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Sean Carroll pretty much debunked that view point:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/29/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/10/01/one-last-stab/

And one last link about what "wrong" means for good measure:

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Sean Carroll pretty much debunked that view point:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/29/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/10/01/one-last-stab/

And one last link about what "wrong" means for good measure:

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Btw, it's really hard to read your comment without quote or italics tags.

I should have been more specific but I never said anything about the article, everything I said was only about the paper.

Also you might have already seen the link in the latest /. story that explains how qualified scientists have now declared this paper to be crap.

Now to me this brings up two main scenarios.
a) Either the bad astronomer (Phil Plait) and the scientists he cites are wrong/unqualified/biased and are somehow wrong about the paper.

b) Or the paper is crap, in which case I was right about it being crap and you (if I read you properly) were wrong.

If you accept a, and hold that you were qualified to assess the quality and significance of the paper, than how do you respond to the specific criticisms mentioned in the BA article?

If you accept b, that my opinion of the paper being junk was correct, than do you think I just got lucky or was my heuristic broadly correct?

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Here's a few I use all the time:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/

http://www.pandasthumb.org/

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/ataglance

http://scienceblogs.com/channel/24-hours/?utm_source=globalChannel&utm_medium=link

http://sciencehack.com/

The old fashioned way: scan through the abstracts for about a dozen journals in molecular biology, genetics, and comp bio (most journals have handy feeds for new articles), and, at least theoretically, read the papers relevant to my work.

It's sometimes informative, less often engaging, but (apparently) doesn't require a PhD.

For non work-related stuff I enjoy the Discover blogs.

Science news delivered periodically to your inbox. Some of them are customizable, so you can receive updates only on topics of interest to you.

Highly recommended:
American Scientist
Physorg

Also interesting:
Spaceweather
Nasa Science News
Nasa Earth Observatory
Discover Magazine

I imagine there are RSS feeds for most of these as well if you prefer that format.

This is the best website for science news for reasonably educated but not specialized people: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Science News has a website - http://www.sciencenews.org/ and a weekly magazine which are always good, if overly sober, though the magazine doesn't have near enough content to cover everything that happened that week.

New Scientist is a weekly mag that has drifted towards Omni or PopSci lately ('IS SENSATIONAL THING TRUE? (...no)'), but will still keep you up to date on most happenings including things you might miss online. http://www.newscientist.com/

Scientific American is a monthly mag that's a bit too political but has some good articles: http://www.scientificamerican.com/

Then there's Discover Magazine, which is a step down from either but has some good blogs: http://discovermagazine.com/

Live Science is a further step down, a good site for training wheel science: http://www.livescience.com/

I won't recommend the mag Science, because even though it's The Magazine, it's not suited for the dabbler.

My balanced suggestion is add the news feeds for all of these to your RSS reader (like Google Reader), click on what looks interesting, and subscribe to New Scientist in print or on Zinio and read it every week.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
http://www.physorg.com/physics-news/
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/

Startswithabang especially goes into some very nice details about astrophysics topics and has some smart people commenting.

The pretty picture in TFA is caused by the nebula being lit up by radiation (mainly ultraviolent) from the dying star at the center. As the star dies from running out of stuff which is easy to efficiently fuse in the core, the star undergoes contractions and expansions which push the outer layers away to form a nebula. The term "planetary nebula" is a bit misleading- they are called that because they look like planetary discs if one looks for them in a small telescope. Phil Plait has a pretty good summary of what we are looking at - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/25/a-glowing-bubbly-bauble-in-space/

If only that were true. According to this article from Discover magazine and published in 2009 only 35% of Americans believe that humans evolved from mammals. What's nice about the Discover article is that it breaks the US down by region. New England and the Mid-Atlantic states lead in scientific literacy, and the south (East South Central of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi) brings up the rear. That Texas has decided to support scientific literacy in it's schools is a wonderful surprise. Texas is a trend setter when it comes to school districts purchasing new textbooks, so if the Texas Board of Education is lead by a person who thinks the world is 6,000 years old and evolution is garbage such as recent chair of the board Don McLeroy then that can easily reduce the quality of textbooks nationwide.

Nathanial Burton-Bradford created a 3D red/cyan anaglyph which I posted and explained on my blog (if you pardon the blog spam; here's the direct link to his image w/o an explanation).

I'm a complete idiot with this sort of thing, but why did they orbit so far away (9k miles)? It surely can't have that great of a gravitational pull, can it? Why not get as close as is prudent (or is 9k miles the prudence limit)? It seems like the closer the better for studying the thing.

