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"All models are wrong, but some are useful." You can't disprove something that you already know to be wrong. Also see Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong.

What we get is every 10 years a new set of predictions and models explaining why the last 20 years models and predictions weren't correct but we are still doomed anyway

In the words of Issac Asimov

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

I kindly refer you to Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong.

Why do people refuse to admit mistakes - so deeply that they transform their own brains? They're not kidding themselves: they really believe what they have to believe to justify their original thought.
There are some pretty scary examples in this book. Psychologists who refuse to admit they'd bought into the false memory theories, causing enormous pain. Politicians. Authors. Doctors. Therapists. Alien abduction victims.
Most terrifying: The justice system operates this way. Once someone is accused of a crime - even under the most bizarre circumstances - the police believe he's guilty of something. Even when the DNA shows someone is innocent, or new evidence reveals the true perpetrator, they hesitate to let the accused person go free.
...
Once we hold a position, say the authors, it's almost impossible to make a change.

Or: how we merely like to convince ourselves about reliability of our memory, how many myths about it & our minds we tend to believe. Not only textbook cognitive biases; also, say, the myth about "monolithic me" while split-brain patients end up virtually unchanged; there's one localized brain trauma which results in people becoming completely blind without them realizing it; popular harmful BS lies of "we're so important, gods love us, more of us live now than have ever lived!" & simply ignoring 100+ billion dead homo sapiens sapiens (at least we will be similarly ignored very quickly, so there's some "balance"); also myths about how decent and freedom loving people we are (a bit sad how our deep need for Just World gets derailed so easily :/ )
How, when people get older, they tend to start believing myths about the greatness of their youth (not the least because it makes us feel better when faced with "frustrating" reality of how much better in fact it is "now", for most cases of "now") - the "good old times" known in written forms since antiquity and which give tiresome political results (being essentially at the core of anti-liberalism; though, on the other side, it's not that much better, with progressivism too often forgetting about good stuff the past has to offer)

What's worse, all this while too many people live in a world of absolute right and wrong. With almost total lack of understanding of risk, statistics. Too stupid to connect their votes with the consequences they suffer.

Ignoring how a good leader is someone who sometimes makes mistakes; who is not perfect but is able to lead in good direction despite the imperfections. Contrast this with the usual rhetoric when people root for their "new mythical hero" and how they present them and their ideologies as perfection. A total BS right at the core of many political movements.

People believing their position in life is due to merit and hard work (despite most not ever doing anything which could be called "hard"), not understanding how it's largely an accident of birth, viewing the poor as lazy and unworthy of success (a view which eases acceptance of actions that maintain this relative social order). Perpetrating the myths of "land of opportunity" or "American Dream" while the actual metric of this stuff, social mobility, places the US at the bottom of developed countries (at the top are, popularly disparaged, so-called "nanny states")
People who will only learn new things if it confirms a pre-existing belief.

Oh, and some of our most lasting

It appears I recollected an occasion on which Shakespeare did in fact use a word with the letters "woot", committed it to memory, and assumed that digging up the first dictionary that came to mind would settle the question properly without remembering any other detais. For what it's worth, this is what I should have been pointing to. At any rate, both accomplish my point: that "woot" has had a meaning in the English language for hundreds of years before the neologism was coined.

I wasn't actually aware he used "woot" at all, but what's more interesting is that it appears he isn't even using it in the middle English sense. His usage appears to be a neologism (or at least "neo" in his time) as an alternative of the second person present for "willen"/"willan" - "wilt" (to want).

It's not terribly surprising though, as Shakespeare was a bit free and easy with language at the best of times (allowing for some excellent puns sometimes, but also more often than not, just making a mess of things)

And bravo for rendering a grammatically valid structure; I spent five minutes pondering over how to cram it into the third person and the present tense and never considered dumping the stupid auxiliary verb. My linguistics background is mostly in the extremely synthetic breed of conlang, and as such I tend to stumble with subtle realities of legitimate linguistics.

I'd probably be more interested in constructed languages if someone came up with a really nice Germanic one. It seems all the really popular ones are heavily Romance oriented though. Not that I have anything against the romance languages (I speak French pretty well, and can at least read most of the more common languages in the family like Spanish, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, etc), just that I tend to prefer the Germanics for clarity.

