Posts by GrimJack

Debates on evolution that revolve around, whether you believe Darwin's theory of how we came about, or the literal acceptance of the first book of the Christian bible, generally lead nowhere, as participants usually have rigid beliefs, I thinkthis is the best routeto take, as the cell is the building block of life; your at the "coal face"in a manner of speak. You have good input there, and your right, the question of intelligence can come later. Children at play will form themselves into small groups, each group will then take, almost an existence of it own, with an overall mindset and drive to preserve itself, so will a street gang. In a sense, cells in an organism do much the same, there are cells for making bone, cells for making muscle, cells for repairing the body and, cells for fighting off 'outside invasion' - "warrior cells" if you like. Whether the body stays healthy or diseased, how antibiotics work, or not, and the formation MRSA, all depend in how the cells perform.

What I find puzzling about ID/creationists is what they choose to fight about; seldom do they bring up the bombardier beetles or the complex set of hormonal messages that control the amorphous mass of cells after the zygote divides and the beginning of cell differentiation. So many different instructions must be turned off and on at just the correct time to produce a viable life-form.

This leads to the complexities of DNA, RNA, rDNA, mRNA, tRNA, …

Could it be that the Simpsons have evolved from the Flinstones - by the way - what has happened that family, the las time I saw them I was in Canada.

Have you noticed the evolution of the Simpson family -- now that they have been around for 30 years, they have started to insert lots of stories that explain what happened between marriage and kids.

We were fish then we grew legs as we came out of the water then we changed to dinosaurs then we changed to mammals then we changed to monkeys then we changed to people (watch the simpsons if you got lost)

The interesting thing about mammals is not the 'live young' thing or 'fur thing' - it is actually the jawbone/earbone thing:

Two characteristics of mammals that are at least sometimes preserved in the fossil record are (1) the mammalian middle ear contains a chain of three bones, the malleus, incus, and stapes; and (2) the lower jaw of mammals consists of a single bone called the dentary and is where the teeth are. In the therapsids, immediate ancestors of mammals that dominated terrestrial habitats during the Permian, the middle ears contained just one bone, the stapes, and the lower jaw was made up of several bones.

The question becomes why might these changes have occurred? Speculation follows:

First, the changes in the lower jaw are perhaps not surprising in a group under selection for increased efficiency of biting and chewing. The dentary bears the teeth. Sutures between bones are weak points; therefore, enlargement of the tooth-bearing bone, so that most of the forces resulting from chewing acts upon it alone, makes sense. Similarly, the growth of a coronoid process provided extra space for attaching muscle, especially muscle oriented to increase the strength of the bite at the point where upper and lower teeth meet and reduce the forces operating …

The joke about the politicians was meant to lighten you up man, you sound so angry. And the joke was in the implication that polliticians lie all the time, therefor is their lips move to speak you they ar telling lies - Got it?

Did you get my reference about ventriloquists? Politicians who are ventriloquists do not move their lips therefore they do not lie - dude, I get jokes; I make jokes but I try to make appropriate jokes or relevant jokes.

I really do not need someone to 'lighten' me up; just because I question other people's beliefs does not mean I am angry; the anger you see is yours not mine.

What you consider a 'politician' joke is also told about lawyers, salesmen, etc. and really did not strike me as funny when I heard it 30 years ago (I admit I thought it was funny when I first heard it 50 years ago)

I think in science it is widely known that all cells are intelligent. From what I have learn't from a Biology course, each cell has programmed into it a set of instructions. For example, a human airborn virus is basically a bunch of cells programmed to infect other cells to enter the system. Example, if the virus first infects the blood cells like a lot of viruses do, it will get into your system quicker. That is when our immune system gets into place destroying nasty cells and some of its surrounding cells. While the immune system is at work, the virus attempts to effect parts of the body where it can then spread to other humans while doing whatever it was programmed. Some might say this is an effect of creationism where an agent created a virus but I believe it is more likely to be a effect of evolution where somebody sneases then the bacteria that sneasing creates then grows until it form new life or in the above example a virus.

