>>You believe the theory that has observations to prove it works. Not the scientist. Pretty simple if you ask me.
Excellent, so we can dismiss global warming then?
Temperatures went down from the 1930s to the 1960s, and again in the last 10 years. 10 years is too long for random variation to be credited to the decrease. In fact, what we found out from Climategate was that the scientists were at a loss to explain the decline, calling it a travesty that nobody could explain it.
While I'm being about half tongue-in-cheek here, this does highlight why CLIMATE SCIENCE IS NOT SCIENCE. There's no testing, experimentation, or falsification of theories. If we had a bunch of identical copies of Earth to work on, and could engineer them in different ways... then yeah, it'd be science.
The real issue at stake here is that climate science is not science, and by calling themselves scientists (practicing science), they called into question real scientific disciplines like physics, where you actually can test your theories. Unless it's string theory. Then you just sort of flap your hands around a lot.
To invent more pointless crap that is vaguely environmentally friendly?
Maybe now is the time for me to patent my oil-leak caps, which would be positioned on all the leaking fissures off the coast of California, to stop the earth from polluting itself with all that crude oil.
Never thought off-shore drilling could be so environmentally friendly, eh?
>>Most of the "green products" you've just mentioned in all likelihood have little actual environmental benefit.
But... but... they say GREEN in huge letters on the boxes! Surely they must be good for the environment! My lord, man, my soap has a giant hole in the middle of it! If that doesn't save the pandas, I don't know what will.
Looking around my hotel room here, there's no less than: Green shampoo and conditioner Green shampoo bottles (made from corn!) Green soap (no soap in the middle of the bar - less waste!) Green soap box (it's brown! it must be good for the enviroment!) Save the environment sign with a panda bear, telling me to reuse my towels. (If you don't, the panda will eat you?) Another sign explaining just how green the green soap is (and the green soap is actually branded "Green Natura"), including the use of soy products for the ink. Green facial soap. Sign telling me not to smoke unless I can breathe backwards. Sign by my bed, telling me I need to place it on the bed if I want my sheets changed.
My fucking lord - you want MORE green products? Where will they go?
All I see is a troubling increase in the number of diagnoses, combined with a troubling increase in the belief that these symptoms require medical/psychiatric attention to normalize any differences. I don't know about you, but I loathe the idea of a society of homogeneous personalities as much as I loathe the idea of an ice cream shop with homogenized flavors. Variety is the spice of life.
Not all of it is the result of increased diagnosis. As in, it's unlikely the increase is due to improved detection. Read up on the subject if it interests you.
I'm with you in that a vanilla society is uninteresting, but there is something troubling going on, more than just classification.
This notion was both used in Brave New World and Dean Koontz's Frankenstein - using autistic people to perform as worker bees.
That said, there's been a troubling increase of babies born on the spectrum in recent years, and so finding a productive niche for them is something I'm all for.
(And of course, they'd probably make great software programmers.)
>>A guy who's looking forward to his contract ending so he can get an Android on a network that hopefully sucks less.
I've been enjoying the droid on Verizon. The 3G is decently fast, and has pretty good coverage (I've yet to be in an urban area that wasn't covered, and I've been all over the country in the last couple weeks). And you can always enable wifi if you want better bandwidth, less latency, or are worried about being tagged a data hog.
I think the iPhone is still the better experience, but I've been wanting to buy a (somewhat) open source phone for a while now, and this was my first opportunity to do so on Verizon. I haven't regretted it yet.
>>If a company makes a game, they own it. If you want to play it, you have to agree to their terms. If you don't like their terms, ok, go away and play a different game. Sorry, you don't get to play the game and ignore the rules. Is that really so hard to accept?
There's two parts to buying World of Warcraft. You give them $40 or so for the game. Ok. And you give them 10 or 15 bucks a month for the subscription.
If you don't pay the subscription, *you still own the game*. If you want to fuck around looking at the title screen, or feeding it fake information (say, from a private server) that's your own damn business and they can't tell you otherwise. The most they can do is kick you off their own servers and cancel your account.
>>It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open.
This is good design for large numbers of open windows. This is not good design for small numbers of open windows.
