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Mr Justice Burton identified nine significant errors within the former presidential candidate's documentary as he assessed whether it should be shown to school children. He agreed that Mr Gore's film was "broadly accurate" in its presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change but said that some of the claims were wrong and had arisen in "the context of alarmism and exaggeration".

...just referring to the things that Downes alleged were errors. Burton puts quote marks around 'error' 17 more times in his judgement....Burton is not even trying to decide whether they are errors or not. So what is Burton assessing in his judgement? Well, [the relevant law] says that where political issues are involved there should be "a balanced presentation of opposing views" so Burton states that the government should make it clear when "there is a view to the contrary, i.e. (at least) the mainstream view". Burton calls these "errors or departures from the mainstream".

Burton's point is thus that the "errors" are not necessarily incorrect, just that their distance from the mainstream requires that they should be balanced in the context of the applicable law. Happy to clear that up.

I also have to point to my favorite counterexample of the idea that science has to be oversimplified to be worth reading, Carl Zimmer. http://scienceblogs.com/loom/

DDT is not banned in most of the developing world; it can be obtained, and rather cheaply. Nobody has cut off supplies. What has actually happened is that--- due to massive overuse for agricultural spraying--- many species of Malaria-carrying mosquito have developed immunity. Simultaneously, other more effective pesticides have dropped in price to the point where DDT is just one of many tools in the arsenal (and an ineffective one in most cases). To counter the notion that DDT has been banned everywhere, it's informative to note that a number of countries still use some quantity of DDT in their anti-malaria programs, but these efforts have only limited success and only in certain regions where DDT immunity has not been fully established.

The argument "for" DDT is mostly political, and carried along by people who aren't familiar with the facts. Some people are tempted by the notion that DDT is some kind of panacea for Malaria, but that evil environmentalist hippies are using their awesome power to prevent it. Of course, there's usually very little evidence supporting the latter notion, but it's tempting to believe because it sounds like a "free lunch" solution to a hard problem (one that happens to reinforce some folks' pre-conceived political notions). Unfortunately, the idea founders on, well, just about every basic fact of the story--- including the very important one that many of the nations that would ostensibly be "saved" by DDT use have chosen not to use it because it doesn't work anymore.

http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/05/who_put_out_the_contract_on_ra.php#more

No. You are falling for anti-environmentalist FUD spread by chemical companies.

http://timlambert.org/2005/10/crime-of-the-century/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/05/this_week_in_the_unending_war.php

And so on.

As a Creationist I'm stunned that they would do something this dumb. Honestly, I have no problem with people arguing about religion and trying to prove it wrong, that's to be expected and trying to silence it is akin to saying that your argument is weaker than your opponent's.

http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/09/liberal_and_conservative_anter.php

The three that do reject the consensus are Gerhard, which was published in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin; Shaviv arguing for cosmic rays, which doesn't explain how they could make a difference over the past 50 years when the cosmic rayflux hasn't changed over that period; and Zhen-Shan and Xian, which is just a rubbish paper that should not have been published. (What is the next number in this sequence? 60. Their answer is 60.)

One of the problems, is sometimes the media gets science wrong out of ignorance.
Other times, there's a 'reason'. Either it's a well oiled PR firm or political gain.

I love this site that blogs about bad science and reference the other CRANKS and WONKS out there that continuously spout off the wrong information and call it science.

They've deemed it the art of Denialism:

This one is classic:

How to write a Terrible Science Paper:
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/09/how_to_w rite_a_terrible_scienc.php

Or Does Smoking Pot Cause Schizophrenia?

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/07/does_smo king_cannabis_cause_sc.php

http://www.scienceblogs.com/denialism/

Great stuff!

One of the problems, is sometimes the media gets science wrong out of ignorance.
Other times, there's a 'reason'. Either it's a well oiled PR firm or political gain.

I love this site that blogs about bad science and reference the other CRANKS and WONKS out there that continuously spout off the wrong information and call it science.

They've deemed it the art of Denialism:

This one is classic:

How to write a Terrible Science Paper:
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/09/how_to_w rite_a_terrible_scienc.php

Or Does Smoking Pot Cause Schizophrenia?

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/07/does_smo king_cannabis_cause_sc.php

http://www.scienceblogs.com/denialism/

Great stuff!

One of the problems, is sometimes the media gets science wrong out of ignorance.
Other times, there's a 'reason'. Either it's a well oiled PR firm or political gain.

