Sal9000

There are negotiations on the status of this region. In the future it will either belong to Croatia or Serbia. There is little infrastructure and the landscape is not that impressing.

As a Croatian native I strongly discourage anyone moving there.

There is. Ask the people involved in the tests. Or attend a lecture on Nuclear Physics and ask questions. Also you can go to the tests sites and run tests. So according to you we live on a flat earth that is the centre of the universe. Yes new features and designs were tested constantly. Where is the problem with that?

The exact opposite of this sentence is true. The scientific method is based on late Nominalism, a movement that was decidedly anti-Aristotelian. All the early physicists had to fight hard against the church which had Aristotle's physics as its basis.

Evidence for a metabolical catastrophe are all around the USA (diabetes, obesity, metabolid syndrome). The reason I called Paleo et al a fad is very simple. Every five years or so, there is a new flavour of the month of what to cut out or how to prepare your food, regardless of scientific backing. The problem with Paleo is manifold. We don't know what exactly our ancestors ate. Was their diet based on vegetables, fruits, berries, meat. What kind of vegetables? Which fruits? Lets assume for the sake of the argument that you know what your ancestors had, bc of incredible luck you could find your DNA in a prehistoric group and via an analysis of their teeth you know what they had. Could you reproduce their diet? The answer is pretty clear. You could, since the original plants we use for our veggies and fruits are still around. However, there is a reason not even the most strongest Paleo supporter eats them. They taste horrible. Almost every plant we consume today is the effect of the agrarian revolution where plants have been adapted for human consumption. The same is true for meat as well (beef, sheep, pigs). Unless you are really hardcore you cannot emulate your ancestors diet. Few people understand the Glycemic Index. Different food is dried and 50 gramm of it is compared to the Insuline release of Fructose. This is problematic on some levels. First of all, it's not objective like the caloric index that can be found using experiments. Different people react differently, so you have to take a sample with many participants. Secondly, it wields a lot of strange results. Because of the method (only dried food is used) a normal apple and dried apple have the same glycemic index, regardless of their other ingredients. Furthermore, the interpretation of the charts is not as straightforward as one may think. In fact, you have to measure the area of the curve that is the Insuline reaction to get the total load of Insuline released. This means eg, that food that have a sudden spike may have a lower glycemic load compared to other food that cause a slower reaction but their area is large compared to 'spiky' food. In addition to that, the Glycemic Index only looks at single items. What happens when you add three or four veggies in a meal? How do they influence the respective insuline reaction? There still needs to be a lot of research before the GI becomes usable.

You can see it from a different perspective too. In theory, humans reproduced as if they used an r strategy. But the enviroment and high mortality makes this look as if humans were a K species. One indication that this is correct is the low life expectancy rate during most of our history. Most died at a young age, only few made it to adulthood. Also I think that the difference between r and K strategies is subtle when it comes to humans. In total numbers it may be 2,1 children (K-ish strategy) compared to 4,2 children used by a r-ish mode or reproduction.

I did some time ago. However, there are multiple positions on what you should eat, depending on the fad of the moment. Right now, Paleo seems to be trending, before it was Atkins and so on. I have yet to find a consistent fact based theory.

My argument is that there is no or little difference. The total numbers of humans has not changed much for most of our history. Only since the industrial revolution has there been a massive rise. The reason for that, and the indifference between r and K strategies for both groups (nomads and farmers) is pretty simple. It was the norm to breastfeed for a long time, during which most of the women could not have children. Add to that the high child mortality and you get populations that are barely above the reproductive minimum (2 children per family unit). Lets assume a woman gets married with 16 and goes into menopause at 36. She has roughly 20 years of fertility. Pregnancy and breastfeeding take up 3 years typically. This means she can have about 7 children. Those 7 children are subject to all sorts of diseases, so that only 2, 3, or 4 make it to adulthood. For most of human history, women were either pregnant or breastfeeding. So I can't see how r or K strategies could have selected for or against, when the basic conditions were the same essentially.

There is a major flaw in the r / K thesis. In short it says that species who follow the K-strategy have fewer offsprings and that they care for them, while r species pump out babies like there is no tomorrow. First of all, there is no species that uses both at the same time. More importantly, the r / K theory can't be applied to humans for a simple reason. Most of our ancestors followed the r strategy out of sheer necessity. There were no contraceptives available for at least 98000 years. This oc means that there could have been no fundamental difference between the 'races' when it comes to the number of children they had, since breastfeeding for two years was the norm. When there is no difference to the numbers of children, the whole r / K distinction becomes void.

