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My argument is that if you select for scientists called "experts on climate change", of course that person will believe that climate change is real and serious. Just like if you ask a professor of theology, of course they will believe in God. Their careers are essentially based on that axiom. It's also hard to get a grant if you don't believe in the thing you are getting paid to study.

You are wildly out here. I am not talking about experts on 'climate change', I am talking about experts on 'climate'. My point is that virtually all experts on 'climate' believe it is changing. Also, the phrase 'climate change' does not imply anyone automatically assumes positive change. Climate scientists have also discovered negative changes. But now, positive changes dominate.

But if you ask a statistician, or a biologist, a physicist or a chemist what they think of the arguments for climate change being real and serious, they are much more skeptical. But they're not skeptical of other bits of science outside their specialty. That makes me trust the study of climate change less than say physics. That and the fact that when I actually look at the data, it's mostly random with a slight trend. I can't really explain any further than that.

This is just a plain wrong generalisation. It is not random with a slight trend, and if you think it is, you are looking at the wrong data, or looking at the data the wrong way.

What can happen is that people confuse apparently noisy data with randomness. With the appropriate statistical techniques, accurate trend predictions can be made from what looks like noise, using methods recognised throughout science.

Your generalisation is wrong because publications regarding global warming have appeared in top-rank interdisciplinary journals, like Nature. Publications only get there if they are of the highest quality, and recognised as such by those outside of the field.

It's not convincing to me, it's not convincing to the people I discuss it with.

I simply don't understand what is not convincing? Global warming? It is happening - just look at glaciers and the thinning of the arctic. That CO2 traps heat? That is basic chemistry and physics. That we are producting vast amounts and changing the atmosphere? That is plain fact.

"No respectable scientist is denying" is an appeal to authority. There's also an implicit ad hominem there, since you're calling all the scientists who disagree with you non respectable.

No, you are drawing the wrong conclusions here. In the past many respectable scientists did disagree. All that has happened is that growing evidence has convinced them. If you want to read the opinion of a real honest skeptic on this matter, read what Michael Shermer says. He has made a career on being skeptical about scientific fashions, and he is very well respected in science, unlike Crichton. Like you he assumed much of the concern about global warming effects was from extreme environmentalists, and damaging. However, look at what he now says:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B557 A-71ED-146C-ADB783414B7F0000

"How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip"

"The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance."

"And biologist Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) reveals how he went from being a skeptical environmentalist to a believing activist as incontrovertible data linking the increase of carbon dioxide to global warming accumulated in the past decade."

"According to Flannery, even if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent by 2050, average global temperatures will increase between two and nine degrees by 2100. This rise co

Read the Nov 12th Scientific American article on this release (http://sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=CE7B B73A-E7F2-99DF-3069CE90D77629FB). According to Wikipedia, Freund's adjuvant is highly toxic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freund's_adjuvant).

Also, some very early experiments in humans have been done in Israel, using a less-toxic immune-suppressive (which doesn't suppress as much). No success, but there may be some data from it that it was heading in the right direction (see SciAm article).

This would be great if it works; my father is a 72-year-old juvenile diabetic (since age 9 - WAY outliving the probabilities), and my cousin once-removed on my father's side is also a juvenile diabetic (age ~23, diabetic since ~19 or 20). Many type-1 diabetics die before they're 40, often with severe complications.

Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University, claims* that the appendix is involved in immune functions. Some people are born without an appendix, but there were no reports of impaired immune or gastrointestinal functions. This means that these people, as a result of mutated genes, have a loss of a phenotype, but their health are not affected by it. However, as very few literatures exist (also due to little number of cases) about people with a congenital absence of an appendix, we cannot exclude the possibility that the appendix is involved in immune functions. Nonetheless, we can assume that the appendix has little or no useful function, and thus congenital absence of an appendix as a result of mutation does not lead to any significant effect on the mutant.

As such, we cannot conclude if the appendix is vestigal or not, rather that people can live healthy lives without it. Heck, we can't even conclude if something is vestigal or not coz we'll never know ALL the bodily functions, not forgetting that the whole is greater than the sum of parts.

