Slashdot Mirror

what are we better than? the truth?

the GOP is the party of stupid. who said that?

the GOP said that:

http://thehill.com/video/in-th...

you haven't noticed a connection between incredibly ignorant, antiscience statements and the GOP? oh i'm sure you can find a democrat who said something stupid. and i can find ten republicans for every one odd democrat

do you want to bet on that?

let me get started:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rep...

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08...

that's off the top of my head

how many more do you want?

Interesting, I did some googling and found a competing theory that it is the restrictions of the mother's metabolism that demands that the baby be born at nine months. As compared to a chimpanzees development at birth (brain 1/2 the size at adulthood) the birth canal would only need to be 3 centimeters wider, a size that many women could accommodate

link to study:
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Taking that out of consideration, I still have to wonder at the novelty of increasing brain size and complexity in mammals. I think that mice would have severe limitations to the size of the brain that they could support. What mammals would be capable of supporting a brain of similar size to humans? Elephants can obviously support a very large brain, would this gene provide for a more human-like brain (increase in folds and complexity). They would face limitations in terms of supportability (kinda hard to keep that super-intelligent elephant in an urban environment.

What would be an appropriate target for engineering an intelligent companion for humans? Dogs, cats or even horses? To be honest I selected cows because of the intelligent cow at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe offering to serve up portions of its own body for consumption. But they would also have a fairly docile pattern of behavior and we are pretty good at keeping them in line. Pigs may be another option (Animal Farm anybody).

Suggestions?
 

How would we know?

In theory, a star's brightness should fluctuate as it becomes unstable. This may happen over weeks, days, or even hours. We really don't know, because there have not been any close before/after observations. But there would likely be some sign that it is about to blow.

Ultraviolet glow from impending supernova.

Do you understand that an individualized warrant is required to target, collect, store, analyze, or disseminate the communications content of a US Person anywhere on the globe, and that the current law on the issue is stronger and more restrictive with regard to US Persons than it has ever been?

Whether a warrant is required or not is irrelevant when the agency itself ignores such laws as "inefficient."

It has been proven that they log everything (what used to be called a pen register) and admit to it ("it's only metadata, why should you care?" we are told), and I've previously calculated how much data they'd need to record any person's utterances 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and it came out to something like 5 bucks the last time, assuming that someone talked continuously without sleep or stopping to breathe . It's less now because single 4 terabyte hard disks are available for $132 at Newegg, retail and a top-of-the-line enterprise quality 8TB disk with helium goes for under $750. And these are retail prices.

Don't believe me? 16Kb/s for that amount of time is roughly 64GB (516.7E9 bits no parity). So being generous, say we lose 500GB to formatting a 4TB drive, 3500 Salesman Gigabytes.

3500/64=54.blahblah 1 year partitions.

132/54=$2.44.

Less than an Extra Large Dunkin Donuts coffee.

For a year.

But wait there's more.

People don't talk 24 hours a day. They talk on average about 16000 words a day, according to this:

http://www.scientificamerican....

So what amount of time does that mean? It means about an hour-and-a-half of speaking at 3 words/second (which is average). 1/16'th of a day.

So take all of that $2.44, and divide it by 16

15 cents.

That's all it takes to store your utterances for an entire year. Half that if you really don't give a fuck about voice quality.

For the entire nation, which is 319 million, that gives $48 million to record everyone's utterances for an entire year. If you only record what is said on the phone, it's a tiny fraction of that.

CHUMP CHANGE WELL WITHIN A FEDERAL AGENCY'S BUDGET ESPECIALLY IF THAT BUDGET IS BLACK.

This does not include all the other stuff like connection to the networks, but that is all externalized by requiring the phone companies, etc, to take the bulk of that cost on themselves.

And by looking at that huge datacenter in Utah, they are already doing it and doubling-down on the methodology.

They don't give a flying fuck about warrants as we've seen, and it's technically and financially feasible, so they'll do it / are doing it.

--
BMO

"And where does nitrogen in food come from?"

It's in part a cycle -- land to humans to waste to land. Only in part as nitrogen can oxidize to go back to the air, so it needs to get fixed again by bacteria.

"Very little fertilizer is lost in modern agriculture in relative terms."

First, 40% of food in the USA is wasted. So, all that fertilizer is wasted. Food produced closer to home might not incur so much waste.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

But that is not what I meant. This is what I meant:
http://www.scientificamerican....
"Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones"
The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situation"

"Pathogens are not a problem, they are outcompeted by soil bacteria during composting."

Composting doesn't always get everything, as compost piles have edges and heat zones, and all that depends on careful management. Also, compost is contaminated by chemicals people dispose in the waste stream (chemicals from home darkrooms used to be a big issue) and also pharmaceuticals flushed down toilets.

"China's population grew 3 _times_ during the last century virtually without increasing the land use, because of the fertilizers and pesticides."

The fact that China's population may now need more inputs given growth in the last century since the Haber process does nothing to invalidate that they managed large (but not quite so large) populations for 3900 years before that without the Haber process. What that shows is that alternatives have worked. China is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. If they could do it, it shows the US could do it and other countries could do it.

"Still won't work. You'll need livestock for manure (to concentrate nitrogen and other nutrients). "

I agree that much current "organic agriculture" is dependent on livestock manure from conventional farming which is based mostly on feeding conventionally farmed grain (not pasture grass) to animals, and so there is a big nitrogen input there. That said, given a change in land uses patterns (especially away from agriculture), and with more nutrient recycling, and with intercropping and crop rotations and ground up rock dust, likely we could feed the planet well without the Haber process. I'll admit it would be good to back that with more numbers.

