Slashdot Mirror

Have you heard of this thing called a search engine? You should try it.

Protip: Blindly using a search engine is not research.

"Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century"

Untrue. It was hypothesized by Arrhenius but then Robert Wood showed that greenhouses do not warm because of the "greenhouse effect"

Errm, do you actually believe what you just wrote there? Do you actually believe they called it "greenhouse effect" not as an analogy, but as an actual attempt at explanation? Are you a true moron who can't think for himself and repeats some silly explanation he heard from some moronic talk radio host? Or just a troll?

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/07/19/the-greenhouse-effect-is-not-t/

You had a lot of interesting points, and yes, some vaccines like tetanus (the second most deadly toxin known) are for preventing infections which are not transmitted human to human.

You had to toss in that worthless "cure everything with Vitamin C" quack and his friend the Orthopedic surgeon Cathcart though..

http://scienceblogs.com/insole...

Mauritius is the site of the "underwater waterfall", a beautiful optical illusion caused by the sand and water currents.

There's a billion links on Google but as a quick specific piece of evidence here's a blog post by a doctor from 2011 that among other things covers Dr Oz's dalliances with reiki, Deepak Chopra, and the endorsement of a quack who claims baking soda cures cancer.

So yes, Dr Oz endorses quackery and he's been known to do it for years.

Antarctic ice expanding?
Er, no, not at all. What is happening is that there is more Antarctic SEA ice during the winter but unlike the Arctic, that sea ice does not persist.

The great mass of Antarctic LAND ice is slowly melting - and overall that melt rate is increasing

http://scienceblogs.com/gregla...

This article explains who this paid idiot is: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/06/27/who-founded-greenpeace-not-patrick-moore/

http://scienceblogs.com/gregla...

Well, it wouldn't be the only hole in Relativity, but it would be a huge hole in Relativity. Which otherwise describes the observed Universe very, very well. It's not the best-tested theory in science; that probably goes to QED. Plus then you have to account for observations of massive stellar objects spiraling towards each other, which lose energy more-or-less as predicted by GR. See also the 1993 Nobel. New Physics is always fun, but I'm afraid that a null result would be better explained as experimental design flaws. You know, the way that every other similar experiment to date has been explained. The parallels with aether measurements are hard to avoid, but the alternative theories of gravity are, well...insufficiently predictive. Also aether was more of an assumption than a theory per se: there was never any evidence for it. Contrast with Relativity, which is undeniably a true description of reality.

All told, while I agree with you about finding new things beyond the delineations of our theories, I don't think that a null result here would necessarily lead to much. IANAP, any corrections are appreciated.

Can you provide links to the stories of these "skeptic scientists"

Canada does not now support science, or at least only a conservative politically correct version of it

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read...

http://hour.ca/2006/04/20/catc...

http://ottawariverkeeper.ca/ne...

http://scienceblogs.com/confes...

http://www.thestar.com/opinion...

And in a happy flashback to the KGB monitoring it's people The Government actually sent people to MONITOR Canadian Scientists at an international polar conference!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...

http://ottawariverkeeper.ca/ne...

That is just about as creepy as it gets. A gulag for the evil scientists is next?

Any questions comrade?

The problem is that parents can simply fill out an exception form in lieu of getting their kids vaccinated, and that's what needs to be done away with.

No, it shouldn't... and if you don't understand why, then you're the one who needs to study some history...

You want to hand over to government the power to forcibly inject whatever they want into all kids. That is all kinds of stupid...

The irony is, I'm vaccinated and I get the point of them, but that isn't the government's choice to make... Just because people want it in large numbers, doesn't matter... We don't live by mob rule, yet you want it...

The only reason on the exception form should be if they can't get the vaccine for medical reasons (e.g. allergic to it), which must be accompanied by a physician's signature (a real physician, not a naturopath or chiropractor).

What about kids who don't go to the doctor?

http://scienceblogs.com/insole...

"A Jehovahâ(TM)s witness died shortly after giving birth to twins because her faith prevented her from having a blood transfusion.

Emma Gough, 22, began haemorrhaging but because her beliefs did not allow her to receive blood she slipped into unconsciousness and died.

As she suffered severe blood loss and her life ebbed away, medical staff urged her husband, Anthony, and her parents, all of whom follow the same faith, to overrule her decision and allow a transfusion which could have saved her, but they refused."

Would you suggest the government should forcibly have given her a blood transfusion anyway? Jehovah's Witnesses aren't a "new" religion, their beliefs are well known.

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

I hate to break it to you, but the courts have been ruling in favor of religion... While I'll personally go to the doctor, I respect your right not to. Why do you think you should be able to tell someone they have to?

though, like this moron who somehow still hasn't been stripped of his license to practice medicine for irresponsible conduct. Yes we should have the "right" to contract dangerous childhood diseases (and pass them on to the rest of the public)... What an asshole!

Perhaps a few of the scientists believe ?
To become a scientist, you pretty much just have to be able to get through school with adequate grades. It doesn't necessarily require you to agree with other's findings, or have good judgement.

It's a statistical fact that many women make career choices that will or do give them time to take care of a family.

That has been my experience in the workplace. It sits with career/life choices. There are also men who make similar choices. But largely since we cannot get away from the physical apparatus of sex, the female has a larger share for good or evil.

