Bill Angel

 

As far as i know the soft tissue does not contain retrievable DNA and may not be the original soft tissue any more than the fossil bone is the original bone.

 

A zoo like environment is probably closest to how it would be kept depending on how well it would socialize to humans.

I realize that you are asking an ethical rather than a scientific question, but I would guess that it would have to be kept in a sterile bubble with filtered air, as exposure to modern infectious diseases would be fatal to the creature.

I don't understand the hate towards religion in this thread. Scientists should be respectful of religious people since there is religious people who have no interest in science but still have an interest in being part of a group. Hence following a religion serves them even though they don't believe in everything about that religion. All in all.. Religion is excellent form of free therapy.

When I was a youngster I played the violin in the school orchestra. During the holidays we played Christmas music and other seasonally appropriate selections like Jingle Bells. As you suggest, this activity filled a genuine need we children had for group participation in an enjoyable activity. Religious beliefs didn't really enter into it. This was back before Christmas music in public schools became a contentious issue.

See: Concerned parents label elementary schools holiday concert a form of bullying

http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/20/concerned-parents-label-elementary-schools-holiday-concert-a-form-of-bullying/

That reminds me of the end of Tim Minchin's "Storm":

Tim Minchin said

Isn't this enough?

 

Just this world?

 

Just this beautiful, complex

Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?

How does it so fail to hold our attention

That we have to diminish it with the invention

Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?

If you're so into Shakespeare

Lend me your ear:

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,

To throw perfume on the violet is just "really" silly

Or something like that.

I agree with his sentiments, and would add a quote from Richard Feynman:

[The Big Bang] is a much more exciting story to many people than the tales which other people used to make up, when wondering about the universe we lived in on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable. And, so, whats the wonder in physics to me is that its revealed the truth is so remarkable.

 

I would like to submit a question for consideration:

 

The question: Dark matter is supposed to interact with gravity. Does that mean dark matter is sucked into black holes? And are there dark matter black holes?

 

You don't like the educational system? Well I'm beggining my scientific education in psychology to help make a better educational system. I've already made a thread about it but my system would involve emotional therapy, building self esteem, and actually teaching people of their "subconscious."

 

However things take time, Martin Luther King didn't live to see his dream along with many dreamers before him fold out to the way it is now dealing with racial discretions in this country.

Is the analysis of dreams something that can be done scientifically? If the brain is a machine like a computer, then it would seem that any activity that it engages in, including dreaming, should be amenable to scientific analysis.

 

Dreaming has been described as an information processing activity that functions to match new experience with representations of past events already stored in long-term memory. ~ Lillie Weiss, Dream analysis in psychotherapy, 1986, pp. 32-33, Psychology Practitioner Guidebooks, New York: Pergamon Press.

University of Chicago physicists have succeeding in creating a vortex knot, a feat akin to tying a smoke ring into a knot. Linked and knotted vortex loops have existed in theory for more than a century, but creating them in the laboratory had previously eluded scientists.

 

http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2013/03/04/vortex-loops-could-untie-knotty-physics-problems

We can multiply Eq. (2) by M₂ to have it, if you like.

 

 

If an external force is time dependent (a moving wall), then F(t) acts during a short period and transfers some energy to M₁. This energy does not depend on presence or absence of oscillator in this set (1), (2). On the orher hand, the oscillator also gains energy due to acceleration of particle-1. Does it look like energy is conserved?

Does the situation you are examining resemble that of a driven oscillator?

See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/%E2%80%8Chbase/oscdr.html

I have two equations: [latex]M_1\ddot{x}_1=F,\qquad (1)[/latex]

and [latex]\ddot{x}_2+\omega^2\cdot x_2=\epsilon\cdot\ddot{x}_1.\qquad (2)[/latex]

The first equation says that particle [latex]M_1[/latex] can be affected with some force [latex]F[/latex] and the second one describes the oscillation amplitude variations if the first particle is affected by a force. Oscillations take some energy. How to complete the first equation to take into account this energy loss? Thanks.

If the particle [latex]M_1[/latex] appears in the second equation, and it interacts with a particle [latex]M_2[/latex] via that equation, should not the masses of particles [latex]M_1[/latex] and [latex]M_2[/latex] also appear in the second equation?

It's been a long time since I saw the movie, but wasn't the hoax claim politically motivated?

Perhaps, in the sense that the space traveller's (Jodie Foster's character) testimony was called into question and discredited in the context of a Congressional hearing by a Congressman (played by James Woods). The purported Congessonal criticism could also have been politically motivated as several scenes incorporate Bill Clinton as President lauding the scientists for their success in decoding the message from space and then building the device to transport someone out and back through wormholes. But Jodie Foster's character was supposed to a radio astronomer with a PhD from Cal Tech, who could not explain at a Congressional hearing why scientists were certain that the signals originated from 26 light years away and not from relatively close proximity to Earth.

