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yeah sort of, i just thought the colour one was a little busy for my taste, eye catching doesn't have to mean cluttered, actually i thought a better picture for the background would be a wattle sprig/flower photod on a white background, something like this (but without the watermark) http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/1141/1141,1221192633,1/stock-photo-australian-wattle-acacia-blooms-isolated-on-white-background-with-clipping-path-17276530.jpg i can't find one without a watermark on the web, and i don't have the available means to do it myself, if someone has the means/opportunity it'd be cool to have one, i was just thinking the wattle may appeal to peoples idea of "australian values under threat" than a brugmansia flower, but thats just me..

The hard grown peruvianus seed batch, tiny compared to the same time sowed pachanoi.

February 17, 2011 Article: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-rewrite-textbooks-conventional-wisdom-neurons.html Links: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n2/full/nn.2728.html http://www.physorg.com/tags/axons/ http://www.physorg.com/tags/dendrites/ http://www.physorg.com/tags/neurons/ http://www.physorg.com/tags/neurological+diseases/ http://www.physorg.com/tags/nature+neuroscience/ http://www.physorg.com/tags/nerve+cells/

Hi everyone, Just a note to let you know that some of us from the Sydney Evolver Spore group have been working on a couple things in response to the proposed legislation. Firstly, the Attorney General's office has stated that they will not be making submissions publicly available even though that is normal practice during government consultations. We've created a website where people can upload a copy of their submissions (anonymously if desired) so that there is a public record of as many responses as we can get. This means that people looking to write submissions can see what other people have already written and also, once the AGs office comes up with their final proposed legislation we will be able to evaluate how adequately it reflects public sentiment. The site is at http://opendecisions.net There are only a few submissions up so far but hopefully as more people finish theirs the collection will grow. If you've worked out a submission please consider recording it here. We'll be contacting groups supportive of and opposed to the proposed legisilation so hopefully it will be a fair indication of public opinion on this. Secondly, we are organising a screening of 'DMT the spirit molecule' in Sydney next Wednesday 23rd Feb to raise awareness about these new laws. I've just posted details in the News and Notices forum (http://www.shaman-australis.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=26998). Hopefully some of you might be come along and join in the conversation. I've been following discussions on this issue in some other forums but have only just read through the posts here tonight. Its great to see so much fruitful discussion and I hope you guys find the website idea useful!

Thats one thing i WONT be making noise for. You may want to see parliamentarians without pants T but i think its something most of us could do without!

I used to work for the polise about 15 years ago and shit, lots of stuff I cant remember, but the little things, like how square my boot laces was, I recall that stuff. Maybe I left some badges at my moms place? I should give her a call o.0

Hutch. I would have show far more respect for you if you had actually addressed the material with which you disagreed. You might think that I am being just rude, but think about it from my point of view - I happen to have a scientific understanding of the underlying material, and I have seen the denialist arguments repeated time and again. If they are aired without any actual comparison of point and counterpoint, without any testing of the veracity of the claims and acknowledgement of mistakes, then it becomes just more garbage after old garbage. Do that long enough and you'll fray the patience of most people who do understand the material, and you'll simply make them believe nothing other than the sort of conclusions that I come to. And that's fine too, if that's how you want to play it, but don't then turn around and say that the science was wrong. Admit that you aren't interested in having a scientific discussion about it, and it'll make it easier for all. As to my links, wherever I was countering on a scientific point, there was relevant material presented. If there were snarky comments there as well that wasn't what I was directing people toward. Where I was illustrating the partisan nature or the demonstrated nonsense of a denialist or of their arguments, I was again referring to the accounting of the material, and not to any subsequent community commentary. Sometimes though there were pertinent comments worth reading, and in those specific cases I would have said so. It puzzles me that you seem to interpret material in a way that is very different from the content inherent within it. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why you seem to take home a different message compare to what is being said by the messenger. I'm sure that you will disagree, but perhaps the best thing to do is simply to wait for time to tell who was correct - science, or those who believe that they have a better way to analyse the world of complex data than do scientists. Having said all this, I do not think that leaving the Corroborree is any answer and it disappoints me to see you go. Personally, as much as I disagree with your opinion about the 'greenhouse' effect or about ecological sustainability, I'd rather that you stayed here and benefited from the many other resources here, and where you disagree with me (or anyone else), that you try to get to the nub of the reasons for the disagreement. I'm interested in the truth as best as rational analysis can determine it. If you have a valid point you should do your best to convince me, or to allow me to convince you. If we can engage on that basis then no-one needs to call another names, or use belligerent language. So yeah, don't leave the forum entirely. There are better ways to get past this than that.

