fukuda

Mines and heavy industry tend to leave developed countries because, let's face it, they're only productive when their employees earn low wages and suffer bad security measures. Modernization is a way to get rid of most workers and the need to pay their wages and also a way to improve the mining efficiency. However in most cases it is still not enough for the company to survive or the mines to stay open. Needless to say that the mines will someday run out of coal to produce or it will be too expensive to extract, what will happen to the state's economy then? It's a bit too dangerous to base an economy on a limited resource like coal.

A correlation between religion and individualism? I seriously doubt it. Modesty, punctuality and equality are considered virtue by most religions and ethics, including Christianism (at least according to Christ himself). I've lived in religious countries as Morocco or Senegal and most people were as laid back and content than any european even living with way less material possessions. Same thing happens in deeply christian South America. It's imho more a matter of culture than one of religion as Duke pointed out. (actually europeans do sweat it if productivity is not at 100%, they're just not obsessed with it).

The only thing that was on that ship was weapons that the Hamas (which by the way, is a terrorist organization) was trying to smuggle in. quote> So uhm, the diplomats from Norway, Germany, Bulgaria, Ireland, Sweden and Algeria plus the turkish, greek, spanish etc. NGOs plus the independent reporters and organizations who organized and checked what was being carried onboard the expedition were sending weapons to Hamas? I'm so tooootally going to believe it. Tell your leaders to at least be a bit more imaginative with their propaganda, please...

toll-booth workers choose to work there. As do builders.quote> Almost all the builders I know work there because it was the only relatively good-paying job they were able to get with their school grades and social level, not because they wanted to. They consider being able to eat everyday and live relatively comfortably more important than any possible long-term illness (it's not like I wouldn't do the same thing in their places)... Driving a car is not the same thing as smoking is proven to shorten other people's lives. Car's doesn't have the same affect.quote> So they selected a 300 young people group (statiscally relevant) and exposed them to periodic amounts of cigar fumes near the average daily dose of a non-smoker in contact with a smoker and then waited 50 years to get the results? No, Obviously not, but that's how you "prove" a hypothesis. Statistics mash-ups looking for correlations don't prove any hypothesis. Tobacco is obviously bad for the direct smoker's health, there's however a small dose-response problem for "second-hand smokers". I think that he was talking about car fumes, not driving a car. Now car fumes do have an effect on your health, Carbon Monoxide levels in a normal-sized street are high enough to close veins in your brain with small ischaemia (death of brain cells by lack of oxygen) ensuing. Now these injuries are sparse and small so no visible effects appear on a relatively long term. But they may be significantly involved in brain degenerative illnesses, I can offer no proof of any "shortening of people's lives" though. Car fumes also release other tocix compounds like benzopyrenes which are carcinogen for your lungs, these may probably build up in your lungs in a similar way as cigarrette fumes do, being one of the various triggers for respiratory illnesses and cancer. We need a long and constant exposure to tobacco to develop a cancer or a related illness. Just crossing smokers in the street is not going to give you cancer as your body has several ways to dispose and destroy carcinogens and dangerous substances as long as the given amounts are not too high. Surveillance and repair mecanisms are in place to avoid or remove any source of cancer or metastasis. They are the main reason why most life-long smokers won't develop a cancer and also why we don't die of cancer even if the natural environment itself is full of carcinogens (plants love releasing them into the air).

No one has been seriously injured after an explosion at ATK near Short Gap, West Virginia, according to Maryland State Police helicopter personnel. Several fire and hazmat trucks responded to ATK around 5:15 p.m. after the blast. ATK makes rocket propulsion systems. It is the largest defense contractor in West Virginia. It was formerly known as ABL(Allegany Ballistics Laboratory). Security personnel at ATK told a 911 dispatcher "there was no hazmat involved." At least one person was transported to the hospital, but they were alert and conscious in the ambulance, according to dispatchers. WHAG's Adam Winer is on the scene. We will have a full report at 11pm.quote> link

Next thing to do: rewrite the Civil War. Oh wait...

