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What's the difference between talking on a cell phone and talking to a passenger?

According to Harvard it is quite different.

Good idea! She should contact this person, who even has the same name as her!

That's the wrong Yun Zhou. The Yun Zhou who wrote this article has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.

Yes, it would be a very bad thing for the Soviet Union to come back, a disaster of epic proportions. Communists killed 100,000,000 people in the last century. Such tyranny has seldom been equaled.

If you miss the "sanity" of Soviet times, you are woefully ignorant about events, badly confused, or a madman. Perhaps you could start smaller, such a suggesting widespread castration because it "calms" men?

If you really miss an ever present threat against you then you could try a visit a tribal society and start a blood feud?

Astrophysicists my ass... Geologists have this covered! From "Static and dynamic angles of repose in loose granular materials under reduced gravity"
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...

Until now it has been assumed that the angles of repose are independent of gravitational acceleration. The objective of this work is to experimentally determine whether the angles of repose depend on gravity. In 33 parabolic flights in a well-controlled research aircraft we recorded avalanching granular materials in rotating drums at effective gravitational accelerations of 0.1, 0.38 and 1.0 times the terrestrial value. The granular materials varied in particle size and rounding and had air or water as interstitial fluid. Materials with angular grains had time-averaged angles of about 40 degrees and with rounded grains about 25 degrees for all effective gravitational accelerations, except the finest glass beads in air, which was explained by static electricity. For all materials, the static angle of repose increases about 5 degrees with reduced gravity, whereas the dynamic angle decreases with about 10 degrees. Consequently, the avalanche size increases with reduced gravity.

They could have thought about a study like this when they first started thinking about the green house effect and climate change:

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/121...

But no, temperature recordings normally start mid 19th century, that is tardy. Now if they had actually started doing something against climate change around 1950

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ep...

that would have been wise, alas ...

That's 100 (or 93) faculty members out of "about 2,400 faculty members."

Another headline could be, "2,307 Harvard Faculty Members Don't Call On the University to Divest From Fossil Fuels."

http://www.harvard.edu/harvard...

I posted a brief list of some interesting new storage technologies last week:

There have been MANY teams working on this, for several years, with lots of VC/R&D, and several new products are going to hit the market it the next couple of years: liquid metal batteries, sodium ion batteries, compressed air storage, sodium air batteries, artificial leaf, another artificial leaf, flywheels, super-capacitors, etc... Most of these are intended for grid-level storage, but a few are quite suitable for transportation as well. In particular, sodium-air batteries have the advantage of light weight, since one of their reactants (air) is available on the fly. And the two "artificial leaf" technologies can be used to create fuel from sunlight.

[posting as AC here, to preserve mod points]

I can't tell if you completed your degree or not. If you did complete it, there are some programs out there that will allow you to get a master's degree without having a computer science undergraduate degree. Harvard's Extension School has what appears to be a reasonably good program for this. They also have some certificate programs that give you something to put on your resume as you work your way toward a degree. Here is a review of the program from a few years ago. I believe Georgia Tech has a similar program.

If you haven't graduated, it might be worth considering how much it would be worth to you to go ahead and finish your degree regardless of the field. If it lets you get a master's degree in an area where you already have technical skills as opposed to starting at an associate degree level, finishing a degree in philosophy might be a good step toward your goal.

some hybrids pump engine noise through speakers to appease the driver

They do that for safety too, not just to appease the driver. Domino's Pizza in the Netherlands made a marketing coup with this a few years ago when they switched to electric delivery scooters. They added audio of a guy going "VROOoooooommmmmm! Lecker-lecker-lecker... Vrrrooooommmm!" (Apparently, "lecker" means "yummy" in Dutch.)

invent some better ways to store more energy

There have been MANY teams working on this, for several years, with lots of VC/R&D, and several new products are going to hit the market it the next couple of years: liquid metal batteries, sodium ion batteries, compressed air storage, sodium air batteries, artificial leaf, another artificial leaf, flywheels, super-capacitors, etc... Most of these are intended for grid-level storage, but a few are quite suitable for transportation as well. In particular, sodium-air batteries have the advantage of light weight, since one of their reactants (air) is available on the fly. And the two "artificial leaf" technologies can be used to create fuel from sunlight.

