dannym3141 said:

These tips never really sit properly with me.. I want to know why the rule is important, perhaps contrasting it with pictures that are similar but somehow fail to meet the same standard, or maybe offset the picture slightly from it's normal alignment and show that it doesn't work as well.

When it says "use natural frames like windows and doors!" and shows a few pics of windows and doors, that's not evidence of how good windows and doors are for framing pictures, it just shows that some pictures of windows and doors are nice. Diagonals create movement? Well the first pic was of a kid running, and the second one in the snow looked perfectly still to me.

I've yet to see one of these that really sells me on the idea that composition trumps subject matter.. the pictures are always of interesting things, and whilst i'm willing to believe the composition makes it interesting, it hasn't proved that to me, and i can always find or create examples that don't work within the rule.

It's interesting to me that the same people who are anti-contraceptive (and against sex-education or availability of contraceptives) are also the same people who are anti-abortion.

How do they not see the correlation between unwanted pregnancy and abortion? And yet, they don't want any more "welfare moms" either? /confused.

Ashenkase said:

I'm going to point out the inevitable error in your base argument which will nullify the remainder of your comment. I will also reveal myself as a grammar/spelling nazi by pointing out egregious errors in your poorly thought out dribble. A subsequent poster will call me out as a grammar/spelling nazi and I will re-reply with "neener neener".

newtboy said:

WTF?!? 30 min of sex "might burn off 85-150 calories!?! Not the way I do it, buddy! Try moving a little.
Peaking sexually is about how much sex you WANT, not how much you might get.
The study said men think about sex every 7 seconds ON AVERAGE, dumbass, that's different from 'every seven seconds'! That means if they think about sex 100 times in one minute, they're good for the next 12. A 'thought' doesn't take long for most of us. If you consider many teenagers spend months or even years thinking about sex, it gives them a lot of time later in life to think about other things and yet still 'think about sex every seven seconds on average'.
Can a newt get a *fail (I'm not talking to you, Sifty)

So who decided there were seven notes in an octave and why?

artician said:

I was expecting a comparative analogy more along the lines of "slowly enjoying a nice bowl of soup", versus "pulverizing a steak via tenderizer to the point of near-liquidation for 30 minutes".

Interesting. I've got a semi-relevant story, but I get long winded so feel free to skip to the next comments if you like.

My wife (Thai) and I (American) had our first daughter this year. When she first got pregnant, one of the doc's first priorities was to get us both tested for "Thalassemia", which I had never heard of before. Apparently it is a blood disorder that affects hemoglobin production and therefore red blood cells -- if both parents carry the (rather rare) recessive gene, it can be a pretty bad deal.

It turned out that my wife is in the 1% or so of Thais that carry the gene (but she doesn't express / suffer from it, it is recessive and she has the dominant gene also). I had to get tested as well, but they said it would be incredibly unlikely that I'd be positive and I wasn't. So, our daughter has a 25% chance of being a carrier like my wife but zero chance of suffering from the effects of it.

Anyway, I was curious about the disease and asked the doc why it is a big deal here (every pregnant couple MUST get screened for it here when getting hospital/prenatal care) but I'd never even heard of it in the US. It turns out that the disease / genetic mutation arose only in places with high rates of malaria. As it happens, the genetic effect on your blood cells that the mutation has makes you more resistant to malaria -- full-on exhibitors of it (two recessive genes) are far less likely to die of malaria than people that don't have the gene. That is, assuming that you don't have the extreme variants of it that make it very unlikely to survive early childhood. Basically, if you have the disease and yet are healthy enough to survive to adulthood, you're close to malaria immune (that's overstating it, but ballpark). The malaria parasite can't survive and reproduce properly on your funky Thalassemia-affected red blood cells.

I thought that was a pretty interesting evolutionary response that must have arisen from some populations being pretty much decimated by malaria back in pre-recorded history. Current carriers like my wife are probably the descendants of lucky folks that survived a deadly outbreak in history by virtue of having a disease/mutation that is, under normal circumstances, slightly or even extremely bad in species survival / reproductive fitness terms. I thought that was kinda cool -- but I'm glad that neither my wife nor my daughter are/can be full-on expressors of the gene.