I saw Pokemon 2000 in theaters when I was a kid, and I think I remember that it was the original anime with a pretty good dub. The storyline did involve Mewtwo being a genetically engineered super-pokemon with godlike powers.

But of course, in the end, the love of a trainer for his thundermouse saves the day.

And others like Mewtwo, are portrayed as hideous genetic engineering and animal husbandry mistakes, the likes of which the world shall never recover from. Heh. Mewtwo.

Ah, Futurama. Now you've got the phrase "compellingly short garment" stuck in my head

RE: the deathstar joke,

Totally gave me a flashback to Galaxy Quest with Tim Allen. The ultra-advanced race of aliens have no concept of deception or even untruth, so they believed the Galaxy Quest show (read Star Trek) was filmed-as-it-happened documentary, and used it to develop their ship. Heh. I can't believe a species as or more intelligent than us could ever survive without a concept of deception....

And if life is common in the galaxy or universe, life advanced enough to do convenient interstellar travel, would it be a surprise if hoaxers and pranksters would put these kinds of "significant objects" in orbit around a bunch of planets, just to piss off other species, or teenagers pranking their own civilizations?

Perhaps (wild, totally out of the air guessing) people were making sugar of lead using the bullets? Or perhaps, some little kid thought it was candy or something and ended up swallowing a bullet and the ammo-maker had to settle for the medical bills?

Heh, just stupid conjecture on my part.

Yeah, but if you read the article you'd know humans suck at regeneration. It's not impressive that we can regenerate (very, very slowly) the extreme tip of a finger or toe (as long as all the knuckles are left intact), or the kidney *MIGHT* regenerate somewhat, but doesn't happen often enough to be in the literature or commonly suspected. And we can regrow a rib or two over the course of *YEARS* as long as the sac surrounding the rib remains intact.

About the only thing we humans are good at regrowing is liver, and that's only with healthy liver, and doesn't work rupture or puncture that isn't cauterized/sutured. We'll completely regrow a new liver if as much of 3/4ths are removed. Which is actually pretty impressive. But not very cool as a superpower....

The point of the discovery is that there's interesting mechanisms at work allowing these mice to heal in an absolutely complete way, never before documented in mammals. And with further study we might be able to apply their biochemistry to the human healing process. There's a lot of potential, and it looks like an interesting, if not promising, avenue for research.

Quit bitching, cuz I'll bet 10:1 if you lose the tip of your finger, you'll likely not regrow it, and if you do, there will be a lot of scar tissue. If you lose a square inch of skin all at once, there WILL be extensive scarring.

These mice don't scar. How is that not awesome.

Actually, It's not inverse mass. There are several pieces of strong evidence for inverse charge. The amount of energy it takes to push around a positron using magnetic fields is the same amount it would take to push around regular electrons. The fact that anti-matter can be trapped using fields of opposite polarity used to trap regular matter proves that antimatter has inverse charge to matter.

Also, there are some interesting (calculated theoretical) behaviors to inverse mass objects. An inverse mass object will fall towards a massive object of equal absolute mass, but the regular mass object will fall away from the inverse mass object. There are also weird things that happen with infinite gravitational potential energy, and none of the effects have been observed as yet.

Just remember that mass and charge are not interchangeable, and they have distinct effects when inverted. Electromagnetism is roughly 10^36 times stronger than gravitation, so a single particle with inverted mass but normal charge is unlikely to interact any differently at currently achievable energy scales than a particle of normal mass and normal charge. Especially when most of the experiments today use electromagnetism as the only input force to manipulate where particles go, and what they do.

I'm not a long-time smoker like a lot of the older guys I know, who've been smoking nigh on half a century. But I have been smoking for ten years, and I'd like to print me a new set of lungs and a new trachea. I don't have cancer (that I know of (yet)) but I used to be able to play sousaphone while marching briskly uphill. I can't even carry that sousaphone uphill now without getting winded and wanting to have a smoke.

Or maybe a new brain would be better.....

Nothing other than the fourth amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. I'd count backscatter x-ray of everyone's naked bodies as unreasonable. Especially since it exposes everyone to a scientifically undetermined amount of ionizing radiation. Seizing ANY liquid of a volume greater than 3 ounces is also unreasonable.

Also, the US Constitution grants citizens the right to unrestricted interstate travel. The TSA is pretty restrictive. So The TSA is breaking the FUCKING CONSTITUTION on at least two counts. I'll bet they'll be granted more and more ability to trample on citizen's rights until we have FUCKING NO RIGHTS AT ALL

Dammit, I'm about to puke thinking of the FUCKING LEMMINGS IN CONGRESS, who said "oh, well we need to catch 'bad guys' at any cost. Terrorism seems like a good excuse. Let's just take everyone's rights away at bottle necks in movement and work out from there." Eventually we won't be allowed to walk on the sidewalk or drive on a road without a FUCKING PERMISSION SLIP from homeland security letting their agents know that "this person's a good guy, unless he's brown or black and seems suspicious (aka being brown or black)"

Ya know, most of the time, the TSOs really aren't to blame....
Yes, some of them (less than 50%, although probably close to 50%) do steal shit from your checked baggage and carry on.
But really, it isn't the TSO's fault that they work for an organization as dumb as a pile of dogshit. It's a well paying job for people unwilling or unable (usually unwilling) to get an education of any kind, even if EVERYONE FUCKING HATES THEM.

What are you gonna do? You have a girlfriend and two kids, and you're just too dumb to get a technical degree, are you gonna let them starve? No, you're going to go and get a menial, unskilled labor job with the TSA and get paid well to piss everyone off, cuz that's really all you're good for.

I'm not saying the TSA is good. And I'd rather have no jobs for the genetically lobotomized, but it's just not their fault that most of them got the job of TSO, they're so useless they have no other choice. And in the "land of opportunity" (yeah right, opportunity my ass), everyone is entitled to try working at something. And it turns out that unskilled mouthbreathers are really great at fondling the unwilling, and stealing shit from people's bags.

To ensure cetacean transparency? XD

So it's not illegal to do a DMCA takedown on a recording/stream of someone mentioning something protected by copyright? (eg: You just said the name of a famous fantasy novel trilogy involving people of lesser stature, you also quoted four lines of a poem found in the trilogy. You owe me money now since you've caused irreparable damage to the owner's copyright!)

It's a Turing Oracle problem. There's no way to know all the things a system can do without testing every possible situation.

It's impossible to make a bugproof program of any real use, or any nontrivial complexity.

Also: irrationality is detrimental to the health of an organism. Acting irrationally is not optimal behavior, although I have the suspicion that some irrationality plays an important part in problem solving strategies. Guess and test problem solving tends not to be productive in a continuous problem space since, since they have essentially infinite permutations. Irrationality allows one to pick values at random and test them to look for patterns. From there you find the closest value to what you want and permute the input up and down and go on from there.

What I meant by sane is: in order to be considered mentally healthy, an individual is required to exhibit irrationally optimistic behavior, often to the point of their own detriment.

Sanity is a relative term at best, and is often totally arbitrary.

I did make the mistake of mixing vernacular and jargon in my earlier post