mrburns2012

 

I think altered states of consciousness, whether through brain damage, seizures, chemicals or meditation do have something to do with spiritual beliefs.

 

 

 

That's fine, but I would still recommend treating for termites and ants. I also wouldn't rule out antibiotics for those pesky bacteria.

That's a very interesting video.

Junk food: Unnecessary but profitable. As long as people keep buying it; they'll keep selling it.

Maybe after a time evolution will kick in and we'll settle down to a sort of Nash equilibrium. Whereby obese people who eat when they're not especially hungry tend to die off without passing on their genes, and people with higher metabolism who only eat when its absolutely necessary propagate into the gene pool. A kind of opposite to how things used to be (Where a bad harvest would kill off the skinny guys.)

or even better - evolution kicks in and selects the strongest of the strong, giving rise to a society that sees atherosclerosis, strokes, and heart attacks as nothing more than a distractive itch.

Is fast food healthy for me? Definitely not in the long run. Is it necessary? For me, yes. Either that or stay hungry.

The OP is probably referring to open wounds in the mouth like canker sores. If that's the case, check out:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000998.htm#Complications

In short, it states,

"Rarely, bacterial infections such as cellulitis and Ludwig's angina may occur."

From that, I guess you can get an infection, but it's rare and may not necessarily come from chicken. Common sense tells me you should avoid undercooked meat and practice good oral hygiene, but that's wise thing to do in general anyway.

And don't take my comments as expert or medical advice. I'm as unfamiliar with the condition as most of everyone else.

Im building a general blue print for a list of jobs. The list of jobs involves every job needing to be done if we were to hypothetically go out and cure every disease, dissorder, affliction and dissabling health condition with in the next 50 years.

 

What I need now is to explain the concept to somebody who knows how to write up the idea in the form of a proffessionally organized and thorough proposal.

 

If I can just get the proposal drawn up like that so I can feel confident in promoting it then I will doing some heavy, heavy marketing and persuading to get people to look at it and get some initial funds pouring into this project so we can accelerate its completion.

 

If the owner of this group is reading this, please let me know if you care if I post links to peices of writing from my forums in msn that go into different details about this.

You remind me of this guy Aubrey de Grey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).

He was on a quest just like yours, and even became the subject of the documentary film, "Do You Want to Live Forever?"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3329065877451441972&hl=en

Watch it if you want to see where the road might lead you.

Say what?!

 

Have none of you people drunk in your life?

 

The main reason ... ... to get drunk.

I would like to know how many drinks it'd take for me to learn all that cool info.

To be more accurate, glucose breakdown often refers to its conversion to some form of energy like ATP. After a meal, your blood glucose level will skyrocket, so to protect you from hyperglycemia, your body releases insulin which signals organs like muscles, fat tissues and liver to remove glucose from blood and store it. The stored glucose can be released back into blood when needed (e.g. when you're asleep) to protect you from hypoglycemia. The hormone telling the body to release stored glucose into the blood is glucagon.

See this graph, if you're a visual person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suckale08_fig3_glucose_insulin_day.jpg

Informative and reliable. Should be very useful for a lot of people. I like it!

As I've delved further into science, I've realised how much research depends on animal testing. Lots of experiments in genetics and medicine are based on knock-out mice, rabbit-developed antibodies, and many more besides.

 

Personally I'm a vegetarian. However, I ultimately believe that human life (and happiness) is more important than other animals. I'd probably do animal testing if it was necessary for medical research.

 

What are your thoughts on this in vivo stuff? Do you think animal testing is good, bad, or something else? Are animal models required for biological and medical advancements?

To study human physiology, pathology, etc..., animal models are absolutely not required since we could always perform in vivo experiments directly on humans. Unfortunately, I think you would run into problems looking for volunteers . On the other hand, in vivo experiments are very important because we simply don't know enough to predict everything from in vitro experiments.

@ iNOW

In biology, we learn that the "survival of the fittest" depends on how many offsprings they can pass on their genes too. Homosexuals can't pass there genes to anyone, and thus that provides a large hurdle in any gene theory of homosexuals but then again there are numerous genetic possibilities that would allow for homosexuality. I will only give one example of this: It might be possible that the homosexuality gene only works in a recessive way. Persons who are heterozygous for that gene, remain heterosexual and reproduce. Only when two heterozygous people for that gene, get children 1 in 4 of the children can be recessive and will thus develop homosexuality. This way that gene need NOT become extinct because it is being transmitted through the 'normal reproducing' heterozygotes but thats not the point since as u mentioned above, the fact that homosexuality is genetic is granted as a given in my question so theres no point in talking about whether it is or it is not genetic....what im having problems with is HOW could that be proven beneficial or "adaptive" in terms of genetic fitness...i thought n did some research but still wasnt able to come up with any solid reasons to prove that.

Bees experience a similar problem: sterile worker bees can't reproduce (obviously), but they're adaptive. People have done extensive studies trying to explain why sterile worker bees are adaptive. I'm not suggesting that there's an absolute answer for your assignment, but you could always extrapolate reasonable ideas from animal studies, like ones of honey bees. Another related question is why sterile grandparents (e.g. postmenopausal females, or most males, not including Hugh Hefner) might be adaptive.

meet one special couple and their bundle of joy: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/02/14/boy.baby.dad.england/index.html?eref=edition

What do you think? Plausible?

You'll pretty much find any formula you might need here: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/

To emphasize what has been said numerous times before, the difficult part isn't the memorization. It's knowing when to use them.

