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Besides all technical inaccuracies on the movie, besides watching him drive by in his limousine and fly over Katrina in his private jet while he tells you to use a bicycle and public transportation (I hated that), besides he was vice president when the US was at war and besides the political bias that wraps it, his work is why we are all[*1] here talking about climate change. It rose awareness about a topic that concerns us all. It made the topic mainstream. So, although the "peace" word doesn't fit that exactly, I think it's the right thing. It doesn't matter WHO wont it (don't forget the IPCC), but what are the news talking about today.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/

"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"

*1 - By all I refer not to the /. crowd, I refer to everyone, from taxi drivers and the guy at the grocery store to politicians.

I believe to win you must have produced an important body of work (often by pulling together threads of work from many areas) which has (or will have) significant impact on human society the world etc.

Consider Einstien:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html

His nobel prize in physics in 1921 (Special Theory of Relativity 1905, Relativity (English translations), 1920 and 1950, General Theory of Relativity 1916) had major parts that were not directly verifiable until many decades later via experiments with advanced technology.

Don't be a deny-er because recearch or its conclusion don't fit your political views

The work that Al Gore has done to raise awareness of our current planetary climate crisis is second to none. The Peace Prize goes out to individuals who raise global awareness of issues that affect the peace of the entire world, right? Wouldn't you say that climate change is in that category? [bold added]

Well, first, let me say I'm thrilled Gore has been recognized for his very fine work.

But a thought did occur to me, and it's partly underscored by your choice of words in this question. Strictly speaking, any of the world's historically prominent totalitarian dictator types (I'll decline to mention them by name, since they tend to be conversation stoppers, but you know the usual suspects) have raised awareness (usually through attack) about issues affecting the world peace (like their attacks). And yet we'd presumably not want the prize to go to them. So this caused me to wonder what the criteria were for the prize.

I have cited the general clause in Nobel's will saying that the prizes should be given to those who "in the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on makind." With regard to the Peace Prize, Nobel defined this as having "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." The most difficult stipulation to live up to has undoubtedly been "in the preceding year." This is now understood to indicate the most recent contributions in the various cultural fields to which the will refers. Where the Peace Prize is concerned, the wording has been seen as opening up opportunities to engage in processes which have not yet reached a conclusion, but where there has been clear evidence of progress [...]

I took the remark about the difficulty of the preceding year to mean that you can't know for sure how history will regard the actions, and whether, in fact, they were a contribution to peace. For example, in theory, Gore's contributions could lead next year to a sudden realization of imminent resource scarcity that might otherwise have waited some number of years, and could actually precipitate a war. Good intentions are not always enough to ensure good outcomes. It's so hard to know, when the timeline between the doing and the analysis of the result is short. So while I'm comfortable with the award, I have considerable tolerance of those who doubt the propriety of giving this award at this time. Probably they're just saying the timeline of the award should, in general, be longer. And yet, the good effect of the short timeline might be to affect an ongoing situation in a pro-active way, not merely to comment on history (as are so many of the other Nobel awards).

For myself, I regard the climate crisis with the highest priority the world faces, and something that the world must confront together. I hope that doing so will reduce the set of issues faced, and that a reduced number of issues will lead to greatest peace. So I'm willing to see this award as appropriate even in a theoretical sense.

But even if it's only has the practical effect of helping to underscore that there really is global concern, I'm willing to live with a world that has given out an award that some think is undeserved, if it still has the good effect of raising consciousness about this serious issue. If the only effect is to incentivize others to do greedy, selfish, mercenary work on how to raise climate awareness and/or fix the problem, not for the good of humanity but just so they can win an award like Al's, I'm afraid I just don't see that as a remarkably bad outcome.

Besides, with Bush at the helm, anything that raises world consciousness that not everyone in the US is out to start a war is also good, and perhaps protects the peace as well.

Congratulations to the recipients.

Nobel Peace Prize was disgraced, when Yassir Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev received theirs. The latter caused Andrei Sakharov's wife Elena to try to get her husband's name crossed out in disgust.

Al Gore is joining a good company, indeed. I wonder, what Henry Kissinger would be thinking about this new club-member.

After getting tax-exempt status and easing their investment rules, the fund began to grow exponentially, and in both nominal and real terms, the current monetary award is larger than it's ever been. Here is a listing and chart of how that amount has changed over time.

