Posts by Bart Janssen
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Thanks Russell that was great.
I just love the disconnect between the bright cheerful music and voice and the really quite intense emotion and content underneath.
To then use it to highlight the evil bastards that spend their time spreading hate against TBGLs or GTBLs or LGTBs or whatever that is ... while Stevie may not have done the best version, the idea of adapting the song was brilliant.
I can't wait to see what creative kiwis do with this.
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Catholic friends (more accurately: friends who were raised Catholic) all have that 'don't ask, don't tell' thing going on with regard to stuff they know they're not meant to be doing.
Isn't that the whole point of catholicism, lots and lots and lots of rules so you can pretty much get excited about doing anything, because ya know it's naughty.
And then this cool reset button so you're all good again and can get another boner from doing something naughty again.
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26 years is not long in science
mmm yes and no.
Yes there are times when it takes a long time to see or understand that a dogma is wrong. And yes there are some things that only reveal themselves over generational timescales.
But also no - 26 years is an eternity in some ways as well. Given the level of scrutiny given to GE it is very difficult to believe that any of the concerns raised initially are real. During those 26 years we developed PCR and sequenced genomes and discovered epigenetics and ...
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expand upon the reasons for your womanly alienation?
Are you suggesting women are not alien?
but that (at that point) the all-male commenters did get it
I find relaxing (disconnecting) the cortex helps when reading Dr David. There is a kind of state you enter where it all seems so real and it all makes sense.
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a transparent one laid on the harbour bed
Jumps up and down shouting "see, see"
I told you it was a winning idea!
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I just loved the line from Reverend Garvey
that reading the report's "presentation of the history of our institutions, it is hard to avoid feeling shame"
Of course he managed to avoid feeling shame because he's just that kind of man, right?
Sometimes you just despair and lose all hope that there are any civilised people :(.
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Vitamin tablets = expensive urine
However I find the fluorescent yellow entertaining especially when hung over.
You could just eat fruit and veges but you'd miss out on the opportunity to support our local economy, in particular help pay for your pharmacists new car which they bought from a struggling car dealer so it's got to be the right thing to do.
And besides fruit and veges just don't make your urine glow quite the same way as those pills do.
Trust the marketing guys they know what's good for you
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Islander
epigenetics is highly controversial, unproven - indeed contested -work. It is not yet scientifically proven.
Epigenetics is proven. I'm not sure what part of it you have a problem with.
What has been shown multiple times in multiple labs is that information that is not in the DNA sequences present in the chromosomes can be transmitted to the progeny.
It isn't controversial. It was surprising at first but really it was mostly in the sense of "well doh!" why didn't we think of that before.
The short description of the most common form (that we know of yet) is that DNA becomes modified chemically (methylated) and that modification causes a change in the expression of one or more genes (usually turns them off). Because that change doesn't affect the DNA sequence it is called epi-genetic or outside the gene .
What was surprising and was hard to prove was that such changes could be transferred to progeny.
Now we know it's possible, there are several ways to change gene expression that are epi-genetic, some of which are inherited.
Heres two links to reviews, it is really cool science but a bit hard going
from a medical journal
and Science Daily -
Sorry long post back to the threadjack.
Hi DyanMy apologies for misunderstanding you. I’m afraid I’m still a bit confused about what you are saying. It was not my intention to misquote you I genuinely am not sure what you are trying to say.
I am very much in support of use of GM technology in medicine and the pursuit of GM science. What I object to is the lack of independent scientific research in GM. Companies like Monsanto using the word "science" when they really mean "technology" or "industry".
I’m not sure what lack you are referring to. There is a huge amount of research (which we believe is science) around all aspects of GM. How to do it, how to do it differently, how to do things people haven’t done before, what the effects are on: existing crops; existing environments; previously present ecologies. You seem to have read some sources so I’m not sure how you could have missed the scale of the research that is going on. You may be implying that it is not independent of companies but that just is not true.
Yes there is a shit load of “development” of products but there is also a lot of pure science as well.
and the message from every discipline [snip] the message is "caution."
Um yes but the other half of the message is very clear as well. Thus far none of those disciplines has come up with anything they can demonstrate as being dangerous about GE. The people are all smart enough to know that unexpected things happen and hence they all want testing and monitoring. But people in all those fields all say there is nothing inherently unsafe about GE (as far as we know now – what we don’t know is of course unknown).
Regarding your quote from the meeting. There is lots on that to talk about but I’ll just make two comments.
Re: science for profit.
Over the last two decades in NZ (and many other places) there has become an established dogma that science can me “managed” to produce wealth (profit). This despite all evidence from the history of science that it is NOT possible to manage science to produce wealth. Personally I believe it is a pile of bullshit designed to allow MBAs to steal science funding so they can sit in meetings.
Science does produce wealth for countries/businesses etc but only when the science is directed by quality and not by managers.
Over the last two decades in NZ there is no evidence that “managing” science has improved the wealth of NZ but it has reduced the amount of science being done. Which should piss of every taxpayer.
I will happily spend hours discussing this but unless one can change the current administration of science it is a fruitless argument and my time is better spent doing the bench work.Re: world hunger is clearly a problem of distribution not production.
This is only true in the sense of maths. It is clearly not possible to change the behaviour of people to alter the unequal distribution of food. That has been tried for decades and has failed.
Hence my personal opinion is that we may as well try changing production efficiency – which we can do using a range of technologies of which one of the most important is GE, in my opinion.
By all means continue to try and resolve distribution issues but please don’t try and stop me trying to address the production side of the equation.We don't know what effect GM will have in generations to come …. GM has not been around long enough for us to predict the effects, much less assess them.
The above is true to a degree (see below) but it is still not a reason to stop using GE technology. It is only a reason to test and then monitor, nobody I know in science has any objection to testing and monitoring. Our objection is when the testing and monitoring is so ridiculously extreme that it becomes impossible to do the work.
However I would point out that GE has been around since 1983, I was personally making transgenic plants 20 years ago! And GE crops have been on sale since the early 1990s. How long do you want? And I would point out that we have pretty thoroughly assessed existing crops for everything we can think of, but not of course for things of which we cannot yet imagine.
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advancing it in the face of cultural prejudices
And here you say this like it's a bad thing?
Seriously do you expect the argument that "because other nations allow prejudices to define their laws then so should we" to be compelling?
The key to changing the law is to allow all groups of society the same feedom. In crude terms where someone wants to put the sexual organs should not grant or deny them any rights and that's what the current situation does.
Changing it does not reduce your rights.
BTW NZ was progressive enough to allow wimin to vote when many societies/culture argued vehemently that they simply had neither the capacity nor god given right. They were wrong in that.