* http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articl eID=000CAE56-7201-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7

Who is Bill O'Reilly and why the hell should I care about what he has got to say?

He's on TV, that's why you should care.
After all, FOX would never air anything senational or just plain stupid.
They work hard to give you nothing but reliable, fact-checked information from people with impeccable credentials.
Why do you hate America so much, anyways?

The Telegraph and several other news outlets are reporting on the international deal to build the world's most advanced nuclear fusion reactor that was signed in today. Representatives of the EU, the US, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and China signed the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) agreement in Paris, finalising the project which aims to develop nuclear fusion as a viable energy source to fossil fuels. According to the ITER consortium, fusion power offers the potential of "environmentally benign, widely applicable and essentially inexhaustible" electricity, properties that they believe will be needed as world energy demands increase while simultaneously greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced,justifying the expensive research project.

While I do encourage slashdaughters to go to the library, you can also see the story on SciAm's website.

Talking about 'respectable' scientists is dangerously close to saying "The scientists I picked all agree."

Lindzen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /04/lindzen-point-by-point/
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00095B0 D-C331-1C6E-84A9809EC588EF21

May very well be a big-energy shill, crank, or crackpot, but MIT doesn't seem to be working real hard at distancing themselves from him, and he at least comes off as reasonable.

Stem Cells: The Real Culprits in Cancer?

Especially considering that the library people who are supposed to be teaching them are all idiots. We had to do that in my sophomore year in high school, and our librarian taught us such useful things as "Google uses boolean search terms" and "The internet is never reliable".

It's a list of 50 scientific accomplishments from 2006 that the Scientific American editors feel are noteworthy. You can probably get a better idea of this from the introduction to the article/list.

I thought it was interesting that the section on green cars ("on the road to green") mentioned GM and DaimlerChrysler for their work on new Hybrid technology, and HyMotion for their new plug-in Hybrid conversion kits, but didn't mention any of the advances with pure electric car designs. For example, the Tesla roadster has sold a couple hundred sports cars that perform well (0-60 in 4 seconds) with excellent range (250 miles). This achievement in a production auto certainly seems worthy of their top 50. While it's not exactly for your average consumer (it costs $100K), the company plans to offer family cars for their homepage.

"Buildings, roads and sidewalks have developed an appetite for air pollution. Researchers in Japan and Hong Kong are testing construction materials coated with titanium dioxide--the stuff of white paint and toothpaste--to see how well they can fight pollution. Better known as a pigment for whiteness, titanium dioxide can clear the air because it is an efficient photocatalyst: it speeds the breakdown of water vapor by ultraviolet light. The results of this reaction are hydroxyl radicals, which attack both inorganic and organic compounds, and turn them into molecules that can be harmlessly washed away with the next rainfall." - Scientific American (Feb 2002 Issue)

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

We examine arctic variability using long-term records of SAT from the maritime Arctic
poleward of 62N, fast-ice thickness from ve locations o the Siberian coast, and ice extent
in arctic marginal seas. Arctic atmosphere and ice variability is dominated by multi-decadal
variability, which is exceptionally strong in the northern polar region, probably because
of its proximity to the North Atlantic, which is believed to be the origin of the LFO.
The highly variable behavior of arctic trends results from incomplete sampling of largeamplitude
multidecadal fluctuations. Trends for LFO-modulated arctic air-temperatures
are generally larger than northern-hemispheric trends, but over the 125 year record we
can identify periods when arctic SAT trends were actually smaller or of dierent sign than
northern-hemispheric trends. Arctic and northern-hemispheric air-temperature trends over
the 20th century, when multidecadal variability had little net eect on computed trends,
are similar and do not support the hypothesis of the polar amplication of global warming
simulated by GCMs. It has been hypothesized that this may be due to the moderating
role of arctic ice. Evaluation of fast-ice melt required to compensate for the two-fold
enhancement of polar warming simulated by GCMs shows that the required ice-decay rate
would be statistically indistinguishable from zero, given the substantial intrinsic variability
observed in the data. Observed long-term trends in arctic air temperature and ice cover are
actually smaller than expected, and may be indicative of complex positive and negative
feedbacks in the arctic climate system. In summary, if we accept that long-term SAT
trends are a reasonable measure of climate change, then we conclude that the data do not
support the hypothesized polar amplication of global warming.

