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Whiteness have nothing to do with that. Stop being racist. Stop characterizing people by their skin color when it is unrelated.

If you are educated (not even rich), your life expectancy is higher. Some "race" (there is no such thing, a color does not make a race) start higher (most probably because better food habit or culture, that is part of education even if this is not college), educate people then you will have higher life expectancy. Remark as in nearly every single plot that come about "race", asian are never in : ideology at its best. Because if you put asian in, they have better life expectancy than everybody, they are highly educated and they have good food habit.

White male are not even in good position, you know those bastards who are the cause of every single problem

If you educate people (at least about food), whatever their color, you won't see a lot of differences about life expectancy.

Having company housing would make more sense

That suggestion would not go over well at all in the US, where Company Towns have a long and dismal history; no one wants to go there again.

Oceans Could Soon Not Have Enough Oxygen To Support Marine Life

The use of "could" makes the entire statement unfalsifiable and therefor non-scientific. We get these in popular press — /. included — about weekly.

For several decades now such doom-sayers have been predicting disasters "soon" without a single one of them getting anywhere close. When the predicted time passes and anyone still has the attention span to ask: "Hey, was that wrong?" — the answer, if any, is: "We never said, it will happen, only that it could."

Basing public policy on these "predictions" is completely bogus. Geico's "promise" of "15 minutes could save you 15%" is as reliable — and more fun too.

Hedging terms like 'could', 'might', 'potentially' are MORE scientific, not less.

A statement like "It may rain tomorrow" is not falsifiable and therefor non scientific...

Good science hedges its bets

"15 minutes could save you 15 percent or more on car insurance."

The actions of police have no bearing on whether an inference is sound.

There have been no actual actions of police anyway. But there have been calls for actions. Which means, the inference is unconvincing and the inferrers — unscientific (and totalitarian).

But we knew that already — Climate Science is notoriously short on scientific statements, that have come out true. Falsifiable, but not falsified in due time.

Just try to cite any... Here are the rules: your list of scientific statements must have two links per entry: the first link pointing at a prediction made, the second — to its confirmation with reasonable accuracy (say, 80%, if quantifiable). The two links in each entry must be several years apart — "predictions" publicized after coming true do not count. The predictions need to be at least marginally useful — something promising, for example, that the temperatures will rise or fall aren't.

The rules are reasonable, but you will not be able to succeed — many have tried. Depending on your personality, you may make several attempts omitting some of the requirements, and then give up (calling me names is optional).

The former.

Typically, such answers are accompanied by arguments and citations of supporting evidence... Unless, of course, you wish me to accept it on faith — like the rest of the AGW...

Next question?

Please, cite two scientific statements made by climatologists between 1970 and 2011, that made a useful prediction. Each of your two (or more) examples must contain a link to the prediction and a link to confirmation...

Of course, if you can't find such statements, we'll have to conclude, that Climatology is not really a scientific discipline and thus scientific powers of Millennials aren't, after all, related to the argument... Thank you!

White House Warns

They are lawyers and politicians. Who among them are scientists for their warnings to have any credibility?

health risks that could be exacerbated by global warming

Funny, how the write-up said will, but the actual warning contains only the non-committal "could". Yeah, right, "15 minute call could save you 15% on car insurance". Sure.

The "could be" part makes the statement non-falsifiable and therefor unscientific. Nothing to see here, folks. Lawyers and politicians are mongering fears to the populace.

If there is a small subset in the NYPD, then, it is likely that this is reproduced nation-wide.

If it were, it would've, probably, been reproduced by now. Wake me up, when it is. But remember the saying: New York is not America, and Manhattan is not New York.

it is likely that nation-wide the excessive force complaints are against a subset of officers in every city

Sure. But your statement — thanks to its caveat-words like "likely" and "subset" — is non-falsifiable and thus non-scientific. And therefore it can not be debated.

What all police-critics ought to remember, however, is that "excessive force" is a term, that's even harder to define than "pornography" (as opposite to "erotic art"). One "knows it when one sees it" — at best, and sometimes not even then — and otherwise reasonable people may disagree, whether a particular encounter involved excessive violence or not.

Another thing to remember is that any time a citizen disobeys a policeman's order, violence becomes justified. The cop(s) should still try to limit it, but any consequences are the citizen's to bear: if one suffers, say, a heart-attack during a violent arrest — remember the "I can't breathe" meme? — it is not the cops' fault. They may (or may not) be breaking some police department regulation, but they are committing no crime...

Several times I've pointed out to you a scientific paper [...] You reject it since it is not in your required format

Those several times should've been enough for you to understand the point: predictions lauded after coming true aren't acceptable. That — despite several months of being challenged, you remain unable to come up with a prediction publicized before its "success", tells everyone, that no such predictions exist.

