The thing you're missing is the fact that there's a relatively finite amount of Gold, which makes it fairly inflation-proof. A dollar tied to the value of gold retains it's value much better than a dollar that is not tied to anything, and can be duplicated out of thin air.
That's true, but why would we substitute controllable fluctuation in the value of currency for uncontrolled fluctuation that's dependent on the ratio of gold reserves to economic growth? We've been here before, and I don't see a strong benefit for choosing noisy deflation over steady inflation.
Wouldn't say that. Abstaining from a vote is probably the best thing you can do when rushed legislation is introduced and you don't have time to research it.
When nobody has time to research it, I'd say a "no" vote makes a lot more sense.
I think that The Daily Show did a good job of pointing out how ridiculous this is by showing a video montage of a number of prominent and "tough" politicians tearing up on the Senate floor and elsewhere. It happens. People need to get over it. By all appearances, Clinton is already under enough pressure to look "tough" that she overreacts to leading questions and comes off mean as hell. I'd rather not have public reaction pushing anybody to feel like they have to bite the head off of a live puppy to get the nomination.
As with McCain, while I disagree with him politically, I believe he's a decent, sincere person.
You must have missed McCain's trip to Baghdad to show us how "safe" it was. I actually had some respect for the man until that. I expect better from a man who as seen war than to lie to the American people about the state of a war as blatantly as he did. There's spin and then there's outright fabrication. Neither one is good, but the latter is completely unacceptable.
The only people who think Giuliani is running his entire campaign based purely on 9/11 are not either listening to him, but rather listening to his detractors, and they are not reading his policy statements, and understanding that 9/11 shouldn't be taken off the table either.
I watched the man turn a health care question into an answer about 9/11. He seriously needs to get a grip. He may be a talented public sector executive, but a lot of us are well beyond sick of the politics of fear.
Michigan was stripped of its delegates because the state Dem party moved up the primary without the blessing of the DNC.
Well, Clinton is the only major candidate on the ballot there, and she also more or less has the blessing of the powers that be in the party. Many of us would not be surprised if, when she wins the Michigan primary, the party decides that maybe Michigan's delegates should count.
I just cannot agree with 3 years of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. There are data backups which can be restored. Particularly in the post-HIPAA world of data driven health care. Granted, it may take a little time and a little expense to hit the undo button, but I think the punishment does not fit the crime.
So, is there an amount of financial damage that you think warrants a 2.5 year prison sentence? If there is, what number are you thinking?
Given that this probably involved significant expense and was done with malice, I don't think that 3 years is unreasonable. Accounting for the cost, the lack of meaningful mitigating circumstances, and the fact that it was done with intent to cause significant damage to a lot of people, what's an appropriate sentence that provides both punishment and deterrence?
Do people who think there's no upside to immunization really not think it through far enough, or are they just amazingly stupid?
I think that the reasoning goes something like, "I've never seen anybody with polio, so what's the point of vaccinating?" Obviously, there's a tiny flaw with that reasoning, but scrolling through the comments, I see at least one or two posts that say something like that. I'm leaning toward "amazingly stupid" at this point.
I thought that the Bush Administration could do nothing good by Slashdot standards?
I can't tell for sure, but I strongly suspect that whichever anonymous coward posted this also complains loudly when people post irrelevant anti-Bush trolls.
The rate of deadly infectious diseases is far below the rate of autism.
Can anybody suggest why that might be the case?
I doubt we'd even be having this research without this "conspiracy-theory group".
While I can agree that any research that gives us information is a good thing, I think that our research time might have been better spent elsewhere, since it appears to have confirmed what the experts have been saying all along. Would I welcome a study that shows that good oral hygiene doesn't lead to cancer? I suppose so. Would it be a good thing if a bunch of panicked lay people forced the medical research community to do it in lieu of useful research? Probably not.
There are still a lot of sources of thimerosal. Are you saying these studies showing no link removed all sources or just vaccines? For example they know the kids didn't get into their parents' nasal sprays and breath it? For that matter, that the mother didn't use one during pregnancy? How would they control for other sources.
Well, all of those things could be true, but that's not what the anti-vax crowd has been crowing about all this time. They've specifically pointed to vaccines => mercury => autism. If the theory holds, any significant decrease in the input should cause a decrease in the output. Yes, they could be getting their thimerosal somewhere else, but if you don't know where, and you can't quantify (or even estimate) the thimerosal intake, why would you suspect thimerosal in the first place? Instead of "it must be some thimerosal from somewhere else" why is it not "it must be some other input from somewhere else"? As I see it, it's back to the drawing board for these people.
It may simply be that the autism was 'triggered' by some other source than vaccines.
If autism can indeed be "triggered" then I think that there's no avoiding this conclusion.
