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kisai

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Everything posted by kisai

  1. If I don't get a lightsabre and/or magic powers, I really don't care if it's the apocalypse or not.
  2. Oh, I agree it's entirely possible to create a device that would hack into your neurons and give you sensory information that goes beyond what humans can experience. This isn't going to happen anytime soon, not that fooling a neuron is difficult, but that your brain as an infant goes through a period of plasticity where it is "Use it or lose it" time. So if you're born missing an eye, the resources for that missing eye can be commandeered by your good eye. Beyond this infancy period, it is very difficult for the brain to readjust to a different way of operating, so a restored eye would probably still be blind. To go beyond this limit may be possible if you could revert portions of the brain into stem cells and then retrain it, but we are so far into science fiction territory here... As for your collection of points, you're going to have to look for evidence in animals to help support your theories.
  3. You're going to have to identify which organs act as receptors for EMF beyond visible light. I haven't seen any evidence that humans could detect radio waves, for example. Neurons themselves trigger on a chemical change within their cellular structure (lots of neat stuff with keeping an imbalance of ions with the help of a pump that I shan't get into), not on an arbitrary exposure to an EMF. I thought you were implying that neurons themselves could convey information about frequency, when all they are are more analogous to pulsed switches which trigger on a stimulus, and its amazing the way vision works to take all of that pulsing and turn it into a picture.
  4. This is an error. Neurons cannot transmit frequency. All they can do is pulse. More pulsing means more stimulus, not higher/lower frequency from the exterior stimulus. For example, the cones in your eyes are excited by light at a range of frequencies (and you have three different types to capture this). When they transmit, they do not convey frequency. They just pulse. Your brain sorts out this pulsing to mean to see such an object in such a color range, but it doesn't actually know what frequency of light that is, and that information is not conveyed. To illustrate my point: humans don't have a cone for yellow. The color yellow stimulates both the red and green cones, but not the blue. So red and green pulse, and your brain takes that info, and turns red-green and not-blue into its own color: yellow. Your idea of how smell works is wrong. Yes, smell is keyed to an olfactory bulb, but that receptor twinges neurons that stimulate memory, so you recall what you're smelling. Once again, neurons cannot relay information about a frequency. They can only pulse, which is unrelated to the exterior stimuli.
  5. I'm trying to think of a society which tolerates hacking up your neighbors with an axe, or burning the village to the ground, or going to the chief's house and taking a crap on the dinner table, but I'm going to fail.
  6. One could probably jot down 20 different clauses about science, ranging from a sentence to a paragraph, all true, and still not touch upon a full answer. I think the briefest I could get is that it is a method of knowing things, provided that those things are able to be rationalized and assumed consistent. If you want to believe things are inconsistent, for example, Flying Spaghetti Monsters wrote the universe into existence a moment ago, then science may not be for your tastes. If you want to believe that things cannot be rationalized, that everything will be tinged with a solipsism that denies even a partial knowledge of things, then science may not be for you. Given that mankind has reaped the most rewards from science, that it has consistently upgraded our standard of living from mud huts to landing on the Moon, it is our greatest treasure.
  7. kisai