Simply refusing a paternity test does not suggest that the test will be positive. If the mother has recently had and affair with ten men who works for her husband, your guess will be wrong 10 out of 11 times.

It's rather odd that science, so advanced in so many respects, seems to be so backwards with respect to publishing.

 

The problem is, PLOS is...well, it's got a lot of problems, including some pretty egregious failures of peer-review and quality control.

All PLoS journals or specifically PLoS ONE? I like PLoS ONE, but I'm not sure of it's progress.

I worked with a faculty with assistant professor status during most of my undergrad, and I can tell you I noticed a lot of stress and frustration with grants and funding. It's unfortunate but with an economic downturn affecting all almost everything, it's not very surprising. Hopefully Obama and company can pull some tricks out of their sleeves.

Culture has affected evolution tremendously. No longer do superior biological adaptations and mutations ensure survival, it is culture now that determines how long an individual will live. We have come to a point in science where we know how superior traits come into existence, its though mutations and genes. Since we have not evolved much since the dawn or agriculture why can’t we help future humans by altering them genetically? We can make our offspring faster, smarter and stronger than we were. Natural selection no longer weeds out the weak and we now have hugh occurances of degenerate genes in our population. We are literally in an evolutionary stand still. If our limited intelligence has gotten us this far, imagine the mysteries of the universe that could be solved if we just tweaked ourselves a bit......

How do you plan to deal with the mess? (let's say there was a complication.) Design new human waste disposal equipments?

From what I can tell, I think it's because "Venus" and "Mercury" originate from proper nouns whereas no mythical figures that I know of are named "Moon" or "Sun."

Similarly, assuming there's only one rock and one guy named Happy Gilmore just as there is only one Venus (planet) and one moon:

Correct:

"Look at a rock."

("Look at the Sun.")

Incorrect:

"Look at rock."

("Look at Sun.")

Correct:

"I saw Happy Gilmore."

("I saw Venus.")

Incorrect:

"I saw a Happy Gilmore?"

("I saw the Venus.")

Do WE exist?

 

And if so, what proves our existence?

Cogito ergo sum

René Descartes exists. Therefore, I do too.

The difference is rather simple. One is faith in the knowledge that evidence exists to support the position, that it could be checked, validated, and further... discarded if wrong. Another is faith in the total absence of evidence (and worse yet, faith in the face of the impossiblility of evidence to support it).

 

I have "faith" that the sun wil come up tomorrow morning because that's what's happened everyday, and I have a chance to test it. That's rational.

To have faith that some guy was born of a virgin, then died, and came back to life...and that he is the master of entire universe like all of the other sky pixies... Sorry, that's irrational.

 

It's important not to equivocate here on that term.

To add, rational conclusions don't always lead to correct conclusions. For instance, my conclusion from the poll that there are as many people who believe in Thor as there are those who don't is perfectly valid and rational, but is highly likely to be incorrect. Other examples include beliefs that the earth is flat, sun revolves around the earth, etc... The idea is that conclusions drawn from rationality, although unlikely, may not be any more true than one from irrationality. The reason some people are stirred up by your seemingly condescending post about god and unicorns is likely that you somehow suggested they are without a doubt wrong about their beliefs when we in fact don't know because we can neither prove nor disprove them. In fact, claiming that unicorns don't exist is also one of those science facing "the impossibility of evidence."

Originally Posted by DrDNA View Post

Who or what is the judge of rational vs irrational?

We are After all' date=' we invented the words, didn't we?

Surely someone has an answer or they wouldn't be claiming that some things are completely irrational, while others are rational.

Even without going too far, even in this very thread in fact, there posts validating whether or not some conclusions are rational.

Then why do you believe them? Why not believe that paper clips created the universe?

 

Also, how are we to distinguish between the beliefs you rationally concluded, like belief in gravity, and the ones you irrationally concluded?

I don't believe that paper clips created the universe because I believe that god created it. My "rationality" isn't justified by modern scientific standards, but it is a belief nonetheless.

And the difference, in my opinion, is this: rationally concluded "beliefs" e.g. theories and hypothesis are justified by its predictive potential, whereas irrationally concluded ones are "justified" by faith until there is evidence to the contrary. Obviously, modern science does not consider faith sound evidence.

That was quite brilliant. Loved the whole response, especially the end.

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I don't understand. Why is this question any sillier than the question "Do you believe in god?" Can you elaborate?

 

 

As for other motives, in addition to wondering why the logic and rationality of so many humans seems to completely evaporate when the word god comes up, I'm also making a point. By simply displacing the original question a little bit, it becomes painfully obvious (to me anyway) how silly that other question is. It should hopefully cause pause for those who answered "Yes" to the "Do you believe in god" thread, and spur some internal reflection on that silliness.

 

So, Lance, oh great arbiter of what is and what is not silly or allowable, I was both asking a question and making a point, all at the same time.

"Do you believe in God?" is not silly a question. We can believe in the existence of god for the same reason we don't believe in the existence of Thor. Unlike what you seemed to suggest, beliefs don't have to be rational or justified.

I think the question you really wanted to ask is, "Do you have evidence to justify the existence of god?"

There are far more simplistic solutions the problem of energy and food shortage. Either increase their supply or decrease their demand. The former is challenging, but the latter isn't.

You're missing quite a few options. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_of_science for suggestions.

Or at least have an option for "other."

Yes. How else could you explain thunder and lightning?