Institutionalised anti-science groups foisting policies the directly conflict with something as important and well researched as the pentagon's annual threat assesments upset most scientists and skeptics in the same way as shoplifting upsets shopkeepers. In my book deniers are intellectually dishonest people who cannot be swayed by reason and evidence, the exact opposite of what it means to be a skeptic or a scientist. Yes, it really is THAT simple, some people still live and die by their principles other's sell them for whatever they can get. No grand conspiracies, no scientists living the highlife on the taxpayer's dime, no NWO, no reputable journals playing the role of Pope Urban VIII. Just a loose group of 50-odd "think-tanks" all headquareted within a mile of K-street and all selling the same (surprisingly cheap) product - tailor made anti-science propoganda and face to face access to the likes of senator Inhofe.
I can understand why honest, descent people sacrafice things to try and shut these morally bankrupt institutions down, especially when 'the people' are supporting their FUD factories via a tax free charity status. What I can't understand is how easily their obvious propoganda convinces literally millions of otherwise intelligent people that someone like Lord Monckton is anything but batshit insane and/or a compulsive liar for hire.
It's one thing to laugh at this group and their ineffective methods
Crazy yes, ineffective hardly! They've been selling the best anti-science propoganda money can buy for almost 2 decades and more than a few Americans have sucked it down like it was chicken gravy. Science cannot compete with cheap and nasty PR, especially when a large chunk of the population is scientifically illiterate.
Al Gore won one for giving a powerpoint about Global Warming... the hundred plus scientists who have dedicated their lives to collecting, analyzing, and releasing the data haven't gotten anything.
Your talking about the 'peace prize' which is has always been contraversial, even more so when people don't bother to check the facts. Gore was jointly awarded the peace prize along with the thousands of scientists who have also DONATED their time to the IPCC reports over the last couple of decades. Gore is not a member of the IPCC but his 'slide show' put AGW into the venacular of the US public, so much so that many Americans still think it didn't exists before Gore started banging on about it in movie theaters,
Gore, Thatcher, and Reagan were among the first political leaders who paid any attention to AGW, Reagan was probably influenced by Thatcher who was orginally trained in Chemistry at Oxford, he personally spearheaded the push for the very successfull international 'cap and trade' treaty on sulphur emmissions that effectively stopped the acid rain problem in it's tracks. Gore always has, and always will be more of a nerd than a politician, but to middle America sucking on a steady diet of Murdoch's propoganda he is just another has-been politician trying to make a buck.
Second.. it's a bit early to congratulate them... they've published a paper, not cured a patient.
If they were to win a Nobel prize for this it would be for the discovery in their paper that has stumped others for decades, not for 'curing cancer'.
Chill out, corporations were collecting warehouses full of personal information from mail order catalogues and other sources long before my grandparents were born, stealing an identity from someone's letter box for fun and profit is nothing new either.
I don't use MySpace or FB but from what I remember MySpace died when Rupert bought it, and it's unsurprising since Rupert approaches the internet like Mr Burns trying to release a penny from a jam jar.
...is an oxymoron. Not convinced a law would do any good here though, probably just encourge IT companies to stack standards committes even more than they do now.
Indeed and I don't think we know that much about Dino digetsion either, AFAIK cattle are a part of the AGW problem because of land use issues, I have not seen reputable claims that unequivocally claim that methane from cattle is altering the composition of the atmosphere over time. However to be fair TFA only claims a certain senario is 'possible' and science is all about accepting or rejecting speulations based on the strength of evidence. Having said that, the speculation in TFA requires a level of detailed evidence that is difficult to obtain with extant species and I doubt it's any easier with species that have been extinct for 70M yrs.