    Saint Paul

    Paul's a cult leader. Don't trust them.
  8. Do you possess knowledge of genetic markers for these traits? It just struck me that if you had the power to make only highly moral, intelligent, polite, altruistic, and humanitarian people breed with one another, the human race would go extinct.
  9. I agree. Religion is a method of interacting with the universe, one which anthropomorphizes natural phenomena. By treating nature as a person, hopefully it can be bargained with, placated, and reduce events of probability (storms, drought, famine, disease). Religion used to be intrinsically linked to the ruling classes, who would favor a group of priests. There is an advantage to keeping social cohesion, mankind, the naked ape, survives much better in socialized groups than he ever could as a loose collection of individuals. Religion is practiced worldwide. I would be amiss not to speculate positively that religion has contributed to an evolutionary advantage, in lieu of rational thinking and a commitment to ethics, and decent government.
  10. Off the top of my head: 1) Power losses. It is very inefficient to transfer electricity at low voltages. Edison's original plans for providing DC current for the city of New York would have required generators every mile or so. The further you lived from the generator, the greater your losses. and the less voltage to your house. This originally would have been too terrible a problem, given that the only loads for homes in those days were primarily electric and a few motors, but it would be a difficult problem today with computers, which really don't like unstable sources. 2) DC cannot be stepped up and down like AC can using transformers, so you cannot transfer power at high voltages, then transfer it to homes directly without wasting a great deal of it,
  11. Highly suspect there's a negative correlation between television watching and intelligence.
  12. You certainly are taking a roundabout trip to wealth and fame. Two weeks should have been more than enough for you to successfully proven your telekinesis in a controlled environment to scientists. Are you in contact with an academic or scientific institution yet?
  13. My university( UC Santa Cruz) used Giancoli's Physics for their physics track. I find it to be decent, if a little glossy in advanced areas. The problems are mostly average in difficulty. There are some textbooks with better mindtwisters if you like the physics equivalent of red hot chicken wings.
  14. It isn't a difficult question to answer at all: when faced with evidence that supports a hypothesis once thought unlikely or contrary, a rational person changes his or her mind. You cannot sue someone for acting professionally. A therapist would be seriously amiss if he or she automatically gave credence to a likely delusion.
  15. Public health, which includes determining who is psychologically sane or not, is statistical in nature. As of such, it is pretty successful in diagnosing people who have common conditions, and will usually fail at identifying outliers. If I entered into a psychologist's office and told him or her that I was being hunted by a secret society that thought I was a supernatural being, the psychologist should first highly suspect that the more probable condition, that I'm acutely paranoid and delusional, might be the correct diagnosis, and not that my highly unlikely claims are indeed true.
  16. If someone asks me about my morals, I tell them I'm a resurrectionist. "Oh, so you're a Christian?" "No, I steal dead bodies for science."

    1. Moontanman

      Moontanman

      Does it pay well?

    2. kisai

      kisai

      About sixpence and a farthing.

  17. That's pretty universal to all cultures. If you examine Egyptian mythology, for instance, the ruler of the Gods changes according to which city rules Egypt at the moment. The Zhou dynasty legitimized their rule by making huge bronze pots and saying Heaven and the ancestors favored them because of their pots. The creation of the Daibutsu, a giant iron Buddha, was originally a scheme to keep the Emperor in power during a time of famine and disease. Why even today, in Atlanta, Georgia, you can switch on the radio to Christian Fundamentalist programming. Among their prayers is an sincere plea for America's leaders to listen to and implement God's will, i.e. act according to the mandates of the religion.
  18. I can only think of one human in literature that accomplished apotheosis: Ganymede, Zeus' cupbearer. Zeus basically thought he was hot and kidnapped him. I can recall other stories of ascension to divinity, but there's usually the element of being a demigod or related to a god first.
  19. What is the process in which "immortalized" DNA is recognized and preferred by "aged" DNA?
  20. If you had a boat, and you placed the boat on a body of water with waves which, as far as you knew was random, and you walked away from it, went to a pub and had a drink, A person asks you "Where's your boat?" You answer "Well, I don't rightfully know because I'm not observing it. Since these waves are occurring, they move the boat, I can't say exactly where the boat is, but I can give a range, given how the waves move the boat and how much time passes, of statistically where it might be." The person looks at you and says "We must be living in a computer simulation!" Does that follow?
  21. I saw Randi in the Dragoncon parade last year in Atlanta. Judging by the state of his clothes, I would be very skeptical if he possessed a million dollars.
  22. Well, you have a choice. You could go to an academic or scientific institution, demonstrate what you can do for them, and they'll be terribly excited and you'll become a huge celebrity instantaneously after they verify your talent. You could then go around the country and show people your talent which will easily rake in millions of dollars. You can let scientists perform experiments on you and try to detect what you are doing and if they figure it out, it'll basically revolutionize the world as a free energy source becomes available. Gas and petrol prices will drop, the environment will improve, and I wouldn't be surprised if you wanted to run for POTUS, if you are an American citizen, you could win it. Or you could try to insist you have a gift on a forum without providing any evidence. I look forward to seeing you in the papers!
  23. They are both really just ways for human beings to chunk strings of binary numbers. Your computer will only deal with 0's and 1's.
  24. There's the wonderful branch of science called epigenetics, which studies how the environment and genes interact, often in a very complex way. You may inherit a gene which is never expressed due to the environment (and vice versa). Even identical twins, who share the same genes, may differ slightly due to different environmental factors in an essentially shared environment.
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