This results in them earning lower pay and avoiding highly technical fields.

This is really two things in my judgement. Yes indeed, if you choose to take a lot of time off to have a family, then stay at home for the max time allowed, you simply are not at work as much.

The case I like to use is a woman at work, a staff assistant, who had 3 children. Okay, that is her right of course, but over the course of 7 or more years, IIRC, she wasn't at work much.

The great irony is that they had to give her job back. Now that would only seem fair, right? But that meant that three other women who filled in while she was on leave lost their jobs whenever she returned for a while. DId they deserve it?

Furthermore it's well known that a good portion of brilliance is dedication. To women considering a career knowing that "brilliance" is necessary is the same as knowing dedication and willingness to devote time to it is necessary -- to the exclusion of having a family that makes demands on one's time. Some women make that choice. Some don't.

Pretty much this. The best women engineers and scientists I worked with were very dedicated. We worked a lot of hours, went out of town often for work, and wanted to get the work done. There were a few for were not as dedicated - one suddenly decided to leave and become a full time mother. Hardly dedicated. Wouldn't work more than 40 hours a week, 8 to 5 with an hour lunch break.

And that's okay. No one has to make their work be a major part of their life. I did, and if someone wanted to do what I did, they needed to do the same. You just were not going to change that workflow without tripling the workforce.

As long as the choice is there; as long as the trade-off for women is the same as for men there's no sexism in this. And if a woman has a hard time finding a man willing to stay at home and support her, well, that's the choice men have and make and should be free to make.

And I have seen it much more lately. There are a number of Stay-at Home dads on my street, and the woman is the breadwinner. Isn't gender parity and choices the goal? I've seen many couples where it is obvious who is acting which part. The major difference is that the men I've seen who have elected to stay at home tend a little toward playfulness.

In fact to distort these fields by making it harder for men to enter, that's sexism.

Yes it is. What we have to do is listen to voices of reason. Are STEM men the sexist pigs, the testosterone crazed wanna be rapists that some will have us believe they are, so women end up going into law and business, bdecause as we all know, in the business world, which often actually employs female escorts for visiting businessmen is completely free of sexism, where a woman is always recognized for her acumen, and the upward mobility is endless? Yeah - right.

Sorry, but that toilet don't flush. We can listen to Dworkinettes who hate men in general, or we can try to make sense out of the world. Because for oppressors, men are pretty lame any more. We are now at a roughly 60/40 female to male college enrollment:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/cc...

Women now make up almost 80 percent of Veterinary students

http://scienceblogs.com/aetiol...

Plenty of other careers that are shifting towards an imbalance in favor of wo

there's poor quality and then there's poor quality - you can compress it a bit too much after all, but assuming anything other than that there's little to no difference in sound quality.

I used to know a sound engineer and he told me about these frequency response levels that high-end audiophiles keep on about, expecting perfect reproduction at 10 or 10,000 Hz and he said that is was all a bit useless - the studio microphones weren't that sensitive so cutting off the top and bottom isn't cutting anything that's not already present... and then couple that to human hearing and you're trying sooo hard to reproduce nothing audible.

128kbps is enough for practically everyone, and even those who are able to tell the difference between it and 256 are only going to notice if you compare the same track side by side.

I think you may have tinted glasses. I'm a lay person and I certainly didn't get the impression that the sky was falling after reading Mann's essay. Regarding the two other links - Cook isn't a climate scientist and Hanson didn't say anything about tornadoes except that he had been in one and that heat is the fuel for tornados but that we don't yet know if frequency will increase and we didn't have enough data to tell if there has been a trend. On the other hand, look at these links:

David Archer on methane increase: "Is this bad news for global warming? Not really, because the one real hard fact that we know about atmospheric methane is that it’s concentration isn’t rising very quickly. Methane is a short-lived gas in the atmosphere, so to make it rise, the emission flux has to continually increase " - http://www.realclimate.org/ind...

What about that Arctic methane bomb? "Shakhova et al (2013) did not find or claim to have found a 50 Gt C reservoir of methane ready to erupt in a few years. That claim, which is the basis of the Whiteman et al (2013) $60 trillion Arctic methane bomb paper, remains as unsubstantiated as ever. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/ind...

The fact that the ice core records do not seem full of methane spikes due to high-latitude sources makes it seem like the real world is not as sensitive as we were able to set the model up to be. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/ind...

Here's William Connoly betting against an arctic death spiral (and trying to engage in a bet against arctic ice recovery): http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/...

Here is the head of the NASA climate team explaining why he and others publicly mocked a colleague during a presentation where the colleague suggested that we may be experiencing an arctic death spiral. His excuse seems to include the fact that he was mocking both sides (read further for examples): The negative engagement stemmed both from the “green” end (which we would characterize as “things are worse than they seem”) and from the “blue” end (“things are not as bad as they seem”). We were actively deflecting negative criticisms from both blue and green “wings” throughout both meetings. - https://drive.google.com/file/...

The Iraq war?

The Iraq war what? Do you have any data supporting the claim, that Americans have joined their military because of their Christian beliefs, which compelled them to kill Muslims? Put up or shut up...

I didn't claim that. I claimed that some Americans were joining the military for the same reasons that some Muslims become terrorists, to defend their religion and culture against its perceived enemies.