As someone far more knowledgeable than me has pointed out elsewhere, they did this because astronomers are not sure about the exact mass of the asteroid and therefore want to play it safe until they have more data, at which point they plan to lower the orbit.

Link

One route to sort out the mess in the middle east, is not to fight over useless desert, but to provide water to make much more land usable.

The founders of Israel had a plan.

    http://discovermagazine.com/1994/nov/bettermedorredth452/

Why they have not carried it out, baffles me.

If the Jews set this plan into motion they would attract love and respect from the Arabs and the rest of the world.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/29/awesomely-weird-expanding-halo-of-light-seen-from-hawaii/ Another link on said pretty thing that reads better than the forum.

I have seen several articles lately (Example) suggesting the Viagra is useful in some people for fighting migraine and similar headaches. I don't know if old age or biofeedback was my solution, but I'm sure before I found relief I would have tried almost anything.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/files/2008/04/mr-fusion.jpg

Moreover, neutrino astronomy is pretty much the only thing that can give us warning (albeit only a few hours) if a nasty supernova happens in our vicinity

There are no candidate supernovae progenitors close enough to us to be dangerous. (I can't remember what the lethal radius is, but it is not terribly large.)

I once tried to find the nearest possible supernova progenitor, and the best I could find was gamma velorum A, at 260 parsecs away, but I didn't spend a long time on this. (I might have been only looking for type II progenitors.)

More info here, which mentions a danger radius of about 25 light years for a type II supernova.

Though shalt not make spaceship with maximum speed limit.

unless you state that its in different universe.

It'd have to be in a different universe not to have a speed limit. Interstellar travel is just plain unrealistic in a universe like ours.

Nature is not fickle.

It is amazingly robust, self healing, and self preserving and resilient.
It is consistent over eons, with constant change within limits based on energy input from the sun.

Most of the universe's environments are hostile to life as we know it, and even on Earth life has only existed for a very short time.

For the short time life on Earth has existed it's actually changed a great deal, with countless species becoming extinct as the conditions necessary for their continued survival have changed. As a member of one of those species that might someday become extinct, I think it is fair to worry about how manmade changes to the environment might precipitate our demise. Life might go on, but humans might not. I think it's that last bit that tends to worry climate scientists.

Nothing "meddlesome man" can do will have as much effect as a 2% change in the sun's output.

Wrong.

Because 'coondoggie' posts summaries of all of blog articles on here, it seems, with only links back to his blog.

At least Roland Piquepaille learned, and started linking to places other than his blog ... especially as coondoggie's blog spam tends to just be regurgitated press releases with mostly self-referrential links or broken links when he does link externally (eg, whenever he tries linking to the SDO website).

Check Google News -- there have been well over a hundred groups responding to the press -- NatGeo, Space.com ... all are better informed than coondoggie's recycled crap with his own conjecture inserted. (maybe that's why Slashdot likes posting his stuff so much ... because they get more people responding to how mis-informed he is)

http://news.google.com/news/more?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=frank+hill&biw=1169&bih=793&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=d-UvhPYxunMkI0MlB6BfoT_DWec-M&ei=1OL3TZfwLoKisAPG2LzxDA&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CC4QqgIwAA

Discover Magazine had a good article -- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/14/the-sun-may-be-headed-for-a-little-quiet-time/

And let me quote them:

Also, it seems very unlikely to me that we might experience another global cooling period due to this weakened sunspot cycle, but it shows you that there are very sensitive effects going on here that are very difficult to predict -- and let me take this chance here to say that no, the Sun is not responsible for global warming, as has been shown fairly conclusively. It can mildly amplify or suppress such things, but is not the main driver of it. If it were, we'd see very strong correlations between the climate and solar activity on a decade-by-decade basis (or even shorter as sunspots form and dissipate over the course of days and weeks). We don't, and therefore the Sun is not the culprit.

(disclaimer ... I'm actually at the SPD meeting, and I've co-authoried with Frank Hill, but I didn't go to his talk today)

The spider could live in its bubble indefinitely, were it not for the fact that nitrogen tends to diffuse out of it. This means that the bell eventually shrinks. It's why the spider still has to travel to the surface periodically to top up its home, and prevent it from collapsing.

Actually, the D0 announcement is about attempting to confirm the discovery by CDF of a new particle that would not be the higgs.