"And agricultural robots are a pipe dream."

Did you do the slightest research on them?
"Are agricultural robots ready? 27 companies profiled"
http://robohub.org/are-agricul...

"Unlike you, I actually helped to grow my own food (lean years after the USSR collapse) so I appreciate the amount labor required for that."

I'm sorry you had to go through that involuntarily due to crazy geopolitics and economics that cause that crisis. Still, you can't compare what you presumably had to do with limited tools and limited materials and limited information in a (probably) limited climate on impoverished soils with what is really possible with good tools, abundant materials, abundant information, in a good climate on well prepared soils.

Still, how do you know what foods I've grown or what I've studied?

"And I also worked with the Great Evil (Monsanto) on actual modern agriculture to appreciate the difference."

I see. I'll try not to assume that context might explain a lot. :-) Still, at the very least, it may be something like how someone who works with Microsoft products a lot might never think that open source software is possible or even better sometimes? Have you studied organic agriculture? Have you read Wid

Sometimes it is 'later' enough to influence entire generation of people in doing wrong or useless things. For example salt in food
http://www.scientificamerican....
One wrong study done in 70ties and entire generation of people were scared from using salt. Bluff was called 20 years later but it took _another_ 20 years to officially admit 70ties findings were completely wrong - and I suppose another 20 years are needed before 'salt if white death' people will finally die out.
I think similar thing (other direction) happened with tabacco.

Climate is complicated enough that it is not really an 'objective reality'. Given all the possibilities of handpicking data points and applying arbitrary correction factors, you can manipulate data in subtle ways, rather than blatantly fake it. And as it is complicated enough that normal people cannot really doublecheck data, we are left to believe the 'consensus'.

> Gartner gives the numbers the group contracting the study want.

It doesn't work like that. Gartner publishes the numbers the group contracting the study want.
If the study had produced less useful numbers, it would never have seen the light of day.

That may seem like a subtle distinction, because the end result is still the same, but what it means is that are probably a ton of unpublished studies out there that contradict the viewpoints of the powerful. Kind of like the way drug companies cherry pick test results. In both cases the long term result is to erode institutional trust and trust is directly correlated with the health of a society.

Yes I think it is an important aspect of human nature- it's just how you channel it. Below is an interesting article about anger an creativity, I know that I can be kind angry when working on a difficult problem and I call it my 'mental razor'.
http://www.scientificamerican....

Note the last line of the article: http://www.scientificamerican....

Laymen article: http://www.quora.com/How-long-... ... spent fuel is in pools for about 10 years.

That is more interesting: http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent...

This is a german article: http://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...Ãrme (contains umlaut a) ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... the numbers vary a bit, the german one has a table in the middle, saying after a month the heat is 0.13% and after three months it is 0.07%

The next paragraph after that table states: fuel rods create enough decay heat to melt themselves _months_ after shutdown, if they are not cooled obviously.

Well, to get real numbers I guess we need a anti radiation suit, wait for the next melt down, and measure our selves ^_^ would you volunteer for the first two weeks?

Crappy and totally uninformative graph. Try some high resolution ones.

Then understand that follows temps

Even the Skeptical Science people agree but they try to dismiss it with a bunch of speculative "Ya...but...".

Even the IPCC admits this.

Facts are facts no matter where you find them. Don't be a Face Painting Homer cheering "my team rules, no matter what the score!"

If you are a smart nerd, you realize that you are dealing in anecdotal evidence and know the pitfalls of that. Your thought process seems to be : "I got beat up, therefore girls in general have it easier than I did." If that is truly your thought process, it tells a lot about whether or not you are a smart nerd or not. High school was a social meat grinder with no positive memories for me, and I still recognize the advantages I have had even through that horrible time.

Logically, you know those who were drawn to CS and actually made it into the program, but have negligible information about those who were drawn to CS and discouraged from it.

You really don't believe in a gender bias? Really? There is ample evidence for it. http://blogs.scientificamerica...
[ tldr: a study shows that the exact same resume gets statistically significant different responses when male or female names are attached to it ]

Of course sons are praised for being strong, and they are also praised for being smart. Even the dumb ones are praised for being smart the few times they do something not stupid.

It seems that people have forgotten the autism/thiomersal hysteria of a few years back -- just in time to deliver a generation of unvaccinated kiddos into our schools. Unfortunately, the "thiomersal-autism-link" was promoted loudly by people like the well-meaning, but misinformed Jenny McCarthy as panicked parents sought answers for the "autism outbreak". Autsim is heavily over-represented in families that have engineers as family members. See this article from Scientific American (paywall, sorry): http://www.scientificamerican.... The referenced UK survey showed that families with engineers in them can have between 2.5 to 8.6 *times* the statistical occurrence of autism in their children. Even though the whole thiomersal-autism link has been debunked, in the intervening time a lot of people have sadly opted out of vaccinating their kids -- better "safe-than-sorry" seemed the prevailing wisdom -- until science can make a ruling on it, right? After all, when was the last time a kid came down with measles? ...This against the backdrop of seeing kids with a life-long devastating condition like autism -- nearly every family I know in Silicon Valley knows one or more families that are stricken with it. I personally know over half a dozen, including my own son. Unfortunately, the success of vaccinations seems to have been blunted everyone's memory of why we did it in the first place. As parents, all of us try to make the best decisions based on the most current studies/data available, but the tragedy is that current prevailing wisdom failed us on this one. --Ace

