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almost always from eggs or people with white AVI's

I have no idea what that means.

Asserting something doesn't make it true, even if you do it angrily.

Your response to that assertion is to simply claim it isn't true? How about this picture and the story behind it?

I don't want to have an argument where I try to find examples of things Bernie has done his "entire career" and have to try and back up the specific words I wrote until you're satisfied. Instead, I'll just say that Bernie's policies are unaffected by the color of the people that he represents, whereas Clinton is on record calling young black men super-predators and touting her husband's crime bill that saw so many of them locked up. To imagine that Hillary has done, or even more to the point, will do in the future, more for the benefit of black people (and indeed all people) than Sanders is, I believe, incredibly naive. If you look at Clinton's behavior and track record and conclude anything other than that she is in the pocket of Wall Street and other special interests, and is in this election to serve her own interests, then you have well and truly bought into her stock and we both know I'm not going to convince you otherwise. A show of hands, how many people think that Clinton will refuse to sign the TPP? I know, someone ask Terry McAuliffe what he thinks. He knows the game that she's playing.

I admit that I have no idea where Clinton's wide support from black people comes from, and maybe that's the piece of the picture that I'm missing. I honestly don't know what they see in her that is so appealing. I don't understand the logic. I'm willing to admit that.

We had his whole campaign to watch. It was pretty obvious.

The enormous crowds and unprecedented funding effort illustrates to you that he wasn't trying? What else do you think he should have done? Should he have pushed for more debates with Clinton? Because he did that. I'm not sure where you think the effort was lacking. The message that he was promoting had nothing to do with race, why does he need to treat black people with the special gloves if his entire platform is based on more equal treatment of everyone who is currently getting screwed by the system regardless of the color of their skin?

They knew what Bernie was going to say, and knew it would not be taken well at all by TWiB or its audience.

Well don't leave me in suspense, what exactly was he going to say that was so offensive? Hopefully that isn't all just hearsay.

So what does his own high-level former staff (who know the campaign better than you or I) say happened [motherjones.com]?

I don't believe that any election in any state was rigged. That's not what I think happened. I think that the DNC tilted the playing field so that Clinton would cruise to a relatively easy victory. That explains the shift from 26 debates to 6. I don't think the election was stolen or rigged, I think that the DNC simply pushed the narrative from the start (with the help of the media, you can see the close relationship in the emails) that Clinton was going to be the nominee, as if it was a foregone conclusion, it was already decided, Sanders was just some fringe kook to be ignored and ridiculed, and I think the rules that they set up were created with that in mind. If they had a more transparent and unbiased system with 20 or more debates I think that we would be having a different discussion right now. I'd like to see some exit poll numbers concerning people who voted for Clinton who knew next to nothing about Sanders, but we aren't going to see those numbers (not because of some conspiracy, but we're just not). I think Clinton got rammed down people's throats and the Democrat

Then there are other views:

http://skepdic.com/hutchisonho...

much of the problems in this world are rooted in human weakness

and i'm not going to be all holier-than-thou: i have weaknesses too. we all do

it's just nice not to have a mediocre garden variety weakness like being fearful of appearances or inability to say "fuck you, i'm out of here" when appropriate. the sunk cost fallacy

http://skepdic.com/sunkcost.ht...

Sorry to be rude, but I don't think there's any peer-reviewed scientific evidence that Meyers-Briggs is anything but pseudoscientific bullshit. I think the real problem is that teaching is a shit job. The pay sucks, the hours aren't much better, the continuing education requirements are onerous, and the job gets no respect.

What sane American would take a public school teaching position if they can get a better deal doing something else?

I was first introduced to the issue by Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and pretty much accepted what he was saying... except that there was some nagging doubt due to things like unlabeled graphs and the like in his presentation.

Those nagging doubts? They're the manifestation of your political identity conflicting with the science.

It was when I started digging into the science that I started changing my mind. I found irresponsible handling of data, bizarre secrecy where there shouldn't be any, and so on. And all this has mushroomed in recent years.

And this is how you rationalize your refusal to accept the science. You use selective thinking to focus on minor issues while ignoring what should be the glaring obvious parts.

