If a rape victim was trying to get pregnant (not using birth control, having sex frequently) then I'd agree. And in that case, I don't imagine that a single sexual incident would greatly increase the chances of anything. But considering that most people only have 2-3 kids, the majority of people use some kind of birth control. So even among those people who are technically sexually active, they may not be at risk for pregnancy from their sexual activity. If so, you'd exculde them for the purpose of this question. Statistically, more people will not be trying to get pregnant than trying to get pregnant.
Additionally, is a rape likely to increase or decrease someone's sexual activity immediatly afterwards. I'd say decrease.
... that make Slashdot my favorite source of straight lines... er, I mean my favorite source of tech news.
But this article is a little behind. Not only have scientists found the part of the brain responsible for understanding sarcasm, but they've also found the part of the brain that makes some people believe that every trait is localized to a part of the brain. Not surprisingly, it's just centimeters away from the part of the brain researchers believe makes certain people think that every human trait is localized to a specific gene.
Damage to the latter two parts of the brain are loosely correlated with an inability to get research grants and strongly correlated with an inability to get your research published in prestigious scientific journals like Forbes magazine.
>>Well you generally have an equal number of X and Y sperm (while all eggs are X of course) its been shown that Y sperm die easier when conditions are harsh (acidity, not right temperature etc.) and are stronger when conditions are just right.
So couples who have sex more frequently are more likely to have a boy and couples who have sex less frequently are likely to have a girl.
Makes sense.
I wonder if people in "sterotypically male" professions have sex more frequently.
I also wonder if the products of one-incident rape are more likely to be female. I'd suspect so.
The Chinese Gov. uses the money to buy industrial equipment, weapons, Mercedez Benzes for politically connected Chinese polititians and little red packets of money for foreign ones.
>>I think your proposal is interesting philosophically but far-fetched medically.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=4009638&dop t=Abstract
If what you propose was possible, do you really think that saving babies with genetic problems would be a "truly ghastly implication" of accepting the easily verified fact that conception creates a new human organism?
I don't think that an embryo is an individual. And for this, I've gotten quite a bit of flames in past net conversations. I think that sexual selection is natural and moral. Not all sperm will fertalize an egg, but letting them die is not murder even though they are alive and contain unique genetic code. I think that deliberatly creating a deformed human being is morally wrong. Many scientists refuse to practice cloning for this reason, since a cloned human being is less likely to be healthy and older women are warned against having children because of the health problems the child might have to endure. I honestly don't think that such considerations are synonymous with setting up the gas chambers.
If a person altered sperm cells in a lab in order to create a deformed human being, that would be easily recognized as unethical. Is that a matter of "ranking the worth of human beings?"
I realize that the question of "when a person becomes a person" isn't going to be satisfactorily resolved by increasing measurements. And I accept that.
Once you start going down that road of ranking the worth of human beings you are only a short trip away from some of the arguments used by the Nazis and other white supremicists.
I'm don't really buy into the "Slippery slope to Nazi-ism" argument since there's a difference between trying to decide whether to allow a person to live and trying to decide whether to create a person in a manner which increases the liklihood of health problems. Of course, if you believe that an embryo is a full human at conception, then your conclusion is valid and morally inevitable.
Public funding of research is not communism. Public ownership of industry is.
>>The multibillion dollar drug industries who do this research seem to be doing just fine off of their own capitalistic powers at the time.
Of course, given the bayh dole act and technology transfer acts, publicly funded research is increasingly done to further commercial interests.
I've seen how biased this industry research is. Consider the recent DOW publication discussed on slashdot on how asbestos didn't cause health problems... with another research contesting the finding. This is common. There's a real need for research not tainted by industry bias in a free society.
Additionally, private industry has little incentive to publicize the basic research that it does, if it can't patent it.
Actually, I have no clue who competed on American Idol and couldn't care less.
Do you honestly think that facts are going to sway the average idiot here?
I think that the average person here is not an idiot and, moreover, is very receptive to facts. Of course, your post doesn't contain a single one, including your screen name. Coward.
