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Skye

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Posts posted by Skye

  1. If you want to know where science comes from, I recommend The New Organon, by Francis Bacon. Or A Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes, if you don't mind obnoxious Frenchmen.

     

    Other philosophers that might be of particular interest to the scientist or science enthusiast are Leibniz (probably better known as the simultaneous inventor of calculus with Isaac Newton) and Spinoza (of the frequently invoked by Einstein). But honestly, they might be more of the "don't try this at home" variety for curious laymen.

     

    Guys like Kant, Hegel, Nietsche, etc. are going to be more important to philosophy generally, but I don't know they could really be approached without a background in all the earlier philosophers they are responding to.

     

    Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein is another one that's relevent to science.

  2. Syke; Am I correct in assuming any person, not from Australia, is responsible for paying the full expense of their medical service?

    To be honest I don't know much about it, although Australia has reciprocal arrangements with other countries with universal health care to provide basic care to their cizizens in Australia. But I'll assume aside from that that you're right.

     

    In the US, if a Medical Service, wishes to participate in the revenue from our Medicare/Medicaid (1/3rd the total) they MUST attend to any person, walking/ambulanced into (Emergency Room) at no cost if necessary. We are NOT landlocked, with additional access by millions each year for many reason, visiting, work visa or illegally in the Country, all basically covered for attention. Remember near 20 Million are said to be in the US, from many places and can access accordingly, to say nothing of border crossings (legal), for the sole purpose of receiving medical assistance. Mexico has 50+ million folks, Canada another 31 million or so and their are about 22 Million in all of Australia. Texas alone with 25 Million or so people, may have 5 Million in this group and Florida, even today is giving needed health care to thousands from Haiti. All this and much more gets added to the cost per of actual citizens, and for the most part so do there statistical results.

    Right, but how much does this cost? 20 million is a lot of people, and would cost a lot of dollars, but it is less than 7% of the US population and they are only getting emergency treatment so the contribution would be some fraction of that. The US apparently spends 132% more a person than Australia on health care, so while I wouldn't completely discount it, it can only play a minor role.

     

    If you reply, I'll go further tomorrow; The cost of labor, medications, diagnostic equipment and all things related to health care facilities, including maintenance, especially through modernizing, additions or new facilities are extremely costly in many places like our Northeastern States, where labor unions are used and/or anyplace permits are very costly for 100 reasons. Another thing, maybe from a biased opinion, much of that service these countries supply at a lessor cost, come from equipment and medication provided from the States. If you were to take, N/S Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and through in Utah to get the population near Australia or Canada, there statistics, including cost, life expectancies, infant mortality, may rival any of the highest rates.

    I think these are better lines of thought in terms of figuring out where the money is going.

  3. This is a diagram of health care spending vs life expectancy for some nations.

     

    http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.html

     

    The US is at the bottom end of the developed nations for life expectancy, but it isn't separate from them. I don't think it's reasonable to say that the US necessarily has the worst care based on this outcome, there's a fair amount of variability in the outcomes for other developed nations and the US could simply be the victim of poor social factors. On the other hand US spending is completely distinct from other developed nations. They range between US$2500 and $4500 a person a year, the US spends over $7000.

     

    This isn't necessarily a bad thing, health care is arguably one of the better services to spend your money on. Yet given that the US spends so much more and doesn't seem to have so much better, perhaps even worse, outcomes than developing nations, it makes you wonder where the money is going and whether it could be better spent.

  4. I think you're right, the critic from Amazon phrased it badly. I think the circular logic argument would more correctly be:

     

    "Creatures with adaptive traits are selected."

    "Adaptive traits cause evolution to select them."

     

    It may sound circular, but since that isn't the only argument for natural selection, then the point is moot. The fact that adaptive traits make a creature more successful in surviving to reproduce is the overwhelming argument.

     

    It's not circular, it's iterative.

