This only matter if having a computer helps with your academics. Or, more precisely, has a net benefit.
When you read the rhetoric over the digital divide, they always talk about poor kids growing up not knowing how to use Word or Google or something, and that's just nonsense. Even the modest exposure they get at school is enough to learn that.
>>In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children's computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes.
Which is why the entire digital divide issue is stupid, in my opinion.
Unless a kid is growing up without any exposure to computers at all, he'll be technologically proficient by the time he graduates. Study after study show that using technology often hurts, instead of helps, student performance.
I say this as someone who teaches teachers how to use technology in the classroom, and I start every lecture by saying, "Only use it when there's a damn good reason to do so."
And there *are* good reasons to do so. Sometimes. But the way that most schools use computers is nothing short of neglect.
You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered?
For example; "This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like "hide the decline") and then hyped into "Climategate"." (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/)
Or the tendency for certain climatologists to throw out offensive notions like the Salem Hypothesis when someone disagrees with them.
>>In fact, climatologists express how "well understood" an effect is by the error bars on the radiative forcings chart.
To a certain extent you can do this. If you have a positive or negative feedback cycle that is poorly understood, error bars become so large as to be meaningless. For example, if all the ice in Greenland suddenly slides into the ocean next week, it would create a global catastrophe that would lead to various situations well outside of our confidence levels.
>>In the House: 153 Democrats voted for the civil rights act, and 91 against, or 63% in favor. 136 Republicans for, and 35 against, or 80% in favor.
Well, there you have your concrete proof that Republicans were the party of racists./rolleyes
Certainly there was a geographic divide. What I was attacking was your notion that Republicans were racists when, as you say, more of them supported the bill than democrats. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was included in the Republican party platform, FFS.
>>In your universe welfare and welfare reform has something to do with race. Interesting. Very interesting.
When did I say it had anything to do with race? I have simply noticed that there is a correlation between thinking that 1) Republicans were against the various Civil Rights Acts and 2) The belief that Clinton was responsible for welfare reform, when it was enacted as part of the Republican's Contract with America, over the protests of the Democrat party. Clinton didn't veto it, but he certainly didn't propose it, and certainly didn't do anything during the two years he controlled an undivided government.
>>The title Grand Moff is, you moron, from Star Wars. Christ, you're an idiot.
Gosh. Wow, really? A Star Wars term? I, as an avid Slashdotter, have certainly never heard of Star Wars, and wasn't at the Star Wars Live concert last night, and I CERTAINLY wouldn't be caught dead mocking the ludicrous titles of the KKK, would it?
Had nothing to do with Byrd advising the KKK on appointing people to positions within the organization, advising the Grand Imperial Wizard Samuel Green, could it? In the time period after he claimed he'd left?
>>No, but again that's totally irrelevant to my original point, in that the Republicans ended up with the racists in the mid-60.
Which mid-60s? The 1860s? Oh, but Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Maybe you mean the later 1960s? Oh, but the Republicans overwhelmingly voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Either way you slice it, it's just really hard to peg the Republicans as a party of racists.
>>A 40% swing in votes may be due to error rather than intent, but it's worth noting here that you'd be very hard pressed to find a scenario worse than what just happened,
It's only a 40% swing if you don't actually read the article.
The difference between the electronic machines and absentee ballots was (only) 11%. The GP was exaggerating out of his ass.
>>In a poll taken approximately a week before the election, only 4% of the potential voters recognized the name of the "loser". So, no, none of that sounds suspicious.
Because the party choice had strong name recognition?
Oh, wait... only 5% recognized whatever-his-name.
Just because you have a number for one side doesn't imply the other side is any better.
"...a 99% chance of having a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake within the next 30 years."
That is the assessment we have for California.
What they don't tell you is that that prediction was made 30 years ago.
Well, okay, not that exact study, but as someone who grew up in San Diego with its occasional earthquakes, we were taught in school that The Big One would certainly hit before 2000.
In Canada we have an efficient, simple, business-friendly tax system (to say nothing of our health-care system, which allows higher worker mobility and much greater risk-taking for entrepreneurs with young families). In the US you have a mess.
