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About the only thing we can be certain of with science is that the answers are always going to be changing.

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

"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] 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." - Isaac Asimov

Heparin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_heparin_adulteration

Since this "over-sulphated" variant is not naturally occurring and mimics the properties of heparin, the counterfeit is almost certainly intentional as opposed to an accidental lapse in manufacturing.[8] The heparin was cut from anywhere from 2-60% with a counterfeit substance due to cost effectiveness, and a shortage of suitable pigs in China.

Drywall: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100402/ap_on_bi_ge/us_chinese_drywall

The drywall has been linked to corrosion of wiring, air conditioning units, computers, doorknobs and jewelry, along with possible health effects. Tenenbaum said some samples of the Chinese-made product emit 100 times as much hydrogen sulfide as drywall made elsewhere.

Pet Food: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls

Sometime in mid-March, an "unnamed pet food company" reported to Cornell that they had discovered an industrial chemical utilized in plastics manufacture, melamine, in internal testing of wheat gluten samples. ..... The chemical was found in the suspected wheat gluten in raw concentrations as high as 6.6 percent.

Cooking Oil: http://rawstory.com/2010/03/chinese-consumed-millions-gallons-toxic-sewage-oil-study/

Chinese cooking oil siphoned from restaurants' waste tanks and stripped out of raw sewage is being resold on the cheap and has for years tainted approximately one out of every ten meals cooked in the eastern nation, according to a recent study.

Tooth Paste http://publicsafety.tufts.edu/ehs/?pid=27

In recent weeks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has identified a number of instances of contaminated toothpastes that have been imported and sold in the United States. The toothpaste from China and counterfeit Colgate toothpaste may contain diethylene glycol (DEG), a chemical used in antifreeze.

Two are current: cooking oil and drywall.

Yes, the US will be a much better competitor if we just give up regulation, make a few people rich and poison everyone. Actually we already have, if you consider how unregulated Toxic Assets have ruined both the domestic and world economy....

Seriously, you DO know that the same was true at every point in history, right?

30 years ago, the then current theories were quite simply, the most accurate and comprehensive theories mankind had ever developed. Ditto 60 years ago. And 100. And 1000. And....

And of course we all realize that for the past couple hundred years at least, these theories have been converging on greater and greater accuracy and precision, not 180 degree reversals, right?

I don't need to link Asimov again do I? Oh snap too late.

Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it.

What's great about cognition by amygdala is that it's never wrong.

History has shown again and again that scientists understand far less about the complexity of natural systems than they wish to get paid for.

Arguing from a universal is another time-proven technique. If we negatively condition on human overreaching we'll become so lax we'll all die of unscrubbed bathtub ring.

Then suddenly they were demonized for their cholesterol content.

By the powerful cereals lobby, back in an era where people were less clued in about whitecoats for sale. Thankfully the tobacco interests ran a public education campaign on that score for several decades, and finally the message sunk in to a fairly broad swath of the general public.

You know what? Things change. Furthermore and health industries are a lousy case study, mired as they are in proof by dilution, one of my many pet terms for population studies. Science that works forward from a known mechanism tends to have a better track record. With the genetic revolution now taking place, even health and nutrition can one day aspire to status as science by mechanism.

The law of unintended consequences comes into play as well.

Wow, you brought all your friends today. The importance of this rule of thumb aphorism is greatly inflated by fire and forget political activism.

There are principled ways to wade into the unknown, if you have the social conviction to use them. Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging. Maybe with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, we'll collectively decide to bring our A game. Or maybe not. Whichever, I think it's a mistake to enter into this debate with the premise that humanity is too stupid to live, and that the first move is to execute anyone who thinks otherwise.

Now for another perspective on heat.

Download

The problem with CO2 is that it makes planet earth less like an ideal black body in the infrared spectrum associated with the 300K temperature regime. If we're going to have a high information intensity civilization, we're going to want to optimize the planet's dissipation of waste heat.

In the short term, the small amount of reflectivity of incoming energy required to restore our historical thermal equilibrium point will hardly be missed.

Unlike the SO2 approach, this approach has a vastly superior "under our thumb" profile for adaptation as we learn about how it works. If it works at all.

