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Dr. Roy Spencer is a professional Denialist, who has been putting out junk "science" like this for years now:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/roy_spencer/
What's next for /. ? An expose of last year's headlines from snopes.com?

Here's a few I use all the time:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/

http://www.pandasthumb.org/

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/ataglance

http://scienceblogs.com/channel/24-hours/?utm_source=globalChannel&utm_medium=link

http://sciencehack.com/

Or science blog-aggregators:

http://cb.openmolecules.net/blogs.php

(for chemistry). I suppose that there are notable individuals as well, like http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ (PZ Myers).

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
http://www.physorg.com/physics-news/
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/

Startswithabang especially goes into some very nice details about astrophysics topics and has some smart people commenting.

Protecting me from snake oil salesmen (like your Burzynski quack) who have the one true cure for cancer is exactly why I want the government involved in health. You shouldn't be able to make shit up and pass it off as medicine, and you bet I want someone looking over real science before something goes to market where it can do real damage either if it is dangerous or if it just doesn't work and prevents people from getting real treatment. Could this lead to a a legitimate treatment being overlooked due to those big bad close minded doctors who just can't see the brilliance of (insert probable pseudoscience but possible real treatment here)? Maybe. But it's better than the alternative, and it is much more likely that they'll be preventing lots of bad treatments rather than suppressing a few good ones.

And it's funny that the people always bashing the FDA (usually because their favorite quackery didn't get approval) are always the same ones hating on the pharma companies. Uh, hello, who the hell do you think is keeping those guys in line? You really want them running amok?

This is true. In fact, there's actually a National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is doing it. Total number of beneficial effective medical techniques they have developed via the use of chiropractic, homeopathy, chi, acupuncture, or any other so-called alternative medicine: 0. Their yearly budget: something in the range of $120 million. Your (if you're an American) tax dollars at work.

(I worked on) Music: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz
3D plants: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/

Ultimately, what kind of effect will this have on employment as robotics and AI get more and more creative? See:
    http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/04/enter_adam_the_robot_scientist.php

Here is a 12 minute YouTube video I recently made that talks about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
    "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

So, I help provide evolutionary tools that will change the value of most paid human labor, but I also provide ideas about how to upgrade our society to accomodate that.

But so many people just make the tools and don't think about the human consequences yet. I hope more and more people start thinking about all this. My writings are just a place to start...

Anything you speculator on without direct observation is pure speculation.

Stop right there... You're doing a Ken Ham, and I'd like you to read this

Actually Ken Thompson, first author of the Unix C compiler, did just this - not as a bribe or trick, but just to dissuade people from putting too much trust in the compiler. The more you know, the less you trust - which is the point of this exercise. Trust is for suckers. Also: we've forgotten long ago more things than we know now.

Whoa, back up there. Inhumane conditions are bad, that much is clear, and I totally agree that antibiotics are often abused, but factory farm != inhumane conditions Factory farming typically refers to CAFOs, and that has nothing do do with how the animals are raised, but actually just the number. It gets a bad rap, but no small amount of them are just family farms (even some of the big ones) that do, indeed, treat their animals fairly well. It's like the spinach E. coli outbreak; one jackass lets his cattle get too close to the irrigation source and the entire spinach industry takes a hit over it. Yeah, there is animal cruelty, a lot of it, but I don't think it's the norm, so don't blame factory farms in general any more than you should attack free range farming because some organic idiots treat treat sick animals with homeopathy (no medicine could also be considered inhumane). Factory farms are mostly about efficiency, and that is no vice, nor in producing less output a virtue. Sorry, they're not. You want to pay more for something that uses more land, fine my me, but unless every so-called factory farm is abusing their animals (hint, they're not) I'll take efficient and cheap thank you. Before you paint everyone with that big brush, maybe you should learn something about agriculture beyond some bullshit movie with all the credibility of Loose Change. That you are concerned about hormones and GMOs indicates to me that such films are your primary source of information and you know very little about modern agriculture and agricultural technology.

Especially GMOs, jeez, can we as a society get over that one? It's just a way of improving a plant, it isn't Frankenstein or Jurassic Park or Splice or whatever fairy tale people are believing over science today, and contrary to the perpetual moaning of unscientific denialists like Greenpeace, they are actually a gain for the environment (Bt GMOs reduce pesticide use and Ht GMOs prevent fertilizer runoff, reduces soil erosion and promotes carbon sequestering via no/low-till ag) and not dangerous to humans. And we can talk about the politics of Monsanto all day long, but that is not relevant to the benefits GMOs provide.or mean GMOs are dangerous any more than Merck or Pfizer's unethical decisions mean that vaccines cause autism.

