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Don't worry. The theologians will just grant themselves scientific degrees and then (presto-chango!) they'll be scientists too!

I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I don't. So instead I'll quote this guy:

In Dawidoff's piece, Dyson comes off as a classic contrarian, sounding off late in life. A journalist with a scientific background would know how important it is to take such people with a grain of salt-no matter how distinguished their scientific work may be in other areas. Dawidoff, though, just goes for it-for 8,000 words of it. He writes foolish things like this: "[Dyson's] dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science." Um, no, it isn't. It isn't significant at all. Dyson's fame and authority don't buy him any special deference in this area; science does not work that way.

While the scientific debate may be far from over, the problem here isn't that somebody on Earth questioned the validness of Pluto's classification. The problem here that a bunch of incompetent politicians (please read TFA to see; the "passing overhead through Illinois' skies" part is marvelous) attempt to intervene in none of their business under the ridiculous excuse of "...Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto, being born on a farm near the Illinois community of Streator".

Okay....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/health/21canc.html
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12202589
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080409130711.htm
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/18/embryonic-stem-cell-therapy-causes-cancer-in-teenage-boy/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4465717.stm

However, new information was released this week. There are scientists who think they've found a way around the cancer problem with stem cells:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/virusfreeips.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13384-stem-cell-breakthrough-may-reduce-cancer-risk.html

Yes. The Catholic creed (Latin from I Believe) starts "We believe in One God" and is said at ever Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation service. Unfortunately, as you imply, plenty of people don't seem to understand what that belief implies.

As for the GP post, Dawkins acts more like an atheist fundamentalist, who likes to use evolution as his preferred weapon, than a scientist who is defending himself from misguided Fundamentalist Creationists. There was a pretty revealing cover story about him in Discover Magazine in 2005, and he chooses to try to destroy Christian evolutionists over religion instead of siding with them on evolution.

Unfortunately, childhood vaccines have been positively linked with parental stupidity.

Maybe not.At least, the Bad Astronomer has argued in the past that Cyberax's point really is valid.

>"So no, they weren't going to be fighting any wars"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare

There is evidence of wars 7,000 years ago. And I am fully aware that Catal is land-locked:) I was attempting to show that large cities did in fact exist pre-greek, pre-egyptian, and more likely than not, we are probably missing quite a few large cities due to the rise in the ocean over time.

>"Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any >Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard."

Huh? Plato referred to a "source", not himself. Most likely, his source, was traders bringing mythology up from Egypt. People that.. you know, most probably spoke several languages. Your sentence,
>"It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians."

That is what I was explaining: its not mentioned in any archives (if you can call them that) in Egypt because of the reasons I previously listed (in a nutshell, secrecy and self-centered culture).

>"I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of >nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back >thousands of years before the First Dynasty.

I did no such thing. I just said that they were secretive and symbolic, and that could be a reason why there is no records in Egypt of Plato's Atlantis. It is also just as likely that a trader or merchant that told Plato the story, said "the egyptians told me this story" and he was wrong about its origin.

>"Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric >period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect >the two using more than just correlation/causation,"

Someone already is doing that, and is making great headway right now. I just watched a history channel show on it. He looked at all the flood myths, plotted their density and relative levels of how bad the flood was in their eyes, and pinpointed a likely comet impact area off the coast of Madagascar. In addition, there were comet/crater impact scientists (forgot their names, google around, you'll find them) how have been looking at ocean sea floor cores from the area and discovered fairly good evidence for an impact.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/did-a-comet-cause-the-great-flood/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

Lots of similar myths, and hard physical evidence. Like most of science, it is 100% yet (or ever:), but getting there. At any rate, all I wanted to show was an example of most likely real knowledge persisting through vasts amounts of time.

>"You can start fuming about how evil academics are now."

My degree is in Anthropology, and I'm not a 'nutty atlantis believer' if that is what you think. I just have an interest in Near Eastern pre-history.

This was previously on /.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/13-is-quantum-mechanics-controlling-your-thoughts/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

Published estimates were likely wrong on purpose

I agree with you there.

to give them the opportunity for more media coverage and subsequently budget opportunities

If this is what you meant by that then I agree with you there ;)

Note that Carl Zimmer wrote about this exact research in greater detail about a year and a half ago in Discover magazine. Take a look: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/aliens-among-us/ The story even includes the line about "life as we don't know it"!

Most recent entry

As someone noted above, I'm now very sure this was a natural piece of cosmic debris, a chunk of asteroid or something similar. I posted a wrapup with my thoughts.

