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Ah, jellyfish. This is one of my favourite up-and-coming ocean doomsday scenarios.

Consider:
- No hard parts, so unaffected by ocean acidification
- Perform well in anoxic (low oxygen) environments
- Eat everything
- Have almost no nutritional value of their own
- Can shrink when food resources are low, and simply eat less
- Few natural predators
- Some species are effectively immortal by way of reverting to earlier life stages

To a certain extent, it's a bit of a miracle that the oceans managed to ever keep them in check, but oxygenation of the oceans created whole ecosystems of creatures that could--as a group--effectively compete against jellyfish.

There's no one predator that we can release that will keep the jellyfish contained or under control. It takes whole ecosystems to combat a real jellyfish problem.

Here's a review of a book written by Dr. Lisa Gershwin (composer Gershwin's granddaughter, I believe) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?pagination=false

Fortunately, humans are adept at obliterating species if they can get a taste for them. Better acquire a taste for them quick.

"Or you keep throwing things at it until it gets better by itself and the psychiatrist takes credit for it."

Yeah, it is ironic how homeopaths are villified but psychiatrists are celebrated, when the placebo effect is strong in both... Must have a better PR firm?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Quoting Marcia Angell:
        http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)

Bruce Levine's book goes into detail on this:
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711

Also:
"Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why."
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
"Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol."

The mind/brain/body/spirit/etc. indeed is amazing...

Why are you pretending that you have expertise in an area you provably do not- climatology-

You need to review Dyson's bio a little more closely. He was one of the first physicists to work on global warming at all, and I would venture to say that a lot of the experimental work that's been taken place in the last 20 years has happened because of his prompting.

and making dramatic pronouncements which are directly counter to what people who DO have the requisite educational and research specialization are making?

If you'd like to know why he said what he said, you might start by reading his argument: The Question of Global Warming.

It's great that you have cultivated an impish, child-like , authority-resistant public persona, but science is not really interested in any of that.

Actually, Dyson disagrees with you on this point, he's argued that there's a need for scientific heretics. Ane previously, he's had a book published on this subject: The Scientist as Rebel

Interestingly enough, this book did not provoke any great controversy. We all like the idea of intellectual rebels and heretics in principle, but when they go up against one of our own beliefs, then they're just incredibly arrogant for going against the authorities.

(By the way... speaking of arrogance, it takes some balls to lecture Freeman Dyson about science... but whatever.)

If you want to attack Dyson's policy recommendation on global warming, by the way, I suggest going after him on the economics. I guarantee you that he knows more about climate science than you or I do, but on a subject like the costs of imposing heavy carbon taxes he's got to defer to economists, and they've got they're own problems with objectivity.

In your article The Question of Global Warming, you make the point that the Earth's vegetation acts as a big carbon sink, and suggest that genetically engineered plants might do an even better job -- thus becoming the first person in history to make environmentalists angry by suggesting that top soil management is important. I have a few questions about this: (1) you mention the fanciful-sounding notion of "carbon-eating trees", but aren't there technologies that already exist that might do the job? There are claims that "no till" agriculture via the dreaded "roundup ready" plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially. (2) A big part of the argument against immediate reductions in CO2 emissions is economic. Do the analyses you've seen really make an effort to capture all the costs and benefits associated with a move like banning coal burning completely? The annual deaths estimated from coal pollution seem big enough to make it worth doing even before you put global warming on the table.

I am happy to pay for these publications because they are well written, well edited, and have content that is not easily available elsewhere.

Sure, except that they're all available online or in a digital format (e.g. eBook).

The Economist's
National Geographic
Harper's
Paris Review
The New York Review of Books
Granta
Foreign Affairs

Granta and The Paris Review appear to only have digital versions available, but the rest provide logins and a means to access the full content of each article online, from what I can gather. And, honestly, if you're interested in supporting these magazines, shouldn't you be reading them on a screen anyway, since the printing and distribution account for some of their largest costs?

I do believe something is lost in the experience when we switch to screens from paper, but I also believe that it is largely outweighed by the convenience of easier access, the availability of more content at any given moment, and the lower costs for content creators. And for someone like you, who seems to believe that content is king, I'm surprised you wouldn't agree.