There's a reason for this. The US Constitution prohibits the federal government from doing a lot of different things. Back during the Great Depression, for example, FDR pushed through the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, and a number of them got overturned by the supreme court, since they were stepping outside the constitutional limits. A supreme court justice sent a note to FDR telling him he was missing the obvious point: the federal government controls taxation, and so could use that to make the changes he wanted to make, constitutionally.
So what's happened is the tax code has become a proxy for being able to pass laws that other countries can at the national level. Taxes (and the commerce clause) are the engine for politicians trying to control our country, and as a result you have a tax code longer than the entire corpus of laws in most countries.
It also leads to an IRS that can basically act with impunity. A company I used to work for got audited, and the agent started off by summing all the deposits made into the company accounts as "income" to provide a "starting point for negotiations". This included TRANSFERS of money between accounts, and so the "starting point" for taxes worked out to be more money than the company made in a year. They complained to the agent's supervisor at the IRS who said, in essence, well yeah.
>>The contrail cover from planes reflect more light from the sun.
Also, it's important to state that up until this point, climatologists thought that contrails had a forcing effect helping to cause global warming. And still show it that way, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
While honest climatologists will admit that some areas in AGW are very well understood, and others are much less understood, dishonest climatologists will pretend that they know everything and how dare you for questioning the global warming groupthink. In fact, how they respond to reasoned criticism is often a clear giveaway as to which camp they fall into.
Right, he was talking about the Republican crossover theory, but he was puzzled why so many Republicans turned out to vote this year, which means he's kind of ignorant of the Sweet Tea Party.
>>>>he won the election day votes by 20 points but lost the absentee votes by 60.
From TFA: "The result in the Senate election is highly statistically significant: Rawl performs 11 percentage points better among absentee voters than he does among Election Day voters."
In other words, not at all what you're talking about.
While an 11 point swing is interesting, it's not the smoking gun that TFA makes it out to be - absentee ballots are not an independent sample of an electorate. They're well known to have statistically different compositions than the general populace, in various ways.
Overall, the investigation just has a bit of hand-waving going for it, along with a lot of unsubstantiated skepticism. For example, TFA can't understand why lots of Republican voters turned out this year ("From eyeballing the GOP primary totals, it seems like turnout in that elections was almost ludicrously high..."), meaning that the idiot probably isn't aware that there is currently a very active movement based upon the consumption of a certain type of caffeinated beverages. (Though in South Carolina, I guarantee you it would be sweet tea./shudder)
>>If this shows anything, though, it's the need for a non-electronic audit trail. I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting.
Indeed. In fact, it has been demonstrated to be so easy to own some of the electronic voting machines (many years back) that the fact that people are still using these atroicities is a disgrace. My county (San Diego County) scrapped the electronic voting machines, or at least it looks that way. They weren't in existence at the local Registrar of Voters, but they were four years ago... and those even those would just print a paper ballot that you would be asked to visually confirm.
>>if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
It depends. It would probably take energy to reduce the mass of an object. You'd have to maintain the field reducing the mass of an object - as soon as the field ended, it would slow down (due to conservation of energy/momentum, otherwise you could build an perpetual motion machine). Depending on how much energy it takes to reduce mass would determine if it wouldn't just be better to use the energy on the spaceship to boost around.
Of course, this only holds true if the mass stays positive. If you can reduce the mass of an object to zero, it moves at the speed of light, and time doesn't pass for it, making interstellar travel a lot more attractive than what we have now (generation ships and whatnot). You'd need some way of restoring mass at some point though.
If mass could go negative, then it would open up the possibilities of creating wormholes.
>>Another programmer has a similar habit of accusing me of making strawman arguments
I've also noticed you perhaps get me confused with other people.
>>Your error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical... among other mistakes which would be inexplicable for someone with a graduate or undergraduate (?) degree in physics.
Two years of physics as an undergraduate, perfect score on the SATII Physics Test, 5 on the AP Physics test, I taught methods in solving physics problems, etc., including an undergraduate quarter spent on error analysis. I also read a great deal. This is one of the reasons I get annoyed when you so blithely disparage people as non-physicists. The main reason, though, is that it's arrogant and rude. I don't assume that you don't know how to program a computer because of your field, except when I'm intentionally insulting you. =)
>>I'm only allergic to answering the same questions repeatedly
That's awesome for you. Except I think that I had never stated my stances in an encapsulated fashion before. Perhaps you're tired of answering them from multiple people? Because from my perspective, you just appeared to be dodging the subject.
