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Can we skip the name calling in favor of some references, please?

So what do you want the deniers to be called? Gotta have some reference name.

Mann's initial investigation was regarding the infamous Hockey stick diagram.

There was broad and general support by the science community in the year's since. I'll include some citations of freely available work:

Really long url, so I provided a tinyurl

Stalagmite records http://tinyurl.com/m2yhtgl

Reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the last 11,300 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Millenial Temperature Reconstruction. http://www.clim-past.net/3/591...

Borehole heat flux data. http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu...

There is a lot more, but you might be able to do a little research after digesting this initial stuff.

After hackers stole the emails with the University of East Anglia, Penn State made two investigations of Mann. They cleared him of misconduct, but criticized him for sharing unpublished manuscripts.

Virginia Attorney Ken Cuccinelli, then Attorney General of Virginia (before this gets too contentious, yes, the Ken Cuccinelli that wants to make oral sex illegal) demanded that the University of Virginia release documentation of Mann's work via a Civill Investigation Demand.

The first demand was overruled by a judge. Cuccinelli revised his subpoena, and appealed to the State Supreme court. He lost there also, with the judgement that he had no authority to demand the work.

Note that Mann aided in the subsequent election efforts of Terry McCauliff, who was running against Cuccinelli in the 2013 Gubernatorial election.

Mann was investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the National Science foundation in 2011, and exhonorated Mann of any professional misconduct.

http://www.science20.com/uploa...

At this juncture, I doubt that those who would deny AGW will accept any evidence, and would simply accuse Penn State and the National Science Foundation of corruption or worse. Note that there are many who likewise think of that University as a tool of the energy industry. Some interesting irony there.

Cuccinelli's failure to subpoena University of Virginia's records is probably the groundwork for claims that Mann refuses to share data with others. However, a pretty compelling case can be made that it was blatant politicizing of science.

Furthermore, Mann's campaigning for Cucchinelli no doubt really raised some hackles. Pretty much all out war. I suspect Mann would say he is just fighting back against those who have made it a mission to destroy him.

I doubt he ever found any true stenography in there.

A few experts years ago found an effective way to detect commonly used forms of stenography in jpegs, and tried feeding two images from ebay through the detector, plus another million from usenet. Not a single one had any stenographic information that they could find, and their detector was demonstrated as very reliable.
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf

The NSA leaks did reveal that they have an interest in porn though: They've been monitoring the porn use of some unnamed 'radical muslims' in the middle east were planning on using it to blackmail them into silence or destroy their credibility. It's not clear if they actually pulled off the blackmail or discrediting part though, the leaked document is from the planning stage.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25118156

As someone who intends to use Glass or something like it for GPS while driving, I really don't see that Glass will be any more distracting than having my tablet do GPS for me, or my phone, or a dedicated GPS on the dash. I recognize that it may be slightly more distracting than the dedicated GPS due to the possibility of notifications suddenly taking focus on the screen, but no more so than when the same thing happens on my phone when I'm using it for GPS.

I understand the concern about people playing on the internet, or actually watching movies on it, but should the device's usage be outlawed due to things that it is simply capable of doing?

I recognize that these aren't exactly HUDs, but HUDs have been proven to not significantly increase reaction times, and to decrease the amount of time with your eyes off-road. From every review I've read about Glass online, the display is out of the way unless you want to look at it, and easily ignored when you're focused on something else.

Maybe I'm giving other drivers too much credit. Most people probably will be facebooking on them, not simply using them as a convenient display for GPS guidance.

Not many.

Strangely the actual stats for children under 5 is hard to find. All they want to talk about is 'children', defined as 19 and under.

From http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/guns.htm

1999 - 3,385 'Children'
73 5 and under. Slightly more then 1 per week.

The ratio of CEO compensation to average worker compensation is now approximately 10 times its value in 1950. This is approximately commensurate with the average increase in the Dow average adjusted for inflation.

Right; and one should hardly be surprised by this since our government continually passes more and more regulations that generally only benefits big businesses. The barrier to entry for a small or medium-sized firm to get on a public stock exchange is enormous. When competition is limited, one should not be surprised when the market can no longer efficiently remove wasteful players. Paying prices vastly more than necessary to secure a proper executive is, of course, very wasteful. But this is not a fundamental issue with CEO pay, this is an issue with regulation that keeps smaller firms out.

But why should CEOs receive the entire benefit of a growing economy when all actors have contributed to that growth? CEO compensation has no correlation with company performance.

As I see it, the problem has nothing to do with a free vs. a coerced market. The problem is that the market of executive compensation is entirely divorced from the market at large. "Stockholders... vote... for whatever the management recommends no matter how poor the management’s record of accomplishment may be". This is what I mean by oligarchy: a few privileged elites have control over this smaller market without the essential feedback cycles that stabilize prices in the larger economy.

