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Slightly OT but important.....

There have been several studies that show that IQ is mostly genetics

That's a superficial and flawed reading of the evidence. First of all, behavior genetic studies typically show that the heritability of intelligence is about .50, which means that about 50% of the population variance is attributable to genetic differences. The rest -- the other half -- is environment, mostly nonshared environment (i.e., unique individual experience).

However, what most people do not realize is that heritability quotients depend on the population in which they're derived. Most heritability studies have been on middle- to upper-middle class subjects. It turns out that when you look at poorer populations (see original study here), heritability goes way down, and the importance of environment (including shared environment) increases dramatically.

The upshot is that for a poor kid, the expected return on an investment in the environment is huge. For a well-off kid, it's smaller but still real.

Slightly OT but important.....

There have been several studies that show that IQ is mostly genetics

That's a superficial and flawed reading of the evidence. First of all, behavior genetic studies typically show that the heritability of intelligence is about .50, which means that about 50% of the population variance is attributable to genetic differences. The rest -- the other half -- is environment, mostly nonshared environment (i.e., unique individual experience).

However, what most people do not realize is that heritability quotients depend on the population in which they're derived. Most heritability studies have been on middle- to upper-middle class subjects. It turns out that when you look at poorer populations (see original study here), heritability goes way down, and the importance of environment (including shared environment) increases dramatically.

The upshot is that for a poor kid, the expected return on an investment in the environment is huge. For a well-off kid, it's smaller but still real.

The slashdot fortune cookie that I received upon reading your tract should be your new tagline. It is latin, so people will be awed at your brilliance.

SEMPER UBI SUB UBI
Always where under where

On a discussion note:

Are you trying to emulate Discordianism or is this a case of a philosophy whose time has come?

you should be using the Remote Assistance feature of XP Home

Remote Assistance sounds like a solution to the problem. But based on the description, doesn't Remote Assistance require Windows Messenger to be turned on? Isn't the Windows Messenger service an annoying source of pop-ups? Wouldn't this hack be an "essential step" in getting rid of Messenger spam? Or does Remote Assistance actually require what I know of as "MSN Messenger" which is distinct from Windows Messenger?

I think cartoon accurately sums up the state of the Union....

A very fact-filled response there. At least apparently. Allow me to attempt a rebuttal... and a continuation of the off-topic, though interesting, thread here.

But firstly, I'd like to thank you for a stellar example of the hostility which most of /. has for anything with even a hint of support for a Christian world-view. However, while most simply offer a slobbering rant, at least you've built a (somewhat) coherent argument. You have my respect for that, anyway.

I won't comment on the Deist/Christian/Star-Goat-Worhiper/insert-religion -here issue except to say that we could likely get into a never-ending semantic battle trying to specifically classify each of the founders as a certain religion, or sub-class, or denomination. I will accept the "lowest common denominator" in this case that most of them believed in a God.

Regarding Jefferson's "Bible", I generally don't visit wikipedia for information, but there was a link there that I quickly perused and found most useful. Perhaps you missed these passages there. Jefferson's purpose "at first was to compile a book which would be valuable for the use of the Indians." Though his plan later changed, he still placed great value on Jesus' teachings because in them (his words) "will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man." And finally, these words of Jefferson speak volumes, I'd say: "A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." Perhaps Jefferson was less of a Deist than the rest, then.

I wish I had time right now to briefly research the others, but work-time is coming up. Let me offer a few rapid comments, though.

As seen above, Jefferson's purpose in "rewriting the Bible" (a misnomer, by the way) could be misconstrued if not taken in context. I don't know the details of Washington's walking out of Communion, but I'd expect in context we'd see some form of Popist Communion or something equally repugnant to a Protestant. (Remember, I'm speaking off the cuff here, trying to get out the door.) Your comments on Madison are likewise out of context. Selective highlighting (bold text) appears to reinforce your position, but a correct reading actually weakens it. I also expect the proper context to clear up the remaining points.

If you've no objection, I may take some time later to consider the remaining points and return my opinion by private message, or whatever it's called here. Certainly I'd rather attempt to bolster my side in public, but we're far off-topic now.

Technically, the Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventist church.

Well, I've begun the download for this video, and seeing as how mirrordot is being slashdotted, I have only downloaded about 20 megs out of the 60 meg file, with an ETA of about 25 minutes. At any rate, I've put the mirror up linking to the file that's being created -- and in 25 minutes that file will be complete, until then it'll be some percentage of the total.