And watching Food Inc. to get different perspectives on agriculture is like listening to Michael Behe to get different viewpoints on evolution. Different points of view are good, but sometimes they're just wrong. That movie made some good points, but was mostly foodie nonsense and bogus FUD. What's amazing is that all those foodie idiots lapped that up, but when a real agriculturalist talks about real farming then they just go into dismiss it. I truly love that society in developed nations runs so smoothly that we don't need to produce our own food, that labor is nicely divided that people like people can go on about something they've never done or been involved with, but people really should know a bit more about where their food comes from, how it's produced, and why farmers do it that way so that they won't go into panic mode every time some bored art history major throws together a few film clips.

Here're a bunch of fat slobs who aren't geeks!

Amazing, but true!

Wrong. Invertebrate model organisms are how most discoveries about the mammalian brain started off and continue to be how we discover the basics. On the most obvious level, THIS IS A NEURON. Same type of cell your brain is made up of.

As far as one individual meganeuron in your head, maybe not. I think the histologists of the past would have realized if there were giant neurons similar to this. In the 1800's, they were using advanced staining techniques to show the shape of cells, I think if one neuron were synapsing with that many neurons, it would have shown up with golgi staining back then, or with the brainbow mouse more recently.

The concept of bottlenecking information when sparsity is necessary: that probably IS a valuable lesson for human brains. It probably isn't a single cell, but the concept is still possible with a smaller number of cells.

Anyway, as a general rule, it's idiotic to write off any valid scientific findings as "not interesting" just because they don't immediately beat you over the head with the relevance.

The humanities have a place, and are even important to a civilized society, but we've reached saturation on new useful areas to study in much of the humanities and hence are at this position.

Well, I think I will avoid the age-old "science good/humanities bad" debate as it's a little too "either/or" for my tastes.

Having read the Slashdot article a few weeks back in which some PhDs are essentially exceedingly well trained lab assistants whose skillset is useless outside of academia.

I don't think it's limited to sciences (or humanities) to overspecialize into an area so much that you exist in a purely academic bubble, with no bearing on anything whatsoever. If you're not learning skills you can use in other contexts, you may be making yourself useless to anybody except the guy you work for now.

Until the "traditional model" of academia dies, graduate schools will be turning out students prepared to compete for a handful of academic jobs, and unprepared to do anything else. That's just not right.

This is (at least) the second article in the last few weeks which points out that some PhD candidates (no matter the field) are ill-suited for anything but working for the person they studied under for their PhD.

Yes, the fossil record only contradicts the literal reading of a 6000 year old earth with special creation of each type of animal, literal world-wide flood, etc.

You might be surprised to learn how many people believe the Genesis story is literally true. http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2007/10/genesis_held_to_be_literally_t.php

So - can you reproduce the Big Bang and verify that is indeed how the universe was created?

Big Bang theory makes certain predictions about what the universe should be like. We can and do verify those predictions. In the case of the Big Bang in particular, this xkcd comes to mind. The picture in question is the cosmic microwave background radiation where the error bars from our measurements are so small and match the theoretical result so well that when plotted together with the theoretical curve for the black body spectrum, the theoretical curve obscures the error bars.

As for additional theories of what the universe was like shortly after the big bang, we reproduce those energies in small spaces with a small number of particles all the time and try to learn and adapt our current theories to fit those observations. That's what particle accelerators are for.

Can you reproduce evolution to the point of speciation in a laboratory?

Yes.

The point I'm making here is that you're always starting with an assumption. If you're a creationist, you assume that the revealed knowledge from the bible is correct, the earth must be 6000 years old, and therefore scientific methodology that indicates it's much older must be incorrect.

You start off with an assumption, sure. Then you make predictions from it that you can test. What predictions can you make from the assumption that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and how can you test them? Well, one way to test that is through radiometric dating: you would predict that you would not be able to find anything older than 6,000 years old. That's not true, so you now assume that the methodology is incorrect. If you make the assumption that radiometric dating gives the wrong result, what prediction does that make? The only reasonable prediction is that the half-life for isotopes somehow changed over time. Have we ever observed that to happen? No, so another prediction failed. That leaves you with God is deliberately trying to fool you and is planting false evidence around. Well, if you assume that, why wouldn't you assume He also lied in the Bible?

