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Marat

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Everything posted by Marat

  1. Med schools are always looking for applicants who stand out from the pack because of some unusual attribute, such as volunteer work, experience assisting in professors' research, nursing experience, etc. If you were to complete your surgical tech degree/certificate first and then do the premed requirements, that would help your admission chances by attesting to the seriousness of your interests. Since the impact of your GPA will be multiplied at some med schools by the reputation of where you earned those grades, it much is better to do your premed courses at a regular, four-year university than at a community college, and of those, the greater the renown of the university the better. For applications like you with an unusual background, it is always a good idea to consider alternative routes into medicine, such as going to a good medical program in Europe if you speak a foreign language. European medical schools include both North American premed and medical courses in a single program lasting about six years, so if you don't yet have the premed requirements, you might consider the European option. Another major plus is that European medical schools are generally very inexpensive, even for foreigners, though they are getting more expensive over time. When I studied medicine some time ago in Germany, for example, my total yearly fees amounted to about $30 for the student activities charge, used to support the various extra-curricular clubs. The education per se was free, which was a lot cheaper than what my fellow students were paying in the U.S.
  2. To get around the carbon-dating problem, some religious folk argue that the samples were taken only from the borders of the shroud, which were probably repaired in the middle ages after relic enthusiasts had worn the original edges thin from frequent touching. But people should really take a step back from all this factual in-fighting and ask themselves, what could be more profoundly silly than deciding the ultimate meaning of all human experience and the moral order of the universe based on miniscule factoids like whether a particular old shroud has God's face depicted on it, or whether a given Judean carpenter of the first century of the common era rose again and bestrode the earth as a zombie after his death. The latter fact, if true, seems more likely to be a proof for devil-worship than for Christianity.
  3. Safety officers today are what the priests of Antiquity were: a professional class called into existence by the absence of enough real tasks to occupy people having a sufficient degree of education and skill to expect some task to be assigned to them. To keep themselves employed, the priests keep having to invent new sins which only they can forgive, just as today the safety officers have to keep inventing new risks only they can remove. The problem is that since today's 'priesthood' of safety officers hides behind the guise of being scientific, they are harder to dethrone than the old priesthood, which started to lose its grip once Galileo pointed out that the planets don't look right in terms of the demands of theology.
  4. Jack Straw's impassioned speech in the House occurred just about the time that the German reunification was being negotiated with Gorbachov, but I can't remember the exact date.
  5. Without bothering to check official statistics, I would guess that total military and civilian casualties of World Wars I and II were about 50,000,000. Even if you assume a very low replacement rate in that population because it was European, it had to have generated a huge progeny by now, three or four generations later, perhaps increasing today's high-energy, high-resource consuming and high-pollution producing population by about 200,000,000.
  6. Chaseman: If you give me the sporty girl's phone number, I'll tell you how to have your testosterone levels checked! Seriously, though, any doctor can order a check of your testosterone levels, and along with that it is useful to have other endocrine functions checked, such as thyroid function, since low thyroid function can also often produce symptoms of intellectual decline. Many males have less than optimal testosterone levels (hypogonadism), and this can easily be corrected (as long as your prostate is healthy enough not to suggest a cancer risk) by a testosterone gel application which you can apply every morning to your stomach or upper arms to bring the levels back to normal. The improvement in overall energy and zest for life found in old men whose testosterone levels have been restored in this way has been remarkable, though it remains an area of controversy in medicine whether this should be routine treatment for aging males, given its influence in increasing prostate cancer risk.
  7. Since a lot of the human version of this activity occurs in secret, if this were to produce very loud noises in social animals such as ourselves, it could be quite unfortunate -- say, for teenage boys living in religious school dormitories, for example.
