Posts by GrimJack

Er hi.. I have no idea how I got to this page, but here I am and although it's a little late perhaps, erm.. thanx peeps!

Happy (belated) B'day - how did you get your post date to be from the past?

You share your b'day with Charles Boycott, Ireland, estate manager, Harry [Maxwell] Harrison, UK, sci-fi author, Deathworld Trilogy, among other

goats can . they are a menace. i did them for a biolofy experiment - they devour grass (right back to the root) like theres no tomorrow

also look up overstocking

And that was the basis of the cow/sheep wars in the west - cows shear grass while sheep/goats grasp and pull, getting roots and all; then their tiny hooves tear up the ground. Cattle can re-graze after a couple months whereas it takes at least a year before sheep can re-graze.

[digression]The Great Plains grass grew so high that a person on horseback had trouble seeing for any distance, this is how the huge herds of buffalo could be supported. [/digression]

I saw it first on CSI! Though I predicted that one, oddly enough. Not the means, but the result.

That is where I first ran across the reference; later when I was trying to come up with an assassin with an uncompromisable cover for a story I was telling, I did more research and found the reference to 'Jane'.
<<Koo, kooka choo, I am the Eggman>>

I'd say it is more likely the lab got the samples mixed up.

Um, what samples? It is true that when the results came back that she was not the mother of the boys, the samples were retested but once the results were reproducible (this is one of the key tests of science - reproducibility) then they tested her and found that she had the dna of 2 people.

If you are actually interested in this phenomenon try Ask a geneticist or Wiki - Chimera

The question I pose is:
Assume she is a chimera composed of fraternal twins
then
she is 2 people
so
does she have 2 souls?

Ravenous Wolf, I must take issue with your .sig -
"The colour of nature is not green, its red. The red of blood. The strong eat the weak. And the weak eat the weaker." The strong do not eat the weak - carnivores eat herbivores (generally) and herbivores eat plants and plants eats sunlight and the sun consumes hydrogen (then Helium... until it reaches iron and suddenly energy is consumed in stead of produced then <Nova>)

Dang, I digressed again. Food chains are pyramidal because the further up the chain, the less the less energy is available. Plants are producers, herbivores are primary consumers, carnivores are secondary consumers (and carnivores that eat carnivors are tertiary consumers). Stronger elk do not eat weaker elk.

And this is not really accurate either because it is purely macro and does not take chloroplasts or mitochondria into account - but going there would be a massive digression and I imagine you know all of this.
This might be where K.A. Applegate got her quote:
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
In Memoriam A.H.H. Lord Tennyson

You will not change my religious beliefs, if that is your intent. Nothing can do that. So I am not interested in any diatribe against any religious belief.

But my other post was not made on the basis of any belief. It was based on an apparent contradiction in fact that is independent of any particular belief. This became apparent to me when I was making a CD backup of the files containing the instructions for using the CD burner I was using to make the CD.

The real problem is that second cell, when the first cell divides. If the ribosome instructions are not written on the DNA, one of the cells wouldn't have a ribosome, and would die.

I do not want to change your religious beliefs -- if I had it to do over, I would have worded that sentence much differently. Especially, I would not have used the word 'beliefs' -- I should have spent more time choosing my wording but never mind.

The transcription story is long and rather complicated so I am going to point you to an interesting site that might help you understand the process: Evolution of DNA. I hope this helps and I hope it stimulates further discussion

I'm not actually sure if this thread should be in this category but it seemed like the most logical choice.

Anyway I'm looking for a book, or some source of information, that provides details on all the commands that can be used in Firefox; about:cache, ect.

Any info would be appreciated.

First you want to install MR Tech add-ons. Do you have NoScripts add-on?

If you screw around with about:config, you had better have a backup file.

Places to go:
NoScript
MR Tech

when you go to the NoScript site, scroll all the way down and read the FAQ on how to turn off the NoScript redirection - essentially a tutorial on how to make a change to about:config.

Let me know how it goes.

i know - my (white skinned) mate is from south africa but he has american citizenship (his mum was amaerican, his dad was afrikan) - does that make him african-american or is that title only for black people?

Well, generally when someone becomes an american citizen and wants to hyphenate themselves, they use the country they are from not what continent they are from. Since most black African-Americans do not have the history to know what country they came from (which may not even exist any more, anyway), and people get uncomfortable using broad labels like Negro or Black, they fall back on a more neutral label like African-American.

Time zone differences cost the world economy over 12 billion dollars a year in lost efficiency.

Is there another option?

