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Take heart: the Adler Planetarium in Chicago invested in a new Zeiss Mark VI about five years ago. You may have heard about it: John McCain, either through ignorance or willful deception, referred to it as an overhead projector, a $3 mil earmark that (then-Senator) Obama had requested.

Horses are expensive to maintain, and have a rough daily limit of about 30 miles. In comparison, a human walking at 3 mph can go the same distance in only 10 hours.

That's not comparable. The horse could do that forever (for example, see this US cavalry manual which stipulates cavalry can go 35 miles a day, six days a week indefinitely - page 152) while the person would not be able to maintain that sort of pace for more than a few hours to a day unless they were in really good shape.

In comparison, typical indefinite marching rates for an army were about 10 miles a day (both for roman legionaires and US soldiers).

It's very comparable. A human can keep up a 3mph walk forever as well. A 3mph pace is not hard for a human at all and without
a pack 30 miles a day would not be an issue for a human. 35 miles per day, six days a week indefinitely would not be a problem for
the average person either. I don't think a march with camp setup, etc... is comparable to what the original poster was talking about.
I think you underestimate what a human is capable of. When I was in college we went on a hike to the bottom of the grand canyon
for a week. None of us were in great shape, did any training, or probably near as fit as a peasant who worked all day in the field
every day yet we averaged about 20-25 miles a day for a week with heavy packs on rough terrain and making camp each night.
We obviously could have done alot more with a light pack. And again, we were not in shape, didn't train, and most had never even
been backpacking before. For endurance running a human is every bit as good as a single horse. The pony express used multiple
horses because horses are faster over short distances but over multiple days a human is actually faster. A good runner can do alot
more than 35 miles per day. This guy averaged over 50 miles a day for 40 days:
http://www.outsideonline.com/blog/outdoor-adventure/the-human-express-interview-with-karl-meltzer.html
Here is one of many articles that states that humans can outrun every animal on the planet:
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us

Yep

No we didn't. We evolved to be long-distance runners.

Surprisingly, horses are not very good at running long distances. In fact, people can run long distances faster than horses. The switchover point in that contest is around the length of a marathon. This robot can run a sub-4-minute-mile, but more importantly, there is every reason to think it could be made to sustain that pace all day.

Nope. Well, not unless you're really into surfing. But all that nonsense about hospital rooms visits and the like syncing with lunar cycles has been debunked time and time again. For example: Bad Astronomy Science Daily

Thought I recalled reading something about this in Death From The Skies and sure enough, from over four years ago, Death from the Spirals! Maybe not so much. Given its age, I especially liked the punchline...

To be honest, I won’t be rushing to edit that chapter in my book just yet. This study looks good, but I’ll wait and see what other scientists say. With another few dozen million years to go, I have plenty of time.

Her name is Barbara Shipman and here is a down to earth article about the whole thing. She's easy to google if you want more info about her. She was raised around bees and studied mathematics. One day, as she studied the math, she recognized the two dimensional projection of a 6-D "flag manifold". (I'm not a mathematician. I have no idea what that is or even if I'm using the term right.)

I kept this article because it is an easy article to give to young girls that they can understand. I use it (along with other examples) to encourage them to go into the field of mathematics or traditionally male-oriented fields.

When you have faith, true faith you see the weird man-made scaffolding of intelligent design theories as unnecessary and counterproductive. Where God seems to conflict with science some choose to believe that one is right and the other is wrong when the truth is that both are in harmony and it is our understanding of both that is flawed. Those who read only their own ephemeral rules, theories and prejudices into the bible have not accepted the spirit which is necessary to guide each of us through the poetry of God's creation whenever it seems to conflict with the logic of what we think we know.

A faithful person also knows (as any honest scientist should know), that those "gaps" where God must exist are enormous. The amount of her universe(s) we truly understand is vanishingly small, far less than 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the universe is known to us. What we know is certainly smaller than ourselves, our brain, a leaf of grass, , DNA, atoms, quarks, strings and everything. While we've come to learn more about each of these things with each passing day, we should accept that a scientist 50 or 100 years from now would look at the social constructs we know as scientific beliefs as being remarkably simplistic. Even for agnostics and atheists who choose to disbelieve in a universal creator with more embedded intelligence than the 3 pounds of chemicals within their brains, the Judeo-Christian bible contains remnants of the human story which pre-dates agriculture and civilization. In this age of short attention spans we need such an anchor to counter-balance pop-cultural fads and give us a longer view of humanity.

