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However, meat starts out at so much higher an energy density, the loss from cooking hardly makes a dent, relatively speaking. Meat-eating has been for some time pretty generally considered to be the thing that enabled humans to evolve large brains in the first place.

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/6-14-1999a.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/04.03/13-aiello.html

This cooking thing may be a more-or-less concurrent change in the same direction, too.

Some people can learn by being told what not to do, some can learn from observing the mistakes of others, and some have to pee on the electric fence themselves.

With at 30% incident rate, I highly doubt that low dopamine levels is a defect.

http://sickle.bwh.harvard.edu/malaria_sickle.html

The Vatican gets at least 0.5% of Italy's tax revenue through the Otto per mille, a way to publicly finance religion in Italy. Through that channel alone, the Vatican got one billion euros (not dollars) last year.

Where you are mistaken is in the idea that the Catholic Church is the same thing as the Vatican. It is not. Every Catholic parish is a separate financial entity from every other Catholic parish, and each parish is a separate financial entity from the diocese to which it belongs, which is in turn a separate financial entity from the ecclesiastical province to which it belongs, and on up the chain. (Many Catholic Churches have borrowed money from their Diocese for various building projects and are required to pay it back with interest.) Those who view the Catholic Church in an uncharitable light often see this as a way to protect the Church from large legal settlements against priests or bishops who protected pedophiles. Others who view the Church more charitably see it as a way for each parish to guarantee that donations will work at improving the local community rather than go to some far away group. Money that is sent to the Vatican itself is referred to as "Peter's Pence", and there is typically a once-a-year fundraising drive for it.

In any case, just because the Italian government gave money to various Catholic Churches does not mean that it gave the money to the Vatican. The same goes for whatever illegal tax-breaks that you feel qualify as revenue. Institutionalized greed notwithstanding, you haven't demonstrated that the Vatican itself received billions of dollars in revenue.

... and, by the way, Harvard university's budget is in the range of billions of dollars [pdf], 2.6 in 2005 to be precise.

Fair enough.

no, [the Vatican] don't have billions in capital at their disposal. Their annual budget is less than that of Harvard University.

I call bullshit. The Vatican gets at least 0.5% of Italy's tax revenue through the Otto per mille, a way to publicly finance religion in Italy. Through that channel alone, the Vatican got one billion euros (not dollars) last year. That's one tax, for each year, in one country, and that's even a legitimate channel; illegal channels include tax breaks on commercial activities operated by the church, which are granted by my country's government, headed by a "legitimate businessman", in spite of European rules, and financing of religious private schools, forbidden as explicitly as possible by the Constitution of Italy, article 33, which however politicians use as toilet paper; In case you did not know how schools work in Italy, private schools are basically diploma mills for stupid or lazy sons of rich people who can't handle public school, where your professor can flunk you without fear of making the school lose its money.

Read on about cardinal Marcinkus and the IOR to know more about the greed of the Vatican.

... and, by the way, Harvard university's budget is in the range of billions of dollars [pdf], 2.6 in 2005 to be precise.

At least I think this is his (free download). It's from 1974 and on the topic of the thesis. Isn't that research a little dated for a dissertation?

You realize that both Yale and Harvard are, for all intents and purposes, free to anyone whose family makes less than $60k? And heavily subsidized up to three times that amount? Absolutely everyone who makes it in to those schools can afford to go... Yale Daily News Harvard University Gazette

This may be true for sending entire frames to threads, but in mpeg4, frames are broken up into chunks. Motion vectors are created that allow these chunks to move about the image from frame to frame. Other filters are used to remove blockiness, compress the image, do motion detection and macroblock detection, and do various other tasks. MPEG4, especially H.264, can be easily multi-threaded: http://ietisy.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/E88-D/7/1623 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004SPIE.5308..384L http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2007/05/02/41296/aspex-targets-parallel-processor-at-blu-ray-dvd.htm When doing a two-pass encode, this is even easier because the keyframes are discovered on the first (faster) pass, so (if encoding already couldn't be threaded) it could by taking advantage of the known keyframe markers in at least the second pass. But, that's not necessary. I use handbrake to create H.264 videos under Linux all the time on my dual core machine, and both processors stay between 80%-90% utilization from start to finish regardless of the number of passes.