The supposed discovery of the Higgs was an unrelated thing by a group at the LHC... but most of the people who have gone back and re-analyzed that some data have found that there is no evidence of a Higgs either - it looks like the paper claiming a discovery jumped the gun (it was just a few people that were on that paper, although they were part of the LHC team), especially given that it's now understood that the Tevatron would have detected it independently if it were a real signal.

For more details semi-understandable to lay people, Cosmic Variance is a good source (just look over the two most recent posts that contain data plots).

"Those bastards at Fermilab have discovered the Higgs Boson before we did! It's time to initiate... Plan Z."

"Sir, you't seriously mean to--!"

"Oh, but I do. PREPARE THE ANTIMATTER BOMB!"

[Disclaimer for the perdantic: I know the 150GeV bump is probably not the Higgs boson.]

Might take awhile to pay itself off. Discover ran an article that priced a unit at $800 for one small flywheel.

From a blog post at Cosmic Variance: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/29/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood/

I've copy/pasted the relevant portion here:

Obviously there are a lot of things about the workings of the human mind that we don't understand. So how can we be so sure that new physics isn't involved? Of course we can't be sure, but that's not the point. We can't be sure that the motion of the planets isn't governed by hard-working angels keeping them on their orbits, in the metaphysical-certitude sense of being "sure." That's not a criterion that is useful in science. Rather, in the face of admittedly incomplete understanding, we evaluate the relative merits of competing hypotheses. In this case, one hypothesis says that the operation of the brain is affected in a rather ill-defined way by influences that are not described by the known laws of physics, and that these effects will ultimately help us make sense of human consciousness; the other says that brains are complicated, so it's no surprise that we don't understand everything, but that an ultimate explanation will fit comfortably within the framework of known fundamental physics. This is not really a close call; by conventional scientific measures, the idea that known physics will be able to account for the brain is enormously far in the lead. To persuade anyone otherwise, you would have to point to something the brain does that is in apparent conflict with the Standard Model or general relativity. (Bending spoons across large distances would qualify.) Until then, the fact that something is complicated isn't evidence that the particular collection of atoms we call the brain obeys different rules than other collections of atoms.

have you also noticed that it looks like a cum shot in the cassini probe: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/12/28/a-saturnian-storm-larger-than-worlds/
Dangit, God! I told him to keep it in his pants, but he couldn't contain himself when he saw Saturn.

Is this, then, the Coming of the Lord?

I thought the Rapture wasn't until Saturday.

have you also noticed that it looks like a cum shot in the cassini probe: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/12/28/a-saturnian-storm-larger-than-worlds/

Dangit, God! I told him to keep it in his pants, but he couldn't contain himself when he saw Saturn.

It's preposterous to state that human evolution is over. Here's a short list of evolutionary changes from just the last 10,000 years:

* Blue, green, and gray eye variants
* Ability to process lactose as adults
* Ability to process high-starch diets without developing diabetes (the prevalence of which is much lower in populations with older histories of farming)
* Wider variety of skin tones
* Differently shaped and sized teeth and skulls from the past

And those are just surface traits that are easy to see/detect in everyday life.

More info here: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Ah, yes, it's not like people have been living in the area and using well water for a couple hundred years. Yet now, they can light their tap water on fire and somehow this study does not count because no one tested the water beforehand.

Would there have been a reason to test the water BEFORE you could light it on fire? And what might be the cause now, after a hundred years of prior use, that the water is flammable?

This is not something confined to the PA-NY border; it happens wherever fracking goes on, yet we are supposed to believe that this particular case is confined to one bad operator? The gas industry needs to seriously review the precautions they are supposed to be taking and see if they are truly being responsible corporate citizens.

Actually, that's perfectly rational thinking. Evolution, the whole of biology, and even economics is based on just that notion: the fuck do I care what happens to you as long as it increases my chances of survival/my fitness/my happiness. Being altruistic is by definition a losing move in any game, which is why altruists always make sure their altruism benefits them the most.

Except that you are totally wrong

I am not so pessimistic. Some animals - and possibly some humans - are immune to cancer. See this news report: http://discovermagazine.com/2006/aug/areyouimmune

Likewise, people have been convinced that expensive drugs are the cure all for everything. This leads to, for example, in the US the creation of medicare part D whose purpose is support the drug companies ability to charge higher than market values for drugs. The drug companies has the help of people like this who laugh at the medicine that has kept the human race healthy for thousands of years, and doesn't seem to understand that difference between marginal statistical efficacy and safety. We may choose to take a drug because it is necessary for our own health or the health of the community, but that in no way means the drug is safe, or the community should not ask for drugs with fewer potential side effects. At the root of this is the idea the inductive reasoning will conclusion that then become necessary conditions of life, rather than things that are probably good for you. This fallacy is promoted because it is useful, and most regular people don't know it is a fallacy.

