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.

Hi stevoboi! Hope you have fun with Xisto.And Semsem has a point. Register with the billing Department in short order so you can get your site up and running.Don't be surprised if I end up picking your brains about Javascript either, lol.

Well nirvaman, I was kidding about my sister. It never would have worked out anyway since she doesn't like vets, lol (I have no idea, actually).I'm pretty sure there are women in here. Likely some who are 22 - 25 as well. Since "pretty" is such a subjective thing, there's no point in speculating. Besides, how many guys do you know who think their own sisters are pretty :angel:

I got into this thread a little late but .... I'm not crazy about anything with "sutra" in it. I understand where the word comes from and everything but unless you intend on re-educating the western world ahead of time, it will be associated with something sexual. For thousands of years the swastika has been used as a symbol of well being among the Hindu and Buddhist cultures but I don't recommend you renaming yourselves "Swastikas-R-Us" either. I am currently job hunting and, as such, am making myself a contact card. I want to put a reference to my new website on it. "Xisto" I HATE. I don't think I could face an 87 character URL for my site I know it's a matter of personal taste but I like Xisto. It's just weird enough to be memorable but doesn't have any cultural baggage associated with it. At least not that I can tell. Since we do seem to be a rather global group, I think it's important to consider that aspect (not having a name that makes a significant number of people uncomfortable). The only downside I see to Xisto is that one may wonder what happened to the person who went browsing into a Trap16 site :angel: Just my 2 cents worth

This is just too funny. I just finished thanking Oualid/Waleed/nirvaman for posting on MY Intro thread Hope you are figuring out how the myCENTS system works alright. Feel free to contact me if you get stuck. Looks like everyone is in agreement. You get my nomination for best start to an Intro topic for 2010. By the way, I have a 45 year old sister who's single. You interested???? :angel:

Yup, I seem to be getting the hang of this. It took me a while to find a topic or two that I felt I had something intelligent to say. Once I did though, lol. I log on to Xisto's billing site to see if I have $2 and I have over $4 :angel: No, this is not too hard if you have a bit of persistence in you.Thanks again Running With Scissors (WATCH IT!!! You'll put somebody's eye out) and nirvaman.

Hi redrighthand. Nice to have you here. I'm fairly new to Xisto myself.The myCENTS are not really very hard to build up. Before I knew it, I had enough for 2 months worth of hosting. I now have a URL, disk space and bandwidth but nothing to upload to the web yet, lol. I guess I worry about that next.Oh yes, although English is my first language, I am a terrible typist so forgive me if I misspell something here :angel:

As soon as I saw the the title of this topic I IMMEDIATELY came to check it out. This is something I've been thinking about, on and off, for over a year now.I had very little experience with chat rooms, forums or other forms of internet communication with individuals (other than e-mail) until I joined a persistent MMORPG about a year and a half ago. I had no idea what kind of relationships to expect to have with people I had never met in person and had a "wait and see" attitude.This past Christmas I got a rather large "care package" of X-mas baking from a family I "met" through the game. I guess they consider me a friend, lol. They live in a different country (about 600 miles away from me) and I doubt I'll ever meet them face-to-face. Even though "Mom and Dad" are young enough to be my kids (I'm also "buddies" with their 10 year old daughter), I feel like they've adopted me, lol. They, by the way, are very cautious about what they say on-line.My personal experiences are that lack of non-verbal communication like tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures do slow down the communication process. It doesn't stop it though. It just means it takes longer to "get to know" someone than it does face to face. I can see it being a great inconvenience to someone with little patience.I have run across phrases in the posts here like "not everyone online you talk to can be trusted", "the majority of the online relationships (including friendship and others) are based on lies" and "there are all kinds of people out there - some friendly, some sulky, some dangerous, etc". You know what? You are all absolutely right! You know what else? That sounds EXACTLY like the people I meet "face to face", lol. So what was your point again? :angel: In writing this post, I just realized that I don't like they way the term "real life" gets used. When I was playing the on-line game, the game was not "real" but the people I was playing with were as real as me. You can get together with some friends and play cards or Monopoly or something and the game is still not real but the people you play with are no more "real" than in my last example.Personally, I am no more cautious talking to someone in a chat room as I am face to face (notice I didn't say "real life", lol). I am no less cautious either. My thoughts on the topic are pretty close to unwanted_flower's, I suppose. People are people and where you meet them or how you communicate with them is largely unimportant in terms of how it affects the outcome.A few specific comments;To mra550:If the worst experience you have with identity theft is having your picture show up beside somebody else's name in Facebook, consider yourself lucky. I had somebody charge about $800 to a credit card of mine once. I hadn't lost the card and the internet had nothing to do with it.To Zagubadu-:Different people have different definitions of what constitutes "friendship". I knew a girl once who I considered a friend. One person who knew us both described us as "Acquaintances", another described us as "Buddies".To evilsmiley25:I think the "on-line" versus "face-to-face" labeling dilemma is most easily solved by asking yourself "What form of communication do I use most often to talk with this person?". Be careful with this though. We may end up with not only "Real Life" friends and "On-Line" friends but "Telephone" friends and God knows what else as well.To getube:Thanks for the link even though I'll never use it. Some people are uncomfortable about giving out personal information about themselves. I respect that. Since it's not really any of my business where a person lives anyway, I don't really care if they lie to me about it.To Ho-oh'sRealm:The next time your Mom get's on your case, try this (if you choose to),"I have a question that I want an answer to. Nobody that I've met face to face has an answer. Somebody I know who I have not met face to face probably does."