WinNT did not fail. On a test platform, not an operational ship, running non-release versions of software: A client application accepted incorrect input. A server application accepted this bad data, performed a bad calculation, and corrupted it's database. Client apps that tried to use this database crashed. These events are OS independent, the same thing would have happened under MacOS X or Linux. The publisher of the original article that blamed WinNT later distanced themselves from the article calling it "early speculation".

The chief engineer on the ship at the time, and the developer of the application software, seem to say that the problem was not with WinNT:

http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.h tml

"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits, "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred."

The captain at the time does further debunking:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorkt own.html#Schwartz1

In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states, "The _Yorktown_ was never towed as a result of any Smart Ship initiative. During my command, we lost propulsion power twice while using the new technology. Each time, we knew what caused the interrupt and were underway again in about 30 minutes. The September 1997 incident was caused by incorrect data insertion by a well-trained crewman. The _Yorktown_ returned to port using two FFG-7 emergency control units that specifically had been requested by me, and supported by other commands as a risk reducer. We knew there were some risks in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished."

OK, I've now had time to read/digest and investigate. This contradicts in many ways that article.
http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=will_europe_ freeze_over&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

More than half of all life on the earth has been wiped out, repeatedly, in mass extinctions over the past 500 million years. The biggest, at the end of the Permian, wiped out 90 percent of ocean dwellers and 70 percent of plants, animals, even insects, on land.

1. Volcanic activity releases CO2 and methane.
2. Rapid global warming.
3. Warm ocean absorbs less oxygen.
4. Anoxia destabilizes chemocline between oxygen and hydrogen sulfide, causing H2S to upwell.
5. Sulfur bacteria thrive while oceanic oxygen breathers suffocate.
6. H2S kills land animals and plants.
7. H2S destroys ozone layer.
8. UV radiation kills remaining life.

Scientific American had an article in june talking about stem cells and their role in some cancers.. specificly that some cancers are caused by stem cells in "normal" people going awry. From june SciAm: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B1BE D-0C0A-1498-8C0A83414B7F0000&sc=I100322 Pretty interesting read, IMHO.

So where are the reports for people who can't do without the Tee Vee?

Oh wait, right here.

Could it be that people are addicted to inactivity itself? I dunno, just a thought. Are there book addicts? If so, is it regarded as a problem?

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. The paper is based on statistical analysis of precipitation, cable TV adoption, and Autism. Interesting thoughts, but no proof. This is a true scientific look into posible Autism causes. No statistics - actual science., And a facinating read.

How about the nice printable page without all the breakup...

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0 00B7F38-893D-152E-88E283414B7F0000

Before anybody starts jeering stupidly and making wise about this subject, perhaps people should read this article from Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colI D=1&articleID=000B7F38-893D-152E-88E283414B7F0000

Now for some of the usual comments people tend to spew out:

Correlation is not causation

This is true - but correlation indicates that there MAY BE a causation. Thus, when things are strongly correlated and there are other reasons to suspect a causal connection, it is well worth researching further.

Increased awareness

Perhaps 'increased awareness' of autism means that we discover more cases that were not previously recognised? Perhaps, but I don't think it is very likely. Full-blown autism is not something you overlook. It is a serious disorder that in most cases means lifelong disability, and it is unlike any other psychiatric disorder. The increased awareness, I suspect, mostly means that now we spot more of the milder cases, but it is not my impression that this is what this research is about.

So why is it that people on this list are hostile to the idea that maybe TV can contribute to the emergence of autism? My guess is that this is because people on the list tend to be heavy consumers of passive entertainment, like TV and computer games; you don't want to hear that it may be bad for you.