I have four windows open right now. 1 Adobe Acrobat, 3 Firefox. Titles showing on all the windows so I know what they are.
On XP, it's a single click to the bottom of the screen to switch windows.
With Tabbed Browsing in Firefox - which I refuse to use (thanks, Tabkiller) due to the reasons in this post - I'd have to click twice to switch to the window I want: once on the bottom of the screen to go to Firefox, and then once at the top of the screen to pick my tab. This is stupid and annoying, so I use tabkiller. (Unfortunately, the Firefox guys were so enamored with tabbed browsing that they put in no native ability to disable tabs into the browser, and Tabkiller bugs out occasionally.)
On Win7, I have to mouse to the bottom of the screen, hover, and then click on the window that I want. I then (if tabs are enabled) have to mouse up to the top of the screen to pick the tab that I want. In other words, this is the slowest method yet of switching Windows.
So in summary, FUCK YOU WIN7. I wanted common operations to be easier in Windows 7, but it didn't happen. So yeah, I guess I Didn't Make Windows 7(tm).
>>Another study of teachers, asked to estimate the IQ of their students, found they overestimated the IQ of extroverted kids, and underestimated the IQ of quiet kids. Males tend to be more extroverted than females, so that could explain the perception of males as 'smarter'.
Hmm, interesting. Do you have a reference for this?
I've certainly seen this in work - the more talkative/eloquent guy comes off as smarter than the guy who can't put two words together. But then there's also the typical introverted nerd stereotype, which is a true stereotype.
While I do think general intelligence is real (look at how well doctors tend to do when they apply themselves to a completely new field), I tend to doubt that IQ is meaningful past 150 or so. I wrote a long analysis of very high IQ groups (like the Mega Society) once, and concluded that there's no valid testing, ranking, or meaning of IQ past ~150.
>>Corporations like SOME regulations... ones that benefit them.
Sure. But the way they usually work out, they universally favor the big corporations over the small.
I'm saying this as a small S-corp owner - dealing with all the regulations and hoops they make you jump through while it's just you and a couple other people is a ridiculous burden for a small corp. For a big corp, they just Have People For That.
>>I have personally witnessed hogging of bandwidth and, I'd wager, so have you
Right. A neighbor torrenting 24/7 will impact your cable modem performance. And if not one, two.
A simple test is to measure the speed of your local connection (roadrunner used to have an FTP site to test in-network cable modem speed) and watch as it fluctuates dramatically during the day.
Uh, what do you mean he won't be heralded as a great achiever? There's a front page story about him on Slashdot, which is more fame than your hypothetical ship-in-a-bottle builder will ever see.
Even IF all the posts on here are mocking him. William Hung is famous too, right?
It's amazing you can tell that from my post on here. I suppose being a computer scientist in and of itself doesn't make me a scientist, even though I've written a thesis, published peer-reviewed articles, etc.
>>All the time is data not released, due to constraints by whoever is funding the research.
They released the data, just not to people who would use it to argue against them. In the CRU emails, you see them intentionally finding ways of avoiding responding to an FOIA request, as well as instructing people to delete emails.
When I was working at the San Diego Supercomputer Center doing modeling work, we certainly never did anything nefarious like Phil Jones and his crew.
>>I fully understand guys for not desiring to have unprocessed data around which _will_ get quoted out of context but nutcases.
Or have errors found in their processing, like McIntyre has found before.
>>I will add that when raw data is anomalous, does not match with the expected result, etc. it is normal to try and correct it based on your understanding of what might have gone wrong. And you call that a "trick".
I didn't use the word trick, so I don't know what you're talking about. Phil Jones called it a trick, I guess.
And yeah, I would actually say its very important to see how they correct the data. That's the entire value-added step they perform there.
>>>>The plain fact is that the emails revealed the extent to which the "Hockey Team" were prepared to pervert data, methods, peer review and the scientific method in order to get the result they wanted.
>>I'm really hoping that slashdot gets rid of the politics section. I hate having the scientific illiteracy of my country rubbed in my face every other day.
What on earth does the GP post have to do with scientific illiteracy? There's no unscientific statements in that post... instead the GP was making a criticism of the CRU emails based on an understanding of how the scientific process works, which they did their best to pervert, by refusing to expose their data for review.