  8. The identification of contemporary Germany with its Nazi past in foreign countries is both absurd and persistent. The national ideology of Germany today is extreme pacifism, and yet there are still fools like Jack Straw who stood up and railed about the danger of German troops on the march in his speech in the House of Commons when German reunification was being considered. The fact that countries without nuclear weapons are not in much of a position to threaten anyone anymore, to say nothing of the profoundly anti-Nazi ideology of modern Germany, seems to have been noticed by no one outside Germany. Another perhaps outdated perception I have of Germany from when I lived there is that it was surprisingly technologically backward. There was, for example, a bank of telephones near the Zoologischer Garten subway stop and a group of street urchins equipped with twisted pieces of metal used to hang around it to pluck the coins out of the phones, since on every second try at a phone call the coins would get stuck and the tourists didn't have the technique to get them out again. Couldn't the Germans even make a working coin-operating telephone? In contrast, when I was living in Cambridge, England, there were three public phones for a town of 100,000, and just as I was moving out the city decided to remove one of them because they thought three was too many -- but England is another story...
  9. This sounds terribly Malthusian, but the fact can't be denied that if there had not been all those deaths in World Wars I and II, the world's overpopulation and environmental stress would today be intolerable. There was not only a boost to medical progress in the war, but also to science and technology, such as in the improved ability to substitute one product for another to compensate for shortages, improvements in rocketry, jet propulsion, submarine and torpedo design, computers, atomic power, etc. International law improved in response to the Holocaust and legal positivism was discredited. Racism became much more unpopular than it was before the war. The troops returning home from World War II insisted on progressive social policies at home, since once the working class has been subjected to lethal threats by the ruling class, they become relatively less tolerant of its economic exploitation. Interestingly, if you look at a map of the German plan for the subdivision of the Russian Empire if Germany had won the First World War and compare it with the current subdivision of the Soviet State into independent republics, you would think that the Kaiser had won rather than lost in 1918. So perhaps some plans simply reflect the deeper economic and world historical patterns which will develop anyway, regardless of how the wars on the surface turn out. Thus in the case of Russia, perhaps it was too large to hold itself together in the face of the greater concentration of economic power to the west of it which did not want a large Russia, so eventually historical forces were bound to fragment and oversized eastern state in the interests of the West.
  10. Some of the complaints on this thread suggest low testosterone rather than diminishing IQ. As testosterone levels decrease in males, they lose the energy and drive that is necessary to sublimate into intellectual effort in order to produce really solid, creative, or brilliant results. Before you go to the neurologist to find where your missing IQ points have gone, have your free testosterone levels measured.
  11. Usually it is not size which determines how large the population of a country can become, but the available resources, the climate, and the geography. Canada, for example, is larger than the U.S and has only one-tenth of its population because the livable area in Canada is like an elongated Chile laterally stretched along the warmer zone next to the U.S. border. Everywhere else is too cold. Similarly, in Australia, I assume population growth would be limited in the interior because so much of it is a wasteland.
  12. It always seemed odd to me that God would give humans rational minds so that they would have trouble believing in him, given the irrational stories and deceptive demonstrations he confronted them with, and that he would then punish them for their disbelief, which his 'gift' of rationality to them had conditioned them to have! Once we are painted into the corner where the only way we can save God is by resorting to arguments like 'he uses a special sense of logic,' 'the ordinary rules of morality don't apply to him,' 'he manipulates ordinary physics in some bizarre way,' 'his ways are not our ways,' 'he is too mysterious for us ever to understand,' etc., then the whole notion of God trying to communicate himself to us becomes paradoxical and self-defeating, since he must know he can't succeed, so why does he try, and why does he punish us with eternal damnation for not being stupid enough to believe proofs he knows to be inadequate in terms of the mind he has given us? All of these problems arise because a series of historical contingencies which has made a poorly thought-through idea of Bronze Age Nomads into an apparently important moral principle for 21st century thinkers of an advanced, post-industrial era. The great philosopher Immanual Kant left behind a number of disorganized papers at his death, among which have been found the comments, 'Time is like a peppercorn,' and 'What if a bird barked?' These scribblings, which for all we know might have been just private jokes and random phrases selected to try out a new quill pen, are now actually being seriously studied by professional philosophers for their hidden meaning. Shows what can happen when you take contingencies from the past too seriously.
