Doubt it. If a group of guys with a boat and sonar equipment thought it was a flying saucer down there they'd actually have gone down. The fact that they didn't bother shows that they're not the "source" for the Daily Mail's story. Who knows, perhaps we'll find the Daily Mail doesn't even have any "scientists" claiming it's a flying saucer! But no, that could never happen, surely.
Don't be too harsh on the reporters. Yes, "God particle" is exceptionally annoying but I get equally annoyed by people calling the baryon acoustic oscillations "wiggles". What are we, children? FUCK OFF. And unfortunately this is something that's come out of the community itself. It's very irritating. We've even got a big survey called WiggleZ. It's like we're a pack of morons.
To be honest, I'd say even at PhD level, anyone with reasonable intelligence and dedication can get a PhD. Not in every field (I'd never be able to get a PhD in pure maths or computer science, let alone in comparitive theology), but in *some* field that fits their interests. As you say, though, resources are very scarce in anything other than some areas of the sciences, and competition can be fierce. It doesn't get better down the line, either. There are too many PhDs being produced for the number of post-doctoral positions, and too many young post-doctors (each costing more than a newly-qualified PhD due to their experience) for the same posts, and then too many of them for the 5-year/tenure-track positions and too many of *them* for the permanent posts. There's a cut-off at each step.
It wasn't entirely what I was meaning, though. It's ultimately unrealistic for a layman in a field to be able to reproduce, or even entirely understand, a scientific report. I'm out of my depth if I just go and talk with people down the hall, and we're all theoretical cosmologists. When I'm visiting other universities I get to talk to people doing another part of astronomy, and I'm floundering even more... Expecting someone who hasn't been steeped in this for the last 14 years to understand would be pretty silly of me.
I was meaning whether there's a feeling that the tools and explanations are there at each level of sophistication -- so that you can read a brief press release, go into more detail, go into a bit more, and find an explanation at roughly the level of sophistication you're looking for, and the feeling that you *could* eventually be able to reproduce the results. Basically, whether there's an openness and a communication, or whether it looks like we're living in a locked world and occasionally throwing out crumbs to the public while we scoff the cake.
Sorry, I'm being way over-defensive here. If I understand your point properly I totally agree - science means someone should be able (in principle) to take the data and reproduce the results, or to *re-take* the data and reproduce the results. In practice that's basically impossible, but in principle, I totally agree with you.
Oh, hang on, my CMB angular power spectrum response was to someone else. (And I think I *was* being a bit over-defensive there. All he was suggesting is that it's not real science if you can't get the data and reproduce it... at least in principle. And I totally agree with that.)
Hmm OK. Thanks for the response, I don't know if I came across as over-defensive while I'm actually interested in knowing whether we're communicating properly with the people who pay our wages.... Then would you say that things are open enough that someone wanting to understand how the conclusions are drawn can find that out?
I know in my field that to do that in full would be *extremely* tough -- the example of redoing the WMAP CMB angular power spectrum is a real one. There's a Chinese team, just two people, who took the raw time-ordered data and went through the entire process a couple of years back. The reaction in my university, and amongst anyone else I've talked to about it, is blank astonishment that they'd even do it. It seriously must have taken years. It's brilliant that they did it (although the prevailing belief is that they made a slight mistake at one point, which produced their only significant difference from WMAP; if they did that's hardly a surprise and quite excusable, and if they didn't then they should probably make more of a deal about it) but it's amazing. I don't have the time, or the ability even, to go through that process. Other fields can't be any more accessible. I'm really just asking whether further and more detailed information is easy enough to find, or whether there's a massive, unbridgable gulf between the basic "This happens! Ain't it magical?" level and the hardcore specialist journals.
A quick correction: arXiv is the site where people post preprints, which are the versions of papers that they submit to journals. Many papers are revised once -- the authors upload the version of a paper accepted by a journal. The changes are often very minor apart from formatting. There are badly-written papers on there (and an increasing amount where someone hasn't used a spell-checker, or evidently even re-read it) but the very vast bulk are just the submission-quality paper. What a lot of authors do is prepare the preprint using the same style-file as the journal they'll submit to, meaning that the article on the arXiv is likely to be very close to the published version. Authors will then add a journal reference when the paper is published.
