins including among others limestone, wind blown cross bedded sandstone, basalt, shale. Some layers feature fossils, bioturbation and tracks.
Do the Mt Saint Helens deposits have these. No they have fine laminea of the same material.
Also sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon are Limestone marine deposits (which by themselves falsify a young earth) full of fossils. Can you explain how these fossils were transported to 10000 ft above sea level with your theory of hydological sorting.
Next move north and explain the incised meanders of the Goosenecks on the San Juan river and explain those features via a rapid flood.
Yes and this NASA article throughly debunks Podkletnov claims.
.2.3. Tests of Podkletnov Claim. In 1992, a controversial claim of a "gravity shielding" effect was published by E. Podkletnov based on work done at Finland's Tampere Institute [17]. Regrettably, the article was not fully forthcoming with all of the experimental methods and jumped to the conclusion that a gravity shield effect was responsible for the anomalous weight reductions observed over spinning superconductors. Although others dismissed this effect on the grounds that it violates conservation of energy [42], this dismissal itself did not take into account that the claimed effect consumes energy.
From 1995 to 2002, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) attempted a full experimental replication of the Podkletnov configuration [43], but was not able to complete the test hardware with the available resources.
A privately funded replication of the Podkletnov configuration was completed by Hathaway, Cleveland and Bao, and the results published in 2003 [44]. This work "found no evidence of a gravity-like force to the limits of the apparatus sensitivity," where the sensitivity was "50 times better than that available to Podkletnov." Therefore, this rotating, RF-pumped superconductor approach is considered non-viable.
Could there possible be bits of dinosaur DNA orbiting around in the deep freeze of the solar system? or would high energy particles quickly destroy the DNA? Well if anything sounds a like a great mechanism for a movie.
Man finds chunks of frozen desiccated dinosaur. Man brings back Dino DNA to earth and splices DNA with that of frogs, Man recreates Dinosaur species, Dinosaur eats Man.
Appologies to Ian Malcolm...
Concerning the comment on the "little guy". Keep in mind estate taxes are paid by few Americans because they are not assessed on the first $1.35 million of net worth. Also there are provisions for parents to gift certain amount of wealth to children tax free. So the term little guy is relative (excuse the pun) here.
Concerning Innovation. You seem to prefer that rich kids have an advantage to innovate. I prefer a society that levels the playing field and rich and poor have opportunities to innovate and earn their wealth based on merit and individual contribution and initiative. This is a conservative, not a liberal or democrat notion.
Agreed the real question with taxes is always "How much overhead is too much?" and how well the taxes are used in furthering the roles of government, etc.
However, "When a society begins to forcibly take wealth from those who work harder, smarter or just are lucky, and hand it to those who do not contribute, the end of that society is guaranteed" The common result of inheriting wealth or receiving public assistance is that wealth is being handed to those who "do not contribute". Why should the offspring of the wealthy have inordinate advantages in life? Inordinate is the key idea here, since being born into a wealthy family alone provides many opportunities such as education, starting capital, connections, etc. regardless of estate tax or not. In a democratic society that places an priority on equality of opportunity to provide a nearly level playing field on which young people, rich and poor, can compete and reward is more merit, risk or innovation based.
Why should the government be involved with deciding what I do with my property, be it my body, my house, or my wallet?
Because the property you earned during you life work and investiments was due to a stable society, economy and government investment in infastructure. I would prefer to have a society were wealth is based more on merit and hard work and not just because some distant ancestor made it big in plastics. There are several key arguments for an estate tax.
Continued concentrate of power in the elite. In any democracy, wealth can be translated into political power. It is a fact of life. Rememeber Bush's address to a group of wealth business men, "This is an impressive crowd -- the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." Continued power concentrated in the hands of few will diminish the protection and representation of the unelite. Growing numbers of the very rich can give money to political candidates who support their personal agendas. "Those contributions clearly have an influence on public policy," Gates says, such as more tax breaks for the rich or weakening of regulations that protect consumers.