We know that living material can by synthesized from non-living chemicals under primordial conditions created in the laboratory, but whether the material so created can evolve in any kind of measurable time is not answered right now as far as I know. Does anyone know if life created in any of these experiments was allowed to continue? quote> No one has ever created life in a lab experiment. Please keep in mind that organic molecules are just building blocks, not living beings or living material by themselves. The thing to be careful of here is that they might create a pathogen that would eliminate us. This sort of result is called the Frankenstein Effect (by Mary Shelly).quote> Not in such a short time, not even in thousands of years (unless it's purposely done). Our bodies are pretty well protected against any foreign susbstances and our current pathogens have developed incredibly complex mechanisms over millions of years to break our defenses.

Didn't Einstien postulate curved space well before the technology existed to test the concept?quote> I don't remember Einstein saying that it was somehow unknowable? The no-brainer is not the fact of announcing it before evidence appears, it's to announce something as unknowable. And he was famous after they actually confirmed it. It wasn't confirmed by the means of high-tech, astronomers proved it few time after he published his papers as they saw how the sun moved the position of stars during an eclipse. (displaced star positions before/after) Modern Scientists would do well to remember that in Newtons day there was a point of view that man was close to knowing all there was to know. In retrospect laughable, but illustrative of the dangers of intellectual arrogance.quote> Devil's Proof is not a valid move, I'm sorry. We are aware that almost everything we know is badly formulated at best, but this by no means can be used to justify any unproven point. You are absolutely right, however this applies to everyone. Science is an accumulative effort and we will know way more things in the future than we do now and most actual concepts and models will fall or be replaced by better approaches. There is however no way to know what the future is preparing for us, which means that what we know right now will stand until it is refuted or expanded. Ehm, by the way, ain't we going a bit off-topic?

why not postulate an unknown and unknowable supreme being and let it go at that?quote> Providing relief for people's existential dilemmas is not science's job. As long as something interfers with this universe's matter or energy it is measurable and knowable. If it doesn't interfer with the known universe there is no way anyone could know about it in the first place and it therefore does not exist in practicality. Saying that something is there but you can't know about it is a philosophical no-brainer. There is no reason to postulate the existence of something that cannot be tested.

When God gave mankind dominance over nature (plant and animal)quote> Dominance? How so?

Originally posted by: N_O_Body -Lexus-: In your biology class did anyone say anything about genetic studies using Drysophila Varigata (fruit flies). quote> Do you mean Drosophila melanogaster? (Specific epithets, melanogaster here, always go in lower case btw)

So all that wonderful radiation seeping through the magnetic poles causes cancer and if it causes evolution, then the odds would be far more than astronomical that it creates anything but cancer.quote> Radiation? Which one, the Earth's electromagnetic field? Too bad it's by far too small to cause any effect in direct chemical bonding, some animals and plants can just barely sense it by having specialized structures in which metallic atoms are located and can transmit a signal when the spin of these atoms is modified, that's all. Electromagnetic fields can cause changes in enzimatic and electric activity of some reactions and modify the spin of some metallic atoms, but they won't cause direct mutations, even less in the puny amounts the Earth's field operates on. Darwin proved that some birds will grow a variety of beaks during different climate conditionsquote> No, Darwin never stated or proved anything like that, that's Lamarckism . Birds won't grow beaks out of necessity, it just seems like that because we are looking at the end result. Most bird populations will never have the chance to suffer several positive mutations in time and will either have to flee or will disappear. Interpreting a result is sometimes a bit dangerous when you have no way to see what happened before. but no observable species-evolution has occured. Once an evolutionary jump has been observed then it shall be proven.quote> Species evolution as 2 populations no longer being able to mate and produce fertile offspring? Oh but we have observed it, here's an example, and there are more I haven't posted: London Underground Mosquito species << this one is pretty amazing Genetic variation was quantified between surface-dwelling populations of Culex pipiens and the so-called molestus form found in the London Underground (the Underground) railway system. The molestus form is a commercially important biting nuisance and in the southern part of its range is also a disease vector. The surface and subterranean populations were genetically distinct, with no evidence of gene flow between closely adjacent populations of the different forms, whereas there was little differentiation between the different populations of each form. The substantially reduced heterozygosity in the Underground populations and the allelic composition suggest that colonization of the Underground has occurred once or very few times. Breeding experiments show compatibility between the Underground populations but not with those breeding above ground. There is evidence of greater gene flow and a mixing of molestus and pipiens traits in the south of the species range. This paper considers the processes that may allow establishment of reproductive isolation in the north of the species range but not in the south.quote> scientific article source See, you just proved exactly what I said. It doesnt make sense to you. In other words, you dont understand it. You dont comprehend the science behind it. So, you come up[...]quote> Oh and please talk about the topic at hand, not about the people posting in here.

