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If anyone is making decisions based on the results of one paper, they're idiots.

btw, a lot of the problems mentioned in the second half of this article still exist today

I'm not clear on what magic needs to come into existence to test it.

This certainly says it's untestable:

My conclusion, as you'd expect, is that string theory is not testable in any conventional scientific use of the term. The fundamental problem is that simple versions of the string theory unification idea, the ones often sold as "beautiful", disagree with experiment for some basic reasons. Getting around these problems requires working with much more complicated versions, which have become so complicated that the framework becomes untestable as it can be made to agree with virtually anything one is likely to experimentally measure. This is a classic failure mode of a speculative framework: the rigid initial version doesn't agree with experiment, making it less rigid to avoid this kills off its predictivity.

So, tell us, please ... what is missing from our collective understanding of whether String Theory can be tested?

Because I've been hearing for rather a long time that physicists can't test it, or that parts of it have been refuted by the LHC.

I get the distinct impression that we simply have no basis on which to test it. Reputable scientists say it can't be tested.

So, on what basis are you asserting that it's testable?

Or would be have to create a 26 dimensional device to measure this? Because, really, that's a pretty steep challenge.

I know enough about math and science to know that physicists have been saying String Theory is voodoo for decades, and it doesn't sound like we're any closer to being able to test it.

http://neurotheory.columbia.ed...

"It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated."

In the search of positive results, and p-hacking to get there, they're failing to demonstrate scientific integrity.

Asynchronous designs are faster (~3x) and consume less energy (~2x) but need an overhaul of the production process who is deemed too costly. Perhaps this technology could make it interesting again. (Source)

"Can you imagine what he'll be like at 18?"

Ability and age tend to not scale linearly. His abilities probably aren't going to change that much from here (he peaked early) and he's not going to amount to much if he can't handle advanced and abstract mathematics.

"...if we encourage young people to go into STEM"

TERRIBLE IDEA! There's already far too much supply for the lack of demand that exists, at least as measured in salaries. As long as we allow desperate, 3rd world coolie laborers to take our technology jobs and thus drive down the salaries, there's no point in anyone bothering to study STEM.

Professor Peter Woit at Columbia comments on the low wages for STEM jobs ( http://www.math.columbia.edu/~... ):

"Pollack repeats the claim of a serious shortage of students in STEM fields:

...Last year, the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology issued an urgent plea for substantial reform if we are to meet the demand for one million more STEM professionals than the United States is currently on track to produce in the next decade....

something which is actually only a shortage of talented people willing to work for low wages."

What a long way down to this.

TWENTY YEARS ago when a 1 megabit T1 cost $10,000 a month installed to the Caribbean -- with an equal measure of determination, deft grantsmanship and elbow grease we managed to bring Internet to the US Virgin Islands with the Virgin Islands Freenet. One day in September 1994 connectivity was available for ~40 cents a minute if you dialed long distance to the states, a couple thou a month for 56kbit or 10k for T1. The day after you could get an email address, access Usenet groups and browse the web with Lynx on 4 (and later as many as 12) local dialup lines.

So when the National Telecommunications Information Administration announced the first-ever roundtable discussion on the future of the global Internet we were there, and carried the newsgroups so our growing user base could follow and participate in this near real-time discussion. The issues were well presented, the discussion was formal and polite.

There does seem to be a general lack of civility and willingness to participate in process these days.

Now I do hold some measure of contempt for the Federal Government as a whole in its hubris over control of the Internet. The NSA is pushing net neutrality in its charter-be-damned initiative to listen to everyone, the president-du-jour tolerates 'Internet kill switch' dialogue throughout the Executive Branch as if martial law security checkpoints should be written into law, and let's not forget the peoples' hero Al Gore who lobbied for the government to hold our encryption keys in escrow. There is a large bullshit factor.

But attacking the FCC is sort of like going after park rangers. For better or worse (mostly better) it presided over the breakup of the Bells. It helped to ensure that even rural USA modernized its telecom to bring about modern access choices, the ones we take for granted today, to as much of the country as possible. And now they are charged with accepting comments on 'net neutrality' -- which will be as hard to adequately define in the modern context as it would be to discuss.

