failure

Yep, I had a kid born with a sixth finger. Finger nail, but no bones. The delivering MD simply tied it off with a suture and it shriveled up and fell off within a few days.... not even a scar.

...Jim Thompson

Pah. Calculus was on the O Level syllabus (exams at 16) when I were a lad. Only the easy bits, of course.

Paul Burke

I read in sci.electronics.design that Bob Monsen wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Tue, 27 Sep 2005:

No, that's a real god, as invented by the Greeks, Romans, Scandinavians and no doubt many others.

Yes, Thor, Jupiter etc.. These are anthropomorphic gods. You can tell, by looking at their sexual antics.

Quite. But then they give this god powers wholly inconsistent with that. Omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence require a quite different sort of god, capable of setting up this Universe as a self-regulating system and then going off to do something more interesting.

It is in fact the nearest we are ever going to get to proof of almost anything- the proof that if a mutation is available that gives an organism an advantage under certain conditions, it confers selective survival advantage on that organism. That IS Darwinian natural selection.

What you don't see is the demise of the ones (individual strains or whole species) that don't have an adaptation available. You could almost put it another way: when circumstances change, the cripples become the athletes- if they surive to be there at the time.

You need a good bash through Dawkins, Dennett & C0., my lad.

Paul Burke

I read in sci.electronics.design that Jim Thompson wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Tue,

You are standing on his foot. Or perhaps treading on his dreams.

Giv3en that statement, I'm curious to know just what you think "Darwinian" means.

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Tue,

But it's dysfunctional because of the close balance between the main parties, which means that minority parties with extreme views hold the balance of power.

Jewish

Palestine.

traditionally

camps in

OK ?

end

Well it looks like you've proved two things...

You are totally ignorant as to how the State of Israel was formed.

You are anti-semitic.

...Jim Thompson

And how did the Jews get there in the first place?

...Jim Thompson

Which is a varey verbous version of: "I never really read anything about the subject; I'm not all too interested either, but I do have an opinion."

Nothing wrong with that, but I'd recommend a couple of S. J. Gould's popular books for a somewhat more comprehensive glimpse at evolution theory.

I agree that all of that is hard to imagine, but not as hard as imagining 1e9 years passing.

robert

Let's add that science requires brains (the more the better) while religion doesn't (the less the better). Let's also not forget that the purpose of science is to gain knowledge about the world while the purpose of religion is to gain power over people.

...and it is why Bush dislikes science. It's to do with the brain thingy.

Science tries to UNDERSTAND the universe whereas religion merely EXPLAINS it in some made-up way, the simpler the better. There are people who literally think that the Bible, if read thoroughly enough, contains the answers to ALL questions.

Like any religion. It's just to keep people in check, to keep them from developing moral standards of their own by education and applied intelligence.

robert

The arabs lost land in retreats from battles they started. I sort of admire people who are attacked, unprovoked, by six times their number, and send them running. I bet those Manly Arabs were terrified to see Jewish chicks in jeans shooting at them; I sure would be.

Palestine shouldn't exist. Gaza should be part of Egypt (who is at peace with Israel) and the West Bank should be part of Jordan (ditto). But the Egyptians and Jordanese are too smart to want the Palestinians among their lots.

The policy of the Israeli government is the survival of the Jewish people. That's the policy which is fundamentally anti-European. If the Jews would all just die like they were supposed to, we'd have a final solution to the problem.

Well, the Arab countries that started all the failed wars against Israel should offer to buy it back for them. I'm sure the Jews will make them a deal.

John

Well, that's how parlimantary systems work. You must then prefer a place like Egypt, where one party wins every time for generations, and presidents stay in power until they die. Is that "democracy"?

John

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Tue,

I agree about 'different talents', but I'm not entirely convinced. I've been through the 'doesn't make sense' thing with one teacher, only (luckily) to be enlightened by a much better one.

I don't much care for Jim's more rabid right wing views either but there is NO excuse for tolerating *illegal* immigrants ! We've been far too tolerant here in the UK too and we're paying for it.

Graham

Not if you play first violin for the Boston Symphony. And I'd bet that Bob Dylan has made more money than all the participants of this ng combined... many times over. The average salary of American major-league baseball players is well over a million dollars a year.

OK, now tell me how fundamantally unimportant they really are.

John

Snort !

Reminds me of a cartoon I saw a few years back. A couple of 'arab' parents were talking about their kids. One said mournfully, ' they blow up so quickly these days ' .

Graham

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Tue,

These people have memories that can be trained in a specific way, using associations (visual or verbal). This training is widely advertised, but not all respond to it.

That's an entirely different thing, and very little understood indeed. Some can give you the day of the week for any given date, past or future, barring calendar changes. There are lightning calculators who may have ASD but can communicate substantially normally. Some say that the answer just appears in their mind at conscious level and they have no idea how it gets there.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Pooh Bear wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Wed, 28 Sep 2005:

I don't agree. We need all the diverse human talents to be accessible to us, in order to have a life rich with experience. Bread and circuses.