As I’ve noted before, I think one of em’s a ginger as well.

Can’t be having this. Where’s the pitchforks and the outrage bus?

:lol:

The borderline ginger garfield lookalike would be punched first.

an ex of mine was called “Fuchsia”…….she always wore a lot of flowery orange dresses so we used to say “the Fuchsia’s bright, the Fuchsia’s orange”.

Having said that a mate of mine named his baby Algernon….proper name that.

Montgomery….there’s another proper name….might call my son that although I would be highly tempted to name my daughter Lyra after the Northern Lights character – childhood book that I read dozens of times and all that.

We’re not talking aobut ‘science’. We’re talking about ethics. Which comes down to your own particular point of view.

Any ethical stance should be answerable to the question, why? If you can’t link your ethical stance in with a scientific rationale then to me, it’s utterly devoid of any legitimacy.

There are a few lines where abortion can be drawn with a scientific basis –

1) Before the fetus can feel pain

2) or before it is a person in terms of it’s self-awareness which actually put’s the age at about 1 years old (I seem to remember).

We can cross the second one out because just about any form of euthanasia has the ability to cause pain – and we can also cross it out from a utilitarian + possibly a public health perspective (mental health and happiness of society….unforeseen consequences to people’s psyche living in a society that euthanizes babies….it’s a lot easier for medics to stomach abortions without suffering from dehumanization than it is with euthanasia…..the throwaway attitude it would foster towards children as being sub-human….. etc etc etc…there’s probably all sorts of public health issues you could use to argue against it)

On the other hand the idea that a foetus at the age of conception has as much right to life as a human has no basis in science what so ever. Can it feel pain? No. Can it think? No. It’s only a POTENTIAL human – much like my sperm is a potential human. So am I committing mass genocide by **** into a sock?

The idea that life is somehow special at the age of conception has no basis in the material world, it’s purely a stance grounded in ‘belief’. Which has no place in the 21st century – when someone makes a claim they need to back it up with supporting evidence, even religion.

A class mate of mine was shot by his dog in the same way. Put loaded cocked shotgun against fence while he climbed over, and his dog knocked it whilst following and it went off. It was point blank, and shattered his tib and fib. Bad practice yes, but he would have been about 16 at the time and we’ve all gotten away with things which in hindsight were bloody stupid.

Has no one heard of a gun sling….ffs lol

Eugenics is already happening; advances in medical science mean that people can be informed about possible disabilities their unborn child may have, and make decisions about it’s survival at that early stage. It would be interesting to see figures of how many foetuses with say Downs Syndrom are aborted/the number of children born with Downs, and compare it with data from 20 years ago.

Would a family with limited economic means be doing the right thing to abort such a foetus? Seeing as how that child’s birth and subsequent need for care would undoubtedly place a much greater strain on their own and society’s resources?

*For the record I’m not advocating any particular course of action or viewpoint, merely putting the subject up for discussion.

There’s a huge moral difference between abortion and killing someone with the capacity to think – even if that capacity is limited.

This is entirely dependent on your own cultural/religious/ethical stance though. Many feel that abortion is as fundamentally wrong as ‘euthanising’ an independently living person.

And that would be a scientifically unsound stance to have.

Totally fair point. It’s not all cycling at all ….. It’s a totally different discipline involving shaving ones legs!

Banish yourself to a roadie site!

+1 the bunch of dirty infidels

52 mph and somehow kind of high sided into a hedge.

The new Apple Earpods are superb. I’ve tested them against some £200-£300 headphones in a couple of places and I think they’re better then pretty much anything I’ve ever put into my ears.

Most reviewers seem to think that’s a total exaggeration – guess I’ll have to try a pair.

There’s other drugs available eg Primaquine but I don’t know whether this is licensed for general use in the UK and can only be offered if you’ve run out of all other options (which you seem to have done) but I can’t be to sure as I can’t find the UK guidelines on the drug, just crap wiki articles. I’ll have a deeper look for you when I have time – up to my eyeballs in work atm.