>>Then watch a dozen or so different lectures and tell me if the precautionary principle doesnt say to you that its a fair bet
If you look at the Medieval Warming Period vs the Little Ice Age, the precautionary principle would instead argue for a slight (0.5C to 1C) positive anomaly. A little bit of extra cold is much worse for humanity than a little bit of extra hot.
Then again, any arguments made using the precautionary principle are stupid.
It is politics, though. Even RealClimate.org, which is supposed to be the climate scientists talking about the science behind global warming mercilessly filter responses that disagree with them or make them look bad. Some sample comments they filtered: 1) You criticized State of Fear making it look like there was a conspiracy to keep dissenting viewpoints out of climate journals. But Phil Jones' emails show that Crichton got it right. Likewise, Phil Jones refused to give his data to people that might disagree with him. Do you think this is healthy for the science?
2) Gavin, one of Jones' emails about hiding from FOIA requests was directed to you (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=914&filename=1219239172.txt), but I didn't see a response in the hacked emails archive. How did you respond to this email? Did you push for transparency, or did you go along with Jones' desire for secrecy?
Moderated away, twice now on two different threads.
When you're so afraid of criticism it means you have something to hide. (In this case, it would be Gavin going along with the FOIA shenanigans, is my guess.)
Slashdot Mirror
When will this treatment become available in the black market neuro shops in China City?
>>I gotta say, reading that makes me think John Kerry might have been right after all. That's an awful lot of college kids that didn't finish college.
Hmm, maybe because you're looking at the stats for *enlisted* people?
Think about that one for a second.
>>You believe the theory that has observations to prove it works. Not the scientist. Pretty simple if you ask me.
Excellent, so we can dismiss global warming then?
Temperatures went down from the 1930s to the 1960s, and again in the last 10 years. 10 years is too long for random variation to be credited to the decrease. In fact, what we found out from Climategate was that the scientists were at a loss to explain the decline, calling it a travesty that nobody could explain it.
While I'm being about half tongue-in-cheek here, this does highlight why CLIMATE SCIENCE IS NOT SCIENCE. There's no testing, experimentation, or falsification of theories. If we had a bunch of identical copies of Earth to work on, and could engineer them in different ways... then yeah, it'd be science.
The real issue at stake here is that climate science is not science, and by calling themselves scientists (practicing science), they called into question real scientific disciplines like physics, where you actually can test your theories. Unless it's string theory. Then you just sort of flap your hands around a lot.
To invent more pointless crap that is vaguely environmentally friendly?
Maybe now is the time for me to patent my oil-leak caps, which would be positioned on all the leaking fissures off the coast of California, to stop the earth from polluting itself with all that crude oil.
Never thought off-shore drilling could be so environmentally friendly, eh?
>>Most of the "green products" you've just mentioned in all likelihood have little actual environmental benefit.
But... but... they say GREEN in huge letters on the boxes! Surely they must be good for the environment! My lord, man, my soap has a giant hole in the middle of it! If that doesn't save the pandas, I don't know what will.
But yeah, seriously. Nuclear power.
Looking around my hotel room here, there's no less than:
Green shampoo and conditioner
Green shampoo bottles (made from corn!)
Green soap (no soap in the middle of the bar - less waste!)
Green soap box (it's brown! it must be good for the enviroment!)
Save the environment sign with a panda bear, telling me to reuse my towels. (If you don't, the panda will eat you?)
Another sign explaining just how green the green soap is (and the green soap is actually branded "Green Natura"), including the use of soy products for the ink.
Green facial soap.
Sign telling me not to smoke unless I can breathe backwards.
Sign by my bed, telling me I need to place it on the bed if I want my sheets changed.
My fucking lord - you want MORE green products? Where will they go?
All I see is a troubling increase in the number of diagnoses, combined with a troubling increase in the belief that these symptoms require medical/psychiatric attention to normalize any differences. I don't know about you, but I loathe the idea of a society of homogeneous personalities as much as I loathe the idea of an ice cream shop with homogenized flavors. Variety is the spice of life.
