> I think the biggest challenge of having a "real" science network would be the programming.
> Science isn't something that explodes with sensational discoveries each week, at least not the kind that are easily translatable into hours of television programming.
> Seriously, if there was a science network, what would be on it?
PBS's NOVA has pretty much degenerated into a series of human interest stories. (Still better than most broadcast TV fare, though.)
> I live in a Mississippi "dry county," but beer & wine coolers may be sold inside the city limits after 7 AM & no later than 10 PM, Sundays excluded. Quantities less than 32 oz may not be purchased. Since there's not a liquor store, everyone buys their "distilled spirits" by the case or pickup truckload anyway.
Impact, Texas was founded as a 'wet' jurisdiction just north of Abilene, Texas, to serve the students at that dreary[*] city's three (IIRC) fundamentalist religious colleges.[*] Old-timers tell of sitting for hours in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Friday nights, just to be able to pull their obligatory student weekend benders.
[*] I've heard Abilene described as everything from "The New Jerusalem" to "The Armpit of the Universe". My short stay there inclined me toward the latter description.
The results of the controversial study contradict earlier findings from the same team which suggested a drop of a quarter or more in "adverse outcomes" - including death, heart failure or heart attack.
What is not commonly reported about the earlier study is that even after scumming the data they were not able to identify any statistically significant reults.
I have only seen the abstract (not the full report), but it looked very much like they measured everything they could find in the kitchen sink, and reported that handful where the test group got luckier than the control group. But basic statistics says 5% of those tests should be significant at the standard alpha=0.05 even if the scores were just random noise. If they were not even able to find some faux significant results after scumming the data that way, they should have recognized that they really had a problem. And yet they chose to publish it anyway, as if they had discovered something worth reporting...
Prayer teams from various denominations and faiths were alerted by email to start intercessory prayer as soon as possible after the patient was enrolled on the trial.
Neither hospital staff, the patients, or their relatives had any idea which patients' were receiving prayer, to prevent any chance of the results being skewed.
Mmmm, yes. Is that supposed to be an experimental control? How do they know that someone in the control group didn't benefit from unathorized prayers evoked by a "pray for little Johnny" chain letter?
These are grotesquely flawed studies. The first one should never have been published, and they only reason you've ever heard of it is because lots of people who don't understand experiments think it supports their righteous agenda.
And of course, if the first one hadn't been published there wouldn't have been any need to publish the new one either...
> I beleive him. Did you see the Bear Suit? That guy even looks like Buzz Lightyear! I bet a guy who goes around looking like Buzz Lightyear knows a heckuvalot more about "flying through space" and things like that. More than some guys who make tile.
The question is whether he knows he's just a toy and his gadgets don't really work.
> I thought that usually more than one person goes into space at one time for safety measures. If he gets hurt or something and there is no other people to help him while in space he could become injured or dead and take very valuable and expensive equipment with him.
The first {astr,cosm}onauts were just mascots strapped into a diving bell strapped onto an ICBM where the warhead should be. Their yarbles were a more important qualification than their test-pilot skills.
About 650 years ago, an inventive Chinese mandarin named Wan Hu tied 47 large rockets filled with gunpowder to his chair and, firmly clutching a kite in each hand, ordered his servants to light the touchpapers.
He vanished in a cloud of sparks and blue smoke, according to legend, with many of his Ming dynasty contemporaries believing he was somewhere in the heavens.
> The question that people should be asking is: why are we making kids stand up and recite something in the first place? Teachers should be presenting facts and explaining concepts (hopefully in a balanced way, but that's hard to enforce), not encouraging partiotism.
Sick as I am of living in a society full of people who want to ram their religion down my throat, I think brainwashing schoolkiddies with nationalism is probably a worse problem with the pledge, and very dangerous in a nucular-tipped superpower that thinks whatever it wants is a moral entitlement. That stinkin' pledge may be part of the reason we're having the international problems we're having these days...
Somewhere I heard a suggestion for a "short form" pledge that everyone should be able to agree on:
I pledge allegiance to,
liberty and justice for all.
I wouldn't object to having schoolkiddies drilled on that every morning.
> It may not be realistic (i've not played it, so i don't know) but is it a mockery simply because it is a game or is there soemthing else? I mean, Hogan's Heroes was set in a WWII prisoner of war camp. It first aired in 65. Certianly it had a lot more of a potential to be offensive than a game that comes out now, so much later.
There's a surprising diversity of opinion on that kind of stuff. One of my friend's father was a US bomber crewman during that war, and he was outraged by Hogan's Heroes. OTOH, the guy who played LeBeau in the show had been a member of the French Resistance and may have actually spent time in a POW camp, and apparently didn't have any strong objection to the show.
> History is full of examples of people who were overlooked for the Nobel Prize. [...] The prize isn't something people "earn" and it's not something that you're entitled to. It's something that one particular group of people decide to bestow upon you because you've done significant work in their view.