Now more than ever we need the real voices of people who aren't afraid to write their thoughts into multi-paragraph letters and opinions, no matter the medium, so say something about it. Just like my Freenet folks twenty years ago were eager to do. These folks are not wanting to know how to control, they are asking in what ways it may be best to regulate.

Control is what we generally try to avoid. Regulation that occurs with a majority of support that accomplishes useful goals -- such as the rural electrification and building of telecom in America -- is a necessary part of due process.

Time to try to recapture just a bit of the cultural restraint and intelligent determination of yesteryear, methinks.

That's ridiculous. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~se...

Processor speeds have, and continue to, increase exponentially.

I've seen the code for one model, it was a while back but it was an obvious mess. The guys that write this stuff are mostly Phd candidates in something other than sofware engineering; usually they slave away on the code for a while then somebody else gets stuck on it. How much of the other 95 models currently used are available to "People who just want to tear it apart" I have no idea, but a lot more than most regulars realize especially if you don't mind having a previous version GISS Model II GCM is available for enquiring mind to play with.

Females wanted equality, I define equality by giving the job to the best candidate, not an artificial quota of genders in each position

One issue is the large amount of empirical evidence that people doing the hiring, even if they themselves are women, systematically bias their judgments, so that they will judge an inferior man to be "best" over a better qualified woman.

the researchers mimicked how employers get information about candidates during the job interview process. First, they asked subjects to complete a task that men and women perform equally well but about which there is a pervasive stereotype that men perform better: correctly completing as many math problems as possible in four minutes. ... Employers each met two candidates in person at the same time and had to choose which of the candidates to hire to complete another set of math problems.... The results were not encouraging: both male and female employers were strongly biased against female candidates in all variations of the experiment, choosing women significantly less than half the time (half being the rate women would be expected to be chosen in the absence of discrimination). Even in the variations where employers could change their choices after learning more about candidates’ performances from the researchers or through the self-reported scores, male candidates were still favored by at least 13 percentage points.

And now here's the part that really bugs me:

Mann said after the ruling, “This is a victory for science...

No, it's not! Our high schools really need to do a better job teacher students what science is and not just memorizing the first 6 steps in the first week of class and then memorizing facts that were found using science (biology, chemistry etc). Just because in this case the other side who is trying to get your data has even less understanding of what science is (and will no doubt intentionally misconstrue your data) does not mean this is a victory for science. There is no concept of proprietary knowledge in science, quite the opposite in fact.

This. Thank you. Only cargo cult science finds victory in hiding its underlying thought processes and justifications from public view. Not saying that Mann's beliefs about AGW are wrong, but that his behavior at various points has demonstrated a profound lack of and disregard for scientific openness.

"They make a point now of not sharing the details of the models with people. That would concern you if you had any intellectual curiosity."

Well, that is bullshit of incredible intensity. Just for curiosity, who exactly told you that? You presumably won't have any injection to sharing that data with us.
In return, I will share with you this thing called Google, with which I was able quite rapidly to find:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/fms
http://mitgcm.org/public/sourc...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools...
http://www.nemo-ocean.eu/About...
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/re...
http://forge.ipsl.jussieu.fr/i...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools...
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model...
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model...
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model...
http://edgcm.columbia.edu/
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/f...
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/H...
There's more but I'm tired of cut and pasting. You would be able to find these also if you have any intellectual curiosity, but them you might have to doubt the sources of your info on how bad the climatology people are, and how they're hiding the code to conceal that out doesn't work, and that maybe the models do run and give outputs, ave before you know it the foundations of you whole world view are shaken.

http://www.epic.noaa.gov/epic/...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools...
http://edgcm.columbia.edu/
http://nomads.gfdl.noaa.gov/CM...

Some data: http://www2.cesm.ucar.edu/

Some background info:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/ccmac-cccm...
http://www.climateprediction.n...
http://www.climate.uvic.ca/
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/techni...

This one has videos: http://vimeo.com/user12523377/...

In this age of information, ignorance is a choice.

No discussion of modern money can proceed without referencing the following people? Marriner Eccles http://mikenormaneconomics.blo... Beardsley Ruml http://www.constitution.org/ta... Abba Lerner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... William Vickrey http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp... Wynne Godley http://www.levyinstitute.org/s... Warren Mosler http://moslereconomics.com/man... Randy Wray http://www.levyinstitute.org/p... Bill Mitchell http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n... and CH Douglas, already referenced in another comment

Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand?