That is a really interesting statement - where can I find out more about this.
I wonder whose time would be determined to be standard around the world; the rest would be forced to be time shifted away from diurnal living which I am sure would have its own economic consequences.
What was considered the economic baseline? What were the inefficiencies that they took into consideration?

Uhh hate to break it to you dude, but

Yen
Ramen
Sumimasen (excuse me)
San

There are actually quite a few.

Yep! I have been digging through some discussions/descriptions of Japanese, trying to separate out kanji, hirigana, and katakana to see where I went wrong. So far it looks like, er, 'n' is the only consonant that Japanese can end in. It looks like hirigana and katakana:
are merely phonetic symbols composed of mostly consonant-vowel pairs, but also characters representing the 5 Japanese vowel sounds and the consonant 'n'. Just like (well not exactly but...) A, B, C, D, they are combined to make words. Unlike kanji, each symbol (character) by itself does not carry any meaning.
and
One character = consonant + vowel. You can't get a consonant on its own.The only exception is the syllablic N. N is the only consonant that can stand alone in Japanese. However, it is held out for a full beat. Depending on the speaker, region, and word, it may sometimes sound like an M sound or an NG sound. (You may run across words like せんぱい Romanized as "sempai", when they are more truthfully represented as "senpai".) Have no doubt, though, it is the syllablic N.
Ouch, I just discovered romanji which seems to use 'h's at the end of words but is discouraged.

Sigh! I don't think I will study Japanese any time soon.

I'm hoping someone can give me some help with a self-made problem. I intended to get a reduced price lan drive for my home wifi network and bought a) a LanDrive case and b) a 500GB Western 'Element5' USB drive.

However, when I stripped down the drive I found that it did not have the 40-pin connector required for the LanDrive setup.

I guess there is no way thay these two devices can be matched, is there? Yeah, I'm sorry it's a stupid question, but there you are.

Thanks for any suggestions (without throwing one or both units in the can!

What kind of connector did the drive have? Have you looked at this:
Cables To Go - IDE / EIDE adapter - 40 pin IDC, 4 pin internal power - 44 pin IDC (F) Would it work?

My mother is 82 now and walks about 4 miles a day. When she was 76 she took the Grand Canyon tour, walking down into the canyon then down deeper into the area where there is a village, then walked back out (talking all the time, I am sure). She lives in Bozeman, MT and has climbed all the peaks between Bozeman and Yellowstone. Two hip and one knee replacements have slowed her down. I can only hope to be as active as I get older.

Elephants cannot sneeze.

I will need some sort of proof of this claim - all mammals sneeze.

A quick google (discounting the songs and kid's stories) shows this:
The Lubindas tried everything - beating tins, banging drums, lighting fireworks. Nothing worked.

This is where the charity Africa Now comes in. Farmers are given seeds to grow chilli hedges and are helped to make dung cakes laced with chilli oil, to burn at night! Why? Because chilli makes elephants sneeze! Mrs Lubinda could not believe her eyes. The elephants fled, and their crops were saved. What's more, Africa Now linked the couple to a buyer so they could also sell the chillies for a fair price.

Humans are the only mammal that does not sneeze through its nose.

Ostrich leather makes good boots

I'm sure i fit one of the definitions of 'GEEK' so I'm almost ashamed to admit I can't open the plasic package that my brand new Outlook 2007 came in today. I'm sure i could break it but there must be a secret to it. It seems to have a hinge and some tabs but none move readily. Don't laught, just tell me what to do. :-) ...Sonny

Once you get past the seal, pull on the red tab (the inside pivots on a hinge at the front bottom). I hope you did not have to break anything to get in. the entire MS Office line is all nearly identical. I worked in their gratuity section handing out freebies - I was glad I had a scanner as a check on my visual acuity.

One day I gave out US$27,000 worth of software - a personal best
Here is what I am talking about Usability studies. MS will give you free software if you tell them what you think of them (so to speak).

it happens, but is exceedingly rare.
And the person surviving is even more rare, usually there are all kinds of problems with organs and parts of organs being rejected (as would happen with transplant patients without special medication) even before birth, resulting in a stillborn child.

Yep - even rarer than Siamese twins.

So, is she/are they single or double souled? The 'theological' implications and/or questions raised are, to say the least, interesting.