If we have too many patients, the doctor is only partly to blame. We have an epidemic of cleanliness, kids using hand sanitizer and not getting sick to build up resistance to common bugs. We have people who never eat a real meal of fresh food, rather everything on thier paper plate is processed or synthetic. No one has a Aloe plant around. People are prescribed expensive drugs when, if the laws were tilted to the pharmcos, they could grow what the needed in a pot.

Which is not to say the many people are not genuinely out of kilter. I think the diabetes example might be silly because as we know more, we reset thresholds. Complaining about a new threshold is saying that inductive logic is infallible. In fact, all thresholds are guesses and needs to be reset with new data. In general saying people who were sick in that past are sick now is equally silly. Just because ALS was not written about until the late 19th century and was not widely known in the US until well into the 20th century means we should call these people sick and try to help them? To me this thing is not that doctors have too many patients, but that people do not seem to have a choice to become a patient or not. If you do not subject yourself to the leeches of modern medicine, you somehow are not a respectable person.

Obviously there are many reasons for having a Cesarian section, and sure, having a genetically narrow birth canal is pretty far down the list. The point was not to ascribe evolutionary fitness to a wide birth canal, necessarily. The point was rather the reverse -- that the common use of Cesarian sections changes the evolutionary pressure on the female anatomy, in a very explicit and direct way: Before C-sections became common, it was (quite literally) physically impossible for a woman with a genetically narrow birth canal to pass that trait onto her daughters. Now, she can.

Okay, I'll bite... A few of the top reasons for having a Cesarian are OBGYN's avoiding malpractice suits, reduction in pain tolerance, and epidurals that prevent women from bearing down with their contractions causing fetal distress. If so does the change the evolutionary pressure on the women that want epidurals and are pain adverse or compliant with doctors suggestions for a C-section? That's seems just as likely as the narrow birth canal argument.

Also more likely (and probably true), is that the evolutionary pressure has already happened to adapt humans to the "chronic" condition of an average narrow birth canal to head size. The result is likely selective pressure for early birth before our heads become too big as described here http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/04/evolution-may-explain-why-baby-comes-early/

At least this guys ramblings cites studies and comes with graphs, what's your story?

I think it is worth while to point out that, of the 5 independent investigations that were launched as a result of the so-called "Climategate", all 5 have exonerated the Climatologists under investigation. None of the 5 were able to find any evidence of scientific malpractice. I'd call that, coupled with the endorsement of the G-7 national academies of science, a pretty unequivocal vindication of the science of Global Climate Change.

I'm a major fan of the Voyager project and remember vividly the pictures of Saturn when I was in high school. The engineering involved is impressive, in any context. I'd just like to point out that depending on the definition of space, solar system or which of the two Voyagers we are talking about, this event has occurred quite a few times now in the press. A quick Google search of news reveals at least this many announcements about reaching the "edge of space."

2008: http://www.space.com/5586-voyager-spacecraft-reveals-solar-system-edge.html

2009: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/12/29/near-the-edge-of-the-solar-system-voyager-2-finds-magnetic-fluff/

2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8201280/Voyager-1-reaches-edge-of-solar-system.html

People pave paradise, cut down native ecosystems and replace with farming and livestock, carve wilderness regions into isolated populations with roads and development, introduce alien species, and it's "settled facts" (according to the latest report from the National Academies of science and engineering) have caused the recent observed global warming. What the fuck else do you think is causing species to go extinct at a rate that strongly suggests we're living at the brink of the sixth great extinction event?

Faith is an idea with no evidence to back it up no matter how adept the 'experts'.

By whose definition? According to wikipedia:

Faith is the confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing.

According to this:

confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.

Although, getting to the meat of the argument, back in 2008 someone discussed this already over at Bad Astronomy.

I have faith in science. That doesn't mean I blindly believe what science tells me ... it means that I'm confident that the process is open and documented enough that someone could explain it to me. And, if I really insisted, someone could sit down and walk me through it.

At a certain point, I have to take some of the mathematics or really deep science "on faith", meaning I don't actually understand it in all of its gory detail, but I have been satisfied that a good amount of people who do (some of whom I have personally met, and some of whom are in the pantheon of "smart people"), that the parts I don't explicitly grasp are, in fact, true.