Yes, and this smaller market is much easier to manipulate when it remains artificially small due to artificial barriers to entry. That said, your definition of oligarchy is quite arbitrary; even if you could absolutely measure the power the "privileged elites" have over a smaller market, at what ratio of power to size does it constitute an oligarchy? I do agree with your sentiment, and I think my paragraph above speaks to it.

The issue is that the market value of labor has plummeted in relation to productivity and in relation to the value of top earners. In the 50s one could work part time at a minimum wage job and pay rent and college tuition and walk away with a degree free and clear. Today, just to pay rent, one needs roommates or more than one part-time minimum-wage job, let alone any ability to pay for education in order to get a better job.

1950: $0.75/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $750 wages $42 * 12 months = $504 rent $35 * 4 quarters = $140 tuition

2013: $7.25/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $7250 wages $602 * 12 months = $7224 rent $3917 * 2 semesters = $7834 tuition

How do you measure productivity? GDP is a pretty useless measurement. Also, there is this silly notion that public sector consumption should actually be counted as production. Since there is no objective way to measure public sector "productivity" (since it is not part of a market), it should not be included in aggregates; also it is quite common for the public sector to be horribly inefficient with its "funds". Government makes up

The ratio of CEO compensation to average worker compensation is now approximately 10 times its value in 1950. This is approximately commensurate with the average increase in the Dow average adjusted for inflation.

But why should CEOs receive the entire benefit of a growing economy when all actors have contributed to that growth? CEO compensation has no correlation with company performance.

As I see it, the problem has nothing to do with a free vs. a coerced market. The problem is that the market of executive compensation is entirely divorced from the market at large. "Stockholders... vote... for whatever the management recommends no matter how poor the management’s record of accomplishment may be". This is what I mean by oligarchy: a few privileged elites have control over this smaller market without the essential feedback cycles that stabilize prices in the larger economy.

The issue is that the market value of labor has plummeted in relation to productivity and in relation to the value of top earners. In the 50s one could work part time at a minimum wage job and pay rent and college tuition and walk away with a degree free and clear. Today, just to pay rent, one needs roommates or more than one part-time minimum-wage job, let alone any ability to pay for education in order to get a better job.

1950:
$0.75/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $750 wages
$42 * 12 months = $504 rent
$35 * 4 quarters = $140 tuition

2013:
$7.25/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $7250 wages
$602 * 12 months = $7224 rent
$3917 * 2 semesters = $7834 tuition

I believe that raising the average wage will have a better impact on the economy as a whole than raising executive compensation. I believe that income inequality is a social ill that should be addressed through policy -- not by Marxian state capture of the means of production and not through Randian private hoarding of the means of production, but through a hybrid realistic approach like "all employees should receive stock options or profit sharing if executives do".

You know where you can find female engineers ? Go to India - the percentage is closer to 45% in 2013 (older data here )

Software engineering as a career is seen as the opposite of being a truck driver -- safe, no conflicts (at least physical) and generally predictable hours. In this case the US is the odd one out. I am not sure it is exactly sex discrimination that is the issue, since India is generally a very unequal place.

The average stay on welfare at least used to be three years, which means that most (not all) wanted to get off it. In that case, for most people it does not foster dependence or entitlement complexes

Pre or post reform? Because the Clinton reforms are largely viewed as a success in reducing dependence on the system by reducing the false positive rate: http://www.fordschool.umich.edu/research/poverty/pdf/Isrconference.pdf. Studies on welfare outside of the US seem to concur with a similar view on dependence as well, such as this study from Canada:

You also seem to ignore the other entitlements as well, since welfare is not the end all of dependency syndrome. It is in fact one of our best designed safety nets since its reform in '92.

and it does serve a social benefit, namely allowing somebody to resume being a productive citizen after some hard times. You may want to do your own research.

You misunderstand. I concur that safety nets in general serve a societal benefit. However, the statement I made is that Demcorats generally believe that any spending on any implementation of a "safety net" is a net win for society, regardless of effectiveness or design. And I'm saying that the effect is a net loss for society. Safety net programs require careful design, limits, and milestones -- they must be designed to fight the human predisposition to take advantage, as well as designed to teach people to be "fishermen" rather than just "giving out fish". Democrats are very poor at this, generally (and naively) viewing that any opportunity to yank money out of a rich man's pockets and give it to a poorer person is a "win". It's also largely what fuels the "taxes as theft" argument amongst Repbulicans. If Democrats truly cared about an effective program, they'd be far more judicial with their handouts, requiring more accountability in the programs.

