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That has been known for a very long time already. The force centres around this element: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/...

New chemical Element Discovered
by William DeBuvitz

The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by investigators at a major U.S. research university. The element, tentatively named administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have one neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons, which gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.

Since it has no electrons, administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.

Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately three years, at which time it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic mass actually increases after each reorganization.

Research at other laboratories indicates that administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations, and universities. It can usually be found in the newest, best appointed, and best maintained buildings.

Scientists point out that administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.

No it could not.

Yes it can, because of continued and ever more public screw-ups, retractions, corrections and outright omnishamblic end products of "science" in areas like bio/ffod-sciences.

The science of evolution is well founded.

And is Joe Q Public supposed to take our word for that? And should he?

The reality is that Feynman's warning about cargo-cult science went entirely unheeded for 40 years, and, surprise surprise, the general public is now on average far more skeptical (and in some cases hostile towards) science than they were in Feynman's heyday of practical post-war worship of scientific progress. That public admiration for science -- in part -- paid for a man on the moon, but nowadays it's hard to get the public to pay for sounding rockets without coming up with some excuse about potential commericalisations.

And who's fault is it? Ultimately, scientists are to blame for not keeping up standards among everyone calling themselves a scientist. Science has instead been turned into a take-all-comers mas Powerpoint talk and the public has responded accordingly. Scientists are held to the same esteem as other suited bullshitters in politics, finance, and other professional sectors.

We could have prevented this.

Well, that settles it. If he's got a patent, then it all must be completely legit.

With regard to the text of this particular patent, I would have... a number of specific questions. Let's start with "how are you getting adequate nonlinear mixing of radio signals in meat, without cooking said meat?"

The warm Heaven seems more likely. Some findings have indicated that Heaven is Hotter than Hell.

(Then again, some of the conclusions are not necessarily universally accepted. Hell might be even hotter than Heaven's hot temperature. However, Heaven's heat wasn't a part that was in dispute.

These articles suggest that the possibilities are an eternal hot place and an eternal hot place. And you thought that global warming was making your outlook be scary hot...

They very publicly break the NDA for personal profit and expect no action? They're lucky the actions by Apple weren't more sever honestly.

But was the NDA valid?

Ah, that's slashdot for you.

One poster speculates that they signed a NDA (phrasing it as a statement, not a speculation) and that they violated the hypothetical terms of the hypothetical NDA that they hypothetically agreed to. Another poster speculates on whether the hypothetical NDA, whose hypothetical terms we don't actually know, was valid.

To quote Twain, "There is something fascinating about slashdot. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

They signed a Developer Agreement, or they wouldn't HAVE a Pre-Release AppleTV.

To quote Twain, "There is something fascinating about slashdot. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

I know Slashdot has been around for a while. I didn't think Taco was that old.

They very publicly break the NDA for personal profit and expect no action? They're lucky the actions by Apple weren't more sever honestly.

But was the NDA valid?

Ah, that's slashdot for you.

One poster speculates that they signed a NDA (phrasing it as a statement, not a speculation) and that they violated the hypothetical terms of the hypothetical NDA that they hypothetically agreed to. Another poster speculates on whether the hypothetical NDA, whose hypothetical terms we don't actually know, was valid.

To quote Twain, "There is something fascinating about slashdot. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Pete from Oz seems to have some 'limitations' in his own mind.

It'll never work!

"In Bavaria the Royal College of Doctors, having been consulted, declared that railroads, if they were constructed, would cause the greatest deterioration in the health of the public, because such rapid movement would cause brain trouble among travelers, and vertigo among those who looked at moving trains. For this last reason it was recommended that all tracks be enclosed by high board fences raised above the height of the cars and engines.

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."

- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.

Unfortunately, you are actually incorrect. There are perpetual motion machines with patents even if you don't allow people to patent them through you.

https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek...

Have you read the report? Power input was monitored. At this stage, either this is the most elaborate scientific/engineering hoax in history....

You sure about that? Seriously this is a very close copy of the Keely motor hoax.

There was a survey published in Nature showing belief in God is dwindling among scientists....

https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek...

It's because colleges and universities are natural collectors of Element 0 -- Administratium

There's magic all over in science. Dark energy, dark matter weren't predicted and don't have explanations. Entanglement was predicted as a reductio ad absurdum to cast doubt on quantum mechanics, but was later observed contrary to Einstein's expectations; and seems to involve "conveniently undetectable magical waves".