If you have read the article I referred to above, you will know that autism probably has a lot to do with the development of 'mirror neurons' in the brain; a neural system that makes us able to imitate what other people do. Like all neural systems, the mirror neurons need to be trained, and TV is probably not a very good role model for that, at least not if you are already weak in this area. So it is actually quite reasonable to suspect that watching too much TV at an early age may contribute to the development of autism.

It's not the rotation, it's the tilt

The earth did it]

Of course, the better known theory that an asteroid caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago might also be related to changes in earth's orbit, no?

It's not the rotation, it's the tilt

The earth did it]

Of course, the better known theory that an asteroid caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago might also be related to changes in earth's orbit, no?

That yahoo article isn't really saying much at all. There is almost no real information on how they did it. Scientific American has a much more detailed description. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&arti cleID=000E9691-0261-1524-826183414B7F0000

In taking the next step, Eugene Polzik and his colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen shined a strong laser beam onto a cloud of room-temperature cesium atoms whose spins were all pointing in the same direction and fluctuating according to their given quantum state. The laser became entangled with the collective spin of the cloud, meaning that the quantum states of laser and gas shared the same amplitude but had opposite phases. The goal was to transfer, or teleport, the quantum state of a second light beam onto the cloud.

To do so, the group mixed a second, weaker laser pulse with the strong laser and split the superimposed beams into two arms. A detector in one arm measured the sum of the beams' amplitudes and a detector in the second arm measured the difference between their phases. Neither measurement disturbed the delicate entangled state between the light and cesium. But the researchers could use the results to apply a precise magnetic field to the cesium vapor that effectively canceled out the ensemble's original spin state and replaced it with one that corresponded to the polarization of the weak pulse, as they report in the 5 October Nature.

Here is Scientific American's article on the matter.

First Teleportation Between Light and Matter

He're another eye opener: U.S. homework outsourced as "e-tutoring" grows

This is embarrassing. Not only are jobs being outsourced, but now we're asking people in foreign countries to help train our children.

At this rate, in twenty years, the US will be the China of the 60's, and China/India will be outsourcing manufacturing to the US while they develop the next generation of technology (fusion, electronics, space tech, etc).

But hey, look on the bright side. 1% of the population of the US will control 95 percent of the wealth.

The september Scientific American has indepth book reviews on two books talking about the deep problems with String Theory. Here's some text ripped from their site:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&arti cleID=000713DC-8161-14E3-BAEC83414B7F0000&pageNumb er=1&catID=2

The Inelegant Universe
Two new books argue that it is time for string theory to give way
By George Johnson

The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
by Lee Smolin
Houghton Mifflin, 2006

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law
by Peter Woit
Basic Books, 2006

When you click the link for the Postmodernism Generator (www.elsewhere.org/pomo), a software robot working behind the scenes instantly throws together a lit-crit parody with a title like this: "Realities of Absurdity: The dialectic paradigm of context in the works of Fellini." And a text that runs along these lines: "In a sense, the main theme of the works of Fellini is the futility, and hence the stasis, of precapitalist sexuality. An abundance of deconceptualisms concerning a self-falsifying reality may be revealed."

Reload the page, and you get "The Dialectic of Sexual Identity: Objectivism and Baudrillardist hyperreality" and then "The Meaninglessness of Expression: Capitalist feminism in the works of Pynchon."

With a tweak to the algorithms and a different database, the Web site could probably be made to spit out what appear to be abstracts about superstring theory: "Frobenius transformation, mirror map and instanton numbers" or "Fractional two-branes, toric orbifolds and the quantum McKay correspondence."

Those are actually titles of papers recently posted to the arXiv.org repository of preprints in theoretical physics, and they may well be of scientific worth--if, that is, superstring theory really is a science. Two new books suggest otherwise: that the frenzy of research into strings and branes and curled-up dimensions is a case of surface without depth, a solipsistic shuffling of symbols as relevant to understanding the universe as randomly generated dadaist prose.

In this grim assessment, string theory--an attempt to weave together general relativity and quantum mechanics--is not just untested but untestable, incapable of ever making predictions that can be experimentally checked. With no means to verify its truth, superstring theory, in the words of Burton Richter, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, may turn out to be "a kind of metaphysical wonderland." Yet it is being pursued as vigorously as ever, its critics complain, treated as the only game in town.

