The Very-Many-Questions-Not-Worth-Their-Own-Thread Thread XL

[MaryKB]

Of course not. Males have missed the whole 9-month bonding thing so back when humans were a monkey they likely would just take off.
They are known to do so even now

All the more reason they seem designed by evolution to take over after birth and tend to the child, right?

If you don't think that way about men, what was your point then about them being created through evolution to raise the children?

Because I know you're not trying to say we evolved into two sexes so women could take care of babies "at all times."

 

[Kyriakos]

All the more reason they seem designed by evolution to take over after birth and tend to the child, right?

Because I know you're not trying to say we evolved into two sexes so women could take care of babies.

First of all I am no authority on this, so take my post with large quantities of salt
Secondly, I am not talking about humans as we know them, but some prehistoric ancestor, which is why I spoke of monkey. Humans have different traits and aren't so dumb animals. Animals, on the other hand, even now behave in primordial ways in parenthood (which means nothing about current humans, cause we have evolved).
In other words, I made no claim about humans as we are

I suspect that in the distant future humans may find different ways of reproduction - it happens even now, with artificial fertilization instead of having a sexual partner. Further seems to back the suspicion that we are vastly different from our prehistoric non-human ancestor.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Wikipedia says:

There is no single genetic mechanism behind sex differences in different species and the existence of two sexes seems to have evolved multiple times independently in different evolutionary lineages.

Apparently the earliest organisms to reproduce sexually were single-celled eukaryotes. I somehow doubt they really cared about rearing their children.

 

[Kyriakos]

^I think that, regardless of what reason or "reason" there was for this split, it does create a problematic dynamic for more intelligent creatures. Cause we are forced to identify traits as positive when those are generally made-up. For example somatic beauty is very real for humans, but ultimately it is another phenomenon created by the organism and not something actually real. And it seems to be largely (maybe not entirely) tied to reproduction.

The power of emotions is also a potentially self-harming trait for modern humans, given that emotions seem to mostly be non-linguistic/intellectual means of staying away from danger and of becoming fond of what is good for you (for example it is usual to associate needed food sources with pleasant emotion, such as during consuming those foods; the food itself isn't inherently positive or negative but gets identified as positive by the human)

 

[Farm Boy]

The lower tech you go the more infant care is almost entirely the intimate duty of females of childbearing age. Infants are fussy with who they trust. They don't eat well when they're fussy, and if you don't have powder then you have breasts. It takes time, it takes attention, it takes energy. Men are obviously intrinsically involved in childrearing during and increasingly after that stage(or increasingly earlier, with powders and whatnot), though our current modes of labor seem to suppress male input and perceived competency when so much of the time with children is professional rather than social.

 

[Birdjaguar]

My understanding is that its egg develops before being fertilized, so it doesn't really have a choice whether or not to lay it.

Once hens reach egg laying age there is a chain of egg development that are progressing from small and just forming all the way up to ready to lay. During the two plus years that hens are producing eggs they lay about 2 eggs every three days. If there is a rooster around, he will fertilize them as he is capable of catching the hens and holding them still long enough.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Question: Both tornadoes and hurricanes are big winds that spin around. So technically can a hurricane be described as a very very very very very very very big tornado?

 

[cardgame]

They are more different than they are alike.

 

[Cutlass]

Question: Both tornadoes and hurricanes are big winds that spin around. So technically can a hurricane be described as a very very very very very very very big tornado?

They aren't really that similar in other ways. For one thing, a hurricane typically lasts for days, and can last over a week. A tornado typically lasts for minutes.

 

[W|M]

they are also formed very differently and in different areas: a hurricane will typically form over a warm ocean and dissipate over land, while tornados will both form and dissipate over flat land and can also catch on fire

Spoiler Diagram showing hurricane formation :

Spoiler Diagram showing tornado formation :

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Example: Clinic 554 debate in New Brunswick.

That's like the ridiculous rants about "abortion clinics" in Red Deer. We don't have any. Abortions occur at the hospital.

It's sadly common for politicians to not give a damn about accessibility. If not for the program at the seniors' centre that has volunteer drivers for medical appointments, I wouldn't have been able to have my surgeries last year. The clinic is in a town 20 minutes south, and there is no way I could have gotten there on my own. Especially at 6 am.

If we assume that humans - and any other relatively complex organism - developed into two sexes out of calculation, it would be because back when humans were still another dumb monkey they could benefit from having one parent look after the infant at all times. Now it isn't that important, since you usually don't run the risk of being eaten by wild animals while on your crib. That comes later.

"Relatively complex" includes both mammals and birds. There are more species of birds than I'd ever thought that rely on the male to care for the eggs and chicks (BBC Earth is a marvelously educational channel). There are some amphibians where the mother lays the eggs and takes off. It's the father who cares for them.

 

[Kyriakos]

That's like the ridiculous rants about "abortion clinics" in Red Deer. We don't have any. Abortions occur at the hospital.

It's sadly common for politicians to not give a damn about accessibility. If not for the program at the seniors' centre that has volunteer drivers for medical appointments, I wouldn't have been able to have my surgeries last year. The clinic is in a town 20 minutes south, and there is no way I could have gotten there on my own. Especially at 6 am.


