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No, GrantRobertson was right. You accounted for gravitational time dilation but forgot relative velocity time dilation. The one on the ground aged longer because the ISS is moving so quickly.

A discussion of the two, and which one outweighs the other:
http://ideonexus.com/2009/02/1...

Other links:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-t...
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/t...

Good point. The two effects compete with each other. And you're right: in the (low) ISS orbit, velocity wins. Gravitational effects dominate in orbits with altitudes greater than 5,900 miles.

Interesting. No global warming in 17 years... what a funny number, 17. It's a prime number. Why not 10 years, 20, or even 100? Why are "skeptics" always so hung up on 1997 as the baseline for all global warming trends? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the 1997-1998 El Nino event generated a record year for high temperatures? I was just getting interested in the science of global warming when this phenomenon hit, and I remember NASA scientists warning everyone that we could not blame rising carbon dioxide levels for the anomalously hot temperatures of those two years.

Ironic that 17 years later, the 1997-1998 El Nino event is now the holy grail baseline year to which all skeptics cling like a polar bear to a melting iceberg. In 2008 the skeptics were using this baseline to claim that global cooling was taking place. Then, as yearly record high temperatures kept happening, they used this baseline to claim that global warming had flatlined. Now, just eight years later, the trend from 1997 is on an incline, but the skeptic story is that temperatures aren't warming as fast as predicted. Keep clinging to 1997, you are just one El Nino event away from looking really really silly.

As for the WattsUpWithThat blog, I used to respect it until Anthony Watts pulled a 180 on accepting the findings of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Originally he said he would accept the findings whatever they may be because it was funded by the Koch Brother's, but when the independent research led by a prominent skeptic further confirmed Global Warming was real, Watt's rejected it. The man has zero credibility at this point.

It seems to me that the Climate Skeptics are making the same mistake the anti-eugenics movement made in 1925 with the Scopes Monkey Trial, which fought the teaching of evolution in schools. Most people don't know this, but the anti-evolution activists were horrified by the textbook's use of Evolution to justify Eugenics, but instead of attacking the public policy proposals of the Eugenics Movement, they attacked the science of Evolution, and history remembers them as buffoons for combating the scientific consensus.

Today, Climate Skeptics are fighting the scientific consensus instead of debating the policies being proposed from that consensus. I myself am an adaptationist, I don't care if we do anything about Global Warming for another 20-30 years and at that point I have faith that civilization will start to engineer its way out of the problem... however, I find myself on the side of the environmentalists with their oftentimes draconian public-policy initiatives because I believe in scientific literacy, and the anti-science positions of today's Climate Skeptics threaten to undo the scientific progress on which our civilization depends for its survival.

I'm glad you mentioned the eugenics movement, proponents of which used the theory of evolution to support their policy proposals. As a result, an anti-evolution movement rose up in the United States. Many people don't know this, but the Biology textbook at the heart of the Scopes Monkey Trial advocated for eugenics, but instead of attacking the policy recommendations, the anti-eugenics movement attacked evolutionary science.

The anti-AGW movement is making the exact same mistake today. By attacking the science instead of the policy, they are setting themselves up to be remembered as fools, just like the anti-evolutionists of the 1920s.

"...we've stalled for the past 6 years, actually cooled the last couple of years..."

I realize there's a legitimate debate over how many years constitutes which, but I think you fall in the category of people confusing weather and climate. I remember back in 2008 when AGW-skeptics said there had been a decade of global cooling by using 1998, the warmest year on record, as their baseline. Then increasingly warmer years eliminated that talking point. Now you are saying it's cooled the past couple of years, so you must be using 2010 as your baseline, which is the current warmest year on record.

If the predicted El Nino manifests this summer and fall, it might make 2015 an unusually warm year. So I guess in 2016 or 2017 I should expect to hear again about how the Earth has actually been cooling the past few years. A more intellectually honest way to look at climate is to observe the decade by decade warming trend.

If you're interested in the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming, I suggest you read the science, not blog posts. I've read both WattsUp and SkepticalScience, and they are both very poorly written and lack rigorousness. If you are reading these two blogs, you are reading the work of bias amateurs.