"String theory now has such a dominant position in the academy that it is practically career suicide for young theoretical physicists not to join the field," writes Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. "Some young string theorists have told me that they feel constrained to work on string theory whether or not they believe in it, because it is perceived as the ticket to a professorship at a university."

The counterargument, of course, is that string theory is dominant because the majority of theorists sense that it is the most promising approach--that the vision of oscillating strings singing the cosmic harmonies is so beautiful that it has to be true. But even that virtue is being called into question. "Once one starts learning the details of ten-dimensional superstring theory, anomaly cancellation, Calabi-Yau spaces, etc., one realizes that a vibrating string and its musical notes have only a poetic relationship to the real thing at issue," writes Peter Woit, a lecturer in mathematics at Columb

In Soviet Russia, computer understands your problem and explains it to you.

(If I just leave the comment at that, I am sure it will get modded down)
One of the things I have learned to do is question my assumptions. It is a great problem solving tool, and can also be used just for fun thought experiments. Like this one. Your statement assumes that we input things into the computer. In the theoretical world of AI, why would we need to do this? Maybe we just need to confirm things that the computer *intelligently* comes to a conclusion about.

It is really hard to imagine far into the future. I always wondered how you could explain computers to someone from before the time of electricity, and the questions you would get back from them. And that wasn't THAT long ago. So how can we possibly reliably envision the future? One of my favorite parts of Scientific American is their regular feature of short science news stories from 50, 100, and 150 years ago. It was always entertaining to read. You can get a preview of it on their site.

Austrian economists are by no means mainstream, they are a weird little splinter group that mainstream economists generally scoff at. Now, of course this doesn't mean they are wrong, but it's a good clue.

Let me revise a misunderstanding on this tangent: I agree there is concentration of wealth in current economies. I disagree that these are free markets. I also disagree that concentration of wealth is necessarily a problem. It is only a problem when coercive organizations (like the government), facilitate and/or perpuate a concentration of wealth (as they currently do with market interventions and regulation). Left alone, concentration of wealth is temporary.

I merely pointed out Austrian economics as the most extreme philosophy that holds this position. There are many more economists who hold or held this view, even outside the Austrian economics.

How about you wait until Microsoft actually topples from a monopoly psition before using them as an example of how monopolies naturally disappear?

They are not the only example, merely one that we are seeing unfold right now, and one that /.ers can particularly relate to. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Every example of a monopoly in that article may face very little competition from within that market, but they face intense competition from other markets. Carnegie Steel faced mounting competition from aluminium which was growing in strength by leaps and bounds in the mid 20th, not to mention other metals. The NFL faces competition from baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, and numerous other sports. "Monopoly" is not some great, undefeatable beast which trounces all other options, and when it does, like Microsoft, you'll see that people soon find or create their own alternatives.

As for lassez faire, the 19th century was well known for its social inequality and brutal working conditions, all of which were at least in part due to this outdated and failed philosophy.

As are the same conditions in third world countries that Nike and other multinationals "exploit" for cheap labour. And yet, a recent scientific study revisited these nations after multinationals pulled out due to criticism, and found the living conditions far worse [1]. Women and children that were working for peanuts resorted to their previous occupations: prostitution. Most other jobs from within the country paid less than the sweatshops.

Also, you'll find that investments in the third world eventually raises the standard of living in those countries. We're seeing that happen now in China, and there was a recent /. story about how China is now becoming too expensive for manufacturing as the standard of living has increased significantly.

It took unions forcing governments to intervene before we did away with lassez faire's lovely legacy of unsafe work conditions, 16 hour work-days, 7 day work-weeks, low pay, and child labor.

Unions are a legitimate response to a persistently unfair employer, but your statement does not follow: why are governments necessary in the above statement? A union on its own can force fair treatment by an employer. So how does regulation and government intervention help exactly?