Sorry, that was pointer to BICEP1, this new stuff came from BICEP2 which operated from Jan 2010->Dec 2012... It takes a while to develop the analytics through 3 years of data...

Here's a pointer to the preprint of the "new" paper dated today.

Actually, scratch the above. Reading their paper and the Dyson paper, the frequency limit is set by the seismometers, not by the normal modes of the Earth.

Plus, Coffee is high in antioxidants and good for your heart.

You realize that some antioxidants are actually carcinogenic, and that increasing your intake of antioxidants may not have any healthful benefit, but may in fact be harming you?

1. new currency emerges, becomes significant
2. reigning system of currency/government considers it a threat.
3. coordinated attacks on the stock exchange
4. bankruptcy, uncertainty, disappearance
5. 'Maybe X currency isnt so bad after all!"

the fact stands that shifting major trade away from the dollar is dangerous, but the bitcoin midel would be catastrophic. its a world where international financial sanctions cant work, and in which America would need to do more than just show up to security council meetings in the UN for a rubber-stamp vote against $evil_dictator. Iraq and Iran serve as real-world examples of this in action. both countries have in the past attempted to shift oil trade away from the dollar. Nothing says monetary supremacy like de-stabilizing the competitions government.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/...
http://www.projectcensored.org...

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw...

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.

For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off."

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~s...

A lecture by Michael Crichton
Caltech Michelin Lecture
January 17, 2003

My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming.

Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.

It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics—a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values—international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind. The world might not be a very good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world.

But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan's memorable phrase, "a candle in a demon haunted world." And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free.

But let's look at how it came to pass.

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous 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 a 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 es

Search for your favorite star here:

http://dasch.rc.fas.harvard.ed...

Nuclear power has a larger carbon footprint than you might think: from the concrete used to build the stations, to the energy used in the mining, extraction and refining processes to produce the fuel. It can take more than 6 years to mitigate the energy used in building of the facility, let alone the actual construction costs.

On account of the fact that every utility scale fission reactor design is really nuclear steam power, every watt of power it produces requires two watts of heat dissipation using water. Of course this means the plants have to shut down if it's too hot, and that source of fresh water you were drawing on is not as cool as it was when the plant was built (eg, due to climate change).

It's also super expensive, because risks must be mitigated; some have pointed out this has led to a negative learning curve of nuclear power.

Much as it is kind of cool that people are using nuclear physics to make power, it really is very dated technology. Phasing it out in favor of cheaper, safer alternatives is a much better idea: with the advent of flow batteries, liquid metal batteries, you don't need to have peaking power plants paired with the renewables. You just need more renewables.

In short, regardless of whether a particular institution or entity is engaged in an endeavor for commercial gain, so long as the act is in furtherance of the alleged infringer's legitimate business and is not solely for amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry, the act does not qualify for the very narrow and strictly limited experimental use defense. Moreover, the profit or non-profit status of the user is not determinative.

(Source)

(My quote counts as fair-use, right?)

So... a person is allowed to copy a patented design for fun, curiosity, or "philosophical inquiry" (nice and vague!), but no other reason?

I can work with that :)

In short, regardless of whether a particular institution or entity is engaged in an endeavor for commercial gain, so long as the act is in furtherance of the alleged infringer's legitimate business and is not solely for amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry, the act does not qualify for the very narrow and strictly limited experimental use defense. Moreover, the profit or non-profit status of the user is not determinative.

(Source)

(My quote counts as fair-use, right?)

It's an estimate with order of magnitude error right there in time and another significant error in CO2 quantity (with a ceiling of 2 PgC incidentally rather than the 1 PgC claimed in the article).