As for political influence, consider Feynman in Cargo Cult Science:

Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...

I should have expected that mentioning Myers-Briggs would have opened the can of worms about its validity and the whole subject of psychometry. Since I'm not a psychologist, I cannot participate too deeply in that discussion. If you want to classify the Myers-Briggs (sorry, I misspelled it originally) as cargo cult science, I will not argue against you.

Even poor science can include accurate measurements, though. From Wikipedia:

In 1991, the National Academy of Sciences committee reviewed data from MBTI research studies and concluded that only the I-E scale has high correlations with comparable scales of other instruments and low correlations with instruments designed to assess different concepts, showing strong validity. In contrast, the S-N and T-F scales show relatively weak validity.

Since my remarks are restricted to the I-E scale, and that's the part of the Myers-Briggs that critics say holds up to a bit of scrutiny, I maintain that my Myers-Briggs results are the best available evidence that I am an introvert. If you're aware of a better diagnostic test, I'll take it.

The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism.

Dude, if the way engineering and science are taught doesn't give one a healthy dose of skepticism, they are not being taught right. The humanities are not the answer to incorrect teaching of science or engineering. Feynman's Caltech commencement speech is all about how science should be done. It's all about doubting yourself and actively working to undermine your warm feeling of being right. You must be your worst adversary - that way, and only that way, you can be guaranteed to win the battle. You control your worst enemy. That's the way good science is done, that's the way good engineering is done.

I started reading the report and I quit halfway through the executive summary. This is one of those reports that says, "We documented a bunch of stuff happening. No idea why it happened, but let's speculate." I generally respect the folks at White Hat (have met several at conferences etc.) but I simply don't see the value in this report. I think they've lost track of why it's worthwhile to conduct a study in the first place. Perhaps Richard Feynman can help.

the term perpetual motion is used in different ways. usually to imply that something is a magical source of endless motion.

There are actually plenty of physical systems that will move for ever. anything that moves with no friction. bodies in space is almost an example of this, but would actually be a small friction from interstellar (and intergalactic) gas and dust, and interaction with CMBR. also there are plenty of quantum 'motions' that could qualify. you can't extract energy from these systems without slowing them. in the quantum case they might still 'move' in the ground state, so you can't extract that energy.

Then there are the crazy mechanical designs that people invent. generally (ignoring the flat out fraudsters) the inventor believes that they have found a system that generates a perpetual force that for example rotates a wheel. They usually believe that they just need to get the friction a bit lower, and then it will run. This is a good example http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm#stevinprob (in fact everone should go and read that whole site.)

Believers and disbelievers are all in the same boat.

False equivalence I'm afraid. Randi was advising scientists to devise tests which preclude the possibility of cheating so the results reflected what the test was intended to measure.

Put another way, I suggest you read the Cargo Cult Science essay by Richard Feynman. In it he refers to an experimenter attempting to test learning in rats and ending up with useless results because the rats could achieve the results with smell, light, vibration etc. Only when he eliminated ways that rats could "cheat" his test was he sure the results reflected what he was attempting to measure in the first place.

Replace rats with paranormal subjects and the same principle applies.

Thanks for the compliment, although by skeptic I think you really mean "scientist". If you look closely you will find that variations on the above criticisms will apply to almost everything published these days in a large number of fields. It is one thing when people make a new mistake and it gets past reviewers (everyone learns from this process), it is another when the exact same mistakes are made over and over again with no one correcting them, or even encouraging/demanding they be made. Sadly this is the status quo, the same mistakes in logic and presentation of results have persisted for decades now, this is why I mentioned cargo cult science. I think it is an apt description of this type of behaviour.

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

The collider beams go off by a few millimetres. Oceans go up and down by as much as several meters.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/08/222247/how-the-moon-affects-lhc-operations

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/06/07/is-the-moon-full-just-ask-the-lhc-operators/

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/tides.htm
The "tidal trivia" summary below puts things into perspective. The so-called equatorial bulge due to the Earth's axial rotation lifts the equator about 23 kilometer. The moon's gravity gradient lifts water mid-ocean (where the ocean is deep) no more than 1 meter, that's 1.6 x 10-7% of the Earth radius. Why do we fuss about this? Because over an ocean of large area, that represents a very large volume of water. Also, it's the driving mechanism that controls the periods of the much larger tides at shorelines.