OK, you found another source with a different definition. This is a reputable way to argue and I appreciate it.

Of course, you're still wrong. You don't think democracy is primarily about equality and freedom? You want to argue otherwise? You are on thin rhetorical ice.

You think that statement is dubious? It wasn't made up by an anonymous internet user. Here's the source for that statement used in wikipedia. It is Aristotle.

Is there a government in open source? Yes. Open source operates under the governments of the societies we live in. Most practitioners are operating under a common set of criminal and civil laws that set the backdrop for how open source software can work.

"absence or denial of any authority or established order b : absence of order :" - In other words, Anarchy is not GPL compatible. Thanks very much. You proved my point even more strongly than I did.

Nuh-uh. virus is second declension all right. It hasn't got a plural because it's a mass noun.

"That sounds right, but isn't part of being the best explanation, that such an explanation is true? Establishing the truth of an explanation would fit into one of the commonly used meanings of "proof.""

Sure, but then you fall into circular reasoning since you need proof to assert truth. I would go as far as to call well established science "beyond reasonable doubt" but that is neither proof nor truth.

The strength of scientific philosophy is that it is never 100% certain about anything and is willing to change it's explaination if provided with compelling evidence that an alternative explaination is a better fit for the observations. This usually doesn't mean the first explanation was wrong, mearly incomplete (see: Asimov's insightfull essay The relativity of wrong).

Most other philosophies (especially religious ones) view uncertainty and imperfection as weaknesses and hold up dogma and blind faith as virtues, my pet theory on that is that those philosophies seek to control people rather than inform them.

"I don't think your restriction of proof to axiomatic systems coincides with the way that that word is usually used."

Maybe, but that would be because few people are ever taught the basics of epistomology and science itself is generally taught as a grab-bag of usefull factoids rather than a coherent worldview. Also I would love to take the credit for that idea, but I am not that bright.

"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] 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."

Asimov wrote a perfect tract on this here. A relevant quote:

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 am not claiming that adding chemicals is totally risk free, nothing is. I am claiming that there is demonstrateably way more risk leaving them out. If it were not for chlorine even trivial flooding of sewrage pipes that reqularly contaminate the water supply would kill millions with Cholera.

Chlorine is not added to drinking water in large doses, anything over 100ppm in a swimming pool will burn your eyes, recommended levels in drinking water are usually measured in ppb and vary according to temprature.

"The fact that the earth is the center of the universe was also based on thousands of years of research."

No it was based on the universal observation that celestial bodies appear to move across a dome shaped sky. I direct you to Asimov's answer to your line of reasoning entitled The relativity of wrong, his prose is far more readable than mine.

I'm guessing Project Perseus doesn't provide this `critical text' you speak of, but....

        , , .

John 1:1 at Perseus Project (Open Classics)

I'm confused by this. Are you saying we already know everything about physics? Please elaborate.

No, he's probably just saying that any revisions/replacements to Einsten's theory are much more likely to be minor corrections rather than complete reversals. I'll refer to The Relativity of Wrong, and say that revisions to Relativity are most likely going to be like going from the theory that the earth is an Oblate Spheroid to it's actual, more complicated but still extremely Oblate Spheroidal geometry, not finding out that the earth is actually a cube or a torus. The Oblate Spheroid theory was wrong, but it wasn't horribly, horribly wrong. It was extremely close to precisely correct.

It's possible that Einsten's theory is wrong in such a way that FTL travel is possible. However it is highly doubtful that it's wrong in such a way that FTL travel is easy, or even possible via conventional means. For example the Relativistic Kinetic Energy equation is extremely well verified, any post-Relativity theory is likely to only add a couple significant digits to the end of it, so achieving FTL with a rocketship is still going to be out of the question.

Einstein is almost certainly wrong, but it's very very doubtful that he's "horribly, horribly" wrong.

But I'm still hoping for FTL travel. :)

I hardly find it surprising that Monbiot has spotted a "crisis" but I will give him credit for putting across a more reasoned case than the WSJ article linked in the summary.

From the WSJ link - "The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory."

That quote, if not the whole article, makes exactly the same absurd argument that Asminov dissmissed so eloquently in his essay The Relativity of wrong.