Case in point: the recent admission by NCDC that certain USHCN data had been derived and used improperly, and they had known it for a long time. They said they had "intended to fix it" at some undefined point in the future, but the question is: why was it not fixed already, and why had they not told anyone (including scientists) about it, even though they knew about it?

Are you referring to this? It seems like a rather minor bug.

And how about the recent "97%" claim by the people at SkepticalScience? It was dirt simple to show that it was nothing but statistical bullshit. Why would an organization representing responsible scientists lie to people?

Except that it hasn't been shown to be "nothing but statistical bullshit". I have yet to see a credible refutation of their claim that 97% of the published scientific articles that take a position on climate change support the consensus position that global warming is happening and driven by human activity. The argument that I'm assuming that you are referring to is the one made by Anthony Watts that they should not have excluded papers that do not discuss global climate change or global warming. However, it seems fair to me that when you are looking at positions taken on a issue to only look at papers which discuss the issue.

The IPCC's latest report states clearly that the science supporting their position is weaker than ever... yet they're even more certain that it's true. WTF?

That's a very interesting interpretation of the IPCC report, but one that most people do not get after reading the report. I strongly suspect it is a result of more selective thinking. You place undue emphasis on minor details of the report like a decrease in confidence of the link between severe weather and global average temperature and the lower of the top end of reasonable climate sensitivity, while ignoring the increase in the bottom end of reasonable climate sensitivity to conlcude that the "position is weaker than ever" while I think unbiased readers generally come away with the impression that uncertainty has decreased (because both the upper and lower limits have tightened).

Personally, I didn't believe in global warming when I first heard about it in the 90s, but since then I have been convinced that it is true. My experience with so called "skeptics" like yourself has played no little part in that belief. I have found that the actual scientific proponents tends to have well researched and detailed explanations for why and how it's happening, but the so-called skeptics tend to have arguments based on emotion and finger-pointing. Time and again you, in particular, have disappointed me with claims that were poorly backed up. Invariably when I investigate your claims I find them to be blown out of proportion, mistaken, or referencing some kook's incomprehensible arguments*.

I could, in theory, be falling for the same blinded b

I was first introduced to the issue by Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and pretty much accepted what he was saying... except that there was some nagging doubt due to things like unlabeled graphs and the like in his presentation.

Those nagging doubts? They're the manifestation of your political identity conflicting with the science.

It was when I started digging into the science that I started changing my mind. I found irresponsible handling of data, bizarre secrecy where there shouldn't be any, and so on. And all this has mushroomed in recent years.

And this is how you rationalize your refusal to accept the science. You use selective thinking to focus on minor issues while ignoring what should be the glaring obvious parts.

Case in point: the recent admission by NCDC that certain USHCN data had been derived and used improperly, and they had known it for a long time. They said they had "intended to fix it" at some undefined point in the future, but the question is: why was it not fixed already, and why had they not told anyone (including scientists) about it, even though they knew about it?

Are you referring to this? It seems like a rather minor bug.

And how about the recent "97%" claim by the people at SkepticalScience? It was dirt simple to show that it was nothing but statistical bullshit. Why would an organization representing responsible scientists lie to people?

Except that it hasn't been shown to be "nothing but statistical bullshit". I have yet to see a credible refutation of their claim that 97% of the published scientific articles that take a position on climate change support the consensus position that global warming is happening and driven by human activity. The argument that I'm assuming that you are referring to is the one made by Anthony Watts that they should not have excluded papers that do not discuss global climate change or global warming. However, it seems fair to me that when you are looking at positions taken on a issue to only look at papers which discuss the issue.

The IPCC's latest report states clearly that the science supporting their position is weaker than ever... yet they're even more certain that it's true. WTF?

That's a very interesting interpretation of the IPCC report, but one that most people do not get after reading the report. I strongly suspect it is a result of more selective thinking. You place undue emphasis on minor details of the report like a decrease in confidence of the link between severe weather and global average temperature and the lower of the top end of reasonable climate sensitivity, while ignoring the increase in the bottom end of reasonable climate sensitivity to conlcude that the "position is weaker than ever" while I think unbiased readers generally come away with the impression that uncertainty has decreased (because both the upper and lower limits have tightened).