Now, if you just blindly believed everything science told you without holding it up to some degree of a "smell test" to assure yourself it's consistent with everything else, science could become "faith". But that doesn't mean that science is inherently "a faith".

I don't necessarily agree with your rigid (and possibly pulled from thin air) definition of "faith", but I do agree that science in general isn't "faith".

My protest about the fly ash wasn't based on how much you'd need to be equally dangerous.
it was about how much is produced to generate the same amount of power.

I certainly wouldn't be happy to eat the fish at the outlet of the plant.
even a few miles away I wouldn't want to long term or without first dosing up on some iodine tablets.

It's likely going to destroy the fishing industry near there for a few years like BSE destroyed the British beef industry for a few years or the gulf spill fucked over fishermen in the gulf though at least it probably won't actually kill many of the fish so when they get the all clear in a few years there will be lots of stock (one up on the gulf spill at least).
With any luck it won't be too long if ocean currents carry away and dilute what's leaked.

To be fair planes are designed with vastly more safety systems, if your average car and average driver had the kind of safety systems a 747 has and the kind of training a 747 pilot has there would likely be almost no accidents on the roads... in part because every car would cost millions so there wouldn't be very many on the roads.

the deathstar flaw was repeated up and down the coast in non-nuclear scenarios, there's a heartbreaking clip from a town up the coast which had been wiped out by tsunamis in the past so this time they'd gone all out, they'd build 2 huge sea walls and the town was a model of how to resist tsunamis.
they'd sunk 30 years of time and money into building the massive wall yet it was a couple of meters too short for the wave that hit in this case and most of the towns population died.

There's always a small probability that *something* extraordinary will happen, at the far end of the curve there could be a meteor strike.
Again it's a decent parallel with plane crashes since there is a tiny chance of it happening but it's simply very very unlikely.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/04/did-a-meteor-bring-down-air-france-447/

âoeWhat is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?â They concluded that there was a 1-in-10 chance that this could happen

I completely agree with you on the need for extraordinary safeguards but there will always be the case at the far extreme of the normal curve, if you build a wall 100 meters high there's the chance (p=0.00000....0001) of a wave 101 meters high hitting it.

If you build it beside a river there's the chance of a dam collapse, some kind of natural flash flood or something really weird happening like, as mentioned before, a meteor strike directly on the reactor.

life is all about probabilities, a car could swerve off the road and crash through the wall of the building you're in now but the cost of reinforcing that wall *and every other wall of every other building you're in regularly* isn't worth it vs the actual risk of that happening.

so if you're looking for 100% certainty of no disasters or accidents you won't ever get it.
with any energy source.

A plant making solvents for the production of solar panels could leak and cause another Bhopal, a dam could collapse and cause a another Banqiao etc.
there's always the possibility of something at the far end of the normal curve though we absolutely should try to make the chance of disaster as small as possible.

The possible harm from a nuclear accident is significant and that absolutely does mean we should invest heavily in safety systems, backups, backups for backups etc but there's still always going to be the occasional event at the far end of the normal curve.

The way it's looking to turn out the nuclear plant issues likely going to be almost entirely economic though as a human disaster you're right that it's eclipsed by what's already happened.

You could just ask your neighbor. Most high school kids who are even remotely interested in science already have a neutron source in their basement. Borax, you get in the laundry aisle and as moderator I suggest to go with pencils. Graphite is a well documented moderator and has worked in Chernobyl for many years without a problem. You could use tea-lights for shielding, but imho shielding is for sissies.

Just one warning: As in banking, the important thing is to start big. If you build a small reactor, the police will come knocking down your door, but if you build a really big one, your local congressman will help you to find a way around stupid regulations.

I think you are not giving the subconscious mind enough credit, but here are a couple of citations to show that people can be influenced by small things.

How an issue is framed can influence how an individual approaches a problem. I would suggest that children are more impressionable than the people in this study, and would be more likely to be swayed.

But to be honest, I wasn't convinced by research. I just grew up around boys who imitated Beavis and Butthead and girls who mindlessly followed every fashion trend of the day. I know it is anecdotal, but seeing how teens and people in their twenties openly imitate the people they see on TV, I see nothing "crazy" or implausible about the idea that a small child would emulate the attitudes of characters he sees in games or in TV. Again, when I say "emulate", I don't mean "rape women". I mean that he will be more likely to treat them as objects than someone who has never been exposed to that attitude.