It appears I recollected an occasion on which Shakespeare did in fact use a word with the letters "woot", committed it to memory, and assumed that digging up the first dictionary that came to mind would settle the question properly without remembering any other detais. For what it's worth, this is what I should have been pointing to. At any rate, both accomplish my point: that "woot" has had a meaning in the English language for hundreds of years before the neologism was coined.

And bravo for rendering a grammatically valid structure; I spent five minutes pondering over how to cram it into the third person and the present tense and never considered dumping the stupid auxiliary verb. My linguistics background is mostly in the extremely synthetic breed of conlang, and as such I tend to stumble with subtle realities of legitimate linguistics.

If anything, SETI is a hell of a lot closer to playing the lottery then it is to religion.

Playing the lottery is a "tax on the mathematically challenged". Nothing that you or Ragondux wrote have convinced me that SETI is anything but a "tax on the reality challenged". Flat Earthers have a closer grip on reality.

Sean Carroll pretty much debunked that view point:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/29/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/10/01/one-last-stab/

And one last link about what "wrong" means for good measure:

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

VUE - from http://vue.tufts.edu/ might be a helpful mix of directory tree and mindmap. It allows for content tagging and linking (local or on the Internet). Search by hierarchical (or not) ontologies is possible.

Hm, each one of those majority positions has a chance of being wrong. I wouldn't be too sure not one of them turns out to be.

Established theories are well tested models of how certain bits of the universe work and by definition models are imperfect. However, established theories (eg:Evolution, AGW, Heliocentricity, Germ Theory, Politically sensitive theory X) are very unlikely to be flat out wrong

It's good to remember also some other things Asimov wrote. Maybe hoping for some surprising stuff... but better not to expect it.

I think this is an appropriate link: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Ultimately, you can bet future won't be as imagined in works of popular fiction - because you must remember that's what scifi is. Grandiose, fabulous, "awesome" style of exploration depicted in those - that's catering to audiences which would be uncomfortable with anything too dissimilar from Earthy experiences; and coincidentally making the work of writers helluva easier. A sign of... limited imagination (how many people remember that we can already transport people while miniaturized and in deep hibernation? Heck, give me one medium launcher + additional few dozen million bucks, and I can transport at least a thousand living / viable humans to pretty much anywhere in our system), afraid to face what the wild realities of existing universe.

And ultimately, people will remain upset how space travel will most likely remain different from earthly experiences

BTW, how is that building of ships' hulls ignoring Archimedes' principle going along? It's over 2k years old, surely we should be able to ignore it by now, eh?

If a bit of evidence can equally well support either view, then it cannot be cited to support one or the other.

Yes it can, there are infinite theories to explain anything. A unicorn did it. A wizard did it. Flying green man did it. Infinite theories just by adding some unprovable piece to them. Do you accept all these theories as valid? Do you accept the Hindu explanation of the universe? The Buddhist one?

Which version of ID do you accept? God as the clockmaker that did nothing afterward? God who only modified things occasionally? God who tinkers constantly? How much evolution do you accept in the process? Bacteria clearly evolve or are you saying god is the reason we have anti-biotic resistant bacteria?

The Roman Catholic Church, btw, which covers quite a few Christians has no problems with evolution.

Of course, your belief that evolution does not predict anything shows how little you know of evolution or problems you have with it. You parrot talking points you do not even comprehend. Nor do you even seek to learn more, a 10 second google search leads to things like this:
  * http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience
  * http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA210.html

So please, shut up for your own good and let the grown ups talk till you've learned enough not to make yourself look like an uneducated intellectually lazy hick.

If you believe in a spherical Earth you'd be wrong.

But not that wrong http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Macro vs micro evolution is a distinction made for convenience, not to represent any special difference between the two. Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.

No, that's not necessarily true. That's an assumption, and one rather largely unproven. Thereby, it's not demonstrable and is therefore faith, not science.

It's not an assumption, it's a definition. Micro-evolution is natural selection at small scales. Macro evolution is natural selection at large scales. They are the same thing, the difference is time or the result (more differences).

That's the great thing about science -- using small things that we can observe to understand big things that we can't.

