Try living in a 100% oxygen atmosphere at sea level pressure and let us know.
Anything can be a pollutant when the levels get too high. In some cases, the levels have to get very high to have a pollutant effect. In others... they don't.
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
Oh really? Are you competent to evaluate controversial issues in high-energy physics? Synthetic organic chemistry? Structural bioinformatics? Or is it only in regards to climatology where you think you have some magical insight which people who have worked and studied in the field for years lack?
'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not,
A vast majority of the world's working climatologists isn't a consensus? I'm curious as to what you would consider constituting a consensus. 99%? 99.9%? Would you insist that there is no consensus so long as there is one dissenting voice, no matter how much of a crank that dissenter might be?
is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method)
With regard to the methods of science, you're partly right -- obviously it's true that science isn't done by consensus, else no new science would ever be done at all. (I say "partly" because all scientists in the modern world build on the knowledge gained by their predecessors, and that knowledge is passed on by, yes, consensus in the field.) But with regard to the body of knowledge we call "science," you're dead wrong. Politicians aren't scientists. Lobbyists aren't scientists. Activists, as a rule, aren't scientists. Hell, when it comes to dealing with fields outside their expertise, scientists aren't scientists; my opinion as a bioinformatician is of absolutely no more import to the climatological debate than any other reasonably well-informed layman's, which is to say, not much. Which means that when it comes to setting policy based on science, it is the responsibility of those who do not work in the field to shut up and listen to those who do -- and when scientists in a particular field overwhelmingly agree, those outside the field have absolutely no credibility arguing with them.
So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists.
Do you have any evidence for these statements? At all?
to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title
To refer to "the scientific method" as though it were a single thing is to show that one's understanding of science is limited to half-remembered lessons from high-school "science class." And to imply, as you strongly do, that working scientists aren't really scientists because their results disagree with your politics is to show that you are an ideologue with no interest in science beyond how it can serve your agenda.
Note that in the "real world" of which you speak, the reason it was economical for GPP to put up solar panels was because of the tax writeoff -- i.e., governments setting environmental policy. Imagine that.
[nodding] And polluters dump toxic crap into our air, water, and soil in the name of economic efficiency -- "it would cost too much to clean up" -- and then turn around and pay lobbyists millions of dollars to fight laws designed to prevent them from doing so. Which is just as extreme as groups like Earth First! spiking trees or setting SUV dealerships on fire, not to mention that it does a lot more damage to a lot more people. So how about we acknowledge that there are fuckheads on both sides of the argument, and then we non-fuckheads can work to find real solutions to real problems?
Well, it is a programming language; it's Turing-complete. And there are a fair number of packages on CRAN to make general-purpose programming tasks easier. But yes, mainly it's good for math, especially statistics.
Because that's more or less what R is -- a free version of SAS or SPSS.
More specifically, R is a free implementation of the S language; it would be more accurate to call it "a free version of S+" -- although at this point I suspect that, thanks to CRAN, its capabilities exceed those of the proprietary alternative.
One big advantage R has over Matlab (er, besides the fact that R is OSS, but of course there's Octave for those who want an OSS Matlab alternative) is that R handles non-matrix data structures much, much better than Matlab does. Trying to work with anything that isn't a vector or a matrix in Matlab is an exercise in pain.
The worse thing about R programming is its name. Googling for "R" turns up way to much noise and way too little signal.
Yep. There are a couple of dedicated R search engines that can help with that: http://www.dangoldstein.com/search_r.html and http://www.rseek.org/. It may also sometimes be useful to Google on "Splus (whatever)" since most R and S+ code is pretty much interchangeable.
Oh no, you've uncovered our evil plan! And we would have got away with it, too, if it weren't for you darn/.ers!
GMAFB. Environmentalists don't want people to starve to death any more than anti-environmentalists want people to choke to death on pollution. Pretty much everyone (well, everyone sane, anyway) wants steady food production, clean air and water, a healthy economy, thriving wildlife, etc.; we simply disagree about the best ways to accomplish these goals and resolve the conflicts which sometimes occur between them. If you want to talk about specific issues and ways you think we can do better than the current approach, go ahead. If all you can do is throw out blanket accusations, you have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion.
The goal of environmentalism is to improve the quality of life for human beings -- to ensure that our environment, which by definition is everything that surrounds us, is a healthy and pleasant place to live. I'm not sure what it is about this that raises your ire.
I get the impression that the people who compiled the list aren't complaining about emoticons as a class, but rather a specific one which -- along with a bunch of regular words and phrases -- they think is absurdly overused. Now, of all the emoticons out there, <3 wouldn't have been my first choice for such an "honor", but I see their point.
