Rael IAK

I think it would take some of the fun out of life for me if I knew when I was going to die. Part of what I enjoy is being surprised by what life throws in my direction on a daily basis. Some days it's not especially interesting but other days ......

I didn't see this one mentioned.Viruses are not considered forms of life because they don't metabolize anything. They can't "eat" anything in their environment, convert it into some more useful form and then rid rid of what's left over (what they don't need). Viruses can't do this. They have to get everything they need ready made from the host they are infecting.And ....I think the "Responds to stimuli" is a sort of silly condition just as it is. It's true alright. All forms of life respond to stimuli. So does everything else. If you kick a pebble, it moves. It's responding to a stimulus. If you say "A response caused by the application of energy generated by the organism", that would make more sense to me.I don't see what the origin of life has to do with a definition of it. Whatever characteristics we decide "life" has it either has them or it doesn't. It doesn't really matter how it got that way.

I refer to all these things as "it" since, being non-living things, gender is irrelevant. This just means I'm probably agreeing with most people who replied to this topic. I was brought up in no particular religion and my education is in biology. I tend to think of things in that perspective as a result. If I had a different upbringing, I could see myself referring to non-living things as male or female. Although "Mother Nature" is a very common term in the English language, I find I rarely use it.

I don't consider the logistic equation chaotic at all. Like any other deterministic model of anything, you plug in some values (like for N(0) and R) and it spits out a result. You always get the same result when you plug in the same starting values. Stochastic models allow for some unpredictability in the output when you have a given input.Whether chaos exists depends a lot on what you mean by "chaos", I think. I'm not sure what the point of using the existence of math as an example of chaos is all about. Math is entirely a construct of the human mind. It was not created "out there somewhere". I suspect I'm on a different page somehow.

I generally try not to make my comments "personal" in a public forum. You should be criticizing arguments and not the person presenting it. I gotta agree 100% with Baniboy's last post on this topic though. Somebody should be taking a tolerance pill.

LOL!!! Well anwiii, if I'm ever in a bar and a woman asks me why men are stupid about sex (and it's happened), I'll make sure to give you a call before I explain it. I wouldn't want you to miss it. I won't even charge you for it, lol.

I'm a bit unclear on your position, nirmaldaniel. Are you saying that God forgives you no matter what you do or are you saying we have some responsibility for our actions? You say we "can either understand ... or you can take advantage of ...". I guess I don't quite get what I'm supposed to understand. I can see no reason why a person couldn't do both. I also think it's not really appropriate to compare a prostitute to a murderer webishqiptar, for a person who was raised in North America (like myself), I had to re-read this a few times since some of the terms are used differently than I'm used to. I would agree that there are stages that everyone goes through with their relationship with ANY individual. Whether one chooses to call it "love" or not is pretty well a matter of personal preference. I, for example, have no problem saying that I love my parents, my siblings, my 3 kids and even a few male friends I have, even though I feel no sexual attraction towards any of them. Almost everyone I've ever met use the words "infatuation" and "attraction" interchangeably. They generally imply sexual attraction. That is likely just a matter of translation problems or something similar. The "most psychologists and scientists" in the above quote is, I'm assuming, something you read somewhere. If you can remember where, can you tell me where you read it (if it's in English, lol). Since I'm on the slow side at times, I'm unclear on the difference between "attraction" and "affection" as you define the words. To me, the word "affection" means to "like a whole bunch". There may or may not be any sexual attraction as part of the package. As such, the following is the only part I really disagree with. I do NOT believe people are emotionally monogamous. Most people I know are quite capable of (platonically) feeling attached to a number of people at any given time. I'm assuming here that your "sexually monogamous" was supposed to be "sexually polygamous". If I assumed incorrectly then I missed the point of the paragraph entirely.

Hi Jeanne,You might try poking around the forums here for a bit (if you haven't already). There seems to be LOTS of topics that have already received some coverage around here somewhere.I personally wouldn't get too excited about "affiliations" that organizations like the NSA and the CIA may or may not have. It's not like these guys are famous for going public about every place they have their fingers into. If people like you and me can access something on the internet, then rest assured that they can access 10 times as much. It's their job.

Well bojah (sorry, I'm not sure how to put non-Arabic characters in here), I believe I understand what you are saying and I don't really disagree with you. I'm just not sure I'd call the behavior "stupid", lol.Every animal (and plant) species needs to have a way to reproduce and make sure it's children live long enough to have children themselves. If they don't, then they go extinct and are not around for us humans to talk about.Some types of animals, like insects or fish, make dozens or hundreds of kids at a time and then don't worry about them. A lot of the kids die young but there are so many that some live to be adults.People (and a few other species as well) have very few children at a time but they spend a lot of energy protecting and raising the few children they have until the children are old enough to take care of themselves.In people, the males tend to be mostly concerned about sex (making the children) while women are more concerned about security (raising the children safely). So men are happy to spend money to get sex and women are happy to have money spent on them as it's an indicator that this man will be able to adequately provide for children.I don't think it matters whether you believe we got this way by natural selection or if God made us this way. I'm pretty sure we can all agree that we are the way we are regardless of how we got that way.So far, it seems to be working ok. Humans don't seem to be in any danger of going extinct any time soon due to a low population size. It's not really "stupid" in my opinion. It's just the way we are in order to survive over time.