WTF are you talking about? The projections in that paper were made in the IPCC AR3 (2001) and IPCC AR4 (2007) which were published well before the paper was written. You can read those reports to verify that.

I just don't see any good reasons to disbelieve the climate scientists.

Well, the obvious conflict of interest would be one reason — if climate is not a problem, there go their grants and the very employment. But even besides such dark suspicions, their seeming inability to make a falsifiable statement, that is not eventually falsified, is a reason for scepticism in itself.

If there were no global warming we would still be studying climate and scientists would still be getting grants to do so. Maybe the attention to the subject has increased the money going into it but by no means would there be no grants for study of climate if AGW wasn't happening.

Several times I've pointed out to you a scientific paper [...] You reject it since it is not in your required format

Those several times should've been enough for you to understand the point: predictions lauded after coming true aren't acceptable. That — despite several months of being challenged, you remain unable to come up with a prediction publicized before its "success", tells everyone, that no such predictions exist.

I just don't see any good reasons to disbelieve the climate scientists.

Well, the obvious conflict of interest would be one reason — if climate is not a problem, there go their grants and the very employment. But even besides such dark suspicions, their seeming inability to make a falsifiable statement, that is not eventually falsified, is a reason for scepticism in itself.

I asked you — months ago — to list the counterexamples, and you remain unable to do so...

I think about the amount of energy accumulated when I am driving. Even at moderate urban speeds it is an awesome amount of destructive force when dissipated rapidly. To minimize the chance that such an energy release will destroy yours truly I minimize distractions. I view it is a long statistical game played over decades. Even small degradations of capability will tell in the long run. I am not a complete Pearson's Puppeteer about this (otherwise I would probably avoid cars altogether), but I try to channel the attitude a bit. I have always done my best to fully concentrate on the road. The fact that I have driven in many places where driving culture is quite crude and rude -- Eastern Europe, Asia -- has, I will confess, helped to concentrate my mind. As I see the crap that other people do in their cars, especially lately with all the cool new tech, I really am starting to get impatient for the robots to take over. With roughly 30,000 dead on our highways every year they can hardly do worse. In fact chimps could hardly do worse.

Mr Brin, Mr Page I know you are both quite busy. But, um, can you get on with it? Please?

As a male vegetarian, I have encountered the "real men eat meat" mentality repetitively. Carol Adams may not be mainstream, but she's not a complete crackpot. My kids are vegetarian as well. My son, at 4 years, saw a bus drive by and noted to me: the number of that bus, 462, is a multiple of 3. I just about crashed the car when he said that. I don't see any evidence of intellectual issues with him as he reads ahead of his class level, and a 6 is doing long division. Likewise, he is average size for his age and does quite well on his medical evals for school. Granted, this is anectodal, but I'm not seeing any evidence of what the Swedish meatballers found.

If we want to get into the study itself, it seems to have a number of issues. First and foremost, they are trotting out that old chestnut that brain size and intelligence are equivalent. They are not. Research has shown that intelligence is genetically determined in humans. While we do know that lack of adequate nutrition seems to impact later intelligence, the American Dietetic Association has not found any lack of nutrition in vegetarian or vegan diets as noted in their position papers on the topic. Furthermore, correlations between IQ and brainsize as determined by MRI show very weak correlation (R-squared ~ 0.4) despite the title of the meta-analysis.

Secondly, using a linear model across a number of species they are saying that weaning time is best predicted by meat consumption. Granted this shows a correlation. However, they also show a strong correlation with body weight, and there is no normalization of body weight or brain weight within a species. Based on their conclusions (correlations only), body size ~ brain weight ~ intelligence. This seems to mean that shorter people should be less intelligent. We just don't see this in real life. Furthermore, we see that late weaning in humans has benefits such as fewer cavities later in life and a better immune system.

This study has so many problems on so many levels....

No, there is a relationship between cranial volume and intelligence. It can be confounded by several other factors, (e.g. hydrocephalus, white vs. gray matter, cortical area, body size) which weaken the correlation, but it is real.

Here's the first decent reference I could find: "In a meta-analysis McDaniel (2004) found an in vivo brain volume/IQ correlation of 0.33 based on 37 published studies (N= 1535)..."
http://abc102.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/brain-size-and-correlates-with-iq/
Citing: http://www.govrel.vcu.edu//news/Releases/2005/june/McDaniel-Big%20Brain.pdf

In fact, brain size does not matter in humans either. It's just an old wise tale carried over from the 19th century that still haunts us today (as seen here).

For a long time, we were not able to conclusively show that brain size and intelligence were correlated. We now are. The seminal reference is McDaniels, 2005 - a metastudy over MRI research. The fact seems to be considered fairly well established nowadays.

