Sorry I was unclear. I don't deny that these things happen, just that the philosophy of science does not condone it and it's method does not require it.
OTOH industry confrences often blur the lines between science, technology and business. Maybe the CHI selection commitee is simply not interested in anything that does not have "Implications for Design" and considers Paul's paper "out of scope". If that is the case then Paul is banging his head against a brick wall, his time would be better spent submitting the paper to a respectable sociology journal.
Without carbon-based life, such an atmosphere would not exist on Earth.
Of course the whole problem with all this is we do not have a good definition for "life" or "intelligence". For example an ants nest can be considered as a single intelligent organisim or a swarm of mindless individuals. The same concept applied on a global scale is what Lovelock's much maligned Gaia hypothesis was all about.
"This is an unfortunate shortcoming of science at the moment."
I agree with most of your post but disagree with your conclusion.
Contrary to the GP's claim there is no requirement in science for a "suggested mechanisim", the results of the experiment are far more important than the explaination. For example, nobody has yet explained gravity but few doubt it exists and that we can acurately predict it's behaviour via models.
However it is common practice for papers to offer (clearly labelled) speculation in the hope that "someone else" will look for evidence and cite your paper if they find it. A failure to understand the difference between clearly labeled speculation and repeatable experimental results is definitely a "shortcoming" but it is not a "shortcoming of science". Worse still the "shortcoming" of which you speak is often indistingushable from willfull ignorance.
"A tested result is rejected until there is a suggested mechanism" - This is simply false.
IMHO the "unfortunate shortcoming of science" is the apparent inability of it's philosophy to rate a mention in high school science classes. This is not due to a lack of trying, see: Sagan, Dawkins and Randi. My own SPECULATION as to why is it so, is that most people ( including the majority of educators ) simply want certainty and cannot accept a philosophy that shuns it, so the philosophy part is ignored and science becomes a library of factiods that are discovered via inspiration, rather than found via critical thinking.
"If you give me a choice between working a rice paddy or being effectively chained to a hard stool with guards and spies, I'd choose the former 10 times out of 10. Advancement this is not."
Chairman Mao had the same idea and forced much of the population into subsitence farming, millions of people starved to death.
Since the gang of four were booted out of power in the mid-seventies China has dragged more people out of starvation and poverty than the rest of the world combined. I am not defending these kind of labour practices but I am old enough to remeber a time when "Red China" was the basket-case of the world and living conditions were immeasurably worse for it's people.
I think you are conflating application with theory (or I have misunderstood you). What you call a "hash table database" others might call an "indexed cursor". It is true that setting up a distributed RDBMS is probaly more difficult than setting up a distributed "hash table database" but this is not the same thing as saying scaleablity is their main weakness.
"A better idea for what?"
I was asking for an example of a data storage technique that scales better than RDB. Your last sentance makes a lot of sense but Memcached isn't really a database in the traditional sense, it's more akin to a fancy cursor that could just as easily be part of the RDBMS toolkit.
I did not say Wegman was political, I am saying he was appointed by a political commitee to give an OPINION. If you want to appeal to authority then by all means go ahead but I am kind of fond of the scientific method.
"Of course, I don't actually expect you to read any of this stuff, but other people following this discussion might be curious."
I have followed the science for at least 25yrs, I also followed the Wegman thing while it was happening. You don't have a clue, you are grasping at straws to try and debunk the hockey stick, perhaps because you think that will debunk AGW (it won't). Wegman, McKintrick & McKintyre all failed and so have you.
...read the Wegman report into the Mann et al. "hockey stick" paper...
Please don't encourage people to waste their time by conflating politics with science. We are talking about trusting scientific papers. Mann's "hockey stick" papers have been published in the journal science (2nd highest in academic journal rankings). The correct way for McIntyre and McKitrick to attack them is to publish contrary journal articles, asking a political committe devoted to 'energy' to act as judge and jury on a particular scientific result is idiotic in the extreme. It demonstrates just how desperate some politicians are to burry what they see as the "smoking gun".
Wegman'sreport was a request from a political committe to "evaluate whether the McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) (MM05) criticism of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) (MBH) had statistical merit."
"As usual, this is self-publicity disguised as news."
Thanks for the link. One question, self-publicity for whom - the papers author is probably shaking his punny fist when he reads some of the news reports. "World's premiere physics journal" is the author's way of saying "the only one I know".
"Bullshit alert!"
At least that bit was informative.
The bullshit that followed the warning was clearly anti-science drivel...so out of interest...why do have an account on a geek site?