Just to stop people from stereotyping.. if you read the article you would know Abdus Salam won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the Standard Model in particle physics. If you read his biography http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1979/salam-bio.html you get the impression that he enjoyed teaching and collaborating with the world (like any other scientist) and he has this to say about religion: "The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah's created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart." It is not at all about hate and destruction... A.

There are, he wrote, "sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. (...) He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician."

Gandhi had many critics in the international peace movement. The Nobel Committee adviser referred to these critics in maintaining that he was not consistently pacifist, that he should have known that some of his non-violent campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror.

... "One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse."

"Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. No one wanted war, but he could never advise anyone to put up with injustice. If all Hindus were annihilated for a just cause he would not mind. If there was war, the Hindus in Pakistan could not be fifth columnists. If their loyalty lay not with Pakistan they should leave it. Similarly Muslims whose loyalty was with Pakistan should not stay in the Indian Union."

Until June, I had been working in a live-cell imaging laboratory for nearly four years. There's a whole list of criteria that will cell proliferation while being grown on a microscope. My lab had (before I arrived) already proven they could grow cells on a microscope stage that would match cells grown in an incubator (ie, number of mitotic events). These like this are important.

A few people have mentioned bits about imaging and I thought I'd kind of list the important ones:

• 'Normal' brightfield
• Phase-Contrast
• Confocal
• DIC, AFM, and others

'Normal' brightfield microscopes are the kind that you'll find in a high school classroom. They work because the sample absorbs light. When they talk about fixing and staining cells, you can use these. Usually cells are transparent and won't attenuate light as it passes through the cell.

Confocal works by exciting a fluorophor with a laser and measuring the emitted photons. Its neat. But you're pointing a laser at a cell.

DIC, AFM and others work on varied principles. AFM is atomic force. They basically poke a cell and measure how it pushes back. But you're poking a cell. DIC are light based but as far as I have seen not extremely popular in the field of live cell imaging for one reason or another.

Phase-Contrast I left till last as its really the only microscope that can be used for live-cell imaging. It works by measuring not how much the light is attenutated, but how much its slowed as it passes through the cell. Basically, a small fraction of light is slowed and difracted as it passes through the sample. The light that passes through unaffected is attenuated after the sample so it and the two groups have approximately the same intensity. Then normal interference will give an image on the detector.

As usual for science articles, it got most of the details wrong. We've had phase-contrast microscopes for over 50 years now. Zernike got the Nobel Prize for inventing them in 1953 http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/physics/mi croscopes/phase/index.html We can use these to measure living cells. We could do drug screening. Nothing the article said was really new and frankly it was rather irritating.

What is exciting though is the fact that this might allow the machine vision guys to be able to reliably segment live-cell image data. Currently this is a problem with no *acceptable* solution. [By acceptable I mean to say, something that has an accuracy over 90-95% for any cell line I give it as well as not using anything like a nuclear stain] Once we get this level of segmentation there is an unlimited number of things we can do:

• Personalized drug screening: Part of your tumor is checked against as many as 96 drug coctail combinations. You get the one that works best. Not the one that works best for 60% of people in a study
• Determining a patients response to radiation. For some cancers, about 50% of people need radiation AND chemotherapy. Chemotherapy can be cancerous (ironic, no?) The 50% of people that DON'T need chemo, still get chemo cause we can't predict if they need it or not, and seeing as the only to find out is to let them get cancer again...
• Primary research in the area of whole-cell systems would grow enormously. Current studies include numbers like 20-30 cells. Your average live-cell experiment will capture as many as 200 to 400 cells. And thats a small one.

Shoo. Go read an Elfriede Jelinek play or something.

Well, guess I should have Googled first.

Google: "synthesizing hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox- a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=1QI&q=synt hesizing+hydrocarbons+from+water+and+carbon+dioxid e&btnG=Search

Apparently they've been working on this technology for awhile. I think they were originally planning on using the exhaust gases from a coal plant or something as a source of raw carbon dioxide. But I don't see why you couldn't use this new technology!
http://www.inl.gov/videos/sc/syntrolysis.pdf
http://www.kpk.gov.pl/images/i7pr/bb295736b8d250fc 0ccf0a0742b164c1.pdf
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/artic les/olah/index.html

I think this could work. Imagine a facility centered around a nuclear reactor. It draws water from a lake/river, uses what energy is needed to power an array of these atmospheric C02 extractors, and combines them to produce usable fuel! This could change everything. At our current level of technology, we don't have a problem with clean energy. If we had the will power, we could turn off all the coal plants, build a bunch of reactors, and remove that component of global warming overnight (relatively speaking). However, we would still need a source of portable power. A facility like this would be an "instant oil field." Any nation on Earth can become its own Saudi Arabia.