Probably just as much as the global warming alarmists do, seeing as they predicted the opposite result before it happened, but of course are now claiming that they knew all along that this was a possibility. That assertion has been thoroughly debunked, by many actual scientists, but that doesn't stop anti-science people like you from making your specious claims to support your ideological agenda.

That is, quite frankly, offensive, and shows ignorance about the work of real scientists.

When cosmetologists work on a model, they refine and test their techniques until they can successfully predict how everything will turn out, and in fact time proves their predictions right. To put it another way, if they consistently gave a bad haircut, they would go out of business. Because it turns out that models can't stand a bad haircut.

Climatologists, on the other hand... well, don't take it from me. Read Feynman on cargo cult science in general, and Richard Lindzen on climate alarmism in particular.

Bottom line -- shame on you for lowering cosmetologists to the level of (OK... _some_) climatologists.

http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/u...

        English: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
        Jamaican: Chruu, a kwik di kwik brong fox a jomp huova di liezi daag de, yu no siit?
        Irish: "An fuil do roí ag buala ó aitíos an rá a eall lena óg éada ó lí do leasa ú?" "D'uascail Íosa Úrac na hÓie Beannaie pór Éava agus Áai."
        Dutch: Pa's wze lynx bezag vroom het fikse aquaduct.
        German: Falsches Üben von Xylophonmusik quält jeden größeren Zwerg. (1)
        German: Im finteren Jagdchloß am offenen Felsquellwaer patzte der affig-flatterhafte kauzig-höfliche Bäcker über einem verifften kniffligen C-Xylophon. (2)
        Norwegian: Blåbærsyltetøy ("blueberry jam", includes every extra letter used in Norwegian).
        Danish: Høj bly gom vandt fræk sexquiz på wc.
        Swedish: Flygande bäckasiner söka strax hwila på mjuka tuvor.
        Icelandic: Sævör grét áðan ví úlpan var ónýt.
        Finnish: (5) Törkylempijävongahdus (This is a perfect pangram, every letter appears only once. Translating it is an art on its own, but I'll say "rude lover's yelp". :-D)
        Finnish: (5) Albert osti fagotin ja töräytti puhkuvan melodian. (Albert bought a bassoon and hooted an impressive melody.)
        Finnish: (5) On sangen hauskaa, että polkupyörä on maanteiden jokapäiväinen ilmiö. (It's pleasantly amusing, that the bicycle is an everyday sight on the roads.)
        Polish: Pchn w t ód jea lub osiem skrzy fig.
        Czech: Píli luouký k úpl ábelské kódy.
        Slovak: Starý kô na hbe kníh uje tíko povädnuté rue, na stpe sa ate uí kváka novú ódu o ivote.
        Greek (monotonic):
        Greek (polytonic):
        Russian: .
        Russian: - ? , ! .
        Bulgarian: , , , .
        Sami (Northern): Vuol Ruoa geggiid leat mága luosa ja uova.
        Hungarian: Árvíztr tükörfúrógép.
        Spanish: El pingüino Wenceslao hizo kilómetros bajo exhaustiva lluvia y frío, añoraba a su querido cachorro.
        Portuguese: O próximo vôo à noite sobre o Atlântico, põe freqüentemente o único médico. (3)
        French: Les naïfs ægithales hâtifs pondant à Noël où il gèle sont sûrs d'être déçus en voyant leurs drôles d'ufs abîmés.
        Esperanto: Eoano iuade.
        Hebrew: .
        Japanese (Hiragana):

                  (4)

Actually, XENON isn't a European project, it's an international collaboration with leadership in the United States and members in Europe and China. The device is in Europe, but that's sort of incidental. Here's the membership: XENON-100

according to Dan Pink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us --- This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. Watch the full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/v... "

Maybe asking for "passionate" programmers to do mundane tasks is a sign of supply/demand issues for programmers? So, perhaps many employers think they can demand more and more from a large number of programmers? That may be made worse by our overall mainstream economy continues its death spiral of lower wages leading to lower demand leading to lower wages etc.? Contrast with how things were like in the 1970s when there were very few programmers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/com...
"It must have been about 1973. Life at IBM was good, and I was busy doing whatever it is that engineers did then. Suddenly, in the life of our project, something came up that called for a computer program that did not exist, and I was asked to create it. My boss knew I'd never written a program before; not unusual since in those days there were very few engineers who knew how to program. ..."

