dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja: 02/08/14

Saturday, February 8, 2014

this shit's been going on forever. they told einstein not to bother with physics because it was a closed field. ha. and as i'm typing this, most people don't realize that the process we just went through to find the higgs closed a theory we already knew was unworkably wrong.

rather, we're on the cusp of some radical rethinking that will toss a lot of ideas we hold to into the trash bin.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/01/17/end-of-science-meme-infects-edge-website-again/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

the quartet's economic plan seems to be to convert the area into a low-wage labour force, probably to export goods primarily to israel. and the concentration camp comparison just got pretty real.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11448

1) the us objective is written down in the pnac documents. it is to swing areas under the russian sphere to it's own. it's a long term objective that can happen in multiple stages. but in the long run, syria itself is just a piece on a risk board. it has nothing to do with assad, his behaviour or his decisions. it's solely about a struggle against russia for dominance in asia.

2) the chemical weapons weren't really an asset because they can't really be used. the idea that the dictator in it's last throes would gas it's own city is some kind of homeric era romanticism or something. none of these guys want to slaughter their own people. so, as a weapon, they're useless. it's as propaganda that they're valuable. the americans may have won a propaganda coup with it, but they were given away so readily precisely *because* they have no real strategic value. the flip side is that it also indicates a level of naivete (think chamberlain) on behalf of the syrians and russians, as though they really think that concessions will stop this aggression. the americans will not cut this off until moscow has an american flag flying off the kremlin. it would have been smarter to use it as more of a bargaining piece.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11423

it's thought that the common ancestor of bees and ants were solitary insects that used pheromones to attract their mates, and that hives developed out of a process of increasing complexity.

think about how that would have happened. you'd be forced to think of queen bees as practicing a type of witchcraft.

http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2014/01/scienceshot-queen-sex

"Although today’s southern Europeans tend to be somewhat darker than their northern counterparts, they are still relatively light-skinned compared with Africans, an adaptation often linked to the need to absorb more sunlight and so produce adequate amounts of vitamin D. "

southern europe has been successfully colonized by many darker-skinned people, from phoenicians and greeks (and maybe egyptians) through to arabs and moors. there have been population movements from the north as well (germans, vikings, celts, slavs). the result is pretty "gray" across the mediterranean. i see no reason to think that the same process of dark-meeting-light (south-meeting-north) wouldn't have been present in the region at the time.

as pointed out elsewhere, i'm pretty sure the blue eye mutation has been identified as a single event and localized to europe. i guess we know the mutation is older than 8500 years now. it doesn't really answer the question of where it came from, though.

"It seems possible that latitude is not the key factor in skin depigmentation, but diet,"

well, i'm glad people are questioning this, anyways.

truth is it's barely even correlated.

i'm still leaning more towards drift

(maybe sexual selection helped with the drift)

"This suggests, Willerslev says, that there might have been “substantial gene flow between east and west” leading to more homogenous populations than previously suspected."

not necessarily. well, i mean the fluidity. we know there was a migration of people from the north to the south after the ice melted.

well, at least we used to know this. did the goddamned hippies erase the evidence because it created too much negative energy?

if so, there's some old models to dust off that provide an easy explanation.

i'll just be brief about this, i'll get into it with something more topical: a lack of archaeological evidence is not something to reject a theory on.

for those that don't know what i'm talking about, there's been this awful hippie movement in archaeology and anthropology that wants to purge pre-history of all human conflict. we were just all god's children playing happily in the garden. then there was capitalism, and then violence. i'm being overly dismissive.

but they've actually been derp enough to stand up and say "well, i know there's this pile of interdisciplinary evidence, but we can't find an archaeological record, so therefore it didn't happen".

the general response is to point out that there's a long list of historically documented events that cannot be corroborated with archaeological evidence, and yet we know happened. it's a logical fallacy, in fact - an inability to prove an event occurred does not imply it never happened. but, the hippies were arguing from ideology in the first place, so it hasn't been an effective way to counter them.

now, we've got all this genetic and other novel evidence coming in that's backing up the interdisciplinary conclusions, and the archaeologists are just terribly confused by it.

some of the younger ones may not even be aware of the older conclusions.

the answers are there, though. you just have to go back to sources that were published before the 90s to find them.

i'd expect this to continue as more dna evidence comes in.

fucking hippies….

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/01/how-farming-reshaped-our-genomes

" the world's first Internet-connected toothbrush,"

ugh. again, the answer is that the mutation happened in northern europe and moved south with population displacement.

the error in thinking is deeper, though. it's only a contradiction if you take the ridiculous position that every trait is the result of natural selection.

again: that would be a world that was practically created. if you're going to substitute natural selection for god and ignore chance and randomness, you're not really taking the religion hat off, you're just giving it a different name.

biologists need to get it through their skulls that genetic drift is a valid explanation.

the way they should look at it is to assume genetic drift unless evidence exists to justify natural selection. that is, genetic drift ought to be the null hypothesis, and ought to be only overturned under the presence of sufficient evidence.

*that* is a naturalist position.

his hypothesis, though, is worthwhile. i don't, however, see why it should apply specifically to the south.

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-calcium-absorption-evolution-digestion-europeans.html