>>And that's the second time you've accused me of being dishonest
Making a claim, then refusing to answer it, provide supporting evidence, etc., and then claiming to have already answered it is dishonest behavior. Now that you've actually given an answer to one of my four claims, I retract that statement.
>>And yet I don't share your obvious contempt for Phil Jones. I don't have time to link everything now, but here's the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle,
From what I understand, one of the anti-AGW M's filed one FOIA request a month, and only then because Phil Jones refused to ever answer a single FOIA request. This hardly seems like flooding his office, and his circumlocutions to hide the data reek badly in a field that needs openness to survive.
I do thank you for your answer on this, though. It's nice to see that we both agree on the core matter.
>>Another programmer with a similar debating style as you also recently accused me of being dishonest because he didn't want to do a lot of reading.
I don't mind reading. To the contrary, really - my wife thinks I have a reading problem. But linking to a hard to read flat thread is tedious in the extreme to work with.
>>in my mind having a fixed limit is better than having an 'Unlimited' plan
The problem is, they're setting the fixed limits so low as to be laughable. A 5GB plan is the equivalent of 10 youtube videos a day. A far, far cry from "unlimited". Likewise, even downloading even a single game over Steam goes from being slow to ridiculously expensive (as in buy-a-new-car expensive because you tethered your 3G device).
>>You responded to a dozen pages of carefully referenced science without saying anything new
I'd also like to answer this. Most all of your links are to your own website, which abuse the nice, nested comment threads here on slashdot and flatten them. If you have something to say about a post on Slashdot, reply to me here. I'm not going to scroll through another mega-block of flattened text trying to pick out your non-existent thesis statements.
If you ever figure out how to do proper argumentation (thesis statement + supporting statements), please reply to this post here, and not on your site. It's annoying in the extreme to debate someone who doesn't know the proper forms of debate.
I can argue the same way as you. I can strawman your arguments, give extensive reasons why the argument (that you didn't make) are wrong, and then shut up when you present your points in a clarified manner.
That's why I'm doubting your honesty. Believe me, man, I understand about writing papers, but you seem allergic to actually answering anything I actually say.
Here's a quick one that you can answer in one sentence (or more, if you'd like): do you think Phil Jones acted appropriately?
You were debunking strawnen that I didn't make. I bloody well understand what error means, but you completely missed my point on it, and so forth. Your references were wonderful, but also completely missing the point.
I just gave you a nice summary of my stances. If you can't give a simple agree/disagree after all the posts we've traded on the subject, I'm bound to suspect your honesty.
I don't believe I've ever contradicted myself on RC.org, though I suppose it's possible. Care to share? It's possible that you got distracted by my language (which is generally negative toward them and Phil Jones and others), so let me summarize for you. Please let me know if you agree or disagree on each point. Answering this summary will be easier than you dancing around through a bunch of different threads.
1) RC.org is a valuable website, but they have a very strong political bias, censor and edit posts heavily, and engage in biased behavior that borders on the dishonest, giving free passes to people that agree with them, and nitpicking heavily on people that disagree with them. I don't believe their core science is bad, though I take issue with how they present it sometimes.
2) Phil Jones and his merry band of climatologists engaged in bad behavior, using legally-questionable tactics to dodge FOIA requests. Most telling was his statement that he wouldn't share his data because they might use it to disprove his work. This is anti-scientific. In a field where all you really have are climate data and computer models, refusing to share them with the world is akin to a physicist claiming that he's invented Cold Fusion, but refusing to show exactly how (except perhaps to a couple of his friends). Gavin of course defended him saying that while maybe THEIR data wasn't available, HIS data was available, and so that made it all better. (Which it didn't - it rather just highlighted their shady behavior). However, I think that most of the rest of the Climategate scandal was completely misrepresented in the media, with absolutely horrid reporting by a variety of sources. The real story - which everyone ignored for red herrings like "hide the decline" - was Phil Jones mailing people (Gaving Schmidt included) talking about ways to dodge FOIA requests. I'd also take Jones to task for losing the data, but I've worked at universities before and know how disorganized they can be.