No, Hell's tempure is 444c. Let’s try to be scientific here.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hell.htm

often enough the scientist will have a pretty good idea of the expected nature of the data to be collected.

Sure. I was clarifying that you can't just change to a different method of analysis according to the data you got, just because your original analysis didn't give you the result you expected.

In other words, you simply can't change your plan once you've seen the data. In this lecture, Feynman gives a very clear and real example of what can go wrong even if you're trying to be completely honest (look for the part where he talks about Millikan). That's a neat example because it's a very controlled experiment measuring a completely objective thing. In other fields, like Medicine or Psychology, it's much harder to know if your own expectations are influencing the study, so it's very important that you follow a very clearly defined plan from the beginning.

Not the first time... http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/whoops.htm#gears

It is not uncommon to hear amateurs pontificating to scientists about what the "scientific process" should be. And almost invariably, what they are advocating is the opposite of science—a kind of superstitious thinking that is precisely what the disciplines of science, statistics, experimental controls, blinded analysis, etc., have been developed to counteract, dressed up with "sciencey" jargon, what Richard Feynman famously characterized as "cargo cult science".

As human beings, we are all prone to superstitious thinking. Our brains are hyperaware of connections and associations, to the point of often seeing them where they do not actually exist, and this is even more exaggerated where risks are concerned. It is easy to understand why "jumping to conclusions" has been favored by evolution—the rabbit cannot afford to think, "Perhaps the next fox will be friendly." We are particularly prone to see exaggerated significance in "runs" of behavior. Any sports fan will tell you that their favorite player or team has periods in which they are "hot" or "cold," even though numerous statistical analyses have shown that such runs occur no more frequently than expected from random fluctuations about a mean. Such erroneous perceptions often have associated with them an emotional conviction of great meaning and certainty. So you have attached great significance to the fact that you had a run of of years with colds, and then a run without colds (something that tends to happen with greater frequency as we get older and develop immunity to many of the common pathogens around us), and have developed an unshakeable conviction that this was associated with your vaccination, and also with your illness. In fact, you were undoubtedly exposed to numerous novel substances and organisms over that period of time, but your mind has likely seized upon vaccination because the experience of receiving an injection stands our more prominently in your mind because being stuck with a syringe is a more unusual experience than the routine cuts and scrapes that are constantly introducing bacteria, viruses, and environmental contaminants into our bloodstreams.

One of the reasons why doing science requires experience and training is that we have to learn the hard way just how often that such convictions, which often arrive in our minds with a sense of great clarity and certainty, turn out to be mistaken when subjected to the hard discipline of scientific analysis. So it is certainly possible that CFS is some sort of immune dysfunction (perhaps even interacting with a vaccination), just as it is possible that it is some sort of chronic infection, and these are hypotheses worth investigating (and they have, indeed, been investigated for quite a few years, so far without major insights), but your own experience, no matter how compelling it feels to you, is very weak evidence from a scientific perspective.

ok, I apologize, I really am trying to be nicer.

It would help if you'd follow Feynman's rule of scientific reasoning. He says you need to find ways to attack your own ideas as much as possible. It would be much easier to have a conversation with you, if you did that.And your ideas and points would be much stronger.

As a scientist, I'm frustrated by the apparent fact that most people don't care about the science.

Is this a one-sided frustration, or did it bother you when you read the unscientific things said Hansen said in the paper? Things like, "Over the next several decades....California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated." I'd love to see his source for that, it's certainly not supported by IPCC report, nor by any science I am aware of (Central Valley rainfall is hugely affected by ENSO, and climate computers aren't able to predict ENSO at all).

Or what about this fun stuff? "Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk. That's as sensationalist as you get.

Does it REALLY sound scientific to you? How much different is it than this lovely quote, that "entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.". Sensationalism attracts attention, but is it scientific?

There's a lot of unscientific behavior all around, and it's extremely depressing to people who are interested in how the environment works. You could do worse than following Richard Feynman, who suggested that if people are not trying to find ways to attack their own ideas, they aren't being scientific.

I thought you were incapable of scientific reasoning. I was right. You take it on faith.

IThere was a rebuttal of their "data" in the link next to it [skepticalscience.com], if you prefer (which itself links to this one [skepticalscience.com]).

That is definitely a better attempt at rebuttal. It is unfortunate that the computer professional who is the author of that page, was more capable of responding than the climate scientists in the earlier link.