Do I have to use really little words so that you understand, hutch? I said, to paraphrase, that to the extent that the warming of the planet has caused the enhanced evaporation of ocean water which fell as precipitation over eastern Australia, then yes, global warming has exacerbated the flooding. That's different to "blaming global warming", although I suspect that you don't understand why. Oops, I didn't use little words, did I? When exactly did I say this? And hutch, just so you know, I've archived this thread for posterity. I'm not scared of your threats of violence (I doubt that you could hit me harder than I've been hit in the past), but my safety and my kids' has been threatened by real bullies before and there's no way I'm going to quietly allow someone to threaten me or my family again. It's one thing for anonymous people to slag off at each other on a web forum, but physical violence is something else entirely. If you ever feel the need to debate science with your fists or with a cricket bat you'll be standing in a dock faster than you can say "charged with assault". And hutch, just so you know some more, that's a warning, not a threat. I broke a vertebra in my back once, and it's now seriously displaced, and if anyone ever decides he has the right to endanger my already dicky spinal health he'd better be prepared to face conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, and committing GBH, and to pay a suit for paraplegia. If you're prepared to endanger my glass vertebra because you have a glass jaw, go for it. As I said, you've been cautioned. Now, can we get back to some science?

imo its one of those things that you dont want to be proven fact or fiction, its better that it remains mysterious.

The thought of any significant enforced depopulation fills me with dread. If authoritarian governments do it, it'll be ugly - China's 1 child policy could end up looking good by comparison. If nature does it, it'll be horrible beyond words. There are many things that could be done instead, and that are humane: 1) Educate women, and especially women and girls in the Third World. Educated women have dignity, they have control over their own bodies, and they help to create a much more human-friendly society. Oh, and they have fewer kids. 2) Reduce global wealth disparity. The way that Robin Hood would do it. Or, at least by not ripping off Third World countries just because they can't stand up to Western transnational companies and governments. 3) Stop the Roman Catholic church from interferring with people's sex lives, and especially with their family planning decisions. The same is also now starting to apply to some Islamist sects who are going very fundie... 4) Stop giving tax breaks and cash handouts to people to have more than two kids. 5) Encourage people to put off having children for an average of 5 years, or even 10. As any demographer will tell you, this has a profound effect on how populations grow. I actually took the last point to heart, and waited until I was 15 years older than my father was when my parents had me. Biologically, it's actually a bit Russian roulettish, but I walked the talk. We also stopped at two pregnancies. I don't think that humans will actually be able to fully reduce their population to sustainable numbers completely voluntarily. I'm pretty sure that war, famine, environmental degradation - and ensuing disease - will play all their parts in the future, and I suspect that economic collapse is quite likely put its boot in too. For many people it'll suck to live in the future, but the more we do now, the less it will suck for others (and maybe even ourselves) later on.

"You're a poorly-read, inadequately-educated, analytically-depauperate, ideologically-blinkered ideologue who wouldn't know truth if it ripped his arms off and slapped him in the face with the wet ends." - WoodDragon.