"Relatively complex" includes both mammals and birds. There are more species of birds than I'd ever thought that rely on the male to care for the eggs and chicks (BBC Earth is a marvelously educational channel). There are some amphibians where the mother lays the eggs and takes off. It's the father who cares for them.

Just to be clear, I don't have a real opinion on this... It is very theoretical and there isn't any hard evidence to guess why some creatures split to two sexes.
Last thing I need is to sound like that lobster guy ^_^

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

So I was looking at the satellite animations for Hurricane Teddy, and

(Note for both of these the default is only a few images, you can use the dropdowns under the picture to change that)

IR + Visible shows the storm just kind of slowing down as it gets closer to Nova Scotia and then it starts going east and starts falling apart

In the IR animation the red bits (which I assume is warmer air bits) also disappear very quickly

Any idea what happened? Did the warm air that was making the hurricane spin around go away?

 

[tjs282]

Any idea what happened? Did the warm air that was making the hurricane spin around go away?

AFAIK, hurricanes mostly form between 30°S and 30°N.

So by the time it reached NS it was pretty far north, and possibly running out of steam (so to speak), while also meeting colder (circumpolar?) air masses -- and though I'm certainly no meteorologist, and also not great at circular maths/physics, I have an idea that there might also have been significantly less Coriolis feeding into it once it passed ~45°N?

 

[AdamCrock]

A quick question for our resident Star Trek expert @Valka D'Ur : Kirk or Picard ?
I am asking because I've just finished rewatching TNG and can't seem to choose which captain I like more. They both have their good sides and bad sides . Somehow I like the original series characters more . I'd always pick Scotty before Geordi , Dr. "Bones" over Dr. Crusher , Spock over Data etc. but it's not so obvious about the Captains. Picard seems more competent but his "sophistication" buffoonery bothers me some , Kirk is always fun to watch though he's a womanizer and a daredevil, sometimes hos boyish behavior bothers me too. Which one is Your pick Valka ? (....I know it's Spock He's mine favourite character as well ... but what about captains ?)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

A quick question for our resident Star Trek expert @Valka D'Ur : Kirk or Picard ?
I am asking because I've just finished rewatching TNG and can't seem to choose which captain I like more. They both have their good sides and bad sides . Somehow I like the original series characters more . I'd always pick Scotty before Geordi , Dr. "Bones" over Dr. Crusher , Spock over Data etc. but it's not so obvious about the Captains. Picard seems more competent but his "sophistication" buffoonery bothers me some , Kirk is always fun to watch though he's a womanizer and a daredevil, sometimes hos boyish behavior bothers me too. Which one is Your pick Valka ? (....I know it's Spock He's mine favourite character as well ... but what about captains ?)

Kirk, of course. To specify, TOS Kirk, not that ridiculous nuTrek caricature that I usually refer to as "Captain Frat Boy."

Kirk might prefer coffee, Romulan ale, and Saurian brandy over "tea, Earl Grey, hot"... but that doesn't make him unsophisticated. It might to Picard, but Picard can go stuff himself.

I was prepared to like Picard, at first. He has some great lines in "Encounter at Farpoint", but in "The Neutral Zone", when he dismisses the three cryogenically frozen 20th century people as not being worth the bother of reviving and curing "because they're already dead"... that lost me. By that reasoning, nobody should ever try to revive someone who is in the last stages of succumbing to drowning, or who's had a heart attack or stroke, since they're basically dead anyway.

That unmitigated arrogance, and sheer contempt he and Riker display toward the three is the very opposite of what Picard claims is an "enlightened" way of life. and nobody gives a damn that Claire Raymond desperately misses her family; they can't even conceive of why she's crying. They're just annoyed by it and basically tell Troi to take care of the problem ("you're the counselor, shut her up" kind of attitude).

And do not get me started on the "no money" BS and the "nobody wants for anything in the Federation" double BS.

So every time Picard goes into one of these "we're so enlightened and you need to grow up and be like us" speeches, I just think about what a hypocrite he is.

Not that Kirk doesn't make self-congratulatory speeches, and judge societies for not being "like us" - he does. But he doesn't pretend to be perfect, and he doesn't pretend the Federation is perfect. Kirk knows he's flawed, and he has insecurities. He'll own up to them with his two closest friends.

Picard had to get into a mud fight with his brother before owning up to being less than perfect.

This in no way means I don't like Patrick Stewart as an actor, btw. I just dislike Picard.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Windows Calculator can't seem to handle really really really really long numbers. It wouldn't let me put in any more digits after a certain point. What do I do now?

 

[Gori the Grey]

There are online calculators. I don't know whether they handle more digits than the Windows one, but you could try.

 

[Sarin]

@Valka D'Ur interesting...every Trek captain has his derps IMO. So, the logical followup...Kirk or Sisko?

 

[Cutlass]

@Valka D'Ur interesting...every Trek captain has his derps IMO. So, the logical followup...Kirk or Sisko?

Picard is technically better. Kirk is better at improvising when everything goes to ****. Sisko is good, but a definite third place.