Charcoal is well known for it's use in purification. I'm curious if this works better than using charcoal and if the decay of the living tissue actually ends up making this less safe than just rendering that wood to charcoal.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that nobody has discovered this. The utility is likely somewhat reduced when you consider that A. places with trees everywhere generally have water about and B. tree branches rot.

"Those groups begin with women and gays, and continue with Muslims, atheists, and ends God knows where."

That capital G really tells me all I need to know. The special interests of Christians have no business in our military or our government.

"The internal structure is being eroded. We no longer have the military that we had thirty or forty years ago."

Really? The Navy has had women in service since WWII. Despite all the cracks about men alone cooped on a ship for months it really was never the case, there are and have not been any shortage of women in uniform. There are sexual assaults everywhere, every day. 1 in 6 women in the general population have been raped. The military does a better job of catching and punishing offenders.

As for the religious requirements of Muslims. Every man and woman in uniform swears an oath to defend and support the Constitution and the people of the United States of America. Christians, Jews, Church of Satanists, and every other federally recognized religion are granted flexibility to freely practice their religion in the military because the Constitution says so. Examples of people who aren't allowed are not justification for denying Muslims their Constitutional rights, they are additional things that need fixed.

The anti-gay agenda stems from people who want military policy to be based on their religious beliefs and want to keep military policy that stems from days when policy was improperly and unconstitutionally written on the foundation of religious beliefs. In some cases the opposition stems from simple homophobia. This indicates a lack of self discipline and moral character. Having homosexuals around isn't going to turn anyone gay, it will potentially provide opportunities and some with tendencies and curiosity who might have been afraid to explore them might take advantage of them of their own free will but there is nothing wrong with that and frankly it's nobodies damned business or concern. Similarly, it doesn't seem unreasonable to have the expectation to expect men and women in uniform to suck it up and get over silly and sad personal emotional hangup's over whether or not someone might (or more likely might not) be enjoying the sight of them in a shower room. This has the same actual impact as being seen by someone who could care less or finds the sight of your disgusting and far less than the "mean and rough" way your drill sergeant or petty officer speaks to you in boot camp. Man up pussy, the girls are tough enough to get over it.

And yes, I served my time in the military.

Other governments spend dramatically less per citizen with total government provided healthcare than the US government spends on healthcare per citizen with no national healthcare at all.

If they told the entrenched medical system and insurance system to take a hike and copied a successful system from people who have already solved the problem it would work fine. Unfortunately, they won't, they'll pull an Obamacare half assed solution that really just lines the pockets of insurance companies and it will be the fault of the people who say the government can't manage healthcare because they will push against any attempt at it and try to keep as much private as possible. Whether you support national healthcare or not, if there is going to be national healthcare you need to recognize that it is all or none, a half measure is a really expensive waste of time.

I consider amount of time that evolution has been doing it's job to be the only significant factor. There is nothing to say that having short lifespans and changing more rapidly is a superior result. Nor is having a larger gene pool. These things are simply the products of different branches that evolution is working down in it's massively parallel processing alongside natural selection.

Simple organisms like bacteria evolve genetically in a rapid fashion due to short lifespan whereas very complex organisms like humans have evolved complex mechanisms to allow them to dynamically respond to and overcome most selection pressures during their lifetime. The two are marrying quickly as complex organisms like humans are gaining the capability to use their dynamic response capabilities (sentience, intelligence, tool usage) to augment their own genetic code and steal from the genetic code of other organisms.

True, but we share a lot more than 20% our DNA with OTHER primates.

That we now nothing about? Obviously I don't know. But we share 96% of our DNA with chimps. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0831_050831_chimp_genes.html

The amount of change caused by evolution is most meaningfully measured in generations, the rate at which generations occur is itself the product of evolution. More is simply more, not necessarily better.

Not that I disagree but it's worth pointing out that the summary is a bit misleading. Europeans share these genes but africans do not and it's 20% of the .15% of the neaderthal genome that is distinct, obviously humans share a lot more than 20% of their DNA with neaderthals, we share a lot more than that with primates!

There's no such thing as more primitive in a genetic sense which makes it ridiculous in both cases. Anything alive today is the result of all the evolution that has taken place since the first bits of life and is therefore equally evolved.

"If that bloated pretentious undergraduate essay style waffle was an attempt at justifying drugs it failed."