I will accept that cells can follow certain programming using rDNA and RNA to build new proteins; with this I can see how as cells begin to 'network' and eventually build up to intelligence but that is probably for another time. The body is flushed with so many different messages and messengers - it is a magnificent machine. But I can't accept intelligent cells, this might be my age. I googled around a bit and did …

Well, you are welcome anyway! Please look around but wrt your driver problem try here. Here is another pretty good place to look.

Yea, I agree, my "inbuilt evolutionary clock" was a bad attempt at a quick metaphor. However, you agree that the scenario I was describing was adaptation and, that is exactly the modus operandi] of evolution: adapt, overcome and develope.

Nope! that is not how evolution works. What you are describing is Lamarckian - a disproven theory that <sort of> says "if you cut the tales off of all the mice, eventually, the mice will breed only tailless mice"

Let's be certain just exactly what we are discussing here. The meaning of the word 'evolution', which stems from the word 'evolute',

evolute means the locus of the center of curvature or the envelope of the normals of a curve". Evolution is the noun form of the verb 'evolve' " to produce by natural evolutionary processes"

is: To unroll, expand and, when applied to animal and vegetable organisms or their parts: The process of developing from a rudimentary to a complete or more complex state - that that takes place is a ' no-brainer'. But, you cannot develope the argument by sweeping statements like: "Muscles change according to usage" or, explaining away antibiotic resistant bacteria, or MRSA, as the result of bad medical practice. You have to know what is taking place in the processes.

I know exactly what I am saying; I am not explaining anything away. I am beginning to think that you do not know what you are talking about.

All animal and vegetable organisms, even the most primative, …

No meat is another term for penis so men have meat. Get it now?

Only for 16 year olds who think 'beating their meat' is a subtle way to say masturbating.

He is looking more at government outsourcing -- just a quick example, the CBs (seabees) build a bridge for military pay-scale where KBR builds a bridge for cost + 10% (their cost which is not necessarily true cost). That means it actually pays for KBR to abandon a truck with a flat tire and buy a new one (cost +10%) than to guard the truck until repairs can be made.

Another example might be KBR employees installing the electrical for the USArmy - those contractors don't really care how well they do because, well - they don't live there but last count was that bad electrical installation has killed 17 soldiers (can you imagine having to worry about dying while taking a shower in the Green Zone after an 8 hour fire-fight?).

We may never know how much graft, corruption, and outright theft went on in Iraq because all the outsourcing contracts were no-bid, no oversight contracts.

He also said "Cocaine is God's way of telling you 'you make too much money'" - I loved that line back in 1980 and it still kills.

It means what it means. No one here has the time to think for you.

No you are just an a**hole - you do not need a reason.

Ooh, let's make a sandwich.

That was it - when I disable ShockWave, the problem goes away. I have to turn it back on to watch youtube so eventually I have to reboot. I should check with FF/Mozilla to see if they have something for me.

You're not going to wear that, are you?

no.. because I look like a rabbit.. (just kidding) ahihihih ...

You should probably start a new thread for this - unless you want to tie this in to Evolution.

Generally speaking dis/belief in evolution has no direct correlation to dis/belief in god - though I am willing to bet heavily on the proposition that 99% of the people who do not believe in evolution believe in god; the obverse is not true.

Mmmm... bacon.

Vegetarian friends tell me that the smell of frying bacon is one of the worst temptations that they face....

I love bacon... and they lost me after weaving the foundation :)

I really liked that weaving part - I was wondering how they did it.

Speaking of the Big Bang -- where did that huge gas ball come from anyway? What was there before the BB ? Don't you think we humans are just too ignorant to understand all that yet? Even if God did explain it exactly to us it would have the same affect as us trying to explain TV to Julius Ceasar or even worse to Moses.

Yeah, the question of first causes has always been an interesting question. That is one of the reasons that the lack of visible anti-matter is puzzling. It has long been accepted that particles can appear in a vacuum as long as there has been no overall change in the total 'energy' in the system - say a proton and an anti-proton or a quark and its anti. The BB theory posits that for all the matter in the universe should be balanced by and equivalent amount of anti-matter.