Here's what you should be reading:

• the peer-reviewed Journal "Nature Climate Change," which includes and references thousands of scientific papers on the subject.
• he IPCC's 1,500-page "Physical Science Basis" report, clearly states what we know, don't know, and how we know it. It reviews its past predictions, notes where its models have errored, and takes into account an incredible wealth and scope of scientific observations over 150 years. I highly recommend downloading this 0.5 GIG report and at least skimming it. I consider it the model of good science.
• The IPCC also makes all of its data and models available for review. So you can see for yourself. Take this data and give it to a machine-learning algorithm. The science of AGW is actually shockingly simple.
• The US Government also recently updated it regularly scheduled report written by over 300 experts.
• If you don't trust the government, then I recommend The Berkely Earth Project. It was funded by the liberal's favorite bad guys, the Koch Brothers, but its results were so compelling that the lead Climatologist, Richard A. Muller, wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing he no longer a skeptic.
• Of course, it's always good to have a contrarian viewpoint in the mix, and for that, I recommend AGW skeptic Judith Curry, who presents valid challenges to the consensus with her strong scientific background. I don't find her convincing, but her challenges make for good food for thought.

Science, published peer-reviewed science, not blogs, is where we should keep this discussion.

For everyone else who has that gene (I don't know if I do, I'm still trying to figure out what SNP KLOTHO references in my genetic results), and can't stand reading the Economist's painfully dumbed-down explanation of the research, here's the actual paper.

In his book "The Selfish Gene" Richard Dawkins uses the Prisoner's Dilemma to construct a quasi-mathematical proof that judicious altruism beats greed as an evolutionary strategy. Also, Hamilton's Rule provides quantification to why altruism makes sense for the species.

Unfortunately, this mirrors my own experience when I bought all the kids on my street laptops on the condition that they spend weeks with me learning how to handle and respect them. One year later, every single laptop was inoperable. Of course, every one of these kids owned an iPod touch... with a broken screen, so there were warning signs.

I think the problem is the portability of these devices. The reason I didn't break my Commodore 64 when I was a kid is because it sat on a desk. If it was portable, I probably would have shattered or lost it at some point too. I don't think we can make these devices rugged enough to survive your average teenager.

I allowed Immersion to review my gmail, and I don't think it really reflects what PRISM is accessing in any way. All it did was go through my emails and build a standard social network map out of my emails based on who was in the address lines. My understanding is that PRISM is actually analyzing the content of my emails. Immersion is neat, but it really seems like the developers are trying to promote their own software by attaching it to the surveillance scandal.

As for Immersion itself. It is a neat application and it's fun to see a chart of everyone you interact with an how they are all networked together. If you're interested in seeing your Facebook and Twitter networks modeled in a similar way, you can use the open-source NodeXL plugin for Excel, which let's you harvest your data from these social networks and build your own visualizations. It's actually much much more robust than Immersion and you don't have to give a third-party access to your accounts since you run it from your local machine yourself.

I recently ordered one from foc.us. I've been following this technology for awhile. I briefly considered building one myself, but my electrical skill are highly wanting and if you get the voltage too high I've heard you can burn holes in your brain. This device is not FDA approved, but it does meet "CE Safety standard EN60601-2-10: 2001 and EN60601-1: 2006" (and I admit I am a dumbass for not knowing what that means). It's a very small voltage, so I feel safe using it in limited amounts.

I think the thing to keep in mind is that this technology is like Personal Genomics, in the wrong hands it can be a disaster and some people will harm themselves with it, but if you keep up with the continuing research you'll get a clearer and clearer understanding of it. When I get my device in a few months, I plan on following the research that continues to be published on it. I've already read studies that found people who use these devices are trading their ability to learn new material for the ability to focus in the moment. So I probably won't use it for studying, but I will use it for programming sprints.

I'm sorry, but this urban legend that Monsanto sues farmers for cross-pollination with their crops simply has to die already. I saw the film "Food Inc" and completely bought into the horror stories of Organic Farmers being sued out of business for cross-pollination, but then those same farmers took the case to court and the Judge threw the case out because the farmers could not produce one single example of this ever happening. Here's the Court Transcript, and the defense makes a pretty strong argument pages 33-36:

23 ...the notion that Monsanto's campaign, so to speak, against farmers -- which, by the way, by their count, over 15 years has amounted to 144 lawsuits brought, every single one of them against farmers who wanted, affirmatively were making use of the trade, and spraying herbicide over the tops of their crops without signing a license, without paying Monsanto the royalty for the use of its intellectual property -- the notion that that terrorizes people who have no desire to use it whatsoever is perhaps belied most significantly by Mr. Ravicher's inability to cite anything other than a movie called Food, Inc. or a CBS report to demonstrate what they can't demonstrate, which is if this were a ubiquitous threat, you would expect that there would be some plaintiff in this case who would say, "I am an inadvertent user. I have it and it's inadvertent. I have it in my fields and Monsanto has sent me a letter or Monsanto has called me and said, 'You are in patent jeopardy.'"

