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Which must be a good thing, because it will make non-psychopaths far less likely to murder someone in real life.

I think desensitization is just as likely...

It's not that simple. I assume you are basing this on your personal observations, and not on any controlled study. If you do know of studies, please share them. It will take a while before we know the true effect of violent video games on a person, but studies are starting to trickle in: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/03/violent_films_and_games_delay_people_from_helping_others.php"> like this one showing people who play violent video games are slower to help people. There are similar studies for movies. These things do affect people, it's just not clear what the entire affect is.

(PS Please do not respond to this post with anecdotal evidence, or telling me I am wrong, without having some kind of study to back it up, or SOMETHING)

See Greg Laden's notes here. http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/06/lost_moon_tapes_found_in_perth.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink Because I'm from Perth this is old news. As Greg points out, the Daily Express may have some retracting to do.

Nice cut and paste skills for an AC. Of course the text is from Senator Inhofe's discredited Minority report. This is the same senator who introduced an anti-science fiction writer to the US senate as a climate expert. It comes as no surpise to me that Inhofe's pet lobbyists at the CEI are the same people in TFA who are trying to corrupt the process at the EPA.

Here is my own attempt at cut and paste from WP describing the area Inhofe alledegly represents:

"Oklahoma is the nation's second-largest producer of natural gas, fifth-largest producer of crude oil, has the second-greatest number of active drilling rigs,[72] and ranks fifth in crude oil reserves.[73] While the state ranked fifth for installed wind energy capacity in 2005,[74] it is at the bottom of states in usage of renewable energy, with 96 percent of its electricity being generated by non-renewable sources in 2002, including 64 percent from coal and 32 percent from natural gas."

I always laugh when people suggest the 'obvious' solution.... it either equates to, over fishing, destroying rain forest, inhumane treatment of farm animals, or well too much gas. Fact is the real problem is there are too many human beings... not only that these human beings eat a lot and we mess a lot.

Bottom line is the earth simply cannot handle it. In 1950 the world population wa below 3 Billion, in less than a generation we have doubled that. projections show that we will hit 1o billion by 2010.

http://www.treehugger.com/World-Population-Growth-2050.JPG

With the oceans over fished, rain forest being destroyed for farm land, and farm land being turned into industrial and commerce how are we planning to feed all these people ?

There is only one solution

http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/condom%20cartoon.jpg

I'm not sure many people want to be professional bloggers. I have a blog that has a small number of readers and having more readers is always nice, but blogging to me and to most bloggers is a hobby or a side element. Blogging professionally would involve a tremendous amount of stress as if every post isn't just perfect, readership, and hence profit, will suffer. Blogging would cease to be a relaxing activity. In fact, many so called professional bloggers such as say most of the bloggers at http://scienceblogs.com/ aren't professionals in the sense that they get large income streams but rather that is a convenience to have a small income stream in addition to their day jobs.

Also, apparently Firefox includes the word "blog" in its default spellchecker and "blogger" but not "bloggers" although "blogs" is included. Weird.

You have kind of contradicted yourself there. If we only know an infinitesimal small amount about how the brain works, it is kind of hard to definitely state the nature of consciousness.

On the contrary, we know a decent amount about how the brain works at a high level (brainwave patterns) and at the low level (neurons). What I wrote was that our sense of self and memory are poorly understood. In other words, we can see electrochemical waves flowing through the brain, and we can sometimes correlate changes in brain activity with physical or mental activity. However, the mental activity is only coarsely understood: your brain imagining an elephant looks very similar to your brain imagining a rocket ship, and my brain is the same way but will look different from yours. Imagining looks different from recalling past experience--actually, some research shows evidence that remembering something consists of the pattern of the original experience played back only weaker. In my view, this complexity and individuality coupled with the fact that our bodies and brains change continuously and in a chaotic manner precludes modeling accurate enough to forge memories. It took researchers a day and a half to model the sound of water hitting itself, and that's a relatively simple interaction compared to a process of consciousness that involves both billions of neurons and the waves they propagate.

I will agree with you that the "I know Kung-Fu" trick is many many orders more complicated then simply creating a virtual environment to interact with. However, why do we need to do that at all? If we have the technology to attempt something like that, why not just use the "fly-by-wire" concept? Create a wetware system capable of taking over your body and performing the kung-fu for you.