  13. Since this problem is stated in the philosophy forum, I think it is important to distinguish the subjective idealism of Berkeley and other 18th century thinkers from the positivism which Einstein was using. Positivism holds that the fact that we can know things only by measuring them, so the reality of everything is relative to our capacity for discerning and measuring it, and everything 'real' in the world is thus always essentially a physical relation between the observer and the signal observed, is a physical fact within a world accepted as objective. Philosophical idealism holds that the entire physical world is relatively unreal compared to our minds, which we know by a kind of superior, immediate experience, while we only know the external world as an appearance of something which underlies it, analogous to our own minds, but which we can never know. In this sense idealism is profoundly anti-positivistic, since it posits the existence of things which are somehow significant for the mind (the underlying ontology of the outside world which makes it distinct from us but which we cannot directly know, since we know the world only as an appearance dependent on our own minds) without being knowable by the mind by any specifiable experient, but just as a philosophical assertion. Idealism assumes distinct subjective and objective realms where positivism just assumes that everything known is on the same level and part of the same, single experience. True, what is known within the world is scientifically measured only according to each observer with no privileged reference systems (what experiment could show them privileged?), but it is still all part of the same universally shared, objective world of experience, and for ordinary, non-scientific purposes we all experience it alike, since our common experience is informal, linguistic, and social, and need not concern itself with exact measurements.
  14. The data in the thread above don't support the idea that significant advances are being made in medicine. Lung cancer deaths are many times higher now than they were in 1950, for example, even though the major habit known to promote lung cancer, cigarette smoking, has for a long time been in decline. Someone argued earlier that lung cancer deaths might have sykrocketed since 1950 because other causes of death have declined so lung cancer has taken up the slack, but a healthy population dies not of cancer but of pneumonia, which is the characteristic disease carrying off the very old who have no other serious illness. The fact that life expectancy increases recorded almost every year (with the exception of the Spanish Flu years) since records were first kept have now ceased in the developed world is further evidence of this medical stagnation. The other day further evidence of the catastrophe emerged with the National Institute of Health announcing its 'Advancing Translational Science' (NCATS) program to provide federal subsidies to address the problem that now for the first time in the history of modern medicine there are absolutely NO new blockbuster drugs in the developmental pipeline. This is something my patent-attorney friend has been complaining to me about for years. According to him, the intellectual property laws are a mess since they were designed to respond to rapidly-appearing blockbuster drugs and now there are none. Stem cell therapies hold great promise, but you won't see anything significant in clinical practise for another half century in that field. Keep in mind that the slow pace of drug development, if the cure for cancer were found tomorrow it would be another 15 years before you could get it with a prescription. Preventative medicine is a favorite mantra of our age, but it utterly unrealistic. The major diseases producing patient suffering, morbidity, mortality, and huge financial costs simply cannot be prevented by any know means. Lupus, type 1 diabetes, 50% of renal failure cases, 50% of heart disease cases, many cases of spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer's diesease -- all these and more are simply unpreventable. Medicine tries to pretend the situation is less dismal and to shift the blame for its failures onto the general public by exaggerating the percentage of diseases which are preventable. To do this, it tries to label as preventable all diseases whose onset might be delayed or slightly influenced by medical or lifestyle interventions, even though these conditions ultimately cannot be prevented, but only feebly influenced. Typical among these is type 2 diabetes, which is powerfully genetically determined, though the onset of the disease can be influenced by diet and exercise.
  15. Probably the most famous and successful book ever to present mathematics in a popular way was Lancelot Hogben's 'Mathematics for the Million,' published many years ago. It might be useful to have a look at its approach to get some ideas.
  16. Billy Wilder, the German-born, famous American film director, always spoke perfect English, in contrast to most of his fellow German film directors who emigrated to America and always retained German accents (Stroheim, Preminger, Lemmle). He said the best way to learn a foreign language quickly, well, and easily is to live with a woman who is a native speaker of it. Since speaking the language is then an everyday necessity, and a number of personal factors make accurate expression vital, you will be amazed how well you learn compared to classroom study.
