Low hanging fruit: Harvested. Difficult questions: Fruit harvested only when money is evident.

You are viewing a romanticized history of science, via textbooks. The scientific research community, today, is very different from that of Jonas Salk.

You can't address "the source of the problem" without a benevolent eye toward human vulnerabilities. We do volunteer information frivolously "just because some site asks for it" -- in return for a minimal value. That does not make us stupid. That is human nature. Human weakness. The average human does not, and cannot, look ahead that far.

When businesses capitalize on human nature, human weakness, that's not OK. It's unethical. Our society is afraid to use the statistics of human behavior to say, "business cannot capitalize on the human weaknesses in the manner of a, b, c." Somehow our human weaknesses are ignored, belittled, treated as an unmentionable embarrassment. We cannot say, "50% of humans do "x" therefore you may not merchandise based on "x". Somehow it makes our species feel too stupid, to be seen as a species with limitations to our collective reasoning powers.

We all (acording to our behavior) long for a white-haired person to trust, to give us a permanent cure to bad breath, etc. Human "weaknesses" (in other words, instincts honed by millenia of natural selection) are exploited, in our lifetimes to an unprecedented degree of sophistication, to sell products. But nobody feels comfortable saying it's wrong. Instead of saying, "All humans trust old folks in a position of prominence, do not market that way!" we say, "People are stupid to trust TV ads showing old folks in a position of prominence." This is completely illogical to blame humans for their instincts!!!

Dudes! our instincts to trust, or not trust, are completely natural and sane. INSANE is using adverts to place "old folks in a position of prominence" as maketing drones. It's a complete misuse and overthrow of otherwise-sensible and otherwise-useful instincts.

What you say makes no sense to me, and I am a sensible, well informed, credible individual. What you say?

money is not the only motivator. but in health care, it is the only motivator that matters. Otherwise scientists would be avidly working on cures for the interesting (sorry) orphan diseases. Money is the only motivator that matters - in health care research.

This is my experience, too. Where are these doctors, giving more medical care than I need? I live in an affluent area in California. Yet no doctor has ever mentioned that I seem to have a dislocated shoulder. Yes, I have had a dislocated shoulder since childhood (near as I can figure) which was only diagnosed last year, by a neruomuscular massage physical therapist / body genius.

The shoulder is now relocated (what an amazing feeling of relief and right-ness) but I will need physical therapy for a year or more, to offset the problems caused by other muscles "shouldering" the problem of how to keep my body upright. In retrospect, my physical complaints of being un-coordinated, stumbling into walls frequently, my posture, and my inability to dance or move smoothly, were clearly begging for medical attention.

IMO what we need are more people with knowledge, seeing fewer patients, so they can treat the whole patient, not just a currently-manifesting problem. A life-long Scientist, I now believe that holistic medicine is equally powerful. Science let me down. A dyslexic and unassuming body-worker, making a low-to-comfortable income, was far more effective than a series of well paid doctors over decades of my life.

We have lost so many words needlessly. Rapeseed is an oil seed once grown mainly in Europe. Today we are aware that some food oils are healthy, and some are not; when people noticed that Rapeseed oil is healthier than others, it became a celebrity cooking oil. How to market it, though? Rapeseed oil? um... gRapeseed? um... today, we call Rapeseed oil "canola oil."

I thought it was sad we've lost Rapeseed as a socially appropriate crop, but then, why go on growing a crop called Rapeseed when the word represents an act that is so repugnanat?

Further musing on philosophy that stems from a dictionary "fixation" of a term: flammable and inflammable. Let's move on beyond the obvious confusion. WHY are there ambiguous terms like this? As a scientist, I suspect there is a category of things that are so important, we only need to know the existence of the problem, not its polarity. In other words, only one meaning is important, while the other can generally be discarded.

Consider the word pair, flammable/inflammable. We need to know if something can catch fire. It's a special context. We look across the campfire and worry that the dancing children will catch on fire, and we shout out, "Are their banners ___?!" ( We never look across the campfire and wonder if that (say, an iron grille) might _not_ catch on fire, and shout out, "___!?" )

Such terms are very special. They are a barometer for our species' priorities.

I was once really bothered by the flammable / inflammable conflation, but the more I grow, the more comfortable I am with words that are defined by common useage, not because "there's nothing we can do about it" but because "perhaps common usage knows more than I do about this word."

Love, the Word Goddess

PG&E - Pacific Gas And Electric (and other utitilies) have full reign over entering my backyard to check my meter monthly. I've long wondered whether and/or when they'll team up with others to provide sensitive data to those with money.

Wikipedia was great. Wikipedia is broken. And it's broken because of f**kery like the above post, extolling how wonderful it is that Wikipedia has managed to split-the-hair and call the county "Londonderry" and the city "Derry." Here is a post by a Wikipedia insider, bragging that Wikipedia does not reflect REALITY.

Wikipedia was great.

Wikipedia is broken.

Smart people like me cannot correct facts or grammar, without being reverted.

Wikipedia is broken.

Wikipedia WAS great.

QUOTE: "Donation is indeed forced... That's not a donation, that's tax."
- - -

RESPONSE: This "donation" is a cynical maneuver. The companies that install huge, bright LED billboards along I80 in California also donate money to children's charities. So... when the populace tried to ban these distracting eyesore billboards, there was a big outcry.

"But they are donating $$$ to childrens' charities, and if we don't let them put up those billboards, then childrens' charities will lose $$$!"

