I can't believe you are falling for Bill Nye, a guy who repeatedly had weaker science shows than a someone who worked with a guy in a rat suit.
It was a kids show for crying out loud!
Note that Ol' Bill there never says WHY any of the things he lists as shortcomings are shortcomings - a thicker lid? Really?
From the link "Lid too thick Soaks up too much of the heat"
He explains the other problems as well
The link I presented carefully laid out the full bill of materials used in the experiment. Bill never responded to a question at your link asking for the list of "appropriate" materials.
As far as open science goes, so far my link wins hands down.
Maybe because all you have to do is fix those shortcomings or watch one of his previous demonstrations and you'd get good results instead of rigorously adhering to a specific setup known to be broken?
Actually since you mention it I regularly hear about these kinds of shenanigans or worse during US elections, though it never makes a real splash. I'm actually relieved that the same stuff up here is still able to draw outrage.
I played football in HS. It was quite joke among the volleyball and tennis players about how dumb football players were. I asked them to compare they're playbooks to ours (end of discussion). It takes more intelligence to be able to play football well than lots of other sports.
That still doesn't mean you need a lot of intelligence to play football well, it just means that the minimum threshold is possibly higher. I also played HS football and our best player had a learning disability. This apparently became an issue when he tried to play professional ball but wasn't a problem in HS.
Contrast that to hockey, I can't speak much from personal experience but although it doesn't have much in the way of playbooks it has a lot of schemes and systems which take a lot more intelligence since they're dynamic. "Hockey sense" is a critical factor in the NHL, and a lot of stars are often lauded for their hockey sense while busts often fail in this category. According to this article intelligence along with skill is the major variable that changes as one goes up through the professional leagues in hockey.
While there's an environmental component (rates vary by country) if it was purely learned I'd expect that some groups would be predominantly left handed instead of right handed.
System administration and IT support is not computer science or programming, and after the introductory courses technical skills aren't what's being taught in computer science. It's like comparing being a machinist or technician with having an engineering degree, there is a certain level of mechanical ability certain engineering disciplines need, but they won't be on the level of a machinist or technician, and they don't have to be.
"Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The signals that these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies are directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere. Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets (see here and here)that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of eleven instruments flying on eleven different satellites over the years. As of early 2011, our most stable instrument for this monitoring is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite and providing data since late 2002."
So he's looking at "natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere", which may or may not be directly correlated with global warming. Mixing data from eleven different sets, from "different, deep layers of the atmosphere" and shoving a poor sine curve through the whole thing when he doesn't even have a full cycle!!
Oh, and even then I'm still just assume that him and John Christy have made no errors in retrieving and processing the data, and that's why, unlike the rest of the scientific community, they can't find any warming.
You said, "That data is suspect because Roy Spencer is an intelligent design blah blah." That's ad hominem. No serious scientist doubts the accuracy of those satellite measurements. You do, apparently, probably because of your preconceived biases.
No, I doubt the graph that Roy Spencer made by interpreting those satellite measurements, because I know he will misinterpret data as evidenced by his belief in ID.
It's nice you are capable of mounting an ad hominem, but the adjustments for the decay of satellite orbits started being applied in the 90s.
It's not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is "an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it". If I attacked the graph by calling you a creationist that would be an ad hominem, because the argument does not depend on you. But he's calling Roy Spencer an intelligent design believer, meaning Dr Spencer is a crappy scientist who denies the foundations of biology because of his religion. And Roy Spencer isn't relaying the argument, he's part of the argument, he's the one who made the graph and used whatever methods he needed to get rid of the warming that everyone else shows.
To put it another way if Bernie Madoff came up to you and said "look at this mutual fund I have, it's a great investment!", not investing because Madoff is a crook and it's probably a scam isn't an ad hominem, it's common sense.
You don't think there might be something different this time.
Food production has flat lined. There's certainly a lot of areas where we can grow better than we do now, but unless we get another green revolution it doesn't take that much longer at our current growth before a lot more people start going hungry.
The oceans are getting heavily over fished, entire species of fish are smaller on a genetic level because we're removed the largest members from the gene pool. There's dead zones where complex life can't survive. It's hard to know how close we might be to causing a ecological collapse.
From an economic perspective our economy relies on positive interest rates, ie always growing. And we get a lot of that growth from our ability to increase the rate at which we extract resources from the planet. That's obviously not a process that can continue indefinitely.
