To the conservatives, saying "don't do drugs, but if you do here's a free needle" would be the same as saying "drug use isn't encouraged, but isn't really bad either".
Why would it be that, and why only to conservatives? Surely if we live in an objectively real world, whether or not two things are the same as each other is independent of political bias!
My argument is not in the least intellectually dishonest: I am stating clearly and without equivocation what I believe to be true of the anti-drug side, based on my experience with them and other puritans over many years. I believe that their explicit arguments are incoherent, like the one you've presented here, and therefore infer that there is another reason they are against these things, and that they are either two cowardly to say it out loud or too unreflective to be aware of (it in fairness, I think the latter is depressingly common.)
The claim "making a dangerous activity less dangerous encourages it" fails the test of empiricism on many counts--so many that it is very, very difficult to credit anyone who makes that claim with any intellectual honesty whatsoever.
It is well-known and well-documented that the United States, one of the least free jurisdictions in the developed world, has a much higher rate of drug use than other, more-free jurisdictions: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080630201007.htm
This despite the conservatives doing everything they can to make drug use as dangerous as possible to users, including limiting access to needle exchanges and treatment, violent interdiction of drug supplies, and incarceration of everyone involved in the drug trade from high level dealers down to individual users.
So it is not clear why conservatives would think that liberal drug laws and programs like needle exchange and other public health measures, which have a record of getting addicts into treatment in other, more free, jurisdictions than the United States, constitute "condoning" drug use. It seems to me on the contrary that such programs do nothing but recognize the fact that drug use is bad... so bad that considerable public health resources need to be directed at the problem of treating addicts, to make things better.
It is ONLY if you take a purely punitive attitude toward drug use on the basis that it is "pure evil", in the sense that "whatever the consequences, it is still bad," that such an approach makes sense, at least to me. I really and honestly don't see any other way to read conservative policies, given the objective facts of the matter: freedom-oriented, health-oriented policies reduce drug use.
Conservative, punitive policies increase drug use by making it harder for addicts to get help and destroying the legal employment prospects of people found guilty of drug crimes. Conservative policies, at the same time, make drug use more dangerous.
Can you give me any non-punitive, non-desert-based account of why conservatives think this is the right thing to do? And failing that, can you give me any rational justification for the claim that drug users "deserve" to be harmed by their activity? I just don't see it.
No, actually they will still inject, and they will have a higher chance of contracting Hepatitis or HIV.
Yes, but most anti-drug people are arguing from the basis of a puritan's punitive mythology, in which taking drugs is pleasurable and therefore drug takers "deserve" to be harmed. You can see this in puritans of all stripes: environmental puritans are often opposed to safe and effective means of disposal of nuclear waste because they would make nuclear power safer, which would be unacceptable because humans aren't supposed to have access to clean, cheap power, we're supposed to suffer for any pleasure we get, because we "deserve" to.
I have no idea what "deserve" means, other than, "I don't like what you're doing and want to see you get hurt as a consequence of doing it." It's a primitive, pre-scientific concept based on rudimentary rationalizations around social control behaviours in our primate ancestors, I think.
It's a curious phenomenon, how the mind closes once a certain type of conclusion has been reached. This is the phenomenon that lead to the the NoScript/AbBlock war, and it seems entirely unfruitful to emulate exactly the kind of thinking that caused the issue in the first place.
Faith in what? Have you read the paper behind this idea? It's full of assumptions and caveats that are explicitly laid out by the authors, pointing out that one can follow a particular thread of plausible but unproven argument, and suggesting ways of empirically testing it.
Ideas are tested by experiment and systematic, often quantitative, observation. That is the core of science.
Ideas are believed without question. That is the core of faith.
Crossfit certainly has the right idea. Workouts don't have to be long to be effective
Dunno about crossfit but I've been doing the "Big Five" workout from the book "Body By Science" for about six months with good results. I used to be on a much heavier program, four days a week, split between upper and lower body on two/two schedule. WIth the Big Five I'm in the gym for about an hour a week, and have had good results recovering strength and definition lost during a couple of difficult years at work.
Sorry, the point I was trying to make was that the injunction stopping the friend from carrying out the murder grows successively weaker with each ultra-realistic simulated murder
No, the point you were trying to make is that for some inexplicable reason you believe that. You've given no evidence, no arguments, nothing. You've just said, "Hey, it just makes sense to me that..."
If you have any evidence whatsoever that repeated exposure to simulated murder makes a statistically significant difference to people's willingness to actually commit murder, please present it. Otherwise, state your opinion as an opinion, unsupported, anti-empirical and baseless as it is.
You're aware--since you have an opinion on this issue and it would be unethical to form such an opinion without doing at least a little research on the matter--that there is a very significant correlation between easy availability of pornography and a large decrease in the incidence of rape (http://www.impactlab.com/2008/01/06/internet-porn-shown-to-decrease-incidence-of-rape/)? (curiously if you google "rape decrease pornography" the machine kindly asks you if you meant "rape INCREASE pornography", so deeply embedded is the "it just makes sense to me" in our culture.) The detailed structure of this correlation in time and space makes it pretty compelling that the link is causal: would-be rapists are using pornography as a surrogate for actually committing rape, rather than a training manual as a certain bunch of anti-empiricists want to believe.
Plausibly, the same phenomena could apply to other crimes of violence, and I believe there is some evidence to show that people who play violent video games are less likely to commit violent crimes. Oh look, here's Google again: http://www.livescience.com/health/070425_bad_video.html. Please note that finding someone who has committed a violent crime and then pointing to his use of violent video games for entertainment does not increase the Bayesian plausibility of the statement "people who play violent video games are more likely to commit violent crimes" one tiny bit.