I don't mind that people choose to have faith. I do mind when their faith trumps evidence. For anything in which science doesn't have an explanation for, you are free to believe whatever you want to believe (as long as you call it a belief, and not 'truth' or worse, 'science'). If you choose to believe that the stories in the Bible are metaphors, and that God had a hand in the Big Bang, and that God created humans through the process of evolution, I can't tell you that you are wrong (and you can't tell me that you are right). You are free to take that on faith. You are not free to call it scientific theory like the Intelligent Design guys are doing, because you don't have predictions that can be tested. You are not free to have it taught on science classrooms, because it's not science. You are free to believe in it with absolutely no evidence (that's called faith), and it might even be true (science only deals with testable, but it does not imply that if it's not testable it doesn't exist), but it's not science and science is not faith.

Its starting to look more and more like project Rho haven't really got a clue what they are talking about though:

http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2010/03/while_doing_some_poking_around.php

Yeah, it's embarrassing when someone who's brilliant within his area of expertise starts nosing into other fields (in this case economics and the electronics industry) just to say stupid things. By the way, he did this before, although the previous victim was biology. Why do physicists think they are masters of all sciences? Granted, that was in response to a question, but he really should have said ‘I have no clue’. Why oh why do experts always think they're experts in everything?

there's about as many games that could be argued are 'art' that there are movies.

was spiderman 3 art? then mass effect 3 could be art...

is ICO art or just a moody puzzler? was schindlers list art or just a history lesson? did you care more about the girl in the red coat or about Aeris (Aerith) when she died?

I mean they put this crap in museums as "art"

*anything* can be art or artistic. games can be moving and emotional visually stunning just as much as movies. both have independent branches and corporate franchises. the concept of art is up to interpretation and the argument is all a bit silly.

While much of PZ Meyer's blog could be considered highly flammable the guy also has a large number of good science posts. Here's his take on the basics of chromosome number change. BTW to plants chromosome number doesn't mean all that much as change in ploidy number is common and even exploited by plant breeders.

Your Google search turned up a fundamentalist Christian website dedicated to disproving the topic. VERY unbiased science there...

As most of these sites, it's basically filled with logical fallacies and based on 50 year old scientific knowledge.

Turns out they created a LOT more amino acids than they knew how to detect in 1953...

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/old_scientists_never_clean_out.php

Also, the argument that the environment for the experiment was "too perfect" doesn't mean that those molecules could not have been present together in smaller quantities and environments and created smaller numbers of amino acids. Also, the very fact that such a simple experiment was able to create amino acids from basic inorganic molecules shows that it's very possible, just not necessarilt the *exact* mechanism by which it happened...

So why are you so quick to accept this? How can this press release saying 'Its not really us' carry any more weight then one saying "It's us".

There are no leaders of Anonymous, so if you happen to be Anonymous, you've gotta figure out what to believe for yourself.

In this case, the hypothesis that Anonymous has better things to do with its time makes more sense than the original idea of attacking WBC. And because the text in WBC's "come at us bro" had patterns that identified its author as the same one as in the initial "hai guyz lets raid WBC".

Anonymous is right: There's nothing Anonymous could do to WBC to make WBC any more funny than it already is. WBC is a troll; if you do not feed the troll, the troll will starve to death - maybe its death throes could inspire some lulz. An invite to DDOS is often a trap. Anons who do not step into the trap can remain Anonymous.

An analysis of the text is consistent with the hypothesis that WBC appears to have invited Anonymous to a DDOS party of WBC for reasons unknown. It's a troll, it's a trap, and it wouldn't have even been particularly funny.

Wake me when over 9000 people show up for something like the awesome counterprotest at Comic-Con.

So why are you so quick to accept this? How can this press release saying 'Its not really us' carry any more weight then one saying "It's us".

There are no leaders of Anonymous, so if you happen to be Anonymous, you've gotta figure out what to believe for yourself.

In this case, the hypothesis that Anonymous has better things to do with its time makes more sense than the original idea of attacking WBC. And because the text in WBC's "come at us bro" had patterns that identified its author as the same one as in the initial "hai guyz lets raid WBC".

Anonymous is right: There's nothing Anonymous could do to WBC to make WBC any more funny than it already is. WBC is a troll; if you do not feed the troll, the troll will starve to death - maybe its death throes could inspire some lulz. An invite to DDOS is often a trap. Anons who do not step into the trap can remain Anonymous.

An analysis of the text is consistent with the hypothesis that WBC appears to have invited Anonymous to a DDOS party of WBC for reasons unknown. It's a troll, it's a trap, and it wouldn't have even been particularly funny.

Wake me when over 9000 people show up for something like the awesome counterprotest at Comic-Con.

