GKSB

Differentiate between skeletal muscle (which is what dystonia affects) and cardiac muscle; they are controlled by different aspects of the nervous system. This is why people can be paralyzed from the neck down but still have functioning hearts. Other than that, you're right. Either way, it is a tip-off that her symptoms were extremely dramatic and yet did not seem to have coinciding symptoms, such as heavy muscle cramps and pain that would keep her from even attempting her spasm walk.

Rock on Bio majors? The math we use in chemistry is a little more fun than abstract math as well, I suppose.

By having our President meet with the Dalai Lama we are recognizing him as an authority figure - in other words, there is the implication that the United States supports Tibet becoming a sovereign nation. We already do this for Taiwan, because we love rubbing on our Chinese buddies. The geopolitical reasons are obvious - decrease Chinese possesion, ergo decrease Chinese power. Nevertheless, it seems foolish to take such provocative actions towards a country which we are heavily invested in, considering the HUGE STEAMING PLATE OF POO our country is already having difficulty dealing with.

Guys. Opera has mouse-movement based browsing. I SLIDE MY MOUSE LEFT TO GO BACK, RIGHT TO GO FORWARD, DOWN TO OPEN A NEW TAB. I AM ORGASMING CONSTANTLY.

yo dawg i herd you leik mudkips so i accidentally your triforce

I'm speaking specifically on the election and campaign progress, which is the end-all for any politician's thinking and action (we control the government through votes much more than voice, after all). Campaigning is undeniably a factor of money. Also, you prove my point, corporations do not represent the people they employ. Why should the size those people confer then give them that weight of representation in government (which was a theme I saw in previous posts)? Obama may have recieved 'small' donor support, but that which he did receive was evidently enough to reject public funding and the spending restrictions that go along with it. His advertising was also extremely effective, you might note - his pre-election sheen was maintained through fall of 2009, before skepticism set in again. I realize we have a system of removed representation and I recognize it's for the better. However, that has little to do with the fact that heavily interested non-government entities can significantly influence the actions of the government through increasingly unrestricted direct participation in the political process. This is removing the separation of government and people which you imply is ideal, because it allows more reach by businesses into politics outside of votes. I know the history of the Federalists and Democratic Republicans, and I don't understand your point. They were concerned by division of government, which does not involve increasing the political powers of non-government entities such as businesses (probably because powerful companies or unions didn't exist in America at that time). Note I exclude political parties because their (idyllic) interest is representing the interests of the voters who are members of that party. I concede that business have affected politics ever since they became powerful enough to significantly do so; but by the government type we claim to have, it isn't justifiable. Basically, it's loathsome to me to dance around the issue that actions like these give more political power to non-voter entities by pretending it's an issue of defending what is being undermined - the power of the individual in the political process and their right to free speech.

I won't sell my soul to Google, so no Chrome. I use Opera, and IE for non-supported websites (essentially some school-related websites)

