GiantEvil

This doesn't really have anything to do with anybody who is likely to read this, and is wholly of a personal context which will not be explained.

I felt like declaring eternal and infinite personal bitterness, I have before, and having lived long enough, that too faded. But really, I'm just terribly sad.

Poor people do have guns sometimes. I think richie rich trying to exclusively sit on a youth formula would end up on the wrong end of the gun. It's certainly something I would fight over.

If you have a device with internet, you have educational access; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc

Google "birth rate vs education". Education is the single biggest correlate to low birth rate. Population control plan, lot's of books and computers for everyone.

Live young for a long time? Hell yea! And don't get in my way!

There are many Linux kernel OS's available, for free. I'm not sure why, but Linux systems are considered pretty virus proof. When I ran windows it was always getting blown up by malware and whatnot. I use Ubuntu now, no third party virus protection, been working great. Sometimes my Chrome settings get changed, but that's easy to fix.

It depends what you mean by love. Recently I was in love with somebody whom is no longer in my life. If I think about them and look in the mirror, I can see my pupils dilate and my pulse rate will increase. Yet I still know that the only reason that I feel this way is because natural selection has shaped myself and all other human beings to select potential mates and to pair bond until any resulting offspring are of sexual maturity. Love may feel, and does feel, extreme from a subjective point of view but the process that produces that effect is fundamentally heartless. Love does not exist without a conduit; just as noises almost certainly exist independently of our senses, the sound itself requires a listener.

 

Love as portrayed in the movies is hogwash.

I considered young Wesley to be quite foolish for his unconditional conformity to the "As you wills" of the apparently bratty Buttercup, and then there was that exquisite sword duel with Inigo Montoya. Perhaps some movies would be more realistic with a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ending?

@OP; Just because scientists seek a logical model for the human experience it doesn't mean that they are dismissive of the vitality and beauty of that experience.

The Michigan site is going fine now. That's some cool stuff, open source distributed manufacturing. The democratization of obtaining stuff. Open source desktop molecular printing is hopefully coming some day.

I just realized that I don't know any more about Nepal than its name and that it is proximal to China.

That Buddhists might drag their feet about building a giant temple complex doesn't seem that strange. Mindfulness and causality.

Maybe they will restore the area of the first shrine, no shrine, plant a tree.

Unless a crop species is a "mule" incapable of reproduction or incapable of survival outside intentional cultivation, then once introduced to an environment that species will continue to reproduce until intentionally eradicated. Do crops stray from their fields? I don't know. I suppose I should do a little research. Just as I cant say "definitely will", you can't say "definitely will not". Non modified stocks of a crop species could also be unintentionally pollinated by the GM version. From your own reference in post #24 it is unknown whether or not transgenes have spread to native Mexican maize.

Use less fertilizer. What GMO does that? I know Monsanto has engineered corn to be resistant to their own brands of pesticides.

It seems that pesticide use has gone up in conjunction with GMO use; http://www.enveurope.com/content/24/1/24

According to your own reference in post #24 it is true that "superweeds" have appeared in conjunction with GM crops.

Snakes are a good GMO metaphor. Some people hate and fear all snakes regardless, which is a shame. Rat snakes are unobtrusive and useful. Some people might be inclined to go handle just any old snake whatsoever, which is a good way to get envenomated. GMO is in and of itself merely a label, like the word "snake", and not indicative of either harmfulness or safety.

All of that aside, current GMO's have not been found to be directly harmful to consumers. So telling people they are just scared and ignorant is probably a good PR campaign. And while you are at it, blatantly spend millions to defeat regulation and labeling efforts, that looks good. Be sure to not mention the ONE GMO ever developed as a non profit humanitarian effort; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice. Because profit motives are distinctly trustworthy, and the only reason every other GMO in existence has been developed.

Apparently when a male Drosophila is exposed to certain female Drosophila pheromones it triggers an increase in a certain neuropeptide. If the male manages to mate then the neuropeptide levels return to normal. If the male doesn't get to mate then the levels stay high, in which case the male is observed to go sickly.