When you go from a culture of growth to a culture of stagnation you go from trying to grow the pie to fighting over the pie (why do you think politics everywhere has gotten so dysfunctional since 2008?). If we make that transition permanently our society might not survive.
It seems to me that this system just invites the lawyers.
If it was easy to reverse a domain transfer that could be shown to have been fraudulent then domain stealing would be a much less lucrative business. (granted, I'm not sure how easy that system would be to implement)
Not really. That particular clause is worded quite poorly and the only way it's interpreted in its current form is because that's the current culture and sentiment. If public opinion shifted and became less pro-gun than the supreme court might alter some of its prior rulings to take a narrower view of the second amendment.
The problem with a city or even statewide ban is it's a relatively small region embedded in a gun heavy region, so there's a lot of guns floating around and even a lot of otherwise law abiding citizens are probably flouting the law.
To conduct a proper test you'd probably have to do something on the national level like the assault weapons ban, though from my short reading it sounds like the evidence is slightly ambiguous in that instance.
Step 1: Choose 100 voters at random from the given state/country/whatever, or use something more similar to the courts where the campaigns get to challenge potential voters selected from a larger pool.
Step 2: Give the 100 voters a month or two to grill the candidates and educate themselves on the issues.
Step 3: The 100 voters vote.
Clearly you'd need to put in a lot of safeguards to avoid voter tampering, but if you could pull it off I'm sure you'd have an extremely reformed and responsible electorate, and a higher quality of candidate to match.
Only downside is this changes politics into a much more explicit spectator sport and it's hard to say how that will affect the country as a whole.
The exclusion of anyone who didn't own land tended to mean the voters were educated and prosperous enough that they could devote time to being active in politics.
And they'd vote to make sure it would stay that way (with themselves educated, prosperous, and in power).
What I'd like to see is some kind of very tough civics test as a requirement for voting. It should be as openly and transparently administered as possible, so that anyone who wants to study and learn could pass it but very few who didn't care to study would stand a chance.
Gerrymandering^1000
In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival.
Does this include government contracts? I'd consider the military-industrial complex to be on par with entitlements as a long term danger.
The last thing I would change is that all campaigns be publically funded, each candidate gets a very generous amount, and any other "contributions" are treasonous bribery resulting in a death penalty for the candidate and 20 years in prison for the one "contributing" the money.
I'm sympathetic to public funding, though the penalty is completely out of whack.
And since it's going to come up, the Conservative Party of Canada is actually the result of a merger between two separate parties: the original Progressive Conservatives, who were the centre-right answer to the Liberal's centre-left, and the Canadian Alliance-née-Reform party, the country's (relatively)-far-right party. Prime Minister Harper was previously a member of the Canadian Alliance, and it's safe to say that his view, regardless of his party's, doesn't represent the overwhelming majority of Canadians. He's not all bad, but I will throw a party he is unceremoniously dumped from the Canadian political scene.
I've always felt the Harper was one of the only things keeping the Conservatives in check, and the reason for his somewhat authoritarian style is that a lot of his MPs are pretty far off the deep end so he needs to keep them under reign.
I very much doubt the plan was all Sona's doing, though I don't believe that Harper is to blame.
Trying watching Star Wars with a fresh mind. It's a terrible, terrible movie with bad dialogue and worse acting. It was a novelty that many of us remember fondly because we saw it when we were kids, but it's very much a B-movie.
That could be the case, but it could also be possible that it's a lot of damn fun.
I think there's more to a movie than good dialogue, acting, and strong plots. Sometimes in spite of those flaws, or maybe because of them, a movie just manages to be a lot of fun.
For the record I wasn't a huge fan of Avatar or 300, I didn't really like Serenity, and while LOTR was good, I certainly didn't think it was nearly as spectacular as most people.
The Tea Party has corrupted the Republican party to the point where it's so extreme that the only candidates who have a chance are nutjobs, ie Bachmann, Cain, Palin, Santorum, etc. Or possibly sane people who will say anything for power, ie Romney, and to a lesser extent Gingrich and Trump. The qualified honest and sane candidates simply wouldn't get enough votes.
Santorum really is a pure Tea Party candidate in that he's virulently anti-liberal and highly religious. And unlike the other Tea Party candidates he's also soft spoken and not a complete idiot.