That's a clever, interesting option that I hadn't considered in the physical realm. Despite my kung-fu pop culture reference, I was thinking mostly of memorizing the LOC. The mental analogue to what you describe and which I forgot to mention was that instead of taking the time to memorize the LOC you would instead be able to query the network to get as much information about any book (or indeed any subject) that you wanted, negating the need for memorization. Your kung-fu solution is the same idea, operational knowledge streamed instead of stored, and is much more practical than the "Matrix download."

The brain is really nothing more than a computer.

This is a very modern idea that is quite simply wrong, just like all of the other historical brain analogies. See especially differences #6, #9, and the bonus. This myth has been debunked time and time again, but it seems that it's just something people (especially geeks) don't want to hear, and so the truth is drowned out by the fervor of the lie.

I think the issue has little to do with trying to equalize the balance of men and women so much as equalizing the balance in the opportunities to pursue the fields that people want. I think that the general agreement is that (especially since the percentages have been changing quite dramatically in recent decades) women don't have the same opportunity as men do. There are various studies showing that women make less than men for the same jobs, and this is blatant discrimination. I don't think anyone is arguing that men have less opportunities in veterinary medicine (although I think there is some framing that goes one as I mentioned below).

This reminds me of the way orchestra auditions have changed over time (described in "Blink"). Before, candidates would play in front of the judges and the judges would decide-- seems harmless enough. However, women have been consistently under-represented in orchestras, and especially on instruments deemed "better" for men (e.g. french horn). Now, candidates perform behind a curtain, so that the judges can't see the candidates, only hear them. Almost overnight, the number of women skyrocketed. I think it's essentially the same thing with women in math and science. People are predisposed to think that men are better than women at certain tasks/professions (even if it's subconscious) and this is reflected in the number of women we see in various industries. I don't think anyone is really immune from this, and in math and science, I think the framing effect is rather strong. Just read some of the blogs of women in science (e.g. http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/) and you'll see that there is still an opportunity gap.

Also, it's not entirely the fault of men. I think women have almost just as much to do with the problem. From mothers telling their daughters they're not smart enough to do science to an example from aforementioned blog: Isis took her toddler to daycare and the caretaker asked what she did; she said "I work at the hospital" and the response was "oh, a lot of the other mommies are nurses too." This does not help the problem...

what seems far more likely is that you simply don't actually have the intellectual firepower to argue the actual economics,

That's what's known as a courtier's reply.

Keynes is to economics as Lysenko is to biology.

-jcr

From http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/the_c_is_efficient_language_fa.php :

"I didn't know what language to use for this project, so I decided to do an experiment. I wrote the LCS algorithm in a bunch of different languages, to compare how complex the code was, and how fast it ran. I wrote the comp bio algorithm in C, C++, OCaml, Java, and Python, and recorded the results. What I got timing-wise for running the programs on arrays of 2000 elements each was:

        * C: 0.8 seconds.
        * C++: 2.3 seconds.
        * OCaml: 0.6 seconds interpreted, 0.3 seconds fully compiled.
        * Java: 1 minute 20 seconds.
        * Python: over 5 minutes.

About a year later, testing a new JIT for Java, the Java time was down to 0.7 seconds to run the code, plus about 1 second for the JVM to start up. (The startup times for C, C++, and Ocaml weren't really measurable - they were smaller than the margin of error for the measurements.)"

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ has more.

Right... one of my commenters is saying this is a fake as well.

Curiously, the internal numbering scheme used in this research is practically handing paranoia fuel to a certain class of anti-science forces on a silver platter.

The only viable male marmoset produced by the experiment was Code named "666". Are they trying to rouse the god squad?

According to the recent NYT piece on aging yet brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson:

Dyson published a paper titled "Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?" His answer was yes, and he added that any emergency could be temporarily thwarted with a "carbon bank" of "fast-growing trees." He calculated how many trees it would take to remove all carbon from the atmosphere. The number, he says, was a trillion, which was "in principle quite feasible."

You can disagree with his math, but he does raise an interesting point. Sometimes the best ideas are also the simplest.

As an aside, I noticed that a lot of his critics seem to focus on what happens if you extract too much carbon from the atmosphere - which begs the question of how can Global Warming be an irreversible, extinction-threatening process if it's so 'easy' to fight.