Your argument makes as much sense as saying that since we will probably never be able to watch a planet form up-close, we'll never understand how planet formation works. Who cares if we understand the basics (gravity, thermodynamics, radioactive decay, conservation of momentum), we haven't actually seen it so despite what we know, it must be magic.

For example, Newtonian Physics works great at the macro (every-day-object), slow-speed level. However, it substantially breaks down at the macro, high-speed and the micro levels. Einstein improved this with special relativity, though it still breaks down at the sub-micro levels, where Quantum mechanics fine tune from there using vastly different equations - different enough it cannot be reconciled (yet) with Newtonian and Einsteinian Physics. Yet, we wouldn't know that there is any break down of the Newtonian Physics without demonstrating it, the same goes for Einsteinian Physics.

Time is not the same thing as size and speed. Yes, maybe evolution doesn't work close to the speed or light, or at the atomic level. No one is claiming that does. What you seem to be claiming is that everything we know about physics only applies on short time scale, which we do have evidence for (the speed of light changing would make distant galaxies look different, gravity changing would do the same thing, changes in the strength of forces like the strong and weak nuclear forces would completely change everything).

You're also missing the point of science becoming "less wrong" all the time, meaning that if we found out that things that work now didn't work before, it would have to be a tiny tiny difference, or we would've noticed already. I highly recommend reading this article by Isaac Asimov. It explains things like how Einstein discovering relativity didn't prove that all of physics was wrong, just a very very small part of it.

Now for part of the kicker - Micro-Evolution has been shown to be temporary in many cases. Things "evolve" to meet a need, and as soon as the need is no longer they revert back. This has been shown time and time again - example: check out any of the examples used by Darwin to demonstrate Micro-Evolution; they all reverted after a time. All within his lifetime nonetheless.

I'm not actually familiar with this, do you have references I could see?

The flat earthers deserve more respect they are closer to the right answer than the ID crowd

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

From what we know about our universe, it's very unlikely any survey ships will be coming back. Also, archetypal "dark ages" are largely a myth, a fabrication of following era - those were also times of immense progress.

Generally, it's possible that such grandiose inspirations do at least quite comparable amounts of harm and good. STS (and how it provoked ignorant Soviet generals into pushing for "strategic counterpart" for nonexistent advantage, when their engineers wanted to do different things, also outside LEO...) can be easily seen as a great contribution to the possibility of near Earth orbit being the final frontier of manned space exploration in our lifetime [1]. Unsustainable crash projects in the style of Apollo (not that STS was very different) also aren't the way (BTW, please remind me - what happened with public attention soon after July 20, 1969?). Overall, be careful for those "boldly going beyond the reaches of our imagination" minds to not fall out of their skulls (as one saying with being "open minded" goes) - for one example at hand: it's quite possible that designers and decisionmakers of the STS were raised by pop scifi from 30s, 40s and 50s - scifi with many dreams (nightmares, it turns out?) of "spaceplanes", no doubt inspired by rapid advances in airplane technology during that time. Kinda like those airplanes from "our times" - no doubt influenced by rapid advances in marine tech (and we can even build them! Take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy) - vs. what reality dictates as a good idea (for airplanes! Not launchers and spacecraft... unless you want something analogous to Catalina at best, Spruce Goose at worst)

(BTW, why is the Enterprise counted as a Space Shuttle, as an orbiter, anyway? Equivalent in Buran program was called "Buran aerodynamic analogue"...)

1. It's not very likely though. Have $100 million? Get yourself a ride (those are the people responsible for almost all orbital "tourists")

They are still locally finite. And even if we realize the dream of colonization, there are strong hints that many other dreams (or, to put it bluntly: creative shortcuts to ease production or storytelling) won't be coming (while we're at it - where are ships with hulls overlooking Archimedes' principle? It's 2k+ years old, surely we should be able to ignore it by now...)

This means continuation of something which was always true, is still true on Earth (even with very easy travel) ... even probably much, much stronger: if you're born somewhere, you're very likely to die near that place (because when it comes to travel, people will probably mostly do it while miniaturized and in deep hibernation). Similar for infrastructure.

Because of the only two available explanation -- evolutions and divine intervention

And why do you assume there are only two available explanations?

What, you have a third explanation?

