Most of the research is being done with money from government grants, and grants have been (very much) selectively given to people known to be on the "AGW" side of the argument.
No, the money is given to people who have demonstrated competence in that scientific field. If that group strongly correlates with the group of people who think AGW is happening, what does that tell you?
Or, how about this: what incentive does a government have to want to fake evidence that global warming is human caused? The measures to deal with it are politically unpopular, so there are no votes in it. Not to mention all the lobbying from powerful industry groups. The motivations for faking evidence lie strongly on the "it's not happening" side - so the fact that the "it is happening" message has got through is impressive in itself.
But it isn't Big Oil spouting this any more. Even Exxon admits global warming is happening. No, it's people who don't like the idea because it has bad implications for their political philosophy,
When they start using words like 'trick', trying to insult peoples' intelligence by telling them that it is a special scientific word
It's not a special scientific word, it's a standard English word for "clever technique". If you don't know that you're either a non-native speaker or pathetically poorly read.
It's less like we've imported Latin loanwords and more like we've stapled large amounts of English into Latin text. Many other characteristics of scientific writing are also borrowed (or meant to accommodate) quirks of Latin; we almost exhaustively use the passive voice, for example, because there's no way to avoid giving a direct subject in English. (This may be bogus.)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The passive voice is perfectly valid English and is useful when the subject is unimportant, and to the best of my knowledge has nothing to do with Latin. While Latin has a passive voice as well, it's formed quite differently to the English one.
If you're still really so upset about irregularities in language
I'm not upset about it. I've been using the language long enough to be used to it, but don't see any need to make English more irregular than it already is. If people use "data" in the manner of a mass noun, why not treat it as one grammatically? That's easier for everyone, and avoids the need to remember unintuitive "rules" such as data taking the plural verb form even though it typically isn't treated or thought of as a plural.
Just because English took a word from another language doesn't mean it has to preserve the inflections of the original language, or even the meaning. "Data" means something completely different in English to what as it did in Latin, for example. The way the word is actually used in English is much more like a mass noun than a count noun. How often do you say "those two data" compared to "2 gigabytes of data" for example?
I studied Latin at school, and my God am I glad that English doesn't work the same way. English has enough irregularities already without importing more from elsewhere.
That's not an accurate way of looking at the statistics, but it's a common mistake (and most likely one I've made myself).
The confidence levels (such as 99%, 95%) tell you very little directly about the probability that a result is correct. What they do tell you is the probability of getting a false positive - if you were to do 100 separate searches at a 95% confidence interval, you'd get a positive result in about 5 even if there were no Higgs there.
Given the number of potential places to search and the number of experiments done, you'd expect some false positives at these confidence levels. The standard for claiming a discovery is 5 sigma, which is something like a 99.9999% confidence level.
Re:such is the life of a bump hunter
on
No Higgs Just Yet
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· Score: 1
May well be worse than that in practice thanks to publication bias.
Of course, in particle physics p=0.05 (a mere 2 sigma) is nowhere near enough to claim a discovery.
England has over 80% of the population of the UK, Scotland about 8%. Not much surprise that non-Britons tend to treat England and the UK as the same thing, really, Scotland just isn't very significant.
There are cameras everywhere and face-recognition software is used to identify people on it, the law system is "by custom" or how it's called, internet and phone serveillance everywhere, and all big parties are decidedly right-wing.
Labour - the party which describes itself as a "democratic socialist" party and is a member of Socialist International and the equivalent European groups? They may not be as left wing as they were in the 1980s, but they're certainly not right wing.
I'm not sure why people outside the UK should be frightened and alienated because of our internal politics though. It's not as if we're going to start invading the rest of Europe.
Testing only two examples is hardly conclusive. Most studies I've seen suggest that while older people do have somewhat slower reactions on average, the variation within an age group is much larger than the variation between age groups.
That chipset really was a pile of wank. I had a Thunderbird too, and the damn thing never worked stably. Really soured me on AMD and I haven't bought an AMD chip since, though I'm sure the more modern versions are better. Couldn't be much worse after all.
The ether was not a stupid theory. It was an *incorrect* theory, but one that was entirely reasonable to believe based on the understanding of physics at the time. In Newtonian concepts of space and time, all velocities depend on your frame of reference, so the speed of wave propagation for light also needs to be defined relative to something. Searching for that something and determining its properties was a good thing to do. As it turned out, there doesn't need to be one because space isn't what we thought, and it is possible to have an absolute velocity which will be the same in every frame. The investigations into the ether were important steps along the way.