Some seem to think that 'dark' matter and/or 'dark' energy may be the answer to the missing anti-matter. The search for dark matter has lead to some interesting acronyms.

The two main categories that scientists consider as possible candidates for dark matter have been dubbed MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects), and WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Although these acronyms are amusing, they can help you remember which is which. MACHOs are the big, strong dark matter objects ranging in size from small stars to super massive black holes (1). MACHOs are made of 'ordinary' matter, …

Yea, a good example and, when you start using your hands for some hard graft such as shoveling coal or rock climbing; at first the skin will be torn and blisters will appear but, if you continue, nature, or your inbuilt evolutionary clock will kick in and you will develop thicker skin and welts on the parts of the hand where needed.

That is not evolution but adaptation; let us not drag Lamarck into this or we won't get anywhere (not that we will anyway). There is no inbuilt evolutionary clock (whatever that is), the body adapts to how it is used. Muscles change according to usage, skin toughens when rubbed.

Just to put a fine point on it - MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a bacterium that causes infections in different parts of the body.) is the result of the misuse of common antibiotics. Currently more people in the US die from MRSA than from AIDS (2005 statistics).

wtf?? Who are you and what the heck are you talking about (or did the mod. remove a link?)

If you watched the response given by the Governor of Louisiana a few days ago, you wonder if there is evolution.

Can you believe how lame that was!! And he was the 'new, improved' Republican and their next presidential candidate. He dropped such a brick, he will probably disappear (unless he joins the Palin ticket).

I believe in creation. Simply put, you don't come across a cabin in the woods and think, "wow, it must have built itself!" (Same fits a well designed PC...like mine! hehe) When you look at the fact of how the world works in the design itself, it didn't just happen, it had to be constructed. The exact distance from the sun to survive, not freeze to death or burn up, the oxygen levels not too much not too low, water. These things didn't just POP and now we have a perfect home, it was created.

You are just trolling, right!? You aren't really dragging out those tired old 'watchmaker' cliches as some sort of disproof of evolution.

The planet did not always have an oxygen atmosphere, it was changed by what we now call extremophiles that 'ate' the old atmosphere and 'shat' Oxygen. wrt "the perfect distance from the sun' - er, we evolved for the environment we have not the environment we wanted (to bastardize an infamous political leader).

Well, just in case you believe what you stated - would you please explain MRSA, fossils, -- well, if you can explain just those 2, I will donate my points to you.

This drummer is so f--ing good - he is playing live for the cd release party. I was just there but as an old f*rt I could not stay for the full club scene but that drummer. Probably they will be on to other things by the time you get to the site but DJ Myng says they will be keeping it in deep rotation, so it will come around again.

I may have pllugged GlobalVortexRadio.com here before but they are having a release party tonight - got me hyped up enough that I may rebuild my old radio show that I build up in my youth - who know.

Are you stating that in an apologetic sort of way?

Yep - I was not listening to music like everyone else here but truth be told, his speech made me proud and thankful.

Reality is not what your eyes tell you

Oh, d*amn! I thought you just wanted some abuse - oh, well:

(i.e. it don’t exist) doesn't
in all form of medi - forms
Members may check out the media, much as with any library
Members may check out <moved> and enjoy the media, <deleted> as with any library
it at their leisure. delete.

Should read:

The Medieval Media Library is a special library (i.e. it doesn’t exist) that deals in all forms of media, ranging from Movies, to Games, to Books. Members may check out and enjoy the media, as with any library.

The rest looks good but I am not much of an expert in that area.

Er, President Obama's (state of the Union) speech to the joint house/senate.

And all that work washed away with the tides!
At first I thought you were reprising but thankfully, not.

There are professional sand artists!!

Not as modern but a marvel just the same"

What if Babbage's Difference Engine spawned a "laptop"?