[1] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0004B7F D-C4E6-1421-84E683414B7F0101&sc=I100322

We probably won't. Landfill mining isn't likely to be more economically viable than farming anytime soon, and lots of research is being done to figure out how to get better precursors out of plants.

see:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&arti cleID=00037C83-124F-14E6-8DFC83414B7F0000&colID=16

Science doesn't appear to publish online, so no link to the full article.

Anyway, sure, they aren't there yet, but it pretty much comes down to picking the solution that is reasonable energy efficient and convenient. Wasting a little energy by burning instead of recycling is ok if you can just grow some plants and get better(fresh) plastic anyway. Storing the chemicals in the biosphere seems just as good as storing them in a landfill. And yeah, attention does need to be paid to the consequences of putting carbon in the atmosphere, but power production from hydrocarbons in general is the problem, not the particular hydrocarbon you happen to use.

A GIANT SPIDER IS ATTACKING THE SPACE SHUTTLE ATLANTIS!

I saw this on Fark, so it must be true! Here's photographic evidence: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&arti cleID=38EB982EE635354D3FEBF457BEEEE736

There is a good article about this in August's Scientific American by W Wayt Gibbs. It's only a couple pages but worth picking up a paper issue, or if you have one of their digital subscriptions here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa001&arti cleID=000637F9-3815-14C0-AFE483414B7F4945

Which is to say, you didn't read it. Honestly, have a look at chapter 12 (Attribution) of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. You'll find just a single mention, buried in the qualitative section, of Mann's study, listed amongst 5 other different palaeological climate reconstructions by different authors, and only to note that "the 20th century warming is highly unusual."

You said the SUMMARY not the chapter. The centerpiece of the SUMMARY was the thoroughly discredited "Mann Hockey Stick" a piece of shit so bad that not even Mann bothered to defend it when he testified in Congress recently. It was Mann's study that was touted as the "Smoking Gun" of man-made climate change and it was Mann's study that was reproduced five or six times in the Summary for Policymakers.

You can see those reconstructions (plus several others) charted together if you're curious. Mann's studies, let alone the "Hockey Stick", far from being "the centerpiece", get scant mention.

Actually the Mann Hockey Stick gets scant attention now because it's been revealed to be a fraud, which was shoved down the throats of scientists, politicians and the public. The other studies in that spaghetti graph are siblings of the Hockey Stick, using the same flawed proxies over and over again, as the Wegman report made clear. Steve McIntyre has shown that ALL of those studies fail statistical verification tests just like the Hockey Stick.

Hockey Stick Denialism means rewriting history, and Wikipedia is the perfect medium to do it.

Of course calling Mann's work a "scientific fraud" is rather unfounded too. You may note, in the chart linked above, that there are many other historical temperature reconstructions, done indepdently by different people, that arrive at a similar result to Mann.

As Wegman noted, all of those studies used the same flawed proxies, and some used Mann's flawed PC1 as a proxy in itself, even though it had already been shown to be a product of bad data in 2003 and bad statistics in 2005. There's even a nice table in Wegman showing how they are all related. Wegman testified that Mann's study was a piece of "bad mathematics" and was meaningless.

The Mann Hockey Stick was a deliberate fabrication of the climatic record. It removed the Little ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as global phenomena and even last year Mann confirmed that the Hockey Stick did not have those events. It should be obvious that writing "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" across the top of a set of graphs that doesn't show them is not exactly evidence, but we're dealing with Denialism here.

There is also the recent National Academy of Sciences report on the subject which concluded, with high confidence, that the earth was the warmest it had been in 400 years, and that while there was less confidence in reconstructions going further back, they still point to the earth undergoing unusual recent warming.

What they effectively was re-establish the Little Ice Age, which Mann had said didn't exist and downgraded the rest of his crap to "plausible" which my dictionary defines as

1. having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable: a plausible excuse; a plausible plot.
2. well-spoken and apparently, but often deceptively, worthy of confidence or trust: a plausible commentator.

That the Mann Hockey Stick was deliberately fabricated and knowingly false was the discovery of

Energy on earth comes from one of four sources. Period.

A) "Fresh" Solar
B) "Stored" Solar
C) Nuclear
D) Lunar (Tidal)

That's it. If you're using energy on this rock, you're using one of those 4 sources. Everything else is illusion.

