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Um please read this and come back. it's quite as simple as you think..
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

A millennium? Only if our energy needs don't continue to grow exponentially. The scariest blog in the world warns us that thermodynamics requires the surface of the earth to reach 100C in about 400 years. That doesn't depend on what type of energy we're using, just that the energy use grows exponentially. It falls out of the laws of thermodynamics without ever taking into effect things like the greenhouse effect. So we cannot continue to grow our energy consumption at current levels for 1000 years. If we did, earth would be hotter than the surface of the sun by that time. (Scroll down to the section labeled "Thermodynamic Limits." Somebody should explain to that guy how to use anchors.)

The problem is not so much with the technologies' themselves as it is people's understanding of the scale of them. For example Tom Murphy explains that dropping the great lakes by 1m would produce 54 billion kWh. Compare that to the 2,000 billion kWh produced every year by coal plants. My napkin math says we would drain the great lakes of their current supply of water in the order of years, not decades just to replace coal.

Since the people on Slashdot are mathematically inclined, try to calculate the physical area needed for solar panels to replace a nuclear power station near you. To replace the Pickering Nuclear Planet (3.1GW) the oldest planet here in Ontario with solar assuming Ontario get the global average amount of sun light (which is pretty generous for Ontario) and gets an average of 20% efficiency you get 250W x 0.2 = 50W/m^2. So, (3.1E9W) / (50W/m^2) = 62E6 m^2 or 62,000 square km, a box 8km by 8km of solid solar panels or a circle with a radius of 4.4km. That is approx 2% the size of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. We are talking about building something 2% the size of the area we fenced off during the worst nuclear accident in history per nuclear station.

Most renewable source of energy are not very concentrated, so anything dealing with them has to be huge, it's inescapable.

Believe that man is the cause of the current trend, and that man can do something to stop it.

Showing that the amount of CO2 we pump out into the air should have an impact on the climate is pretty easy: Recipe for Climate Change in Two Easy Steps. It's the global warming deniers that need the help of the data models that you say are all wrong to find enough negative feedback loops to compensate.

It's also all those who claim that solving the issue is just a matter of sequestering some CO2 that have to prove that their plans can actually work on a global scale: Putting the Genie Back in the Toothpaste Tube. That said I agree with you that there's no way we will stop global warming: as a species / society we are too lazy to fight the entrenched interests or change our way of life.

As the saying goes: Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

Believe that man is the cause of the current trend, and that man can do something to stop it.

Showing that the amount of CO2 we pump out into the air should have an impact on the climate is pretty easy: Recipe for Climate Change in Two Easy Steps. It's the global warming deniers that need the help of the data models that you say are all wrong to find enough negative feedback loops to compensate.

It's also all those who claim that solving the issue is just a matter of sequestering some CO2 that have to prove that their plans can actually work on a global scale: Putting the Genie Back in the Toothpaste Tube. That said I agree with you that there's no way we will stop global warming: as a species / society we are too lazy to fight the entrenched interests or change our way of life.

As the saying goes: Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

"Without gravity, we'd die."

Citation needed. Note that none of the astronauts have died due to the lack of gravity.

And to see how evolution proceeds without gravity we just need to look at the sea. Sea lions, dolphins and whales are all descended from mammals that used to live exclusively on land.

Sea lions etc. are just as much influenced by gravity as we are. The problem is in our organs. Whether you're surrounded by air or water on earth, the gravitational pull on your organs are the same (they are, in a sense, always submerged anyway)...

The problem is not the survival of the individual, but our spices. There are experiments on rats indicating that they can't get pregnant in zero gravity...
Citation: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Space/dp/1851687807/ref=sr_1_2 - just read it; highly recommended. On a similar note; http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/#more-417

Anyhow, seeing the rapid drop of energy prices, I assume the solution is near, when energy becomes essential free, everyone gets a jetpack!... ... Oh wait! I am holding the card upside down!

Reminds me; I once read a sci fi - can't remember which - there were a passing reference to other races who had burned the fuel on their planet before reaching spaceflight. They were forever trapped in the gravity well. I assume the same will happen to us.

Not that it changes much. Saving between 0% (robotic probe) and 0.00001% (a crew of few thousands) of the population will not really make a dent, especially when you add the fact that it mission will either be bias towards christian theocracy or aggressive capitalistic pseudocommunism (how much do you trust e.g. China to represent American, if they are the ones "rescuing the race"??). All in all, regardless of the outcome, the probe will not be representative for most .. The rest are left to die...