So again: when you have something beyond your imagination to support your position, please share it.
Nope, his "talent" is his funny haircut. Notice how all the self-proclaimed pundits have really weird hair? Gladwell is a canonical example.
In a way, it's really nice, because it makes it really easy to stop the charlatans: if a media-hyped "expert" has weird hair you know they're a pretentious wanker. So on the one hand it attracts the attention of idiots to their stupid ideas, and on the other hand it paints a big red flag on them for anyone with two brain cells to rub together.
I fear that the modern environmentalism is pushing in the wrong direction by becoming ascetic -- by telling us that our wants and desires are bad because they are bad for the environment instead of focusing on way to satisfy those wants in an environmentally friendly way.
I see this as a legacy feature of 1970's political "environmentalism" that is dying rapidly in the modern environmental movement because the puritanical approach to political change is unsustainable. People are never going to choose what the puritans want them too without coercive inducements, and coercive inducements are incredibly costly: they involve massive deadweight losses, as the Soviets learned to their cost and the Chinese are about to find out about.
So anyone who really cares about the environment and isn't just about perfectly ignorant of economics will focus on market-based and technological solutions to environmental issues. They will promote cap and trade schemes for pollutants and they will fight against subsidies for unsustainable energy sources like oil, coal and especially natural gas (which has a depressingly small world-wide supply relative to human needs.)
Market-based economics with aggressive capture of externalities is the tool that has proven to be by far the most effective at promoting the good of the environment, in part because it leaves the question of how to deal with those conditions up to individuals. The focus on capturing externalities is also important because they are what we care about, whereas things like CAFE limits are anti-market forces that have nothing to do with the amount of pollutants produced. Who cares how many cars are sold with what gas millage? What matters is how much they pollute, which depends on all kinds of things like how well maintained they are, how much they are driven, and how much time they spend idling.
Only someone who didn't care two pins for the environment would focus on the irrelevant ("you can't buy a big car") when the relevant ("you must buy credits to emit pollutants") is staring them in the face. The puritans have pretty much lost on this issue, although the dinosaurs of the Party in Washington are still not quite aware of it.
And then there's the fact that you have to vote for the party and not the person, so if I hate Harper but like the local Conservative I'm screwed.
Yeah, breaking the stanglehold of the parties on Parliament is a huge issue, mostly procedural. I've been slowly learning a little about House procedure to try to figure out how we got into this mess, but this is the major issue in Canadian democracy, and we certainly shouldn't even be thinking about online voting until we've dealt with it.
The current state of affairs means that almost all of the business of the House gets done in the caucus of the ruling party, or in committee (which is at least a little bit visible.) Far too much of the business of government is being done in secret now, not being properly debated in Parliament.
I actually voted Liberal in the last election for the first time in my life, which as a Westerner was pretty much like signing a pact with the Devil. But he was the best of a terrible lot--I actually wrote our Conservative candidate to tell him what a scumbag he was, and how as a one-time supporter of the PCs I couldn't see myself ever voting for his party again. If we'd had a Marijuana Party candidate I'd've gone for them, but what I really wanted to see was a Rhino.
I would put forth the "idea" that somebody while in a church may have some sort of bias towards a particular religious political party.
And you would label yourself as a nut for doing so.
I've voted in firehalls, old folks homes, community halls and yes, churches. I am an enemy of organized religion, and I have no problem with this. To suggest I might be biased toward a religious party due to being in church is as crazy as suggesting that I might be biased due to being in a old folks home toward the party that is in favour of the most generous old age pension benefits.
At least there are differences between the parties on what the believe about old age pensions. The Family Coalition Party is the only explicitly religious party in Canada that I'm aware of (unless you count Natural Law as religious.) Even though the current Conservatives are a bunch of Reform nutjobs, they are running away from their religious/Social Credit/Reform roots as fast as they can. Stephen Harper is no Preston Mannning, which is one of the reasons he could get elected (with a minority government.)
As soon as we let politics of any kind into the electoral process we're on a slippery slope to American-style single-Party rule. So please don't go making up crazy stuff about voting in churches being a problem. It puts the whole country at risk.
Two other things: I said nothing about exceeding 1998. I said the data since then look like noise. According to the graph I linked, we have exceeded 1998 in the early 2000's, so using "we have not exceeded 1998" as an element in any argument is pretty strange, and more evidence that this debate has become data-free.
Secondly: why do you mention tracking hurricanes? I wasn't aware there was any strong evidence that the strength or frequency of hurricanes was in any way related to AGW, except in popular mythology.
The third of my two things: temperatures in Antarctica are generally falling, including some records that have been kept for many decades. It is problematic to accept Arctic warming as evidence for AGW and dismiss Antarctic cooling as disconfirming.
I am a an empiricist, and the GCMs are very poor models of empirical reality, so I'm concerned that an extremely complex effect in a highly non-linear system is considered confirmed based on a simple sign in the Arctic, but not dismissed on the basis of the opposite sign in the Antarctic. The same level of complexity should apply to the analysis at both poles.
I'm a computational physicist who does climate science,
Go have a hard look at GCM's, then use your experience with long-term integrations of unphysical models--which as a computational physicist you surely have--and come back and offer an opinion on their quality. Pay particular attention to how strictly (or not) energy is conserved.
You will know, as a computational physicist, that strict energy accounting is absolutely necessary for long-term integrations to make any sense at all. Long-term integrations of models that do not strictly obey conservation laws in the basic equations produce nonsense results. You know this, I know this, everyone in computational physics knows this, from the guys who do galactic dynamics to the guys who do particle-particle interactions.
The whole reason I say that no one doing climate science is a computational physicist is that no GCM I've seen strictly obeys conservation laws in the basic equations, but always has energy conservation put in by hand, which anyone who does computational physics knows is a certain recipe for generating nonsense results.
