Yeah, that's why we had all the snow that had the deniers on full volume. Some people don't seem to understand that more snow in the winter might merely mean "wetter" rather than "colder".
Ironic that it was a record-warm year, after all the shills talking about how the weather disproved global warming.
there is no observational evidence for a black hole occuring in nature.
Actually we observe stars near the center of our galaxy moving at high speed in small orbits. We can calculate the mass and maximum size of whatever it is that they're orbiting, and it sure comes out sounding like a supermassive black hole.
You're welcome to offer an alternative explanation.
...that the point mass singularity...
I'm as ignorant on this topic as you are, but I suspect that when we finally unify gravity with the other forces we'll see that the collapse isn't total... Pauli Exclusion Principle, kind of thing.
And there are other notions - created by actual physicists - alread out there. E.g., fuzzballs.
Liberals seem to have a lot bigger problem than conservatives do criticizing "their guy" when he engages in anti freedom behavior
Yes, we're all cheering him on for his stance on telecom immunity, his refusal to prosecute manifest war crimes, his diplomatic pressure to quash the war crime investigation in Spain, his foreverwar in Afghanistan and drone war in Pakistan, etc.
He's going to lose by a large margin in 2012, because anyone with the slightest progressive sentiment is going to stay home.
The hypothesis in this case comes from the poster's family
Who strayed from the scientific method when they neglected to apply Ockham's Razor.
Science isn't in the business of determining whether folk beliefs are true. Science is in the business of explaining funny stuff people notice. Here's how science actually operates:
Say "That's odd...."
Say "And it doesn't seem to be just a random occurrence..."
Say "So I wonder what's causing it?"
Generate a bunch of hypotheses.
Apply Ockham's Razor to see which hypotheses are worth following up on.
Figure out what the hypotheses you do follow up on predict w.r.t. stuff you haven't checked.
Go look at that stuff and see if you can rule out some or all the hypotheses.
Repeat until you die or lose interest.
So the scientific approach wouldn't be to post to Slashdot asking what instruments are useful for detecting ghosts; the scientific approach would be to ask the relatives what phenomena gave them the "That's odd..." sentiment, and follow up from there.
Why should a scientist go looking for ghosts? Are ghosts the best available hypothetical explanation for some body of observations? Does someone have a ghost hypothesis that makes predictions? Is there an actual reason "ghost hunters" look for temperature changes? Are there simpler explanations for the stuff people find when they profess to be looking for ghosts?
The summary is a good example of what real, healthy skepticism is. It boils down to "I don't think I will find anything, but I don't actually know that until I look, so here is the experiment I want to conduct."
Maybe you can explain why a thermometer would be useful for detecting ghosts.
Apparently the authors were either ignorant or dishonest, and the reviewers were either ignorant, dishonest, are careless.
I should have added, "or the author got tired of the journal's sloppy review practices and decided to embarrass them". One of the rebuttals someone linked quoted the author's previous comments on the need for statistical rigor.
Your comment does hit on another area of bias, which is to discredit results we don't agree with rather than retry the experiments. My favorite example is Duncan MacDougall's [wikipedia.org] experiment to prove the existence of the soul. Everybody discredits him but the experiment has never been repeated. So if anybody asks me, I will always say that the best scientific evidence is that there is a soul.
Ah, the soul has mass... LoL... Maybe dark matter is just the accumulation of all the souls of people who died and are now gravitationally bound to the galaxies where they lived. Utterly undetectable except by mass!
I'm sorry, but I have trouble finding fault with people who reject this out of hand. Generally I'm a stickler for going where the evidence leads, e.g. ISTM that Wegner had compelling evidence that the continents had drifted and scientists should have accepted the fact and started looking for the mechanism. (Easy to say in hindsight, huh.) But some crank trying to weigh souls? It's small wonder no one has tried to replicate his results.
P.S. - Be sure you don't die by falling into a black hole - you'll never be able to get to heaven!
It's appalling that this effort to boost ratings almost certainly cost the lives of infants and probably still does.
But that's the American Way. We've got legislators who want to repeal food safety laws because they're inconvenient for businesses that produce/distribute food products.
Our post-1980 notion of Civic Responsibility is "make as much money for your shareholders as you can".
Big Pharma doesn't primarily harm people by putting dangerous additives in their products. They primarily harm people by lobbying the US Congress to make it illegal to buy the same drug from Canada for 1/3 the price.
