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Comment News: Tony Abbott evolved a punchable face (Score 1) 190

OLDUVAI GORGE, Warringah, Monday (NTN) — A new theory suggests that Tony Abbott's ancestors evolved remarkably punchable facial features, accounting for people's deep desire to do so today.

The bones most commonly broken in prehistoric Liberal Party punch-ups gained the most strength in early "conservative" evolution. They are also the bones that show most divergence between Liberals and Nationals.

The paper, in the journal Guardian Australia, argues that the reinforcements evolved amid fighting over females and resources, in which communication by kicking each other's heads drove key policy changes.

Fossil records show that Australopithecus menzieii had strikingly robust facial structures. This was long seen as an adaptation to a tough diet including nuts, seeds and Malcom Turnbull's balls. But more recent findings suggest that violent intra-party competition was the cause: the "protective buttressing hypothesis".

Interestingly, the evolutionary descendants of Australopithecus — including more left-leaning humans — have displayed less and less facial buttressing. "Human arms and upper bodies are not nearly as strong as those found in Liberal Party members," said the author, Prof David Carrier, dusting off his gloves.

Studies from Canberra emergency wards show that faces are particularly vulnerable to violent injuries, many self-inflicted from being banged against desks when Coalition policy proposals reach the news.

"The historical record goes back a short time, but anatomy holds clues as to what selection was important, what behaviours were important; and so it gives us important information about what caveman notion Mr Abbott is going to come out with next."

Photo: Tony Abbott actually getting punched in the face. What a happy-making photograph this is.

Comment Re:Qualifications: thinker and visionary (Score 1) 107

Authors, including authors of cartoons, tend to spend most of their time thinking, so they're a fairly good profession for spawning visionaries quite regularly.

IMO he should have spent more time thinking about his cartoon strip, which (back in the day) had one that was funny, interesting, or insightful out of every few hundred.

Comment Re:Disappointingly Linux-centric (Score 3, Funny) 611

Disappointingly computer-centric too. My favorite desktop environment consists of a pencil, a paperweight, and a stapler.

And I can put my head on it for a nap whenever I think that will increase productivity.

(As for the survey, I voted, but I'm not sure it's correct to identify one as my favorite when I haven't actually tried all of them.)

Comment Re:salty seawater vs melt ? (Score 2, Interesting) 298

It's seasonal, and one of the reasons for the increase is increased precipitation (caused by, you guessed it, global warming).
The sea there is actually warmer, and the land ice is shrinking.
In short, this is only interesting if you need facts with superficial interpretations that can "refute" global warming to the uninformed masses.

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

p.s. - I notice in another skepticalscience link that gw deniers have joined evolution deniers in invoking the second law of thermodynamics as "proof that it couldn't happen". As if scientists are ignorant of the 2LoT.

Comment Re:if you want your day in court (Score 1, Insightful) 215

> Why does the legal system allow settling class action suits?

Because when all the basic facts are the same, it makes *a lot* more sense to have one trial covering 64,000 victims than it does to have 64,000 trials. The *only* people who benefit from having all those unnecessary trials are the lawyers. If anything, class actions are less profitable for lawyers than the alternative.

Furthermore, unlike this case (where each plantiff suffered substantial harm: tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each), imagine a case where the harm suffered is small-but-nonzero. (For example, a few years back, the music CDs with the rootkits on them. For most people, the harm is the cost of the CD, around $15. Maybe twice to four times that if you want to include the cost of rootkit removal) In those cases, nobody in their right mind is going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to file a lawsuit to recover $15. So the victim's choice is a class action suit or nothing at all.

Comment Re:needs some (Score 1) 470

Really if you want to see pseudoscience in action take a good look at all the assumptions behind cosmology and astronomy. Redshift = distance is an ASSUMPTION and Edwin Hubble himself was the first to point that out. Or start being honest enough to teach students that LOTS of biologists as well as physicists like Sir Hoyle have valid doubts about the theory of evolution, and no they are not creationists. Their main problem with evolution being that it is so often presented as settled established fact when it really has a lot of serious problems that need to be worked out. Just saying that is some kind of heresy in most English-speaking areas. Truth is many scientists would love to replace evolution with a better theory.

Every hypothesis is "an assumption". But some stand up to scrutiny and offer a lot of explanatory value.

As for evolution, what you said isn't heresy - it's a claim that you didn't try to back up.

Comment Re:needs some (Score 2) 470

Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception," wrote a trio of scientists in a 2012 issue of the Astronomy Education Review.

Yes we must use government institutions to regulate what people believe! If we start young we can change the next generation.

That's one spin you could put on it.

Another choice is "How is a country full of people that believe nonsense going to survive the 21st Century?"

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