Not all of it is the result of increased diagnosis. As in, it's unlikely the increase is due to improved detection. Read up on the subject if it interests you.
I'm with you in that a vanilla society is uninteresting, but there is something troubling going on, more than just classification.
This notion was both used in Brave New World and Dean Koontz's Frankenstein - using autistic people to perform as worker bees.
That said, there's been a troubling increase of babies born on the spectrum in recent years, and so finding a productive niche for them is something I'm all for.
(And of course, they'd probably make great software programmers.)
>>A guy who's looking forward to his contract ending so he can get an Android on a network that hopefully sucks less.
I've been enjoying the droid on Verizon. The 3G is decently fast, and has pretty good coverage (I've yet to be in an urban area that wasn't covered, and I've been all over the country in the last couple weeks). And you can always enable wifi if you want better bandwidth, less latency, or are worried about being tagged a data hog.
I think the iPhone is still the better experience, but I've been wanting to buy a (somewhat) open source phone for a while now, and this was my first opportunity to do so on Verizon. I haven't regretted it yet.
>>We have a world food distribution/shortage problem as it is. Imagine SUPER STRONG STARVING Humans.
So you just give it to Americans, who could use a little bit more muscle, and a little bit less fat. We get plenty of calories.
We could even just give it to our armed forces, and call it the Super Soldier Project. Tho' the Titan Project has a nice ring to it, too.
>>If a company makes a game, they own it. If you want to play it, you have to agree to their terms. If you don't like their terms, ok, go away and play a different game. Sorry, you don't get to play the game and ignore the rules. Is that really so hard to accept?
There's two parts to buying World of Warcraft. You give them $40 or so for the game. Ok. And you give them 10 or 15 bucks a month for the subscription.
If you don't pay the subscription, *you still own the game*. If you want to fuck around looking at the title screen, or feeding it fake information (say, from a private server) that's your own damn business and they can't tell you otherwise. The most they can do is kick you off their own servers and cancel your account.
Just make sure you get the unexpurgated version of Olsen's Standard Book of British Birds. Some people don't like the Gannet.
>>It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open.
This is good design for large numbers of open windows. This is not good design for small numbers of open windows.
I have four windows open right now. 1 Adobe Acrobat, 3 Firefox. Titles showing on all the windows so I know what they are.
On XP, it's a single click to the bottom of the screen to switch windows.
With Tabbed Browsing in Firefox - which I refuse to use (thanks, Tabkiller) due to the reasons in this post - I'd have to click twice to switch to the window I want: once on the bottom of the screen to go to Firefox, and then once at the top of the screen to pick my tab. This is stupid and annoying, so I use tabkiller. (Unfortunately, the Firefox guys were so enamored with tabbed browsing that they put in no native ability to disable tabs into the browser, and Tabkiller bugs out occasionally.)
On Win7, I have to mouse to the bottom of the screen, hover, and then click on the window that I want. I then (if tabs are enabled) have to mouse up to the top of the screen to pick the tab that I want. In other words, this is the slowest method yet of switching Windows.
So in summary, FUCK YOU WIN7. I wanted common operations to be easier in Windows 7, but it didn't happen. So yeah, I guess I Didn't Make Windows 7(tm).
>>Another study of teachers, asked to estimate the IQ of their students, found they overestimated the IQ of extroverted kids, and underestimated the IQ of quiet kids. Males tend to be more extroverted than females, so that could explain the perception of males as 'smarter'.
Hmm, interesting. Do you have a reference for this?
I've certainly seen this in work - the more talkative/eloquent guy comes off as smarter than the guy who can't put two words together. But then there's also the typical introverted nerd stereotype, which is a true stereotype.
While I do think general intelligence is real (look at how well doctors tend to do when they apply themselves to a completely new field), I tend to doubt that IQ is meaningful past 150 or so. I wrote a long analysis of very high IQ groups (like the Mega Society) once, and concluded that there's no valid testing, ranking, or meaning of IQ past ~150.
>>Call me Mr Grumpy Pants, but my ideal woman is not someone whose idea of a fulfilling life is playing some stupid flash game.
My wonderful wife is downstairs playing Harvest Moon on the Wii.
She's not only beautiful, but this also gives me time to play Dragon Age.