I ran across this interesting bit of medical news:
One human chimera came to light when a 52-year-old woman demanded an explanation from doctors after tests showed that two of her three grown-up sons were biologically unrelated to her. Although the woman, "Jane", conceived them naturally with her husband, tests to see if she could donate a kidney suggested that somehow she had given birth to somebody else's children - the most likely explanation is that Jane's mother conceived non-identical twin girls, who fused at an early stage of the pregnancy to form a single embryo. The link: human chimera Essentially, around the 3rd or 4th day, the twins merged with one twin 'owning' certain portions and the other owning the others. If the merging happened a day or 2 later, they would have been 'Siamese twins'. Knowing who the mother is is pretty absolute so they went searching for an answer - can you imagine the same circumstance except it was the father - no one would have bothered to look for any other explanation than cucholdry

I stick with firefox even though it's memory leaks drive me nuts. But the restore session is nice so when firefox does crash I can pick up where I left off.

w00t,w00t!
Yes, I don't bother to close my FF sessions when I shut down so I always come back to where I was - I have a thread that I started 4 days ago that comes back up in the middle of my edit. With a couple of clicks, I can figure out what the heck it was I talking about and back up to speed.

> MS and Yahoo put their paid ads within the search results so there is no distinction

GOTO.com (later renamed to Overture) used to do this. Once they were bought out by Yahoo!, they stopped and took on a structure similar to Google. I don't use MSN so I cannot be 100% sure but I don't believe they do this either.

I just did a Yahoo search on "alzheimer's" - the top position was a sponsored result and there were 'sponsor results' threaded throughout. I find it difficult to understand the positioning of the 'sponsor results' flag that is off to the right - is it in reference only to the nearest entry or the following entry, or the following entries.

All-in-all, I just end up suspicious.

When I find sites that manage to hijack google searches, I can report it and will get a reply within a couple of days and they seem to tweak their algorithms and that sort of thing does no recur.

Personal preference, I guess.

I was blown away by the sounds this woman can make - about 13 minutes into her presentation, she makes a marimba sound like an organ. presentation.
On her front page, there is a youtube overview of some of her percussion (this is short - not like the 30 minute thing above). short move

Ten? I thought it was only five. May I request the name of whatever source material you found that in?

You are correct, I had to dig pretty deep to find where I made my mistake - it was the discussion of viscid silk used in glue-covered catching spirals which is 10 times stronger than -- well, rather than go into technical details, I will agree that standard spider silk has only 5 times the tensile strength of steel.

I ran across this interesting tidbit:
In their new work, Kaplan and colleagues used genetic engineering to make a cloned spider silk protein that can form films and fibres. By mixing this material with biosilica -- from the proteins of diatoms -- in aqueous solution, the researchers were able to create a new composite nanomaterial with exceptional mechanical properties. The researchers found that the eliptically shaped silica particles attached themselves to the protein fibres, which as a result became "sticky".
Unfortunately, they did not go into too much detail.

Haha, because Google is *so* much less of a corporation that MS is. As for the advertising, it's not so much that Google wants to hide their ads from you, no, they're just a lot more sneaky with them.

I say anybody who trusts one corporation while denouncing another, especially Google over MS, needs therapy.

NO! NO! NO! Google puts their paid ads along the top and the right side; whereas, MS and Yahoo put their paid ads within the search results so there is no distinction. The more you pay, the higher up in the search results are.

and NO! NO! NO! I do not trust google - I use NoScript to block googlesyndication and google-analytics; I do not use googletools or google desktop.

I use trackmenot to confuse search engines; I use TrashMail to confuse registrations.

I use EQuakeAlert to see what is happening geologically around the world (there was an M-5 quake in Indonesia

Spider venom liquefies its prey's insides and it sucks it out leaving only a chitinous shell behind.

Pound for pound, spider silk is 10 times stronger than steel.

Being polite is one thing, back stabbing and ass kissing another. Maybe he was talking about the latter ones...

Even back stabbing ass-kissers should be polite - just like in Judo and Aikido, one should be polite while lowering them to the floor

I use FF because I don't like advertising all over my screen. I particularly hate those roll-over and scroller adds that require that click to close. There may be add-ons to IE that do the same thing but I have not found them (or really tried). I only use IE7 when I am contracted to a house that requires it.