There are very good theoretical reasons for expecting new physics to turn up at around 10-100TeV. Some coefficients in the current model indicate that there will probably be new physics at those energies. The last time we encountered such a thing was when Fermi theory (for weak interactions) predicted new physics at around 100GeV. When we looked there, we found the W/Z bosons and the Higgs mechanism. So this is a very good motivation for a particle accelerator at such energies. The LHC will have a max of ~15TeV. The SSC would have had ~50TeV and would have been a wonderful instrument and we'd have probably had it 10 years ago if they'd not cancelled it around 1990.

There is good funding today for astronomy experiments -- Planck, CMBpol, FERMI, etc... and they're not particularly strapped for funds. Scientists (including particle physicists) have made a strong case for funding in this area.

Cancelling the SSC to fund the ISS was imho one of the stupidest things that could have been done. The ISS has been up for a long time and till recently contributed *nothing* to science. Only recently, they've started trying out small scale space experiments up there. For a description of events, check here -- Wiki:SSC

The feudal mentality of imagining that particle physics grabs funding from other sciences is harmful to everyone. For some observations from Steve Weinberg (one of the most respected physicists today, and deservedly so) check here -- The Crisis of Big Science

Funny, it's the Left that is justifying tyranny under the name of "coercive paternalism". You see, when we have a choice, we make the wrong choice. Go and have a read and find out how much you agree with tyranny. Erk...awkward. Sucks to be you, doesn't it?

Yeah, I know....the Left has started the intellectual foundations for tyranny with a positive review in an elite magazine. They're putting John Stuart Mill on the chopping block. It's for our own good, of course.

Hmm, funny how the left is beginning the intellectual foundations of tyranny by dismantling "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill. Yes, the link does lead to a positive review by an elitist magazine. We shouldn't be free because we might make the wrong decisions. it's for our own good. Of course, the reactionaries (right) will be in for a full dose of this treatment.

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right."
-- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"

"You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.
-- Mao Zedong

"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
-- George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

So what is your excuse for ignorance if not youth?

Development of flagella has been gone over again and again, it is basic evolution re-using existing structures and processes to build cellular structures:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Flagellum

And further, abiogenesis, what you seem to call OOL, has nothing to do with evolution and natural selection.

And then some lame appeal to philosophers, not biologists or scientists, making arguments from ignorance. For a reasonable refutation of the first work of dreck, see what an actual biologist has to say about it:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/?pagination=false

His focus is based on a cost analysis (skip to point 6). He finds that we are better off financially if we take action now vs doing nothing and vs taking action later.

Regarding economic engineering, I understand your reservations and obviously we will need to take a measured approach. It is worth mentioning that we are currently supporting a system that flies in the face of libertarian values and a free market system. A core principal of each is that the cost of the good should be paid by the person consuming the good. The system we are supporting forces part of the cost (the financial impacts of climate change) on a person not even involved in the transaction. Just by including this cost in the transaction we can allow the free market to solve the problem.

This is a PR move by the FBI. It makes them APPEAR to be an actor for justice - it matters of little consequence, except those personally involved.

Another oxymoron for America? How about "Justice Department"?

4 Years - and not ONE criminal indictment perused against the "investment" and reserve Banksters. Surely, the FBI could better spend their time and resources to ensure that the entire country is safe from another criminal fraud, costing tens of Billions, no?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/20/wall-street-role-financial-crisis

http://www.propublica.org/article/why-no-financial-crisis-prosecutions-official-says-its-just-too-hard

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/should-some-bankers-be-prosecuted/?pagination=false

http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=30979

BTW: The Fed knew about LIBOR fixing specific to Barclays and beyond... in 2008.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/14/barclays-employee-to-ny-fed-2008-we-know-that-were-not-posting-um-an-honest-libor/

So what's our precious FBI doing about examining THAT evidence?

"I just wish they would make an exception for pharmaceuticals, because getting the fruits of someone else's labors for nothing is a moral issue."

There, fixed that for you.

Meanwhile, here in Reality, pharmaceutical companies are doing just that, and jackasses are jumping blindly off the cliff to defend them...

Eh - borked the link. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/

Maybe you should petition your local school board to NOT buy textbooks from Texas.

Eh - borked the link. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/

Seems to have been quite great for Google, which spent its first six years (1998-2004) without making anything and just running things on venture capital.

Actually not quite true, in the year+ before Google's IPO they were making money hand over fist, far more than they had thought they would be, and so they were hiding it:

By 2003, AdWords Select was serving hundreds of thousands of advertisers and making so much money that Google was deliberating hiding its success from the press and from competitors. But it was only a launching pad for the next brilliancy.

source

Global Warming/Climate Change may or may not be happening.

