Most people in a bad situation (e.g. financially) realize that having another kid rarely, if ever, improves it, hence it's not an intelligent thing to do. Furthermore, while bad luck can put anybody in a bad situation, intelligence is a major factor in getting out of it.

That said, "bad situation" is relative and we're far better off than people were historically, and high intelligence isn't strongly linked to genetics. Low intelligence can be, but higher intelligence is more a function of derived epigentic effects (thus a step or three away from direct natural selection) and upbringing (not the binary "good" or "bad", more how your environment affects you -- some people thrive in adversity and become dull with privilege).

Exactly. If I'm looking for something using Google, it's quite rare for a single webpage to completely answer my question. It's also intellectually lazy to quit your research after reading a single source.

IMHO, this comic illustrates this point nicely. (That's assuming a perfect Question -> Answer AI, which probably won't be possible for decades.)

You seem to be thinking of mild depression or even subclinical sadness. This is quite common, as psychiatric disorders tend to be an exaggeration of normal things that everyone feels, so it's easy to underestimate them. You also rarely see them, as holding a job and going out requires a fair degree of psychological health. The last hundred years or so of medical research specifically tests for effectiveness VS a placebo, so it's not like people are just shooting in the dark here. (To throw you a bone, medications don't seem to be very effective against mild depression.) Most of the people I've talked to keep struggling with depression throughout their life and getting treatment means getting better in weeks/months rather than years.

Also, stop getting your medical knowledge from TV, it's wrong. The vast majority of psychologists don't do the couch thing anymore. Plus, CBT (the most common type) isn't really talking about one's feelings at length. If I remember my history right, that sort of therapy died out as psychology progressed beyond Freud. There are likely a few psychologists that still do it, but they cater to rich people with similar misconceptions (it requires almost weekly visits for years before you see significant results -- assuming the psychologist doesn't incorporate newer forms of therapy).

OTOH, we would probably fire a safe designer if a 15 year old could easily open it without the combination. Similar to how someone in charge of physical security would be terminated if 15 year olds could non-destructively enter the building as they pleased.

The grandparent didn't say we eat meat because we evolved to, he said we eat meat because our body is configured to eat meat. To make an absurd analogy, just because we evolved to breath oxygen doesn't mean we have to breath oxygen, or even that we should.

In other words, a naturalistic argument would be that we should eat meat because we evolved to and have always done so. The GP argued that we should eat meat because that's what our bodies are built to do. Such an argument implies it's healthier to do so, but it's not incontrovertible (supported - yes, proven - no).

If you want a more formal example, look at our lipoprotein enzymes. They work much better with saturated ("animal") fats, leading to larger LDL sizes. Unsaturated fats lead to smaller LDL sizes. High levels of either are bad, but the smaller ones get stuck in blood vessels more easily, counteracting the benefit of lower absolute levels. Hence the probable reason why traditional Eskimo diets (99% meat) lead to lower cardiovascular disease than modern diets, and why the Atkins diet works. (Meat-derived omega fats, and such also have an effect.)

Saturated Fat is an interesting topic to compare to AGW. There's a lot more scientific controversy (e.g. the last big meta-analysis) but public consensus. The science behind the two is similarly difficult to study. In nutrition, you can't do randomized controlled clinical trials in humans for 30-40 years to measure the health effects, just as you can't do direct RCTs in climatology. So, the science isn't terribly strong behind either, hence why there's controversy. Plus they're both overly-politicized.

Eugenics is a junk science because nobody dared advance it since WWII while other fields have advanced to the point that it seems ridiculous in comparison. There's a real basis for it, since humans aren't 100% nurture, but it's now reprehensible to say that people are not equal.

Realistically, people just tried to conflate race with genetics to justify their racism with science. The reality is that humans are far too promiscuous, so we display very little genetic variation between various groups. (Our total population also bottle-necked a few times, leading to extensive cross-breeding.) Humans differ by only 0.5% genetically, which is similar to dogs. However, human populations only account for 5.4% of that difference, while dog breed counts for 27.5%. Also, when left to their own devices, both humans and dogs create mutts at very high frequency.

There's also the problem that whoever was harking on eugenics believed that their group/race was superior, when genetics doesn't seem to work like that in humans. Genetic defects are real, but genetic superiority is a racist fantasy. There's no super-intelligence gene, but plenty of things that can go wrong and give a person a low IQ.

