Posts by GrimJack

The practice of eugenics is of all ages, it's only the term that's recent (late 1800s I believe, became a bit of a hobby for people in the 1920s and '30s).
Before that it was not "scientifically" executed, but more on an ad-hoc basis by for example banishing or killing people you didn't like to see as parents rather than sterilising them.

Post a cite please - don't just make bald statements.

evolution may not stop completely, but it does slow down dramatically.
Evolution after all is driven by the need to adapt to changing conditions and when a species becomes able to prevent or alleviate such change it no longer needs to change itself.

And yes, maybe civilisation started when we started taking care of our sick and elderly. But civilisation has nothing to do with evolution and for thousands of years those sick and infirm would not procreate.
In fact for most of human history there has been a strong taboo, and in many cases laws, against such procreation.
It wasn't until after WW2 that forced sterilisation of mentally ill people was abandoned in most countries for example.

Eugenics was a recent and short-lived blip. I am googling now but it is late - if you have some info on this, please link it for me - and I lose so much time when I get sucked into an interesting site like this. I still think that the culling from wars on the healthy, young men would wreak more havoc but then again the winners tended to rape and pillage the vanquished (it is estimated that .05% of all men alive today are descended from Ghenghis Khan).

In other words I am still researching this question.

I have my own beliefs, but I do take interest in others'. Essentially this topic I find to be a pursuit of something other than its apparent intended purpose, but that is my opinion. I do enjoy this topic and the comments it receives nonetheless.

This choice was intentionally the opposite of what you may probably think, but that is in part because I think a lot of folks have great misconceptions with all parts of what seems a simple question. Much like a great number of questions of forums such as these, the most salient point is not "what's the answer?" but "what's the question?"

That was a good link - I am still working my way through the abstracts. I just want to point out that since I started this particular thread, I want to assure you that I do not have a hidden agenda other than to stimulate dialog without diatribe. I believe that I learn from these discussions because I try to research my responses and I often have had to change my entire post and admit I was wrong then I discover that to be the case. I would never have thought to look to the Vatican for Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe.

As to your final point - sometimes you have to know most of the answer before you can ask the correct question.

Not sure who it was, but I heard the notion years ago that evolution of a species stops when that species starts changing its environment to suit itself.
Then when that species starts caring for its sick, elderly, and infirm and lets them procreate evolution actually starts reversing itself.

We're in that stage now...

Well, if you take war into account then all our best and brightest have been killed off every generation. It is always the strong, young men who fight and die thus leaving the weak and ill at home to produce the next generation. This is a more direct weeding out of good qualities (strong healthy) than any altruistic caring for sick and elderly.

I postulate that civilization began with our taking care of weak, sick and elderly (along with cultivation, of course). Also, I would like to point out that evolution does not stop when species begin to modify their environment (nesting is the most common form of changing environment - beavers, ants, birds all change their environments).

I found this article on the Freakonomics blog; The city of Dallas budgeted for a lot of income from their 'red light cameras' and darned if people stopped blowing through the red lights (like by 50%).

Hey, they still haven't found the guy who mailed anthrax around the country either - I was sure they would catch that person!!

I think he used to believe in evolution, but now believes in creationism. Changing your mind is the prerogative of old folks.

February 23, 2007 Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was the keynote speaker for the most prominent creationism advocacy group in the country. The Discovery Institute, a religious right think-tank, is well-known for its strong opposition to evolutionary biology and its advocacy for 'intelligent design.' The institute’s main financial backer, savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson, spent 20 years on the board of the Chalcedon Foundation, 'a theocratic outfit that advocates the replacement of American civil law with biblical law.'

The Discovery Institute is here is Seattle - I should check it out some time, could be good for a laugh.

I just found the youtube video The Get Out Clause made - wow, bus cam, taxi cam, bridge cam - pretty cool idea

I wonder if it might not be liability worries.
If all the energy it takes to build and maintain a nuclear power plant were just used to produce energy, it would just about be a break-even thing. Then there is the idea that Nuke power does not contribute to global warming - this is a joke, those iconic cooling towers are 'cooling towers' they put heat into the atmosphere.

<<look at me - I go out for a couple of beers with DW and I come back here and rant>>

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found the comments to this blog post quite entertaining.