Of course, that was back when more companies were willing to invest significantly in employee education and career development... Back when US labor was stronger politically and before trickle-down neoliberal economics, deregulation, offshoring, H1Bs, and lowered taxes on the wealthy and corporations became popular ideas (even though ironically the US economy overall has gotten worse and worse for more and more people the more these ideas are adopted). Still, there are always exceptions of organizations or parts of organizations (like "skunkworks") that embrace the ideas Dan Pink talks about.

These short-term global fluctuations are associated principally with natural oscillations of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures summarized in the Nino index in the lower part of the figure.

HTH

So you'll believe Mann's site.

Perhaps I would, but you'll never know, since skeptical science is not Mann's site. Not sure why you are immigrating to the land of speculation.

How about famed pro-AGW NASA scientist James Hansen who is on record as confirming the stall in temperatures [wattsupwiththat.com]?

Whoops. Your mistake. Turns out in the actual paper written by Hansen (rather than a misquote by that idiot Watts) there is no indication of an actual stall in temperature rise, he is just addressing the myth that there is a stall, and explaining the reason for the slowdown. Serves you right for getting your information from a blog (a blog written by a paid employee of the Heartland institute) rather than from a scientist. In order for denialist theory to be right (i.e. the warming is attributable to a natural cause) the observed warming trend would have to be zero. This means not going back to the temperature in 2012, but going back to the temperature in 1901. So tell me, how long until the warming trend reverses itself? How long until we return to the average temperature from 1901?

If you read the following, you will understand: http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

No, because that is a definition of the term "cargo cult science". I obviously will not "understand" that James Hansen is a cargo cult scientist just by reading the definition of the term again.

Scientists who try to prevent others from validating their work

How is Hansen preventing others from validating his work? Is he not providing his data? Sabotaging others' equipment? How?

who put confidence in extrapolation of curve fits to chaotic systems

Hansen certainly doesn't do that. That is certainly not the basis of climate science, or of Hansen's work.

If you read the following, you will understand:

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

Scientists who try to prevent others from validating their work, who sway politicians using graphs without error bars, and who put confidence in extrapolation of curve fits to chaotic systems and insist that others share their confidence without really articulating why. Stuff like that.

I'm not saying everything he does and says is wrong, but climate science is really in its infancy, and is not prepared to instigate the kinds of global policy mandates that Hansen periodically trumpets.

Seems as good a place to ask it as any.
What does /. think of:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21457072

http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7520940937

http://www.physiology.columbia.edu/MartinBlank.html
"
â EMR accelerates the reaction rate, i.e., electron transfer rate
â EMR competes with the chemical force driving the reaction, so the effect of EMR varies inversely with the reaction rate
â Interaction thresholds are low, comparable to levels found in EMR-cancer epidemiology studies
â Effects vary with frequency, and there appear to be different optima for the reactions studied: ATPase (60Hz), cytochrome oxidase (800Hz), BZ (250Hz)

These properties, in addition to stimulation of DNA in the cellular stress response, are consistent with EMR effects on many biological systems through interaction with electrons moving during redox reactions and also within DNA"

I ran into it a couple of weeks ago and it ran contrary to what I was expecting to find.
Curious if there's any problem with his work.

These guys at Columbia did something similar years ago, but used eyeball reflections and a cornea model to figure out what the person was looking at: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/

At 18 in 1964, I was just a young guy who programmed the IBM 407 Accounting machine that was also installed with the AN/FSQ-7 in the Canadian underground NORAD headquarters in North Bay, Ontario. The program complexity on those machines was measured by how much the boards weighed. Lots of wires terminated with pins containing tiny metal balls (like hitch pins) to keep the pins from being pushed out when the board was inserted into the 407 to run whatever program its wiring instructed. Diodes were sometimes needed to prevent back-flow (that machine's source of bugs). Spent over 7 years in the "hole" with the huge Q-7. Nostalgia!