Would it surprise you that a whole field of scientific research can be corrupted by bad scientific principles? Richard Feynman describes it happening (around paragraph 31, although the whole thing is a good read). There is plenty of evidence it is happening in the global warming field too.

Good scientists welcome opposition. They see their critics as their most useful commentators, because they help them find holes in their logic. They understand Richard Feynman's principles of good science. Good scientists are more interested in finding out what is true, and not so interested in pushing their own viewpoint. When someone disagrees with them, they ask for the data. Good scientists don't cheer when a researcher with an opposing viewpoint dies.

If scientists don't do this, they are not acting in good faith. When scientists don't act in good faith, you must look at their data, not their opinions.

Here's a hint for you. You're falling into the trap Richard Feynman warned about. You actively seek information that supports your position, and ignore information that doesn't. It's a dangerous trap, get out of it.

To expand upon your great post, at the risk of getting modded down, since people confuse passion and integrity:

A fantastic read is "Myths of Skepticism"
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/talk/talk.html

Feynman already warned about how Science was turning into a religion.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

He wasn't the first, Planck said it ~50 years earlier.
"Science advanced one funeral at a time", paraphrasing Max Planck's "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

The worse are the "pseudo skeptics" -- those who "pretends to be a skeptic but is so closed-minded that they have become a fundamentalist; unable to accept any other perspective - their mind is already made up by ignoring any (potential new) evidence, such as that liar Randi, a magician pretending to be a Scientist.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page30.htm#RealSkeptics

"Simply put, one unwon public challenge by a debunker and magician does NOT invalidate the countless millions of paranormal experiences throughout world history, nor does it refute the years of replicable psi research done by Ganzfeld or PEAR experiments, among others."

A perfect example of how Science has become Religion is Astronomy. They make _several_ assumptions that will turn out to be false once they have more information. They "assume" Dark Matter and Dark Energy Energy exists but they have never observed it. They assume the laws of physics are constant throughout the universe; that is a very dangerous precedent when you have only directly explored %0.0000000001 of it.

While it is fine to come to conclusions before the evidence is in BUT it would behoove BOTH the scientist and public by being honest and upfront with the usual disclaimer: "With our current understanding, this is our best guess (theory) for how we think things work." To pretend otherwise is sheer dogma.

The greatest problem with a few Scientists is that they believe their Holy Scientific Principle is the ONLY way to achieve truth. What Science does is remove one _falsehood_ at a time. There are other methods that add truth one level at a time.

Great post BTW.

You have freedom of speech, you don't have the right to force people to listen. Which is good because otherwise I might have to read the rest of your post, where you draw a false-equivalency with China, sprinkled freely with fact-free pessimistic predictions of the future. You fail at the basic logic fallacies Richard Feynman warned about

Nice appeal to authority there.

I addressed how meaningless it was to have freedom of speech in an environment in which our political leaders are basically had picked for us and completely ignore everything we say.

Well then. There's nothing like reaffirming your own misunderstandings by repeating them, is there. When can freedom of speech be more important than when the ruling class ignores the people? How else can you find out about injustices, if people can't tell each other about it? "The pen is mightier than the sword," a true saying, which is why tyrants the world over suppress freedom of speech.

And you really should read the Feynman thing. It'll help fix some of your cognitive biases.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean much when your political leaders don't listen to it. In China, they simply delete information they do not want to address. In the United states they ignore it, or more often then not, drowned it out by creating fake controversies

This is the dumbest conception of Freedom of Speech that I've heard in a while.

You have freedom of speech, you don't have the right to force people to listen. Which is good because otherwise I might have to read the rest of your post, where you draw a false-equivalency with China, sprinkled freely with fact-free pessimistic predictions of the future. You fail at the basic logic fallacies Richard Feynman warned about

Should have studied more in physics ...

Excellent! You are eminently qualified to invest in my company, which harnesses this technology to generate power from a workable perpetual motion machine!:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm#cheng

And that doesn't refute my argument one iota.

Your argument is that you can increase the cost of something without affecting the actions of people. That's retarded.

Furthermore, you are saying that if we give money to people who immediately spend it, then the economy will be improved. Empirically speaking, that seems to be a net drain on the economy (based on studies of the Obama tax cut, the Bush tax rebate, and the similar Carter payroll tax cut). Robert J Barro suggests that such spending as you suggest might be effective if unemployment is high (say, over 15%). In other words, you have that idea, but you haven't checked your numbers.