I happened to recently watch the movie Contact which starred Jodie Foster. I noticed what I thought was an irritating gaffe in the plot. At the end of the story the possibility is presented that the First Contact purportedly established with an alien society was a hoax perpetrated by a wealthy individual to serve his own greedy corporate purposes. The First Contact was supposedly a signal received from a source located 26 light years away in the constellation Vega. If the purported First Contact was indeed a hoax, then the implication was that the scientific community was fooled into believing that the signal establishing First Contact (which therefore was actually of local origin) had originated in a radio source 26 light years distant. But it would seem to be impossible to fool scientists on this matter, as astronomers have very accurate ways of measuring the distance from the Earth of stars and other sources of radiation. A perpetrator of a hoax could never fool scientists on this issue. In the context of most science fiction this issue would be a minor gaffe. But the story and movie originated with Carl Sagan, who would have been expected not to have made such a gaffe, considering that the credibility of whether First Contact was even established becomes a central issue at the end of the story.

Then there's the attitude that being scientifically illiterate is not only OK, but something in which one can take pride. That opinions are just as good as facts.

Described by Asimov: Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

 

Society as a whole does not value science, so it's not surprising that science education is not a priority.

One area of public attitudes towards science that may deviate from that assessment is in the area of health care. There are a number of medically oriented internet sites at which people query members of the user community for information about medical treatments for various diseases. For the afflictions I am personally most familiar with (psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis), fellow sufferers are looking for information on what courses of treatments have proven to be most successful. Science is based on "peer group review", and for these sufferers their peer group is other persons that are afflicted with their disease.

I was a graduate student in chemical physics 30 years ago, so I'm uncertain as to

whether my insights about education from that period would still be of relevance. But someone else's would be. It's worth checking out the article titled Popular Misconceptions about the Feynman Lectures on Physics

Also,here is a picture of Feynman with the undergraduate Cal Tech students.

The problem isn't the criminals. The problem is our diets are lacking in fat soluble vitamins. Fat soluble vitamins are scientifically known to stimulate the production of hormones and neurotransmitters in the required amounts. How many people in the world eat their leafy greens for Vitamin A/K and get sun exposure for Vitamin D?

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked with anxiety and depression.

There also seems to be a correlation between anxiety, major depression and criminal behavior. So it seems plausible that if someone improved their diet to eliminate a vitamin D deficiency, it could also have the effect of reducing their level of anxiety and episodes of major depression, factors contributing to criminal behavior. Such individuals that were drug abusers would of course also need to stop drinking alcohol and snorting cocaine for any improvement in their diet to have a positive impact on their behavior.

Any punishment is unusual if the law does not mandate it, as soon as the law mandates it it become standard practice and quite usual. All punishments are cruel otherwise they are not punishments by definition. So all and all that is quite a silly thing to write in your constitution.

If one looks at the history of punishments in Europe before the drafting of the US Constitution, it's easy to understand why the drafters of the US Constitution included that clause.

Castration also causes sterility which, considering the inability of prisoners to raise their children, may be an added bonus.

Violent criminals destroy their lives and the lives of others, is society not morally obliged to save them from themselves via castration?

Castration sounds like one of those "cruel and unusual punishments" that would be held to be unconstitutional.

Another class of computer game that remains popular is the strategy game, such as chess. The limiting factor in a computer chess game is how fast the computer can perform algorithmic searches in the background looking for its best move, and not how fast the computer can render the graphics of the pieces.

Imagine space as a continuous mass that behaves like a fluid. This is not a collection of particles, but one continuous "particle" that encompasses nothing short of the entire universe. This mass is not stationary, it is moving. The flow of this movement creates eddies, and the eddies eventually begin to create whirlpool-like vortices. These vortices open up, creating "holes" in the mass. Like any other vortex found in nature, the opposite ends of each vortex swirl in opposite directions. Clockwise swirl could be considered positive charge and anti-clockwise swirl is negative charge. The result is a pair of charged sub-atomic particles that are interacting with each other at all times, no matter how much "space" separates them. This accounts for the FTL reactions seen in quantum physics experiments...electrons that have moved a great distance from their positrons.

A basic property manifested in the behavior of matter and energy is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I don't see how your model could incorporate this principle, as it appears to be based on the concepts of classical fluid dynamics, which apply to large collections of particles on the macroscopic level.