I really hope this CO2 extraction technology proves viable, because if it is, we have on our hands nothing less than the solution to the entire global warming problem.

I would mention the Chinese invention of paper and the printing press. When combined, these two triggered more progress than was achieved in all of human history prior to these inventions. (The incredible impact of the printing press is why the West has tried so hard to steal credit for it, even though Gutenberg was 700 years late, and used many Chinese techniques, such as rice glue, in his system. Slightly more honest Westerners assign Gutenberg credit for the movable-type printing press, but even for that he was over 400 years behind the Chinese.)

But you wanted something "modern". How about "laser cooling", which earned Steven Chu the primary credit for the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics?

This was for sure not an obvious trick, which is partly why it was worth a Nobel: lasers were famous for zapping things with their heat; who would have thought of using them for cooling things to record low temperatures (microkelvins)!

But the main reason that laser cooling earned Chu a Nobel so quickly (most winners have to wait for decades) is that once you cool things down to microkelvins, quantum effects start becoming visible in macroscopic amounts of matter. Laser cooling is already responsible for an almost unending stream of breakthroughs: Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum computers, slowing light, near-field optics, new phases of matter, et cetera, et endless cetera.

And remember, China is just getting started.

Yes, many of them. The concept I particularly liked of all the courses I took was the fact that "free markets" include many externalities and unintended effects that they don't account for - clean air, strong local communities, etc. Basically, free markets are a great example of the original issue you brought up - the tragedy of the commons. If you can't put a price tag on it, it doesn't have value.

You also don't need to be a genius to see that the assumptions that underlying free market ideology are fundamentally flawed - people are rational actors for instance. Try looking into what is being done in behaviorial economics, such as Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize speech that shows how fundamentally flawed this premise is. It also has a good discussion of framing effects that you can apply to your next issue of Forbes magazine - should you choose to do so.

What Country has landed on the moon?

Prove it! (Joking) I've already conceeded this one.

What country invented the transistor, and later the microchip?

Erm... Julius Edgar Lilienfield invented the transistor(Polish) and registered his patents in Germany which were later copied by Bell Labs

What country harnessed electricity, and set up the first electric lights?

Well it was done in the US but it appears America's greatest electrical engineer was Serbian (Nikola Tesla).

What country set up the first assembly line, and mass produced the automobile?

True but what country pays china billions a year to make things for it because it cant mass produce them efficiently enough on its own?

What country split the atom?

Erm... Germany [NobelPrize.org]http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes /chemistry/laureates/1944/

Is this old news, or is it just a new productization of old news?

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laure ates/2000/

So I get the sensation that just like everywhere else on Slashdot, a lot of people are out of their depth when it comes to this topic. For some background, might I suggest reading about the work of the three men who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for their work in conductive polymers. These materials are incredible in a myriad of ways, but require a nontrivial understanding of materials to really get it.

nano-scale artworks. It includes a 15 micron wide badger, a ten micron long guitar (which was actually played) and a 120 micron long New Scientist logo.

This features are all multi-micron in size. That isn't nano-scale, that's micro-scale, a three orders of magnitude difference. Just because it's small doesn't make it "nano". (Perhaps "nano" is the new "turbo" or "extreme"? Oh no wait, that's "HD".)

Come back when the features are nanometer size, like this one, or these.

No, it was discovered in the late 1930s in Germany, which earned Otto Hahn the nobel prize in chemistry in 1944 (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laur eates/1944/index.html).

Abdus Salam is known to be a devout Muslim, whose religion does not occupy a separate compartment of his life; it is inseparable from his work and family life. He once wrote: "The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah's created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart."

This is my list of 10 key discoveries that were initially rejected by scientific peers, or at least not easily accepted:

1. Theory of Relativity wasn't well received at the time. In fact, Einstein didn't actually get a Nobel Prize for it. Instead, he received the prize for other work he did dealing with quanta. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureat es/1921/press.html

2. Quantum Mechanics - Even Einstein didn't particularly like Quantum Mechanics and the search for the unified model. It was the home of the quote "God doesn't play dice with the universe."