A study that should be required reading for all gun-control proponents:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

Take special note of the statistics covering several countries with draconian gun control, and how if anything, murder rates tend to be inversely proportional to gun ownership. Luxembourg, in the heart of civilized Europe, is the most astonishing example: despite an absolute ban on handguns and near-total ban on other guns, it has the highest murder rate of that contiguous set of countries.

And an article on feelgood laws, and why they don't work:

http://www.naiaonline.org/library/From_Firearms_to_Fido.htm

In that same article apparently given what you provided has absolutely nothing to do with data sharing, it's an article about when Google started implementing government required blocks on search terms on their China based domain.

On the other hand since my post refering to Viacom was about their track record as a company as a whole, we have the fact that Viacom is a member of the MPAA, the movie industry's version of the RIAA, and just a year ago were caught submitting false DMCA takedown notices, multiple times.

Want to try again?

XML is crappy format

That statement underlines most people's myopic vision of the XML family of technologies. XML is not a format it is a family of technologies based around a common grammar.

XML is not a bucket.
It is not a passive container for data.
It is a transformable semantic graph.

The heart and sole of XML is XLST it serves as a common 'glue' that allows the transformation between the various standardized 'languages' XML, XHTML, XLST, XSL-FO, SVG, RDF, RSS, etc...

Example; the same XML document (lets say it represents rows in a database) can be transformed into a web page, pdf file, visual graph, rss feed, directed graph, or [insert non-XML text based output of choice]. More importantly the transformation can take place on the client side of a transaction effectively decoupling content and representation.

That being said, I completely agree that XML is over-kill for simple fixed message passing. But, then again simple fixed format message passing isn't what XML was really designed for :-) XML was designed for situations where the representation needs of the client are unknown and/or dynamic.

--
If you don't know XSLT you don't know XML

Dan Gilbert did this experiment - its described his book Stumbling on Happiness. Here is the NYtimes article. In this video, he describes the theory of Choice Paralysis

The theory in short means we all think that "Breasts of my wife GREAT! All others suck! " (except Tina Fey.. and Natalie Portman and.. Penelope Cruz)

I'm not sure where you got the presidential campaign thing from.

It's called paying attention. Try it sometime.

I am well aware of the Bill Gates for president thing that was going on some time ago. I guess I should be more specific: where did you get the information that this was Bill Gates testing the waters?

And why you're so cynical about his intentions. Have you heard his Harvard speech last year?

No. If you can point me to a transcript I will read it - I cannot receive high-speed internet where I live (except satellite - $80/mo for 9GB/mo - fuck that) and cannot use youtube at all (not even downloading with a download manager.)

Here's the speech. It's actually a really good read.

he doesn't give a fuck about anyone. But go ahead and believe what you want to believe.

You beleive he doesn't give a fuck about anyone. I'm taking his deeds through the foundation at face value. Don't you think you're being a bit unreasonable here? I mean, the google search for his speech took me all of 5 seconds. You seem to be so well-armed with all the negative information you can possibly find, but won't take 5 seconds to see the other side?

In short, Beethoven. ;)

Now if you had talked about Edison's or A.G. Bell's dyslexia, you might have had a better point. But even so, dyslexia's a disability that, properly diagnosed, can be worked around. Still it does raise a good point which is, what positive traits with disability co-factors might we eliminate if we try to eliminate disabilities. The best example of that is how the genetic traits for thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia also provide limited protection against malaria

"Malaria's not a problem for me, I live and have evolved for northern latitude where the mosquitoes and malaria are less prevalent", you might say. Ah, but what happens when you get something like Global Warming combined with air travel increasing the territory for malaria? Could genetic defect selection be wiping out currently unnecessary gene variations that could prove critical in another few hundred years?

Or to speak to problems that may prove critical today ... would the world be better if we eliminated all embryos predisposed to ADD? Many small business owners, inventors, and innovators of the next wave of technology are kids who grew up with ADD... Many who have it see it as a gift, not a weakness. Many parents, however, see it as a huge defect.