There's no cachet in submitting dross to a journal and expecting it to be smartened up through peer-review. Referees are busy people, refereeing out of a sense of duty to their field. They have neither time nor interest in polishing someone else's work. Likewise, journal staff are overworked and want to devote their time to dealing with the formatting, the type-setting, the layout and the image quality of a paper. They've got absolutely no interest in correcting badly-written, badly-spelled papers -- and no interest in cleaning up horrific formatting. People are aware of this, so generally what hits the arXiv is clean enough to pass through referees, editors, sub-editors and type-setters without being held up at any step.
In my field, at least, the arXiv is the first stop to find a paper that was published from about 1997 onwards. (It was there before, but in the mid-late 90s it became hard to find a paper that wasn't on the arXiv.) Only if that fails do we go off and look elsewhere.
Jesus. He said that he wants to keep up to date with developments, not reanalyse the fucking data himself. What do *you* do when we release a new CMB angular power spectrum? Do you run off to NASA and download the entire WMAP raw data stream and then sit there and go through the entire analysis, from pipeline and beam correction through to foreground removal and then the full analysis of the cleaned sky? That's a two- or three-year job, on top of about 7 years training.
In which case those of us in active research have failed.
How would you prefer this to be addressed? We normally try and be open about how we research, why we research, the techniques that are used, the conclusions that can be drawn, flaws with the model, alternative explanations, and our level of certainty that we're right. We also try very hard to make sure that that last is quantifiable and not just some subjective feeling.
(In reference to the Higg's boson discoveries, for example, the last I knew (and it's not my field) they were claiming roughly 3.5 sigma or so. That's a nice discovery, given that one sigma is a standard deviation. In cosmology we tend to believe something if it's at 3.5 sigma... and particle physicists laugh at us. We *have* to do that because of a lack of data; they don't. They want to push it to 5 sigma or so. This holds in other fields. People try and actually quantify how sure they are that this result is better than some control. In cosmology there's even a trend to go further and attempt to quantify whether this *model* is better than another.)
What would you like improved so that we're not as bad as the mediaeval scientists?
It's possible. But there is a difference between the trigger-happy meatheads of Special Branch and whichever force pinned things on the alleged topiary.
oh come on. i saw that "What 19-year-old would even know that song from the 1970's? Or anybody under 40? Much less use it as a reference" stuff before, too. i'm under 40 and i know it well. i know of three versions (and i know that there are more out there): the original, which i heard growing up because, like, you know, my parents would listen to it?; the execrable westlife version from about 8 years ago which a british 11 year old would definitely have heard; and a me first and the gimme gimmes version from about the same time.
i don't know why people keep trotting out the "lulzsec could NEVER have heard of this song!!!!!!" argument because it's utterly vacuous. there are many ways they could know it. it's a famous song; their parents would know it. it's also been covered and rereleased - and by westlife, no less, who may be unknown in the states (thank your lucky stars) but were definitely not unknown in britain.
They're not going to charge him with "being a spokesperson", same as they didn't charge Cleary with "running an IRC server". If they find evidence that he actively took part in (or even facilitated) any attacks on a company, they'll charge him under the Misuse of Computers Act.
Yes, that is the rub - but if I genuinely had a legal copy I'd upload to the service. I doubt it would be in a record label's interest to pursue a court case like that when I can provide hard copies of each album. It's unreasonable (and I think a court would back this up) to expect me to retain the receipt for each CD. Even if the court viewed that suspiciously, there would be thousands of easier targets that would be less expensive and lower risk (for them).
(Of course, being British I believe it's still technically illegal for me to format-shift, but the labels are on record as saying they won't prosecute for that. I may be behind the times and this may finally have changed; I know it was being discussed quite recently.)
REM did something similar on Reckoning, as I recall -- there's a little section of music at the end of my (unfortunately long expired) cassette copy just after Little America which isn't on the CD I've got. I kind of regret not copying that across before the tape died...
Anyway, personally I think you'd be fine uploading things transcoded from LPs and cassettes - but hell, I'm not a lawyer, and the record labels have proven themselves unpleasant and vindictive.