For example - dolphins have been shown to understand what a mirror does, and to recognize themselves in a mirror, a trait only found in the great apes (including humans). See: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002433 B-A643-1C5E-B882809EC588ED9F I'm pretty sure goldfish don't get it.

It's gone paywall online, but a recent edition(June or August) of Scientific American has an article about bird vision, with comparisons to mammalian and human vision.

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0 00DA6AC-F10C-1492-A7CE83414B7F0000

There are nifty diagrams showing the different pigments present in the different eyes and their sensitivities. Another interesting factoid, birds have oil droplets associated with their color sensing cells; the droplets narrow the spectrum that the cell is sensitive too, increasing the birds ability to see color. The relatively poor color vision of humans is ascribed to mammal's rather nocturnal evolutionary history.

A somewhat related posting by the author of the article:

http://listserv.arizona.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9512c &L=birdchat&P=5566

here: http://www.sciam.com/podcast/podcast.mp3?e_id=000E 5E86-9BA2-14CF-9BA283414B7F0000&ref=p_house

Slashdot wants more characters per line Sky above 37Â375"N 122Â2222"W at Sat 2005 Jul 2 20:11 Slashdot wants more characters per line ScienceDaily Magazine -- News Summaries Slashdot wants more characters per line BBC NEWS | Science/Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Science News Online Slashdot wants more characters per line Molecule of the Day Slashdot wants more characters per line The Loom Slashdot wants more characters per line Cosmic Variance Slashdot wants more characters per line Scientific American news Slashdot wants more characters per line Sciencegate Slashdot wants more characters per line New Scientist Slashdot wants more characters per line LiveScience Slashdot wants more characters per line Science And Politics Slashdot wants more characters per line Chris C Mooney Slashdot wants more characters per line symmetry Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Discover Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Mathematician OTD Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line ESA - Cassini-Huygens Slashdot wants more characters per line NASA - Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line HiRISE Operations Center -- HiROC Slashdot wants more characters per line Cassini Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Slashdot wants more characters per line Saturn Today Slashdot wants more characters per line HubbleSite - NewsCenter Slashdot wants more characters per line MESSENGER Web Site Slashdot wants more characters per line Deep Impact: Your First Look Inside a Comet! Slashdot wants more characters per line Pluto, Charon, and other Kuiper Belt Objects including, Sedna, 2003 UB313, as well as Asteroids and Comets. Slashdot wants more characters per line Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Pharyngula

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FE C-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=2

Wanna talk about fear of being found out, look at religious kooks and their "theories" that have NO proof. NONE.

Tell me now what's more plausible?

A year old issue of Scientific American had a really good article which is a kind of Big Bang for Dummies.

The article is online and you can read it here: "Misconceptions about the Big Bang"

A year old issue of Scientific American had a really good article which is a kind of Big Bang for Dummies.

The article is online and you can read it here: "Misconceptions about the Big Bang"

It's the embryolic stem cells which has the various parties frothing at the mouth because specific types could be generated for the purpose of research and not as for the purpose of life. Otherwise, they could wear out their current strains. Preventing the gov'ts funding don't stop the research, it will only slow it down.
This is why a couple of families (and many, many TV plotlines) have had an additional child which they're hoping will be a better donor for whatever the issue is.

The other popular service being provided is umbrylic freezing so you can be your own donor, where I know people to begin the process of freezing their offsprings' cords and creating an autologous blood bank should they need something to be available and not worry about getting infected (e.g, Hep D, and E haven't been discussed and Hep C wasn't discussed [at all until The Amazing Plastic Woman got it].


Scientific American, issue prior to than the current one (chess boards), has a big story re: do stem cells cause cancer.

It turns out to be the July '06 issue and the article is online (free): here

If that link breaks, go to sciam.com, and follow the yellow brick road.

It's got a few suggestions for additional reading. I've read a couple of them before and they're good reading, but slow at times.

Apart from the time scale involved, this isn't all that new. Scientific American had an article on this over a year ago.