Way to play kill the messenger. Unfortunately, attacking the source of an argument rather than it's content is a logical fallacy. Your argument is like a table and your premise are it's legs. My argument showed that each of the legs of yours were faulty or didn't support your table. In order to make a VALID argument, you'd have to successfully refute my argument. A fallacy is fine for falsely persuading people to agree with your invalid argument but serves no purpose if your objective is to reach a valid conclusion.

"Get back to me when someone picks a fight in the street or stabs someone for money or increases someone else's chance of lung cancer after they've had a few glasses of water or played a game of CoD."

Here you've artfully managed to combine at least three logical fallacies. You are using a plea to emotion to try to stir emotional sentiment with mention of violent crime and causing physical harm to others. You've built a strawman to beat down because you've mentioned easily demonstrable cases of negative things associated with some of the specific examples of addiction cited earlier (thus creating a resemblence to the topic of debate) but establishing those cases nor my providing counter examples adds or subtracts support for your assertion that "activit[ies], not a chemical you're ingesting whose sole purpose is to alter your brain chemistry - [they are] entirely different things." with regard to addiction. Also, you are asserting that nobody picks fights in the street, stabs someone for money, or increases someone's chance of [developing] lung cancer after drinking water or playing a game of CoD. This is called begging the question because the phrasing of your query assumes that you are correct.

Your strawman, while bearing plenty of resemblance to the topic is easy to demonstrate because you've provided no premise to support it. So I can trivially build it back up and demonstrate that doing so lends no support to my own argument nor does it detract from yours thus proving it was nothing but a strawman and does support either of our conclusions. Humans will die of dehydration in 72hrs or less without drinking water, therefore all of them have drank water at some point. Therefore every human that has picked a fight in the street, stabbed someone for money, or increased someone's chance of developing lung cancer did so after drinking water. If we assume that your strawman was intended to imply that water and video games aren't sources of people inflicting harm on others and disregard the qualifiers of specific types of harm, we have your red herring. Wars have been fought over water and the harm inflicted in them easily dwarfs any claimed drug related crime statistics. Mass school shootings, murders, and theft related to video games and possession of game items and funds are all examples of people inflicting harm on others after playing games and the murders and theft over in-game property.

People inflict harm both intentionally and through disregard in order to support their addictions. The level of harm is related to their perception of the harm being caused, the strength of their addiction, their desperation for a fix, and the difficulty of acquiring a fix. Name any example of someone causing harm to support/engage in addiction behavior and one or more of those factors can explain it without need to introduce any requirement that the addiction be to a chemical you are ingesting for the sole purpose of altering brain chemistry.

It's unlikely you'd need to steal if recreational drugs were legalized without ridiculous taxes attached to them. We don't tax people for dieting, excess exercise, depression associated with working, etc and all those things cause health expenses.

Cocaine and Marijuana would as cheap or cheaper than sugar by weight if legalized globally, sold in an unregulated market, and taxed comparably to other goods without special taxes/duties attached to them.

It's a shame. Cocaine in high concentration doesn't have much real benefit but at levels such as found in coca leaves it could be one of the most useful tools imaginable for brain training. Just use it for one thing at a time. Afraid of heights? Spend significant amounts of free time in high places, chew coca leaves while there and only reward yourself with chewing them while in those high places. Do it for awhile. Stop for a bit, then revisit at periodic intervals to reinforce. Watch your fear melt away as your brain forms neural chains associating being at heights with positive reward pathways and the reinforcing will solidify them and make them permanent. Eventually, you will not only not be afraid but actually enjoy being at heights and it will trigger a feeling of satisfaction of it's own without the leaves! Also chew during sex and other tightly bound positive experiences so you don't form a negative association with coca leaves. Anything else in your life that you don't enjoy but wish you did? Perhaps studying. Once you've associated studying positively with the coca you could form extremely positive interconnective associations by studying at heights, sometimes chewing coca, sometimes not. Every time you are at a height, chew coca, or study it will light up the neural chains associated with all three and reinforce all of them and their associations.

The "sole purpose" thing is nothing more than a red herring. It makes no difference what a things purpose it. It only matters what it does. Playing video games and engaging in any activity you find rewarding, fun, satisfying, or gain a sense of accomplishment from alters your brain chemistry in pretty much the same way as addictive recreational drugs. There's really not much difference between a substance that triggers your brains reward pathways and an activity which does so.