There are various life-saving procedures that require all the bacteria in a persons gut to be killed. (I think Crones disease and Colitis might be one). Without bacteria in your gut, you really can't absorb food or nutrients (at least not very well). You can only eat a very small selection of foods, and they don't provide all the nutrients you need, and you wind up being very weak). In order to restore the gut bacteria, they (initially) took feces (poop_ from another person, got someone desperate enough to try anything, made sure it didn't have anything really dangerous in it (no diseases) and then swallow it. The process was (awful), but effective. After 3 days of gargling and brushing their teeth and getting over it, they were once again healthy (able to eat foods, gaining weight, stronger, etc.) Now instead of raw poop, they take the feces, test for harmful disease and if ok remove water and odour, take a small sample of the bacteria, compress it into a pill form, coat it with wax and give that to people. The findings about weight would lead to a conclusion that diet and exercise might not be the reason for obesity, it might have more to do with the bacteria in your gut. There are other studies that the lack of certain bacteria in your gut can give symptoms of Autism (and preliminary studies have -completely- reversed the symptoms in some patients). Jenny McCarthy and vaccines bedamned.

Figure out which bacteria the obese patients have in common that the thin ones don't, and figure out a way to eliminate it.

Sounds easy, but there are more bacterial cells in your body than eukaryotic (human) cells by a factor of 10, and unlike the human cells that all have the same DNA, the bacteria are different. By the way, if you want to know what various types of bacteria are in your personal stool, you can go to American Gut and pay someone $99 to analyze your shit. The answer, however, will be fairly general, because no one's sequenced all the different bacteria there.

I'm not as familiar with the effects on humans, but it has had a noticeable effect on fish populations: http://www.scientificamerican....

There is no evidence that female programmers write any differently than male ones, but there is plenty of evidence that they are treated differently.

You are right in that there has been a push to get women into computer science. There has to be a pull from industry, too. The students should be taken just as seriously as any other, but that does not happen and nor is it likely anytime soon without a push from people inside the industry http://blogs.scientificamerica....

In other words, many women have left tech because they were treated like shit there and they decided they would no longer going to take that crap any longer. You can pretend that is not so and turn a blind eye to it. I don't know if it is a learned behavior or if there is something intrinsic in humans that causes this. All I can do is hope for the former.

You mention wartime and yes, women did get a big boost in careers to fill the void that working men left behind, see the Rosie the Riveter character. Once them men came back, the women were expected to leave the workforce, to leave their jobs that they were doing perfectly well, and get back to raising children. You might be somehow immune from social pressure, but it weighs heavily on most people.

I'm just going to leave this here : http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Of course a person is not going to be so hot for a career where they are paid less for the same value and have to deal with not being taken seriously. That is not on the women, that is a matter of corporate culture. That is a huge disadvantage. You seem to be claiming that this bias does not exist and that all is a fair level playing field. Is that what you believe? How would you tell one way or an other?

No one is stopping a fracture victim from a race; they can crawl if they want to. They didn't win, well that is on them - they did not try hard enough.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Don't be dumb.

Don't be a tool,

... last year "was not even close to be[ing] the warmest on record" according to data compiled by the two top satellite climate data sets: the Remote Sensing System (RSS) satellite data, which measure the lowest few miles of the earth's atmosphere, and data compiled by the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH).
ast year "was third-warmest, but barely," said UAH climate scientists Roy Spencer and John Christy.

The year 2014 "was warm, but not special. The 0.01 degree Celsius difference between 2014 and 2005, or the 0.02 difference with 2013 are not statistically different from zero," Christy said.

Christy said that between 2002 and 2014, temperatures have warmed at a "statistically insignificant" rate of 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade.
RSS and UAH satellite data show there has been no global warming for more than 18 years. This period, which began in October 1996 and lasted for all of 2014, is referred to as "the Great Pause. Satellite Data: 2014 'Not Even Close' to Warmest Year

If you don't like satellite data,

The HadCRUT4 dataset (compiled by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) shows last year was 0.56C (±0.1C*) above the long-term (1961-1990) average.

Nominally this ranks 2014 as the joint warmest year in the record, tied with 2010, but the uncertainty ranges mean it's not possible to definitively say which of several recent years was the warmest. 26 January 2015 - Provisional full-year global mean temperature figures show 2014 was one of the warmest years in a record dating back to 1850

and as far as the 18 years without warming,

[T]he rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012) [is] 0.05 [–0.05 to +0.15] C per decade)which is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012) [of] 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] C per decade.
IPCC AR5 weakens the case for AGW

even the IPCC AR5 agrees.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Don't be dumb.

I think that you are mistaken
http://www.scientificamerican....

The Uranium is in the coal, it has been there for millions of years and can you explain why it would magically disappear just because the material is being burned?

FTA
"According to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the average radioactivity per short ton of coal is 17,100 millicuries/4,000,000 tons, or 0.00427 millicuries/ton. This figure can be used to calculate the average expected radioactivity release from coal combustion."

It becomes an issue because we burn 6.14 billion metric tons of coal per year
Get it now, minute quantities of a highly radioactive material being carries away by the fly ash that results from the coal being burned, which contains the uranium

Try looking for real perspective than repeating FUD and misreading facts;

http://link.springer.com/artic...

http://www.reuters.com/article...