WOW!
I thought it was only the Dems that eat their young - I had been trying to read and/or listen to 'lefty' stuff and it all reads/sounds like the Rush-left. Just screeding, anti-clinton bombast that sounds just Rush in the '90s. The left and the right are calling the others a 'whore'
Sigh!

It is like the world is getting taken over by people lik rush, malkin, Rhodes, who do not know how to do anything but.....

Sigh! Now I'm starting to rant.

Never mind - thanks for the link Dave

Obligatory elephant: The French hated the Eiffel tower - the common complaint was "They have only erected the framework of this monument, It has no skin"

You want to walk up the Eifel Tower in Paris, there are 1,792 steps to go.

And the view is stupendous - I made the walk the first time because the wait for the elevator was like 3 hours.

I found this blog - their tag is "We watch FOX so you don't have to." FOX news has hired Bush's brain (Carl Rove) as an 'objective' talking head. Oddly enough, Carl has taken to appearing without his wedding band on???

I can barely even read about FOX news w/o getting my bp up -- then I have to watch Dave take Bill O' to the woodshed to calm down

I just love that slam 'that's because I am a thoughtful guy'

What did you step into?

That was from a Mad TV ad for 7-up, the front of the t-shirt said 'Make 7' and the back read 'up yours' - the dude could not figure out why everyone was throwing stuff at him.

An I was responding to someone's .sig that ended with 'up yours' - look back a post or 2

John Twelve Hawks has written some very good books that do deal with this form of prison. I read them awhile back and if you enjoy reading his style of fiction I urge anyone to read them. The author himself is quite interesting.

Damn! you're good - that is actually what I have been reading lately and what triggered this thread. I just started Dark River (I think that is the name - to lazy to walk to the bedroom to look).

I just heard of an Indie group in the UK that had a new album to release but no money to produce a video so they performed for free in public around Manchester and then submitted Freedom of Information requests for the public tapes and built their video from that. The poor guy said that he does not know how many times they had to do the show for free to get a complete production because many of the cameras were dummies, sometimes the FOI request did not go through. Here is a story about them: The Get Out Clause

Make 7 -
up yours

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example"

Is the world becoming a Panopticon?

Do you behave differently when you know there is a camera around?

Anybody from the UK where cctv is omnipresent -- does the knowledge that you are under observation whenever you are out in 'the commons' affect how you behave?

If you thought that your neighbors (the police, members of your church, total strangers) might be watching you, would you behave differently?

I marvel to my inability to keep this post strictly sober. Perhaps is due to the fact I can't take seriously any writing where a “thesis” contains the word “crap” several times. Moreover, my thoughts continue to divagate: Why green, shouldn't be of a more “brownish” shade since you favor “crap” in so many diverse terms?

This quote has been nagging at me for quit a while and I finally figured out why. You could not attack my thesis so you picked out the word 'crap'. I had hoped that I could get a good discussion out of you but you got nothing.

Since ~s.o.s~ put a well-deserved end to a 1400 post thread (put a stake right through its tiny little heart) - I thought I would see if any one was interested in keeping the topic open.

If you do not think evolution is a valid theory, why.
If you think it is, why.

Do you believe in Creationism and/or Intelligent Design?
Do you believe in evolution?

Please note that I specifically used the words 'think' and 'believe'; please use them carefully - not interchangeably.

If I remember the incident, you are correct the original poisoner was never caught Later someone poisoned their spouse with Excedrin but when no one caught on, she went out and laced another 5 bottles and someone else died. Then she collected on his accidental death policy. She was caught when her daughter got a guilty conscience. After the Tylenol thing in Chicago, a Federal anti-tampering law was passed - this is what the Excedrin lady was sent to prison for; if she ever gets out, she will probably be charged with murder and put back in.

The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295 or −2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647 using two's complement encoding. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory. Some of the 4 gigs is reserved.

Cite

Don't forget that 32 bit machines do not support more than 3.2 gigs of mem. I recommend buying a matched set of 1 gig and a set of half gigs -- it is not worth paying for 4 gigs if can only use 3.2. (from summary: Leveraging the Intel 875P chipset to support 3.2 GHz+ P4)

Sorry about the above copy and paste error, I was watching a PBS special on the climbers who died on Everest and I misread GHz as memory, sigh

Sorry I did not close this - the needed chip arrived and all is good

Don't forget that 32 bit machines do not support more than 3.2 gigs of mem. I recommend buying a matched set of 1 gig and a set of half gigs -- it is not worth paying for 4 gigs if can only use 3.2. (from summary: Leveraging the Intel 875P chipset to support 3.2 GHz+ P4)

Unfortunately, 32 bit machines can only handle up to 3 gigs of mem. <approximately> Oh, well.