What won't he talk about? I've seen him on the news talking about supervolcanoes (instead of, say, a Geologist), he likes to spout gibberish about evolution, and he always seems to pop up any time a TV show needs a token physicist or just a scientist.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/why_do_physicists_think_they_a.php

GWB! Palin! Fox news! Global warming! All human caused changes are evil because they were human caused! There is a waiting list for Prius! Whole Foods reports a shortage of goat cheese! All savages are noble and cultural imperialism is eliminating them! Somewhere, someone is not being taxed! There exists at least one social engineering law which we have not enacted!

Death panels! Muslims! Mexicans! Communists! Nazis! Liberals! They're gonna take away our right to ! They're gonna make sex ed mandatory, and take away abstinence only education (which totally works by the way)! They're gonna take away our guns! They're gonna ban religions!

What does this prove? Well, without much effort I came up with ten real things conservatives have flipped out over for no reason - you came up with maybe four, and six that are just silly.

I think that says something, huh? Just because both sets A and B exist and are not empty doesn't mean that set A must be the same size as set B.

The submitter obviously did not read his own links. While the universe is only 14 billion years old, the _observable_ universe is > 90 billion light years across.

This is due to expansion, which stretched the wavelength of the light coming towards us, so redshifting those galaxies. It also makes those galaxies appear to be moving away from us at many multiples the speed of light, although they're not really moving at all, space is expanding.
An explanation

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

You have an artificial guilt complex like so many that follow religions.

No, I have an understanding of science, the ability to read and analyse for myself, and the capacity to think beyond my own selfish ends - both in the present and extrapolated to mine, and my descendents' futures.

The hard facts

Oh dear, here we go again...

that the arctic summer holes are now closing

Are you talking about ozone? Because that has absolutely nothing to do with climate.

If you're talking about arctic sea ice, you're completely wrong.

the south pole overall has been cooling for over 30 years

Wrong. On average, antarctic monitoring stations on land have seen warming. The ocean temperatures around antarctica are absolutely clear.

You may be confused because antarctic ice is thickening. That's entirely consistent with predictions, though. A warmer planet does not mean everywhere changes in the same way. Warm air causes more evaporation from oceans, and more precipitation in places (in the case of the antarctic, more snow makes thicker ice). However, that gain is nothing compared to losses elsewhere.

You simply cannot extrapolate from individual local phenomena to the global climate, you have to look at the entire picture, which is very clear.

This article explains the science well:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Why-is-Antarctic-sea-ice-increasing.html

that sea level rise has been going on for thousands of years since the last ice age

That's a logical fallacy. One cause (the end of an ice age) having resulted in sea level rise in the past does not discount another cause (anthropogenic emissions) resulting in sea level rise now.

If you're actually interested in educating yourself (which I'm starting to doubt) the NYT ran an accessible feature that got the science right last November:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/science/earth/14ice.html

that more glaciers are growing than retreating

Categorically wrong. There are always localised fluctuations, but globally, we're losing glacier mass at an astonishing rate.

that mount killimanjaro's ice shrinkage is entirely a local phenomenon driven by land use

Remember what I said about local fluctuations? Look at the global picture and open your eyes. Possible localised causes around KMJ do nothing to change the extremely clear pattern of global glacier loss due to temperature rise.

are lost on you because you have a self-destructive and society-destructive false belief, fueled by hucksters with an agenda for money and power, in the "sin" of man using his mind to better his life.

Way to open and close with an ad-hominem.

Second, you mentioned the “0.3C per decade” prediction from emission Scenario A, but you’ve repeatedly ignored Scenario B which Hansen himself called “more plausible” in 1988. [Dumb Scientist]

That’s great, but I’m not talking about Hansen88, but AR1, which focuses on Scenario A. It’s possible this was done to scare politicians into action, but when one reads it, the +0.3C increase appears to be the best guess. [ShakaUVM]

No, what you and Michaels are doing isn't "great" in any sense of the word. Again, by "summarizing" the IPCC AR1 WG1 report as though it only gave one scenario, you pulled a "Pat Michaels".

As I've explained ad nauseum, the dynamical nature of climate models means that evaluating a GCM ensemble requires comparing projected forcings to the actual forcings. In other words, each scenario is an "if-then" statement: "If greenhouse gas concentrations rise at rate X, then temperatures will rise at rate Y." You and Michaels not only chopped off the first part of that sentence, you both presented it as the only scenario... which "coincidentally" makes it seem like scientists are discrediting themselves by making bad predictions.

The correct approach is to open the AR1 to the Annex on page 333, and examine the rates of CO2 rise given in the top-left of figure A.3. Scenario "A" (BaU in that plot) only applies if CO2 levels exceed 400ppm by 2010, which hasn't happened. The top right graph also shows that methane rises to over 2000ppm in that scenario by 2010, and once again that hasn't happened either.