Eivind.

"Tracing basic implications" is hardly the only thing computers do in mathematics; there is plenty of work on the "flash of insight" part, which computers have done successfully on a number of occasions. In particular, there's a long body of work on conjecture-generating systems, which don't try to prove things, but look for conjectures that: 1) would be interesting if true; and 2) seem that they could at least plausibly be true. Generating conjectures is historically a large part of the creativity in mathematics, and in some areas, computers are getting good enough at it that professional mathematicians use conjecture-generating software to get ideas for interesting problems to work on or useful lemmas to prove on the way to another problem.

This survey provides a useful overview of some of the work.

Well, again, simply not true.

We have an entire field of study in the domain of biological complexity theory which is directly germane to the inference of design. No effort to "refine anything" is occurring in this domain?

-Who- represents "all of ID" is all people in all domains around what the "design inference" -is-, that is, -design-. That scope includes exactly what it says. That you wish to redefine it as you wish, ascribe your straw-man redefinition to the people you wish, and pretend that you've addressed -the hypothesis for what the hypothesis is-, hardly addresses any form of honest inquiry, scientific or otherwise.

1) "Bush" can't "pass laws". If you don't understand how the US government works, don't jabber about it, k?

2) "Bush" had nothing to do with this. This was an action of the state of Illnois, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is one of the most anti-Bush states in the Union.

3) It's not really necessary to start screeching about "Bush", regardless of the topic under discussion. Please stop behaving like a rat that's been conditioned in a Skinner box. Thanks.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, John Hancock, and many others are rolling over in their respective graves in response to your statement. If everyone believed this, government tyranny would be much greater than it already is.

MLK, referencing Thoreau, makes the point better than I can:

"I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest." - Martin Luther King, Jr, (Autobiography, Chapter 2).

Oh man! The memories of my grandmother reciting by heart "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb". Good thing I wasn't a thumbsucker, otherwise it probably would have actually frightened me. :)

I remember the night my father used to read struwwelpeter to me.

"When children have been good,
That is, be it understood,
Good at meal-times, good at play,
Good at night, and good all day, -
They shall have the pretty things
Merry Christmas always brings.
Naughty, romping girls and boys
Tear their clothes and make a noise,
Soil their aprons and their frocks,
And deserve no Christmas-box.
Such as these shall never look
At this pretty Picture-Book."

This whole thing is just a big load of garbage. First of all, I don't consider this guy an expert on the human brain. "Industrial Psychologist" seems little more than a businessman with a fancy degree. (consider his Professional Experience and his CV, all business related, not brain related) Plus I don't think I have to go into how suspect the terms "smart" and "intelligence" are. He didn't even do any original research (which may mean that this isn't even really a study..), this is basically just a regurgitation of old "selected" research. It's basically a high school research paper. Anyone know how to find out if "Intelligence" is peer reviewed or not? Imagine how dangerous this would be if business people believed it. If there's data out there that says whites have bigger brains than blacks, hire whites over blacks. If men on average have bigger brains than women, hire men over women. I wonder how many other bosses would consider "highly intelligent people" to be more productive than normal folks?

This whole thing is just a big load of garbage. First of all, I don't consider this guy an expert on the human brain. "Industrial Psychologist" seems little more than a businessman with a fancy degree. (consider his Professional Experience and his CV, all business related, not brain related) Plus I don't think I have to go into how suspect the terms "smart" and "intelligence" are. He didn't even do any original research (which may mean that this isn't even really a study..), this is basically just a regurgitation of old "selected" research. It's basically a high school research paper. Anyone know how to find out if "Intelligence" is peer reviewed or not? Imagine how dangerous this would be if business people believed it. If there's data out there that says whites have bigger brains than blacks, hire whites over blacks. If men on average have bigger brains than women, hire men over women. I wonder how many other bosses would consider "highly intelligent people" to be more productive than normal folks?

as a service to the reader, i'll help you decide for yourself if the author is biased

Jeez, I hope not all Ph.D's are landed as easily as this guy's must have been. This is nothing more than modern phrenology. Here's a link to the actual publication: http://www.vcu.edu/uns/Releases/2005/june/McDaniel -Big%20Brain.pdf

It's mostly a literature review, which obviously attempts to use the 'majority must be right' fallacy to some mysterious end. The guy's an 'industrial psychologist,' though, so go figure.

To argue something so bold and broad that the size of the brain is an indicator for intelligence is frighteningly naive. If you leave your computer for a second and go meet a few people, you'll quickly realize that people with little heads have no problem outsmarting people with wide hats. This is about on par with 'people with big noses have big johnsons.' Don't read this publication if you're expecting any insight on anything other than a statistical analysis of random literature. You won't find any discussion of neuroplasticity here. I've a question I'd like to ask this guy: how come people 3 feet tall are smarter than you?

