A big problem (little pun)

Goddessmisca · Post by **Goddessmisca** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 9:21 am

gealachtine wrote: Honor, Queenhank and Misca - Huzzah! Bring it on, I think a night of happy spa fun and drinking would be a hell of a lot of fun with you. I believe my bed will hold 4.

I think my Sailor boy would say no

Queenhank · Post by **Queenhank** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 9:31 am

What if we let HIM be the towel boy?

Halo299 · Post by **Halo299** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 10:23 am

queenhank wrote:What if we let HIM be the towel boy?

HIM? the lovemetel band?

The sameone that did the cover of Wicked Game and that song about killing butterflies?

I saw them live last fall when they came to america. It was a good show but man i have not seen so many high school kids making out since ...well, i was in high school.

-halo

Aeridus · Post by **Aeridus** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 10:51 am

gealachtine wrote:You may be androgynous aeri, but you still have a phallus. Note I said a Russian Women's Spa - no bio-joysticks allowed. Sorry.

Though they close it to women and do men only nights too. You can sweat with a bunch of old Russian guys - what fun!

Aw, poo.

*sweats it out with Vlad and folks instead*

Good thing I set up that videocamera with antifog lens...

Honor · Post by **Honor** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 11:55 am

Goddessmisca wrote:
gealachtine wrote: Honor, Queenhank and Misca - Huzzah! Bring it on, I think a night of happy spa fun and drinking would be a hell of a lot of fun with you. I believe my bed will hold 4.
I think my Sailor boy would say no

I think any guy who's so jealous / possessive that he'd bitch about you playing bedgames during a girls night out is probably trouble... But that's maybe just me.

Gealachtine... Yeah. I think that's 'agrees' all around. The Arthur C. Clarke quote has always been one of my favorite one-line ways to illustrate the fluidity of scientific "truth" and "fact":

When a distinguished and elderly scientist says that something is possible, he's almost certainly correct; when he says something is impossible, he's very probably wrong.

And I agree... The healthy - no, unhealthy - no healthy - no, unhealthy - no, healthy egg was an eggcelent eggsample. *ducks* Another might be the Cro-Mag problem...

*warning, tangent ahead*

I doubt I've ever thought of anything nobody thought of before, but every now and then you make a leap by yourself and later discover that other people made the same leap or discovery, right...? Well, about 20-25 years ago, I started thinking about the fact that almost all other "ethnic groups" of humans were essentially the same in superficial, external markers...

If you discuss humans, on average, they are pretty uniform. They have brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. There is some significant tonal range (and even a little tinctular range) to the brown of the skin, but still. Except those pesky europeans... They have pale skin... eyes ranging from brown to ice blue... hair running from the normal black, through a regionally predominant brown, all the way to near-white-blonde. Wierd. And their noses are different, too... As are their brow ridges... And they're -way- more hirsute than most other humans...

And they're the only geographical group of H.Sapiens that is known to have coexisted with another strand of of... our branch, so to speak, for a long period of time. Anyone who's been around human or animal populations knows that, eventually, anything that -can- cross breed will. (I later read that in a text book too... that was a "well, duh!" moment.)

Suddenly it occurred to me that it was perfectly obvious that european h.sapiens had interbred, to some very small but significant degree, with cro magnon... Thus giving them the only -really- distinctive features of any human sub-strain... And it amused me to no end that the humans who were the absolute worst about ethno-centric "we're so much better than you!" bullshit were, in actuality, probably the most impure mutts of the humans - not that being a mutt doesn't have it's own significant evolutionary advantages... It's only funny because they love so much to use words like "pure" and imply that all the other races are mixed, muddied, or impure.

Anyway... Years later, I was dissappointed to discover that I wasn't the only person who'd made that connection... Then even more dissappointd to learn that genetic science had "proven" that this was not the case. But, by then I knew enough about the nature of science to point out that we were really kind of new at this "genetics" thing, and I wasn't willing to completely let go yet.

Well, recently, I've been seeing more and more stuff pointing back in that direction... So I'm happy again.

ugh. long tangent... I have to get to work.

Anyway... Yeah. As someone said once... Today's conventional wisdom is tomorrow's belly laugh.