Just like in Hansen88, AR1's scenario B is the closest match to the actual forcings. That's not really surprising, considering that Hansen was a contributing author for sections 6 and 8, table 2.2 on p52 repeatedly references Hansen88's radiative forcings and corrects a typo on p9360 of Hansen88, and chapter 3 repeatedly references Hansen88. Unsurprisingly, the emissions scenarios used in both studies seem very similar.

I thought you'd be able to learn something from the eerie parallels between your mistake and Michaels's, but apparently I was wrong. Again.

Unlike many other scientists, I don't think Michaels is lying because his "rebuttal" seems to indicate that he's trying to draw conclusions based entirely on each scenario's legend, and that he doesn't understand the difference between dynamical and empirical models. If he thinks that climate models are empirical, it makes sense that he wouldn't understand the reason for making three different projections. In that case

"You need to study your theology. Continuous implementation of new ideas."

LOL! Theology is nothing but inventing lame excuses for lame myths. Courtier's reply sums it quite nicely: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php

Theology was not able to adequately answer even the simplest questions: "Why there is evil?", "Why there are different religions?", "Should we rely on faith rather than facts?".

In this regard theology is even worse than philosophy (I'm not including theology as a part of philosophy), as the philosophy can be somewhat excused because it lacks the clear object to study.

How is surfacestations.org relevant? It shows that surface data isn't terribly reliable and nothing more than that.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/so_thats_why_surfacestationsor.php

http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2009/05/antony-watts-and-surface-stations-wait.html

By the way, two counter links:
http://open.salon.com/blog/rahul_k_parikh/2009/09/06/huffington_post_health_watch_mark_hymans_faux_autism_cure
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/09/dr_mark_hyman_mangles_autism_science_on-.php

But, while I agree with the dangers of chelation (I think appropriate iodine supplementation might be safer and as effective), in general, I feel Mark Hyman is right about the big picture.

The problem is that in the USA, dermatologists and cosmetics companies have scared everyone about being in the sun, which along with and indoors lifestyle have led to vitamin D deficiency (which is involved in dealing with heavy metals). And with the way the meat, dairy, and processed/refined food industries have captured the US FDA, we have a crazy food pyramid that contributes to most people in the USA getting about half their calories from animal products and about the other half from refined and processed foods, with less than 10% percent of calories from fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds. We need to turn that around so less than 10% of calories comes from animal product and refined/processed foods, and 90% of calories comes from whole plant foods.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

Unfortunately, because of the "Pleasure Trap", people have a hard time breaking out of that bondage to deadly foods and thus come up with endless rationalizations for why they are not harming us:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm

And we've been told for so long by so many people to avoid the sun (whether for health or energy), it's hard to think it is important. A little story about that is at the end of this:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-october.shtml
"Then, new priests of science and medicine, told the people the Sun God was only a star, one of trillions, nothing special. Great temples called hospitals and research institutes arose, which admitted only filtered sunlight and where the people offered sacrifices to the gods of science and medicine, sacrifices that enriched the new priests. Then, thirty years ago, the new priests of dermatology told the people to shun the Sun God. "Banish her from your lives", they said, "She is evil." The people listened to the new priests and kept their pregnant women out of the Sun God's warmth, and told their children she was wicked. The people stayed inside, their children with them and traveled behind glass in their cars and wore sunblock and sunhats to keep the Sun God away. The Sun God grew vengeful...."

Look, we've been told for decades that type 2 diabetes in incurable, when it is in most cases cured within a week of a better diet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
http://www.rawfor30days.com/
Above is a link on how to get past the "pleasure trap" keeping people from changing their diet for the better and readjusting their tastes to healthy food.

We've been told heart disease and cancer are just inheritable and "genetic", when most of that is

It's called the Nobel Disease. The Nobel Prize is one of the highest prizes awarded in science, so it seems like some scientists think that once they have it, the only way to top their previous work is to escape the confines of reality entirely.

It doesn't turn out well, most of the time.

Are you saying http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/strange_loops_dennis_ritchie_a.php would be a GPL violation, or are we talking about different things?

This article has already been taken apart by P.Z. Myers in a blog post on Pharyngula. Here's his conclusion:

But those last few sentences, where Lehrer dribbles off into a delusion of subjectivity and essentially throws up his hands and surrenders himself to ignorance, is unjustifiable. Early in any scientific career, one should learn a couple of general rules: science is never about absolute certainty, and the absence of black & white binary results is not evidence against it; you don't get to choose what you want to believe, but instead only accept provisionally a result; and when you've got a positive result, the proper response is not to claim that you've proved something, but instead to focus more tightly, scrutinize more strictly, and test, test, test ever more deeply. It's unfortunate that Lehrer has tainted his story with all that unwarranted breast-beating, because as a summary of why science can be hard to do, and of the institutional flaws in doing science, it's quite good.