Oh, don't get me wrong - they can't be "the" dark matter. But they're a dark matter. How significant I don't know; we'd need tighter constraints. (You're looking at a few eV from lab experiments; cosmology claims tighter bounds but take them with a pinch of salt.) So for more "physical" models that has to be taken into account. I think it's one of the signs that the problem is a lot more complicated than finding "the" dark matter -- although I know for sure that if an LSP is found people will be trumpeting that it's "the" dark matter, and then wondering why it doesn't quite fit the data, its abundance is a bit low (or high), its properties not quite right.
My only real point was that you can fit the bullet cluster with modified gravity models assuming massive neutrinos (which is a very uncontroversial assumption these days) -- the fact that that model (TeVeS) is ugly and ad-hoc and that the neutrino mass is a bit on the steep side was a bit beside the point, it's a matter of principle for me. It shows that we can't take the bullet cluster as proof that "the" dark matter is a particle. It also doesn't say that dark matter isn't a particle. Personally I strongly suspect that the dark matter problem will eventually be solved by a mixture of relativistic effects (a cylindrical metric will never be identical to Minkowski space even though the Newtonian potentials are small), poorly-applied relativity (average metrics will never evolve with the averaged metric's dynamics; and even small inhomogeneities can have a large impact on observation), some modified form of gravity (GR is wrong, we know that; what surprises me is how controversial stating that can be), standard model particles (neutrinos do have mass and are a dark matter; they're just nothing like significant enough to solve the whole problem), and some new particle species and forces between them (perhaps from SUSY or perhaps from something yet more exotic, which would be a lot more exciting).
Of course, dealing with all of that is a massive problem, and frankly if we add that many parameters into a model we'll quickly lose accuracy, because the data is nothing like good enough to constrain everything. So at the minute, unfortunately, we're more or less forced to work with phenomenology. That's fine... except when people then believe in the literal truth of a phenomenological model.
But hey, this is all just my opinion. I could very well be wrong and all of the problem is solved by an LSP. If so, so be it.
What part of "this shows that in principle a modified gravity can explain the bullet cluster" says "MODIFIED GRAVITY IS TRUE AND IT'S TEVES!" to you?
A) Neutrinos have mass. Are you arguing that? If so, this conversation is over now. B) Given that neutrinos have mass, they act as a warm dark matter no matter what the theory of gravity. Are you arguing that? If so, this conversation is over now. C) Given that neutrinos act as a warm dark matter it should be taken into account. D) Adding massive neutrinos into one particular example of a modified gravity (TeVeS) demonstrates that it can fit the bullet cluster. The details are unimportant because no-one in their right mind is pretending that TeVeS is a good theory of gravity; it's an ugly ad-hoc collection of fields.
What's your problem here?
Let's throw open a suggestion here: imagine a universe where GR is inaccurate and is modified in the infra-red. This universe also contains massive neutrinos. It *also* contains something similar to MSSM with a stable lightest supersymmetric particle. Then let's put "ceoyoyo" and his amazing abilities at physics into this universe. Rather than understanding what's there, the mighty ceoyoyo will attribute everything to a non-baryonic dark matter (evidently not even caring to link it to his supersymmetric particle but let's say he does that, too). Then he'll find that things are inaccurate, because that's not the whole story, and invent another particle to make it work, and then he'll relax, happy. And ignorant.
I strongly suspect that that's the universe we live in. I'd love it if MSSM was wrong and there's nothing of hte sort but I'm not silly enough to actually believe that. It's a complicated place out there. We can either describe it properly, or we can make snide little comments on internet forums mocking anyone who doesn't want to restrict themselves to some unspecified "non-baryonic dark matter".
If you're trying to claim that non-baryonic dark matter fits "Occam's razor" better then you also don't understand it. *It doesn't exist*. You have to have a proper, working model, and that model is going to be just as ugly and ad-hoc as modifying gravity. The MSSM is an ugly collection of assumptions. A modified gravity theory is typically an ugly collection of assumptions. Just saying "aha! a single pressureless particle fits everything!" doesn't work because it's not a physical model - it's a phenomenological one.
"In fact, it would appear you're being racist, in your implication that the Neanderthal race is inherently worse than other races... on the basis of what, cranial volume of a few fossils?"
