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The original retraction letter is inspiring. I am glad that Dr. Jacobson set the record straight, even though it would have been easier for him to ignore his earlier mistakes.

The New York Times is wrong again. He did not retract the entire paper. He retracted "two brief passages". Besides, there is recent evidence that water existed early in the Earth's formation so his assumptions about the Hadean environment might be obsolete.

From American Scientist Magazine, May/June 2002. It's a few years old but the best article I've read to date on hard drive technology. It recaps the phenomenal advances of hard drive technology over the years and then asks the question: "When the terabyte drives come out, will we have enough data to store on them?" (At the rate I aggregate data, I would give an emphatic "Yes!") http://www.americanscientist.org/content/AMSCI/AMSCI/ArticleAltFormat/2003423135512_546.pdf

So at least by the 1920s scientists knew that something man-made could break the sound barrier:

In the early 1900s, some scientists wondered whether a whip's crack came from a sonic boom. That is, perhaps part of the whip moves faster than the speed of sound, around 750 miles an hour, and the clap of noise comes as the sound barrier is broken. Presumably the cracker creates the crack. By the 1920s, high-speed photography revealed that a whip's cracker can indeed break the sound barrier.

Across many fields, journal articles made openly available on the Internet are more heavily cited than those that remain behind subscription barriers, evidence that open-access articles have a greater impact on research. This chart shows results from a 10-year tracking of citations. Shown is the ratio of citations of open-access articles to citations of closed-access articles published in the same issue of a given journal, averaged by discipline. (Data from Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras 2005.)

> The principle you outlined is related to the Avogadro's number hence the name of the project.

How can you expect to have any degree of accuracy if you don't even have an exact value for one of the fundamental constants?! At best we have a estimate which isn't even that accurate, unlike other people who are actually proposing how to calculate it.

--
Until you've been dead, you don't realize how completely clueless Science and Religion are about Life, Consciousness, Time, and God.

> The principle you outlined is related to the Avogadro's number hence the name of the project.

How can you expect to have any degree of accuracy if you don't even have an exact value for one of the fundamental constants?! At best we have a estimate which isn't even that accurate, unlike other people who are actually proposing how to calculate it.

--
Until you've been dead, you don't realize how completely clueless Science and Religion are about Life, Consciousness, Time, and God.

Using a sphere precludes choosing an integer at all, because of the irrationality of pi.

OK, someone's going to have to explain this for me. Why do we have to have an actual object to define a weight?

You don't. That's just the way we've done it in the past. I read a really interesting article a couple months ago in American Scientist magazine called An Exact Value for Avogadro's Number that addresses exactly this question. In the past, Avogadro's Number (6.02andchange x 10^23) was defined experimentally, based on the reference kilogram. These scientists propose reversing that -- defining the number absolutely, based on the number of atoms of a particular element that fit within a sphere of a certain size. It's sort of similar to what they're doing with the silicon sphere, but it's all done on paper, rather than by actually manufacturing an artifact.

The advantage of this, they say, is that the number will remain constant and not be affected over time as refinements in building and measuring such "reference kilograms" change the accepted mass of a kilogram. They make several other arguments, as well, but it's much better if you just read the article. :) It's also mentioned that a similar approach was taken to defining the meter, based on an absolute definition of the speed of light.

And yes, the DNA of most animals in the area is pretty effed up, but surprisingly most of them appear healthy and reproduce normally.

One of the main studies that said that the DNA was effed up was later retracted. There's a very interesting article "Growing up with Chernobyl" (PDF) by Ronald K. Chesser and Robert J. Baker, that was published in the American Scientist (subscriber link). Baker is one of the scientists quoted in the featured article. In the "Growing up with Chernobyl, he says:

Soon after the paper was published, we acquired an automated sequencer that was more accurate than the manual methods used to sequence DNA. We had archived the tissues from all the animals used in our Nature study, so we decided to re-sequence the genes to compare the methods. To our horror, the automated sequencer failed to replicate the result we reported in Nature. The more accurate method failed to find an elevated mutation rate, even though we repeated the sequencing several times.

This IS a stirling engine. Specifically, a modification of the thermoacoustic stirling engine originally developed at LANL.

It's grossly ignorant to suggest it's not a series of chemical reactions

It's grossly ignorant to confuse experiences of subjective personal realities, with observations of objective consensus reality. (Also beware of confusing maps with territories, menus and meals, equations with things, and summer days with pretty girls.)

unlike numeracy (which is human construct), what we know as love existed long before Homo Sapiens came along.

