神事Miller's Live Journal

h4x0r3d

2009-04-02T01:02:09Z

This user's account has been h4x0r3ed. To release them from the grip of the h4x0r m3m3 b075 change your status to h4x0r3d and message h4x0r3d to 30 people on your friend list.

Japanese Air Force

2009-03-26T02:41:43Z

I don't know if this is real or not but its hilarious.

Lawerly things and SPam

2009-03-23T02:17:28Z

So for some reason, people all around me keep telling me I should become a lawyer. I'm starting to give it some thought. It would be quite enjoyable to sue spammers all day long.

An Online Movement to LOWER the drinking age

2009-03-22T21:59:51Z

http://www.chooseresponsibility.org/home/

Zombie Drill !!!!

2009-03-21T07:11:52Z

There are no words except: ONLY JAPAN!

I decided I should read the comic today so I can watch the movie tonight.

2009-03-07T19:08:28Z

I am not very proud of my Church today.

2009-03-06T00:29:21Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7926694.stm

For Dewmaster

2009-03-04T09:02:35Z

Signs of Intelligent Life

2009-03-03T17:07:22Z

You know, when we finally do find a planet with the same level of intelligence and technology as us, it MIGHT be a little more obvious than you'd think...

Word of the Day

2009-03-03T15:22:45Z

Spanogyny. + or - ?

Emacity

2009-03-03T07:35:25Z

http://www.futilitycloset.com/

If you learn nothing else in life here is well.... something. I can't tell if this is educational or not.

Zeitgeist

2009-02-22T22:59:53Z

http://www.sprword.com/videos/zeitgeistaddendum/

Obviously I do not agree 100% with the viewpoint of this documentary, but its still definately worth watching.

HAPPY LESS THAN THREE-DAY!

2009-02-14T23:17:38Z

VALENTINE LULZ

SPEECHLESS

2009-02-13T20:19:23Z

I got this email about a program that was supposed to air on local TV, but got canceled. Its about the media's tactics for pushing the homosexual agenda onto the public. Its a fascinating take on the issue that you rarely ever see.

http://www.silencingchristians.com/

If you take the time to watch it, please feel free to share your thoughts.

In other news...

2009-02-11T22:09:35Z

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-06-14-death-van_x.htm

Barbaric

2009-02-08T20:18:50Z

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/06/florida.abortion/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

If this story doesn't point out the sheer backwardness of our society I don't know what does.

Quote

2009-02-06T15:59:54Z

"This is so important! Its "Dont feed them after midnight important!"

Science Discovers Real Life Pokemon Evolution! Flail!

2009-01-31T21:55:56Z

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126935.600-shapeshifting-fish-fools-scientists.html

9/11 Here comes the Science!

2009-01-24T23:27:51Z

This is worth two hours of your day.

http://www.ae911truth.org/flashmov11.htm

CHUCK NORRIS WROTE THIS!

2009-01-21T20:39:05Z

http://www.peoplesdefender.com/main.asp?SectionID=3&SubSectionID=3&ArticleID=128798&TM=51084.86

Barack Obama emphatically promised more than a year ago, "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." Will he keep his word?

The Freedom of Choice Act is a sweeping bill that would abolish all pro-life regulations across the nation, from parental notification laws to bans on federal funding of abortions. The Office of the General Counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops identified 13 categories of pro-life laws that would be stampeded and nullified by FOCA.

As far-reaching as the decision of Roe vs. Wade is into the states' jurisdictions and our lives, even it, for example, showed certain respect for state laws and limits on infringing regulations in the medical field. FOCA shows no such restraints; it nails shut the coffin on pro-life choices and safeguards.

And why has Obama pledged his allegiance to pass FOCA? Not only because he has the most passionately liberal pro-choice record of nearly any politician but also because, as he told a meeting of Planned Parenthood during his campaign, "it is time to turn the page" to a new day, when pro-life views and laws and debate on abortion are passe´.