In an order issued yesterday, February 19, 2009, in National Meat Association, et al. v. Edmund Brown, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence J. O'Neill enjoined the State of California from enforcing California Penal Code Sec. 599f, which prohibited the sale of meat or meat product of nonambulatory (or "downer") animals for human consumption, and that required the immediate humane euthanization of such animals. In doing so, the Court found that federal law, which has no such provisions, preempted California's law. As a result, slaughterhouses in California remain free to slaughter and process meat from cattle, swine, and other animals that are unable to walk possibly due to disease or other disability.

As you may recall, the release of video footage by the Humane Society caused an uproar early last year when awful, gut-wrenching cruelty was revealed at the Hallmark Meat Packing Company, located in Chino, California. Undercover Investigation Reveals Rampant Animal Cruelty at California Slaughter Plant – A Major Beef Supplier to America’s School Lunch Program.

Do your children eat America's School Lunch?

Thanks - I forgot all about the Plug-ins (I went crazy disabling Add-ons to no avail). I disabled Shockwave and Shockwave for directors and Silverlight. I will see if this helps.

Thanks!!

Time for Taps? - I hang my head in sorrow as I prepare the carbonara for dinner tonight

And Aia has been throwing swine before pearls for years now - if only he could read his own lips:

Give credit and judgment to a person for what [s]he does, and not for what you think [s]he would do.

Those are really, really Kool numbers and I have bookmarked the page (even set NoScript to permanently allow the page) but the adverts are pretty weird

Prefuse 73 for a soft change of pace

Oh, cr*p - I have been having the hang-up problem lately with FireFox and was hoping for a fix here. I can't close FF and when I kill it with Task Manager, the sessions go away but the process remains and can not be killed; I have to re-boot. Is this similar? Or should I open my own thread?

I wanted to vote for Superman, but sadly he died a couple years ago.

Didn't he get beat to death by Batman?

1945            [B]Harry Truman[/B] sends a message to Congress [B]asking for[/B]
                legislation establishing a national health insurance 
                plan.  Two decades of debate ensue, with opponents
                warning of the dangers of [B]"socialized medicine."[/B]
...
July 30, 1965   [B]Medicare and its companion program Medicaid[/B],
                (which insures indigent recipients), [B]are signed into 
                law by President Lyndon Johnson[/B] as part of his 
                "Great Society."

                Ex-president Truman is the first to enroll in Medicare.

http://seniorjournal.com/NEWS/2000%20Files/Aug%2000/FTR-08-04-00MedCarHistry.htm
AFAIK, Truman and Johnson were not conservatives. Aren't Democrats known as liberals?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States. He was a central figure of the 20th century during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war. Elected to four terms in office, he served from 1933 to 1945 and is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Roosevelt created the New Deal to provide relief for the unemployed, recovery of the economy, and reform of the economic and banking systems, through various agencies, such as the Works Project Administration (WPA), National Recovery Administration (NRA), and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).[1] Although recovery of the economy was incomplete until World War II, several programs he initiated, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), continue to have instrumental roles in the nation's commerce. [B]Some of his other …

What? Who says I dont know what a socialist is? You? Thanks, but I can see for myself. Your puny mind has been brainwashed by the Great Messiah.

Then define socialist. You have been brain-washed by the drug-addled, sausage Rush and his constant worrying about "bend over and grab ankles"

Why do you always involve Bush into every conversation? Did I say anything about Bush? For all you know, I dislike Bush. Assuming someone aligns himself with a political party simply because he dislikes the other candidate is naive.

You were attempting to denigrate Obama about ruining the economy so I mentioned that Bush already did that. No one gives a rat's butt whether or not you like Bush (now - I am betting you were a strong supporter until it was no longer a popular position). I have no clue what you are talking about wrt 'naive'.

LOL. A doody-head, huh? Why, because you cant see the same parallels now as existed in Germany post-WW2? You are a fool.

No, I think you are a doody-head because you can not come up with anything original and need to echo right-wing talking points. If you are going to make such a comparison, you should at least have the intellectual honesty to try to back up your comparison.