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

http://news.discovery.com/eart...

http://www.insidescience.org/c...

This argument again? I'm so sick of having to explain why "Don't feed the bears" != "Don't feed the poor". If you feed bears, they'll learn to nag you and other people for food. If you feed the poor, they'll also learn to nag for the food, but there are good reasons why you'd maybe want a hungry poor person to ask you for food instead of having a bear ask.

Anyway, regardless of how they feel about bears, conservatives certainly don't like wolves.

There is poison in everything you eat. The skins of potatoes are naturally poisonous, the seeds on strawberries are naturally poisonous. However, the health benefits in these items outweigh the damage the poison does. Like everything how a poison impacts you depends on the dosage.

Lots of poisons are safe for humans at the levels we ingest them. There is no way you could eat any food without dealing with some level of poison.

The rat study you mentioned has LONG since been discredited and not been replicable by other experts in the field. The scientist that did the work is largely considered to be a fraud in the field and at this point articles published under his name are no longer accepted by reputable journals and he has resorted to destroying students reputations in the field instead by getting them to submit his articles under their names.

The paper in question was retracted http://www.scientificamerican.... and is widely considered to be fraudulent.

I also feel that nicotine actually helps me clear my head and refocus, however that can be just part of an old habit.

Actually, there is evidence that you are right on that point.

Of course, if the CIA hadn't used a vaccination program as a front for an intelligence gathering operation in the region, maybe this violence against and mistrust of vaccination teams would be much lower.

And if you do even a bit of googling, you will find that many people in those latitudes have sleep and affective disorders that are treated with a combination of sunglasses and bright lights.

Have a look at the NASA research. Blue light promotes wakefulness. So, it is desirable during the day. But when you're trying to get ready for bed, wakefulness is not a good thing, so remove the excess blue.

Likewise, in the morning, a gradual wakup tends to be nicer than being suddenly blasted out of bed, so I would like the blue slowly introduced.

Note that the pattern I described is very much like the pattern of sunlight before we had indoor lighting other than a fire.

Whatever you think of their politics

Well, it is exactly those policies, that made them a pariah of the world (except, of course, Russia) and caused the very poverty, that forced them cancel the space-program.

Spaceflight is one of the few remaining areas of "friendly rivalry" where everybody still cheers for the other teams' success

That may be so between Europe and US. Russia — and knowing Russian I know it for sure — stopped cheering American successes about 10 years ago. USSR never did either — when the Moon-landing was watched world-wide by everyone with a TV, USSR's television was broadcasting a ballet — the news appeared in news-papers the next day, but there certainly was no "cheering" of the other team's success.

I dare speculate, the official Iran today are much the same. As the old Russian saying goes: "tell me, who your friend is, and I'll say, who you are."

Gee, I wonder why you didn't just type "resume female name acceptance" into Google. That'll get you a whole slew of citations.

Why didn't you do that utterly trivial task, instead of shooting, er, downmodding the messenger?

It couldn't possibly be because you can't handle the truth? Naaahhh....

Here, silly little AC, since you'd rather go LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU than type four measly words into Google, have some citations.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/bu...

These are far from the only ones out there. If only you could be bothered to look.

And just for a bonus, here's a citation (from those same four simple words you can't be bothered typing into Google) that shows racism biasing hiring in the same pervasive, insidious ways sexism does.
https://selfuni.wordpress.com/...

I got that from your post, because you posted it about "denialism" and did not make a comment about it being equally true for the AGW side.

That's the problem, now, you use a more moderate tone and say there are extremist on both sides, but If I had not called you on it, would you have come back to make those statements?

Denialism is a now generic term for people who refuse to accept generally accepted science. AGW, evolution, vaccinations, genetically modified food. While it is possible to have a liberal component to GMO, perhaps some to anti Vaxxers, we weren't discussing those. And we were discussing AGW. I know of no one on the liberal end of the spectrum who denies AGW.

So someone who has a leaning towards believing AGW dogma, because he's a lefty, because he's a greeny, because he just has no idea but figures "I have children, and CO2 must be a pollutant, they all say so, oh and look those who speak against AGW science are Koch brother shils and religious nutjobs".

When you categorise one side into 1 box, and you speak forcefully, you help make up the minds of those who dont really know anything on the subject and then they believe you and Greenpeace and Leonardo DiCaprio."

Some times that happens in a forum like this.

But there are people who lobby for the Koch brothers who pay politicians money, and seem to have some influence.They are getting paid for that influence, no?

It's getting a lot more difficult to tell these days, because now these people hide who they are by what is essentially money laundering through third party institutes.You can figure out the political motivation by the other lobbying they do.

http://www.scientificamerican....

These people hide who they are by what is essentially money laundering through third party institutes.You can figure out the political motivation by the other lobbying they do.

God, the courage of their convictions. Patriots too cowardly to even give their names hiding behind money launderers.

The power of bribery, and Baksheesh now rules. But I digress.

You also try to reduce it down to basic physics. As if we are all just too dumb to understand grade 3 science. As if it was that simple, when you have PHD Dr. in Science actively disagreeing on so many of the nuances.

I would love to discuss some physics with people. But I keep getting replies like "Mann is an asshole". Or such and such glacier is growing. Or "it's zero degrees outside today". That gets pretty old. after 10 years or so.

And yes, there are nuances, and yes, there are changes. And yes, there are things we have learned. The basic science hasn't been discarded at all.

