Delta1212

Actually, that got me thinking about this in a good way. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down through the female line. The person donating the mitochondrial DNA would be as related to the child as some distant cousin descended through the female line so many generations back that they share no other DNA. That's the approximate DNA-level relationship that they would share.

If you could donate blood and have a single gene extracted from the DNA in that blood and spliced into the genetic code of a zygote that had a genetic defect, how would you feel towards the resultant child?

Trump is getting his Daily Intelligence Reports once a week. That makes for approximately a 14% attendance rate, for comparison.

Humans have not stopped evolving and we don't use only 10% of our brains.

You'd need to know the actual size of the room, the degree to which the room is insulated, the surface area that it shares with the other rooms and the outside, the temperature outside, the temperature to which you heat your rooms and the local rates for your area.

A great deal of our democracy rests on respect for norms and traditions that allow our government to function without explicitly being enumerated in law. Those traditions have been eroding for some time and I fear the attrition is only going to accelerate in the coming years. This is going to be a bad time to live through.

He's being facetious in an attempt to mock his idea of what liberals are.

Actually, the dishonesty of people is limited by a government mind control project funded by the NSA, CIA and YMCA.

I'm confused, which is more important: Following the democratic principles of society or winning by following the rules? Or do democratic principles coincidentally trump the rules exactly as far out as gives you the result that you want? Also, while we treat the election as being "for President" it isn't really. The reason we do the whole campaign thing and build coalitions to win states is that the people are electing the electors who do the voting. So it is, in fact, still a representative democracy. If you weren't voting for the representative you thought you were voting for, then you should learn how our representative democracy actually works, perhaps.

Who doesn't consider cancer cells to be alive? Edit: I think you are getting cancer mixed up with viruses, which... Those are not easily confused if you know anything at all about even basic biology. Also, what does "the y axis represents everything except time" mean? Everything increases during the day and everything decreases at night? I'm genuinely not sure what it is you are trying to communicate. I mean, I can see a sort of broad overview of an idea in your posts. I can see how the idea seems to have a shape and how someone, such as yourself, could latch on to such an idea. But if you drill down into the substance, well, there doesn't seem to be any. There are no details to this idea and the ones that you have laid out don't make any consistent kind of sense.

If you want to be a super strict "by the rules" person, Trump hasn't technically won yet. I mean, he's obviously going to, but you can't say that the popular vote doesn't matter because the rules don't elect people based on the popular vote and then turn around and say that trying to get the electors to vote for someone other than Trump is overthrowing a democratic election because, per the rules, the election hasn't even taken place yet, and legally the electors could still vote for whomever they wanted. So nobody has actually won yet according to the rules, and the only way to argue that they have and that trying to influence the outcome still is "overthrowing" the election is if you conclude that the popular vote in each state is what elects the president. But according to the rules, it isn't. As we've established, the popular vote doesn't matter. Only the electors' votes matter. Funny how that works.

I've never liked lobster, but I think good caviar is quite nice. It's a spread that tastes like the ocean.

Go back in time, introduce yourself as Time 4 and tell yourself to change as little as possible.

Well, the feather imprints found in some fossils had already put the question of whether dinosaurs had feathers at all to bed, and there were past finds that were believed to be tail feathers in amber. This was the first one that included some bone, so it could be definitively demonstrated to not only have been from a dinosaur but the specific one it came from was identifiable. It also gives more of a clue toward coloring, which obviously isn't possible with fossilized feather impressions.

And it's on Netflix streaming. Excellent.

I'm sure such individuals exist in the same way that there are probably plenty of people who could have been great pianists if someone had ever sat them down at a piano and taught them to play. Great achievement in any area of human endeavor requires some combination of creative and technical skill. The greater the technical skill that is required, the more impressive are the achievements of those who master the skills. If you went to the NBA and said "I have the natural talent to play basketball like Michael Jordan, but all of the rules and skills required are getting in the way. Is there any way you could simplify things so I would be able to play on a professional level without having to train or practice at all?" you would get laughed at. Just because the skills required by science are more mental and information oriented than physical doesn't make them any less essentially critical to doing the work, and capacity is no replacement for actual accomplishment.

I know he did. I've peeked at his blog on and off over the whole campaign season. He's slightly nuts.

Scott Adams is slightly bonkers in general, so...

By definition, the unobservable universe isn't observable. There are only very limited conclusions we can draw about it from available evidence, mostly about what it is not, and even that is largely speculative because of a, by definition, lack of direct evidence about it. I believe we are able to, for example, put a lower bound on how large the universe must be if it is finite in size and unbounded because it curves back around on itself and has uniform curvature throughout. Local space appears to be flat to the best of our ability to measure, so any curvature must be on a lower level than we are currently capable of measuring. A bit like saying that the diameter of the Earth must be at least X because if it was less than that, the arc of the horizon would be prominent enough to be easily detectable just by looking at it.

There probably is. It's not the entire universe that was the size of a pea. It was the observable universe that was the size of a pea. The entire universe may have been much larger or even infinite in extent. The CMBR is not so much the "outer shell" as it is the radiation that filled the very early universe. What we're getting now is the radiation from that early period that, thanks to expansion, had to travel 14 billion light years to reach us. And since it's limited to traveling at the speed of light, we can then determine that it took 14 billion years to get here. Which means that it has been 14 billion years since it started traveling toward us near the beginning of the Big Bang.

Either infinite or finite but unbounded. A finite and bounded universe would have a definite center.

Depends on what you mean. There is evidence that fracking has resulted in an increase in earthquakes in regions that don't normally have them. So it's entirely possible to cause earthquakes to happen. The question is whether it is possible to intentionally cause an earthquake rarher than just having a general increase in seismic activity as a result of human activity. I don't think we're anywhere near that point, and even if we were, there is quite a difference between being able to "cause an earthquake" and being able to cause an earthquake of that magnitude. That would require a huge amount of energy already bound up in the earth's crust, so even if someone had the ability to trigger a large earthquake, the most they could probably do is trigger an earthquake that was already going to happen anyway, and likely wind up with a weaker one than would have occurred if the tension had been allowed to continue building and the release naturally. I don't find this scenario to be remotely plausible in any case, so it's really a moot point about what could be achieved with technology that nobody has anyway.

Roosters don't lay eggs.

Can you name a widely recognized climate expert?

Is a chicken egg an egg that hatches into a chicken, or an egg that is laid by a chicken? The definition you use gives you the answer.