If you know of a GCM that strictly respects conservation laws, please point it out to me.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, you would expect it to have an effect.
CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas, as the atmosphere is already black in the bulk of the absorption bands (methane is much worse simply because there is not yet enough of it to absorb everything.)
"It makes sense to me" is not a compelling argument with regard to a system as radically non-linear as the atmosphere. Anyone who has studied turbulent phenomena would laugh themselves silly at the thought of anyone predicting the direction, much less the magnitude, of an effect from a given cause based on intuition when dealing with turbulent mutli-component flow, which is what we see in the atmosphere.
I think ocean heat content is the most compelling evidence for a shift in heat balance, and it does not get nearly enough attention. The historical record is weaker, but the data are relatively clean (there are some instrumental issues, as is expected from any decades-long time-series.) And the oceans act as a relatively static integrator of heat-balance effects, in both reality and models, so it gets you a little bit away from the insanely bad energy balance stuff in the GCMs.
"Global temperature" is a meaningless term in any case, but so long as measures are consistent (they aren't--the thermometer coverage in Asia dropped precipitately after the fall of the Soviet Union) the trend should have something vaguely to do with atmospheric heat content. On that basis, there was a large increase in atmospheric heat content from around 1900 to about 1940, then nothing much for the next forty years, then a sudden jump between 1980 and 2000. It's too soon to tell yet, and I've not run a statistical analysis myself (although one is trivial to do) but you'd have to be insane not to notice that the past decade looks a lot like noise.
Furthermore, the climate modelling community are now predicting "the possibility" of a reduction in global heat content in the next decade, making AGW an untestable hypothesis, globally. If temperatures go up: it proves we have global warming! If temperatures go down: it proves nothing because global warming can cause that too!
So now the ball is firmly in the court of AGW advocates: what facts would you count as evidence that AGW is NOT occurring? If you can't name any, then your belief is not science but faith. We'll argue about priors strength and whatnot after you've adduced the facts that you would count as evidence.
Secondly, with a B.Sc. in physics from Caltech he is one of the smartest people you could possibly imagine, with a better grounding in physics--and remember, climate science is nothing but a special category of physics, so anyone with a decent physics degree is qualified to do climate science--than many people with Ph.D.'s in the subject. I was a post-doc at Caltech, coming from a top-tier university, and felt myself in good company with the grad students, post-docs and profs there. The undergrads were like they belonged to a different species: focused, intelligent and intense beyond belief.
And I should also point out: no one doing "climate science" is a computational physicist, yet a huge amount of climate science is nothing but computational physics. As a computational physicist who has had a look at GCM's, I'm appalled by what I find there. Good science, certainly, but nothing like what I would want public policy based on.
I think there are good reasons to try to reduce our dependence on carbon-based fuels, and as a believer in free markets I am in general an advocate of cap and trade as a sustainable mechanism for imposing property rights and limiting dumping in the atmospheric commons. But as a scientist I think there are far more open questions on AGW than settled ones, and the public debate as pretty much abandoned any pretence of science, with each side arguing its own religion with no reference to any facts that would reasonably bear on the issue.
When does something changing from a liquid to a solid change models?
When it's convenient for the knowing subject. Stuff is what it is. We categorize it in various ways for our own convenience. Our categories are constrained by the way stuff is, but not determined by it. An inability to grasp this fact explains most of epistemology for the past several thousand years. Philosophers think the world must either fully determine (realists) or leave completely undetermined (subjectivists) our concepts.
Depending on the timescale and forces involved most things can be considered liquids, including things like coal--engineering a soft-rock mine can sometimes look more like fluid mechanics than rock mechanics, because with the forces and timescales acting the rock flows rather than breaks or bends in response to cavities being opened.
However this new piece of work shows rather strikingly that the origin of the force is a very weak form of surface tension
That's from the Nature summary of the article.
something that shouldn't happen without surface tension.
That's from the/. summary of the article. I really don't know why the/. summary mentions that droplets can't form without surface tension when the Nature summary makes it clear that the droplets form due to surface tension. Indeed, the/. summary, read naively, would seem to imply that the droplets form due to some cause other than surface tension.
What? Have you LOOKED at modern "conservatives"? They are a bunch of wild-eyed big-government radicals who want to extend the power of the omnipotent state everywhere, in secrecy.
I agree that there used to be a political philosophy called "conservatism" that was in suspicious of government activism.
That philosophy is nowhere to be found today. There are no conservatives in office anywhere in the United States, and in Canada our formerly conservative party (the Progressive Conservatives) got hijacked by a bunch of wild-eyed radicals (Reform) to create the new Conservative Party, which is anything but. Just as Bush et al were "conservatives" who hated the Constitution, Canada's "conservatives" hate the very foundation of our parliamentary democratic system, which is the supremacy of parliament. Instead they want to have a directly elected head of state, like our revolutionary cousins to the south.
Conservatism doesn't mean small government: it means distrust of innovation in government. No one who calls themselves a conservative today means that by it. They mean "power for me and my friends" and nothing more.
the 535 members of congress draft them, ratify them, and present them for signature. If you are so upset with it, I'd suggest that you blame them.
Congress has an approval rating that sometimes dips into the single digits, and never gets far above them. Congress as an incumbent return rate of well over 80% and never drops significantly below it.
Any student of economics who was looking at a product with a 10% approval rating and 80+% customer loyalty would immediately suspect some kind of serious market interference. Can you imagine a car that almost everyone hated but that everyone still kept on buying, year after year, model after model?
"Yeah, I bought a 2008 Republican and it totally sucked. Unresponsive handling, fuel hog, huge maintenance costs and the financing just about killed me."
