Taking the authors' data and applying the authors' methods should lead to the authors' conclusion. That isn't reproduction. Reproduction is doing something independently (not necessarily the exact same thing) and getting compatible results. If you don't trust people to get things right, why would you think the data was properly collected and not deliberately fudged?
The effects of vaccination and global warming are things you can look into yourself. You don't have to take those things on faith. Look into them as much as you like. There is no religious war of AGW acceptance, although there seems to be one for denial (which is less than the political war against it in the US). There is no religious war for vaccination. It's all a matter of people looking at the evidence and drawing conclusions. If you don't like the conclusions, you're welcome to look at the evidence yourself.
Fortunately for your karma, Slashdot has no (-1, Really Really Stupid) mod.
107 incidents in one journal doesn't indicate a serious systemic problem. How many papers in that journal were examined? How typical is that journal out of how many journals? How much influence do these papers have? If influential, how long before someone gets conflicting results and throws things into doubt that will eventually be resolved?
Religion isn't objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, but there's no reason to think they're more accurate than, say, Aristotle's physics. If you trace what people say and write back, you'll find that there isn't any sort of objective standard. You may have some sort of spiritual sense, and you can evaluate religious claims based on that, but that's hardly objective.
Science is objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, and you'll be told what the observations were and what they apparently mean. You can't check all of any significant scientific field, since it's far too big, but you can spot-check whatever you like, assuming you can understand the lingo. (Twenty-five years ago, I found that I could easily understand what experimental psychology papers meant, but not a lot of the papers on physics.)
Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt.
If you're talking about individual papers, that's the right attitude. If you're talking about science more generally, it isn't. Science, like all fields, has always had its little corruptions. Science, however, has ways of dealing with these and finding things out regardless of mistakes and fraud. Some researchers will always screw up, some will be positively deceptive, and the majority are doing good science. If a paper is published that is wrong, it will not fit into the growing body of knowledge, and it will eventually either be ignored or found out.
There are fraudulent cancer papers. Treatment of cancer has gotten far, far better over the last fifty years anyway. There are presumably fraudulent climate science papers, but we're still warming up. There are presumably fraudulent computer science papers, but our knowledge of computers keeps getting better. (Computer science is not the same thing as programming, any more than physics is the same thing as making a machine.)
The science is open to scrutiny. What it is not open to is unreasoning carping and nitpicking. The "deniers" are people who refuse to accept that AGW is happening, and are immune to evidence to the contrary. They typically look for little inconsistencies and things that sound odd, and libel climate scientists. (After all, if climate scientists are virtually unanimous in saying AGW is going on, and the denier wants to claim it isn't, something has to be wrong about virtually all climate scientists.)
The basic physics isn't definitive, but it's strong anyway. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it will absorb energy. There's more in the atmosphere than there used to be, and the CO2 in the atmosphere has, proportionately, less Carbon-14 than it used to. This is consistent with it being from burning fossil fuels, which will be very low in C-14 due to radioactive decay. (This is how we do carbon dating: we examine carbon in an object and note the C-12 to C-14 ratio, which is greater the older the object is.) Given more CO2, we have more heat retention.
Any theory denying global warming will (besides denying all the careful temperature measurements) have to account for this. What is the decrease of energy reaching Earth, and/or what is the mechanism for letting more heat out? Any theory denying the anthropogenic quality will have to show how the CO2 level is increasing from natural causes, and why burning fossil fuels shouldn't increase the amount of CO2 in the air, and why the isotopic concentration is changing. There's no sign of anything that would be increasing Earth's albedo in order to reflect more sunlight, lowering the amount of heat coming in (there are assorted proposals to do just this) to anywhere near the extent necessary.
The details of what happens with global warming are really difficult to figure out, but the general overview is simple.
Nutrition is a different issue. It's far more complicated than climate science, since the human body is more complicated than the Earth's surface. Earth is a mostly closed system, with sunlight being the main input and radiating into space the main output. The human body is not a closed system. I breathe in nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and some less common gasses. I exhale those and other gasses. I lose energy through conduction, convection, and evaporative cooling (radiation is probably not significant here). I lose potential energy by excreting stuff that contains chemical potential energy. The whole calories in == energy out is technically true, but not really useful. It would be necessary to account for all energy flows. Burning food in a bomb calorimeter and measuring the potential energy doesn't mean that's the energy that will be used by the body. The human body adapts in complicated ways to its diet, with two bodies not necessarily adapting in the same way..