Yes, languages change, and we have to accept that. We should also understand that at any point in a language's evolution, there are people who use it well, and those who use it badly. The latter group makes communication difficult for everyone, and deserves to be mocked.
I'm not likely to forget when it happened, since I was on the bridge about five minutes before it went down. I felt the beginning of the collapse, although I didn't know that was what it was at the time -- I felt a weird vibration and I was worried about the road (which was in the middle of a resurfacing project) eating up my tires. Didn't find out what actually happened until I reached my destination.
August 1st, 2007. Fine, about a year and a half ago, neither "a couple of years" nor "just over a year." Whatever.
The point is, yes, it was a funding failure as well as a mechanical failure; had the bridge been properly inspected before the resurfacing project began, they would have found the decay that caused the collapse. Furthermore, there had been warnings for years that the bridge was in trouble, but nobody ever quite seemed to come up with the money to fix the thing. (Gov. Pawlenty wanted the repairs done in 2020, i.e., after he was out of office and coming up with the money would be someone else's problem.) Lack of spending on infrastruture is a classic example of "penny-wise, pound-foolish" -- sure, repairing the bridge would have been expensive, but not nearly so much so as the collapse and its aftermath.
"Bridges collapse, it's a fact of life" is not an acceptable excuse. This was a preventable collapse, and the means of prevention involved money. As for Minnesota's overall tax rates, those taxes (generally) provide a level of services for the citizens of the state that I've never seen equalled in any of the other several states I've lived in, and those services contribute directly to the state's high quality of life. The slimy bastard currently warming the Governor's chair has done his best to dismantle this, but hopefully the state will outlast him.
Or maybe they've already cut back spending to the minimum point they can while still providing the services the citizens of Oregon demand? "Cut spending" is not a magic bullet, you know. At some point, things fall apart. Those of us who were living in Minnesota a couple of years ago know this well.
So maybe we need a Bayesian Impact Factor (BIF)? Start with some distribution for journal reputation (say, the results of a survey of university faculty and other researchers working in the area) as the prior, and then calculate a posterior based on observed citation data.
Researchers in just about every field build on layers of other researchers' work. There simply isn't time to go back and verify every result in the reference tree of every article you site -- if you did that, you'd never get any original work done! Creating code that compiles and executes properly doesn't guarantee that everything you've based that code on is correct, of course, but it's a good sign. I'm not aware of any equivalent reality check in pure math. Now, I know relatively little about the field (applied CS and statistics is my game, specifically bioinformatics) so I'll happily accept a correction on this point.
You realize, of course, that the only reason I was able to use a computer analogy is that we're talking about pure math. If we had been talking about CS, I'd have had to go with a car analogy right off the bat.
Seriously? There's a lot of high-quality CS research out there in the journals and conference papers; of course there's also a lot of crap. But I'd say most of the crap comes from wishful thinking rather than pure crackpottery. If nothing else, if you try to implement something that doesn't work, you'll know immediately -- thus CS at least potentially has a built-in reality check that pure math lacks. I rather suspect that whether or not a CS journal demands working code from its authors is a strong predictor for the quality of the articles which appear in that journal.
The harm, I think, is that he's not a well-enough-known crackpot; a respectable publisher (Elsevier) has given him a journal as his own private playground. This makes it more difficult for non-crackpots trying to enter the field (e.g. grad students) to sort the wheat from the chaff. It also allows other crackpots to come off as more credible by citing crackpot articles which have a veneer of respectability. Imagine if a computer science "journal" based on Hollywood's portrayal of how computers work were being published by the ACM, and you have some idea of how big a problem this is.
Wow. That may be the most bizarrely wrong/. psychoanalysis I've ever seen.
Anyway. There's nothing to falsify. You have made an assertion, and when challenged to justify it, come out with... more assertions. I don't know what your line of work is, but in mine, that type of argumentation doesn't fly.
You wrote specifically of "naive people threatened by science." I am neither naive nor threatened by science, and most likely, neither are the people who modded OP up. If you claim otherwise, you need to back it up. Neither I nor anyone else is obliged to get into a specific discussion of possible mechanisms until you justify what you wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
Christianity has eyewitness testimony
Oh, really? Do tell.
If he'd shown any logic or science in his post at all, maybe you'd have a point.
Do you know what a greenhouse is?
Do you know what greenhouse gases are, and why they are called that?
Did you read your own post?
Seriously. Go back and read what you wrote. Ponder the part about "reflecting sunlight out into space."