And that's your problem all over. You've read some ideas about economics, maybe that you got from some blogs, but ultimately, you don't know jack. You don't know the data or reasons to back up your opinions.

You might want to read this, because you're probably falling into that mental trap too.

That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.

This is dead on the money -- I agree. I keep Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" address here: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm permanently open in a browser tab just to remind me how important replication really is. There is a major effort at the highest levels of the government that sit in oversight of the granting agencies and that ultimately fund the journals themselves (indirectly) to change some of this, because it is this very reluctance (plus a tendency to publish "results" but hide the actual data and methodology from precisely the public access and scrutiny and critical replication that is essential to the scientific process) that leads to a huge amount of junk science being published every year, much of it (sadly) in social psychology, medicine, and climate science, where at least two of these have enormous costs associated with error.

ESP, fortunately isn't one of them. As you note, it (as a hypothesis) could be true, but there is so far no good reason to believe in it. Such evidence as there is is anecdotal and fails to stand up in a reproducible way to skeptical critical tests seeking to verify the anecdotes. However, we can go farther than this -- ESP may exist, but it is in some sense a rare phenomenon if it does. If it were universal and common, we could hardly have failed to discover this by now. The many experiments that have been done seeking to confirm the phenomenon (and failing) have the effect of gradually lowering the plausible boundary of its existence, just as the many (failed) experiments seeking e.g. magnetic monopoles don't disprove their existence but they do establish plausible limits on how common they are (at least in the forms being tested).

ESP, unlike monopoles, suffers from a serious flaw as a scientific hypothesis. I can understand how a monopole might exist, and can further see how their existence has considerable explanatory power and esthetic appeal -- electrodynamics would become more symmetric, charge quantization would be "explained", if there was at least one monopole in the Universe. They consistently fit in with our existing knowledge. ESP, on the other hand, does not. There is not one single theory (that I know of) that offers a consistent explanation of how ESP could function in terms of known physical law. Indeed, things like precognition overtly violate so very many physical laws -- for starters, the second law of thermodynamics -- that verifying it might well require the complete rewriting of all the laws of physics. This is actually a serious problem. It is like "coming back from the dead" or other forms of supernaturalism and magic -- sensible people reject such hypotheses as the default belief (often in the face of various offerings of anecdotal "evidence") because, to paraphrase somebody (Thomas Paine?) it is far more easy to believe that a human is a liar or mistaken than to believe that the stars themselves have gone out of their courses. If true precognition were reproducibly demonstrated, analyzing the requisite dynamical flow of information involved would very much make the stars go out of their courses, with future complex phenomena causing entropic shifts in current chemistry. We do not, as a general rule, ever observe entropy-shifting effects preceding their causes.

rgb

You are interpreting the result wrong. What it means is if the government says kill and torture a terrorist that people don't mind.

No, I am interpreting the results differently than you. You have learned one interpretation of the results, and you are blind to the fact that there are other interpretations, so much that you are willing to reject the results of other experiments.

This is a serious cognitive flaw you have. Learn about double-blind experiments, learn why the Milgram and Stanford Prison torture experiment needed control groups. Read this as a good introduction to the problems of sociological experiments, and bad science in general. Don't bother me again until you at least try to fix your cognitive biases.

I know there are problems with a flawed experiment. It doesn't change the fact that torture exists in the real world in developed nations and the experiments only try to explain why. Why are prisoners treated so bad? Why do so many in society in polls view torture as okay when used against terrorists? It also helps us to understand why in Nazi Germany did so many Germans go along with Hitler.

This is not a scientifically complete answer, bt neither is just looking at neuroscience and seeing that people aren't psychopathic bastards. The real answer is people are just very weak and accept anything authority figures give or tell them. People are nice because they are trained and conditioned to be nice, when trained or conditioned to be mean then people aren't nice anymore. It doesn't matter if they are a psychopath or a neurotypical, when people are conditioned to behave in a certain way that is what they do and sociology and psychology reveals this.

In particular look at the skinnerbox, operant and classical conditioning (pavlov's dogs), and you'll see some hard science with well conducted studies to back up my opinion that there is no genetically predetermined human personality but that personalities with the exception of traits and talents are programmed in by other humans.

Racism is the result of other humans programming that in. Sexism is the result of other humans programming that in.