and science still doen't explain how a week was first invented. 7 days isn't explained by science, science explains one day, one month and a year. So where did we get the week? how does science explain a week? Just because it's a lucky number?quote> Back in the day we didn't use the 12 month system, we used the lunar calendar system (in some languages like japanese a month is still called a moon). Each lunar cycle lasts approximatively 28 days and has 4 phases(full moon, waxing, new moon and waning), each phase lasts 28/4 days which means.. yes each phase is 7 days long and this astronomical landmark was used to easily identify weeks and months just at a glance of the sky. This is the most accepted hypothesis around. Also the living cells have non living components, alot of it isn't non-living, sorry bad wording... quote> How does that go against science? Of course separate components ain't alive, it's the interacting system which is alive.

I just don't get how you can get order form a huge explosion ( aka the big bang). If you blow up a pile of bricks you don't get a house... the scientists are going against their own principles!quote> The universe right now is way less ordered than it was at the beginning (luckily for us). You can get order as long as the final result is energetically favourable (Thermodynamics 101) Also when you see layers of rock in a mountian, those had to be laid down very quickly and can't be 1. whatever years old or erosion would have wipped all that out.quote> Earth is not static at all, neither is life. Just because something happens in a way different timescale than the one humans live in does not make it non-existent or impossible to notice, we can measure how mountains raise and go down centimeter per centimeter. Think about a human cell and how it all works togther, it has millions of parts to it and hardly any of them are living! That goes against science. quote> What?

1996-1997 for me I don't remember much of my childhood (and I'm just 22!) and sincerely, most has been voluntarily forgotten. My family just moved to Spain the year before so I still was trying to integrate and learn the local language, Catalan. At school, everybody inferred from my first 2 spanish names that I was a spanish kid coming from another region instead of a french kid (I was already almost native-level at spanish). However, part of my family was of spanish origin and was subjected to forced exile for political reasons in the past (3/4 of my grandparents), which allowed me to acquire the spanish citizenship during the year. Now I had 1 name and 2 family surnames, my father's one and my mother's one, instead of just one surname as the french model states. And my mother's one was.. well a bit exotic for my classmates (it's my username), so I was the focus of attention for 1/2 of the year. Unluckily, there's nothing more I remember except the same repetitive classes and me falling in love with maths back then.

Great. Disregard the resulting nuclear pollution in all the Mexican Gulf's food chain...

Plan C: Stuff the well with lots of tyre bits and rubbish and then see if it works.(I'm dead serious, I wonder what Plan D looks like)

Why don't you just time travel to the future? It just makes the same kind of sense as "going into the hyperspace"

Trippy chat tonight

No, the entire library A lab is fine too

That's a misleading number. Aren't we something like 98% genetically the same as chimpanzees?quote> That 98% mainly refers to the coding sequence of genes, not the overall DNA. Genes themselves have repair machinery and won't change that much in small amounts of time. we don't use genes to do that kind studies, we mainly use non-coding repetitive sequences called microsatellites that are highly variable through time and show may more difference between humans people. They bear no biologic information whatsoever though, they're just used by us as measuring units. The other physical differences aside (ever met a really tall Asian person?)quote> I've met several of them, why? This, however, is a purely emotional problem.... it is absurd to deny that we are different, and there is absolutely no reason why we cannot acknowledge our differences ("celebrate diversity!") while at the same time accepting that we are all equally human.quote> Indeed

Maybe Natal in Brazil?