What I never understood about the EO (when I still lived in the Netherlands *and* still watched TV) was that they were (and possibly are?) both the most moronic broadcaster when it came to spouting religious nonsense but also one of the best when it came to showing all sorts of nature programs from (amongst others) known and proclaimed atheists like David Attenborough. They could not refrain from editing his programs though as they contain all sorts of references to evolution. Would they not be doomed by their allmighty $deity and condemned to a hereafter full of fire and brimstone by associating themselves with unbelievers like Sir David?

Yeah, fruit, nothing else. Well, except things like, um CAT scans. That's space spinoff technology. Maybe oh, one or two people have been helped by CAT scans.
Look at Heinlein's space spinoffs article, printed without permission but in in its entirety at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/08/06/neil-tyson-on-exploring-space/ (under "Lucid Movement.")
Then tell me no one's affected by space spinoff technology. And that was 1980.

I suggest you read this and see why the Sun is not responsible for our current climate problem. Mars receives a tiny percentage of the Sun light the Earth does so we should be seeing a corresponding percentage increase. Jupiter's climate is mostly driven from its internal heat not the Sun (and we really don't know much about that). What about all the other planets, Mercury? Venus?

I suggest you read this and see why the Sun is not responsible for our current climate problem.

poorly (stupidly) optimized is not the same as unoptimized, and being unoptimized for English does not mean it automatically allows for easier typing in other languages--just as being optimized for English does not necessarily make it harder to type in non-English languages.

QWERTY was designed based on English, that's why there are no diacritic marks or non-English characters on a QWERTY keyboard. and if you want to type in Chinese, you need a whole new set of key mappings. and rather than being completely random and unoptimized (which i don't understand how you would construe as an advantage), the keyboard was simply poorly optimized:

Sholes began to redesign his keyboard by commissioning a study to determine the most common letters or letter combinations in English texts, then he scattered those common letters as widely as possible over the keyboard. For example, the three most common letters (E, T, O) were placed in the top row, the next two most common (A, H) in the home row, and the next most common (N) on the bottom row, causing the common digraph on to require a hurdle from top row to bottom. Remington engineers slightly modified Sholes's almost-QWERTY design by transferring the common consonant R to the upper row, thereby enabling typewriter salesmen to show off their machine to prospective buyers by typing the word typewriter very quickly (all the letters were now in the same row). That final resulting keyboard still betrays its origin as an alphabetical arrangement of piano keys, by the nearly alphabetical sequence fghjkl in the home row, with de just to the left and I just to the right of that sequence.

--The Curse of QWERTY

your last statement also makes no sense. ofcourse you can switch from one QWERTY keyboard to another and type without relearning a new keyboard mapping--just as you can switch from one Dvorak keyboard to another with relative ease. how is that an argument for using an unoptimized keyboard layout?

but, hey, at least you can peck out "TYPE WRITER" with just the top row of keys. clearly this is the most rational layout of an English-language keyboard.

I guess we'll be importing our biofuel from China now.

Jet aircraft are insanely inefficient and guzzle fuel at prodigious rates

I think you're talking about the engines, and not the aircraft.

I couldn't speak for the airlines, but the jets I've flown are about as efficient as a Hummer or a typical RV. But we can carry a hell of a lot more people.

I always wondered what the motives for claiming that CO2 causes global warming. I figured it must be power or money.

After reading this article I finally figured out it was power.

You are correct:

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/seeding-the-universe/article_view?b_start:int=2&-C=

sounds like a cool potential battery technology too. The battery element determines the power, and the amount of energy storage is only limited by the size of the tanks.
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/29-the-element-that-could-change-the-world/

Can you look them in the eye and say "choose cancer"?

No, no I can't. I can, however, look them in the eye and say that removing any amount of genetic material or replacing it can have unexpected results. I'm not a biologist of any sort but we still don't have a full understanding of the human genome. Mapping, sure, but we're largely ignorant of what everything does.

Assuming they can assure that this will only effect the cancer risk, then they should go for it.

I recall a study that removed what was thought of as "junk DNA" from mice. In which case, they were badly deformed and doomed from birth because that "junk" was actually acting as a decoy or buffer or something (I don't think they ever really figured it out) to absorb deformities. From the article:

Hirotsune's team made their discovery during an unrelated study in which they inserted a fruit fly gene into embryonic mice. The fruit fly DNA disrupted the mouse pseudogene for makorin1, a gene thought to be associated with bone and kidney development. Most of the mice in this line died within days of birth, exhibiting severe kidney and bone deformities, even though the proper makorin1 gene was unaffected. Putting additional copies of makorin1 or its pseudogene into the mice helped only somewhat. But when Hirotsune reintroduced an intact copy of the original pseudogene into mouse embryos, the animals developed normally.

