Dial tone
“Standard” phone ring
Records
Cassette Tapes
CDs
Desktop computer
Live TV
Roaming
Being without a phone
Ethernet
Floppy Disk
Non-hybrid car
$1/gallon gasoline
The evening news
A regular commute
CRTs
Film
VCRs
Rewind to start
Commercial interruptions
Long Distance phone call
Manual car door locks
Turn-key ignition
Spitting watermelon seeds
“Stop wasting film”
7 digit phone numbers
AP quotes the first lady as saying she doesn’t believe the President’s poll numbers because when she travels around the country she sees many people who express their appreciation and who tell her to “stay the course.”
Of course this is the beauty of statistics. Assuming the polls are accurate and representative, with around 300 million people in the United States it’s pretty easy to find some of the 90 million or so who are supportive - especially when the first lady is giving a speach or press conference.
Defense Tech has a brief discussion about why the NSA’s massive collection of call records is a completely waste of time.
A wonderful discovery by Joseph W. Thornton at the University of Oregon shows how a specific stress hormone receptor evolved. Hormone receptors have previously been thought by some to be an irreducible system. Such systems, naysayers argue, provide no function when one component is taken away and thus cannot be created by evolution. This counter argument states that if a system has no beneficial function then it cannot be selected for and will not mutate into the beneficial form. Of course the key that people like Michael J. Behe are missing is that evolution is not a guiding force, rather it describes a observed progression of nature - a mechanism by which genes change over time. Mutations are random and neutral mutations are just as likely to survive as not. One might posit from Thorton’s findings that redundancy can also beneficial and therefore can lead to mutations of the form he discovered: when an accidental replication (perhaps beneficial because of redundancy - Omer) mutates it creates a new function. Genetic Replication may provide the stepping stone that, while too complex for people like Dr. Behe to reduce is completely natural.