3. Darwin's Theory of Evolution - This was hotly debated at the time, and still is. On-going debates in school boards still occur.

4. String Theory - Hotly contested, mostly because no one can show if it is actually correct.

5. Newtonian Calculus - The notation sucked. Most of the calculus done today uses Leibniz's or Euler's notation, however all of Euler's, Newton's, Lagrange's and Leibniz's notations are still in use.

6. Periodic Table - This was a key chemical discovery, and initially not accepted. It was a big change to the understanding at the time.

7. Freud - The father of psychoanalysis. Many of his notions were not widely accepted, correctly perhaps. Nevertheless, he founded psychiatry.

8. Armstrong and the FM Radio. He also designed the double-heterodyne tuner, which is the primary tuner type in use today. He died poor after leading a controversial life, and butting heads with Sarnoff at RCA.

9. AC Power - Edison was firmly behind DC power. AC power can be sent long distances efficiently by using a transformer. DC power cannot. AC power is in use in almost all homes throughout the world, and Edison lost this technology debate.

10. Transatlantic Radio - At first, it was not at all decided if transatlantic radio was technically feasible, and even then if it was commercially feasible. Times have changed.

It turns out that most scientific discoveries are highly controversial initially. This controversy is a sign that they are new ground-breaking research.

Einstein's Nobel Prize was actually awarded for his work on the photoelectric effect, not Brownian motion.

Hannes Alfven similarly made a slew of successful predictions related to space plasmas and his success with predictions was overwhelmingly ignored.

What? Maybe you need to read the UU or KTH biography of Hannes Alfven instead of the EUT one. Alfven was a Nobel laureate based on his work in originating magnetohydrodynamics, won the Bowie award for his work with (non-electrical!) comets and astronomical plasmas, and made significant discoveries with respect to the galactic magnetic field and nonthermal synchrotron radiation from astronomical sources. He was very well known in physics communities (he's a Nobel laureate!) and his work, especially in magnetohydrodynamics, remains in use today by many of the astrophysicists you seem to revile.

(I note also that you claim that Alfven's acceptance speech somehow rejected MHD. No. Read it here: Alfven @ Nobel Institute. His banquet speech was a standard Swedish dinner speech with no technical content wahtsoever; his lecture speech elucidates his idea of the formation of the solar sytem, which is based on his work in MHD for which he won the prize.)

Alfven was an electrical engineer with some keen insight, mathematical talent, and an insatiable curiosity. He liked to complain that he stepped on toes by being curious about other people's (non-EE) disciplines, but really people in the fields in which he did good work (astronomy, astrophysics, rocketry and hypersonic fluid physics, control theory) were more exasperated by his unwillingness to submit to the anonymous referee system used by most of the large journals in the USA, which reduced the direct first-hand accessability of his theories to subsets of the relevant scientific communities. (He would have liked arxiv.org very much, I guess).

Yes, Alfven contributed some good stuff to astrophysics, but his Plasma cosmology was not among that. Nobody's perfect!

It appears that contrary to popular belief, a theory's predictive capabilities actually have little to do with its acceptance amongst astrophysicists today because our most popular theories in astrophysics today tend to have after-the-fact, retrospective origins.

Theories have to be accurate and useful. Alfven's Plasma cosmologies do not describe the visible universe.

Most of the scientific proponents of Plasma universe theory have moved on since BOOMERANG, COBE and WMAP's more detailed explorations of the CMB and the Sloane galactic survey have clearly demostrated the existence of a nearly-scale-invariant Gaussian random field, which cannot be explained by any existing Plasma universe theory, and which is a key prediction of Cosmic Inflation. Furthermore, the deviation from perfect scale invariance is exactly the opposite of the prediction made in the final Alfven-Klein cosmology, and the amplitude is several orders of magnitude too low to be compatible.

Nobody is perfect.

For instance, Immanuel Velikovsky was able to predict that the surface of Venus would be extremely hot at a time when everybody unanimously believed that the surface of Venus would be fairly similar in temperature to the Earth's. When he then accurately predicted that Jupiter would be emitting radio waves, it was claimed that his accurate predictions were pure luck.

Velikovsky, however, was no scientist or engineer.