In short, Beethoven. ;)

How so? Beethoven's deafness had an adult onset, and it's now believed to have been due to lead poisoning, not a genetic cause. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have a genetic propensity to heavy metal poisoning. Although some people may be more sensitive than others, I wouldn't call it a genetic disorder.

Now if you had talked about Edison's or A.G. Bell's dyslexia, you might have had a better point. But even so, dyslexia's a disability that, properly diagnosed, can be worked around. Still it does raise a good point which is, what positive traits with disability co-factors might we eliminate if we try to eliminate disabilities. The best example of that is how the genetic traits for thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia also provide limited protection against malaria

"Malaria's not a problem for me, I live and have evolved for northern latitude where the mosquitoes and malaria are less prevalent", you might say. Ah, but what happens when you get something like Global Warming combined with air travel increasing the territory for malaria? Could genetic defect selection be wiping out currently unnecessary gene variations that could prove critical in another few hundred years?

As usual, SF touched on some of these issues already decades ago, starting with a Heinlein novella called "Beyond this Horizon".

It sounds like you are thinking about applets. That is a LONG dead technology.

No it isn't. The "Processing" IDE/API breathes new life into applets. Here's a Java applet I wrote and it is quite nifty keen:

http://am.iic.harvard.edu/DendroStar

|>oug

If we have the technology to build a plane that can fly at Mach 10, then we can build Zubrin's Hyersonic Skyhook without nanotube cables or any kind of unobtanium. This would give us Space Elevator priced access to space!

Basically, you build a beanstalk that doesn't go all the way to geosynch, and doesn't go all the way to the ground. It's a lot less massive and doesn't require the same stupendous tensile strength as a Space Elevator. A Mach 10 hypersonic plane could deliver cargoes to the bottom end, perhaps with the help of a small booster rocket on the cargo pod. After the cargo is attached, you winch it up and use ion engines or interaction with the earth's magnetic field to accelerate the skyhook. (Which would be cheaper, since ion engines have huge delta-V, and magnetic interaction requires power and no fuel.)

Another Paper

Computed escape flux 3*10^6 (molecules)/(cm^2 s). Hydrogen escape fluxes are two orders of magnitude greater. (source below) A simple calculation someone may wish to do involving the density of oxygen molecules required for breathing as well as the surface area of the Martian ionosphere can give you a very rough idea of how quickly a magically-induced breathable atmosphere would decay away. It is unclear to me how the density of the atmosphere will effect the M-B speed distribution (considering how effectively the new density will effect light absorption, etc.) so it is also unclear (to me) how this escape rate would evolve with, say, "terraforming". 1997 paper - may be outdated, probably a better source exists http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993GeoRL..20.1747F

I've done a little more research. This article supports my point:
States With Higher Levels of Gun Ownership Have Higher Homicide Rates, January 11, 2007
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2007-releases/press01112007.html

Your point on Sweden is misleading because Swedes have compulsory military service, and their firearms are rifles with a small clip and the guns are difficult to conceal. Further, citizens undergo regular training throughout their life on firearm use.

The Brady Campaign (while clearly supporting the assertion that guns are problematic) is telling:
http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/factsheets/

In particular, the USA has over 11,000 firearm homicides a year, compared to (for example) Canada's 184. That's 44 firearm deaths per million citizens in the USA per year, compared to 6.1 per million in Canada. Statistically, the USA is economically superior to Canada in virtually every way, including the distribution of wealth (as measured by per capita income).

However, I think those statistics may fail to reveal something sinister. There seems to be a racial or class segregation in the USA, and the per capita income fails to illuminate the number of people who are essentially destitute in the USA. I expect that gun violence (and the fear of gun violence) reinforces this segregation.

I do not feel I have an adequate explanation of the aberrant level of gun violence in the USA. I feel you are correct that the violence is in no small part due to the disparity in wealth. However, it seems clear (from the Harvard article, the Brady statistics, if not common sense) that the abundance of easily accessible guns significantly contributes to the amount of violent crime.

What you can *do* about those hundreds of millions of guns, now that they've polluted the country, is another issue.

Pluto and Charon aren't formed the same way.