C really isn't that great.
See here for some info on C perf from a googler, and FFTW for the fastest code around for doing FFTs.
In both cases, Objective CAML (a high-level and functional language) smokes C. Both are in areas (in particular FFTs) where people have been optimizing implementations for decades.

Java _is_ faster.

"I didn't know what language to use for this project, so I decided to do an experiment. I wrote the LCS algorithm in a bunch of different languages, to compare how complex the code was, and how fast it ran. I wrote the comp bio algorithm in C, C++, OCaml, Java, and Python, and recorded the results. What I got timing-wise for running the programs on arrays of 2000 elements each was:

        * C: 0.8 seconds.
        * C++: 2.3 seconds.
        * OCaml: 0.6 seconds interpreted, 0.3 seconds fully compiled.
        * Java: 1 minute 20 seconds.
        * Python: over 5 minutes.

About a year later, testing a new JIT for Java, the Java time was down to 0.7 seconds to run the code, plus about 1 second for the JVM to start up. (The startup times for C, C++, and Ocaml weren't really measurable - they were smaller than the margin of error for the measurements.)" http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/the_c_is_efficient_language_fa.php

Your 'challenge' was already issued. From Git: "It is faster than all(?) other web application frameworks for serving small dynamic webpages. Please let me know if you have a case where another framework is faster!"

Put up or shut up. No one's interested in trivial examples. That's what the great language shootout on Alioth is for, where C slacks more and more every year. Or from http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/the_c_is_efficient_language_fa.php :

"I didn't know what language to use for this project, so I decided to do an experiment. I wrote the LCS algorithm in a bunch of different languages, to compare how complex the code was, and how fast it ran. I wrote the comp bio algorithm in C, C++, OCaml, Java, and Python, and recorded the results. What I got timing-wise for running the programs on arrays of 2000 elements each was:

        * C: 0.8 seconds.
        * C++: 2.3 seconds.
        * OCaml: 0.6 seconds interpreted, 0.3 seconds fully compiled.
        * Java: 1 minute 20 seconds.
        * Python: over 5 minutes.

About a year later, testing a new JIT for Java, the Java time was down to 0.7 seconds to run the code, plus about 1 second for the JVM to start up. (The startup times for C, C++, and Ocaml weren't really measurable - they were smaller than the margin of error for the measurements.)"

Here's actual data on the political views of the academy by department.

A gene therapy in humans that reawakens a gene we lost. The kicker? A kind of antibiotic cream can reawaken it without gene therapy!

Well, now CO2 is not an emission? "Emission" comes from Latin "ex" and "mittere", i.e. "from" and "to send", or "to send out". Ergo, CO2 is an emission produced by car engines, just like water is for that sake.

You seem to imply that CO2 is not a polluting emission, and curiously you call people who think it is "indoctrinated"; somewhat ironic, since the scientific consensus is that anthropogenic global warming is as real as science gets. If you are an AGW denier, you are the one indoctrinated by certain interest groups (fortunately mostly confined to the US), so much indoctrinated in fact that you ignore the world-wide consensus of people who know much more than you or I about this issue.

So, if you want to disprove the consensus (which historically has indeed happened a number of times), the only thing you need is to prove it wrong. So do not waste your time posting your wisdom on Slashdot, but submit your theories, measurements and simulations to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and when the article is accepted we will have something to talk about.

Otherwise, you could simply find a peer-reviewed scientific article (even if only one) that disproves AGW. Good luck with that, since it has been attempted before.

Wrong!

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.php

Temperature _trend_ is still "up", even though we have fairly large year-to-year fluctuations.

You're citing stock climate change deniers' arguments. They were refuted looooooong time ago. Do you think all climate scientists are idiots?

Specifically: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/historically-co2-never-causes.php

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/geological-history-does-not-support.php

From the long list of: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

Ummm, your links agree with me. Temperature rises preceded CO2 increases. It then goes on to claim that somehow the CO2 STILL causes it. Apparently CO2 moved faster than the speed of light and violated causality back in those days. The second link admits that CO2 levels are not well correlated with historical temperature (he blames this on a lack of comprehensive data--meaning that he recognizes that they don't have data, but he's somehow still right).

There is a lot more to the story of climate change than CO2, but governments around the world would shut down civilization rather than hear that.

You and I must have wildly different understanding of the word "refute".

You're citing stock climate change deniers' arguments. They were refuted looooooong time ago. Do you think all climate scientists are idiots?

