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kisai

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Everything posted by kisai

  1. Ironically enough,Nazi Germany was the first country to ban animal vivisection.
  2. The sword that Yeshua is referring to means an armed insurrection against the Pax Romana. It it very clear from his actions that he wished to incite a rebellion during Pasach by attacking moneychangers inside Herod's Temple. The synoptic Gospels are obviously edited to whitewash this insurgency, as key players (Pilate and Herod) are described much differently in The Antiquities of the Jews.
  3. There isn't any evidence for the existence of human conceptions, which are mostly about limiting the amount of information that our tiny primate minds can process. We speak in languages every day, but you won't find a scrap of evidence that our language is inherent in the warp and woof of the universe as a mystical kabalah. Likewise, our mathematics mostly rests upon our tendency to separate and focus on limited relationships. On the very surface of reason, for example, I could count and say I had five apples. But that's actually specious. Are the apples identical on the molecular level? Not a chance. Are they even the same species of apple? Maybe not, but the language that I use suggests that I can call them all 'apples', but that's really a lazy shorthand because I don't want to individually name every single thing I come across.. My counting of five is actually an arbitrary distinction of my limited senses and my inculcated idea that I can keep items in my possession as 'mine'. In reality there isn't five of anything in the universe.
  4. Electromagnet turning on and off in synchronization with the other magnet. I'm not sure if this would be easier to do with two electromagnets or just one. Probably easiest to do with a microprocessor with pulse width modulation driving a power circuit.
  5. Vision actually starts out visible inside the eye as cone and rod cells react with light, and then goes invisible as the neurons transmit electrical signals to the brain.
  6. What you would do is research the possible ways that an air conditioner can break down. Then you have sensors monitoring those problem areas which are connected to a microprocessor with communications back to a host server. The microprocessor samples the data X amount of minutes and sends it to the host, where X is a happy medium between how often you want to check the data and your communications bill. The host server can then check the data to see if they are within parameters or not and then e-mail you if they aren't. You could also have the server display the data to a web page if you like. The data itself doesn't have to be checked by fancy algorithms. You can just check to see if it falls within an expected range. ex: Min < x < Max.
  7. I have committed the sin of leaving my last book half-finished. Instead I read The Quantum Universe, revised 2nd ed. by Tony Hey & Patrick Walters which is a neat primer on quantum mechanics. And I read Egg, by Richard Burton, which is a children's book with marvelous photographs of various species in the act of hatching. I currently read Molecules, by Peter Atkins, which is a collection of descriptions of various molecules, where they are found in nature, what they usually react with, and their products.
  8. Tricky subject. On the one hand, a genuine questioning of scientific theory should not be thwarted. I would welcome original material that calls us to re-examine some tenets. However, rarely, if ever, does a Creationist argument come from a sincere questioning. Mostly it consists of rehashes of discredited misunderstandings of thermodynamics or lies about Lucy's knee. I do not see why Creationism should be given special treatment from any other crackpottery. If a member started posting about how everything was made according to The Lord of the Rings and used tenuous arguments like the existence of Homo floresiensis obviously points towards Hobbits and the Shire, it should be given the same respect and attention.
  9. Money is a lot of things. Mostly it is an abstraction of value and choice. I do action X, which has a value. People give me money to the extent that they value that action. X could be a good or a service. I take my money and I pick and choose things which I value: sandwiches and comic books and rent. Of course, that's just how money works at my level. It's completely different when you have a lot, a lot being that you make your money by lending it out to other institutions. A lot being that you have a good that everyone wants, like oil. It's more like a living thing that wants to get larger, devour its competition, and not care where it poops.
  10. No, mathematics does not exist. It acts as a consistent and precise language, which is useful for describing universal phenomena, for these are also usually consistent and precise.
  11. These models are all obsolete theories about the structure of the atom. They presently do not have a function, except as interesting history lessons.
  12. I'll toss in my hat and say 4 years. I believe it will take 2 years for the electrons to respond to the electric field from the positive end of the terminal and 1 year to travel towards the resistor. Once an electron hits the resistance, it should produce light, which will take an additional year to travel back towards the observer.
  13. Where are all those megafauna and homo erectus?
  14. I recall an Iain Banks novel where there were an alien race with three sexes, a male would deposit his seed into an apex-gendered egg, who would then implant the embryo into a female for gestation with its 'reversible vagina'. It seems like that's just an extra, unnecessary step, but what if there was an advantage to reproducing in this manner?
  15. If you have a nuclear reaction going on within your body, you should either seek medical attention or the Incredible Hulk.
  16. I am for artificial wombs, but then I'm also for the experimentation on the genetic code of human beings, which some may deem monstrous.
  17. Isn't instinctual behavior used to contrast with a learned (or conditioned) behavior? I'm not certain how useful it would be to differentiate a behavior that there is nothing else to differentiate it from.
  18. Ehh... There do indeed exist people who seem to be optimized for their job/hobby/sport/vocation/et cetera, but there's plenty more people who indulge in a field who are average or even bad at it. For instance, there are plenty of rotten painters, singers, and dancers, but you never really see these people because their work isn't put on display. There are plenty of people who, through the Dunning-Kruger effect consistently overrate their own skill. There are also people who believe that because they are okay or successful in one field, this intelligence spills over into another field which they know nothing about. It seems ideal to be at the top of the vocation that you choose, but unless you win the genetic/environment lottery, it probably won't happen.
  19. If the liquid in the teacup was frictionless, would the surface change?
  20. Both print and pdf format have their advantages. I prefer not having a hardcopy hanging around, taking up space, unless it's a reference book. That said, hardcopies are very useful for sneaking peeks at during traffic lights, long lines, and times where you want to conserve your battery power.
  21. Here is a picture of the vasculature of a human heart.
  22. My casual reading book at the moment is Why the West Rules For Now by Ian Morris.
  23. Thank you very much for the explanation!
  24. A friend posed a riddle. There are two boxes, one with ten tickets, and one with one hundred tickets. There is one lucky ticket in each. Do you choose one chance with the ten or ten chances with the hundred? I reasoned that with the ten out of one hundred, a person's chances are better because as you're picking tickets out of the box, there are less tickets in the box. Therefore the probability is 1/100 + 1/99 + 1/98 + 1/97 +... + 1/91 for a 10.48% chance of getting the lucky ticket. My friend says no, the probabilities are equal. Which one of us is correct? EDIT: I'm wrong because I know that this series doesn't add up to one, but I still have the feeling that since you're picking without replacement, your odds would be better.
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