Where did you get *that* from? Yes, plenty of people have done that (though technically they're not being racist; Neanderthals are a separate species to us, and don't try and pretend different species can't interbreed because they can and any definition of "species" that works will yield separate "species" that do so - if you don't believe me, get a fucking education) but can you point out where TWX did that? Be serious, he didn't. You're just taking an excuse to jump on an agenda and setting up something that isn't even a strawman in the process.
Seriously, if you're gonna debate at least fucking do it properly. He said "Somehow I doubt that telling those white supremacists that they're the ones descended from Neanderthals and that the Africans are the only group lacking Neanderthal DNA would do anything to change their perspectives."
Firstly, it's obvious to me that he's joking, and I'm not even American and don't have so many fucking white supremacists in my country. Secondly, he's simply making a joke about white supremacists having to acknowledge that *they're* the ones descended from Neanderthals rather than some mythical pure-blood Homo Sapiens line, and never doing so.
What's the problem? Fuck all, except your own idiotic prejudices.
As far as I understood it, it was that the evidence suggested - to some degree of certainty - that the genes of all extra-African races were different from sub-Saharan African races to a level that agreed with Neanderthal sequences. Obviously the errors were large - and acknowledged in the studies - but so far as I understood the reasoning for the implications, Homo Sapiens was reputed to have interbred with Homo Neanderthalis at least in the Middle East at about the point that we left Africa, simply because all of us who aren't predominantly sub-Saharan African have the same gene sequence as some recently-sequence Neanderthal fossils.
So far as that goes, fair enough. I remember reading a lot of that kind of thing a good few months back. And a natural implication is that anyone who isn't sub-Sahran African probably has Neanderthal in them. (Entertainingly, of course, many sub-Saharans also will. This is due to humans, err, interacting constantly and repeatedly and the effects propogating through populations. But the studies took that kind of simple-minded thing into account, of course.)
Slashdot Mirror
Doubt it. If a group of guys with a boat and sonar equipment thought it was a flying saucer down there they'd actually have gone down. The fact that they didn't bother shows that they're not the "source" for the Daily Mail's story. Who knows, perhaps we'll find the Daily Mail doesn't even have any "scientists" claiming it's a flying saucer! But no, that could never happen, surely.
A mysterious "circle" on a grainy scan, "this" is what scientists are claiming is finally evidence that "Earth" has been "visited" by aliens.
Hell, *I* don't read science journals...
Don't be too harsh on the reporters. Yes, "God particle" is exceptionally annoying but I get equally annoyed by people calling the baryon acoustic oscillations "wiggles". What are we, children? FUCK OFF. And unfortunately this is something that's come out of the community itself. It's very irritating. We've even got a big survey called WiggleZ. It's like we're a pack of morons.
To be honest, I'd say even at PhD level, anyone with reasonable intelligence and dedication can get a PhD. Not in every field (I'd never be able to get a PhD in pure maths or computer science, let alone in comparitive theology), but in *some* field that fits their interests. As you say, though, resources are very scarce in anything other than some areas of the sciences, and competition can be fierce. It doesn't get better down the line, either. There are too many PhDs being produced for the number of post-doctoral positions, and too many young post-doctors (each costing more than a newly-qualified PhD due to their experience) for the same posts, and then too many of them for the 5-year/tenure-track positions and too many of *them* for the permanent posts. There's a cut-off at each step.
It wasn't entirely what I was meaning, though. It's ultimately unrealistic for a layman in a field to be able to reproduce, or even entirely understand, a scientific report. I'm out of my depth if I just go and talk with people down the hall, and we're all theoretical cosmologists. When I'm visiting other universities I get to talk to people doing another part of astronomy, and I'm floundering even more... Expecting someone who hasn't been steeped in this for the last 14 years to understand would be pretty silly of me.
I was meaning whether there's a feeling that the tools and explanations are there at each level of sophistication -- so that you can read a brief press release, go into more detail, go into a bit more, and find an explanation at roughly the level of sophistication you're looking for, and the feeling that you *could* eventually be able to reproduce the results. Basically, whether there's an openness and a communication, or whether it looks like we're living in a locked world and occasionally throwing out crumbs to the public while we scoff the cake.
