seriously disabled

I have very low pain tolerance and I'm a man not a woman. So what causes very low pain tolerance in men?

Mathematics is made of numbers and symbols. But the numbers and symbols are just pixels on the computer monitor or ink on a paper, numbers and symbols are completely human creations and as such I don't think that they can exist in the wild nature.

Ever since I was a kid I have the fear of getting painfully injured, like being cut by a very sharp knife. I think this type of phobia is called agliophobia. Angliophobia (the fear of pain) can be a serious problem and can even paralyze a person. Agliophobia is a psychological disorder that can be described as the fear of experiencing pain. In most cases, the person fears an event that may potentially cause pain. The fear may be worse than any real potential injury that could actually occur, making the fear illogical. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-agliophobia.htm

Time does not even exist in nature and there is no shred of proof that it does. Time is a completely human invention so it cannot exist in nature. The same can be said for numbers. Numbers are human inventions too so by definition they do not (and cannot) exist in nature. Everything in nature (including humans and animals) is made out of molecules and atoms so you can see that is quite obvious that time, numbers and infinity do not and cannot really exist.

I've never lived in British Columbia but I always thought that British Columbia is supposed to be a cold and mountainous region with plenty of snow during the winter months and plenty of rain during all the seasons of the year (including in the summer months). This makes sense because British Columbia is located in the pacific northwest and the pacific northwest region (which British Columbia is part of) is famous for it's abundance of days with lots and lots of rain. So why are there so many forest fires in British Columbia (Canada) if it's a relatively cool and rainy place?

My mother always told me that there is no God and I believe her. I think God is definitely a myth since I've seen and experienced zero evidence of his existence. I have experienced no miracles in my life and God never made any of my dreams come true. So my best guess is that he simply doesn't exist. Also there is too much pain and suffering in this world for there to be a loving God. People (and animals) are suffering and are in terrible pain so if there was a loving God then he would not let people needlessly suffer. So all the evidence I have at my disposal points to there being no God at all.

I've never been to California but based on what I've seen on BBC's Natural History Unit television series called Planet Earth, coastal California is home to the largest trees in the world, called douglas firs and giant redwoods. But the funny thing is that these giant trees in coastal California are only there because of the heavy summer fog and heavy winter rains. There is no rain during the summer months in California so even if the winter rains fail these kind of trees can extract enough moisture from the fog. So my question is: What actually causes the heavy summer fog in coastal California which allows for the growth of such big trees as opposed to other coastal areas (like coastal Portugal or coastal France for example) which do not support such trees like in coastal California?