You don't mention whether or no you used the 'safely remove Hardware' button. If you don't use it, you will lose it.

Wow, you mean you actually read that - congrats.

Yes! I, too, demand some truth in thread naming.

Opium is the opiate of the masses

a metaphor is just an aggressive simile

In other words, the present CPI would simply assume that if the price of milk goes up like it has recently, the consumer would then drink water instead.

Or drink powdered milk or buy the milk but cut back somewhere else. Consider the food budget as a bucket and the cost of things the contents of the bucket. If milk is necessary (ie inelastic) then something else must be adjusted so that the bucket does not overflow. If the cost of meat goes up, then you buy less meat (or different meat) and more starch. <<digression - Most of the 3rd world eats mostly starch and now that the cost of starch is going up there is food rioting. - /digression>>

Why even bother with a Consumer Price Index?

I think the CPI numbers are used to adjust workers annual wage increases.

You answered your own question. CPI is used to adjust adjust workers annual wage increases called COLA Cost of Living Allowance - this is a part of what we call inflation. As the cost of things rise, we adjust our purchasing. At one time chicken was so expensive it was considered a Sunday meal (ie. you could only afford it once a week). When I was in college eggs were $0.25 per dozen but chicken cost about 3 or 4 times as much as beef per pound. I ate a lot of egg sandwiches and hamburgers but no chicken sandwiches

Hillary Clinton is trying to polarize the US along gender lines, the Iron Lady never did that. Old ladies are Hillary's major support.

You see what you look for. What you are saying is as meaningless as saying that Obama is trying to polarize the US along racial lines or that McCain is trying to split the US along,er, along.... ah! Age line, yeah, McClain is trying to polarize the US along generational lines.

Part of the Windows Registry is/was ROT13 encrypted. ROT26 anyone?

Part of the protection built into Excel is a hidden Point of View game that is accessed by pressing a complex series of characters (I lost the email that detailed this). These sorts of hidden 'goodies' are called Easter Eggs.

Despite the commonly held belief that all calico cats are female, a blue-eyed calico has an 86.4 percent chance of being male.

Female cats have two X chromosomes, and each one can carry a different color. "In calicos...one X has the black gene; the other X has the orange gene." At some point in the female cat's development, one X chromosome becomes inactive. The timing of this determines the amount of calico patches. A male cat can be calico if it's created with "two X chromosomes and a Y, allowing one X to be inactivated." This is a genetic defect known as XXY, and it's very rare. In fact, only one out of every 3,000 calicos is male.

Sniper rifles are rifled clockwise in the Northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the Southern due to the Coriolis force. Doing this allows approximately three millimeters more accuracy at 100 meters.

No! Not even close - unless you flush the bullets first to get them spinning correctly, this is done right after manufacture so the spin imparted by the flushing is maintained at the qark level. There are special toilet facilities in kept in both hemispheres just in case you need to snipe someone on the equator. You need to flush a bullet to be fired through clockwise rifling in the Southern hemisphere (or vice versa) to counter the countering effects on the equator.

Tomatoes were considerd fruit until WW2, then they were recategorized vegetable to obtain lucrative U.S. Army contract.

Then Reagan tried to re-categorize catsup as a vegetable for school lunches in the '80s

Everybody should believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.

Dean Martin

I think you misspelled WC Fields

What makes the Iron Lady a 'class act'? She has a Brit. accent? She beat up on Argentina?

Inflation is on a rapid rise in the US, thanks to the Federal Reserve ludicrous credit spending on banks and hedge funds that have made major mistakes during years of loose lending and lackadaisical regulation.

Don't you think the fact we are in a war costing $341,000,000 per day with no commensurate increase in taxes might have something to do with it?

The offical government rate of inflation is the Consume Price Index (CPI) that is reported to be 4%. The CPI was changed during the Clinton administration to make it look more optimistic. If the government wouldn't have changed the CPI and would use the former Alternate CPI, our inflation rate would be 13% now. Which more closely reflects the prices the average consumer pays.