First off I don't attribute on particular heat wave to AGW.
Second it's the first time we have ever had 3days in a row above 43deg.
Third the "debate" is political and largely phony, it's obvious to anyone who has followed the science that the 1997 IPCC reports demonstrated AGW to be real and of genuine concern to all but the most recalcitrant of genuine skeptics. Perhaps you should take your own advice and read the science before accusing me of being sucked in by talking heads.
I'm from Melboure Australia, some say it's the 2nd largest Greek city.:)
Here's shame: We were the last "friend" the neo-cons had in the international climate "debate".
We have just had a week of ~40deg celisus, three days in a row at 43deg+. Footpaths slabs pop out of the ground due to expansion, rail lines buckle and damage points. Our coastline is a shallow straight in the "roaring fourties" of the southern ocean, it has tremendously powerfull tides and huge swells.
Last weekend everyone was hoping the bushfires and heat would not cut off a major power line from the coal mines to the city, another major line was out because a sub-station exploded in the heat. No air-con literally kills people (as it has also done in Greek heat waves).
Our electricity is centralised and more or less all coal with gas/hydro backup, (same with most of Australia). Where we have the most hydro capacity it's screwed because of the "permenant drought" (accelerating shift in rainfall patterns for last 50yrs). But coal? The stuff everywhere, we even sold "coals to Newcastle" in the Thatcher era. The disinformation in this country over the last decade is only rivalled by that of the US. To overcome the water shortage we are now contemplating building another coal plant to power the humungous desal plant we are building on the coast of said roaring fourties.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when has asking people to pay for what they use been considered flamebait?
"we have no reason to suspect that there is life beyond this planet"
I do, it's called chemistry. Enlightenment in ten minutes, great sound track to boot!
Let's not forget the late great Prof. Julius Sumner Miller. The clip from episode 11 will take a bit of explaining.
Sorry I was unclear. I don't deny that these things happen, just that the philosophy of science does not condone it and it's method does not require it.
OTOH industry confrences often blur the lines between science, technology and business. Maybe the CHI selection commitee is simply not interested in anything that does not have "Implications for Design" and considers Paul's paper "out of scope". If that is the case then Paul is banging his head against a brick wall, his time would be better spent submitting the paper to a respectable sociology journal.
"nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere"
Without carbon-based life, such an atmosphere would not exist on Earth.
Of course the whole problem with all this is we do not have a good definition for "life" or "intelligence". For example an ants nest can be considered as a single intelligent organisim or a swarm of mindless individuals. The same concept applied on a global scale is what Lovelock's much maligned Gaia hypothesis was all about.
"This is an unfortunate shortcoming of science at the moment."
I agree with most of your post but disagree with your conclusion.
Contrary to the GP's claim there is no requirement in science for a "suggested mechanisim", the results of the experiment are far more important than the explaination. For example, nobody has yet explained gravity but few doubt it exists and that we can acurately predict it's behaviour via models.
However it is common practice for papers to offer (clearly labelled) speculation in the hope that "someone else" will look for evidence and cite your paper if they find it. A failure to understand the difference between clearly labeled speculation and repeatable experimental results is definitely a "shortcoming" but it is not a "shortcoming of science". Worse still the "shortcoming" of which you speak is often indistingushable from willfull ignorance.
"A tested result is rejected until there is a suggested mechanism" - This is simply false.
IMHO the "unfortunate shortcoming of science" is the apparent inability of it's philosophy to rate a mention in high school science classes. This is not due to a lack of trying, see: Sagan, Dawkins and Randi. My own SPECULATION as to why is it so, is that most people ( including the majority of educators ) simply want certainty and cannot accept a philosophy that shuns it, so the philosophy part is ignored and science becomes a library of factiods that are discovered via inspiration, rather than found via critical thinking.
"If you give me a choice between working a rice paddy or being effectively chained to a hard stool with guards and spies, I'd choose the former 10 times out of 10. Advancement this is not." Chairman Mao had the same idea and forced much of the population into subsitence farming, millions of people starved to death.
Since the gang of four were booted out of power in the mid-seventies China has dragged more people out of starvation and poverty than the rest of the world combined. I am not defending these kind of labour practices but I am old enough to remeber a time when "Red China" was the basket-case of the world and living conditions were immeasurably worse for it's people.
I think you are conflating application with theory (or I have misunderstood you). What you call a "hash table database" others might call an "indexed cursor". It is true that setting up a distributed RDBMS is probaly more difficult than setting up a distributed "hash table database" but this is not the same thing as saying scaleablity is their main weakness.