US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

i would love to see their response when mexico demands extradition. yes, mexico can extradite people from the US.

i'm pretty sure espionage is a capital crime.

Extradition only works for things that are crimes in both countries, and the extraditing country generally gets a veto on the death sentence.

Since spying on foreign countries is a core function of the US Government several Constitutional provisions make arresting a US Government employee for spying he did in the course of his job illegal. Which means all Mexican charges will do is stop some NSA spooks from vacationing on Mexican beaches, or in Latin American countries likely to extradite them to Mexico.

US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

i would love to see their response when mexico demands extradition. yes, mexico can extradite people from the US.

i'm pretty sure espionage is a capital crime.

That's just not right. Arbitrage is a very useful function. In particular arbitrage equilibrium to exist for general economic equilibrium to exist. This implies existence of price stability.

HFT is just the inevitable end game when there are companies competing to arbitrage prices across markets. The more competitive it is the less profitable will be.

HFT is squeezing the nuts of arbs across the world. Because the price differences are always decreasing the ability to extract money from the trading system by arbs is decreasing all the time. The result is smaller buy/sell

This particular article is clear illustration of this. If power to run the HFT servers is a determining factor in the profitability of HFT, surely the margins are razor thin.

Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/how-the-robots-lost-high-frequency-tradings-rise-and-fall

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~kulesza/pubs/hft_jot10.pdf

It's where we are today.
Look at the great maps in http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/

Specifically, this one: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/countycartpurple1024.png (county-level 2012 results by population)

What I see here is clearly the major metro areas went overwhelmingly blue.
As a conservative friend mentioned, if nukes went off, obliterating 5-mile circles around the center of the largest 10 US cities, the Democratic party would never win another election.

It's where we are today.
Look at the great maps in http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/

Specifically, this one: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/countycartpurple1024.png (county-level 2012 results by population)

What I see here is clearly the major metro areas went overwhelmingly blue.
As a conservative friend mentioned, if nukes went off, obliterating 5-mile circles around the center of the largest 10 US cities, the Democratic party would never win another election.

The "bounce" is just the natural step response of an underdamped second order system. You cannot patent, or at least you should not be able to patent fundamental mathematical principles. The only people who think this is in any way novel or patent-worthy are those who've never taken a higher level math or physics course. But ignorance of the natural laws of math and physics is not an excuse.

You're talking about an individual student; I was talking about how the typical outcome expected for an entire school faces impacts the outcome for everyone. The motivated, involved parent is important. But they may not have the ability to elevate a student that far above the average outcome for the school they're attending. And those averages all depend heavily on the income of the parents.

Income, parent education, and parent involvement are not disconnected. Table 3 here tries to map how related they all are to each other. For any one parent, yes getting involved can be the most important thing to improve outcomes. But a child placed into a low income school will be surrounded with children of parents without much parent involvement or education. All of that drags down the whole school in a way that's tough to overcome.

There's some useful data from Michigan that shows the trend here. As usual there are people there who believe that "support from parents is the most important way to improve the schools". But when you look at test scores, the biggest correlation is with differences in family income and the corresponding education of the parents. The University of Michigan spelled it out quite clearly: More Money, Better Grades. That cites a Harvard study that breaks the phenomenon down into small parts.

The Company They Keep: How Apologists for Faith Rationalize Terrorism

Oh, WOW! The story has been SOOOO debunked. Al Gore never said that he invented the Internet! He said that he *created* the Internet which is the total opposite!

I know you're just trolling, but here's your sign.

The native americans disagree.

The decline of the native Americans had many causes. The role played by the US federal government was rather limited. European nations holding colonies in the New World are at least as much to blame, if not more so. The main cause, however, was likely disease.

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?

Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill's Genocide Rhetoric and Discrediting the Politicization of History

I'm surprised that the inventor of The Internet would make such erroneous claims.

Of all places, Slashdot really ought not to fall victim to such an erroneous meme.

What Al Gore actually said: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

"In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."
- Newt Gingrich, 2000

He didn't do that either. Al Gore was involved in the creation of NREN, the successor to Arpanet and NSFnet and the immediate predecessor to the commercialized Internet we have today. But the Internet already existed and had for several years, dating no later than 1983, with the creation of a gateway between Arpanet and CSnet.

You should do some research into amount of radiation already in the biosphere from natural sources.

http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/natural.htm

Oceans get about a "massive Fukushima-leak" amount of radiation dumped into them from cosmic sources every few hours, continually..

Why aren't you freaking out about that?

"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."

Quoth an open letter by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, both of whom must be considered "founding fathers" of the Internet.

The full file is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

He did not do the engineering bit, nobody would think so. But... the internet was a government research project, FFS. If a politician said he took initiative to the creating a road, would he ever be confronted with people insisting on interpreting his statement to mean that he claimed to have built the road?

