Einstein's work was never considered pseudoscience by those knowledgeable in the field. I really wish people would stop repeating this myth. Relativity theory was groundbreaking, to be sure, but both special and general relativity were widely accepted within a few years of publication because they so neatly solved so many problems which had been bugging so many physicists. It seems we're so wedded to the story of "great scientist mocked by his peers but vindicated by history" that we tell that story about every famous genius, even those to whom it doesn't apply -- while, sadly, nearly forgetting many to whom it does, including Wegener.
As for Copernicus, the idea of "science" in the modern sense didn't really exist in the 1500s, so "pseudoscience" didn't either. The objections to heliocentricity, and to the nature of Copernicus' investigations, were entirely religious in nature; scientific debate, as we would understand it today, never even entered into it.
Part of the problem is that the "Gaia hypothesis" is misnamed; it's not a single hypothesis to be tested. Obviously there exist regulatory feedback cycles within the environment; the question is how strong those feedback cycles are. If you want to think of the entire planet as a single self-regulating organism, you certainly can, but it really doesn't change the nature of the investigation into how specific parts of it work.
So the OP's professor was in grad school circa-1912?
No. Pretty much the whole point of TFA is that it took a half-century for Wegener to be vindicated. Continental drift theory was not generally accepted until the 1960s, and I remember that in the 70s there was still considerable debate about whether or not it really explained the modern shape and placement of the continents. It's not at all surprising that he ran into someone who still dismissed the whole idea as nonsense if he was in grad school in, say, the mid-60s -- or even up to the 80s, if the prof was particularly ossified.
It's happened not once, but several times. You're right, it would be highly unlikely that all the continents were lumped together one and only one time, and then assumed their current fairly scatted forms. Instead, they keep merging together and then breaking apart.
the person I responded to said that you might as well use the same argument to ban cigarettes and gasoline. That's a stupid argument because cigarettes and gasoline haven't ever been implicated in violent, cannibalistic assaults.
Actually, the person you responded to said:
Same reason should be used to ban alcohol,cigarettes and fossil fuels then
I note you deliberately left off alcohol, which is most certainly a factor in a great many violent assaults. And the point of the entire thread isn't the specific nature of the harm these various substances do, but the fact that they are all demonstrably harmful to people other than those using them; the question at hand is whether or not this harm is sufficient cause for banning them. If you want to engage in obvious cherry-picking, go ahead, but be aware that it's really not helping you make your case.
You can add up every single murder and suicide committed under the influence of illegal drugs, every death by overdose, every death due to organ failure caused by years of addiction... and you still won't come close to the number of deaths and the amount of damage caused by the "War on Drugs" rather than the drugs themselves. If you don't think the argument makes sense, that's your problem for not paying attention.
Honestly, the TLD system has been broken for a long time. There should probably never have been TLDs without country codes, for one thing. And enforcement on TLDs that were supposed to be reserved for specific purposes was always lousy -- I remember seeing clearly commercial sites with.net TLDs popping up in the mid-90's.
CIPS really stands for Child Internet Porn Society. They're clearly a bunch of pedophiles, because otherwise, why would they be trying in any way to limit efforts to PROTECT THE CHIIILDREN?!?
This. When I started an MS program in biostatistics, with a BS in math and an MS in computer science, I figured I already knew at least half of what I'd need to know. I was wrong -- the biostatistics coursework was the toughest I'd ever had.
That being said, a math BS is fine preparation for a statistics or biostatistics MS or PhD, and most graduate biostatistics programs, at least, come with excellent financial support packages; the TA and RA stipends tend to be quite generous, as such things go. And the job prospects once you get the degree are good too.
This post is one of the most brilliant illustrations of Poe's Law that I've ever seen. What scares me is that I can't tell if the brilliance is intentional or not.
The number of researchers, scientists and engineers is going down, not up.
In terms of proportion of population, that may be true; in terms of absolute numbers, I'm pretty sure it's not. The number of papers published continues to grow at a more-or-less exponential rate, and while it's true that the "publish or perish" mentality forces researchers to have their names on more papers now than ever before (which is easier than it used to be, because author lists are also getting longer; it's not unusual for papers in biology to have ten or more authors listed) I have a hard time believing that the number of people writing the papers isn't also growing steadily.
I am sure it happens, but (a) it seems unlikely that they would be in the same field
I have a few name collisions just in my own reference database (i.e., list of papers to which I've referred in my own work.) I can pretty much guarantee that if you look at the author lists for any major single-subject journal, you'll find a whole bunch of identical $FIRST_INITIAL $LAST_NAME entries which are not, in fact, the same people.