And yes, this occurs:
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

...

This is hardly the first time something like this has happened. We’ve had soldiers painting Bible verses on turrets of tanks and on bombs on airplanes. We’ve had soldiers handing out Bibles to the locals. The Pentagon and the American government seems to understand that this is very, very bad for American credibility in the Muslim world because it sends the message that this is a religious war of Christianity vs Islam.

And don't forget Ann Coulter

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

That sounds a hell of a lot like terrorist ideology to me except she's able to carry out her religious war via army instead of suicide bomber. Don't you think there were a few people who thought like Ann Coulter and joined the military? Enough to rival the number of Muslim terrorists?

I'm not saying Iraq war=terrorism or Drone attacks=terrorism, but I will say that a lot of people who turn to terrorism in the Middle East would be able to fulfil those urges as soldiers in the West.

I said nothing about "preaching". I said, Muslim faithful are compelled — by their religion — to fight for spreading Islam world-wide and to establish a Califate.

There is nothing of the kind in the Bible.

He's fighting and promoting, same way the IRA did.

IRA's fight was purely secular — nothing in Catholicism insists nor mandates the sort of things they've done. Muslims, once again, must fight other religions — in order to remain good Muslims. Because Koran — which they believe to be the word of God verbatim — says so.

Crusades? Residential schools? Inquisitions? The mechanisms are different but Christianity has it's own long history of aggressive attempts to spread the faith.

Of course it "helped". Its a "theatrical placebo". The more theatrical the placebo, the stronger the effect. Trials have shown that sticking pins in the accepted "acupuncture points" is as effective as sticking them any old place. So all the mumbo-jumbo about "chi" energies is just that.

Surely if it "helped tremendously" you wouldn't be still going after ten years. And TCM was invented by Chairman Mao anyway

Here is a rebuttal article http://scienceblogs.com/insole...

Citation needed for .3%

You'll note that "a ridiculous number of decimal places" is extremely non-specific and could as easily describe .3% as 3 * 10^-17%. However, I was intentionally vague because there's a variety of effects described by Relativity which have been measured in different ways at different times with differing accuracy. A simple number (like 0.3%) is simply wrong without further context. QED probably takes the prize for the most precisely-tested theory ever, but Relativity still qualifies as one of the most well-tested theories ever. Calling it a "bad model" is deeply ignorant.

Relativity is incomplete, in ways that have nothing to do with mass/energy or information exceeding c. On that point it is in agreement with QM.

The Turing Test has flaws.

Firstly, it requires a human-level of communication. One cannot use the it to determine whether a crow (for example, or cat or octopus) is intelligent since they cannot communicate at our level. Even though these creatures demonstrate a surprising level of intelligence. Watch this video and be astonished.

The extended video shows the crow taking the worm to it's nest, then returning to grab the hooked wire and taking that back to the nest! Can we use the Turing Test to determine whether the crow is intelligent?

Secondly, it conflates intelligence with human intelligence. There's no spectrum of measurement, no "ruler" which can be laid down to measure the level of intelligence in an entity, or to determine whether one entity is more (or less) intelligent than another. Are crows more intelligent than cats? Can the question be resolved using the test? Could the test be used to determine which of two humans is the more intelligent?

But most importantly, the Turing Test has no predictive value: it cannot be used to guide research or development of intelligence.

Consider trying to build a fizzbin, and whether you are successful will be determined by a yes/no decision from a jury of professionals. With no description of what a fizzbin actually is, how hard would it be?

Consider trying to deliver a package, given that you have a GPS system with a broken display. The GPS still works, and the LED will light when you are at the delivery address, but otherwise you have no idea where to go. The address could be in NYC or Tokyo, or anywhere else.

The fundamental problem with the Turing Test is that it doesn't define intelligence(**). Defining something as a test works in mathematics where there is no time or effort to make the axiom of choice on the set of all objects (ie - the universe), but intelligence isn't a purely mathematical concept. It's partly based on a real-world measurement (being: information), and as such is more closely akin to physics.

Instead of a fizzbin, consider trying to build a car. A car can be defined as a body, frame, 4 wheels, engine, and seats, and the purpose is to transport people from place to place (*). A wheel can be further described as a tire on a rim with brakes, a tire can be described as a loop of rubber with steel wires and a valve-stem, a valve-stem as a tube with a schrader valve, a schrader valve is... and so on.

This is a constructive definition: an object is made of simpler objects, each of which is composed of even simpler objects. Math is full of these (a field is a ring plus some stuff, a ring is a group plus some stuff, a group is a set plus some stuff... and so on.)

With the constructive definition, one could build a car directly; or at least, know how to make the attempt. You can determine whether something is a car; and if not, know what needs to be changed.

In my opinion (I'm an AI researcher) the Turing test and the Lovelace test have little value. The tests don't show where to look or how to proceed.

(*) A simplified definition to not lose sight of the position.

(**) This is an academic position. I am a great admirer of Alan Turing and his many brilliant results, including the Turing Test.

Hows that luminous aether working out for you ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Little dated ? Maybe supersymetry and string theory ?
http://scienceblogs.com/starts...