Then why hasn't it been decoded already?

My nine dimensional computer is in the shop - sorry, it's all on me. My bad.

To convey the direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the waggling run makes with an imaginary line running straight up and down. One of Von Frischâ(TM)s most amazing discoveries involves this angle. If you draw a line connecting the beehive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive and the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed by the two lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run to the imaginary vertical line. The bees, it appears, are able to triangulate as well as a civil engineer. ..
The shape or geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food source changes, Shipman explains. Move a pollen source closer to the hive and the coffee-bean shape of the waggle dance splits down the middle.
Move the food source closer than some critical distance and the dance changes dramatically: the bee stops doing the waggle dance and switches into the round dance. It runs in a small circle, reversing and going in the opposite direction after one or two turns or sometimes after only half a turn.

One day Shipman was busy projecting the six-dimensional residents of the flag manifold onto two dimensions. The particular technique she was using involved first making a two-dimensional outline of the six dimensions of the flag manifold. This is not as strange as it may sound. When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional outline of a three- dimensional sphere. As it turns out, if you make a two-dimensional outline of the six-dimensional flag manifold, you wind up with a hexagon. The beeâ(TM)s honeycomb, of course, is also made up of hexagons, but that is purely coincidental. However, Shipman soon discovered a more explicit connection. She found a group of objects in the flag manifold that, when projected onto a two-dimensional hexagon, formed curves that reminded her of the beeâ(TM)s recruitment dance. The more she explored the flag manifold, the more curves she found that precisely matched the ones in the recruitment dance. I wasnâ(TM)t looking for a connection between bees and the flag manifold, she says. I was just doing my research. The curves were nothing special in themselves, except that the dance patterns kept emerging.

Holy shitcock monkey balls fuck! When I looked at it in 6 dimensions instead of 9, it made sense to me! It's almost like... like people can know things somehow that I don't! Like there is a whole other source of information for these people!

TIME CUBE IS REAL

TOYNBEE IDEA ON JUPITER

WHEN 6 WAS 9

It has been here the whole time!!!

Nope, I remember pretty clearly it being dimensions. If it was something as mundane as nine variables, I doubt I would have remembered the article.

Oh look, I found the article! I was wrong, it was six dimensions projected down to two. Still, the point stands. http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/quantumhoneybees1263#.Ujo3p8bNXqk

And sometimes there are more water around, but not just in the ocean, like flooding big areas inland.

That isn't really relevant..., you can get such a shape with a much smaller moon further away from the planet too.

You do realize that, until very recently, all these creationists were split rather equally between both dems and reps. (The gay marriage and abortion issue pushed white evangelists into the Reps side.) The black population is over 50% creationist (and 90+ are dems) and almost 50% of those who classify themselves as liberal are creationists.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/who-are-the-creationists-by-the-numbers/#.UdBCoDu1H4s

Another thing to think about is that all creationists are not the same. There are they young earthers as well as those who accept that the earth is billions of years old but who think that God created life (and accept minor evolutionary change).

I am willing to bet that years of gaming will physically change the brain, to a degree that it will not quickly subside afterwards. Not unlike the cab drivers of London learning "The Knowledge". It has been proven that the hippocampus area of their brains actually grows to a much larger size than the average population. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/12/08/acquiring-the-knowledge-changes-the-brains-of-london-cab-drivers/

In myself, being a gamer, I know that I usually surpass my none-gaming friends in two areas: Reaction time, and spatial awareness. These we've even tested under atleast close to scientific circumstances. We have a museum here in Oslo called "Norsk Teknisk Museum" (Norwegian technical museum). They have an interactive exhibition providing, amongst other things, reaction tests and similar. What it showed is that the 3 of us playing a lot of games had way faster reaction times than the average.

Can an "after" happen _before_ a "before" ?

As far as we can tell, yes. This is known as retrocausality, and experiments have been done that it's at least plausible to interpret as having observed it.