Hell, I have a pretty rare (in the US, at least) last name -- and occasionally I still get e-mails from people who think I'm the Daniel Dvorkin who wrote a paper on psoriasis in 1989. It's not entirely unreasonable, since my name appears on a couple of papers related to inflammatory disease, but I'm a grad student in Colorado, not a dermatologist in Pennsylvania...
and (b) it seems even less likely that they would be at the same institution and (c) even less likely that their contact information would be the same so are there really cases where there is confusion over who wrote a paper
True enough, but people who are looking at author names are not necessarily looking at the entire paper (where contact information is usually given.) A related problem is that journal publications are increasingly subject to various kinds of text data mining, and rightly or wrongly, the format for fields like author institution and contact information isn't standardized from journal to journal -- and in academia, both institutions and e-mail addresses are subject to frequent change. If you published a paper five years ago while at the University of East Dakota and your e-mail in the corresponding author field was given as betterunixthanunix@eastdak.edu, and you're now at South Virginia State with the address butu@svs.edu, good luck getting any database to make that connection without human assistance.
If you're a giant corporation, sure. (And you could be; corporations are people, after all, so why shouldn't they have/. accounts?) But if you're a regular mortal, sorry, you're SOL.
And while you are pointing out that they are desert nomads who use oral traditions, please consider what would happen if you read to them out of a science textbook and then had them write what they heard down on paper 2000 years later.
The ancient Hebrews certainly understood the concept of "year," as well as "ten," "hundred," and "thousand," and multiples thereof. There would have been no reason that divine revelation couldn't have included something like "for over a hundred thousand thousand years, no life moved on the land, but only in the water." Our ancestors weren't idiots, they just didn't have the knowledge we do. Saying "well, they said 'day' when they really meant 'millions of years'" strikes me as a subtle form of denigration.
Your "we can never be completely sure" argument isn't the one that motivates creationists, and you know it. Yes, of course it's possible that evolutionary theory is wrong. It's possible that anything we think we know about how the universe works is wrong. Acknowledging this basic fact is required for any kind of scientific inquiry. But creationists are completely sure that their explanation is right, and they will continue to be sure of this no matter how much evidence accumulates against their position. By invoking "the idea of evolution as a religion," you're arguing against a straw man; the beliefs based on faith rather than science are entirely on one side of this argument, and it's not the side of evolutionary biology.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the ancient desert nomads who told and retold the collection of folktales which eventually got written down as the Book of Genesis meant anything at all other than the literal meaning of the word "day." The Hebrew "yom" has exactly the same meaning as the English "day," and while it can be used poetically to indicate other periods of time ("in those days," "a day will come," etc.) there is nothing in Genesis to indicate such a usage.
... "I hope you're right. I really do." But we know how that worked out.
Leakey is being wildly optimistic. The evidence for evolution is already overwhelming (and no, "intelligent design" is not required.) There is a large and noisy group of people who have made it very plain that they will not accept this evidence. It's an ideological issue for them, not a scientific one. And they will continue to maintain this position in the face of any new evidence that is presented to them. There's no way to win them over with appeals to logic. The only solution, AFAICT, is to continue to shower them with the mockery they so richly deserve, and hope that they're driven back to the lunatic fringe where they belong.
The problem with both Afghanistan and Iraq is that the period after the war was half-assed.
The point is that talking about "after the war" is meaningless in Iraq and (particularly) Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan is still going on, and the situation in Iraq is best described as a poorly enforced cease-fire.
Wars don't end when people say, "Hooray, the war is over!" They end when large bodies of armed men stop trying to kill each other. That hasn't happened in either place, and it won't for the foreseeable future.
The logic (Philosophy) professors at college hated me, because I was right.
They didn't hate you. You weren't interesting enough to be worthy of hatred. They may, however, have been deeply annoyed by you, because you were always taking up class time with your incoherent babbling which you thought was a brilliant refutation of their ideas and everyone else could tell immediately was complete crap.
In general, any tale along the lines of "The Xs hated me because I outsmarted them," where the Xs are any group of authority figures, took place only in the teller's imagination.
People born a long time ago were more likely to be criminals? That's interesting, how does that work?
Younger people are more likely to commit crimes. As the population in general gets older, with fewer people in their late teens and early twenties, crime rates go down.
PLoS, like all reputable open access publishers, waives publication fees for authors who cannot afford to pay. I've seen the specious "open access publishing locks out researchers who can't pay" repeated so often, in such obvious defiance of the facts, that I'm starting to wonder if it's astroturfing on the part of the PRISM crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
So was Einstein's and Copernicus theories.
