Members Solace _

Nov 24 2010: On the other hand, did you know that the enforcement of bike helmets actually made the number of bike/car collisions rise? There's a few guesses why, but as they're guesses you can just look it up yourself. Basically, unintended consequences and all that. My brother got hit by a car twice on his bike and my sister once, but none of us fell off for no reason and hit our head. I actually flipped my bike once, but always managed to land on my side.

Oct 4 2010: I remember a few years ago there was a similar biodegradable styrofoam substitute made from seashells, which worked perfectly well for food applications.

Sep 28 2010: As amazingly complicated as a human connectome is, it's not even the biggest part of understanding our brains. To use his analogy, that a connectime is like that wall of wires between devices, and as long as it would take for you to determine the purpose of every connection, it would take longer for you to determine the exact function of every one of those connected devices. A single neuron is responsible for your recognition of any aspect of a person, for example, and neurons take on more than one job at once, too. That's not even getting into gillial cells, 10x more common and we know even less about them; it was recently discovered that gillial cells can talk to any nearby gillial cells, merge with and split from other gillial cells, crawl to a different part of the brain entirely, and talk with neurons. That's all that's currently known about them, but that's a lot of functionality they have.

Sep 21 2010: I actually don't have any problem meditating in a chaotic environment; I think people mainly have trouble reading or thinking or studying when it's not silent is because they're told they should have a problem with it. Haven't you ever worked so intently on something that you lost sense of your time and surroundings? The whole point of meditation is to find your inner calm, not bask in outer calm.

Sep 19 2010: @murray: He went on to say he didn't care about other's definitions because his definition is what mattered to him, and that we shouldn't care about his definition either, because our definition is what matters to us. ;)