Before science gets hot and bothered about the loss of data scientists need to do something about the quality of the data they produce to begin with. Frankly given the complete lack of quality controls that a lot of scientists use the loss of their data is probably for the best. Depending on the field as much as 60% of all scientific research cannot even be reproduced. Work that cannot be reproduced by another team is far from isolated to one field either:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203764804577059841672541590
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/half-cancer-scientists-have-been-unable-reproduce-studies-survey-finds
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/reproducing_scientific_studies_a_good_housekeeping_seal_of_approval_.html
https://www.xsede.org/gateways-for-open-science
http://www.eusci.org.uk/articles/data-doesnt-lie-scientists-do

Depending on the study that means that either the data has been fabricated by unethical scientists, or the data has been misrepresnted for political purposes. Studies are often improperly interpreted by failing to take into account sound statistical modeling and noise is reported as science. In some fields politics have effectively taken over (e.g. social sciences) and standards are used that would never be tolerated in other scientific fields.

The very culture of science that demands quantity over quality needs to change as the rat race that inspires junk science to begin with. I can't think of any other field where those kinds of failure rates about the reproducibility of your work would do anything other than get you fired for fraud and destroy your career. I like science, I have since I was a young child, but the junk were getting labeled as science doesn't deserve the label.

. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive. In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena's conjecture is true."

Not. Even. Wrong.

None of this is evidence of anything, and anyone who takes these ideas for granted, without the slightest experimental proof whatsoever, can be assumed to be no longer talking about physics.

...is no longer not even wrong ?

But where do those numbers come from?

You can copyright an implementation of a language, but you cannot copyright the language itself. This view is more completely settled in EU law, but there are US cases that have reached the same conclusion.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~aho/cs6998/lectures/11-10-11_Zimmeck_ProtectPL.pdf
http://the1709blog.blogspot.com/2013/01/sas-v-wpl-programming-languages-not.html
http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2013/january/computer-programming-languages-should-not-be-viewed-as-copyrightable-says-high-court-judge/

You can use http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html instead of being lazy or ignorant. Did you know that?

Some computer generated maps...
http://rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html
http://www.maproomblog.com/2006/11/computer-generated_electoral_districts.php
http://igpa.uillinois.edu/content/igpa-releases-computer-generated-legislative-district-map

Not computer generated, but lots of options:
http://web.law.columbia.edu/redistricting

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~mikepo/papers/gpukeylogger.eurosec13.pdf

a lot more if you just Google...

This has got to be the most full of crap post I have ever read on slashdot. Even in Australia, where they have a history of being big on Carbon (enough to spark a backlash of late) they won't claim half of that. Australia has ideal solar capacity and even they are projecting that they theoretically could reach 50% of baseline with renewables by 2040 and that is the most aggressive credible study I have ever heard of.

Keep in mind that Australia is largely ideally suited for renewables with ample sunshine, and a low population that is largely either in large cities or small towns and very little in-between. That makes it about one of the best places you could possibly have short of a small island for having a renewables based energy source. The resources to scale up windmills, solar panels and other forms of renewables are not infinite and have to come from somewhere.

Windmills and solar panels require rare earth minerals and those come from mines that are almost exclusively in China. A new mine has recently opened in the US so at least one mine will be run with environmental standards. However your notion that we have enough supplies to build enough windmills to power the world is absurd. Don't forget about present shortages in silicon for creating solar panels with the today's production capacity. The idea that we have the materials to supply the world is absurd as cold fusion.

Even when you get the power which often comes at less than ideal times (when it's sunny, windy etc) you have to store somewhere. That means creating batteries and batteries are either going to use materials that are bad for the environment or going to be hyrdopower based or air based and difficult to scale. They can be built, however you simply cannot scale these on a world wide basis at any kind of realistic rate, no matter how well they work at a small scale because the capacity simply isn't there.

I firmly support renewables and have followed the technology for decades. However I have to call out pie in the sky posts like yours as being environmentally irresponsible. The result of always claiming baseline renewables were right around the corner has been decades of keeping society firmly in the hands of the coal industry. Meanwhile we could have had real environmental change by building nuclear power plants instead of more coal power plants because people forget the power has to come from somewhere.

Well, it's good to see a major scientific institution waking up to a phenomenon Richard Feynman warned about in the 1970s. Yet it seems to me the proposed solution is a little ad hoc. If scientists want to restore integrity to their field(s) -- and I applaud their efforts to do so -- why aren't they using an experimental approach to do so? I think they should try several things and collect data to find out what actually works.