Personally, I didn't believe in global warming when I first heard about it in the 90s, but since then I have been convinced that it is true. My experience with so called "skeptics" like yourself has played no little part in that belief. I have found that the actual scientific proponents tends to have well researched and detailed explanations for why and how it's happening, but the so-called skeptics tend to have arguments based on emotion and finger-pointing. Time and again you, in particular, have disappointed me with claims that were poorly backed up. Invariably when I investigate your claims I find them to be blown out of proportion, mistaken, or referencing some kook's incomprehensible arguments*.

I could, in theory, be falling for the same blinded b

I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.

Unfortunately, that comparison is rarely disappassionate. In fact, some recent studies have found that the "just the facts" approach to education on controversial topics tends to backfire. Among the general populace, there a high tendency to acknowledge only the facts that support a pre-existing position and the ignore the facts that contradict it.

Frankly, that's why there is an entire cottage industry built around denying something that 97% of the people researching it have concluded is true. However, that 97% may actually be low-balling the consensus, since James Powell says he's reviewed 25,182 scientific articles in peer-reveiwed journals mentioning global warming and climate change since 1991 and only 26 of them reject the anthropogenic cause. That's would be a disagreement rate of about 0.1%.

The people most qualified to evaluate the evidence seem to be in a near universal agreement that is rarely accurately represented by the media.

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

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

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

http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...

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

There is also a lot of evidence that they don't.

Except that NONE of these studies say polygraphs "don't work". Instead they say they are imperfect, and often used incorrectly or even maliciously. Which is a different thing.

"Anyway, there is evidence that they work significantly better than chance on untrained people that believe they work. In other words, most of the time for most people."

There is also a lot of evidence that they don't. Or rather: it may be "significantly more than chance", but not enough more to be really useful.

Quote from the first sentence of that first link:

"Most psychologists agree that there is little evidence that polygraph tests can accurately detect lies."

And from the second:

"For federal agencies, the polygraph is a way to get around discrimination laws. There is virtually no appeal you can make if you are failed by a federal polygrapher. The polygraph is a license to abuse power."

And from the conclusion of the third:

"The instrument cannot itself detect deception... false positive rate (innocent persons found deceptive) ranged from 0 to 75 percent and averaged 19.1 percent;"

An average of over 19% false positive rate (government's own figures), and as high as 75%, means the polygraph is effectively useless as a lie detector for any serious purposes. That's a HUGE false positive rate. It simply isn't a basis for punishing someone when there is an almost 20% chance on average that the results are false. And that's just false positives... there are false negatives too.

I repeat: the government knows this, and uses it more as an instrument of intimidation, in order to try to wring confessions out of people, than anything else. Many ex-government-polygraphers -- and subjects of polygraph exams, for that matter -- have told the same story.

It is unfortunate in some ways that you're modded down. This is the evidence for why there is no face on Mars: The other side of the coin is that seeing faces where there aren't any is an artefact of how your brain is wired up. Random natural formations (on any scale) stand a better chance than most people think of appearing as a face. This also extends to other objects, however, such as Jesus, and genitals. This one is really cool too.

"Yeah, maybe for an AB, but not for an O."
sigh. That's complete bull crap.
http://www.skepdic.com/bloodty...

You should do your own homework too. That is nothing like the fallacy of sunken costs. The fallacy refers to when somebody invests in a course of action, and sticks to it when it is clear that the investment won't pay off. Citation: http://www.skepdic.com/sunkcost.html

Of course it would. How very convenient.

So why aren't you out there getting rich and famous with this ability of yours? You could make $1,000,000 if you demonstrated your powers to this guy.

My guess is you won't make $1,000,000.

No. There are no machines and no experts that can detect with a high degree of accuracy when people, selected randomly, are lying and when they are telling the truth.

So DOJ, WTF are you going to do to those of us who think these things are full of shit?

Arrest us for saying the emperor has no clothes?

If I were ever ordered to take the test, I would agree and offer to take a palm reading test, hand writing test, and a Phrenology test - I'll even shave my head to make it easier!

Now, can I have the job?