The great seams of fossil fuels we are busy burning were mostly layed down when plants had few preadators (no insects for a start) and the atmosphere had very little oxygen. All of it is carbon that plants took from C02 to produce the O2 we animals breath, burning it just recombines it back into the original CO2. David Attenbourough's (*) documentry on the Cambrian explosion ( in the 'Planet Earth' series) claimed that increasing levels of O2 made the formation of collegen possible and that collogen is what holds cells together to form an animal. It's the best explaination I've heard as to why animal life 'exploded' at that particular point in time. In other words we are still figuring out major features of the big picture when it comes to the history of our climate and how life in general, and modern man in particular, have altered its composition.
(*) - A reputable source with an outstanding track record.
But what has any of that got to do with coding for 'personal reasons', eg: a retirement hobby? - My 78yo dad has just discovered Python and PyGame and loves it, he is a game development team of one and the only cost involved is his time. Commercial development processes are meaningless.
So let me get this straight, you get up have a crap that's swpet out of your home by a gigantic system of tunnels specially built to handle the morning peak hour. You have a warm shower yet you don't live in the tropics, fresh breakfast from the refrigerator, boot up your computer made from sand, using electricity made from 'dead dinosurs' hunderds of miles away and connected to your home by long flexible rocks called cables, log on to a network that connects you to everyone else in the industrialised world through countless billions of tiny pixels all individually placed on billions of pieces of flat transparent sand by machines.
And the first thing you do when you get here is ask for proof that the scientific method works?
Here's what 'wrong' from an old farts POV: Metaphorically all she has done is read some kids diary, yet I'm reading and commenting about it from 10,000 miles away. Yes it's creepy and unacceptable, but it doesn't require a constitutional lawyer to remedy the situation, nor should she have her life ruined just because she's a parinoid sticky beak. This stuff is just as much social gossip as a Paris Hilton story, it's posted on the front page because we eat it up with gusto, but it ain't news.
Picked your post at random, I'm surpised that this needs spelling out for so many adults in this thread, but here's a simple guideline to tell the difference between thoughts and death threats...
- If it's all in your head it's a thought, if it's in someone elses face it's a death threat.
...or if that's not enough, maybe Goodwin can kill off this myopic meme.....let's give it a try, eh???
So following your definition of 'thinking', Hitler was just thinking about attacking Poland when he declared war.
Issuing death threats in writing or over the phone is a crime in most places, when done in a manner that can be recorded a direct threat of violence ceases to be a thought crime and becomes a stated intention, (metaphorically, it's a declaration of war). OTHOH, 5yrs is way over the top for such a trivial offence against the peace the rest of us actively maintain, especially since he had time to act on his threats but chose not to. A weekend in the slammer would be more than enough to convince him he's not as 'smart' as he thinks he is.
I think more fair chunk of the violence in the world could be averted if someone steps in early and cools things down with a glimpse of the consequences (or a distractingly funny one liner), but 5yrs is stepping in with jackboots since it's longer than most people get for carrying out their verbal threats of violence.
In other words, there are no GoodGuys(TM) in TFA, it's not a matter of choosing who's right because neither side has a moral or ethical leg to stand on.
Rejcting a claim that has zero evidence and defies logic is not only scientific, it's common-sense. Dawkin's has on many occasions stated in plain english that neither he nor anyone else can be absolutely sure that unicorns don't fart rainbows, but that there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that unverifyable reports of such beasts are anything more than an elaborate fiction. If you had spent more than 5 minutes to read his books, listen to his lectures, or watch his debates, you would have known that.
If you are interested in forming a more accurate picture of Dawkins rather than parroting the Fox and Friends charactature that is so popular in the US, the first of his books with a religious theme that I would recommend is "Unweaving the Rainbow".
Very easy for me to know. I dropped out of HS and worked for 15yrs as an "unskilled" labourer. I signed up to a CS degree at age 29 beacuse I liked programming as a hobby and the employment ads showed salries for a 40hr 9-5 week were ~4X what I was earning on a 60hr rotating shift. There was now way in hell I would have got my foot in the door at such an oppurtune time in the software industry without that piece of paper, I know because I tried the few ads that didn't specify a degree. I figure I'm about $1,500,000 better of over those 20yrs and that's going by a monthly rate, an hourly rate puts me even further ahead. Of course YMMV, but that's life.
