Cerebral Stasis

Cangor's explaination seems the most likely and logical one to describe how the concept of breathing fire came about, although Dragons as a species I would definately say never existed, at least not in the form that legends portray them as having.

The 2D to 3D Photosynth program isn't near as cool as the Seadragon extreme pixel zooming technology.

Actually, no, bursting tubes isn't much of a problem. These tubes are about a quarter to an eigth of an inch thick, and it's very flexible, so unless you cut it, it won't break on it's own. Besides, these pumps require distilled water, and distilled water does not conduct electricity, so your board wouldn't short out even if it did burst.

Oh, and when the Bible was written, "I ate a cupcake" would not have meant "I ate a cupcake" simply because the cake wasn't invented until about 2000 years ago, let alone complex spin-offs like cupcakes. Personally, I think that, in many cases, religions are methods of control. Consider that practically every society ever to develop has either created or adopted some kind of religion. Perhaps religions were simply created as a cheap and easy way to control the masses. If a society believes that they can do whatever they want without consequences, there will be anarchy. However, if they were convinced that there was a supreme, all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful being watching over everything that would strike them down if they "sinned", they would hesitate before doing said "sins." This would mean that the society would have to spend less time and money on police, courts, and other expenses related to crimes. Look at how much money the United States spends on their criminal system, and it doesn't come close to catching everything. Now, if everyone in the USA was a Christian, that budget could be chopped down to nearly nothing. Seems a perfectly good incentive for a society to write an "inspired" book, make up a diety, and start pressing it on the people.

But then there is, of course, the ethical questions that come along with that. How does one know that giving people an extra arm is actually the way we should go? Isn't genetically modifying people to be smarter, faster, stronger, etc. cheating to a degree? What about those who were born without modifications? They would become like retards compared to enhanced humans, forcing them do to menial tasks as the genetically superior people took on the jobs of intellectual value. The list goes on.

Of course it's a joke. Some people don't even realize that they can pleasure themselves and, as you said, some people with strong wills are able to resist (for whatever reason). Of course, the sexual urge is a natural one and there should be no real need to fight it, as long as one can keep it in check (meaning one does not go around screwing everything they see like some animals do).

This is the one that I use with my computer.

Even giving people the excuse for which they can sin (or whatever you call it) can be a big mistake.

If I recall correctly, one poll said that 95% of men claim to masturbate. The other 5% lie about it.

To Truefusion: Smart @$$ :)Seriously, though, most religions bring about holy wars and other events that cost millions of lives. It doesn't seem to me like it is worth having opinionated groups that are allowed to kill in order to spread their opinions. Annoying door-to-door stuff, maybe (although that is annoying too), but any religion that is violent or has a majority of violent followers (*cough* Islam *cough*) should be split up as if it were a homocidal cult.

Unfortunately, AIDS, even being one of the most deadly STDs, is the only one that doesn't have to be tested for and, if one tested positive, does not have to be announced as such.

I heard about that slowing down due to the tsunami. As for water leaving a planet, sure it can evaporate off the planet, but that isn't the case when the planet has an atmosphere as thick as Earth's. The pressure of the atmosphere and the pull of gravity keep Earth's atmosphere from boiling off, so as a result, we aren't losing any water.

No, all religions are not good. True, some offer enlightenment and self-dicipline, but that can be acquired without religion. Religion means holy wars, crusades, cover-ups, and lots of fraud and lies.

For men, it's a lot more about relieving hormonal pressure than actual pleasure (in my case, anyway). And then there are some benefits, such as decreased prostate cancer risk (or so some studies have suggested). For women, though, I'm not sure if there is any benefit, and for them it may be purely for pleasure.

Wait, you're saying they shouldn't find a cure because AIDS is supposed to be a plague? That's very short-sighted of you, since many completely innocent people get AIDS either from birth, from not realizing it exists (as in third-world countries), or even from unintentional contraction (i.e. partner/spouse lied or they were raped). As for there being no cure, I'm positive that there will eventually be some kind of cure, even if it means the use of nanobots that physically destroy the virus. It will come eventually. Soon AIDS will take the course of smallpox (in being mostly extinct, I mean).

Could you give us a link to your feed?Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but it sounds like you're saying that, unless you open the feed file in a feed-reading program, you get an error saying that it is not an associated file format. I don't see how that would be any different than trying to open a .pdf file in a media player. Feed files can only be read by text document readers, web browsers, and feed readers, unless I'm mistaken. Trying to use something else would definately cause an unknown file format error, which may be your problem.Of course I could be wrong, but that is what my guess is from what you've said thus far.

2 Gb isn't much space. I think I'd much rather either buy a spare backup harddrive, make a storage partition on my primary one, or even email myself files via Gmail. I doubt I would want to store 2 Gb of my important personal files on an online database where someone can steal or accidently (or purposefully) remove them. Heck, if I back up my stuff on a writeable DVD disk, I'd have more than 2 Gb of space, and writeable DVDs are maybe fifty cents a piece, if not less.

Listening to audio books such as A Short History of Nearly Everything, it's amazing how much we know about the universe without even leaving our solar system. On the other hand, it's a bit depressing, since it really puts the size of space into perspective. The author of A Short History of Nearly Everything says that he thinks it's unlikely that humans will EVER leave their own solar system, simply because it is so unbelieveably massive (apparently the length of the sun to Pluto is only a small faction of the actual size of the solar system).