It's a very very manipulative tactic. And it works. Which makes me sick.

Agreed. That is why, for instance, your voting records are not public, regardless of whether you want them to be public.

Respectfully submit that those who are obsessed with the scientific laboratory definition of 'room temperature' are missing the meaning in this context:

It is *not* an ultra-cold storage device with expensive cooling requirements, useful only for the long-term archival needs of Deep Pockets. It is a room-temperature (in the common meaning of the phrase) storage device that is within reach of Shallow Pockets consumers.

I, for one, have been yearning to store my photos until I'm old and need to draw on them for happy memories. For my 90-year-old withered carcass, the loss of past photographs means the loss of memories. Huzzah for advancements in LT storage.

When I clicked on your link, the menu at the restaurant did not feature black duck anything.

Congratulations! YOu have won the honor of testing our first dose of the medicine. What, you don't want the prize? Should have read the fine print...

How the hell did my mention of some cutting edge cosmology hypothesis lead to a creationism debate ... is there nothing in this world the creationists WON'T latch onto ?
So I'm rather going to discuss the dragon posts - ignoring the bible stuff - because THOSE are at least slightly interesting.

>Flying lizard-like creature? I give you the Pterosaur [wikipedia.org].

Yes, erm - no mammals ever saw one, the earliest mammals were the Morganocodontids, who did live before the K/T event, but not THAT long before. Pterosaur is as far in the past of the earliest mammal as Tyranosaurus is in ours.Seems rather unlikely that racial memory from a time our ancestors were smaller than your pinky would remember the big lizards that were around at the time -and which we outlived.

>Fire breathing creature? Not quite, but the bombardier beetles [wikipedia.org] is somewhat there. It's not real fire, but getting hit by a liquid close to 100 C is going to feel like being burned. And if that compound is also acidic or caustic, it gets even worse, and anyone hit by a decent amount of it would certainly feel like they're on fire.

The fire breathing bit was never the hard part. There are numerous creatures on the planet that mix chemicals that create something very close to fire. There are many plausible evolutionary paths to that. The fact that none of them are big suggest however that either it is simply not a good trait for survival - or there just never was mutation to do that in any vertebrate. It's not that, that can't happen - it's that it just never did.
Even the flying lizard bit is easy - probably not on the scale the legends drew them, but hey legends are prone to exaggeration - especially on size (what slashdotter does NOT exaggerate the size of their legendarily unused physical features ?).

>These two aren't exactly along the same evolutionary branches, but a combination of the two aren't beyond the realms of realism.

I said above that fire breathing wasn't hard - so lets see what IS hard. The hard part is this: every culture, every dragon story get the same basic body shape. A creature that has four legs AND wings. A vertebrate with six limbs. Nothing like that has EVER existed. Not in the fossil record, nor anywhere on the planet now. Birds have only TWO legs to get wings. The first vertebrate on the planet had 4 limbs, and every descendant got that basic body pattern - and the DNA evidence concurs.

Again, a mutation in DNA could produce a six-limbed vertebrate - but not a flying lizard in one jump. So you'd need a BRANCH of vertebrates with six limbs, before natural selection could refine those extra limbs into working wings. While a single species living and going extinct without leaving a fossil is statistically MORE probably than a species leaving one at all - an entire BRANCH - that level of natural selection means at least 500 thousand generations - multiple species, and never once did even ONE of them leave ANYTHING ? Unlikely. Now further - this creature is supposed to be a big reptile, so that's a fairly LATE branch-off from other vertebrates, and if humans ever saw one (and could draw it) then it must have been around until no less than 5000 years ago.
The odds of THAT not leaving any fossils shrink to nearly nothing.

The dragon myth is still interesting because it's so pervasive. It occurs in every culture everywhere on earth. Even if we are generous and say it dates back more than 70-thousand years to when we were all one "race" in Africa - and this is how it got in them all (so how come NO other myth made it all the way through ? If there is something psychologically attractive to the myth - then that would be just as good evidence for it arising independently over and over - a hell of a lot of other ideas did) - that's still statistically unlikely to leave no fossil evidence but nevermind.
The point is - in those cultures there are marked differences between their dragons (and a lot of what WE know as dragon stories aren't, they are other mythical beasts like the Great Orm that got confused in post-medieval times [Saint George NEVER killed a dragon in the original story, he hunted Orms), so lets stick to dragons, not giant earthworms). Some breath fire, many make no mention of that. Some are wise, some are vicious beasts. Some are stocky and short (particularly in South American drawings) while some are slender. What all the recognizeable dragons in mythology have in common is that special body-plan, six limbs.
What makes the dragon myth scientifically interesting is it's pervasiveness, and the pervasiveness of this particular attribute especially - but it would be stupid to assume that this pervasiveness proves there "some truth to it", it's evidence - but it could be evidence for many other explanations. We still lack a convincing explanation with strong additional evidence - we have speculative hypothesis, a few with interesting supporting evidence, but nothing that really answers the question: Why do all human cultures tell the same story ?

I don't think Dragons ever existed (cool as it would be too be wrong) - but I still find the story beguiling, because of what it tells us about OURSELVES. The problem is - we don't (yet) KNOW what it tells us about ourselves, we just have some interesting suggestive ideas, we lack a strong theory with genuine evidence (let alone experimental evidence). If/When we find one, perhaps we'll understand something about our brains way beyond our current understanding - THAT possibility is intriguing.