Ponder some more. Maybe, eventually, you will realize how incredibly ignorant you just made yourself out to be.
Do we consider Oxygen a pollutant as well?
Try living in a 100% oxygen atmosphere at sea level pressure and let us know.
Anything can be a pollutant when the levels get too high. In some cases, the levels have to get very high to have a pollutant effect. In others ... they don't.
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
Oh really? Are you competent to evaluate controversial issues in high-energy physics? Synthetic organic chemistry? Structural bioinformatics? Or is it only in regards to climatology where you think you have some magical insight which people who have worked and studied in the field for years lack?
'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not,
A vast majority of the world's working climatologists isn't a consensus? I'm curious as to what you would consider constituting a consensus. 99%? 99.9%? Would you insist that there is no consensus so long as there is one dissenting voice, no matter how much of a crank that dissenter might be?
is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method)
With regard to the methods of science, you're partly right -- obviously it's true that science isn't done by consensus, else no new science would ever be done at all. (I say "partly" because all scientists in the modern world build on the knowledge gained by their predecessors, and that knowledge is passed on by, yes, consensus in the field.) But with regard to the body of knowledge we call "science," you're dead wrong. Politicians aren't scientists. Lobbyists aren't scientists. Activists, as a rule, aren't scientists. Hell, when it comes to dealing with fields outside their expertise, scientists aren't scientists; my opinion as a bioinformatician is of absolutely no more import to the climatological debate than any other reasonably well-informed layman's, which is to say, not much. Which means that when it comes to setting policy based on science, it is the responsibility of those who do not work in the field to shut up and listen to those who do -- and when scientists in a particular field overwhelmingly agree, those outside the field have absolutely no credibility arguing with them.
So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists.
Do you have any evidence for these statements? At all?
to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title
To refer to "the scientific method" as though it were a single thing is to show that one's understanding of science is limited to half-remembered lessons from high-school "science class." And to imply, as you strongly do, that working scientists aren't really scientists because their results disagree with your politics is to show that you are an ideologue with no interest in science beyond how it can serve your agenda.
Note that in the "real world" of which you speak, the reason it was economical for GPP to put up solar panels was because of the tax writeoff -- i.e., governments setting environmental policy. Imagine that.
[nodding] And polluters dump toxic crap into our air, water, and soil in the name of economic efficiency -- "it would cost too much to clean up" -- and then turn around and pay lobbyists millions of dollars to fight laws designed to prevent them from doing so. Which is just as extreme as groups like Earth First! spiking trees or setting SUV dealerships on fire, not to mention that it does a lot more damage to a lot more people. So how about we acknowledge that there are fuckheads on both sides of the argument, and then we non-fuckheads can work to find real solutions to real problems?
Well, it is a programming language; it's Turing-complete. And there are a fair number of packages on CRAN to make general-purpose programming tasks easier. But yes, mainly it's good for math, especially statistics.
Because that's more or less what R is -- a free version of SAS or SPSS.
More specifically, R is a free implementation of the S language; it would be more accurate to call it "a free version of S+" -- although at this point I suspect that, thanks to CRAN, its capabilities exceed those of the proprietary alternative.
One big advantage R has over Matlab (er, besides the fact that R is OSS, but of course there's Octave for those who want an OSS Matlab alternative) is that R handles non-matrix data structures much, much better than Matlab does. Trying to work with anything that isn't a vector or a matrix in Matlab is an exercise in pain.
The worse thing about R programming is its name. Googling for "R" turns up way to much noise and way too little signal.
Yep. There are a couple of dedicated R search engines that can help with that: http://www.dangoldstein.com/search_r.html and http://www.rseek.org/. It may also sometimes be useful to Google on "Splus (whatever)" since most R and S+ code is pretty much interchangeable.
Oh no, you've uncovered our evil plan! And we would have got away with it, too, if it weren't for you darn /.ers!
GMAFB. Environmentalists don't want people to starve to death any more than anti-environmentalists want people to choke to death on pollution. Pretty much everyone (well, everyone sane, anyway) wants steady food production, clean air and water, a healthy economy, thriving wildlife, etc.; we simply disagree about the best ways to accomplish these goals and resolve the conflicts which sometimes occur between them. If you want to talk about specific issues and ways you think we can do better than the current approach, go ahead. If all you can do is throw out blanket accusations, you have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion.
The goal of environmentalism is to improve the quality of life for human beings -- to ensure that our environment, which by definition is everything that surrounds us, is a healthy and pleasant place to live. I'm not sure what it is about this that raises your ire.
