gort

14 ms·

91.
by gort 16y ago
The paper is: Jianni Liu, et al (2011) An armoured Cambrian lobopodian from China with arthropod-like appendages. Nature 470(7335): 526-530 (doi: 10.1038/nature09704) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7335/full/nature0...
92.
by gort 16y ago
A nice parable, though bears would destroy lions in combat if they met. :)
93.
by gort 16y ago
> warfare was less painful for all involved Does that book or other sources you have give a rough idea of how rare/common death by warfare/violence is in this type of society?
94.
by gort 16y ago
"socialistic contrarian splendour" They're really post-scarcity; they have no need for capitalism or socialism.
95.
by gort 16y ago
Apparently Wikipedia also carries that content. Down with Wikipedia!
96.
by gort 16y ago
This isn't really evidence one way or the other; its the sort of statement they could make in any event.
97.
by gort 16y ago
I think it's not immediately obvious why they would.
98.
by gort 16y ago
of course, the Bayesian theory is taught in schools; otherwise how could they send the spaceship to the outer space and have the fastest super computer in the world Do these things require specifically Bayesian statistics?
99.
by gort 16y ago
I think the idea is that your neighbours are poorer than you thought they were.
100.
by gort 16y ago
Remember though that the polyploidy in plants is a fundamentally different process from the way animals speciate. I don't want to mislead you on that point.
101.
by gort 16y ago
"How are scientists so convinced that mutation and natural selection is all that is required" They believe no such thing. Selection isn't required for allopatric speciation. Two isolated populations will naturally start to diverge just due
102.
by gort 16y ago
If you have access (i.e. from university or whatnot) the actual paper is now online at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1...
103.
by gort 16y ago
Phosphorous is used by all previously known life in a number of ways, including as part of the DNA backbone. If there's something that uses something else, it's a big deal.
104.
by gort 16y ago
Nature News: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101202/full/news.2010.645.ht... [Edit] They are calling it a member of the Halomonadaceae, which means it is descended from the common ancestor of that group, and so does not represent a second
105.
by gort 16y ago
I mis-spoke; it wasn't my intention to call viruses alive. My intention was actually the opposite: I was trying to anticipate a possible objection to what I said about all known life having the same genome type (double stranded DNA). That's
106.
by gort 16y ago
I think he was predicting/speculating that any complex life anywhere will have arisen through Darwinian selection; that there's no other process that leads from simple replicators to complex life. Video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watc
107.
by gort 16y ago
It should be pointed out that there's a fairly vast range of metabolisms already known for bacteria. The test of whether life developed twice will be how whatever-it-is stores its genome (DNA?) and how it goes about making useful molecules
108.
by gort 16y ago
What on earth is going on in that URL?
109.
by gort 16y ago
a fallacy, as it turned out A falsehood. A fallacy is an argument where the conclusion does not follow from the assumptions.
110.
by gort 16y ago
"we need a more nuanced scale of what is morally acceptable or not that includes various forms of intelligence (without the same logic being used to treat disabled people poorly)" Explain the discrepancy.
111.
by gort 16y ago
Are you sure? In Britain billion always means 10^9 these days; it may have been different decades ago.
112.
by gort 16y ago
Tango (US) NATO phonetic alphabet for the letter "T" and for "Target" (or enemy). Example: "We have two Tango's at 3 o'clock - I'll take the right one." http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Military_slang
113.
by gort 16y ago
"If I may ask, you mean you will like the government to "force" or "regulate" the airline to take over the recruitment so that there is one male and one female in every cabin and at every age group?" That's not what non-discrimination means
114.
by gort 16y ago
A lot of people don't seem to grasp the concept of assuming certain things for the sake of exploring a problem.
115.
by gort 16y ago
He means he wishes he believed in Hell, so he could believe patent trolls went there.
116.
by gort 16y ago
In fact, much of the URL is meaningless: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1666/09/great-fire...
117.
by gort 16y ago
the relationship between the various components ... does not fit with the reductionist viewpoint. On the contrary, that's exactly how reductionism tries to understand things.
118.
by gort 16y ago
He says it like it's a bad thing. Militancy: the view that it's OK to tell people that they are wrong. Materialism: the expectation that things are made up of stuff that can be investigated by empirical experiment; which is to say, physics.
119.
by gort 16y ago
The author lost me at "The evolution and growth of modern science has been accompanied by the adoption of a militant, materialistic, reductionist, and atheistic creed by many leading scientists and popularizers of science".
120.
by gort 16y ago
Is this actually about something? The "journal link" goes to creationist site Answers in Genesis and its "journal", however I cannot find anything relevant there...

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