3) I think AGW is real, a serious threat, that parts of it are exaggerated, parts of it are under-reported (most significantly the acidification of the oceans) and that most of the mainstream solutions are horrible. The AGW community (painting a very wide paintbrush here) has a fascination with solutions that will kill people, destroy the economy, and be horrendously expensive, but refuse to look at geoengineering solutions that could be cheaper and more effective, and refuse to look at green technologies like nuclear because they're ignorant. Climatologists also tend to think that because they know the science of global warming, they're qualified to write policy.
4) Depending on how puckish I'm feeling, climatology could or could not be a "science". Science is defined by empirical observations, hypothesis generation, testing, and hypothesis confirmation or falsification. Climatology doesn't meet up to this full set of requirements to be science, so it, like a lot of other fields, fall somewhere in the middle of the science divide. Due to the prestige "science" acquired in the 20th century, most fields nowadays have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves, and I see this as being more of the same. It's also why I think that climate scientists are much more angry and defensive than, say, plasma physicists.
>>Note that I didn't respond to the neutral word "heuristics" and instead concentrated on the colorful (and inherently subjective) adjectives that you used.
You're not a computer science, guy, then. A heuristic IS a hackish attempt to solve a problem without mathematical elegance or rigor. It's just a nicer way of putting it than I did. Heuristics can certainly be effective (that's why I thought your criticism of my statement was rather silly), but they're really just educated guesses at solving a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
>>What was that rant about?
The background story involves Hispanic voters complaining that they weren't getting people of the right race elected.
>>It's the home where the divide exists.
This only matter if having a computer helps with your academics. Or, more precisely, has a net benefit.
When you read the rhetoric over the digital divide, they always talk about poor kids growing up not knowing how to use Word or Google or something, and that's just nonsense. Even the modest exposure they get at school is enough to learn that.
>>Have you ever heard of Repetitive Sprain Injury?
Repetitive STRAIN Injury? Sure. My wife has it, and it has really messed up her ability to work (as a pharmacist, she needs to be able to type).
I on the other hand am a computer science guy, and have never had any problems, and I have spent most of my life in front of a computer.
When I take hand notes, though, my forearms cramp up almost immediately.
>>In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children's computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes.
Which is why the entire digital divide issue is stupid, in my opinion.
Unless a kid is growing up without any exposure to computers at all, he'll be technologically proficient by the time he graduates. Study after study show that using technology often hurts, instead of helps, student performance.
I say this as someone who teaches teachers how to use technology in the classroom, and I start every lecture by saying, "Only use it when there's a damn good reason to do so."
And there *are* good reasons to do so. Sometimes. But the way that most schools use computers is nothing short of neglect.
>>responding badly to reasoned criticism
You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered?
For example;
"This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like "hide the decline") and then hyped into "Climategate"."
(http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/)
Or you can just read the editor's comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here's an interplay between Pielke and Stefan:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/#comment-159627
Or the tendency for certain climatologists to throw out offensive notions like the Salem Hypothesis when someone disagrees with them.
>>In fact, climatologists express how "well understood" an effect is by the error bars on the radiative forcings chart.
To a certain extent you can do this. If you have a positive or negative feedback cycle that is poorly understood, error bars become so large as to be meaningless. For example, if all the ice in Greenland suddenly slides into the ocean next week, it would create a global catastrophe that would lead to various situations well outside of our confidence levels.
>>In the House: 153 Democrats voted for the civil rights act, and 91 against, or 63% in favor. 136 Republicans for, and 35 against, or 80% in favor.
Well, there you have your concrete proof that Republicans were the party of racists. /rolleyes
Certainly there was a geographic divide. What I was attacking was your notion that Republicans were racists when, as you say, more of them supported the bill than democrats. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was included in the Republican party platform, FFS.
>>In your universe welfare and welfare reform has something to do with race. Interesting. Very interesting.
When did I say it had anything to do with race? I have simply noticed that there is a correlation between thinking that 1) Republicans were against the various Civil Rights Acts and 2) The belief that Clinton was responsible for welfare reform, when it was enacted as part of the Republican's Contract with America, over the protests of the Democrat party. Clinton didn't veto it, but he certainly didn't propose it, and certainly didn't do anything during the two years he controlled an undivided government.
>>The title Grand Moff is, you moron, from Star Wars. Christ, you're an idiot.