I guess this depends on the sort of toxin and how it enters the food chain. Mercury takes some time to make it's way to fish and seafood until humans are affected by it. Glyphosate should enter the foodchain at the human level already. Yes, but you should see an increase in Autism earlier than was indicated in the video. What are we supposed to eat and how do we know?

I saw that some time ago. Nice video, too bad it's wrong. Glyphosate has been used since the mid 70s. If her theory were true, autism would have spread since then and not since the mid 90s. She makes a simple mistake by confusing correlation with causation. You can do the same graphs comparing vaccines and autism with: The popularity of Chinese food, the numbers of cell phones, internet use and so on.

This is brilliant.

Here's genetics 101 for you. Genes don't produce absolute outputs but relative ones. What the outcome is, gets shaped by the enviroment (basically anything outside the DNA is now seen as enviroment). Lets assume you have two plants of the same species. To make it simple, we assume they have a growth factor that can be determined precisely and that enviroment can also be quantified. Plant 1 has a growth factor of 100%, plant 2's factor is 150%. Lets have a look at different scenarios. Both plants are subject to good enviromental conditions (enviromental value: 2). This gives you an absolute value of the plant's height as 200 and 300 respectively. Both plants are subject to bad enviromental conditions (enviromental value: 0,1). The output is 10 and 15. Now for the interesting part. The enviromental factors differ for the plants. Plant 1 has good conditions (enviromental value 2) = 200 while plant 2 has poor conditions (enviromental value 0,1) = 15. Another scenario might be that plant 1 is subject to bad conditions (enviromental value 0,1) = 10 while plant 2 enjoys good conditions (enviromental value 2) = 300. While we can (so far) only determine absolute values (IQ eg), we have to do some research when finding out about the genes that determine the relative value. While this is simple for monogenetic traits in a controlled enviroment (think of the height of plants), it is pretty hard when it comes to a polygenetic trait in a complex enviroment (IQ in society). To make it worse, monogenetic traits are inherited seperately. Though this is common knowledge since Mendel, few realize that. Polygenetic traits are also inherited seperately, but since this relies on the single genes that make up the trait, the result is hard to calculate.

Not really, when you look at the numbers. https://medium.com/silk-stories/women-and-children-first-9273e97289b0

While I am sceptical of those studies, you can measure general happiness by the use of psychiatric drugs. When you need them to get through you are anything but happy. http://www.capmh.com/content/2/1/26 http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/20/mental-health-antidepressants-global-trends http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/20/mental-health-antidepressants-global-trends

I was curious. And to prevent anybody from being shamed or touting his or her horn I decided to make it anonymously.

Most 'Jewish' haplogroups indicate a non-European background.

Since IQ was discussed frequently in recent shows, I became curious. What is the distribution of IQ among the listenership. If you want to, you can participate in an anonymous survey, using a MoPad. To make it more telling, please use the abbrevations I posted on the front of the document. Thank you https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Fo0xiMVIzr

Lets assume for a moment that these numbers are correct (they are not; it takes a lot less proteins to form a self replicating protein, the starting point for evolution). This mindboggling number does not tell you when the unlikely event happens. It could be right at the start, at the middle, or at the end. In addition, there is not one trial to produce these protobiotic form, but billions, namely everywhere where the conditions are given. It is unlikely that you throw 10000000000 times a coin and you get heads up every time. But imagine billions of people doing that for a long time and it is to be expected.

Feminism achieved equality in education, work, and finances.

The problem with pollution is similar to the tragedy of the commons. Accumulated actions lead to the destruction of biospheres that may affect all. One way out of it is to claim that there is no destruction (phosphates don't harm amphibes, lead in gasoline does not cause physical harm). The other solution would be to price in externalities in a free market.

The Nazis ran a 'model concentration camp' where they allowed international visitors in, to show that everything was just fine. There were several Soviet model cities where you could live the Socialist dream now (Akademgorodok and Magnitogorsk to name two).

Sam Harris on how to deal with death as an atheist. Cannot recommend the lecture high enough.

There is no lack of those. Again, no lack. Can you back this up with references? Well, I am afraid to say that the Cambrian explosion is a prime example. During the Cambrian Explosion, the first occurance of the Hox genes happened. This discovery of those regulatory genes caused a huge leap forward in the biological sciences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene Short, compared to?