Limit Innovation. A society full of undeserving rich kids travelling around collecting art work for their private collections does not induce innovation.
Govt research and investments. Reducing taxes could crimp government research and investments in education -- the source of innovations that create jobs. With less education, growing numbers of workers can't get ahead.
Overture claims to provide "Click Protection" for their pay-per-click advertising service. In reality they fail to prevent the most basic and easiest to detect non-authentic clicks - that is competitors clicking on competitors. They do not even filter out a customer clicking on their own links from within the Overture manager. Nor do they provide a method for an advertiser to test their own ad rendered URL's - a necessary function as a means to test the validity of an entered URL.
Since filtering out such clicks would be simple and straight forward using established cookies or session id's - I can only speculate the reasons for not patching this obvious flaw and question the "sophistication of Overtures "Click Protection".
Didn't the Government spend a decade and millions of dollars breaking ma bell into piece and now we are only watching those piece reassemble. Unfortunately for most people internet access only comes thru the phone company and a system lacking competition in this vital area is not healthy
This is really an extension to the Endosymbiotic theory. Where the existence of mitochondria and other organelles are really vestiges of prokaryotic parasites that became symbiotic and that the parasite's repoduction cycle became aligned with the repoduction of the host cell, and the two became one.
Carried to the extreme this theory indicates that all cellular and multi-cellular life are really just parasites that finally got along.
For a better view check out the large-virus Gallery. I hate it when people publish articles about something visual but only give you a little low-res image to accompany the article.
So are extant viruses sorta like the biological equivalent of big bang background radiation?
Slow in what way. I recently wrote a data parsing tools that demultiplex's a large binary sensor data file, changes then endian and combines some of the quantities, look for fault conditions and check checksums and finally writes out processed data into separate files. I first prototype in Perl and then rewrote in C. The performance difference was around 12%. The time in production and total lines of code was another story and of the order of 3 to 1.
Top Ramen has fueled many a university student for 4 years why not astronauts? The last.3 years could be spent drinking the remainder of the animal beer in celebration of making the trip!
At the risk of invoking the Goodwin law, isn't this issue somewhat similar to the moral and ethical considerations of manufacturing Zyklon B, knowning full well how the chemical was being used. Yahoo recently provided information that resulted in the jailing of Chinese Journalist
Slashdot Mirror
Undoubtable creationist will claim this as yet another piece of convincing evidence of a young universe and the scientist just don't want to admit it.
When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution, he responded that he doesn't believe those traits would stem from evolution.
Most of those traits that your are referring to, are typically sexually selected traits. There are a plethora of examples in the animal world were traits are developed that have nothing to do with survival but everything to do with procreation.
Look at the male peacocks tail. Male peacocks - and many other bird species too - have spectacular 'tails' that are extravagantly developed. The peacock tail is a disadvantage to survival and there a specific "costs" in maintaining such an extravagant train.
All sexually reproducing species have traits that are sexually selected and result in bizarre displays such as large antlers, bright colors, hairless bodies or even musical ability.
Note: your two points on how evolution works from which your reasoning springs is flawed and incomplete. I find Dawkins gene's centric viewpoint revolutionary and provides a much deeper level of understanding to how and why natural selection works.
Life needs to find a way off this gravity well before the next "great extinction". For better or worse that burden falls on us, homo sapiens sapiens. People view earth as some permantent hospitable sustaining womb and that "we should just solve our problems here on earth first" before venturing out.
The truth is we will never solve our problems here and geological and life history tells a story with several instances of wide spread extinction of species. Life has come a long long long way and if our puny existance has any meaning at all it is spread self-aware intelligent life beyond our little neighborhood.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us, And the Wild is calling, calling...let us go....
Two researchers demonstrate how much more effective the AIDS virus could become if only a few basic modifications could be made to personalize the attack on the immune system.
brain cells linked to choice Wow and I always thought it was the lung cells that determine choice.