Not necessarily true.

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review has a case study on Toyota's success, and how it is the result of a culture of innovation and respect. It encourages competition, but in a constructive manner. And rather than praise success (say, a promotion), they have a culture of reminding you that your coworkers were just as good and just as close to making it. You are expected to question your superiors, and you are constantly reminded that the customer is your top priority.

There are several exceptions to your statement, and while Microsoft has done a lot of things wrong, they have also done a LOT of things right. Stereotypes and generalizations are the root of conflict.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992LPICo.787...18K

Actually, the average body temp is 98.6F using a sampling of "most people". Some are a bit higher than that and this page says that older people are actually a bit below 98.6 but 96 is too low to be an average.

From what I've read, current CO2 levels are at the low end of what plant life can tolerate.

When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million
years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere
than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures
to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the
world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant
productivity on average by 32 percent across species.

Past CO2 levels have been documented in peer-reviewed journals:

We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume
tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7
times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.

This discussion may prove enlightening:

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times
the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon
dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably
higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better...
And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur
extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide
increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of
photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they
started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs
really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the
neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible
with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this
suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first
dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second,
the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly
tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous...
The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present
ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides
for a much greater biogenic diversity.

A corporation is essentially a group of people legally organized to do business. Thus the fact that a corporation's sole responsibilities to follow the law and make money stem from this fact.

Large corporations do engage in large social programs (such as the Ronald McDonald House for families) because they believe (and studies by organizations such as Harvard show) that such philanthropic acts improve the environment in which corporations operate--which help the corporate bottom line. (One reason why many tech companies have contribution matching programs is to make the area in which those tech companies operate better places to live, which help attract better quality workers.)

For anyone to stop and suggest that a corporation must (rather than 'should') engage in social responsibility--and to base that argument in a 'class warfare' style argument that corporations which solely profit seek are somehow evil (forgetting that even philanthropic activities are part of corporate profit seeking) is to suggest the people who created that corporation must engage in activities outside of the reason why they came together in the first place.

In the United States we bristle at the notion that people should be forced to provide services against their will in order to satisfy some notion of a "social good." The last time we forced a subset of our population to do work for what we considered at the time a large-scale social good without providing them compensation, we wound up fighting a Civil War over the issue...

Actually, yes.. If you're around Boston.

The Red Cross doesn't have a perfect image, but bullying them is about as good for public opinion as bullying the Girl Scouts.

Yea, because nobody would go after the Girl Scouts.

jcr,

Usually, I'm on the same side as you when you say something, but you missed the mark on this one. Rentals of videos, even if they include sound, are not illegal. But rentals of audio are illegal unless performed by a nonprofit library or educational institution. First sale doctrine for the purposes of music rental does not apply, but it does for video rental.

there will be no natural PeV neutrino source

they broadcast spherically or in a beam towards us

That's a very simplified view of what happens in your body with carbohydrates. Check out this for more information.

In summary, at the core of every carbohydrate is a sugar molecule. Depending on the structure of that carb, your body will break it down into sugar quickly or over longer periods of time. Simple sugars, enriched pasta, potatoes, white bread and *SOME* fruits have carbs that break down very quickly, causing a large spike in blood sugar levels. At this point, your body releases insulin which is a hormone that tells your cells to absorb that sugar and store it for energy.

Eating whole grain breads, many different kinds of fruits, and whole grain pastas gives you a ton of critical nutrients that your body needs, and break down into sugars slowly so that your insulin producing glands aren't overworked and you have a constant supply of steady energy that you will use for everything you do instead of turning into fat.

Diets that say "carbs are bad" have always annoyed me, and while they may work, they may be starving your body of critical nutrients which may lead to severe health problems down the road.

You can partly blame the government for it, because their food pyramid is complete and utter nonsense, because basically it was made by the food companies.
Just a few days ago Haward released a food pyramid that is not driven by big business:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/pyramid/index.html

*That* is how the food pyramid should have looked like from the start. More information here.

You can partly blame the government for it, because their food pyramid is complete and utter nonsense, because basically it was made by the food companies.
Just a few days ago Haward released a food pyramid that is not driven by big business:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/pyramid/index.html

*That* is how the food pyramid should have looked like from the start. More information here.