Not if the measurements are done competently. The ether as a straightforward medium was disproven by experiment designed to measure the properties of the ether. Of course, that wouldn't have been possible without having some idea of what the ether should be.
So what's your idea? Given that the observed behaviour of the universe is inconsistent with what we expect, there are basically two possibilities:
1) Our understanding of gravity is wrong. 2) Our understanding of the matter in the universe is wrong.
Despite lots of effort, nobody has come up with a satisfactory theory of gravity which fixes the problem. And a new theory to fix the problem is not really more satisfactory in itself than a new type of matter - they both would be fudges to fit the data until some independent test came along. And it's not as if the scientists said "it must be dark matter, right, problem solved", there are active efforts to determine dark matter's characteristics and independently test for it.
There's been talk about phlogiston, but what about the neutrino? When the energy of electrons from beta decays didn't appear consistent with known laws of physics, someone (Pauli IIRC) said "there must be a new particle that we (so far) can't detect, which has properties X, Y and Z"... not unlike dark matter. And lo and behold, he was right.
They aren't the same thing. Your example is inefficient because it uses more labour to achieve the same result - a shorter working week would get less done but require less work to do it, which isn't less efficient.
I dont' understand why we still have 40 hour weeks. Surely with all the technical improvements over the past few decades we can still be wealthy enough without as much work.
Who cares if CCTV works? The fact is it is a violation on basic freedoms.
CCTV isn't a violation of freedom because it doesn't actually stop you doing anything. It may be a violation of privacy, but since these are public spaces anyway, you don't have a huge amount of that to start with.
Yes, I'm sure the situation would be much better if the rioters were armed with handguns instead of whatever they can find lying around to throw. For fuck's sake...
It seems to me that democracy is necessary not because it necessarily makes the right decisions, but because it acts as a negative feedback mechanism to ensure that the governors at least approximately act in the interests of the population. Without it, the only way of getting rid of a bad government is through violence.
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Most of the research is being done with money from government grants, and grants have been (very much) selectively given to people known to be on the "AGW" side of the argument.
No, the money is given to people who have demonstrated competence in that scientific field. If that group strongly correlates with the group of people who think AGW is happening, what does that tell you?
Or, how about this: what incentive does a government have to want to fake evidence that global warming is human caused? The measures to deal with it are politically unpopular, so there are no votes in it. Not to mention all the lobbying from powerful industry groups. The motivations for faking evidence lie strongly on the "it's not happening" side - so the fact that the "it is happening" message has got through is impressive in itself.
Big Oil is worth Trillions.
But it isn't Big Oil spouting this any more. Even Exxon admits global warming is happening. No, it's people who don't like the idea because it has bad implications for their political philosophy,
When they start using words like 'trick', trying to insult peoples' intelligence by telling them that it is a special scientific word
It's not a special scientific word, it's a standard English word for "clever technique". If you don't know that you're either a non-native speaker or pathetically poorly read.
It's less like we've imported Latin loanwords and more like we've stapled large amounts of English into Latin text. Many other characteristics of scientific writing are also borrowed (or meant to accommodate) quirks of Latin; we almost exhaustively use the passive voice, for example, because there's no way to avoid giving a direct subject in English. (This may be bogus.)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The passive voice is perfectly valid English and is useful when the subject is unimportant, and to the best of my knowledge has nothing to do with Latin. While Latin has a passive voice as well, it's formed quite differently to the English one.
If you're still really so upset about irregularities in language
I'm not upset about it. I've been using the language long enough to be used to it, but don't see any need to make English more irregular than it already is. If people use "data" in the manner of a mass noun, why not treat it as one grammatically? That's easier for everyone, and avoids the need to remember unintuitive "rules" such as data taking the plural verb form even though it typically isn't treated or thought of as a plural.
Just because English took a word from another language doesn't mean it has to preserve the inflections of the original language, or even the meaning. "Data" means something completely different in English to what as it did in Latin, for example. The way the word is actually used in English is much more like a mass noun than a count noun. How often do you say "those two data" compared to "2 gigabytes of data" for example?
I studied Latin at school, and my God am I glad that English doesn't work the same way. English has enough irregularities already without importing more from elsewhere.
You get this little detail of Latin grammar drilled into your forehead in first-year biology,
And if we were speaking Latin, that would be relevant.
That's not an accurate way of looking at the statistics, but it's a common mistake (and most likely one I've made myself).