And if he and the Democratic majority have their way, America will have that new day, one in which hundreds of thousands more abortions will be performed annually. (I still think it is utterly hypocritical that a president and a political party who pride themselves on providing and protecting minorities don't include the unborn among those minorities.)

The fight to pass FOCA is being waged despite a new nationwide survey revealing that about 4 in 5 U.S. adults would limit abortion's legality. About 1 in 3 would limit abortion to rape, incest or saving a mother's life. One-third also would limit abortion to either the first three months of pregnancy or the first six months.

Only 9 percent said abortion should be legal for any reason at any time during pregnancy. These statistics are in stark contrast to the goals and objectives of FOCA, which would close the culture debate on abortion in an unprecedented way for any piece of legislation.

America doesn't need to "turn the page" on culture battles, such as abortion; it needs to reopen the pages of its history to our Founders' heightened views about the rights of all human beings in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. And we need to revive and re-instill that value of humanity back into society, our children and our children's children.

Under our Constitution, the federal government should protect that right to life. But besides affirming that foundational human right, the details and debates of the laws governing abortion should be left to the states.

Despite the Supreme Court's unconstitutional striking down of abortion laws nationwide in 1973 and instituting a completely unconstitutional federal right to abortion, there is still much we can do at the state level to protect human life by promoting pro-life legislation and education. That is, unless FOCA is enacted into law.

After 35 years of ceaseless controversy since the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade, some people think that abortion is an "old" issue better dropped. But as my friend and prolific author Randy Alcorn wrote in his small book "Why Pro-Life? Caring for the Unborn and Their Mothers": "Abortion has set us on a dangerous course.

We may come to our senses and back away from the slippery slope. Or we may follow it to its inescapable conclusion -- a society in which the powerful, for their self-interest, determine which human beings will live and which will die."

Abortion is not about a woman's "right to choose"; it is about a more fundamental "right to life," which is one of three specifically identified unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence (and the Constitution, through Article VII and the Bill of Rights). And it is a violation of government's primary purpose: to protect innocent life.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1809, "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." He was not, of course, writing about the America of today, with state-sanctioned and even subsidized abortion and a movement to promote the killing of the elderly through euthanasia.

But he could have been. And his belief in what should be "the first and only legitimate object of government" still should stand, and that includes for the president of the United States of America. But if he and his administration won't protect the rights of the living (even in the womb), then who will? Pelosi? Reid? A left-leaning Congress?

All of our elected officials should uphold that pre-eminent objective of government and strive to get us back to the view of humanity that emphasizes the immortal worth of every human being. Without that, we never can believe that all people (including those in the womb) are created equal, that they have inherent, unalienable rights and that the protection of those rights is "the first and only legitimate object of good government."

And if our politicians won't protect unborn human life, then we must. With Sanctity of Life Sunday on Jan. 18, Obama's inauguration Jan. 20, the annual March for Life pro-life rally in Washington, D.C., Jan. 22 (the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision), and FOCA looming on the legislative precipice of Congress and the White House, now is the time to march and take action again to defend the unborn. (That's why I devoted an entire chapter to "Reclaim the value of human life" in my new cultural manifesto, "Black Belt Patriotism," and why my wife, Gena, passionately entreated for the unborn in our most recent interview, which you can watch online on GodTube.)

Please, before FOCA flies onto the congressional floor in the upcoming days, sign the online petition to fight FOCA (www.fightfoca.com), and then contact your representatives and senators to tell them how you expect them to vote on the bill. You can write to them online by simply going to www.capwiz.com/nrlc/ issues/bills/?bill=9668701 and entering your ZIP code.

Does God have a giant Holodeck?

2009-01-16T04:34:55Z

Science says yes! We are living in a giant hologram!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Human hunters make the world better faster stronger smaller or in some cases deader.