When you go to court to sue a company for unfairly suing innocent farmers who's crops were inadvertently cross-pollinated with patented GMOs, you better be able to produce at least one single example of this happening. When I read this transcript, I realized the Organic Seed Growers Association and all this anti-GMO stuff is really just anti-Science Neo-Luddism. As nerds we should be concerned with veracity and not fall into the trap all the muggles fall into of condemning technology and believing all the scientifically-unsupported horror stories about it simply because it's new and different.

Both of you are off-topic and not insightful. Nowhere in this article does anyone mention Monsanto. Monsanto sucks, but:

Monsanto != GMOs

GMOs hold incredible promise to feed the world, but all anyone can ever talk about is Monsanto and "Frankenfoods." There is not one single shred of scientific evidence of any GMOs causing serious health problems (Note: I said "GMOs" not the pesticides farmers are using on those crops), and there are plenty of publicly funded GMO projects that have produced real-life benefits like saving Papaya crops, bringing crops to parts of Africa where they wouldn't normally survive, and bringing nutrient-rich rice to impoverished parts of China.

But you know what? All of this scientific progress is being stymied because of anti-science people screaming "frankenfoods!" In Africa, some countries refused American food aid because of GMO fears--until their people began to starve to death. The Blood Rice GMO could nourish millions, but China can't get anywhere with it because of GMO fears. GMO farm salmon has spent 15 years trying to get approved in the United States, but politicians have blocked it for fear of GMOs; meanwhile, our natural fish stocks collapse from over-fishing.

If you are anti-GMO, then I put you in the same class of people who don't believe in Evolution, who are anti-vaccine, or don't accept the very basic science of Global Warming. You believe things without evidence or are simply denying the scientific evidence that exists, and your ignorance is making life harder for the rest of us.

You're daughter Esther is one of the most incredibly inspiring women role models alive today. Do you have any parenting advice for those of out here with kids of our own who would like them to become similarly active, positive, and brilliant adults?

Incorrect. There are plenty of GMOs engineered for higher yields and better nutritional value. GMOs single-handedly saved papaya crops. Blood rice holds the promise of eliminating malnutrition in parts of Asia. GMO salmon will make fish farming more viable and reduce stresses on salmon in the wild.

Hate on Monsanto all you want, but hating on GMOs is anti-science and, even worse, it's killing people. Children have starved to death in Africa because leaders there refused to accept food aid from the United States because organic farmers told them the grains were "Frankenfoods" that would kill their children. GMO Salmon took over a decade to get approved because of public protest. Blood rice is still failing to get to the people who need it most because of "frankenfood" rhetoric.

Fun Fact: Organic Farmers are capitalists too. They have the same greedy motivations Monsanto has to spread disinformation in support of their profits. Stop listening to any of these people and start looking to the science.

Following up on your "serious note" part, I did a review of the peer-reviewed literature concerning the beneficial and inconsequential effects of meditation from the perspective of a rational secular skeptic. Some studies have found no benefits, but the majority of them do find mindfulness meditation, as opposed to other forms of meditation, does improve brain plasticity, increase novel thinking, and greatly improves the sense of well-being. This really seems to be something we should work into our lives like physical fitness and eating healthy.

My wife and I attended the Reason Rally on the National Mall this year, which was billed as a positive expression of non-theistic secular thought. We met many wonderful people there and were truly inspired by Adam Savage's incredibly positive and inspiring speech on the wonders of science, Nate Phelps remarkably eloquent denunciation of his father's Westboro Baptist Church, and your own speech highlighting the absurdity of having to hold such a rally at all; however, I we were also incredibly put off by vitriol on display by so many other speakers who were entirely focused on the evils of religion rather than the good science and rationality brings to civilized life. We ended up leaving the rally in the middle of PZ Meyer's speech because we found it so distressing in its Rush Limbaugh-esque tone.