Einstein's work was never considered pseudoscience by those knowledgeable in the field. I really wish people would stop repeating this myth. Relativity theory was groundbreaking, to be sure, but both special and general relativity were widely accepted within a few years of publication because they so neatly solved so many problems which had been bugging so many physicists. It seems we're so wedded to the story of "great scientist mocked by his peers but vindicated by history" that we tell that story about every famous genius, even those to whom it doesn't apply -- while, sadly, nearly forgetting many to whom it does, including Wegener.
As for Copernicus, the idea of "science" in the modern sense didn't really exist in the 1500s, so "pseudoscience" didn't either. The objections to heliocentricity, and to the nature of Copernicus' investigations, were entirely religious in nature; scientific debate, as we would understand it today, never even entered into it.
Part of the problem is that the "Gaia hypothesis" is misnamed; it's not a single hypothesis to be tested. Obviously there exist regulatory feedback cycles within the environment; the question is how strong those feedback cycles are. If you want to think of the entire planet as a single self-regulating organism, you certainly can, but it really doesn't change the nature of the investigation into how specific parts of it work.
So the OP's professor was in grad school circa-1912?
No. Pretty much the whole point of TFA is that it took a half-century for Wegener to be vindicated. Continental drift theory was not generally accepted until the 1960s, and I remember that in the 70s there was still considerable debate about whether or not it really explained the modern shape and placement of the continents. It's not at all surprising that he ran into someone who still dismissed the whole idea as nonsense if he was in grad school in, say, the mid-60s -- or even up to the 80s, if the prof was particularly ossified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle
It's happened not once, but several times. You're right, it would be highly unlikely that all the continents were lumped together one and only one time, and then assumed their current fairly scatted forms. Instead, they keep merging together and then breaking apart.
the person I responded to said that you might as well use the same argument to ban cigarettes and gasoline. That's a stupid argument because cigarettes and gasoline haven't ever been implicated in violent, cannibalistic assaults.
Actually, the person you responded to said:
Same reason should be used to ban alcohol,cigarettes and fossil fuels then
I note you deliberately left off alcohol, which is most certainly a factor in a great many violent assaults. And the point of the entire thread isn't the specific nature of the harm these various substances do, but the fact that they are all demonstrably harmful to people other than those using them; the question at hand is whether or not this harm is sufficient cause for banning them. If you want to engage in obvious cherry-picking, go ahead, but be aware that it's really not helping you make your case.
You can add up every single murder and suicide committed under the influence of illegal drugs, every death by overdose, every death due to organ failure caused by years of addiction ... and you still won't come close to the number of deaths and the amount of damage caused by the "War on Drugs" rather than the drugs themselves. If you don't think the argument makes sense, that's your problem for not paying attention.
Honestly, the TLD system has been broken for a long time. There should probably never have been TLDs without country codes, for one thing. And enforcement on TLDs that were supposed to be reserved for specific purposes was always lousy -- I remember seeing clearly commercial sites with .net TLDs popping up in the mid-90's.
Microsoft should be perfectly happy with their ownership of .crash, .virus, and .bsod.
CIPS really stands for Child Internet Porn Society. They're clearly a bunch of pedophiles, because otherwise, why would they be trying in any way to limit efforts to PROTECT THE CHIIILDREN?!?
This. When I started an MS program in biostatistics, with a BS in math and an MS in computer science, I figured I already knew at least half of what I'd need to know. I was wrong -- the biostatistics coursework was the toughest I'd ever had.
That being said, a math BS is fine preparation for a statistics or biostatistics MS or PhD, and most graduate biostatistics programs, at least, come with excellent financial support packages; the TA and RA stipends tend to be quite generous, as such things go. And the job prospects once you get the degree are good too.
Scientists are at war with a movie?
This post is one of the most brilliant illustrations of Poe's Law that I've ever seen. What scares me is that I can't tell if the brilliance is intentional or not.
There are many, many more scientists than there are members of WGA.
The number of researchers, scientists and engineers is going down, not up.
In terms of proportion of population, that may be true; in terms of absolute numbers, I'm pretty sure it's not. The number of papers published continues to grow at a more-or-less exponential rate, and while it's true that the "publish or perish" mentality forces researchers to have their names on more papers now than ever before (which is easier than it used to be, because author lists are also getting longer; it's not unusual for papers in biology to have ten or more authors listed) I have a hard time believing that the number of people writing the papers isn't also growing steadily.
I am sure it happens, but (a) it seems unlikely that they would be in the same field
I have a few name collisions just in my own reference database (i.e., list of papers to which I've referred in my own work.) I can pretty much guarantee that if you look at the author lists for any major single-subject journal, you'll find a whole bunch of identical $FIRST_INITIAL $LAST_NAME entries which are not, in fact, the same people.