Nah, I was talking about the "post" part, not the "typing" part.I was hoping someone would tell me to switch text editors using the button on the far top right of the posting entry window. Nobody did but I eventually figured it out on my own :angel: So your post gets a "D" for Usefulness but an "A" for Sense of Humor.

This cracks me up. How am I supposed to vote in this poll, lol? 2012 is NOT a hoax. It's a year that is coming in about, oh, a little less than 2 years. Do I believe in what crap? Are there going to be natural disasters plaguing the Earth and will some of them come closer together than others? "Yup", on both counts. I could have told you that without Mayans, the Bible, Nostradamus or anything. Obviously, we all are going to get to wait and see. Given that you are born, about the only thing guaranteed in life is that you will die so, yeah, "we're gonna die!!" I sometimes take anwiii's position on this particular topic but I'm in a pretty good mood right now so I'll try not to "point and laugh" as much as him, lol. My background in science and applied statistics has taught me that people often go looking for causes for events when they have no particular reason to do so. Sometimes it'll just rain for 5 days straight. It doesn't mean God is trying to flood the planet again. It just happens once in a while. I also think that part of it is because lots of people enjoy being scared. There are plenty of scary movies which became box office hits. So what could be more fun than sitting around with your buddies and discussing the latest Doomsday Prophecy over a few beers. It's not such a good idea if you take that stuff too seriously though. I feel sorry for people who end up dishing out their hard earned cash for asteroid collision insurance and stuff. anwiii makes an excellent point at the beginning of his post. I am also willing to bet nobody here can actually produce any objective evidence that the Mayan's predicted the end of the world. Their calendar ends at 2012? Maybe the continuation of the calendar is stored elsewhere. Could be they didn't think they'd need it anytime soon, lol. Anyone here remember Y2K? The computer representation of our perception of the passage of time "predicted" the world would end 10 years ago. Maybe the Mayans just couldn't be bothered running their calendar out any farther as well. Here's a summary of why I don't get excited about Doomsday Prophecies in general. I haven't figured out how to do the quote thing yet in a post here so bear with me please. The following is addressed to Deadmad7's list of "weird" stuff. The current generally accepted standard for describing and predicting astronomical events is Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and it works WAY better than what the Mayan's had to work with. To my knowledge, it does not predict the end of civilization at any particular time. If it did, I expect we would have heard about it by now. Let me be clear here. I am in no way attempting to "bust" Deadman7. It's a list of quotes, I understand, but guy, you you take everything you hear seriously? What exactly does this quote mean to you? The solar system revolves around the center of the galaxy (like the rest of the galaxy does). It is located about 2/3s of the way out from the center in one of the spiral arms. What exactly does "best aligned with the center" mean? What exactly do you find weird about the milky way galaxy revolving anyway? The fact that the north and south magnetic poles reverse themselves every couple of hundred thousand years is not news. The fact that geologists only missed the next occurance by a few hundred years on something that happens on a 200,000 or 300,000 year cycle is remarkable, actually. Now I'm just plain confused. Wasn't the book of Revelations written about 2000 years ago? If the end of times are "near", shouldn't it have happened already, like, 1900 years ago or so. Did "Timewave Zero" predict the recent crash in the global credit system or the trashing of the North American automotive sector? While we are at it, did "Timewave Zero" predict ANYTHING reasonably accurately? See "Timewave Zero" above. Nice. Asteroids "pass" Earth all the time. How "gigantic" is it and how close will it get to Earth? What are the expected effects of it's gravitational field? Will it increase high tide on one side of the Earth by 2"? Will it rip the Earth in half? Will it crash into us with the point of impact being anwiii's backyard? "Hey, that girl over there just looked at me. She must be in love with me. I'll go over and hit on her. If she turns me down, I'll follow her home and turn her into little bitty pieces with a chainsaw". Psychotics are good at finding "hidden" messages as well. SOME interpretation of SOME Nostradamus prophecy will support ANY event conceivable by the mind of man. I don't really get too excited by this stuff. It's just about some people trying to get rich off of people's love of being scared. As long as no one is spending money over this stuff that they can't really afford to spend, I doubt it will cause the end of civilization as we know it.

I did not read every post on the 7+ pages of this topic so pardon me if I'm repeating what has previously been said.A lot of the debate in the earlier posts seem to revolve around "life" as it is familiar to us. Organisms which are made up primarily of organic molecules (carbon-based, not the "grown without pesticides" use of the word) and absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide in order to maintain their internal workings unless you are a plant.The chances of life elsewhere in the universe depends a lot on how you define life. If you restrict your definition of life to life as it exists on Earth then you are restricting the possibility of life to Earth-like planets at the same time. Chemically, silicon behaves very much like carbon does. It's not out of the question that things that behave very much like life forms on Earth could exist on planet's which are much hotter or colder or with a larger or smaller gravity than we have. I'm a biologist by education, not a chemist, so I don't know what physical conditions are most favorable for silicon to easily form more complex molecules. Just don't be surprised if a silicon-based life form ends up inhaling water, breathing out oxygen and eating sand for a living (or something), lol.There are so many planets out there that it is VERY likely that organic life exists on at least a few of them. Is there intelligent life on other planets? The definition of "intelligence" is as big a starting problem as the definition of "life". Everybody knows what it is until you try to put an objective definition down on paper. Then nobody "knows", lol.