This is a very thorny subject because we have so many biases about how the universe "ought to" be, and it's hard to even talk about the subject, much less interpret an experiment, without bringing in all those biases. But I'll describe the interpretation that I find the cleanest, simplest, and most appealing. Other people have other views.

First, you need to let go of your presentist way of thinking about time ("only this moment exists") and accept an eternalist, block-universe viewpoint: space-time is a continuum that all exists "at once", and what you call "the present" is merely an arbitrary slice through it. The arrow of time is likewise arbitrary: the future affects the past in precisely the same way that the past affects the future, and information propagates in both directions according to exactly the same equations.

Once you accept that, all the strange features of quantum mechanics disappear. Entanglement is an illusion created by ignoring the information flowing in one direction. The collapse of the wavefunction isn't a change to the thing you're measuring, just a change in what you know about it. The uncertainty principle is just a limit on how much you can learn by doing an experiment.

If you want to learn more about this subject, this article is a good place to start.

If someone figures out how to capture and store antimatter on long timescales (even just positronium), this could be an orbital energy source. It's known that lightning creates antimatter and ejects it into space.

Once a method to capture and store antimatter from lightning has been created, this could be used for a low orbit fuel station. Just because there's a tiny amount detected doesn't mean that a much larger quantity isn't created by thunderstorms and lost to space and/or annihilation events from collisions with matter.

After a design is known to work, a station could be placed in orbit over Jupiter's great red spot for continuous collection.

Well, supposedly they have enough CPU power to do a pretty reasonable simulation of insect and even small mammal brains, like rats and cats.

But supposedly there might be more going on in there than just interactions between connected neurons...
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/13-is-quantum-mechanics-controlling-your-thoughts#.UZQDe7VeZ30

Except that it isn't a study, and the 'peer-reviewed journal' is a low-tier pay-for-play publication.
The paper states without providing any data that glyphosphate "may be the most important factor" in causing "inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, depression, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancer, cachexia, infertility, and developmental malformations". With claims like that, it shouldn't be surprising one of the authors is an anti-vaxxer.

MRI works fine on dead brains, which is a bit of a problem really.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/22/evidence-that-placebos-could-work-even-if-you-tell-people-theyre-taking-placebos/

That's something we already know. It's how humans got viral genes, how cows got snake genes, how a sea slug got algae genes, and how a pea aphid got fungal genes, among other known examples. It's pretty rare unless you're giving things an evolutionary time frame, and has little to do with genetic engineering, either in terms of scientific or patent related concerns.

To get an idea, consider the energy output of a windmill and divide it by the span of the prop to get the amount of energy removed per centimetre of length, assuming the width is about the same all the way is good enough. That puts it at the scale of a small fragile bat. The number you get is very small because it is less than the pressure of the prevailing wind on an area the size of a bat since you can't get all the energy out of the wind due to bearing friction etc.
Now do you see why I am dismissing the "bats killed by pressure drop" stupid bullshit as the PR campaign lie it is? It's the sort of thing that sounds OK initially due to technical terms thrown in to hide the really stupid lie, but if you think about how a windmill works the audacious lie is apparent. People caught out with it are also likely to be embarrassed that they fell for something so stupid so it's hard to talk them out of it.

I don 't know if the length is directly proportional to the amount of energy captured by wind mills. I bet the area of the blade, as well as it's pitch, is more important. Oh, and obviously the height. The bottom of the blades are supposed to be higher than the tallest thing that can block the wind. That includes trees. And I bet that that is higher than most bats will be flying.

And no I don't expect your explanation as to why you dismiss the "bats killed by pressure drop" as stupid bullshit. For all I know what you said was bullshit. More of the NIMBY shit delaying wind farms, even off the coast. You still did not provide evidence which is what I asked for. Can you provide scientific studies supporting your position? That is what I'm looking for.

