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Driving Drunk Is Not Easy
Not convinced yet? Birds have been observed reconstructing cultural information in complete isolation, meaning that culture can be genetically encoded. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientists isolated a Zebra Finch, preventing it from learning the songs of its parents (and probably pissing off a bunch of PETA activists). These finches are known to learn their song from elder male relatives, which is why the scientists were surprised to see the same songs emerge from a colony of these utterly isolated birds. They didn't get it right immediately. The first isolated bird, cut off from its culture, emitted a cacophonous screeching about as melodious as nails being dragged down a pieces of broken blackboard which were, in turn, being dragged down an even larger blackboard. It even tried to teach its kids the same, but they obviously thought "that sucks" (in bird) and made a few improvements. After four generations, the original finch songs reappeared, meaning that either a) Cultural information can be genetically encoded or b) Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has embarrassingly bad sound insulation. We're going to assume a) for now. The implications are enormous: the encoded information wasn't immediately available like some kind of genetic database, but as the baby birds learned and improved what they saw they were all along being guided by built-in information. At every point, if you'll forgive the outrageous anthropomorphization, they "thought" they were working it out for themselves while dancing to the genetic tune. That's the kind of thing that would make you think very seriously about free will. Even better, imagine the interactions of such genetically-tuned tendencies with a world full of things survival never had to deal with. The evolutionary importance of mating songs can't be overstated, so such information being backed up in every single cell is understandable. But what about innate tendencies like wanting to be popular or successful, interacting with technologies which can send your image far further than our cave-dwelling originators could ever imagine? That could lead to people doing the stupidest, most self-destructive things just for the chance of a few minutes of fame and, oh, hang on. YouTube and Reality TV just made a lot more sense to us. And that's scary.— August 6, 2009 2:19 a.m.
Movie Pet Peeves
dfhnnsvil sorry, my jaw just hit the keyboard when it dropped!— August 6, 2009 1:46 a.m.
Driving Drunk Is Not Easy
Now to beat this dead horse just a little more, here's more evidence that people can't be counseled out of following their impulses (I couldn't resist): To the surprise of few outside the rarefied world of the Religious Right, it has emerged that George W Bush’s “abstinence only” policies led directly to a rise in teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. The Centres for Disease Control (CDC) says that after years of falling rates, teen pregnancies and STDs started rising after Bush was re-elected in 2005. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but rose sharply in more than half of American states after 2005. The number of teenage girls with syphilis had risen by nearly half after a big decrease, while a 20-year fall in the gonorrhea infection rate was being reversed. AIDS cases in adolescent boys had nearly doubled. The CDC says southern states (the Bible Belt) tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs. In addition, about 16,000 pregnancies were reported among girls aged 10-14 in 2004 and a similar number of young people in the age group reported having a sexually transmitted disease. Some of the statistics the CDC report reveals: •75% of teens will have sex prior to their 20th birthday. •The teenage birth rate in the US is the highest in the developed world. •1/3 of youths have not received any instruction on methods of birth control before the age of 18. The number of teen pregnancies is double in areas where abstinence is the only method of birth control taught as opposed to areas where there is comprehensive sex education and condoms are handed out. The organisation Planned Parenthood said the report was alarming and that teenagers needed “medically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education”. However, religious proponents of the “abstinence-only” policies still insist that the reason for the rise is because their policies were not promoted hard enough..— August 6, 2009 1:11 a.m.
Driving Drunk Is Not Easy
Refried if you think this other stuff is irrelevent to the topic, how about this: I just saw the story about this bride of six months who was arrested for trying to hire someone to kill her husband. Yesterday I read about the guy who shot up the gym because he couldn't get a woman to date him. Am I the only one wishing these two could have hooked up?— August 6, 2009 12:35 a.m.
Movie Pet Peeves
Pete I hope you copyrighted those game ideas, or some Hollywood type is going to run with them. Storyteller totally agree. It's so obvious when there's some big name in a part that totally doesn't suit them, and you know they only got it for big-name appeal.— August 6, 2009 12:03 a.m.
Fast and Furious
That's actually a great suggestion. Better then putting in unnecessary stop signs everyone can then roll through, because they're pissed about having them there, so then residents complain about that, and cops start writing tickets for failure to stop at a stop sign that shouldn't even be there.— August 5, 2009 11:55 p.m.
Driving Drunk Is Not Easy
You're both right. Transitional fossils (popularly termed missing links) are the fossilized remains of intermediary forms of life that illustrate an evolutionary transition. They can be identified by their retention of certain primitive (plesiomorphic) traits in comparison with their more derived relatives, as they are defined in the study of cladistics. Numerous examples exist, including those of primates and early humans. According to modern evolutionary theory, all populations of organisms are in transition. Therefore, a "transitional form" is a human construct of a selected form that vividly represents a particular evolutionary stage, as recognized in hindsight. Contemporary "transitional" forms may be called "living fossils", but on a cladogram representing the historical divergences of life-forms, a "transitional fossil" will represent an organism at the point where individual lineages (clades) diverge. In 1859, when Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published, the fossil record was poorly known, and Darwin described the lack of transitional fossils as "the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory", but explained it by the extreme imperfection of the geological record.[1] He noted the limited collections available at that time, but described the available information as showing patterns which followed from his theory of descent with modification through natural selection.[2] Indeed, Archaeopteryx was discovered just two years later, in 1861, and represents a classic transitional form between dinosaurs and birds. Many more transitional fossils have been discovered since then and it is now considered that there is abundant evidence of how all the major groups of animals are related, much of it in the form of transitional fossils.[3] The idea of a "missing link" between humans and so-called "lower" animals remains lodged in the public imagination. The concept was fuelled by the discovery of Australopithecus africanus (Taung Child), Java Man, Homo erectus, Sinanthropus pekinensis (Peking Man) and other Hominina fossils.— August 5, 2009 11:51 p.m.
Driving Drunk Is Not Easy
People are their biology, another example: NEW YORK (AP) -- The American Psychological Association declared Wednesday that mental health professionals should not tell gay clients they can become straight through therapy or other treatments. Instead, the APA urged therapists to consider multiple options - that could range from celibacy to switching churches - for helping clients whose sexual orientation and religious faith conflict. In a resolution adopted on a 125-to-4 vote by the APA's governing council, and in a comprehensive report based on two years of research, the 150,000-member association put itself firmly on record in opposition of so-called "reparative therapy" which seeks to change sexual orientation. No solid evidence exists that such change is likely, says the report, and some research suggests that efforts to produce change could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies. "There's no evidence to say that change therapies work, but these vulnerable people are tempted to try them, and when they don't work, they feel doubly terrified," Glassgold said. "You should be honest with people and say, 'This is not likely to change your sexual orientation, but we can help explore what options you have.'"— August 5, 2009 4:49 p.m.
Have you exacted revenge on someone?
Man, some people are really cold-blooded!— August 5, 2009 4:33 p.m.
Unforgettable: A Walk on the Stingaree Side Part 6
The “Purity League”: A group that said everyone else should live like them, according to their definitions of right and wrong. Todays equivalent: Every person who voted for prop 8.— August 5, 2009 3:38 p.m.