Specifically: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/historically-co2-never-causes.php

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/geological-history-does-not-support.php

From the long list of: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

Ummm, your links agree with me. Temperature rises preceded CO2 increases. It then goes on to claim that somehow the CO2 STILL causes it. Apparently CO2 moved faster than the speed of light and violated causality back in those days. The second link admits that CO2 levels are not well correlated with historical temperature (he blames this on a lack of comprehensive data--meaning that he recognizes that they don't have data, but he's somehow still right).

There is a lot more to the story of climate change than CO2, but governments around the world would shut down civilization rather than hear that.

You and I must have wildly different understanding of the word "refute".

You're citing stock climate change deniers' arguments. They were refuted looooooong time ago. Do you think all climate scientists are idiots?

Specifically: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/historically-co2-never-causes.php

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/geological-history-does-not-support.php

From the long list of: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

Ummm, your links agree with me. Temperature rises preceded CO2 increases. It then goes on to claim that somehow the CO2 STILL causes it. Apparently CO2 moved faster than the speed of light and violated causality back in those days. The second link admits that CO2 levels are not well correlated with historical temperature (he blames this on a lack of comprehensive data--meaning that he recognizes that they don't have data, but he's somehow still right).

There is a lot more to the story of climate change than CO2, but governments around the world would shut down civilization rather than hear that.

You and I must have wildly different understanding of the word "refute".

You're citing stock climate change deniers' arguments. They were refuted looooooong time ago. Do you think all climate scientists are idiots?

Specifically:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/historically-co2-never-causes.php

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/geological-history-does-not-support.php

From the long list of:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

You're citing stock climate change deniers' arguments. They were refuted looooooong time ago. Do you think all climate scientists are idiots?

Specifically:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/historically-co2-never-causes.php

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/geological-history-does-not-support.php

From the long list of:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

You're citing stock climate change deniers' arguments. They were refuted looooooong time ago. Do you think all climate scientists are idiots?

Specifically:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/historically-co2-never-causes.php

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/geological-history-does-not-support.php

From the long list of:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

If you believe everything you read, you shouldn't read. I could post links to stuff like studies showing that the theomirsal scare was bullshit (surprise, when someone makes something up on the spot, odds are it's wrong), but instead I'll just post this and this because they have all the citations at the bottom. It isn't worth the time to post anything else because vaccine fear makes about as much sense a germ theory of disease denialism at this point.

That barrier must be overcome for video games to be accepted as a dignified medium worthy of serious topics. It's the perception that must be overcome. I challenge game designers and publishers everywhere to break down this barrier. At one point Lolita and Ulysses were nothing more than "juvenile self-indulgence" ...

Fuck that. The mainstream commentators will never, ever accept video games as a legitimate artistic medium. Ever. Games like "Shadow of the Colossus", "Ico", "Symphony of the Night", "Okami" and others will never be accepted by artistic communities or by the mainstream as being any more culturally, artistically or aesthetically important or "dignified" than "Pong" or "Zombies Ate my Neighbours". Ever.

Besides, why are looking for the approval of these people anyway? Mainstream artistics regard arrangements of concrete blocks as intellectually stimulating and worthy of acclaim. Most modern artists are wasters who spend their time talking up works that can and have been drawn by 10 years olds into magnificent products of human culture. Three blank paintings do not constitute art. The people who tell you they do, have likely no talent and spend their time and money talking shit and getting high.

Video game developers are much closer to the true artists of old than all the talentless hacks that call themselves artists nowadays. Why? It's simple. Patronage.

When Caravaggio painted The Taking of Christ, or Michelangelo carved David, they didn't do it because they were trying to get a Humanities Phd, or impress their circle of bohemian friends. They did it so well because they were paid by Patrons to specifically so they would do it so well. And more to the point they produced such great works because there were a hell of a lot of other great artists who were ready to step up and do the same if they didn't deliver the goods.

I don't mean to compare video game developers directly to Renaissance artists. But I do mean to say that like Renaissance and other artists before the modern day, developers rely on patronage of their customers to stay in business. There is a lot of competition, and they need to deliver an entertaining, challenging, and yes artistic product if they want to stay in business. This fact alone means that over time, games have stepped up to the plate artistically.

