Excellent bit, and as always, he's got to the heart of the problem at the end.

No-one wants to pay for anything. If you tell people that you actually pay for tv shows like Game of Thrones, 50% will call you an idiot and the other 50% will actually express some kind of moral outrage (how dare you give that corporation money!)

The internet has essentially taught everyone that all digital content (movies, music, games, software, etc) should be free.

And a large part of the problem is that most content providers have failed to adapt to this. Instead of experimenting and looking for new ways to monetise their content, they have added increasingly archaic looking artificial barriers in a vain attempt to maintain their old business model. There are a few companies getting things partially right (Valve are mostly there, but could still use some work, and Apples consumers seem to consistently spend money in their app store), but most are failing miserably (especially movies and TV).

Ok guys, Genetically Modified Organism refers to both "artificial selection" and "genetic engineering". But both are not the same. Artificial selection has gone on for millennia while genetic engineering has been going on for only a few decades. Genetic engineering comes in many forms: gamma ray bombardments for chaotic mutations, splicing and dicing genes, implanting and hormonal reproduction of clones can indeed create many monsters both visible and invisible. The invisible monsters and the toxins they can create with their genes are the threat here. The manufacture of biological warfare, virus engineering and playing with the elements that make up life without understanding the consequences is the threat here. The bullying of corporations playing God and patenting their spreading genes are the threat here. Not the fact that apples or cows are bred to be bigger and juicier. Give me a fucking naive simpleton break, gawd that was disappointing.

Mmmmm, unwrap me another artificially-flavored congealed polysaccharide shit-brick honey, I can't stop eating them!

This sort of thing is just a function of knowing what components of vocal tone you can manipulate, how to manipulate them, and engaging in careful, recorded practice until you can routinely reproduce the correct mix. Some vocal strengthening also has to occur over time, much like a singer gradually extending his or her range. The average female voice is only an octave higher in pitch than the average male voice, i.e. a pitch which with practice can easily be reached and maintained by nearly all men. The bigger problem is that men's voices are far more resonant, i.e. rumbly and full, than women's voices. What a man would need to do to reproduce a "girl voice" would be to raise his pitch, and then partially pinch his upper throat and palate, while simultaneously keeping a relaxed throat through which breath can easily flow. If you just pinch the throat without raising pitch, you sound like a nasally drag queen. If you raise the pitch and overly pinch the throat, then you get an artificially thin voice. Merely raising the pitch would just sound like a guy whose voice didn't deepen terribly.

Finally, all of the above would just produce female tone. Much of what we identify as "female" about a voice, isn't tone, but cadence, word choice, and inflection.

#1 the shots are synched fine, it is just your mind manufacturing evidence.

#2 Leto (?) is using one shot and 2 cameras so that #1 is a realistic reflection.

#3 the mirror doesn't exhist and is chromakey, it is also where the 2nd camera is located.

#4 Lighting is as you would expect from any tv/movie production. Artificial lighting in these productions are horribly unrealistic with tons of hidden lightsources coming from above.

In dogs, artificial selection gave lots of variety that couldn't have existed in nature. But in humans there's no distinction between natural selection and artificial selection. We intelligently select our own mates by stringent criteria. Females favor good providers, and the cognitive traits that make a good provider changed drastically over the past 10,000 years, so you would expect the frequencies of genes affecting cognition to undergo unusually rapid change.

I think this is both right and wrong...natural selection CAN be even faster (but is not always) at forcing evolutionary change than 'breeding for traits' is, because breeders are not perfect and may allow unwanted traits or incomplete but wanted traits to continue, but nature is a horrible bitch goddess and if your traits really don't work for her, you simply die. That's certainly not always the case, but when it is nature is better at 'selecting' than humans. The rate of reproduction makes either process move faster.
It's true that humans have artificially created more breeds than nature would likely create alone, because we sometimes like traits that would hinder survival and through breeding amplify them to create a 'new breed'.
Nature forces the one's most suited for their environment to thrive, while humans often allow those less suited to live in their environment to survive for human reasons, erasing natural selection from the equation. Without our 'guiding hand' in their evolution, I think it's likely they would likely have even MORE change in some areas (and less in others) because environments are drastically different and different traits would evolve in different places, creating different 'dogs' such as wild dogs in Africa and/or dingos in Australia, which I think (but may be wrong) have evolved so separately that they can't breed with non-"wild dogs". It may lead to less variation in specific areas/populations, but more variation between those from different areas.