Magnetic Monopoles ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Science is about being aware of what you don't understand and just how vast it is. Pseudoscience is about certainty. Maybe you can get a corrective phrenology session to clear that up ?

According to a Nobel scientist quoted here: http://www.naturalnews.com/047...
"In voicing support for Christie's quarantine, Dr. Beutler -- current director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas -- told the website, "I favor it," adding, "I favor it, because it's not entirely clear that they can't transmit the disease." He was referring to currently asymptomatic healthcare worker Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who recently returned to New Jersey after treating patients in Sierra Leone and was quarantined in the state for 65 hours. She was eventually taken to her home state of Maine.
    "It may not be absolutely true that those without symptoms can't transmit the disease, because we don't have the numbers to back that up," Dr. Beutler continued in his NJ.com interview. "It could be people develop significant viremia [where viruses enter the bloodstream and gain access to the rest of the body], and become able to transmit the disease before they have a fever, even.
    "People may have said that without symptoms you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses," he added."

Also apparently sneezing can potentially spread Ebola for several feet and it can live on surfaces for days:
http://www.naturalnews.com/047...
http://www.naturalnews.com/047...

Ways to decontaminate with robotics UV:
http://www.naturalnews.com/047...

Some suggest vitamin C may help:
https://www.patrickholford.com...

Others disagree: http://scienceblogs.com/insole...
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/...

As seen here...

Regardless of whether Nickle to Copper fusion can occur in the conditions that Rossi claims for the Ecat, the input and output of "fuel" isn't in line with what would happen.

That is, given what his input Nickel fuel is, the output "spent" fuel after the run would look radically different than what Rossi has shown.

In fact, his "spent fuel" looks very much like: he went out and put together a fuel rod from commerically-available Nickel and Copper, and didn't bother to do the actual Physics behind what the Isotope ratio should be, then just pulled this "fuel rod" out of the device to "prove" it worked.

Also, as pointed out by the article, if his Ecat worked as he claims, everyone would be dead within 10 minutes of starting the reactor, due to massive Gamma radiation leaks.

One can claim that low-temperature fusion is happening, for some reason we don't understand. But then you can't go on and claim that the actual fusion process is somehow different than all possible combinations using your input and output elements.

Since Rossi's still alive to peddle his snake oil, it's plainly, well, snake oil.

-Erik

To be brutally honest, it's not surprising that yet another genome-wide association study has failed to explain even half of the heritability of a trait / disease / condition.

There's plenty of literature out there arguing whether these studies are a waste of money or not:

* http://blog.goldenhelix.com/?p...
* http://scienceblogs.com/geneti...
* http://gettinggeneticsdone.blo...

I would have been surprised if this study did find the majority of inherited variability in height.

The comparison between Congo/Zaire and these west african countries, with respect to their dysfunctional health care systems, isn't really valid. There is a huge difference between remote village areas in the Congo and the cities. Had Ebola broken out in Kinshasa it would have looked like the current outbreak. But in Kinshasa, the bush meat is a long way from the bush and long processed, so there is no chance of Ebola going from bat reservoir to duiker/monkey to human in those settings. The outbreaks in Congo/Uganda etc. have involved, most or all of the time, direct contact with fresh bush meat right near or in the settlement that was affected. In this particular outbreak, patient zero is a little kid. She probably did not get Ebola from bush meat, but more likely (in my opinion) directly from discarded fruit from an infected fruit bat. As far as going airborne, I've come down on the no it won't side for reasons that have to do with evolutionary theory. I wrote this up here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregla... You are absolutely right about the lack of up to date info. That seems to have dropped out of the picture entirely. Personally, I'm guessing that the number of "new cases" is actually fixed by the number of beds that become unoccupied by someone dying or getting better. That makes the information pretty useless anyway.

You are rather backed by your opinions and guesses ABOUT science... Now those opinions might be reasonable and the guesses could be educated... but they are not science.

They are not "opinions" or "guesses". They are probabilities, backed by a great deal of evidence - like virtually everything in science. Higgs Boson existence? Probability. The Big Bang? Probability. Quantum mechanics? Yeah, a lot of that. To be scientific, a theory does not have to be a certainty at all; the probability just needs to be carefully quantified, and backed by observation and/or experiment.

...you have overstated your reasonable degree of confidence on issues for political gain. This has been done repeatedly which is why many of the IPCC reports have come under such savage criticism

Citation needed. The IPCC reports all state their conclusions in probabilities, which are carefully quantified, and are backed by citations of peer-reviewed studies at every stage. The vast majority of the evidence presented in the IPCC reports has proved under very close examination to be solid (NOT absolutely certain, but of sound scientific methodology). This is why they are accepted as, not the gospel truth, but the best information on the subject that we have, by every major scientific institution and government, as well as by the great majority of scientists (and nearly all climatologists).

It is THAT which is ultimately causing most of the controversy. Not the science but rather the political solution to the science.

I do agree that this is the source of the controversy. Solutions are indeed often political, but unfortunately all too often, peoples' political views about some of the solutions contaminate their views of the science, which usually leads to claims that the science itself is being politicised. I disagree with that.

Or you must sit down and talk about solutions we can all find palatable.