With that position, God isn't particularly an execption to the rule that everything that exists needs a creator, because God wouldn't "exist" in the same frame that we recognize everything else to exist (and don't offer the suggestion that what I just said would be just as correct with a period after the word "exist", it completely misses the point).
As I read it, you're just explaining why God is an exception to the rule. That doesn't really make it smell any less like special pleading to me. At best, it's a case of fiddling with the word "exists" to define oneself into correctness. It seems to me that by using the "everything needs a creator" argument and then adding nuances until only their particular god will do, theists are simply building their conclusion into one of their axioms. That doesn't make the "everything needs a creator" axiom very palatable to the rest of us.
That would be a perfectly reasonable position except for one thing: The "who created god" question is usually asked of people who invoke gods as a solution to the "everything that exists needs a creator" problem. It goes like this:
1) Everything that exists needs a creator.
2) The universe exists.
3) I invoke a creator that violates rule (1) to explain (2).
Isn't it just easier to assume that rule (1) may not be true for everything--including the universe? It seems to me that proposing an exception to the rule isn't a particularly clever solution.
Except that any rationalist could see that religion has not been discarded by the gigantic population, and you are therefore making baseless assertions.
That's an interesting point, but I would guess that just about every religion that has ever existed has been discarded, and I don't see much to recommend the current leaders of the pack over past versions.
I changed my mind about wanting to live in the US in 2007. It seems worth seriously considering a move to another country or even another continent.
I don't know about anybody else, but being a victim of our sometimes confused domestic policy seems a lot safer than being a victim of our nutbar foreign policy. I'll stick around here.
What the crap does it matter whether a doctor understands evolution? Doctors deal with the way people's bodies work today, and I couldn't care less what they think about how they worked millennia ago or how they got here.
An electrical engineer can do his work without understanding basic Newtonian physics, but I would seriously question the intelligence of one who went through engineering school without managing to pick it up in the process. I don't think that a doctor not understanding one of the fundamental tenants of biology is any different. Sure, he may do an acceptable job, but there's clearly something wrong.
Contrary to modern economic theory (see: people who failed out of mathematics and switched to economics in undergraduate school) money does not grow from faith: It's just a way to represent man hours, energy, raw materials, and anything else needed to PRODUCE things to CONSUME. But why believe in reality (a.k.a. scarcity) when you can believe quick fix economists desperate to make a name for themselves, sell books, and get political appointments.
I agree with your points on software, but I seriously doubt that you'll find many economists who disagree with this paragraph (except for the implied part about economists being dumbasses). Maybe you didn't totally understand the points your economics professors were trying to impress upon you? Remember: The economics experts on television are to real economists what the computer experts on television are to real computer experts.
I know it was a joke, but isochron dating is actually a really interesting technique. It's a way of telling how long ago stuff that came from a shared pool of matter separated off. A good trick is to use samples from meteorites which should have formed about the same time as the rocky planets from the same pool of matter. The details of the system are covered really well here and a good graph of meteorite results is here. One of the snazzy things about the system is that if your samples violate the assumptions necessary to make the measurement, it's usually easily detectable. The built in check is the correlation coefficient on the linear regression of the data. If the points aren't strongly collinear, there's something wrong with the date. Most violations of the necessary conditions for a correct result produce scattering in the points.
The book is about various aspects relating to the theory of evolution by natural selection through random mutations, but the point of it is not to argue as an apologist towards a religion or towards a bible. Milton is himself irreligious and not a member of any religion.
I appear to be mistaken. Milton just seems to be fond of fringe science. He's a rarity, but they do exist. Why, I'm not sure.
And yet reportedly Milton's summary of Dawkins' review is that it is a hysterical atheistic screed denouncing him as a closest creationist, and short on any specific hard evidential criticisms. Have I read Dawkins' review myself? No more than you have read Milton's book.
I just read Dawkins' review, and I'm thinking that Milton has some rather thin skin for a would-be Galileo. I would think that laboring alone to overturn most of the scientific theories of the 19th and 20th century would have gotten him used to receiving criticism. I don't see accusations of "closet creationist" being thrown around except in Dawkins pointing out that his anti-evolution arguments are essentially rehashes of well known creationist canards from the likes of Henry Morris. Then again, while I don't see any reason not to take Milton at his word (there are plenty of people with too much raw intelligence and too little relevant information who love acting as gadflies to assume that he couldn't possibly be one of them), you have to forgive suspicion in a time when slogans like "Intelligent Design theory is not religion!" are the norm.
My own technical experience is in electrical engineering, not radiometric or isochron dating. Yes I am quite open to the possibility that I am the proverbial layman bamboozled by a technical charlatan and the profession itself is eminently respectable and completely in consensus at all points.