Yes, you're free, svarg26, and that's a wonderful thing. You're even free to believe rubbish, and as long as you don't hurt anyone else by doing so, I don't give a rat's arse what you think. The problem occurs when your muddled thinking is spread to others, to the extent that it can interfer with social and/or political progress based on the best science. You mention Hugo Chavez. One of my population biologist colleagues (yes, my PhD work was in population biology) is an ardent fan of Chavez, and not without good reason, because Chavez is bang on the money when he says things like the quote you use. [Edit: I forgot the first time around that my colleague is also a strong promoter of the fact that humans are living unsustainably on the planet, and that the Earth cannot sustain current numbners or great indefinitely. My point being that population science and the politics of egalitarianism are not mutually exclusive.] The trouble is, you make several red herring errors again in your reference to Chavez. It is entirely possible - and indeed, it is actually the case - that Chavez can be correct about Western politico-economics and its damaging efect on the Third World, and that the planet can simultaneously still be under pressure from the number of humans living on it. Quite simply, they're different things. And yes, it is currently entirely possible to feed everyone in the world... but in the near future, if such numbers are to be sustained, and at Western living standards, then that ability will disappear. You see, we're using up the planet's capital, just as you could live a Monte Carlo lifestyle for a year or two on a $500 thousand inheritance. But use it at too high a rate, and you spend it all, exhausting it, rather than potentially living forever (but more simply, and splurging on fewer friends) on the sustainable 'interest'... As I have said before, in order to live the way that we (or at least, some of us) are living, humans are using in several centuries the energy that was fossilised in coal and oil over hundreds of millions of years. We are depleting in several centuries the stocks of topsoil that take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to form. We are draining, in less than a century in many cases, fossil (aquifier) water that takes thousands to tens of thousands of years to recharge. We are wiping out within several centuries biodiversity that provides us with essential ecosystem services - biodiversity that will take tens of millions of years to re-establish given the rate at which we are now obliterating it. All these reasons underpin the fact that we currently could, if we so chose, feed the entire population of the planet adequately, but they are also the reasons why we cannot do so in the long run without something giving. No matter the correctness of Chavez' or Chomsky's or Walberg's observations, the underlying principles of ecology still stand, because they're two different beasts. Get it?! You're confabulating two separate issues. Heck, I even agree with William Blum, because the "commodity exchanges, grain futures, selling short, selling long, and other forms of speculation" that form the issue of "supply and demand" that so irks him are economic in nature, and as far as I am concerned economics is a pseudo-science because it is based upon opinion and upon meta-stable past practices, rather than upon testable and verifiable science. The economists' idea of supply and demand is a bugbear for ecologists, because it actually assigns many things to the category of "externalities", and it does not acknowledge the fact that the planet is for all intents and purposes a closed system. When economists and ecologists speak of "supply and demand", they are speaking about very different things. You speak of common sense. The thing about common sense is that it is often wrong. Attributed to Einstein is the quote: Wickedpedia says it well though: Add to subatomic distances and speeds approaching that of light the complexities of global ecological and climatic systems... In the past it was common sense that the earth was flat, that the sun circled around the earth, and that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. If you're enamoured of common sense, it might be time for a reality check. The end few paragraphs are telling... Or you might consider this essay on science and common sense that was drawn to my attention by another colleague some time ago. Another quote often cited in the same context as Einstein is one by Don Wood: I've been trying to elicit from you an indication that you're prepared to address your misunderstandings of resource limitations, but you have to this point shown no capacity for doing so. Seriously, svarg26, there is an enormous body of data and fact out there supporting the subject of ecological constraints, in both the scientific and in the lay literature, and that has withstood all feeble attempts such as yours to contradict it. If you disagree with me, stop throwing red herrings and strawmen into the thread and actually produce some numbers that back up your claims. It is telling that you can't. If you are struggling with understanding where to start in such homework, might I suggest that you begin with a study of water requirements and availability? In particular, work out how we could deliver adequate water to 30 billion (a number that you suggested) people and still maintain any semblance of a Western lifestyle. Heck, work it out for a globe living a Cuban lifestyle! There is a plethora of information available to help you - it's about time that you did some self-development: as you yourself have pointed out I have already expended far more energy on this thread, than is advisable, dealing with you.

Man, what a twatty and ignorant response!!!! Sorry mate, but to totally flip off all the really good ideas/suggestions for thought that WoodDragon put forth in that last post of his is pure arrogance and an indication that you're not prepared to consider facets of reality you haven't come to think about yet. I have a few questions for you, Svarg. If you can answer every single one with a truthful "yes" then I'll apologise for calling you a twat. a- Do you consume only food grown from your own garden? (ie: no store bought meat, legumes, sauces, sugars, ever) b- Have you rid yourself entirely of the need to use mains water? c- Do you generate all your own electricity? d- Have you stopped using all forms of powered transport? e- Do you produce all your own soaps, oils, fertilisers etc...? f- Have you built all your house furnishings from materials you have produced yourself? I'm sure you can think of further questions along the same lines, but for the sake of this post, I'll leave it there. Did you answer "yes" to every question? If so, good on you.... I'm enormously impressed. If any of the questions were answered with a no, then you are not completely self sufficient and you are a twat for the way you dismissed WoodDragon's feedback. Let me know.... I sincerely hope that I'm wrong in my assumption about you being a twat because that would mean that there is a member of this community who can potentially teach us all a thing or two about self-sustainability.