Various scientists quoted in the biomedcentral article suggest that the decision may be very legit, even if controversial:
So why did the Nobel committee disagree? Primarily, some leading scientists say, because the approach to scanning first proposed by Damadian was surpassed by a technique using gradients in the magnetic field developed by Lauterbur and Mansfield.
An article from the National Academy of Sciences' Beyond Discovery Web site sums up this argument: "An essential technical advance that opened up the ensuing widespread application of NMR to produce useful images was due to chemist Paul Lauterbur, who was then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1971, he watched a chemist named Leon Saryan repeat Damadian's experiments with tumors and healthy tissues from rats. Lauterbur concluded that the technique was insufficiently informative for locating and diagnosing tumors and went on to devise a practical way to use NMR to make images," it says.
[...]
What all this illustrates, says another prominent Canadian researcher R. Mark Henkelman, professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, is the difficulty of pinpointing the eureka moment in scientific endeavor.
"This is probably one of the hardest prizes, as making MRI a reality in the medical domain involved many, many people," he told The Scientist. "It's very hard to go back to the beginning and stick your finger on one guy with one bright idea."
Nevertheless, Henkelman thinks the Nobel committee did the right thing. "I think he [Damadian] had a real insight on NMR and cancer and that there might be differences in tissue with pathology that might show up with magnetic resonance, but that's not what this prize is given for, the prize is given for MR imaging and that really belongs to the other two people."
[...]
Richard Ernst, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, takes a philosophical view on the whole thing.
"It's not a very pleasant issue," he told The Scientist. "There are always arguments about who deserved it most. You have to just live with the facts and the reality and accept your fate.
> What on earth makes you think that a person's religious beliefs have anything at all to do with whether or not they are eligible for the Nobel Prize?
Would you give a prestigious scientific award to, say, a chemist who believed the world was flat and the heavenly bodies rotated around it, regardless of his contributions to chemistry?
> I say find the people spying on me, and stop them. Isn't that what the FBI/CIA/NSA are for?
No, their job is to ensure that the rich get richer. They're more likely to throw you in jail for calling attention to the spyware than they are to throw the spiers in jail. Computer "terror" laws notwithstanding.
> TrueActive is given positive press for removing a 'feature called "silent deploy", which allows the buyer to place the program on someone else's computer secretly via e-mail, without having physical access to the machine', although little criticism is made for making the stuff in the first place.
Someone ought to take their sorry asses to court and see how the Feds like having the new "computer terrorism" laws applied against businessmen.
Though I personally wouldn't rate it as "terrorism", that sort of behavior simply isn't acceptable, and someone needs to send a strong message to that effect.
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> I think the biggest challenge of having a "real" science network would be the programming.
> Science isn't something that explodes with sensational discoveries each week, at least not the kind that are easily translatable into hours of television programming.
> Seriously, if there was a science network, what would be on it?
PBS's NOVA has pretty much degenerated into a series of human interest stories. (Still better than most broadcast TV fare, though.)
> words "purple" and "seven-centimeter long", when in one sentence, usually mean it should be filtered by the antispam filter.
7cm isn't big enough to be obscene.
> I live in a Mississippi "dry county," but beer & wine coolers may be sold inside the city limits after 7 AM & no later than 10 PM, Sundays excluded. Quantities less than 32 oz may not be purchased. Since there's not a liquor store, everyone buys their "distilled spirits" by the case or pickup truckload anyway.
Impact, Texas was founded as a 'wet' jurisdiction just north of Abilene, Texas, to serve the students at that dreary[*] city's three (IIRC) fundamentalist religious colleges.[*] Old-timers tell of sitting for hours in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Friday nights, just to be able to pull their obligatory student weekend benders.
[*] I've heard Abilene described as everything from "The New Jerusalem" to "The Armpit of the Universe". My short stay there inclined me toward the latter description.
> Embargo On!
LoL! (Loved that movie!)
Windows vulnerabilities fixed faster!
Rush does dope!
US taxpayers pay $1.75 to support each gallon of gasoline sold in Iraq!
It seems we've all been teleported to Bizarro World. I want to see the results of a study about praying to purple frogs...
I have only seen the abstract (not the full report), but it looked very much like they measured everything they could find in the kitchen sink, and reported that handful where the test group got luckier than the control group. But basic statistics says 5% of those tests should be significant at the standard alpha=0.05 even if the scores were just random noise. If they were not even able to find some faux significant results after scumming the data that way, they should have recognized that they really had a problem. And yet they chose to publish it anyway, as if they had discovered something worth reporting...Mmmm, yes. Is that supposed to be an experimental control? How do they know that someone in the control group didn't benefit from unathorized prayers evoked by a "pray for little Johnny" chain letter?
These are grotesquely flawed studies. The first one should never have been published, and they only reason you've ever heard of it is because lots of people who don't understand experiments think it supports their righteous agenda.