Gosh. Wow, really? A Star Wars term? I, as an avid Slashdotter, have certainly never heard of Star Wars, and wasn't at the Star Wars Live concert last night, and I CERTAINLY wouldn't be caught dead mocking the ludicrous titles of the KKK, would it?
Had nothing to do with Byrd advising the KKK on appointing people to positions within the organization, advising the Grand Imperial Wizard Samuel Green, could it? In the time period after he claimed he'd left?
>>No, but again that's totally irrelevant to my original point, in that the Republicans ended up with the racists in the mid-60.
Which mid-60s? The 1860s? Oh, but Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Maybe you mean the later 1960s? Oh, but the Republicans overwhelmingly voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Either way you slice it, it's just really hard to peg the Republicans as a party of racists.
>>A 40% swing in votes may be due to error rather than intent, but it's worth noting here that you'd be very hard pressed to find a scenario worse than what just happened,
It's only a 40% swing if you don't actually read the article.
The difference between the electronic machines and absentee ballots was (only) 11%. The GP was exaggerating out of his ass.
>>In a poll taken approximately a week before the election, only 4% of the potential voters recognized the name of the "loser". So, no, none of that sounds suspicious.
Because the party choice had strong name recognition?
Oh, wait... only 5% recognized whatever-his-name.
Just because you have a number for one side doesn't imply the other side is any better.
>>Only in the Republican universe did 'Republicans' oppose segregation and 'Democrats' support it.
Actually, that's exactly how it was. Your disconnect with reality is fascinating, though.
Some questions for you:
1) Are you one of the lunatics that thinks that Clinton was responsible for Welfare reform, too?
2) Is Senator Byrd (former Grand Moff of the KKK) a Democrat or Republican?
3) Is affirmative action color blind or not?
4) Are there hordes of racists still running around in the Republican party?
Harry Reid has done a lot worse in Nevada. :/
What they don't tell you is that that prediction was made 30 years ago.
Well, okay, not that exact study, but as someone who grew up in San Diego with its occasional earthquakes, we were taught in school that The Big One would certainly hit before 2000.
There's a reason for this. The US Constitution prohibits the federal government from doing a lot of different things. Back during the Great Depression, for example, FDR pushed through the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, and a number of them got overturned by the supreme court, since they were stepping outside the constitutional limits. A supreme court justice sent a note to FDR telling him he was missing the obvious point: the federal government controls taxation, and so could use that to make the changes he wanted to make, constitutionally.
So what's happened is the tax code has become a proxy for being able to pass laws that other countries can at the national level. Taxes (and the commerce clause) are the engine for politicians trying to control our country, and as a result you have a tax code longer than the entire corpus of laws in most countries.
It also leads to an IRS that can basically act with impunity. A company I used to work for got audited, and the agent started off by summing all the deposits made into the company accounts as "income" to provide a "starting point for negotiations". This included TRANSFERS of money between accounts, and so the "starting point" for taxes worked out to be more money than the company made in a year. They complained to the agent's supervisor at the IRS who said, in essence, well yeah.
>>although unless somebody has successfully plotted the curve (nobody has)
Really? Nobody ever has? *Laffer* never has?
This is one meme that needs to die. He's done the work on it and set the optimal tax rate around 15% or so.
You may or may not disagree with him (the evidence either way isn't overwhelming), but please don't repeat this meme:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FzjwXNKlSOQ/R7nsXl5svhI/AAAAAAAAAJc/63nQesUpCLQ/s400/gardner.gif
No problem. I'll see if I can dig up a better paper for you. From what I recall, the average temperatures went up as well, ~2.0 C
>>The contrail cover from planes reflect more light from the sun.
Also, it's important to state that up until this point, climatologists thought that contrails had a forcing effect helping to cause global warming. And still show it that way, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
However, papers like this: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6898/full/418601a.html rather convincingly argued that they have a rather strong forcing in the opposite direction (i.e. that they help to dim sunlight more than they trap heat).
While honest climatologists will admit that some areas in AGW are very well understood, and others are much less understood, dishonest climatologists will pretend that they know everything and how dare you for questioning the global warming groupthink. In fact, how they respond to reasoned criticism is often a clear giveaway as to which camp they fall into.
Right, he was talking about the Republican crossover theory, but he was puzzled why so many Republicans turned out to vote this year, which means he's kind of ignorant of the Sweet Tea Party.