Wow, your going to go there, you picked about the worst cases you could. I could bother doing the same thing with coal and quickly show far worse pollution and death figures, but you can google that all by yourself. So let's take your worst case scenario and run with it (you have researched these things, right?). How many people were killed in these or all other nuclear related incidents? How much actual damage was done?

Now compare those numbers to your favorite form of green energy, how about windmills? Go on, google this and tell me how it compares. Why don't you compare pollution figures while your at it. Remember your windmills require the very rare earths that come from these types of mines.

Okay, now that you've bothered to do a bit of research scale your numbers of for world wide power and tell me what they would look like. You see, if strip mining is done in a place like Greenland they will bother with these pesky things called environment regulations. The Chinese don't do that and as a result they have cornered the market. You can't get rare earths from Unicorn farts and rainbows, you have to get them out of the ground. Better we do the mining, so that it can be done responsibly.

If you are deliberately killing innocent people with drones, you aren't doing it right. That is why they don't deliberately target innocent people.

That's the point: they don't deliberately target innocent people. Drones seem to still kill a fuckton of civilians, though.

Former US drone pilot quits, regretting bombing innocents, including children

U.S. Accused of Using Drones to Target Rescue Workers and Funerals in Pakistan

Living Under Drones: Stanford International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic"

Hear hear! A bit of background to the politics of this:

NFTables is brought to you by a group of codes created when Alexey Kuznetsov decided to replaced the low level linux network stack for Linux 2.2 to make it more like what Cisco provided in IOS. The result added whole pile of new functionality to Linux (eg routing rules), and a shiny new highly module traffic control engine. Alexey produced a beautifully written postscript documentation for the new user land routing tools (the "ip" command), and 100 line howto for the far more complex traffic control engine tools (the "tc" command).

Technically it was a was tour de force. But to end users it could at best be called a modest success. Alexey re-wrote the net-utils tools ("ifconfig", "route" and friends) to use the new system, and did such a good job very few bothered to learn the new "ip" command even though the documentation was good and it introduced a modest amount of new features. But real innovation was the traffic control engine, and to this day bugger all people know how to use it.

At this point it could have gone two ways. Someone could have brought tc's documentation up to the same standard Alexey provided for ip, or they could ignore the fact that almost no one used the code already written and add more of the same. They did the latter.

It was also at this time the network code wars started in the kernel. Not many people know that a modest amount of NAT, filtering and so on can be done by Alexey's new ip command. But rather than build on that Rusty Russell just ported the old ipfwadm infrastructure, called it ipchains (and later replaced it with iptables). There was some overlap between Rusty's work and tc, and this has grown over time. For example the tc U32 filter could do most of the packet tests ipchain's introduced over time on day 1. Technically the modular framework provided by tc was more powerful than ipchains, and inherently faster. Tc was however near impossible for mere mortals to use even if they had good documentation. There were some outside efforts to fix this - tcng was an excellent out-of-tree attempt to fix the complexity problems of tc. But in what seems like a recurring theme, it was out of tree and ignored. In contrast, Rusty provided ipchains with the some best documentation on the planet. In the real world the result of these two efforts are plain to see - while man + dog uses iptables, there maybe 100 people on the planet who can use tc.

Another example of the same thing is IMQ. IMQ lets you unleash the full power of the traffic control engine on incoming traffic. (Natively the traffic control engine only deals with packets being sent, not incoming packets - a limitation introduced for purely philosophical reasons). IMQ was very well documented, and heavily used. The people who brought you tc had a list of technical objections to IMQ. I don't know whether they were real or just a case of Not Invented Here, but I'd give them the benefit of the doubt - they are pretty bright guys. So they replaced it with their own in-kernel-tree concoction. (For those of you who don't follow the kernel "in-tree" means it comes with the Linux Kernel. An out-of-tree module like IMQ means at the very least you have to compile the module source, and possibly the entire kernel.) For a while this discouraged the developers of IMQ so much they stopped working on it. If you follow that link, you will see it's back now. Why? Because the thing that replaced it had absolutely no documentation. They never do. So no one could use the replacement. Again, in the end, the thing code that was documented won the day.