It bothers me that so many of us define ourselves by what we don't believe rather than what we do. As Carolyn Porco elucidated so concisely at a talk you were involved in, I am not an atheist, I am a scientist. Like Carl Sagan, I get a profound sense of spirituality from science that I want to desperately for everyone in the world to open their own eyes and discover.

My attempts to get people to read your book The God Delusion were met with strong resistance, people were very turned off to its tone, but those same individuals loved your book The Magic of Reality . As someone who has pursued both the strategy of being highly critical of religion in one work, while apparently softening that criticism in your latter work in exchange for focusing on the wonders of the natural world, could you speak to pros and cons of these different strategies of persuasion, not just in your own work but in the efforts of others like Adam Savage and PZ Meyers?

Thank you so much for your taking the time to interact with us on /.! This really is an exciting development and an honor.

This article should be required reading for kids today. This is an issue I find myself wrestling with from time to time. I spent two years wasting time in Star Trek Online with the purpose of wasting that time. It was a pretty game and I decided this was where I was going to grind away in thoughtless leveling-up--and it was brainless, repetative nonsense. I basically voluntarily put myself in a Skinner Box, holding down the "fire" button while runing around for hundreds of hours in order to get that little hit of dopamine each virtual reward of experience points brought me. Finally, I decided it was time to just uninstall the damn thing and walk away from it incomplete (not that it could ever be completed).

That one was voluntary, when Skyrim came along, I got sucked in again, playing heavily for several months before my family and job responsibilities forced me to shelve it for six months. I recently started it up again long enough to complete the main quest, and that felt like a chore. The months of not playing broke the spell, so that I didn't feel connected and invested in the rewards anymore. Why the @#$% would I spend hours saving to buy a virtual house or read a hundred vitual books about a virtual world when I've got the real thing to work on here? Skyrim was epically beautiful, but so is a weekend hike in the mountains.

Gaming is an important, healthy activity. It increases mental alertness and improves reaction times. I think all kids should play video games--or rather, play the right kinds of video games. My new rule for games is no more "forever" games like MMORPGs and Skyrim. I'm currently looking for a new game, and the most important characteristic is that it that it take <=20 hours to complete. I'll pay $20 to see a two hour movie with my wife, so $50 enjoying 20 hours of Portal II is a bargain.

I think Science Debate is the greatest thing to happen to those of interested in science and politics. When they got Obama and McCain to answer science questions in the 2008 election, I immediately cancelled my membership to the Union of Concerned Scientists and started donating to this grassroots organization.

I have one issue that I vote on, and that's science. It's the only issue I understand well enough to evaluate the candidates on. If they know their science or have advisors that understand science, then I will trust them with most everything else. I summarized Obama's 2008 responses here, McCain's here, and my calls for who won on each issue. Obama's responses won on most issues, but McCain did not do poorly. Since Obama has taken office, he has impressed me with his support of science with Data.gov, Science.gov, a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, proposed major increases in science funding, and put the Office of Science and Technology Policy back in the Whitehouse.

These might seem like small accomplishments, but compared to the Dark Ages of the Bush Administration they were a breath of fresh air. Unless Romney answers the science debate questions this election cycle, I won't even consider him.

I think Science Debate is the greatest thing to happen to those of interested in science and politics. When they got Obama and McCain to answer science questions in the 2008 election, I immediately cancelled my membership to the Union of Concerned Scientists and started donating to this grassroots organization.

I have one issue that I vote on, and that's science. It's the only issue I understand well enough to evaluate the candidates on. If they know their science or have advisors that understand science, then I will trust them with most everything else. I summarized Obama's 2008 responses here, McCain's here, and my calls for who won on each issue. Obama's responses won on most issues, but McCain did not do poorly. Since Obama has taken office, he has impressed me with his support of science with Data.gov, Science.gov, a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, proposed major increases in science funding, and put the Office of Science and Technology Policy back in the Whitehouse.

These might seem like small accomplishments, but compared to the Dark Ages of the Bush Administration they were a breath of fresh air. Unless Romney answers the science debate questions this election cycle, I won't even consider him.

I think Science Debate is the greatest thing to happen to those of interested in science and politics. When they got Obama and McCain to answer science questions in the 2008 election, I immediately cancelled my membership to the Union of Concerned Scientists and started donating to this grassroots organization.

