Humodour

Some smokers do care - there is plenty of research on the efficacy of advertising and subliminal messaging as well as results from other countries which introduced the scary images earlier (which is a large number of countries) to show that they are effective. Anyway, the more current smokers that quit the better, even if it is, say, only 10% of current smokers that decide to quit because of those images. But I doubt current smokers are the primary target audience for those images. I imagine the target audience is potential future smokers.

I'm suggesting an incentive for consumers to use less harmful (but not less fun) drugs, and for producers to manufacture analogues of the existing drugs which do not contain their most detrimental health impacts. Analogues of cocaine exist which are as potent or more potent and do not cause damage to the heart, for example. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is one such analogue, and cocaine addicts cannot distinguish the two. Similarly, most common psychedelics do not cause heart damage and are plenty strong and fun - but those which do cause damage should be banned. So while I strongly recommend the continued illegality of physically harmful drugs, I take this stance so that people switch to safer drugs and so that chemists use rational drug design principles to produce far safer analogues (which can easily be designed to be far more potent orally, but method of administration is really a side issue at the moment so let's drop it) Rational drug design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_design#R..._drug_discovery Examine this analogue list for cocaine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cocaine_analogues As for your mangled point about religion vs science... not going there. This thread has nothing to do with spirituality, but I would generally say my way leads to a better 'spiritual' (whatever that means) outcome for people given that one of the aims of this approach to drug supply and consumption is a healthier brain and a healthier body to enjoy the world with, for longer. It is worth noting that an evidence-based approach like this still mitigates the worst excesses and abuses of the drug war - for example, a black market is hardly going to pop up when people can legally and safely purchase non-damaging analogues of the illegal drugs on the black market. Keeping the physically harmful drugs illegal MAY not be necessary - given sufficient information available to consumers and a large legal drug market, people would logically choose safer analogues anyway. But for the initial transition period to a society without the war on drugs it would seem a very good idea. EDIT: Illegal in this context refers only to supply/sale. As I mentioned previously I believe in penalty-free decriminalisation of possession of all drugs as I don't believe that punishing the 'victim' (or consumer, however you wish to put it) is a logical course of action.

And this, kids, is what 21st century fascism looks like. 21st century fascism is banning and legalising the SUPPLY of drugs based on peer-reviewed scientific evidence of their level of harm and addictiveness? OK weirdo.

Decriminalise possession of all drugs. Make the least harmful ones legal to buy and sell (with regulations and tax similar to alcohol), and funnel the tax money gained directly into health improvement and drug education programmes. This does not mean propaganda programmes. But if drug X can cause Y problems, educate people on that, no bull**** or agenda. If marijuana is consumed habitually it causes productivity and relationship problems, so educate people on that and encourage consumption in moderation if as is done here with alcohol. Some drugs are known to be neurotoxic, extremely addictive, or cause other reasonably severe health problems, such as methamphetamine (somewhat neurotoxic to dopamine receptors) ecstasy (somewhat neurotoxic to serotonin receptors), nicotine (causes bone degradation and is as addictive as heroine), heroine (extremely addictive), alcohol (addictive for many people, causes a wide array of physical health problems due to being a solvent, and has been shown to cause long-term gene regulation changes in the brain and shrink the size of various brain centres such as the amygdala - the emotional processing centre), cocaine (causes heart damage), and a certain class of rare psychedelics which cause permanent heart damage. I don't think these should be legalised, and I think supply/dealing in them should remain a gaolable offence. This shouldn't be a problem if their far less harmful or addictive analogues are legally available and people are being properly educated about the harms of various drugs, rather than being brainwashed with lies about how all illegal drugs are equivalently bad. Of course, I can't see alcohol being banned any time soon. Nicotine is going that way, though, which is good. An important aspect of any drug education programme would be getting people to understand that the safest and least addictive consumption method is oral, and that injecting, snorting, rectal administration and smoking are all very dangerous for different reasons (the one negative they all share in common being that they bypass first-pass metabolism). Injecting has problems with dirty needles, overdose, addictiveness, and potentially lethal blood clots from poorly prepared solutions of a drug (e.g. crushing up tablets and forgetting to remove the filler and binder), people have been known to die easily from overdose via rectal administration, smoking is very addictive and causes a multitude of physical harms such as emphysema and lung cancer, and snorting destroys the mucous membranes in the nose and is extremely painful.