At what point does a person actually die? That depends on who you ask. To one person, it's the moment the heart stops beating. To another, it's when the brain enters a "vegetative" state. But a heart can be forced to keep beating; and how dead is a person, really, if she can continue to grow, develop, and even give birth after experiencing "brain death"? In search of answers, we turned to Dick Teresi. A seasoned science writer and the former editor of Science Digest and Omni, Teresi has spent the last ten years researching and writing about the science behind the line that separates life and death. He has recounted his findings and experiences in his new book, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers — How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death. In your experience, do most doctors and scientists relate to death in similar terms? In other words, does "death" mean the same thing to a cardiologist as it does to a cell biologist, a neurologist, or a neonatologist? I've been a science writer since 1973, covering a lot of particle physics, and I've discovered that compared to, say, physics, "medical science" is an oxymoron. Doctors are not well schooled in scientific principles. They are healers, not scientists, and they don't understand basic concepts such as falsification in science. For example, doctors believe that if drug A heals 9 out of 10 people with disease X, then drug A heals disease X because it usually does. A scientist, on the other hand, believes that one exception destroys the whole theory. More to the point, take brain death. Some patients are declared brain dead and then begin spontaneously breathing hours later. Medical scientists say it doesn't matter because most brain-dead patients do not come back to life, but a rigorous scientist would say that these cases speak loudly about the flaws in our criteria for death. And yes — death to a cardiologist means that your heart has stopped, and he can't get it to restart. But to a neurologist, it might mean something else. In 1968, a committee at Harvard Medical School put forth an article stating that there is a second kind of death: brain death. Even though your heart is still pumping, and you're still able to breathe on a ventilator, if your brain stem is down, you're dead. This theory was made law in all 50 states in 1981, so now in the U.S. we have two kinds of death: real death (cardiopulmonary death) and what some doctors call "pretty dead," or brain death. A cell biologist, on the other hand, may have a standard more rigorous than cardiologists or neurologists. They might want to see all one's cells dead, which we call putrefaction. So clearly death is not as straightforward as some people make it out to be. Tell us a little about why that is. Since the beginning of recorded history, we have looked for a simple set of criteria that tell us when a person is dead. This is because we don't like to bury or cremate people if they're still alive, among other reasons. We have looked for a central organ that spells the difference between life and death, or a set of behaviors that indicate with certainty that our bodies have called it quits. But every time we think we have solid criteria, we find exceptions. The ancient Egyptians, for example, thought the brain was totally unimportant, and they hollowed out the skulls of mummies, tossing the brain away. They concentrated on the heart. But stopped hearts often restarted spontaneously, and embalmers who declared live persons dead were stoned. The Romans came up with "conclamation," which involved yelling a person's name in his ear three times — hardly a foolproof method. Inventions like the stethoscope helped immensely because some heartbeats and breaths are faint. Artificial respiration, smelling salts, and electric shock resuscitated people previously thought dead. Medical journals continue to fill with conditions that mimic death but which are not death at all. Would you say that definitions of death have evolved over time? Definitions of death have not changed a great deal, but that doesn't mean much. Often we'll say "death is the absence of life," but then we have to define "life" and that's almost impossible. All we can really do is set criteria for who's dead, and that is tough enough, and we have no real definitive set of standards. You suggest in your book that relating to death as something that is "irreversible" can be problematic. Talk to us about what makes that word so troublesome. "Irreversible" is not a very scientific term. Is the solar system "irreversible?" How about the universe as a whole? No, even the proton may eventually decay. Nothing is forever. What science looks for is stable systems. We can say the solar system or the hydrogen atom is stable. Death comes, we might say, when the stability of the human body breaks down, and the system no longer works as a whole. Does that happen when the heart goes? The lungs? The lungs and heart together? The brain? That's the debate. We are acquiring more and more evidence that the body can go on in a somewhat stable system long after the brain has called it quits. For example, brain-dead pregnant mothers can continue to gestate and give birth to their babies long after being declared brain dead. In one case, a mother went 107 days after "death," and then delivered a healthy newborn. "An MRI that twenty years ago was considered a 'photograph of death' is now just an image of a sick but reparable brain." How do you think our understanding of death might continue to evolve in the years to come? I can only hope that medical scientists become true scientists, and acknowledge some ugly truths: that life lingers on far past our criteria for death. Perhaps it is impractical for us to keep people alive-and on life support-indefinitely. Today we declare such inconvenient people to be "dead," even if they're not, so we can bury them and be rid of them. Perhaps we should acknowledge that they are not dead, but in, say, "condition X," a condition at which time we can terminate them. These are ugly realities, and it is easier just to call them dead. But we should face reality, and make tough decisions. Do you think our relationship with death is more likely to change in response to breakthroughs in medical treatments, or advances in our ability to understand the body? I recognize that these two things are not mutually exclusive; but if I might borrow an example from your book, what I'm getting at here is the distinction between something like tissue plasminogen activator (a medical advancement that "moved the line" dividing life and death, so to speak) and imaging techniques like MRI that allow us to visualize a brain and decide if someone is or is not "dead." Yes, [tissue plasminogen activator, aka "tPA"] is a good example. In the past, brain scans taken of people 1 to 3 hours after a stroke would be read as the scans of a dead person. Today, tPA can bring people back to normality even 3 hours after a stroke. So an MRI that twenty years ago was considered a "photograph of death" is now just an image of a sick but reparable brain. But again, these are not definitions but criteria for death. One of the problems of brain death is that it was described as death all the way back in 1968, and there have been remarkable discoveries in neuroscience since then. In 1973, Candace Pert discovered the opiate receptor in the brain. The discovery of endorphins followed, as did dozens of other receptors and neurohormones. The brain of 1968 was envisioned as a Tinker Toy kind of machine, with electricity mixed in. Now we know biochemistry has a great deal to do with consciousness. And yet, that has all been ignored because brain-death criteria were developed in the stone age of neuroscience, and neurologists still are schooled in this backward fashion. Neurochemicals are found being secreted in supposedly dead brains because brain-death tests are not designed to detect them. Our tests are crude, requiring an exam shorter than my last eye exam, and using such crude instruments as a flashlight, ice water, cotton swabs, and the like. None of this can tell us about consciousness. Organ harvesting/transplantation and the science surrounding death. You suggest that the two have difficulty playing nice. Why is that? Plain and simple: we want the organs. Organ transplantation is a $27 billion per year business. Most of the people harvested for organs today would not have been considered dead prior to 1968. But really dead people-those whose hearts have stopped and are not breathing-do not make good donors. The blood stops bringing oxygen to the organs, and, for lack of a better word, they spoil. But if the donor is just "mostly dead," meaning that his heart is still beating and he can still breathe with the aid of a ventilator, then the organs remain fresh and juicy and bring huge prices in the transplant business. The average cost for a heart transplant, such as the one Dick Cheney just received, is nearly $1,000,000. Kidneys will cost you about $250,000 each. The donors by law cannot be compensated, so this is a very, very profitable business, one in which the raw material-human organs-do not have to be paid for, thanks to federal law. It is one of the great federal subsidies of our time. How close do you think science and medicine can come to truly defining death — at least as it pertains to the notion of death on the organismal, human level? Because "irreversible" is locked into our present definition of death, I don't think we can ever truly define it. And what happens to consciousness? I personally believe it disappears with the entropy of the body, but many would say otherwise, and I have no evidence to dispute them. To what extent is the definition of death a philosophical question? With your answer to that question in mind, do you think doctors are the most well-equipped people to come to decisions involving life and death, and are there any realistic alternatives? Today, more than ever, it has become a philosophical question. When we witnessed the brain-death exam of a woman in Springfield, Massachusetts, after the perfunctory tests, a nurse proclaimed, "Whatever it was that made her her isn't there anymore." So that is the new standard: "personhood." Doctors say brain death is imperfect as a rule for calling the body biologically dead, but so what? The "person" is gone. Here's what I'd like to know: during what year of medical school do doctors learn what a "person" is, and when the person is missing? In your experience, how do non-scientists and non-doctors relate to the concept of death? Is there as much disagreement over (or differences in definition between) what it means for a cell, organ, animal, or human to be dead, or is that kind of thing not even on the average person's radar? I imagine there are grave disagreements. But I think on a personal level, we are all on the same plane. We are terrified. Death is the unknown and shall always be the unknown. We don't know where we're going, if anywhere. And will we be annihilated? I kind of think so, and that is hard to grasp. We all have to face the fact that at some point, the universe will exist without us. We are not special and we are not ultimately needed. Neither science nor medicine is of much help here, and neither is most egocentric religion. I've had to deal with this reality during the ten years I worked on this book. In the end, it is of some comfort to know that whatever inequities exist in the world, we are all equal in this regard, and we all share the same fate. Source: http://io9.com/5915339/the-meaning-of-death-how-do-we-know-someone-is-no-longer-alive