While I am not a theist, your argument fails as their is more evidence that prayer works than there is life on other worlds

Actually there isn't. There is evidence that prayer has no effect and no evidence to support it having any effect (anecdotes are not evidence) and while there is no evidence that life exists on other worlds, there is also no evidence that it does not exist on other worlds.

and yet people who believe that life exists on other planets, without any evidence to support that assertion whatsover are not subjected to the ridicule that people who believe in a higher power or deity.

Not all beliefs are of the same quality. For example, I would argue that it is reasonable to believe there is car parked in my garage, while it is not reasonable to believe there is a dragon sleeping in it. By the logic you are employing both statements should be equally believable. After all, you have no evidence that I have either a garage or a car. However most sane people would think one those statements is less believable than the other.

You would think that as fickle as the human person is, if all of those prayers and practices you mention continuously failed, people would simply cease to appeal to their deity and move on to something else.

Only someone who knows nothing about human nature should believe that. intermittent reinforcement is a powerful motivator. Even if prayer is totally ineffective, the people who pray for something generally have a chance of getting it. They usually pray for lots of things, and sometimes they what they pray for. Selective thinking leads them to believe that prayer works and when someone points out that they don't usually get everything they pray for, they will resort to an excuse as to why that isn't important.

it must be somewhat effective.

It's as effective as my anti-dragon rock. It protects the earth for dragons. You've never been attack by a dragon, so therefore it must be effective. Now we're both engaging is specious reasoning.

So, unless people are going to start their own scientific inquisition to eliminate error, it seems grossly injust for people to always bash the billions of people on the planet who think differently than you do.

It's not a matter of thinking differently, it's a matter of believing falsehoods. Prayer doesn't work, the people who think it does are both superstitious and suffering from confirmation bias.

While I am not a theist, your argument fails as their is more evidence that prayer works than there is life on other worlds

Actually there isn't. There is evidence that prayer has no effect and no evidence to support it having any effect (anecdotes are not evidence) and while there is no evidence that life exists on other worlds, there is also no evidence that it does not exist on other worlds.

and yet people who believe that life exists on other planets, without any evidence to support that assertion whatsover are not subjected to the ridicule that people who believe in a higher power or deity.

Not all beliefs are of the same quality. For example, I would argue that it is reasonable to believe there is car parked in my garage, while it is not reasonable to believe there is a dragon sleeping in it. By the logic you are employing both statements should be equally believable. After all, you have no evidence that I have either a garage or a car. However most sane people would think one those statements is less believable than the other.

You would think that as fickle as the human person is, if all of those prayers and practices you mention continuously failed, people would simply cease to appeal to their deity and move on to something else.

Only someone who knows nothing about human nature should believe that. intermittent reinforcement is a powerful motivator. Even if prayer is totally ineffective, the people who pray for something generally have a chance of getting it. They usually pray for lots of things, and sometimes they what they pray for. Selective thinking leads them to believe that prayer works and when someone points out that they don't usually get everything they pray for, they will resort to an excuse as to why that isn't important.

it must be somewhat effective.

It's as effective as my anti-dragon rock. It protects the earth for dragons. You've never been attack by a dragon, so therefore it must be effective. Now we're both engaging is specious reasoning.

So, unless people are going to start their own scientific inquisition to eliminate error, it seems grossly injust for people to always bash the billions of people on the planet who think differently than you do.

It's not a matter of thinking differently, it's a matter of believing falsehoods. Prayer doesn't work, the people who think it does are both superstitious and suffering from confirmation bias.

So essentially it sounds to me like the Quadro QRS 250G "Detector" device sold a few decades back http://skepdic.com/quadro.html . Of which even after they were proven to be just an antenna, hooked to a box filled with dead ants. Many schools found it worth it to keep them for detecting drugs because the security theatre aspect, if the students think a machine can detect drugs... they will be afraid to bring drugs.

looking at the past performance of 65536 (~sixty-five thousand = 2^16) brokers each of whom makes one of the binary bets of heads/tails on 16 binary events and then being surprised that one of them got all 16 bets rights, and 120 got 15 out of the 16 bets right.
.
Sometimes it's pretty random, and looking for reason in fluke choices won't get you far. As for that betting example, go look at the Binomial distribution. Also see http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html where they use an example of 100 letters, whereas they would be better off having a power of 2.
The best explanation of the "stock market prediction scam" is at http://totse2.com/content.php?163-The-Old-Stock-Market-Prediction-Scam .