Giving the line that significance is frankly stupid. This trend of purposefully misunderstanding people is doing some serious damage to the intelligence of politics.

Don't try erecting straw men; I did not and would not say he claims to have built the internet.

He didn't say "create a road", which in this context might mean "create an internet". He said "I took the initiative in creating the internet", and the internet demonstrably already existed before he started co-writing the bill that increased funding for the backbone.

And "the first political leader" means the first political leader, not the first architect, engineer, futurist. Lots of things, even government things, happen without direct involvement by a politician. Being the first political leader signifies the first involvement by a political leader, not the first existence of the thing the politician chooses to support.

Not even mentioning that he CO-wrote the bill.

"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."

Quoth an open letter by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, both of whom must be considered "founding fathers" of the Internet.

The full file is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

He did not do the engineering bit, nobody would think so. But... the internet was a government research project, FFS. If a politician said he took initiative to the creating a road, would he ever be confronted with people insisting on interpreting his statement to mean that he claimed to have built the road?

Giving the line that significance is frankly stupid. This trend of purposefully misunderstanding people is doing some serious damage to the intelligence of politics.

Do you talk about Mercury dumped into the environment from coal in number of atoms or do you belittle that number and use kilograms or grams instead?

The reason to use things like Ci and not Bq, is because normal people can relate to them. It is akin of talking about about grams of sodium in your diet vs. atoms of sodium you consume. Or why we talk in years not megaseconds.

For example, 1 Curie of radioactive material in one place can make you sick over long-ish period of time.

1000 Curies is a dangerous amount - you do not want to be next to that amount for any period of time. 1000 Curies is amount of radiation that exist in things like cancer treatment machines (although those have something like Co in them, not tritium).

If you want to talk about Gigacuries, read the following link. Very informative.

http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/natural.htm

There is over 20,000,000 Ci of tritium in the oceans. Another 500 is not significant to alter concentrations. Now, if we dumped 500,000 every year, that would be cause for concern, but we don't. We keep radiation contained. If only we did that to Carbon or Mercury, we would be able to fish in the lakes we have and there would be no global warming.

It's not the only factual error.
In the first line they call it "the size of a large rat", but its body length (without tail) is actually only 150 mm (6 inch) long.
That's pretty small for a rat: the common brown rat has a typical body length of 10 inch, and there are much larger species.

The stock market is not gambling. Gambling a zero sum game where participants obtain a percentage of the result minus the house take.

The stock market is a positive sum game, which if you are smart about using low trading cost strategies to participate you will get about a 7% annual return on your investment. Of course the standard deviation of this is large, but none the less that's what it's been for the past 200 years.

While there is a lot of noise in the signal studies are out there which show the value of individual stocks approximates the time discounted future earnings of companies.

There are boat loads of economic models of this going back almost 100 years. Here is one:

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/28288/0000041.pdf

The idea that stock prices are not related to the worth of the company is not supportable at all.

Thanks. I first read "The Machine Stops" about 30 years ago, seeing it by chance in a first(?) edition book at SUNY Stony Brook's rare books viewing room. I was so surprised to find a sci-fi story like that in such an old book!

I'm reminded of it when I use internet video conferencing, as one minor point in the book is that the videos were distorted and degraded.

If you like old sci-fi-ish stuff, JD Bernal's book here is great from the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/
"All these developments would lead to a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present, capable of supporting a much larger population, secure from want and having ample leisure, but still a world limited in space to the surface of the globe and in time to the caprices of geological epochs. Already ambition is stirring in men to conquer space as they conquered the air, and this ambition - at first fantastic - as time goes on become more and more reinforced by necessity. Ultimately it would seem impossible that it should not be solved. ... Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. ...
Yet the globe would be by no means isolated. It would be in continuous communication by wireless with other globes and with the earth, and this communication would include the transmission of every sort of sense message which we have at present acquired as well as those which we may require in the future. Interplanetary vessels would insure the transport of men and materials, and see to it that the colonies were not isolated units.
However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere."

I may not have made much progress towards that, but that was essentially my life's work, inspired by JP Hogan's writings and others, before I read that book years later -- to find it envisioned decades earlier.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

But I got bogged down in trying to make better information management, simulation, and sensemaking tool, both because it was a step towards that and because that is cheaper for one person to focus on. An example is our garden simulator, because people will need to know how to grow food in space as well as on earth.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html

Learning to support human life with better sustainable recyclable manufacturing and agriculture on Earth also supports being able to live in space.

Bicycles truly are a very efficient means for transport for certain types of infrastructure.