There is so much documentation, that a basic model is given, and the denialists simply refuse to accept it.

And so far, I have not seen one single model of the failure of AGW.

Refusal to accept a model, and not supplying an alternative is ideology, not science.

Allow me to give a possible model here

An increase in the the average global temperature will cause an increase of evaporation of the oceans and other bodies of water. This will lead to to mechanisms that mitigate the effects of increased greenhouse gases. The collective albedo of the increased cloud cover will also counteract the increased energy retention by reflecting insolation out and away from the atmosphere.

See? Something basic, something even testable. Something provided by a person who doubts it will be proven true.

But you do know scientists do that don't you? competing hypothesis is a big part of what goes on behind the scenes. We're nowhere near as afraid o being proven wrong as politicians or politically inclined are. So until I get some models, I really don't take too seriously people who get their physics from politician

If you work your ass of for 10 years, making sure to be the best, only to get passed by for a rookie on a "diversity" quota,

Is that any different from working your ass off for 10 years, making sure to be the best only to get passed by because you're not a man? Is it possible for science to identify bias using a randomized, controlled trial?

Why yes!

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

So the thing is you're assuming everything is equal and therefore quotas are hurting men. The thing is that they're not equal and women are demonstrably being passed over in favour of men simply by vitrue of not being male.

So what do you think should be done. Unless you have a good rebuttal for that study, something is clearly messed up.

Bad article. The author condescendingly dismisses an argument, providing merely a link to her sister's article which claims the argument arises from media bias. The argument being:

From reading the comments on Sean Carroll’s post, most people who read this will have one of four reactions:
[snip]
4) Equally qualified women should be discriminated against, because they could go off and get pregnant.
I’m afraid the 4’s do exist, and from my experience they are not very willing to have their minds changed. (For a concise article that touches on why their argument is flawed, I’d recommend this piece by my sister, Shara Yurkiewicz.)

Her sister Shara is "disturbed" by people that claim actual differences between sexes is a legitimate reason to discriminate, going so far as to misstate #4s position. The argument I see is NOT that "equally qualified women should be discriminated against", it is that two people with equal education & experience, 1 being male & 1 being female are not equal. She goes on to define when she considers a preference to be discrimination (and fails to mention actual differences; thus validating the actual argument behind #4) and concludes with

The commenters claim that their views are grounded in the economic model we work within. That is fair, but – wrongly, I believe – there is nothing said of the normative, or "what ought to be."

"What ought to be" has and is said, but she disagrees due to being on the short end of the stick, and so her own bias as to how the world should be causes her to miss it. "What ought to be", in many people's eyes, is "The best of the best". Sometimes you have to compromise, but you always search for the best. Obviously for those that are not the best that is a horrible system to live in. So the author ignores it, effectively claims that is not a valid goal, and moves on to simplify the solution to everything being just

a shift in mindset about traditional gender roles.

But there is actual, real, research that shows women miss more work due to being a woman. Some of that no doubt is just a view of traditional gender roles, and so can be changed to some extent. But there are also real physical differences as well that will affect worth no matter how far you stick your head in the sand. So if you're looking for the "best of the best", you have to consider how much missed work will affect your hire's worth just like you consider their education, experience, attitude, cleanliness, credit history, & interpersonal skills.

The question the author should be asking & trying to answer is: What is HER "ought to be"; what is YOUR "ought to be"; and how do we reconcile them? Reading between the lines makes her "ought to be" just sound like any other argument presented by anybody else that has ever been on the short end of the stick: I deserve to have anything you have. So I'm inclined ignore it with "Tough shit."

If you work your ass of for 10 years, making sure to be the best, only to get passed by for a rookie on a "diversity" quota,

Is that any different from working your ass off for 10 years, making sure to be the best only to get passed by because you're not a man? Is it possible for science to identify bias using a randomized, controlled trial?

Why yes!

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

So the thing is you're assuming everything is equal and therefore quotas are hurting men. The thing is that they're not equal and women are demonstrably being passed over in favour of men simply by vitrue of not being male.

So what do you think should be done. Unless you have a good rebuttal for that study, something is clearly messed up.

Quota driven diversity just makes the bigots right.

No on two counts. Firstly it only matters if everything is already equal. Secondly no matter what quotas exist, women are not de-facto inferior to men (or any other bias you choose to discuss).

If you hire based on attributes other than competence, then people having those attributes will, on average, be less competent than their colleagues without those attributes.

Indeed so: no disagreement there. However, the claim is that is ALREADY happening, with people discounting (e.g.) women in favour of men.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

A spot of paint on your balloon would locally restrict expansion as it inflates, as galaxies seem to do in our expanding universe. My understanding of current hypotheses is that dark matter plays the role of "paint" in this analogy. However, there's an intriguing alternative explanation, which only becomes apparent when you think of space as a fluid.

Ironically, I stumbled upon this notion after musing on the strong interaction. (And I confess I was a bit high at the time.) Something that repels at a distance but attracts in proximity... that reminds me of bubbles interacting in the surface tension of fluids. So I googled "space as a fluid" and found that there's a whole branch of inquiry in this direction. It doesn't get as much attention as String Theory, but it's not dismissed out of hand either. (Correct me if I'm wrong... IANA physicist.)

Anyway, I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this.