This is kind of an aside, but I thought dogs vary so wildly in physical characteristic and behavior (over such a small period) not because of their rate of reproduction, but because favorable traits were selected for/unfavorable traits selected against artificially, by people.

Yes, they breed faster than us which helps the process along and, yes, the desired traits will vary geographically depending on a whole host of cultural and practical concerns, but without our guiding hand there'd be little outside impetus for such seemingly drastic change at all, right?

I agree, the whole bailout thing was un-American. Thanks W for starting the processes with the airlines and Wall street. At least we got something back with the auto bailouts, but we still artificially kept the near monopoly going strong when it should have failed and split into numerous smaller companies, and paid through the nose to do it.
I also wish we still broke monopolies instead of giving them MORE artificial advantages. It is disgusting how much of our government has whored itself out to the highest bidder.

Looks like an American Woodcock (snicker).

These well-camouflaged little guys spend most of their life tentatively creeping through the underbrush, effectively off-setting the sound of their own movements by moving "in-tune" with the rhythms of the forest and appearing as leaf-litter gently swaying in the wind.

I don't know, maybe a misfiring of that instinctual behavior when confronted with our own artificial rhythms might be what we're seeing here?

@poolcleaner, maybe no-one reacted because they had experience that told them they weren't in danger? The last few earthquakes in California were pretty small (5.1, 4.4) or pretty far away (6.8 50 miles out to sea) and none of them rated above moderate on the MMI. Sorry, but if you run around yelling at people that they should panic, when the danger isn't that great, then yeah, you kinda look like a crazy person.

I certainly won't react to anything under a 5.5 these days.

As for the video, it's kinda bullshit.

It's a completely artificial scenario. If there was a real fire, people would have gotten up, at least a few would be panicking, etc.

People love this kinda thing because they can point and laugh at all the sheep who blindly follow the herd. In reality, this behaviour is an evolved response, because 9 times out of 10, it's the correct behaviour.

There's a phenomenon known as "the wisdom of crowds", where a group of people who make advocate wildly differing solutions to a problem will actually average out to the correct solution. Everyone hates this, because everyone likes to think they're smarter than average, and they want to believe that a single individual is the pinnacle of everything.

This is prevalent in our culture. Look how many stories involve "one man against the odds", etc. Reality tends not to conform to this. Even if you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, when you storm the compound, you get killed by a random guard. Most scientific discoveries are not one lone genius against the establishment, but a whole bunch of people working simultaneously toward the same goal and arriving at the same answer around the same time.

Of course this is not always true, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.

The sad fact is that a consensus among informed people generally tends toward the correct answer. It makes for a lousy story, but it's generally true.

Still, if you see flames, get the hell out of the building

I still don't really understand why some people in the deaf community are so upset about cochlear implants, claiming it is destroying the deaf community.

To me, it seems like a community of people with missing limbs saying that using artificial limbs is destroying the missing limb community.

Why do some cats not eat unless they are being pet? It leads to ridiculous scenes like this, where the cat has food, but is still desperate for its owner to feed it
..oh.. right, "sloppy artificial selection."

Yes it does, thats excactly what it does mean. Try standing on the floor spinning around, if you spin fast enough, you'll feel that your arms starts tending towards a jesus-like pose, if you were somehow artificially accellerated to spin around some point in your torso to say a million spins a second, your arms and legs would be pulled outward, and your body would be squeezed more and more and stretched more and more from the center. now You wouldnt actually become a disc, because there wouldnt be anything to stop the centrifugal force from ripping you apart, but in space that center is also the center of mass and gravity, so stuff gets pulled towards the center while the whole thing is spinning, the spinning stuff gets pulled outward from the center of the spinning direction by the spinning, but also kept in orbit because of gravity.

It makes complete sense if you sit down and think about it, there really is nowhere else to go but a disc.

Keep in mind that the movements in the blob at the beginning can be completely random, its just that by chance, there is one way, when all the vectors are added up, that the blob spins more than any other. and that eventually becomes the direction of the planets., because all the other movements cancel out.

Liked the hands the most, most lifelike artificial hands I've seen, I think.