Sorry, I'm being way over-defensive here. If I understand your point properly I totally agree - science means someone should be able (in principle) to take the data and reproduce the results, or to *re-take* the data and reproduce the results. In practice that's basically impossible, but in principle, I totally agree with you.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2352470&cid=36905508
Oh, hang on, my CMB angular power spectrum response was to someone else. (And I think I *was* being a bit over-defensive there. All he was suggesting is that it's not real science if you can't get the data and reproduce it... at least in principle. And I totally agree with that.)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2352470&cid=36905322
Hmm OK. Thanks for the response, I don't know if I came across as over-defensive while I'm actually interested in knowing whether we're communicating properly with the people who pay our wages.... Then would you say that things are open enough that someone wanting to understand how the conclusions are drawn can find that out?
I know in my field that to do that in full would be *extremely* tough -- the example of redoing the WMAP CMB angular power spectrum is a real one. There's a Chinese team, just two people, who took the raw time-ordered data and went through the entire process a couple of years back. The reaction in my university, and amongst anyone else I've talked to about it, is blank astonishment that they'd even do it. It seriously must have taken years. It's brilliant that they did it (although the prevailing belief is that they made a slight mistake at one point, which produced their only significant difference from WMAP; if they did that's hardly a surprise and quite excusable, and if they didn't then they should probably make more of a deal about it) but it's amazing. I don't have the time, or the ability even, to go through that process. Other fields can't be any more accessible. I'm really just asking whether further and more detailed information is easy enough to find, or whether there's a massive, unbridgable gulf between the basic "This happens! Ain't it magical?" level and the hardcore specialist journals.
A quick correction: arXiv is the site where people post preprints, which are the versions of papers that they submit to journals. Many papers are revised once -- the authors upload the version of a paper accepted by a journal. The changes are often very minor apart from formatting. There are badly-written papers on there (and an increasing amount where someone hasn't used a spell-checker, or evidently even re-read it) but the very vast bulk are just the submission-quality paper. What a lot of authors do is prepare the preprint using the same style-file as the journal they'll submit to, meaning that the article on the arXiv is likely to be very close to the published version. Authors will then add a journal reference when the paper is published.
There's no cachet in submitting dross to a journal and expecting it to be smartened up through peer-review. Referees are busy people, refereeing out of a sense of duty to their field. They have neither time nor interest in polishing someone else's work. Likewise, journal staff are overworked and want to devote their time to dealing with the formatting, the type-setting, the layout and the image quality of a paper. They've got absolutely no interest in correcting badly-written, badly-spelled papers -- and no interest in cleaning up horrific formatting. People are aware of this, so generally what hits the arXiv is clean enough to pass through referees, editors, sub-editors and type-setters without being held up at any step.
In my field, at least, the arXiv is the first stop to find a paper that was published from about 1997 onwards. (It was there before, but in the mid-late 90s it became hard to find a paper that wasn't on the arXiv.) Only if that fails do we go off and look elsewhere.
Jesus. He said that he wants to keep up to date with developments, not reanalyse the fucking data himself. What do *you* do when we release a new CMB angular power spectrum? Do you run off to NASA and download the entire WMAP raw data stream and then sit there and go through the entire analysis, from pipeline and beam correction through to foreground removal and then the full analysis of the cleaned sky? That's a two- or three-year job, on top of about 7 years training.
Christ almighty.
In which case those of us in active research have failed.
How would you prefer this to be addressed? We normally try and be open about how we research, why we research, the techniques that are used, the conclusions that can be drawn, flaws with the model, alternative explanations, and our level of certainty that we're right. We also try very hard to make sure that that last is quantifiable and not just some subjective feeling.
(In reference to the Higg's boson discoveries, for example, the last I knew (and it's not my field) they were claiming roughly 3.5 sigma or so. That's a nice discovery, given that one sigma is a standard deviation. In cosmology we tend to believe something if it's at 3.5 sigma... and particle physicists laugh at us. We *have* to do that because of a lack of data; they don't. They want to push it to 5 sigma or so. This holds in other fields. People try and actually quantify how sure they are that this result is better than some control. In cosmology there's even a trend to go further and attempt to quantify whether this *model* is better than another.)
What would you like improved so that we're not as bad as the mediaeval scientists?