I have one issue that I vote on, and that's science. It's the only issue I understand well enough to evaluate the candidates on. If they know their science or have advisors that understand science, then I will trust them with most everything else. I summarized Obama's 2008 responses here, McCain's here, and my calls for who won on each issue. Obama's responses won on most issues, but McCain did not do poorly. Since Obama has taken office, he has impressed me with his support of science with Data.gov, Science.gov, a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, proposed major increases in science funding, and put the Office of Science and Technology Policy back in the Whitehouse.

These might seem like small accomplishments, but compared to the Dark Ages of the Bush Administration they were a breath of fresh air. Unless Romney answers the science debate questions this election cycle, I won't even consider him.

I'm sorry this display of ignorant prejudice got modded up as "insightful". I know there are unthinking people on slashdot like anywhere else, but I would expect the more thoughtful community members to down-mod such an offensive stereotype that has no basis in reality. If 13 percent of Americans are poor then, based on your idiotic generalization, there should be base-thumping rim-spinning Lexus cars all over the freakin' place.

I accidentally bought a house in a poor neighborhood in Northeastern North Carolina because I naively didn't know segregation still existed in the South. The people who lived on my street owned old beat-up cars and a few lived without electricity, heating their homes with wood stoves. Yes, there were a few kids whose hobby was working on old Cadillacs to bling them out or whatever, but they were the exception and not the rule.

When I got to know these families, I was constantly challenging them as to why they didn't get rid of their cable-TV service (shared between households) and not go in on a community internet connection with wifi? The answer, it took me forever to finally understand, is that the entire family can share watching a single cheap television, while a computer is something only one person can use and interact with at a time. When you have five kids, you can't get a computer for each and every one of them.

Finally, I sold some stock and used it to buy every kid on my street a used laptop at $200 a head. I gave the kids the laptops on the condition that they take a series of classes from me about computing, which I blogged about, and everything seemed great. I opened our internet connection and put signal-boosters in some of the houses so everyone could enjoy it. I thought I was doing a good thing in this world.

One year later, not a single one of those laptops was still functioning. One by one they succumbed to being stolen by neighborhood gang members or simply broke from the abuse they took at home (if you've ever been in a poor family's damp, cockroach-infested, ancient crumbling home, you'll understand this last statement completely). On the bright side, after the kids got on the internet for a little while, they craved more and I get to keep in touch with most of them on Facebook today as they will walk to the library to get online or have pooled their money together on a family computer.

So when I read comments like those of the parent, it fills me with rage at their ignorance, and when I see people the statement up as "insightful" it breaks my heart.

We do subsidize our gasoline in the United States, to the tune of $10 Billion in tax breaks a year, with which the Oil Industry did nothing to lower prices, but rather maximized profits with record earnings.

I actually hadn't noticed gas prices going up here in the States. That's probably because my hybrid-electric nerdmobile can go 500 miles on a single 10 gallon tank of gas. In fact, everytime the price of gas goes up, so does the resale value of my car. Must suck to be one of the majority of Americans who didn't pay attention in science or math class growing up. Ignorance is expensive.

I am bothered by one part of this article, the idea that Science Debate 2008 was only moderately successful. True, they were unable to get the candidates to debate science topics live on television, but the organization DID succeed in getting the candidates to debate science. The organization gave the candidates a list of questions and then posted their answers online side by side for comparison (I wrote up a score card on who I thought gave the best answer to each question).

This was more than the Federation of American Scientists or Union of Concerned Scientists have accomplished in their decades of activism. This was HUGE for an organization that had just come into existence. This success is why I abandoned my memberships to these other organizations and committed my donations to Science Debate.

(Side Note: Newt Gingrich is a scumbag, but if he gets the nomination I can't wait to see him and Obama throw-down on Science... I've seen Newt destroy John Kerry on how to tackle Climate Change and I believe his nomination would bring scientific issues into the spotlight since Obama is something of a science geek himself.)

The whole U.S. is established on the idea of God and religion.

This is demonstrably false. With the exception of a few individuals the Founding Fathers were men of science, scholars of the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson thought the words of Jesus were nice, but the miracles were nonsense, so he cut-and-pasted together the Jefferson Bible, leaving in only the parts of the gospels he appreciated philosophically. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both highly praised Thomas Paine's book The Age of Reason, one of the most scathing condemnations of the Bible ever written, and it was written by the man who is considered the instigator of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin even had Voltaire, an atheist, bless his son. George Washington is more complex. He wasn't a regular church-goer, but was a strong advocate of religious freedom.