If only we could do that. Unfortunately, there are still far too many strident voices still trying to undermine the science, which blocks any reasonable discussion of solutions. If those voices actually had any peer-reviewed evidence of a quality that could convince a reasonable number of experts, that would be fine, but sadly these dissenting voices tend to rely on volume instead.

I'm also of the opinion that many people misunderstand the solutions that have been proposed (for example, see all the claims that a phased transition to a carbon-neutral economy would be a disastrous burden on society, whereas many economists are seeing it as an opportunity for actually reducing the many existing external costs of carbon emissions).

I read a rebuttal to that which was fairly compelling: http://scienceblogs.com/builto...

The equation given isn’t derived. We have no idea where they’re getting that 13.4 proportionality constant. Dimensionally it’s correct, and it’s pretty easy to derive the equation up to that constant which will depend on the sensitivity of the detector. That equation modulo some uncertainty with respect to that constant is accurate as far as it goes given a spacecraft of hull temperature T and cross-sectional area A.

I would take you through the steps of the derivation, but it would be pointless because the assumption that the hull temperature has anything to do with the interior temperature is simply flat wrong. We can prove this with a potato.

Switch your oven to the “Bake” setting at a temperature of 350 F. After preheating, put in the potato. The interior of the oven, and eventually the potato, are maintained at a constant temperature of 350 degrees. How hot is the exterior surface of the oven? Depends on how well insulated your oven is, but I can guarantee it’s a lot less than 350 degrees.

The key is the understanding the relationship between heat and energy. Put hot coffee in a thermos – the hot coffee is hot because it contains thermal energy. If the energy can’t leave, the coffee will stay hot because the energy stays inside the thermos. The outside of the thermos stays at the temperature of the surroundings. Now neither the thermos nor the oven is a perfect insulator. Some energy leaks out of the oven’s interior, cooling it down. The oven thus has to pump energy into the heating elements to make up for this loss. Equilibrium is reached when the rate of energy being put into the oven equals the rate of loss through the insulation.

For a spacecraft in a vacuum, the pretty much the only way to lose energy from the interior is by radiant heat. The higher the temperature of the outside, the higher the rate of energy loss via radiation. But the temperature itself is irrelevant, since just like the oven and the thermos it’s not necessarily related to the actual temperature inside the cabin at all. It is always and everywhere a function of the total power passing through the hull. If the temperature inside the cabin is constant, the power leaving the hull by radiation is exactly equal to the power being generated inside the hull.

So how far away can we detect a given amount of emitted power? According to Wikipedia, a telescope of 24 aperture can detect stars of magnitude 22 after a half-hour exposure. I think this is a pretty good realistic limit for detection with reasonable equipment in a reasonable time frame. Now we need to compare this magnitude to something of known power output. How about the Sun? The sun has magnitude -26.73 as seen from the Earth’s surface (smaller magnitude is brighter), for a difference in magnitude of 48.73. The exponent used for magnitude is 2.512, so the difference in power per unit area of telescope is 2.512^48.73 = 3.1 x 1019. Since the Sun radiates about 1000 watts per square meter at the distance of the earth, the smallest radiant power we can reasonably detect in our telescope is about 3.123.1 x 10-17 watts per square meter.

Our hypothetical spacecraft is radiating that power into space, evenly distributed over the surface of a sphere of radius r, where r is the distance to the detector. When that power-per-area is the same as the limit of our telescopic capability, that gives us the maximum detection range. Mathematically,

Where rho is the sensitivity of our detector. Solve for r:

So what’s the power? Well, each human on board is going to produce about 100 W just from basic bodily metabolism. Computers, life support, sanitation, and all the rest will contribute more. We might assume 10,000 watts total for a futuri

The laffer curve is a fictional construct of corporate greed.It is laughed out of any conference of economists for it's absurd leaps of faith and lack of supporting evidence.

https://www.princeton.edu/~rvd...
http://scienceblogs.com/goodma...
http://business.time.com/2012/...
http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/L...
http://economistsview.typepad....

That still doesn't explain why the owner of the building himself said that they blew it up. Or why the BBC reported its fall 20 minutes before it actually fell. ... blah blah [Jane Q. Public, 2008-08-24]

... Kinda hard to argue with the owner of the building when he publicly says he did it on purpose! ... why did the OWNER say that it was done on purpose? ... A NY radio station was told beforehand that the building was going to be demolished. The BBC reported the fall of the building 20 minutes before it actually fell. ... the odds are strongly against the idea that WTC 7 collapsed due to fire. ... Does this prove that WTC 7 did not collapse because of the fire? No, of course not. But the credibility of any "official" story by now is very, very thin. [Jane Q. Public, 2008-08-24]

... for example lumping 9/11 together with the moon landing. Those are not even remotely the same class of questions. ... On 9/11, for example, there are some very serious questions, raised by very reputable scientists. Not "conspiracy theorists". [Lonny Eachus, 2012-02-10]

Your "examples" should not all be grouped together, since some of them are at vastly different levels of "known", compared to the others. For example, some (but by no means all) of the "9/11 truthers" (a very derogatory phrase) have some good evidence to cite. This is hardly something an area that is "unequivocally known". ... Further, while flouride may not be a communist plot, there are some very serious ethical issues involved with putting it in drinking water. [Jane Q. Public, 2010-02-24]

