Interesting, because you sound like a pompous, ignorant dick who hasn't met a single atheist in his life, knows virtually nothing about what they believe or don't, and appears to know even less about forming cogent, lettered sentences to express your stupid, laughably caricatured opinions.

Your daughter is going to be a very butch lesbian.

lol, wtf? defensive much?

"So what I'm asking is, do you think homosexuality was magically created by a process other than evolution?"

uh, no. duh.

"Look kin selection is a very common, very well understood, fundamental concept in genetics. It's as close to proven as you're ever going to get. Homosexuality has been well demonstrated in numerous studies to have a genetic component in numerous species"

Fine, great, so SHOW ME THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE supporting your IDEA that kin selection is the actual mechanism for the continuance of homosexuality in animals. Because until you collect the evidence and do the statistical analysis on the data for, eg., homosexuality in a particular species, your idea is just as good as any other. And just because YOU can't come up with an "other evolutionary mechanism we don't know about that is likely to have caused it" (and there ACTUALLY ARE SEVERAL other highly plausible theories for the evolution of homosexuality BTW), doesn't in any way mean that the theory you shat out over your lunch break must be the right one.

Oh, and you should probably start taking your own advice when you snidely chastise other people because you think THEY "haven't bothered to look at the hundreds of studies" on a particular scientific issue. Because it just so happens that Bobrow and Bailey DID look into the theory of whether kin selection explained homosexuality in humans in a paper from 2001 entitled "Is male homosexuality maintained via kin selection?", and guess what, they RULED IT OUT as the causative mechanism. you ass.

Well, that's a nice hypothesis, and it very well may be right. But I want empirical evidence. For instance with the case of the eye, we see examples of all of the evolutionary intermediate stages and we have computer programs that very nicely simulate eye evolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ybWucMx4W8 I don't see anything near that level of rigor yet when it comes to the evolution of homosexuality. Trust me, as a gay uncle myself, I'm eager to know how it all works! But I am strongly scientifically skeptical too, and I want hard evidence first.

"You seem like you respect Alan Turing, ergo I assume you pride yourself in logic thinking and sense. Would you argue that from a scientific, logic point of view, homosexuality is not a flaw?"

Yes.

"I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it."

And the reason you think that, is because you are unimaginative and ignorant. The fact that the phenomenon in question is found WIDESPREAD in nature, in many other species of vertebrate and invertebrate, means there is an indisputably adaptively advantageous aspect to its existence. It has obviously been selected for over hundreds of millions of years. The onus is on you to explain how it evolved, in the same way that it was on us to imagine the way in which the eye evolved. We solved that problem and we will solve this one, eventually, in the exact same way, using science and reason.

"*sigh* Can't we design some virus or some such that forces the right half of the brain to be the dominant one already?"

Indeed. Though as you've demonstrated, we'll obviously still have to contend with the general dimwittedness of said same brains.

oh that's nerdy! I tip my hat sir.

204? jesus. And I thought I was old.

No it should work fine, most window(s) installations are usually pretty dirty.

also, it doesn't have shit to do with using "two lasers", the story writer at PC Authority is just retarded. In addition, if I might editorialize, is this really necessary? How hard is it to just grab a piece of paper or something and use that, or, GASP, use a mousepad! What's Logitech going to come out with next, a raman scattering microscopy, mid-infrared quantum cascade utilizing wireless mouse, for those times when you simply must do your mousing on an atomically pure, sub-angstrom microroughness telescope mirror in a class 1 cleanroom? cmon now.

I don't understand why they need the computing power either.

here's work on active stabilization. See "Active-Feedback Control of the Magnetic Boundary for Magnetohydrodynamic Stabilization of a Fusion Plasma" [aip.org]. That's a 2006 paper on a scheme involving 192 active feedback coils to stabilize a plasma. There's other work like that, and hope that one of the designs that's almost stable might be nudged into stability with active control.

Yes but that work was done on the reverse field pinch device called RFX-mod ( http://www.igi.cnr.it/rfxmod2009/ ). It's a tokamak-like magnetic confinement device so it probably has shot times measured in the multi-second range. Plenty of time for active stabilization but way different from this new MTF approach.