Goodnight, and happy dreams! :-)

While I find the whole "let's escape our problems on Earth by migrating to space" fantasy interesting, I think it's worth remembering that, at our present rate of consumption, we will exhaust our planet's resources long before we're actually able to permanently survive somewhere else. For details, I'd suggest reading this excellent post from physicist Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" blog. It was featured on Slashdot a while back.

The basic point is that, given our current situation, proposing a future in space is essentially a distraction that ignores the problems we will absolutely have to solve here on Earth. Hawking is probably right in that, if we manage to survive long enough, we will eventually establish colonies on other worlds. But if we can't focus on immediate challenges here, we'll never get there.

...doesn't anyone think it might be time to revisit fractal image compression and maybe look at ways of improving iterated function systems and their associated algorithms?

Considering that the best results were obtained using college grads as the compression engine, probably not.

...doesn't anyone think it might be time to revisit fractal image compression and maybe look at ways of improving iterated function systems and their associated algorithms (I might give Mike Barnsley a call and ask him how his IFS patents are developing if you're nice and mod me up)?

Maybe the French industry is different, I don't know.

The French nuclear industry is 90% owned by the government. AREVA encompasses the entire power chain, and being an energy company which realises uranium is a finite resource (which could be due to the fact they don't own majority stakes in any of the world's largest known deposits), has a fairly proactive alternative and renewable division. They're also working on a fusion plant (a tokamak). The press releases say they could switch it on in 2020, but I'm betting 2030 before any real power is generated. (I can't even imagine what a fusion accident will look like, but it's really the only direction we can go.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva
http://www-ferp.ucsd.edu/FPA/fpn11-58.shtml

I'm not against the concept of nuclear power per se, but eveything I've read about the industry and its practices makes me think they're rather untrustworthy and greedy.

As another comment says, that's the energy industry in general. Siemens, a German company, received the largest fine among a electricity price fixing cartel.

There's still the available, cheap energy from the Sun.

Yeah, that's our income - the cheap fossil fuel energy is the solar inheritance we're squandering.

Guess what we used before fossil fuels? Solar-- by way of plants fed to work animals and wood burned in stoves and steam engines. We had to switch to coal because the wood supply was tapped.

Of course, we can convert solar directly to electricity, which is a good idea, but electricity is only good for certain applications.

In 2010, the US added a little less than a gigawatt of solar generation capacity. A million barrels of oil is equivalent to 73GW per day, and the US goes through about 20 million barrels of oil a day, so you see the gap.

Plus, it takes energy to get energy - building all that solar capacity demands an investment of energy that will only get harder to obtain. See The Energy Trap.

Keep telling yourself that. Your faith in markets is misplaced: as the man said "anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."

The only reason we've been able to fend off Malthus for this long is because we've had available cheap energy to do so. Unfortunately, it is not sustainable as we're blowing through our inheritance - and the Age of Fossil Fuels will eventually come to an end with the inevitable downsizing in population. Maybe we can soft-land if we play it smart, but I don't see any sign of that yet.

(captcha: predate)

I'm a scientist and a skeptic by nature. Not of global warming, I've read enough scientific papers myself to convince me; of the fact that humans are solely responsible.

Could someone please inform me where to look for direct access to the scientific evidence that disproves other sources of possible global warming?

There's a quick back of the envelope analysis there: Recipe for Climate Change in Two Easy Steps.

There are two parts to it:

1. It is known that without CO2 to absorb infrared on its way out our planet would be much colder. So it does a rough estimation of how much an increase of 280ppm to 390ppm would impact the temperature finds out the results roughly match what has been seen so far.
2. It then checks whether the amount of fossil fuel we have burnt so far can explain the increase in CO2 concentration. The conclusion is that, taking into account absorption into the oceans, what we've burnt so far can account for 70% of the increase. Given all the approximations that's a good match. It also does not take into account other man made CO2 emissions like deforestation, cement production, etc.

So while quantifying the exact effects present and future is hard, thinking none of what we do can have an impact on the planet or the climate as a whole is just wishful thinking. We're just not a handful of hunters/gatherers anymore.

Linear/exponential growth is not possible forever. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/

Solar is out because it takes too much room and is too ugly and not to mention how inefficient it is.