MS is a for-profit business - I can not imagine them being as vigilantly anti-adverts as FF which is a non-profit business. And, of course, I don't trust MS to do anything that interferes with their bottom line. This is why I choose to use Google for all my searching needs, they try very hard to separate search results from advertising. I once used yahoo to search Alzheimer's and got the message "you can purchase Alzheimer's at ----"

Okay, Okay - not a babbling idiot, (sometimes I think I am but then <in the background I am listening to Dave Attel on "the Best of Insomniac: Uncensored" in a head-banger club chanting "I am Satan, I am Satan" -- we don't have cable so we have to get our Comedy Central via netflix> er where was I - dang there is the theme song, "stay with me and you will see a late night freak-show jubilee")
Never mind, I lost my place

yes

exactly, its still a mutation though

Yep, another way to say it is that there was a niche open and the longer necked mammals could eat stuff their shorter-necked brethren couldn't reach.

I think you meant decrypt rather than encrypt - google is your friend; be prepared to let it run a long time.

Hmmm - have youi compared the color coding of the jacks? some cables have the RTS pins crossed for direct pc to pc connections so hold the 4 cable ends up to the light at the same orientation just to check to make sure that each end has the same color sequence as the others. Test the cable on your phone - heck test you phone cable on your modem.

Check out BitTorrent via wikipedia and remember, even with file-sharing programs, you are not anonymous.

It is illegal for individuals to pump their own gas in Oregon and New Jersey.

To follow up on your nick -- there are only 2 words in Japanese that end in a consonant, one of which is san; almost all other words are composed of consonant-vowel pairs.

biological opinion:

antibiotic bacteria is an example of natural selection

the selection pressure is one made by man (to survive the antibiotics) and the resistant ones have an advantage

e.g

1000 bacteria - mainly normal, a tiny number are resistant

antibiotics are used. normal ones die, resistant ones are left. they multiply. this happens again in many seperarte cases, until eventually the majority of bacteria are resistant

this can be applied to animals. if one has a selective advantage, it will survive.

e.g in africa there isnt much food. the giraffe can reach high trees which is an advantage as other animals cant therefore there is less competion. biologists believe that initially there was many short necked giraffes and a small number of tall necked giraffes (due to a random mutation) and when africa became desertified (many tens of thousdands of years ago it was a swamp/jungle type place) the tall necked ones suddenly had an advantage and could outcompete the short ones, which then died, leaving tall necked ones as the dominant species.

this is natural selection.

I am sure you meant to start the post off with 'antibiotic-resistant' bacteria

The giraffe has the same number of neck vertebrae as all other mammals - 7, they are just bigger.

Society's most redundent comment:

"Thank you very much, I appreciate it."

Watch CNN and other news organizations, they all say the same thing.

It's like deja vu, it's like daja vu!

I'm Michael Cruz and I approve of this post.

Wow, someone is annoyed by people being polite - now that annoys me!

Midi, he was probably thinking about the 'burbs with the concomitant sprawl.

Sneekula, worker strikes are not a major problem with mass transit; they may have major impact 'during' the strike but have no effect on mass transit in general. Remember that it is workers' strikes that gave you a 40-hour work week.

Gays will all burn in eternal hellfire...

You are joking right? and not just a babbling idiot, I hope.

@GrimJack:

I've looked over the site a bit; I'll admit what I've done is more skim than scan, but I've looked at some of it. I'll try to get more done over the coming weekend, or over the week if I discover extra free time; this is looking to be a possibility, although I cannot yet say how probable.

I do, however, have one question: In looking over the history listings, I saw that the CDC had the US definition of AIDS upgraded occasionally, but that appeared to be it. Has the African definition ever been upgraded, or are they still using the 1985 Bangui definition?

That is the WHO definition as of 1985 which updated a previous document produced in 1982. The definition of AIDS as a collection of symptoms as stated in the 'Bangui definition" called this because Bangui is the city in which the WHO, CDC, and other health organizations came together to develop a serveiling case definition of AIDS for use in countries where testing for HIV antibodies was not available. I imagine that as the cost and complexity of testing for the antibodies are reduced, reliance on the definition will also be reduced.

Thanks for the response - I went hunting (as I did not know the name of the definition so had to research it) and found this quote:
The first human known to be infected with HIV was a man from Kinshasa in the nearby country of Congo who …

Over eighty percent of people will yawn within twenty seconds of seeing another person yawn.

I just yawned reading this!

There are evolutionary benefits for groups of humans living together being able to synchronize their schedules.

Somehow we got infected with a strong case of ostrich syndrome

One hopes that a person of your intellectual abilities knows that ostriches do not stick their heads into the ground/sand. We all know what ostrich syndrome is (due to its constant repetition and/or common usage) but to link to a faked picture seems sort of crude.