I was talking about the obervations from sediments in the southern ocean that show reduced calcification in many organisims. The southern ocean is of particular interest since it's turbulance means gasses are more readibly absorbed. As for predictions, I fail to see how one can make a prediction about anything without using a model or a time machine.

Excuse me if I don't go and chase up any more papers for you, like Asimov I am well aware of frat boy debating techniques and have grown weary of your willfull ignorance.

This is reminiscent of the tobacco research showing that cigarettes cause lung cancer. There was incredible controversy about this, mostly because of industry funded research throwing doubt on the results. People were also saying that it was just a scare tactic.
http://www.tufts.edu/~skrimsky/PowerPoint/FundingEffect4.pdf

Just look at the larger picture of research funding involved since 1960's. Climate change was a total non-starter for most scientists years ago. The first scientists to proclaim climate change had an uphill battle to get any funding at all. The energy industry and the auto industries have a financial interest in throwing doubt on climate change, and then on whether the climate change is man-made. And they provide a lot of the current research funding motivation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange

Now what motivation does a scientist have for proclaiming climate change? Scientists are ordinary people, most don't have grand agendas, they just want to get ahead with research papers and get tenure; they try to do some science. Controversy hurts researchers a lot when they get up for tenure. Climate change garners a lot of opposition, and there wasn't historically much research funding for it. What does any single researcher get for saying such a thing? A lot of grief, really.

There is very little historical motivation for any reputable scientist to manufacture a scare, all they want is research funding now, not research funding years from now. The government does not like climate change as a problem, they'd much rather the problem goes away. On the other hand there is plenty of financial motivation for many powerful industries to deny climate change. If there is a significant subset of scientists saying there is man-made climate change, we should really pay attention, as it is very likely to be true.

The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days.

They sure don't! The only Latin plurals that have -ii are the ones where there's already an -i- in the word, like radius => radii.

Deus, as it happens, is one of the very very few irregular nouns in Latin, and the plural can be either di or, less often, dei.

In answer to the sibling AC who asked if di ex machina wouldn't imply a whole bunch of gods hanging from a single crane: the answer is no. In Latin that kind of construction is distributive, i.e. the usual implication is that there's one machina for every deus.

You seem as if you could benefit from a bit of Asimov.

Here's the essay that Aasimov quote comes from. It's excellent:

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

This would mean that yesterday, SCIENCE WAS WRONG. I keep getting reminded how this can't happen, usually from people looking at fossil records of CO2 use to cool the Earth, then supporting things to remove CO2 from all industry.

Who was it that kept saying science can't be wrong?

Are you sure they weren't just saying that your arguments of why the science is wrong were, themselves, wrong?

Science can be wrong, huh? Are ya listening guys?

Yes, but that doesn't mean that science being wrong in the way you presuppose it to be is any more likely. So, yeah. There's more entropy in the universe than thought -- but still within the theoretical upper bound, so basically this is a refined measurement not an undoing of thermodynamics and cosmology. Newton was "wrong", but it's not like we discovered that actually masses repel each other. Similarly, our climate models are certainly inaccurate and will be improved, but it is highly unlikely to be in a way where CO2 is no longer a greenhouse gas and threat to the environment.

This is how science works. We guess, then we confirm it. THEN, AND ONLY THEN, is it considered fact.

To be pedantic, it's still not considered fact.

Perhaps you've been fooled by the people with the "If the government pays, I'll give whatever results they want" model.

Yeah, that's why when the government wanted the result that you do, the scientists in their direct employ still came up with the same answer as they had before and since. The administration had to tamper with the report and tone down the language, because scientists always make sure the result of their research says whatever the government wants.

Science is often wrong, because the whole process of science is one of theories refined through observation. "Science can be wrong" does not mean that your wishful thinking is an equally viable alternative. "Wrongness" is not binary.

Christ, you're lazy and ignorant.

Plato refers to how people were told they were different based on what materials god put into them - ome were gold, some silver, some bronze. You've never read Plato?

India's caste system is well-known for stratifying people based on family, in a rather rigid way (especially considering the disparate populations involved).

The House of Mirth revolves around Lily Bart, who has social standing but no money and her potential suitors. One of them, Simon Rosedale, has money but no standing and wants to marry Lily in order to make it in to society. That plot wouldn't make sense if social classes had always worked the modern way, which is apparently the only way you think they've always worked.