"Look! I can sit in a classroom and waste my money! Doesn't this automatically mean I'm good enough to do the job!?"
As opposed to; "To be blunt I'm special, you'll just have to trust me on that because I can't be bothered jumping through your hoops just to convince you that your own degree is worthless. When do I start?"
Yes there are lot of questions and the answer will always be; it ended the war in the Pacific. Unless you lived thru WW2 I don't think you have the personal experience to be judge and jury on the question of how that generation chose to defend itself. Which is not to say that we can't take advise from history.
Modern westerner's consider anyone under 16-18 as a child and those under ~12 as an 'innocent' child, it's no good arguing whether it's true or not, "think of the children" is just as much a societal meme as "respect the troops" and most people (including me) generally abide by those moral axioms. However not a small number of 'soldiers' in the troubled parts of Africa are kidnapped and brainwashed 8-12yo's with AK-47's. Parts of the middle east are like medieval europe, in that you can inherit the political position of warlord before you hit puberty.
We refer to these places as 'backwards' because we've been there and done that centuries ago. From a 'liberation from oppresion" POV if you take out the evil dictator in a society that routinely creates evil dictators, then the problem becomes who fills the power vacum? Stevie Wonder sang about "freedom coming to Zimbawae" when Mugabee's jungle army took over, I've seen a similar thing recently, it's called the "Arab spring" but it could just as easily be their autum.
Slashdot Mirror
Why wasn't the science good enough for him?
Institutionalised anti-science groups foisting policies the directly conflict with something as important and well researched as the pentagon's annual threat assesments upset most scientists and skeptics in the same way as shoplifting upsets shopkeepers. In my book deniers are intellectually dishonest people who cannot be swayed by reason and evidence, the exact opposite of what it means to be a skeptic or a scientist. Yes, it really is THAT simple, some people still live and die by their principles other's sell them for whatever they can get. No grand conspiracies, no scientists living the highlife on the taxpayer's dime, no NWO, no reputable journals playing the role of Pope Urban VIII. Just a loose group of 50-odd "think-tanks" all headquareted within a mile of K-street and all selling the same (surprisingly cheap) product - tailor made anti-science propoganda and face to face access to the likes of senator Inhofe.
I can understand why honest, descent people sacrafice things to try and shut these morally bankrupt institutions down, especially when 'the people' are supporting their FUD factories via a tax free charity status. What I can't understand is how easily their obvious propoganda convinces literally millions of otherwise intelligent people that someone like Lord Monckton is anything but batshit insane and/or a compulsive liar for hire.
It's one thing to laugh at this group and their ineffective methods
Crazy yes, ineffective hardly! They've been selling the best anti-science propoganda money can buy for almost 2 decades and more than a few Americans have sucked it down like it was chicken gravy. Science cannot compete with cheap and nasty PR, especially when a large chunk of the population is scientifically illiterate.
Must be tough having a language barrier in your own head. /jk
Al Gore won one for giving a powerpoint about Global Warming... the hundred plus scientists who have dedicated their lives to collecting, analyzing, and releasing the data haven't gotten anything.
Your talking about the 'peace prize' which is has always been contraversial, even more so when people don't bother to check the facts. Gore was jointly awarded the peace prize along with the thousands of scientists who have also DONATED their time to the IPCC reports over the last couple of decades. Gore is not a member of the IPCC but his 'slide show' put AGW into the venacular of the US public, so much so that many Americans still think it didn't exists before Gore started banging on about it in movie theaters,
Gore, Thatcher, and Reagan were among the first political leaders who paid any attention to AGW, Reagan was probably influenced by Thatcher who was orginally trained in Chemistry at Oxford, he personally spearheaded the push for the very successfull international 'cap and trade' treaty on sulphur emmissions that effectively stopped the acid rain problem in it's tracks. Gore always has, and always will be more of a nerd than a politician, but to middle America sucking on a steady diet of Murdoch's propoganda he is just another has-been politician trying to make a buck.