But isn't that simply applying the maxim: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? I.e. it is not asserting the evidence doesn't exist, only that the evidence isn't strong enough to make the assertion that the hypothesis is true with any confidence. There's a subtle difference.
Not all that subtle, since you can say "the evidence isn't strong enough" about any claim you care to pull out of your 455.
I don't understand this. If the researchers did a proper experiment, respected the rules, followed proper procedures, and did a proper analysis of the data they collected, in a scientific way. Why is it a problem to publish ?
Shouldn't be any. However, this case isn't relevant to your question, since they didn't do a proper analysis. (Or at least that's what the rebuttals say; I haven't read the paper.)
One of the most glaring problems is that they (reportedly) went fishing for statistical significance in their results, without making the correction that is required for rigor when you do that. When you find significance at the traditonal 95% confidence level, there's a 5% chance that you're finding meaning in noise. If you test for 20 different effects and then go fishing to see whether *any* of them show significance at the 95% confidence level, you have 1 -.95^20 = 64% chance of finding "significance" in noise.
There are simple ways to fix that problem, e.g. the Tukey HSD "honestly statistically different" test. Apparently the authors were either ignorant or dishonest, and the reviewers were either ignorant, dishonest, are careless.
That assumes perfect precognition. The effects that I saw claimed were more like, 3% better than random.
in the PDF rebuttal posted by 246o1, the authors show that with a mere 53.1% advantage on predicting the color a roulette wheel turns up, a psychic could "bankrupt all casinos on the planet before anybody realized what was going on".
This is a no-brainer. If merely one person in a million could predict the future, teleport, move objects with their mind, or any of the other stuff usually claimed, our society simply couldn't operate as it does. There would be new layers of safeguards on darn near everything, which don't actually exist because they aren't actually needed.
The fact Amazon.com needs to resort to a bald-faced lie to distance itself from the allegations of government pressure says a great deal about the truth here.
Where are people going if they don't want to use Amazon anymore?
When did acting like the villains out of a WWII or Cold War spy flick become publicly acceptable for the country that prides itself on being the leader of the free world?
09/11/01
Not that we never misbehaved before. That's just when it became acceptable.
Of course, the War on Drugs already had us primed for it. Politicians like to spin some problems as so severe that normal rules of good behavior don't apply.
As a conservative, freedom of expression means freedom from government intervention into my everyday life. I do not need government regulation on what TV I choose to watch, what food I wish to eat, and how I wish to use the Internet.
Yet for some reason the political orientatoin that purportedly supports non-intervention is the same one that wants to tell you what you can and can't do in bed.
The answer to every problem is *not* more laws and regulation. This should be an absolute last resort, and personally I do not believe we are there yet.
Hopefully you're aware that that is a political ideology, not an established fact.
I haven't exactly noticed an exodus of conservatives to such ungoverned paradises as Somalia and Afghanistan.
"The right" is against NN for the same reason "the right" rejects global warming: the rich and powerful don't want it.
We've got an enormous problem with political ignorance and naivety in this country. The Republicans want to run the country in whatever way helps the rich get richer quicker. (If you don't accept that premise, go back and look at whose interests they consistently looked after when they held the White House and both houses of Congress, vs. whose interests they occasionally threw a bone to. By the time of the 2006 elections the leaders of various socially conservative movements were complaining that they were bringing in a lot of votes and not getting much of anything in return.)
But there's a problem if you want to run a republic for the benefit of the rich: there aren't enough of them to win elections. So you have to find ways to get people to vote against their own best interests. But any decent politician knows that if they can make your knee jerk, they can make your finger twitch in the voting booth. So Republican politicians have offered the country things like the Southern Strategy, and the new Southwestern Strategy that they've been rolling out for the last ~5 years, and of course their association with the religious right. I.e., appeal to people's worst instincts rather than their best.
But now, due to the aforementioned political ignorance and naivety, people think that whatever the Republican politicians want is an inherently conservative position. So we get idiotic ideas such as that global warming and net neutrality are leftist ideologies. People in this country need to wake up and smell the bullshit before they've been fucked beyond the point of no return.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who (cough) actually bothers to read the literature
Read the literature? We can't even be bothered to RTFA!
I am just hoping that global warming will allow our earth to sustain a larger population via more fresh water and more crops.
I think they're expecting more rain in some places and less in others.
The US intelligence community identifies the dislocations resulting from climate change as one of the top security threats for this century.
What should I say to him when we talk about this again?
Tell him he's as clueless as he is greedy.
Or just refer him to this post, and I'll tell him for you.
It was the wettest year on record.