Sounds kind of like stress in humans, physiologically useful in the short term, long term stress responses tend to be physiologically harmful.

Who would have thought that sexual selection and mating ritual could be so complex in Drosophila, and would include oral genital stimulation.

Here's another article about Drosophila, sex, and alchoholism; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17357560

Once again neuropeptide F is implicated as a behavorial mechanism.

It seems reasonable to me to suppose that given other equal circumstances, humans who experience more satisfying sex lives probably do live a little longer than otherwise.

Add on edit; Here is a repetitive example of why any non native species introduction is not necessarily reversable; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species

I agree, political alignment is rarely based on a reasonable assessment.

One of the main problems here is the presence of for and against camps, and a dearth of careful consideration of consequence.

Fear is after all a useful genetic adaptation and doesn't necessarily imply incorrectness.

I like what this article has to say; http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/genetically-modified-foods-what-is-and-isnt-true/2013/10/15/40e4fd58-3132-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story.html

 

 

So let me suggest a simple impartiality test: Does the person or organization you trust admit to both risks and benefits? If not, chances are good that your source has a dog — financial or ideological — in the fight.

Perhaps when the male is primed to mate they don't eat? Don't get un-primed, don't eat?

Why do you imagine such a conversion would be irreversible? It seems to me we could quite easily revert back to traditional non-GMO seeds during the next planting cycle if circumstances warranted it and GMOs were deemed dangerous.

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

Here is a PDF of the text of the GMO labeling initiative from Washington State (10 pages total.); http://sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/initiatives/FinalText_285.pdf

And 21 million spent against the labeling initiative. Also the State has sued one of the largest contributing lobbying groups for violation of campaign contribution disclosure regulations. ;http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/28/food-fight-bringsinthebigbucksinwashingtonstate.html

Why wouldn't a corporation want a brand name on their product?

The insulin I use is a direct result of recombinative DNA technologies, but the prices currently charged are prohibitive exclusively from a cause of corporate greed. (I'll provide a more detailed explanation on request)

GMO and other recombinative DNA technologies are tools, and depending on the hands into which any particular tool is delivered, creation or destruction may result.

You're supposed to unwrap it before eating... DUH!

And the BLUE ones taste best.

 

 

It is oft said that, in order to love others, one must first love oneself. What is the reasoning behind this assertion?

I find that with many oft said assertions that there is no particular reasoning involved. What exactly is self love? And where do we draw the line between an altruistically useful self love and narcissism? I think that things people say is like a stopped clock, mostly wrong except for twice a day.

 

 

It seems that all types of love are at least partly selfish - even friendly love can be regarded as mutual support for the purposes of survival. How quickly we cease to love somebody once they no longer represent a viable reproduction or survival benefit!

What about Romeo and Juliet?

Yes, the concept of my own death is much less disconcerting compared to the loss of someone I know and care for. If I were to die it's not as if I could be ass'ed to even notice. However if someone I care about were to die, I got to live with that for as long as I live. Definitely solutions and positive effort are preferable to emotional flailing. And really, the problems of living are far more profound than the possibility of dying. Biomed is a worthy front against death. I would like to get into the electric vehicle market, I would hope to save some lives and grief there.

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

Memes happen in the brain, which is an entirely biological thing. My breakdown for the separation of these things would be something like hard wiring or ROM BIOS as brain, and software or data in RAM as meme.

The act of crying is biological, lacrimation. My personal preference to not do so in front of people is memetic.

I myself haven't gone near nicotine in four or five years, and am determined to never do so again. It was the devil to quit, and even a tiny bit reinitiates a degree of the addiction. I am an admitted and intentional physiologic addict of caffeine. Most other substances that I might care for I have the rare skill of being able to flirt with, without going down the "hole". I hope no one is assuming that I either advocate or disapprove of substance use as a general coping mechanism. Really it's an individuals choice, and in a general context shouldn't be considered as superior or inferior to other grief responses or coping methods.