If you'd just skim this overview you can see that while the classes change and there is some mobility, stratification has been present in many societies and often associates itself with things other than "making your mark."

Sure, but a spheroid earth fits with other observations (e.g. that we can observe heavenly bodies that are round, which fits with spherical), etc.. There's a great essay by Isaac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong", which uses this topic as its main example.

By that definition, evolution is not science either. It has never predicted anything and never will.

So tell me, does it hurt to be that stupid?

If that's an attempt at Latin, it failed. In Latin, virus is in the fourth declension and its plural is virus (yep, just like the singular), and NOT viri or virii.

You, too, fail at Latin: it's second declension. Didn't your Latin teacher ever tell you to look at the genitive to determine which declension it is?

Don't be misled by the fact that it's neuter: it's one of three 2nd-decl. -us nouns that are neuter (the others are pelagus and vulgus). Nouns of this type do not have plurals in Latin (see Allen & Greenough p. 22).

You are mostly wrong. Lewis & Short dictionary entry: "virus, i, n." It's 2nd declension, so the plural in Latin would be viri. You are correct only to the extent that the word doesn't seem to be attested in the plural (at least not in the passages referenced by Lewis & Short).

Asimov said it much better than I ever could.

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

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.

If we're wrong about the cosmic speed limit, we are wrong about just about everything in our universe; right down to causality itself. We know, for a fact, that some portions of relativity are correct, including time dilation. It has been tested using atomic clocks and our GPS system wouldn't work without the theories being put to real, practical use. Therefore, if FTL travel is possible, then it is possible to travel to your destination and back and return before you have even left.

I can believe many things, but a world without causility is not one of them.

Let's say you have a few thousand (name, address) pairs and you want to be able to quickly look up a name to get the corresponding address, to add new names, etc. In imperative programming you'd probably use one of the mainstay data structures of CS 101, the good old hash table. To add a new name, you hash it and go and poke that address in the table to record the entry.

Well remember that stuff about values in functional programming being immutable? Right, no hash tables in functional programming. You'd instead use something like an AVL tree or red-black tree, that let you create a completely new structure that shares most of its content with the old one, except that the new one has this extra node. Of course FP language libraries come with modules for making those structures, and in practice you can use them at the API level sort like how you used to use hash tables, but they are completely different underneath, and if you want to program them yourself you are going to have to learn a lot of very basic techniques from scratch all over again. Chris Okasaki's book "Purely Functional Data Structures" is a good place to learn about this stuff in detail.

Even more basic: the good old "for" loop, which updates an index variable each time through. Whoops! You can't update the index in a functional language, so there's no "for" loop. You instead use recursion, or a "higher order function" (function that operates on other functions). So instead of

      for (i = 0; i < n; i++) xs[i] = f(ys[i])

You'd write something like

      ys = map f xs

("map" takes a function f and a list of values xs, applies the function to each item in the list, and gives you back a new list). There is also a "list comprehension" syntax that you might know from Python:

      ys = [f(x) | x <- xs]

but for complicated functions you end up having to use higher order functions and recursion explicitly. You really have to think a lot harder to program 20 lines of Haskell than 20 lines of C. But those 20 lines can do an order of magnitude more.

(Aside:) In case you were wondering, yes, you can implement traditional hash tables and other mutable structures in functional languages, and there are times when it's necessary, but it's comparatively a pain in the ass and you give up some of the advantages that had you programming functionally in the first place. Here is an article about someone's experiences switching from a mutable structure to a functional structure in a large program, and the headaches the functional structure solved:

http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/pubs/zipcfg-abstract.html

Agreed on all points. In fact, the course of study that you outlined almost matches that of the course that I took: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/50GD/lectures/index.php.

"dumb" by your standards perhaps. or how about for most of the pheasants history as a species it hasn't had to worry much about marauding toddlers. remember that evolution takes place over a long period of time, it will take many subsequent generations of marauding toddlers stomping on nests and killing birds before all that's left are birds with the propensity to fly away from marauding toddlers. by then most of their habitat will probably be destroyed though so no worries...

on another note, some birds can count! There was also a study (too lazy to find) about a bird who would perform 6 tricks in a row but would not complete another until a treat was given. Once it received the treat it would complete 6 more tricks and then refuse to cooperate until it received another treat.

