Greg H.

 

 

How could mammoths impact other elephant species? They do not share the same habitat.

Indeed. They'd be more of a threat to Elk, Caribou, and Moose than to Elephants in India and Africa.

 

It's impossible in modern language to express any complex thought and to be entirely correct in every aspect. Even the simplest thoughts expressed in modern language are open to deconstruction and misinterpretation. "I have one red apple" can have a virtually infinite number of meanings and it's worse if you consider homonyms.

When used correctly, language can be applied to convey very complex ideas very specifically. It's one of the reasons so many speculations thread have so many problems - people misuse or try and redefine terms that already have very specific meanings in order to make their idea seem more plausible (or something). Yes the context of a statement can change it's meaning, but when you're dealing with scientific ideas, the terminology is specific enough that context shouldn't matter. In a scientific context, if I say "I am currently in possession of a singular fruit from Malus domestica, colored in such a fashion that it reflects light at approximately 650 nm" everyone who understands the terminology knows "I have a red apple." But I've just confused 90% of my audience. Contrary to your idea, "I have a red apple" is actually less confusing to most people than the more exacting scientific language.

Everytime anyone speaks he is referencing expert opinion.

And yet that does not mean that the person speaking has committed a logical fallacy. The fallacy depends upon the context and on the "expert" being referenced.

For example, if I post a thread here and Mr. Swanson calls me on my understanding of the science involved, I tend to listen because he is a practicing scientist. If I find that he is correct is his view of what I posted, I try to incorporate that into my thread so that my nonsensical ramblings become less nonsensical. If on the other hand, he tries to correct me on, for example, a medical scenario (not that he ever has, but consider the example), I have every right to be extremely skeptical of his statements, since he's not a medical doctor and not an actual authority on the subject.

(Which doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong, it just means accepting the information at face value, without doing additional research, is probably a bad idea).

I have never, in all my life, had the displeasure of reading something so....distasteful.

Your baseless and vitriolic attack shows a basic lack of empathy at best, and at worst some severe emotional damage. This thread serves no point, as you are obvious here to soapbox, not discuss, and no amount of counter argument is likely to in any way change your mind about this drivel. As such, it has been reported for the being the detritus of rational thought that it is.

As a veteran, I can honestly say that I would much rather have someone in my foxhole that had chosen to be there than someone who was compelled to be there. You fight harder for something you believe in, and when the bullets are flying, we need people who believe in what they're doing, not people who are just trying to put in their time.

 

I will pedantically point out that this is a matter of degree, and not a categorical truth. The sun is continually losing mass, so our orbit (and the orbit of anything that orbits the sun) has got to be changing as a result. But it's a small effect. The sun loses 4 billion kg/s, meaning over 10^17 kg per year. But its mass is 2 x 10^30kg, so even in a billion years at that rate it's less than 1%.

Heh, fair point.

Anything powerful enough to shift the orbit of any planet would fall into the category of "Things we don't need to worry about, because it would kill us all anyway."

Wilfully ignorant

That's a good one. My dad uses premeditated stupidity.

Ever use a lens? How can it focus light if the light doesn't bend?

Your eyes work on the same principle (because they are lenses).

Hehe.

It won't stop you from eating radioactive Potassium-40.

Or from radioactive Carbon-14..

LOL. True enough. But heck, everything will kill you in large enough quantities.

I refuse to eat anything with the prefix radio- in it. Just in case.

Just because they aren't watching TV doesn't mean they're doing something that will improve their grades, etc, as others have pointed out. They could simply be sleeping.

I'd be more interested in the correlation between children's grades and parental involvement in their education.

 

Maybe we could use that as a form of punishment. Instead of suspension, we just Jar Jar your avatar.

ROFLMAO. Maybe use that as the pre-suspension warning.

 

Meesa hadn't thought of that.

 

That's not funny man. Seriously. Not Funny.

 

Yes, but we're talking about the legal system in the intersection with religion. I don't know what that's like elsewhere, but (as I'm sure you're aware) "it's my religion" has a way of skewing what's become normal here in the US ... but often only as long as you're a Christian. It can give rise to behavior that would otherwise be wholly unacceptable.

Sad, but too often very true.

In answer to the OP, it doesn't matter really. In our team, for example, developers routinely stub in data to test their code with while db development is ongoing by our db team. The code and db are integrated prior to going to UAT.

Buy the computer that does what you need it to do.

At the end of the day, that's the only rule of thumb. If all you want to do is surf the web and check your email, buy a tablet, not a computer. They are (normally) cheaper and easier to carry (even compared to a laptop).