The whole 'left wing media' line is garbage. American media are very economically conservative and fairly conservative in other respects as well. Claims of "bias" in order to deny plain and obvious fact is somthing that both the far left communists and modern conservatives have used to close their eyes to truths they simply don't want to hear. "Oh, natural selection is biased towards imperialist capitalism. We'll stick with Lysenko." "Oh, scientists won't acknowledge that the earth is only 5000 years old because they're biased atheists." BS.
Go back to the yahoo message boards, from whence you came.
The thing is, we CAN do somthing to prevent at least some miscarriages.
Many unborn babies have genetic problems. The body aborts them naturally. We can give expectant mothers anti-aborfactant drugs which would preserve the life of these unborn individuals which are weaker than us and deserve our protection. To allow them to die is to act like Hitler, murdering individuals simply because they are handicapped (or in this case, acting like the Greeks and Romans and simply "exposing" deformed babies). To allow a human being to die by not administering these drugs is negligence.
Of course, I don't believe it's moral to actually do this, but this is the logical conclusion for those who truly believe that stem cells are identical to human lives. It often amazes me how those who believe that 'life begins at conception' fail to consider the truly ghastly implications if their beliefs were consistently enshrined in law.
Lets say a potential employer says "I want you to follow these poor standards when doing this project" and you point out some problems with those standards. The employer insists upon these standards (which will, in this case, produce non-industry standard code.) The employer wants you to do this in order to service a particular client.
Do you really think it's this guy's obligtion to walk because he doesn't like the standards of his workplace? He has that option, but it makes sense for him to weigh things and ask 'is it worth it?'
Don't abstract things. Focus the specific instance that's being discussed here. Vauge generalizations prove nothing and mean nothing until they're applied to a particular instance in a definite way.
I've been in this situation. I've stood up for the standards I believed in. Sometimes the company listened to me. Sometimes they didn't, but I still stayed there. The company lost some money because they chose to do things their way, but noone got hurt or suffered except perhaps the shareholders.
I'm not going to leave my job just because I think a company should use an open sourced solution and they don't, etc. If you want to, though, you go ahead and do that.
He's talking about writing code, not performing surgery on unwilling human beings.
Judging from the context of his post, "his morals" (probably more properly refered to as ethics) involve using the best tool for the job, writing good code, etc.
If he's paid to follow standards that will produce substandard code or code that must be run in an environment which is considered substandard, he will bow to the will of the person writing his paycheck even though he thinks it's unethical to produce and deliver substandard products in exchange for money.
We're splitting hairs here, but the key is the phrase "my morals" which would seem, judging from context and his other posts, to refer to the personal ethics he applies to code creation rather than to universal moral standards (don't lie, don't steal, don't bear false witness, etc.)
According to the view that all human change is random and non-selective via point mutaitons, how long should it take for an animal's immune system to design an anti-body which precisely binds to the antigen on a pathogen?
And how long does it actually take?
We agree on one count, there's more at work here than point mutations.
we can do even better by putting the car in neutral while the engine is stopped and pushing it off a cliff -- you'll get ~9.8m/s^2 of acceleration without burning any fossil fuels whatsoever!
Perhaps they'll burn when it hits the bottom of that cliff?
Slashdot Mirror
If a rape victim was trying to get pregnant (not using birth control, having sex frequently) then I'd agree. And in that case, I don't imagine that a single sexual incident would greatly increase the chances of anything. But considering that most people only have 2-3 kids, the majority of people use some kind of birth control. So even among those people who are technically sexually active, they may not be at risk for pregnancy from their sexual activity. If so, you'd exculde them for the purpose of this question. Statistically, more people will not be trying to get pregnant than trying to get pregnant.
Additionally, is a rape likely to increase or decrease someone's sexual activity immediatly afterwards. I'd say decrease.
... that make Slashdot my favorite source of straight lines... er, I mean my favorite source of tech news.