Most pre-meds go on to do something unrelated to medicine. The acceptance rate to medical school is quite low, especially when people looked to medicine as a "guaranteed job" during uncertain economic times. In my undergraduate class, there were roughly 400 pre-meds initially, ~10 went to the affiliated medical school, and ~10 went to other medical schools. Even a single bad grade will dramatically worsen one's odds, hence why so many pre-meds succumb to the temptation of cheating.

Research is similar, because grants & funding are also stupidly competitive. This drives people to behave unethically as a calculated risk. Even well-intentioned people lose their objectivity when they dedicate their careers to something, and unobjective science is an oxymoron.

I had my (Visa logo) check card compromised on Feb 12th, and this seems like the most logical mechanism behind it. For me, what it entailed was a call to my cell phone from my bank at 10:00 am concerning a 7:00 am charge of $7 in another state. The charge was never authorized and I was sent a new card within the week. My own review of my account and credit history revealed no further anomalies.

That was perhaps my second or third call from them in the past eight years, so they're frighteningly accurate at knowing what is and what is not a typical charge for me. All that said, I expected headaches since fraudulent use of a check card involves "my" money rather than theirs, but the process was rather painless for me.

You're much more than an optimist than me if you did that and expected to still get mail service and pizza deliveries.

Yes, they no longer exist. That does not preclude comparing the current market leader to the past market leader. Google and Doubleclick differ substantially, hence why Google dominated and bought them despite being a latecomer to the market.

"Playing"? Sorry, I was trying to have an intellectual discussion, which is cooperative, not competitive. It's not "winning" if you give nothing but assertions and steadily decline in civility until people stop talking to you.

Pegging Google as an ad company is overly simplistic. It doesn't allow you to adequately predict the range of Google's actions, thus it's not a useful classification (beyond rhetoric). It also leaves you vulnerable if they ever pose a threat, since targeted advertising is far less sinister than many of the things they could do.

Collecting "we know what you like to do" data is much more consistent with their mission statement and allocation of resources than with the actions of any ad company. Look at a company like Doubleclick if you're having trouble seeing the difference. You cannot reduce their actions to a simple "they want to sell our eyeballs to advertisers", for if that were true, they'd be one of the most random and inefficient companies of all time, which their track record disagrees with.

Google Health, Bookmarks, Checkout, Contacts, Code, Docs, Latitude, Wallet, Play, Notebook, Reader, Sites...

Not all of Google's offerings have ads, nor did their initial product have ads. What Google started as, and creates most of their products through, is finding, processing, and compiling data. It's the common factor from search to AI driven cars. Most of Google's products make no sense for an advertising company and most ad companies don't even have consumer facing web services. They make perfect sense for the development of search algorithms though.

A chemical company might make most of its money through a specific chemical (e.g. bleach), but it's not too difficult for them to switch if the need arises. Likewise, Google makes most of its money through ads, but their real asset is a vast collection of data and the programming talent to use it. They do ads, but that's an application of their core business. IMHO, that's why they now dominate internet advertising despite not being the first to market. Being overspecialized makes you vulnerable.

Well, most cells in the body work better when they're in the "not-eaten" state, so I'd venture to guess "all of them".

"Do not eat" is an oversimplification, but the "eating" refers to your immune cells destroying things that aren't supposed to be in the body. For example, bacteria lack CD47, so they get eaten by phagocytes. Your kidneys have CD47 so the immune system generally leaves them alone. If your CD47 membrane proteins all magically disappeared, your immune system would try to destroy nearly every cell in your body. If we didn't have CD47, then it'd be harder to tell what is and what is not supposed to be in the body. It's part of the immune system's IFF.

Cancer cells are rapidly mutating versions of your own cells. They already have CD47 and other membrane proteins, so the immune system has a tough time with them. That said, there are a large number of checks the immune system does, and many of the anti-viral checks (e.g. present random fragments of internal proteins for examination) also cause an early cancer to be eliminated (probably happens all the time). It's a delicate balance, because an "auto-immune" disease is what happens when your immune system errs on the side of killing something it shouldn't, and an infection or cancer is when it errs on the side of not-killing something it should.

Which is a more relevant way of pinning a word on a company: naming them after their most profitable product, or naming them based on how they create their products?

If you have a rooted phone and use gingerbread, then try PDroid. It allows you to send a blank, random, or custom value to those applications, which prevents a poorly written application from crashing. It's essentially the same feature that CyanogenMod rejected (IMHO, clearly demonstrating where their loyalties lie).