Solar is not "inefficient". I hate how that myth is perpetuated. Compared to plants (biofuels), solar is extremely efficient. Typical crystalline PV panel is around 15% efficient at turning sunlight to electricity today - meaning that 1 sq/M of panel in direct sunlight of ~1000W sq/M will produce about 150W. Thin-film panels are around 10-11% efficient, but they are cheaper per watt of output. High-efficiency consumer panels are around 20% efficient, but they cost more per watt of output. The best solar panels are around 40-50% efficient, but these are so expensive that they are only used where space and weight is an absolute premium - like space ships and satellites.

Efficiency doesn't really matter for most uses - just covering all your ugly rooftops with that technology would provide a very substantial amount of electricity. Even if we could produce 50% efficient panels for the cost of 15% panels, that's only a 3x improvement - not quite earth shattering - and still not the limiting factor in use today.

Really, the only thing that matters is cost. Right now PV costs between $0.15-$0.30 / kWh depending on how much sun your area gets and the details of your installation. Get that down to $0.05-$0.10 / kWh and you will see panels plastered everywhere the sun shines. We're not that far off - we'll probably be there by the end of the decade. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/sunshot/

A lot more detail on this subject on this great blog post: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/dont-be-a-pv-efficiency-snob/

According to this guy, we have about 450 years until the oceans boil, no matter where we get the energy from. Scariest. blog. ever.

There certainly is that point, though what would be considered "detrimental" seems to be questionable (see also: Climate Change Debates). Hydroelectric has some of the most directly visible effects (i.e. a giant pile of water held up by the dam) and the effects on wildlife are easily observed. Other forms will have more subtle effects -- slightly reduced wind-speed past a wind farm, changes in localized heat distribution and re-radiation around various solar traps, presumably some changes to ocean currents from tidal traps... Difficult to isolate the effects, but there certainly will be some.

Of course, at some point, we exceed the possible limits of what is the Earth would support: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

The Chinese are keeping us from going bankrupt, and meanwhile going bankrupt themselves. Not once did I say anything that your response even made sense for other than the "lying" part, and I do acknowledge politicians lie. Its just that the Chinese have absolutely no ability to make it seem like truth, then they threaten without weight and act like they are somehow superior to everyone else which is basically the same way a fucking egotistical moron with no higher brain function acts. Im not advocating change for another nation since I don't give a damn, nor did I even say anything related. Its not my responsibility to man-up and get killed so that a group of people won't even bother to fight for themselves. You have to start caring more about your own neighborhood when the shit hits the fan since there is no way to help others when your resources are being spread so thin that everyone will starve. In my post, I am advocating that if you come here you are expected to behave a certain way if you expect the same privileges as everyone else. You had the choice to come here, you could have stayed where you came from and dealt with the issues you face day to day however you see fit. I never once said that the US should get involved in other nation's business, however your examples I believe you are mentioning are quite poor. In order to maintain the standard of living self-entitled Americans who bitch, moan and "vote" are accustomed to in the US, we must secure "energy". This energy is oil and there is a whole hell of a lot of it located overseas in the areas we choose to intervene with. Communism, i.e. USSR, threatened our "energy" supply during the cold war because they were a major consumer of it, just like us. This is the motivation for crushing out communism and interfering. If you would like to live in a cottage with your grandparents, parents, siblings, and children, while your family and the majority of the US population starves then by all means, lets just forget oil even exists and is the easiest energy source to get and stop meddling in other oil producing nation's business. I suggest you read articles from this blog to gain some perspective before you spout drivel. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

Indeed, that has been proposed as the future...

.. from so far back that IBM will see its neural ideas hit their 50 year anniversary this December;

    US Patent 3,165,644
   
    Electronic circuit for simulating brain neuron characteristics including memory means producing a self-sustaining output (12-Jan-1965)

    US Patent Publication (Source: DOCDB)
        Publication No. US 3165644 A published on 12-Jan-1965
        Application No. US 162127 A filed on 26-Dec-1961

    Inventors
        CLAPPER GENUNG L

    Assignees/Applicants
        IBM

    Priority
        US 162127 A 26-Dec-1961

    Classifications
        International (2006.01): G06N 3/00; G06N 3/063
        European: G06N 3/063A

    Patent References
        US 3097349 A Information processing apparatus Jul-1963
   

Indeed, that has been proposed as the future...

The ATA Secure Erase is a function built in to most drives to wipe them. NIST 800-88 (pdf warning) shows that apparently it's on par with degaussing in terms of recovery.

How to wipe in Linux
CMMR link from the PDF (Windows software)

So ? Lunar Laser Ranging is done routinely at the few picosecond level with that level of detection. The Apollo LLR observatory sends Gigawatt pulses out (100 picoseconds long) and counts photons coming back, and does mm level Lunar ranging. A very low signal capture rate is perfectly adequate, as long as you have enough captured.