That statement is absurd. I cannot believe there are still people pandering this and similar opinions. Read Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong by William Nordhaus. Climate change is happening, and human activities are likely causing it.

[Not at] the rate that would justify dismantling civilization over...

Nobody is suggesting that. This is nonsensical hyperbole on its face. However, the scientific community is suggesting that we: use less energy, find renewable energy sources, and make less babies. The first two are profitable investments we ought to make regardless whether the climate is changing.

Here, for one.

It shows that Stalin did not, in fact, kill more people than Hitler. But the two of them together killed 17-20 million people. (The article mentions that this combined figure sadly doesn't even come close to the 30 million who died as part of Mao's revolution in China.)

Communism is responsible for far more deaths than the Nazis, by multiples. But Hitler wins vs. Stalin.

According to people like Diane Ravitch, who was assistant commissioner of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, the data is still too noisy.

They can't correct for socioeconomic makeup because schools have no way of knowing family income unless the kids are in a free lunch program.

Ravitch has a PhD, she spent her life studying the data. She started out believing in high-stakes testing, and now she says she had to change her mind because the data doesn't support it.

See
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch

http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf as her supporting data.

If the LA tests found that there was no correlation between the judgement of the administrators and the results of the tests, that doesn't mean the administrators were wrong. The tests could have been wrong. It could have been the tests that were no better than random, which is what seems to have happened in NYC.

I'd like to see anything that shows the LA tests were scientifically valid.

BTW, one teacher in LA killed himself after his low test results were posted.

They don't say there's no way to rate a teacher. They say there's no way to rate a teacher with a machine-scoreable test. This particular algorithm is statistically invalid. It gives bizarre results. A teacher ranks in the top one year, and in the bottom the next year.

They say good teachers can rate fellow teachers and tell them how to improve rather than firing them.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch

According to the educators who have been working on school reform for years, the only way to evaluate a teacher is to have good educators evaluate him/her by sitting in the classroom. Teachers know how good their colleagues are.

That would have the advantage of having a colleague in the room who can tell the teacher after class what he/she is doing right and wrong. There are programs like that. You can teach people how to teach. You don't have to fire them (except in extreme cases).

If you want a metric that you can give in a machine-scoreable test, it doesn't exist. You can't reduce everything to algorithms and computerized management.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch

Your understanding of statistics and scientific validity is naive.

The tests don't work. They don't measure achievement with enough accuracy to use them for anything more than a rough guide. People are assuming that the tests are valid, when they're not.

This is explained in the teachers' newspaper ad linked in TFA, and also here:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch

http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf

Diane Ravitch says the same thing you did. The National Academy of Education says the same thing you did. Every scientific review of these teacher evaluation systems says the same thing you did.

If you want to be fair to the teachers -- which most people are not -- before you fire them, you should read what they have to say in their own defense in the ad linked in TFA http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/uft-teacher-data-reports-formula-ad.pdf . They say that the tests have a huge margin of error. Teachers in the top 50% could be rated in the bottom 50%, and vice versa, simply because of the error ranges in the testing system that have nothing to do with how well their students learn.

If you want to conceptualize it, consider this: A good teacher in a top school with good students might have a class in which the average grade is 98%. Students like that have nowhere to go on a standardized test. They're already at the top. When they run the formula on teachers like that, they get bad evaluations because their students aren't improving.

Here's what Diane Ravitch said. I recommend the entire article for those who want to be fair to the teachers and are interested in the facts:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch

New York’s education officials are obsessed with test scores. The state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren’t able to produce higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe that the methods for calculating teachers’ assumed “value-added” qualities—that is, their abilities to produce higher test scores year after year—are inaccurate, unstable, and unreliable. Teachers in affluent suburbs are likelier to get higher value-added scores than teachers of students with disabilities, students learning English, and students from extreme poverty. All too often, the rise or fall of test scores reflects the composition of the classroom and factors beyond the teachers’ control, not the quality of the teacher. A teacher who is rated effective one year may well be ineffective the next year, depending on which students are assigned to his or her class.

and she cites the NAE study http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf as her supporting data.

You're wrong. That's the problem. The tests can't measure performance above expectations because there is no way to figure out what the expectations should be. The evaluations are scientifically invalid.