Jupiter is fucking huge, but let me assure you, I'd rather be back home. Bigger is not always better.

So does VCU, but from scratch and without off-the-shelf components. Plus they win the competition.

Disclaimer: I'm a VCU EE student, but not associated with this project.

So does VCU, but from scratch and without off-the-shelf components. Plus they win the competition.

Disclaimer: I'm a VCU EE student, but not associated with this project.

A high-efficiency red LED puts out about 2.5 mW of luminous energy in its emission band, and consumes 120 mW of power. That's 3% efficiency. The rest is dissapated as heat. Incidentally, that's why LEDs have a large footprint (the luminous area is very small); so the heat can spread out and the junction characteristics don't change. Incandescents emit light energy outside the visible band, unlike LEDs. This is where most of the power goes, not heat. Thus, incadescent lights achieve about 15 lumens per watt, flourscents get about 50 per watt. Contrary to popular belief, LEDs are in between, the high efficiency models get about 25 lumens per watt.

The most efficient LED right now is %32. You can't buy these yet... they will be used in lights that operate like flourescent lights since they emit UV. This will be the ideal, long-lasting but low power light source.

LEDs are not economical when a flourscent light with electronic ballast can be used in the same situation. In scenarios where the extra electronics required by a flourscent light are too bulky or not enough power is available- this is where LEDs shine. That is why they are the flash-light champs.

The only cartoon in Fantasia with much of a story is The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which Mickey tries to make a broom do his work for him and ends up overwhelmed. That story is ... borrowed from the public domain. Goethe, to be exact.

Another Disney more-or-less original is "The Emperor's New Groove." Whee.

Norway: Fractal dimension 1.52 (here and here, apparently from Feder.)
Google is your friend

I suspect the swedish coast has nearly as high a dimension, with Denmark a bit lower.

From meempool
(I can heartily recommend Leisure Town, it's twisted.
I find the comment in the Forbes article about comic books not making a profit, and that the publishers treat them as R&D for ancillerary rights to be quite intriuging...)

Whatever happened to comic books? In the 1940s millions of Americans read comics not only for Superhero stories, but Romance, Cowboys, War, History, Literary Adaptations and more. Readers were lured away whenever another medium provided their "fix" cheaper, easier or better, beginning with television in the '50s. By the early '80s the only genre still dominated by comics was Superheroes, and 1989's hugely profitable Batman signaled the beginning of the superheroic exodus from comics to film. Since then comicbook sales have plummeted, from $850 million in 1993 to $275 million in 2000 and still falling fast. Leading publishers Marvel and DC Comics both now treat comics solely as Research and Development: they lose millions printing the comics, but earn far more selling licenses for movies, cartoons and toys. Comics' core audience, traditionally pre-teens, is now 18-30 and getting older every year. Is this the death of comics? Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, plays Gandalf to an unofficial fellowship out to save comics by migrating to the Internet! Join the revolution with Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl, Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep, Tristan Farnon's Leisure Town, Derek Kirk's Small Stories, Jenn Manley Lee's Dicebox, Cat Garza's Magic Inkwell and more!

Why the hell does her dog have an email address?

Well, according to a 1995 study, 33% of pet owners leave answering machine messages for their pet when they're away... so maybe she's from the Ozarks or something, and figured she'd do the same thing with email? :o)

To me, there's already a big source of this type of information. The members there would also help.

I'd like to think there's interesting analogies in some of the following most popular books:

Dick Tracey/Batman/Superman comics - compare that gear to today. Law enforcement isn't too far from it.
Brave New World - Tech advances versus the animalistic nature of mankind
1984 - modern homoginization of media and the "social herd" concept.
Day Of the Triffids - agricultural bioengineering driven by money, although quite a bit of B-movie sci-fi in there.
Foundation - psychohistory akin to reviewing patterns of internet usage and predicting outcomes
2001 et. al - Moon mining and the possibility of so-called precious metals becoming commonplace

Clarke, Asimov, Huxley - these were some of the earliest predictive sci-fi writers - even if they didn't know it at the time. There were TONS of pulp sci-fi books in the 50's though (giant radioactive _fill_in_blank_, etc)

Since the 80's there's been a bandwagon effect for writing like this.

mug

+-
rub continuously across screen until clear

The driving age, however, has been the subject of a proposed bill that has yet to be passed. The first step was implementing the midnight curfew for those under 18. There are groups dedicated to trying to raise the driving age as a safety measure.

While I haven't found a link to the script, there are several sources (like this) that list the quote as

Roy: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.

Note the spellings "C-beams" and "Tannhäuser" (which is an opera by Richard Wagner)!