Basically, it's not like anyone's surprised at this.

As pointed out by Orac, things are nowhere as simple here as they've been presented. There was still an establishment of expectation of the treatment working, which is exactly one would expect would elicit the placebo effect.

...the investigators deceived their subjects to induce placebo effects. Here's how they describe what they told their patients:

Patients who gave informed consent and fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria were randomized into two groups: 1) placebo pill twice daily or 2) no-treatment. Before randomization and during the screening, the placebo pills were truthfully described as inert or inactive pills, like sugar pills, without any medication in it. Additionally, patients were told that "placebo pills, something like sugar pills, have been shown in rigorous clinical testing to produce significant mind-body self-healing processes." The patient-provider relationship and contact time was similar in both groups. Study visits occurred at baseline (Day 1), midpoint (Day 11) and completion (Day 21). Assessment questionnaires were completed by patients with the assistance of a blinded assessor at study visits.

Moreover, the investigators recruited subjects thusly:

Participants were recruited from advertisements for "a novel mind-body management study of IBS" in newspapers and fliers and from referrals from healthcare professionals. During the telephone screening, potential enrollees were told that participants would receive "either placebo (inert) pills, which were like sugar pills which had been shown to have self-healing properties" or no-treatment.

Even the authors had to acknowledge that this was a problem:

A further possible limitation is that our results are not generalizable because our trial may have selectively attracted IBS patients who were attracted by an advertisement for "a novel mind-body" intervention. Obviously, we cannot rule out this possibility. However, selective attraction to the advertised treatment is a possibility in virtually all clinical trials.

In other words, not only did Kaptchuk et al deceive their subjects to trigger placebo effects, whether they realize or will admit that that's what they did or not, but they might very well have specifically attracted patients more prone to believing that the power of "mind-body" interactions. Yes, patients were informed that they were receiving a placebo, but that knowledge was tainted by what the investigators told them about what the placebo pills could do.

When a straight soldier discusses his/her sex life, it's a social faux pas as you say- on the same level as evangelizing co-workers during business hours. But when a gay soldier does the same thing, the consequences are significantly more severe: immediate discharge from the service. Seems like a double standard.

Besides, I've worked with a few homosexuals who eventually trusted me enough to tell me that their "roommate" was actually their partner. I can't imagine what kind of psychological effects are incurred through being forced to pretend their own love lives don't exist. We're not talking about sordid details here (I wouldn't be interested either) but don't you have some vague idea of whether or not your coworkers are married? That's the kind of dishonesty that "don't ask, don't tell" requires: gay people have to pretend their relationships don't even exist. Frankly, that expectation seems incompatible with the code of honor I've come to expect from the military.

And that's even before getting into cases like Jene Newsome who followed the rules only to be discharged because the police ratted her out.

No.

You're saying only when corruption reaches a certain level it should be exposed, we shouldn't sweat the small stuff because it could be worse?
Ignoring the small stuff makes it harder to stop corruption growing. Do some reading on police corruption for instance, or how organised crime gains power over politicians, etc.

Besides at what level of illegality, scandal or corruption or breaking their own rules does it become acceptable to you that wrongdoing should be exposed? Please define who should be the arbiter of "true corruption" and how they would objectively decide what qualifies. "Proper and controlled"? Controlled by who?

Journalism is meant to be the fourth estate. It's meant to keep an eye on the activities of the government and a free press is one of the mechanisms to guard against abuse by those who would prefer "Proper and controlled" release of information. If FOX News et al had been doing their job then maybe Wikileaks would not be creating such a stir.

Tolerating indiscretions or failures of the US because they are 'not as bad as the others' is a very poor argument. The fact is, if that behaviour is not rooted out, then the US loses credibility to criticise the failings of others. It's already happening, look at Putin's support of Assange and 'tsk,tsk' comments about the efforts of the US
to silence Wikileaks. How will the US ever be able to be taken seriously when they try to argue for free speech or freedom of the press? They will be laughed at as hypocrites.

PS
As far as has been reported, no lives have been lost due to the info in the Wikileaks cables.
"If you don't have the resources to conduct such a review, give the docs to a news organization which does." - Wikileaks did this already. They also offered the US government the opportunity to do this, an offer which was declined.