>>Other ways to defeat it? Talcum powder or other particulates (like rain ferinstance).
Yeah, in D&D we'd always carry sacks of flour around for invisible opponents.
It's nice to see that it has real world applicability.
Tag: Flour
>>Corporations like SOME regulations ... ones that benefit them.
Sure. But the way they usually work out, they universally favor the big corporations over the small.
I'm saying this as a small S-corp owner - dealing with all the regulations and hoops they make you jump through while it's just you and a couple other people is a ridiculous burden for a small corp. For a big corp, they just Have People For That.
>>I have personally witnessed hogging of bandwidth and, I'd wager, so have you
Right. A neighbor torrenting 24/7 will impact your cable modem performance. And if not one, two.
A simple test is to measure the speed of your local connection (roadrunner used to have an FTP site to test in-network cable modem speed) and watch as it fluctuates dramatically during the day.
Uh, what do you mean he won't be heralded as a great achiever? There's a front page story about him on Slashdot, which is more fame than your hypothetical ship-in-a-bottle builder will ever see.
Even IF all the posts on here are mocking him. William Hung is famous too, right?
Or a climate science person calling their group scientists?
Oh, er, I guess they do try to claim that title.
>>You, sir (or madam), are not a scientist
It's amazing you can tell that from my post on here. I suppose being a computer scientist in and of itself doesn't make me a scientist, even though I've written a thesis, published peer-reviewed articles, etc.
>>All the time is data not released, due to constraints by whoever is funding the research.
They released the data, just not to people who would use it to argue against them. In the CRU emails, you see them intentionally finding ways of avoiding responding to an FOIA request, as well as instructing people to delete emails.
When I was working at the San Diego Supercomputer Center doing modeling work, we certainly never did anything nefarious like Phil Jones and his crew.
>>I fully understand guys for not desiring to have unprocessed data around which _will_ get quoted out of context but nutcases.
Or have errors found in their processing, like McIntyre has found before.
>>I will add that when raw data is anomalous, does not match with the expected result, etc. it is normal to try and correct it based on your understanding of what might have gone wrong. And you call that a "trick".
I didn't use the word trick, so I don't know what you're talking about. Phil Jones called it a trick, I guess.
And yeah, I would actually say its very important to see how they correct the data. That's the entire value-added step they perform there.
>>Absence of critical thinking == scientific illiteracy.
Riiiiight.
>>>>The plain fact is that the emails revealed the extent to which the "Hockey Team" were prepared to pervert data, methods, peer review and the scientific method in order to get the result they wanted.
>>I'm really hoping that slashdot gets rid of the politics section. I hate having the scientific illiteracy of my country rubbed in my face every other day.
What on earth does the GP post have to do with scientific illiteracy? There's no unscientific statements in that post... instead the GP was making a criticism of the CRU emails based on an understanding of how the scientific process works, which they did their best to pervert, by refusing to expose their data for review.
>>Then watch a dozen or so different lectures and tell me if the precautionary principle doesnt say to you that its a fair bet
If you look at the Medieval Warming Period vs the Little Ice Age, the precautionary principle would instead argue for a slight (0.5C to 1C) positive anomaly. A little bit of extra cold is much worse for humanity than a little bit of extra hot.
Then again, any arguments made using the precautionary principle are stupid.
It is politics, though. Even RealClimate.org, which is supposed to be the climate scientists talking about the science behind global warming mercilessly filter responses that disagree with them or make them look bad. Some sample comments they filtered:
1) You criticized State of Fear making it look like there was a conspiracy to keep dissenting viewpoints out of climate journals. But Phil Jones' emails show that Crichton got it right. Likewise, Phil Jones refused to give his data to people that might disagree with him. Do you think this is healthy for the science?
2) Gavin, one of Jones' emails about hiding from FOIA requests was directed to you (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=914&filename=1219239172.txt), but I didn't see a response in the hacked emails archive. How did you respond to this email? Did you push for transparency, or did you go along with Jones' desire for secrecy?
Moderated away, twice now on two different threads.
When you're so afraid of criticism it means you have something to hide. (In this case, it would be Gavin going along with the FOIA shenanigans, is my guess.)