Svarg26, I am breaking my back making myself as self-sufficient as I am able to in food grown on my own land, and I have many uncles and aunts who were/are farmers and on whose farms I've worked as a lad, so I actually have some clue about farming. There are many very scientifically- and agriculturally-founded reasons for being concerned about future food (and other) productivity. And don't forget that we Westerners have the advantage of fossil-fuel powered machinery and transport; tools, materials, and fertilisers produced from, and/or transported using (finite) oil supplies. Once this limited resource starts to dwindle, the numbers of humans able to live on the planet change profoundly. Millions are not billions. And a bit of triginometry will demonstrate that 'terracing' only extends arable land by a finite amount. It does nothing to address other issues related to agriculture, such as limits on other components of crop-growing (q.v. Western predilictions for industrial fertilisers as mentioned above) or for any number of other factors such as altered water availability that comes with climate change, or the fact that even terracable land itself is in finite supply. My PhD work was in ecology, and more and more I am realising that many lay people are completely oblivious to what really are fundamental biological/ecological principles even when they themselves think otherwise. They have a cornucopian view of productivity and of economics, and don't recognise how growth limits and asymptotes fit into a dynamic system. Try doing some background reading on matters such as Leibig's Law of the Minimum, or of complex systems stability theory, or of trophic cascades/energy fluxes, or of biological thermodynamics: all issues that are fundamental to the subject of this thread but are far too involved to tease out here. Whilst you're at it, do some reading on edge effects, and extinction debt, and species diversity/richness in relation to patch size. Do a lot of reading on soil formation, and depletion, and on soil volume requirement for global food production. I don't need to google terra preta as I have extensive references on it in my own libaray, and it was one reason why I started years ago using charcoal routinely in my own soils. Yes, charcoal's fantastic, but for many reasons it is not a soil panacæa - the aforementioned Leibig's Law of the Minimum is one reason, but a smart person should be able to come up with at least three or four others. I'll leave them as homework. I'm all for spreading the word on self-reliance, self-sufficiency and improved farming techniques. However, the issue of population is much more profoundly complicated than building terraces and creating more terra preta. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other critical factors that are tied in a global confluence of approaching challenges to supporting the number of people and the desired lifestyles that we currently have, and will have in the near future. Take fisheries for example. At the beginning of the 20th century the planet had 1.6 billion people, and most fisheries were healthy, although a few species of whales, seals, marine birds, and turtles were already staggering or had been lost. Today, with slightly less than 7 billion people on the globe, 90% of fisheries are over-exploited, with a majority facing economic and even biological extinction if they are not immediately and carefully managed. Using median estimates, by 2050 there will be 9 billion people, and at that rate the oceans will basically be producing almost no seafood for humanity. Seaweed and sea jellies are probably the notable exceptions, and I'd be curious to know who thinks that these are a good substitute for our current seafood diets... The Dude touches on an important issue, that of 'First World' food wastage. As he implies it's criminal, but human nature being what it is as long as people have it easy they will waste extravagant amount of food. It's the same with water. I myself, and my mum, my siblings and their families, and my kids' mum, are all on tank water, and we are continually amazed at how most Australians take for granted even this resource when we in my family can all get by with what falls on our roofs. I am agog when I see townies washing footpaths with hoses (use a fucking broom, for pity's sake) or who run their hoses for 15 minutes to wash a car... mum did hers yesterday with just two bucketsful. And then there are those who run their hoses for whole afternoons to just grow a bloody green lawn. I don't see that such wastage will ever change in a well-off society though, without authoritarian interference, and as long as the poorest 80% of the planet aspires to a Western lifestyle such wastage will only increase, as will the trend for other desired Western habits like eating far more meat than is nutritionally necessary. I spent the first 5 years of my working life doing cancer research. Cancer's a fiendishly complicated state of affairs, but the fundamental principles of growth and resource use in cancerous conditions are simple to grasp. It seems that many people are emotionally and/or intellectual averse to recognising it, but human use of planetary resources follows a typical cancerous trajectory, or a plague species one. That includes just about every one of us in Australia, whether