But this article is a little behind. Not only have scientists found the part of the brain responsible for understanding sarcasm, but they've also found the part of the brain that makes some people believe that every trait is localized to a part of the brain. Not surprisingly, it's just centimeters away from the part of the brain researchers believe makes certain people think that every human trait is localized to a specific gene.
Damage to the latter two parts of the brain are loosely correlated with an inability to get research grants and strongly correlated with an inability to get your research published in prestigious scientific journals like Forbes magazine.
>>Well you generally have an equal number of X and Y sperm (while all eggs are X of course) its been shown that Y sperm die easier when conditions are harsh (acidity, not right temperature etc.) and are stronger when conditions are just right.
So couples who have sex more frequently are more likely to have a boy and couples who have sex less frequently are likely to have a girl.
Makes sense.
I wonder if people in "sterotypically male" professions have sex more frequently.
I also wonder if the products of one-incident rape are more likely to be female. I'd suspect so.
What I've said here is not flamebait, It's true. I've taught English in China.
This is part of why the Chinese gov. wants foreign capital and why it's exploiting its farmers so badly, forcing them to sell at submarket prices.
Our war economy can kick the ass of all those pansy peace economies.
WWII made things pretty clear. American will be successful when our competitors factories are rubble.
(p.s. I'm kidding)
The Chinese Gov. uses the money to buy industrial equipment, weapons, Mercedez Benzes for politically connected Chinese polititians and little red packets of money for foreign ones.
>>I think your proposal is interesting philosophically but far-fetched medically.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query .fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=4009638&dop t=Abstract
If what you propose was possible, do you really think that saving babies with genetic problems would be a "truly ghastly implication" of accepting the easily verified fact that conception creates a new human organism?
I don't think that an embryo is an individual. And for this, I've gotten quite a bit of flames in past net conversations. I think that sexual selection is natural and moral. Not all sperm will fertalize an egg, but letting them die is not murder even though they are alive and contain unique genetic code. I think that deliberatly creating a deformed human being is morally wrong. Many scientists refuse to practice cloning for this reason, since a cloned human being is less likely to be healthy and older women are warned against having children because of the health problems the child might have to endure. I honestly don't think that such considerations are synonymous with setting up the gas chambers.
If a person altered sperm cells in a lab in order to create a deformed human being, that would be easily recognized as unethical. Is that a matter of "ranking the worth of human beings?"
I realize that the question of "when a person becomes a person" isn't going to be satisfactorily resolved by increasing measurements. And I accept that.
Once you start going down that road of ranking the worth of human beings you are only a short trip away from some of the arguments used by the Nazis and other white supremicists.
I'm don't really buy into the "Slippery slope to Nazi-ism" argument since there's a difference between trying to decide whether to allow a person to live and trying to decide whether to create a person in a manner which increases the liklihood of health problems. Of course, if you believe that an embryo is a full human at conception, then your conclusion is valid and morally inevitable.
Public funding of research is not communism. Public ownership of industry is.
>>The multibillion dollar drug industries who do this research seem to be doing just fine off of their own capitalistic powers at the time.
Of course, given the bayh dole act and technology transfer acts, publicly funded research is increasingly done to further commercial interests.
I've seen how biased this industry research is. Consider the recent DOW publication discussed on slashdot on how asbestos didn't cause health problems... with another research contesting the finding. This is common. There's a real need for research not tainted by industry bias in a free society.
Additionally, private industry has little incentive to publicize the basic research that it does, if it can't patent it.
Actually, I have no clue who competed on American Idol and couldn't care less.
Do you honestly think that facts are going to sway the average idiot here?
I think that the average person here is not an idiot and, moreover, is very receptive to facts. Of course, your post doesn't contain a single one, including your screen name. Coward.
The whole 'left wing media' line is garbage. American media are very economically conservative
and fairly conservative in other respects as well.
Claims of "bias" in order to deny plain and obvious fact is somthing that both the far left communists and modern conservatives have used to close their eyes to truths they simply don't want to hear. "Oh, natural selection is biased towards imperialist capitalism. We'll stick with Lysenko." "Oh, scientists won't acknowledge that the earth is only 5000 years old because they're biased atheists." BS.