You're suggesting that numbers did not exist until humans came along?

Not only does that make figuring out the physics of the early universe interesting, trying to write equations without numbers and all; but it is known that non-human animals have some basic concepts of numbers.

Well, to get to the heart of your point...

"Just a gut feeling but I don't think that we will develop real general purpose AIs without some type of hardware breakthrough like quantum computers."

Do you think that we humans use some sort of Quantum Coherence to maintain very short decision chains? If so, where in a cell would be stable for such temporary coherence be maintained? Theories suggest that microtubules MIGHT be able to hold containment, but most experts say 'probably not'.

However, to hold that theory, a recent study found that water does really weird things in carbon nanotubules with 4 gigapascals @ 250 K. H2O helixes are quite interesting, and do show promise to any sort of quantum processing in cells.

"The only thing I described as a "verifiable fact" is the claim that "significant amounts of Antarctic ice that have never been thawed in recorded human history are now gone". At the same time I provided a link to a BBC article describing particular patches of ice that are gone."

How are you defining 'significant'? The sections that are melting are tiny compared to the area increasing. Yes, some ice is melting while other ice is growing. Thats how its been on this planet for billions of years.

"You'll forgive me if I remain unconvinced without being provided with compelling evidence (or any evidence at all). This is not to say I'm confident that the Gulf Stream will stop: at this point I am skeptical of most universal claims on this subject (but especially those of people with an agenda to push, like most of those who claim it's not happening)."

Yeah, because those who claim that it is happening never have an agenda...

Here is the article.

Amen. And Al Gore hasn't contributed one iota. All he is doing is pumping the current Climatology Zeitgeist. Too often, we just go on blindly accepting traditional notions without ever bothering to actually put them to the test.

And yes, Scientific American in general has been going downhill, IMO. It's not yet as bad as Popular Science, but it's getting there.

> The melting polar cap stops the Gulf Stream elevator dead.

Urban myth.
The Gulf Stream is driven by the wind stress of air flowing from the Pacific over the Rocky Mountains!
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDet ail/assetid/51963?fulltext=true

Then there's the fact that North-West Europe (in particular us Brits) is kept warm by the Gulf Stream (look it up)

> You can't make a perfect copy of an individual quantum (i.e. one photon). If you
> have an lot of quanta (i.e. loads of identical photons coming out of a laser)

Those photons would be perfect copies of one another, wouldn't they? Ok, so the laser can't produce identical polarization, but it certainly can produce identical phase and amplitude; that's what a laser beam is all about. Splitting a beam does not disturb those parameters and they can be separately measured, as was done in the experiment. A measurement of the left beam would produce the same result as the measurement of the right beam, so you can measure in one and know in the other. Phase and amplitude of a wave may be considered its equivalents of position and momentum, so doing this disproves the uncertainty principle by example.

> In the case of a photon, you'd probably (in principle) use a polarisation-sensitive
> beam-splitter and two detectors, one on each output from the beam-splitter. The photon's
> polarisation isn't just disturbed - the photon is absorbed and hence destroyed when it
> hits the detector and is measured.

When it hits the detector, not when it passes through the splitter. If all the photons in the beam have the same parameters (like phase and amplitude), each beam coming out of the splitter will still have those same parameters. That's making a copy. Yes, each photon is destroyed at the detector, but you will have more photons in the other arm with the same parameters that you will now know without having measured them.

> If (as would be the general case) it was in some superposition of both states,
> we'd still only measure either one state or the other, with the appropriate
> probability; you'd need lots of states to work out what this probability was.

That's typical QM thinking. I would categorically deny that anything can be in "superposition"; in the real universe that's called a contradiction. A thing can't be both white and black at the same time. The reason QM gives you such contradiction is that it works with probabilities and interprets them incorrectly. A probability is not a state of the universe, it is a measurement of your knowledge. When a photon is in superposition of two states, it really means that you do not know which state it is in. You might say that it is 60% probable it is in state A and 40% probable that it is in state B, which means that you think A is somewhat more likely result than B. It does not mean that the universe does not know the state. To believe otherwise is called the mind projection fallacy. See this book (review) for more information; I highly recommend it to anyone working with probability.