  17. Although experimental accuracy is of course important, the major problem is that the conceptual units the researchers factor the phenomenal continuum into at the outset determines whether the experiments have the possibility to be worth much, and this initial decision is a matter of having the right hypothesis, which is a theoretical issue. An example will illustrate the problem. In allopathic medicine, the foundational ontology over which induction operates are entities artificially constructed by the theory called 'diseases.' If persons A, B, C, and D are all very different in their somatotype and physiology, but they all have symptoms of essential hypertension, then they are all treated as being 'the same' since the disease entity, not the person, is the primary unit of analysis. Thus if allopathic medicine tests a new drug for its effectiveness in treating essential hypertension and it proves effective in only 5% of those taking it, the drug will be dismissed as ineffective and the 5% positive cases will be explained away as placebo effects, statistical irregularities to be eliminated when the curve is smoothed out, or failure of the double-blind process, etc. Because the focus is on the disease entity and not the individual person, if the drug has not replied to the challenge of the disease entity, it is worthless. But homeopathic medicine operates with a different foundational ontology focused on persons rather than diseases as its essential factors. If persons A, B, C. and D each have distinctly different somatotypes and physiologies, then they will each need a different treatment if they are feeling unwell for any reason. Whether they have any of allopathic medicine's ontological entities, that is, traditional 'disease things' such as essential hypertension or not is not the key issue in treating the patients successfully, since it is the person and not the disease who is treated. So if homeopaths tested the same new anti-hypertension drug described above and found that it worked only in 5% of patients, they would regard it as a complete success for the special type of individual who constituted the 5% of patients in whom the drug stopped the symptoms of essential hypertension. Instead of rejecting the drug as useless as would the allopath focused on an ontology of disease entities, he would accept the drug as good for the 5% of freckled, pale-complexioned, neurasthenic ectomorphs in whom it worked, since that was the appropriate remedy for that type of person. Now I'm not posing this example to say that homeopathic medicine is right: far from it. I'm just using it to show how the initial ontology into which data is unitized preliminary to the inductive process can totally change the significance of the experimental or investigational work done. So since theory always precedes induction, science is always going to be threatened with the uncertainties of theory-formation, and it can't just hide safely in induction.
  18. Yeah, but the OP also concluded with the additional question, "Should race, gender, ethnicity, etc. be used in college admissions?" so I was replying to that more general issue.
  19. I spent about a decade of my life in Germany, and I arrived as an absolute teutonophobe, so I was strongly disposed to like it. Unfortunately, I found the place nearly unendurable, largely because of the people, who are the most violent and rude in everyday interaction with each other that I have ever seen (and I have lived and worked in seven different countries). I found that even for a simple shopping trip, you had to armor yourself psychologically in advance to endure the browbeating you would have to experience from every shopkeeper, taxi driver, post office official, customs agent, and fellow passenger on a bus or subway. Everywhere there were memorials proclaiming that 'War Will Never Arise Again from German Soil!' but it seemed as though Hitler had split into 80 million pieces at his death and had been reincarnated as the now profoundly politically correct, left-wing, green, and pacifist German people, who had conserved and transformed Nazi hatred from wars of aggression into an everyday mode of interaction. The country was also ridiculously bureaucratic, not to promote rationality, but instead to allow the government to dominate people's lives and to slow things down for no better reason than a kind of delight in perverse inefficiency for its own sake. You can't name your children anything you want, but instead you need prior government approval; you can't move into a new town without reporting your name and address to the police within seven days; you can starve to death on a weekend because the government wants all the stores to close, even though the people don't; you can't go anywhere without official identity papers in your pocket, just so the police show off their old movie imitation by stopping you and saying, "Papers please!!" Ugh, what a suffocating place! On the plus side, the cultural level of the country was much higher than that in North America. People actually go to public lecture series in various academic topics at the Urania institute, and large numbers of people pay high prices for this experience. Television programs are also much more intellectual, and commercial interferences are minimal. University education and public healthcare are a right, not a privilege of those with money. Public transportation is excellent, and if you want to travel from a smallish town like Oberhausen to a major city like Duesseldorf at 2 AM, you can always find a quick train available for a cheap price. There are fascinating cultural treasures like palaces, museums, art galleries, and first-class academic libraries around every corner, although there is so much construction going on all the time it looks as though the war is still going on. The women are also extremely friendly, though the downside of that is that they remain extremely friendly with everyone even after you have begun a serious relationship with them. They have a distinctively attractive, vulpine look, which makes them appear sly and seductive, and their look is so emphatically German that they almost don't need a passport to establish their citizenship, and many men may find that a plus.