It's not even a matter of whether a particular substance is a "pollutant" or "toxic". Many necessary substances can be harmful if present in high concentrations. You can die just by drinking too much water. That doesn't mean that water's a pollutant, even though too much can kill you. The argument that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant because plants need it is similarly confused -- too much of a good thing can be harmful.

To get to the heart of the matter, the EPA considers any harmful emission to be a pollutant, even if the substance emitted is necessary for life.

No assumption. Check the links in my other replies to you. I'll even gather the most relevant ones again:
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

male and female brains are literally wired differently.

Yes, hormones -- particularly testosterone -- have an effect on neuronal connections. Men and women are more alike than they are different, but they are qualitatively different to a minor degree. How much of this difference is due to biology and how much is due to cultural conditioning? There is no consensus. How much of the difference actually gives men an advantage in STEM fields?

"the brains of 949 young men and women were scanned at the University of Pennsylvania... [the] findings demonstrated that women are better disposed to deal with ‘analytical’ and ‘intuitive’ tasks at the same time. Men, meanwhile, were better at complex motor skills."

Which of those sounds like a more effective computer programmer? A more effective scientist?

Do you have any actual evidence of this?

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Even if we assume that men are indeed more apt at science and technology -- a questionable assumption -- it does not fit the facts of hiring practices.

Diversification for it's own sake is not beneficial.

I disagree: the result of diversification is indeed beneficial in itself. Ecological, a diverse population is more robustly equipped to survive disasters than a highly integrated and cohesive population. A diverse population has many chances to survive and thrive in the face of changing environmental conditions where a mono- or oligo-culture would collapse. From a systems standpoint, diversity in a population is similar to redundancy in a network. A diversity of viewpoints helps to solve problems in novel ways, allowing us to escape local maxima.

Surely a person with superior group dynamics processing has a lot to contribute to software projects dealing with massive parallelization and to teams dealing with the social dynamics of humans in proximity. Surely a person with well-integrated analysis and intuition has a lot to contribute to a project with a large legacy codebase.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

It is false to assume we should have an even distribution of squares and triangles for it's own sake.

Add in the natural and useful distrust of the unfamiliar that we each possess. We get segregation, ghettoization, and balkanization. We create an us, we create a them, and We are usually right, and They are usually wrong, and this leads to crime and war. We see this happening today with rich vs. poor, rural vs. urban, democrats vs. republicans, SJWs vs. MRAs. Both camps are right, both camps are wrong, and we won't be able to distinguish the signal from the noise until we stop yelling and listen to each other.

When we seek diversity for its own sake, we make it more difficult to create a Them. All the nastiness that arises from us vs. them thinking dissolves.

the result is that our economy is built on the concept of dual income families now, which means no parent staying home to guide and raise children.

The problem of missing caregivers -- and many other problems related to the raising of children -- are firmly rooted in the deification of the nuclear family in the early 20th century. "Dad is always away at work" was already a problem before the move towards dual incomes. Communities of adults are much more effective at raising children than a single breadwinner and a single homemaker can ever be. Don't forget the issues that occur when one or both roles go missing, whether by choice or by chance. Not to mention that the move to dual income families has at least as much to do with wage stagnation than it does with

male and female brains are literally wired differently.

Yes, hormones -- particularly testosterone -- have an effect on neuronal connections. Men and women are more alike than they are different, but they are qualitatively different to a minor degree. How much of this difference is due to biology and how much is due to cultural conditioning? There is no consensus. How much of the difference actually gives men an advantage in STEM fields?

"the brains of 949 young men and women were scanned at the University of Pennsylvania... [the] findings demonstrated that women are better disposed to deal with ‘analytical’ and ‘intuitive’ tasks at the same time. Men, meanwhile, were better at complex motor skills."

Which of those sounds like a more effective computer programmer? A more effective scientist?

Do you have any actual evidence of this?

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Even if we assume that men are indeed more apt at science and technology -- a questionable assumption -- it does not fit the facts of hiring practices.

Diversification for it's own sake is not beneficial.

I disagree: the result of diversification is indeed beneficial in itself. Ecological, a diverse population is more robustly equipped to survive disasters than a highly integrated and cohesive population. A diverse population has many chances to survive and thrive in the face of changing environmental conditions where a mono- or oligo-culture would collapse. From a systems standpoint, diversity in a population is similar to redundancy in a network. A diversity of viewpoints helps to solve problems in novel ways, allowing us to escape local maxima.

Surely a person with superior group dynamics processing has a lot to contribute to software projects dealing with massive parallelization and to teams dealing with the social dynamics of humans in proximity. Surely a person with well-integrated analysis and intuition has a lot to contribute to a project with a large legacy codebase.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

It is false to assume we should have an even distribution of squares and triangles for it's own sake.

Add in the natural and useful distrust of the unfamiliar that we each possess. We get segregation, ghettoization, and balkanization. We create an us, we create a them, and We are usually right, and They are usually wrong, and this leads to crime and war. We see this happening today with rich vs. poor, rural vs. urban, democrats vs. republicans, SJWs vs. MRAs. Both camps are right, both camps are wrong, and we won't be able to distinguish the signal from the noise until we stop yelling and listen to each other.

When we seek diversity for its own sake, we make it more difficult to create a Them. All the nastiness that arises from us vs. them thinking dissolves.

the result is that our economy is built on the concept of dual income families now, which means no parent staying home to guide and raise children.