Note that he mentioned AVAILABLE explanations, not possible conjectures. You are welcome to create a new explanation for biological diversity and present credible evidence for that, please!

on Slashdot where people can completely lose their claimed open-mindedness.

Being open-minded does not mean the same as being feeble-minded. The fact is that science progresses towards the truth, even if the absolute truth may never be reached.

Being open-minded does not mean one should reject all the facts that have already been discovered. If and when stronger evidence becomes available, only then will the open-minded scientist abandon current ideas that have been proved plausible through experimental observations.

Being open-minded means one might do further testing on known truths, in order to discover possible errors in experimental data, in order to refine the model, or in order to close the gaps in current theory.

Being open-minded does NOT mean one should give equal time to ideas that are complete bullshit, that have no evidence for them.

AND, also, it has many elements which don't go away despite wishful thinking (BTW, realizing the conclusions of Michelson–Morley experiment or of some dualities getting into the way of elegant wave theory ... not only brought new possibilities, also new barriers) - our science is, less and less over time, incomplete, not blatantly wrong (which would be required by many of the "alternatives" to rockets)

Why does Neal want to start with rockets, anyway? Surely calling for new era of ships' hulls which aren't constrained by Archimedes' principle (over two thousand years old! Should be trivial to ignore!) will give much quicker and profound effects - imagine the benefits for existing commerce everywhere!

Said article is based upon bunk proposal of somebody who wishes for current working systems to be replaced by his system. Do you expect us to grant every such wish (when looking closer at engineering, even at physics, tells us they can't work...)

From what I see, some people also tend to belittle all of current science and scientists mostly when too many of its aspects run counter to some "opinions" of said people... while the humanity is doing quite good (there is nothing wrong with "inertia" in such case). You can't know if we're not approaching relative stability of practically possible technology ... what is indeed the normal state for our species (interspersed with very few short bursts of progress). At the least, logic dictates that wishful thinking has limits.

(medicine has social problems BTW - people, the patients care about their lives too much to simply trust evidence)

There are relatively subtle signs that our science is incomplete. For what you wish for, it would have to be very, very wrong. A Universe with FTL (=time travel) would be most likely very different from the one we observe (and which agrees remarkably well with our understanding of it)

It seems to be a very fundamental limit; I wouldn't be too surprised if even more integral to our reality than we suspect now. Inertia appears to act like a gravitational influence from the rest of the Universe. Of course you'll say "so what?" ... well, that brings with it few headaches, like requirement for instantaneousness or requiring the "interaction" to go backwards in time! Couple it with how the Universe doesn't appear to have signs of expansive intelligence which developed (that's almost exactly equivalent to "will ever develop"!) FTL / time travel. Trying to work around it might not matter - the relative values, properties and characters of interactions remaining similarly limited for all sensible Universes.

Don't treat works of fiction like an oracle (airplanes from "our" time, as envisioned ~130 years ago, probably a mix of rapid advances in marine tech + a large doze of wishful thinking ... I don't see much in common with the boring reality ... but, the best part in this case - we even can build them! Basically: take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy. Nobody in their right mind would).

Can't you at least see that wishful thinking must have limits? Don't extrapolate progress (hm, I've seen a nice movie recently ... one happening in 2010); if anything, relative technological stability with shorts spurts of progress is a normal state for our species.
(but you might start by building a ship with a hull not constrained by Archimedes' principle ... its over 2 thousand years old, surely should be easier to ignore!)

How many times...

Don't work in the realm of works of fiction (airplanes from our times, as envisioned ~130 years ago .... I seem to notice few differences). But while you insist (hey, where we would be without trying, right? Right?) - maybe start with building a hull for ships which isn't constrained by Archimedes' principle? (it's quite old, at over 2 thousand years, should be much easier to ignore...)

Possibly no warp drive, too

(but you might start by building a ship with a hull not constrained by Archimedes' principle ... its over 2 thousand years old, surely should be easier to ignore; those airplanes from "our" times, depicted in works of fiction from mere ~130 years ago, shouldn't be too far away now, too - because reality is just too boring)

Asimov's essay "The relativity of wrong" should be required reading... It puts some perspective on 'truth' and 'wrong'. Religious people love to point out small errors in the theory of evolution and claim that all must be wrong, that's an inherent property of blind faith (you either believe the whole thing no matter how ridiculous or you have to abandon your whole faith, it's an all-or-nothing game). The scientific way that Asimov illustrates has degrees of 'wrongness', but a steadily improving model that gets closer and closer to the truth.