I love this site that blogs about bad science and reference the other CRANKS and WONKS out there that continuously spout off the wrong information and call it science.

They've deemed it the art of Denialism:

This one is classic:

How to write a Terrible Science Paper:
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/09/how_to_w rite_a_terrible_scienc.php

Or Does Smoking Pot Cause Schizophrenia?

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/07/does_smo king_cannabis_cause_sc.php

http://www.scienceblogs.com/denialism/

Great stuff!

There's also a bit of a problem calling those lines human and gorilla. Really 8-12 million years ago, those species don't exist in the least. And the "human line" still gives rise to chimp, human, bonobos, not to mention all the hominids and offshoots thereof. It isn't anywhere near as amazing as people seem to pretend it is, as every fossil find needs to cause massive changes to our understanding of human evolution, even if it doesn't. I'd recommend the blog afarensis actually written by somebody in the fields and covers most of the neat finds.

Another problem with putting the human-chimp divergence back that far is that it doesn't make any sense. Humans just aren't that different from chimps. We don't have as much hair, we stand upright, have some impressive cognitive functions, are much weaker, have restructured hips, feet and hands. But really, that's it. Hardly amazing, and hardly 10 million years worth of work.

I'm a big fan of PZ's blog, and he did say in another post that Pivar was a crackpot.

IANAEB (I am not an evolutionary biologist) but I'd side with Myers. Pivar sounds like a crackpot and a tool as well.

To be fair if you click on the link to the review, the author provides a link to the actual review: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/07/lifecod e.php Where he does use the term crackpottery. However, as it has been pointed out, by the meaning of the word crackpot, the author was making a true statement calling him that and should not be punished for it. The most likely reason for this lawsuit is to draw media attention to the book and cause ignorant or curious people to buy the book.

I have to add another compliment for the book, though. In addition to the lovely artwork, it's an extremely high quality print; well bound, on heavy stock, and looking to last a thousand years. It seems no expense was spared getting it published, which is in contrast to the content, and is unusual for such flagrant crackpottery. It may well be popular among creationists, who can always be trusted to favor glossy superficialities over substance.

To Mr Pivar, I would suggest a simple rule. Theories are supposed to explain observation and experiment. You don't come up with a theory first, and then invent the evidence to support it. Lifecode

He launched a blog to attract attention to his research and created a website where he posted his manuscripts that had been rejected by Nature. But in early January of this year, he finally had a paper accepted into a real science journal--Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

Decades of research have created a massive body of scientific literature on climate change, and thousands of new studies on the subject appear every year in different science journals. Yet, within weeks of publishing his first peer-reviewed study, McIntyre was profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The article ran 2209 words and was written by reporter Antonio Regalado.

Tara Smith, a Professor of Epidemiology, and author of the science blog Aetiology (which I like) reviewed the book here , and has a short interview with Danica.

Tara Smith, a Professor of Epidemiology, and author of the science blog Aetiology (which I like) reviewed the book here , and has a short interview with Danica.

Tara Smith, a Professor of Epidemiology, and author of the science blog Aetiology (which I like) reviewed the book here , and has a short interview with Danica.

Ignorant?

With respect, http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/ (various articles) and more specifically Bad Science (http://www.badscience.net/?p=470) contain lots of information to counter what you have said in your post. Maybe the 'ignorant' should read what these scientific bloggers have to say ...

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/07/in venting_the_lobotomy.php

.. something seems different .. can't quite put my finger on it ..

I write proprietary code for a living as do plenty of other people here I'm sure. Why should everybody have to release code as open source? Some of us would like to get paid for what we do without having to "add value" by offering support services as well.

Some people would like to be paid for going to the toilet, but it ain't gonna happen.

At any rate, there's such a thing as software which you get in Source Code form, but have to pay for and aren't allowed to copy or distribute. There's no evidence that non-availability of Source Code prevents unauthorised distribution. There is evidence that non-availability of Source Code fucks people's computers up.

In terms of Linux drivers there are several reasons why companies do not create or want open source drivers for their hardware. The most obvious one being that you are trying to keep exactly what the hardware does secret to make it harder for your competition to copy its functionality.

You aren't allowed to keep exactly what the hardware does secret from its rightful owner. That's just Common Law Property Rights.

Personally I don't give a shit whether the drivers on my system are open or closed source, I just want them to work and closely match the functionality of the windows drivers.