Show something like Gears of War to a mainstream commentator or art critic, and they will likely deride it as "crass" and "unworthy" without drawing breath. Now actually play the game and experience the mechanics. Look at the vistas and locales on display. Listen to tracks like the "Train Wreck" theme playing. Look at the real talent and effort that has gone into the game, and this is a title that isn't even trying to be overtly artistic. Now tell me that the product as a whole is a lesser artistic work than a painting of a tin of Campbell's soup, or an episode of Lost.

I'm sure there's a lot of Slashdotters who will queue up to deride the notion that something like "Gears of War", or any video game for that matter, could in any way be considered "artistic" or "dignified". Fine. Go back to reading Nietzsche or Kafka, or watching the Seventh Seal, or whatever else makes you feel intellectually sophisticated. Meanwhile, even crass "action" video games will continue to surpass in quality the majority of what you regard as "art".

- Any public-school science teacher, atheist or not, who wants to tell his students that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old and that Jesus didn't ride dinosaurs can expect to be "inhibited or dissuaded" from doing so, if he's teaching in the wrong part of the country.

- Yes, Richard Dawkins

- All atheists were "demonized" by no less a figure than President G. H. W. Bush.

- 53% of the American public would refuse to vote for an atheist in a presidential election. That's not just "demonization," that's disenfranchisement. Unless you profess a belief in an invisible sky fairy, you have no representation in American government.

More examples here.

Any more questions?

Blasphemer

Not only that, but recent research has demonstrated that lithium itself is one of the few substances that have an effect on the circadian rhythm, and this could be why it helps people with bipolar disorder and other psychological disorders. What people with common sense have been saying for ages, scientists may actually be starting to demonstrate in their research: that sleep deprivation and sleep disorders can make you go crazy if you suffer from them for long enough!

Speaking of logical concepts like "correlation does not necessarily imply causation", well, consider this. There happens to be a higher incidence of sleep disorders in people with psychological disorders. Doctors have traditionally assumed that this was because their patients' psychological problems were keeping them up at night. Well, what if for some of these patients, it is the other way around? What if a number of them have some kind of underlying neurological sleep disorder, and it is their sleep deprivation due to this sleep disorder that is causing their psychological symptoms?

Here's a link to an overview of info on the lithium/circadian rhythm connection: http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/05/lithium_circadian_clocks_and_b_2.php

Remember, humans are the only animals who volunteer for sleep deprivation.

It might help your argument if you actually, you know, knew the substance of the Dawkins lecture in Oklahoma before commenting on it. But then you wouldn't have much to say, because Dawkins' lecture wasn't nearly as controversial as you'd like to think. Or hope. I'll go into that more in a moment, but first...

I don't remember a ban on Dawkins, I remember a censure statement criticizing the lack of equal time for competing theories and stating that Dawkins is too polarizing for public funded venues. Of course I see the freedom from religion in the same light as the freedom of religion which does question the state or any state resources speaking about it at all. Dawkins does speak about religion and he does call people names.

Again, you might want to actually read the text of the resolution so you could actually be well informed as to what the resolution said. It was a resolution, not a censure statement -- and no, that's not hair splitting, it's a difference with meaning. The resolution says nothing about time for "competing theories," in fact, although it calls for an "open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian [sic] theory of evolution and all other scientific theories" and then proceeds to tell OU how it ought to be conducting the business of science.

The resolution does explicitly state that the Oklahoma legislature opposed Dawkins' visit because of the statments he's made about evolution and the opinions he's expressed about those who do not agree with his viewpoint. That's awfully "noble" of them, until you start to question why the Oklahoma legislature hasn't condemned any fundamentalist Christian clergy for the patently offensive statements they've made about the theory of evolution and its adherents. The difference here seems to be that the Oklahoma legislature thinks that mob rule serves as justification for asymmetric treatment.

Then there's the little detail that after the lecture, the legislators who engineered the aforementioned resolution weren't satisfied, and decided to go on a witch hunt because the university had the audacity to not bow to political pressure. Doesn't this response seem just a bit lacking in proportion? Or is that "justified" because you think Dawkins is a dirty name-caller?

Anyways, not wanting a polarizing person speaking on the public funded dime isn't really an attack on science, It's an attack on a polarizing person. His message is secondary to say the least. Especially when the school already teaches evolutionary biology. SO obviously, it wasn't evolutionary biology that was the problem, it was his "deliverance" of it.

