bascule

Thanks for conceeding my point. Cool Folks, I give you the Republican ideal, the Laffer Curve: ...compared to the more realistic neo-Laffer Curve: (relax, it's a joke, but the point is that the Laffer Curve is a gross oversimplification) The President has enormous power to influence how the budget is managed. The executive branch writes it, Congress augments it, then sends it back to the President for approval. The President can leverage great control over unnecessary or otherwise bad spending decisions on the part of Congress by exercising his veto power. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Bush remains the only President in US history who has never vetoed a single bill. So yes, the Democrats and Republicans are both responsible, but the President simply isn't doing his job in terms of preventing runaway spending. If Bush had just once gone "Nope, not gonna sign that spending bill because we don't have the money" my opinion would be different... but as far as I've read the only bills Bush has even considered vetoing have been on moral grounds, not economic.

My own hypothesis has always been that the rapid evolution of humans came about through tribal warfare in which one tribe would wipe out all the (male) members of the other tribe, thus the best thinkers who were able to outsmart their enemy and the best communicators who were best able to work together against their enemy were favored by evolution, as those who lost out died. Thus we are descended from the best thinkers and speakers among the proto-humans. Is this how it happened? Beyond that, I'd say socialization and forms of expression became intermingled with sex, and thus appreciation of music, dance, etc was genetically favored because it became a sex-linked behavior. Am I at all on here with what SCIENCE has to say about it?

Vinyl. As in records. Why? 1. Scarcity - Vinyl is hard to come by, which makes it more collectable 2. Quality - Most of what I collect is 60s/70s classic rock. This means the vinyl roughly the same age as the recording was cut from tapes recorded around the same time, especially the Mobile Fidelity Studio Labs records I have which were cut from the original masters. And while tape degrades with time, vinyl degrades with use, meaning that anything I have in good condition is likely a closer approximation to the original masters than the CDs mastered from 30 year old tape are. And while there's lots of nice filters for getting rid of time-related tape distortions, the bottom line is running time-distorted tape through distorting filters will... ultimately give you a distorted digital master. There's a lot of songs with shitty digital masters I've listened to where the vinyl offers MUCH better quality, such as Jethro Tull / Locomotive Breath or the Kinks / Celluloid Heroes. Just because a song sounds shitty and old on the radio doesn't mean that it sounds as bad on vinyl! 3. Collectability - When you buy a record, what you get is BIG! A 12" x 12" picture of the cover art, printed on cardboard that allows a number of customizations. For example, the Andy Warhol-designed cover of the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album has a zipper built into the cover. Anyway, have about 300 so far, mostly major albums from popular artists in pretty good condition.

http://www.costofwar.com places total Iraq expendatures at $197 billion.

I've already answered this twice (see here and here), and my answer is ultimately that it would be hypocritical of me to condone experimentation on chimps and not on infants or the mentally deficient. And in fact, it's quite likely that interspecies variation means that we could accomplish the same research with fewer infants/brain damaged people than we do with chimpanzees. But it's impractical. Newborns and the brain damaged have human families who decide their fate, and the number of families willing to donate newborns or the mentally deficient to research purposes is virtually nonexistent, therefore this is not a practical alternative to chimpanzees or other animals for animal research. Animal experimentation is the only practical means to conduct biomedical research.

Memes evolve. Chimpanzee cultural evolution is nonexistant (at least compared to the exponentially increasing rate at which human culture evolves) I guess bottom line, you either see humans as superior to animals or you don't. The superior of humans to animals is something which is outright obvious to me given the exponentially increasing rate of our memetic/cultural evolution which is driven by our superior biology. But I guess some people don't see it the same way... However, is it really fair to ask other people to die because you don't wish to see animals die? What if killing 100,000 chimps will save an incalculable number (or for the sake of argument, millions/billions) of human lives as it saves generations from being beset by a particular disease? I see leading a vegan/vegetarian lifestyle as something noble in trying to reduce animal suffering, and I certainly try to avoid eating mammals and other animals as much as possible. But opposing biomedical testing increases human suffering, and that's something to which I am diametrically opposed.