The quote from that review paper is a summary of references 54-56 which are Payne et al. 2010, Wignall 2011 and Shen et al. 2011. The quantities of carbon come from Fig. 3 in Payne et al. 2010, but the 20kyr timespan comes from Shen et al. 2011 where it only refers to the second carbon isotope excursion. The PgC/year range is a summary of all those references' PgC/year estimates, but with each using their own quantities and their own timespans to avoid mixing apples and oranges.

We also don't have a good idea what else was released, which might have been more lethal than the CO2 (for example, sulfates or fluorides).

A few sentences down in Honisch et al. 2012:

"Knoll et al.(59) inferred the preferential survival of taxa with anatomical and physiological features that should confer resilience to reduced carbonate saturation state and hypercapnia (high CO2 in blood) and preferential extinction of taxa that lacked these traits, such as reef builders (32)."

To be consistent with the fossil evidence in Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF), your "more lethal" extinction mechanism would have to have the same marine extinction pattern as that expected from a massive release of CO2. Also, the PETM doesn't have an obvious volcanic culprit but does have a carbon isotope excursion, rapid warming, and a similar (albeit smaller) marine extinction pattern.

Finally, it's worth noting that even if your assertion is complete and accurate, it would take at minimum a millennium for current rates of CO2 production and 13,000 PgC (the lower bound) to put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to match the impact of this extinction event. The upper bound increases that to over four millennia. We should be able to figure things out long before that happens.

Species adapt to climate change by migration and/or evolution, both of which have rate limits past which extinctions become more likely. In light of this, why should the total be more important than the rate?

What is the hurry? Sure, we don't want to run the situation out for a few millennia until we end up in a huge global extinction event. But we can figure things out in far less time than that.

Just suppose the national academies are right to say that we should try to limit global warming to "only" 2C. All else being equal, warming is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions. Here are three different ways to achieve that. Notice that the longer we wait to address the CO2 problem, the steeper our emissions cuts will have to be.

You seem to have a really bad grasp of history. You might want to think about taking a step or two to remedy that.

You guys are going to have to do this yourself as no ISP will take an interest in your small neighborhood.

You might want to try reading this case study.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/p...

It covers the hurdles a small rural town went through in order to build their own municipal network.

Almost no colleges offer credit for taking AP tests regardless of score so high schoolers have absolutely no reason whatsoever to take those tests.

That's completely false. Here are AP credit policies for a couple top universities. The first two I checked, as a matter of fact. Both give credit for most AP exams, both in terms of class placement, and in credits for graduation.

http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&pageid=icb.page388448&pageContentId=icb.pagecontent1194786&view=view.do&viewParam_name=asgeninfo.html
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/exam-credit/ap-credits/index.html

Let's build a model of the Earth's atmosphere.

First let's model the Earth as a point particle with perfect blackbody characteristics. Taking into account the received radiation from the sun, that should get us a global temperature of ~6 degrees C.

But wait, we know the Earth isn't a perfect blackbody, so we'll factor in an albedo of ~ .3 and get a global temperature of -18 degrees C.

This isn't a very good model so far, is it? Well, let's model the atmosphere as a layered column of gases, then. Oh hey, funny thing. It looks like if you increase the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it heats up, and then the atmosphere can hold more CO2, leading to arbitrarily large temperatures. That can't be right. Let's revise the model...

That brings us to the beginnings of the 20th Century in terms of atmospheric modeling. You can read more about subsequent steps in this textbook, or perhaps this one. I can particularly recommend the former as it is brief and a good introduction to the problems associated with e.g. where in the atmosphere CO2 is concentrated, and its peculiar vibrational modes.

All of Science is to some degree wrong. Congratulations on your discovery of this fact. The question is, how wrong? And with these models we try to estimate that. We would all dearly like for there not to be such thing as the greenhouse effect right about now, believe you me. However, since it is trivial to show that an atmosphere with a greater proportion of CO2 will retain more solar radiation, and this has been known since the early 19th Century, we're not holding out much hope for that hypothesis. Wrong we may be, but that wrong we are surely not. I don't know where in your fathomless depths of ignorance and hubris you find the means to dispute apparent fact, but keep in mind that when many others' opinions differ from yours, it's unlikely to be a conspiracy.