The UFT ad in TFA makes that argument. If you want to be fair to the teachers before you fire them, you ought to at least read what they say in their defense.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch

New York’s education officials are obsessed with test scores. The state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren’t able to produce higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe that the methods for calculating teachers’ assumed “value-added” qualities—that is, their abilities to produce higher test scores year after year—are inaccurate, unstable, and unreliable. Teachers in affluent suburbs are likelier to get higher value-added scores than teachers of students with disabilities, students learning English, and students from extreme poverty. All too often, the rise or fall of test scores reflects the composition of the classroom and factors beyond the teachers’ control, not the quality of the teacher. A teacher who is rated effective one year may well be ineffective the next year, depending on which students are assigned to his or her class.

and she cites the NAE study http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf as her supporting data.

Read this article. Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. She has a PhD, and she understands the statistics and data much better than you or I ever will. She started out believing in these educational reforms, particularly charter schools, and she said that, when the data came in, the reforms didn't work.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch

Most significantly, in terms of what we were discussing, she says:

New York’s education officials are obsessed with test scores. The state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren’t able to produce higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe that the methods for calculating teachers’ assumed “value-added” qualities—that is, their abilities to produce higher test scores year after year—are inaccurate, unstable, and unreliable. Teachers in affluent suburbs are likelier to get higher value-added scores than teachers of students with disabilities, students learning English, and students from extreme poverty. All too often, the rise or fall of test scores reflects the composition of the classroom and factors beyond the teachers’ control, not the quality of the teacher. A teacher who is rated effective one year may well be ineffective the next year, depending on which students are assigned to his or her class.

and she cites the National Academy of Education study http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf as her supporting data.

I don't have a PhD, and I don't understand statistics and the data as well as Ravitch does, so I can't help you understand this any more. But this is what the peer-reviewed literature consistently says. This is what I read in Science magazine. This is what the National Academy of Education says. Who are you going to believe, Mayor Bloomberg or the expert panel of the National Academy of Education?

Using student test scores to measure teacher's teaching ability doesn't work. The evidence is against it.

You should really give this article here a good read. It's not long and it's fascinating. Does it prove Strauss-Kahn is innocent? Not conclusively. Does it show that there's a heck of a lot more going on than something as simple as a woman claiming rape? Yeah, I'd say it does.

"Care to provide some sort of a citation for any of that?

"

sure

The NYT piece by Marcia Angell is excellent, really worth reading all the way through. The second part of her article can be found here:
here.

I found the most infuriating bit of information to be that Irving Kirsch had to use the freedom of information act to get the FDA to release all of the study data it had on the antidepressants he analyzed. I assume he succeeded because the patents had expired, so the FDA was no longer able to treat the data as "proprietary". It is really criminal that drug companies aren't forced to release all the information that they've collected about a drug once it is approved.

I think the NYTimes has some good book reviews but:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/
http://www.nybooks.com/

The NYTimes is on par with Chicago, LA, SF Chron, the Telegraph which is good for a paper.

In terms of quantity and timeliness: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Similarly for the other examples. Yes the NYTimes is good but the problem is in an internet based market they aren't anywhere near the top nor do they have anything truly specific to offer.

Type 2 diabates in most cases is curable within a week by superior diet. You don't have to look far to find lots of evidence for that.

Here are two videos by Dr. Fuhrman on that:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw

But you can find many peopel who say similar things about type 2 diabete. Type 1 also benefits from such a diet, but you'd still need some insulin, but with less complications.

The other two I don't know much about. But I can believe diet effects them.

Dr. Fuhrman is involved with a non-profit to do clinical research on nutrition:
    https://www.nutritionalresearch.org/

Here is a study he was involved with that suggests his dietary approach is more effective than gastric bypass surgey for weight loss:
    http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/high_nutrient_diet_and_weight_loss.aspx

Dr. Fuhrman is a great hero of medicine. There just is not much money in preventing or curing disease. And, sadly, most people just say the same things you do. It's hard to get people to change their diet, and our society offers little support for that. Here is part of why that is true:
    http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Anyway, I'd readily agree the field of alternative medicine has frauds in it, but I'd say the same thing of areas of mainstream medicine too. The Flexner Report from 100 years ago was part of what made US medicine become so messed up:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report

I collected lots of links here about how and why mainstream medical research has gone wrong:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html

Just one example for there, from Marcia Angell:
        http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
        "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."

Oh, look, they've stolen Apple's motto, too.