I've never noticed it being seasonal. Here's a guy who observed it happening on the night of the Winter Solstice, and even took pictures to demonstrate that it is an illusion and not an optical effect.

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Yes, this is a highly improbable scenario. But so is ambiogenesis, and I'm willing to bet that there's a direct connection between the tidal forces of such a massive satellite and the formation of life on earth. Of course "willing to bet" is hardly a scientific conjecture...

Aiee, another strawman!

Ooh, ooh! I know that one! It's... a strawman, right! Yay... BUSH WANTS TO EAT YOUR BABY! Just look at him with... his teeth, and that crazy look in his eye, like a drooling hyena... c'mon, don't tell me you can't see it. I'm sorry, I had to release some pent up seriousness from this thread. So Pangloss, am I right in guessing your solution to the skyrocketing national debt would be to end entitlement spending, which you so clearly point out is the problem... I mean, despite inflation Bush is yet to top 2000 revenues, despite claims that the economy is "back on track" with where it used to be. You can claim it was scandalously overheated at that point, but what about inflation? If the economy is doing so well as so many pundits insist (ones with which you seem to agree, correct me if I'm wrong) then why haven't revenues topped 2000 levels yet again? I mean, you're trying to use the Laffer Curve argument with Bush's tax cuts, and it seems to me that it didn't work under Reagan and it isn't working now... And spending has substantially increased under Bush, while revenue is yet to break $2 trillion/yr like it did under Clinton.

Well, in my typical aloof ruminations I was thinking about expressions we teach parrots and other birds which can mimic human speech, and I was thinking about the birds who were able to pick up these phrases as they waited to be bought in a pet store. I mean, clearly these birds get enough exposure to the same phrases over and over that they are able to learn them. You know, the ones like "Polly wanna cracker?" and "Pretty bird." They're memes which are successful because they're a sort of universally agreed upon set of nonsense phrases between both humans and birds so that people repeat often enough for the birds to pick them up, and do so because they have so often have success at getting responses from the birds with these phrases. Wouldn't this be an example of memetic Mullerian mimicry? I mean, that's all it really is right, a cospecies symbiosis which leverages an evolutionary advantage, although in this case it's for the meme.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112735391238948229-ZTudG5HjJNdXRKw00DSaiyOdZKc_20060921,00.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top Will this finally bring an end to IDiots trying to teach religion in a science classroom? Only time will tell...

No, and if I were ever trapped in a situation where the grid broke down like that, the first thing I'd want is a gun. Well, that and fresh water. The media has mostly been reporting systemic problems, not case instances, unless the case instances are bizzare and warrant attention. "Woman fends off rapist with gun in flood ravaged New Orleans" doesn't exactly scream national news, in my opinion. And besides, who's going to try to rob or rape someone when there's a camera crew around?

People have been bouncing around ideas for "space planes" which could do this sort of thing for a long time, but with the goal of speed, not saving fuel/making things cheaper/etc because obviously it would be more expensive and require more fuel. It'd be so expensive, in fact, that no one has ever managed to make it practical. Yes, planes, trains, and automobiles... they're so damn practical...

I vote Max Headroom! Mmm, Theora...

Check swansont's link... it's been scientifically proven that the effect is NOT optical

Wow, that was a really awesome article, especially the stereoscopic image they provide as an example of how something our brain misinterprets as being closer to us than it really is as being smaller. View this image as you would a stereogram, as if you were focusing on a distant object: Notice that the moon on the right seems both larger and farther away. Their conclusions were: So I would continue to contend that this is a Stalinsque (i.e. pre-experiential) illusion. So the real crazy conclusion we can draw from this is somewhere in the visual centers of our brain is an algorithm for scaling images as we perceive them in the theater of consciousness...