This post brought to you by the Anthropogenic Global Warming Conspiracy. Get your membership card today!

Most of the good schools make everyone take a placement exam at the school you want to attend, even if you take AP classes.

Not sure this is true. Though, it may depend on how you define "good school". Harvard only lets you count them toward graduation if you have a full year's worth of credit. However, with a high enough score they let you use them to fulfill prerequisites for other courses. Scores on the foreign language exams regardless of whether you have a full year of credit.

"Stars with degenerate neutron cores", Astrophysical Journal, 1977.

Courtesy of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, an open-access digital library that other fields could do well to emulate...

"Stars with degenerate neutron cores", Astrophysical Journal, 1977.

Courtesy of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, an open-access digital library that other fields could do well to emulate...

as it is from Harvard (typically not a pro-gun source)

I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. The authors have no Harvard affiliation. The study is not endorsed by Harvard in any way. It is merely published in an independent law journal published by students at the Harvard Law School which is specifically described by Harvard as "the leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship." As with most major law schools, the students are a diverse group, and they often choose to organize peer-reviewed law journals with a variety of focuses. If the journal wasn't following accepted scholarly practices, Harvard might step in and shut it down or at least insist on removing its name from it -- but short of that, this journal probably operates pretty independently from the Harvard law faculty or Harvard University in general.

This is the currently popular one, as it is from Harvard (typically not a pro-gun source) http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

Yes, or no. Do you deny that given the size of the body of evidence, the probability of ALL available evidence being against the ideas of creationism or "young Earth" is very close to zero? Do you deny that a corollary if this is that SOME evidence must almost certainly be supportive of creationism?

Yes, I deny that any fact supports young earth or old earth creationism. Yes, I deny that there is any evidence supporting young earth or old earth creationism. I'm a denier.

You've repeatedly claimed that some facts support the creationist position. Again, you can either find an example that isn't ridiculously wrong, retract your absurd claim, or keep pulling a "Jane" by doing neither. Since you probably won't surprise us on this account, perhaps lowered expectations are in order. Earlier, you claimed:

Just one example: The fact that radiometric dating relies on certain assumptions has been one of their favorite talking points. Are those assumptions reasonable? I think so. But they ARE assumptions, and that is a fact. Therefore, there do exist facts that can be said to support (or at least not refute) the creationists' arguments. ...

I replied by saying "No, isochron dating only relies on nuclear decay rates being constant, which has been confirmed by SN1987a, etc. Try again." and your response was "Okay, maybe it was a bad example."

Any example may be a bad example, so that wasn't a retraction. Your example actually was a bad example, and anyone who understood my point would have the intellectual integrity to admit that without weasel words. So perhaps my website was down; here's the relevant part:

Isochron dating results of old rocks depend only on nuclear decay rates being constant in time. Isochron dating isn’t dependent on initial quantities of elements, and the analysis method automatically produces error bars on the obtained age. The oldest rocks we have agree that the Earth is 4.55 billion years old, plus or minus 100 million years or so.

Just to be clear, we can’t be sure that nuclear decay rates are exactly constant. But experiments have placed constraints on the size of any variation in decay rates:

1. Supernovae produce many radioactive elements which slowly decay after the explosion. At first they shine brightly in a spectroscopically unique manner, but over the course of several weeks they fade to half their previous brightness. The amount of time it takes the brightness to fade is a direct measurement of the nuclear decay rate. The best example is supernova 1987A, which lies ~169,000 LY away. That means that when scientists looked at that light in 1987, they were measuring the nuclear decay rate as it was around 169,000 years ago. The results were experimentally indistinguishable from current decay rates, and have been confirmed by similar experiments on SN1991T, which is 60,000,000 light years away.
2. The Oklo natural nuclear reactor left evidence that can be used to determine the fine structure constant and neutron capture rates, both intimately entwined with quantum mechanics’ predictions of nuclear decay rates. This experiment is more ambiguous and as a result the error bars are much larger than the SN1987A constraint, but it’s also consistent with a constant nuclear decay rate. Since the Oklo reactor was active 1.8 billion years ago, the Oklo evidence only supports a change in the fine structure constant of one part in 10 mil

Communists have the unique distinction of killing approximately 100,000,000 people in the last century.

