ashennell

And how do you explain this:

 

- pools of molten steel found at the base of the collapsed twin towers and WTC7 weeks after

- seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy' date=' caused unexplained seismic "spikes" at the beginning of each collapse

 

There must've been explosives in the basements.[/quote']

 

If you think this constitutes some form of logical arguement then I don't think that there is anything we can do to hlep you here.

 

The seismic spikes have all ready been explained, on the same site I provided a link to a number of times!!! You obviously arn't readig this. These answers are from the people who produced the original seismic data used by the CT crowd.

Again... basically they say "it's all lies' date=' trust us".

[/quote']

 

Isn't that exactly what you are saying? You think that the government, intelligence agencies and god know how many other people who have investigated or somehow been involved in this instance are all lying.

 

A few problems with their explanation for WTC7:

 

- no plane hit WTC7 (building 7 in the picture below)

 

They did not say that one did.

 

- its fire was too small

Thats just speculation.

- nothing there could've reached temperatures to melt steel

- its steel was fireproof insulated

- it collapsed by freefall (first 100 meters in 4.5 seconds)

- it collapsed suddenly and totally (instead of portions breaking)

 

From the link I posted previously :

 

Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F' date=' not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

 

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

 

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.

 

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers'] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."

 

 

- WTC5 and WTC6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams

- no steel building ever collapsed from fire (except WTC's)

- FEMA was FORBIDDEN to mention demolition in their explanation

- FEMA admitted that official explanation "only a low probability of occurrence."

- FEMA said the examined steel had rapid "sulfidation" and "oxidation"; (sulfur is used in explosives and burning it produces sulfur-dioxide)

 

 

WTC 5 and 6 are much smaller buildings with fewer floors. I don't see how a comparison between them and wTc 7 is useful. Furthermore there is this

from the website i linked to before (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=5&c=y)

 

Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report' date=' which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.

 

NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.

 

According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."

 

There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.

 

Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire'] for a long period of time."

 

WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.

 

Better explanation is that a controlled demolition created an implosion in the lower floors' date=' collapsing the entire building.[/quote']

 

Have you seen how much preparation is required to demolish a building? I have had the opertunity to walk round one, much smaller than WTC &, before it was demolished. I think people would notice, it's a massive operation.

 

If you really wanted to create the impression of a terrorist attack on your own country then the apparent controlled demolition of a number of buildings is not very convincing. What a stupid idea!

 

Another plane crashes in the middle of nowhere, leaving no remains.

 

Assuming this is true, how does it support your conspiracy theory? Was part of the plan to deliberately make the whole think look unbelievable?

 

7 of 8 blackboxes (made of stainless steel and high-temp-insulated silica) are destroyed' date='

BUT one of the terrorist's passports (made of paper) somehow flew out of his pocket,

out of the burning inferno, on to the streets below, where it was found somehow by FBI amidst all the panic.[/quote']

 

Ahhh... the typical "it's unlikely therefore impossible" arguement. How many other ordinary items (luggage etc.) survived from the planes? If the passport was the only one then maybe you have the beginnings of a slither of an arguement.

crims. I was trying to say that he should wait for the investigation to be completed to draw his conclusions. There is more evidence to be seen.

Ok, I agree. Well, he should wait for the investigation before he follows blindly the conclusion drawn by the conspiracy nuts.

No, but at least you'll have some explanation to criticize.

Why would I want to criticize it?

I am confused, maybe a misunderstanding. Who was your initial suggestion aimed at?

The collapse of WTC 7 is the subject of a current investigation, and I suggest you do not make conclusions before that study produces results.

Is anyone seriously expecting the outcome of the investigation to indicate that WTC7 was deliberately demolished as part of a secret goverment plot?

First' date=' look at the times:

 

9:59 AM - South Tower collapses.

10:28 AM - North Tower collapses.

5:30 PM - WTC7 collapses.

 

 

 

Now try to find the cause for WTC7's collapse:

 

No planes crashed into WTC7.

WTC7 collapsed 7 hours after the towers.

So a plane could not be the cause.

 

WTC7 had beams and columns of steel.

Steel loses integrity at > 1000*C.

Aviation fuel burns at < 500*C.

So a fire could not be the cause.

[/quote']

 

Nonsense. All of the evidence for conspiracies surrond 9/11 has been debunked at one place or another.

 

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=4&c=y

I feel the behavioural semantics should be the only criteria for defining life as scientists are trying to achieve the same in other fields of knowledge .. for example robots with sufficient complexity can tomorrow be called alive..

I think there is a difference between something exhibiting intelligent/motivated behaviour and being alive.

I would go with something like Bascules second definition. I'm not completely happy with it but I'm not sure how I would improve it either.

By the way, i don't think 'extropy' denotes the opposite of entropy. I've never seen it used in this context and I think it has some other wierd meaning anyway.

here is another poll:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm

48% percent said that evolution provided the best explanation for the origin of species.

That is quite a chunk of the population but I'm suprised that it isn't higher. Data that would be useful to answer this question would be a poll that is subdivided into different age groups. It would interesting to see if the general trend is for a higher percentage of younger people to believe in evolution.