You've got a lot of ranting and suppositions in there, but not much of use.

1) Even in the 70s most of the research indicated Global Warming not cooling. You need to understand that what the media says scientists are saying and what scientists are saying are not always the same thing.

2) Al Gore isn't the main leader of climate change, he's most likely just the person you are most aware of being associated with it.

3) I consider it highly unlikely that anyone could really afford to pay off that many scientists without leaving a clearly visible money trail.

4) The point isn't to damn the economy or take away anyone's technology. The point is to reduce our reliance on a limited supply of petroleum which is having an effect on the global climate which is going to be harmful to many people.

5) Frankly, I'm not pursuing any policies.

6) I think you are likely overstating the negative consequences of taking actions to reduce carbon emissions

7) I would be skeptical about the results of any such a laws. I strongly suspect it would be used to enslave people regardless of the outcome of climate change. I'm strongly reminded that in there have been many times when disaster was averted only to have people immediately declare that was never any danger because disaster didn't happen.

8) Juries routinely face the question of how much evidence is enough. It's their primary job to determine whether the evidence presented is sufficient to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt.

9) You are making a huge jump to reach the conclusion that I think "we don't need to be fully informed". I'm merely pointing out that you can always claim there isn't enough evidence. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if every defense lawyer who ever practiced law routinely used that claim in their closing arguments. It's a claim that requires justification.

10) People like me do not come out and say the scientists were paid off or anything like that. You might notice that I said nothing of the sort. I hope these researchers are right, it would be good for everyone if they were.

11) Also people like me do not unthinking back catastrophic predictions of climate change. People like me usually assume that it's an idiot reporting making the claims and that they are not backed up by the underlying science. Then we check to see what the real story is. It's partly of really actually being skeptical.

12) I don't blindly support any side. I'd really rather than climate change wasn't occurring, but like you said, I can't blindly agree with you when the evidence indicates it is occurring.

13) As long as you continue to believe that everyone who disagrees with you is an unthinking zealot, you will find agreement difficult to reach on any issue.

As pointed out by PZ Myers http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/another_reason_to_avoid_visiti.php
The comments in their javascript are kind of funny.In particular, // CREATIONIST GROUPIES

'Yeah, but a human has ~3 billion base pairs. IANACS, but with 2 bits per base, so one byte represents 4 bases, so it's roughly equivalent to 750 megabytes. That's pretty impressive compression to shrink to 50 megs (which I agree, is a lot of data).'

Indeed. The 2-bit encoded human genome available from UCSC runs to 778Mb, or a conventional gzipped ASCII file is 905Mb. Better compression is an active area of research. Depending on the complexity of the input sequence and the compression algorithm, various values in the 1-2 bits/base pair range have been quoted, see e.g.:

http://fabrice.lefessant.net/papers/cpm2005.pdf

But that still leaves you far short of Kurzweil's supposed compression ratio, unless you allow this sort of cheating:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942

This trick relies on comparison to a known standard reference sequence, and therefore doesn't say anything about the information content of the genome in general (so it's no good for Kurzweil's argument).

'Then again, if you skim the "junk DNA" (which may or may not really be junk), you can shrink it quite a bit'

If you include only protein-coding genes and discard the rest as 'junk', you can get to around Kurzweil's number in uncompressed ASCII. But that really is cheating. There's lots going on outside the proteome:

http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2007/02/dinner_with_the_transcription.php

So you have to deal with all 3 billion bp.

My tribute to LN: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/11/leslie_nielson_is_dead.php

Long answer: Dark matter wasn't invented just because someone saw some anomalous behavior that didn't agree with theory, and said to themselves: "Oh, there has to be something mysterious at work here, we'll call it dark matter.". There are several reasons for believing in dark matter, for example that when measuring gravity we notice gravity coming from directions where we can't see any matter. However, the source of this gravity behaves a lot like matter would. For example we can observe these "invisible gravity sources" being thrown around when two galaxies collide. Because these "invisible gravity sources" acts a lot like matter, except for the fact that we can't see it, it's called dark matter.

If you're not yet convinced, take a look at this recent blogpost by a professional astrophysicist: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/11/the_simplest_argument_for_dark.php In this post, he basically explains how we can derive the existence of dark matter from: A) Assuming that the theory of general relativity is valid, B) assuming that the big bang theory is valid, and C) our observations of the cosmic microwave background.

The "market" has no lobbyists or campaign contributions, the market is not a player, it is the field on which the players compete. Blaming the market itself for the actions of would-be monopolists is nonsensical.

Welcome to Reductionism 101. It's also clear we can't blame the atoms. I think.