Nuclear does have the benefit of no greenhouse gases

Actually nuclear power does emit greenhouse gases. The major building materials for nuclear power plants are concrete which is made from cement and steel, both of which require massive amounts of energy to make. Cement has to be fired in a kiln which is fueled by coal, coke, or natural gas. While recycled steel has lower embodied energy than virgin steel, it's still takes a lot of energy to make. And that's not counting the mining and refining of the uranium.

Falcon

Apologies for trying to simplify things and type less. There's no causal link between a sperm whale size and our brain function, but if you plug and chug those numbers into EQ, we end up smarter. Hence, hence.

We believe that we are smartest, so we looked for a plausible function that "happens" to make us win.

Well, I can't argue that because by that token any solution in which we are smarter fails simply because we want one. But the truth is that there's a reason that humans are smarter than all creatures, that primates are smarter than most, that dolphins and other cetaceans are highly intelligent, that fruit flies are dumb as shit. And whether it's EQ or the ln of the cubed-root of the number of post-synaptic membranes, there's some thing out there that indicates our increased intelligence; if there weren't, we wouldn't be.

Use your circular definition if you like, but it's hard to explain away graphs like this by what you are essentially saying is investigator bias.

And, I remain skeptical of that paper. The fact that the abstract is exceptionally vague leaves me suspicious. I can't read the full article, so I can't evaluate their methods and experimental design.

Here's another good read. EQ isn't the answer, but sheer size definitely isn't either. Clearly nothing fits the regression perfectly, and there will always be outliers, but their existence does not disprove the theory. More than that, though, it's simply nonacademic to dismiss it all as "circular."

The facts that come along rarely change our understanding, more like they refine our understanding. Think of how General Relativity refines our understanding of Newton's Laws of Motion. We understood how things move but not perfectly, presently we are much closer to perfect but maybe not quite all the way there.

I think this letter from Isaac Asimov sums it up pretty well:
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

[...] The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so. ...When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example.

In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on.

Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians.

Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days.

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.

There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling.

All three observations could not be reasonably explained if the earth's surface were flat, but could be explained by assuming the earth to be a sphere.

What's more, Aristotle believed that all solid matter tended to move toward a common center, and if solid matter did this, it would end up as a sphere. A given volume of matter is, on the average, closer to a common center if it is a sphere than if it is any other shape whatever.

About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size

This is an example of how the rising generation is so used to "buzz words" chosen for shock value, etc., and has gone completely away from clarity of speech and writing. What the O.P. means to say, really, is "I don't want to pay the going rate for this service, so I'll call Verisign 'a monopolistic company' because everyone knows 'monopolies' are bad, and that will communicate the 'badness' of 'companies like Verisign.'"

Oddly, the word "rhetoric," also from the Greek (rheteros, "a speech") used to be a positive appellation for the study of good, clear communication of thoughts and ideas. But it has also succumbed to the buzz-word dementia, and now usually means "empty words."

Speak for yourself. The real Greek word meaning "speech" (among many one that is still related to the term "rhetor" or "rheter") is "rhesis".

Come back either after you've found "rheteros" (at best a made-up "Greek" word that you came up with to sound smart without being) or realized your stupidity.

I mean, if you really wanted to sound smart and start spewing "Greek" words without knowing Greek words, why didn't you simply look up an English dictionary that usually states the etymology in a very friendly transliteration to alphabet (so you won't have to wreak your brain trying to learn the Greek letters)?

Exactly my thought too.

Perhaps the person posing the question should start here:

http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/

We should be certain only that we are certain of nearly as little as these Amazonians are.

"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] 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."

How does 3x1750Kbps + 3.25Kbps = 8.5Kbps overwhelm anything? BGAN terminals offer 300-400Kbps up, $5K per terminal. $5-10:MB is $19.13-38.25 per hour for voice, to a maximum of $1800:h full continuous bandwidth for 6h transcontinental. That's $114.72-229.44 transcontinental, $363.28-726.56 19h semicircumglobal, max $5.4-10.8K-17.1K/34.2K if they somehow use the full 400Kbps at $5:MB-10:MB for 6 or 19h respectively.