2009-01-13T23:54:04Z

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090112/sc_livescience/superpredatorshumansforcerapidevolutionofanimals

Super-Predators: Humans Force Rapid Evolution of Animals

Robert Roy Britt
Editorial Director
LiveScience.com robert Roy Britt
editorial Director
livescience.com – Mon Jan 12, 5:17 pm ET

Acting as super-predators, humans are forcing changes to body size and reproductive abilities in some species 300 percent faster than would occur naturally, a new study finds.

Hunting and fishing by individual sportsmen as well as large-scale commercial fishing are also outpacing other human influences, such as pollution, in effects on the animal kingdom. The changes are dramatic and may put the survival of some species in question.

In a review of 34 studies that tracked 29 species across 40 different geographic systems, harvested and hunted populations are on average 20 percent smaller in body size than previous generations, and the age at which they first reproduce is on average 25 percent earlier.

"Harvested organisms are the fastest-changing organisms of their kind in the wild, likely because we take such high proportions of a population and target the largest," said lead researcher Chris Darimont of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's an ideal recipe for rapid trait change."

Darimont told LiveScience that while he considers the changes to be evolutionary, some biologists consider them phenotypic and, without evidence of genetic shifts, would not call them evolution.

The study found dramatic change in several fish species and creatures as small as snails and as large as bighorn sheep and caribou.

Dominant force

The results, published online today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are similar to a host of other scientific conclusions dating back nearly two decades.

In 1990, Douglas Chadwick wrote in National Geographic magazine how trophy hunting - the practice of selecting only the largest beasts to kill -"has caused a decline in the average size of Kodiak Bears [in Alaska] over the years."

By harvesting vast numbers and targeting large, reproductively mature individuals, human predation is quickly reshaping wild populations, leaving smaller individuals to reproduce at ever-earlier ages, Darimont explained.

"The pace of changes we're seeing supercedes by a long shot what we've observed in natural systems, and even in systems that have been rapidly modified by humans in other ways," Darimont said. The study found the changes outpace by 50 percent those brought on by pollution and human introduction of alien species.

"As predators, humans are a dominant evolutionary force, he said.

Others agree the problem is serious. Columbia University biologist Don Melnick recently said trophy hunting is akin to selective breeding and is "highly likely to result in the end of a species."

Surprising ability to change

One surprise: The capacity of creatures to change.

"These changes occur well within our lifetimes," Darimont said. "Commercial hunting and fishing has awoken the latent ability of organisms to change rapidly."

Changes occur in two ways. One is sheer genetics:

Evolution can favor smaller fish able to pass through the mesh of gill nets and survive to reproduce, thereby passing on genes for smaller offspring.

Another change process is called plasticity. Shifts to earlier reproduction, for example, can occur because there is a lot of food and fewer fish to dine on it. The fish eat more and reach maturity sooner.

"Whatever the underlying process, shifts to earlier breeding spell trouble for populations," Darimont said. "Earlier breeders often produce far fewer offspring. If we take so much and reduce their ability to reproduce successfully, we reduce their resilience and ability to recover."

One specific example: the overfished Atlantic cod on the eastern coast of Canada. Less than two decades ago, they began mating at age 6. Now they start at age 5.

Government problem

In some cases, as other studies have found, the problem results from decades of big-game hunting and, more recently, poaching. Some populations of African elephants, for example, have unnatural percentages of tusk-free animals among them now, because hunters and poachers favor the ivory.

But some government rules contribute to the problem.

"Fishing regulations often prescribe the taking of larger fish, and the same often applies to hunting regulations," Darimont said. "Hunters are instructed not to take smaller animals or those with smaller horns. This is counter to patterns of natural predation, and now we're seeing the consequences of this management."

Darimont thinks new policies are in order.

"While wolves might prey on 20 animals, humans prey on hundreds of thousands of species," he points out. "We should be mimicking natural predators, which take far less and target smaller individuals."

Policy shifts may or may not save a species, however.

"It's unknown how quickly the traits can change back, or if they will," Darimont said.