And the best way to achieve that is by making the Source Code available, so that as many people as possible get the opportunity to inspect and improve the drivers. If the driver belongs in the kernel, so much the better. Linux kernel developers are by definition some of the world's best programmers.

I have no interest in looking through the code that makes up every driver on my Linux box any more than I would like to do a code audit on every version of Linux kernel before I compile it. Are you going to tell me that you have looked through the code for the various open source apps you use or do you take most of them on trust just like proprietary apps? Certainly for me this is far too much like what I do for a living to do it every night when I get home as well.

This is a variant on the Argument from Incredulity, aka Argument from Limited Imagination. As usually presented in places like Pharyngula it goes along the lines of "I can't believe ___ could have happened, so God must have done it." Here, we have "I can't believe anybody would read the Source Code so nobody does it". Same argument. Still a phallacy.

I would not want to use this particular driver as it is quite obviously a worthless piece of badly written junk but this does not mean that all proprietrary drivers need to be. Also note that this driver was revealed to be a piece of crap without needing access to the source code.

It was found to be a piece of crap by studying such parts of the Source Code as were available. Who knows what horrors would be revealed, had anyone dared look further?

For a good example of a closed source driver check out the nvidia driver. It works and has never casued me any problems. I know it has had some security holes in it but so have plenty of open source drivers.

Slave: My master is a good master! He is better than some masters, who make their slaves work in forty-five degree temperatures. At least my master lets me stop working for awhile when it gets to 40 degrees. And he feeds me every day. Even some free people don't get a meal every day.

You're deluding yourself if you think an Open Source driver would be worse.

I do think that the open source usually produces better quality software if the project is well maintained, but not this model is not suitable for every piece of code produced.

Have to disagree with you there. Keeping the Source Code hidden from end users (and -- probably more important -- developers; although

Actually, pharyngula has moved over to http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/

Just did a search, and here's as decent a summary of any of the field and development of thinking about the subject:

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/06/those_de nialists_move_fast_1.php

It's part of a larger discussion about creationism that's offtopic from what you asked about, but the timeline itself is what I wanted to point out.

After reading what some actual scientists have to say about this, I think its worth noting that the way this article phrases and "explains" things is seriously confused and confusing, and most of our discussion here is a complete mess because of it. Understanding biology's position on JunkDNA is a LOT more complicated than just thinking you know what the word "junk" implies.

Here's some posts relevant to this issue:
http://genomicron.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-about- encode-from-scientific.html
http://genomicron.blogspot.com/2007/06/junk-dna-ge ts-wired.html
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/06/wired-on-junk -dna.html
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/06/its_jun k_get_over_it.php

Galileo ran into trouble because of remarks he made about the hope - politics was the problem, not science.

I can't believe this ridiculous white-washing of history. It's on par with the previous pope's remarks that the Galileo affair was just something like healthy "scientific skepticism" on the side of the church. He was tried by the Papal Inquisition for breaking the church edict that forbade promoting heliocentric model as more than a hypothesis, or heresy. Insulting Pope Urban VIII was not the crime his book was ultimately banned (until the 19th century!) for, or the crime why he was put under house arrest for the rest of his life. The crime he was charged with was "heresy". Just read the recantation he was forced to read. The Church didn't even apologize until the 20th century, and even then they were apologetic.

Then there is also Giordano Bruno, who was burned on a stake for the heresy of going against the Catholic dogma. His works were banned by the Church for hundreds of years too. I wonder how you would construe that to not be a conflict of science and religion.

Try telling them that Christianity and science don't mix.

The statistics speak for themselves: science, especially the natural sciences, is corrosive for religious faith, and religion is corrosive for education. If you don't believe it fuels indoctrination of ignorance, just look at how Ken Ham teaches children, the exhibits in his "museum", or the Trojan horse of the religionists -- the ID creationism. It's almost amusing how you claim that there is no conflict between science and religion, and base it on the fact that there are many scientists with religious beliefs, as if that meant anything after thousands of years of religious, in this case Christian, hegemony. Duh!

Sure, if we go along with your false dichotomy that anything you think is a contradiction must be a contradiction and the explanations of those who know the Bible better, have studied it considerably more and arrive at a different conclusion are clearly wrong.

No one who has actually studied the Bible can honestly say that there are no contradictions. If they do, they really are wrong (most don't). Also, your usage of "false dichotomy" is nonsensical. If I think that 2 + 2 is not 5, is it also a "false dichotomy" just because someone might interpret that expression with his own arithetic in which there are different rules?

