Prometheus

To dance and sing.

Treatments working on similar principles already exist. Capsaicin, which puts the kick in chilis, is effectective with certain types of peripheral pain. Some chronic pain is due to pathological modulation of the central nervous system. It's been 6 months - did you get a chance to read those books i recommended? You obviously have an enduring interest in the subject - why not harness that and learn the science behind pain in detail?

Maybe the question should be how do all these environmental crises interact. As Itoero alluded to there is significant overlap between them (like ocean acidification and CO2 levels). Trying to identify one as the most urgent might lead us to lose focus on the others and neglect the complex interactions between them all. A systems approach rather than a reductionist approach.

Reminds me of this for some reason:

Likely true, but did it inhibit their ability to reproduce? Experiencers of chronic pain are usually older, having had a chance to reproduce. Anyway, it would be irrelevant if chronic pain is some modulation of acute pain: you couldn't have the former without the latter.

Evolution can be thought of a series of trials and errors. Acute pain was obviously a successful trial: people unable to feel pain usually die young. But chronic pain may be an 'unsuccessful' trial in that it confers no reproductive or survivability advantage, while not being erroneous enough to stop people from reproducing. I don't know, i'm just speculating. I think it more likely that chronic pain is some kind of biochemical and/or psychosocial modulation upon acute pain and hence the former is an inevitable consequence of the latter for some people. When i was a nurse i was thinking of becoming a pain specialist but life took me in other directions. I haven't looked into it for a very long time but the books i studied when i did though might still be pertinent: This one is a medical textbook, very detailed and expensive, but worth it if you want to delve deeply into the subject: https://www.elsevier.ca/ca/product.jsp?isbn=9780702040597 This one is more accessible both in terms of price/availability and requisite knowledge: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009UV5ZG4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

There wouldn't be any changes to the genes themselves. It's possible there are changes in certain gene expressions in response to the environment, but that's slightly different. If you want to look at modulation the nervous system, including the brain, seems the best place to start. The stuff about the body deliberately simulating organ failure doesn't make sense. Ultimately though it's not a very well researched area so you are likely to find more questions than answers. Good luck.

You don't like Die Antwoord? I think you're freaky.

I will resist the instinctive urge to downvote your posts everytime i see that pic: although under Bourinho that hate is turning into sympathy. But welcome anyway.

The maths i was thinking is stuff like stochastic calculus, statistical inference and measure theory - pretty rigorous stuff. I'm not sure about the stuff in that link you provided, i haven't heard of any of it, like M-waves. From your description it does look like BS though. It may be that some places offer decent courses while others do not.

If the maths is thorough i've no problem with it being taught for credit, but any model stands or falls on how well it holds up to the assumptions it makes: i think this is where financial modelling falls. It's future might be brighter though: you could think of financial modelling as just an application of quantitative social science. Now we have data sets kindly provided by Facebook and co to anyone an their mother, and with developing machine learning techniques, we are starting to see rigorous mathematical applications in social sciences.

I guess you must be using some kind of time series analysis, an ARIMA model perhaps, which assumes past information is sufficient to predict the future. This can work if the assumption is reasonable - if you are running an airline company and have observed a seasonality in the data (i.e. more people fly in summer), that can be usefully modelled. But this simple model can't take into account events like shooting down a plane (unless it happens regularly) which shocks the market. A better model might be something like the Black-Scholes equation which models market ups and downs as a Brownian motion (i think it makes the assumption that time is independent). As i understand it the important parameter is the variance (or market volatility) as it makes the likely range of predictions (under monte carlo simulations) broader. I'm not sure how useful it is in practice though, people in the business must already know more unpredictability means more risk. Horoscopes might work just as well for these decisions, i wouldn't call it a science. Interestingly, i came across a particular MSc course called Financial Engineering which costs £20,000, which with the selection of certain modules was identical to an Applied Statistics MSc which cost £8,000. People were willing to pay just for the name of the MSc.

Some people will be comfortable with this, some not. You shouldn't worry about couples that are comfortable, just bear this in mind that you are not when choosing your partner. All that matters is that you are on the same wavelength as your partner on this issue.

Debating whether this is a good way to learn all the elements.

RIP Leonard Cohen. My favourite song of his:

My new favourite song to do science to.

Both i guess. Sometimes people are able to separate but maintain some line of healthy communication. Other times the break has to be clean. I'm just basing this on personal observations, i don't really know any more about than any one else.

It's possible, if hard, to love someone and still leave them. It's about doing what you think best for all involved. Also, is love just one emotion? I vaguely recall reading in some psychology book that love (or was it happiness?) is actually 8 distinct emotions.

Cheers. It all seems to depend on a translation of a Hebrew word which could be taken to mean either circular or spherical. I think this quote from the second link summarises it best: In other words, ambiguous. Else there never would be any debate in medieval Catholic Europe about its shape: they could refer to the inerrant bible. Something unambiguous, would be like when Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference, by using knowledge that the Earth is round, to a good approximation.

I look forward to you providing the exact passages/verses so i can check out how they unambiguously state the earth is round. I think this issue is actually the crux of the matter when it comes to conflict between science and religion. The bible is very obviously a terrible source for factual information - it can't even get pi right. But that only matters if a religion is trying to make factual claims about the physical world. If religion gave up this pretence and instead focused its energies on the spiritual development of its followers, there would no longer be any conflict and our spiritual development might be able to catch up with our technological development.

I'm not saying a thing - i find my house increasingly built of glass. Oh yeah, missed that. Not heard Counting Crows before, but i do like Vanessa Carlton. How about suggestions for covers that are better than the original? Original: Cover:

Because it got mentioned on a thread somewhere:

I don't understand. You go into great detail during your posts, so i thought you may appreciate a little detail in return, but instead you label it pedantic. Nevermind, nothing more to be said here. See you around.

The only point is that Buddhism is not nearly as homogenous as you seem to think. 'Buddhism' itself doesn't hold beliefs - its adherents do. And it's adherents have a great range of beliefs. The range includes belief, agnosticism and non-belief in rebirth. This range of beliefs is possible while still calling all these people Buddhists. That is all. Interesting. Source? P.S. Your posts touch on so many points i have difficulty staying on one train of thought: would you be able to keep your posts brief to accommodate my waning brain power.

Fair enough, but why the caveat that it needs to be practiced in the east? First lets look at some Buddhist texts. The Kalama Sutta is perhaps the most famous, but from a lesser known section the Buddha says: i.e. it doesn't matter if there is a life beyond this one (rebirth), Buddhism is a method developed to help you out either way - the Buddha is explaining an agnostic position on the afterlife. Here you can also find an argument that some of the earliest Buddhist texts do not teach the doctrine of rebirth: I hope by appealing straight to the scriptures i have by-passed your need for such non-rebirth believing Buddhists to be from the east. But just in case my anecdote of having met a Buddhist priest who does not believe in literal rebirth (she is Korean, from a Zen school), apparently Shin Buddhism - ironically a branch of pure land Buddhism, and thoroughly eastern - pays no heed to any afterlife. I accept that the majority of Buddhists believe in rebirth, but the key point is that such belief is not necessary and can (if you want) be taken separate from karma. There is no reincarnation in Buddhism: any reference to reincarnation is a slip of the tongue. Buddhism generally teaches rebirth - the subtle difference being that there is no transmigration of a 'self'. I think this is explained well here, but there's plenty of online resources. It is not just the case that Buddhism has a more rarefied and ephemeral concept of self: the concept of anatta, or no-self, is a core Buddhism belief. That is my least favourite description of Nirvana i have ever seen (for one it's not a place). My favourite: after enlightenment, the laundry.