> This isn't just a technical problem. A device which amplifies some signal from
> an individual quantum necessarily introduces noise, as do all amplifiers.

This is a technical problem. There is no theoretical reason (aside from the uncertainty principle, which I reject) that an amplifier must introduce noise. Just because you have not yet found a way to build a perfectly clean amplifier does not mean that it can not exist. This is the same sort of thinking that leads to "intelligent design" arguments.

> Through the process of amplification, the quantum superposition is changed to a plain
> old classical probability, and the cat is either dead OR alive before we open the box
> - no observer required! (This tending towards a classical probability from a quantum
> one has a sound mathematical backing in the ugly but effective density matrix treatment.)

And that is yet another reason to get rid of QM: it has a tendency to do the math and ignore what the math really means. When you do that you may get a valid result, but you will never know why you got it because you do not know what you did. Another Niels Bohr legacy of considering reality as being of no importance. Be

Okay...

This is not my area of expertise and not my parent post... but since you put serious time into reading.

I'll do a bit more digging.

How about:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDet ail/assetid/39261;_f5BEi_EFM ... Their main result is expressed in the title of their paper: "Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years." ...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/08/04080 3093903.htm
As the scientists have reported in the renowned scientific journal, Physical Review Letters, since 1940 the mean sunspot number is higher than...

http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=870
This is a critique of a peer reviewed article that turned out to play fast and loose with the facts to support the global warming argument.
Nature lays (another) egg ...the researchers failed to use the complete temperature record -- a record that actually spanned 1957 through 1995. ...

http://communities.anomalies.net/forum/ubbthreads. php/ubb/showflat/Number/159231/page/1/fpart/23
This is an article *about* an unlinked but peer reviewed article suggesting ice age correlation with stellar clouds. ...new research suggests the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy. ... ...The latest evidence appears in the June 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal...

Um, Jared Diamond's Collapse. That would be the one that's based on the ecological collapse of Rapa Nui from deforestation, the one that didn't actually happen that way? (Introduced rats, introduced measles, and Europeans with guns are what really did it for the Easter Islanders.) The book that was so far wrong that it sparked a special journal issue noting its errors?

Would that be the Jared Diamond Collapse you're referring to?

(You might look back at what I actually wrote, which was something to the effect of "trying to sell as prime real estate." No one who has every talked to a real estate agent about a house thinks "trying to sell as prime real estate" is a real strong recommendation for its general habitability. In any case, though, the point is that there was a Little Climactic Optimum, as well as a Little Ice Age: demonstrating that we're at the top of a thousand-year cycle, about a thousand years after the last top, is a whole helluva lot less impressive than saying "it's the warmest it's been in 400 years.")

There's an interesting article in the July/August edition of American Scientist which claims that Europe's warm weather (for its latitude) doesn't depend on the Gulf Stream:

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDet ail/assetid/51963

Of course, that doesn't mean Europeans (where I am!) shouldn't care about global warming.

By the way, the part about the wind generating these currents, or currents anywhere, is wrong. Currents are generated by a combination of the earth's rotation, the uneven solar heating of the earth's surface and the underwater topologies of the world's oceans.

I've hunted around for some web resources that give good overviews of the events that took place. Some are biased, but contain good information nonetheless. As with many such things, a balanced overview can only really be obtained from "averaging" several sources.

A rather good (if biased) article with an extensive list of references can be found at http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/ReligGalileoMyth95.h tm

There is another good resource at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/g alileo/galileo.html. Again, somewhat biased, but it includes some interesting translations of original trial documents, including the inquisition's verdict.

A link to a book review which nevertheless contains some key points such as the fact that Galileo had no actual proof for his heliocentric beliefs:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookRevi ewTypeDetail/assetid/49581;jsessionid=baaesdBdzFeP Uj

A quick overview of the history of heliocentricism (including some good links) is here:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/helioce ntrism.

Obviously biased (considering the source!) but nevertheless interesting is the entry for Galileo in the Catholic Encyclopaedia. One of many links to it is at:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06342b.htm

I hope you find these links both useful and interesting. If nothing else, the fact that some of them cite sources means that they can be used as "jump points" for further reading.

