warri0r45

How does god existing make life any more meaningful? Because you believe you'll get a reward in an afterlife? Because you need some cosmic father figure to feel significant? If god doesn't exist then we still have something to live for, and that's life in the here and now. Life should be reward enough, especially so if it's the only one we have. We all have hopes and dreams to make something of ourselves, to be surrounded with good people and to enjoy all that life has to offer. We all have things that are meaningful to us and dreams that drive us. Life is not meaningless without god.

Cool, someone studying what I am. :) From what I know, you're right - imprinting makes the idea of parthenogenesis pretty much impossible. The only mechanism I know of that would lead to parthenogenesis in humans is called uniparental diploidy, which is where both sets of chromosomes are inherited from one parent. The problem here is that (as you pointed out) there is either a maternal or paternal imprinting pattern on various genes which means they are methylated and thereby inactivated. Without either the maternal or paternal set of chromosomes, there is no set of non-imprinted genes for the corresponding set of imprinted genes, so gene function is compromised. Given how commonplace imprinting is, the zygote does not develop into a viable human. You're also right with deletions on 15 causing Angelman's or Prader-Willi syndrome, of course depending on whether the deletions are on the maternal or paternal chromosome. Interesting stuff!

If you like a band when they're being played on triple j, why do you care if they go mainstream? I hope you're not one of these people who has an irrational fear of anything popular.

Colossal Titan Strife by Kronos (album). Pretty impressive.

I don't think I could do 75, but I'd give 10 or 20 a go.

Probably olive skin and middle-eastern appearance. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3958241.stm The western depiction of Jesus makes no logical sense.

I don't believe in ghosts or anything supernatural of that ilk, but I think aliens are a more interesting possibility. I'm not necessarily talking about intelligent alien life, but alien life nonetheless.

Doctors don't recommend that you drive or do any dangerous work if you're messed up on prescription pills. Quite the opposite. I don't think it's ok to get messed up on legal or illegal drugs. Both should be taken in moderation for their proper purpose (or in the case of illegal drugs, at your own legal/physical risk). By the way, where do you get the idea where it's ok to get messed up on prescription pills? I've never come across that attitude before.

On the rare occasion I might like something on mainstream radio, but generally I don't. I'm not really into the majority of what they put on TV either.

No. This is a stupid thread. Someone please lock it before I make a thread about how annoying crappy threads are.

Has to be one of the stupidest news stories of recent time. Obviously he had female reproductive organs, so biologically he was female. He only identified mentally as a male, which allowed the media to essentially make a news story out of nothing.

Yeah, that's overbearing. I went to quite a few sleepovers as a kid and didn't get yelled at for bad grades. I might have got strong encouragment to do better, but I was never yelled at. That's hardly a productive way to encourage your kids. In my opinion there should be some obvious boundaries when you bring up your kids and those boundaries should change with age. At your age I'd probably make a curfew of 10 or something, unless you wanted to go for a sleepover with friends. I'd probably talk with the parents to make sure it's all good, but I don't see any harm in a sleepover every now and then. At my age (20), I don't have a curfew. I might be considerate and cut a night out shorter if I'm getting my dad to pick me up, but that's self-imposed. I think this is a fair set up because I'm more or less an adult now.

Commonplace? I hardly think so. Most people weren't adventurers back then, just the same as today. The only difference is that today, our adventure consists of going to the moon, sending probes to mars and discovering other extra-solar planets. Although I think it would have been interesting to adventure as people like Columbus did, I think it's just as interesting, if not more interesting, to go looking for new planets and trying to land on them.

I've always found his music pretty appealing. I'll have to get Thriller or something and give it a good listen. Best of luck to him I suppose. Despite all the weirdness, I hope he goes out on a high note.

Elvenefris by Lykathea Aflame (album).

My thoughts exactly - I doubt anyone will tour there for a very long time. It was a tragic event and it's lucky that none of the players or umpires were killed. For those wondering what we're talking about, a group of terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team with AK-47s while on tour in Lahore, Pakistan. They killed around 6 people including police and a driver of one of the team's buses. It occured while on the road and it sounds like it was a calculated ambush.

I mostly like death metal, particularly regular death metal, tech death and some brutal death. Death metal bands: Death metal: Death, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Malevolent Creation, Obituary, Demigod, Bolt Thrower, Carcass, Carnage, Abhorrence, Monstrosity, Necrophagia, Thanatos, The Chasm, Torture Division, Vader. Tech death: Pestilence, Gorod, Decapitated, Spawn of Possession, Demilich, Atheist, Cynic, Gorguts, Ontogeny, Lykathea Aflame, Psycroptic, The Faceless, Blotted Science (instrumental). Brutal Death: Suffocation, Devourment, Abysmal Torment, Defeated Sanity, Dripping, Gorgasm, Grotesque, Nile. There's some crossover in those genres, so please don't get pedantic on me. Other genres/bands: Heavy metal: Danzig. Thrash: Metallica, Slayer Alternative metal: Sunk Loto, Lynchmada, Deftones, Faith No More (iffy categorization, but I have to add them because I love them). Post-thrash: Pantera, Lamb of God, Meshuggah Post-metal: Cult of Luna Prog metal and/or prog rock: Tool, A Perfect Circle, Porcupine Tree, Cog, Portal, Control Denied, Opeth Core: A Different Breed of Killer, Parkway Drive, Ion Dissonance, BTBAM Again, I can't possibly put all these into 100% accurate categories because it would just take me too long.