You are interpreting the result wrong. What it means is if the government says kill and torture a terrorist that people don't mind.

No, I am interpreting the results differently than you. You have learned one interpretation of the results, and you are blind to the fact that there are other interpretations, so much that you are willing to reject the results of other experiments.

This is a serious cognitive flaw you have. Learn about double-blind experiments, learn why the Milgram and Stanford Prison torture experiment needed control groups. Read this as a good introduction to the problems of sociological experiments, and bad science in general. Don't bother me again until you at least try to fix your cognitive biases.

That's, correct, the device is using both electrical and thermal energy input to generate light output.

Unless someone's made a very big breakthrough, you cannot get energy from heat. Not by itself. Otherwise we'd have generators you can drop into a fire and get say, electricity from. Or just stick the generator in a room and let it "suck the heat out", that'd make a marvelous air conditioner, that actually produced power. I think if that was even remotely possible we'd see those for sale by now.

What you can do is extract energy from a difference in heat. Too many examples to mention, but a sterling engine and a peltier are probably the best examples.

On an atomic scale, thermal energy is like kinetic energy, since heat is vibration. A ball flying through space has energy, but you can't just suck it out. You have to intract it with something with a different vector. In the interaction, you can extract energy from the system. It's the same with heat - you can only extract energy when interacting it with something of a different temperature.

Or you could compare it with magnets. You can't "get energy" from a magnet. But you CAN get energy out of the system of a magnet interacting with another magnet or ferrous metal etc.

So there's no way for this LED to "get energy from heat". I wonder if they are heating it up by powering it normally (below unity), and then dropping it way down in power, and changing some of that heat back into power while cooling the LED down closer to room temperature? Considering the absurdly low power levels they're using to test it, it would not surprise me if there was some recovery of electrical energy from the cooling process. But they didn't say what they did to the LED immediately before the test.

Usually when someone is claiming above unity, there's additional input of energy somewhere else that's not immediately obvious. Just a matter of careful examination of the circumstances and comparison of the pre- and post-test conditions.

Check here for some ideas on how to spot this subtle input of energy. Look specifically at the "Rubber Band Heat Engine" for an example that may apply here with these LEDs.

So you say. But it's a bit hard to prove when a majority of people haven't started learning to draw.

Uh, you're starting to say stupid things, which I hope you wouldn't under normal circumstances. Otherwise you might need to read this, before you say even stupider things.

I mean, if only we had scientific, statistical methods for determining traits of a population, without actually investigating every individual of the population. If we had such a thing, what would we call it? Maybe, random sampling?

"The economists have been feeding us lies for decades" eh? You talk in the same way as those who deny that we've ever landed on the moon. Great.

Unless you want to actually look at the evidence. Go read something like "A Monetary History of the United States." You will get a taste of what real evidence is like, and when you disagree with the conclusions, you have a way to back it up. It's lot different than the trash propaganda someone has been feeding you so far.

You should also read this. You've fallen into the same trap as the cargo cults, probably the same trap that the 9/11 conspiratorialists and the Obama birthers fall into. Learn how to attack your ideas, like any real scientist does.

This is, or should be, education 101.

That's a really interesting question. I don't know about Mathematics, but in Physics, its pretty damn important to publish negative results. Feynman used to tell a story to show that (available here). Basically, the story goes something like this:

Robert Millikan, which was already a famous experimental physicist, published a (now famous) experiment that determined the charge of a single electron. This was the first time such a thing had been done, so it was a really big deal. A lot of other physicists replicated the experiment, with lots of papers published all around. The thing about experiments is that the value measured always has an uncertainty, and experimenters make mistakes, so it's very common for later experiments to correct previously-measured values. The strange thing about this case is that, if you plot the "known" value for the electron charge over time, you get a curve that gradually grows from the value measured in the first experiment to the value we now know is correct (because today we have many different ways to measure the value, so we're pretty sure of it).

So, why is the plot a gradual curve and not a straight jump to the correct answer? Why didn't the second experiment get the correct value right away? The answer is embarrassing. Since Millikan was so famous, subsequent experimenters didn't publish their results if the value they got was too far from the "currently accepted" value -- they thought of their results as "negative results", even though they probably had less error than the "currently accepted" value. The ones that got published were the ones with similar errors to the previous ones, or the ones that kept tweaking their setup (introducing all kinds of random errors) until they got a value that was closer to the original.