Your optimistic thinking, and blind faith in someone makes you so. You probably know NOTHING about Obama aside from what the lefty media tells you. I suggest that you use that tiny brain …

I assume you can give examples of this? Sounds like the mythical Cadillac-driving Chicago welfare queen urban legend.

And to bring this back to Reagan - that was the senile old fart "specialized in the exaggerated, outrageous tale that was almost always unsubstantiated, usually false, yet so sensational that it merited repeated recounting… And because his ‘examples’ of welfare queens drew on existing stereotypes of welfare cheats and resonated with news stories about welfare fraud, they did indeed gain real traction." He sold missiles to Iran within 2 years of Iran's release of the hostages (was he fulfilling his part of a bargain). He supported terrorists in South America even after laws were passed to prevent it.

A stapler will bind people too, if it's big enough.

I used to operate one of those huge staplers used to bind wood - would definitely bind 2 people together for the rest of their lives - blood-loss might shorten the experience.

Good call, Josh.

"Can Barack Obama save America?"

hahaha<snip>haha

Is that a joke? If anything, Obama will DESTROY America. He's a manipulative socialist bastard...

You have no clue what a socialist is so how do you get off calling anyone with a label you can not define?

Obama will expand government every chance he gets.

Er, wtf do you think Bush and his conservatives did?

He will use our current economic recession to his advantage much in the way that Adolf Hitler did in the 30s.

Heh,heh - Hitler - heh,heh don't be a doody-head; Hitler is supposed to be the last resort of an idiot without a clue, not the first attempt.

He will destroy our economy, ruin our overseas reputation, destroy our alliances, and ultimately kill the American way-of-life as we know it.

Bush has already done all that - Obama is here to save America from the Bush era.

The salmon thing is only partially true - there are some species that spawn more than once. The species that spawn only once; begin to die on the way back. Their mouths deform and they are no longer able to eat - every last bit of energy that they have is used to get them back to the spawning grounds. I would have to look into the senescence (okay, I did - I cold not resist):

The antagonistic pleiotropy theory of senescence postulates genes or traits that have opposite effects on early-life and late-life performances. Because selection is generally weaker late in life, genes or traits that improve early-life performance but impair late-life performance should come to predominate. Variation in the strength of age-specific selection should then generate adaptive variation in senescence. We demonstrate this mechanism by comparing early and late breeders within a population of semelparous capital-breeding sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka). We show that early breeders (but not late breeders) are under strong selection for a long reproductive lifespan (RLS), which facilitates defence of their nests against disturbance by later females. Accordingly, early females invest less energy in egg production while reserving more for nest defence. Variation along this reproductive trade-off causes delayed or slower senescence in early females (average RLS of 26 days) than in late females (reproductive lifespan of 12 days). We use microsatellites to confirm that gene flow is sufficiently limited between early and late breeders to allow adaptive divergence in response to selection. Because reproductive …

"NOT TRUE; We use 100% of our brains."

"If you feel a reluctant sneeze coming on, look at a bright light and it'll come" - one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard, but is there any truth to it??

Actually there is quite an interesting correlation in that statement. The extreme of this is called "Photic sneeze reflex". This can be quite a handicap (imagine a fighter pilot breaking out of a cloud into the bright sunshine and sneezing - eyes snap shut, and the next thing you know they're picking him up off the landscape with a rake.
In a study of 460 subjects, 24% sneezed in bright light.

Help! I need an insulin drip.

Not really a joke but...:
Dear Dogs and Cats: The dishes with the paw prints are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Placing a paw print in the middle of my plate and food does not stake a claim for it becoming your food and dish, nor do I find that aesthetically pleasing in the slightest.

The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Racing me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn't help because I fall faster than you can run.

I cannot buy anything bigger than a king sized bed. I am very sorry about this. Do not think I will continue sleeping on the couch to ensure your comfort, however. Dogs and cats can actually curl up in a ball when they sleep. It is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other, stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out on the other end to maximize space is nothing but sarcasm.

The first time that January 1 will fall on a Sunday is the year 4300. I am going to stay up extra late to celebrate that year!