I'm not going to hunt out the dozens of other examples of partisan behavior

Dozens of examples, huh. It seems like you should have hundreds of examples, what with about 1460 days to choose individual statements from.

I think you're cherry picking events to try and make a case while at the same time ignoring the underlying truth. It's called confirmation bias and you continue to provide an excellent example of exactly the type of thing Weaselmancer said was happening.

If OOOE is out-of-order execution, itanium does oooe fine. It just expects compiler to tell more about it.

They have clairvoyant compilers now, do they?

Placebos are not increasing effectiveness. In fact, they have no effectiveness.

They just decrease the perception of pain or other subjective symptoms.

Not entirely so. Placebo can sometimes have measurable objective results. http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html

Yet, there are too many studies that have found objective improvements in health after being given placebos to support the notion that the placebo effect is entirely psychological.

Doctors in one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the color wore off. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were inhaling a bronchodilator, even when they weren't. Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better -- and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).

As I've stated, not only does the title seem correct, but the colums in the spreadsheet itself are titled CO2. And again, where do these numbers come from? That seems to be something you haven't dealt with nor acknowledged.

Yes, the columns are titled CO2 and the accompanying graph labels the units as "Million Metric Tons of Carbon Equivalent". If you're going to believe the numbers you should also believe the units. Accepting one as more reliable than the other really is selective thinking.

Here is a little brochure put out by the DOE and I linked this earlier. http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html [eia.gov]

First, that pamphlet appears to be about 12 years old. Second, did you read the headings on the graphs? They say "Million Metric Tons of Carbon Equivalent". That's carbon equivalent not CO2. You have to convert carbon to CO2 to compare numbers and it just so happens that 9 billion tons of carbon equivalent is around 33 billion tons of CO2.

Molar mass of C: 12 g/mol
Molar mass of O: 16 g/mol

Weight of CO2 to C: 3.7:1
Converting Carbon to CO2: 9 billion tons of carbon is approximately 33.3 billion tons of CO2.

Every piece of evidence you have cited to support your view has only served to undermine it, because each explicitly contradicts the views that you hold. That's an amazing display of confirmation bias and scientific illiteracy.

We also happen to know how much of that turns into CO2 (about 19lbs per gallon). So, anyone can figure out how much CO2 was created in the US. And guess what? The numbers seem to correspond closely to your spreadsheet.

See my previous comment on the multitude of errors in your calculation.

I also liked your selective reading above on the analysis of the eruption of Mt St. Helens. First you denied that 60% per volume of the magma can be converted to CO2/SO2, then I shot that one down. Now, your new one is that a sampling of the eruption (one data point) is all the gas that was emitted. But that is just par for the course with you. Read it more carefully next time.

It's your evidence that you are claiming is unreliable. The same "data point" produces both numbers. If you're going to throw out their calculation for the total amount of CO2 released, you shouldn't rely on their calculation for the percentage of magma converted into CO2 either for the same eruption. Once again you're engaging in selective thinking.

1 cubic mile of magma converted at that rate emits a tremendous amount of CO2/SO2. Since one cubic mile of magma weight about 45 trillion pounds, it doesn't take much mathematical ability to realize how enormous the OVERALL eruption is (on the scale of 100's of billion of tons of CO2/SO2).

As I previously noted, you don't know how much magma was converted to CO2, you have applied an estimate of the percentage of magma converted to CO2 from a separate eruption to an earlier eruption, you have decided that more magma was converted to CO2 than was actually exposed during the eruption and you have decided that your estimates are more accurate that what the experts say actually occurred.

You opinion seems to be based on misreading a pamphlet and a rough estimate of what you think probably should have occurred.

You mean the Hutchison Hoax?

Thank you for the excellent example of the logical fallacy known as a False Analogy.

