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  1. nomadthethird

    AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

    Not even worth it... No, it doesn't render the story problematic in the least. Number one rule of biology: biodiversity exists. As others have pointed out, people have different immune systems and different genetically-based abilities when it comes to fighting off HIV/AIDS. In fact, there...
  2. nomadthethird

    AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

    Apparently Americans aren't the only ones who fall prey to this nonsense. Haha. Yes, who on earth really believes in mathematical models, rather than honest-to-goodness UNIVERSAL AIDS BLOOD TESTING? That would be absurd, even though we use the same ones to estimate TB infections, malaria, etc...
  3. nomadthethird

    AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

    What is it with you and getting fixated on the words of one person (which you misinterpret and misrepresent) and taking those as "proof" of something you only believe for emotional reasons and can't support? Dr. Montainger is by far NOT the most renowned AIDS researcher in the world. David Ho...
  4. nomadthethird

    AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

    Exactly. Protease inhibitors basically inhibit the cellular production of protease, which is an enzyme that catalyzes the degredation of proteins in the proteasome (after they've been targeted by ubiquitin). This is of course a post-transcriptional and post-translational process-- if you can...
  5. nomadthethird

    AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

    What's funny to me about the anti-medicine folks is that they imagine medical doctors are these evil minions of big pharma who are part of a conspiracy bent on convincing people that homeopathy doesn't work and that it should be ignored--because, of course, they're afraid that people will...
  6. nomadthethird

    AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

    All kinds of RNA viruses do this same thing, it's not uncommon or miraculous... what's really amazing about HIV is how in each host it infects it mutates into several different strains (it's "plastic"). This is why a vaccine is exceedingly unlikely, because even if a vaccine was developed for...
  7. nomadthethird

    AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

    Oh wow. Dissensus has some ridiculous threads but this one should win an award. "Best Well-Meaning but Alarmingly Ignorant Conspiracy Theory On the Net" I don't know where to start... with the nonsense about a "single pathogen theory" (whatever that is supposed to mean with regard to a...
  8. nomadthethird

    Holding everything together in your head

    Wrong on most counts... There's some evidence that insomnia in childhood is an early marker of mental illness and a good predictor of mental illness later in life. It's abundantly clear that anxiety disorders and depressive disorders have a high rate of co-morbidity. But the sampling error here...
  9. nomadthethird

    Holding everything together in your head

    I don't know... If you substitute the word "psychotic break" in there for "nervous breakdown" or "manic episode", I would say you have a point. If someone has a psychotic break in public or around friends, that person will likely never be seen the same way again, and possibly with good reason...
  10. nomadthethird

    Anti-Capitalist Fake-ism

    O lord... My sides hurt. This right here...exactly. I've enjoyed the k-punk blog and in general I've always figured it's a good read. But I also find that I very rarely agree with what the guy's saying if I let myself think through the rhetoric. The best/most engaging writers aren't...
  11. nomadthethird

    Swiss new minaret ban

    Islam is the new punk, everyone knows it, this just confirms what we already knew. Gotta love how bans always reinforce and amplify whatever it is they pretend they want to stamp out. Makes Islamic aesthetics just that much cooler. Within 10-15 years every middle class white kid in America...
  12. nomadthethird

    Swiss new minaret ban

    Snort.
  13. nomadthethird

    Continental Philosophy PhD Topic plz

    Oh, that's an easy one. I'd rather shoot myself in the face right now than do a PhD in Continental Philosophy.
  14. nomadthethird

    "NME Top 50 Albums of the Noughties" or "black music scares us"

    Out of that entire list the only ones I'd be caught dead listening to are the Blueprint, BitC, and Arular. And I don't even like M.I.A.
  15. nomadthethird

    Obama health reform

    It was so strange to watch this whole scandal go down... my brother actually worked for Dede Scozzafava, the female representative who was supposed to run on the repug ticket instead of Doug Hoffman, but whom the party ran out on a rail because she's basically an evil socialist liberal who...
  16. nomadthethird

    Obama health reform

    You know what? As pissed as I am that it couldn't get through with the abortion coverage on deck, I think this won't affect practice as much as some people think it will. (I'd have to read the bill more in depth to be sure, but...) The legal sitch was similar in the 1950s too before Roe v...
  17. nomadthethird

    Non-Prescription Drugs

    The awesome thing about those days was that there was still no stupid moralistic prohibition against being on a drug for life. So once you got on morphine or laudanum or whatever, you just did it till you died. No biggie. Nobody cared. Now we have to spend all this time and money and energy...
  18. nomadthethird

    Technological Singularity

    Oh yes there are some amazingly simple and elegant neurotransmitters, including all kinds of ions. Ca 2+ is a fav of mine. Are you saying here that the quantum tendencies of a system cohere longer in a more complex system? Or can't this be expressed this way?
  19. nomadthethird

    Technological Singularity

    Ahhhhh...now a couple of things from the debate make more sense. I don't know, I think I'm with the "Yes" team on this. There are plenty of things that we just can't explain yet with reference to classical explanations (biomechanical ones), viz., for example, how spindle fibers/microtubules...
  20. nomadthethird

    Technological Singularity

    Ok, I just waded through that, and that's not actually what they're discussing. They're discussing whether the effects of quantum physics are trivial in biological systems, which is a different claim. Quantum biology would be a superimposition of principles from quantum physics over biological...
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