"A better idea for what?"
I was asking for an example of a data storage technique that scales better than RDB. Your last sentance makes a lot of sense but Memcached isn't really a database in the traditional sense, it's more akin to a fancy cursor that could just as easily be part of the RDBMS toolkit.
13-TOLL, up to 3 days after travel, any toll road in OZ, no $10 invoice fee...
Sagan often used something called a book/a>.
"Uh, actually, relational databases are pretty damn hard to scale. That's basically the main problem with them."
Do you have a better idea?
Why do you think relational databases are so often paired with a cache made from a hashtable-based database?"
You mean an index? - the kind of thing you would use to efficiently access large amounts of stored data?
NAS testimony to the energy commitee (pdf).
NAS climate homepage
As you say "other people following this discussion might be curious", even if you are not.
I did not say Wegman was political, I am saying he was appointed by a political commitee to give an OPINION. If you want to appeal to authority then by all means go ahead but I am kind of fond of the scientific method.
"Of course, I don't actually expect you to read any of this stuff, but other people following this discussion might be curious."
I have followed the science for at least 25yrs, I also followed the Wegman thing while it was happening. You don't have a clue, you are grasping at straws to try and debunk the hockey stick, perhaps because you think that will debunk AGW (it won't). Wegman, McKintrick & McKintyre all failed and so have you.
..with GPS, in case it get lost.
Hmmm, "Original Link", someone will get that a username in 10, 9, 8,...
Point 3: Here in Australia we have found that a 20% drop in rainfall translates to a 60% drop in run-off to the dam.
...read the Wegman report into the Mann et al. "hockey stick" paper...
Please don't encourage people to waste their time by conflating politics with science. We are talking about trusting scientific papers. Mann's "hockey stick" papers have been published in the journal science (2nd highest in academic journal rankings). The correct way for McIntyre and McKitrick to attack them is to publish contrary journal articles, asking a political committe devoted to 'energy' to act as judge and jury on a particular scientific result is idiotic in the extreme. It demonstrates just how desperate some politicians are to burry what they see as the "smoking gun".
Wegman's report was a request from a political committe to "evaluate whether the McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) (MM05) criticism of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) (MBH) had statistical merit."
is the reporter's way
"As usual, this is self-publicity disguised as news."
Thanks for the link. One question, self-publicity for whom - the papers author is probably shaking his punny fist when he reads some of the news reports. "World's premiere physics journal" is the author's way of saying "the only one I know".
"Bullshit alert!"
At least that bit was informative.
The bullshit that followed the warning was clearly anti-science drivel...so out of interest...why do have an account on a geek site?
"Geez. For that matter, as long as we're speculating, it could have made the quake much less intense."
It "could have" but it didn't, the speculation is about the dam's role in a particular earthquake that was OBSERVED to be more intense than normal.
First off I don't attribute on particular heat wave to AGW.
Second it's the first time we have ever had 3days in a row above 43deg.
Third the "debate" is political and largely phony, it's obvious to anyone who has followed the science that the 1997 IPCC reports demonstrated AGW to be real and of genuine concern to all but the most recalcitrant of genuine skeptics. Perhaps you should take your own advice and read the science before accusing me of being sucked in by talking heads.
Per day.
Thanks, knew it was wrong (after posting). It doesn't detract from the conclusion.
As they say in the movie The Castle: "It's the vibe of the thing."
I'm from Melboure Australia, some say it's the 2nd largest Greek city. :)
Here's shame: We were the last "friend" the neo-cons had in the international climate "debate".
We have just had a week of ~40deg celisus, three days in a row at 43deg+. Footpaths slabs pop out of the ground due to expansion, rail lines buckle and damage points. Our coastline is a shallow straight in the "roaring fourties" of the southern ocean, it has tremendously powerfull tides and huge swells.
Last weekend everyone was hoping the bushfires and heat would not cut off a major power line from the coal mines to the city, another major line was out because a sub-station exploded in the heat. No air-con literally kills people (as it has also done in Greek heat waves).
Our electricity is centralised and more or less all coal with gas/hydro backup, (same with most of Australia). Where we have the most hydro capacity it's screwed because of the "permenant drought" (accelerating shift in rainfall patterns for last 50yrs). But coal? The stuff everywhere, we even sold "coals to Newcastle" in the Thatcher era. The disinformation in this country over the last decade is only rivalled by that of the US. To overcome the water shortage we are now contemplating building another coal plant to power the humungous desal plant we are building on the coast of said roaring fourties.