Second.. it's a bit early to congratulate them... they've published a paper, not cured a patient.
If they were to win a Nobel prize for this it would be for the discovery in their paper that has stumped others for decades, not for 'curing cancer'.
Chill out, corporations were collecting warehouses full of personal information from mail order catalogues and other sources long before my grandparents were born, stealing an identity from someone's letter box for fun and profit is nothing new either.
I don't use MySpace or FB but from what I remember MySpace died when Rupert bought it, and it's unsurprising since Rupert approaches the internet like Mr Burns trying to release a penny from a jam jar.
A society with no regulations
...is an oxymoron. Not convinced a law would do any good here though, probably just encourge IT companies to stack standards committes even more than they do now.
I'm not sure why people are so compassionate
Which makes me wonder why you think 'we' have a problem and you don't?
A model is only as good as its assumptions
Indeed and I don't think we know that much about Dino digetsion either, AFAIK cattle are a part of the AGW problem because of land use issues, I have not seen reputable claims that unequivocally claim that methane from cattle is altering the composition of the atmosphere over time. However to be fair TFA only claims a certain senario is 'possible' and science is all about accepting or rejecting speulations based on the strength of evidence. Having said that, the speculation in TFA requires a level of detailed evidence that is difficult to obtain with extant species and I doubt it's any easier with species that have been extinct for 70M yrs.
The great seams of fossil fuels we are busy burning were mostly layed down when plants had few preadators (no insects for a start) and the atmosphere had very little oxygen. All of it is carbon that plants took from C02 to produce the O2 we animals breath, burning it just recombines it back into the original CO2. David Attenbourough's (*) documentry on the Cambrian explosion ( in the 'Planet Earth' series) claimed that increasing levels of O2 made the formation of collegen possible and that collogen is what holds cells together to form an animal. It's the best explaination I've heard as to why animal life 'exploded' at that particular point in time. In other words we are still figuring out major features of the big picture when it comes to the history of our climate and how life in general, and modern man in particular, have altered its composition.
(*) - A reputable source with an outstanding track record.
But what has any of that got to do with coding for 'personal reasons', eg: a retirement hobby? - My 78yo dad has just discovered Python and PyGame and loves it, he is a game development team of one and the only cost involved is his time. Commercial development processes are meaningless.
So let me get this straight, you get up have a crap that's swpet out of your home by a gigantic system of tunnels specially built to handle the morning peak hour. You have a warm shower yet you don't live in the tropics, fresh breakfast from the refrigerator, boot up your computer made from sand, using electricity made from 'dead dinosurs' hunderds of miles away and connected to your home by long flexible rocks called cables, log on to a network that connects you to everyone else in the industrialised world through countless billions of tiny pixels all individually placed on billions of pieces of flat transparent sand by machines.
And the first thing you do when you get here is ask for proof that the scientific method works?
So in summary; Rainbow farting unicorns == Angels dancing on pinheads?
Here's what 'wrong' from an old farts POV: Metaphorically all she has done is read some kids diary, yet I'm reading and commenting about it from 10,000 miles away. Yes it's creepy and unacceptable, but it doesn't require a constitutional lawyer to remedy the situation, nor should she have her life ruined just because she's a parinoid sticky beak. This stuff is just as much social gossip as a Paris Hilton story, it's posted on the front page because we eat it up with gusto, but it ain't news.
Informative grammar Nerd crushes grammar Nazi like a grape, win-win!
I know what a rose smells like but I have no way of proving it, even to myself.
Picked your post at random, I'm surpised that this needs spelling out for so many adults in this thread, but here's a simple guideline to tell the difference between thoughts and death threats...