A more fitting analogy would be wanting to order a steak, but instead only having the option of buying an all day catered dinner, during which the time slot for getting served a steak falls within a one hour window. You still have to pay for each item served, regardless of whether you ordered it, ate it, or even attended the serving. If you pay for the upgraded DVR package, you will be given 3 take-home containers. If you would be willing to enter into a contract to do this every day, then I'm sure broadcast television pricing makes perfect sense to you.

All analogies, including mine, have faults. The thing is, no analogy is needed for what OP said. He explained the position very well without using any. Your bumbling, unrelated car analogy does nothing to detract from his point.

The >3000 people who died on 9/11 might disagree.

Then millions of Americans who were not killed on 9/11 apparently (from various news reports) disagree with those 3,000. Your argument is classic post-hoc reasoning: the 3,000 did not experience the security-state Medusa that is the DHS and its subsidiary TSA. Those unfortunate individuals would have had only the same pre-9/11 experience those of us older than a teenager had.

Given that information, they *might* have come to your assumed conclusion -- but given our experiences of the TSA in response to 9/11, they might *not* have come to your conclusion.

One who thinks in probabilities does not think as you do. In assessing terror risk, you sound like somebody who failed Probability 101, or one who is a timid, whiny person, easily-frightened by bearded men speaking a foreign language while carrying box-cutters.

An aside: Also, it is morally-presumptious, arrogant, and intellectually-flatulent of you to claim to know what the victims (or anyone else, living or dead) would say.

Sounds like a political statement you just made. You know who else makes political statements? Politicians. You better wear a lot of bulletproof armor,

Please. Try logical fallacies at a dinner party, not on /. where every second visitor has a degree in something and most of those somethings included Logic 101.

If politicians make political statements, it does not follow that people who make political statements are politicians.
Compare: If chickens are birds, it does not follow that all birds are chickens.

This is called a non sequitur and is one of the simplest and oldest logical fallacy arguments around. Frankly, I feel insulted that you even tried it on me.

You mean Dr. Don 'No you can't see my data but you should totally believe my wacky claims' Huber? Wow. Has he released has data yet? Didn't think so. Why should I believe anyone who hides their data?

This is because most country's will not allow GMO's to be planted in their country due to their lack of long-term testing of effects on humans.

So its just a coincidence that they can't compete against countries like the US, Canada, and Brazil in terms of large agronomic crops and want to protect their own industries without breaking WTO laws? That has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. Ask any European plant biologist about GE crops. They'll say the same things American ones do.

We want to see what it does to your children's children before we'll even consider it

So, you can't find any differences between the Ge and non-GE plants (besides the epsps or cry1ab or bar or CMV coat ect) but you expect there to be some long term effect, though strangely breeding, hybridization, mutagenesis, ect is exempt from this? That's what we call magical thinking.

> I dunno if we should mandate it on men. Then again, I don't think it should be mandated for women either, at least not without parental consent to opt in.

The problem with that approach is that the anti-vaccination kooks don't just make themselves and each other sick, they incubate diseases that affect everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversy
http://www.skepdic.com/antivaccination.html

That's magical thinking.

His argument was laughably bogus, even to me with my very thin background. Can't remember the guy's name, but he had won a Nobel prize for his work in chemistry...

Yeah, that's called the Nobel disease. It seems to come from thinking, essentially, "Well, I have a Nobel Prize, so clearly I'm always right - no matter what the facts say".

Consumers who think they are audiophiles with more money than sense use $100 speaker cables too. There's unfortunately no word that means "normal person who wants his music to sound good without buying into the woo".

There, fixed that for you. http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/06/15/1213249/Music-Pirates-Wont-Rush-To-iCloud-For-Forgiveness#

Correct. True audiophiles use $100 speaker cables too. There's unfortunately no word that means "normal person who wants his music to sound good without buying into the woo".

Keep it simple, it's Cognitive Dissonance

http://www.skepdic.com/cognitivedissonance.html

Actually I would say reasonably intelligent people could be fooled by Confirmation Bias. http://www.skepdic.com/confirmbias.html
Almost everyone is susceptible to Confirmation Bias and intelligent people tend to rationalize even more.