Exactly. Using 26 is a noob mistake. He should have said the chance was 17%. As everybody knows, 17 is the most random number http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/is_ 17_the_most_random_number.php

Yeah that's right C++ can't match C. It outperforms it. The STL sort function is faster than qsort http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html. I'll leave it to you to figure out why this is true but it has to do with the extra type information you can embed when using templates in C++. I'm willing to bet that a library written in C++ using expression templates, like Boost::uBlas or VSIPL++ will be faster than an equivalent C implementation. Anyway arguing for C based on it's performance against C++ is daft and it annoys me that people still do. Also read this http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/the_c_is_ efficient_language_fa.php. He makes some good points about what C and C++ is good at (mucking with memory addressese) and not good at (numeric computation, efficient optimized code). Now go tell your programmers at your company to use the STL sort because it's faster.

As for those who don't, a rogues gallery...

Well, things might get worse. Kenneth R. Williard, who was a member of the Kansas Board of Education (yes, you probably remember that) is running unopposed to be the president of the National Association of State Boards of Education, a non-profit organization of state school boards.

Apparently, when he was on the Kansas board, the board was looking for a replacement for the education commissioner, and hired the NASBE, the group he wants to lead - and fired it.

"It's a great place for children who are in public school and haven't really decided what to believe yet."

Who ya gonna believe! GOD or some hairy liberal professor!

Welcome to the 21st Century, America!

Okay, so the story's a few days old and everyone here's pretty much already given it the vivisection it so richly deserves. But there's a bit more from Pharyngula at ScienceBlogs. Notably, it points out that Milloy quotes his source out of context and ignores the portion of the article that says the whole thing was absolutely unnecessary and Bridges could have easily cleaned the bulb up herself.

But hey, apparently a scaremongering blog post from a right-wing shill who deliberately misleads his audience is obviously good enough for Slashdot.

My favorite parasite that he covered unfortunately didn't make it into Parasite Rex. On his blog he covered Ampulex compressa a wasp that "zombifies" roaches by inserting a stinger into their brain, piloting them back to the wasp's nest, injecting them with a venom that keeps them alive in suspended animation for eight days while one of its larva eats the roach's organs and then pupates inside the shell of the now finally dead roach which is bursts out of four weeks later.

The suspended animation and the laying of eggs inside is pretty neat/creepy, but it's the way the wasp doesn't paralyze the roach but instead enslaves it and directly manipulates its motion back to its nest that's the most fascinating thing about it to me.

The matter between Wiley and the blogger was resolved by the publisher ignominiously blaming the "junior member of staff" they had tasked with their dirty work. They admitted no fault and continue to push against fair use by demanding permission up front, not from the author but from themselves. The matter between Wiley and the wider world, therefore, remains open.

I would not recommend anything rude, but the publisher should hear that we are not slaves and do not want to live in a permission society. They will listen because they need us more than we need them.

The problem seems to have already been resolved. http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/04/vic tory_a_happy_resolution.php

Way to go blog-o-sphere, for making your voice heard. Though, interestingly, they didn't state that it fell under fair use, but rather they "gave her permission" to use the figure and data. So, maybe only a half-win.

Please note: Wiley has responded and resolved the issue favorably, blaming the matter on a juinor staffer... and asking for no abusive email to the junior staffer...

Look, the DCA story isn't as simple as we'd like it to be. Clinical trials are going on, and if you're wondering why you shouldn't buy it from a chemistry supply company and try to treat yourself, Orac and Abel Pharmboy have some information which might interest you. "The media is told not to report it"? Look, it's the media not reporting it! Could you even be bothered to do a Google search before throwing out your conspiracy theories?

In short: (a) The drug has never been actually given to live people for cancer. (b) The drug doesn't kill cancers, it slows their growth. (c) This isn't the first time a drug has shown mighty promise in the lab; this doesn't mean it will work in practice. (d) The drug is not without side effects, and isn't entirely safe, though if it works against cancer, these risks are no doubt acceptable. But until it's shown to be effective, it's not good to give it to people.

Look, the DCA story isn't as simple as we'd like it to be. Clinical trials are going on, and if you're wondering why you shouldn't buy it from a chemistry supply company and try to treat yourself, Orac and Abel Pharmboy have some information which might interest you. "The media is told not to report it"? Look, it's the media not reporting it! Could you even be bothered to do a Google search before throwing out your conspiracy theories?