Hell, I have a pretty rare (in the US, at least) last name -- and occasionally I still get e-mails from people who think I'm the Daniel Dvorkin who wrote a paper on psoriasis in 1989. It's not entirely unreasonable, since my name appears on a couple of papers related to inflammatory disease, but I'm a grad student in Colorado, not a dermatologist in Pennsylvania ...
and (b) it seems even less likely that they would be at the same institution and (c) even less likely that their contact information would be the same so are there really cases where there is confusion over who wrote a paper
True enough, but people who are looking at author names are not necessarily looking at the entire paper (where contact information is usually given.) A related problem is that journal publications are increasingly subject to various kinds of text data mining, and rightly or wrongly, the format for fields like author institution and contact information isn't standardized from journal to journal -- and in academia, both institutions and e-mail addresses are subject to frequent change. If you published a paper five years ago while at the University of East Dakota and your e-mail in the corresponding author field was given as betterunixthanunix@eastdak.edu, and you're now at South Virginia State with the address butu@svs.edu, good luck getting any database to make that connection without human assistance.
If you're a giant corporation, sure. (And you could be; corporations are people, after all, so why shouldn't they have /. accounts?) But if you're a regular mortal, sorry, you're SOL.
And while you are pointing out that they are desert nomads who use oral traditions, please consider what would happen if you read to them out of a science textbook and then had them write what they heard down on paper 2000 years later.
The ancient Hebrews certainly understood the concept of "year," as well as "ten," "hundred," and "thousand," and multiples thereof. There would have been no reason that divine revelation couldn't have included something like "for over a hundred thousand thousand years, no life moved on the land, but only in the water." Our ancestors weren't idiots, they just didn't have the knowledge we do. Saying "well, they said 'day' when they really meant 'millions of years'" strikes me as a subtle form of denigration.
Your "we can never be completely sure" argument isn't the one that motivates creationists, and you know it. Yes, of course it's possible that evolutionary theory is wrong. It's possible that anything we think we know about how the universe works is wrong. Acknowledging this basic fact is required for any kind of scientific inquiry. But creationists are completely sure that their explanation is right, and they will continue to be sure of this no matter how much evidence accumulates against their position. By invoking "the idea of evolution as a religion," you're arguing against a straw man; the beliefs based on faith rather than science are entirely on one side of this argument, and it's not the side of evolutionary biology.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the ancient desert nomads who told and retold the collection of folktales which eventually got written down as the Book of Genesis meant anything at all other than the literal meaning of the word "day." The Hebrew "yom" has exactly the same meaning as the English "day," and while it can be used poetically to indicate other periods of time ("in those days," "a day will come," etc.) there is nothing in Genesis to indicate such a usage.
... "I hope you're right. I really do." But we know how that worked out.
Leakey is being wildly optimistic. The evidence for evolution is already overwhelming (and no, "intelligent design" is not required.) There is a large and noisy group of people who have made it very plain that they will not accept this evidence. It's an ideological issue for them, not a scientific one. And they will continue to maintain this position in the face of any new evidence that is presented to them. There's no way to win them over with appeals to logic. The only solution, AFAICT, is to continue to shower them with the mockery they so richly deserve, and hope that they're driven back to the lunatic fringe where they belong.
The problem with both Afghanistan and Iraq is that the period after the war was half-assed.
The point is that talking about "after the war" is meaningless in Iraq and (particularly) Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan is still going on, and the situation in Iraq is best described as a poorly enforced cease-fire.
Wars don't end when people say, "Hooray, the war is over!" They end when large bodies of armed men stop trying to kill each other. That hasn't happened in either place, and it won't for the foreseeable future.
The way I saw it, he was talking about the reason why the situation in Afghanistan is so violent.
I think you're giving him way too much credit.
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
I'm really curious as to how you define the situation in Afghanistan as "peace."
The logic (Philosophy) professors at college hated me, because I was right.
They didn't hate you. You weren't interesting enough to be worthy of hatred. They may, however, have been deeply annoyed by you, because you were always taking up class time with your incoherent babbling which you thought was a brilliant refutation of their ideas and everyone else could tell immediately was complete crap.
In general, any tale along the lines of "The Xs hated me because I outsmarted them," where the Xs are any group of authority figures, took place only in the teller's imagination.
People born a long time ago were more likely to be criminals? That's interesting, how does that work?
Younger people are more likely to commit crimes. As the population in general gets older, with fewer people in their late teens and early twenties, crime rates go down.
PLoS, like all reputable open access publishers, waives publication fees for authors who cannot afford to pay. I've seen the specious "open access publishing locks out researchers who can't pay" repeated so often, in such obvious defiance of the facts, that I'm starting to wonder if it's astroturfing on the part of the PRISM crowd.