Nowadays, physicists are very careful not to make mistakes like this. Part of that care means that you don't pay too much attention to the "expected" result, so you really should publish negative results. Of course, that's just the theory -- no one likes to publish negative results, because most of the time, they're just a waste of time.

Every scientific fact starts with some kind of belief (yes, I did just call evolution a 'scientific fact'. If you disagree, I'll ram the evidence down your throat, since there's so much of it).

In the case of the GP, what he meant by "I believe" was "I have a hypothesis that....." His hypothesis is that with better scientific techniques, we could learn more. Richard Feynman said something similar, in fact almost the exact same thing, although he was talking more about psychology

when you work harder than you did this week, more of each dollar you make

No, you are wrong. Your first dollar will always be taxed at the exact same rate, no matter how much you make. That is how tax brackets work.

Sorry, if you refuse to learn, this conversation is useless. I also strongly suggest you read this, and make every attempt to avoid the same mistakes the cargo cults made.

I did a little looking around and can't find any instance of anyone pumping antifreeze up from their well.

Try harder:

glycols, including ethylene glycol

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/dimock-pennsylvania-epa-_n_1217422.html

Their have been instances of faulty drilling techniques being employed (bad casing cement seals) that have allowed drilling fluids to leak up the well bore and into surface waters.

This was apparently found to be the case for Cabot's wells in Dimock: http://www.lhup.edu/rmyers3/marcellus.htm (among others).

The fact is, our current socioeconomic system is falling apart (see other links I've posted in this thread) -

Meh, we see this kind of scaremongering during every recession. Our current socioeconomic system is the best we've ever had in thousands of years of human civilization. Not perfect, but good enough that we don't want to scrap the whole system to try a new one (if you've ever tried to rewrite a large software system from scratch, you know the difficulties involved in something like that).

So, you think you have a better approach? So does Ron Paul, he says a truly free market will make everything better. He has all kinds of links and studies and data that appear to prove his point, just like you do. But the fact is, in history we've never had a truly free market system, so we don't know for sure how it will end up. A small mistaken detail can make a huge difference. You need to be careful, follow Richard Feynman's advice. Instead of proposing huge changes, start with small, incremental changes that can be shown to be a real improvement. Think of it as refactoring a piece at a time, instead of trying to rewrite. If you try to rewrite, you WILL fail, because there are fatal flaws in your plan that you, nor anyone else, has ever thought of.

Besides, what is wrong with redistributing one half the GDP as a basic income

I had to come back to this point because it was so intriguing, why would I want to do this?

Hmmm, you really do need to read the climategate 2 letters, don't you.

From message 4241.txt, a communication from Rob Wilson to Ed Cook (and others):

I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel – I did not try and approximate the persistence structure in tree-ring data. The autocorrelation therefore of the time-series was close to zero, although it did vary between each time-series. Playing around therefore with the AR persistent structure of these time-series would make a difference. However, as these series are generally random white noise processes, I thought this would be a conservative test of any potential bias.

I then screened the time-series against NH mean annual temperatures and retained those series that correlated at the 90% C.L.

48 series passed this screening process.

Using three different methods, I developed a NH temperature reconstruction from these data:

1. simple mean of all 48 series after they had been normalised to their common period

2. Stepwise multiple regression

3. Principle component regression using a stepwise selection process.

The results are attached.

Interestingly, the averaging method produced the best results, although for each method there is a linear trend in the model residuals – perhaps an end-effect problem of over-fitting.

The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.

Surely this vindicates Mann -- by proving that it does indeed turn white noise into hockey sticks! Not only is Mann wrong, but the hockey team knows it perfectly well! There are letters where people openly lament being involved with the hockey stick type reconstructions (and other places, e.g. where they "hid the decline" in tree ring data) because they are terrible science and because they are openly worried that sooner or later people will catch on. As indeed they have, although they have won the PR war (another great Mann quote) to such an extent that even though they themselves know that the hockey stick is bogus and that white noise fit according to Mann's cherrypicking methodology will produce nothing but hockey sticks, it just won't die, will it? Thanks to people like you!

We could review the specific Climategate 2 letters where Jones talks about deliberately trying not to give away data to the people who requested it (something I would call "stonewalling", except that the circumstance in question is a FOIA request that was only a missed deadline away from being "a crime" upon the release of the CG emails), or about the points where it turns out that he does a lousy job of keeping records (problems with Excel spreadsheets) and no longer can reproduce his own results because he doesn't know what data he used, if you like.