In short: (a) The drug has never been actually given to live people for cancer. (b) The drug doesn't kill cancers, it slows their growth. (c) This isn't the first time a drug has shown mighty promise in the lab; this doesn't mean it will work in practice. (d) The drug is not without side effects, and isn't entirely safe, though if it works against cancer, these risks are no doubt acceptable. But until it's shown to be effective, it's not good to give it to people.

Details from VT gunman's suicide note revealed, blames actions on "rich kids" and "debauchery" but makes no mention of Anna Nicole Smith, Don Imus or violent video games

Turned into a whole string of "I blame..." responses.

Usually art imitates life, but sometimes life imitates art. A few threads later After Columbine, Tom Delay blamed the shootings on science classes teaching evolution. Surely, we've learned from past idiots, right? Well... a day after the VT massacre, it appears not showed up, with a link pointing to a Crooks and Liars article in which Tom Delay blamed the Columbine attack on the teaching of evolution, and some other contemptible ghoul of a fundie whackjob blamed the VT shooting on the teaching of evolution.

Just when we'd thought we'd blamed it on everything, some fucking fundie freak has to play a game of one-upmanship.

I think the trouble comes about when we start to think of evolution as a "force". Evolution is not the driving force behind change; instead, outside forces in the environment (temperature, weather, resources, competitors, etc.) create natural selection, which drives change. Evolution is merely the description of that change.
What kind of force? A bangy force? A pushy force? A growy force? A forcy force force? A magic man dunnit
No-one thinks of evolution as a force, except those that don't understand it. Your final comment is true - evolution is the result of Natural Selection, and that is the real beauty of Darwin's insight. He proposed a machanism to explain diversity beyond the then-prevalent magic man dunnit hypothesis. Others had played with the idea of evolution, but no-one really saw how it could occur. Lamarck was famously wrong on this count, and even Linnaeus got caught up in the magic man.

sciency details:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/04/15/dragging-on/ (4:33 p.m.)

Also of interest if you're into this sort of thing, what Beyond Einstein programs will be cut?
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2007/04/beyond _einstein_iv_showdown_in.php (April 4)
sad if you compare sticker prices to the $10 billion per month on the Iraq adventure.

Can I just edit that slightly for you?

As if a hundred million anti-evolutionists screamed in error (yet again).

Although I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the "suddenly silenced" part--that never seems to happen, they just get more shrill and more stupid.

"As I made clear, both in the
preliminary discussions, and in the interview itself, I believe that
global warming is a very serious threat that needs equally serious
discussion and no one seeing this film could possibly deduce that.

What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which
there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why
many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely
accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples,
it's hard to know where to begin, so I will cite only one:
a speaker asserts, as is true, that carbon dioxide is only
a small fraction of the atmospheric mass. The viewer is left to
infer that means it couldn't really matter. But even a beginning
meteorology student could tell you that the relative masses of gases
are irrelevant to their effects on radiative balance. A director
not intending to produce pure propaganda would have tried to eliminate that
piece of disinformation.

An example where my own discussion was grossly distorted by context:
I am shown explaining that a warming ocean could expel more
carbon dioxide than it absorbs -- thus exacerbating the greenhouse
gas buildup in the atmosphere and hence worrisome. It
was used in the film, through its context, to imply
that CO2 is all natural, coming from the ocean, and that
therefore the human element is irrelevant. This use of my remarks, which
are literally what I said, comes close to fraud."

Recent experiments that have given mice new color-sensing ability seems to imply that if you can just get the input into the brain, the brain will try and incorporate it. Obviously, this works best when the brain is still "plastic", when the organism is young. I wonder if you wired an infrared camera (or similar) to a newborn that by the time they were a couple of years old, they'd be making full use of the additional information.

Unlike the Neuromancer fantasy, you can't just jack in, but if implanted early enough, you could adapt to the additional sensory input.

The title "over 50% of all Americans believe in evolution" would have been an inacurate title. For this poll, ~48% said evolution was wrong. The other ~52% fall into at least two other groups: 1) yes, evolution is correct and 2) I don't know if evolution is correct or not. Then there is this chart originally from Science Magazine which says ~60% of Americans either think evolution is wrong or don't know. Only about ~40% believe it is true, a minority in that study. Also note the position of the USA in relation to the other countries on that chart. Sad, really.