Enjoy.

I'd like them to start teaching my alternatives to Schwarzschild metrics when they're discussing general relativity theory in their high school physics class.

Credit for system-wide scripting languages goes to Xerox PARC and SmallTalk on the Alto. Smalltalk formed the inspiration for HyperCard and later AppleScript.

You also have AREXX on the Amiga (1985), RiscOS on the Archimedes was also fully scripted (1987), and you could argue that the MS-DOS command shell (1979) and batch filing methods are akin to an OS-wide scripting language, particularly as a major goal of AppleScript was to make up for the Mac's lack of a CLI. Interesting to note that the opposite happened for NT 3.51 - the MS-DOS shell was slated for removal, but left in to fulfil the role of system scripting.

Is a life a commodity?

Yes, in fact if you drive a Pinto the courts have valued it at $100K.

Mercedes drivers, of course, have a higher value.

There is, like it or not, a price on your head, and you can be sold for it. Mark Twain, in his brilliant article "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", Read it here, remonstrates Christian missionaries for overcharging for a life.

Those of us who take our spiritual guidance from some text other than the Bible might well have a broader definition of life than yourself. If you wish to see life reduced to a commodity you can do very little better than visiting a modern pig "farm."

No child can visit one of these without weeping, because a child has to yet to be indoctrinated with a morality derived from a text. They know suffering, cruelty and immoral behavior when they see it.

God has written it on their hearts and they know the difference between good and evil as a God, not as a man.

You have fired the wrong shot of criticism across the bow of your adversary and have thus missed the target. He need not even take the trouble to back sails to avoid your onslaught.

No, what you should have pointed out was that Bush knows damned (excuse me) well that you wouldn't be diseased in the first place if you weren't evil and receiving a just punishment.

KFG

But the Nine Billion Names Of God wasn't a learning system - the monks had figured out that just reciting all the names of God would do the trick, and printing them out on paper using an appropriate Tibetan font would do the trick. It turns out that Tibetan typography is actually rather more complicated than in the story, so simply making an X-Windows counter that runs in the background isn't going to do the job very well :-)

I already use programs like TiBR to read textfile novels on my Treo 600. It's a little scrunched, but I don't really notice it; things are probably considerably better on the Treo 650.

Project Gutenberg has plenty of textfile novels ripe for reading. Cory Doctorow's stuff is also pretty good. I read his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom entirely on my cell.

Another handy resource is the University of Virginia Library's Etext Center, which has 1800 freely-available eBooks.

Hrm. 1999? 2000? I think you're a decade or so off. All the old h/p/a/v/c BBSs not to mention Compuserve and GEnie have used "netspeak" since at least the late 80's and I imagine earlier.

It is a little hard to find old text documents, but here is one from circa 1985 entitled The History of Real K-K00L DOODS.

Of course that is when it was cool to type in all caps with only a splattering of 0's and 1's in words, BeFoRe ThE MuLtI-CAsE ThING WaS K-RaD eLiTe.

There are some great old textfiles. Including the smiley dictionary (1989/1990), The Jargon File (1990), and a post about Compuserves Online Magazine in 1989 that includes such wonderful ones as ROFL, OIC, OTOH, etc.

Anyway, this whole discussion is beside the point: In http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/s cience/McKitrick Tim Lambert's blog I found a reference to ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/MBH98/TREE/IT RDB/NOAMER/pca-noamer.fMike Mann's tree-ring source program (fortran), which he apparently has made public. Happy refuting!

In conclusion, be sure to research "the Mormons" using legitimate sources.

A Study in Scarlet is a good legitimate source...

:)

I would like to recommend all religious people to join sects like Heaven's Gate. By all means... catch the next comet.

I wrote this in response to the post "What I want to know is..." but it grew long enough (and I hope it's interesting enough) that I thought it should be in the main thread rather than a subcomment.

What I want to know is this - who at Scientology is in on the gag?

One of the commonly-used criteria for a cult is that the leader(s) know they're lying and that what they're peddling is crap. While that IS common among cult leaders, it isn't neccesarily true in all "high-demand" groups. And such groups obviously don't stop being coercive just because the founder has been dead for many years.