     

    Anyway they provide an explanation for the book:

     

    Accordingly, if natural selection disappears from biology, its offshoots in other fields seem likely to disappear as well. This is an outcome much to be desired since, more often than not, these offshoots have proved to be not just post hoc but ad hoc, crude, reductionist, scientistic rather than scientific, shamelessly self-congratulatory, and so wanting in detail that they are bound to accommodate the data, however that data may turn out. So it really does matter whether natural selection is true.

     

    That's why we wrote our book.

     

    Which boils down to: since natural selection is misused by pop psychologists it must be wrong!

     

    Idiots.

  5. For my chemistry class, I have to make a fictional news report in regards to

     

     

    At first I had a brilliant idea of me doing a news report of beavers or some other aquatic animal found dead because they drank the water that was containmented with fertilizer, now I'm starting to have my doubts, are fertilizers able to seriously harm or kill small animals? And if so, what is the most dangerous kind of fertilizer?

     

    Fertiliser isn't itself all that dangerous. However run off can cause cyanobacteria or dinoflagellate blooms. These produce toxins that can kill people and animals.

     

    Cyanobacteria are also called blue-green algae, and that cyanobacteria blooms are often called algal blooms, despite cyanobacteria being bacteria rather than algae. However dinoflagellates are actually algae.

  6. npts, I think you're answering a different question. You're right that phase changes are defined thermodynamically, and I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you. However the question seemed to be about the behaviour of solids, and ways that they are similar to liquids.

  7. lucaspa was the only one who answered the question directly.

     

    selfless acts are good for the group, but bad for the unit or element.

    is that why selflessness should kept as a mutation? it seems to me some are saying yes.

    but we forgot that natural selection keeps the helpful traits around because they help their carriers, it's like the law of genes and natural selection is:"if it kills you, it dies with you"..

    yes selflessness raises the groups survival rate, but how does it maintain itself in the group? the selfless should die and selflessness should die with them, but that's not the case..

     

    lucaspa cleared it out by building on what sysiphus said, that the genes of selflessness are ok with you dead, as long as on the other hand of your death MORE selflessness gene's survive, so the selflessness gene in one element or unit helps the other genes of selflessness in other genes of selflessness in other units of the group, which actually make that gene(or allele) more effective in spreading than other genes which rely on their carrying unit to spread.

    so if five carriers of a longer neck for food out of ten units were in danger of death, they will die and the long neck gene will lose 50% of it's capacity.

    if the same scenario was repeated for selfless gene carriers then one or two of the ten would sacrifice themselves for the group and the selfless gene would lose 10-20% of its capacity.

     

    or the other five would jump in and they would all die out, making selfless ness differ from blatent stupidity by being combined with some intelligence.

     

     

    well, that makes things alot much clearer, though it doesn't answer the core question, the first time ever the selflessness gene was introduced, how did it spread from one element to another and a third till it had enough to compensate its self destruction?

     

    if normal genes spread through groups at a linear rate by reproduction, and the selfless gene maintain and spread itself through a group exponentially through sacrificial behavior (just like y=x^2) then how did y reach the increasing interval, when it has to start from zero?(and pass through x<1, which is decreasing)

     

    The thing to note here is that altruism towards closely related members of a social group is only a step away from caring for and protecting offspring. So it's not starting with "zero" altruism. It's starting with self-sacrificing behaviour towards offspring and extending that to members of a social group. Also, social animals often police each other so that selfish behaviour is discouraged. Even worker bees will physically punish other workers for selfish behaviour.

  8. There are several methods to provide the initial chemical compound to work with. Natural products are compounds derived from nature, mainly organic molecules used for defence from being eaten. Given that biochemical pathways that produce classes of molecules are known, and the apparent need for defence can be estimated, organisms can be collected from nature with a reasonable chance of finding defence molecules. Also since the class of molecules are known, generally molecules can be isolated based on what properties you'd expect them to have. Aside from that you have combinatorial chemistry, where huge numbers of different molecules are produced. These will generally be based on known drugs so you have an idea of how they are supposed to work. There's also the goal of being able to work from the other direction, using models of the active sites of a protein that you wish for a molecule to interact with to provide the basis for the design of new drugs. This is still something in development though.