Or we could look at the many, many other places where internal communications show that the hockey team is well aware of many problems with their own results and consistently choose not to let the general public know about them lest we be led to doubt their conclusion. Then we could read Feynman's lovely article on "Cargo Cult Science": http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm. See how close you think the hockey team comes to Feynman's fairly modest standard for good, honest science, while reading Mann going on about the importance of winning the PR war, getting journal editors fired, and generally doing his very best to eliminate all challenge to his papers, or, if he can't manage that, eliminating the challengers themselves.

But really, read them yourself. Don't accept what people tell you about them, read them! Then tell me that this is honest science, well done.

rgb

Your fears are misplaced. Though plenty of pollution is (very regrettably) dumped into the oceans, the ocean is an extremely huge place volume-wise and the low density of pollutants in ocean water will not really affect your food.

(Well, there are a couple of chemicals, notably mercury, which are subject to biomagnification, i.e. things higher up the food chain get all the mercury from everything below them on the food chain; these can reach perceptible levels esp. if you're eating one kind of food all the time. Enough to be a little concerned but not enough to paranoiacally avoid ever eating any seafood.)

If you're concerned about chemicals affecting your food, you'd be much better off to be concerned about the pesticides, industrial pollutants, etc affecting land-based food sources (and fish from lakes and rivers); terrestrial water sources and topsoil have a much much lower volume than the ocean and absorb at least much chemical pollution. (And biomagnification happens with land creatures too.) So you really should consider never eating any land-based food again either.

If you're worried about nuclear radiation affecting your food, you'd do better to start worrying about the great unshielded nuclear reactor in the sky. Your danger of getting cancer from solar radiation is incomparably greater than your danger from Fukushima etc, even if you exclusively eat Japanese fish and stay indoors 24/7.

In a true scientific setting, you'll never hear an idea be rejected because an authority figure or holy book said that it wasn't so. It will be rejected based on lack of supporting evidence.

That is not true. Leading scientists rejected the big bang theory when proposed because of a holy book. They merely did so due to hostility rather than faith. Students interested in string theory were advised not to do research in that area because authority figures in the scientific community were dismissive of the theory.

Then I suppose that those were not true scientific settings then, were they? Also, science doesn't have holy books; I think you're mistaken.

Are you talking about this source? If you scroll down, there's an illustration of the cosmos as described by the Bible, which the rest of that source covers.

No. That illustration is not what the bible describes, it is what interpretations that are making quite a stretch describe. Stretches of the nature that something being above the earth implies the earth is flat.

The interpretations are what people use to claim that the Bible says that the earth is a globe. But it actually says that the earth is flat. When you understand that the Bible is composed of stories written between 2000 to 3500 years ago, you see that it does have a place in history and that the things it describes are based on the knowledge and culture of those who wrote it. The notion of a spherical earth wasn't accepted until the 3rd Century in Greece, over 100 years after the last book of the Bible was written.

I'd also like to point out that you've completely ignored my statement that the Bible has been used to justify such atrocities as slavery.

Its an irrelevant straw man, off topic related to the church and science. Many scientists back in the day supported slavery and various atrocities as well.

No, it's quite relevant. It shows that religious minds are willing to use their faith to justify atrocities.

No it shows that human minds are able to use anything to justify atrocities. There are ample examples in modern history of human minds using some political writing to justify atrocities. There are ample examples of men of science using scientific theory and concepts to justify atrocities.

You'd be really hard-pressed to find someone who would try justifying an atrocity without religion; I haven't seen the rational or scientific equivalent of a meeting or message board where people openly claim their desire for a return to slavery or anything as equally horrible, especially today. Because your Bible is able to justify despicable actions, it is also in a sense advocating them. It's written (or divinely inspired) by god, who is infallible, so there's no reason for its followers to disagree with its teachings.

Catholics are not a majority of christians in the US. Also the graph shows that those believing in a literal interpretation are declining and those with faith believing in evolution are increasing.

So Catholics believe that the Bible advocates evolution while other Christians believe that the same bible argue against evolution. Also, you may have missed some of the other data in that source:

Catholics and various other denominations have nothing against evolution. The stats are US centric, basically you are cherry picking a subpopulation to artificially inflate the stats. Altering the conversation from christianity in general.

(Trimming the rest of the quote s