 

I know that you are being tongue-in-cheek but, in all seriousness, the administration of drugs - including alcohol - is unfortunately not a long-term solution. In fact, alcohol may make one even more depressed (once the initial senselessness passes) and has, as you will know, detrimental effects on health.

 

Something along the lines of this Buddhist approach is what I was envisaging instead:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-03sWBmfLBs

 

"People, long before they die, they are dead, out of fear of death"

Actually, I was providing an example of an approach to bereavement that to my experience is common in America. As to the utility and consequences? Well I guess that's a whole other thread (where I would argue that drugs are natural to the human experience, that we've evolved with drugs as an ubiquitous element in various selection mechanisms, mechanisms which may be either helpful or detrimental to an individual). To my mind, bereavement has memetic elements and also biological ones; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8893324

While Buddhism offers some excellent meta-methods for consciously altering our memetic responses, what are and how do we best respond to the biological realities of bereavement? And how does it effect the social structure of a group unit to increase or decrease memetic diversity?

And I see that fear has been mentioned. How much of fear as a bereavement response is memetic and how much biological? How are we defining and quantifying fear? Also, depending on the Buddhist you ask, mind may either be dependent or independent of the brain, hence altering the perceived nature of death.

And we have yet to mention the word "suffering", which may or may not be contextual to any particular death.

What would your second guess be?

And who cares? The density isn't the issue.

Oop, the atomic weight of gold is 196.9655. It was never a guess, tiny print periodic table.

You brought up density.

Yes, but the legitimate energy source has nothing to do with that bollocks about lasers.

 

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

And, it can't have a lot to do with density (as claimed) because there are plenty of elements denser than thorium- gold is probably the best known.

 

This whole thread is scoring red hot on the BS meter.

Well here's the backup for the part about lasers; http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v106/i16/e162501

I looked up the Atomic weight for thorium, it is 232.0381

The atomic weight for gold is 107.8682

Thorium is in the Actinide series, which are all dense radioactive metals and include uranium and plutonium.

So being dense isn't a cause of thoriums properties, but it does correlate.

The website I referenced in my last post (currently a 404 error) is certainly pure bollocks, a scam or just cranky.

This blog will explain; http://granades.com/2011/09/16/in-which-i-use-scientific-reasoning-to-doubt-the-thorium-powered-car/

While there are thorium reactor designs on paper, and theoretically a thorium laser is possible, these things do not yet exist as prototypes.

So my surmise of thoriums legitimacy needs to be down graded to maybe someday.

 

 

The facts remain the same - my question is, is it possible or wise to alter the response to those events, so as to reduce the suffering of all involved?

I believe it's called mood altering substances, the commonly used one in the case of a wake would be alcohol.

Yep, I'm there! Apistevist, I like it! I hope it catches on.

And BionicDance is cool too!

 

 

Notice: Laser Power Systems is developing a 250Kw power systems “that is of a size that “could” be put in cars and light trucks” however LPS in NOT working on putting the systems in a car! The car that is pictured on most internet blogs is a 2008 Cadillac concept car (never built) and has nothing to do with LPS. Please get it right or don’t put it up on the web. Thank You LPS Management.

http://www.laserpowersystems.com/

Other than (Surprise!) the blogosphere jumping the gun a little and displaying their usual Michio Kakuesque disregard for facts, thorium power seems to be a very legitimate energy technology.

Totalitarian corporatocracy is no longer needed for capitalist ventures.

I give you Kickstarter; http://www.kickstarter.com/

Not that the current system doesn't sometimes produce the generally beneficial;

My understanding is that EM radiation is quantized according to the Planck constant. Which Plancks constant is really tiny, so considered macroscopically the EM spectrum might as well be a continuum.

It's not at all as simple as good gene-bad gene; http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110428123931.htm