Quoting "The black book of communism"? Really? That books is considered a joke by many scholars, lets say that it is at least controversial. Even if you argue 100mil victims of communist regimes, you can hardly say that it is a "unique distinction". Capitalism has killed much more, fasism has had its share too. It is a mute arguement. If you want to argue against communism/capitalism/fasism, etc, at least do it with some serious arguments like the economics, liberties, their feasibility, which system is more just, etc.

Communists have the unique distinction of killing approximately 100,000,000 people in the last century. Revolution, class warfare, and the extermination of class and state enemies are a pattern repeatedly demonstrated in communist rule, often followed by attempts to export the revolution to other places. It is built into the ideology.

The Soviet Story is informative. - Excerpts

When a kinder, gentler communism arises, a "socialism with a human face," the brotherly "socialist," i.e. communist, nations invade to set things straight.

maybe you should read some more, then:

http://www.polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/6120
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013NatGe...6..376B

You mightn't call being in the top 9% of households incomes "exceptionally affluent", but the other 91% of people probably do.

For a school that costs $60k a year?

Are kids today really that stupid? If you don't have an income that high, even with a LOT of grants, you're taking on a crushing debt.

You might try doing some research before calling kids (and parents) who go to many top-tier private schools "stupid."

Harvard gives financial aid to the vast majority of its students. See their policies here.

In sum, families who make less than $65k pay NOTHING. Families who pay between $65k and $150k pay a maximum of 10% of family income.

So, your hypothetical $150k household would pay a maximum of $15k per year, totaling about $60k for four years, not the "quarter million" you assume. That puts the cost close to the range of many of the better state universities, since this $15k/year includes room and board (and even factors in some costs for books and personal expenses).

Once you go above a family income of $150k, the cost will rise proportionally above 10%, but the vast majority of Harvard students are not "taking on crushing debt."

I suggest the Admissions Department screwed up. From their own web site, Harvard rejects roughly 95% of its applicants, yet this guy made the cut.

My guess is he'll get his slap on the wrist, be allowed to graduate, join the Old Boys' Club (to which all Harvard men are entitled), and someday ruin the work of scores of hard-working engineers, driving some company into bankruptcy, and then offer his wisdom for a fee to the Federal government.

Either way, there'll be a nice fat endowment to the alma mater come tax time. Point is, Harvard sent a lot of outstanding applicants to their safety schools so a dumb guy like this can forever put Harvard on his resume.

Depends on the philosophy course. Symbolic logic was not a matter of opinion or history for me. Take a look at Charles Parsons

All the campus networks I've seen remotely recently do some sort of access control, if only to avoid being a free wifi provider for every porn-torrent enthusiast in the neighborhood.

To the contrary, Harvard operates another wireless network called "Harvard Guest" that does not require a Harvard ID for accessing the internet.

You may be wrong yourself. If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian. The USA has a much higher gun death rate than other developed countries, and when you look within the USA itself, you find that Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide., or put simply more guns, more crime. All of the above citations go to original or academic sources. So what could be going on? Well, firstly, the NRA attempts to stop scientists from studying gun violence. (In a similar vein, the junk-food industry tries to limit the study of the health effects of sugar.) Secondly, the NRA keeps its own datasets to do it's own "research" to reach its own conclusions, which (call me crazy), keeps the donors happy. Those would be the gun manufacturers. Most large industries do this. I'm open minded on the issue, and follow it because I have an academic interest in cognitive bubbles. If you are interested learning a different perspective on the issue, then read this. You don't have to believe a word of it; however, if you *can* read it, and accurately repeat back the arguments made, then that would indicate enough cognitive flexibility to really be informed about the issue, and be an expert. Ideologues do not have this flexibility, but want to maintain the self-concept of being an expert, which explains most of what is wrong with politics.

You are a liar. Here, let me quote:

If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian.