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Don't bet on new physics; there's really nothing particularly suggestive of the practical limits we stumbled upon not being there. Of our physics being very wrong (it would pretty much have to be, if you wish for practical FTL / time travel), vs. just incomplete.

(that said, yeah, there are almost certainly more practical approaches than Daedalus or Icarus)

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Also - Archimedes' principle is over 2 thousand years old, surely - thanks to the scientific and technological progress which happened in the meantime - our present ships aren't constrained by it anymore...

(but even assuming science fantasies - it would certainly make things much harder for spaceships not equipped with advanced navigational computers)

You'll note I don't refute BB theory. I just point out that it is far from settled. Hilarious that you were knocked so off kilter by that,

There is a huge gulf between "not settled" and "just hand-waving", and you of course failed to note that it was the latter I was taking issue with. Of course it isn't settled, nothing in physics is, and yet it is in fact the case that the Big Bang Theory is one of the most successfully predictive theories of the last century. You're completely off base thinking cosmologists would agree with your "hand waving" characterization more than my "very successful" characterization.

I really don't think "successful" in this context means what you think it means.

I am certain you don't know what "successful" means in this context, or why the Big Bang Theory is considered extremely successful by cosmologists. You have no idea why it is the favored cosmology, and why it will take a great deal of evidence to knock it down.

For example you bring up CMBR problems without noting the phenomenal success that was the CMBR prediction in the first place -- did you recognize the graph in that XKCD comic? Or how even in the last decade observations of the polarization of the CMBR have matched predictions of the theory precisely?

You bring up Dark Matter as if it's a problem, rather than a prediction of Big Bang Theory (assuming you meant the non-Baryonic matter which is theorized to make up a greater portion of the universes mass-energy than 'normal' matter), which our other observations of Dark Matter have supported.

The BB has had tremendous success and it is utterly foolish and ignorant to pretend otherwise. It also has significant problems and unresolved issues (like all of our most advanced theories), but when weighed against the correct predictions, then yes, that's called "successful".

I guess since you can't refute the physics (specifically the fact that our physics don't allow for any of the early stages of what the big bang hypothesis describes), I'll just have to watch your hand-waving.

You can't refute the BB's tremendous success, not least because you appear to be completely unaware.

And I see no point in denying that there's a big problem with current physics and describing energy densities at the level of the first instant after the Big Bang. GR predicts singularities, too, which is a problem when combined with things like the Pauli Exclusion Principle but I don't hear you calling that or QM "hand waving". It is well known that high-energy physics is an area where we need a lot more development and that our best theories don't play nice with each other in this domain.

And yet, starting nanoseconds after the unknowable and hypothetical Singularity, the Big Bang model allows us to make extremely accurate predictions about many aspects of the development of the universe. Clearly not everything, yet clearly much more than you believe.

So, no matter what it predicts, and no matter what it gets right, something else is wrong: Either it's the theory, or its the physics. But again, you need to hear this from a cosmologist. Or perhaps read up on it a bit.

Yes, of course something is wrong. We know something is wrong. We know something is wrong with GR and QM and the Standard Model. Yet no cosmologist would call those, or BB, anything but what they are: Extremely successful predictive theories. Even cosmologists who are coming with alternative theories must acknowledge that. So while BB Theory is wrong, far more wrong is your belief that cosmologists, or scientists for that matter, would agree that because it's known to be wrong, the BB Theory is "just hand waving" and not "one of the most successfully predictive theories of the last century".

Because, as any cosmologist or astrophysicist can tell you, wrong is relative. Maybe try talking to one.

1: Did we somehow escape the Archimedes' principle of buoyancy? I mean - come on, it's over two thousand years old, surely with our scientific and technological progress we should be able to build ships which are not constrained by it!