The sad thing is, people like you actually believe this crap that you spew, and think it makes a dandy justification. Fortunately, Dawkins and some of his apologists actually addressed this issue. But before I touch on that larger issue, I want to point out that despite your characterization of the man giving the lecture, the substance of the lecture was far less polarizing than you might imagine, and it was very well received by the audience with the exception of one man. You can read a summary of the lecture here and here (although I think PZ Meyers would have been better served by avoiding the kind of editorial comments he made in that second link, even though it's his blog and he can say whatever he damn well pleases). The one man who made a scene may or may not have been the only creationist in attendance, but he didn't do a good job of repre

This is NOT yet known for certain: http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2009/04/swine_flu_and_deaths_in_health.php#more

Bumblebees.

I would guess Ubuntu has rather a large share of the Linux desktop (Net Applications claims to be measuring web usage - not that their numbers are the slightest bit trustworthy, and they admit to fiddling them) - if someone thinks "damn I'm sick of Windows being flaky garbage, think I'll try this 'Leengux' thing," I suspect rather a lot of those are going to try Ubuntu first as the one they'll have heard of as being an easy ride.

I'm not sure if Ubuntu's build of Firefox says it's Ubuntu in the user-agent. I'd check, but *cough* I'm posting this with my work laptop booted into XP ...

Well, this individual story might not tell us much but there's a lot of evidence that creationists are in general dumber and less educated than the general populace. (This is assuming that we define creationist to not mean "belief that God created the world" but rather almost any statement that makes more or less concrete claims about the role that God had in the universe). The GSS data is very strong in this regard, showing that there's a strong correlation between having a large vocabulary (which is a useful proxy for intelligence)and acceptance of evolution.http://www.halfsigma.com/2008/02/who-believes-in.html. Similar results occur when you look at SAT scores and IQ tests. In particular, Protestant denominations which are avowedly Young Earth Creationist have lower average SAT scores and IQ scores. See for example http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/05/biblical_literalism_or_low_iq.php which shows an extremely strong inverse correlations between the fraction of a denomination that ascribes to Biblical literalism and the IQ score (seriously, R^2 is around .86. You almost never get social science data that shows that strong a correlation).

One thing to keep in mind is that this doesn't necessarily mean that this doesn't necessarily imply that evolution is more likely to be correct or that the smart people are paying more attention to the evidence. Razib Khan, who put together the quick little analysis linked to above about IQ and Biblical literalism, has suggested (can't find link right now unfortunately) that smart people are more likely to believe ideas from other smart people and that this accounts for some of the strong correlation between intelligence and acceptance of evolution.

Much smarter people than you talk about the stem cell issues here: Adult Stem Cell Lies: Everything Old is New Again

Basically the conclusion is this: more study is needed before there can be an objective conclusion. What the professionals believe is not a good arbiter of what will actually happen. Just look at all the treatments believed by medical professionals to be effective over the years, like leeches, blood draining, etc.

For some reason a significant amount say yes... I can't understand why one would if they have already committed some terrible crimes, but they seem to.

The trouble is trolling through a large enough database will randomly create some false positives. Even if you assume the DNA data is reliable, which it isn't, then you still have the problem of "I bumped into this person, and through some strange series of events my skin cells contaminated the sample." There was already a case of the police desperately searching for a serial killer for 6 murders, only to later realize that the suspect was a technician who was accidentally contaminating the samples. Check out the story here, here or here.

The problem with modern DNA techniques is they can be too sensitive. They light up anyone who ever came in contact with the sample. Even if this is through accidental contact.

Good Luck if you actually had sex with the girl, and the rapist used a condom. Your going to be a suspect no matter what you do. Hope you have a really good alibi, a really good lawyer, and that the girl swears that you are a nice guy. Your going to need that alibi for the next 100 years.

You probably didn't pay attention to my previous comment. As I said it would be up to the community to set up bylaws that could for example make it mandatory for any resident of that community to pay user fees that a clearly for the local PD or for firefighters, whatever. This means that the firefighters/PD do not have to check whether you paid your bill, they would have to do their work anyway, but you would be on a hook for the user fees. Of-course as long as you pay them, there will be no collection calls and noone would kick you out of their community.

In fact this is not different from currently existing condominium corporations, where the services required to maintain the building and the property are paid for through maintenance fees and that allows local board of directors to be elected and reelected every couple of years and where yearly financial statements are provided as a legal requirement.