Another theory I remember reading about is that the Oort comet cloud becomes disturbed by the sun shifting up and down in an oscillation. Apparently the sun wobbles up and down as it rotates around the center of the Milky Way.

http://www.viewzone.com/nemesis.html
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDet ail/assetid/24618

Consider this fact: In the air we breathe, each cubic centimeter contains roughly 5 X 1019 atoms. In contrast, the intergalactic medium has a density of only 10-6 particles per cubic centimeter--each atom inhabits a private box a meter on each side. This would seem to suggest that there is not much matter in the intergalactic medium. But, given the enormous volume between the galaxies, it quickly adds up: The combined atomic mass of intergalactic gas exceeds the combined atomic mass of all the stars and galaxies in the universe--possibly by as much as 50 percent! There is indeed something in empty space

I've posted this before, in one of the threads a few weeks ago, but there was an article in American Scientist about Intelligent Design that looks at the larger picture. A key bit is this:

Intelligent Design is part of a calculated strategy that [founder Phillip] Johnson calls the "Wedge," referring to the tool used to split a solid object--in this case, the cornerstone of biological science. According to a document that appeared on the Discovery Institute's Web site in 1999, the goal of this plan is "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies." The document also makes sweeping, inaccurate claims such as "new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature." This statement is pure propaganda. (The document can still be found on the Discovery Institute's Web site by searching for "wedge," although it is now prefaced by 12 pages of insistent justification.) [Emphasis added]

It's interesting that the debate has been cast this way. As far as I can tell, the only thing the ID camp objects to is evolution/abiogenesis. What other science are they battling?

You might find this essay interesting. In particular:

Intelligent Design is part of a calculated strategy that [founder] Johnson calls the "Wedge," referring to the tool used to split a solid object--in this case, the cornerstone of biological science. According to a document that appeared on the Discovery Institute's Web site in 1999, the goal of this plan is "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."

That would have consequences in every realm of science except possibly pure mathematics. Physics and astronomy could be in serious trouble. Evolution itself has close ties with geology, though ID doesn't seem to have any issues with the timeframe. At least it's not the young-earth creationist crowd gaining power. It's astonishing how many people reject the big bang theory not on scientific bases, but on supposed inconsistencies with creationism. This despite the fact that the big bang is more compatible with creationism than, say, the steady-state model.

There was a quite interesting article in the Nov-Dec 2005 American Scientist:

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/CurrentI ssue;jsessionid=baadyy7MHypG0u (subscription required)

It talks about how and why tuna and lamnid sharks have elevated muscle temperatures. Has to do with the way they swim. The neat thing is it explains why tuna and these sharks have that stiff-bodied way of swimming. The warm muscles are deep in the body along the spine, but pull tendons that move the airleron-like tail to propel the fish. They say that tuna have been clocked at nearly 70 mph for short distances.

Contrast this with regular fish, which swim by bending their entire bodies back and forth.

Another interesting thing is that the tuna and sharks have to swim constantly their entire lives or they will sink - no air bladder. The lack of a bladder meant they could descend much faster onto prey. As a result they literally must swim or sink.

With that out of the way, American Scientist does a good job of covering science news. It's parent organization, Sigma Xi, has a filtered publication, Science in the News, that is edited by a real person, who screens for quality in the articles.

One of the big problems in journalism at large, and especially coverage of news in science, is that the journalists are not familiar with the material. So, the professional dumbs it down enough for the reporter to 'get it', and then he rewrites his notes into an 'interesting' story.

So, by the time it gets published, a bunch of the original material is missing or misreported, since the reporter is trying to get his story published.

That's way too generous. Approx. 0 IQ is only about 6 standard deviations lower than average intelligence. (See definition of IQ). A more reasonable estimate would be around -50, which would put us at 10 standard deviations.

There is also "American Scientist," a bi-monthly of a more academic ilk, but well edited in my view. It's not totally devoid of politics, but usually quite tolerable.

Actually, Base 3 looks to be the most efficient. What might be interesting to look into is a logic family built around +/0/- signaling. That is, use positive, negative and ground as your three voltages.

The biggest trick would be to map boolean operators onto the ternary paradigm. I don't think ternary computing lends itself to as many neat bit-fiddly things as binary.

Microwave News, edited by Louis Slesin is a prime example of a publication with only one purpose: to show the world that microwaves are dangerous.

Slesin has been criticised for years and years by the very same folks who gave us the ANSI standard for RF exposure.