Problem is, people seem to assume (and wish) how our dreams from works of fiction should inevitably come true, if we only "work hard enough"... but Real World(tm) has practical limits; ignoring them won't do us any good (however pleasant it seems now to live beyond sustainability - though, truth be told, perhaps most of humanity lives on detritus already)

Just look at those airplanes from "our" times (/. & unicode links...), as imagined ~130 years ago (depiction no doubt influenced by rapid advances in (sub?)marine technology, capturing imagination of observers) - we can build them! (take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy), but it would be a horrible idea, at the least. Probably something similar gave us Shuttle (designers of which raised on scifi of ~1940s, inspired by rapid advances in aircraft technology & with lots of shiny spaceplanes) - which, in light of its purpose, is somewhat analogous to flying boats (not many those around nowadays)

2: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Science is an area, to be frank, still in its infancy.

You can't be so frankly sure of that. OTOH...

If you're really interested, read Ronald L. Number's "The Creationists," it should be available in most libraries. It covers the history of creationism, almost exclusively in the USA, but then Christian creationism is largely limited to the USA. One major commonality of evolution denial by creationists is due to an American peculiarity: the Bible is literally true and/or is inerrant. Despite the fact that anybody who can read their Bible or do a quick web search and find the idea of a literal, inerrant Bible laughable, this view hangs on--primarily by people who don't read their Bible or ask questions in church. A second major commonality is ego: some people can't stand the mere idea of humanity being poofed into existence in the very image of God and are appalled by the reality of our ancestry being shared with apes, with dogs, plants, bacteria, etc. A third item held in common by creationists is wishful thinking (coupled with scientific illiteracy), witness the Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism. 162 years of creationist failure, a tradition that continues to this day.

...you know, that was long before the practice of scientific method was developed (with quite rigorous standards of "decisively"), so I'm not sure what was that "scientific community" that you speak of.

(never mind how it's a case of relativity of wrong...and how geocentric is just a different, less convenient in the end, frame of reference; BTW, the barycenter of Sun-Jupiter lies slightly outside the Sun)

PS. Overall: remember this assumption is an integral part of the theories of relativity. Many predictions of which have been successfully verified again and again.

Sure, some other theory might very well supplant it in the future, but most likely in this style.

Most people forget about the basic research performed by most universities, which is absolutely necessary to the academic industry and flows into every aspect of the rest of the world (especially including tech, medical, and military). A good deal of the criticism on the current system comes from a lack of understanding of basic research and its part in academia. While the Wikipedia-style likely has merits for far more than we currently expect (it was equally ill-received when proposed for encyclopedias!), it can't fit into our current paradigm of research universities while retaining the current organization of journals and how they handle submissions (which is another point of contention that needs a serious upgrade of its own).

Therefore, perhaps the part-time lecturer model is preferable as a starting-point. However, due to its for-profit (not to mention anticompetitive and controversial) nature, Phoenix is not an appropriate role model.

Take a look at examples that are already far closer to Wikipedia, like MIT's ESP and Tuft's Experimental College.

And what gives you the knowledge to make those assertions? We could as well be further than many wanting-to-look-smart-people might assume.

(obviously we're not talking simply about "GIS, but for the Universe" thing)

If there's some clumsy PR, it seems to be in other part of TFS. WMAP has not ,"quite literally, changed our view of the Universe" - it further refined it nicely, continuing in the footsteps (if mentioning only large space experiments) of COBE and RELIKT-1 (the latter might be one sad example of another type of clumsy PR - apparently already gave us large part of the results for which COBE is praised, but...)

More that the phrase "scientific consensus" is a load of balls, science doesn't work that way. There is no 'consensus', just an as-yet-undisproven theory that most accurately explains the current observations and makes testable predictions. That most scientists will accept that this theory as 'correct' is a byproduct of the theory being accurate, not the other way round. Questioning whether a theory is correct (i.e. attempting to find observations that do not correlate with the theory's predictions) is the very way science advances, and not 'denying the consensus' or somesuch sillyness. That there are people who blindly ignore evidence in their attempt to smear a theory with inconvenient predictions muddies the waters, and results in our current state where anyone who so much as questions any data or theory on anthropogenic climate change is an "anti-science global warming denier", and the slightest correction to data is "proof of the gubernment conspiracy", with BOTH of these being a detriment to actual climate science.