No, not all. But almost: http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/About_Argo.html

Please study what's known as the scientific method before replying. What you're saying is the same as proclaiming that science cannot disprove the existence of God.

to drive your solar panel! Problem solved. Then teach them about the Law of Thermodynamics and the folly of perpetual motion machines in history. Then talk about the data from: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/, and the infeasibility of any energy source to satisfy the hungry maw of exponential energy consumption. Then you might consider a small wind turbine (driven by a fan, of course--no I'm serious, you could use the fan as a prop and explain what happens when you reverse the energy path), and touch on geothermal and tidal power. Tidal power is something you could make your own prop for (just add water on-site and be the wave machine).

Still think the Sun Lamp idea is funniest and quite realistic given the craze to trade food for energy and other such nonsensical ideas.

For me, reading the article immediately brought to mind the argument as to whether thought is a function of language, or whether language is a function of thought. I think that it's perhaps the latter, but that might only be true for abstract ideas (I don't know... I've never read any philosophy or studies on this, but I have pondered it in idle moments on occasion). Do thoughts rely on language at any point? Do the abstractions rely or draw upon language? And if so, are the thoughts of a non-English speaker "different", in some way, to the thoughts of an English speaker? (I'm just using English as an example -- don't read anything more into it than that). Perhaps egocentrism is something to think about as well. An example that comes to mind is the concept of time (see here, here here, and also the Aymaran language. I wonder how this "conversion" from thought/abstractions to language/description/communication really works.

The asshat who wrote the first study sited in TFA is a shill for ExxonMobil. The article hinges it's entire premis on the results of the second scholarly work which is a month old draft of an unpublished, unpeer-reviewed, unproven idea for an econometric model to analyze policy effects on on safety (translate: probably not even close to accurate). In fact, the article states as it's first line "Research confirms that increasing fuel economy standards does cost lives on the road.", as if this is proven fucking fact now. Stuff like this on slashdot makes me want to punch people in the face. Few bother to question or even read linked articles but love to go all modern jackass on meta shit that doesn't even have anything to do with the subject.

Link http://www.econ.ucsd.edu/~m3jacobs/Jacobsen_Safety.pdf

You may want to read Mr Murphy's response to commenters John and Jim Glass. It seems that his intent was to show that the assumptions he used were absurd but illustrative of a helpful framework to address energy and economic issues on a 50 or 100 or 200 year time scales.

You may want to read Mr Murphy's response to commenters John and Jim Glass. It seems that his intent was to show that the assumptions he used were absurd but illustrative of a helpful framework to address energy and economic issues on a 50 or 100 or 200 year time scales.

Nice back-of-the-envelope analysis from Tom Murphy at UCSD: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/100-mpg-on-gasoline/

>>So the fact that he was able to access a list of voters is supposed to prove that votes are rigged?

You're right. It doesn't. It shows it is *possible* for votes to be rigged, but we've known that for a long time. A fellow CS guy at UCSD (at UW now), named Yoshi Kohno, has written a long series of papers and presentations on how easy it is to own electronic voting machines. Open USB port? Plug in your specially prepared flash drive, and you can make the machine tapdance for you, if you want.

For example: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=308

The reason we got paper printouts of our votes the last time I voted was because of this guy.

But it doesn't mean that voter fraud actually occured. Slashdot ran a story in, oh, 2005 or so purporting to prove statistically that voter fraud occurred in Florida. Was from some guys in Berkeley, IIRC. I looked at it, and debunked it easily. They essentially created a mathematical equation to predict the result of the election, and when the election results didn't match their expectations, they said it "proved" fraud occurred. Plugging in some numbers for their equations, I saw that some counties could have been expected to have 120% Bush, -20% for Kerry, so it was pretty much guaranteed to give a "fraud" result. But they tried to hide this glaring flaw in 10 pages of equations and such.

I was going to point out Scripps' awesome FLIP platform, which works on the same principle. You start what amounts to a long section of pipe, flood one end of the pipe. When it flips into the vertical position you have a floating stanchion whose buoyancy is dominated by the part that's well below the level of wave action. Of course the submersible part of FLIP is some 100m long, but for the purposes of launching a rocket the platform probably doesn't have to be as stable as FLIP.