I get the impression that the people who compiled the list aren't complaining about emoticons as a class, but rather a specific one which -- along with a bunch of regular words and phrases -- they think is absurdly overused. Now, of all the emoticons out there, <3 wouldn't have been my first choice for such an "honor", but I see their point.
Yes, languages change, and we have to accept that. We should also understand that at any point in a language's evolution, there are people who use it well, and those who use it badly. The latter group makes communication difficult for everyone, and deserves to be mocked.
I'm not likely to forget when it happened, since I was on the bridge about five minutes before it went down. I felt the beginning of the collapse, although I didn't know that was what it was at the time -- I felt a weird vibration and I was worried about the road (which was in the middle of a resurfacing project) eating up my tires. Didn't find out what actually happened until I reached my destination.
August 1st, 2007. Fine, about a year and a half ago, neither "a couple of years" nor "just over a year." Whatever.
The point is, yes, it was a funding failure as well as a mechanical failure; had the bridge been properly inspected before the resurfacing project began, they would have found the decay that caused the collapse. Furthermore, there had been warnings for years that the bridge was in trouble, but nobody ever quite seemed to come up with the money to fix the thing. (Gov. Pawlenty wanted the repairs done in 2020, i.e., after he was out of office and coming up with the money would be someone else's problem.) Lack of spending on infrastruture is a classic example of "penny-wise, pound-foolish" -- sure, repairing the bridge would have been expensive, but not nearly so much so as the collapse and its aftermath.
"Bridges collapse, it's a fact of life" is not an acceptable excuse. This was a preventable collapse, and the means of prevention involved money. As for Minnesota's overall tax rates, those taxes (generally) provide a level of services for the citizens of the state that I've never seen equalled in any of the other several states I've lived in, and those services contribute directly to the state's high quality of life. The slimy bastard currently warming the Governor's chair has done his best to dismantle this, but hopefully the state will outlast him.
Or maybe they've already cut back spending to the minimum point they can while still providing the services the citizens of Oregon demand? "Cut spending" is not a magic bullet, you know. At some point, things fall apart. Those of us who were living in Minnesota a couple of years ago know this well.
So maybe we need a Bayesian Impact Factor (BIF)? Start with some distribution for journal reputation (say, the results of a survey of university faculty and other researchers working in the area) as the prior, and then calculate a posterior based on observed citation data.
Researchers in just about every field build on layers of other researchers' work. There simply isn't time to go back and verify every result in the reference tree of every article you site -- if you did that, you'd never get any original work done! Creating code that compiles and executes properly doesn't guarantee that everything you've based that code on is correct, of course, but it's a good sign. I'm not aware of any equivalent reality check in pure math. Now, I know relatively little about the field (applied CS and statistics is my game, specifically bioinformatics) so I'll happily accept a correction on this point.
Glad to be of service.
You realize, of course, that the only reason I was able to use a computer analogy is that we're talking about pure math. If we had been talking about CS, I'd have had to go with a car analogy right off the bat.
Oh, snap!
Seriously? There's a lot of high-quality CS research out there in the journals and conference papers; of course there's also a lot of crap. But I'd say most of the crap comes from wishful thinking rather than pure crackpottery. If nothing else, if you try to implement something that doesn't work, you'll know immediately -- thus CS at least potentially has a built-in reality check that pure math lacks. I rather suspect that whether or not a CS journal demands working code from its authors is a strong predictor for the quality of the articles which appear in that journal.
The harm, I think, is that he's not a well-enough-known crackpot; a respectable publisher (Elsevier) has given him a journal as his own private playground. This makes it more difficult for non-crackpots trying to enter the field (e.g. grad students) to sort the wheat from the chaff. It also allows other crackpots to come off as more credible by citing crackpot articles which have a veneer of respectability. Imagine if a computer science "journal" based on Hollywood's portrayal of how computers work were being published by the ACM, and you have some idea of how big a problem this is.
Wow. That may be the most bizarrely wrong /. psychoanalysis I've ever seen.
Anyway. There's nothing to falsify. You have made an assertion, and when challenged to justify it, come out with ... more assertions. I don't know what your line of work is, but in mine, that type of argumentation doesn't fly.
There is a very strong causal relationship. It just goes in the other direction ...
No, but it's an excellent predictor of ignorance.
Having fun moving those goalposts around?
You wrote specifically of "naive people threatened by science." I am neither naive nor threatened by science, and most likely, neither are the people who modded OP up. If you claim otherwise, you need to back it up. Neither I nor anyone else is obliged to get into a specific discussion of possible mechanisms until you justify what you wrote.