It's possible. But there is a difference between the trigger-happy meatheads of Special Branch and whichever force pinned things on the alleged topiary.
oh come on. i saw that "What 19-year-old would even know that song from the 1970's? Or anybody under 40? Much less use it as a reference" stuff before, too. i'm under 40 and i know it well. i know of three versions (and i know that there are more out there): the original, which i heard growing up because, like, you know, my parents would listen to it?; the execrable westlife version from about 8 years ago which a british 11 year old would definitely have heard; and a me first and the gimme gimmes version from about the same time.
i don't know why people keep trotting out the "lulzsec could NEVER have heard of this song!!!!!!" argument because it's utterly vacuous. there are many ways they could know it. it's a famous song; their parents would know it. it's also been covered and rereleased - and by westlife, no less, who may be unknown in the states (thank your lucky stars) but were definitely not unknown in britain.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/contents
Enjoy.
They're not going to charge him with "being a spokesperson", same as they didn't charge Cleary with "running an IRC server". If they find evidence that he actively took part in (or even facilitated) any attacks on a company, they'll charge him under the Misuse of Computers Act.
http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/2011/06/topiary-doxed.html
Of course, neither or both of the Swede and the Shetlander could be involved.
I'm glad we find ourselves in agreement.
Yes, that is the rub - but if I genuinely had a legal copy I'd upload to the service. I doubt it would be in a record label's interest to pursue a court case like that when I can provide hard copies of each album. It's unreasonable (and I think a court would back this up) to expect me to retain the receipt for each CD. Even if the court viewed that suspiciously, there would be thousands of easier targets that would be less expensive and lower risk (for them).
(Of course, being British I believe it's still technically illegal for me to format-shift, but the labels are on record as saying they won't prosecute for that. I may be behind the times and this may finally have changed; I know it was being discussed quite recently.)
REM did something similar on Reckoning, as I recall -- there's a little section of music at the end of my (unfortunately long expired) cassette copy just after Little America which isn't on the CD I've got. I kind of regret not copying that across before the tape died...
Anyway, personally I think you'd be fine uploading things transcoded from LPs and cassettes - but hell, I'm not a lawyer, and the record labels have proven themselves unpleasant and vindictive.
To be honest, anyone who uploads something to this service that they haven't purchased legally is probably being a bit silly.
Oh, don't get me wrong - they can't be "the" dark matter. But they're a dark matter. How significant I don't know; we'd need tighter constraints. (You're looking at a few eV from lab experiments; cosmology claims tighter bounds but take them with a pinch of salt.) So for more "physical" models that has to be taken into account. I think it's one of the signs that the problem is a lot more complicated than finding "the" dark matter -- although I know for sure that if an LSP is found people will be trumpeting that it's "the" dark matter, and then wondering why it doesn't quite fit the data, its abundance is a bit low (or high), its properties not quite right.
My only real point was that you can fit the bullet cluster with modified gravity models assuming massive neutrinos (which is a very uncontroversial assumption these days) -- the fact that that model (TeVeS) is ugly and ad-hoc and that the neutrino mass is a bit on the steep side was a bit beside the point, it's a matter of principle for me. It shows that we can't take the bullet cluster as proof that "the" dark matter is a particle. It also doesn't say that dark matter isn't a particle. Personally I strongly suspect that the dark matter problem will eventually be solved by a mixture of relativistic effects (a cylindrical metric will never be identical to Minkowski space even though the Newtonian potentials are small), poorly-applied relativity (average metrics will never evolve with the averaged metric's dynamics; and even small inhomogeneities can have a large impact on observation), some modified form of gravity (GR is wrong, we know that; what surprises me is how controversial stating that can be), standard model particles (neutrinos do have mass and are a dark matter; they're just nothing like significant enough to solve the whole problem), and some new particle species and forces between them (perhaps from SUSY or perhaps from something yet more exotic, which would be a lot more exciting).
Of course, dealing with all of that is a massive problem, and frankly if we add that many parameters into a model we'll quickly lose accuracy, because the data is nothing like good enough to constrain everything. So at the minute, unfortunately, we're more or less forced to work with phenomenology. That's fine... except when people then believe in the literal truth of a phenomenological model.
But hey, this is all just my opinion. I could very well be wrong and all of the problem is solved by an LSP. If so, so be it.
This is getting ridiculous.
What part of "this shows that in principle a modified gravity can explain the bullet cluster" says "MODIFIED GRAVITY IS TRUE AND IT'S TEVES!" to you?