First, here's the real paper. Actually, this is the previous paper, where they got operation at 177K, but not quite room temperature. (Don't link to Physorg; they just collect press releases, add ads, and delete the citations.)

Terahertz waves are interesting. At one time, that was an inaccessible portion of the spectrum, above radio but below infrared. Now it's understood that it's a region in which both RF and optical techniques can work. At that frequency, propagation is line of sight, although diffuse systems, as with diffuse IR, are possible. Applications are still a ways off, but there's probably something useful to do with this stuff.

Incidentally, "radio", by international agreement, ends at 3THz. Beyond that, it's "light" for regulatory purposes. In the US, FCC regulations (for RF) end at 3THz, and DHS regulations (as for lasers) begin.

I'm normally not a fan of wikipedia, but since this is so very basic stuff, I'm going to make an exception :

Carbon_dioxide_levels_and_photorespiration

I noticed your link says "light-independent reactions" increase with increased CO2 levels however it says nothing about light dependent reactions. And I haven't seen a reduction in light. It also says nothing about plants who slow slower with an enriched CO2 environment yet I previously included links to scientific articles that said some plants do show a slower growth rate.

Yes there are exceptions (that's only because plants have dropped the co2 content of the athmosphere so very much). One or two. Doesn't change a thing for food crops though, or for trees, or ...

Once again you didn't read the articles I provided a link to, the "New Scientist" article specifically says "A two-decade study of rainforest plots in Panama and Malaysia recently concluded that local temperature rises of more than 1C have reduced tree growth by 50 per cent (see Don't count on the trees)." Now this doesn't say an increase in CO2 slows growth it does say a raise in temperatures does, and Greenhouse Gases are called that because they raise temperatures. And if you look at the Google link you will see the search was for "co2 plants OR trees growth". Another article, from Harvard, goes over a science study that shows "Warming may not spark tree growth". Here's another Google, this one for co2 trees slowed growth food. As for food, what affects food crops like corn more than anything else is using the crops to feed cows and other animals as well as biofuels. In the US 90% of the corn grown is to feed livestock and not humans. Yet the amount of corn needed to raise 1 pound of meat can feed a bunch of people. And cows aren't corn eaters, they're ruminants and eat grass. Yahoo! has a webpage explaining why cattle are fed corn instead of grass.

You are being dishonest, sir.

Whereas I've provided plenty of links to scientific research and articles you haven't provided anything and I'm the one being dishonest? You're the dishonest one not me. You're dishonest and, like president Bush, ignore science. Unless you can have a rational conversation and provide evidence to back up your claims I see no reason to continue.

Pick up the Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. The lab manual might also be helpful. The Art of Electronics is basically the electronics Bible for physicists and a popular introductory text for electrical engineers.

For technical electronics work (like soldering or cable assembly) you will probably want to find a specific book (the Navy electronics manuals would be very helpful).

"The DMCA does allow for reverse engineering for compatibility purposes and hence in the end no matter what the 'other points' are the DMCA takedown request was wrongly sent."

However, I think it only applies to reverse engineering of a "technological measure" used to enforce copy protection. The DMCA doesn't single-handedly outlaw reverse engineering.

The bill states that exceptions can be made to comply with local law enforcement, but it does however leave a legal path for retribution in cases where a company (read yahoo) gives a foreign government information with the intent of removing dissent.

However as there's already a US law that can be used there's no need for a new one. A law passed in 1789 allows foreigners to sue US businesses that support human rights violations in US courts. That law is the Alien Tort Claims Act.

Anyway, this actually seems to be a good law. Has Hell frozen over ?

Nope not really. It's just another hypocrisy law. It won't fly; the US has too many economic interests in China to pass any type of 'Human Rights' type legislation.

As I just posted in a response to someone else, there's no need for a new law. A law allowing foreign nationals to sue US businesses in US courts for supporting human rights violations has been on the books since 1789. The Alien Tort Claims Act, ATCA, was passed into law in 1789 and has been used, is being used today, to sue US businesses. Here's some of the cases that have been in US courts recently. For instance Unocal settled a lawsuit brought by Burmese villagers in 2005. In another case Coca-Cola was sued for supporting paramilitaries in Colombia.