I guess I can see parallels to Cuba a bit in that sense of "The Machine Stops" as the oil ran out. But Cuba apparently really rebounded and reorganized as described in that link. Decades ago I mused briefly of getting some place like Cuba or Russia interested in ideas that were the precursor to OSCOMAK, given interest in the USA seemed weak, as an effort to create networks of self-replicating high-tech villages, but while it may seem easy to imagine making progress with the support of a dictator, it certainly is a perilous situatio

The late (sadly, unless he is on to better post-human things) Ian Banks wrote in passing in the Cture Novels about humans in non-human form.
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
"One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it has gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with the human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm. The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to 2100 AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations with the machines and the potential of their own genes.
The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species. Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be found scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body; it is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.
Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will be born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely) greater intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply. There are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance - blister-free callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes and nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive and fully recover from wounds which would either kill or permanently mutilate without such genetic tinkering."

Sci-fi has been exploring this for decades.

Geordi La Forge's Visor in 1990s Star Trek is one answer. As is Data. As is Reginald Barclay's forays into becoming superhuman on the holodeck. As is Q.

From the 1950s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Than_Human

Or from Sturgeon also in the 1950s (The Skills of Xanadu, which presaged an motivated the internet and mobile computing in some ways):
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

From JD Bernal in the 1920s: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/flesh/
"Starting, as Mr. J. B. S. Haldane so convincingly predicts, in an ectogenetic factory, man will have anything from sixty to a hundred and twenty years of larval, unspecialized existence - surely enough to satisfy the advocates of a natural life. In this stage he need not be cursed by the age of science and mechanism, but can occupy his time (without the conscience of wasting it) in dancing, poetry and love-making, and perhaps incidentally take part in the reproductive activity. Then he will leave the body whose potentialities he should have sufficiently explored.
The next stage might be compared to that of a chrysalis, a complicated and rather unpleasant process of transforming the already existing organs and grafting on all the new sensory and motor mechanisms. There would follow a period of re-education in which he would grow to understand the functioning of his new se

Yes, there are: 18% of all households in the US are in poverty, which is defined as being unable to afford food, water, or housing without government assistance. About 1.5 million households are in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2 per person per day.

Here's a research paper on the topic on the theoretical effects of HFTs. The authors recommend switching to a call market instead of a tax. Taxes necessarily reduce efficiency, a call market seems to have benefits beyond eliminating inefficiency caused by HFT.

This isn't a joke. It's about a tiny but very real group of people being able to live their lives safely and in dignity.

Leaving aside questions of what data is needed in the medical profession to handle biology correctly - which is a completely different issue - the attitude that people deserve to have their secrets outed so that other people can entertain themselves by laughing at them is just... not the geek world I grew up in having programmed computers since the age of 8. My mum got me into it, in a family where everyone writes code.

As a lesbian geek girl, I'm disgusted by a lot of the comments here, and really don't know if I even belong on this forum any more. I don't write much but have been reading on a daily basis since the late 1990s.

The transgender community seems to be under attack these days since they're small enough not to be able to fight back in the way that the gay and lesbian community and various ethnic minorities have. Finally all the bigots and religious fundamentalists have found a group of people who it is "safe" to bully.

But please, not on slashdot!!

Surely, as so called "nerds" you would know something about the history of your industry. Have you heard of Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing), who developed the model for the general purpose computer, only to be arrested for being homosexual, clinically castrated, and driven to suicide? You probably have, and I assume he's one of the reasons why a lot of IT companies are very good at accepting gay men and lesbian.

What about Lynn Conway, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, who literally wrote the book on VLSI design (Introduction to VLSI systems). She's alive, fortunately, but we all lost a lot of her work when she was forced to start again "at the bottom of the ladder" as a contract programmer in mid-career to hide her gender past from your bigotry and intolerance.

What about Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski who co-produced the Matrix Trilogy? She came close to not surviving the hate growing up, and if she hadn't survived, we would never have gotten to see The Matrix.

And - he might not have been a geek, but - what about Mike Penner, who committed suicide after an unsuccessful attempt at gender transition?

Seriously, wannabe geeks, as tiny a minority as the transgender community is, the IT industry is packed full of transsexuals and transgender people. And many of us here have romantic partners, or parents, or brothers and sisters and friends who are. At least here in Melbourne, Australia, you can't write code and hang out in the industry without getting close to many of them.

It seems that all the gay men and lesbians are too successful and too powerful for you to attack now. So like all bullies, you run off in search of an easier victim.

Getting back to the topic, why exactly do you need databases to say things about people's gender that don't match how they present themselves? To out them and embarrass them because they "deserve" it? How little compassion and caring do you have for other people? Would you want to be treated this way yourselves if you had some type of secret you had to keep from people who would hate you because of it?

