...but if the hypothesis that the sun is externally powered by electric currents flowing in the spiral arms of the galaxy...
Is this some sort of inside joke? A reference to a Time Cube-style crackpot of whom I'm not aware?
Milk & Honey are good for you, but only if both are raw!
Oh dear. I suspect you're serious.
Beer guts ain't fat, that's not how your body works...Beer guts are enlarged, hardened livers
Citation needed.
"An excess of visceral fat is known as central obesity, the "pot belly" or "beer belly" effect, in which the abdomen protrudes excessively....A study has shown that alcohol consumption is directly associated with waist circumference and with a higher risk of abdominal obesity in men, but not in women, in the present population." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_gut#Relationship_with_Alcohol_Consumption
"Itâ(TM)s not necessarily beer but too many calories that can turn your trim waistline into a belly that protrudes over your pants. Any kind of calories -- whether from alcohol, sugary beverages, or oversized portions of food -- can increase belly fat. However, alcohol does seem to have a particular association with fat in the midsection." -- http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/the-truth-about-beer-and-your-belly
Yes, ascites is a real thing, but it's not what the term "beer belly" refers to.
Leftism was responsible for 99% of the problems in the 20th century.
Thank you for demonstrating the point that Americans do not study history.
We have left parties. Nobody votes for them. We study history in the USA.
If we studied history in the USA, we'd have left parties. Instead we study Indoctrination Into American Exceptionalism.
Being able to fix a stuck wheel has some value, as does being able to make new instruments on the scene from parts in the lab.
If you can send 50 or 100 probes for the price of a manned mission, having humans there to make repairs is pretty pointless. "Hmm, send a human to fix that stuck rover, or send a few dozen more rovers?"
But that line of thought presupposes that gathering data is the only thing humans care about.
If we're talking about doing science in space, gathering data is the only thing we care about.
If people want to do art or religion or something along those lines in space, fine, just don't pretend it's science. Let those space missions compete for arts or religion funding.
While I will agree that there is considerable "low hanging fruit" in terms of very legitimate science that can be done by sending robotic probes, there will reach a point in that research where having actual people physically there will make a whole lot of sense.
For the foreseeable future, the cost of sending humans beyond Earth orbit and bringing them back safely will always be too high compared to robotic probes. That the idea of disregarding the "and bringing them back safely" part is being discussed as a semi-serious proposal shows only that for some folks, manned space flight has nothing to do with rational cost/benefit analysis of scientific data gathering. For them it is instead some sort of near-religious holy quest. ("Some folks" being a general comment and not directed at you, Teancum.)
There is a reason why automated probes don't go running around Antarctica, even though sending people there happens at considerable expense.
Considerable expense?! Compared to even LEO, Antarctica is free. During the summer months there are 5,000 people there. Call me when we can support 5,000 people in LEO, much less out of range of resupply rockets. I should live so long. (Tell you want, I'd settle for living (in good health and the other usual long life caveats) until the population in orbit reaches 1,000, same as Antarctica in winter.)
With the distances involved, bandwidth for sending data can be a considerable problem.
The bandwidth problem does not change when a human is transmitting versus a robot. It is useless to station a human in space if they cannot report back, right? (Unless one assign some metaphysical value to "human eyes have seen such-and-such" -- but that's not a science mission, it's religious questing.)
Some local synthesis of the data...can take place in an automated fashion, eventually even that will eventually need to have somebody physically there to evaluate all of that data.
On what basis do you believe that a human could evaluate that data better than an expert system designed for the task? Especially one with continual (though time-lagged) feedback from Earth?
A good argument could be made that there is no need for human researchers to go for at least a century or more.
In a century, if we're still a technological society with a presence in space, we'll have robots capable of out-performing humans at any given task for which we might send humans into space.
Thrill-seekers (doin' it for the lulz), performance artists (doin' it for the "inspiration"), and religious questers (doin' it to martyr themselves doing what a robot could do more cheaply) aside, anything beyond Luna -- quite possibly, anything beyond LEO -- will always be for robots.