we like to face the fact or not. We basically evolved as k-strategist apes that now behave exactly as r-strategists, simply because we had a few clever ideas and inventions ten thousand to one hundred thousand years ago, and the results for our species and for the biosphere will be close to what they are for individuals who come down with lung cancer or similar... that is, unless we rise above our instinctive behaviour and start using the brains that dropped us into this mess in the first place. If you want "substance" you need to take your involvement beyond a thread for ethno-heads and do some serious reading. For starters, work out how many people are projected to be living on the planet at projected maximum population size. Decide what level of disparity you want between the richest and the poorest, and at what level of resource use each of these two extremes will be living. Figure out what distribution (in the statistical sense) of resource use will be applied to all of the people in between. What are your sources for the numbers and analyses? Once you've set up this background, work out how much energy, in kilojoules, each person will use for transport, for housing and materials contruction/manufacturing, for clothing, for heating/cooling, and for entertainment/communication (amongst other things). Where all of will this energy come from? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses? Work out how much water each person will use, and how much water each of their reliances upon upstream manufacturing will use. Where will this water come from? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses? Work out how much food (grain, vegetables, fruit, meat, seafood etc) each person will consume, and from where it will be obtained. What resources in terms of energy will be used in the production of this food? Where will this energy come from? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses? After all of this is sorted and settled work out how much habitable ecosystem is left for the rest of the biosphere. Determine how fragmentation and size-reduction of these habitats will affect ecological processes within the ecosystems. How do the impacts on ecosystem size and function feed into species survival and into extinction debt? What are the effects of direct human exploitation of non-human species? What are the overall implications for humanity of global ecosystem degradation? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses behind each of these questions? For all of the above human activities, what are the various pollution consequences? How do these consequences exacerbate or otherwise alter the numbers derived? What are your sources for these numbers and analyses? Now take all of the above areas and investigate them in concert in order to determine what emergent phenomena and impacts (e.g. disease evolution/spread, social tensions/disintegrations/behavioural changes) are forseeable. For each of the predicable emergent phenomena, how many unpredictable ones might there be? Together with the foreseeable issues, how might the unforeseeable ones impact societies? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses? That's a start. But just a start. A thorough understanding would take years of reading, and even working as a professional in ecology I have yet to really scrape below the surface myself. I have a grasp of the tail of the substance, but the actual whole substance itself is a thumping great beast that scares the heck out of all of the old-timers who have been immersed in this work for decades more than have I. If you want a short, sweet and conclusive answer to the question of this thread, you'll need to choose the executive summary of any one of a number of reports that best coincides with your own ideology, or preferably with your own objective, scientifically-based understanding of the numbers. If you want to skip around singing about terraces and terra preta and expecting to leash the beast with a sparky diamante collar knitted together from one or two quick-fixes, don't expect your smug cure for the ills of the world to be greeted with anything other than frustration by those who have serious exposure to the underlying principles and facts.

whats the little numbers bottom corner? is that like reps? cool i got -2 and the dumb bid got -1 lol funny as edit nm I figured it out lol and another -1

i am simply a man that grows his own food. believe it or not. i did it with my own two hands. if you have hands, try using them. you would be amazed with what you can achieve. with or without your scientific consensus. i feel sorry for anyone who read woodies long and drawn out yawn fests and believed a single word of it. clearly civilizations that survive 3500 years of isolation, are not at all examples of how we as humans can live self sufficient without destroying the environment. you sold me, mate. well done.

Wow...I haven't been paying much attention I will admit but this clown is everywhere trying to explain how great he is....

It has nothing to do with the thread but I find educated Asians carry on in the exact same way...an endless stream of links designed to show their intellectual prowess...normally very well organized people who have their links lined up and are ready to shoot anyone with an different opinion down...my view.