This is no need for this bill that I can see. US businesses can already be sued and held accountable for supporting human rights violators. The Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 can and has been used by foreign nationals to sue US based businesses.

Do you have data that specifically show the difference of the cost of medical insurance for a changed job versus the incremental salary increase? How do you classify a job as "better?" [...] "Better" is a dangerously subjective word in this context.

Of course it's subjective; it's supposed to be. My point is that people are often forced to choose between keeping their health coverage by staying at their current job, and finding another job they'd prefer but losing their health coverage (either losing it indefinitely because the new job doesn't offer health benefits, or losing it for a period of weeks-to-months as they search for jobs and wait for their benefits to kick in).

They can go with an alternative, that may be less-expensive in the short-run, or they can be not selfish, think about their families and look at it from a cost-benefit perspective. "Hmmm, if I do this, sure i'll live an extra couple of years, but my family's screwed after that."

Yes, and that's a shitty set of options too. National health care would expand the set to include some not-so-shitty options.

It's not a strawman at all. I was merely illustrating that the only things to which people have a "right" are those things that are spelled out in what is the supreme law of the land.

It was indeed a strawman, because you were arguing against a phony position that I never actually put forth. You're the one talking about health care as a "right" here, not me.

Perhaps a question that better illustrates the point I was trying to make is how healthcare as a basic need is any different from the other basic needs I listed.

Well, in one sense it isn't all that different. Housing, food, and transportation are basic needs too. But, of course, the government does provide those things to people in need: food stamps, buses, subsidized rentals and mortgages, etc.

In another sense it's quite different, because health care costs are unpredictable and can be astronomical. You can be pretty sure your food, transportation, and housing costs will be the same next month as they are this month. You can also reasonably expect to pay those costs. Medical costs, however, can appear out of nowhere and end up costing far more than anyone can reasonably be expected to pay.

That is, the ways in which health care as a basic need is different from those other basic needs are the same as the reasons why it's typically paid for by insurance rather than out of pocket.

They want something that they don't want to buy on the market given to them. If someone chooses to pay for it through private insurance, then they are paying for it. If they rely on the government for it, it comes out of someone elses pocket, not theirs.

If that were the case, then no one except the poorest members of society would support national health care. But in fact, plenty of national health care supporters would likely end up paying more than they do now. They support it anyway, because it has benefits other than its impact on their bottom line: mainly, the human-level benefit of knowing that millions of people will be better off because of it.

* ability to pay for medical care, that includes accounting for wisdom of spending habits and financial responsibility

Not sure which specific claim you're referring to here, and in any case, "wisdom of spending habits and financial responsibility" is your claim, not mine.

* leading cause of bankruptcies being medical expenses

Harvard study: Illness and Medical Bills Cause Half of All Bankruptcies. "Medical problems contributed to about half of all bankruptcies [...] the total number of people directly affected by medical bankruptcies [is] more than two million annually.

"Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters were ins

The Drake Equation: N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL Where N* is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. As for aliens causing Global Warming, read about the Science here.

Why, if god created us as his ultimate bmw, are our bodies so not-elegant? anybody who saw the real version of the inner life of a cell ( http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/ ) can see how much complexity lies inside us. why is our chest made from an element that's not the most resistant element in the universe? im sure that prosthetic limbs are now getting better (more resistant, etc) than our usual limbs so how can we get 'better' at doing some parts of our bodies if god created us? most of our bodily processes are not straightforward? of course we are very efficient at doing what we do, but the same effectiveness can be achieved by other, more straightforward, methods. [/newline] and how strange it is indeed that most animals survive better on the enviroments they are found and have a hard time on other places.. of course for evolution theory this questions can be answered in one line, i would like to see such elegant explanation to these and many other questions with ID. Please post more questions that fail to be explained by ID, and of course, saying 'god is all-knowing' is not an explanation by ID.

Fusion can occur in the accretion disks around neutron stars (for example), why not black holes?