There's always been "these people live on that diet and they're a lot healthier than you'd think" issues. Nutrition has always seemed to me to be shaky at best. Climate science is pretty solid by comparison.
You're making that up. The US is not the world, and the political positions here aren't reflected worldwide. Even if US climate science was somehow corrupted, there's plenty of institutions all over the world that aren't subject to US politics. There is no worldwide conspiracy, and there is a worldwide consensus.
Some journal would find work debunking AGW to be worth publishing, because anyone involved in publishing a paper that significant would gain immensely in reputation. Other scientists would join in to be at the forefront of new research.
Are you referring to the EM drive using an asymmetric chamber to bounce microwaves around in that allegedly violates conservation laws without exotic technology? It is exceedingly unlikely that that works as described. It may wind up having interesting physics, but there is so much physics that works so well that's based on conservation of energy and momentum to make it extremely improbable that they're wrong. Moreover, by Noether's Theorem, this would imply that physical laws change over relatively short displacements of spacetime, which we don't observe. We've bounced microwaves around before, and found no anomalies. It's conceivable that we just haven't noticed these things before, but very very unlikely.
It's possible to use light as the equivalent of reaction mass, since it does have momentum. It just has very, very little momentum for energy input, so it's not so much impossible as ridiculously impractical.
A light sail relies on an external source of light, so it isn't limited by need to carry reaction mass or energy to power some sort of space drive. It would actually work.
How can you communicate information using entanglement at all? Entanglement is something like putting a red and a black card into separate envelopes. If you open your envelope and find a red card, you know the other guy has a black one, but that's not communication. It's a lot more complicated, actually, but what it will tell you is probabilities that the other guy will get certain results given certain experimental setups. The only way to make it communicate would be to be able to alter a property without breaking entanglement, and that doesn't work.
I'm out of shape and don't exercise nearly as much as I should. Since I started dying my hair, I look something like fifteen years younger than my age. I attribute it to my skin oil, which gave me horrible acne as a teenager and beyond but seems to keep my skin looking better now.
Health it's something you have to maintain, no one is healthy by default and it doesn't really take much to become healthy.
This suggests to me that you have no real experience with illness. Depending on circumstances, it can take a lot of effort and resources to become less unhealthy. If you can enjoy good health, do so. It can go really fast.
Or the USA not entering WWII even after we knew that the holocaust was occurring
The Holocaust, per se, was a product of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, by which time the US was at war with the Axis (for about a month and a half). The Nazis had already begun horrible atrocities against Jewish and Slavic populations, but I don't believe the extent was known for some time. Germany was considered civilized, and the extent of the atrocities was literally hard to believe.
That's an indirect observation, and doesn't tell you anything about the cause.
All you can do is rule other stuff out (and often to only certain degrees of certainty).
Science is built on tons of indirect observations, and figuring out causes from effects. This is nothing new. We have a theory that explains things extraordinarily well, and it says that virtual particles do various things that hold the Universe together. Similarly, part of that theory is about the behavior of electrons. Ever see an electron? All such observations have to be indirect. We do such and such, and that detector over there reads so and so.
Fascism is a collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government, and Communism has turned into that whenever practiced, whatever its theoretical roots. Socialism is sufficiently varied a concept to be so classified. We know that capitalist and socialist nations both can turn into totalitarian dictatorships.
The routes from capitalism to imperialism and fascism are fairly straight and obvious. Imperialism was largely an attempt to expand a capitalist economy by conquering people and forcing them into the roles that a capitalist economy wanted them in. Fascism comes from the fact that rich capitalists tend to be authoritarian and want the masses to do what they're told.
A socialist country could turn imperialist, but it would be difficult for it to turn fascist, as socialists see history as a class struggle and have a natural affinity to their counterparts across national borders. "Socialism in one country" was controversial, but Stalin was pretty good at getting his way, and it didn't result in anything near the nationalism that came naturally to fascists.
Lots of people in Europe suffered horribly during and after WWII. It's better to know what really happened than to pick out one bogeyman and blame everything on it.
what is relevant is how he came to power, and that is through promises of striking down the capitalist system and forcing businesses to pay people what they are worth and operate in the interest of society and the nation (as determined by the government).
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that your idea of how he came to power was correct, that still doesn't mean Hitler was any sort of socialist. You need to look at what he actually did, which was to get chummy with big industrialists (the socialist model would be to get rid of them) and institute an intentionally ineffectual labor union and abolish all others (again against the socialist model).