So assuming this gene has no other function unfortunately might be something we don't find out ... until we try it.

I sincerely wish them and their offspring the best of luck at leading full healthy lives. Were I in their place, I would be considering adoption.

According to the Bad Astronomy blog, the fire could not have been caused by a meteorite. Basically, if meteor was so big that it didn't burn up in the sky, it would've been giant enough to flatten the warehouse -- and everything else in the area.

How could they not include Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy. He just wrote a book about this for christ's sake.

Just because it happens frequently doesn't mean it is *not* supernatural in nature.

The supernatural does not exist.

Read it....

Semantics.

Literally. You're arguing about definitions. The article you linked to does not in any way prove that the phenomena often called supernatural don't exist, rather it just argues that if they exist, they are natural, and therefore not actually "supernatural".

Just because it happens frequently doesn't mean it is *not* supernatural in nature.

The supernatural does not exist.

Read it....

I'm waiting on the Bad Astronomer's (Phil Plait) take on this before forming an opinion. Too bad he hasn't written anything about it yet. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

Except, I don't really see how high energy physics is involved. I mean, it's not as if anybody has proposed a high-energy experiment that could detect it.

Ultimately, there must be a particle-physics-based explanation for Dark Energy, whether from string theory or something other theory.

And just because Dark Energy not accessible via "classical" accelerator experiments, this does not mean that it should not be considered experimental particle physics research. In other words, instead of using a ground-based accelerator, the Universe is the "poor man's" accelerator.

FYI it will not burn up for some time.

Bad Astronomy posted an entry devoted to refuting this idea! As Phil Plait says, the very fact that the toolkit has just been sighted shows that it's still up there, and could not have been the fireball.

...that the LHC's generated particles from the future will not let it function.

Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog recently published a book, Death from the Skies , about human extinction scenarios — some of them preventable, others not. The inevitable ones such as proton decay would take many billions of years, but some, such as gamma-ray bursts, could theoretically come at any time.

Phil Plait has quite a bit to say about this image:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/07/voyaging-deep-into-the-universe/

"Scanning the full-res image is incredible. There's so much to see! Each dot, each smudge, is a full-blown galaxy, a collection of billions of stars. They're very, very far away; some of these galaxies are estimated to be 10 billion light years distant; you're seeing them as they were just a couple of billion years after the Universe itself began, and the faintest are one-billionth as bright as objects you can see with your own eye."

He also talks quite a bit about his favorite astronomical event - gamma-ray bursts.

As long as it's cheaper to run filler power plants than smarter solutions there's nothing for the power companies to complain about.
1. Variable price per kWh, announced by modulation on the power line (yes, it is being used, but only in very few places)
2. MW/MWh batteries like sodium-sulfur and vanadium redox.

Read this cool article, I Chat Therefore I Am. It has transcripts of conversations between ALICE and Jabberwacky

Here are a few transcripts:

ALICE: Are you alive?
Jabberwacky: Perhaps.
A: Why the uncertain tone?
J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.
A: The whole universe?
J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.

A: Do you dream?
J: Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn't flirt with a robot.

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered "alive"?
J: Stranger things have happened.
A: Not many people express themselves that way.
J: How would you know, machine?
A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.
J: I think I do not understand you completely.
A: Oh, you don't understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?
J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

Yes, we know - an asteroid was tracked, blew up just as expected, and that's it. Have a look at the very nice "Bad Astronomy" site:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/06/incoming-2/

While this article shows an artists impression of a huge asteroid striking our planet, text like "No deaths have been reported yet." and talking about equivalency to nuclear devices.

This kind of article belongs in a bottom-of-the-line newspaper like the german "Bild" or some crappy little website, but not on Slashdot, thanks.

Could it be that the to-be-discovered Higgs boson particulars are causing effecting the past and causing malfunctions with the LHC's components? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/08/11/will-the-lhc%E2%80%99s-future-cancel-out-its-past/

MDMA is a treatment more applicable to situations other than Iraq veterans and with less emotional suffering.

http://www.maps.org/

Also, on the same site as TFA:
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jun/16-could-an-acid-trip-cure-your-ocd

This one: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2005/04/29/first-exoplanet-imaged/

It orbits a brown dwarf. A very non-sunlike star.

