Whoever wrote the articles you pasted here doesn't know very much about evolution.
Many of the questions can be dismissed with little thought. For instance, why don't Eskimos have fur. Well that's because they don't need fur since they wear warm clothing. That in itself is due to the fact that man is an intelligent animal.
Now if they had to go au naturale, then they better have some way of coping with the environmental conditions or they drop dead. This is in fact why many more species that have lived on earth are now extinct. Those that can adapt continue while those that can't become extinct.
You also mentioned bacteria. The goal of evolution is not to turn into a different specie (although this can and does happen). We have drug resistant germs. They've evolved to combat their natural predators. That's enough for them.
My thoughts, man would hardly evolve anymore (minus genetic engineering/modification) because technology has made us overcome our environmental challenges. We are no longer in our natural habitat where the impetus to survive was second nature. In our own way, we have also affected the environment and habitats of other animals.
Bottom line, the article you posted appears good but is pretty easy to deconstruct. Also, always include your sources.
Theres an instrument you can play without touching anything. Its called the Theremin, and it is named after the Westernized name of its Russian inventor, Léon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928.
The instrument's controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the thereminist's hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude (volume) with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. Basically, you play it by moving your hands in the air, through the antennas’ invisible electromagnetic fields (one hand controls pitch, the other controls the volume). It sounds quite like an Opera Singer.
The above is for those that dont like reading . This is for more serious people.
One night almost 10 years ago, I heard an impossible voice on the radio. I was back in my hometown, driving my parents’ car; out of the darkness came the sound of a gorgeous soprano, a singing unlike anything I had ever heard. High and yearning, incredibly fragile, this delicate voice also conveyed a steady, girded force.
I soon learned that the singer was not, in fact, a human being. At the end of the segment, the avuncular presenter declared that the music we had just heard was the work of an instrumentalist manipulating an elaborate electric contraption. A thereminist and his theremin – an almost century-old musical instrument, a box with two antennas. You play it by moving your hands in the air, through the antennas’ invisible electromagnetic fields.
In my experience, there are two kinds of people: those who are beguiled by the theremin and those who just haven’t heard of it yet. Because of the way it’s played – gestures, space – it fascinates instantly. Like the regal glass harmonica or the lowly nose flute, it’s as much about the how as the what. Accordingly, the theremin is most often a novelty – a prop for Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, a gag for The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper, a flying-saucer sound-effect in countless B-movie soundtracks.
In the hands of an amateur, the theremin yowls and screeches. But hearing it on the radio that night, played by a virtuoso, I was struck by the instrument’s overlooked capacity for beauty. I was struck by the thought that this trembling music was the sound of a man holding his hands in empty air, conducting music out of nothingness.
Most musical instruments require their players to strum, push or blow into something. They require that sticks strike skins or horsehair strokes strings. Only the theremin seems to rely on nothing more than its player’s presence or absence. Only the theremin appears to run on hope.
The instrument’s British debut took place on 10 December 1927. Its inventor, the Russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen, known as Léon Theremin in the west, had travelled from Leningrad to London to demonstrate his creation to a public that included George Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, Arnold Bennett and, two days later, thousands more at the Albert Hall. After tuning it up with a procedure the Daily Telegraph compared to “a man testing the heat of a boiler with his naked hand”, the dapper 31-year-old scientist performed pieces by Schubert and Glinka. “The human voice, the violin, viola, cello, bass and double-bass, the cornet, horn, trombone, saxophone, organ, and almost every instrument you can think of, are all beaten at their own game by this one simple little apparatus,” announced the Musical Standard.
“People will learn to play it without too much difficulty,” Termen predicted. One day, he said, there would be a theremin in every home. “I think it could be sold and produced at the price of a three-valve radio set.”
Less than 24 hours later, he gathered up his electric marvel and boarded a transatlantic steamer. Arriving in Manhattan, the fêted inventor set up residence in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel. He would remain in New York for almost 11 years.