It seems journal editors have finally entered the technological age. Congrats. A similar idea they have yep to adopt (at least in social science) is a journal for null findings. The closet drawer problem still hasn't gone away.
http://www.skepdic.com/filedrawer.html

Don't waste your time in the supposed haunted house, the feeling of a 'presence' and 'ghosts' and any other paranormal crap is all in the person's head.

Not necessarily. Infrasound is an ordinary physical phenomenon that can induce sensations of the paranormal in people. Attributing the sensation to ghosts shows a lack of scientific rigor, but it's hard to fault them too much for being confounded by a disconcerting physical phenomenon that many people are unaware of.

Oh, crap, you're right, I guess I really wasn't paying attention. I forgot the dash in the term woo-woo. My bad. I hope that clears things up.

Except, again, for the fact that none of them seem able to actually do what they claim to do.

Finding (pseudo) sciencey-sounding explanation before even knowing if there's a phenomenon to explain in the first place, has a name. It's called Tooth Fairy Science.

Sure, one can handwave a whole theory about what might be the physics behind the tooth fairy, and the market value of different kinds of teeth, and whatever. But if you don't actually have a phenomenon to explain there, it's just a pointless waste of time.

Ditto here. Trying to explain how aura reading might work before anyone proved they can actually read an aura (again: anyone can win a million dollars if they just prove they can) is exactly tooth fairy science.

As regards to Kreeft, that is basically the Tooth Fairy arguments. No, they are not valid, rational or reasonable. They are infantile and silly.

You're not using Buzz because you don't think anyone uses it (I think you're right, incidentally), so you're asking us for other social networking ideas that you've never heard of? Sounds like a losing proposition to me.

Someone needs to make a new Facebook, like how it was when it started up. Back when it was used to find people, connect to them, and keep in touch on occasion, but wasn't meant to be your portal to the Internet or a gateway to every social interaction in your life. I found value in Facebook back then. Now? The only value I find in it is what I've invested previously, not what I'm gaining. That said, I'm aware of the sunk costs fallacy and don't want to be a victim to it for too long, so if they push much harder, I will be leaving Facebook as well. From the very beginning I had everything set to friends only (or stricter), but now I'm being forced to remove parts of my profile as they make them public, since I simply don't want to share that information with others I don't know.

Trudo is a blowhard fraud AND a spammer. That's probably why the judge got pissed. See:
http://www.skepdic.com/trudeau.html

"The New York state Consumer Protection Board warns those who follow Kevin Trudeau's advice to call a toll-free number for information that Trudeau is selling their name and contact information to telemarketers and junk mailers."

and...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Trudeau#2010:_Arrest_and_imprisonment_for_criminal_contempt_of_court
http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0323064.shtm
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/01/trudeau.shtm

Sounds like he deserves whatever he gets...

This could be an example of The law of very large numbers. Basically, this states that people have very little intuitive grasp of statistics and so believe that many unrelated things are indeed connected. Also related to the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. It would be possible for a statisticion to determine whether the rate of battery failure after installing Windows 7 was expected, but that wouldn't convince anyone whose actually knows someone whose battery failed shortly after the installation. Or even not so shortly after.

Of course, it is possible that there is some bad code somewhere in Windows 7's power management that allows batteries to drain and then recharge continuously wearing them out, and a proper statistical analysis would reveal this as well.

I'd be here all night if I listed all the ways that Mercola is a first rate crank, so for starters, read this, and the other things it links to at the bottom, then take your pick from this list. In a nutshell, Mercola is anti-science and proud of it, and preaches his dangerously irrational beliefs to the unsuspecting. That's what makes him an überquack.

I am not a medical professional, and can only judge based on the information we have been given.....

But when I watch this video I don't see the same thing that's being reported.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/11/24/coma.man.belgium/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

What I see is some very questionable "facilitated communication"
http://www.skepdic.com/facilcom.html

Is it possible that the story is true as it's been presented? I don't know

Is it possible that he can actually be guiding the "communication" when his pupils are not following the motion? I don't know

Is it possible that he is still completely unaware at this point? I don't know

I do know that the only people I've seen saying either "It's a MIRACLE!" or "It's a HOAX" have an agenda to support.... and I don't trust anyone who's that certain based on 3rd hand information.

When I heard the story from my co-worker, ...