Now here are some of the things I found:

• Wind turbines make bat lungs explode
• The Wind Turbine Interactions with Birds, Bats, and their Habitats: A Summary of Research Results and Priority Questions [pdf] section "What is the effect of barotrauma injuries to bats" says
  "While direct collision is thought to be responsible for most of the bat fatalities observed at wind facilities (Horn et al. 2008), recent work by Baerwald et al. (2008) suggests that some of the observed bat fatality may be due to barotrauma (i.e., injury resulting from suddenly altered air pressure). Fast- moving wind turbine blades create vortices and turbulence in their wakes, and bats may experience rapid pressure changes as they pass through this disturbed air, potentially causing internal injuries leading to death. The occurrence of barotrauma in bats, the proportion of individuals that succumb immediately versus those that fly away injured, and the associated influences on the estimation of bat fatalities are uncertain."
• Adirondack Bats: Wind Turbine Bat Threat says there are 2 causes of death to bats found at wind generators, blunt-force trauma and barotrauma.
• On a Wing and Low Air: The Surprising Way Wind Turbines Kill Bats says "It is the pressure change--not the blades--that wipe out thousands of bats annually at wind farms".
• Bats' Lungs Burst When They Fly Close to Wind Turbines

That's 5 links to science to your zero links. I found those by Googling

What if you have a support craft that flies higher up, or a few miles away that acts as C&C. What if you get a B52 (Service Ceiling of 15km) loaded with drone control equipment that avoids direct conflict due to cruising so high up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:B-52_with_two_D-21s.jpg

A nice pic of what I imagine. The plane can be fitted to transport 2 drones (I don't know whether they can reattach after launch).

What would the latency be if you had LoS on your drone, using laser (to avoid your signal being intercepted). What would the latency be then even at maximum range (how far can you see from 15km up? Answer: ~400 km)

Even at a distance of 400km (range of a predator drone is 1,100 km) you shouldn't have much lag. The only downside is that the drone doesn't operate above 8km, so you'd have to launch it and then climb, or (guessing) you can drop it from higher, but would have to go down to pick it up later. The good thing would be that after releasing it, you know it can't be taken over and used against the B-52, since it cannot fly up there. Also, the Hellfire missiles usually equipped are Air-to-Surface and not likely to pose a threat to the B-52.

What is likely to spot and target a B52 that is up to 400 km away? A number of B-52's were lost in Vietnam, but they were performing manoeuvres overhead (dropping bombs) and not away off at the horizon simply controlling drones. So this would likely keep the pilots safe.

Well that's not exactly true either, since viruses can affect your genes.. and there are probably other things too that I'm not aware of. Food can change how your genes "express" themselves for example. I'm not a biologist either..

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/nov/27-big-idea-bring-back-the-cold-fusion-dream/

But meteors are more likely to kill you than terrorism! If that doesn't make you panic, then you might be too rational to enjoy this fear/hype-fest. For those that it does make panic, imagine 9/11, but with meteors! But instead of being groped at airports and bombing everything in sight, we need to build giant space lasers. We also need to torture people and monitor your phone calls, but we'll explain that later.

Btw, anyone who has ever scored higher than 20 million on Asteroids needs to contact NASA immediately (an equivalent score on Blasteroids will also be considered).

You see with your brain too. If someone draws a simple picture on your palm or back, you can still "see" it in your mind.

See also: http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/feattongue
The brain is able to learn to see whether the picture is generated by touch or sound.

And even with sound there are different ways for seeing,
echolocation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA
and some software that converts images to pitch and left-right volume: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm

Maybe what they could try is implant a sensory array to baby/young rats and see if they can add a extra video input to rats.

Technically -- this is /. right? -- the answer is no for the same reason that we can measure the "weight of the internet." There is actual space that this electricity travels through. There is weight, and there is volume.

As far as what the article is really getting it, I've always thought it was dumb that people can own such things. People can own land, water, and air. Back in the day, you could actually just live in the woods if you wanted to. Now, you'd be arrested because it's either owned by the government as a park, owned by a corporation, or owned by a citizen of your country. Even parts of outer space itself are owned. You can't orbit your satellite in the same space as other countries' satellite at the same time as their satellite, else they'll probably send you a declaration of war after you crash their GPS/TV/radio/surveillance/etc. In the future, I'm sure dark matter, black holes, and even whole galaxies will be "owned."

> But a neanderthal is not a human (not as we know it). Most consider it to be a different species.

Could any (non-human) primate today fit in with our society as a citizen? Not likely. Neanderthals on the other hand were *culturally similar* to humans. They had musical instruments and had similar cultural habits. If one were born today, giving them full citizen rights would seem to be the most logical thing to do. They could probably learn basic human language at *least*, and probably lead a somewhat normal life in a human world.