"Under God" wasn't added to the Nation's Pledge of Allegiance until the Cold War, the same time "E Pluribus Unum" was replaced with "In God We Trust" as the national motto. The idea that this country was founded on religious principles is complete bullshit. This country was founded on the rejection of the idea of Kings appointed by god.

Probably the most conclusive evidence of America being a secular nation comes from the 1796 Treaty with Tripoly, unanimously passed the US Senate and was signed by Adams. Article 11 contains the clause:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Paine, and Washington were, all of them, men of science. It is nothing but revisionist poppycock to argue America was founded on religion when these individuals were such staunch Enlightenment scholars. I'm sick of hearing this nonsense. It's insulting to the memory of this Country's founders.

This is based on decades and decades of social experiments throughout history. Scientists have studied the adults who were born during the 1918 influenza epidemic and have seen they have a lifetime of cognitive and health issues. We also see these adverse health effects from the Dutch famine of 1944 and the Romania Abortion Ban that led to an unsustainable influx of children to poorly-supplied orphanages, and even more recent studies of children who were in utero when their mothers encountered the stress of natural disasters are just a few examples of scientists stepping in to observe the long-term effects of tragic circumstances, and the effects clearly last a lifetime.

Let me be clear about this because the science is clear on this: growing up in poverty results in a lifetime of major health and cognitive development issues. People too easily forget that there is a strong scientific imperative behind social welfare. If society allows poor children to go malnourished or grow up under intense stress, then society pays for the rest of that person's life through health care costs, imprisonment, and other maladaptations.

I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.

The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).

It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.

Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.

I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.

The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).

It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.

Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.

You have to understand that Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the 24hour corporate spin machine has told them that NN is all about limiting what you can say on the internet. They liken it to the Fairness Doctrine, the now-dead bill that once required broadcasters to give equal time to liberal and conservative viewpoints and, ironically. the same law Limbaugh used to get on the air, a law that once made sense when there was a scarcity of broadcasting outlets.

Net Neutrality works the other way. We now have limitless outlets for expressing our views on the Internet, but corporations need scarcity in order to make money. So they seek to throttle the bandwidth, creating an artificial scarcity on their product and drive its value up. Without Net Neutrality, corporations have the right to discriminate against speech they don't like or companies they are in competition with. It's the exact opposite of Free Speech, but the conservative media have convinced their followers that black is white and that this bill is double-plus bad for Free Speech.

Without Net Neutrality, the Internet risks falling into a communications war, bad for all Americans and bad for the Corporations who are arguing against it. I don't understand how the same ideology that argues so strongly for Free Trade around the world has taken such a strong stance against the same exact principle for the Internet.

Star Wars has only seemed moderately science fiction to me. It's more like Dungeons & Dragons with technology filling in for the magic since the technology is never given scientific explanation. The heroes of Star Wars are all archetypal fantasy characters: knights, princesses, rogues, mercenaries, and the obligatory "chosen one." The whole thing romanticizes the Royalty America and France had revolutions to overcome, with its cynical portrayal of the Republic and idealization of the princess. Star Wars' overall take on humanity is cynical, where, despite living in galaxy filled with technology resembling magic, people are just as unenlightened and motivated by baser desires as they are today.

Good science fiction asks questions that pertain to the human condition and every single episode of Star Trek sets out to tackle the hard philosophical questions. Star Trek takes a positive perspective of humanity's future, with upstanding characters who seek intelligent solutions to social and technological dilemmas presented to them. The humans in Star Trek are the role-models for other species. Earth is the center of the Federation of Planets, the center of a working democratic United Nations on a galactic scale, complete with a Prime Directive to prevent a repeat of Earth's colonialist mistakes. Star Trek gets accused of being "Philosopher Kings in Space" or of presenting an idealistic vision of Communism, but these can also be seen as criticisms of the character's intellectualism and their personal virtue of serving the greater good, as academia is called elitist and humanism accused of socialism in today's society. The fact that we can even have such a debate about the sociopolitical dimensions of Star Trek make it a million-bazillion-times more nerdy than Star Wars' blaster and saber show.