Sure help yourself.... except you will be violating copyright :^)
Companies exist to make money. Period.
You often hear this sentiment bantered around like it was a fundamental physical law. Companies are organizations comprised of humans, so how can it be that companies should abandon all bedrock humanist ethical principles and shape each decision on the only guiding principle of "make money".
Situational example. Lets say you own a hardware store in Rwanda in 1994 and suddenly you notice that machetes are selling like hotcakes. Is it your corporate duty to completely ignore the reasons that machetes are selling so well and be sure as hell to quadruple your next wholesale order so as not to run low? Or lets say your company manufactures a cyanide-based insecticide and suddenly the government is making huge orders do you.... Well I won't go there for fear of breaking goodwin's law. But you get the picture.
Maybe you should see if you qualify for an earned income credit! :)
How much lower will our resolve to make peace be when the cost to ourselves in a war is insignificant?
Cost? What cost? At the start of the last war we even got a tax break. We put the cost onto our children. Thats the way to fund a war - no pain just cool video clips on the tube.
The current cost of the iraq war is sitting around $270 x 10^9. That is around a $1000 bill for each citizen or about $22,500 per tax payer! I think before the start of any war it should be a law that the cost should be projected and be paid by the current generation in a reasonable time span.
If our illustrious leader presented the case for war along with the very real financial cost and let people know that taxes will increase by $3000 for the next ten years we would have looked a little harder at the "case for the war" and the evidence presented and been a little more pissed to learn it was cooked.
Also keep in mind some citizens and families pay the ultimate price. I think every should share some of the pain and public interest in the performance of those conducting the war would be a little more critical.
They'll claim the Grand Canyon is geologic evidence for millions of years of erosion, when Mt St. Helens shows similar features which developed in a matter of minutes.
So do the Mt St. Helens deposits show angular unconformities sitting at the bottom like there is in the Grand Canyon? An angular unconformity requires:
1 Deposition
2 Lithofication
3 Metamorphis is some cases
4 Tilting
5 Erosion
6 Deposition (again)
7 Lithofication (again)
8 Metamorphis (again in some cases)
Try fitting those sequences into a few thousand years.
Also the Grand Canyon has multiple definable layers of different rock origins including among others limestone, wind blown cross bedded sandstone, basalt, shale. Some layers feature fossils, bioturbation and tracks.
Do the Mt Saint Helens deposits have these. No they have fine laminea of the same material.
Also sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon are Limestone marine deposits (which by themselves falsify a young earth) full of fossils. Can you explain how these fossils were transported to 10000 ft above sea level with your theory of hydological sorting.
Next move north and explain the incised meanders of the Goosenecks on the San Juan river and explain those features via a rapid flood.
Yes and this NASA article throughly debunks Podkletnov claims.
.2.3. Tests of Podkletnov Claim. In 1992, a controversial claim of a "gravity shielding" effect was published by E. Podkletnov based on work done at Finland's Tampere Institute [17]. Regrettably, the article was not fully forthcoming with all of the experimental methods and jumped to the conclusion that a gravity shield effect was responsible for the anomalous weight reductions observed over spinning superconductors. Although others dismissed this effect on the grounds that it violates conservation of energy [42], this dismissal itself did not take into account that the claimed effect consumes energy.
From 1995 to 2002, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) attempted a full experimental replication of the Podkletnov configuration [43], but was not able to complete the test hardware with the available resources.
A privately funded replication of the Podkletnov configuration was completed by Hathaway, Cleveland and Bao, and the results published in 2003 [44]. This work "found no evidence of a gravity-like force to the limits of the apparatus sensitivity," where the sensitivity was "50 times better than that available to Podkletnov." Therefore, this rotating, RF-pumped superconductor approach is considered non-viable.
Could there possible be bits of dinosaur DNA orbiting around in the deep freeze of the solar system? or would high energy particles quickly destroy the DNA? Well if anything sounds a like a great mechanism for a movie. Man finds chunks of frozen desiccated dinosaur. Man brings back Dino DNA to earth and splices DNA with that of frogs, Man recreates Dinosaur species, Dinosaur eats Man. Appologies to Ian Malcolm...