IIRC, the Copenhagen Suborbitals group used a submarine they'd successfully designed and built as a tug to position their launch platform. From that I'd have to conclude they have the engineering capability to produce an inertially stable launch platform. If they haven't, it's most likely because it's not needed for this vehicle and mission.

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/Asplos2010CCores.pdf

They call the specialized cores "c-cores" in the paper. I took a quick skim through it. C-cores seem like a bunch of FPGA's and they take stable apps and synthesize it down to FPGA cells with the use of the OS on the fly. The C-core to hardware chain has Verilog and Synopsis in it.

Cool tech, guess they could add gated clocking and all the other things taught in classroom to further turnoff these c-cores when needed.

cheers.

Not really. Carnegie Mellon is the one that put the first Coke machine on the internet.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

And there are more (old page)
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/bsy/coke.html

AFAIK, they did not do whole disk wipe.

The website says "Individual file sanitization techniques, all of which failed and left at least 10MB of a 1000MB file." Does not say what happens when you do a full disk wipe. #Fail.

This is what happens when you don't read the whole article: first, on the website itself it shows that they tested ATA commands, which do a whole disk erase (which you didn't even have to read the paper for), and in the paper they tried overwriting a time >20 times over, which failed as well. Just the fact that they considered "Individual file" techniques means they were well aware of "full disk" techniques.

#Fail by you for failing to read the article.

In actually reading up more on this issue, I contacted the author and he posted the slides from his talk on his website.

To everyone crying encryption: I think encryption is good, you should be actively encrypting your drives. However, you should make sure that all the data is actually gone - what if sometime down the line there is a weakness in the cryptosystem or you used a bad random number generator - remember the PS3? The problem is encrypting SSDs just dump the key, and the encrypted data is still there (or maybe you're using truecrypt, and the data gets leftover on the SSD).

The authors actually make this point in the previous paper SAFE: Fast, Verifiable Sanitization for SSDs. They find that you can fully erase a SSD in 10s of seconds, and then you can actually verify that the data is actually gone. There will be some people out there that say that encryption is enough unless you're uber paraonoid. Possibly: But why not do it right if it's not even that difficult in the first place?

Harvesting antimatter is incredibly hard. It's not like you can just stuff it in a shoe box. You need to make sure that it doesn't come into contact with any normal matter. This means putting it in a vacuum and using magnetic fields to make sure that it doesn't touch the sides of the container. Scientists only managed to make a stable antimatter container for the first time a few months back.

They were able to contain anti-hydrogen for the first time a few months back. This is hard because anti-hydrogen has no net charge. On contrary, this group at my old school http://positrons.ucsd.edu/, has been trapping and storing (for long durations measured in days!) positron for many years.

Uh, did you read the Wikipedia link you posted? "Cone cells are densely packed in the fovea, but gradually become sparser towards the periphery of the retina." They aren't located only in the fovea, but all across the retina. They're merely more densely packed in the fovea than towards the edge. What most likely happened to your classmate is cone bleaching: the longer you stare at a particular image, the more the particular cones bleach their photoreceptors, and the harder it is to figure out the correct color. Depending on what color the chalkboard was, it's quite possible he simply had stared at it for too long.

The retina still perceives color at the edges, it just does so less effectively than if you focus on the center.

I know you can't "verify" that this is my real name, but here's a link to my PhD thesis: http://roger.ucsd.edu/search/t?SEARCH=Organic%20synthesis%20as%20an%20effective%20approach%20to%20chemical,%20pharmaceutical,%20and%20biosynthetic%20investigations%20of%20natural%20products&searchscope=9

Much more interesting and enlightening, the entire report:

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/lerner/papers/ccs10-jsc.pdf

The article is not particularly good, this one is better: http://www.switched.com/2010/12/02/bug-gathers-your-browsing-history-youporn-perez-hilton/ You can find the original study here: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/lerner/papers/ccs10-jsc.pdf It is quite interesting, especially the list of sites is on page 9...

As far as history sniffing is concerned, just recently we heard about history sniffing by “mainstream ad networks” and YouPorn (...accompanied by a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of anon suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced). Also, [PDF] “documents hundreds of commercial sites exploiting it”.

To learn whether you’re vulnerable (and how exactly this works), http://startpanic.com/.