The problem with so much of this research is that it's very difficult to get similar results from similar experiments. Once you're below the ANSI exposure standard, the apparent risk drops to something just barely observable from the usual daily afflictions. Every now and then someone comes up with a study which shows a positive correlation. However, to date, none of these experimental results have been reproduced --either in attempts to repeat the experiment, or in complementary approaches.

The important thing to understand here is that if there is a risk, it is extremely small.

The other thing to keep in perspective is the effects of big money on research. The big money works both ways: Governments love to throw money at research like this so that they can control industry with regulation "for the good of the people." Industry loves to throw money at these researchers to show that their products are safe.

The problem with obvious funding sources from either side is that the researchers have to fight very hard to stay independent and continue studying this phenonmenon.

These behaviors have been documented in many sources. The one I like best is The Great Betryal: Fraud In Science. A review of this work can be found here.

Huh?

There's no fundamental correspondence between the fuel used and the method used to contain it -- only that different fuels have different ignition temperatures. The magnetic-confinement methods currently being explored have difficulty getting up there in the temperature/pressure range, so they're restricted to the tritium-deuterim reaction, which is the easiest to get going (but spews lost of nasty high-energy neutrons).

But there's nothing about an alternative fuel that suddenly makes electrostatic a possibility. Electrostatic methods (e.g. Hierch-Farnsworth or "focus fusion" are theoretically able to achieve much higher temperatures than magnetic confinement, and so can accomodate other fuels (as well as deuterium-tritium). I don't know the specifics of the He3 reaction, but from what I've seen it's the hydrogen-boron reaction that has the most promise, as it doesn't have any high-energy neutrons as products, and so is quite clean. And I think boron is a bit easier to come by than He3. :)

- Doug

American Scientist magazine has an article on "heavy metal" reactors that transform some of the nastiest components of spent fuel into a more acceptable range of isotopes.

A safer, better type of nuclear reactor design, one cooled by liquid metal, was covered in the recent issue of American Scientist (the journal of Sigma Xi). Such a design could also burn the type of nuclear waste destined for Yucca Mountain.
An abstract of the article is here.

Behe's book is in fact quite silly and widely recognized as such. (It may well be both compelling and silly, which makes it all the more pernicious.) See, for example, this review.

What I find particularly poignant is that one need not know anything about biology to spot the glaring holes in Behe's logic. I visited a rather beautiful natural rock arch a while ago. If any of the rocks making it up were removed, the arch would collapse. (Assembling such a delicately-balanced multi-ton construction over a void even with modern civil engineering would be difficult.) It is both aesthetic and function, and not merely random. It has irreducible specified complexity by Behe's definition. Therefore, Behe would have us conclude that the arch was assembled by gods or fairies rather than by natural processes.

(Indeed, the young-earth creationists are compelled to believe this, as it would probably be impossible to erode so many meters of granite in only a few thousand years.)

Pointing out that there are some phenomena which biology cannot explain in complete detail isn't unscientific, though it's perhaps not very helpful. Most of the things Behe questions have apparently now been handled to some extent. But of course there are things we don't completely understand yet; that doesn't mean we understand nothing or that we have to assume "goddidit".

Basically Behe states that any mutation that is not beneficial will be lost over time as the animal with the mutation will be less likely to survive to pass on its genes.

I am not a geneticist, but I don't think that statement is true. You can only say that any mutation which is *harmful* will tend to die out, but there are many possible mutations which are neither beneficial nor harmful. It is possible the mutation is in "junk" (currently unused) DNA; it may have no effect on survival (eye color); it may be a duplicate; it may not be expressed; it may have no relevance to the environment; it may be cancelled by another effect.

If Behe did say that it shows he is enormously out of touch.

When somebody using Behe's techniques designs, for example, a new antiviral drug, then I'll believe he's onto something.

There is an American Scientist (Sigma Xi) article that describes the VERY LARGE deposits of methane in the oceans. Go to Here for more details.

The journal of the Sigma Xi society, my dad is a lifetime member and I've throughly enjoyed reading these. They give you a great sampling of any number of cutting edge topics - and get this - they actually have math and an acceptable level of science! It's not as heavy writing as you would get in a purely scientific journal, but it is much more in depth for the most part than you'd see in something like Scientific American. Pretty color graphics, great book reviews.

Anyway; a real gem not many people are aware of.

American Scientist

American Scientist is a great magazine for general science articles. Past articles include work on Non-determinstic polynomials, neutrino oscillations, and sustainable yield models for fisheries management. It's a great survey magazine. Unfortunately, it's hit or miss sometimes. Some of the articles are boring, even from a scientific perspective.