There are other drugs in the pipeline as well – it might be other getting in contact with someone from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

This isn’t really something for forums, this is something you should be approaching a consultant with – check this out. http://www.uclh.nhs.uk/ourservices/servicea-z/htd/Pages/Home.aspx

Although I guess, look at those Fiio’s the output impedance is stupidly low anyway. I guess I might give on a put, quite interested in the DAC/Amp models actually.

Because I’m not an electrical engineer or physicist I’ll quote wiki hahah.

In order to ensure an even frequency response, adequate damping factor, and undistorted sound, an amplifier should have an output impedance less than 1/8 that of the headphones it is driving (and ideally as low as possible).[6] If output impedance is large compared to the impedance of the headphones, significantly higher distortion will be present.[7] Therefore, lower impedance headphones will tend to be louder and more efficient, but will also demand a more capable amplifier. Higher impedance headphones will be more tolerant of amplifier limitations, but will produce less volume for a given output level.

I seem to remember from my infectious disease module that loss of appetite is associated with malaria flare ups.

If your not bothering to go to the doctors it’s probably best if you start reading some detailed sources about the disease.

Malaria is not to be **** around with though, you should really check yourself in – as there are drugs to treat certain types of recurring malaria.

LOL

Well, if they have to high an output impedance they are going to cause hiss and distortion in low impedance headphones.

(I suggest crushing up contraceptive pills and putting them in her food by the way, if her mother doesn’t have that one under control already.)

I’m pretty sure this is illegal and would see you land a custodial sentence if found out.

All she need’s is to have a piss test for whatever reason and the indicators that she is on the pill could be thrown up. Doctor – “Are you on the pill – our results have some odd readings – why isn’t this in your records?”

Idiots.

My money’s on Carlos Checa

LOL the Ducati’s got owned.

Basically the 1098 was probably the better chassis and currently anything Ducati produce’s is a load of shite.

I’m sincerely looking forward to watching the idiots get it handed to them by Aprillia and BMW.

Was going to get some to drive my Audio Technica M50’s but was told by my local hifi specialist that they are utterly pointless for low impedance headphones and will often actually degrade the sound.

Bionic noise cancellation chip that is surgically attached into your nervous system so that you can selectively mute obnoxious people.

On mars.

not done homework

Please don’t tell me you’re sending your child to a head quack for not doing her homework?

To put your problems in perspective – My brother has gotten away with 5 counts of ABH, arson, theft, drugs charges, fraud and he somehow got away with a borderline firearms offense.

At school both of us were badly behaved, I never did my homework – I was continuously in detention for things like hacking the school computer system and releasing the master password to all my classmates – I once chucked a firework into band practice – I used a science lab alcohol burner as a petrol bomb – me and a few friends set fire to gas taps and also went awol on a trip to Italy. My brother always back chatted teachers (I was the quiet one that got into trouble less but into bigger trouble for stupider things).

I’ve got a decent university education and my brother is a chef in a top top flight restaurant, he’s married and he’ll be a head chef before he’s 28 easily.

necrophilia and bestiality in one day – tick
/bucket list

Just snorted loads of lucozade over my laptop in the Uni Library.

Thanks for making me look like an idiot in front of an attractive blonde.

It’s one of the local birds from Blackbird Leys.

blind tests only begin to work if you using more than 50-60 participants – and even then they are still open to bias.

You can’t conclude anything from a blind experiment with one guy taking part.

Any BF3 addicts here? I feel like finding some people to co operate with and troll public servers.

This video always puts a smile on my face, especially from 4 mins onwards.

Outdated geometry, my old mans Nomad feels to high and short (despite being the same size as my Mega)

Have a look at a Spesh Enduro Carbon or Lapierre Spicy Carbon.

The positive aspect of the Nomad though is that the Aluminum version really does give a lot of trail feel, definitely a bit more than my Mega.

Buy a land shark (German shephard) or a Newfie/Saint Bernard if you have a family….put it’s kennel next to your bikes.