If you were in Europe circa World War 2, would you insist that records there included whether or not a person was Jewish, based on genetic testing? With no ability for a person to change their record to say they were, say, Russian, if it could give them a better chance of finding employment or even survival?

In case you think the analogy isn't fair (and yes, I am Jewish, and migrated from Russia with my parents as a three year old), have a look at what the Salvation Army (who the government in Australia got involved in finding jobs for the unemployed a few years ago) are saying and doing:

Way way off on nearly all you first posted.

Nope, you just didn't understand it.

Did you bother to read this on Wiki?

It seems that you didn't.

Are you calling steady state theory the same as big bang? Both were similar, but until the 80s there was a ton of push trying to determine when the Universe would start to contract because that was required due to the explosion in the Big Bang.

Yes, it really seems that you didn't read the article. For example, steady state theory doesn't explain the CMB, which was observed well before the 80s.

It was because the majority of Cosmologists believed that there was a ball of mass that blew up causing the Universe to begin to exist (and they don't mention how the mass came to exist, or the energy, or the space, or the physics) and for the most part in the Scientific community you were not allowed to discuss it.

Repeating your rubbish doesn't make it right. How about this: Go to your local university or look up their site for email contact info, find an astronomer or a cosmologist, and ask his/her view on this.

If you did, you were shunned and labelled a "Creationist".

So you think that for example string theorists are/were labelled as creationists for proposing systems that would lead to a Big Bang?

Now compare the Wiki with U of M, and see where the same theory can easily contradict itself. As a quick pointer, U of M has the Universe at 15+ billion years, Wiki at 13.

How laughable can you get? Your evidence is two popular accounts of a scientific theory? And the "U of M" site has its latest reference from 1995, do you think that Wiki might have a bit more up-to-date info?

Belief in a creator is a 50/50 shot.

:D This one is a gem. Sure, like winning lottery is a 50/50 shot. You either win, or you don't.

Now compare the Wiki with U of M, and see where the same theory can easily contradict itself. As a quick pointer, U of M has the Universe at 15+ billion years, Wiki at 13. There are other major differences in the theory as well. Such as U of M describing more of an expanding vacuum.

Well, String Theories have at least some hope of being correct. But, as with anything dealing with science, it should be taught as dogma. You are once again building a straw man, as I've nowhere demanded punishing parents for teaching religious rubbish to their children.

Actually, your opinion is rubbish on that one. Belief in a creator is a 50/50 shot. There is no proof that string theory is right, but at least someone believing in a creator can say "The Universe came in to existence somehow". So no, you can't make up a lie, commit ad hominem, then complain that someone else is using a fallacy.

You nicely ignore the points showing that you are factually wrong.

Who are paid to claim those things? The vocal atheists are saying that in light of the evidence (or lack of it), it seems very unlikely that there is a god or gods, and that we have a framework which does a god job in explaining what we see about our universe at the moment.

Did you even bother to listen to any of the 5-10 minute segments with Larry Kraus in them? Kraus is not the best person to publicly speak on the EV theory, yet he does and gets paid a lot of money to do so.

Why don't you quote what you actually claimed? Krauss does not say that we are 100 % certain that there isn't a creator and so on, he says that a) we can build hypotheses that don't require a creator, and b) we have no evidence of such an entity. Thus a creator is an unlikely hypothesis.

If you watch his segments and see him using ad hominem against Religion,

It's not an ad hominem when the religion's (Christianity I'd guess) holy book exactly describes a bully god. It's not an ad hominem to attack an idea.

should you not wonder if that's why he's getting paid assloads of money to speak on EVs behalf? He gets book promotions, as do many others that denounce all Religion

People pay public speakers, was that news to you? And drop the "EV" junk.

and push atheism in science.

Science by definition doesn't recognize anything supernatural, including gods.

Government grant's go to papers that denounce a creator while similar work gets nothing.

Well, can you show some scientific work and results done by creationists? The ID folk have tried and tried, and nothing has come out of it. Rubbish like irreducible complexity has been presented, and shown wrong.

There's plenty of private parties like the Templeton Foundation with money to spare on non-scientific studies.

I know you messed up the quote, no biggie. From that statement however, it is clearly you that are ignorant. Search for the Big Bang and you will find numerous competing theories.

Well, I'm a physicist (in a different field), and I don't think that anyone I know who's working in a related area would agree with you. Why don't you present some of those competing theories that have passed peer review?

U of M's web site has some of the history. The U of M web site calls "EV" theory "Big Bang".

That your source doesn't recognize your "EV" should tell you something. Googling for "U of M big bang" produces this: http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm There's nothing to support your claims there. If you are talking about some other site, please give the reference.

There was a massive publication in the last year that claimed that the Ball of mass that blew up must have been 270million light years in diameter.