I suspect they will use some sort of community voting to establish confidence in vendors - just like ebay.
Concerning the comment on the "little guy". Keep in mind estate taxes are paid by few Americans because they are not assessed on the first $1.35 million of net worth. Also there are provisions for parents to gift certain amount of wealth to children tax free. So the term little guy is relative (excuse the pun) here. Concerning Innovation. You seem to prefer that rich kids have an advantage to innovate. I prefer a society that levels the playing field and rich and poor have opportunities to innovate and earn their wealth based on merit and individual contribution and initiative. This is a conservative, not a liberal or democrat notion.
Agreed the real question with taxes is always "How much overhead is too much?" and how well the taxes are used in furthering the roles of government, etc.
However, "When a society begins to forcibly take wealth from those who work harder, smarter or just are lucky, and hand it to those who do not contribute, the end of that society is guaranteed" The common result of inheriting wealth or receiving public assistance is that wealth is being handed to those who "do not contribute". Why should the offspring of the wealthy have inordinate advantages in life? Inordinate is the key idea here, since being born into a wealthy family alone provides many opportunities such as education, starting capital, connections, etc. regardless of estate tax or not. In a democratic society that places an priority on equality of opportunity to provide a nearly level playing field on which young people, rich and poor, can compete and reward is more merit, risk or innovation based.
Because the property you earned during you life work and investiments was due to a stable society, economy and government investment in infastructure. I would prefer to have a society were wealth is based more on merit and hard work and not just because some distant ancestor made it big in plastics. There are several key arguments for an estate tax.
Surprisingly very wealthy people such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett support the death tax.
Overture claims to provide "Click Protection" for their pay-per-click advertising service. In reality they fail to prevent the most basic and easiest to detect non-authentic clicks - that is competitors clicking on competitors. They do not even filter out a customer clicking on their own links from within the Overture manager. Nor do they provide a method for an advertiser to test their own ad rendered URL's - a necessary function as a means to test the validity of an entered URL. Since filtering out such clicks would be simple and straight forward using established cookies or session id's - I can only speculate the reasons for not patching this obvious flaw and question the "sophistication of Overtures "Click Protection".
Didn't the Government spend a decade and millions of dollars breaking ma bell into piece and now we are only watching those piece reassemble. Unfortunately for most people internet access only comes thru the phone company and a system lacking competition in this vital area is not healthy
This is really an extension to the Endosymbiotic theory. Where the existence of mitochondria and other organelles are really vestiges of prokaryotic parasites that became symbiotic and that the parasite's repoduction cycle became aligned with the repoduction of the host cell, and the two became one.
Carried to the extreme this theory indicates that all cellular and multi-cellular life are really just parasites that finally got along.
For a better view check out the large-virus Gallery. I hate it when people publish articles about something visual but only give you a little low-res image to accompany the article.
So are extant viruses sorta like the biological equivalent of big bang background radiation?
You know things are bad when you come across a parody and you stop for second and check to be sure they are not really serious.
I guess you will just have to wait the pendulum to swing...
Perl itself is slow
Slow in what way. I recently wrote a data parsing tools that demultiplex's a large binary sensor data file, changes then endian and combines some of the quantities, look for fault conditions and check checksums and finally writes out processed data into separate files. I first prototype in Perl and then rewrote in C. The performance difference was around 12%. The time in production and total lines of code was another story and of the order of 3 to 1.
Top Ramen has fueled many a university student for 4 years why not astronauts? The last .3 years could be spent drinking the remainder of the animal beer in celebration of making the trip!
At the risk of invoking the Goodwin law, isn't this issue somewhat similar to the moral and ethical considerations of manufacturing Zyklon B, knowning full well how the chemical was being used. Yahoo recently provided information that resulted in the jailing of Chinese Journalist