But mathematics isn't science. Mathematics is just an art. People tend to confuse mathematics with real science but the fact is that mathematics isn't really science and mathematics is not even required to do science. But this doesn't really matter because one day we're all going to die and what we know and do now doesn't really matter in the long run.

Human life really doesn't mean much in my opinion and I think that it is justifiable to say that the universe is really merciless and cruel. We all live, we all die and then we are forever forgotten. There is no life after death because after we die we just cease to exist... forever and ever.

Wikipedia is a just a work of art, it's not a reliable source for understanding reality.

But the sun won't go dark anytime soon. This is because it just cannot go dark so this scenario is impossible. The sun is just a very big spinning ball of plasma orbiting the galactic center. What I'm trying to say is that in the universe everything is related to each other. The universe is in a lot of ways like the human body. The universe is one big organism where everything is related and causing each other. Gravity is just the motion of matter so of course we can "see" this moving matter: we can see the moving matter with our eyes if it emits any light and if we can't see the moving matter with our own eyes then we can detect the motion of this dark matter with scientific instruments.

I think you must be joking here. Of course gravity must be related to light and electromagnetism, otherwise we could not detect gravitating objects with our eyes.

Life is probably just a rare biochemical accident so of course there will be suffering. I mean why would there no be suffering if life is just a rare accident? The evidence points to humans being just a biochemical accident and that there really is no shred of proof that any God exists or has ever existed. One thing is for certain though. One day we'll are going to die and when we die its all over for us, there's nothing more, and our descendants will continue the eternal struggle for survival. This means that we are here by pure chance alone, and by the same token at some point in the future we may not be here at all. This probably means that we should make the most of the little time we do have. I believe that what I wrote is called Cosmicism and it's the view that humans are completely insignificant in the universe. Cosmicism was the literary philosophy developed and used by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft in his weird fiction.Lovecraft was a writer of philosophically intense horror stories that involve occult phenomena like astral possession and alien miscegenation, and the themes of his fiction over time contributed to the development of this philosophy. The philosophy of cosmicism states that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggested that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects and plants in a much greater struggle between greater forces which, due to humanity's small, visionless and unimportant nature, it does not recognize. Perhaps the most prominent theme in cosmicism is the utter insignificance of humanity. Lovecraft believed that "the human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. And eventually everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists."[2] Cosmicism shares many characteristics with nihilism, though one important difference is that cosmicism tends to emphasize the inconsequentiality of humanity and its doings, rather than summarily rejecting the possible existence of some higher purpose (or purposes). For example, in Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, it is not so much the absence of meaning that causes terror for the protagonists as it is their discovery that they have absolutely no power to effect any change in the vast, indifferent, and ultimately incomprehensible universe that surrounds them. Whatever meaning or purpose may or may not be invested in the actions of the cosmic beings in Lovecraft's stories is completely inaccessible to the human characters, in the way an amoeba (for example) is completely unequipped to grasp the concepts that drive human behavior. Lovecraft's cosmicism was a result of his complete disdain for all things religious, his feeling of humanity's existential helplessness in the face of what he called the "infinite spaces" opened up by scientific thought, and his belief that humanity was fundamentally at the mercy of the vastness and emptiness of the cosmos. You can read more about Cosmicism here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmicism

Then science is flawed at its core if it cannot answer that. I believe that science should be able to answer the metaphysical whys as well. I believe that everything needs to have a cause because there is no such thing as magic. This means that there is no such thing as something without a cause. Also I don't buy into the religious argument that God doesn't need to have a cause just because he is God. If God caused the universe then I think that God needs to have a cause as well.

My father eats very little every day yet he still finds the energy to drive to work every day and work 11 hours every day except on Friday and Saturday and on holidays of course. And he's been working that hard for already 40 years (ever since he was in the military). Sometimes I don't know how he manages to do that because for me it just seems too damn hard. Sometimes I think that my father could be a superhuman Cyborg or something.

In my opinion motion is just another word for change and we experience change around us almost all the time. The Buddha said that the universe is in a constant state of flux, therefore everything is impermanent. http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma8/imperm.html But why does motion (or change) exist in this universe in the first place?

Why don't atomic particles like electrons and protons have inertia like the macroscopic objects like space rocks and spacecraft for example? Why are atomic objects like electrons not effected by Newton's laws of motion like the macroscopic objects are? In other words, why are atomic objects like electrons not bound by the laws of Newtonian mechanics (such as inertia for example) like macroscopic objects are? I'll try to frame my question better perhaps: Why are the laws of physics so different between macroscopic objects (like spacecraft for example) and atomic objects like electrons (for example)?

People believe what suits them but this doesn't prove anything. People have (and probably always had) a panic fear of death (which could probably be final) and they also need a way to cope with the very cruel things which happen to people and animals (animals probably suffer more than humans because we kill many of them and we sell their bodies for food) in this world so they invent God/s to make themselves feel better but this of course does not prove the existence of God.

The sad news for me is that I'm completely powerless to change anything about my stinky life. I'll probably be long dead from starvation or commit suicide before I'll manage to change anything about my stinky life. Western Capitalism is not for people like me and I'm feeling trapped, chained and imprisoned by this cut-throat socio-economic system. Maybe death is really the only option left for me since this world really has nothing to offer for me anymore. I think this song describes my feelings towards my life perfectly:

That's bullshit. God doesn't need to exist in order to explain the cause and effect phenomena we observe in the universe. Actually the evidence shows that the Universe is completely mechanical and is governed by chemical reactions and that God just isn't needed anymore to explain any of this. People by their very nature just don't want to die and they want life to get better for them so they invent God but this is just their wishful thinking and it doesn't actually prove that any God exists except in their selfish imagination.

Old testament is too outdated because evidence shows that this is just not the case. Pain and agony clearly prevail over goodness in the world because there are just too many people in pain and in terrible suffering. In my opinion Satan is so corrupt that he wants to see us scream in terrible pain and drown in blood and then he wants us to die.

Maybe the bad things are actually the work of some kind of may I sadistic, evil designer or an evil architect like Satan. Maybe Satan is actually so evil that he purposely wants to see us suffer greatly and then just die. Or it could be that God doesn't actually exist at all but that only Satan exists or maybe God is just not capable to stop Satan from doing the bad things or bad manipulations that he is doing.

From what I read on the Internet plants, also called green plants (Viridiplantae in Latin), are living organisms of the kingdom Plantae including such multicellular groups as flowering plants, conifers, ferns and mosses, as well as, depending on definition, the green algae, but not red or brown seaweeds like kelp, nor fungi or bacteria. Green plants have cell walls with cellulose and characteristically obtain most of the energy they need in order to live from sunlight via photosynthesis using chlorophyll contained in chloroplasts, which gives them their green color. Photosynthesis is a photochemical process and as such can be studied using photochemistry. However some plants are parasitic and may not produce normal amounts of chlorophyll or photosynthesize... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_physiology http://www.hcs.ohio-state.edu/hort/biology/pplan.html But what kind of physical factors besides the chemistry and physiology of each plant will determine what kind of plant will grow in a particular location on the Earth land's surface?