Really I am kinda hoping Santorum gets the nomination. If Romney gets the nomination, and loses, the Tea Party will blame him for being too liberal and they'll stay in the deep end for another 4 year. But if Sandorum is nominated, even if there's a double dip recession, I don't think Santorum has a hope in the general election. His views are just too extreme and they'll terrify all the moderates. My hope is that seeing Santorum's views nationally expressed and rejected will pierce the Fox reality bubble and push the GOP back towards the centre.
There's also the part where WWI was planned by freemasonry...
Though I do feel reassured that my BS detector was going off even before I noticed all the other conspiracy theories showing up, I guess everything is still in working order.
Do you have a source? That summary sounds overly simplified, I guess they'd have to stick to public land around the fringe to avoid trespassing and theft, but I'm curious if they take more than one or two plants, or if there's any intermediate steps between the sampling and the lawsuit.
95% will be descended from Monsanto crops. But even though the Monsanto crops are probably more competitive they will still only make a small contribution to the total genome. So it might still only be 5% Monsanto DNA.
And even if the seeds are so competitive that all the important Monsanto genes spread and affect most of the species. That process is probably going to take more than 20 years, the length of a patent.
So I suspect it's still possible to distinguish between deliberately using patented Monsanto GMOs and being a victim of contamination.
Are they actually suing people who has a crop with only 5% Monsanto's seeds, or are they only going after people who have pretty much a full Monsanto crop, and are almost certainly deliberately infringing. Most people here seem to be assuming the former, but I haven't seen any real evidence either way, and it makes a pretty big difference in how I feel about the suits.
1) At what percentage of GMO seed is Monsanto suing? If it's 5% it's probably contamination they should definitely not be suing, but if it's 95% than that's probably deliberate contamination.
2) How should their business model work? I find the idea of patented lifeforms and violation of first sale doctrine to both be repulsive. But if you're in the business of developing GMO crops how else can you fund your research?
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I can't believe you are falling for Bill Nye, a guy who repeatedly had weaker science shows than a someone who worked with a guy in a rat suit.
It was a kids show for crying out loud!
Note that Ol' Bill there never says WHY any of the things he lists as shortcomings are shortcomings - a thicker lid? Really?
From the link
"Lid too thick
Soaks up too much of the heat"
He explains the other problems as well
The link I presented carefully laid out the full bill of materials used in the experiment. Bill never responded to a question at your link asking for the list of "appropriate" materials.
As far as open science goes, so far my link wins hands down.
Maybe because all you have to do is fix those shortcomings or watch one of his previous demonstrations and you'd get good results instead of rigorously adhering to a specific setup known to be broken?
Actually since you mention it I regularly hear about these kinds of shenanigans or worse during US elections, though it never makes a real splash. I'm actually relieved that the same stuff up here is still able to draw outrage.
I played football in HS. It was quite joke among the volleyball and tennis players about how dumb football players were. I asked them to compare they're playbooks to ours (end of discussion). It takes more intelligence to be able to play football well than lots of other sports.
That still doesn't mean you need a lot of intelligence to play football well, it just means that the minimum threshold is possibly higher. I also played HS football and our best player had a learning disability. This apparently became an issue when he tried to play professional ball but wasn't a problem in HS.
Contrast that to hockey, I can't speak much from personal experience but although it doesn't have much in the way of playbooks it has a lot of schemes and systems which take a lot more intelligence since they're dynamic. "Hockey sense" is a critical factor in the NHL, and a lot of stars are often lauded for their hockey sense while busts often fail in this category. According to this article intelligence along with skill is the major variable that changes as one goes up through the professional leagues in hockey.
While there's an environmental component (rates vary by country) if it was purely learned I'd expect that some groups would be predominantly left handed instead of right handed.
System administration and IT support is not computer science or programming, and after the introductory courses technical skills aren't what's being taught in computer science. It's like comparing being a machinist or technician with having an engineering degree, there is a certain level of mechanical ability certain engineering disciplines need, but they won't be on the level of a machinist or technician, and they don't have to be.
Then you disagree with most scientists. His data is correct.
Do you have any evidence for either of those assertions?
All I found is this blog post where the graph is from.
"Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The signals that these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies are directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere. Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets (see here and here)that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of eleven instruments flying on eleven different satellites over the years. As of early 2011, our most stable instrument for this monitoring is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite and providing data since late 2002."
So he's looking at "natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere", which may or may not be directly correlated with global warming. Mixing data from eleven different sets, from "different, deep layers of the atmosphere" and shoving a poor sine curve through the whole thing when he doesn't even have a full cycle!!
