I see later in the thread that someone beat me to it, with the guy’s name, which I remembered on seeing the link. Never mind… 
However, most of the time an appendix does no harm. Also, if you think about it, a slightly thinner appendix, on its way to becoming non-existant, would actually be more likely to get infected as its smaller diameter would be easier to block when inflamed. There is a theory that an appendix actually has a purpose as a place for the beneficial gut bacteria to hide out in so they can repopulate the guts if their kind gets killed off by some other infection.
Regarding menopause, it has also been theorized that continuing to live for several years after giving birth to one’s last offspring vastly increases the possibility that this child will survive to reproduce. In addition, the presence of at least some older women will enhance the ability of all the tribe’s offspring to survive to reproductive age. Human children are unique in requiring such a long time to be able to survive on their own.
I don’t know of any formal collaboration before 12-07-41, but whatever sympathies the US had lay with the Chinese. The US had had an interest in China dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century, and there was a faction of “China Hands” that abhorred the Japanese invasion. The famous “Flying Tigers” were American volunteers who fought in China against the Japanese well before Pearl Harbor. And to the extent that Japan’s strategic and material overreach in China led them to seek to secure their oil and rubber supplies by moving against SE Asia, the campaign in China can be said to have led to the attack against the US.
They did collaborate. Joseph Stilwell was the commander of American forces in China (he was later replaced by Albert Wedemeyer). Stilwell and Wedemeyer were also the Chiefs of Staff of the Chinese Nationalist Army.
There had been some discussions of using China as a “front” against Japan with American troops but it was decided this wasn’t realistic. China already had plenty of manpower for ground units. And Japan occupied coastal China which meant AMerican units could not be transported directly to China. For these reasons, the main American presense in China were air units and advisors.
The main air units based in China were the 10th Air Force under Lewis Brereton, the 14th Air Force under Claire Chennault, and the 20th Bomber Command under our own Curtis LeMay.
The main ground force was Alpha Force, which had thirty-six divisions. Most of the troops were Chinese but the officers were a mix of Chinese and Americans.
At the end of the war 46,000 Marines were transferred to China as occupation troops in territory that Japan had controlled.
Because parts of the ship itself are not in your way. From any position on the deck of the ship, your view is obscured. From the crow’s nest, it’s not.
This reminds me of something a professor of mine did when I was studying in France. Our class was all either Europeans/Ameriacans and Asians. The teacher asked us to write the word we thought of when we heard the term “World War II.” Every single westerner wrote Germany, and every Asian wrote Japan. Japan hadn’t even crossed my mind when the question was asked.
I thought it was a pretty interesting display of differing perspective.
without weighing in on whether an appendix is useful or not, it may have once been a useful adaptation at a time when human or pre-human diets and feeding behavior was much different. evolution is a slow process, and even if the appendix is useless for modern humans, it may take much more time for a genetic change which removes or alters it. and of course, even if useless now, it may yet become useful again in the future. your point about a narrower aperture is an excellent argument for why simple variation would maintain the appendix ‘gene’.
i’m not sure that humans evolved to have modern lifespans. modern lifespans may be entirely an indirect result of brain and hand evolution that allows us to alter our environment, eliminating predators and disease, providing a steady food supply, and making rational choices that override instincts for example. animals that we keep in captivity (or as pets, my dog is not a captive) exhibit greatly lengthened lifespans as well. so menopause may have occurred infrequently enough during the evolutionary process that it was not a factor. menopause may also have been a way to minimize harmful mutations. also, with any trait, there may indirect effects we don;t know about yet. the genes that result in menopause may somehow protect women from disease, or allow them to be more fertile.
Arguably it was long life spans that led to intelligence rather than intelligence leading to long life spans. The evidence is the billion heart beat rule - virtually all mammals have a natural life span that’s pretty much equal to one billion heart beats. The biggest exception is human beings - our natural life span is over two billion heart beats.
Now it might be possible that this extended life span was an evolved byproduct of intelligence. Except that the second biggest exception to the billion heart beat rule are chimpanzees and gorillas - their life spans are about one and a half billion heart beats. Obviously this extension was not the result of intelligence. So the theory is that at some point in our evolutionary past, primates got a random mutation that greatly extended their natural life span - and out ancestors got an extra helping on top of that. Instead of dying of old age around 35, we potentially could live until 70.
And these extra years of life supposedly led to the evolution of intelligence. Maybe intelligence was a more useful survival trait if it had more experience to work with.
That Galilei would have dropped lead and wooden balls of same weight to come to the conclusion that gravity affects everything equivally. Besides getting in jail when the first guy gets his skull cracked, he couldn’t have reached that conclusion. Lead balls in the atmosphere fall faster.