Homicides are not a good measure of defensive actions. Defensive homicides are what happens when the criminal does not back off when warned, is too violent too fast for a threat backed by a gun to work, etc. The vast majority of defensive gun uses are simply displays. Like the guy up thread with the gun on his lap. The criminals were there, and may have been working themselves up to act, but left because of the gun.

Your assertion that a gun has to kill to do it's job is both myopic and factually incorrect. Heck, often a simple display indicating this victim will not go down as easy as they thought is enough to prevent the crime.

Why would you need to LIE to support your position unless your position was wrong? You sir, are a LIAR.

You may be wrong yourself. If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian. The USA has a much higher gun death rate than other developed countries, and when you look within the USA itself, you find that Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide., or put simply more guns, more crime.

All of the above citations go to original or academic sources. So what could be going on?

Well, firstly, the NRA attempts to stop scientists from studying gun violence. (In a similar vein, the junk-food industry tries to limit the study of the health effects of sugar.)

Secondly, the NRA keeps its own datasets to do it's own "research" to reach its own conclusions, which (call me crazy), keeps the donors happy. Those would be the gun manufacturers. Most large industries do this.

I'm open minded on the issue, and follow it because I have an academic interest in cognitive bubbles. If you are interested learning a different perspective on the issue, then read this. You don't have to believe a word of it; however, if you *can* read it, and accurately repeat back the arguments made, then that would indicate enough cognitive flexibility to really be informed about the issue, and be an expert. Ideologues do not have this flexibility, but want to maintain the self-concept of being an expert, which explains most of what is wrong with politics.

You've gone wrong on a couple of points there. First, al Qaida and company do indeed want the entire world under Islamic rule. It is their goal. The Middle East is just closer to it since it has a majority of Muslims, a number of the countries already implement Sharia in some form, even if imperfectly. Indonesia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are also high on the list. You may have noticed that they are subject to various troubles as well, not to mention India.

The Future of Terrorism: What al-Qaida Really Wants

They plan to take back lands formerly controlled by Muslims. Just one example: Spain

Alarm in Spain over al-Qaeda call for its "reconquest"
HAMAS Targets Spain

As to the US, there is no such thing as "Christian" rule. The US is a secular democracy. It is a nation of primarily Christians (of various flavors and piety) living in a democracy. There is no theocracy, there is no meaningful movement towards theocracy, and it is unclear what one would even look like since there doesn't seem to be a biblical model for it this side of Christ's return. So your post on that is nonsense.

Christian missionaries have been greatly beneficial to many lands. This is only one example.

Matthew Parris: As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

If you look into the history of the last 100 years, you will see that officially atheist regimes were one of the great scourges of the planet. In their communist form they killed 100,000,000 people and brutalized and oppressed many more.

Jesus lived his life as an observant Jew, is recorded to have fulfilled many prophecies associated with being the Messiah, and made statements declaring himself to be God. Many of his followers preferred to die painful deaths rather than denounce him.

From http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Welcome_files/2012_Science_Meyer_DenisovaSeq.pdf

"To visualize the relationship between Denisova and the eleven present-day humans, we used Tree-Mix, which simultaneously infers a tree of relationships and migration events”. This method estimates that 6.0% of the genomes of present-day Papuans derive from Denisovans. While this procedure does not provide a perfect fit to the data (for example, it does not model Neandertal admixture), it agrees with our previous finding that Denisovans have contributed to the genomes of present-day Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and other South-East Asian islanders"

Ouch. Ok. So, here are the images of your Denisovans?

http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/papuan
http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/aboriginals

They look so kind! But, let us pray WWF and Greepeace doesn't get too involved in this. Or, in other words, How un-pc can this untangling get?

The business model TQP and other patent trolls use may be a thing of the past if the Innovation Act 2013 passes http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/innovation-act-of-2013-latest-effort-to-disarm-patent-trolls

But its profits stay sky high.

You know Roadrunner vs the Coyote? You know how Coyote dangles in the air for a while before cratering? It's like that.

As it happens, you won't need too... There happens to be a rather conveniently placed obesity cluster elsewhere in the world...