Where? What ball of mass? And what's a "massive publication"? There are always fringe hypotheses that may even get published in decent journals, but data is what sorts the incorrect ones out (see below).

So the Big Bang still depends on who you care to believe. Some date the Universe at 13billion years old, others as much as 19 billion,

Read up on the research. The Planck probe gives our best estimate for the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, and Planck is working at a resolution level that won't get better by improving the detection system. Anything claiming the age to be much more than that is excluded by the data, unless a non-BB universe is proposed too.

Absolutely, that's kind of how science and math works.

I have to say I got a laugh out of this. Bundling math with science in terms of theories is ridiculous; unlike science, in math you have proofs.

Sociology study after study shows that there is significant racial bias in the police force against blacks. Minorities are more likely to get charged with crimes, arrested, and pulled over for committing the same traffic infraction as compared to whites.[1] This bias exists and is real. This is a significant portion of the story.

The other significant portion of the story is that blacks are far more impoverished than whites, on average. " In 2010, 27.4 percent of blacks and 26.6 percent of Hispanics were poor, compared to 9.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 12.1 percent of Asians." [2] Poverty has a strong correlation to violent crime and drug use. "Nonviolent drug offenders now account for about one-fourth of all inmates in the United States, up from less than 10 percent in 1980. " [3] This figure does not include crimes which are committed to support a drug addiction.

Interestingly, violent crime rates are similar in impoverished black and white neighborhoods. "The violent crime rate in highly disadvantaged Black areas was 22 per 1,000 residents, not much different from the 20 per 1,000 rate in similar white communities." [4] This means that despite the proven police bias, for violent crimes, only 2 per 1000 more blacks are convicted of violent crimes as compared to whites in impoverished neighborhoods.

In summary... 50 years after Martin Luther King, Jr., we still have significant racial bias in American Culture. However, we have come a long way as compared to even 25 years ago. As we continue to improve as a nation, and treat others not based on their racial makeup, I believe the poverty inequality will begin to equalize in this nation. We still have a big problem with racism in the US. The racism issue is slowly improving, but there are practical and non-racist reasons why the incarceration rates differ so dramatically between whites and blacks. You don't enslave a population of people for hundreds of years and then turn around, snap your fingers, and suddenly have racial, economic, financial, and social equality. Repairing the damage that was done takes time. Now if our prison system could be more interested in healing instead of retribution...



Interesting Note: There is growing evidence that Lead is the cause of the majority of the violent crime. [5] If this is true, this may explain why the violent crime rates are similar--impoverished people are more likely to be exposed to lead, but impoverished blacks are just as likely to be exposed as whites.

[1] http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/08/09/blacks-hispanics-still-more-likely-to-get-traffic-tickets-in-illinois/ [2] http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/
[3] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/269208/prison-math-and-war-drugs-veronique-de-rugy
[4] http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/badcomm.htm
[5] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

“A whole bunch of things that I’ve been working on for 30 years are converging in a very nice way,” he told the audience, before launching into a rather lengthy history of Mathematica’s development. “Given how complicated things in nature are, you might think the programs running them would be very complicated,” he began. As his research progressed, however, he soon found the exact opposite: simple equations and programming could underpin enormously complicated systems.

But then the article says:

It took a lot of Mathematica code to make the Wolfram Alpha system work

It is hard to reconcile "the simplicity of Mathematica" with "it took a lot of code (and presumably a lot of time) to make it work".

I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://oscomak.net/
http://openvirgle.net/

The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.

The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.

I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm

I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.

Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.

Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.

This is the one I like best. For all the talk of it being a red nation or a blue nation, you see that it's really just a mostly purple nation with hotspots of one or the other color.

I really like these maps, which shows red and blue states (and counties), but resize them by their population. The normal map shows that most American soil is red, but the modified map shows that most American people are blue (only just barely).

The easiest way to reduce cost has, and always will be, slavery; there are many synonyms we call it to make it sound polite.

You're full of bullshit.

http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/slavery2/adamsmith.html

That "reality check" need a reality check on more than snowballs; example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

Most of the world is heading in a few more years to being able to make solar power more cheaply than getting power from the grid (the parts that are not already there, like much of India).

I'm all for living within our current energy means in a reasonable way (and I abhor the pollution from mining and burning coal and oil), but she cites a calculation that projects exponential growth on Earth forward a few hundred years, calculates we will need to cover the whole Earth in solar panels (and then the Galaxy), and then concludes from that somehow that we should stay the way we are. That just does not seem to be a healthy emotional space to be in.

She's probably against self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, too? Even if it would mean quadrillions of people could live in the solar system and the survival of some aspect of humanity might be better assured? From the 1920s by J.D. Bernal on that:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

Maybe we should all move back to live in trees in Africa? Or maybe that is too "advanced" compared to flopping around in muddy tidal flats?