Now this question might sound stupid, but is it possible that if scientists manipulated the key genetic difference (2% or so) that seperates us from Great Apes, they could infact cause a form of devolution , so the individual who is inserted with this changed DNA will have many qualties, characteristics, and similarties to some of our recent ancestors.

Ermm... we already have most of the qualities, charactersitics and similarities of our recent ancestors.

As a few people have pointed out, any such changes would not be considered de-evolution as the concept doesn't make sense. To answer your queston properly I think some clarification is needed. Do you want to :-

1. make some changes to DNA so that we are more like what we think are direct ancesters were, or more like monkeys, apes, etc. e.g. hairy everywhere except our behinds. OR

2. actually use some process on our DNA that reveals our true genetic ancestor. Effectively reversing what happened over our recent evolution and hence the temptation to use the term de-evolution.

I think there is a difference between these two processes.

The first approach is plausible in prinicple but we would need to work out each change that needed to be made to the genome. Something we can't do at the moment.

The second approach I am skeptical about. It would require the generation of an inverse model that spanned this period of evolution. I think techniques similar to this are being used in evolutionary biology but I doubt they are intended to serve this purpose.

If you want to get to a common ancester of humans and apes it would be easier to start from apes than from humans, I would guess.

It's a strange idea though so I may be writing a load of rubbish.

4) Klingons aren't real.

Probably true. I wonder if there any crazed trekkies who have tried to have themselves officially declared Klingon.

If I understand correctly that we (all living species) roughly have 30,000 dna strings then I cannot see in the future how we could not build a human from a mouse! since it is looking like the only difference between us is the timing and sequence that genes activate etc etc..........

Genome size differs considerably between speices. I found this page that lists the number of chromosomes for a few different species:

http://morgan.rutgers.edu/morganwebframes/level1/page2/ChromNum.html

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by building a human from a mouse. Do you mean, actually make a living mouse change into a human?

why would they be more at risk? what factor in their lives would make them more at risk? The only thing I can think of is that bisexual men can spread the disease both ways while bisexual women are less at risk to do so. However, all that says, is that men are at a higher risk of getting the disease (which is not true)

Here is a pretty good page from the cdc website:

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts/msm.htm

There is also this information from a UK AIDS/HIV charity website:

http://www.avert.org/aidsyounggaymen.htm

I'm sure there's a lot more if you look.

There is no reason why homosexuals would be more at risk of getting AIDS than heterosexuals.

That is not true. Differences in sexual behaviour can make a huge difference. Men who have sex with men are considered to be a high risk group for sexually transmitted diseases. There are plenty of studies that support this.

Its important to note also that globally, the vast majority of HIV/AIDS cases are overwhelmingly seen in people who identify as heterosexual, both female and male.

This is not a useful statistic. What about normalised values? The percentages of each group that have HIV/AIDS.

There are many other origination/transmission route theories. Likely we'll never know. But attempting to point the finger at the Gay community is pointless and only reflects negative cultural biases.

The rapid transmission of HIV through the gay community is a plausible hypothesis with some evidence to support it. Do you believe that researching this possibility is pointless and grounded on negative cultural biases?

If people wish to use this to support their prejudices against the gay community then they are misusing the information in my opinion. Do gay people care less about getting HIV? Do they care less about spreading it to others? NO, of course not. However, information about transmission of HIV/AIDS and the risks associated with different behaviours is important for raising awareness about HIV and reducing it's prevelence.

Also my computer which can handle several million calculations per second is a tad quicker than my brain, maybe not yours, I wouldn't know!

Most peoples brains can do alot more than that!! Each neuron may be slow, maybe no more than 100 calculations a second but, we have a lots. I think somewhere around 100 billion.

I don't believe a brain could hold 90TB of information, but I guess it's not really something you can prove or disprove and I don't really want to get into a debate about it.

I agree - It's pretty much impossible to compare. One way that is often used is to estimate the number of synaptic connections and use that as an estimate of the number of free variables.

Maybe calculations in math but your brain uses only 5% of its power to controll evbreything you do at any given time. and i think the brain holds more than 90tb

5% of it's power? I'm not sure what this means - it can do things 20x faster but never bothers? It this just a variant of the old 'we only use 10% of our brains' myth?

Wouldn't we be able to detect (using Quantum computers) different emotions produced from the brain through these electrical impulses (changes at atomic level) and then upload the correspoding qubits onto a QC as a program and thus given the attributes of emotion to a computer.

I don't know anything about QC's or qubits but I do know about brains. We don't need to look any deeper than neurons and neurotransitters to understand emotions. Emotions will eventually have a computational explanation, possibily related to grounding of internal models or enforcing some variable constraints on the heuristic processes that brain uses.

Transfering data from the brain to the computer to make it have emotions is implausible. Any recorded information only makes sense in the context it was recorded - if you want to to take on the same semantics. I'm not really sure what a qubit is to I can't say more.

If this kind of research went further the idea is that one day a computer could recognise a face, then expressions etc. etc.

