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StringJunky

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Everything posted by StringJunky

  1. 'Madness' is a colloquial term. I doubt it's usage would be found in technical literature in a formal manner..
  2. Our own continued existence as a species is why. We are becoming too big for the pond and the more there is of us the more we need to tiptoe carefully.
  3. I can't find any scientific evidence, only anecdotal. MSDS sheets say that it may be absorbed through the skin is about as good as i can come up with. Possibly, more would have been ingested from handling the hats as one went about ones day. I can picture people fiddling with their hats, doffing their hats etc then transferring the mercury to their mouths via putting pipes in there mouth, handling/eating food etc. Yes, the association with Lewis Carroll's character doesn't seem to bear out on closer inspection.
  4. I think that which is ‘natural’ is that which is unaffected by human intervention. I think using that word that way is our way of distinguishing two different lines of evolutionary progression; evolutionary in a general sense. Yeah, I think there's just too many of us now to think that we can assert our individual desires on our immediate environments and expect nature to absorb it and recycle our efforts when we are done.
  5. I think quite a few now think that we are no longer puppets with our instincts our main masters and so are concerned about unduly and irreversibly altering the interconnected natural phenomena around them,which keeps this big machine called Earth going. It's called "unnatural" because we can pro-actively alter that which is natural to an irreversible degree. It's an artificial distinction but that is a good thing because it shows that we are collectively aware of the consequences of our actions on our environment and co-inhabitants.
  6. Right ok. Got it now. I suspected it wasn't that simple.
  7. I could well be wrong but if we sequentially take the cousin-line - first with first cousin, second with second etc - and each degree of separation results in 50% gene dilution, wouldn't it take about 15 degrees of separation for any relation to disappear? I assumed the human genome contains 25000 genes.
  8. I couldn't follow your NCBI link and so I left it.
  9. Why is it not 90% the SOL from either frame because I thought the SOL was same for all inertial observers? Obviously I'm missing something. Edit. Just realised that they are NOT travelling at the SOL. Duh!
  10. You got it the wrong way round, it's convex because the mercury is not preferentially attracted to other surfaces. The meniscus doesn't 'climb up' a container. If it it did the mercury would 'wet' your fingers.
  11. Evolution is change in allele frequency, so it seems logical that the factor that causes the change is the driving force i.e. mutation.
  12. My Profile > Edit My Profile (Top right) > Profile Settings (Left) > Scroll down to Profile Information > Edit My About Me Page
  13. In this Wiki about the present Archbishop, Rowan Williams, evolution has apparently been seen as compatible with the Church of England since Frederick Temple who was Archbishop 1896-1902. So it only took about 30 years for the C. of E. to accept the idea of evolution since the publication of Darwin's book. Quite adaptable and pragmatic really.
  14. Best of luck to you both seeing as there seems to be a strong element of it.
  15. Are the choir the best people to ask?
  16. Yes, probably the adolescent demographic that have had no assertive external religious influences from very young.
  17. The compound was mercury nitrate. The wearers were at risk as well, particularly if they habitually wore them.
  18. Try Downloading FF again > uninstalling the old FF > Reboot > Install new FF. A lot of the time, reinstalling a new version is quicker than trying to fix the problem. I installed FF to check for you (I use Opera), your picture is there and that is on default settings so I think there is a quirk somewhere in your current version.
  19. Elemental mercury doesn't stick to your skin and stays as a single deformable bead as it rolls around in your hand. I punctured one of my mercury hearing batteries with a nail as a kid and got a bit out; maybe 2mm in diameter. As far as I understand it's the mercury compounds that are really hazardous because they are more easily absorbed although elemental mercury is toxic if it gets in your body ...it's natural repellent nature doesn't facilitate absorption through the skin though. I definitely wouldn't handle it directly as matter of habit though because it is a serious cumulative toxin if it gets inside you and there's no point in inviting risk.
  20. I think the reason more people in the US are killed by policeman versus European countries is because there is no public right to bear arms in the countries mentioned therefore, it seems to me, the police don't have to default to a lethal stance so quickly as they do in the US.
  21. Seizures triggered by blinking in a non-photosensitive epileptic Abstract An epileptic girl with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome had seizures triggered specifically by blinking, but not by other eye movements or by photic stimulation. Electrographic and clinical seizures were most reliably precipitated by repetitive blinking produced voluntarily on command, by reflex blinking on corneal stimulation, or by psychogenic triggers of blinking such as social stress or cognitive effort. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1028775/
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