Venus was already known to be hot by virtue of studies of its blackbody spectrum. Mechanisms were advanced based on the spectral lines which were far more reasonable (greenhouse) than a hot body cooling rapidly to convert Velikovsky's "supercomet" into an ordinary planet. The degree of required cooling of the overall temperature of Venus would have been measurable with then-current astronomical instruments within a year of the publication of "Worlds in Collision". Velikovsky's assertion of an atmosphere rich in long chain hydrocarbon

Is it possible to nominate someone for a posthumous Nobel Prize?

No, it is not. Previously, a person could be awarded a prize posthumously if he/she had already been nominated (before February 1 of the same year), which was true of Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Nobel Prize in Literature 1931) and Dag Hammarskjöld (Nobel Peace Prize, 1961). Effective from 1974, the prize may only go to a deceased person to whom it was already awarded (usually in October) but who had died before he/she could receive the Prize on December 10 (William Vickrey, 1996 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel). See also par. 4 of the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation.

This of course rises the question if, in light of TFA, Nobel laurates who die between October and December will be reanimated for their extra two years.

Nobody had ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. But according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, the Nobel Prizes could, under certain circumstances, be awarded posthumously. Thus it was possible to give Gandhi the prize. However, Gandhi did not belong to an organisation, he left no property behind and no will; who should receive the Prize money? The Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, August Schou, asked another of the Committee's advisers, lawyer Ole Torleif Røed, to consider the practical consequences if the Committee were to award the Prize posthumously. Røed suggested a number of possible solutions for general application. Subsequently, he asked the Swedish prize-awarding institutions for their opinion. The answers were negative; posthumous awards, they thought, should not take place unless the laureate died after the Committee's decision had been made.

On November 18, 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award that year on the grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate". Chairman Gunnar Jahn wrote in his diary: "To me it seems beyond doubt that a posthumous award would be contrary to the intentions of the testator." According to the chairman, three of his colleagues agreed in the end, only Mr. Oftedal was in favour of a posthumous award to Gandhi.

There's also evaporative cooling in a magnetic field. The atoms you are cooling are placed in a magnetic trap, and the more energetic ones "boil" off, leaving the remaining atoms cooler. This combined with the laser cooling is what was used to create the Bose-Einstein condensate that Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E. Wieman won the Nobel Prize for back in 2001. link

Further back, "In 1992 ... so called prion knock-out mice [were created]. ... Strangely enough, mice lacking the prion gene are apparently healthy".

While other studies have found, "abnormalities in circadian rhythms and sleep" and ataxia late in life.

Proportionally, such symptoms may occur in 13 year old cattle (see halfbakery link).

So, to follow the new year's theme of predictions, I fully expect to be able to buy prion free beef by 2025.

I was going to make a joke about a virtual Pavlov's Dog but someone already did that. Isn't anything sacred anymore?

There is'nt, never has been, and never will be a Nobel prize in economics.

The award he was presented with was "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". It was established in 1968, and not intended to celebrate the memory of Alfred Nobel as the name suggests, but the three hundredth birhtday of the Swedish central bank.

Alfred Nobel only mentions prizes in five categories in his last will and testament: "Literature", "Physiologi or Medicin", "Physics", "Chemistry" and "Champions of peace", and these real Nobel prizes have been awarded since 1901.

An excerpt from the testament

I'm a graduate student in Computer-Aided Drug Design, and as part of my degree I did a research proposal on prediction of smell with computers.

Richard Axel and Linda Buck received their Nobel Prize in 2004 for Physiology or Medicine for "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system". Note that this is not *only* for the discovery of the receptors, but also for the *way they work*. There are hundreds of receptors in mammals (almost 1,000 in mice, about 330 in humans) that have different selectivities for different odorant molecules and act combinatorially, that is, that the signal perceived by the brain is the result of the combination of receptors activated by the odorant. Given the large number of receptors, and that any number can be activated by an odorant, the variety of smells is huge, and on the other hand the promiscuity of the receptors allows for a chance of 2 dissimilar molecules having the same smell...

Some literature I suggest for someone interested:
- Nobel Prize illustrated presentation: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laurea tes/2004/illpres/
(see also the Nobel Lectures therein)
- Unpredictability of smell: Sell, C. S. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2006, 45, 6254-6261.

I really think that the system of smell is already quite strongly explained by this theory, that also follows the classical binding+activation of receptors that drives traditional biochemistry and drug design.