If all you need is to do basic word processing for school or something like that (think I need to run an Office Suite, but I'm not doing heavy spreadsheet work), then you find the cheapest machine that will actually run the software you plan to use.

Where you need a high end machine is for things like CAD and engineering applications, massive data processing (and even then you're better off throwing that at a farm of cheap boxes than trying to do it all on one machine - some people apparently repurpose GPUs for this sort of thing), and if you're a gamer that cares about things like graphics quality and high frame rates.

 

Since evolution increase complexity of the process by adding its components one step at a time, then we are able to retrace that path by reducing the complexity of the process. But, if we do that we will destroy the ability of the eukaryotic

 

This statement is the real problem behind the argument for Irreducible complexity. It shows a lack of basic understanding of how evolution really works. The evolutionary process doesn't work from less complex to more complex. If it did, we wouldn't have viruses and germs - they'd have evolved into something else in the hundreds of millions of years they've existed. There is no guiding hand behind evolution that chooses more complex structures over less complex ones. The structure or trait that enables more successful reproduction gets passed on - nothing more, nothing less.

Actually, that's not even really accurate. It is more accurate to say that structures and traits that do not reduce reproductive fitness are passed on, while those that result in reduced reproduction will eventually be bred out of the organism.

Additionally, how do you define the complexity of the system? Which is more complex, the digestive tract of a cow, or the digestive tract of a person? Is the bovine system more complex because it has more moving parts, or is the human system more complex because it doesn't need the extra bits? Does the efficiency of digestion add to the complexity? What about the ability to digest a wider range of foods (for instance, hogs, which can eat pretty much everything we can, and a few things we can't).

If it wasn't acceptable to a large number of people, it would have been cancelled by now when the ratings dropped. Given that it's been on for 17 seasons, I would be willing to say that a good number of people don't have a problem with it.

If you find it morally irresponsible or unacceptable, don't watch it.

The biggest reason the US hasn't changed is that, frankly, no one wants to pay for it. Just the cost of changing all the highway markers to kilometers, even if only cost say 50 cents a marker, would be in the hundreds of millions. The cost of retooling the factories that produce goods here? Forget it - businesses aren't going to eat that cost.

Unless we can get Congress to agree (LOL) and pass a law, it will probably happen sometime between never and the day after that.

To be fair though, we do use metric in some areas. You'll see liters on most liquids (Except, oddly, milk and gasoline). In fact, the bottled water I have on my desk is listed as

33.8 FL OZ (1 QT 1.8FL OZ) 1 Liter so you can choose the units of your choice. It's all very diverse.

The first thing you have to understand is that "species" is an arbitrary term used by people to classify living things. Nature doesn't give two rat sphincters about our arbitrary definitions.

Secondly, developing an entirely new structure is expensive in evolutionary terms. It's a lot easier to take something that's already there, such as an arm, and modify it so that the creature it's attached to performs better and survives more readily in the environmental niche it occupies. Mutations that enhance overall fitness tend to propagate through the species because the members that have it tend to live longer and have more offspring.

So you might ask, if we go back to the dim recesses of time, where did that first arm/leg/wing come from? Most likely from a fin on a fish-like creature - where developing a small fin at first might indeed offer an advantage over no fin at all in terms of stability. Fins gradually became longer, then as creatures moved onto the land, the developed more specialized functions for walking, running, grasping, and flying. If you look at, for instance, a whale's flipper, it has the same basic bone structure as a human hand, an eagle's wing, or a bear's paw (five "finger" bones converging into a "palm" connected to a shorter or longer appendage that we can call an arm, a wing, or a leg (or a flipper).

What I find funny is that the dress code at my daughter's school forbids skirts that don't reach the knees. Yet suddenly cheerleaders.

Actually, what they said was this:

"Our test campaign cannot confirm or refute the claims of the EM Drive but intends to independently assess possible side-effects in the measurements methods used so far," said Prof Tajmar.

And I have been beaten to the punch by Swansont.

Baseballs aren't photons. They do not have the properties of photons (i.e. mass), so expecting them to behave like photons, or vice versa, seems a little silly.

What you've basically done is thrown a car in the ocean to show why submarines don't work.

I think we also need to consider that this may be a case of correlation without causation. I don't know that we could ascribe anthropomorphic drives to things like, for instance, viruses or bacteria, but they certainly reproduce with amazing fecundity. And just because an particular organism doesn't reproduce and have offspring doesn't mean they had no desire to do so. Even in humans, people want to have children but end up not doing so, for a variety of reasons.