Even if they harden the terminals, that's not going to cost more than $20-30K, if that. Another $20K max to interface it to the fly by wire bus and mics. Transcontinental flights consume that much money's worth of fuel shuttling 210 people NY to LA once.

And that's the most expensive, high quality connections, at small scale consumption rates. I'm sure the airlines could negotiate bulk rates. Or the global industry and governments could buy the defunct Iridium network still hanging around up there, or finally fund Teledesic (or equivalent) now that there's enough traffic to justify the investment. As anchor tenants for a satellite network, they'd have extra capacity to sell as generic networking for all kinds of remote telemetry at sea, at isolated land sites, and in space.

Or they can concentrate on nickel and dimeing us with taxes for searching our shoes, then spend precious hours and days searching for black boxes. FWIW, the black boxes from the 2 9/11/2001 WTC planes "were never found". Maybe there is a competing interest more valuable than reliable telemetry.

Sorry, I can't give credit to the person who posted this before, but someone posted this a few days or a week or two ago. See here: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

You could say that Newtonian mechanics isn't wrong. It's just not the complete picture. Heck, the flat-earth theory is still good enough for living your everyday life, right? When you walk from point A to point B, or drive from point A to point B, do you visualize a round earth or a flat earth?

Not sure if this is entirely on topic, so I'll AC it, and not actually quote it. It's by Asimov, so enjoy :) http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

The Wright Center for Innovative Science Education at Tufts University offers fellowship opportunities for teachers of elementary and high school science, workshops for teachers and free posters and curriculum materials on request by teachers. Some materials are available on-line for free download. Materials range from Space Science and Cosmic Evolution to the Physics of Music and Ben Franklin and Electrostatics. Visit http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center to learn more.

Evolution is simply a model that best fits the evidence, is it not? Wasn't the model of the earth flat at one time?

You really need to read this. "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] 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'm not an American (but I will claim that many, many things ARE subjective). But I am a native speaker of English and as such dispute the definition of standards compliance. I tried dictionary.com but it doesn't seem to address whether compliance is an absolute term or not. Let me draw an analogy:

We have Aristotelian conceptions of Gravity.
We have Newtonian conceptions of Gravity.
We have Relativistic conceptions of Gravity.

Would you agree that a physical theory being "correct" is equivalent to a physical theory being "standards compliant" where the standard is reality?

If so, then I think if we followed your your view, none of these models are correct, and that's that. In my view, all of them are unequally correct, or in other words, unequally incorrect. Every one of them is more correct than "things fly away from massive objects due to gravity". I would tend to go so far to say as Newtonian and Relativistic interpretations are both, in fact, correct; but decline to say either is 100% correct.

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

Of course, you have an easy out if you claim that correct is not like compliance with the reality standard. But in that case I'd like to know why you disagree with that.

But if you accept that correct & compliance with reality are the same, and still disagree with me, then we've devolved into an argument of semantics. "I believe this word means this". "No, this word means THAT". Ultimately not entirely useful.

And definitions are always, ALWAYS up for negotiation, because that's how natural language works :). English doesn't even have a standards body. French has one, but every speaker is to some degree non-compliant.

You need to read this.

> If this response doesn't answer your questions, let me know and I'll email you.

Contact me anyway. I'm always interested in evaluation methodology and experiments that demonstrate the efficacy of spam filters. Maybe we can collaborate. Have you run your filter on the TREC corpora? They simulate exactly the sort of deployment you're talking about. Under laboratory conditions the best filters get the sort of results you're talking about, but transferability to the field has yet to be established. And the best filters aren't what I'd call "Bayesian."

Here are the results to beat: http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~dsculley/papers/emailAndWebSpamSIGIR.pdf

GP was correct: in Latin the plural of virus "slime, poison" is vira (Dictionary entry) Vir "man" has about as much to do with the matter at hand as vires "strength", i.e. nothing.

In case I did not make the point adequately, here is a link to an excerpt from the book:

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

Read it sometime, it's called the Relativity of Wrong.