* 10 Species You Can Kiss Goodbye
* Trophy Hunting Causing 'Reverse Evolution'
* Evolution News & Features

* Original Story: Super-Predators: Humans Force Rapid Evolution of Animals

Only nine years late...

2009-01-12T06:44:17Z

http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1621079/flying_car_ready_for_takeoff/index.html

Sometimes there is Justice in this Universe

2009-01-10T17:58:00Z

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479045,00.html

And the Ninjas rejoiced.

Life 2.0

2009-01-09T04:26:37Z

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/replicatingrna.html

Life makes more of itself.

And now so can a set of custom-designed chemicals. Chemists have shown that a group of synthetic enzymes replicated, competed and evolved much like a natural ecosystem, but without life or cells.

"So long as you provide the building blocks and the starter seed, it goes forever," said Gerald Joyce, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute and co-author of the paper published Thursday in Science. "It is immortalized molecular information."

Joyce's chemicals are technically hacked RNA enzymes, much like the ones we have in our bodies, but they don't behave anything like those in living creatures. But, these synthetic RNA replicators do provide a model for evolution — and shed light on one step in the development of early living systems from on a lifeless globe.

Scientists believe that early life on Earth was much more primitive than what we see around us today. It probably didn't use DNA like our cells do. This theory of the origin of life is called the RNA World hypothesis, and it posits that life began using RNA both to store information, like DNA does now, and as a catalyst allowing the molecules to reproduce. To try to understand what this life might have looked like, researchers are trying to build models for early life forms and in the process, they are discovering entirely new lifelike behavior that nonetheless isn't life, at least as we know it.

As Joyce put it, "This is more of a Life 2.0 thing."

The researchers began with pairs of enzymes they've been tweaking and designing for the past eight years. Each member of the pairs can only reproduce with the help of the other member.

"We have two enzymes, a plus and a minus," Joyce explains. "The plus assembles the pieces to make the minus enzyme, and the minus enzyme assembles the pieces to draw the plus. It's kind of like biology, where there is a DNA strand with plus and minus strands."

From there, Joyce and his graduate student Tracey Lincoln, added the enzymes into a soup of building blocks, strings of nucleic bases that can be assembled into RNA, DNA or larger strings, and tweaked them to find pairs of enzymes that would reproduce. One day, some of the enzymes "went critical" and produced more RNA enzymes than the researchers had put in.

It was an important day, but Joyce and Lincoln wanted more. They wanted to create an entire population of enzymes that could replicate, compete and evolve, which is exactly what they did.

"To put it in info speak, we have a channel of 30 bit capacity for transferring information," Joyce said. "We can configure those bits in different ways and make a variety of different replicators. And then have them compete with each other."

But it wasn't just a bunch of scientist-designed enzymes competing, like a miniature molecular BattleBots sequence. As soon as the replicators got into the broth, they began to change.

"Most of the time they breed true, but sometimes there is a bit flip — a mutation — and it's a different replicator," explained Joyce.

Most of these mutations went away quickly, but — sound familiar? — some of the changes ended up being advantageous to the chemicals in replicating better. After 77 doublings of the chemicals, astounding changes had occurred in the molecular broth.

"All the original replicators went extinct and it was the new recombinants that took over," said Joyce. "There wasn't one winner. There was a whole cloud of winners, but there were three mutants that arose that pretty much dominated the population."

It turned out that while the scientist-designed enzymes were great at reproducing without competition, when you put them in the big soup mix, a new set of mutants emerged that were better at replicating within the system. It almost worked like an ecosystem, but with just straight chemistry.

"This is indeed interesting work," said Jeffrey Bada, a chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who was not involved with the work. It shows that RNA molecules "could have carried out their replication in the total absence" of the more sophisticated biological machinery that life now possesses.

"This is a nice example of the robustness of the RNA world hypothesis," he said. However, "it still leaves the problem of how RNA first came about. Some type of self-replicating molecule likely proceeded RNA and what this was is the big unknown at this point."