By now you might be guess where this is heading. We have two groups in the kernel competing to provide the

I use Latex for almost all my texts: small, large, letters, presentations, what-have-you.
Also I copy texts from web sites to Latex and print it out for reading.
For texts that are only for me I use: plain text.

I don't understand why some (most) people are scared of Latex. In Linux you just install per package manage Latex+Kile and then you are one mouse click away from a nice Pdf document.

Small example from http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
Gives you a very nice document to print out and read at your leisure.

\documentclass[10pt,abstract=no,toc=flat]{scrreprt}
\usepackage[hscale=0.69,vscale=0.79,heightrounded,includehead]{geometry}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}[\section{Cargo Cult Science}]
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece
of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for
separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't
work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. ...
\end{multicols}
\end{document}

Like all forms of mechanical trading, it serves the useful purpose of distracting folks from Value Investing. Since Value Investing wouldn't work if all investors practiced it faithfully, all such distractions are a good thing for us Value Investors. I'm all in favor of it.

It's notable that none of the world's most successful investors use this trading technique or any other. See Warren Buffet's classic article The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville for details.

It's not about being lazy. Feynman famously addressed this in his "Cargo Cult Science" rant in his Caltech commencement address given in 1974. [...]

Fwiw, Richard Feynam's Caltech commencement address, "Cargo Cult Science" — in your own voice. :)

His description, near the end, of an A-number-one experiment done in psychology and its subsequent disregard is a satandalone classic and probably the best part, imho.

When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.

Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics.

I think I'll take the CDC as authoritative over wikipedia.

What you did is called lying through statistics, their are entire books and website about how to use statistics to lie like you did. I called you out on it, in fact here are some websites exposing the types of tactics you used.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/CSE3/Lie_with_Statistics.pdf
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/bag-of-tricks/chap10.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/stat3.html

Your personal desire to make revisionist history doesn't actually change anything. You've even attempted revisionist history on my posting where I said the US hasn't bombed civilian centers since WW2. Your either deluded or so full of hate that you couldn't see the truth if it smacked you across the face.

Actually, the oceans have absorbed quite a lot of the CO2 that humanity has released, but the rate of absorption is dropping rapidly as ocean levels of CO2 increase. cite

Well considering we already use man-made caverns to store compressed gas and it doesn't leak out... And considering the areas where fracking is occurring have also been areas where coal and gas have been previously extracted and thus is the location of a lot of existing coal and gas power plants so transportation should be relatively short.

Usually fracking is done very deep within the earth. So your worries about temperature increases are highly unlikely as well as not likely to increase the pressure in the formation very significantly. For reference the earth pressure at ~4000' depth (which is where a lot of the Marcellus shale is located) is well over 5000 psi. As far as the best solid sink of CO2, that would be limestone... http://www.columbia.edu/~vjd1/carbon.htm

The Slashdot headline, not the physics.

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

"low natural gas prices" the price of natural gas just sky rocketed, but we will make it cheaper for a while if you let us frack your water, because... in the end that's all that happens, all your drinking water gets fracked.

I guess that's why Bush bought all that land over one of the World's largest fresh water aquifers.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/23/mainsection.tomphillips

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/04/13/the-guarani-aquifer-a-little-known-water-resource-in-south-america-gets-a-voice/

Enough fresh water for 200 years, that's the real Bush legacy.

Were the maps the result of the The Ming Voyages? There's old tales that tell of the Chinese reaching the west coast of the Americas in the same era. China's xenophobic history seems to have been punctuated by just that one era of exploration. I've never found an authoritative, definitive read on the subject.

Recall one of the many dramas of climategate was the private discussion of the discarding of tree ring data from after 1960 precisely because it failed as a temperature proxy.

"Private discussion"? People wrote fucking papers about it. Jacoby 1995 and Briffa 1998 for example.

A team of scientists from Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Granada in Spain have successfully reconstructed active enzymes from four-billion-year-old extinct organisms.
[...]
In their study, published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, the researchers used vast amounts of genetic data to computationally reconstruct the genes of extinct species, a technique known as ancestral sequence reconstruction. The researchers then went a step further and synthesized the proteins encoded by these genes. They focused their efforts on a specific protein, thioredoxin, which is a vital enzyme found in all living cells.