The problem of missing caregivers -- and many other problems related to the raising of children -- are firmly rooted in the deification of the nuclear family in the early 20th century. "Dad is always away at work" was already a problem before the move towards dual incomes. Communities of adults are much more effective at raising children than a single breadwinner and a single homemaker can ever be. Don't forget the issues that occur when one or both roles go missing, whether by choice or by chance. Not to mention that the move to dual income families has at least as much to do with wage stagnation than it does with

You have negative freedom, that is freedom from interference and limits on your behavior

And that's the only freedom there can be...

Then you have positive freedom, the freedom to participate in society and to prosper.

You are confused. The freedoms to participate in society and to prosper are the same as those from interference and limits. One does not have a right to prosperity and/or happiness, but only to a pursuit of them — America's founding fathers noted this right in the Declaration of Independence (before the war was won and the Constitution written).

In Europe that kind of thing would clash with a person's freedom to have a private life, i.e. to privately grieve for their loved on at the funeral.

This makes no sense — you can not have a right to privacy in a public place. Those crazy Democrats "thanking god" for dead American soldiers may be an extreme case, but if you devise a law to shut them up, will it not also apply to weddings and birthdays, which are bound to take place on the same block, where other folks are grieving?

We also see the right to a private life

I fail to see, how you can demand privacy while in public — and that includes your making connections to other people's servers.

US company's desire to profile everyone and use their personal data for commercial gain, which Europeans consider to be a massive loss of freedom but Americans consider to be a corporation exercising its free speech rights.

No, actually, one's right to record and remember whatever he has once observed has nothing to do with free speech. I, once again, fail to see, how you can possibly demand somebody forgets about you without opening yourself up to the same demands from others. Do you want your ex- to be able to force you to undergo a memory-alteration procedure — to make you forget, how she looks naked?

One of the issues of the paleo diet is which paleo tribe will you follow. While this Scientific American article is a bit antagonistic, the research on the variation of diets was interesting.

Yes - I'm looking at the article in the print edition of New Scientist 6.December.2014. Tracking a scientist quoted in the article leads to this Scientific Americam blog - snailfish surprise in the kermadec Trench:

Partway into the collection of one-minute video clips, however, a snailfish could be seen doing something it had never been seen to do before: swim up. In an instant, the conception of the snailfish as a purely benthic species was rewritten. This is puzzling because theoretically fish shouldn’t be able to survive deeper than about 8,500 meters , and if they can swim up in the water column they might just decide to migrate deeper at some point to take advantage of the food and habitat down there. But at some point beyond that depth the difference in osmotic pressure between fish cells and seawater flips, meaning that the cellular physiology in fish would have to change in order to expel water rather than keep it in. Some marine fish can do this (think of salmon returning from the ocean to spawn), but they take time for their physiology to reboot and they have evolved the mechanism to do so.

I suspect that since the vested interests are choosing the political attack route, they probably do know it is credible, they just don't care.

The problem is who are the vested interests? The AGW scientists attack anything skeptical of AGW, and prevent everything being published. What science do you consider credible when it cannot be published in the journals?

Much of the money comes form "Dark sources", like DonorsTrust, and DonorsCapital, meaning they won't tell us, Kind of like legal money laundering. Koch Industries and ExxonMobil money has in large part gone away. It might not be unlikely that they have gone to the untraceable route.

Whic is all very convenient, doing this in secret. How many scientific reports have you see that have no names, because the scientists are too big of pussies to put their name on it?

http://www.scientificamerican....

Regardless, some reseach has shown that from 2003 to 2010:

DonersTrust / DonorsCapital 14%

Sciafe Affiliated Foundations 7%

Lyle and Harry Bradley Foundation 5 %

Koch Affiliated Foundations 5 %

Howard Charitible Foundation 4% John William Pope Foundation 4%

John William Pope Foundation 4%

Searle Freedom Trust 4%

John Templeton Foundation 4%

Dunn's Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking 2%

SMith Richardson Foundation 2%

Vanguard CharitableEndowment Program 2%

THe Kovener Foundation 2%

Annenberg Foundation 2%

Lilly Endowmwnt Inc 2%

Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation 2%

Exxon Mobiil Foundation 1%

Brady Education Foundation 1%

The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation 1%

Coors Affiliated Foundation 1%

Lakeside Foundation 1%

Herrick Foundation 1%

A number of others at less than 1 percent

The source of this information

http://phys.org/news/2013-12-k...

Unfortunately, there will be less and less information as these defenders of freedom move to untraceable donorship, which is almost always a sure sign of standing by your principles.

What science do you consider credible when it cannot be published in the journals?

Perhaps it might be better explained what I do not consider credible

http://retractionwatch.com/201...

or this: http://retractionwatch.com/201...

This one was pretty egregious on many levels.

Anyhow, before you put Retrsction watch on your hitlist of liberal organizations, they also hae published retractions of pro AGW papers.

Part of self policing and transparency, rather different than what has become "secret contributors" of the Deniers movement.

if you're not willing to build a bunch of nuclear power plants and shut down a bunch of coal plants, then yes you ARE arguing global warming to advance a political agenda

Some of the most prominent AGW scientists are strongly in favor of nuclear power: http://www.scientificamerican....

Others are a little more cautious, but still think nuclear is an important part of an overall strategy to reduce global warming: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work...

Not to argue your point but just to clarify. Radiation is one of the ways that coal plants do kill people. Burning coal releases radioactive isotopes directly into the atmosphere. Assuming of course that a containment and scribing system capable of removing it has not been installed. Even in that case you are left with the coal ash, which in and of it's self is radioactive. http://www.scientificamerican....