... it goes on to say that fluoridated products should NEVER be ingested by children, because of possible adverse effects. Then it goes on further to say that THERE IS EVIDENCE of other harmful effects from fluoride, PARTICULARLY the form that is commonly put in drinking water. Now, I want to emphasize something: I am not a “conspiracy theorist”, and I do not believe there is some giant conspiracy to stupidify America via the drinking water. But this is what I very much **DO** believe: When there are serious, scientifically valid questions about adverse physical effects of a substance (as their are with fluoride), you’re a moron if you want to put it in the drinking water. [Lonny Eachus, 2013-10-19]

... One thing working in the conspiracy theorists' favor is the fact (discovered by reputable scientists with expertise in the subject and no conflict of interest, and independently verified) that the dust from the buildings contained bits of high-tech thermite. Not your everyday garage variety, either, but real high-tech stuff that is usually only available to government and military. ... there is documented, solid and confirmed evidence, by university scientists, that not only was there thermite, it was of a particular, restricted commercial variety. ... The 9/11 Commission report is nothing but a jok

There's a "skills gap" present in Math aptitude tests that appears in countries where the status of women is worse

This may be partially explained by the mistreatment. However, there is a giant elephant in the room of "sex equality": sports. The all-female teams are invariably weaker, than the all-male ones — and compete separately. Co-ed teams are required to have a certain number of women (2 players for a 6-member volleyball team, for example). Soccer World Cup just ended — did you see a single female player there? Are you going to attribute it entirely to sexism?

It is not all about muscles either — women aren't any better at chess, than they are at at swimming or running. It is so bad, the international chess body(ies) had to create a separate title: Chess Woman Grandmaster (CWG) — because so few of them could become actual, non-gendered, Chess Grandmasters (CG). Indeed, only one percent of CGs are female.

Sure, there are individual women, who are stronger and smarter than an average male. But the strongest man is stronger, and the smartest — smarter, than the strongest and smartest woman, respectively. We just don't look or smell as good. And we can't give birth...

Sure, there are arguments politely trying to explain away this disparity. But they fail.

From this blog post it sounds like the mother taking her off the drugs was what prompted the initial finding: the doctors would have been unethical to tell someone to take their HIV + kid off antivirals because there's a chance they may have killed all the viruses.

As far as why, the cocktail isn't super convenient. It's a bunch of pills taken throughout the day. Getting a toddler to take multiple pills a day every day is probably a very frustrating thing. I'd imagine the mother (who didn't have any prenatal care and didn't realize she was HIV positive until after birth) doesn't have the best health insurance, so the out of pocket expenses probably really quickly added up.

I mean, that's obviously all small potatoes compared to developing drug-resistant HIV and full blown AIDS and dying. Not excusing her actions, just saying it's understandable.

So Whatsupwiththat, JoNova, Climate Depoe, and Climate Etc. and climate comments from Lubos Motl are all crackpots as well, right?
"there is no debate" said the guy who does not want to debate.......idiot.

Whatsupwiththat -- or rather, Wattsupwiththat I presume -- is Anthony Watt's website, and yeah, he's a crackpot and professional grifter. He has no academic or scientific training, his arguments are either debunked climate denier talking points being regurgitated or "hey, it's cold outside, LOL" type circumstantial evidence - hardly worth an eyeroll. He adds nothing to the conversation but he does keep getting speaking gigs and advertiser bucks, so hey, grifters gonna grift.

JoNova is Joanne Codling (aka Joanne "I watch too much Star Trek" Nova)'s blog. She's funded by the Heartland Institute and the Science and Public Policy Institute -- in other words, she's a professional shill for professional climate deniers. Oh, and she's not a scientist (she's a failed TV talking head) and thus her opinion on a scientific fact like global warming is utterly useless.

Climate "Depoe," unless I'm not seeing the site, is one I've already covered - Climate Depot.

ClimateEtc is Judith Curry's blog, and while she's a climatologist at Georgia Tech, she's also a loon. For example, she heavily cites and defends the Wegman Report, and later admitted she never read it. I doubt she'll make it another 5-10 years at Georga Tech before joining Richard Lindzen as a professional crank for some Heartland Institute shell company.

Oh, and Lubo Motl? He's a failed string theory physicist, not a climatologist, and his only claim to fame was being hired at Harvard and fired for being a raging douchebag. You can tell, mostly because his blog reads like something from the GNAA or the Yahoo News comments section. And don't get me started on his shitting over half the science blogs on the internet in the comments section -- I guess when you're a failed PHD student who hasn't done any actual work in science since 2007 you have lots of time to troll blogs.

So yeah, I will repeat it. There is no debate. Your sources are crackpots, loons, cranks, and professional grifters, and at this point, I'm willing to go further -- you don't get to "debate" scientific fact. There is no climate change debate. It's real, it's man made, and it's the biggest threat we as a people will likely ever face.

The only debate left is what we do about it. Deniers are just idiots on par with Anti-vaxxers and should have their brains taken away by social services.

"Regarding your first link, it's unlcear what the chart is depicting. The vertical axis is labelled "Numbers", with each data series corresponding to a different kind of weapon. Are these numbers of weapons? Numbers of violent crimes committed with these weapons? Numbers of homicides committed with these weapons? The chart, on its own, doesn't make that clear."