So California got it's biggest earthquake in 18 years on Easter, did it? Well, that's proof positive that the world is coming to an end in 2012.Obviously, those damned Mayans dug the San Andreas fault under California a few thousand years ago and left a timer which will will detonate in 2 years causing the end of the world. Well ok, maybe it'll only cause California to slide into the Pacific and turn half of Nevada and Arizona into beachfront property but you get the idea.Wait a second, I remember talking to a Jehovah's Witness back in 2006 who told me the world was coming to an end in 5 years. Forget 2012. We've all had it in 2011. Ummmm ... well the "Witnesses" have been predicting the end of the world in 5 years forever, haven't they. Now I'm REALLY confused !!!?! (or not)

You could always try asking HER what she's thinking instead of asking us to guess at it.

If Microsoft wants to worry about it's market share for Office, it doesn't need to look any farther than OpenOffice. It comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentation software (like MS PowerPoint), a database package, an equation editor and a vector drawing program (like Abobe Illustrator). They don't have ALL the features of their commercial counterparts but close to it. Since it's open source software, lots of people have been making "add-ons" as well. Oh, did I mention that it's free?

It seems the last several posts have been about how to make it "rich" with a social networking site. It seems to me that africa is on record (more than once) as stating that what he wants to make is a site for Africans .... not necessarily for 250 million users worldwide. I don't see anything wrong with this. Maybe being a millionaire is not one of his goals in life. I'm not a particularly materialistic person so it's not one of mine. africa, I think you have a good point when you say that you are not really competing with FaceBook and MySpace. You are competing for people's time. Everyone has only so much recreational time available and a lot of options on how to spend it. ANY social networking site is competing with MMORPGs, game consoles, TV and DVD Rental Stores (among other things) for that time. I started playing an on-line game about a year and a half ago just to see what one was like since I started hearing about WoW EVERYWHERE, lol. It wasn't WoW I played, by the way, and the game itself was nothing to write home about but I enjoyed the social aspect of it well enough to stay active. I'm not real active any more. I find myself spending lots more time in Xisto forums . The point is, I like the caliber of conversation that goes on here so this will get a good chunk of my "spare time" for the foreseeable future. As far as what goes into your site goes africa, you would know better than me. What do you think your potential audience would like? You could always try asking some of the people that you already know what they would enjoy. As far as FaceBook (or anything else) being a "threat" goes, I doubt it. When my kids were younger (yeah, it appears I'm a fair bit older than the average Trapper) there was some fairly serious discussion among some parents as to whether Pokemon spelled the end of civilization as we know it, lol. Obviously, it didn't. It was one in an endless line of fads. "Everybody" was on MySpace at one point. Then "everyone" is on Facebook. Next will be Twitter (or something else). I can't think of any good reason that africa shouldn't just do what he thinks would be fun or rewarding to him. Even if only a few hundred people end up spending their time on his site on a regular basis, THEY will consider it "successful". My two myCENTs worth

Technically, the question which forms the title of this topic doesn't make much sense. It's sort of like asking "Do you think gravity will ever be possible?". It depends on exactly what you consider an acceptable definition of time traveling. If I 1) Get into a spaceship and travel towards somewhere off in the galaxy in a straight line at 99% of the speed of light on Aug 1, 2010 2) Travel for a year and turn around and come back to Earth at the same speed 3) I will NOT find that I arrive on Earth on Aug 1, 2012. It will be September 27, 2024 on Earth. I will have aged 2 years since I left. The Earth and everything on it will have aged 14.16 years. If you think that qualifies as traveling into the future then time travel goes on around us all the time (although only to an appreciable degree to VERY small things). You can adjust the amount of the discrepancy in the passage of time by increasing or decreasing your speed and the length of your trip (how long you figure your trip to take). The math is actually not that hard. Anyone who owns a calculator and can manage high school algebra can do it. This is a consequence of the Special Theory of Relativity which has been around a little over 100 years. The only thing stopping man from doing it is the engineering hurdles in making a ship that can go fast enough. It basically stems from the fact that time does not "go on" at a constant rate throughout the universe. Time passes more slowly for an object that is moving relative to another object. Special Relativity says that the ONLY thing that is constant no matter "what" is moving around "where" is the speed of light. Ok, I'm a biologist by education, not a physicist. I have an interest in relativity and quantum physics so I learned something about them but I'm certainly not an authority. Having said that, Special Relativity has been a generally accepted theory for decades. There is a ton of evidence to support it. To my knowledge, Einstein's version of General Relativity is NOT generally accepted. There is/was some debate as to whether the universe is best described using 13 or 27 dimensions or something. Special Relativity says nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Special Relativity "sort of" allows us to travel into the future as described above. It does NOT allow traveling into the past so don't freak over the Jurassic Park scenario, lol. If this qualifies as "time traveling" then, yes, it's not only possible but sub-atomic particles have been doing it for billions of years

Welcome martvefun. Hope you enjoy your experience at Xisto. I'm hoping I do as well since I'm fairly new here also. :angel: From your avatar, I'm going to guess you are a Linux user. Which distro are you using?Just so you know, you don't need to write a tutorial to get myCENTS quickly. I know a bit about HTML, CSS and Javascript. Only enough to be dangerous though. Certainly not enough to write a good tutorial (yet). There are LOTS of forums here on LOTS of different topics. Just find one that you are interested in and have an opinion on. If you make a post giving your opinion along with the reasons you hold that opinion, you can gain points rather quickly.It took me a few days of searching the forums until I found a topic that I thought I had something intelligent to say something about but it was quite easy after that. I logged in one morning to see if I had enough myCENTS to pay for a month of hosting and I had more than enough for 2 months, lol. I now need to work on some web pages You don't really need to rush this .... and good luck with setting up your own server.