From a contemporary vantage point, the theremin’s story sounds familiar. Like the Segway or Google Glass, it was an impressive invention that caught, and eventually fumbled, the public imagination. Despite international headlines, celebrity sponsors, and a major investment by RCA, the theremin never really took off. Enthusiasts could blame the great depression, just as RCA’s mass-market theremin went on sale. The company could blame a patent dispute between Termen and a New Jersey-based radio company, but mostly it should have blamed the flaws of the technology itself: Termen’s namesake was much fiddlier, and harder to play, than the Russian let on.
Yet the tale of the theremin is not quite as simple as other stories of fad, failure and recession. To begin with, there’s all the espionage. According to Albert Glinsky, Termen’s biographer, the inventor’s journey into the west was not just a propaganda tour for the “Soviet Edison”. The Kremlin also used Termen’s activities to expand their nascent spy network. Profits from theremin contracts got siphoned back to spooks, and Termen himself was allegedly “on assignment [the whole] time”, plundering whatever industrial secrets he could.
Was Termen more scientist than spy, or more spy than scientist? As the 1930s wore on, he built early drum machines, sensing instruments for US aircraft, touchless effects for sales windows?? and the first weapon detectors at Alcatraz prison.
He had married Lavinia Williams, a member of the American Negro Ballet. On 15 September 1938, Termen disappeared. He left home in a huddle of Soviet agents, telling Williams not to try to follow him. He had already packed up all his things; they were loaded on to the Stary Bolshevik. In the ship manifest, Termen was listed as “captain’s assistant”.
Williams never saw him again. Advertisement
There was also the matter of Clara.
A few years after I first heard the theremin on the radio, I began to research its inventor. I have always been interested in stories that seem as if they have been made up. Here was one of them: a scientist turned spy, a hero or betrayer, an instrument that runs on hope. When Termen arrived back in the USSR, his life took yet another turn: instead of being greeted like a prodigal son, he was caught up in Stalin’s political purges. The former paragon was banished to Siberia; later, in a special prison for scientists, he was ordered by secret police to help them eavesdrop on Stalin himself. (Termen also helped the NKVD to develop the most notorious bug of the entire cold war, known as “the Thing”.)
But there was another story that teased my imagination even more. Anyone who studies the theremin will become familiar with Clara Rockmore, the greatest thereminist of all time, whose performance of Saint-Saëns’s “Swan” is the finest example of what the instrument can do. Termen met Rockmore when she was a young and gifted violinist. They went dancing; they fell in love; she learned to play the machine he had invented. She mastered it as no one ever had.
He asked her to marry him.
She married someone else.
Every time I went back to Rockmore’s “Swan,” I felt as if I was back in my parents’ car, hearing that beautiful theremin for the first time. It is a recording filled with such complicated longing.
I resolved to write that longing out.
Sometimes the work of writing historical fiction is to try to concoct the most plausible past. You are a detective searching for clues, filling in gaps. Approaching the tale of Lev and Clara I decided to attempt something very different. I imagined a novel that expressed the story of the theremin’s sound – that uncanny electric music, true and lying at the same time. From the details of their lives I’d trace a silhouette of what reached me through the air that night, like a dream.
The principle behind the theremin is that the human body conducts electric current. This is true for every one of us: for Termen and Rockmore, Stalin and Page, writers and readers with our own private songs. Forces flow through everyone. Before a theremin, our arms uplifted, all of us would find one of life’s familiar riddles: am I conducting this music? Or am I conducted by it?
nenyibabs: To be honest, no. It's not an incentive, it is their pay. You probably didn't get to know details. Doctors, Pharmacists, Med Lab scientists are on a salary structure from the time they graduate, when they do the mandatory 1yr internship: conmess for doctors, conhess for others. They are not on the regular civil service salary structure, theirs is peculiar. The pay is structured : there is a basic salary, which every corper gets, then they get paid call duty allowance, because when others work and go home, they are on duty. They get a hazard allowance cos of the risk of infection and stuff (remember Adadevoh?). Etc etc. It's mandated by law, and even in private practice the pay is broken down like this as well.
Now, I'm looking at 15k. Is that supposed to be call allowance, or basic, or... what exactly, it has to be specified. What most people do, is to remove or slash the basic, and keep the allowances as per the salary structure. The emollument is stated by law and enshrined in the public service Gazette or whatever it is called.