Sorry, I should've posted the full link. It's the number of recorded incidents:

http://www.publications.parlia...

"In the end, I'm curious as to why there's an apparent discrepancy between the claims made by the WSJ and BBC. It's sad that even with an issue that's so thoroughly documented, it's hard to get a straight answer."

I don't know why either, but personally I'd be inclined to consider that the WSJ article is an opinion piece by someone who seems to have a history of being a bit of an anti-gun control zealot and provides absolutely no citations, whilst the BBC article is an actual news report reporting on the actual ONS figures. It wouldn't be like it's the first time that Dr. Malcolm had just made stuff up on violent crime:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoi...

I know I know, this is an ad-hominem argument against her, but without citations to consider or dispute what is left? Honestly, it's gotten to the point where I almost just discount US sources automatically because the debate there is so polarised and so full of dirty tactics on both sides. I shouldn't of course, because there's the danger in discounting sources of only ending up with one side of the picture, but when it comes down to outright lies (again as is the case with The Daily Mail) it becomes ever harder to give such sources just consideration.

This is predicted by some models outside of the Standard Model, like Supersymmetry.

Except that that LHC's ongoing failure to find any SUSY particles is making it increasingly unlikely Supersymmetry is right either:

http://scienceblogs.com/starts...

This Guy!

Open source or not, you can't trust anything even with code audits:
Dennis Ritchie's back door

You didn't follow his Electricity from air stuff then?
I'm familiar with him looking like a gargantuan idiot and pathetic narcissist, but not being right about a paradigm shift in engineering. Do you have an example?

The problem is that parents are making decisions for just their own children. Their children can make other vaccinated kids or immuno-comprimised sick, where if they hadn't those kids wouldn't of. So the parents are making a decision which effects the well being of more than their children. Now how do you hold them accountable or liable for taking a risk with other peoples children, that's an interesting ethical question.

As far as your article goes, that information was based on a 8,000 responses on an anonymous web survey done by a homeopathic quack with no test controls and biased wording. It's about as far from science as you can go.

http://scienceblogs.com/insole...

Mars' atmosphere is thin because of low gravity - it will never hold any kind of proper atmosphere. See http://scienceblogs.com/starts... for sizes. Venus is damn close to Earth in size. I don't have time to look up the atmospheric composition, but even if fully made Earth-like, it would have bad weather forbidding most space missions to it, because of greenhouse effect from water vapor. Venus is too hot, and once it's too hot it's got a lot water in the atmosphere to make it even hotter. You gotta put up some shades.

I really like your idea of diverting all comets to slam into Venus and put it into a farther, higher orbit from to Sun, as a cooling effect. The comets would have to come from their trip back from the Sun, on the way back to the outer parts of the solar system. Diverting comets with a tsar bomba while it's near Jupiter, it only takes a tiny detonation to create a large effect down the road in the trajectory. By the way even if you directly bomb Venus, any physicist would know that the detonations could not happen on the surface, because of conservation of momentum, whatever impact the ground gets, equivalent impact is absorbed by the atmosphere, and the whole planet doesn't move as an end result. In order to impart a change in impulse, momentum, you have to deliver momentum, by exploding the bomb in outer space in a way that it divides into two pieces, one half shooting directly down into the Sun, the other half shooting up directly at Venus.

Down the road we may get to the point where we compose a dozen or so Earth-sized planets, sharing Earth's orbit, from other planets like Saturn, or from the shooting star asteroid debris between Mars and Jupiter, by ping-pong pooling them into the proper orbit. Any stuff, any substance you can find that you can use to either build a planet from - or better, more efficient: a rotating cylinder artificial gravity space station - is very valuable, like gold, in the vast emptiness of outer space. The Moon contains a lot of stuff ripe to make space stations from, because it will never hold an atmosphere, and getting stuff off the Moon into outer space is a lot cheaper than lifting it out of Earth's gravity well. The first rotating gravity space station could be made profitable by soap-opera or reality show type things.

The sicence behind Global Warming is so fake

If it's so fake, why do you think it is that the vast majority of climatologists (you know, scientists who actually study the climate) are in agreement that climate change is happening and that it's caused by our actions? A vast global conspiracy across thousands of researchers in hundreds of universities and research institutions with no financial, cultural or organizational commonalities? If you think that, then you've got your tinfoil screwed on a little too tight.

If we REALLY wanted to clean up the environment we would agressive upgrade our energy production facilities like we do with our PC's.

Fully agree, but it's a little more difficult than with computers - large scale industrial processes aren't so easily modified due to the complexities and the expense involved, not to mention the physical difficulties in achieving quantum leaps in technology other than semiconductors. Here's a hint: you're not the smartest person on the planet, so you can rest assured that other, smarter people have already thought about. Why do you think things aren't moving along as quickly as you think them possible, despite smarter people being on the forefront of them? Do you think it's possible that these much smarter people see a little deeper than you into these areas and have good reasons why they don't think it's as easy?

Thorium Nuclear power would be a good place to start.

Thorium is great, but it's still got tons of unresolved issues. Reactor designs need to be developed, certified and tested. The reprocessing and refueling chemistry is still largely theoretical and untested. These are not minor issues, but large projects that will take years, if not decades to resolve and perfect.