...or if that's not enough, maybe Goodwin can kill off this myopic meme.....let's give it a try, eh???
- If it's all in your head it's a thought, if it's in someone elses face it's a death threat.
So following your definition of 'thinking', Hitler was just thinking about attacking Poland when he declared war.
/s "I think more fair chunk" , "I think a fair chunk"
Issuing death threats in writing or over the phone is a crime in most places, when done in a manner that can be recorded a direct threat of violence ceases to be a thought crime and becomes a stated intention, (metaphorically, it's a declaration of war). OTHOH, 5yrs is way over the top for such a trivial offence against the peace the rest of us actively maintain, especially since he had time to act on his threats but chose not to. A weekend in the slammer would be more than enough to convince him he's not as 'smart' as he thinks he is.
I think more fair chunk of the violence in the world could be averted if someone steps in early and cools things down with a glimpse of the consequences (or a distractingly funny one liner), but 5yrs is stepping in with jackboots since it's longer than most people get for carrying out their verbal threats of violence.
In other words, there are no GoodGuys(TM) in TFA, it's not a matter of choosing who's right because neither side has a moral or ethical leg to stand on.
This is not in any way standard English
Of course not, there's no such thing.
Rejcting a claim that has zero evidence and defies logic is not only scientific, it's common-sense. Dawkin's has on many occasions stated in plain english that neither he nor anyone else can be absolutely sure that unicorns don't fart rainbows, but that there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that unverifyable reports of such beasts are anything more than an elaborate fiction. If you had spent more than 5 minutes to read his books, listen to his lectures, or watch his debates, you would have known that.
If you are interested in forming a more accurate picture of Dawkins rather than parroting the Fox and Friends charactature that is so popular in the US, the first of his books with a religious theme that I would recommend is "Unweaving the Rainbow".
...makes him certain that you are one of "them". And no, I'm not in a position where I can avoid him and I'm not in a position where I can help him.
If that's the case then simply "confess" to being one of "them" and he will avoid you.
Very easy for me to know. I dropped out of HS and worked for 15yrs as an "unskilled" labourer. I signed up to a CS degree at age 29 beacuse I liked programming as a hobby and the employment ads showed salries for a 40hr 9-5 week were ~4X what I was earning on a 60hr rotating shift. There was now way in hell I would have got my foot in the door at such an oppurtune time in the software industry without that piece of paper, I know because I tried the few ads that didn't specify a degree. I figure I'm about $1,500,000 better of over those 20yrs and that's going by a monthly rate, an hourly rate puts me even further ahead. Of course YMMV, but that's life.
"Look! I can sit in a classroom and waste my money! Doesn't this automatically mean I'm good enough to do the job!?"
As opposed to; "To be blunt I'm special, you'll just have to trust me on that because I can't be bothered jumping through your hoops just to convince you that your own degree is worthless. When do I start?"
Yes there are lot of questions and the answer will always be; it ended the war in the Pacific. Unless you lived thru WW2 I don't think you have the personal experience to be judge and jury on the question of how that generation chose to defend itself. Which is not to say that we can't take advise from history.
Modern westerner's consider anyone under 16-18 as a child and those under ~12 as an 'innocent' child, it's no good arguing whether it's true or not, "think of the children" is just as much a societal meme as "respect the troops" and most people (including me) generally abide by those moral axioms. However not a small number of 'soldiers' in the troubled parts of Africa are kidnapped and brainwashed 8-12yo's with AK-47's. Parts of the middle east are like medieval europe, in that you can inherit the political position of warlord before you hit puberty.
We refer to these places as 'backwards' because we've been there and done that centuries ago. From a 'liberation from oppresion" POV if you take out the evil dictator in a society that routinely creates evil dictators, then the problem becomes who fills the power vacum? Stevie Wonder sang about "freedom coming to Zimbawae" when Mugabee's jungle army took over, I've seen a similar thing recently, it's called the "Arab spring" but it could just as easily be their autum.