A a point of clarification, the writer of that quote is a woman.

I came across the following posting at another website, a posting that I wished to respond to.

An atheist or agnostic would just laugh at this person's thinking. But besides being unscientific it could be exploited by unscrupulous individuals (and perhaps has been) who couple such thinking with the idea that certain individuals (or members of some minority group in the community) spread or are a source of "negative energy".

Here is the statement:

I would not let ANYONE I know mess with any of this spiritism without first praying for spiritual connection and protection. Or praying after you have been exposed to negative energy. It is deceptively manipulative and I don't recommend that to people because it is unpredicable and can cause rashes of deaths or sudden disruptions in relationships for no foreseen reason. So it is best to be safe and pray with someone who knows how to pray to remove that kind of energy and influence from your mental and spiritual space!

Please do not dabble with this stuff, even a little bit has messed some of my friends up. One friend had about 9 people die around him within a year and people told him to stop whatever he was into because it became obvious negative energy was circulating. Please be careful to avoid this kind of energy, and don't hesitate to call my friend and ask for help to clear your mind and emotions of any confused or mixed thoughts.

"It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out,..."

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there'll be a catastrophe,...A little bubble of what you might think of as an 'alternative'

universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us," says Lykken, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.

 

One issue what should be mentioned is what might be the state of the universe billions of years from now.

 

Some cosmologists have speculated that ultimately the accelerating expansion of the universe will rip apart all matter.

See the section in this article about "The Big Rip"

http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/dark_energy/de-fate_of_the_universe.php

 

So if a little bubble of an alternative universe appears and expands at the speed of light, it wouldn't seem to matter much if the space in OUR universe is already expanding at a speed many times that of the speed of light. Also, this alternative universe bubble can't wipe out our universe if our universe has already been wiped out by having all of its atoms ripped apart by the expansion of space!

In the article Why We Love Beautiful Things

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-we-love-beautiful-things.xml

The author states

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals - irregular, self-similar geometry - occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals - not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder - home is where the genome is.

If as this writer asserts "beauty is in the genes of the beholder", then concepts of beauty might be encoded in the genome of other primates. It's just another way to say that certain patterns resonate in our minds as attractive, and similar patterns instinctually resonate in the minds of other primates.

Symmetry need not be as simple as that of a flower. There is also fractal symmetry.

A lot of the aesthetic appeal in nature, for example the beauty of a mountain range or a snowflake can be understood as an expression of fractal symmetry.

In any case I like the aesthetics of this video, which is a rendering of fractal symmetry.

Here is another interesting paper:

Symmetry perception in humans and macaques

The Summary from the paper is shown below:

In summary, the approach taken by Sasaki and colleagues is exciting, and opens several promising research avenues. First, by establishing a correlation between psychophysical perception and neural activity in humans, the study paves the way for a deeper understanding of the relationship between symmetry perception and its underlying neural basis. Second, the parallel investigation of symmetry perception in humans and macaques lays the groundwork for future physiology studies directed at a better understanding of the cellular mechanisms that are involved in this fundamental perceptual ability

My belief is that the perception of beauty is closely related to the perception of symmetry. For example, which of these two flowers would the viewer consider to be more "beautiful"? Most people I think would select the top tulip as more attractive, compared to the bottom one. FYI: the second tulip actually grows that way, it is not diseased.

 

 

Red Tulip

This is a Tulip!

 

This, for me, gives rise to a fundamental question; are we the only species that can appreciate the beauty of the world around us? Does the appreciation of art/aesthetics stem from intelligence or is it innate in higher life forms?

 

 

Interesting essay on Animal Aesthetics:

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=243#FN54link

To quote from this article:

Yet there is strong evidence that the females do perceive the beautiful as such. With peacocks, for instance, a slight variation of the beautiful ornaments can already reduce and even ruin the chances of mating. So there is an extremely close correlation between the female preference and the elements constitutive for beauty, which more than suggests that precisely the elements constitutive of beauty are perceived and esteemed. If, as sociobiologists assume, they were to be grasped as indications of something else (fitness), it would be extremely unlikely that precisely the minor modifications which lead to failure with respect to beauty (and beauty is a precarious phenomenon) should cause equally intense failure in the different order of fitness. Thus, according to all evidence, it is indeed the beauty characteristics that are perceived and positively reacted to.

In other words, the author is asserting that female peacocks respond to the aesthetic beauty of the male, and select mates based on this criterion.

Every summer Baltimore hosts a Cosplay (costumed roleplay) convention called Otakon.

Here's a shot I took of a fellow who attended as the Star Wars character Boba Fett:

Boba Fett