My question is are *we* culturally mature enough to handle them. It was just 40 years ago African American humans in America had to reassert their rights.... and even having a black president stirs some folks' pots. Can we handle Neanderthals with respect, or would we treat them like Bigfoot?

The Biggest "Spooky" System Ever Seen: 4 Entangled Ions (Jun 2009)

Ok, that's Discover magazine. Never quote discover magazine. They're the foxnews of science. I don't trust a god damned thing they say. I tried looking up the experiment and I just keep seeing the word "Study"... So I'm thinking this was all on paper. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't trust it. Actually entangling IONs would be big news and I should find it all over the net.

and Entangled diamonds , big enough for the eye to see (Dec 2011). We haven't managed the information transportation part with anything other than photons though but we're doing well on distance; quantum key transmitted wirelessly 144km.

With both of these, see my post above. To me these are just parlor tricks with optics that maybe... or even are likely to be examples of Quantum teleportation. But they are not proof. It's neat that people are doing this, but it's not the "Real-deal" yet. It's kind of like that meteorite with the possible fossilized martian bacteria. Was there life on mars at one time? Most likely. Is the meteorite proof of that life? Maybe, maybe not... we need something better.

Humanity has entangled stuff bigger than photons; The Biggest "Spooky" System Ever Seen: 4 Entangled Ions (Jun 2009) and Entangled diamonds , big enough for the eye to see (Dec 2011). We haven't managed the information transportation part with anything other than photons though but we're doing well on distance; quantum key transmitted wirelessly 144km.

or a skeptic of $prevailingOpinionOnHighlyPoliticizedTopic in the scientific community.

*yawn* The only people still denying AGW are not "skeptics" they are people who have a political or economic reason to deny it. Especially in light of this, this and this. These are people who were specifically trying to disprove everyone else and instead confirmed the prevailing stance the "politicized topic".

Sorry, but the last remaining industry shills trying to proclaim AGW as not true are being intentionally dishonest.

We may not have to worry about supernovae, but a gamma ray burst is quite another thing.

As Phil Plait points out, we're practically staring down the barrel of WR-104!

... be sure to take a look at the 2002 film "Space Station 3D". It's a 47-minute documentary made in IMAX 3D; since it's not likely to be showing in IMAX currently, you can check it out in 2D on DVD. Narration by Tom Cruise, if that matters to you.

Found a couple links for "Space Station 3d". Here's the movie's trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5cGHk7hSp0

Bad scientest Phil Plaitt review has a video link: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/14/extremely-cool-3d-space-station-video-taken-from-the-ground/

Google search has some download links: http://www.google.com/search?q=space+station+3d&hl=en&safe=off&tbo=d&nota=1&biw=1067&bih=640

Incorrect

No, it isn't really. It is in fact quite correct. The chance of getting hit by an asteroid is infinitesimally small. Chances of getting killed by one is a lot higher. According to Alan Harris, any persons lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid is about 1:700 000. Not high, but higher than getting killed by a terrorist.

History doesn't really matter. What is relevant is future. Remember, if a big one hits, that is about 6 billion people dead. So, that drives the odds up quite significantly.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/13/death-by-meteorite/#.UMotd2_BGSo

Story Submitter here: I actually linked to this Discover.com version ( http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/12/05/the-catfish-that-strands-itself-to-kill-pigeons/#.UMJpTYWgQVn ).

Do diamonds count? If so:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/12/08/exoplanets-of-the-week-a-diamond-planet-and-gas-giant-quadruplets/

QED

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/04/28/the-universe-is-not-a-black-hole/#.ULlcWoddM0E

Facts are the fossil record, genetics, the redshift of distant starts, the amount of oil under the ground, erosion rates...

I can use each of those scientific facts to logically 'prove' that the earth is young. Other use those same facts to 'prove' that the earth is old. Other's use those same theories to 'prove' the universe is only a big hologram. The entire debate about young vs. old earth is a debate about assumptions of how the universe works. Let's settle for a concrete example: does red-shift prove a young earth or old earth? answer: neither.