Authoritative scientists told us that margarine was better for us than butter; in that miscegenation laws were necessary for public health; and that electromagnetic waves were not quantized (Bohr's school said this) and that they were vibrations of a luminiferous aether (most textbooks said this, decades after Einstein published relativity). All of those claims turned out to be false.

Granted, scientists have been wrong. However, most often we arrive closer to the truth than we were before. The luminiferous aether was not correct, but it was more correct than the idea that light was only a particle because it explains interference and the double slit experiment. In comparison to other contemporary sources, I would think that scientists have been less wrong than any other group. Who would have disputed the luminiferous aether besides other scientists?

Unless you are going to become an expert in a field, when you don't know enough to interpret the raw data you must trust those who can rather than those who cannot. We do need experts who can question the status quo, but no-one can be an expert in every field. That said, you can check for scientific misconduct which will help you know which scientists to trust.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Issac Asimov

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Read and be enlightened. Quote:

"Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface. Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness. The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile.

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.

The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth.

Mind you, even a tiny difference, such as that between 0 and 0.000126, can be extremely important. That difference mounts up."

This one also applies here, in a way...

It was realised (by few) for quite some time how it seems possible - at the least, the physics didn't appear to work against our efforts too much. No such comfort with interstellar distances yet, and we can't assume it will come.

BTW, how's that inspiring part with manned lunar missions works so far?

You quote something that when searched for is revealed to be a quote popular with young-earth creationists and utterly irrelevant everywhere else, you ignorantly and without evidence spout off about the alleged unreliability of radiocarbon dating, attempt to insinuate that "evolutionists" don't believe it's accurate when in fact radiocarbon dating is accurate which is why it lines up so nicely with dendrochronology, ice cores, varves, and other nonradiometric dating systems, insinuate that the actual experts who do radiocarbon dating either are so incompetent they don't understand the limits of the technique and how to identify contaminants or are liars despite again having no evidence, and finally when spoon-fed relevant links to correct your misunderstandings you refuse to read. There is one conclusion to this: not only are you willfully ignorant, you are also amoral enough to slander the entire membership of multiple professions without cause. I do not suffer fools and as you clearly are such you are unworthy of any more of my time or anyone else's.

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

R is an excellent language to learn for just about every field. It's ability to import and export data to MS based resources such as Access, Excel, MS-SQL and other non-MS sources makes it a versital tool. It's commerical parent is S-PLUS and is nearly syntax identical with minor variations. Buy the book, use the tool, impress your Eve Online players by pinning down the July Tritanium prices and hitting the weekly averages within .5 ISK by doing time series analysis using regression plus ARIMA on the residuals. Find out cool things like Hulkageddon impacts frigate prices more then exhumers and MORE! FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY (Except your big sister because she's icky and into boys....) For those what want to do google searches but find 'R' difficult there is the rseek.org site and a few quick links to get you started while you wait for the nutshell book to arrive in the mail. R Intro : http://www.itc.nl/~rossiter/teach/R/RIntro_ov.pdf Programming in R: http://manuals.bioinformatics.ucr.edu/home/programming-in-r R Graph Gallery: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/ Big Resource I use: http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/StatResource.html The Little Handbook: http://www.tufts.edu/~gdallal/LHSP.HTM The Big N: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/ There are hundreds of PDF references out there that can help as well, too many to list. Good luck, have fun.

The median US citizen goes to school for 12 years. During that time, they all have to take at least one course on science. If after spending an entire course studying science (and probably many more than one class) they don't have an understanding of what science is and how it works, then I'd say the average US citizen has failed in their duty to become a rational and thinking being.

I think there are a couple of major issues with science education in the US. It's taught as a bunch of "facts" for the most part, especially biology and chemistry. My recollection is that the scientific method is mentioned in some introductory science class, you get a quiz with multiple choice answers or three blank lines for: observe, hypothesize, and experiment and you're done. Now it's time to memorize what ever level of physics is "age appropriate": newtonian, relativistic or quantum. Of course most people never get past Newtonian physics, then they hear vaguely about Relativity and Quantum Physics and hey, what do you know, those crazy scientist don't really know anything. Toss in people screaming "correlation isn't causation" and what do you know, you can't "prove" anything so my long held misconceptions are just as good as any... Asimov write's about this in The Relativity of Wrong.