"So, you gonna buy something else this year?"
"Naw, I figure since the 2008 is so bad the 2010 is bound to be even worse, so I'm going to get it and see."
What is wrong with this picture? Political choices are made in a market-like context, and almost everyone hates almost everything on offer in that market, yet no one is able to crack the barriers to entry.
As with many problems in modern democracies, this appears to be a largely American problem. In Canada we generate new political parties every few decades (they start off regional, usually in the West, like the Social Credit, CCF and Reform, and then go national, sometimes forming governments--our current federal government is the Reform Party under a false name.) Britain manages to turn over the established parties once a century of so, having killed the Liberals in favour of Labour in the first half of the 20th century, and now the LibDems are up-and-coming today. In Europe the democracies are so young it's hard to draw comparisons, but the American one-Party, two-wings system is so strongly entrenched that despite almost universal dissatisfaction with the product, everyone keeps buying it.
Gerrymandering is an important feature in this system, by which state parties set electoral boundaries, and incumbents can be substantially protected by the two wings of the Party in this way. That means they don't have to worry much about voters. Likewise, the role of the Party in voter registration is probably a significant barrier to a second party forming and becoming competitive.
The US needs an arms-length electoral body like Elections Canada to take the Party out of the electoral process. Unfortunately, that would require the Party leadership to approve of it, which isn't about to happen.
But "failure to grow" is so much less catchy than "failure to age". "Failure to age" implies "live forever!" "Failure to grow" implies "live a normal or truncated lifespan as an under-developed individual who requires special care for most or all of that time." And since this is a kdawson article, you don't need to look beyond the headline to realize the main point is sensationalist hype without a shred of scientific basis.
There is no reason to believe that failure to grow implies anything other than a normal or, more probably, a truncated lifespan. Humans are already tuned up, for obvious evolutionary reasons, to live far longer than a normal mammal (normal mammals live about a billion of their own heartbeats, humans live twice that.) It is very unlikely that a random genetic anomaly will extend the viable span of a system that is already highly optimized for longevity.
My bet: she'll be dead in a few years, early 30's at the latest.
And energy rationing, by this name or any other, spells death for the economy.
That's what free markets do: they generate scarcity pricing and Pareto-optimal allocation of resources.
Why do you hate capitalism so much? Why do you think that a capitalist economy needs to be able to dump freely in the atmospheric commons? Why do you hate property rights?
Cap and trade does nothing but create property rights in the atmospheric commons. These are as artificial as all other property rights, maintained by means as artificial as legal codes and fences, just like all other forms of property. When capitalists were first pushing for property rights in open lands they were widely attacked by people like you, people who hated property rights, for artificially enclosing common lands.
People like you, who hate capitalism, hate property rights and hate markets should go back to the 20th century, where you belong.
Put a cap on the emissions that industry can output, then create a market where companies can trade the right to pollute
Exactly. Not a tax: a market. Just like the market in sulphur emissions that GHW Bush helped create back in the day, that took acid rain from a big problem to a minor one.
Opponents of this bill hate capitalism, pure and simple. They hate markets and they hate property rights. Creating property rights in the atmospheric commons for the purpose of capturing externalities has been the preferred approach to pollution abatement amongst proponents of free markets for decades. Now that that dream is becoming a reality the anti-capitalist oligarchs of existing industries, which have built their businesses around dumping in the commons, are up in arms about it.
But don't kid yourself for a moment: cap and trade is a market-based solution to the problem. You are free to disagree that dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a legitimate problem. That is certainly open to debate, and I might even be on your side. But if you hate cap and trade, you hate capitalism.
Too high risk because of (a) vibrations transmitted to the window and microgrinding of the knob against the window
This makes no sense. There may be other reasons for not cutting, but these can't be them.
Cutting would obviously be done by hand, or with a very slow speed reciprocating saw, which produce minimal vibration. They'd probably encase the whole thing in epoxy first to further reduce vibration. More importantly, if the choice is a) scrap the shuttle early for sure or b) risk having to scrap it due to damage done during knob removal, the choice is so obvious that only a NASA engineer could get it wrong.
If scratches can lead to "spontaneous catastrophic failure" in the window material then obviously there is zero risk because the window must have a strong scratch-proof covering, probably a thin layer of plexiglas or similar. Otherwise trivial incidents over the course of the shuttle's working life would pose an unacceptable risk--anything breaking loose on re-entry, in particular, could scratch the surface if it was not heavily protected.
There may be good reasons why the knob is not removable, but they aren't the ones you suggest. Personally, I'm wondering why engineers rather than machinists are working on this problem. Engineers don't have the appropriate hands-on skills to deal with it. Machinists do.
The best thing about the article, typical of an unfortunately large amount of usability literature, is the complete absence of empirical data. He simply asserts, for example, "users will not be confused by this" without offering a shred of empirical evidence for the claim. I'm not a typical user, but I'd sure as hell be confused if plaintext started to appear in the UI where a decade or two of experience has taught me to expect a line of bullets. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be on a helpdesk for a system that has just made this change.
Usability is an important area of software design, but it is still in its infancy, and the lack of usability experts chiming in to call this guy a blithering idiot is depressing. All claims about usability of any feature should be considered nonsense until someone comes to you with empirical data from real users that tell you what they find usable. Otherwise you're arguing mythological hypotheticals--how many users can dance on a pinhead.
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To the conservatives, saying "don't do drugs, but if you do here's a free needle" would be the same as saying "drug use isn't encouraged, but isn't really bad either".
Why would it be that, and why only to conservatives? Surely if we live in an objectively real world, whether or not two things are the same as each other is independent of political bias!