Yeah, that's why we had all the snow that had the deniers on full volume. Some people don't seem to understand that more snow in the winter might merely mean "wetter" rather than "colder".
Ironic that it was a record-warm year, after all the shills talking about how the weather disproved global warming.
there is no observational evidence for a black hole occuring in nature.
Actually we observe stars near the center of our galaxy moving at high speed in small orbits. We can calculate the mass and maximum size of whatever it is that they're orbiting, and it sure comes out sounding like a supermassive black hole.
You're welcome to offer an alternative explanation.
...that the point mass singularity...
I'm as ignorant on this topic as you are, but I suspect that when we finally unify gravity with the other forces we'll see that the collapse isn't total... Pauli Exclusion Principle, kind of thing.
And there are other notions - created by actual physicists - alread out there. E.g., fuzzballs.
being contrary just so you can feel yourself superior is the sign of stupidity.
I beg to diff-
Uhm, never mind.
Man what is happening over there in the US? Didn't you guys start off as the good guys? When did it all start to go so horribly wrong?
When we found out someone already lived here.
What makes you a "supporter" ?
Liberals seem to have a lot bigger problem than conservatives do criticizing "their guy" when he engages in anti freedom behavior
Yes, we're all cheering him on for his stance on telecom immunity, his refusal to prosecute manifest war crimes, his diplomatic pressure to quash the war crime investigation in Spain, his foreverwar in Afghanistan and drone war in Pakistan, etc.
He's going to lose by a large margin in 2012, because anyone with the slightest progressive sentiment is going to stay home.
completely unbreakable, unlike every other computer security system that has ever been developed.
There's no chance that 'a centralized database will emerge'
Of course not. What government or business would be so crass as to track what people do on the internet?
The hypothesis in this case comes from the poster's family
Who strayed from the scientific method when they neglected to apply Ockham's Razor.
Science isn't in the business of determining whether folk beliefs are true. Science is in the business of explaining funny stuff people notice. Here's how science actually operates:
So the scientific approach wouldn't be to post to Slashdot asking what instruments are useful for detecting ghosts; the scientific approach would be to ask the relatives what phenomena gave them the "That's odd..." sentiment, and follow up from there.
Why should a scientist go looking for ghosts? Are ghosts the best available hypothetical explanation for some body of observations? Does someone have a ghost hypothesis that makes predictions? Is there an actual reason "ghost hunters" look for temperature changes? Are there simpler explanations for the stuff people find when they profess to be looking for ghosts?
The summary is a good example of what real, healthy skepticism is. It boils down to "I don't think I will find anything, but I don't actually know that until I look, so here is the experiment I want to conduct."
Maybe you can explain why a thermometer would be useful for detecting ghosts.
Or any other instrument you care to name.
I liked the X-Files episode where Scully takes a sample of presumed ectoplasm down to the lab to see if it's supernatural.
Apparently the authors were either ignorant or dishonest, and the reviewers were either ignorant, dishonest, are careless.
I should have added, "or the author got tired of the journal's sloppy review practices and decided to embarrass them". One of the rebuttals someone linked quoted the author's previous comments on the need for statistical rigor.
Your comment does hit on another area of bias, which is to discredit results we don't agree with rather than retry the experiments. My favorite example is Duncan MacDougall's [wikipedia.org] experiment to prove the existence of the soul. Everybody discredits him but the experiment has never been repeated. So if anybody asks me, I will always say that the best scientific evidence is that there is a soul.
Ah, the soul has mass ... LoL ... Maybe dark matter is just the accumulation of all the souls of people who died and are now gravitationally bound to the galaxies where they lived. Utterly undetectable except by mass!
I'm sorry, but I have trouble finding fault with people who reject this out of hand. Generally I'm a stickler for going where the evidence leads, e.g. ISTM that Wegner had compelling evidence that the continents had drifted and scientists should have accepted the fact and started looking for the mechanism. (Easy to say in hindsight, huh.) But some crank trying to weigh souls? It's small wonder no one has tried to replicate his results.
P.S. - Be sure you don't die by falling into a black hole - you'll never be able to get to heaven!
It's appalling that this effort to boost ratings almost certainly cost the lives of infants and probably still does.
But that's the American Way. We've got legislators who want to repeal food safety laws because they're inconvenient for businesses that produce/distribute food products.
Our post-1980 notion of Civic Responsibility is "make as much money for your shareholders as you can".
Sadly, there's a lot of money in junk science.
