I'll watch Arrow just for that guy's abs. OMG!

He would complain about the lack of soil for all those lush plants...

A lot of people might. That's why it's such an interesting question. Is alien life less worth if it's monocellular? How about if it's algae or lichen or plant-like? Or something like fish or insects? Where do you put the line for what's "important"? I don't have an answer for that. If I did, I'd be god. I do know that…

2,5 years on hiatus. What a shame, I was getting really curious to see where that was going...

Huh! The UK version I first read definitely had the Belgium passage in it. It also still called ball point pens biros etc so it was definitely a UK version. My current version is a US edition and the Americanized changes always annoy me. I never noticed any change in the swearing though. Maybe they sanitized the UK…

Thanks!

Around here a lot of small breed dogs like chihuahuas are stolen. They can be sold for insane amounts of money if they're young enough, and if they're not I guess they go to Eastern European puppy farms...

That was in Bergen, Norway, but it's gone from Street View now. Here's an article though. In Norwegian... http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/02/09/nyheter/innenriks/google/10321908/

So much to read, so little time!

But if he was only smelling it in his house and not the garage it must have been something else. Not necessarily something real though.

One word: Flashback

Yes, go to bed!! I didn't even think about the time difference, I was just impressed at a discussion that had me completely occupied on my commute home from work. Gotta love the philisophical stuff. :)

There was norovirus there, it just hadn't been discovered yet... You could simulate the organism yes, but you wouldn't know if what you did to that model would be truly comparable to a living animal. Say you wanted to do toxicity testing on new drugs. The model could probably narrow down the amount of animals you had…

The problem is that the processes and variables that are considered unimportant today can turn out to be extremely significant ten years from now. 20 years ago in lab animal science, nobody cared much about infections if they didn't create actual diseases in the animals. Today we worry about everything they have even…

Considering this is a single celled organism, and a really simple one at that, I'd say a very very long time. (Edit for typos)

Maybe you should. This discussion is blowing me away! Really making me think. Wish I was better at spelling out my deep thoughts though. Mostly they've already been said or they're not clear enough to put down in words.

Sorry, I needed to share my very sudden depression...

They were under the impression that they had approval?! Knowing the amount of paperwork and accurate description of procedures and ethical end points and use of medications and analgesia you need to go through to do fairly simple experiments with rodents I can't take that statement in any way seriously. It's either a…

If we're around for another billion years we won't be "us" anymore. We'll have evolved about 200 stages beyond Homo sapiens and split into who knows how many species. Now think about what THEY can do!

Ugh, that made me think of the ending to The Dark Tower. :/