Unsuprisingly, this is a already a major research area. Although I think that results so far have been disappointing.

http://www.face-rec.org/ - a good place to find out more.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nacelunk

We can create computers that perform calculations trillions of billions times faster than we do but we will never ve able to create intellegent computer until we fully understand how our brain works. And I think that would be much more important event than creating super fast computer

 

Oh can we now! I think that rather depends on what you consider to be a calculation. Robots' date=' even those connected to supercomputers, have major difficulties performing what we consider to be simple tasks such as walking, or bending down to pick up an object without falling over let alone anything truly athletic. Surely the calculations brains perform to enable us to do these tasks would outstrip any computer? I think there is a football match planned for 2050 pitching robots against humans. I think the humans will win![/quote']

 

Genius. Did you bother to read nacelunks point!! You agree with him. His point - even if we could make really fast computers they won't be intelligent unless we can understand the types of calculation made by the brain.

So you are interested in the localisation of receptor subtypes with respect to the thumb areas involved in different manual tasks?

I'm still not sure what the contrast enhanced images are for. I assume that you have increased the contrast because you are interested in the patterns, probably related to capillaries, that become visible. Are you expecting a some correlation between these patterns and receptor densities?

The receptors types will be distributed over the entire thumb (I would assume) just at different densities in different places. I think you will be lucky to find very detailed info on the internet.

I'm intrigued though, may I ask what you want this for?

I've often wondered if there are other layers of the universe we can't sense because we lack the organs for it' date=' or have them but favor the five we know instead.

[/quote']

 

There are quite wide portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that we are insensitive to. Some species are sensitive to magnetic fields. I think it would be cool if we could sense the entire spectrum directly. Pick up radio etc., etc.

 

In addition - technically, we have more than five senses without needing to add psychic powers.

 

On a serious note, adding a new neurotransmitter wouldn't make much sense without some new neurons for it to be transmitted between and sensory modalities don't have their own specific transmitters anyhoo.

Plus there are way more than 4 neurotransmitters in the brain.

Are there any of you that have your own theories on why we forget?

I always found "Why" -type questions difficult to answer. There is a limited capacity for storing information. A large portion of the information we recieve is useless to us over long periods. we need some heuristic that normally results in us keeping information that is usefull. Forgetting is probably just the result of trying to maintain an effective internal-model. Holding on to every peice of information is not something useful for the brain to do.

It seems ot make more sense to try and answer 'Why to we remember something?" What properties of a stimulus, event ,etc., make it stay in memory for longer.

Unfortunately the case is not so simple. He claims to more than the rest.

He claims to hold the Knowledge of Universe and has a little eccentric aprocah to the entire spectrum of Human Behaviour.

His questions are logically valid and can explain the Universe... (It can be found at http://www.scienceagogo.com under the heading "m-theroy")

It would appear that it is you who were posting on this other forum and not not some friend.

Yep its possible. It is possible for people to experience smells after seisures when the smell isnt really there. A lot of things can cause seisures.

These count as hallucinations and not as illusions.

Why not apply the term "paresthesia" to other all senses ?

Because the definition includes reference to the somatosensory sense:

Paresthesia

: a sensation of pricking, tingling, or creeping on the skin having no objective cause and usually associated with injury or irritation of a sensory nerve or nerve root. (from http://www.dictionary.com)

There are lots of types of Tinnitus and many different causes. Some forms of tinnitus are casuses by similar type of nerve damage/dysfunction that are also sometimes the cause of paresthesia.

Hi, sorry I meant to quote your previous post, i.e :-

There are false sensations (paresthesia) of smell, e.g. some people experience a false smell of burning when they have a stroke or TIA.

There are classed as halluccinations and the definition I gave of halluccinations is brief but essentially accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination

Parasthesia is a specific name for a somatosensory condition. I don't think you can apply it to other senses such as the olfactory system. Parasthesia, in my opinion, is neither an illusion or a hallucination. We are quite aware that the sensation is not from some stimulus in the environment but from within our own sensory system. It is not a case of misinterpretation of ambiguous bottom-up signals.

So I agree with you - parasthesia is not what I would call a halluccination.

Surely only false sensations which are psychogenic can be described as hallucinations.

I think the most important criteria is that a some external ficticious cause is created. Psychogenic sounds like terminology that is impossible to pin down.

When I said "false" I meant other people could not smell it, it did not exist in reality, it was a neurogenic fault. Paresthesias are "real" and can be extreme (painful parasthesia = dysesthesia), however they are false sensations.

These phenomena are classed as hallicinations as there is no sensory basis for the perception.

Some more potential smell illusions :

The first are links are regarding a study of the self-perception of bad breath and indicate that in some cases this may be exaggerated in individuals with low-self esteem. Question : Is this a hallucination (complete fabrication) or illusion (exaggeration of already existing smell)? I don't know.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/is_6_34/ai_82261836

http://members.rediff.com/drkhosla/News/news69.html

This is an interesting little snipped from a Criminal Psychology website:

http://www.nimblewisdom.com/Criminal_Psychology/Section_103_6_The_Illusions_of_the_Olfactory_Sense

There are two abstracts of studies that looked at context dependant peception of odours - one of which relys on non-olfactory information.

http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/3/2/183

http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/16/4/349