Thread: Sexy Science

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

That would probably be CERN's Large Hadron Collider. It's fucking awesome. Check out the link I posted above, talking about "100 Million Collisions Per Second"

Nope, that's above ground. I'll try and find the thing I'm talking about tomorrow.
EDIT: Woops, Thanks Xei!

Also the other thing I forgot while I was reading everyone else's posts is the Fibonacci Sequence.
Simply beautiful; as it relates to nature as well as fractals.

Okay my reason for staying up a bit more is to drink Chamomile tea so that I can sleep. hehe

Originally Posted by Xei

Nope, it's literally just a disk of metal.

Hm, why's it so special?

Originally Posted by Xei

Yes, I find anthropology, human history, and the history of life extremely interesting. Here's a ridiculously amazing visualisation of the concept you're referring to:

Evolution Timeline - AndaBien - StumbleUpon

Lots of people disagree with me but I find that to be something that requires explanation. It is no doubt that intelligence experienced a paradigm shift with the emergence of homo sapiens, but why was it such a minuscule period of time ago, geologically?

Thanks for the link.
Well, our closer ancestors were also fairly intelligent. So it wasn't a HUGE shift.
This is just my opinion, and I am by no means educated enough to have any say in the matter -
But I think that the biggest advantage that we have and had over other species is our language capability.

Maybe a small increase in intelligence. But honestly I don't think it was that huge.
The only way to prove this though, would be to go back in time or clone one of our close ancestors.
Alternatively we could give existing animals, through genetic manipulation, a better ability for language and give them arms and hands like ours.
Dolphins and monkeys would be good candidates.

Originally Posted by tommo

Well, our closer ancestors were also fairly intelligent. So it wasn't a HUGE shift.

Well, that's debatable (the idea of behavioural modernity, which is thought to have started around 50,000 years ago and explains the sudden emergence of art and culture, is not set in stone), but still, even if we include them; homo still makes up a very tiny period of world history, and I don't think it's debatable that there is something extraordinarily different about homo.

Hm, why's it so special?

Just because of the amazingly long time it can spin for. They did the equations and worked out the optimal shape.