My argument is not in the least intellectually dishonest: I am stating clearly and without equivocation what I believe to be true of the anti-drug side, based on my experience with them and other puritans over many years. I believe that their explicit arguments are incoherent, like the one you've presented here, and therefore infer that there is another reason they are against these things, and that they are either two cowardly to say it out loud or too unreflective to be aware of (it in fairness, I think the latter is depressingly common.)
The claim "making a dangerous activity less dangerous encourages it" fails the test of empiricism on many counts--so many that it is very, very difficult to credit anyone who makes that claim with any intellectual honesty whatsoever.
It is well-known and well-documented that the United States, one of the least free jurisdictions in the developed world, has a much higher rate of drug use than other, more-free jurisdictions: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080630201007.htm
This despite the conservatives doing everything they can to make drug use as dangerous as possible to users, including limiting access to needle exchanges and treatment, violent interdiction of drug supplies, and incarceration of everyone involved in the drug trade from high level dealers down to individual users.
So it is not clear why conservatives would think that liberal drug laws and programs like needle exchange and other public health measures, which have a record of getting addicts into treatment in other, more free, jurisdictions than the United States, constitute "condoning" drug use. It seems to me on the contrary that such programs do nothing but recognize the fact that drug use is bad... so bad that considerable public health resources need to be directed at the problem of treating addicts, to make things better.
It is ONLY if you take a purely punitive attitude toward drug use on the basis that it is "pure evil", in the sense that "whatever the consequences, it is still bad," that such an approach makes sense, at least to me. I really and honestly don't see any other way to read conservative policies, given the objective facts of the matter: freedom-oriented, health-oriented policies reduce drug use.
Conservative, punitive policies increase drug use by making it harder for addicts to get help and destroying the legal employment prospects of people found guilty of drug crimes. Conservative policies, at the same time, make drug use more dangerous.
Can you give me any non-punitive, non-desert-based account of why conservatives think this is the right thing to do? And failing that, can you give me any rational justification for the claim that drug users "deserve" to be harmed by their activity? I just don't see it.
No, actually they will still inject, and they will have a higher chance of contracting Hepatitis or HIV.
Yes, but most anti-drug people are arguing from the basis of a puritan's punitive mythology, in which taking drugs is pleasurable and therefore drug takers "deserve" to be harmed. You can see this in puritans of all stripes: environmental puritans are often opposed to safe and effective means of disposal of nuclear waste because they would make nuclear power safer, which would be unacceptable because humans aren't supposed to have access to clean, cheap power, we're supposed to suffer for any pleasure we get, because we "deserve" to.
I have no idea what "deserve" means, other than, "I don't like what you're doing and want to see you get hurt as a consequence of doing it." It's a primitive, pre-scientific concept based on rudimentary rationalizations around social control behaviours in our primate ancestors, I think.
Eh, noscript has become adware in the last year.
This is an out-dated claim: http://hackademix.net/2009/05/04/dear-adblock-plus-and-noscript-users-dear-mozilla-community/ It pertains to an ugly episode for which the NoScript author is rightfully apologetic.
It's a curious phenomenon, how the mind closes once a certain type of conclusion has been reached. This is the phenomenon that lead to the the NoScript/AbBlock war, and it seems entirely unfruitful to emulate exactly the kind of thinking that caused the issue in the first place.
Faith in what? Have you read the paper behind this idea? It's full of assumptions and caveats that are explicitly laid out by the authors, pointing out that one can follow a particular thread of plausible but unproven argument, and suggesting ways of empirically testing it.
Ideas are tested by experiment and systematic, often quantitative, observation. That is the core of science.
Ideas are believed without question. That is the core of faith.
See the difference?
Crossfit certainly has the right idea. Workouts don't have to be long to be effective
Dunno about crossfit but I've been doing the "Big Five" workout from the book "Body By Science" for about six months with good results. I used to be on a much heavier program, four days a week, split between upper and lower body on two/two schedule. WIth the Big Five I'm in the gym for about an hour a week, and have had good results recovering strength and definition lost during a couple of difficult years at work.
Highly recommended.
Your odometer can report how much of your mileage was on public roads?
And your gas pump can tell how much gas you're going to burn on pubic roads? AMAZING!
Sorry, the point I was trying to make was that the injunction stopping the friend from carrying out the murder grows successively weaker with each ultra-realistic simulated murder
No, the point you were trying to make is that for some inexplicable reason you believe that. You've given no evidence, no arguments, nothing. You've just said, "Hey, it just makes sense to me that..."
If you have any evidence whatsoever that repeated exposure to simulated murder makes a statistically significant difference to people's willingness to actually commit murder, please present it. Otherwise, state your opinion as an opinion, unsupported, anti-empirical and baseless as it is.
You're aware--since you have an opinion on this issue and it would be unethical to form such an opinion without doing at least a little research on the matter--that there is a very significant correlation between easy availability of pornography and a large decrease in the incidence of rape (http://www.impactlab.com/2008/01/06/internet-porn-shown-to-decrease-incidence-of-rape/)? (curiously if you google "rape decrease pornography" the machine kindly asks you if you meant "rape INCREASE pornography", so deeply embedded is the "it just makes sense to me" in our culture.) The detailed structure of this correlation in time and space makes it pretty compelling that the link is causal: would-be rapists are using pornography as a surrogate for actually committing rape, rather than a training manual as a certain bunch of anti-empiricists want to believe.
Plausibly, the same phenomena could apply to other crimes of violence, and I believe there is some evidence to show that people who play violent video games are less likely to commit violent crimes. Oh look, here's Google again: http://www.livescience.com/health/070425_bad_video.html. Please note that finding someone who has committed a violent crime and then pointing to his use of violent video games for entertainment does not increase the Bayesian plausibility of the statement "people who play violent video games are more likely to commit violent crimes" one tiny bit.