You seem to assume that Communism is the only possible outcome of socialism. I have seen no reason to think that.
Fascism is a collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government, and, hence, I'm against it. I'm not actually a socialist either. I am against Social Darwinism, which was the guiding philosophy of a lot of capitalists.
First, the DNC is not a government organization and has no legal requirement to be impartial. There are still people involved with the party [raises hand] who remember McGovern in 1972, and feared that a Sanders candidacy would be similar. That's a big reason why the Democrats have superdelegates.
Second, I've seen no sign of vote fraud or fraud in the caucus-convention process. As far as I can tell, Clinton won because she had more support than Sanders.
The first cite mentioned nothing that I find problematic. The second cite talked about the DNC strongly favoring Clinton, and doing some dirty but not excessively dirty campaigning against Sanders. The DNC has no legal or moral duty to be impartial. Its main duty here is to help the best candidate win the Presidency. If, as I do, you think Sanders had a considerably worse chance against the Republicans than Clinton did, then there was much to be said for favoring Clinton.
Come back when you've got a cite that supports your position.
Obama was given a horrible mess to start with, and improved things dramatically. The recovery had some serious issues, but not anywhere near a failure. Possibly Obama would have done better without a Republican Congress more interested in making him look bad than helping the country.
The question is not whether Obama failed to stop chemical attacks. We know that. The question is whether Trump has, and as yet we have no indication that he did. The lack of chemical attacks in the short period since the Tomahawk attack is insignificant. If Assad launches another chemical attack, we'll know Trump's strike did nothing to deter them. If he doesn't for a long time, that's some evidence the strike might have been influential.
I can see arguments for making a strike that has a serious effect on Assad's capabilities, and for not making a strike. Using lots of expensive missiles for a mostly ineffective strike is stupid, no matter how you look at it. I don't know enough to know whether making a strike at all was a good idea (I tend to think not, but I could be convinced otherwise), but I know that that particular strike was a big mistake.
"Hundreds of civilians"? Compared to the number of civilians that died as a result of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, that's trivial. There is no way we can possibly enforce peace in the Middle East, short of genocide.
Slashdot Mirror
My son is sufficiently like me in so many ways that, if I got a lab report saying he wasn't mine, I'd figure they screwed up the test.
Taking the authors' data and applying the authors' methods should lead to the authors' conclusion. That isn't reproduction. Reproduction is doing something independently (not necessarily the exact same thing) and getting compatible results. If you don't trust people to get things right, why would you think the data was properly collected and not deliberately fudged?
The gold and silver clause forbids states from making anything except gold and silver legal tender. It isn't a restriction on the Federal government.
The effects of vaccination and global warming are things you can look into yourself. You don't have to take those things on faith. Look into them as much as you like. There is no religious war of AGW acceptance, although there seems to be one for denial (which is less than the political war against it in the US). There is no religious war for vaccination. It's all a matter of people looking at the evidence and drawing conclusions. If you don't like the conclusions, you're welcome to look at the evidence yourself.
Fortunately for your karma, Slashdot has no (-1, Really Really Stupid) mod.
107 incidents in one journal doesn't indicate a serious systemic problem. How many papers in that journal were examined? How typical is that journal out of how many journals? How much influence do these papers have? If influential, how long before someone gets conflicting results and throws things into doubt that will eventually be resolved?
Religion isn't objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, but there's no reason to think they're more accurate than, say, Aristotle's physics. If you trace what people say and write back, you'll find that there isn't any sort of objective standard. You may have some sort of spiritual sense, and you can evaluate religious claims based on that, but that's hardly objective.
Science is objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, and you'll be told what the observations were and what they apparently mean. You can't check all of any significant scientific field, since it's far too big, but you can spot-check whatever you like, assuming you can understand the lingo. (Twenty-five years ago, I found that I could easily understand what experimental psychology papers meant, but not a lot of the papers on physics.)
If you're talking about individual papers, that's the right attitude. If you're talking about science more generally, it isn't. Science, like all fields, has always had its little corruptions. Science, however, has ways of dealing with these and finding things out regardless of mistakes and fraud. Some researchers will always screw up, some will be positively deceptive, and the majority are doing good science. If a paper is published that is wrong, it will not fit into the growing body of knowledge, and it will eventually either be ignored or found out.