If you do not like a particular condominium, it is possible for you to move. It is also possible to get elected based on financial deficiencies and a promise to maximize efficiencies. It is easier for a local community to deal with its own efficiencies than for a large government to be efficient.

Communities could pull resources together to get larger projects built if people desired so, but it would be totally possible for real bidding to take place unlike what often happens. One example is Howard Moscoe, a Toronto counselor, who would rather have Toronto pay over hundred million dollars more for some streetcars by buying them from a Canadian company rather than allowing proper bidding with other firms like Siemens participating.

It is obviously not business of city of Toronto, Ontario to pay more property taxes to 'save canadian jobs' in city of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

This new story from /. is yet another example of how governments waste money, this time on http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090420/hayes">corporate welfare

Also if some communities decide they need school, it would be up to them to pull money together to have the schools built, otherwise private schools would be sufficient. I would not want to live in a community that would have a bylaw that would require me to pay 'user fees' for something I don't actually use or intend to use. I don't believe in public schools, as you rightfully mentioned, they used to provide some service - most people can read, it's true. But what the public schools have shown themselves to be, is not something I believe in from point of view of education anyway.

Another point is cops and prisons. One community might have cops as part of its system. Another may require the participants to train in usage of guns, to own guns and to defend themselves. Of-course this community would have to provide a meaningful justice system based on the citizens' participation and some professional investigation unit. Those, found in violation of bylaws or criminal laws would be moved to prison facilities. This is probably something that a number of communities would outsource and share the cost.

cheers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html
http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2007/05/monkey_economics.php
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/monkeys-practic.html

These links all point to the story, but not to any sort of brief from the research conducted by Keith Chen
http://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/keith.chen/

Anybody know where that is?

Sometimes they have, but not always: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/01/expensive_wine_tastes_better.php

"Hot burglary"? Is that like a "hot cop"??

You link to some guy on a mailing list claiming that guns in the home decrease burglary rates, without any evidence.

But he's completely refuted by the next poster, blogger Tim Lambert, who brings evidence and an actual citation.

The new empirical results reported here provide no support for a net deterrent effect from widespread gun ownership. Rather, our analysis concludes that residential burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence.

Whether you want to call it proof or disproof is a matter of semantics. However, the theory of evolution makes testable predictions. Those predictions have been tested repeatedly; sometimes they've been wrong and the theory has advanced (it's not the same as it was when Darwin proposed it), and often they've been quite accurate. The most dramatic examples are things like predictions that we would find intermediate fossils of a species in between two known fossils.

If you're looking for direct observational evidence of speciation (sometimes called macro evolution), it has been observed in the lab. One of the defining characteristics of E. Coli is the inability to metabolize citrate; this experiment demonstrated that E. Coli can evolve into something that can metabolize citrate.

In general, most modern scientific theories can't be tested in detail in the classroom; testing even Newton's version of gravity is a nontrivial experiment for a high school classroom. That doesn't mean it isn't worth study, though -- a discussion of the experiments is still useful.

Superficially, the decision sounds fine - of course we want students to analyze the scientific evidence! The problem is that the creationists are going to come back with a novel definition of 'scientific' evidence that treats Intelligent Design as a scientific hypothesis, and they're going to demand textbooks that include a treatment of all kinds of nonsensical 'theories'. ID is not scientific. It has no evidence in its favor (pointing out that we lack intermediate fossils showing the evolution of the lesser red-necked Argentinian swamp leech is not evidence that it was designed). But the Discovery Institute does have another bad textbook waiting in the wings for the next round of textbook-buying decisions in Texas.

For more details, see here.

Virtually 100% of real climate scientists agree on global warming.

You have to scrape the bottom of the barrel even to find several dozens of real dissenting climate scientists: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/more_on_inhofes_alleged_list_o.php

It doesnt go to a story, it goes to a login page.

If you can't find a URL that actually links to what you are talking about DONT FUCKING POSTING IT.

It took me about ten seconds to find the URL's below. Just imagine, how much time could be saved overall, if either the submitter or the /. ed had taken this ten seconds to find a good URL, for everyone, instead of *every individual reader* having to either wade through the jackass NYT login nonsense, or google around for this themselves.

http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2009/03/co2_freeman_dyson_magic_trees.php

and

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/some-inconvenient-thinkers/?ref=energy-environment

you refrain from pejoratives and hyperbole

Gee, thanks, "chump"! :->

I'm going to have a hard time translating something like Entropy into an equation...