So again: when you have something beyond your imagination to support your position, please share it.
Well, his talent is that he can talk.
Nope, his "talent" is his funny haircut. Notice how all the self-proclaimed pundits have really weird hair? Gladwell is a canonical example.
In a way, it's really nice, because it makes it really easy to stop the charlatans: if a media-hyped "expert" has weird hair you know they're a pretentious wanker. So on the one hand it attracts the attention of idiots to their stupid ideas, and on the other hand it paints a big red flag on them for anyone with two brain cells to rub together.
Win-win!
replying to undo an erroneous mod
I fear that the modern environmentalism is pushing in the wrong direction by becoming ascetic -- by telling us that our wants and desires are bad because they are bad for the environment instead of focusing on way to satisfy those wants in an environmentally friendly way.
I see this as a legacy feature of 1970's political "environmentalism" that is dying rapidly in the modern environmental movement because the puritanical approach to political change is unsustainable. People are never going to choose what the puritans want them too without coercive inducements, and coercive inducements are incredibly costly: they involve massive deadweight losses, as the Soviets learned to their cost and the Chinese are about to find out about.
So anyone who really cares about the environment and isn't just about perfectly ignorant of economics will focus on market-based and technological solutions to environmental issues. They will promote cap and trade schemes for pollutants and they will fight against subsidies for unsustainable energy sources like oil, coal and especially natural gas (which has a depressingly small world-wide supply relative to human needs.)
Market-based economics with aggressive capture of externalities is the tool that has proven to be by far the most effective at promoting the good of the environment, in part because it leaves the question of how to deal with those conditions up to individuals. The focus on capturing externalities is also important because they are what we care about, whereas things like CAFE limits are anti-market forces that have nothing to do with the amount of pollutants produced. Who cares how many cars are sold with what gas millage? What matters is how much they pollute, which depends on all kinds of things like how well maintained they are, how much they are driven, and how much time they spend idling.
Only someone who didn't care two pins for the environment would focus on the irrelevant ("you can't buy a big car") when the relevant ("you must buy credits to emit pollutants") is staring them in the face. The puritans have pretty much lost on this issue, although the dinosaurs of the Party in Washington are still not quite aware of it.
And then there's the fact that you have to vote for the party and not the person, so if I hate Harper but like the local Conservative I'm screwed.
Yeah, breaking the stanglehold of the parties on Parliament is a huge issue, mostly procedural. I've been slowly learning a little about House procedure to try to figure out how we got into this mess, but this is the major issue in Canadian democracy, and we certainly shouldn't even be thinking about online voting until we've dealt with it.
The current state of affairs means that almost all of the business of the House gets done in the caucus of the ruling party, or in committee (which is at least a little bit visible.) Far too much of the business of government is being done in secret now, not being properly debated in Parliament.
I actually voted Liberal in the last election for the first time in my life, which as a Westerner was pretty much like signing a pact with the Devil. But he was the best of a terrible lot--I actually wrote our Conservative candidate to tell him what a scumbag he was, and how as a one-time supporter of the PCs I couldn't see myself ever voting for his party again. If we'd had a Marijuana Party candidate I'd've gone for them, but what I really wanted to see was a Rhino.
I would put forth the "idea" that somebody while in a church may have some sort of bias towards a particular religious political party.
And you would label yourself as a nut for doing so.
I've voted in firehalls, old folks homes, community halls and yes, churches. I am an enemy of organized religion, and I have no problem with this. To suggest I might be biased toward a religious party due to being in church is as crazy as suggesting that I might be biased due to being in a old folks home toward the party that is in favour of the most generous old age pension benefits.
At least there are differences between the parties on what the believe about old age pensions. The Family Coalition Party is the only explicitly religious party in Canada that I'm aware of (unless you count Natural Law as religious.) Even though the current Conservatives are a bunch of Reform nutjobs, they are running away from their religious/Social Credit/Reform roots as fast as they can. Stephen Harper is no Preston Mannning, which is one of the reasons he could get elected (with a minority government.)
As soon as we let politics of any kind into the electoral process we're on a slippery slope to American-style single-Party rule. So please don't go making up crazy stuff about voting in churches being a problem. It puts the whole country at risk.
Two other things: I said nothing about exceeding 1998. I said the data since then look like noise. According to the graph I linked, we have exceeded 1998 in the early 2000's, so using "we have not exceeded 1998" as an element in any argument is pretty strange, and more evidence that this debate has become data-free.
Secondly: why do you mention tracking hurricanes? I wasn't aware there was any strong evidence that the strength or frequency of hurricanes was in any way related to AGW, except in popular mythology.
The third of my two things: temperatures in Antarctica are generally falling, including some records that have been kept for many decades. It is problematic to accept Arctic warming as evidence for AGW and dismiss Antarctic cooling as disconfirming.
I am a an empiricist, and the GCMs are very poor models of empirical reality, so I'm concerned that an extremely complex effect in a highly non-linear system is considered confirmed based on a simple sign in the Arctic, but not dismissed on the basis of the opposite sign in the Antarctic. The same level of complexity should apply to the analysis at both poles.
I'm a computational physicist who does climate science,
Go have a hard look at GCM's, then use your experience with long-term integrations of unphysical models--which as a computational physicist you surely have--and come back and offer an opinion on their quality. Pay particular attention to how strictly (or not) energy is conserved.
You will know, as a computational physicist, that strict energy accounting is absolutely necessary for long-term integrations to make any sense at all. Long-term integrations of models that do not strictly obey conservation laws in the basic equations produce nonsense results. You know this, I know this, everyone in computational physics knows this, from the guys who do galactic dynamics to the guys who do particle-particle interactions.
