Posts with Comments by Lady

Some Musings on Patent Law

  • With a good patent lawyers and consultants you could patent anything...which doesn't seem right to me too and I still wonder if there are some limitations.
  • http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/eurvp/web.nsf/Pages/Paper+by+Henry/$File/HENRY+DRAFT.PDF 
     
    I think that here is the answer :) seems that it is not impossible to patent a gene as a synthetic chemical molecule, the invention of which patent law usually reward by rights over all possible applications
  • Inducing disgust

  • Charles Darwin, in his classic book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, took perhaps the earliest scientific look at disgust. Recalling a colorful incident from an expedition to South America, Darwin wrote: "In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his fingers some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac., and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty." 
     
    By putting his finger on the meat, the Indian helped Darwin put his finger on three key aspects of disgust: first, that it can be elicited by quite different things--in this case, food and people; second, it is an emotion shared by radically diverse cultures; and third, what different cultures consider gross can vary tremendously. Darwin then inventoried the physiological reactions to disgusting things. At one end of the scale is a frown, often accompanied by hand gestures or body language aimed at pushing away or shielding against the repulsive object. In more pronounced cases, a person's mouth may drop open, and he's likely to spit, purse his lips or blow air out between them, and make an "ach" or "ugh" sound. Episodes of "extreme disgust," Darwin observed, tend to produce facial contortions identical to those observed before vomiting--mouth wide open, nose wrinkled, upper lip retracted and lower lip protruded--and some actually do double over and retch. 
     
    The key problem, as Freud and others later observed, is that humans don't really exhibit aversions towards most of what we consider disgusting--including our own excrement--until we are taught to. Even worse, those famous feral "wild children" plucked from the forests were often almost totally lacking a "nominal" capacity for disgust. Finally, our closest primate cousins, such as chimpanzees, fail to exhibit disgust of any kind, and many mammals routinely ingest feces to replenish the beneficial bacteria that they, like we, carry in their digestive tracts. 
     
    On closer examination, then, disgust appears to be a cultural acquisition: people are taught what is disgusting, when to be disgusted, and, if all goes right, how to avoid being disgusting themselves. Indeed, "disgust marks the boundaries of culture and boundaries of the self," University of Michigan law professor William Ian Miller noted in his recent book, The Anatomy of Disgust.
  • http://www.siriusmindbody.com/generic14.html 
     
    Here is the recipe of David Gordon. Gordon says he now cooks bugs regularly at his Seattle home, and at demonstrations around the world. He says insects are high in protein, vitamins and minerals.  
    I shudder at the thought to eat that. I doubt that this man will sell his book about cooking of bugs :) but nobody knows... different people, different tastes.
  • http://www.jsonline.com/entree/cooking/jul03/158524.asp 
     
    It sounds delicious,though I won't have the courage to taste it.
  • Men, women, math….

  • I would like to play chess with you, Jaimito :)
  • http://www.oregoncounseling.org/ArticlesPapers/Documents/DifferencesMenWomen.htm This man wants to stimulate discussions.  
    Well, compared to my brother, I have perfect depth perception and I am extremely good in the maths and sciences, i have a pretty good career and I am a woman :) I think that the education, the family circle and the fact that I was born and live in the 3-rd world gave me willingness to succeed and I am not an exception here :) I remember that we were 75% girls graduates of 1991 in the most elite secondary school for maths and sciences and 100% of my classmates nowadays are high educated and succeed in life. Why the women here are better in maths than the men? Or may be it depends on the motivation? :)
  • Beyond languagese

  • These maps are almost complete. One of the south slavic is mine! :)the root of the slavic languages is the antient Bulgarian. 
    http://www.rusyn.org/?root=rusyns&rusyns=lang&article=39
  • I would make few corrections to this language family tree. For example I can't see my native language there, instead of it I see russian :)
  • The Indo-European Language Family Tree :) Take a look at it : 
     
    http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.html 
     
    This one is good too: http://www.danshort.com/ie/
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