     

    Once molecules have been isolated it's a process of elimination based on how effective they are against side effects caused. For example, a number of compounds will be screened against cancer cells of various types, the ones which kill the cancer will then proceed to a next stage which might be the side effects caused in rats and so on up until a drug is ready for human trials. The initial stages are often caried out in universities, once you get to the latter stages, especially human trials, the money required and money to be made, means that private companies are more involved.

  9. There seems to me to be three main issues here:

     

    1. The tendency of industries to consolidate in free market conditions.

     

    2. The interconnected nature of the finance industry.

     

    3. The uneven distribution of risk within the finance industry.

     

    The second two points are what this figure is looking at, but I think the first one is most important.

     

    If we assume continued consolidation then the above figure could realistically contain three or four companies at some point. The failure of any company would be almost impossible for the industry to withstand or for the US government to be able to bail or buy out. The failure of larger, less risky companies is less likely. However it is a likelihood, and over a long enough time scale failure would (probably) occur. So even with an even distribution of risk due to well thought out regulation the system would be arguably be more prone to catastrophe, unless the process of consolidation is resisted or ideally reversed.

  10. The lagging unemployment rate could easily drag retail sales back down again over the six months. So there's some speculation that there will be a W-shaped recession, with an apparent recovery for a few months, then some poor results for a few months, then the actual recovery starting March-ish next year.

  11. In my opening statement I said " The evolution of life on Earth of the simpler to the more complex organisms." The numbers of domains is not what I am trying to discuss. My intention is to explain how the process of simpler organisms have evolved into more complex organisms at an accelerating rate.

    The problem then is, what is complex?

     

    You're assuming that we are complex, and in many ways we are, but in other we are simple. Metabolically, like I said in that other thread, for example. So you have to specify what you mean by complex. Is it the structure of the cell? Multi-cellular life? Behaviour? Senses?

     

    As far as a mechanism of how complexity emerges, this has been studied and thought about a great deal. Stephen Jay Gould was good at explaining this sort of thing, here's an interview with him on the subject giving his view:

     

    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/gould_11-26.html

    The fact that archea emerged along with bacteria in the primorial oceans is not surprising. I have a question for you. Did all eukaryotes that are alive today evolve from bacteria ? ...Dr.Syntax

    Eukaryotes have features of both archaea (nuclear chromosomes) and the prokarya (cell membrane and plasmids, like mitochondria and chloroplasts). So there must have been some degree of mixed parentage, such as fusion, symbiosis or a sort of failed attempt to engulf and digest another cell. Also, genetic elements from viruses are common in the genomes of eukaryotes.

  12. The mechanism for generating a lot of the change is errors in replication, some of which are bad, and too many bad ones can't be tolerated. Also complex multicellular life control these mutations to prevent cancers. So the ideal state is a best compromise between the bad effects of some mutations and the need to adapt to a changing environment. And note that since the environment varies, then the ideal state isn't at a given rate of mutation.

  13. Medicine in the US, mainly through the American Medical Association, has opposed reforms that undermine the rights of private practitioners since these sorts of ideas started to spread from Europe in the early 20th century. This opposition is partly dependent on self-interest, private practitioners being more wealthy than employees generally, but also ideologically. The ideological opposition has not just been founded on opposition to socialism, early attempts to promote state medical insurance modelled on the German system were undermined by WWI.

  14. umm, skye are you sure?

     

    breaking bonds typically uses up energy and forming bonds releases energy. this is because the bound stat is at a lower energy level than the unbound state.

    Yeah it was a poor answer by me.

     

    It depends how you view the reaction. Often, like Fuzzwood says, it's considered to a positive change in free energy in water, since energy is released. But really this energy comes from the better stability of the ADP molecule in water, with the formation of hydration bonds.

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