There are fraudulent cancer papers. Treatment of cancer has gotten far, far better over the last fifty years anyway. There are presumably fraudulent climate science papers, but we're still warming up. There are presumably fraudulent computer science papers, but our knowledge of computers keeps getting better. (Computer science is not the same thing as programming, any more than physics is the same thing as making a machine.)
The science is open to scrutiny. What it is not open to is unreasoning carping and nitpicking. The "deniers" are people who refuse to accept that AGW is happening, and are immune to evidence to the contrary. They typically look for little inconsistencies and things that sound odd, and libel climate scientists. (After all, if climate scientists are virtually unanimous in saying AGW is going on, and the denier wants to claim it isn't, something has to be wrong about virtually all climate scientists.)
The basic physics isn't definitive, but it's strong anyway. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it will absorb energy. There's more in the atmosphere than there used to be, and the CO2 in the atmosphere has, proportionately, less Carbon-14 than it used to. This is consistent with it being from burning fossil fuels, which will be very low in C-14 due to radioactive decay. (This is how we do carbon dating: we examine carbon in an object and note the C-12 to C-14 ratio, which is greater the older the object is.) Given more CO2, we have more heat retention.
Any theory denying global warming will (besides denying all the careful temperature measurements) have to account for this. What is the decrease of energy reaching Earth, and/or what is the mechanism for letting more heat out? Any theory denying the anthropogenic quality will have to show how the CO2 level is increasing from natural causes, and why burning fossil fuels shouldn't increase the amount of CO2 in the air, and why the isotopic concentration is changing. There's no sign of anything that would be increasing Earth's albedo in order to reflect more sunlight, lowering the amount of heat coming in (there are assorted proposals to do just this) to anywhere near the extent necessary.
The details of what happens with global warming are really difficult to figure out, but the general overview is simple.
Nutrition is a different issue. It's far more complicated than climate science, since the human body is more complicated than the Earth's surface. Earth is a mostly closed system, with sunlight being the main input and radiating into space the main output. The human body is not a closed system. I breathe in nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and some less common gasses. I exhale those and other gasses. I lose energy through conduction, convection, and evaporative cooling (radiation is probably not significant here). I lose potential energy by excreting stuff that contains chemical potential energy. The whole calories in == energy out is technically true, but not really useful. It would be necessary to account for all energy flows. Burning food in a bomb calorimeter and measuring the potential energy doesn't mean that's the energy that will be used by the body. The human body adapts in complicated ways to its diet, with two bodies not necessarily adapting in the same way..
There's always been "these people live on that diet and they're a lot healthier than you'd think" issues. Nutrition has always seemed to me to be shaky at best. Climate science is pretty solid by comparison.
You're making that up. The US is not the world, and the political positions here aren't reflected worldwide. Even if US climate science was somehow corrupted, there's plenty of institutions all over the world that aren't subject to US politics. There is no worldwide conspiracy, and there is a worldwide consensus.
Some journal would find work debunking AGW to be worth publishing, because anyone involved in publishing a paper that significant would gain immensely in reputation. Other scientists would join in to be at the forefront of new research.
Are you referring to the EM drive using an asymmetric chamber to bounce microwaves around in that allegedly violates conservation laws without exotic technology? It is exceedingly unlikely that that works as described. It may wind up having interesting physics, but there is so much physics that works so well that's based on conservation of energy and momentum to make it extremely improbable that they're wrong. Moreover, by Noether's Theorem, this would imply that physical laws change over relatively short displacements of spacetime, which we don't observe. We've bounced microwaves around before, and found no anomalies. It's conceivable that we just haven't noticed these things before, but very very unlikely.
It's possible to use light as the equivalent of reaction mass, since it does have momentum. It just has very, very little momentum for energy input, so it's not so much impossible as ridiculously impractical.
A light sail relies on an external source of light, so it isn't limited by need to carry reaction mass or energy to power some sort of space drive. It would actually work.
How can you communicate information using entanglement at all? Entanglement is something like putting a red and a black card into separate envelopes. If you open your envelope and find a red card, you know the other guy has a black one, but that's not communication. It's a lot more complicated, actually, but what it will tell you is probabilities that the other guy will get certain results given certain experimental setups. The only way to make it communicate would be to be able to alter a property without breaking entanglement, and that doesn't work.
I'm out of shape and don't exercise nearly as much as I should. Since I started dying my hair, I look something like fifteen years younger than my age. I attribute it to my skin oil, which gave me horrible acne as a teenager and beyond but seems to keep my skin looking better now.
