I would recommend an excellent book "The Red Queen" by Ridley.

It explains why sexual selection pushes many organism features that are in fact handicaps for survival.

Human brain has all the characteristics of a feature evolved to be a handicap. It uses 40% of total energy, it evolved quickly, and we seemed to survive without it being such a big organ before.

Once you have a large brain and language, it becomes harder to just look at the genetic evolution, since it becomes a genetic/memetic evolution. And it is this person/culture complex that is seemingly most evolutionary successful thing.

One could also argue that is it in fact bacteria that are evolutionary most successful organisms on earth.

I would agree that it is hard to argue that a huge brain is a survival handicap. It may have started that way, but it got useful in all sort of ways. And also, we all look at this problem from the brain's perspective, since this is what we actually are, and not from the genes' perspectives. Also, being in a long non-food crunch situation also makes those 'details' hard to see.

Or if it is coming, it is coming in the form of a simple single cell size, frozen in space, riding a simple rock. Perhaps that is how we got here. (plus the 3 billion years of evolution.)

And fire. Not much chance of using fire in the oceans.

Excellent points.

Maybe the Earth is just lucky to contains all sorts of frequencies with various periods that hugely help evolution.

Daily temperature cycles, yearly temp cycles, ice ages, continents moving around, volcanos with huge cycles.

Perhaps we got lucky that the earth is not locked with the sun, that is, only one side always pointing to the sun. Perhaps we had some lucky series of large comet collisions that kept those cycles going. This could be quite rare thing in the universe.

That is a very simple and probably the most important explanation.

Life does not need intelligence. In fact intelligence itself is a handicap, and a product of sexual selection and its handicap principle. (Same with elks' antlers and peacocks' tails.)

We don't know how long do intelligent species exist. By using one smoothing technique, one can say that they live for average of 200k years.

It's worse for nuclear civilisations. A guess by the same rule would say that they live for around 100 or so years.

In that list of 100 most influential persons, who is on the number 11?

Where is the actual list?

And uses random forests to identify humans in the 3d space it sees, and also locate 3d positions of ten or twenty of their body parts. Just some details of what 10% does.

Did you even read the post you are responding to? MS has no 5000000 billion dollars.

I want to congratulate that person that made an unsortable excel. What a superb idea that was.

How the fck would you manage to lose 4/6 of the time to an opponent who must play rock at least 50% of the time?

"How about the fact that on a quad core, 16 gigabyte, 2.4 gigahertz computer, it can't buffer a few keystrokes as I type *while* the google page loads?"

Almost everything is this fucked up, and nobody seems to notice it.

And as long as an exchange exists, you can exchange your bitcoins for money, and thus use them for whatever you want.

Also, Bitpay is nothing but an external branch of a bitcoin exchange.

At 3.29 in the video, if you connect Greece to Austria, and disconnect Porgugal from Iceland, you save about 1500 km.

"3) Banks owe each other a lot of money. If a large enough bank goes down, it can turn another "good" bank into a "bad" bank simply because that bank was holding a lot of paper from the bank that died"

No, this does not "turn" it bad. This means the bank was bad the whole time.