Could you seriously justify ending another person's life yourself, if you didn't believe in an afterlife for them?
If that person is trying to kill me? Yes. If necessary in self-defense or the defense of another innocent person, ending an attacker's life is justified. And I teach people how to do it.
I don't believe in an "afterlife" (in the usual sense of that term).
I don't see any relation between these two concepts.
You, the user -- especially if you are a typical, naive user -- have no idea how much bandwidth you are using.
I know how much bandwidth I'm paying for.
If an ISP cannot supply the bandwidth it has promised, if it has oversubscribed, than it should be prosecuted for the fraud it has committed.
I'd be willing to bet money that 90 percent of you would wilt like a daisy dropped in Death Valley.
Maybe so. One never knows until one's in that position.
OTOH, I do know that when the "Communications Decency Act" passed, I and a whole bunch of other people got pissed off and engaged in civil disobedience (strong language NSFW) at the (small, but we didn't really know at the time) risk of federal prosecution. I was younger and more full of fire then, perhaps; but I like to think that if I received a "National Security Letter I'd still have the testicular fortitude to post it far and wide, snail-mail out as many copies as I could, stand on the street corner handing them out to passers-by until they came to get me.
And then? Go out in a blaze of glory, or let them drag me off to prison in hopes of being a continual embarrassment to them? I don't know. Maybe that's when I'd wilt and say, "ooh, so sorry." But I hope I'd still stick a thumb in their eye first.
The delusion is that any living being knows what comes after death.
Of course we know what comes after death. Rot. Seriously, go look at some dead critters. Not much mystery.
Racial profiling works well because believe it or not, terrorists are often from countries...
You have confused "race" with "national origin".
The only reason it was added to rice is because that's what these people grow/eat on a daily basis.
Actually many of the people with vitamin A deficiency live in Africa, in areas not known as rice country.
The actual problem is an economic system that leads to people growing rice almost exclusively: "Beyond that though, poorly-fed people are unlikely to be able to absorb beta-carotene even when they eat golden rice. To use it, they need a diverse diet, including green leafy vegetables. But the sorts of vegetables people used to be able to find have declined in number as the green revolution of the 60s and 70s emphasised monocultures of new varieties. Household consumption of vegetables in India has fallen by 12% in two decades." -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3122923.stm
Golden rice only contributes to the problem (economic and ecological) of monoculture. Growing carrots, sweet potatoes,mangoes, papaya, or other vitamin-A rich crops is a much more sensible answer -- unless one is devoted to the current exploitative system.
The purpose of "golden rice" is not to solve malnutrition, that could be done far more cheaply and easily with carrots, etc. Its purpose is to provide good PR for the biotech industry: "Why, yes, our GM crops are largely untested for safety, and most of the studies on safety that do exist are ones we've done ourselves (trust us!); and yes, they present a novel ecological hazard of genome pollution; and yes, they have led to increased pesticides use; and yes, they give more control of agriculture to corporate interests -- but look! We found a very expensive and impractical way to prevent some cases of vitamin A deficiency! Love us! Worship us! Big Science!"
It's not science, it's scientism in the advancement of corporatism.
So in your model how does a site like YouTube work?
Why should a site like YouTube be needed? If everyone had to host their own video content, perhaps we'd have come to useful video standards long ago? Certainly having the majority of on-line content in one place is useful for the copyright cartel, but what does it do for the rest of us?
The other alternative would be to have ads, but not have them fill up every available space. If ads were rare and tasteful, say a single simpIe text link on each page, I wouldn't need Adblock Plus. Heck, if in addition to that they didn't track people, I might even click on one once in a while.
Instead they're so common and obnoxious that the web is useless without ad blockers. And in 20 years of using the web (holy shit -- yes, I wrote my first HTML in 1993), I can count on my fingers the number of ads I've clicked.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