I'm still surprised that some theoretical chemist/physicist didn't do QM calculations to prove the tunneling, and publish it in a leading peer-reviewed journal, if the theory is so sound...

Maybe he does, but he'd be better off with Schrödinger's notebook.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureat es/1933/schrodinger-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_ca t

This years peace nobelprize went to a Bangladeshi who pioneered banking with loans for very poor people. I don't know how an ATM for poor people would fit into that plan http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates /2006/

Well... the sad truth is that Ms. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, whereas Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were awarded their Nobel Prizes in 1962. The Nobel Foundation does not award the Nobel Prize posthumously. Thus, she could never have won. But, there is no doubt that Watson's The Double Helix took great liberties in smearing Ms. Franklin unnecessarily.

Paramount Classics announced today that "An Inconvenient Truth" has grossed over $20 million dollars, making it the #4 highest grossing documentary of all time. As part of the campaign to encourage audiences to see "An Inconvenient Truth," Classics made an unprecedented pledge of 5% of all box office receipts to be donated to The Alliance for Climate Protection. With the success of the film, that donation will exceed $1 million dollars.

Consider our development aid record. Last year, the nations of the world spent over $1 trillion on armaments. But we contributed less than 10 per cent of that amount - a mere $80 billion - as official development assistance to the developing parts of the world, where 850 million people suffer from hunger. My friend James Morris heads the World Food Programme, whose task it is to feed the hungry. He recently told me, "If I could have just 1 per cent of the money spent on global armaments, no one in this world would go to bed hungry."

Ever hear of microfinance? This is the same idea -- one laptop can go a long way in allowing people to access information, just like one cell phone in a village. Bottom-up, self-directed development works best, and wins Nobel prizes. Look into it: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates /2006/index.html

Btw, Pinter's lecture can be read here in text. I just like to hear people talk, it conveys more meaning the way people emphasize things.

What I wonder is whether you believe that this is a political issue or not. Science has been "fighting" with religion for centuries. Do you think that fight is over?

In an age where some stem cell research is banned for religious reasons, managing only to drive the research overseas, is it wise to ignore the battle between science and religion?

.... Is your strategy to oppose such religious extremism, or is your strategy simply to surrender the battle between science and religion?

Since when was the Nobel Prize a team sport?

Actually, it's been pretty common since the beginning of the prize, at least for things other than Literature. Heck, the 1904 Nobel Peace prize was give to the entire Institute of International Law. The entire International Committee of the Red Cross has won multiple times. The 1902 Nobel for Physics was given to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman for ""in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena". Etcetera.

Lots more examples here.

Here's the schedule for future announcements: http://nobelprize.org/prize_announcements/

Actually, Norway should not be on the list, it has had assasinations/terrorist attacks recently. The Mossad gunned down some random immigrant a few years ago. Wan't even the guy they were after, jut had the bad luck to be at the wrong place. IIRC it was the first terrorist incident in modern times on Norwegian soil.

Nor should Sweden be on the list. Sweden has had two political assasinations in as many decades. Going back further, there is quite a bit of uncertainty about how accidental the demise of Dag Hammarskjöld really was. So the total could be three in modern times. That doesn't count Russian mafia gunning people down in parking lots, which would bring the total much higher.

Denmark had the Banditos and the Hells Angels in all-out war, even breaking into prison to kill. Now they collaborate... That doesn't count the street fights between ethnic groups nor the daylight gang rapes etc. Nor does it count the random eastern european mule here and there who drops dead from radiation poisoning because of a hot cargo in his vehicle.

The point here is that those that count above are all tied, or supspected to be tied, to the West, and the US in particular.

Here's a Nobel laureate http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laure ates/2005/schelling-lecture.html who says that more people are killed in bathtubs than by terrorists.

Wall Street Journal
November 7, 2005

A Nobel Economist Analyzes the Strategies Of the Deadly Serious Games Nations Play, Jon E. Hilsenrath.

Interview with Thomas C. Schelling, 2005 Nobel Laureate in economics.

[snip]

Schelling: "With the exception of the Twin Towers in New York, terrorism is an almost minuscule problem. [John] Mueller, at Ohio State University, estimates that the number of people who die from terrorist attacks is smaller than the number of people who die in their bathtubs. If you take the Trade Towers, we lost about 3,000 people. Three thousand people is about 3 1/2 weeks of automobile fatalities in the U.S. If you rank all of the causes of death in the U.S. or around the world, different kinds of accidents, drowning, falling down stairs, automobile accidents, struck by lightning, heart attacks, infections acquired during hospital surgery, terrorism is way down at the bottom."