This suggests to me that you have no real experience with illness. Depending on circumstances, it can take a lot of effort and resources to become less unhealthy. If you can enjoy good health, do so. It can go really fast.
So you want my wife to live farther from work? We live in a fairly central location between our workplaces.
Are you really, really sure that you want to see me in black spandex?
Finding good engineers that want to work at supporting old versions is harder than finding good engineers that want to make new stuff.
The Holocaust, per se, was a product of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, by which time the US was at war with the Axis (for about a month and a half). The Nazis had already begun horrible atrocities against Jewish and Slavic populations, but I don't believe the extent was known for some time. Germany was considered civilized, and the extent of the atrocities was literally hard to believe.
Science is built on tons of indirect observations, and figuring out causes from effects. This is nothing new. We have a theory that explains things extraordinarily well, and it says that virtual particles do various things that hold the Universe together. Similarly, part of that theory is about the behavior of electrons. Ever see an electron? All such observations have to be indirect. We do such and such, and that detector over there reads so and so.
Fascism is a collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government, and Communism has turned into that whenever practiced, whatever its theoretical roots. Socialism is sufficiently varied a concept to be so classified. We know that capitalist and socialist nations both can turn into totalitarian dictatorships.
The routes from capitalism to imperialism and fascism are fairly straight and obvious. Imperialism was largely an attempt to expand a capitalist economy by conquering people and forcing them into the roles that a capitalist economy wanted them in. Fascism comes from the fact that rich capitalists tend to be authoritarian and want the masses to do what they're told.
A socialist country could turn imperialist, but it would be difficult for it to turn fascist, as socialists see history as a class struggle and have a natural affinity to their counterparts across national borders. "Socialism in one country" was controversial, but Stalin was pretty good at getting his way, and it didn't result in anything near the nationalism that came naturally to fascists.
Lots of people in Europe suffered horribly during and after WWII. It's better to know what really happened than to pick out one bogeyman and blame everything on it.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that your idea of how he came to power was correct, that still doesn't mean Hitler was any sort of socialist. You need to look at what he actually did, which was to get chummy with big industrialists (the socialist model would be to get rid of them) and institute an intentionally ineffectual labor union and abolish all others (again against the socialist model).
You seem to assume that Communism is the only possible outcome of socialism. I have seen no reason to think that.
Fascism is a collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government, and, hence, I'm against it. I'm not actually a socialist either. I am against Social Darwinism, which was the guiding philosophy of a lot of capitalists.
First, the DNC is not a government organization and has no legal requirement to be impartial. There are still people involved with the party [raises hand] who remember McGovern in 1972, and feared that a Sanders candidacy would be similar. That's a big reason why the Democrats have superdelegates.
Second, I've seen no sign of vote fraud or fraud in the caucus-convention process. As far as I can tell, Clinton won because she had more support than Sanders.
The first cite mentioned nothing that I find problematic. The second cite talked about the DNC strongly favoring Clinton, and doing some dirty but not excessively dirty campaigning against Sanders. The DNC has no legal or moral duty to be impartial. Its main duty here is to help the best candidate win the Presidency. If, as I do, you think Sanders had a considerably worse chance against the Republicans than Clinton did, then there was much to be said for favoring Clinton.
Come back when you've got a cite that supports your position.
Obama was given a horrible mess to start with, and improved things dramatically. The recovery had some serious issues, but not anywhere near a failure. Possibly Obama would have done better without a Republican Congress more interested in making him look bad than helping the country.
The question is not whether Obama failed to stop chemical attacks. We know that. The question is whether Trump has, and as yet we have no indication that he did. The lack of chemical attacks in the short period since the Tomahawk attack is insignificant. If Assad launches another chemical attack, we'll know Trump's strike did nothing to deter them. If he doesn't for a long time, that's some evidence the strike might have been influential.
I can see arguments for making a strike that has a serious effect on Assad's capabilities, and for not making a strike. Using lots of expensive missiles for a mostly ineffective strike is stupid, no matter how you look at it. I don't know enough to know whether making a strike at all was a good idea (I tend to think not, but I could be convinced otherwise), but I know that that particular strike was a big mistake.
"Hundreds of civilians"? Compared to the number of civilians that died as a result of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, that's trivial. There is no way we can possibly enforce peace in the Middle East, short of genocide.
IIRC, the extraordinary rendition thing caused something of a political kerfluffle in Sweden, and they're unlikely to cooperate again.