A) Neutrinos have mass. Are you arguing that? If so, this conversation is over now.
B) Given that neutrinos have mass, they act as a warm dark matter no matter what the theory of gravity. Are you arguing that? If so, this conversation is over now.
C) Given that neutrinos act as a warm dark matter it should be taken into account.
D) Adding massive neutrinos into one particular example of a modified gravity (TeVeS) demonstrates that it can fit the bullet cluster. The details are unimportant because no-one in their right mind is pretending that TeVeS is a good theory of gravity; it's an ugly ad-hoc collection of fields.
What's your problem here?
Let's throw open a suggestion here: imagine a universe where GR is inaccurate and is modified in the infra-red. This universe also contains massive neutrinos. It *also* contains something similar to MSSM with a stable lightest supersymmetric particle. Then let's put "ceoyoyo" and his amazing abilities at physics into this universe. Rather than understanding what's there, the mighty ceoyoyo will attribute everything to a non-baryonic dark matter (evidently not even caring to link it to his supersymmetric particle but let's say he does that, too). Then he'll find that things are inaccurate, because that's not the whole story, and invent another particle to make it work, and then he'll relax, happy. And ignorant.
I strongly suspect that that's the universe we live in. I'd love it if MSSM was wrong and there's nothing of hte sort but I'm not silly enough to actually believe that. It's a complicated place out there. We can either describe it properly, or we can make snide little comments on internet forums mocking anyone who doesn't want to restrict themselves to some unspecified "non-baryonic dark matter".
If you're trying to claim that non-baryonic dark matter fits "Occam's razor" better then you also don't understand it. *It doesn't exist*. You have to have a proper, working model, and that model is going to be just as ugly and ad-hoc as modifying gravity. The MSSM is an ugly collection of assumptions. A modified gravity theory is typically an ugly collection of assumptions. Just saying "aha! a single pressureless particle fits everything!" doesn't work because it's not a physical model - it's a phenomenological one.
Wow. Sounds like someone should get over themselves.
It was a joke. Whether you think it was funny is a different matter, but it was a joke. Sometimes it's worth accepting that.
Also, I apologise for the tone of my previous post which looks absurdly aggressive in the cold light of morning.
"In fact, it would appear you're being racist, in your implication that the Neanderthal race is inherently worse than other races... on the basis of what, cranial volume of a few fossils?"
Where did you get *that* from? Yes, plenty of people have done that (though technically they're not being racist; Neanderthals are a separate species to us, and don't try and pretend different species can't interbreed because they can and any definition of "species" that works will yield separate "species" that do so - if you don't believe me, get a fucking education) but can you point out where TWX did that? Be serious, he didn't. You're just taking an excuse to jump on an agenda and setting up something that isn't even a strawman in the process.
Seriously, if you're gonna debate at least fucking do it properly. He said "Somehow I doubt that telling those white supremacists that they're the ones descended from Neanderthals and that the Africans are the only group lacking Neanderthal DNA would do anything to change their perspectives."
Firstly, it's obvious to me that he's joking, and I'm not even American and don't have so many fucking white supremacists in my country. Secondly, he's simply making a joke about white supremacists having to acknowledge that *they're* the ones descended from Neanderthals rather than some mythical pure-blood Homo Sapiens line, and never doing so.
What's the problem? Fuck all, except your own idiotic prejudices.
As far as I understood it, it was that the evidence suggested - to some degree of certainty - that the genes of all extra-African races were different from sub-Saharan African races to a level that agreed with Neanderthal sequences. Obviously the errors were large - and acknowledged in the studies - but so far as I understood the reasoning for the implications, Homo Sapiens was reputed to have interbred with Homo Neanderthalis at least in the Middle East at about the point that we left Africa, simply because all of us who aren't predominantly sub-Saharan African have the same gene sequence as some recently-sequence Neanderthal fossils.
So far as that goes, fair enough. I remember reading a lot of that kind of thing a good few months back. And a natural implication is that anyone who isn't sub-Sahran African probably has Neanderthal in them. (Entertainingly, of course, many sub-Saharans also will. This is due to humans, err, interacting constantly and repeatedly and the effects propogating through populations. But the studies took that kind of simple-minded thing into account, of course.)
Errr, more to the point, January called and it wants its (mildly but not excessively) controversial news back.