Unless you catch someone saying something that gives them away (such as "Why are we writing this SF crap for ten cents a word? The REAL money is in creating one's own religion," attributed to LRH), there's no way to tell if the leaders(s) are sincere or just out for fame, fortune and 13th-stepping new women. Actually, you don't know either way about most general members either.

It seems to me that such groups attract a large number of sociopaths and psychopaths who have no respect for or even concept of the truth, and once they spend some time in these groups learning the ropes they get to control the lives of others (the groups encourage and even demand "passing it on" to others as part of continued membership) and be commended for it, a dream come true for them.

Here's an excellent resource on any currently or recently active religious group of significant size, duration or publicity, whether mainstram ofr fringe, even non-religious MLM/DSO groups, and of course Scientology. If you suspect might be in a "coercive, high-demand" group, look it up here, this is just the beginning of a reading list:
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/
and of course, the entry on Scientoligy, including their invoking of copyright law to protect their literature.
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/sc ientology.html

I wasn't involved with Scientology (though I allude to the group I was in above - it's PR is so good it's considered "the only thing in town" and is rarely thought of as a cult), but when I started reading books about cults in the library, I was amazed at the similarities of tactics between it and other well-known cults (mileu control, sacred literature that's believed inherently true, etc.). That was over ten years ago, nowadays it's much easier to find "alternative" viewpoints and former-insider descriptions on the web of just about ANY group, as well as good general "coercive group" info.

If you have doubts about where you're spending your time and/or money, you owe it to yourself to investigate all available viewpoints on your group.

I wrote this in response to the post "What I want to know is..." but it grew long enough (and I hope it's interesting enough) that I thought it should be in the main thread rather than a subcomment.

What I want to know is this - who at Scientology is in on the gag?

One of the commonly-used criteria for a cult is that the leader(s) know they're lying and that what they're peddling is crap. While that IS common among cult leaders, it isn't neccesarily true in all "high-demand" groups. And such groups obviously don't stop being coercive just because the founder has been dead for many years.

Unless you catch someone saying something that gives them away (such as "Why are we writing this SF crap for ten cents a word? The REAL money is in creating one's own religion," attributed to LRH), there's no way to tell if the leaders(s) are sincere or just out for fame, fortune and 13th-stepping new women. Actually, you don't know either way about most general members either.

It seems to me that such groups attract a large number of sociopaths and psychopaths who have no respect for or even concept of the truth, and once they spend some time in these groups learning the ropes they get to control the lives of others (the groups encourage and even demand "passing it on" to others as part of continued membership) and be commended for it, a dream come true for them.

Here's an excellent resource on any currently or recently active religious group of significant size, duration or publicity, whether mainstram ofr fringe, even non-religious MLM/DSO groups, and of course Scientology. If you suspect might be in a "coercive, high-demand" group, look it up here, this is just the beginning of a reading list:
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/
and of course, the entry on Scientoligy, including their invoking of copyright law to protect their literature.
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/sc ientology.html

I wasn't involved with Scientology (though I allude to the group I was in above - it's PR is so good it's considered "the only thing in town" and is rarely thought of as a cult), but when I started reading books about cults in the library, I was amazed at the similarities of tactics between it and other well-known cults (mileu control, sacred literature that's believed inherently true, etc.). That was over ten years ago, nowadays it's much easier to find "alternative" viewpoints and former-insider descriptions on the web of just about ANY group, as well as good general "coercive group" info.

If you have doubts about where you're spending your time and/or money, you owe it to yourself to investigate all available viewpoints on your group.

The part about sending something faster than light is just bad reporting. Einstein says that no information can travel faster than light. If I point a laser beam at the moon and move it quickly, the dot on the moon will move around faster than light. However, no information is sent so there is no problem. The same applies to this experiment except it involves group and phase velocities of light. The concept is very hard to explain in words so I'll just point you to this Java applet with a moving picture:
http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/more _stuff/Applets/sines/GroupVelocity.html

The part about light moving slower isn't anything special. It has been known for a while that light slows down in a medium (ie anything other than a pure vacuum) at a rate dependent on the type of medium. This includes normal glass.