Think of god as a parent. They'll punish you. They'll piss you off. They're unfair. But in the end, they usually know what's best. That's just my take on it. I mean without negatives, how would positives exist? I have a take on the question. If you just remove all the negatives, the positives will still exist. It's not like our neural pathways will rewire to perceive positive things differently. Having said that, I agree some negatives are good for building character and appreciating the positives, but sometimes it's just over the top. For example, there's not much character-building to be had from childhood/infant diseases like cancer or SIDS. At least, I don't think you can possibly reconcile cruel things like that with omnibenevolence. Maybe god just doesn't care that much. Sorry, I'm not one to buy into the whole "god knows best" argument. I don't see why god couldn't simply bypass all the grief and send everyone to heaven straight away, but I never liked the idea of an eternity of perfection either. EdgedThesis is right, it does seem to be way too stagnant. [To answer EdgedThesis' question in the other post, I'm talking about DNA evidence, not the fossil record]

I agree. The scientific process involves mimicking some sort of occurrence to see what happens and in what conditions to find out truth. People have theorized about how life has formed, but they haven't mimicked it yet. While we haven't mimicked the process in it's unbroken entirety, we have managed to mimick some of the key steps (one of which only recently; see [3]). It's a pretty active area of research - It's not all just theoretical hot air. Sustained polymerization on mineral surfaces. [1] Autocatalysis in biological molecules (they catalyse their own reproduction). [2] [3] Such as... (I already know the answer, I'd just like to see what you know).

Religion/social conservatism. The church doesn't like it, basically.

I can't really tell from that article whether they urged them or not, so I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. For me this is one of the reasons why assisted suicide should be legalised. If it is, we can regulate it with strict oversight by doctors and psychologists and only allow it for people with terminal illnesses or something of that ilk. When it comes down to it I don't think anyone should have the right to tell me I can't end my life should I be on my death bed going through pain every moment of every day.

Again, not even close to accurate. Why not google it? The answer is 5 seconds away and you could avoid looking like you have no idea what you're talking about. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/e ... ated.shtml Aside from that, I don't agree with roccodog at all. Punctuated equilibrium in no way answers how society has gone from hunter-gatherer beginnings to developing modern day technology. It's like invoking archeology to try and explain what you did last thursday. I'd say modern advancement is mostly due to a formal system of writing and documentation which both open up a much better possibility for education. Not just writing on cave walls or things like that, I'm talking about a formal system of documentation like the Egyptians had on papyrus. In that way we can easily build on ideas rather than having most of them die off with the people who hold them. With writing and documentation we've been able to come up with and refine neat little ideas like the scientific method. Given a few thousand years, science has been able to come up with the theoretical underpinning of every amazing technology we have.

Agreed. He also seems to like ignoring criticism and moving right on to the next bout of scientific illiteracy. I'd just like to add that the source I cited is a great case study into the methods of creationism and how they come up with "evidence" for their claims (despite some typos in the article). It's also written by a Christian. Yet more nonsense. The first problem is that abiogenesis doesn't propose the formation of larger modern day proteins in one evolutionary step (if I can assume for a minute what on earth the article means by "protein") - a more likely scenario would be the formation of short oligonucleotites or oligopeptides which have the ability to reproduce themselves. The second and even more ridiculous problem is that abiogenesis doesn't propose the formation of Mycoplasma in one single step. Like any other bacterial genus, Mycoplasma is modern and has been developing gradually for billions of years, not in one single step. The final flaw is that this kind of analysis assumes the necessity of one protein or one full bacterial species to form life from non-life. If you consider the formation of small autocatalytic, reproductive molecular systems, none of the probabilities you outlined are even remotely applicable to relevant theoretical models. In other words, if you actually listen to what biologists suggest when they talk about abiogenesis, your numbers mean nothing. What you quoted is anything but revolutionary. It's full of flaws an undergraduate biology student can pick out.

:-w Not even close to accurate. http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1986/PSCF9-86VanTill.html This is exactly the kind of tactic creationists use to come up with the figures you quoted - holding onto the conclusions of isolated preliminary studies, ignoring contradictory evidence and avoiding critical analysis. That's not a scientific approach, it's a scientifically illiterate approach and feeds on the ignorance of the faithful who are taught to believe in creationism.

To respond to your examples, it doesn't matter how the content is used, you're still copying it and distributing it in your own way, which by definition violates copyright. It doesn't matter if the owner gains anything out of it because there are no such stipulations in copyright law. If you know that there are then I'd gladly be proven wrong. As far as I can remember, youtube has never been a free site; I've always encountered examples of videos being removed for copyright reasons. The ones that aren't just haven't been caught yet. Perhaps some of the owners of the material don't care, but others do. They're not thinking about being "cool" in forbidding others from copying their material, they're just looking out for their own interests which they're perfectly entitled to do. Perhaps they can be nazis sometimes, but you have to give them the right to defend the distribution of their own material. Having said that, I'm a bit of a hypocrite in that I don't live up to that right; I watch copyrighted material on youtube all the time. My rationalisation is that I don't buy music without getting a taste of it first and it's only though doing this that I have a ~100 CD collection and counting. At least I don't distribute it myself, I just help it along by being a viewer. If I can't find a band's music because they're being super stringent on copyright, then so be it. I'm definitely not going to complain because that would be like complaining when someone stops sending me free CDs in the mail.