I think the most famous scare which caused as much reform as the current scare was the Global Cooling crisis that was in the 70s and 80s. Statistics 101; Correlation does not signify causation. The fact that temperature has been significantly rising since the 1850s ONLY means that it has been rising since the 1850s. It says nothing about previous trends, it says nothing about the cause. The correlation people draw is between industrialization and global warming, yes? However, since there are no direct measurements until well into the industrial age, this is not a fair assumption based on that data which you presented (since hurricanes are a measure of water temperature) For any and all data about climate change before direct measurement occurred, we run into the problem of how representative of a sample we are taking. If we look at carbon levels in air bubbles in Antarctic ice, we are only looking at data from a small section of the earth's atmosphere - and it would be extremely foolish to assume the planet is homogeneous. Probably the next best measurement of global temperature patterns in the past would be glacial movement. Now, we need only look at the planet surface to know that about 12000 years ago, glaciers started receding from the past ice age (notably these glaciers probably covered at least half of the globe at the coldest point). Their extent suggests that the planet was very cold. Since glaciers have been sequestered in the northern and southern latitudes (there were no glaciers in Germany in written history, for example), it is very easy to say the planet has been warming ever since the last ice age. Significant temperature increases, mind you, enough to move glaciers back thousands of miles over a comparatively short period (12000 years is not long geologically). Also significant is warming trends that lead to glaciation, and visa versa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation#Quaternary_glacial_cycles I can't say it better than Wikipedia can, but the caveat is that, again, samples are representative of a small area so small changes can often be attributed to local fluctuations. However, the greater the increase or decrease in temperature projected by the measured phenomenon (in this graph's case, core samples of carbon dioxide), the more likely it is a global trend. Humanity does spit tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and is a contributor - we are changing the speed of the glacial cycle, this I concur. We may even knock it out of its current loop and into the larger warming/cooling cycles of the Earth's past. However, the idea that we fundamentally change the outcome of an already set process of nature - the build up of carbon dioxide which will most likely cause a trend reversal as the earth's albedo to heat both traps heat and prevents it from entering (also see changes in amount of heat we receive from the sun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles ) is a little silly. Finally, we have two further questions, what will global warming's impact on humanity be and how much effort should be expended to 'slow' it down (if such a thing is possible). First, consider the beneficial effects of global warming. Huge swathes of land are going to become increasingly arable due to warmer climates and longer growing seasons; our prime examples are in counties like Russia and Canada, and areas like southern Argentina. Furthermore there will be a reduction of some dangers even as others increase; for example, it's highly underreported but statistically, thousands more people die from cold exposure than heat exposure each year in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Second, there are major costs with few benefits for reducing global warming. This fact must be accepted; attempts to slow global warming will only occur in developed countries with a 'well-informed' demographic. It serves no nations interest primarily to cut carbon emissions or 'go green', except when the voters coerce their representatives to (I exclude other government types because they really never are developed countries). Since developing nations, such as China and India, are coming close to surpassing the United States with no signs of slowing in their carbon dioxide, the effect is questionable, since global warming, as I have shown, is a cycle that will continue, only with humanity speeding it along its way. Then, the effect of this is disproportionatly devastating. It only takes a bit of logic to realize that if, say, half of American consumers stopped buying gasoline-run cars next year, the American automobile industry would most likely crash. That's a huge segment of our industry, with economic ramifications both in areas such as banking, which suddenly shortchanged billions of dollars, and the millions of employees. This simple event has a long series of effects that, in the end, make people's lives much worse than being forced to relocate from their expensive waterfront condo. I can go on with examples, such as the carbon tax which, in order to have a noticeable effect on carbon output would severely cramp commercial growth and drive up prices to the point where most Americans would buy foreign - promoting carbon production in other countries and completely removing the reason for the carbon tax in the first place. As a side note, it also is telling to compare the cost of reducing global warming to solve a given problem - lets say coastline recession - and conventional fixes. Given the economic effects describe above (and also the fact that waterfront properties are hilariously disproportional in price to their actual worth), relocating properties from waterfronts is an extremely cost effective solution that ALSO helps reduce risk from problems that will never go away, such as hurricanes, storms, and flooding. I'm kind of bored of writing this, so I'll stop here. However, the book "Cool It" by Bjorn Lomborg link is an excellent, well-researched skeptical take on the effects of global warming. Note, he never denies that humanity is affecting global warming, he denies the value in attempting as we are currently proposing to slow it down.

Only if you're a capitalist idiot who runs towards the next town rather than returning the way you came.

Don't try and argue the logic, comrade, socialism simply produces idyllic societies again and again. -edit: I needed to restate the point , because it deserves emphasizing. I second his post.

It is an invasion on our right to representation to allow uncontrolled political support by corporations because, even though under law a corporation is considered a separate entity, it has hugely disproportionate influence due to its size and resources than any real person. So, even if the majority of the population supported one candidate through money donations, a few large corporations (which are composed of people whose own political opinions are NOT factored into their employer's actions) could easily back another candidate in their favor and aid them substantially more, increasing their chance of winning highly. There's no sense in being naive about the fact that money is extremely important to a candidate's likelihood of winning - President Obama's own election is surely representative of this. Essentially, corporations (and for that matter, extremely wealthy individuals) can heavily influence, say, an election to favor a candidate that supports them, despite the fact that it is not truly representative of the majority's will. Since the Constitution makes no reference to any entity other than the individual taking part in the election process, it only makes sense by our form of democracy to assure that the main concern of candidates is a voting demographic made up of individuals - not corporations, unions, and so on. However, I'm also not foolish enough to believe we actually follow that kind of democracy any more. Nevertheless, total lack of restriction on large entities like businesses will help drown out the will of the huge amount of people who aren't involved in that sphere of influence and who aren't benefited by their successes.

I think all math is interesting, but I immensely dislike practicing it. I am not a math person; finishing my requirements for Calculus has made me very happy. That being said, statistics and Biology are intertwined, so I suppose that is my favorite from the smörgåsbord of mathematics.

I second this

Don't forget the goddamn Batman. Goddamn, that guy worked for everyone, without charge, pretty goddamn socialist if you ask me.

I use IE though I used to use Firefox. IE is the only browser that gets the job done without fucking up on my current interwebz connection. Firefox likes to not know how to send credential information and open links without making a new tab and such.