Some scrawny Yemeni peasant probably wouldn't work out; but you'd have options.

there is also no way to put this genie back into the bottle. once your cred is gone, its gone. and the US has lost ALL cred when it comes to safeguarding your privacy.

sad but true. as a US citizen, I am sorry for how badly we have botched the world's trust.

Well then, why don't you base your next project on equipment and software from a country that doesn't engage in any spying?

Before you do, why don't you check to see if the city you live is in the orange zone on this map. Can you guess what that map is, or do you need help? That is from the state controlled Chinese media, by the way. You might also want to read up on a few of the "implementation errors" they made in arriving at the current society. If you think the US is bad, you clearly don't appreciate the finer points of the alternatives that are out there. There used to be a lot more countries just like them, and nothing says there won't be again. And they are just one band of the rainbow.

... for example China has dragged more people above the poverty line than the rest of the world combined in the last 40yrs, (coincidently 14yrs less than my age). China did that with a centrally planned economy. Of course they also put themselves in that the position of wide spread famine in the first place, ironically using the very same "system" of a centrally planning following a series of 5yr plans.

The main enabler for Chinese economic grow over the last 40 years was the free market reforms of 34 years ago. Prior to that they had a crippled, stagnant economy. It was only through moving away from Marxist - Leninist - Maoist economics towards a form of state capitalism that they were able to develop into an economic powerhouse.

Prior to the initiation of economic reforms and trade liberalization 34 years ago, China maintained policies that kept the economy very poor, stagnant, centrally controlled, vastly inefficient, and relatively isolated from the global economy. Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world’s fastest-growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging nearly 10% through 2012. -- China’s Economic Rise (.pdf)

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The opening line of Karl Mark's book..."From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". A succinct, compassionate, and efficient "prime directive" for any "we the people" if you ask me.

Communism may sound beautiful in theory, but in practice it has been pretty much a bloody train wreck of ruin and oppression wherever it's been tried. The Chinese finally decided to move away from it and their economy prospered. The Soviets stuck with it and the Soviet Union disintegrated.

Chinese communism managed to kill about 60,000,000 of the 100,000,000 million people killed by communism in the last century. The vast majority of the Chinese deaths were prior to their economic reforms.

Under communism there will be free people.

Quite so, they will be free from liberty, free from plenty, free from democracy, free from justice. It will be just like pretty much every other communist country.

To get to communism we need to free the workers and put the capitalists under the workers dictatorship.

Communist "workers" dictatorships have been a bloody mess resulting in poverty and oppression pretty much everywhere they've been in power. Communism killed 100,000,000 people in the last century.

In the US, the last group that seriously pursued that goal had a similar plan in mind. You may want to pay special attention to the very bottom section of the page under "Additional links."

Perhaps you mean well, or perhaps this is simply your preferred troll, but if you are serious, you should look into this book: The Black Book of Communism - Review

Under communism there will be free people.

Quite so, they will be free from liberty, free from plenty, free from democracy, free from justice. It will be just like pretty much every other communist country.

To get to communism we need to free the workers and put the capitalists under the workers dictatorship.

Communist "workers" dictatorships have been a bloody mess resulting in poverty and oppression pretty much everywhere they've been in power. Communism killed 100,000,000 people in the last century.

In the US, the last group that seriously pursued that goal had a similar plan in mind. You may want to pay special attention to the very bottom section of the page under "Additional links."

Perhaps you mean well, or perhaps this is simply your preferred troll, but if you are serious, you should look into this book: The Black Book of Communism - Review

I'm familiar with the sophistry. Communist political parties have ruled many nations with the stated goal of pursuing "true communism." Unfortunately "true communism" always seems to be 10-20 years away, indefinitely, much like the horizon. The theories of communism are based on many mistakes, not the least of which is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Its pursuit has practically always been a bloody mess which has repeatedly turned countries that were bread baskets for entire regions into lands of want and oppression. If there is any true monument to the folly of man, it is the continued existence of communist parties.

The Black Book of Communism