But, just to make it clear. I don't really care if you play the game. If I had the free time, I would probably play it myself. I choose not to expose my son to that, because I feel that the characters he sees on TV are role models that I will have to compete with, even if they are nothing more than cartoon trains that like to read stories, or muscle-heads who like to punch people in the balls. When he's a teenager, I'll let him play whatever he wants (although we may have an unspoken agreement that the porn stays hidden), but not until then.

for a lay audience. And did a great write up. Glimpses of the Fourth Domain? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/03/18/glimpses-of-the-fourth-domain/

Science is already well past that point. String theory: Is it science's ultimate dead end? Some respond to Japan earthquake by pointing to global warming (Global warming - is there anything it can't do?)

Some random people on twitter makes outrageous claims, and that means that science is broken?

As for string theory, I don't get why it is considered science, but a lot of people more knowledgeable in the field than me thinks it is, so I would prefer to wait and see where it ends up.

Occam's razor is a guide, not an iron law. If it was an iron law, we would probably be using the TeVeS theory of gravity and leave the search for "dark matter & dark energy" (supposedly the matter and energy that makes up all but a tiny fraction of the Universe despite never really being seen) to compete for funding with the search for eluminiferous Ether.

TeVeS? The theory that doesn't explain all of the data, and where even it's proponents agree that dark matter is still needed?

Moreover, there are limits to what can be known, and what is provable. Godel's incompleteness theorems

So, since Gödel's theorem is relevant, science must somehow be an axiomatic system that is capable of expressing elementary arithmetic. Weird, I thought it was all about observations, hypotheses and testing.

That the full Moon and any other Moon have the exactly same mass, gravitational pull etc.? We just don't see a part of it - it is still there.
Also, solar and lunar tides combined come out to about 5% increase in the tides - NOT "half as big as lunar tides".

When the moon is either new or full, the sun, earth and moon form a straight line and we get the highest (and lowest) tides: the effects of the sun and moon add up.

You DO realize that such conditions occur EVERY TWO WEEKS.
So much for "the maximum possible tidal effect" and its correlation to earthquakes.

only rates a D as compared to Bill O'Reilly's F.

It wouldn't be fair of me to grade you at all. Clearly you didn't even take a look, let alone read, any of the fine links I provided above.
It would be like grading someone who didn't even take the course. While stealing candy from a baby. Seal.

Here's a clue: Moon orbits Earth (coming closer and then moving away again) EACH MONTH.

So... Unless you are experiencing major earthquakes EACH MONTH at about the same time, but NOT during the rest of the month... There is no correlation whatsoever.
Bonus points for Moon actually being closer to its FURTHEST point in its orbit around the Earth (apogee) at the time of the recent earthquake in Japan.
Oh and... Take a look at this.
Each pixel in that photo is about 500 kilometers. During this particular perigee Moon will be ENTIRE 12 PIXELS CLOSER.

The best popular link I could find is from Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy" blog:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/18/kryptonite-for-the-supermoon/

Good old Bad Astronomy, love that site.

Gotta say, looking up at the full moon right now, clear skies, and sure, nice full moon, nothing visibly spectacular at all, beyond being a massive lump of rock in the sky. Nothing breeds contempt like familiarity.

And I do so hope /. does not become Digg.

The best popular link I could find is from Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy" blog:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/18/kryptonite-for-the-supermoon/

Interview with Henry Markram This is the guy the article was about, but for the life of me I can't find the actual article where they describe the brain 'lighting up like a christmas tree', though I remember that exact phrase. Still, this describes his work pretty well. So might be worth a read.

I would agree that the easy and fast communication provided by the Internet is helping the news of successful protests spread, and it's also helping protesters organize. It's also helping Wikileaks spread leaks easily. It sounds like the protests and Wikileaks are caused by a common cause. Similarly, births in an area are tightly correlated with the number of cell phone towers. Both births and cell phone towers are caused by the human population in the area -- it's not the cell phone towers causing the births. Similarly, I think the protests and Wikileaks are caused by Internet communication, but it's not Wikileaks that's causing the protests.

I just posted an article on my blog about this. My opinion: we need to be very skeptical (shocker, I know). The scientist involved is legit, even if the journal in which the study is published has some very shaky stuff in it (they published an insulting ad hominem screed against me, for example, linked in my post). His evidence is interesting, and is more than just pictures; he did a chemical analysis as well. I am not an expert and so I cannot say whether this finding will hold up or not, but I wanted to get some facts out there before the media blow this up into an impending alien invasion in December 2012. :)