The whole reason I say that no one doing climate science is a computational physicist is that no GCM I've seen strictly obeys conservation laws in the basic equations, but always has energy conservation put in by hand, which anyone who does computational physics knows is a certain recipe for generating nonsense results.
If you know of a GCM that strictly respects conservation laws, please point it out to me.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, you would expect it to have an effect.
CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas, as the atmosphere is already black in the bulk of the absorption bands (methane is much worse simply because there is not yet enough of it to absorb everything.)
"It makes sense to me" is not a compelling argument with regard to a system as radically non-linear as the atmosphere. Anyone who has studied turbulent phenomena would laugh themselves silly at the thought of anyone predicting the direction, much less the magnitude, of an effect from a given cause based on intuition when dealing with turbulent mutli-component flow, which is what we see in the atmosphere.
I think ocean heat content is the most compelling evidence for a shift in heat balance, and it does not get nearly enough attention. The historical record is weaker, but the data are relatively clean (there are some instrumental issues, as is expected from any decades-long time-series.) And the oceans act as a relatively static integrator of heat-balance effects, in both reality and models, so it gets you a little bit away from the insanely bad energy balance stuff in the GCMs.
"No warming in 11 years", in particular, is a wingnut claim. And with a PhD in Economics, he's not a climate scientist.
First, have a look at the data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
"Global temperature" is a meaningless term in any case, but so long as measures are consistent (they aren't--the thermometer coverage in Asia dropped precipitately after the fall of the Soviet Union) the trend should have something vaguely to do with atmospheric heat content. On that basis, there was a large increase in atmospheric heat content from around 1900 to about 1940, then nothing much for the next forty years, then a sudden jump between 1980 and 2000. It's too soon to tell yet, and I've not run a statistical analysis myself (although one is trivial to do) but you'd have to be insane not to notice that the past decade looks a lot like noise.
Furthermore, the climate modelling community are now predicting "the possibility" of a reduction in global heat content in the next decade, making AGW an untestable hypothesis, globally. If temperatures go up: it proves we have global warming! If temperatures go down: it proves nothing because global warming can cause that too!
So now the ball is firmly in the court of AGW advocates: what facts would you count as evidence that AGW is NOT occurring? If you can't name any, then your belief is not science but faith. We'll argue about priors strength and whatnot after you've adduced the facts that you would count as evidence.
Secondly, with a B.Sc. in physics from Caltech he is one of the smartest people you could possibly imagine, with a better grounding in physics--and remember, climate science is nothing but a special category of physics, so anyone with a decent physics degree is qualified to do climate science--than many people with Ph.D.'s in the subject. I was a post-doc at Caltech, coming from a top-tier university, and felt myself in good company with the grad students, post-docs and profs there. The undergrads were like they belonged to a different species: focused, intelligent and intense beyond belief.
And I should also point out: no one doing "climate science" is a computational physicist, yet a huge amount of climate science is nothing but computational physics. As a computational physicist who has had a look at GCM's, I'm appalled by what I find there. Good science, certainly, but nothing like what I would want public policy based on.
I think there are good reasons to try to reduce our dependence on carbon-based fuels, and as a believer in free markets I am in general an advocate of cap and trade as a sustainable mechanism for imposing property rights and limiting dumping in the atmospheric commons. But as a scientist I think there are far more open questions on AGW than settled ones, and the public debate as pretty much abandoned any pretence of science, with each side arguing its own religion with no reference to any facts that would reasonably bear on the issue.
When does something changing from a liquid to a solid change models?
When it's convenient for the knowing subject. Stuff is what it is. We categorize it in various ways for our own convenience. Our categories are constrained by the way stuff is, but not determined by it. An inability to grasp this fact explains most of epistemology for the past several thousand years. Philosophers think the world must either fully determine (realists) or leave completely undetermined (subjectivists) our concepts.
Depending on the timescale and forces involved most things can be considered liquids, including things like coal--engineering a soft-rock mine can sometimes look more like fluid mechanics than rock mechanics, because with the forces and timescales acting the rock flows rather than breaks or bends in response to cavities being opened.
However this new piece of work shows rather strikingly that the origin of the force is a very weak form of surface tension
That's from the Nature summary of the article.
something that shouldn't happen without surface tension.
That's from the /. summary of the article. I really don't know why the /. summary mentions that droplets can't form without surface tension when the Nature summary makes it clear that the droplets form due to surface tension. Indeed, the /. summary, read naively, would seem to imply that the droplets form due to some cause other than surface tension.
conservatism is the reduction of government.
What? Have you LOOKED at modern "conservatives"? They are a bunch of wild-eyed big-government radicals who want to extend the power of the omnipotent state everywhere, in secrecy.
I agree that there used to be a political philosophy called "conservatism" that was in suspicious of government activism.
That philosophy is nowhere to be found today. There are no conservatives in office anywhere in the United States, and in Canada our formerly conservative party (the Progressive Conservatives) got hijacked by a bunch of wild-eyed radicals (Reform) to create the new Conservative Party, which is anything but. Just as Bush et al were "conservatives" who hated the Constitution, Canada's "conservatives" hate the very foundation of our parliamentary democratic system, which is the supremacy of parliament. Instead they want to have a directly elected head of state, like our revolutionary cousins to the south.
Conservatism doesn't mean small government: it means distrust of innovation in government. No one who calls themselves a conservative today means that by it. They mean "power for me and my friends" and nothing more.
the 535 members of congress draft them, ratify them, and present them for signature. If you are so upset with it, I'd suggest that you blame them.
Congress has an approval rating that sometimes dips into the single digits, and never gets far above them. Congress as an incumbent return rate of well over 80% and never drops significantly below it.