After all, it's the high end of that curve -- e.g. the anybody-to-anybody connection of the 'net -- that brings us things like wikipedia and Linux. IMO, when you start reaching scales "beyond mortal comprehension" (or at least everyday life) the growth isn't as much being able to connect to more individuals, but being able to have more specialized groupings and network those.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! pwhew. I'm sorry, it's out of my system now, really, I promise. The idea that microwave ovens operate at 2.45Ghz because this is a resonant line of water and it absorbs most strongly here is some kind of pernicious zombie urban legend from hell that will not die! It's just totally incorrect. There is no particular resonant line for water here at all.(search for "resonant" in the page) For a good visualization of how microwaves heat things (any molecule with a dipole charge) look at this very cheesy but useful site.

Even a simple sequential read loop that exceeds the L1 cache can benefit greatly from the appropriate cache hints in the assembly (prefetchnta and its variants).

Toss in a second processor and a NUMA architecture, and everything gets even more fun.

For examples of the hacks you can do on Opterons that vastly improve simple C code speed, take a look at the stream.c source and see AMD's technical pubs no. 25112, 24592, and 32035.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

Even a simple sequential read loop that exceeds the L1 cache can benefit greatly from the appropriate cache hints in the assembly (prefetchnta and its variants).

Toss in a second processor and a NUMA architecture, and everything gets even more fun.

For examples of the hacks you can do on Opterons that vastly improve simple C code speed, take a look at the stream.c source and see AMD's technical pubs no. 25112, 24592, and 32035.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

It's a reference to a story "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"( (also a good Iron Maiden song). In short the Mariner shoots an albatross, the shipmates sees it as bad omen, and hang the dead bird around the mariner's neck, which would be a very heavy burden to carry.

You might also consider that Mann refuses to release the complete dataset on which he based his research as well as the algorithm used to generate the graph. This means his work cannot be validated by anyone else because he is not making available the conditions for the experiment.

When I went to Stonehenge (courtesy of Mad Max Tours) some loon (I mean that in the best possible sense) was flying in powered paraglider with an oversized fan attached to its back. He appeared to be steering with his elbows as he snapped pictures like a madman. He got close enough that I was sure that he was going to lose control of his craft and turn Stonehenge into Stoneunhenged.

On this same tour we also saw Avebury, and I do agree that it was more enjoyable. I never did see the devil behind my shoulder, however.

Interesting.. I am a grad student now, and at NRAO in Green Bank. Some pictures I took this week.

That is true. And on MS's site, it is called XML. No matter, which it is, by XML standards it is broken, and by SGML standards it is broken. When you create a DTD for SGML, you have to actually note in the DTD whether or not a closing (or opening) tag is optional. They have not marked any tag in the DTD I have (from www.ofx.org) as optional.

If they had marked tag closings as optional then in the DTD you sould see something like this:

<!ELEMENT SEVERITY - O %SEVERITYENUM;>

<!ELEMENT SEVERITY %SEVERITYENUM;>

Since a proper SGML document does not exist seperate from its DTD, then the data in the file must be marked up according to the associated DTD (which they have gone to the trouble or creating) or the document is broken. At least, that is how I learned SGML while working on legal documents and TEI. It may be yet, that what I learned is bunk, but I hope not.

InnerWeb

True they claim that it's not availible for commerical use but if I was to use it as basis for say a Graphic Novel or print edition they would have no rights to defend. Regardless of the effort it took to produce the work, the fact is that they have no rights. Anymore then a printer would. The author Thomas Preskett Prest had been dead over even the puffed up copyright of 90 years. Arno Press, which published a version in 1970 can't create a copyright from use of a public domain source. Even then copyright had already lapsed.

The point I am trying to make here is that claimed copyrights are mostly faked. UofV has no protection, never had never will. Likewise with Arno Press.

The only thing I would worry about is that the story was Biographical (un-biographical) in nature and not a work of fiction. Then I may have Varney show up on my doorstep some night wanting to take a bite out of me.

This study is interesting as it posits that in fact the rise of CO2 levels really began 8000 years ago when people began clearing large tracts of land for farming.

That accounts for half of the CO2 changes from the norm; the last 150 years accounts for the other half.

He also notes that from climate models it seems the rise in CO2 has served to shield us from a large scale glaciation phase that was scheduled to hit long before now, and kept the climate more stable!

The study is rather interesting (full link to study in article, check end) as he really ties together a wide variety of data from different sources.

They are not inherently evil or monstrous

It is a widely held belief that all humans are inherently evil. See original sin.