CERN has also almost disproved the existence of both the Higgs and Supersymmetry. By the end of 2012 these two things should be definitively disproven. I love shake-ups like this because it gets more people interested in science, and doing science, and also tends to lead to a huge burst of new technologies being invented. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-01/supe...?site=melbourne

nah i'd be more likely to fistbump him gf and i spent most of today just lazing around on the couch watching QI among other things... ahem *fistbump*

But can they keep up with the demand? If the technology its as good as advertise then there's bound to be high demand and if they fail to meet it then shortages are bound to rise the price. Seems there's more of a market for applications of this tech and the technology itself rather than it as a product. I do not feel that you have a point and that you are arguing for the sake of it. Yes, they can keep up with the demand. The manufacturing processes are highly automated and the ingredients are highly abundant on earth: carbon, hydrogen. There may be some rare earths, or boron, phosphorous, nitrogen, etc. But these are all really common resources. If they don't have enough rare earth production, for example, then they will just start opening more mines in my country (Australia), America, and China for instance, where there are vast rare earth reserves (they are actually NOT rare... just rare relative to the other elements). Many rare earth mines in Australia (and America from memory) were closed down due to lack of demand, before the big technology boom of the last decade. Although some have since been reopened when it became apparent that China couldn't be trusted with rare earth supply (no surprise there). The arguments you are making could just as easily be applied to many current conventional touchscreens and polymers/plastics, because the ingredients and demand response are the same - have you seen the prices of these products fall or rise, hmmm? I am currently using a 21 inch multitouch monitor which I purchased 3 months ago for $200 AUD. It's fun using my fingers to click on web pages. What do you mean when you say "there is a market for this technology, but not this product"? Seems nonsensical. Holy crap. This really is the future, isn't it? As in 'the fuuuuutuuuure'. It makes me giddy like a schoolgirl. And it is my field! Next year I will be studying ligand chemistry, organometallic chemistry, and polymer chemistry. I'm going to bug some profs about doing a research project a year early. Something I am fascinated by right now is a carbon analogue called boron nitride. Boron nitride is isoelectronic with carbon, and so you can make diamond, nanotube, graphene/graphite, polymers, benzene, and other carbon analogues out of it. Boron nitride analogues are more thermally and chemically stable than their carbon counterparts, and are generally very similar in properties. Although boron nitride nanotubes are an insulator rather than a conductor, which I found surprising. Boron nitride nanomesh (graphene analogue) is, however, a conductor like graphene. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanomesh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borazine#Applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron_nitride

That is really awesome. Using human brains as nodes in a massively parellelised supercomputer. And while this isn't a new scientific discovery so much as history playing out before our eyes, it's fascinating nonetheless: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ga...cy-2356189.html

I guess I'm not knocking fraternities necessarily, but I AM knocking jock attitudes (and yes, the silly rituals and pecking order that go with them). They are unthoughtful, cater to the lowest common denominator, and hold people back. I have never experienced a fraternity, but I am imagining them to be just worse forms of the jock colleges and jock structures in high school and university here. So I'm glad you found something worthwhile in your fraternity, Hurlshot, but the good parts of what you're describing sound like any typical dorm/college experience at uni, while it sounds like you're glossing over the bad parts because you take them for granted. The traditional and ritual rubbish associated with jocks (and hence frats, based on popular media representation of them) is NOT required for that positive experience to occur and for many people taints it.

Soon to be named the "iExpensive" Just like computers, televisions, mobile phones, and microwave ovens were expensive for the first few years they came out. And then prices crashed because manufacturing became cheap and highly-automated and demand was so large. Anyway, this is a product that is almost purely polymer (plastic). Manufacturing processes for polymers are already highly-streamlined and cheap. These guys can likely sell this product for a dozen-fold markup and STILL keep the price low. Here is their support number to ring if you are curious and would like to know the price: http://www.visualplanet.biz/support/ Another cool thing is 'parametric sound': "To aim a sound signal at a particular passer-by without everybody in the area hearing it. In commercial applications, it can target sound to a single person without the peripheral sound and related noise that a loudspeaker emits." It exists, and companies are now selling the technology to businesses for advertising purposes, among other things. Reminds me of Minority Report or something.

What the **** is this dumb jock sorority bull****? Uhg, I'm so glad we don't have that crap in Australia.