I also read Scientific American but it's kind of sensationalistic. I have a guilty pleasure of reading Wired, "Linus Torvalds, Leader of the Free World - His open source software is making Bill Gates sweat. What's next: Open Source science, law, and design". After reading that article , it's hard not to imagine him laughing after reading it.

I'd probably subscribe to an dead tree tech Linux journal but what's online seems sufficient.

American Scientist is a great magazine for general science articles. Past articles include work on Non-determinstic polynomials, neutrino oscillations, and sustainable yield models for fisheries management. It's a great survey magazine. Unfortunately, it's hit or miss sometimes. Some of the articles are boring, even from a scientific perspective.

I also read Scientific American but it's kind of sensationalistic. I have a guilty pleasure of reading Wired, "Linus Torvalds, Leader of the Free World - His open source software is making Bill Gates sweat. What's next: Open Source science, law, and design". After reading that article , it's hard not to imagine him laughing after reading it.

I'd probably subscribe to an dead tree tech Linux journal but what's online seems sufficient.

American Scientist is a great magazine for general science articles. Past articles include work on Non-determinstic polynomials, neutrino oscillations, and sustainable yield models for fisheries management. It's a great survey magazine. Unfortunately, it's hit or miss sometimes. Some of the articles are boring, even from a scientific perspective.

I also read Scientific American but it's kind of sensationalistic. I have a guilty pleasure of reading Wired, "Linus Torvalds, Leader of the Free World - His open source software is making Bill Gates sweat. What's next: Open Source science, law, and design". After reading that article , it's hard not to imagine him laughing after reading it.

I'd probably subscribe to an dead tree tech Linux journal but what's online seems sufficient.

If you really want to know what we know about Alzheimner's, for instance, I suggest you read this. Similar resources exist for each of those conditions I mentioned and are quite easily found.

This is the larger paragraph that you quote from:

Several NPA members believe that the main benefit of criticizing and replacing special relativity may be--beyond even the likely development of new energy sources this will facilitate--the undermining of the relativism and subjectivism that have increasingly infused many areas of thought over the past century, since the iconoclastic amorality of Nietzsche. It will then become more difficult to support ethical relativism, and to argue that truth and values are not objective, absolute, eternal, and/or rationally based.

What they are saying is that science has been infected by the same moral relativism as the society at large in which it exists. Instead of ideas being scientifically rigorous and testable by anybody, you have science that is politically expedient. There is no such thing as "objective truth" that might be known, but only a paradigm which scientists view the world. In other words, science is a "subjective experience."

One example of this would be the science of the bush administration. I also think that string theory is another example.

The redshift stuff did look a bit hokey to me too. But I also know that if for some reason the transmission of light was not constant across the vast distances of the universe, that it would/could throw all of the cherished cosmological theories (like that of an expanding universe) down the drain.

There are two things that we know about but yet their effect on light is not known. Over great distances, if these two things were to affect light in even the most infinitesimal way, all of the cosmological theories would have to be rewritten.

Those two things are dark energy and dark matter.

P.S. In my experience, whining about how alternative theorists are ostracized is a dead giveaway of a crackpot.

Like all those people who whined that Galileo was ostracized?

Real scientists know that all theories are honestly criticized,

So what makes a "real scientist?" Is it the the fact that they are pursuing scientific knowledge in a scientific manner, or do they need to be "the right people."

Real scientists know that all theories are honestly criticized, and they can point to the literature in which alternatives have been proposed.

I do not think that all theories are honestly criticized. One prime example of this is String Theory

In an ideal world, your statement would be true. But scientific endeavor is fraught with the same problems that are caused by human failings as much as anything else.

1. Science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) and comic books are popular,
2. SF/F fans think about other worlds
3. you can't think about two worlds at once,
4. internet interactions retreat from the real world
5. retreating from the real world is bad
6. on the internet you never have to argue with people who disagree with you
7. if you feel you can't change the world you read fantasy so
8. SF/F keeps us from exploring our world and should be less popular.

Where to start? Addressing these in no particular order...