>>>>he won the election day votes by 20 points but lost the absentee votes by 60.
From TFA:
"The result in the Senate election is highly statistically significant: Rawl performs 11 percentage points better among absentee voters than he does among Election Day voters."
In other words, not at all what you're talking about.
While an 11 point swing is interesting, it's not the smoking gun that TFA makes it out to be - absentee ballots are not an independent sample of an electorate. They're well known to have statistically different compositions than the general populace, in various ways.
Overall, the investigation just has a bit of hand-waving going for it, along with a lot of unsubstantiated skepticism. For example, TFA can't understand why lots of Republican voters turned out this year ("From eyeballing the GOP primary totals, it seems like turnout in that elections was almost ludicrously high..."), meaning that the idiot probably isn't aware that there is currently a very active movement based upon the consumption of a certain type of caffeinated beverages. (Though in South Carolina, I guarantee you it would be sweet tea. /shudder)
>>If this shows anything, though, it's the need for a non-electronic audit trail. I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting.
Indeed. In fact, it has been demonstrated to be so easy to own some of the electronic voting machines (many years back) that the fact that people are still using these atroicities is a disgrace. My county (San Diego County) scrapped the electronic voting machines, or at least it looks that way. They weren't in existence at the local Registrar of Voters, but they were four years ago... and those even those would just print a paper ballot that you would be asked to visually confirm.
>>if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
It depends. It would probably take energy to reduce the mass of an object. You'd have to maintain the field reducing the mass of an object - as soon as the field ended, it would slow down (due to conservation of energy/momentum, otherwise you could build an perpetual motion machine). Depending on how much energy it takes to reduce mass would determine if it wouldn't just be better to use the energy on the spaceship to boost around.
Of course, this only holds true if the mass stays positive. If you can reduce the mass of an object to zero, it moves at the speed of light, and time doesn't pass for it, making interstellar travel a lot more attractive than what we have now (generation ships and whatnot). You'd need some way of restoring mass at some point though.
If mass could go negative, then it would open up the possibilities of creating wormholes.
>>Another programmer has a similar habit of accusing me of making strawman arguments
I've also noticed you perhaps get me confused with other people.
>>Your error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical... among other mistakes which would be inexplicable for someone with a graduate or undergraduate (?) degree in physics.
Two years of physics as an undergraduate, perfect score on the SATII Physics Test, 5 on the AP Physics test, I taught methods in solving physics problems, etc., including an undergraduate quarter spent on error analysis. I also read a great deal. This is one of the reasons I get annoyed when you so blithely disparage people as non-physicists. The main reason, though, is that it's arrogant and rude. I don't assume that you don't know how to program a computer because of your field, except when I'm intentionally insulting you. =)
>>I'm only allergic to answering the same questions repeatedly
That's awesome for you. Except I think that I had never stated my stances in an encapsulated fashion before. Perhaps you're tired of answering them from multiple people? Because from my perspective, you just appeared to be dodging the subject.
>>And that's the second time you've accused me of being dishonest
Making a claim, then refusing to answer it, provide supporting evidence, etc., and then claiming to have already answered it is dishonest behavior. Now that you've actually given an answer to one of my four claims, I retract that statement.
>>And yet I don't share your obvious contempt for Phil Jones. I don't have time to link everything now, but here's the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle,
From what I understand, one of the anti-AGW M's filed one FOIA request a month, and only then because Phil Jones refused to ever answer a single FOIA request. This hardly seems like flooding his office, and his circumlocutions to hide the data reek badly in a field that needs openness to survive.
I do thank you for your answer on this, though. It's nice to see that we both agree on the core matter.
>>Another programmer with a similar debating style as you also recently accused me of being dishonest because he didn't want to do a lot of reading.
I don't mind reading. To the contrary, really - my wife thinks I have a reading problem. But linking to a hard to read flat thread is tedious in the extreme to work with.
>>in my mind having a fixed limit is better than having an 'Unlimited' plan
The problem is, they're setting the fixed limits so low as to be laughable. A 5GB plan is the equivalent of 10 youtube videos a day. A far, far cry from "unlimited". Likewise, even downloading even a single game over Steam goes from being slow to ridiculously expensive (as in buy-a-new-car expensive because you tethered your 3G device).