If you get targeted for another break in, the police will be able to trace them through testing their blood and bodily fluids that will invariably be strewn all over your house if they aren’t armed and come face to face with your new loveable doggy.

Session about once every 4 to 8 weeks.
Mostly a bottle of wine or a few beers spread out over the week.

Well, the more you drink the more likely you are to develop alcohol withdrawal. Just because your not drinking at alcoholic levels, doesn’t mean to say you won’t develop it. It’s just less likely.

Try and keep a diary on how many units you are drinking and then either get back to me or look up the long term affects of your drinking level yourself.

I’d bet a 10er your suffering withdrawal IMHO.

How often do you drink? Sounds like alcohol withdrawal tbh – right time frame.

True, deluded (!), and anecdotally I’ve been told by an extremely experienced criminal trial lawyer that he thinks women on juries are particularly unlikely to find a defendant guilty of adult sexual assault charges because they want to distance themselves from identifying with the victim/complainant.

Sounds like a good one to mail into CIF at the Guardian for a bit of national broadsheet trolling.

You could always move to a communist country because don’t forget there can only be two ways.

Team Twitter vs Team Dictatorship.

Buy your iphone or learn to march. It’s them or us.

American? Or satire?

To which I really don’t care He can do what he wants, and I will do what I want, and most importantly it’s got nothing to do with anybody else.

It’s got plenty do with everyone else – greed, wealth inequality and consumption affects us all.

You see unlike what Thatcher would have you believe that isn’t the case, we live in a society. We have laws and you cannot just do as you want – society if it deems fit has the ability to take your wealth off you. You have to be able to get on with other people and live with them side by side, you can’t expect utter adherence to privacy and individualism.

Hopefully the majority will one day wake up to realize the extent to which they are being ****.

Here’s a nice article from The American Conservative that should hopefully make you think.

I think this applies to you in particular, with your disregard for having to co-operate with you fellow man.

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless.

This bit was also good.

That wealth-worship—and a consequent special status for the wealthy as a kind of clerisy—should have arisen in the United States is hardly surprising, given the peculiar sort of Protestantism that was planted here from the British Isles. Starting with the Puritanism of New England, there has been a long and intimate connection between the sanctification of wealth and America’s economic and social relationships. The rich are a class apart because they are the elect.

Most present-day Americans, if they think about the historical roots of our wealth-worship at all, will say something about free markets, rugged individualism, and the Horatio Alger myth—all in a purely secular context. But perhaps the most notable 19th-century exponent of wealth as virtue and poverty as the mark of Cain was Russell Herman Conwell, a canny Baptist minister, founder of perhaps the first tabernacle large enough that it could later be called a megachurch, and author of the immensely famous “Acres of Diamonds” speech of 1890 that would make him a rich man. This is what he said:

I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich. … The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly … ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. … I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins … is to do wrong … let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.

Evidently Conwell was made of sterner stuff than the sob-sister moralizing in the Sermon on the Mount. Somewhat discordantly, though, Conwell had been drummed out of the military during the Civil War for deserting his post. For Conwell, as for the modern tax-avoiding expat billionaire, the dollar sign tends to trump Old Glory.

The conjoining of wealth, Christian morality, and the American way of life reached an apotheosis in Bruce Barton’s 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows. The son of a Congregationalist minister, Barton, who was an advertising executive, depicted Jesus as a successful salesman, publicist, and the very role model of the modern businessman.