The version I heard was that he dropped lead and wooden (or leather) balls of the same size, as inthis illustration, not the same weight. Since the intuitive assumption is that heavy objects fall faster, dropping objects of the same weight would seem to be pointless. It’s not an experiment that anybody would actually do because everybody would intuitively guess that the objects would fall at the same rate. It would falsify nothing.
Of course if you drop wooden and leaden balls of the same size then they will indeed fall at the same rate, having the same air resistance.
More importantly, if you dropped a lead and wood ball of the same weight they would fall at the same rate, at least as far as the time keeping methods of 1600 were concerned. Both materials are sufficiently dense and the sphere is sufficiently aerodynamic that you would need modern technology to discern any difference in the rate at which they fall.
Whatever. The point is that the experiment is a myth, probably arising from the fact that Galileo came from, and spent much of his career, in Pisa, and the one thing everybody knows about Pisa is that it has a leaning tower, ideal for dropping things off. However, nowhere in Galileo’s published writings does he mention such an experiment, and we can be fairly confident that, given the technical limitations of the era (such as a lack of stopwatches and high-speed photography to record exactly when the balls hit the ground), if he did attempt it, it would have proved nothing.
In fact, he argues that rate of fall is independent of weight not on the basis of an actual experiment, but on the basis of a thought experiment involving two falling objects of different weights tied together. He shows that, in this situation, the theory that rate of fall depends on weight leads to the contradictory prediction that the assemblage should fall both faster and slower than the heavier object would by itself.
Galileo did carry out experiments of rate of fall, but he did it by rolling balls down inclined planes, not by dropping them off towers. This provided much more controllable conditions, and slowed down the descent enough for him to be able to time with sufficient accuracy, it using a type of water clock that he devised. (But he did these experiments in Padua, not Pisa.)
Not true. They have the same air resistance but the air resistance has a greater effect on the less dense object. Replace the wooden ball with a balloon of the same diameter and I think you will understand.
Because the Earth is curved.
When a ship approaches, you can see the sails over the horizon before the hull, so clearly someone up on top of the mast could see you before someone on the deck.
There’s no reason that an animal that scientists call apatosaurus can’t also have the common name brontosaurus. The only real error was the belief that they were two separate species.
this turns into one of those chicken and egg questions (yes, i know there were eggs before chickens). i find the billion heartbeat thing to be in the category of ‘pop-sci’. there is no clear connection between intelligence, heartbeat count, and lifespan. and even if there is, nothing to say which led to the other. my dog is more intelligent than a lot of people i know, but he isn’t likely to live past 15 years, and much less than that if he lived in the wild. that doesn’t sound scientific, so i’ll rephrase it to say my dog is much more intelligent than many longer living species. and who says chimps and gorillas aren’t intelligent? they make many decisions that affect their environment, not acting merely on instinct.
another counter to this is modern life. people who reproduce less are considered more intelligent by some who place high value on experience.
also, since most human reproduction occurs at an age well below actual and theoretical lifespans, the age and experience effect on survivability would have to outweigh the more basic factor of volume. dawkins found the concept of altruism faulty (i’m not saying this case is about altruism), with one reason being the competition among genes occurring at a much lower level. for instance. genetic protection from disease would seem to be a much greater factor than good parenting.
finally, i doubt you believe that a lack of menopause would have made people less intelligent, decrease their lifespans, or decrease the survivability rate. there is some current evidence that menopause decreases the lifespan of women.
of course, all of these arguments highlight the complexity issue. individual advantageous characteristics don’t survive unless their integration with all other characteristics results in a survivability advantage.
excellent discussion though. i don’t intend to sound argumentative, all of your points may be just as valid, or more so, than mine.
(7) BullS*&^ - anything taught by Kansas schools as science.
Indeed. If I were to talk about my pet dog, nobody would correct me and say that I meant my pet Canis lupus familiaris. Just as “dog” is the common name for Canis lupus familiaris, so “brontosaurus” is the common name for apatosaurus.
(and amusingly, Firefox’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize “apatosaurus”, and suggests “brontosaurus” as one of the corrections)
As Baracus has noted, this is incorrect. At the same airspeed, the two will experience the same drag force; since F = m*a, that force will yield a greater deceleration on the less massive object. The lead ball thus reaches the ground sooner.
If they are dropped together, the human eye (possibly assisted by the ear) is all the technology necessary to tell which reached the ground first.
The problem is rather that you U.S. Americans have appropiated the term “America” for your country’s name.
It was (and, to me and to most Latin Americans, still is) the name of the continent, not the name of a country. And, since Cuba and Hispaniola are considered to be a part of that continent, he did “discover” America.
No problem, America is just a shortening of United States of America. And if we want to talk about the continent we can talk about North America and South America. And maybe on some occasions Central America.