Stepping back to philosphy/mathematics: logically, we can not be 100% which is true until we make an infinite set of assumptions - Godel's Theorem

I still feel that you completely missed the boat, Phil.

I agree that what MOST people are talking about (comments in the code, etc.) are really no big deal. It is the other emails that concern me... like the ones that show deliberate (and very probably illegal) failure to honor FOI requests and so on. Also, emails that indicate that the data used was improperly handled. Take this exchange, for example (I posted this same link on your other blog entry):

THAT exchange is completely IN context, showing both sides. Yet it indicates that either they used improper data in their calculations, or possibly that they simply are not aware of what data they did use (which amounts to pretty much the same thing). What it does show, pretty clearly and in context, is that they made a mess of this whole study. Add to that the missing data (whether it was done on purpose or not), and what you have is BAD SCIENCE, completely aside from any conspiracy theories.

I am not crying conspiracy, and I don't give the slightest damn about this politics of this whole thing. But you are ignoring the real, demonstrable goofs that these people made... some very big goofs that call their whole set of data into serious question. And when you look at all the OTHER studies done that rely on this very same data... what you have is a travesty and a tragedy. [Lonny Eachus, 2009-12-04]

These are very serious accusations, Lonny. And they're all based on this WUWT article by Willis Eschenbach:

"One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like 'Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn't affect the results, it's still warming.' I got intrigued by one of the hacked CRU emails, from the Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth to Professor Wibjorn Karlen. In it, Professor Karlen asked some very pointed questions about the CRU and IPCC results. He got incomplete, incorrect and very misleading answers. ... Professor Karlen was quite correct. The claims made by the CRU, and repeated in the IPCC document, were false. Karlen was looking at the evidence. ... Now, I have not taken a stand on whether the machinations of the CRU extended to actually altering the global temperature figures. It seems quite clear from Professor Karlen's observations, however, that they have gotten it very wrong in at least the Fennoscandian region. Since this region has very good records and a lot of them, this does not bode well for the rest of the globe ..."

Even if the methodologies used to establish the base data were sound, there is no doubt that it was later used improperly and irresponsibly. For months now, in these blog posts of Phil's, I have asked anybody - ANYBODY - to refute what is on this page: When Results Go Bad. I have had no takers. Not one. Anybody care to take a shot at it now? [Lonny Eachus, 2010-07-01]

Sure, why not? The next day, Zeke Hausfather wrote When results aren't bad which shows that Prof. Karlen, Eschenbach and Eachus based their accusations on a misunderstanding of the geographical region represented in the IPCC's time series. The first link in Zeke's article leads to Lonny's comment.

I see. The "actual experts in the field all have research that shows the same thing"? Interesting! I would be very interested to see some evidence for that claim! Wait... d

I still feel that you completely missed the boat, Phil.

I agree that what MOST people are talking about (comments in the code, etc.) are really no big deal. It is the other emails that concern me... like the ones that show deliberate (and very probably illegal) failure to honor FOI requests and so on. Also, emails that indicate that the data used was improperly handled. Take this exchange, for example (I posted this same link on your other blog entry):

THAT exchange is completely IN context, showing both sides. Yet it indicates that either they used improper data in their calculations, or possibly that they simply are not aware of what data they did use (which amounts to pretty much the same thing). What it does show, pretty clearly and in context, is that they made a mess of this whole study. Add to that the missing data (whether it was done on purpose or not), and what you have is BAD SCIENCE, completely aside from any conspiracy theories.

I am not crying conspiracy, and I don't give the slightest damn about this politics of this whole thing. But you are ignoring the real, demonstrable goofs that these people made... some very big goofs that call their whole set of data into serious question. And when you look at all the OTHER studies done that rely on this very same data... what you have is a travesty and a tragedy. [Lonny Eachus, 2009-12-04]

These are very serious accusations, Lonny. And they're all based on this WUWT article by Willis Eschenbach:

"One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like 'Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn't affect the results, it's still warming.' I got intrigued by one of the hacked CRU emails, from the Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth to Professor Wibjorn Karlen. In it, Professor Karlen asked some very pointed questions about the CRU and IPCC results. He got incomplete, incorrect and very misleading answers. ... Professor Karlen was quite correct. The claims made by the CRU, and repeated in the IPCC document, were false. Karlen was looking at the evidence. ... Now, I have not taken a stand on whether the machinations of the CRU extended to actually altering the global temperature figures. It seems quite clear from Professor Karlen's observations, however, that they have gotten it very wrong in at least the Fennoscandian region. Since this region has very good records and a lot of them, this does not bode well for the rest of the globe ..."