• 5: Then books in general are bad: there's just nothing worse than someone sitting around thinking.
• 5: And as the essay point out, many common activities keep people from reality (or make you talk for hours about trivia or statistics): TV, baseball games, video games, golf, martha stewart trials. These are quantiatively different from fandom how?
• 6: Huh? I suppose if you only IM with a few people and have an interlocked set of livejournal users, perhaps. But otherwise anyone with a blog with comments, or anyone on usenet is exposed to more arguments and opposing viewpoints than ever. You can keep atheists out of your physical church: its much harder to keep them out of Talk.religion.mychurch.
• 3: Not only can you think about two worlds at once, you have to if you want to understand your own time and milieu. Understanding implies the ability to step outside of it- examine it from the outside. Knowing history and traveling to other countries is critical, of course. But if your goal is understanding humanity overall you need a bigger mental space to step back in: science (evolution, anthropology) and SF/F provide this space.
• 1: Yes, SF/F movies are big- 23 out of 25 of the top grossing movies are SF/F. But modern written science fiction isn't the same as modern SF/F movies: most SF movies are 30 years behind written SF
• 7: Much popular written SF/F analyzes or confronts our society. For example, I'd done a quick analysis of Hugo award finalists for last year (what SF/F fans consider to be the best of the year). Few of the stories were standard fantasy: most were about how humans might deal with the inevitable changes coming to our society in the short and long terms.
• 2 & 4 & 8: those who "inhabit imaginary worlds" are often the ones inspired to start new science and technologies, explore our world and local neighborhood, and get us to confront upcoming problems
• 2 & 5: What conventions does he go to? The science fiction conventions I go to are filled with lectures about cutting edge science, technology, health and physiology... they're also filled with scientists [physical, bio and social]. Many fans are scientists, many SF writers are scientists, many scientists were inspired by SF to go into their careers.
• 2 & 6 & 7: Again, I think he's not at the same conventions: anyone who has seen the debates about Trotskyite libertarian cyberpunks vs. K.S.Robinson style socialism vs. LeGuin's anthro-SF isn't going to think that SF cons are a mutual agreement-fest. (Eric Raymond vs. Charlie Stross: now *that* was fun)

And you do realise that it's permissible to reserve judgment until the evidence is in, right?

heh. The evidence is in. String theory is not only a failed idea, it's not even wrong.

That string theory "explains a lot of things (aren't they trying for everything?)" and that "it is beautiful" has all the hallmarks of religion to me.

I don't see where I asked you to believe string theory.

This is the problem I have with string theory. People who defend string theory are asking for faith.

Here is what Jim Gates, theorist of string theory had to say. From the link;

Gates: String theory is often criticized as having had no experimental input or output, so the analogy to a religion has been noted by a number of people. In a sense that's right; it is kind of a church to which I belong. We have our own popes and House of Cardinals. But ultimately science is also an act of faith -- faith that we will be capable of understanding the way the universe is put together.

If that isn't "from the horses mouth", I don't know what is. He makes my entire argument for me.

There is no connection between string theory and the observable universe. This singular undeniable fact is the reason that it is not science.

String theory is a siren song, that people mistakenly cling to because it offers explanations and mathematical beauty. But the abstract string theory has no connection to the real world.. As the article pointed out (more eloquently than I could), string theory is the "fad" among scientists right now.

BTW, I am not a "troll" because I show skepticism about string theory. Is not skepticism the foundation of science, or is that the part of the "scentific method" that is not "correct" anymore? Indeed, disagree with a popular theory here on slashdot and even though you offer a rational explanation, you get modded as a troll. (Not that slashdot has any credence whatsoever).

It seems this is the problem with string theory too. It is popular among a few elitist scientists right now, and disciples are eagerly waiting for these "high priests" to "mete out" explanations on how the universe might work, without any scientific justification whatsoever. Hence the popularity of this particular book being reviewed. So if you stray from the "sacred doctrine" of string theory you are not playing "the only game in town". Peer pressure will haunt you even though there might be totally different and valid ideas that are worth investigating.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....it must be. Taken all together, string theory fits "religious thinking" better than it fits a scientific description of the universe.

Here is a very recent review of one such revival.

It doesn't offend me (yet), I just find it amusing that supposed scientists do not recognize the "religion" that they are escaping into. Truly a spectacle.

Actually, the optimal base would be e (~2.7), although I highly doubt that all the work that has been done to enhance the performance of binary operations inside computers is going to allow us to switch anytime soon.

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDet ail/assetid/14405/page/1

More info about base 3 computing here.