And then, even if you weren't born evil, thinking evil thoughts is just as bad as doing them. (See The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, verses 27 and 28)

So yeah, you and others like you may be inherently evil monsters, but that does not make you any different from the rest of us.

Surprisingly, some scientists think rather the opposite.

Basically thier theory is that global warming hs averted a catostrophic ice age from hitting us.

More details on the study here.

Not to veer dangerously close to the topic, but there is also the flip side to this, namely that while books engage one's imagination, games engage one's strategic thinking. While a story about the kreb cycle would probably be dry and boring, a videogame could be absolutely engaging and unforgettable. A large chunk of economic theory could be taught memorably through interactive simulations, as could the sciences and many other disciplines as well.

Don't discount gaming as not-books. They are not books. But they have their strengths as a medium too. And quite frankly, if young adult's exposure to reading is through High School Textbooks, no wonder they consider it dry, boring, and poorly done. I fail to see how circumventing some of that would hurt.

P.S. Since 7, the Final Fantasy games have contained more text than most any books. I believe that is what the parent was referring to.

Oriental can be refering to any of the countries of Asia, not just East Asia. For example Mark Twain uses the phrase in describing Turkey:
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/twain2www?specfil e=/lv6/workspace/railton/texts/public/twainpub.o2w &grouping=match&docs=TEI2&query=oriental&sample=1- 100&id=TwaInno

The word is rather archaic and Eurocentric, however, and as a result Asian is now the preferred term.

Let's not forget that our friend Ted coined the term.

I'm glad to see that Slashdotters are such a literate bunch.

On what evidence do you base your conclusion that this is an absurd question?

Considering that sex hormones affect neural growth in humans and other higher-order animals - link1 link2 link3 link4 link5 - your insistence that examining male/female neural differences is "arbitrary" is ill-informed at best, and deceptive at worst.

The brains of men and women are - in general - different; that much is (to the best of current knowledge) simple fact. What is not known is what cognitive differences those structural differences create, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

What is also not known is the level of sheer stupidity that would drive someone to over-ride information about an individual with information about a population. If 90% of women are better at math than 90% of men, that's only useful information if I'm I'm hiring someone at random. If I have aptitude scores for each candidate in front of me, it doesn't really matter whether the man is in the 98th percentile of all men but only the 91st percentile of all people; if he's the best candidate, he gets the job.

That is why "but I know lots of women who are good at math!" anecdotes are completely useless; each person is an individual, and population-level statistics like "men are better at math" do no more than tell you about the distribution of those individuals. When you've actually got one of those individuals in hand, distributional information is meaningless.

There are population-level differences; that's not the point. The point is that population-level differences are meaningless when talking about a single person; that, I believe, is where you'll get the most effective combatting of sexism. Think of someone as an individual and suddenly they're not a stereotype anymore, regardless of what the stereotype in question was; cut the problem off at the root.

First, the biggest single system Linux box is 512 CPUs (although I think NASA has 2048 CPUs in a BX2 machine, which has an expanded cache coherency domain to 1024 or 2048 CPUs, I'm not sure if they've actually hooked them up yet).

Still, that literally blows Sun's biggest machine out of the water. Especially in absolute performance, when you consider a new 9MB cache I2 is probably a clear twice the speed of the fastest of sun's sparcs.

Second, Sun's machines are NUMA as well. That's right, they have Non Uniform Memory Access. See here. They have a 4 tiered access hierarcy on memory. Either way, SGI's NUMAlink interconnect is far better than Sun's old crossbar switch dinosaur. See here. The Altix has 4 times the top-of-the-line Sun's memory bandwidth per CPU. That is SGI's old interconnect too, mind you.

In the late 19th century, more than a million Irish diead because their entire food structure was built on a specific breed of potato. All of those potatoes died, and so did a bunch of Irishmen.

Imagine a Monopoly in seeds. Gives a whole new meaning to the thoughts of 'Virus'

For more on the Irish Potato Blight, check here
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Famine .html

I'm going to take the opportunity to respond to one thing you said while ignoring most of the troll portion:

"grow up and realize that Sailor Moon and X-Men are not literature"

While I agree that most "comics" are not literature, there is a fine distinction between comics as entertainment and comics as art form. A good friend of mine presented his graphic arts thesis - a four foot high series of comic panels. I don't like the word comic because it naturally implies humor. So the term I've started to use is "graphic novels."