Any student of economics who was looking at a product with a 10% approval rating and 80+% customer loyalty would immediately suspect some kind of serious market interference. Can you imagine a car that almost everyone hated but that everyone still kept on buying, year after year, model after model?
"Yeah, I bought a 2008 Republican and it totally sucked. Unresponsive handling, fuel hog, huge maintenance costs and the financing just about killed me."
"So, you gonna buy something else this year?"
"Naw, I figure since the 2008 is so bad the 2010 is bound to be even worse, so I'm going to get it and see."
What is wrong with this picture? Political choices are made in a market-like context, and almost everyone hates almost everything on offer in that market, yet no one is able to crack the barriers to entry.
As with many problems in modern democracies, this appears to be a largely American problem. In Canada we generate new political parties every few decades (they start off regional, usually in the West, like the Social Credit, CCF and Reform, and then go national, sometimes forming governments--our current federal government is the Reform Party under a false name.) Britain manages to turn over the established parties once a century of so, having killed the Liberals in favour of Labour in the first half of the 20th century, and now the LibDems are up-and-coming today. In Europe the democracies are so young it's hard to draw comparisons, but the American one-Party, two-wings system is so strongly entrenched that despite almost universal dissatisfaction with the product, everyone keeps buying it.
Gerrymandering is an important feature in this system, by which state parties set electoral boundaries, and incumbents can be substantially protected by the two wings of the Party in this way. That means they don't have to worry much about voters. Likewise, the role of the Party in voter registration is probably a significant barrier to a second party forming and becoming competitive.
The US needs an arms-length electoral body like Elections Canada to take the Party out of the electoral process. Unfortunately, that would require the Party leadership to approve of it, which isn't about to happen.
But "failure to grow" is so much less catchy than "failure to age". "Failure to age" implies "live forever!" "Failure to grow" implies "live a normal or truncated lifespan as an under-developed individual who requires special care for most or all of that time." And since this is a kdawson article, you don't need to look beyond the headline to realize the main point is sensationalist hype without a shred of scientific basis.
There is no reason to believe that failure to grow implies anything other than a normal or, more probably, a truncated lifespan. Humans are already tuned up, for obvious evolutionary reasons, to live far longer than a normal mammal (normal mammals live about a billion of their own heartbeats, humans live twice that.) It is very unlikely that a random genetic anomaly will extend the viable span of a system that is already highly optimized for longevity.
My bet: she'll be dead in a few years, early 30's at the latest.
And energy rationing, by this name or any other, spells death for the economy.
That's what free markets do: they generate scarcity pricing and Pareto-optimal allocation of resources.
Why do you hate capitalism so much? Why do you think that a capitalist economy needs to be able to dump freely in the atmospheric commons? Why do you hate property rights?
Cap and trade does nothing but create property rights in the atmospheric commons. These are as artificial as all other property rights, maintained by means as artificial as legal codes and fences, just like all other forms of property. When capitalists were first pushing for property rights in open lands they were widely attacked by people like you, people who hated property rights, for artificially enclosing common lands.
People like you, who hate capitalism, hate property rights and hate markets should go back to the 20th century, where you belong.
Put a cap on the emissions that industry can output, then create a market where companies can trade the right to pollute
Exactly. Not a tax: a market. Just like the market in sulphur emissions that GHW Bush helped create back in the day, that took acid rain from a big problem to a minor one.
Opponents of this bill hate capitalism, pure and simple. They hate markets and they hate property rights. Creating property rights in the atmospheric commons for the purpose of capturing externalities has been the preferred approach to pollution abatement amongst proponents of free markets for decades. Now that that dream is becoming a reality the anti-capitalist oligarchs of existing industries, which have built their businesses around dumping in the commons, are up in arms about it.
But don't kid yourself for a moment: cap and trade is a market-based solution to the problem. You are free to disagree that dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a legitimate problem. That is certainly open to debate, and I might even be on your side. But if you hate cap and trade, you hate capitalism.
Too high risk because of (a) vibrations transmitted to the window and microgrinding of the knob against the window
This makes no sense. There may be other reasons for not cutting, but these can't be them.
Cutting would obviously be done by hand, or with a very slow speed reciprocating saw, which produce minimal vibration. They'd probably encase the whole thing in epoxy first to further reduce vibration. More importantly, if the choice is a) scrap the shuttle early for sure or b) risk having to scrap it due to damage done during knob removal, the choice is so obvious that only a NASA engineer could get it wrong.
If scratches can lead to "spontaneous catastrophic failure" in the window material then obviously there is zero risk because the window must have a strong scratch-proof covering, probably a thin layer of plexiglas or similar. Otherwise trivial incidents over the course of the shuttle's working life would pose an unacceptable risk--anything breaking loose on re-entry, in particular, could scratch the surface if it was not heavily protected.
There may be good reasons why the knob is not removable, but they aren't the ones you suggest. Personally, I'm wondering why engineers rather than machinists are working on this problem. Engineers don't have the appropriate hands-on skills to deal with it. Machinists do.
Retarded doesn't begin to cover this.
The best thing about the article, typical of an unfortunately large amount of usability literature, is the complete absence of empirical data. He simply asserts, for example, "users will not be confused by this" without offering a shred of empirical evidence for the claim. I'm not a typical user, but I'd sure as hell be confused if plaintext started to appear in the UI where a decade or two of experience has taught me to expect a line of bullets. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be on a helpdesk for a system that has just made this change.
Usability is an important area of software design, but it is still in its infancy, and the lack of usability experts chiming in to call this guy a blithering idiot is depressing. All claims about usability of any feature should be considered nonsense until someone comes to you with empirical data from real users that tell you what they find usable. Otherwise you're arguing mythological hypotheticals--how many users can dance on a pinhead.