Star Wars is fantasy, Star Trek is SF, and I can rant on and on and on about the differences between the two and why SF is vastly superior in every dimension, with the exception of fantasy making better escapist fare for when you want to turn off your brain for a few hours.

Star Wars has only seemed moderately science fiction to me. It's more like Dungeons & Dragons with technology filling in for the magic since the technology is never given scientific explanation. The heroes of Star Wars are all archetypal fantasy characters: knights, princesses, rogues, mercenaries, and the obligatory "chosen one." The whole thing romanticizes the Royalty America and France had revolutions to overcome, with its cynical portrayal of the Republic and idealization of the princess. Star Wars' overall take on humanity is cynical, where, despite living in galaxy filled with technology resembling magic, people are just as unenlightened and motivated by baser desires as they are today.

Good science fiction asks questions that pertain to the human condition and every single episode of Star Trek sets out to tackle the hard philosophical questions. Star Trek takes a positive perspective of humanity's future, with upstanding characters who seek intelligent solutions to social and technological dilemmas presented to them. The humans in Star Trek are the role-models for other species. Earth is the center of the Federation of Planets, the center of a working democratic United Nations on a galactic scale, complete with a Prime Directive to prevent a repeat of Earth's colonialist mistakes. Star Trek gets accused of being "Philosopher Kings in Space" or of presenting an idealistic vision of Communism, but these can also be seen as criticisms of the character's intellectualism and their personal virtue of serving the greater good, as academia is called elitist and humanism accused of socialism in today's society. The fact that we can even have such a debate about the sociopolitical dimensions of Star Trek make it a million-bazillion-times more nerdy than Star Wars' blaster and saber show.

Star Wars is fantasy, Star Trek is SF, and I can rant on and on and on about the differences between the two and why SF is vastly superior in every dimension, with the exception of fantasy making better escapist fare for when you want to turn off your brain for a few hours.

What's really neat is that there are now so many dinosaur/bird hybrid fossils that we don't know which one is the direct ancestor of modern birds. There are just too many candidates for the missing link.

The really funny is that the Creationists are spinning the overwhelming abundance of missing links to mean that none of them are missing the link.

Where did this dude use a rule-of-thumb modifier?

Like the article says. Most of this data was already publicly available online:

• HadCRUT Data
• NASA Data
• UAH Data
• RSS Data
• NOAA Data

I took this data and plugged it into Cornell’s free data analysis software Eureka and it found a clear warming trend in the data. I'm not statistician, so I was just playing around, but I have yet to see anyone use this data to argue for anything but a warming trend (Note: I have seen skeptics use parts of this data to show short-term cooling trends). My favorite email attacking the results the software gave me was that I had "manipulated" the data by copying-and-pasting it into Excel.

I'm glad more data is being made publicly available, but, like someone else said, that just means it's time for the skeptics to move the goalposts again. Either put up a competing hypothesis that explains the data or shut up.

...but I drew up a dinky cartoon about Alan Turing's treatment:

Super Science Ninja Squad: Alan Turing

The problem with a lack of net neutrality is that it takes multiple ISPs to carry the packets. So if YouTube agrees to pay for preferential treatment, they're going to have to pay every ISP in the world for it. So one ISP got their check, but the one next door didn't, so they stifle the traffic. What happens when my attempt to ping Google gets bounced out to Europe as occasionally happens?

If we don't get Net Neutrality, we will have a war between ISPs discriminating against each other's traffic, and they will beg for the government to step in to resolve disputes. Once that happens, instead of the simple single rule of Net Neutrality, we will get a patchwork of situational regulations dictated by corporations through armies of lawyers representing their best interests.

Slide #17 is the one that really scares me. They are talking about having foreigners visiting American sites being greeted with a "You Need Our ISP to View this Site, PAY UP TO CONTINUE". I recently predicted this sort of thing would start an online trade war. They even use the word "Tariff" to describe the strategy.

This sort of dangerous nonsense is exactly why we need Net Neutrality.

Pardon my blog-whoring, but I've posted a short history of powers of 10 media, which goes:

• 1957 book Cosmic View, The Universe in 40 Jumps
• 1968 film Cosmic Zoom
• 1977 film Powers of Ten
• 1996 film Cosmic Voyage
• 1997 film Contact
• Most Recent flash interactive Scale of the Universe

Just another way to celebrate an exponentially awesome day. : )