Oh god I love modern technology (i.e. materials science). It's almost like magic. 'Thin Film Transforms Any Surface Into Touchscreen' "Open up a cardboard tube, roll out a transparent film just millimeters thick, apply it on a flat object and *tada* you've got an interactive touch surface. Cambridge-based Visual Planet just launched its new massive-sized multitouch thin film drivers so you can create touchscreens from 30 to 167 inches in size! Their touchfoil is a transparent nanowire embedded polymer capable of sensing the touch of a finger, or even pressure from wind and translating that to a computer interface. It works on glass, wood, and other non-conductive surfaces." http://singularityhub.com/2011/09/18/thin-...titouch-screen/

Cute and nerdy female scientist shows how to make quantum dots. Wikipedia states: "Researchers have studied quantum dots in transistors, solar cells, LEDs, and diode lasers. They have also investigated quantum dots as agents for medical imaging and hope to use them as qubits." A qubit is the fundamental component of a super fast quantum computer. Nerdgasm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot

Yep, I realised that once I'd typed the post. Couldn't let a good post go to waste! And I love that you used the phrase 'false dichotomy'.

Insanely wealthy or not, Gabe should go on a diet now. He's wealthy but certainly not healthy. It's too late. Gabe is hiring new staff, among them "Food service" and "psychologist". Poor, poor Gabe. I especially liked this insightful comment from user 'neverko' on that site: "Valve can eat a bowl of smashed arseholes until they come out with a new Half-Life episode/game. I don't care about any of the other things they're doing, least of all Steam and hats for retarded morons."

So it turns out evolution occurs much more rapidly than predicted due to epigenetics. It's something I remember studying in molecular biology in 2006. Gene regulation and expression changes AFTER birth. It would appear these changes are heritable. http://www.science20.com/curious_cub/epige...s_rapidly-82714

Suppose your job requires you (as a condition of employment) to be on call 24/7 on your work mobile, and you are attending a conference that tells you to turn your mobile off. What would you do? One option risks a person's employment (and possibly has other consequences if the call was important enough to go through to a work mobile), while the other - being rude and self-important as you paint it - annoys a speaker at a conference for a minute or so. 2 people out of what was probably quite a large crowd seems like a small number to me. It's easy to see how those 2 people may have had very legitimate reasons for keeping their phones on. As always, YouTube comes to the rescue with a video example of my point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiSJthqk4S4

For those out of the loop, he's taking the piss out of this project. A rather obscure and funny fake account, but I always rather liked the idea of FIFE and PARPG. http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showt...226&hl=fife http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showt...612&hl=fife You can read about the latest happenings with PARPG here: http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showt...826&hl=fife The project and developers are actually a little more mature than this alt account implies.

What if the reason he is telling you to turn it off is because he thinks interruption is rude, while the reason you're keeping it on is because you need to be on call all the time in case of an emergency? (Medical specialist, senior sysadmin for an ISP, parent with daughter in hospital in a coma, something like that) I'd say **** army training - I can make up my own mind whether to follow a directive.

Insanely wealthy or not, Gabe should go on a diet now. He's wealthy but certainly not healthy.

But then it's too late, because if you fix the typos, your post is forever tainted with that ugly little edit message. I wish they'd make it like on other boards where the edit message doesn't pop up if you edit within a few minutes of posting. It's unnecessary.

Just an update for those interested - I am now regularly seeing that girl I was (am!) in love with. We usually wake up together and ****. It's great. Also, I am doing awesomely at organic chemistry and Spanish (mid Distinction average last sem, aiming for a full High Distinction average this semester). Next year I will transfer to the ANU (Australian National University) which is the top university in Australia and one of the top 20 in the world. So let's see: 1) Study/career finally path sorted - check (materials science!) 2) Finally found a girl who I am deeply in love with who is also deeply in love with me back and in a healthy relationship - check 3) Going to Costa Rica for 5 weeks in January to do conservation work and adventure sports - check 4) Moved in to a share house full of people I actually identify with and have a lot of fun with - check 5) Successfully learning another language fluently, Spanish - check 6) Seeing The Jezabels live in October - check Life is excellent and Summer is approaching!

I've been using BIS forums (and now here) since like 1999. So that's like 12 years. And I'm only 23. So yeah, I also feel like part of me grew up on here.

http://www.economist.com/node/21529062

Infinity Engine.