In a richer view of the world, it's sometimes reasonable to regard markets as a human institution, built up from negotiated agreements involving many players, including regulatory bodies, whose actions are partly based on representations to the general public, for all it's worth.

There was a capital market culture from 1950 to about 1980 that was reasonably stable. It was becoming frayed a bit at the end by algorithmic trading. No consensus lasts forever. Things change.

Then there was a very different ideological consensus in place from the early Reagan/Thatcher years based Hayek and some loony rhetoric about the Laffer curve. I can't find the hilarious Martin Gardiner parody just now. It looked a bit like this:
tworm.jpg

A Google engineer has a decent blog post about Laffer-nomics in the button down MSM.
A Laughable Laffer Curve from the WSJ

But I would argue that if he's going to subtract Norway, he should also subtract the UAE, which isn't actually an observational data point anyway. Then what curve would you have? A graph of tax code loophole coverage, aka Swiss cheese. He points this out concerning the nominal 34% US corporate tax rate generating almost no revenue.

The free trade component of this new consensus was relatively sane. The extent of financial market deregulation was not. And especially the oversight was conducted on the notion that if the ground underneath you is undulating slowly, you can't be anywhere near a cliff face. And don't put your ear to the ground to listen for industrial scale dollar excavation right under your feet.

That market consensus is gone now. We're still too busy drip feeding blood into the wounded church looters to declare future policy.

No, you can't blame an abstract market conception. But you can blame the markets we've actually built. And yes, the behaviour of a gas is determined by the behaviours of the constituent atoms, but sometimes we prefer to talk about the properties of the gas as if it actually exists.

It's also possible to distinguish monopolies from the exercise of monopoly power. Long ago Microsoft infused $150m in cash into Apple when Apple was on the ropes. If Microsoft held those shares, they made a bundle (one site says $18b based on stock history). Microsoft likely held the power to yank Apple's life support back in 1997, but they were subject to constraints on the exercise of their monopoly powers. That didn't make them *not* a monopoly. Not every company waits until they've been fingerprinted by the FTC to exercise discretion.

I think in any professional toolbox, the trick is to be able to sell solutions. It doesn't hurt to be able to sell solutions you believe in. And you do need to think a bit before jumping on a bandwagon.

Long ago I invested a lot of energy mastering standard C++. But it was hard to find a project where I could actually use those skills because of the abortion known as MSVC, a calculated effort to queer platform independence. I didn't much enjoy programming in dialect of the damned. Kai C++ was wonderful, then Intel snapped it up, and it became code generator of the damned, not working so great for the AMD platform.

How much could I seriously invest in mastering .NET before I'd wake up in a cold sweat and rush off first thing to read MS trade journals for any hint of future platforms whims that awaits me? Even Java made me nervous, on a much longer rope.

I tried watching it a few days ago. Didn't last too long. How anyone can stomach that movie is beyond me. This review about sums up the what I was able to get out of it. I can't believe how many people are able to find such great meaning out of that steaming turd. I guess it's because most of us are so disconnected from agriculture.

A brain is basically a massively parallel computer

No, it isn't.

Reminds me of the Salem Hypothesis, which states that creationists who claim to have degrees often have degrees in engineering.

I have followed Dr. Wakefield's ethical case, and understand that his methods were at question, and his results have not been duplicated in humans. Although there is a new study which calls the vaccine regimen of the 1990s into question.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20628439

That's putting it mildly. Not only did Wakefield conceal conflicts of interest, but it has been shown that the description of the work and how it was done was false. Your statement that it has not been duplicated "in humans" is technically correct--others have tried to reproduce Wakefield's claimed results and have gotten contrary results--but it could be misunderstood as indicating that it has been duplicated in nonhumans. This is not true.

And the study you cite was originally co- authored by Wakefield (although they demoted him to an acknowledgment when the extent of his scientific malfeasance and unethical behavior became widespread public knowledge), and also has major scientific problems.

"What is this NVICP and why do they accept these unscientific claims of "biologically plausible mechanism"? Are they ignorant of science? Or are they required by the words of the legislation to accept claims like this?"

The court is not ignorant of the science. The court is designed that way. It has a lower burden of proof than regular civil court. There are certain injuries that are considered to be vaccine related. Other advantages include: attorney fees are paid, cases are resolved quicker and cases can still be taken to the regular court system. But if you don't win in the NVICP you probably have no chance to win in civil court. And going to civil court means giving up any award (if any) you received in the NVICP.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/09/vaccine_injury_and_compensation.php

And "biologically plausible mechanism" is not an unscientific claim. You might want to brush up on science yourself.