MartinC

I know that group selection in evolution has been controversial, but it is my understanding that it has been shown that kin selection and group selection are two ways of interpreting the same phenomenon. Suppose then that altruism exists only because of group selection. If people were to freely choose the genes of their offspring they might, perhaps inadvertently, select against genes associated with altruism, because it is not advantageous at the individual level. I have not seen this argument made by those against designer genes, but it seems to me to be worthy of consideration. I would appreciate links to anyone of note making this argument.

If I create an event on my Yahoo calendar and then later open the event, the event is no longer set to send an email. If I set the calendar event for Yahoo Messenger, the setting remains. The email setting used to work just fine, sending emails before events. I have not made any changes to my email accounts. Does the calendar email now require using a Yahoo email address?

The HCF of two numbers is 10.

The LCM of the two numbers is 1800.

The difference between the two numbers is 310.

What are the two numbers?

If you look at this the right way, you can solve it fairly easily without using a calculator.

You have a sheet of paper with two points and the x and y coordinates are specified for the two points. Assume that the x and y coordinates have the same scale, that is, the distance between, for example, (0,0) and (1,0) is the same as the distance between (0,0) and (0,1). You are given a ruler (not just a straightedge) and a compass. How can you draw the x and y axes? Note that in the most general case of this problem, the axes need not be perpendicular. If you find that confusing, you may assume that the problem has been set up so that the axes are in fact perpendicular. The method of solution is the same in either case.

I work for a company that maintains sensitive data for a government agency. We have what I regard as a very weak encryption system.

Suppose that we upgraded to a public key system, which should be all that we need, since the only thing that we encrypt is passwords. Assume that programmers work on a development system with a database where the sensitive data is fictitious, allowing them to know the private key for the development system without gaining access to actual sensitive data.

After code is transferred to the production system, what is the specific mechanism by which users could enter passwords and access their data without anybody else, with the possible exception of a trusted administrator, knowing the private decryption key for the production system? Does this require the use of a third party?

I have a PayPal account. I would like to use it to receive money. How do I do this? Does the other person need a PayPal account?

I read that our eye cones do not respond most to red, green and blue but to yellow, green-yellow and blue. I thought it would be of interest to work with a color editor based on these colors instead of the standard RGB editor in order to get a sense for how our eyes respond to colors. I was curious, for example, to understand how we can see indigo and violet in the rainbow spectrum. The RGB formulation of these colors has settings for red and blue but not for green. This could not possibly be how it works in our eyes, since it would imply that our high and low frequency receptors would be active but not our middle range receptors.