There are always at least four issues to a resource question:
* How much stuff do we "want" based on cultural expectations?
* How efficiently can we use what we have to make what we want?
* How should we divide all that up?
* How can we expand the scope of what we are doing to new types or resources or new areas to find them in?

That is the complexity of the issue and she stakes out a position without discussing the possibilities or why she prefers one over the other. There might be a case to be made in the direction she tries to go (e.g. the Amish may have an overall happier community-oriented way of life), but she did not make it.

...this, just announced from the University of Michigan to make silicon crystals at much lower energy than previously required.

The crystalline silicon in modern electronics is currently made through a series of energy-intensive chemical reactions with temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit that produces a lot of carbon dioxide," said Stephen Maldonado, professor of chemistry and applied physics.

Recently, Maldonado and chemistry graduate students Junsi Gu and Eli Fahrenkrug discovered a way to make silicon crystals directly at just 180 F

It is ridiculous to fit a straight line in such a scattered log-log plot.

Cosma Shalizi: "So You Think You Have a Power Law - Well Isn't That Special?"
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html

So you think you have a power law...

Professor James Cutler: http://aerospace.engin.umich.edu/people/faculty/cutler/index.html
RAX: http://rax.engin.umich.edu/

Prof. Cutler works on novel nanosats and how to streamline the nanosat process. He will probably push you off to his students, but I am sure they can point you in a better direction, what sort of commerical off the shelf (COTS) parts you can get and applicable restrictions.

Professor James Cutler: http://aerospace.engin.umich.edu/people/faculty/cutler/index.html
RAX: http://rax.engin.umich.edu/

Prof. Cutler works on novel nanosats and how to streamline the nanosat process. He will probably push you off to his students, but I am sure they can point you in a better direction, what sort of commerical off the shelf (COTS) parts you can get and applicable restrictions.

I don't know about criminal homicides, but the pro-rata level of deaths of children and teenagers through gun accidents (i.e. excluding crime and adult accidents) in the US is the same as total gun deaths from all causes in the UK. (Figures NRA, Home Office). The NRA disregards this level of deaths as unimportant.

I went looking for confirmation of your claim, and I could not find it. Perhaps you can provide links.

What I did find were these numbers:
USA 2002 Unintentional firearm deaths of children: 214
With a population of roughly 287,000,000 that puts the rate at 0.07 per 100,000

UK 2002 Total Firearm death rate: 0.46 per 100,000

So, it looks like the pro-rata level of firearm deaths in the UK is actually much closer to 7 times higher than the accidental firearm deaths of children in the USA.

Have a look at Michigan's page on this: http://linat05.grid.umich.edu/aglt2-merged/supercomputing.php

I think those are routed links. It really looks like that 336G number isn't about end to end speed, but rather aggregate bandwidth for multiple sites and in both directions (on each link). Or possibly its the bandwidth at the caltech link with bidirectional flow with the other sites (I guess one of those is another node at caltech).

So caltech can spew hundreds of gigabits/s across the country and to canada. I wonder if the grad student housing across the street is still stuck with cable modems.

Here is Wikipedia's list of people exonerated from death row. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_inmates#United_States
This is the National Registry of Exonerations http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx

No matter what the crime or conviction, if new exonerating evidence comes to light, a person's conviction can be overturned. If that person has been convicted to life without parole they at least are alive and can be released. Execution, obviously, can not be overturned.

I don't think it's clear at all there,

I'd agree there. It's an awful piece of writing which the university should be ashamed of. However it doesn't actually say anything threatening and if they did try it on they would lose of ever pushed to it.

this page this page is more coherent, laying out the "hostile environment" terms. Whether harassment has occurred is "judged both objectively and subjectively", which is another way of saying "No Men Allowed."

I definitely support the principle that "The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough" but in this case you are being paranoid ;-) The fact is though, that this is basically just a direct cut'n paste from Davis, the related supreme court judgement. For the University it's saying we match exactly what the supreme court told us to do. For real life it's saying that you can't be done for harassment just because some delicate flower felt harassed; you have to actually objectively harass them. It's also saying that if they were (literally) asking for it and don't feel that they were harassed, it's still okay even if, according to the objective standards you could have been said to be harassing them.

In other words, this particular statement is pretty much 100% on the side of sanity and definitely doesn't mean "man == harasser", however much Andrea Dworkin might wish it to mean that.

I don't think it's clear at all there, mixing definitions of coercive or sustained harassment and simple "discomfort", though this page this page is more coherent, laying out the "hostile environment" terms. Whether harassment has occurred is "judged both objectively and subjectively", which is another way of saying "No Men Allowed."