>>You responded to a dozen pages of carefully referenced science without saying anything new
I'd also like to answer this. Most all of your links are to your own website, which abuse the nice, nested comment threads here on slashdot and flatten them. If you have something to say about a post on Slashdot, reply to me here. I'm not going to scroll through another mega-block of flattened text trying to pick out your non-existent thesis statements.
If you ever figure out how to do proper argumentation (thesis statement + supporting statements), please reply to this post here, and not on your site. It's annoying in the extreme to debate someone who doesn't know the proper forms of debate.
I can argue the same way as you. I can strawman your arguments, give extensive reasons why the argument (that you didn't make) are wrong, and then shut up when you present your points in a clarified manner.
That's why I'm doubting your honesty. Believe me, man, I understand about writing papers, but you seem allergic to actually answering anything I actually say.
Here's a quick one that you can answer in one sentence (or more, if you'd like): do you think Phil Jones acted appropriately?
You were debunking strawnen that I didn't make. I bloody well understand what error means, but you completely missed my point on it, and so forth. Your references were wonderful, but also completely missing the point.
I just gave you a nice summary of my stances. If you can't give a simple agree/disagree after all the posts we've traded on the subject, I'm bound to suspect your honesty.
>>Tread carefully.
I don't believe I've ever contradicted myself on RC.org, though I suppose it's possible. Care to share? It's possible that you got distracted by my language (which is generally negative toward them and Phil Jones and others), so let me summarize for you. Please let me know if you agree or disagree on each point. Answering this summary will be easier than you dancing around through a bunch of different threads.
1) RC.org is a valuable website, but they have a very strong political bias, censor and edit posts heavily, and engage in biased behavior that borders on the dishonest, giving free passes to people that agree with them, and nitpicking heavily on people that disagree with them. I don't believe their core science is bad, though I take issue with how they present it sometimes.
2) Phil Jones and his merry band of climatologists engaged in bad behavior, using legally-questionable tactics to dodge FOIA requests. Most telling was his statement that he wouldn't share his data because they might use it to disprove his work. This is anti-scientific. In a field where all you really have are climate data and computer models, refusing to share them with the world is akin to a physicist claiming that he's invented Cold Fusion, but refusing to show exactly how (except perhaps to a couple of his friends). Gavin of course defended him saying that while maybe THEIR data wasn't available, HIS data was available, and so that made it all better. (Which it didn't - it rather just highlighted their shady behavior). However, I think that most of the rest of the Climategate scandal was completely misrepresented in the media, with absolutely horrid reporting by a variety of sources. The real story - which everyone ignored for red herrings like "hide the decline" - was Phil Jones mailing people (Gaving Schmidt included) talking about ways to dodge FOIA requests. I'd also take Jones to task for losing the data, but I've worked at universities before and know how disorganized they can be.
3) I think AGW is real, a serious threat, that parts of it are exaggerated, parts of it are under-reported (most significantly the acidification of the oceans) and that most of the mainstream solutions are horrible. The AGW community (painting a very wide paintbrush here) has a fascination with solutions that will kill people, destroy the economy, and be horrendously expensive, but refuse to look at geoengineering solutions that could be cheaper and more effective, and refuse to look at green technologies like nuclear because they're ignorant. Climatologists also tend to think that because they know the science of global warming, they're qualified to write policy.
4) Depending on how puckish I'm feeling, climatology could or could not be a "science". Science is defined by empirical observations, hypothesis generation, testing, and hypothesis confirmation or falsification. Climatology doesn't meet up to this full set of requirements to be science, so it, like a lot of other fields, fall somewhere in the middle of the science divide. Due to the prestige "science" acquired in the 20th century, most fields nowadays have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves, and I see this as being more of the same. It's also why I think that climate scientists are much more angry and defensive than, say, plasma physicists.
>>Note that I didn't respond to the neutral word "heuristics" and instead concentrated on the colorful (and inherently subjective) adjectives that you used.
You're not a computer science, guy, then. A heuristic IS a hackish attempt to solve a problem without mathematical elegance or rigor. It's just a nicer way of putting it than I did. Heuristics can certainly be effective (that's why I thought your criticism of my statement was rather silly), but they're really just educated guesses at solving a problem.