Go back to the yahoo message boards, from whence you came.
The thing is, we CAN do somthing to prevent at least some miscarriages.
Many unborn babies have genetic problems. The body aborts them naturally. We can give expectant mothers anti-aborfactant drugs which would preserve the life of these unborn individuals which are weaker than us and deserve our protection. To allow them to die is to act like Hitler, murdering individuals simply because they are handicapped (or in this case, acting like the Greeks and Romans and simply "exposing" deformed babies). To allow a human being to die by not administering these drugs is negligence.
Of course, I don't believe it's moral to actually do this, but this is the logical conclusion for those who truly believe that stem cells are identical to human lives. It often amazes me how those who believe that 'life begins at conception' fail to consider the truly ghastly implications if their beliefs were consistently enshrined in law.
Only a Slashdotter would dream of using this technology to further masturbation instead of a way to have real sex.
I'm in total agreement. Lets clone Natalie Portman!
We need to coax them into siding with Pakistan against India. My heart swells at the thought.
... self control?
Seriously though, what I need is a stationary bike which fits under my desk. I'd love to exercise more, but don't have the chance.
More star wars hype. I bet Lucas planned this. ... and as long as we're on the subject, I want a landspeeder.
I don't know how, but he did.
If they get Cheney to cover himself in green paint and wear Yoda ears, I swear to God I'm moving to Canada. For real this time...
Lets say a potential employer says "I want you to follow these poor standards when doing this project" and you point out some problems with those standards. The employer insists upon these standards (which will, in this case, produce non-industry standard code.) The employer wants you to do this in order to service a particular client.
Do you really think it's this guy's obligtion to walk because he doesn't like the standards of his workplace? He has that option, but it makes sense for him to weigh things and ask 'is it worth it?'
Don't abstract things. Focus the specific instance that's being discussed here. Vauge generalizations prove nothing and mean nothing until they're applied to a particular instance in a definite way.
I've been in this situation. I've stood up for the standards I believed in. Sometimes the company listened to me. Sometimes they didn't, but I still stayed there. The company lost some money because they chose to do things their way, but noone got hurt or suffered except perhaps the shareholders.
I'm not going to leave my job just because I think a company should use an open sourced solution and they don't, etc. If you want to, though, you go ahead and do that.
If Natalie Portman flew in them, they would still be "unmanned".
He's talking about writing code, not performing surgery on unwilling human beings.
Judging from the context of his post, "his morals" (probably more properly refered to as ethics) involve using the best tool for the job, writing good code, etc.
If he's paid to follow standards that will produce substandard code or code that must be run in an environment which is considered substandard, he will bow to the will of the person writing his paycheck even though he thinks it's unethical to produce and deliver substandard products in exchange for money.
We're splitting hairs here, but the key is the phrase "my morals" which would seem, judging from context and his other posts, to refer to the personal ethics he applies to code creation rather than to universal moral standards (don't lie, don't steal, don't bear false witness, etc.)
Unless it violates a moral law, there's nothing wrong with doing what you're paid to do.
What's sad is that 9 times out of 10, these articles say essentially, "You shouldn't do this because it's scary."
What's sad is that you or people close to you have bought at least ten of these articles.
Some people have more children, some have less.
High food supply for a long time favors a mild loss of sexual self control, especially in women.
Animals can revert quickly to previous genotypes.
I'm curious;
According to the view that all human change is random and non-selective via point mutaitons, how long should it take for an animal's immune system to design an anti-body which precisely binds to the antigen on a pathogen?
And how long does it actually take?
We agree on one count, there's more at work here than point mutations.
Can this survey provide a margin of error? Is it statistically significant?
That should have been an option in the survey.
"open source iz 133t."
"Pac-Man Turns 25"
:(
But he still lost his hair a long time ago.
we can do even better by putting the car in neutral while the engine is stopped and pushing it off a cliff -- you'll get ~9.8m/s^2 of acceleration without burning any fossil fuels whatsoever!
Perhaps they'll burn when it hits the bottom of that cliff?