Sadly, there's even bigger money in Big Pharma.
Big Pharma doesn't primarily harm people by putting dangerous additives in their products. They primarily harm people by lobbying the US Congress to make it illegal to buy the same drug from Canada for 1/3 the price.
But isn't that simply applying the maxim: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? I.e. it is not asserting the evidence doesn't exist, only that the evidence isn't strong enough to make the assertion that the hypothesis is true with any confidence. There's a subtle difference.
Not all that subtle, since you can say "the evidence isn't strong enough" about any claim you care to pull out of your 455.
I don't understand this. If the researchers did a proper experiment, respected the rules, followed proper procedures, and did a proper analysis of the data they collected, in a scientific way. Why is it a problem to publish ?
Shouldn't be any. However, this case isn't relevant to your question, since they didn't do a proper analysis. (Or at least that's what the rebuttals say; I haven't read the paper.)
One of the most glaring problems is that they (reportedly) went fishing for statistical significance in their results, without making the correction that is required for rigor when you do that. When you find significance at the traditonal 95% confidence level, there's a 5% chance that you're finding meaning in noise. If you test for 20 different effects and then go fishing to see whether *any* of them show significance at the 95% confidence level, you have 1 - .95^20 = 64% chance of finding "significance" in noise.
There are simple ways to fix that problem, e.g. the Tukey HSD "honestly statistically different" test. Apparently the authors were either ignorant or dishonest, and the reviewers were either ignorant, dishonest, are careless.
That assumes perfect precognition. The effects that I saw claimed were more like, 3% better than random.
in the PDF rebuttal posted by 246o1, the authors show that with a mere 53.1% advantage on predicting the color a roulette wheel turns up, a psychic could "bankrupt all casinos on the planet before anybody realized what was going on".
This is a no-brainer. If merely one person in a million could predict the future, teleport, move objects with their mind, or any of the other stuff usually claimed, our society simply couldn't operate as it does. There would be new layers of safeguards on darn near everything, which don't actually exist because they aren't actually needed.
The fact Amazon.com needs to resort to a bald-faced lie to distance itself from the allegations of government pressure says a great deal about the truth here.
Where are people going if they don't want to use Amazon anymore?
When did acting like the villains out of a WWII or Cold War spy flick become publicly acceptable for the country that prides itself on being the leader of the free world?
09/11/01
Not that we never misbehaved before. That's just when it became acceptable.
Of course, the War on Drugs already had us primed for it. Politicians like to spin some problems as so severe that normal rules of good behavior don't apply.
People with different opinions are ignorant. Got it. Very "insightful", mods.
No, people who think USAian politics is about "conservative vs. liberal" rather than "rich vs. everyone else" are ignorant.
As a conservative, freedom of expression means freedom from government intervention into my everyday life. I do not need government regulation on what TV I choose to watch, what food I wish to eat, and how I wish to use the Internet.
Yet for some reason the political orientatoin that purportedly supports non-intervention is the same one that wants to tell you what you can and can't do in bed.
The answer to every problem is *not* more laws and regulation. This should be an absolute last resort, and personally I do not believe we are there yet.
Hopefully you're aware that that is a political ideology, not an established fact.
I haven't exactly noticed an exodus of conservatives to such ungoverned paradises as Somalia and Afghanistan.
"The right" is against NN for the same reason "the right" rejects global warming: the rich and powerful don't want it.
We've got an enormous problem with political ignorance and naivety in this country. The Republicans want to run the country in whatever way helps the rich get richer quicker. (If you don't accept that premise, go back and look at whose interests they consistently looked after when they held the White House and both houses of Congress, vs. whose interests they occasionally threw a bone to. By the time of the 2006 elections the leaders of various socially conservative movements were complaining that they were bringing in a lot of votes and not getting much of anything in return.)
But there's a problem if you want to run a republic for the benefit of the rich: there aren't enough of them to win elections. So you have to find ways to get people to vote against their own best interests. But any decent politician knows that if they can make your knee jerk, they can make your finger twitch in the voting booth. So Republican politicians have offered the country things like the Southern Strategy, and the new Southwestern Strategy that they've been rolling out for the last ~5 years, and of course their association with the religious right. I.e., appeal to people's worst instincts rather than their best.
But now, due to the aforementioned political ignorance and naivety, people think that whatever the Republican politicians want is an inherently conservative position. So we get idiotic ideas such as that global warming and net neutrality are leftist ideologies. People in this country need to wake up and smell the bullshit before they've been fucked beyond the point of no return.