Okay, a fundamental question then... What's the mission?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/11/29/forget-asteroidssend-a-manned-flyby-mission-to-venus/

A circumnavigation of Venus would test our ability to function in deep space, to enter a planet's gravitational influence, to create robust shielding for the higher radiation at Venus's relatively close proximity to the sun, to devise zero-g strategies for long-duration flights -- all of which would bolster us for an even longer journey to Mars. Besides, for a long-duration mission, we might not want to commit our astronauts to landing on Mars only to find out that they could not walk, their musculature had so degenerated upon arrival. In contrast, the crew of a long Venus round-trip would land not on a faraway planet but back on Earth, where medical attention is readily available if needed.

Reading a source link "He plans to donate some of the proceeds to Cold Spring, where he still draws a $375,000 base salary as chancellor emeritus"

He certainly didn't run out of money.

Watson told Nature that his motivation for selling the medal is a chance for redemption. He plans to donate some of the proceeds to Cold Spring, where he still draws a $375,000 base salary as chancellor emeritus, and also to University College Cork in Ireland to help establish an institute dedicated to the mathematician George Boole. "I'm 52% Irish," Watson said by way of explanation.

So yeah, charity in the way of remembering great mathematicians.

2014 is the hottest year on record.

Human CO emission is much more predictable than volcanoes and earthquakes. The most recent volcanic eruptions have had measurable if temporary cooling effects (as Scientific American article explains, data entered from the eruptions explained most of the missed projections from climate modelling that did not account for or predict them http://www.scientificamerican.... ). Climate scientists know the effects of human carbon production very well, know the effect of rain forest / carbon sink destruction (especially burning) less well, ocean sinks not well, and can predict the solar flares and volcanic activity least well. Since what we are most certain about - human carbon pollution - is proven to be harmful, it's understandable that researchers would be wary of speaking out about our inability to predict or control other variables, like volcanoes. We have no idea if volcanic activity is in 10 year, 100 year, 1000 year, or 10000 year, or 1000000 year cycles. Betting that volcanoes will somehow offset known climate warming activity we are aware of and can plan for seems like a foolish bet which too many humans would gladly make rather than do the hard work to fix the problems we know too well.

The life-cycle carbon footprint of different energy production is very extensively studied, and if eco-freaks don't cre about those, nuclear-freaks tend to come up with very fantastic numbers, manaking to make nuclear almost as clean as renewables by creative and fantastic accounting.

And some retardo-freaks make stupid comments on slashdot? Right? No unpossible!

For example, there's often some unknown technical magic happening when moving from high-grade uranium to low-grade uranium that requires no extra enrichment.

NO ONE uses high-enriched uranium for anything except maybe experimental reactors. Do you understand this? 5% enrichment is NOT high-enriched uranium. Do you understand that? Do you also understand that there are nuclear reactors that run on unenriched uranium too? Like CANDU. But those are less efficient than slightly enriched since enrichment process is now very simple (and apparently classified because "no one" can think of the same method twice, given that fundamental technology has been there for decades)

Or by stroke of other kind of magic, we turn all uranium reactor to thorium or other unproved stuff reactors overnight.

Almost all reactors can be fed some thorium already. Some designs more than others.

What everyone utterly fails at is thinking that thorium does not result in the same stuff as uranium. IT DOES!! Thorium biproducts are the same as uranium. Thorium "safety" in a reactor is virtually identical to uranium. If anyone says otherwise, they are talking BULLSHIT. And when they realize that they are talking bullshit, they will be so disappointed that they are likely to jump on the "nuclear can't be safe" bandwagon.

Only the uninformed nutters would think that if something does not breed heavy plutonium isotopes, then it must be safe. But plutonium has nothing to do with safety of the reactor itself. The point that you "can't make bomb fuel using thorium reactor" is wrong too.

Uranium == Thorium for the purposes of reactor safety and waste generation.

As for example of reactor that can burn thorium *right now*, CANDU can do that.

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_...

On-power refuelling and small (half-metre-long) fuel bundles allow almost unlimited capability to shape the axial power distribution, if necessary. Variation of reactivity along a fuel channel can be largely controlled by the fuel shuffling strategy. This allows a variety of enrichments and fissile loadings to be utilized in existing CANDU designs, including slightly-enriched uranium (SEU), mixed oxides (MOX) of plutonium, uranium or thorium, and inert-matrix fuels (containing no fertile material).

Finally, Nuclear power is 100% CO2 free. Just like hydroelectric, or wind, or solar. And do not bring up bullshit about "material cost in CO2". That cost is moot if CO2-neutral energy source is used to create such materials. Like this,

http://www.scientificamerican....

Talking about "material production results in CO2 today so power generation is CO2 intensive" is bullshit to muddle the waters. It's the same bullshit like saying "solar panels are made by coal"... Or in the past, they said it was not possible to make any significant amounts of steel because it would require more wood than all available forests and you needed wood to make steel...

Stop with the bullshit hogwash and at least bring up real problems. Like

1. PV solar panels are not base load. Intermittent. More predictable than wind.
2. Hydroelectric disrupts water ecosystem. Limited supply.
3. Wind is distracting on land - noise, bird hazard etc. Works best when augmented with Hydro.
4. Nuclear power can result in local side-effects that last up-to a few generations if mis

Fuel to the fire: http://www.scientificamerican....