I am in agreement with most of your thoughts except the polywell neutron claim. Have they published with statistically significant neutron yields? I'd like to read it if so. The General Fusion guys will definitely have to deal with severe Richtmyer-Meshkov instability when the shockwave breaks out of the molten metal into the plasma at the center, and then Rayleigh-Taylor instability when the plasma itself if compressed. Question is, how uniform of a shockwave will they need? Who knows. The CDX-U and LTX tokamaks at PPPL http://www.pppl.gov/lithiumtokamak.cfm have run, apparently with some success, using a liquid lithium limiter. But liquid lead? Yeah yikes, I'm not aware of any liquid Pb-using fusion experiments. The stated values for the vapor pressures of molten Li and Pb at their melting points are 1.63E-08 Pa and 4.21E-07 Pa respectively, I'm surprised that lead's VP is 26 times HIGHER than that of Li's. Scary. On the other hand, vortex rings can apparently be very stable and remain highly segregated from the medium they are propagating in over surprising amounts of time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJk8ijAUCiI

I won't sugarcoat my thoughts on that one, I'd say it's nothing more than a fraud. The lowest of the low, vastly kookier than even Bussard's Polywell. I have followed discussions about Eric Lerner and focus fusion VERY closely on the wikipedia pages and I have little to no respect for that man's ideas about fusion or his tactics of argument. He does not have a PhD and he is not a physicist. His ideas about the "electric universe" are idiotic pseudoscience. I will refer you specifically to the plasma physicist Art Carlson's highly thoughtful and reasonable objections to unconventional fusion schemes in general on this issue, and his objections to focus fusion in particular (all on the wiki pages). His credentials and intellectual honesty in these debates seem, to me anyway, to be impeccable.

Robert Bussard can be forgiven for his sin of the polywell. He was a really good scientist who achieved some truly admirable things in his career, but at the end I think he realized that he was getting old and would never live to see his dream of fusion power come true, and he started making wacky claims when things became desperate (like extrapolating his supposed observation of three -count em- THREE fusion neutrons from one of his setups to commercial scale power cost estimates, that's just pain nutty). It's unfortunate but entirely forgivable. Art Carlson's criticism of the polywell device as a non-starter due to its being classified as a reactor whose plasma is in thermodynamic disequilibrium (Todd Rider's MIT thesis on this showed that the bremsstrahlung losses are insurmountable) are highly convincing, and the waffling and flouncing about that the polywell supporters do in the face of these criticisms seem highly dubious.

Uhhhh, what are you talking about? The plasma parameters are not by any means, in so far as I can see, actively controlled in any way in this scheme. Their plan is to launch two colliding toroidal vortex rings of hot plasma into the vorticular void of a large sphere or rapidly spinning molten LiPb metal. Then, using pistons, they launch an imploding spherically symmetric shockwave into the metal to converge upon the merged spheromaks at the center of the setup. The TOTAL confinement time looks like it'll be measured in microseconds at most on this thing, no way is there time for active control of the plasma during a shot like that.

As fusion schemes go, I am obligated to express my opinion that this one is way fucking wacky, however, it is significantly less wacky than a lot of other ideas out there (polywell, I'm looking at you) and it does not appear to have any immediate show stoppers associated with it which would allow me to dismiss it out of hand. I am not a physicist, but I did just get home from my job working on one of the nation's largest conventional (laser driven) inertial confinement fusion reactors and I have a very deep enthusiast's interest on these matters. On the laser fusion device that I work on, we have recently begun shooting MTF targets (we call it MIF or magneto-inertial fusion though) on our system as well, and the results are quite interesting. We use a centimeter scale, single loop Helmholtz coil setup with a conventionally laser-driven fusion microcapsule sitting at the center of the coils. The laser fires, compressing the D-T fuel to tremendous pressure and temperature (higher than in the sun's core) and just before the exact moment of maximum compression and fusion burn (bang time) the Helmholtz coils are fired with power from a couple hundred Joule capacitor bank, thereby producing a huge magnetic field in the compressed target capsule and hopefully increasing the plasma confinement time from a mere few picoseconds to several times longer (the Larmor radius of charged particles in a magnetic field of the intensity we produce is on the order of the size of the compressed capsule, it effectively suppresses electron thermal conductivity and confines the hot plasma within itself). Proton deflectrometry has been successfully used to validate the expected ~.2 megagauss magnetic fields in our setups. The work ahead of the guys with this piston driven shockwave idea is enormous, but the field of plasma and fusion physics is still rich with exciting discovery. I wish these gentlemen the very best of luck.

I found a new dark spot on my pole last week and you don't see me running to the science press about it! media whore!

Future generations of historians will be studying the journals of whoever does go on the first Mars mission for decades.

Day: 428

I tossed off Dave again today for what must've been the 50th time. Jesus he produces an ungodly amount o..... oh shit, the computer's just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours. Damnit!