There are a few ways to immunize Firefox against this sort of attack:

Clearing your history is obviously effective, whether that means clearing it entirely or just deleting particular sites from the history. If a site isn’t in the history, it can’t be detected. You could also use an addon to clean up your history, e.g.
History Deleter – Deletes browsing history by keywords and/or date (on browser close)
HistoryBlock – Blocks specified sites from history, recently closed tabs, and the download manager

Also, disabling the visited link styling will also prevent history sniffing, but you won’t be able to tell if links have been visited by their visual style any more. To disable it, go to about:config, paste layout.css.visited_links_enabled into the search bar, and change its value to false.

Ah ... UCSD ... sounds like this might be what you're referencing: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/papers/jjls10.html could be interesting if linked up with the stuff Microsoft are developing (Slashdot story from couple of days ago).

If you're actually interested in this subject, I suggest reading the original publication: Friendships Moderate an Association Between the DRD4 Gene and Political Ideology

This is much clearer than the junk news article slashdot is pointing at.

In general, I think it takes some thought to evaluate what the researchers have done here, which means that pretty much every single person who is rushing to talk about it have skipped that annoying process. You can use comments on this topic to screen out people who aren't worth taking seriously.

(Slashdot commenters possess the R2D2 gene, and can't resist making annoying squeaky noises.)

Here is one of the authors' home page. Here is the actual paper.

From the discussion section at the end (emphasis mine):

For most traits, the effects of individual genes are too small to stand out against the combined influence of all other genes and environmental factors. Thus, our p-value of 0.02 on a sample of 2,000 individuals should be treated cautiously. The expectation in genetics is that only repeated efforts to replicate associations on independent samples by several research teams will verify initial findings like these. Thus, perhaps the most valuable contribution of this study is not to declare that ‘‘a gene was found’’ for anything, but rather, to provide the first evidence for a possible gene-environment interaction for political ideology.

Contrast this with TFA:

The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views.

I hate it when this happens, makes people dumb.

Frankly, his statement does not discount that "a gene has been found" (essentially the same as a genetic pairing/grouping/environment in the layman's viewpoint), just that if it were found, announcing that fact isn't the reason for the research: the research was done to further research.

Here is one of the authors' home page. Here is the actual paper.

From the discussion section at the end (emphasis mine):

For most traits, the effects of individual genes are too small to stand out against the combined influence of all other genes and environmental factors. Thus, our p-value of 0.02 on a sample of 2,000 individuals should be treated cautiously. The expectation in genetics is that only repeated efforts to replicate associations on independent samples by several research teams will verify initial findings like these. Thus, perhaps the most valuable contribution of this study is not to declare that ‘‘a gene was found’’ for anything, but rather, to provide the first evidence for a possible gene-environment interaction for political ideology.

Contrast this with TFA:

The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views.

I hate it when this happens, makes people dumb.

Frankly, his statement does not discount that "a gene has been found" (essentially the same as a genetic pairing/grouping/environment in the layman's viewpoint), just that if it were found, announcing that fact isn't the reason for the research: the research was done to further research.

From the discussion section at the end (emphasis mine):

For most traits, the effects of individual genes are too small to stand out against the combined influence of all other genes and environmental factors. Thus, our p-value of 0.02 on a sample of 2,000 individuals should be treated cautiously. The expectation in genetics is that only repeated efforts to replicate associations on independent samples by several research teams will verify initial findings like these. Thus, perhaps the most valuable contribution of this study is not to declare that ‘‘a gene was found’’ for anything, but rather, to provide the first evidence for a possible gene-environment interaction for political ideology.

Contrast this with TFA:

The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views.

I hate it when this happens, makes people dumb.

From the discussion section at the end (emphasis mine):

For most traits, the effects of individual genes are too small to stand out against the combined influence of all other genes and environmental factors. Thus, our p-value of 0.02 on a sample of 2,000 individuals should be treated cautiously. The expectation in genetics is that only repeated efforts to replicate associations on independent samples by several research teams will verify initial findings like these. Thus, perhaps the most valuable contribution of this study is not to declare that ‘‘a gene was found’’ for anything, but rather, to provide the first evidence for a possible gene-environment interaction for political ideology.

Contrast this with TFA:

The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views.

I hate it when this happens, makes people dumb.

Sorry for highjacking your high-scoring comment, but otherwise noone will read my late comment which I think could be useful for people who want to go in details:

Here is the original article:

http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/friends_drd4_and_political_ideology.pdf

The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views.

but not the first research linking the same gene to a very similar trait:

...(DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking

Basically, what commentator in the original post says is that "novelty seeking" is correlated with leaning towards liberal views. Surprise!

I leave ripping the paper on the basis of liberal (no pun intended) usage of statistics to others here.