I don't consider serials or regular comic books to be graphic novels. But looking at something like the Pulitzer Prize winning Maus by Art Spiegelman, you see that it's not all funny or action-related. I read that when I was in seventh grade, just a year after it came out. I picked it up thinking it was a comic book... it's not.

I just read Blankets by Craig Thompson. I got sucked in and a few hours later it was all over. Most normal books don't have the emotional impact that his work does.

Graphic novels try to bridge the gap between literature and visual art. It's not often that they really succeed, but when they do it can be far more effective than a regular novel.

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~pg8p/

It downloads firefox, and begins the installation -- that's it.

I could've very easily move iexplore.exe and adjusted icons and everything, but let's play this the white hat way. Enjoy amigos!

Relativity : The Special and the General Theory

Dan East

So, for example, a religion that says all sex is wrong tends not to last very long.

The Shakers died out for this reason. They believed that sex was originally only given for procreation. Since Man proved unable to resist sex for pleasure, the Shakers believed that celibacy was a necessary cross to bear to get in back in touch with God. Hardly anybody wants to convert to a religion with no sex at all and there was little procreation within the church. Apart from a few oldsters that might still be around, this religion killed itself.

The code on the first line should be:
53++!305))6*;4826)4+.)4+);806*;48!8`60))85;1+ (;:+* 8!83(88)5*!;

It's forty, not tweny.

See, for example, this transcription:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?i d=PoeGold.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/eng lish/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1

...except that it happens to be the title of a written work. It is very much consistent with Slashdot style to link to a written piece using the title of that piece. The phrase

"A seminal work referenced when discussing Coleridge's poetry is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sharply written and gripping piece about an...ancient mariner."

If the editors are going to run a story with the phrase anyway--if I understand your position, you don't object to that...?--then it should be appropriate for them to hyperlink as they always do.

The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the captain cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes. Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness -- rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land.

Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and all were killed before earth was reached. It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.

The Christian Science Monitor ... certainly are not exclusively devoted to Christian Science, and indeed often have articles of good value on many aspects of the world, society, technology and life in general.

This jibes with what little I've known about it/them in the past decades, that the CSM is a respected news outlet.
I can understand a concern about the CSM's reporting on medicine, since, as another poster (apparently poor-karma tallbill) alluded to, Christian Scientist believe that one only needs the mind and faith to heal illness or medical conditions, and that submitting to modern medical services represents a lack of faith, thus some Christian Science believers and believers' children die who would be saved by going to any doctor or hospital (Christian Scientists believe such deaths are from a lack of faith, not a lack of appropriate medical care).
The real question here is whether and how much the CSM has an editorial slant dictated or influenced by Christian Science beliefs. In the case of the fusion article, it's hard to see how such a slant would change the article.

For more on Christian Science and the Christian Science Monitor:
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/ch rissci.html

That is a page from the Religious Movements Homepage, which I've found to be a remarkably unbiased source of info on virtually all religious organizations (with a broad interpretation of what's religious):

http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/

The Christian Science Monitor ... certainly are not exclusively devoted to Christian Science, and indeed often have articles of good value on many aspects of the world, society, technology and life in general.

This jibes with what little I've known about it/them in the past decades, that the CSM is a respected news outlet.
I can understand a concern about the CSM's reporting on medicine, since, as another poster (apparently poor-karma tallbill) alluded to, Christian Scientist believe that one only needs the mind and faith to heal illness or medical conditions, and that submitting to modern medical services represents a lack of faith, thus some Christian Science believers and believers' children die who would be saved by going to any doctor or hospital (Christian Scientists believe such deaths are from a lack of faith, not a lack of appropriate medical care).
The real question here is whether and how much the CSM has an editorial slant dictated or influenced by Christian Science beliefs. In the case of the fusion article, it's hard to see how such a slant would change the article.

For more on Christian Science and the Christian Science Monitor:
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/ch rissci.html

That is a page from the Religious Movements Homepage, which I've found to be a remarkably unbiased source of info on virtually all religious organizations (with a broad interpretation of what's religious):

http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/

Back before I broke my pocketPCs glass screen with a pocket camera. (yes both were in the same pocket). I use to go and get classics from UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA'S E-BOOK LIBRARY.