Even if the methodologies used to establish the base data were sound, there is no doubt that it was later used improperly and irresponsibly. For months now, in these blog posts of Phil's, I have asked anybody - ANYBODY - to refute what is on this page: When Results Go Bad. I have had no takers. Not one. Anybody care to take a shot at it now? [Lonny Eachus, 2010-07-01]

Sure, why not? The next day, Zeke Hausfather wrote When results aren't bad which shows that Prof. Karlen, Eschenbach and Eachus based their accusations on a misunderstanding of the geographical region represented in the IPCC's time series. The first link in Zeke's article leads to Lonny's comment.

I see. The "actual experts in the field all have research that shows the same thing"? Interesting! I would be very interested to see some evidence for that claim! Wait... d

The last one I saw was this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14829
and: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-how-to-make-anything-disappear

However, we know that on average, whether deliberately or not, discrimination happens. As in gender biases in academia [discovermagazine.com] and them being even worse in the engineering departments [discovermagazine.com] with a beautiful example of reverse discrimination in the arts departments (i.e. the white males are not creative enough fallacy).

However, we know that on average, whether deliberately or not, discrimination happens. As in gender biases in academia [discovermagazine.com] and them being even worse in the engineering departments [discovermagazine.com] with a beautiful example of reverse discrimination in the arts departments (i.e. the white males are not creative enough fallacy).

According to physicist Sean Carroll, who specializes in this sort of thing. I figured people might enjoy reading this, in case it hasn't been posted.

Well, actually.. looky here.

Those of us with the True Faith have received our OpenBSD 2.5 CDs and T-Shirt in the mail, and give thanks to our Lord Theo, even though he's a total prick.

Funny you should say that. I'm that guy. The prick has its uses, after all. There was a bad patch in the late 1990s where pretty much every operating system had dropped the soap bar. Only it didn't exactly work like that. They reached over to hand you the soap, dropped it in a clumsy handoff, then left you (the end user) to bend over and fetch it again. Repeatedly, all the while promising new and improved soap bar for the next communal shower. Being rogered by total strangers gives me a rash. All hail, King Prick.

It's funny you should say that because it's now end of days for my trusty OpenBSD box. It's really pf that I depend upon these days and that runs just fine under FreeBSD (minus a few fringe features). Since my file server now runs ZFS under FreeBSD, I decided to consolidate to one fewer method of system update. My brain is old and tired now.

1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan

King Prick fathered OpenSSH and packet filter as used by pfSense. Pretty fair achievements, asshole or not.

What I'd give for Theo to fork Android if Google persists in their current security model of forcing me to vet every application I refuse to load--again and again if I can't recall my previous verdict. That's a model that pretty much guarantees that even the most paranoid pre-coffee cold-shower control freak will eventually drop the soap. And this is a shower room where everyone kisses and tells.

I regard the desktop crowd as the people who scrub their junk a little too vigorously and then check themselves in the nearest mirror still dripping from final rinse. The stakes here are a little different. That behaviour gives me a rash too, but it's a different kind of rash.

I've never aspired to a computer desktop covered with soapy self-admiring widgets. I guess XFCE is the equivalent of soaping oneself modestly in the communal shower while maintaining eye contact with the ceiling tiles. Old fashioned or not, there's a case to be made.

Yes he posted it; however it's not as bad as people are making it out to be.
He is sarcastically pointing out that being asked to coffee isn't the same thing as sexual harassment.
Watson point is that when being hit on in an elevator, women get a creepy vibe, and that men should be aware of it.
BOTH of them are correct. Everything is is just internet shit storm nonsense. A shit storm that hit so fast, the I went to ask Rebecca's for a clarification, but in the few minute that went by, people responding had already turned it into a festering pile of violent crap.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/05/richard-dawkins-and-male-privilege/

More proof Dawkins is a jerk:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/07/dawkins_watson1.gif

Whoosh much?