Sony has been on my skiplist for a long time now. I was seriously interested in programming the Cell chip, but it was welded at the hip to the Blu Ray tumour (and the politics that come with it), so I gave it a pass.

Recently purchased a camera as an mxas gift. Asked some people about their experiences. People who bought Sony AV equipment in the past had some stories about lack of ordinary interop, to put it mildly. Some of them put it in a good light: it's a lot better now with Sony's new products. Sorry, I've got better things to do than track Sony's progress through reform school.

Never much liked Frank, either.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

More or less same school of management.

To us Chinese, this is hardly news, considering that they block all kinds of stuff like "carrot"(contains a character which also occurs in the president's name) and "empty chair".

Two slashdot posts by me on general problems with research and peer review:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740048
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740098

Others stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/?pagination=false
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."

http://www.webscription.net/p-236-kicking-the-sacred-cow.aspx
"Galileo may have been forced to deny that the Earth moves around the Sun; but in the end, science triumphed. Nowadays science fearlessly pursues truth, shining the pure light of reason on the mysteries of the universe. Or does it As bestselling author James P. Hogan demonstrates in this fact-filled and thoroughly documented study, science has its own roster of hidebound pronouncements which are Not to be Questioned. Among the dogma-laden subjects he examines are Darwinism, global warming, the big bang, problems with relativity, radon and radiation, holes in the ozone layer, the cause of AIDS, and the controversy over Velikovsky. Hogan explains the basics of each controversy with his clear, informative style, in a book that will be fascinating for anyone with an interest in the frontiers of modern science."

One hopes that eventually science is self-correcting, but can that sometimes take centuries?

No. The anthropic principle is what this issue is. The question is which version of the anthropic is correct. Martin Gardner did an excellent article on this (sorry, most of the article is behind a paywall -- I have a paper copy in his anthology "The Night is Large"). The problem with the cosmological argument isn't "the anthropic principle", the problem is selection bias.

http://www.naturalnews.com/z030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096/rankin-on-thursday-where-communism-succeeded.htm
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-26/glaxo-said-to-settle-u-s-drug-manufacturing-lawsuit-for-750-million.html

Wired on the orginal article:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/the-truth-wears-off/

Anyway, this New Yorker article once again underscores the folly of going to extremes against common sense or long standing cultural traditions, based on some new scientific report or another, without looking at the broad big picture on overall weight of all the evidence we have from a variety of perspectives.

But even when there is a wide variety of good science, often policy ignores it.
Problems with the recent timid vitamin D recommendation:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Dr. Joel Fuhrman on how much money the USA spends on sick care for very poor outcomes:
http://vimeo.com/16682935

I would deeply, deeply love to see this pan out and become a viable approach with scientific evidence to back it up, if only so the rabid Climatology factions would have to eat crow and maybe apologize to Freeman Dyson (you might remember the outrage from the Climate Change community over his book reviews: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-question-of-global-warming/ ). Not because I'm for super-trees, but just because I hate the fanaticism being brought to this whole issue.

He was metaphorically burned at the stake for those comments, but honestly, it made sense--*if* the science backed it up. And I mean "made sense" in that it's a huge issue and that would be an elegant hack to solving some of the key problems we are having. It might even open up other possible solutions--better solutions--but those ideas were dismissed out of hand.

The whole affair reminded me of the outrage over Lomborg (http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html) who basically pointed out that the economics of the the environmental solutions espoused by the Climate Change community just didn't make sense. Or that you could have larger impacts in terms of changing society and the global community by putting your money into other "apparently orthogonal" solutions.

While it has been debated about whether these guys are "climate change deniers" (I think that's a red herring from fanatics), they are pointing out alternatives or uncomfortable facts. Let's do some science, some research, and some testing to make sure they don't have a point. If it's that important to address Climate Change, why are not ALL solutions on the table (as opposed to ones that fit a particular agenda or world-view)?

"US fared worse because we had regulations that encouraged sub-prime mortgages."

Not really. US had a bubble because a shadow banking system was allowed to appear. And even that was not a hard requirement, there was a bubble in commercial real estate as well. Paul Krugman (as usual) has a nice article with citations and sources: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/slump-goes-why/

US also doesn't have any regulations that _require_ banks to give out subprime loans. And yes, I know about the CRA.

You're sure there are abuses? well so am I. In fact I have no doubt personally that the abuses far outweigh any possible good that can come of the classification system. Time after time throughout history the US government has classified information for the sole reason that it's embarrassing to those currently in power. Until we require a judge to review every classification for legality (and I mean every one from presidential orgies to black ops) the abuses will continue. The government's record on this is absolutely unacceptable.

Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity.

I'd suggest that in an environment of social change where all things are hyper-political, personal identity is at the core, but it's much more convoluted than that:

Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites--politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers--are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink...the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.

Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that "the people" can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that.

Put crudely, the libertarian mob cries out "I know what I know and I don't need some scientist telling me anything different". If you listen carefully enough, you'll hear other groups (provocateurs, stake-holders, religeous fundamentalists, etc.) chanting along in harmony.

People are willing to pay for the paper edition because it gives them several benefits over the same content on a website edition. The biggest is convenience: you can take the content with you and read it where ever you happen to be.

You've made some good points, but I'd offer the following: I continue to subscribe to newspapers, periodicals and magazines for a number of reasons, none of which include convenience.

• Whatever it is I intend on reading, I can either read page by page, cover to cover, or skim the entire thing and be able to tell you exactly what's in that issue. With a website, pages are cross-linked to each other in an unholy, incestuous and distracting mess the rules of which are based partly in a misplaced effort at offering convenience, partly to pimp features (typically slideshows or useless video clips), but mostly to generate advertising dollars.
• To expand on the above, no one knows what's in today's "web edition" of the New York Times. It's hardly unusual in a print edition for the day's more important article to be buried on an inside page below the fold. You'll never find it on the web without extraordinary effort and patience. And then, of course, there's those serendipitous discoveries that happen only where there's pages to turn (the most relevant tech news is often found in the Business section, and who the hell reads that, right?). Either way, if you don't think it's important to know what's in "today's paper", you're not part of the discussion; you're just a uninformed (by choice) bystander in the crowd making noise.
• Can you say typography? Websites are, compared to print, ugly to look at and ugly to read.
• Computer monitors are wonderful for displaying things, but they're antithetical to reading. Don't kid yourself you're doing any serious reading if you can't get through at least half of this article, for example, before you start to fidget, try unsuccessfully and repeatedly to sit back, and give up in frustration.
• My newspapers are delivered in the morning. My dog and I enjoy walking to the end of the driveway to pick them up, just as I enjoy reading them in a comfy chair with my morning coffee. My magazines are similarly read at my leisure, but in the evening, and in another equally comfortable chair. You can't replicate those experiences with computer equipment.
• Oh, yeah, Google Makes You Stupid and hyperlinks are a distraction. So much for the premise (and the promise) of the world wide web. At least with respect to reading.

It's certainly possible that a Kindle-like device may revolutionise reading in general, and the newspaper/magazine industry specifically (publishers are certainly hoping it does). But until that happens, I'll continue to pay for print subscriptions .. and bemoan the downward spiral of things.

It was mentioned in Freeman Dyson's article Our Biotech Future, which is a good read in its own right if you haven't seen it already. (Yes, that Dyson.)

The NSA already has Google beat.

At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

...

Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Now, if only the NSA released their specs in terms of Libraries of Congress....

The right question is who cares when the NSA is spending $2 billion just on the structure for a building (1 million square feet big) to house computers which will do who knows what for signals intelligence. Not to mention another facility in San Antonio being built which will be the size of the Alomodome.

Let's not care about that but nitpick over something ~1% the size and far less destructive to our liberties.

Volume 56, Number 17 November 5, 2009

well, a book review from the future is a good enough source for me..

The right question is who cares when the NSA is spending $2 billion just on the structure for a building (1 million square feet big) to house computers which will do who knows what for signals intelligence. Not to mention another facility in San Antonio being built which will be the size of the Alomodome.

Let's not care about that but nitpick over something ~1% the size and far less destructive to our liberties.

However, Hezbollah is devoted to destroying Israel. Here [nybooks.com] are [standwithus.com] some [un.org] links [www.unb.ca], in case [psepc.gc.ca] you didn't bother to find them.

You copied those links from the Wikipedia article didn't you?

The first one:

Adam Shatz (April 29, 2004). "In Search of Hezbollah". The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17060. Retrieved 2006-08-14.

Hezbollah's announced long-term objectives-- [...] the elimination of the State of Israel

Unsupported allegation, which continues

but it interprets its founding principles with considerable suppleness, as when Nasrallah says he will not sabotage an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement

Next up: http://www.standwithus.com/pdfs/flyers/hezbollah_program.pdf

The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel[*]
We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. [...] Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, [...], and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.