But this peculiarly American creed took a severe hit after the crash of 1929, and wealth ceased to be equated with godliness. While the number of Wall Street suicides has been exaggerated in national memory, Jesse Livermore, perhaps the most famous of the Wall Street speculators, shot himself, and so did several others of his profession. There was then still a lingering old-fashioned sense of shame now generally absent from the über-rich. While many of the elites hated Franklin Roosevelt—consider the famous New Yorker cartoon wherein the rich socialite tells her companions, “Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt”—most had the wit to make a calculated bet that they would have to give a little of their wealth, power, and prestige to retain the rest, particularly with the collapsing parliamentary systems of contemporary Europe in mind. Even a bootlegging brigand like Joe Kennedy Sr. reconciled himself to the New Deal.

and

The objective of the predatory super-rich and their political handmaidens is to discredit and destroy the traditional nation state and auction its resources to themselves. Those super-rich, in turn, aim to create a “tollbooth” economy, whereby more and more of our highways, bridges, libraries, parks, and beaches are possessed by private oligarchs who will extract a toll from the rest of us. Was this the vision of the Founders? Was this why they believed governments were instituted among men—that the very sinews of the state should be possessed by the wealthy in the same manner that kingdoms of the Old World were the personal property of the monarch?

Revolt of the Rich

chartzz concerning the USA

Keep up with the aspirational lifestyles though guys, I’m sure one day you to will get to experience the highs of Beckhams lifestyle – maybe the trickle down effect will one day mean you can buy that extension you’ve always longed after and a rolex. Maybe. Probably not.

Oh, and socialism has never created any social divides whatsoever?

Discounting communism, certainly less than capitalism.

Hotel uses money to pay staff, staff use money to buy things those businesses use that money to pay staff etc. Everyone wins.

Correction, hotel owner and shareholders earn a small fortune which they hoard whilst the highly trained chefs earn below living wages – the majority of the staff won’t enough to drive the economy through consumer spending.

Deary me, the politics of envy! Perhaps you really ought to berate the (frequently) obscenely wealthy leaders of the countries who squirrel away billions of dollars while their people starve, and fight wars on behalf of the despots who involve them in those wars.

Despots don’t lead to nearly as many starving people as capitalism’s ability to create insane divides between the wealthy and poor does.

Here’s a nice quote for this thread.

We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.

“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.

The whole media attitude towards science (can we make money out of this, it’s interest in big and ridiculous claims and it’s propensity to talking about scientific research in absolutes etc etc etc) contributes to many of the problems we have in science.

All science assumes that it is correct until proven otherwise, one of the reasons I hate Dawkins and his ‘absolutes’.

LOL

Null Hypothesis, look it up someday.

I do agree with you here, but I don’t really understand why it wasn’t scrutinised a bit more before it was published, given the impact/controversy that the paper was inevitably going to have(as for the media, why wouldn’t they pick up on a potential side effect of a new MMR jab? – what else would you expect?).

Because no one really expected the media to blow the paper way out of context.

Peer reviews don’t allow scientists to make discoveries if there is evidence suggesting otherwise. Remember the experiment that claimed to have broken the speed of light?

If it hasn’t passed a peer review then it is merely a theory, rather than a discovery.

Except in cases of publication bias when journals steer clear of publishing negative results for whatever reason.

More power to the thickos.

Most people on this planet are utter morons – as demonstrated by the majority of singletrack posters total lack of understanding for science. Personally If I ever get the chance to be blasted on a Nasa funded one way ticket to mars with a high probability of premature death, I’ll take it.

Yep, only noticed it when I took the bike to the alps. The lowers are stiff as hell so I can only assume it is where the crown meets the steerer.

Don’t listen to these guys, I had exactly the same issue.

There is nothing stiffer and lighter. For my money Totems are stiffer than boxxers, however the additional crown gives extra leverage and stability. They are vastly stiffer than any other sc fork.

HAHAH – at the wheel perhaps but not at the bars. Totems are stiff below the crown in 1 1/8 configuration but all forces through the steerer are amplified by the increased length of of a 180mm fork when compared to a 160mm design. Dual crowns flex way less laterally and integrated stems are a whole different level in steering/twisting stiffness compared to conventional stems.

air shock…….

Unless you plan to keep the coil or plan on getting a DB air, don’t bother because they are gash for downhilling. You already have a 110mm trail bike – I’d personally being looking at slowly building up a full 200mm race rig – light dh bikes are over rated.