Well, it's up to the corpers involved Sha, but I don't know any health worker who does not consider nysc a demotion after the one yr internship. I wouldn't stay, if it was me. I remember when I served in 04, and I was placed on the wrong salary scale in nasarawa state then. I out rightly refused it. I went to the directorate in Abuja, got a copy of the Gazette, and wrote the management, telling them to correct my placement or officially reject me so I could seek reposting. It was finally rectified after 2months and I got my arrears, though I was branded a greedy igbo girl. Even in 04,my call duty allowance as a Pharmacist was more than the 15k self.
My point is this: if someone is entitled to something by law, let them have it. It's not wrong for someone to ask for what is due to them. If there is going to be a downward review, I don't expect it to go beyond 100, cos I don't see where and where they will slash the pay from, unless the state is saying that they will only pay hazard allowance only, no call, no basic, nothing else. Let them explain details to the corpers involved and release those who don't want to stay, to go and look for their destiny elsewhere.
Anyways, not my monkey, not my circus. To each his own.
I like the way you responded with detailed facts. However I'm fully aware of all you said. Most of my friends are doctors by the way. The last time there was a strike by health workers, I was one of the few people who defended the doctors here on nairaland where everyone else was calling them greedy and all sorts of things.
The point I tried to make is that this is Youth Service. Its a service to the nation. Its not a job for doctors. They make special concessions for corper doctors so that they stay, especially those posted to the interior areas. That's the truth.
When something becomes the norm, its easy to lose sight of the origins of a particular practice.
Its called National Youth Service Corps and the emphasis is on service. While I understand the angst of medical personnel, I wonder if they think they are more special than other professions who are receiving 5k.
In my time they paid doctors more but only as incentives to work in remote areas where they are needed.
Kingy10: Number 9 tho, no Nigerian could be that foolish lol
In reality, at the first attempt, the window didn't budge. So he did it a second time and that was when the window gave way.
If I recall, the window didn't shatter, it just got pulled out of its fitting. So in a way, the lawyer was right. He proved his point at a rather steep price though.
PDBonline: Teachers must be going through really tough times! So if I said, "If Christians learn to listen to atheists about tasking their minds instead of asking God to do everything, many of them will change their minds" -- you would say I meant Christians would become atheists? Or that the statement means ALL Christians will become atheists?
Teachers must really be going through tough times. I endeavor to write as simply as possible. If you don't get it ask someone to explain it to you abeg.
CoolUsername: I'm with jayriginal on this one. OP is basically saying that atheists and theists should listen to each other so that the theists can win the atheists over. So while the advice is sound, the purpose comes off as condescending.
[quote author=PMIcon post=39619702][/quote]I think I should just add the following since you probably will miss the point.
Anyone who believes in God and turns away is not an atheist. You can call them rebels or whatever but not atheists. An example is Job in the old testament. He was hurt, he turned away and even cursed but was he an atheist? NO.
Hope you're not going to be predictable and tell me how you put the word in quotes because I've already addressed that with the second paragraph.
PMIcon: You comment seems like a proof of what I'm trying to say. It is taking things from the superficial.
For example, the "help" is related to those "atheists" who thought God would have prevented a rough situation in their lives if He is real-- in other words are hurting and hold God responsible for everything that happens.
Please read properly before commenting
Whereas the atheist would do a 180 degree turn if he listens, the christian would be able to help him do a 180 degree (as opposed to doing a 180 degree turn himself).
Please reason properly before posting. Oh and listen. Take some of your own medicine.
otijah: @op at the first instance, why would you indulge in raw sex at all, so u dnt have sense ? Y didn't u come to NL to seek for advice b4 u went into having unprotected sex?
Today u can't sleep, u can't eat, u ar restless and u are nw here to seek for advices
U ar lucky AIDS no longer kills anyhow, if not I would have wish u happy after life
Before jumping to conclusions have you considered that she might have been taken against her will?
It's not fair for you and the others to make these kinds of comments. Its a sensitive issue.
Music/Radio › Re: Help Me With The Use Of Deminished Chord My Fellow Keyboardists. by jayriginal: 6:32pm On Nov 10, 2015
. This is for more serious people.