Chemical Fusion

What's chemical fusion? Chemistry deals with molecules and electron-electron interactions.

Low Energy Fusion would be another nice place to start.

Would be, albeit nobody has found a way to demonstrate it. LENR and "cold fusion" are scams.

We have tons of energy solutions for personal cars/transport and mass transit. We are refusing to do these things because it disrupts the power structures, all of them political.

Like which ones? Hydrogen fuel cells? LiOn batteries? All of those have serious scaling, performance and cost issues (though BEVs are slowly improving).

There world seems to be stuck in a rule by Oligarchs

Ok, un-tighten your tinfoil hat again. Learn about the physics in these areas first - these are NOT easy problems.

I think that's more of an attitude question than a placebo effect. Take for example, the 5 year surivival rate for untreated breast cancer, according to this NIH study it's under 20%, however, according to the American Cancer Society the 5 year survival rate for stage 0 and stage 1 intervention is 100%.

So. iIf a pacebo-based treatment were to delay a woman from seeking intervention from stage 1 to stage 2, her survival rate drops from 100% to 93%, if gets to stage 3, it drops to 72%, if she waits until stage 4, it drops to 22%, and if she never seeks any treatment it drops to less than 20% for 5 years (and around 4% after 10 years). That's the danger of treatments that rely on the placebo effect, they can delay the application of real timely medical treatment. In the worst case, the placebo treatment has effectively killed 96% of the people taking it by preventing them from seeking out real treatments.

Interestingly, it seems that having a positive attitude doesn't seem to have any measurable effect on breast cancer survival rates, and even if it did, the detrimental effect of not seeking a real treatment would almost always be worse. Of course, this is all much simpler than I'm making it out to be. After all, what would be better? Getting real life-saving treatment and having a positive attitude or getting nothing and having a positive attitude?

Yes, piecing the skin with a sharp object provokes a response. Gee fucking whiz.
Acupuncture as been thoroughly studied with the highest level of rigor and it doesn't no more then talking to a Dr.

NIH's NCCAM has NEVER shown a positive result, and exists solely becasue a senator who believe in Woo forces it to exist at the cost of millions and million of dollars.
It needs to be cut.

http://www.skepdic.com/shamacu...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...

http://scienceblogs.com/insole...

its time to get rid of the silly but widespread idea of inflation coming from a singularity point source. The universe was hot, dense and still probably infinite, it just started to inflate locally. We probably will never know exactly what was before, but thinking it all came from a point source seems a little silly.

http://scienceblogs.com/starts...

The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you’d see that difference close substantially. ... So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It’s that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table.

We can go on like this for days, by the way.

• Do you still think anyone who opposed the Second Iraq War is an "Idiotarian"?
• Do you still think the scientific consensus on global climate change is a conspiracy?
• Are you still a scientific racist/"race realist"?
• Do you still believe that the 2010 Haitian Earthquake was caused by a Voodoo curse?

In all seriousness, why is this guy still a thing in the Open Source movement? He wrote a few books in the 90s, very good ones, but he's been irrelevant for years and he's a nut. He has nothing to offer.

Zero warming between those years is a lie,

The least you could do is provide some references. I just dug up Chemical dependency on Wikipedia. I don't see sugar in their list, but I do see that heroine, cocaine, barbituates and tobacco are all more addictive than alcohol. Granted that's a somewhat subjective list.

Just to round it out, I looked up sugar addiction too. Which at first read doesn't strike me as quite the same as the other substances. It releases dopamines, but it doesn't fundamentally change your brain chemistry like another drug, caffiene. A little more reading on physical dependence, and another rebuttal. It looks to me like sugar takes advantage of a natural biological response, trigging your brain to produce more dopamine. As opposed to drugs, which go after neuro-receptors or otherwise interfere with normal brain function. I'll end with this quote from scienceblogs: "Sugar may be mechanistically similar to crack in terms of addictiveness, but I have never heard of someone stealing a car radio to get a Twinkie."

I worked for Natural Resources Canada's library system in 2011. My friend worked at Transportation Canada.

They closed Transportation Canada's library system. It no longer exists. Who knows what happened to the information there, if it even exists any more. My friend told me they housed some of the world's foremost research on transportation science, and were called upon by international colleagues to provide them with information.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

They did a similar thing to the library at the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Environment Canada

http://o.canada.com/news/last-...

This government has a war on science and knowledge and actively prohibits scientists from speaking to the media without government approval.

http://scienceblogs.com/confes...

The Conservative government does not care about facts. They have policies they want to implement, and they will do WHATEVER it takes to ensure those policies are enacted. Even if it means destroying our scientific heritage.

Fascists? Really?

Really. Instead of caring about things like human rights and serving the people of Canada, now the government only serves [some] businesses. A good example is diplomacy where we've historically pushed for more human rights. Well no more. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-new-foreign-affairs-vision-shifts-focus-to-economic-diplomacy/article15624653/
This government is also doing the usual fascist things such as pushing nationalism, law and order where the idea is to expand the police state and considering anyone not agreeing with their policies re pipelines to be foreign radicals http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/radicals-working-against-oilsands-ottawa-says-1.1148310 and anti-truth, http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/10/06/the-canadian-war-on-science-updates-to-the-chronology-of-the-conservative-governments-anti-science-actions/