This is sort of the reason for my original post: You're now explicitly disclaiming any real knowledge of the topic when you opened with what was essentially an attack on an entire field of scientists as frauds or idiots. That raises my spider sense in the same way political pundits are always "just joking" when somebody catches them in a lie. Accusations of arrogance from somebody who basically just said, "My knowledge of the topic comes from a single fringe book in the popular press, but physicists and geologists are all liars or incompetent" don't really hold much water. You'll find your posts get a warmer reception when they question the establishment rather than insult it from the peanut gallery.
On the other hand, the other field I know a lot about, economics, I am well-aware of there being no consensus whatsoever but contains the most heated debates imaginable about all points in the field. They are a science (someone is right after all and someone is wrong) but it is a 'softer' science because it is not like whipping particles around in an accelerator again and again and making measurements. And as for electrical engineering, where there is no debate on fundamentals, at least what we study (e.g. an electric machine) is right there in front of us, and we are not engaging in speculative historical study based on neat tools we think might work about a hypothetical machine ten trillion years ago.
Then we have something in common--my degrees are in engineering (computer) and economics. I'll agree with you on the fact that econ is one of those fields with a lot of different models explaining the same things, and reasonable cases can be made for a number of them. As somebody with an econ background, though, you've probably seen the nutbar economic theories debated on the Internet. The various economic schools may not agree on everything, but there are a lot of things that they do agree on, and most armchair Internet economists tend to fall on the other side of that line. Sadly, those ideas can seem pretty palatable in general terms, especially when one h
Of course it is always good to begin on an insufferably arrogant note.
I apologize. I shouldn't have assumed that you would just be parroting the vague and largely misinformed critiques of anti-evolution fringe cases from the popular press. Now that you've done so, though, I'm going to have to retract that apology.
In it, he outlines the precariousness of the logic underlying radiometric dating, arguing to my satisfaction that the results emitted by such methods don't really mean anything at all, and can't be used to argue for anything, for or against.
I'm sure he thinks he does, but I don't really have any intention of buying his book. Any time one starts with a discussion on physics and ends up being pointed to a sermon on the wrongness of "Darwinism" it's pretty clear that physics isn't the real topic and real data isn't the point. My guess is that like everybody else publishing that sort of junk in the popular press, Milton is bringing up the same old tired appeals to all of modern physics being wrong (speed of light bouncing all over the place despite lack of data to support it, every type of radiometric decay miraculously changing in concert with every other type, etc.) in order to support his personal religious views. Nothing says kook better than somebody desperately making modification after modification to atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc. in order to get the numbers to work out right and patch up the holes that their ideas poke in other well established frameworks rather than simply accepting the preponderance of evidence that Earth is, in fact, quite old.
Seriously: Where did the straight line come from? Most of the objections to common radiometric dating are irrelevant to the dating method used in this article and the one in the link I referenced (i.e. people who understand radiometric dating will weep if the response contains words like "carbon dating" or references to hucksters dating sea snail shells). So what's wrong with the line? Why, aside from God's Divine Preference for Straight Lines are the points in the graph collinear? Until somebody can, on one hand, completely destroy radiometric dating and its underlying theory and, on the other, explain that beautiful collinearity, they're just blowing so much smoke.
Nothing to see here. It is not like the radiometric dating methods are completely speculative and saddled with risky assumptions at all. These dates are solid! 4Ma + or - 2Ma... or maybe + or - 4Ma or 40 trillion years, it is not like we are guessing at all.
Hmmm... I would be very interested in knowing your explanation for the nearly perfect straight line found in the first graph here. If what you say is true, well... I wouldn't expect anything resembling a straight line. In fact, I found that graph to be a truly amazing testament to exactly how clever isochron dating is. I strongly suspect that like most people who post this stuff about radiometric dating, you really don't know what you're talking about.
Would someone remind me why we wanted to kick out the Republicans by bringing in the Democrats again? I seem to recall being told that they'd be better than this, but I'm sure it's just me 'cause I always get that feeling after Democrats are elected.
Personally, my highest priority is seeing to it that the people who squander the public trust and thumb their noses at the American people lose their jobs as a consequence. If the next people afterward aren't any better, dump them too. Don't keep incompetent or malicious leaders around just because their replacements might not be any better. If everybody who acts that way is guaranteed to be a one-term office holder, we'll eventually start seeing some better crops of politicians. Hell, we might even stop attracting such sleaze bags to the job if we stop offering them what they want: unchecked power and influence with no accountability.
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I think that The Daily Show did a good job of pointing out how ridiculous this is by showing a video montage of a number of prominent and "tough" politicians tearing up on the Senate floor and elsewhere. It happens. People need to get over it. By all appearances, Clinton is already under enough pressure to look "tough" that she overreacts to leading questions and comes off mean as hell. I'd rather not have public reaction pushing anybody to feel like they have to bite the head off of a live puppy to get the nomination.