The confidence levels (such as 99%, 95%) tell you very little directly about the probability that a result is correct. What they do tell you is the probability of getting a false positive - if you were to do 100 separate searches at a 95% confidence interval, you'd get a positive result in about 5 even if there were no Higgs there.
Given the number of potential places to search and the number of experiments done, you'd expect some false positives at these confidence levels. The standard for claiming a discovery is 5 sigma, which is something like a 99.9999% confidence level.
May well be worse than that in practice thanks to publication bias.
Of course, in particle physics p=0.05 (a mere 2 sigma) is nowhere near enough to claim a discovery.
England has over 80% of the population of the UK, Scotland about 8%. Not much surprise that non-Britons tend to treat England and the UK as the same thing, really, Scotland just isn't very significant.
There are cameras everywhere and face-recognition software is used to identify people on it, the law system is "by custom" or how it's called, internet and phone serveillance everywhere, and all big parties are decidedly right-wing.
Labour - the party which describes itself as a "democratic socialist" party and is a member of Socialist International and the equivalent European groups? They may not be as left wing as they were in the 1980s, but they're certainly not right wing.
I'm not sure why people outside the UK should be frightened and alienated because of our internal politics though. It's not as if we're going to start invading the rest of Europe.
It hasn't happened everywhere in England either. How specific do you want to get?
Testing only two examples is hardly conclusive. Most studies I've seen suggest that while older people do have somewhat slower reactions on average, the variation within an age group is much larger than the variation between age groups.
Does hands free really make a difference? The actual act of holding the phone up to your ear isn't distracting, it's the conversation.
That chipset really was a pile of wank. I had a Thunderbird too, and the damn thing never worked stably. Really soured me on AMD and I haven't bought an AMD chip since, though I'm sure the more modern versions are better. Couldn't be much worse after all.
Most innovation, and nearly all the most revolutionary innovation, is not the original invention but rather an improvement of it.
An improvement of an existing idea isn't revolutionary, it's evolutionary.
The ether was not a stupid theory. It was an *incorrect* theory, but one that was entirely reasonable to believe based on the understanding of physics at the time. In Newtonian concepts of space and time, all velocities depend on your frame of reference, so the speed of wave propagation for light also needs to be defined relative to something. Searching for that something and determining its properties was a good thing to do. As it turned out, there doesn't need to be one because space isn't what we thought, and it is possible to have an absolute velocity which will be the same in every frame. The investigations into the ether were important steps along the way.
Not if the measurements are done competently. The ether as a straightforward medium was disproven by experiment designed to measure the properties of the ether. Of course, that wouldn't have been possible without having some idea of what the ether should be.
What's your alternative then?
But in order to know what data to look for you need working hypotheses.
So what's your idea? Given that the observed behaviour of the universe is inconsistent with what we expect, there are basically two possibilities:
1) Our understanding of gravity is wrong.
2) Our understanding of the matter in the universe is wrong.
Despite lots of effort, nobody has come up with a satisfactory theory of gravity which fixes the problem. And a new theory to fix the problem is not really more satisfactory in itself than a new type of matter - they both would be fudges to fit the data until some independent test came along. And it's not as if the scientists said "it must be dark matter, right, problem solved", there are active efforts to determine dark matter's characteristics and independently test for it.
There's been talk about phlogiston, but what about the neutrino? When the energy of electrons from beta decays didn't appear consistent with known laws of physics, someone (Pauli IIRC) said "there must be a new particle that we (so far) can't detect, which has properties X, Y and Z"... not unlike dark matter. And lo and behold, he was right.
Except that's obvious nonsense to anyone with the slighest background in physics.
They aren't the same thing. Your example is inefficient because it uses more labour to achieve the same result - a shorter working week would get less done but require less work to do it, which isn't less efficient.
I dont' understand why we still have 40 hour weeks. Surely with all the technical improvements over the past few decades we can still be wealthy enough without as much work.
Only if they agree to pay my electricity bill.
Who cares if CCTV works? The fact is it is a violation on basic freedoms.
CCTV isn't a violation of freedom because it doesn't actually stop you doing anything. It may be a violation of privacy, but since these are public spaces anyway, you don't have a huge amount of that to start with.
Yes, I'm sure the situation would be much better if the rioters were armed with handguns instead of whatever they can find lying around to throw. For fuck's sake...
It seems to me that democracy is necessary not because it necessarily makes the right decisions, but because it acts as a negative feedback mechanism to ensure that the governors at least approximately act in the interests of the population. Without it, the only way of getting rid of a bad government is through violence.