Unless I'm mistaken, men usually consider sex to be primarily a physical thing (even if there are emotional strings attached), while with girls, it can either be a physical thing, an emotional thing, or combination of the two. For girls who do not find masturbation to be pleasant, it's probably more of an emotional thing (although I do not claim to be an expert).

I wouldn't base my ideas off of games and movies for the sake of avoiding ridicule if I was you, but in this case, who knows. Supposedly, the universe never ends, so it's like walking on an inverted earth, meaining that if you keep going in one direction you'll end up where you started (although I may be wrong and it's a bit hard to imagine).

You mean you have to choose between a life without sex and a gruesome death? Tough call. - Fry I was simply giving my opinion for the sake of argument, not putting my foot down and proclaiming that I was completely correct. Is it necessary for our survival? By "Intelligence", I meant the ability to understand that the world is more than the present and to change one's ways in order to specifically affect that. For example, a mouse who raids a farmer's oats only thinks of a need for food, while the farmer thinks of the diseases passed by said mouse, the possible loss of lifestock, and the eventual economic downfall that would ensue. I never once claimed that animals did not feel pain, because I knew that they did. I assumed that one would understand that by "language" I meant the ability to express personal ideas and opinions. True, animals talk, but, unless I'm mistaken, they don't discuss why the sky is blue or chat about their dreams. They simply express useful information, as computers do. I'm not saying that animals don't have any primitive emotions or personalities, because I know that they do. As for the pidgeon thing, I hadn't been aware of that article (and had only read to the contrary thus far), although from the video, it looks to me like, during it's constant movement, the pidgeon just happened to notice the mark on it's bib by chance, rather than by realizing that it's mirror image had said mark. I didn't intend to debate animal rights, in any case. I'm just saying that I think that the sacrifice of animal life is worth saving human lives, especially since the animals are not intentionally tortured or put in pain (they are simply used to harvest results in as painless a way as possible). Animals kill animals below themselves on the food chain. Since we also are animals and are pretty much at the top of the food chain, we can kill animals and not feel as though we are being any less than what we are - animals. If one debates that as the highest life form of the planet, we should simply know better, one could consider everything we do to harm animals. For example, we spray our crops, which kills or harms certain creatures, but if we did not, said creatures would eat our food and not give a second thought on the matter. If one's house becomes infested with ants, one can either kill those ants or allow them to destroy one's food. Life is all about the will and need to survive another day, and just because we have an intellectual advantage over other creatures does not mean we shouldn't use it to achieve that goal. Animals with sharp claws and teeth don't hesistate to use their advantages over us, so why should we hesistate to use our advantage (brain power) over them? One cannot live life passively - it just doesn't work. In order to live, one must create and destroy. There's no way to avoid that. The difference is that we have a higher priority to guarantee the creation and continuation of our own species versus that of another species. For example, cows. They live a life of bliss. We humans put them out in fields, medicate them, and guarantee their survival. In return, they give us their meat at a certain point of their lives. If they were to run free in the wild, chances are they would never reach that point on their own (or most wouldn't, in any case), yet living with humans, they are given a life of bliss, doing whatever they like, given all the food they could want. True, they have to pay a capital price at the end, but it seems to me as though it is all worthwhile. Humans are, thanks to evolution, omnivores. This means that, because nature said so, we can eat both animals and plants. Eating animals the "natural way" means we run them down, rip their throat out, and then devour their corpse. These days, we have "humane" ways of killing, namely a gunshot to the head in order to kill the animal without inflicting pain. Now when it comes to tests, such as growing an ear on a rat's face, the creature does not feel pain because there is growth, not decay. In the case of vaccine testing in which a rat is given a disease and then the cure, the scientists assume that the cure will work. In the unlikely event that it is not, the animal is quickly "put out of it's misery" in order to be tested for the reason that the vaccine didn't work. Drugs aren't just randomly pumped into animals until one combination works, every experiment has to have a purpose and reasonable proof that the vaccine being tested will work. It's not an animal torture-fest. Hunting is probably much more of an activity that causes animal pain, and yet that's not illegal (and why should it be? humans, according to instinct, should be able to hunt). Let's assume for a moment that bacteria can feel pain, simply for the sake of discussion. Should we stop trying to kill off bacteria to save human lives because of this? Are billions of single-celled organisms worth the lives of millions of multi-cellular ones? Chances are you think "no." Well, why not? Shouldn't bacteria have the same rights as any other living creature? What gives you the right to decide? The only way to be fair is to throw away all philosophy and technology and just live like animals - no vaccines, no weapons, etc. This would not only mean that the human race as a whole would face extinction, but it would, as I have said, be a waste of the evolutionary advantage our race has been given - the ability to use technology as a tool to help us survive what we otherwise could not.

But if one would "save" a brainwave pattern and then force the mind into that same pattern, wouldn't it also cause one to be put into the same sleeping state as they were when having the dream, thus making the dream just as vague as before when one awoke?

I recommend you make those curvetop.jpg and curveright.jpg images into .gif images instead. There are not very many colors, and .gif files don't have that pixelated distortion like low-quality jpg files do, so it would look much cleaner. Then, make those two images into one and put them as a background for the foreground header.jpg image and allow resizing accordingly. That way, the website can be viewed at 800x600 resolution without sideways scrolling (although that's less of an important thing these days).

I would put the individual articles on seperate pages as you suggest, but unfortunately it's not a feature of Blogger.Thanks for the compliments, by the way.

According to this article, it was discovered as an epidemic June 5, 1981.