Do you know what the change was that was made during the Clinton Administration? "...the changes were aimed at moving the CPI to a cost of living model which takes consumer substitutions into account and typically reduces the reported level of inflation." - in other words, when something costs too much, consumers find a less expensive alternative (consider digital versus film cameras - generally, film cameras are cheaper but if you take into account the cost of film processing vs digital pics, well you can immediately see that the CPI needs to reflect real life).

Go for it! Looks like an interesting place. Wear sunscreen.

Sad story, editing sux.

The only thing I can think of is to buy a flash drive that has a physical write protect switch, set it to write protect, crack the case and remove the switch. Why are you so worried about them destroying the data? You aren't keeping important irreplaceable data on a flash drive are you?

Same thing happened to me when I found QC. Here's a list of comics I regularly read:

D*mn!, I probably should not have started this thread. I have been struggling for days to get caught up w/QC (I am up to 550) - QC pointed me to another 7 strips and now.... you offer me 3 more I have not seen.

Here are the ones I follow regularly (and am caught up on):

www.schlockmercenary.com/
www.wapsisquare.com/
mansionofe.comicgenesis.com/
This one is, um, disturbed
pbfcomics.com
thebunnysystem.com/
Kind of like xkcd

Wow, you like yourself dont you.
If it came from the bible it means Jack to me. But now that i think of it I should have known what you ment. I have heard of the Pale Horse or the horsemen just didnt relate it.

Steve, like you, I keep my tongue firmly in cheek but yeah, I like myself and I think of my self as an intellectual <<what does it take to be an intellectual? Hang around with someone who isn't one>>. I like making literary allusions/references - Umberto Eco is one of my heroes.

First, there should be no direct conflict between t-and-c and internal ethical code (it is a given that neither should conflict with current legal and ethical standards).

Become signatory to a national/international association with a governing body (you know, like the AMA or the American Federation of National Associations).

Start an indie band and name it Ethical Corporate Behavior

I have been chortling to myself all night - I just found this comic - my dearest went to bed hours ago but still I continue to click to the next comic. This one struck home.

Always do a walk-through to note any problems or else you cannot keep the deposit.

Not really!

Yes, really!

oooo im not up that mumbo jumbo

It is not really MumboJumbo, technically, MJ is a meaningless 'ritual'. Whereas, I referenced a religious text that managed to bring to focus the greater fears of humanity in an almost poetic form. Most references in books and music that use the phrase 'a pale horse' is a reference.

Thorton Wilder: myth-making is one of the means whereby the generalized truths of human knowledge finds expression and particularly the disavowed impulses of the mind escape the ‘censor’ of acquired social control and find their way into indirect confession. Myths constitute the dreaming subconscious soul of the race telling its story

Im not sure what you mean by "spot the horsemen", but if this is a true statement maybe somebody should import large amounts of cinnamon to these farmers.

Cinnamon is a natural germacide which kills many if not most micro organisms including bacteria and mold.

I use it on all my plant as soon as they show sign of mold or disease and I has cured it every time.

Cinnamon is non toxic and relatively cheap. They could just spread it throughout there crops using traditional methods.

Unfortunately, the rust is a fungus. In the '50s, the world wheat crop was threatened by a rust; USDA scientists developed the current wheat varieties that were immune to the rust; the rust has altered (evolved) to attack the current wheat varieties, all of which are based on that one variety. I will leave it to the interested look into the politics of why funding for research into the new rust threat was cut.

The point of the Horsemen reference was just a literary indulgence on my part. This guy is Famine. If you look in the news, you might be able spot the Horsemen emerging from the mists.

"Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.... WITH food prices soaring throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, and shortages threatening hunger and political chaos, the time could not be worse for an epidemic of stem rust in the world’s wheat crops. Yet millions of wheat farmers, small and large, face this spreading and deadly crop infection."

Dan, on a personal note - how is your last name pronounced? 'klie' pala?

Man, that takes me back - love those guys! I am a sucker for all their stuff.
AD - I think we may be of an age.

"Live hand-in-hand
And together we'll stand

On the threshold of a dream."

chlipala - I would have done the graphics to "In the Beginning..." differently (but so what) - thank you for reminding me -- hard to believe that was almost 40 years ago. (are you Dan? If so, I am impressed with the artists you have chosen to 'produce').