Daimonie's Blog

A nice anti-gmo study was posted on IFLS. Let's take a look! "We have found that gmo-fed humans have a mass of 48-114 kg, whereas  non-gmo fed humans have a mass of 38.4 - 84kg.  Therefore, it has been shown that non-gmo fed humans have less mass." Rebuke: A long term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined genetically modified (GM) soy and GM maize diet. Well, let's take a look at the abstract. A significant number of genetically modified crops have been approved to enter human food and animal feed since 1996, including crops containing several GM genes `stacked'into the one plant. We randomised and fed isowean pigs (N=168) either in a mixed GM soy and GM corn (maize) diet (N=84) or an equivalent non-GM diet (N=84) in a long-term toxicology study of 22.7 weeks (the normal lifespan of a commercial pig from weaning to slaughter). Equal numbers of male and female pigs were present in each group. The GM corn contained double and triple-stacked varieties. Fe

An anti-GMO article was posted on IFLS; Let's respond. The 8 shocking reasons are false. Let me show you. Response: [8 Shocking reasons GMO's are bad for you]. 1. Health consequences are largely unknown. [health consequence of gmo] on scholar.google gives a great many results. This article seems rather nice: http://rameznaam.com/2013/04/28/the-evidence-on-gmo-safety/ 2. GMOs are unlabeled in America. And the european union has banned gmos! That's good to know, as I live there and didn't know that. Indeed, the EU doesn't  know it either; http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/biotechnology/index_en.htm . On a sidenote, they aren't labelled in our shops either. 3. Genetic modification reduces genetic diversity. That's not even true; we introduce a variation artificially, but they still vary. Indeed, the aim of GMO's is often to increase the robustness of the crop to many kinds of things, including those noted in this reason. I'm not sure how

I haven't checked for a while, so I was rather surprised when I looked at the views - almost 1400 now. I wanted to thank everyone reading and sharing these posts - they're written with the goal to look at things, to elaborate and illuminate; contributors to that should be thanked. And really, don't be shy to point out mistakes in this - I am not an expert in these topics, nor am I an accomplished writer. Response to [...] measles vaccine: fourteen things to consider. So, holiday season. I have a lot of time on my hands and there's another one of these vaccine posts. Time to look at one: m Measles and measles vaccines: fourteen things to consider. ~by Roman Bystrianyk (co-author Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History) [vaccinecouncil.org,  http://goo.gl/RTFi5E ]  The measles. Let us consider what we know about it. To be honest, I really don't know much about it - so let's turn to wikipedia: Four day fevers Coughs Hea

It's time for a longer response, yet again.  This article  has popped up a few times on IFLS. It's starts out with this: In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer. Alarm bells are already ringing - as they always do when something shocks the "archaeological and scientific community". A quick search tells us that stone tools were used starting about 2.6 million years ago .   A team of archaeologists analysed and dated it. The rock encasing the hammer was dated to more than 400 million years old. The hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old. Additionally, a section of the wooden h

Update:  I originally wrote this script after learning that a lot of undergraduate students - as I was, at the time - thought that, because over the three years the B.Sc. lasts - they had always neglected air resistance, so it must be negligible, right? Of course it wasn't - it just indicated a model that was more difficult to solve. This is a simulation of a very simple air resistance on a sphere; you see how much the trajectories are *not* parabolas. These are simply the calculated trajectories when you include simple air resistance. The simple air resistance is just 1/2 rho v^2 A c_d. Everything in there is estimated, with the exception of the velocity v, which is calculated. You can also see why, at one point, projectile trajectories were thought to be triangular. In common day terms, it was thought that the energy given made an artificial movement, after which the energy would slowly be used, then the natural movement would kick in and it'd fall straight down. Yes,

I've taken the liberty of writing a WOT about this video. You may have shared this because you believed in this. Or because you found it amusing. It doesn't matter. This video has been shared a great many times, and apparently people think that's a good thing. So enjoy. ------ Let's listen for a bit. So he has some anecdote with an arrogant atheist. I disagree, it doesn't take much faith to believe in a magical unicorn that created everything. (I) Let's start with his first straw man ; it's the claim that the theory of evolution (henceforth, TOE) doesn't fit the "parameters of parentheses of science" because it "has not been observed". The scientific method wants a hypothesis that is then evaluated with a number of secondary hypotheses; if the experiment is positive, then it is likely the hypothesis, and possibly the underlying explanation, is true. If not, then the intersection of the hypothesis and the secondary