Oh, what does that little [*] there mean?

The Jerusalem Quarterly, number Forty-Eight, Fall 1988
This is a slightly abridged translation of "Nass al-Risala al-Maftuha allati wajahaha Hizballah ila-l-Mustad'afin fi Lubnan wa-l-Alam", published February 16, 1985 in al-Safir (Beirut), [...]

[*] This paragraph did not appear in the original translation published by the Jerusalem Quarterly.

Ah, "this paragraph did not appear in the original translation. Why?

It is possible [possible?] that this omision is due to the fact that the source (al-Safir) for the translation did not include this text, which appears in the original Hizballah Program.

Appears in the original, sez who? Wikipedia says:

Some translations of Hezbollah's 1985 Arabic-language manifesto state that "our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated".[10] However neither the original publication of the manifesto, nor those found on Hezbollah's website, include the statement.[10]

God, this is boring, anyway, struggling on we have http://domino.un.org/unispal.NSF/fd807e46661e3689852570d00069e918/50862df07adbd884852569ad0054a527!OpenDocument

Error 404
HTTP Web Server: Lotus Notes Exception - Entry not found in index

Well, got 'em bang to rights there.

Moving on you cite http://www.unb.ca/web/bruns/9900/issue14/intnews/israel.html

Sorry, the page you're looking for can't be found.

The Brunswickan Student Newspaper is no longer hosted at the University of New Brunswick.

Please update your bookmarks to http://www.thebruns.ca/

A broken link to a student newspaper?

And last, and least of all http://www.psepc.gc.ca/prg/ns/le/cle-en.asp#h20 - "Public safety Canada" whoever the fuck they are say that that Hizballah is a "listed entity". Sounds bad. They seen to have read the dodgy PDF above.

You know, [citation needed] doesn't mean [stick in an unsuppo

Why did you stop reading the article there? Sure, Hezbollah does some positive things, and has a broader scope than just the destruction of Israel.

However, Hezbollah is devoted to destroying Israel. Here are some links, in case you didn't bother to find them.

Getting darkvision isn't all sunshine and roses.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4601

Sometimes the journalist may come to the wrong conclusion on the basis of limited information, despite diligent research. The public arguably has an interest in knowing if corporations evade income taxes, and the corporations arguably have an interest in making tax avoidance strategies as opaque as possible. A journalist may come to conclusions, well supported by the available evidence, that are nevertheless wrong

I'm glad modern medicine has saved your life. However, I'm sorry you've fallen victim to Big Pharma's propaganda. The fact is, some 60% of new drug research is taxpayer funded, done in research universities. A lot of the "research" Big Pharma is doing is slightly changing the molecular structure of a drug, so they can say it's a new drug, and then get a patent on it. So it doesn't really advance the cause of medicine that much, but it does promote the profitability of company.

The question you might be asking yourself at this point is, if Big Pharma isn't spending all this money on research like they say they are, what *are* they spending it on? A: Marketing. They're spending 30-40% of their budget on marketing the drugs. Something that doctors should be doing all by themselves, without any help.

If you care to base your opinion on facts, here's a good article to start with.

Circuit City had a bad reputation. If you could buy something somewhere else, you would probably go there. Now it looks to me as though Office Depot is ODing on the same foolish management ideas.

It would be interesting if we could know two things: 1) Exactly how much Office Depot makes by selling overpriced "protection" plans. 2) How much it will cost Office Depot because of stories about the company being abusive on Reddit.com, Digg.com, and Slashdot.

That Digg link leads to a New York Times article about the Office Depot CEO. Quoting: "The worst chief executive of the year was Steve Odland of Office Depot, according to Glassdoor.com's reviewers. He had an 80 percent disapproval rating."

CEOs in the U.S. often make 475 times the pay of the average person. I suppose it doesn't matter to many CEOs if the company they are managing dies. The CEOs make millions as fast as possible, and when the company dies, they retire or do something else.

That isn't honest, I think it is psychologically self-destructive, but it seems to me that's the way things often are.

Warren Buffett warned about bank failures in 2003. It was certainly no secret; anyone with any interest in financial business knew about the problem. Bank executives knew that what they were doing would be the end of their companies. I suppose they were making so much money (sometimes $40 million per year) that they didn't feel it was necessary to care. It was understood, and often discussed even on TV, that the U.S. taxpayer would pay for any problems that were created; that is happening exactly the way it was planned.