Maybe the diviner retired after winning all those huge prizes for proof of psychic ability?

http://www.skepdic.com/randi.html

I can create custom XML with any text editor. i4i, whether they realise it or not, have just completely destroyed the proprietary software industry in one fell swoop.

I think you may be overreacting a bit. Whether the patent is valid or not (an appellate decision might prove that it is not), it certainly isn't as broad in scope as you are suggesting. Microsoft may end up having to remove some infrequently used functionality from Word, but the software industry as we know it is not going to come to an end because of this injunction.

The courts just don't have a clue. They do not realise the implications of this decision. Multi-billion dollar implications. The death of an entire industry implications. Lawyers will never understand science and should stop pretending they do. The DNA thing is another example, I have been telling them that for years.

Before characterizing the courts as completely clueless, you might want to go through the court's memorandum opinion and order (PACER registration required, but no cost for this document) denying Microsoft's motion for judgment as a matter of law. It is a detailed memorandum (65 pages, double-spaced, 12-pt font) that gives quite a bit of detail as to why the judge decided to uphold the jury's verdict. Go through it and decide for yourself whether the evidence and arguments presented by Microsoft were so convincing that no reasonably jury would have found for i4i.

The law has no place in science. None. To paraphrase a great Canadian: The law has no place in the laboratories of the nation.

Cute, but seriously, take a closer look at what the real issues are in this case. If you don't try to understand the facts that drive a particular case, your arguments regarding the law and the way courts apply it will sound more like pseudoscience than science. Good science is based on facts. Good legal arguments are based on facts too.

>>Intelligent Design is specifically referring to the theory advanced by the discovery institute saying that features of the universe and the Universe are best explained by intelligent cause, not an undirected process.

No, Intelligent Design is the premise that evolution did not happen naturally, but had an outside entity interfering in it to one degree or another. No more, no less. Just because the wikipedia article thinks that the Discovery Institute owns the idea, doesn't make it so. In fact, I'd rather not trust anything the Discovery Institute has to say.

Essentially the whole "ID vs. Evolution" debate is misguided, since ID *acknowledges* evolution. Read anything on ID - you'll see this is true, though not stated in so many words. They just feel that, for example, SJG's punctuated equilibrium can only be explained through some sort of external intervention due to, perhaps, the odds involved or Demsbki's no free lunch theory of information creation. It's a subtle distinction, and one most people miss. It's evolution + intervention.

You should be aware that back before ID became the whole hooplah that it is now, that I actually first heard about it from a lecturer from SIO (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) who considered it an interesting thing to consider, and said that it presented neat challenges for the evolutionary biologist. My atheist AP Bio teacher was the guy who invited him in, and treated it as an interesting topic for a classroom debate.

This was in 1993 or so, before all the nonsense really began with it, and is why I look at it in a different light (as a scientific theory, when presented the right way) than most people. I also doubt that he'd bring in such a speaker nowadays, with all the nonsense surrounding it.

>>[Panspermia is] not an "alternative explaination" or "controversy" to be taught that fills holes in the theory of evolution.

It is an alternative to the standard narrative on albiogenesis. I guess if you don't want to lump that in with the ToE, it's up to you.

>>The idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life influenced evolution on earth is likewise an existing hypothesis unrelated to Intelligent Design

Actually, that IS intelligent design. The idea that an intelligent entity intervened in evolution. I believe... eh, someone, trots this idea out as a possible explanation for some stuff. If you read any documents related to ID, you'll see it quite commonly referenced, since it gives the secular patina that people like the Discovery Institute want in order to get it into classrooms. Intelligent design is not equated with supernatural causes, regardless of what the wikipedia article says (which isn't an especially good article on the subject, by the by, though I guess I wouldn't expect it to be what with all the controversy surrounding it).

Try googling Intelligent Design and aliens. You'll see what I'm talking about.

Oh, this is amusing. From the Skeptic's Dictionary:
http://www.skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html

http://www.skepdic.com/organic.html

I've not read the first two articles here, but I imagine they'll have referenced much of the information I've seen in the past.

http://www.skepdic.com/organic.html
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4019
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.1190/news_detail.asp
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4162