Oh, and even then I'm still just assume that him and John Christy have made no errors in retrieving and processing the data, and that's why, unlike the rest of the scientific community, they can't find any warming.
You said, "That data is suspect because Roy Spencer is an intelligent design blah blah." That's ad hominem. No serious scientist doubts the accuracy of those satellite measurements. You do, apparently, probably because of your preconceived biases.
No, I doubt the graph that Roy Spencer made by interpreting those satellite measurements, because I know he will misinterpret data as evidenced by his belief in ID.
It's nice you are capable of mounting an ad hominem, but the adjustments for the decay of satellite orbits started being applied in the 90s.
It's not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is "an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it". If I attacked the graph by calling you a creationist that would be an ad hominem, because the argument does not depend on you. But he's calling Roy Spencer an intelligent design believer, meaning Dr Spencer is a crappy scientist who denies the foundations of biology because of his religion. And Roy Spencer isn't relaying the argument, he's part of the argument, he's the one who made the graph and used whatever methods he needed to get rid of the warming that everyone else shows.
To put it another way if Bernie Madoff came up to you and said "look at this mutual fund I have, it's a great investment!", not investing because Madoff is a crook and it's probably a scam isn't an ad hominem, it's common sense.
You don't think there might be something different this time.
Food production has flat lined. There's certainly a lot of areas where we can grow better than we do now, but unless we get another green revolution it doesn't take that much longer at our current growth before a lot more people start going hungry.
The oceans are getting heavily over fished, entire species of fish are smaller on a genetic level because we're removed the largest members from the gene pool. There's dead zones where complex life can't survive. It's hard to know how close we might be to causing a ecological collapse.
From an economic perspective our economy relies on positive interest rates, ie always growing. And we get a lot of that growth from our ability to increase the rate at which we extract resources from the planet. That's obviously not a process that can continue indefinitely.
When you go from a culture of growth to a culture of stagnation you go from trying to grow the pie to fighting over the pie (why do you think politics everywhere has gotten so dysfunctional since 2008?). If we make that transition permanently our society might not survive.
It seems to me that this system just invites the lawyers.
If it was easy to reverse a domain transfer that could be shown to have been fraudulent then domain stealing would be a much less lucrative business. (granted, I'm not sure how easy that system would be to implement)
Not really. That particular clause is worded quite poorly and the only way it's interpreted in its current form is because that's the current culture and sentiment. If public opinion shifted and became less pro-gun than the supreme court might alter some of its prior rulings to take a narrower view of the second amendment.
The problem with a city or even statewide ban is it's a relatively small region embedded in a gun heavy region, so there's a lot of guns floating around and even a lot of otherwise law abiding citizens are probably flouting the law.
To conduct a proper test you'd probably have to do something on the national level like the assault weapons ban, though from my short reading it sounds like the evidence is slightly ambiguous in that instance.
Step 1: Choose 100 voters at random from the given state/country/whatever, or use something more similar to the courts where the campaigns get to challenge potential voters selected from a larger pool.
Step 2: Give the 100 voters a month or two to grill the candidates and educate themselves on the issues.
Step 3: The 100 voters vote.
Clearly you'd need to put in a lot of safeguards to avoid voter tampering, but if you could pull it off I'm sure you'd have an extremely reformed and responsible electorate, and a higher quality of candidate to match.
Only downside is this changes politics into a much more explicit spectator sport and it's hard to say how that will affect the country as a whole.
The exclusion of anyone who didn't own land tended to mean the voters were educated and prosperous enough that they could devote time to being active in politics.
And they'd vote to make sure it would stay that way (with themselves educated, prosperous, and in power).
What I'd like to see is some kind of very tough civics test as a requirement for voting. It should be as openly and transparently administered as possible, so that anyone who wants to study and learn could pass it but very few who didn't care to study would stand a chance.
Gerrymandering^1000
In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival.
Does this include government contracts? I'd consider the military-industrial complex to be on par with entitlements as a long term danger.
The last thing I would change is that all campaigns be publically funded, each candidate gets a very generous amount, and any other "contributions" are treasonous bribery resulting in a death penalty for the candidate and 20 years in prison for the one "contributing" the money.
I'm sympathetic to public funding, though the penalty is completely out of whack.
Yep, the Republicans, who ended slavery and had to fight the DNC for 30 years to get the civil rights act passed are the ones opressing miniorities.
More Democrats opposed the civil rights act because the Democrats were from southern states.
Once you control for north vs south the Democrats were more likely to support the civil rights act.