Do a little powder cocaine with your eyes wide open about what is happening. Cocaine doesn't really provide any euphoria, just a feeling similar to a cup of coffee, but it does provide a model for distilled addiction. The addictive properties are strong, so blatant you'd have to be particularly obtuse to not recognize them, and fortunately mostly subside as quickly as they come on. There's a constant feeling of needing/wanting something, no different than the feeling you get when you need a cup of coffee in the morning, something sweet, a snack, a drink, something to do, or even an unspecified impulse where you aren't sure what the answer is. The answer if you've recently used cocaine is pretty much always cocaine and the only euphoria is the same feeling of satisfaction that comes with finding the answer in any of those other situations. Just like anything else that provides that feeling of satisfaction the more you find that answer the more you solidify the neural pathways associated with it.

Now having observed that, realizing what is happening and recognizing the sensation and behavior for a couple rounds, drop the powder (this is easier if you know what is happening and can recognize your brain trying to justify getting more). Cocaine will gradually be the answer less and less in your mind first being replaced by the most deeply entrenched things. These are your strongest addictions in more or less the order they appear, generally it starts with sleep, water, food, love, sex. Your brain justifies (quite easily as you are addicted to these for good reason) saying you haven't had these things in a long time. But note the need/want feeling is nearly identical to your urge for cocaine and the satisfaction of stuffing your face and/or finding that cozy bed is also nearly identical to the feeling of satisfaction when you found the more cocaine that was the answer. As the pieces of your life come back on the radar you will recognize that every one of them is the same.

Everything in life is nothing more than your brain triggering want feelings for things it has associated with reward pathways and triggering highly addictive neurotransmitters to trigger a feeling of satisfaction in response. Overdo it (where it is anything that makes you feel satisfied) at too great a frequency and your brain will become less sensitive to the stimuli in the same way you develop tolerance for a drug or your body adapts to attempts at diet manipulation or you become desensitized to violence with frequent exposure. But every so often you feel like you want something, your brain cycles through the potential paths to reward, the more highly rewarding and/or frequently rewarding the more you'll feel like you want it.

It gets confusing about there, because if you've logically concluded you don't want the thing when your brain requests it, you reinforce negative connections to the idea and your brain will request it less often and the urge will fade over time (but the more rewarding the thing is when/if you do finally have it and the more likely your brain is to "refresh" those neglected but existing reward links). If you decide against it but wish you didn't have to, your brain will do what I call a "shouldn't but I wanna" association and you'll find yourself making justifications for rewarding yourself with the thing, the easiest go to justifications being "it's been a long time", "look how good I've been, I can reward myself with this something something moderation", and "the bad thing is because of circumstance x, if I do y that changes the circumstance I'll get the good without the bad". Note, whether or not the justifications happen to be logically sound and accurate or faulty logic is irrelevant to this mechanism.

If the thing is highly rewarding in a consistent manner, you will not only find more justifications popping in your head, there will be physical responses to push you to seek the thing. For example, caffeine addiction causes you to feel more sluggish and tired in the morning which compliments the stimulating effect and the enhanced brain functions resulting from caffeine; nicotine addiction causes a feeling of edginess and lack of focus which compliments the increased focus and relaxation effects of nicotine; cocaine addiction causes a feeling of dissatisfaction and fatigue, narcotic pain killer addiction causes feelings of pain, addiction to a physical activity will make you feel down, lazy, and discontent with stillness; addiction to social interaction such as love will cause you feel empty, alone, and to "miss them."

So, with that said. EVERYTHING is addictive. Your brain changes permanently in response to anything that triggers a strong positive or negative response repeatedly over time for the same reason it changes to make more and more permanent memories of information you are exposed to repeatedly and changes more rapidly the more strongly those memories are associated with other things in your brain.

Also, whether it is it's sole purpose or not, everything you put in your body is a chemical and pretty much everything alters your brain chemistry. Water actually has one of the most dramatic chemical impacts on your brain of anything you ingest. It has the magical property of physically facilitating more rapid transport of all neurochemicals in the brain! That is some seriously addictive stuff, you crave it even more strongly than food/sleep/sex! How much do you want to bet imaging the brain of people who consistently drink 8, 8oz glasses of day for a prolonged duration would show zillions of permanent changes to their brain. We should open a clinic to treat adequate hydration addicts immediately!

It matters to those of us who use bitcoin regularly. Also, the plural of bitcoin should be bitcoin not bitcoins. Whole units have no significance when handling bitcoin since there are no physical bits and you rarely hold or exchange even whole units.

How can you get to a bank account in 15mins? I can convert instantly but two business days are required to get it to my bank.