Granted, it may not be the sort of long sustained fusion reactions one usually thinks of, but jamming some extra protons and neutrons into some nuclei can still get energetic.

There has to be benifit [sic] to both parties for a contract to be valid. I can't just throw $200 at apple and get software that I they say I can't use without having the option to return it. Since the parties involved refuse to accept returned software the return policy is unconscionable and the license [sic] may be void.

Dawson

George Packer Berry was the Dean of Harvard Medical School (1949-1965) and had a much wiser approach to information. In an address to students at the Medical School, he said, "Half of what we are going to teach you is wrong, and half of it is right. Our problem is that we don't know which half is which."

You need to check information from any source when it matters to you. You think that published books are always better? Check this one out: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. Indeed, according to one study, Most scientific papers are probably wrong. One study found that Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica had similar error rates.

Wikipedia is new, so it's forcing people to notice something that was always true about any information, but that they've been ignoring up to now: You need to check information that's important to you.

I was a little shocked to read the parent post, but he's absolutely right. See the story (from December) here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/science/22fermi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

However, I'm not sure I'd characterize the cuts as a "funding SNAFU". According to the NYTimes article, the cuts were "to meet bottom-line spending targets demanded by Mr. Bush, Congress rolled back the planned increases for the Energy Department and other science agencies." If I were more cynical I'd say that money just got funneled into Iraq.

Oh well. Long as we're busy fighting terrorists, who cares if we have a $1T/year deficit, a weakened dollar, one of the civilized world's worst public education systems, an expensive, inefficient healthcare system, AND are cutting out the roots from future scientific progress in the USA. God bless America.

Don't even bother. The majority of Slashdotters would claim that going to a college is a waste, and would wear their badge of illiteracy with honor, stating that they've learnt everything that there is to learn without setting foot in college. And then they'll tell you how their experience and wonderful geekiness sets them apart from the rest.

And you're right about the need for intelligent people with good academic credentials. I know several companies that are looking for people in EE/ECE related fields with graduate degrees - it is almost impossible to find good candidates, and almost 80% of the folks tend to be Indian or Chinese. I remember a graduate class in Quantum Computing - out of a class of 18, there were all of 2 Americans* in there.

I wonder how many of these people working at Microsoft are Americans? Perhaps, people like this guy should definitely be sent back, rather than let them stay back and use their talents, right?

*Never mind the fact that a lot of people who go to school here eventually identify themselves with an American cultural identity, and call themselves Americans anyway -- what's the point of discrimination then, I wonder?

Umm are you not familiar with the hundreds upon hundreds of articles dating from the 1950s to today explaining why statistical testing is unscientific and harmful to psychology? Here's a list of 402 of them fMRI research is often (although clearly not always) conducted by people using the same statistical techniques. Sure the actual generation of images involves a lot of complicated math, but the analysis does not. In many cases, they simply perform a significance test by voxel to determine whether two images are "different". Here's a PDF of a paper that appeared in Science where they do this: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-et-al-Science-9-01.pdf

What is the response to the criticisms? These points are ignored. The Association for Psychological Science (APS), one of the two main psychology associations recently defined a replication as anything that obtains a non-zero effect in the same direction. Why? Because it allows psychologists to make a simple transformation of the p-value without actually changing standard operating practice.

You greatly overestimate the extent to which psychologists care how much they are wasting grant money conducting bad research.

So when I use ads to find a publication which discusses a topic while I'm writing a paper because I can't remember where I heard this idea or don't understand it fully, I'm cheating at science? Or when I write a program to get my computer to simulate something for me instead of cranking out the math? Or when I go ask a colleague for help instead of figuring something out on my own?
I don't think that if you were in science or understood it properly you would be making these silly analogies. Science is a struggle no matter what you've got in your system. And it isn't a competition in the same way as sports or games are. Yes, there is some level of competition when it comes to jobs and grants, but it's mostly a shared struggle to learn more about the world. Performance enhancing drugs alone won't make someone a good scientist. If you're a good scientist and you can stay awake and focused a bit longer, you'll be able to get more done in a day. That's all.

Intel withdrew their analogy in embarrassment, when it was revealed their spokeperson was referring to this