Historically, scene graph APIs haven't been too useful. There are successful drawing APIs, like OpenGL, and game engines, but the in-between middleware hasn't been that useful. SGI Inventor, later Open Inventor, was the classic in that space, and it's not used much any more.

Java 3D is abandonware. Sun wrote it, badly, and it's now a "community source project", meaning Sun doesn't support it any more. I used it in its early days and wasn't impressed. The Java3D collision detection system was both badly designed and badly implemented. The general consensus was "give us an OpenGL binding and get this turkey out of the way".

... evolution is a particularly hard case. It's a very malleable theory in the broad, and entertains some diverse possibilities. ... it can be hard to find data that contradicts a theory -- or even find enough data to make people consider that the evidence might actually contradict the theory -- but new theories only have to adjust the story to fit that new data. ... Bits of evolution are modestly hard -- where it has hard data like genes, for instance. Bits of evolution are really soft -- fossils are soft data that aren't very amenable to experiment, and are more or less compatible with a lot of explanations.

Based on these statements, and links you provided in another post, it's clear that you think evolution produces no predictions and is not falsifiable. I don't agree, because as far as I know there are many potential falsifications (click on parts 1,2,3,4,5 for long lists of potential falsifications) for evolution and lots of verified predictions. I especially like this quote from Origin of Species: "If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection."

What predictions can creationism offer, and how can we falsify it? As far as I can tell, the answers are "none" and "it's not falsifiable". Creationism is compatible with every conceivable discovery. For instance, it's strange that all life we find uses the same DNA bases (which is a specific requirement of common descent). But it's also compatible with creationism because, even though God could have created every species with different bases of DNA (or something even wilder) to provide obvious proof that common descent is false, He obviously chose not to, presumably because His Ways Are Mysterious. It's strange that the fossil record shows a general progression from simpler, less diverse organisms in the distant past to more diverse and complex organisms in the "recent" past (which is a specific prediction of evolution), but this is ALSO compatible with creationism because God (or Satan?) could be playing games with our heads.

I noticed your link to "Message Theory", but I'm surprised that you would consider this to be a valid example of a prediction. As far as I can tell from the book synopsis and this review, the author is basically saying "the prediction of intelligent design is that intelligent design is obviously correct and no other interpretation is possible." Isn't that tautological? It's like saying "evolution predicts that evolution is correct and no other interpretation is possible". Notice that none of the predictions or potential falsifications I have mentioned or linked to follow this pattern...

Incidentally, did you ever read the novel Contact (NOT the movie)? At the end of the book, Sagan's heroine discovers an obvious, indisputable message encoded in the digits of pi. This is what I would consider to be definitive proof of God's existence, and a true example of the discovery of a message from an intelligent designer.

I sense a problem in that many evolutionists complain that creationists don't have theories of their own, but just pick on the theories of others. That shouldn't be perceived as a problem -- it should be perceived as modern science in action. ...

I completely agree with you

According to, http://uit.tufts.edu/?pid=419 , if lack of a password authorization system (free wifi) would seem to allow a reasonable person to believe that they are in-fact authorized to use the system.

Specifically, the new law:

        * Prohibits unauthorized access to any computer system, either directly or by network or telephone. The law provides that the use of password authorization systems to control access to a computer system puts people on notice that their access is unauthorized if they don't have a legitimate password.
        * Amends the criminal vandalism statue to make it clear that electronically stored or processed data is "property", the destruction or corruption of which is illegal.
        * Prohibits the thefts of commercial computer service.

I can't speak to the helpfulness of your tutorial (amazingly, one of the few I haven't read yet), but what got me over the Blender hump was the open courseware materials for a class at Tufts University. The professor, Neal Hirsig, has posted an extensive set of UI-centric tutorials (both PDF and video). If you can get past the general distaste for Real Player streaming video, and the extremely minor annoyance of him saying "ver-teh-cee" when he means "vertex", you will go a long way towards mastering the UI.

On another note, Blender has five Google Summer of Code projects this year. Maybe those who want to develop for the competing packages should try that avenue.

Study from Tufts

http://csdd.tufts.edu/NewsEvents/RecentNews.asp?ne wsid=6

Kaiser study

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_ind ex.cfm?DR_ID=17747