Given that this probably involved significant expense and was done with malice, I don't think that 3 years is unreasonable. Accounting for the cost, the lack of meaningful mitigating circumstances, and the fact that it was done with intent to cause significant damage to a lot of people, what's an appropriate sentence that provides both punishment and deterrence?
While I can agree that any research that gives us information is a good thing, I think that our research time might have been better spent elsewhere, since it appears to have confirmed what the experts have been saying all along. Would I welcome a study that shows that good oral hygiene doesn't lead to cancer? I suppose so. Would it be a good thing if a bunch of panicked lay people forced the medical research community to do it in lieu of useful research? Probably not.
If autism can indeed be "triggered" then I think that there's no avoiding this conclusion.
That would be a perfectly reasonable position except for one thing: The "who created god" question is usually asked of people who invoke gods as a solution to the "everything that exists needs a creator" problem. It goes like this:
1) Everything that exists needs a creator.
2) The universe exists. 3) I invoke a creator that violates rule (1) to explain (2).
Isn't it just easier to assume that rule (1) may not be true for everything--including the universe? It seems to me that proposing an exception to the rule isn't a particularly clever solution.
GIGO.
I know it was a joke, but isochron dating is actually a really interesting technique. It's a way of telling how long ago stuff that came from a shared pool of matter separated off. A good trick is to use samples from meteorites which should have formed about the same time as the rocky planets from the same pool of matter. The details of the system are covered really well here and a good graph of meteorite results is here. One of the snazzy things about the system is that if your samples violate the assumptions necessary to make the measurement, it's usually easily detectable. The built in check is the correlation coefficient on the linear regression of the data. If the points aren't strongly collinear, there's something wrong with the date. Most violations of the necessary conditions for a correct result produce scattering in the points.
I appear to be mistaken. Milton just seems to be fond of fringe science. He's a rarity, but they do exist. Why, I'm not sure.
I just read Dawkins' review, and I'm thinking that Milton has some rather thin skin for a would-be Galileo. I would think that laboring alone to overturn most of the scientific theories of the 19th and 20th century would have gotten him used to receiving criticism. I don't see accusations of "closet creationist" being thrown around except in Dawkins pointing out that his anti-evolution arguments are essentially rehashes of well known creationist canards from the likes of Henry Morris. Then again, while I don't see any reason not to take Milton at his word (there are plenty of people with too much raw intelligence and too little relevant information who love acting as gadflies to assume that he couldn't possibly be one of them), you have to forgive suspicion in a time when slogans like "Intelligent Design theory is not religion!" are the norm.
This is sort of the reason for my original post: You're now explicitly disclaiming any real knowledge of the topic when you opened with what was essentially an attack on an entire field of scientists as frauds or idiots. That raises my spider sense in the same way political pundits are always "just joking" when somebody catches them in a lie. Accusations of arrogance from somebody who basically just said, "My knowledge of the topic comes from a single fringe book in the popular press, but physicists and geologists are all liars or incompetent" don't really hold much water. You'll find your posts get a warmer reception when they question the establishment rather than insult it from the peanut gallery.
Then we have something in common--my degrees are in engineering (computer) and economics. I'll agree with you on the fact that econ is one of those fields with a lot of different models explaining the same things, and reasonable cases can be made for a number of them. As somebody with an econ background, though, you've probably seen the nutbar economic theories debated on the Internet. The various economic schools may not agree on everything, but there are a lot of things that they do agree on, and most armchair Internet economists tend to fall on the other side of that line. Sadly, those ideas can seem pretty palatable in general terms, especially when one h
I'm sure he thinks he does, but I don't really have any intention of buying his book. Any time one starts with a discussion on physics and ends up being pointed to a sermon on the wrongness of "Darwinism" it's pretty clear that physics isn't the real topic and real data isn't the point. My guess is that like everybody else publishing that sort of junk in the popular press, Milton is bringing up the same old tired appeals to all of modern physics being wrong (speed of light bouncing all over the place despite lack of data to support it, every type of radiometric decay miraculously changing in concert with every other type, etc.) in order to support his personal religious views. Nothing says kook better than somebody desperately making modification after modification to atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc. in order to get the numbers to work out right and patch up the holes that their ideas poke in other well established frameworks rather than simply accepting the preponderance of evidence that Earth is, in fact, quite old.
Seriously: Where did the straight line come from? Most of the objections to common radiometric dating are irrelevant to the dating method used in this article and the one in the link I referenced (i.e. people who understand radiometric dating will weep if the response contains words like "carbon dating" or references to hucksters dating sea snail shells). So what's wrong with the line? Why, aside from God's Divine Preference for Straight Lines are the points in the graph collinear? Until somebody can, on one hand, completely destroy radiometric dating and its underlying theory and, on the other, explain that beautiful collinearity, they're just blowing so much smoke.