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global warming deniers find comfort would be presidents dilemma



 
 
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Old January 4th 08, 03:40 AM posted to rec.pets.cats.rescue,rec.pets.cats.the.other.white.meat,rec.pets.catshealth,rec.pets.catsrec.pets.cats.rescue,alt.usenet.legends.lester-mosley
marika
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Posts: 12
Default global warming deniers find comfort would be presidents dilemma


"marika" wrote in message news:...
I guess Chrissy Hynde is saying that natural pubic hair on women should be
considered normal and OK, whereas unnatural implants, surgery, and
cosmetics in the name of beauty are the real horrors.... in a
leather-trimmed-coat kinda hypocritical way.

My biggest "HUH?" about this whole flap with Chrissy Hynde and Peta is the
anti-message the ad is
actually presenting. By showing the hair and saying "Ick...fur", they
are making a parallel that fur (which according to them is heinous) is
as horrific as pubic hair showing. So in fact, the ad is saying that
natural hair showing is really gross. So in fact they are saying the
exact opposite of what their defenders and Chrissie Hynde are saying,
which is "Show the lovely natural pubic hair ad!" Too bad they're all so
dense and stupid that they can't even see that the ad IS a REVERSE
offense to natural women. Duh.

"marika" wrote in message news:...
How come when newspapers first report this stuff, they always use words
like "amazing" and "breakthrough" and "science". Have seen it before,
lots of times- research on paralysis, diabetes, cancer- the first news
story always heralds these findings as "research/medical miracles". And
then people read it and use words like "Cool!" and "Neat" and "Wow" and
"Possible cure"..
Then as soon as PETA gets a hold of it, you suddenly start to hear words
like "cruel" and "torture" and "vivisection", and all the good
possibilities- cures and milestones- all flies out the window. And
everybody wants all the work stopped, dead in its tracks. Where did all
the "cures" and "miracles" go?

Where/When exactly is the turning point for these stories?


By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse

In what is bound to become a much debated and highly controversial

experiment,
a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and
created
videos of what the animal was seeing.

According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Yang

Dan, Garret
Stanley and Fei Li of the University of California at Berkeley have

been able
to "reconstruct natural scenes with recognizable moving objects."

The researchers attached electrodes to 177 cells in the so-called
thalamus
region of the cat's brain and monitored their activity.

The thalamus is connected directly to the cat's eyes via the optic

nerve. Each
of its cells is programmed to respond to certain features in the cat's

field of
view. Some cells "fire" when they record an edge in the cat's vision,

others
when they see lines at certain angles, etc. This way the cat's brain

acquires
the information it needs to reconstruct an image.

The scientists recorded the patterns of firing from the cells in a

computer.
They then used a technique they describe as a "linear decoding

technique" to
reconstruct an image.

To their amazement they say they saw natural scenes with recognisable

objects
such as people's faces. They had literally seen the world through
cat's

eyes.

Other scientists have hailed this as an important step in our

understanding of
how signals are represented and processed in the brain.

It is research that has enormous implications.

It could prove a breakthrough in the hoped-for ability to wire

artificial limbs
directly into the brain. More amazingly, it could lead to artificial
brain
extensions.

By understanding how information can be presented to the brain, some
day,
scientists may be able to build devices that interface directly with

the brain,
providing access to extra data storage or processing power or the

ability to
control devices just by thinking about them.

One of the scientists behind this current breakthrough, Garret
Stanley,

now
working at Harvard University, has already predicted machines with
brain
interfaces.

Such revolutionary devices should not be expected in the very near

future. They
will require decoding information from elsewhere in the brain looking
at
signals that are far more complicated than those decoded from the
cat's
thalamus but, in a way, the principle has been demonstrated.




 




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