Queenhank · Post by **Queenhank** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 12:23 pm

And I agree... The healthy - no, unhealthy - no healthy - no, unhealthy - no, healthy egg was an eggcelent eggsample. *ducks*

Puns aside, the egg is a great example, not of the imperfections of scientific method, however, but the nature of modern media, and its effect on popular scientific understanding. All the beneficial properties of an egg are still there, as are all the harmful ones. The problem is, as a new property is discovered, the media starts shouting from the rooftops "Eggs are good, because they have X!", and then, when some other property is discovered, they go out and shout "Eggs are bad, because they have Y!". It's jumping to conclusions, and then presenting them to the people as immutable facts, that leads to poor understanding in people. The fact that the media has been ABLE to reverse its position on eggs so much is actually a testament to the fact of scientific method's functioning, as if scientific method didn't work completely right, then we'd just have scientists saying "Eggs are good" or "Eggs are bad", and then dropping the case.

Aeridus · Post by **Aeridus** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 12:35 pm

Reminds me of that bit in Gulliver's Travels where two nations constantly fought over which side to break a hard-boiled egg.

Goddessmisca · Post by **Goddessmisca** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 1:17 pm

Honor wrote:
Goddessmisca wrote:I think my Sailor boy would say no
I think any guy who's so jealous / possessive that he'd bitch about you playing bedgames during a girls night out is probably trouble... But that's maybe just me.

Thats cause you wanna sleep with me :p But he's most likely be fine with it, provided he atleast got to watch.

Toawa · Post by **Toawa** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 5:54 pm

Ahh, good ole' Scientific Theory vs. Scientific Law.

I think the best description I've heard is, a Law is what happens, and a Theory is why it happens. Laws have formulas with which we predict results; theories point to possible new laws (by analyzing why somthing might happen, and carrying that out to some conclusion.) Laws are vetted by tests producing the calculated results; theories are never truely vetted, they're just "not disproven" until such time as they are. Of course, the fact that they're never truly proven tends to lead the term open to fallacious argumentation against them, since we do not seek proof that a theory is right, we seek proof that it is wrong, and have not found any up to the present point. Likewise, just because we haven't found any proof does not mean that it is correct, simply that we haven't found the proof.

An additional problem with this debate is that many people confuse the Laws of nature with the laws of man; it's impossible to break the Law of Gravity because if someone appears to do so, (and their results can be replicated), then they aren't breaking the law, the law is simply written wrong. This actually happened with Newton's motion laws once we found Special Relativity. The momentum of a body in Newtonian physics is p=mv, but in Reletivistic, it's mv/(sqrt(1-(v/c)^2). But it wasn't until the 20th century that we could accurately measure velocities large enough for this difference to be noticable. (There was still the Mercury paradox, of course, but I don't know if anyone connected those dots until Einstein did...)

(This also makes me laugh when people claim that certain segments of the population are going "against the laws of nature". You can't go against the laws of nature, not because it is wrong, but because it is impossible. The laws may or may not be perfect, but our understanding of them certainly isn't perfect.)

Swordsman3003 · Post by **Swordsman3003** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 9:26 pm

I think it was the aborigines in australia who came closest to forming a different "race" of humans, isolated for so long

Honor · Post by **Honor** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 5:21 pm

Sorry for the minor necromancy... Just something I saw in passing that I couldn't resist adding. Yet another reference to one of those zany theories that nobody subscribes to anymore.

Meat eating and brain expansion go hand in hand, one supports the other. If some hominid lineages had not begun to eat meat in this more significant way we could perhaps use the example of the robust australopithicines as an explanation for where that might have lead. They became extinct five million years ago. So, in a real sense, I think you could say - with some qualifications - meat is what made us human." ~ Dr. Henry Bunn, professor of anthropology, University of Wisconsin... Also, pubs from Oxford University Press, etc.

Kingofthemorlocks · Post by **Kingofthemorlocks** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 6:01 pm

Also, meat is delicious. So we should eat some.

Gealachtine · Post by **Gealachtine** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 12:58 am

kingofthemorlocks wrote:Also, meat is delicious. So we should eat some.

YAY MEAT!!!

I think I'll have some bacon right now!

Goddessmisca · Post by **Goddessmisca** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 3:04 am

Cannot resist...

I could go for a sausage...

Error of Logic · Post by **Error of Logic** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 6:04 am

I prefer chicken, myself.

Aeridus · Post by **Aeridus** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 7:54 am

Mmm... homecooked burgers...

Ce6 · Post by **Ce6** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 9:24 pm

hmm....I'm thinking sushi

Error of Logic · Post by **Error of Logic** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 10:41 pm

I had a sushi dinner once in a Japanese restaurant. The sushi itself was quite tasty ... Only after I'd paid the bill and left the restaurant, my stomach started sending urgent signals. Roughly translated, they amounted to: "Thanks for the snack. Now get some FOOD down here, it's dinnertime!" Durn thing didn't stop complaining until I'd had some chicken, chips and peas ...