The other issue is that while we supposedly have a separation of church and state [1], we tap dance around evolution in public schools so we don't offend people. Suddenly people think that God in the Gaps is a valid scientific theory - though so far "God did it" is a bit difficult to test. I mention this because I think many American's glib "it's just a theory" response to any scientific theory they don't like is reinforced by all the tap dancing around evolution.

If I were King, then most science education would be about the process of science, the attempt to approach the truth to the best of our ability, and the drive to continue to question and test theories to improve or replace them. Memorizing the atomic number of Iridium is almost pointless for most students and adults. Learning about how the atomic model changed over time and how useful the "wrong" models were seems much more relevant in understanding science.

Unfortunately, US education is focused on the "three R's" [2] and thinking (reasoning?) is not one of them.

[1] Yes, I know the words "wall of separation" are not in the Constitution but in a letter from Thomas Jefferson.
[2] Reading, writing and arithmetic - go figure.

It's pretty close to flat - the curvature of the earth is less than a foot per mile - a rounding error really, given that even the smoothest of prairies can easily vary by more than that.

The Relativity of Wrong

Just food for thought . . .

Just for the sake of argument let's say the CRU were totally corrupt and in the pocket of the evil geniuses of the NWO. How then do you explain that the independently derived GISTEMP dataset (nasa) closely matches the HADcrut dataset (CRU)?

Others have pointed to the raw data for HADcrut, a small portion of wich is hard (but not imposible) to obtain due to nationalist obstuctions. GISStemp does not suffer from that restriction, the raw data and source code is all publicly available here and has been indenpendently reconstructed here

As for chaos theory, it was discovered by Lorenze while working on a weather models. Climatoligists are aware that climate is the statistics of weather and that chaos theory does not apply to climate over human time scales.

"I'd love to know what this letter would've looked like before we knew about wave theory, or...We'd be hearing about how matter is made up of particles which have neatly orbiting electrons because this hadn't been refuted yet, as though you have to agree with every long-standing theory that hasn't been refuted to be a good little boy or girl."

You are trying to make all science into an "argument from authority" wich it is not. Popper's "republic of science" demands you accept the best testable explaination until you can falsify it or come up with a better one, this has nothing to do with authority and everything to do with logic and skepticisim. Your statement shows you simply do not comprehend the relativity of wrong and utill you do you will never really appreciate the utility of science that is staring you in the face while you type your refutation of it.

Syntax is not morphology: response to TaoPhoenix

TaoPhoenix's useful summary of the development of the "fruitfly" correctly points out that the summary is missing an o. However, the author incorrectly describes this as a syntax error.(1)

This is not a syntax error but a morphology error. Syntax refers to the study of observed patterns in the sequential arrangement of words or lexemes;(2) morphology refers to the study of how lexemes change their form (e.g. requiring an extra "o" or not).(3)

In addition, the author's use of the spelling "Drosophilia" is a morphology error. ("Drosophilia" would signify "the love of dew" in the abstract; "Drosophila", with the implied substantive "zoa", signifies "life-forms that love dew".)(4),(5)

References:
(1) TaoPhoenix, Re:Backwards compatibility
(2) Wikipedia, Syntax
(3) Wikipedia, Morphology (linguistics)
(4) LSJ Greek-English Lexicon, philia
(5) LSJ Greek-English Lexicon, philos, sense II.2

Syntax is not morphology: response to TaoPhoenix

TaoPhoenix's useful summary of the development of the "fruitfly" correctly points out that the summary is missing an o. However, the author incorrectly describes this as a syntax error.(1)

This is not a syntax error but a morphology error. Syntax refers to the study of observed patterns in the sequential arrangement of words or lexemes;(2) morphology refers to the study of how lexemes change their form (e.g. requiring an extra "o" or not).(3)

In addition, the author's use of the spelling "Drosophilia" is a morphology error. ("Drosophilia" would signify "the love of dew" in the abstract; "Drosophila", with the implied substantive "zoa", signifies "life-forms that love dew".)(4),(5)

References:
(1) TaoPhoenix, Re:Backwards compatibility
(2) Wikipedia, Syntax
(3) Wikipedia, Morphology (linguistics)
(4) LSJ Greek-English Lexicon, philia
(5) LSJ Greek-English Lexicon, philos, sense II.2