The link I provided before does so, using the actual thermodynamic definitions of entropy. Here it is again (PDF paper it links to, costs money though). Even by a major overestimate of the amount of entropy in living things, the sun puts in over a trillion times more energy available to decrease entropy than all living things on Earth produce.

The main problem is that Entropy is not "disorder". The other problem is that entropy can and does decrease on Earth, all over the place... though the total entropy in the Universe does go up. If the naive understanding of entropy were correct, snowflakes couldn't form. Here's a discussion that addresses your 'broken glass' example pretty well, noting that "order" and "design" are two quite different things still. It also addresses something else you say:

I argue that what can't happen with an individual is impossible to take place within a population, because a population can always be split ad infinitum until it is a population of one.

You didn't cover semiconductors in your electrical engineering classes? They did in mine. Holes, doping, band gaps, etc. - such phenomena can't be observed in single atoms, only in collections thereof. (BTW, entirely unrelated aside: I once ran it through an anagram generator and discovered that "electrical engineering" could be rearranged to "rectilinear negligence". :-> ) What about convection? How about dipolar bonding in water - of no import in an individual molecule, but leads to anomalously high surface tension in liquid water, and the paradoxical expansion of solid vs. liquid water at Earthly temperatures and pressures?

Ponder for a moment how you'd measure the behavior of shear-thickening liquids in a single molecule. How would you make a quasicrystal out of one atom?

Early on, a blastula is composed of identical cells, but patterns of chemical reactions make "standing waves" around those cells, and start differentiation. You don't get that behavior from the individual cells - indeed, if you split those cells up, they form new blastulas, which then differentiate and develop. (One way identical twins are formed.)

Those are just the simplest examples I came up with off the top of my head. I'm going to ask a few buddies to come up with more examples of behavior seen only in populations, not individuals. It's actually a fun puzzle, thanks.

If there's a way to PM on /. please send me (geotopia) your email and we can take this offline.

Next to my name is a (slightly mangled) version of my email address. If you click on my nickname, my email's there, and you can find my home site with a "contact" page.

No, no, no! This is not a healthy line of thought! There is absolutely no way you can predict with certainty the future benefits of any scientific research. Even electricity was of uncertain value. The very point of public funding is for research whose benefits aren't obvious, but whose results are a benefit to science as a whole. You say that you believe it is possible to 'evaluate potential research'. How do you go about doing that? What are your criteria? Does research which has no practical application whatsoever but advances understanding of the whole get swept under the carpet?

One might argue that without establishments such as the Royal Society, a lot of great scientists in Great Britain might never have been able to publish.

You make a good argument. However, when you have a fixed amount of money, and need to distribute funding, these judgment calls do need to be made.

This debate rages on, particularly in the field of Fusion research. There are several proposed options on the table for attaining a self-sustaining reaction, only enough money to seriously fund one, and a rather fierce debate about which option is "best".

Is the LHC a good value for the money? Should we have constructed the ILC first instead? Should an international consortium have bailed out the SSC in the 90s?

I'm all for funding as much basic research as possible, although there comes a point when funding has to be cut off or redirected.

No, no, no! This is not a healthy line of thought! There is absolutely no way you can predict with certainty the future benefits of any scientific research. Even electricity was of uncertain value. The very point of public funding is for research whose benefits aren't obvious, but whose results are a benefit to science as a whole. You say that you believe it is possible to 'evaluate potential research'. How do you go about doing that? What are your criteria? Does research which has no practical application whatsoever but advances understanding of the whole get swept under the carpet?
One might argue that without establishments such as the Royal Society, a lot of great scientists in Great Britain might never have been able to publish.

The full resolution asked for Dawkins invitation be rescinded. Moreover, Note that they are unhappy because Dawkins views are "offensive". Furthermore, this is the watered down resolution. The original draft included language attacking the the university's "one-sided indoctrination of an unproven and unpopular theory" among other fun statements. See http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2009/03/the_first_draft_of_ok_legislat.php To me the most disturbing thing is the repeated emphasis in both the original draft and the passed version on the lack of popular support for evolution. These people really don't understand how either science or government should work.