And of course, if the first one hadn't been published there wouldn't have been any need to publish the new one either...
> Hmm, 1999 is prior to Microsoft's Rebirth
An Microsoft's Rebirth was prior to when their crapware started affecting me for the simple reason that I have to share an internet with them.
> > "It dissipates heat at an exponential rate, it's beyond belief, and I have no idea why it does, all I know is that it does."
> I'm sure NASA is jumping at the chance....
My computer dissipates heat at an exponential rate; maybe NASA should just coat the shuttle with a skin of Athlon chips.
> I beleive him. Did you see the Bear Suit? That guy even looks like Buzz Lightyear! I bet a guy who goes around looking like Buzz Lightyear knows a heckuvalot more about "flying through space" and things like that. More than some guys who make tile.
The question is whether he knows he's just a toy and his gadgets don't really work.
> I thought that usually more than one person goes into space at one time for safety measures. If he gets hurt or something and there is no other people to help him while in space he could become injured or dead and take very valuable and expensive equipment with him.
The first {astr,cosm}onauts were just mascots strapped into a diving bell strapped onto an ICBM where the warhead should be. Their yarbles were a more important qualification than their test-pilot skills.
> It is interesting that the creators of the USS Enterprise did not anticipate that other countries might create crafts in a non-cooperative manner
Yeah, and they also thought the galaxy would be full of people with outrageously bad personalities and rubber lumps on their heads.
Not a reliable source of information, AFAICT.
> and racial slurs about anyone else get modded to the stars.
Hey, maybe Team Slashdot could put someone in orbit too!
> Space flight 4-U !!! 2-DAY Acting now to get chance to go with space flight !
Someone hacked my Web site to say "Orbited by Chinese!"
> Remember that the V2 is really the granddaddy of both the Russians and the Americans.
Everyone recognizes the V2's freudian significance, but it's a surprise to know it was capable of siring children!
I wouldn't object to having schoolkiddies drilled on that every morning.> The question that people should be asking is: why are we making kids stand up and recite something in the first place? Teachers should be presenting facts and explaining concepts (hopefully in a balanced way, but that's hard to enforce), not encouraging partiotism.
Sick as I am of living in a society full of people who want to ram their religion down my throat, I think brainwashing schoolkiddies with nationalism is probably a worse problem with the pledge, and very dangerous in a nucular-tipped superpower that thinks whatever it wants is a moral entitlement. That stinkin' pledge may be part of the reason we're having the international problems we're having these days...
Somewhere I heard a suggestion for a "short form" pledge that everyone should be able to agree on:
I'm still holding out for that +5 Cloak of Non-Dweebiness.[*]
When I get that and my flying car, the girls will love me.
[*] Cannot be worn by Rangers, Paladins, Television Meteorologists, and other naturally square characters.
> It may not be realistic (i've not played it, so i don't know) but is it a mockery simply because it is a game or is there soemthing else? I mean, Hogan's Heroes was set in a WWII prisoner of war camp. It first aired in 65. Certianly it had a lot more of a potential to be offensive than a game that comes out now, so much later.
There's a surprising diversity of opinion on that kind of stuff. One of my friend's father was a US bomber crewman during that war, and he was outraged by Hogan's Heroes. OTOH, the guy who played LeBeau in the show had been a member of the French Resistance and may have actually spent time in a POW camp, and apparently didn't have any strong objection to the show.
> I personally don't like war games. This one is special. Stalin or Hitler? Whom do you prefer?
OTOH, you don't have to worry about the good guy loosing...
> History is full of examples of people who were overlooked for the Nobel Prize. [...] The prize isn't something people "earn" and it's not something that you're entitled to. It's something that one particular group of people decide to bestow upon you because you've done significant work in their view.
Various scientists quoted in the biomedcentral article suggest that the decision may be very legit, even if controversial:
> What on earth makes you think that a person's religious beliefs have anything at all to do with whether or not they are eligible for the Nobel Prize?
Would you give a prestigious scientific award to, say, a chemist who believed the world was flat and the heavenly bodies rotated around it, regardless of his contributions to chemistry?
> I say find the people spying on me, and stop them. Isn't that what the FBI/CIA/NSA are for?
No, their job is to ensure that the rich get richer. They're more likely to throw you in jail for calling attention to the spyware than they are to throw the spiers in jail. Computer "terror" laws notwithstanding.
> TrueActive is given positive press for removing a 'feature called "silent deploy", which allows the buyer to place the program on someone else's computer secretly via e-mail, without having physical access to the machine', although little criticism is made for making the stuff in the first place.
Someone ought to take their sorry asses to court and see how the Feds like having the new "computer terrorism" laws applied against businessmen.
Though I personally wouldn't rate it as "terrorism", that sort of behavior simply isn't acceptable, and someone needs to send a strong message to that effect.
> 'Rediculous' would be a better word.
Only on Slashdot.