Greetings folks,

I'm Scott Elrick from the Illinois State Geological Survey, one of the researchers involved in the original discovery. Here's a little background:

* This current story is an extension of a story from a year ago. When the story broke, I popped onto Slashdot to answer questions - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232903&cid=18936603 (ignore the misspellings in those posts!)

* As a result of the publicity, I used some of the guts of my postings above to put together this webpage: http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/fossil-forest.shtml I tried to make a 'general public' kind of site that covers most of the basics and posted all of the pictures we took.

* From the guts of the webpage, I put together a magazine article for 'Outdoor Illinois' on the discovery. Here's a PDF (direct link) of the article - http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/Outdoor-IL-art.pdf

* By the end of the year we made it into the top 100 stories of 2007 in Discover magazine - http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/fossils-of-a-300-million-year-old-forest-found

* There should be an article coming out in Smithsonian magazine about the discovery in a few months time.

Now to the current news.

Our colleague Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang of the University of Bristol, UK is heading up a multi year research effort to examine the Desmoinesian - Missourian boundary in the Middle Penn. Howard, Bill DiMichele of the Smithsonian Institute, John Nelson and myself of the ISGS, Isabel Montañez of UC Davis and Neil Tabor of SMU will all be collaborating to work out the paleobotanical, sedimentologic, CO2, and climate history of this large scale climate transition. Really this is more an announcement of further research than of results!

As flat as Illinois is, we do have a pretty good record of this transitional period Rocks in Illinois? Who knew!

Cheers!

p.s. I covered a fair amount of ground in my previous postings last year in terms of answering questions. I'll pop back later this evening and see if any more pop up though.

Of course it turns out that we CAN measure the effects of the solar cycle, and they aren't nearly enough to account for the changes in temperature on Earth

It seems you're getting all your science from one place. Try others. Svensmark's theory is getting more and more support (old article):

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/the-discover-interview-henrik-svensmark

Have you smelled an old person? It's not pretty; like a combination of mothballs, fried bacon, a Catholic church, talcum powder, and the dust underneath the couch

It's lies!

Though McCain himself does have the faint aroma of the Neolithic.

Obama and Mccain on Space Exploration.

Good point. With so many real problems in the world, why invest in a new internet? But on the subject of thugs (governmental or otherwise) having a big impact on our universe, what do you think of this? http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/jarons-world-internet-and-the-war-on-drugs/?searchterm=internet%20anonymity [discovermagazine.com]

Jaron Lanier has an interesting perspective on internet anonymity/big brother in this article. I'm just curious about the slashdot collective's thoughts on the subject. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/jarons-world-internet-and-the-war-on-drugs/?searchterm=internet%20anonymity

Don't worry, I'm sure he'll win the Republican nomination for President in 2012, if recent events are anything to go by.

Yay, with Bobby Jindal as VP!

Here is the only books from the last 25 years on the list... not sure how EW feels about them being "new classics" though.

18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)

22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983)

Honorable mentions

5. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)

6. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)

7. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (1999)

8. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986)

A Mr. Don Bright emailed me to ask if I really thought that Einstein would have worked for Darpa. My response is below:
Yes, I think Einstein would have worked for DARPA (if he was given the security clearance). Please note that Edward Teller (who was directly involved in the Manhattan Project) was also a friend of Einstein and was consulted by Einstein's team about the necessity and urgency to develop the nuclear bomb. Discover states "Despite helping to spur Roosevelt into action, Einstein never worked directly on the bomb project. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI even back then, wrote a letter to General Sherman Miles, who initially organized the efforts, that described Einstein's pacifist activities and suggested that he was a security risk. In the end, Einstein played only a small role in the Manhattan Project. He was asked by Vannevar Bush, one of the project's scientific overseers, to help on a specific problem involving the separation of isotopes that shared chemical traits. Einstein was happy to comply. Drawing on his old expertise in osmosis and diffusion, he worked for two days on a process of gaseous diffusion in which uranium was converted into a gas and forced through filters." Taken from http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/18-chain-reaction-from-einstein-to-the-atomic-bomb/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=
Note that the article says "Einstein was happy to comply" to work for the Govt/Military on this aspect of the project, and it could be implied that it was just because he was not given the necessary security clearance why he did not become more directly involved in the larger Manhattan Project.
Regards.
David W. White

--- On Fri, 6/20/08, don bright wrote:
From: don bright
Subject: Re: your question on slashdot
To: David W. White
Date: Friday, June 20, 2008, 12:42 PM
yes but would Einstein work for darpa? You did not ask "where are all
the Edward Tellers"

What if your research isn't about global warming?