Why is it that animal rights activists look at the suffering as completely one sided? There will be suffering regardless, but the suffering of higher lifeforms can be eased through the sacrifice of lower lifeforms. You must weigh one against the other, and decide if the ends of easing human suffering justify the means of sacrificing animals and causing them to suffer. You seemed to embrace this Machiavellian sentiment yourself earlier, albeit not in regards to life and death matters. I prefer to keep logic seperate from morality. Morality is completely relative and varies from person to person. But this is one of many arguments I made, and in the case of a one year old human I would consider the evolution from a proto human to a meme exchanger largely complete and a mere matter of adaptation of our innate mental plasticity, as opposed to say a human blastula/gastrula which is essentially equivalent to any animal embryo minus the genetic potential. It'd be like burning down a nearly finished house versus burning the forms off of a foundation... which one is really arson? It depends on how much conscious complexity has been reduced to a state of entropy. When you begin to mix morality with logic I think your argument begins to break down. From that standpoint I think we should construct a test for a state of meme exchanging consciousness, and anything less is fair game for biomedical testing, be it a human baby, a mentally retarded individual, or an animal. That would be cold hard logic for you, but morality has this fuzzy quality which doesn't exactly fit into the constructs of logic. But bottom line, I am perplexed as to how the superiority of humans over other animals is not inherently obvious. Humans are so ridiculously amazing creatures compared to animals, why do you not see a distinction? We've done so many amazing things... does humanity not impress you? Ed: Whoops? Why am I still arguing? This is pointless...

Don't get me wrong, I have two cats, I'm a pet lover, and most of the time I eat a vegetarian diet (I guess I had a lot of meat to eat today, but that's an exception, not the norm). But I see the enormous benefits of biomedical experimentation to humanity, and that's something that has helped not only humanity as a whole, but my family and friends.

Everyone knows the moon appears larger on the horizon. Before we even discuss this, I don't anyone to dismiss for a second that this is 100% a neurological effect and not some kind of actual optical effect perpetrated by the atmosphere. To dismiss the latter I offer the following: 1. Cameras do not observe the moon illusion. The moon appears the same size in photographs on the horizon or in the sky. 2. The size of the moon as projected by the lens of our eye onto our retina is constant no matter where in the sky the moon is located (~.55mm I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) Some wish to discuss the "theater" of consciousness (as in a Cartesian theater) but I would rather discuss this in terms of Daniel Dennett's "projector" of the conscious experience (i.e. a meme/phenom pool located in our cerebral cortex into which all of the centers in our mammalian brain constantly inject their data, allowing it to feed back on itself) So what I would like to ask is... is the moon illusion perpetrated by some kind of sensory post-processing which can actually alter the perceived resolution (and therefore potential interpolative) detail? Dennett discussed these kind of effects as either being Stalinesque (i.e. before entering your cerebral cortex ala Stalin's mock trials which are a deception which can be experienced by an observer) or Orwellian (i.e. post-experiential revision ala the Ministry of Information's alteration of the historical record in order to elicit social control). I contend that the Moon Illusion is a Stalinesque deception, and somewhere before the phenoms of our visual processing center enter our cerebral cortex and are thus subjected to abstract processing, the image is scaled by some sort of visual preprocessing center. I base this on my own observations of the moon illusion. I suffer from astigmatism and therefore typically see the moon high in the sky as a large blurry blob (as I rarely wear my glasses, unless I'm driving or at work). But on the horizon, I can make out considerably more detail. Thoughts?

Ditto. Reality is waaaaaay to interesting for fantasy to interest me anymore.

I'm working on a web page for NASA. Most of the guidelines are internal to the agency, but the rest are Congressionally approved law, most notably Section 508 requirements for handicap accessibility (which NASA takes VERY seriously)

If your liabilities exceed your revenue, you run a deficit. Now, the decrease in revenue isn't entirely the result of Bush's tax cuts, but Bush has continued to increase spending in the wake of falling tax revenues. I mean seriously, cut taxes and reduce government spending or raise taxes and increase government spending. Cutting taxes and increasing government spending just doesn't work... Uhh, what? Source please...

A lot of people do feel that way. However, we're informavores constantly in pursuit of novelty, and as long as we have novelty to experience, I think we're relatively content.

Guess SCOTUS is full of intolerant atheists too eh: