Hans de Vries

Would altering the albedo of deserts by (for example) planting trees or building a large number of solar panels cause them to cool down and have more rain?

If one always has one allele from each parent, how it's possible that in certain areas of phenotype only features of one parent are expressed? For example, it's possible for daughter to look exactly like her mother or have personality after her etc.

Oh yeah, these BS "experiments"... Why folks who compare Quran to Bible never mention that (at least according to circa 99.99% of Christian theologians) all those bloody laws were abrogated and are therefore no longer in force. Islam's own bloody laws, by contrast, are very much still in force* *Baha'i Faith has abrogation of Sharia as one of it's main doctrines - but it isn't ISlam.

so...? Data shows that there isno correlation between gun ownership and homicide rate. In the US there is 30 times more gusn per100 people than in Netherlands Is US homicide rate 30 times higher than that of the Netherlands? Or 10 ttimes? No, it's about 4 times higher, for reasons that can be easily attributed to factors other than ownership of firearms.

If your goal is to reduce homicide rate, gun control is not the answer. In the US homicide rate is 3.8 per 100,000 people - slighty larger than European average but in Estonia for example (a high income Baltic country) it's 5.0 per 100,000 people - and Estonia has over ten times fewer firearms per capita than the US. Switzerland ranks 3rd in firearms ownership yet its homicide rate is only 0.7/100,000 - among the lowest in the world

If he truly wanted to start an insurrection, he would do it. But we know that neither he nor any of his disciples started any war against Rome - there were three uprisings in Judea after Jesus' death but they were all started by Jews who wanted Romans out of Israel. Remember that Christianity was a virtually apolitical religion until 313 AD when Roman emperor Konstantin legalized it - it was only when Christianity fused with Roman Imperial doctrine (or rather Roman Emperors adopted elements of Christianity) that the first elements of political Christianity started to take shape.

A lot of these are hardcore gangsters or other people who, for reasons known only to them, decided to resitt police's attempt to arrest them. In Brazil police kills about 7000 people per year

Non everythign that comes from Canon law also comes from the Bible. There is little corelation between these two. Contraty to what common sense dictates, the Bible played a minor role in history of Canon law. Much greater role was played by Roman law ("Ecclesia vivit lege romana") and, to a lesser degree, by various customary legal codes of Europe. @John Cuthber. Laws from the Old Testment have nothing to do with killing infidels/expanding the religion by force. Those laws were never meant to be imposed on non-Jews. They were meant for a highly specific group of people (Jews) in a highly specific piece of land (israel) More on the topic of the sword verse That verse comes from Matthew. This is the same gospel that describes how Jesus was arrested. When Romans came to arrest Jesus, Peter drew a sword and cut off an ear of one of the soldiers. Jesus rebuked him harshly and said the famous sentence "who lives by the sword, dies by the sword" If Jesus was a warmonger and his teachings are all about killing infidels - why didn't he allow his friend to defend him? BTW

There is no need to reinterpret anything because passages from holy books are never interpreted on their own. They are always interpreted in context of other passages.

Just read the passages immediately before and after that verse. It's basics of textual interpretation - you read the passage, then put in the context of surrounding passages and then you put them in the context of the entite book. That rule is especially true for texts outlining rules of behavior, i.e. legal and religious texts. Interpreting Matthew 10:34 as a call to war not only contradicts all other teachings of Jesus, it also contradicts logic - it requires you to believe that Jesus advocated peace all his life, then became a proponent war for a few seconds (the time it takes to say "I came not to bring peace but a sword:") and then switched back to being a pacifist. Isn't it better to accept the non-violent interpretation that at least dosa not contradict common sense (and all other teachings of jesus)?

About the sword verse from Matthew - Jesus was telling his Apostles that if they keep following him, their families may reject them - and in that case they should reject their families too (but they shouldn't if their families accept them). By sword he meant the "sword" separating his followers from their families. As we can see -not much to do with actual warfare. every person that is even remotely aware of the life of Jesus, his personality and his style of speech, will not interpret this verse as a call to war. I picked up a wrong title for the thread. It should be called "Bible - controversial passages" - since at least when it comes to Jesus, those controversial passages turn out to be not controversial at all .

This is a continuation of discussion between me and John Cuthber from the Paris attack thread. There, John quoted a verse from Mathew (10:34) that says: To begin this discussion my question is - what type of sword did Jesus bring and how did he use it?

I love the deceptive way this infographic tries to portray Islam as peaceful. It says: do not kill children, old people, women, monks and priests and people who surrendered - so what about people who are neither of these? It also says: do not impose Islam on others. Of Islam does not force anyone to convert. You can also pay Jizya or die - with so many possibilities, how can we even speak of imposing anything? Most Westerners don't understand Islam and assume it's like Christianity and Muhammad is like Jesus - nothing can be farther from the truth. In Islam armed war against the disbelievers is considered to be the holiest deed possible and an obligation of every able bodied Muslim. It's significance is even higher than pilgrimage. You may pray for 50 years never missing a single prayer, go on pilgrimage to Mecca every year and your entry into paradise still isn't certain - but if you spend just one hour on the battlefield fighting for the sake of Allah (fighting for causes other than Islam does not have the same effect and may send you to hell), you get an instant ticket to paradise - paradise full of beautiful virgins, delicious food, wine etc. Do yiou guys really think this and other stupid beliefs don''t play a role in ISlamic terrorism?

Hiw many genes have so far been identified as contributing to development of depression and anxiety disorders?

IQ is a fairy good representation of intelligence - that's why the test are still used. People who do well at tests usually do well at school. Most people have to study hard to get good grades at university for example - but there are people who do barely any work, skip classes and still graduate at the top. They are not necessarily the highest acheivers overall but have the highest potential - and IQ tests reflect their potential well. I know a guy who breezed through highschool like it was kindergarden, then started 3 undergrad degrees and finished all of them in 2 years(!!!). They were all in STEM fields, people study for long hours just to get through one.

As the title says. By "gifted" I mean people with high verbal and mathematical intelligence (above 140) and by average - people with IQ around 100.

Have you heard of that compound? Some interesting studies were done that demonstrated extraordinary, highly selective anti-cancer properties of 3-BP - unfortunately patent disputes between the researcher and John Hopkins University resulted in discontinuation of research. Since then limited studies on humans have been done in Germany and Colombia albeit with highly promising results (total eradication of metastatic liver cancer in a male patient and of small cell lung carcinoma in a Colombian female patient)

PS: Hitler actually came to power at the time when world economy was already recovering and a part of his apparent success can be attributed to that.

Di normal melanocytes cause cancer or they have to be mutated ones? Say if you inject a normal melanocytes into the bloodstream, would they cause cancer, be destroyed by the immune system or simply float for some time and die?

Johannes Heesters - a Dutch actor and singer, active in Germany from 1930s up until his death at the age of 108 in 2011. A great figure and I absolutely love his voice. Look at how well he looked at 60 in 1965: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Xdu7-mBK8 And how well he sang at 100 in 2003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoHAt7UQCbI Active on stage to the very end. A great career and a life well lived.

Belief that all human beings are equally deserving of life is really very recent - an invention of 18th century Enlightenment philosophy. Before that the golden rule of behavior was: "be merciful to your people, harsh to outsiders". Long periods of relatively peaceful coexistence were known but every group had some other group of people supposedly not good enough to be alive.

But death is not a binary event. It's a process. There is no clear cut border between being dead and alive. So rather than hearing "clicks" infinitely many times, you may as well find yourself being kept forever on life support with barely functioning brain, not being aware that you're evan alive. Or you may disintegrate and be reconstructed by some future civilization in a digital form or physically. After all every atom of human body is exchanged every few years... so Hans from 2015 has not a single atom in common with Hans from 1999 or 2002 but I somehow managed to retain clear continuity of consciousness for my entire (still very short) life.

Could humans (or any animal) aquire the ability to synthetize Vitamin D from simpler compounds without UV? I'm curious.

What are chaotic and non-linear systems?

AS in topic title - is the political world order deterministic enough so that at some point in the future we'll be able to predict what course world politics will take? Like you know, predicting with >90% certainity that 5 years from now country X will go to war with country Y and win after Z months of combat or that country U will have such and such foreign policy vis a vis country V etc Is that even possible? Political "scientists" often make predictions about future events but these predictions are not based at mathematical modelling. So they may "predict" that by 2030 US will still be majority white and world's most powerful country or that China will face problems while India will be increasing in power. Can we even be sure that in 2030 US will be a superpower and not a failed state embroiled in civil war?