A paradox that disproves random chance as the origin of life:

Two elements are needed for self-reproducing life:

1. The DNA with the instructions on it.
2. The ribosome, to read the DNA and make the proteins.

Bit it's that first cell, and even more, the second cell, that bother me:

- If ribosomes were plentiful for some strange reason when the DNA appeared, then how did the instructions for making a ribosome get on the DNA?

- If, instead, the ribosome is first described on the DNA, then what was used to read the first DNA strands.

It's the equivalent of using the first CD Recorder, and finding the blueprints and instructions for making the recorder already recorded on the first blank CD.

If I take the time to answer you points will it make a difference in your beliefs or will you just ignore my post? I take time to make thoughtful responses to such questions but my responses seem to be ignored. If you really want a response to these points, I will provide it.

I will note here that those 2 points don't disprove anything. They might cast doubt, in your mind, on the hypothesis that random chance can account for self-reproducing cells but they disprove nothing.

Also, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

The egg, since birds are descended from dinosaurs which were egg-layers.

Along the confession of Bill Gates, did you read lots of books, lots of books about backwards roller skating grizzly bears?

Nah, I grew up in the mountains of Montana. We spent part of our summers in a cabin with only an outhouse. Generally not a problem, but imagine waking up in the middle of the night needing to go! There is nothing darker than a 20 foot walk from a dark cabin through trees to an outhouse - the dark still contains uncertainties that can send shivers up my spine. I love that place and I still go back whenever I can -- but it is now a 17 hour drive away, so I don't get back as often as I used to.

If at first you don't succeed ... So much for skydiving.

How many successful jumps do you have to make to be considered a skydiver?

All of them.

That came out wrong - I meant the world is a very big place - please, no insult was meant so I hope none was taken/ The stats are 68.8% Africa, 14.4% Asia, the US is lumped into the category of 'High Income Countries' which is 6.4%, 5.5% Latin America & Caribbean, and 4.8% for Eastern Europe & Central Asia.
As you can imagine that getting these stats out the more tightly regulated (read despotic leadership) counties. These stats are for 2005 (the page was updated a couple weeks ago) from UNAIDS/WHO 2006 and 2007 reports. One thing to keep in mind is that HIV/AIDS was not diagnosed until US citizens started dropping dead - no one really knows thow long it was spreading through Africa and India before anyone know what was going on.
Most of stats are in pie-chart form with good legends and then follow up descriptions.

I understand the problem of digging through foot-notes and I do not envy you that task - take your time.

I don't think the US is the world. I admit I haven't looked at your stats yet (I'll try to get around to it), but if you don't mind, how much of that count is located within Africa?

As to the survey, I've got the book I saw it mentioned in on hand, I just need to go back over the book and find the reference to follow the footnotes. More a matter of how much …

More people have attended Star Trek conventions than have given blood.

Note:
I am not surprised, I myself would rather go to a Star Trek convention than give blood

Sigh! I was a life-time giver - gave over 10 gallons in 25 years then I had some minor liver problems and my system was flooded with Hep. anti-bodies and now i can no longer give (though I still do pheresis when I can find the time).

Maybe they should set up donation stations at Trek/sci-fi conventions.

Nearly 50% of all bank robberies in the US take place on Fridays. source = FBI

Well, duh! how else you going to get some scratch for the weekend?

You cannot lick your own elbow. source = 'try it'

Nor can you touch your elbows behind your back (unless you use your fingers - modifying the concept) - when I was young I used to use this on the girls, I only got slapped once or twice.

Just discovered by scientist at the University of Michigan:
Fingernails grow about 3 times faster then toenails.

And what a blessing this is! Can you imagine all the socks you would go through if you had to cut your toenails as often as your fingernails?!

People who post responses to something that was posted in page 2 not remembering that their response will appear at the end of page 5.

Give us a clue! If you are responding to a specific post - point to it.

He was all of the above but he had a dry wit that sometimes I liked. I remember his appearance on Laugh-in - "I decided to do it when they promised to fly me out to Hollywood on an airplane with two right wings". He had the wit and intelligence to argue his position without name calling, he loathed 'W', but when Chomsky ripped him a new one in a one-on-one debate, he lost his cool and threatened to punch Chomsky in the nose. He was not used to being bested in intellectual debate - from this point on, I lost respect for him.

Wow, 0.0000003mg per kg of body mass. That makes a bulging can of green beans a weapon of mass destruction! You have one of those and the US Air Force will come and bomb your kitchen!

I can just see the home guard marching to war with back packs full of spoiled lima beans; the resistance setting 'French cut green bean' booby traps, and drive by corn-beef hash 'cannings'

Sigh - brings tears to my eyes