  20. It is certainly true that the brain and memory do start operating before birth. This is substantiated by the fact that children can learn to speak the language their mothers were exposed to during the child's gestation, even if the mothers move to a country with a different language just prior to giving birth and then the children are first challenged with learning the language originally heard in the womb later in life. But 'knowing' something and simply 'being conscious' of something seem to be two different states. Thus a dog may be aware that it is warm in the house, but he can't 'know' it is 'warm' in the same way that a language speaker armed with the concepts of temperature, seasons, external physical states vs. internal physical states, etc., can know and remember this. Similarly, an infant experiencing the trauma of birth may have sufficient intelligence to experience its sensations (a late-term fetus actually screams when aborted), but since it wouldn't have the linguistic and conceptual structure to isolate and fix the experience as a distinct 'something' called 'birth,' it probably couldn't recover and remember it once the child became a linguistic entity.
  21. Energy is energy, and it knows nothing about the political correctness principles of the current food wars. Since junk foods typically provide a lot of refined carbohydrates it easily assimilable form, they will give you an energy boost. In contrast, healthy foods like grains, vegetables, and fiber-heavy nutrition are digested very slowly and so don't help current strength levels much at all. While it is true that a bolus of concentrated carbohydrates can cause a blood sugar spike which then calls up excess insulin, which is in turn not used up as completely or as fast as the sugar is metabolized, thus causing a potential energy dip later from mild and transient hypoglycemia, this is only a clinically significant problem in hypoglycemics. Those with a normal pancreatic beta cell response will be able to smooth out the glucose curve well enough to remain essentially asymptomatic. Keep in mind that marathon runners have sometimes been recorded to have a blood sugar of 40 mg/% (normal is 80 -120) at the end of a race, and yet they were still running just before this test, so the dip from transient and mild hypoglycemia caused by carbohydrate overload in a normal individual will not be all that syptomatic.
  22. Marat

    me

    If you are able to fund your own postgraduate studies, then you can always get an MSc, even with less than stellar grades. If you don't already have sufficient private resources, it might be worth working for a year after your B.S. to accumulate the money for a self-funded MSc year. Something they never tell you when you are an undergraduate or graduate student is that once you are on the academic job market, it is considered impolite for anyone ever to ask for your transcripts, so no one ever finds out what your grades were! All they want to know is what degrees you have, what you have published, and who is recommending you. I have gotten academic teaching positions without ever even showing my degree certificates; listing my degrees myself on a piece of paper called a 'c.v.' somehow always sufficed, which seems astonishingly lax of the academic establishment, but that's the way it operates.
  23. The claim that affirmative action was to promote diversity was an innovation which arrived late in the history of affirmative action, after the Bakke decision in 1978 put limits on racial preferences in college admissions. The Court there said that since criteria other than academic excellence had long had an influence on admission decisions, then a university could reasonably use the promotion of diversity in its class as a reason to admit minorities preferentially, so suddenly affirmative action -- which had existed in one form or another since the mid-1960s -- became all about diversity, which had never been its motivation before. Earlier it had just frankly been to promote advantages for historically disadvantaged groups, at the expense of those who had the same skin color as the people who used to be advantaged by discrimination before they were born. But the diversity claim is palpably absurd, since it is nothing but stereotypic, racist thinking to imagine that the race differences guarantee that the people of each race think in a distinct way. In fact, there is nothing less diverse than a high-achieving, academic nerd from a minority group sitting next to a high-achieving, academic nerd from a non-minority group in a freshman class at an elite university. If universities really wanted diversity, they could achieve 100 times as much diversity by admitting one student from Outer Mongolia as by admitting one black from a private school in Connecticut. One problem with affirmative action is that it assumes that if a group is now disadvantaged as a statistical whole, then each of its members must be a victim of discrimination. But there are countless reasons why groups have the characteristics they do, and most have nothing to do with discrimination. I have seen a statistic that 60% of psychiatrists in the U.S. are Jewish, just as 60% of the class at Harvard is Jewish. This group has suffered discrimination, but I'm sure that discrimination did not make them psychiatrists and Harvard students. Can the effects of discrimination really propagate themselves through history so that they must now be compensated? Why are so many groups very recently victimized by discrimination (e.g., the Nisei who were interned during World War II) now spectacularly successful? If you see how quickly a single generation can squander an inherited fortune, you can also see that illegitimate advantages acquired by a group from previous discrimination also don't have much staying power without each new generation re-creating them by its own honest effort. Why was affirmative action not applied to people who had themselves benefited from it, but only to those who had the same skin color as they did and who were just now applying to advance through the social system? Thus when affirmative aciton first got underway in the 1960s, White tenured professors who had demonstrably benefited from affirmative action by being insulated from minority and female competition sat comfortably in their offices collecting their fat salaries, making politically correct speeches about how Whites should pay for the history of discrimination, but by 'Whites' they just happened to mean only those 18-year-old Whites who were applying to their universities, and not themselves. And what about the Whites who were descended from indentured servants, or exploited factory workers, or whose ancestors had been seized and made slaves of Blacks by the Barbary Pirates, who took 10% as many Whites into slavery as the Whites took into slavery from Africa? What about Whites from the wrong ethnic group in the former Yugoslavia who emigrated to the U.S. after the wars there in the 1990s, and who now have to pay for a history of discrimination they never participated in, even though 'discrimination' in their own lived-through reality meant discrimination against their own ethnicity? These Whites are also now paying for a discrimination they had nothing to do with. Given that equality is the foundational right of all liberties, a government program cannot sweep a vast group of people up into a program which denies their human equality in the name of some social good and make no attempt to establish who does not really belong in the group. Meanwhile, the vast tobacco fortunes which were accumulated from slave plantations are untouched, because that would mean harming rich people for affirmative action, rather than just the poor and the middle class who rely on the fair administration of the merit system to advance. While it is true that criteria other than academic ability have always been used in college admissions, the cultural expectation is that the essential determinant of university admission should be academic, and since race preferences violate that, they shouldn't rely on the historically minimal impact of non-academic criteria as justification. Generally, the entire logic of desert in the West assumes that each individual is responsible for himself and his own present abilities. The prize thus goes to the person fastest in the race on the day, and no adjustments are made to the result according to who had a virus most recently, who naturally has the higher hemoglobin level, who had the better trainer, who had the more spare time, or who has longer legs. Affirmative action violates this foundational notion of just desert on which our society operates, and no law can claim to be just if it denies a constitutionally-entrenched equality right by using a criterion of fairness which itself denies our most basic notion of fairness.
  24. Another reason the political dynamic is not two-dimensional is that the private sphere itself contains what are functionally 'governments,' in the form of large concentrations of capital which can control people's lives, such as employing them, downsizing them, cutting their wages, denying them healthcare coverage, dumping toxins into the environment, forming monopolies to control prices, establishing dangerous workplace conditions, spying on employee's lockers, inspecting employees for drug use, evicting them from their homes because their financial distress doesn't permit them to make the mortgage payments at the moment, charging absurdly high interest rates on credit cards and hiding the contractual terms that permit this in the fine print, etc. What political government is ever so tyrannical as these private dinosaurs roaming the society and abusing people caught in their claws? These 'private governments' also exude a type of self-protecting toxin through the social environment, which is the hegemonic thinking they impose on the society to ensure that the one power that could threaten them -- the common people acting collectively at the ballot box -- is so alienated from its true interests that it does not vote to protect itself from them. The primary hegemonic toxin protecting private capitalist 'governments' today is the notion that smaller public government means more freedom for everyone. What no one notices is that the more disempowered the only government on the scence which the people can control through their voting becomes -- mainly through everyone voting for reduced taxation -- the weaker the people become against the capitalist predators who most threaten them, and who could only have been controlled through strong government power.
  25. I once read an article in a British newspaper which described the Australian accent as "a continuous whine." It does sound like the type of intonation most native English speakers give to their speech when they want to express complaint, agony, or frustration. I suppose that might get on some people's nerves if they were used to another style of speech.
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