And since it's going to come up, the Conservative Party of Canada is actually the result of a merger between two separate parties: the original Progressive Conservatives, who were the centre-right answer to the Liberal's centre-left, and the Canadian Alliance-née-Reform party, the country's (relatively)-far-right party. Prime Minister Harper was previously a member of the Canadian Alliance, and it's safe to say that his view, regardless of his party's, doesn't represent the overwhelming majority of Canadians. He's not all bad, but I will throw a party he is unceremoniously dumped from the Canadian political scene.
I've always felt the Harper was one of the only things keeping the Conservatives in check, and the reason for his somewhat authoritarian style is that a lot of his MPs are pretty far off the deep end so he needs to keep them under reign.
I very much doubt the plan was all Sona's doing, though I don't believe that Harper is to blame.
Trying watching Star Wars with a fresh mind. It's a terrible, terrible movie with bad dialogue and worse acting. It was a novelty that many of us remember fondly because we saw it when we were kids, but it's very much a B-movie.
That could be the case, but it could also be possible that it's a lot of damn fun.
I think there's more to a movie than good dialogue, acting, and strong plots. Sometimes in spite of those flaws, or maybe because of them, a movie just manages to be a lot of fun.
For the record I wasn't a huge fan of Avatar or 300, I didn't really like Serenity, and while LOTR was good, I certainly didn't think it was nearly as spectacular as most people.
The Tea Party has corrupted the Republican party to the point where it's so extreme that the only candidates who have a chance are nutjobs, ie Bachmann, Cain, Palin, Santorum, etc. Or possibly sane people who will say anything for power, ie Romney, and to a lesser extent Gingrich and Trump. The qualified honest and sane candidates simply wouldn't get enough votes.
Santorum really is a pure Tea Party candidate in that he's virulently anti-liberal and highly religious. And unlike the other Tea Party candidates he's also soft spoken and not a complete idiot.
Really I am kinda hoping Santorum gets the nomination. If Romney gets the nomination, and loses, the Tea Party will blame him for being too liberal and they'll stay in the deep end for another 4 year. But if Sandorum is nominated, even if there's a double dip recession, I don't think Santorum has a hope in the general election. His views are just too extreme and they'll terrify all the moderates. My hope is that seeing Santorum's views nationally expressed and rejected will pierce the Fox reality bubble and push the GOP back towards the centre.
There's also the part where WWI was planned by freemasonry...
Though I do feel reassured that my BS detector was going off even before I noticed all the other conspiracy theories showing up, I guess everything is still in working order.
Sony is a profit-oriented corporation
Their mission is to make profit
Whitney Houston's death was a chance for Sony to make more money, so they took it
I really can't blame Sony for doing such a thing, even when it's kind of bad taste
Why not?
The fact that Sony's mission as a corporation is to make money doesn't mean you have to endorse them acting amorally.
You're perfectly free to say "Screw you Sony! I'm not going to buy product X now!"
And suddenly now Sony has a motivation to make money by acting morally.
Do you have a source? That summary sounds overly simplified, I guess they'd have to stick to public land around the fringe to avoid trespassing and theft, but I'm curious if they take more than one or two plants, or if there's any intermediate steps between the sampling and the lawsuit.
Yes and no.
95% will be descended from Monsanto crops. But even though the Monsanto crops are probably more competitive they will still only make a small contribution to the total genome. So it might still only be 5% Monsanto DNA.
And even if the seeds are so competitive that all the important Monsanto genes spread and affect most of the species. That process is probably going to take more than 20 years, the length of a patent.
So I suspect it's still possible to distinguish between deliberately using patented Monsanto GMOs and being a victim of contamination.
What I mean is exactly who is Monsanto suing?
Are they actually suing people who has a crop with only 5% Monsanto's seeds, or are they only going after people who have pretty much a full Monsanto crop, and are almost certainly deliberately infringing. Most people here seem to be assuming the former, but I haven't seen any real evidence either way, and it makes a pretty big difference in how I feel about the suits.
1) At what percentage of GMO seed is Monsanto suing? If it's 5% it's probably contamination they should definitely not be suing, but if it's 95% than that's probably deliberate contamination.
2) How should their business model work? I find the idea of patented lifeforms and violation of first sale doctrine to both be repulsive. But if you're in the business of developing GMO crops how else can you fund your research?
As a result of this "namecalling" I've been aware of Rick Santorum's bigoted views for years.
I'd say that's damn effective criticism.