[snip]

"It's perfectly clear that [the Bush administration] had no success in Iran, and it's had no success in North Korea. ... We really ought to give North Korea some kind of nonaggression assurance." It's rational for countries to get nuclear power for deterrence, but not to use it.

[snip]

Global warming is a problem; if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts, sea level could rise by 20 feet.

I'd say that eating brains scooped out of the skull of a live monkey would be totally equivalent to 'scientific' research for mere curiosity.

I'm somewhat intrigued by this notion of "mere curiosity" you mention. What do you feel is legitimate scientific research? Should research only be allowed if it has immediate medical applications? What about non-medical applications? (For example, Ringach's work has potential implications in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning)

To use an example I've used elsewhere in this thread, that of the Nobel prize-winning research of Hubel & Wiesel. In their experiments on anesthetized cats, they planted electrodes into visual cortex to gain an understanding of how the brain proceses visual information (the basic idea behind their experiments is quite similar to Ringach's, actually). Although their research advanced our basic understanding of the brain greatly enough for them to win the Nobel, it was basic research, without immediate medical applications. Do you feel their research was justified?

That's a question only UCLA and the researchers can really answer, by providing us with the information about what the research was. They refuse to do so.

In all likelihood, it's because they don't want to give activists some convenient soundbite they can distort.

In any case dude, it's not like Ringach's research is some big secret. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, all you need to do is a Google Scholar search. Ringach's experiments are pretty much standard visual electrophysiology, where you record from neurons in visual cortex while you present stimuli to an animal. It's the same basic technique which Hubel and Wiesel got the 1981 Nobel Prize.

What makes Ringach's research unique is (was?) the sorts of images he presented to the animals, and some clever data analysis.

How does a RV - essentially a bit of RNA (no cell walls) - attack a white cell? No one understands.

So one guy hijacked a whole branch of medical research, and everyone else just followed him. I don't buy it.

Science does make mistakes like this from time to time. But it's all out there - research him.

If that's true, then you're just flat out wrong about HIV not being present in AIDS patients.

HIV is found in most AIDS patients but not all. And then you have to think about the validity of the HIV test itself - is it valid? It doesn't appear to be. It works but detecting antibodies to the HIV RV itself but will always false positive if the blood sample is not diluted 400:1. And why the antibodies anyway? The inventor of the PCR test (used in HIV testing ) himself doesn't believe the link between HIV and AIDS. He's called Kary Mullis - check him out too.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laure ates/1993/mullis-autobio.html

The STM uses a stylus with a single-atom tip and is about a decade old. IIRC it's a carbon atom.

At room temperature the atoms and molecules of which the air consists move in different directions at a speed of about 4,000 km/hr.

Or maybe Werner Forssmann

Modern scientists are just pussies.

According to my copy of "Subtle is the Lord", Einstein failed his college entrance exam simply because he didn't study for it. He did, in fact, do very well on the science and math portions of that exam. Also, at 16 he was several years younger than the normal applicant.

While he did attend a "normal" school in adolescence he was top of his class. Grades provided by the family bear this out. There's no truth to the myth that he was a substandard student. He graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich with his diploma as a teacher in physics and mathematics. Being confrontational and hotheaded, it's not surprising he had trouble finding work, eventually taking a job at the patent office.

From nobelprize.org:

"During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin.

nobelprize.org

People believe some very amusing things about Einstein. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction to brilliance - cut him down a bit, lest we feel insignificant. You can point to a thousand sites that think he was dyslexic... and yet the Cambridge biography of the man found nothing on that subject, and the family has denied it.

>If the police will refuse to enforce this by not arresting the mayor, that will be even better.

As Gandhi & MLK demonstrated, it's even better if the police do enforce the law. Going to jail over a stupid, stupid law is a great way of saying "It's a stupid, stupid law" in a way that (a) attracts attention, (b) shows that you really mean it, and (c) gets the law repealed.

Not that I think the mayor's going to the pokey over wi-fi; I'm just saying that it's best if one wishes to break a law, that one includes the punishment in the total calculation.

Also, the point you make raises one of the problems I have with mainstream religion; it's that it often devalues humanity and life (this life)