The recent SciAm special issue, Becoming Human has an article on the Bonobos -- "Bonobo Sex and Society" that covers it in more detail.

I'm going to regret posting this and admitting I know this, aren't I?

Okay, so Slashdot has this lively debate about Net Neutrality. And paid "experts" stage a lively-looking debate about Net Neutrality on the news. But in the end, does it really matter?

When it comes right down to it, the only people who matter in the debate over net neutrality are the congressmen. If we leave "the market" to decide, it will decide against neutrality-- because "the market" consists of a small pool of telecom monopolies, and they will always "decide" in their own interests.

And the congressmen, the only people whose votes matter here, don't understand this issue-- they're just voting along flat "Government intervention good!" versus "Government intervention bad!" party lines. So basically, what happens on the "Net Neutrality" issue isn't about what's best technically, or what's best economically, or about what's best for the public-- it comes entirely down to, which party line will win? Which party is better at pushing their line? More specifically, it comes down to, which party will win the 2006 elections?

And we already know the Republicans are going to win the 2006 elections. There just isn't any alternative-- there's no opposition. The Democrats aren't even trying. They're just sitting back, letting the Republicans set the agenda of Congress and the terms of every debate, and failing to either distinguish themselves from the Republicans or establish themselves as a credible alternative. The only time the Democrats even manage to get enough media attention for the public to remember they exist, it's over embarrassing internal bickering. And with no impressions of themselves in the public mind except internal bickering, the Democrats are going to lose.

So the "Net Neutrality" debate has already been decided, based on entirely external factors. What does Slashdot have to add?

Just a small note: most mammals are bichromats (except a large swath of primates, including us... and we are just barely trichromats). But most other land vertebrates are quadchromats. There is a nice article on this in the latest Scientific American. Note that this is in the print edition, and so the full article is not available free online.

Sorry, but the disavowal of differences between races is running up against more and more scientific evidence to the contrary. Human racial groupings may not be as discrete as species, but they have medical relevance.

The reality of race
http://mednews.stanford.edu/releases/2005/january/ racial-data.htm
http://www.policyreview.org/DEC01/satel.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002A35 3-C027-1E1C-8B3B809EC588EEDF

Medical significance of race
http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/080501/m et_6870358.html
http://www.marrow.org/NMDP/black_african_american_ patients.html
http://p221.ezboard.com/fbalkanhistoryfrm17.showMe ssage?topicID=2.topic

I'm marking you as a friend because I love intelligent discourse. Dialectic, the interplay of ideas, to me this is the most beautiful thing about being human.

Did you read the Mark Twain essay? It's very short, and quite profound, well worth the read even if you don't agree with him in the end. I am an idealist at heart, and I wouldn't wear my hair shirt of supposing actions are inherently selfish unless I found real explanatory value in it. The way I see it, the very fact that unselfish acts arise from selfish motivations is beautiful. It shows that what we consider to be good is so for a reason, that what we conventionally see as good is in fact smarter than evil, to use two terms that often just muddy the waters.

"See how the argument about 'biological differences' looks in a decade or two when women have finally had a chance to catch up."

Well, yes - that will be very interesting. But frankly, just extrapolating some past and current trends, mixed with non-trends isn't really a great argument.

English used to be a heavily male-dominated academic field. When formal discrimination was dropped, females quickly filed in and estabished themselves in large numbers, at most stages of the academic ladder. The same goes for many fields - females are now heavily represented in much of academia. It is very hard to argue for a general academic anti-female bias.

Contrary to what one might expect from your discrimination hypothesis though, females have had the greatest success in the least meritocratic, "fuzzy" fields of social studies and language, while the fields with the most rigorous standards such as mathematics and physics are still heavily male-dominated. There isn't a large diaspora of female mathematicians or coders toiling away at home, shut out from university by extremely stealthy sex discrimination.

Also, male and female behavioral differances is not a localized phenomenon to a certain human society or point in time. Rather, they are broadly similar across virtually all societies and eras.

As for male and female brains being different, that is not really an object of discussion - here is an old-ish article discussing the issue: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00018E9 D-879D-1D06-8E49809EC588EEDF