Ruse is apparently a philosopher who is an evolutionist but has shown sympathy to creationists. Or something. Got him a warning card from the Dawkins crown, anyway.
As another commenter here has noted, it's being published in a very high-profile journal. It may be contentious, but that doesn't mean it's pseudoscience. It may turn out to be wrong, but that alone doesn't make it pseudoscience. And conspirationism? Does he believe Melott is looking for conspiracy theories? Or merely drawing an analogy to the various types of data manipulation that conspiracy hunters use to "prove" their theories. I guess the latter, but it is something of a stretch.
Rather than Torbjorn Larrson's debunking, it's probably better just to go to the Alroy paper he cites. Alroy doesn't find a statistically significant peak in the frequency spectrum at a period of 27 My. I'd call this a scientific controversy rather than "pseudoscience". Sensationalist is probably a fair assessment, as it's the sort of thing that gets notice in places like Slashdot. But it is being published in a respectable journal, which means it passed at least the smell test of some reviewers.
Peer-review does not guarantee accuracy. In areas of evolving science, many papers are published in good journals whose conclusions are later determined to be in error. Some journals (I don't know if MNAS is one) are particularly willing to publish papers with novel or contentious conclusions in order to further debate on the matter.
I think the key phrase there is "philosopher of biology" (quotes in original). I don't think the author of the comment thinks much of philosophers in general. And a little google will show you that Michael Ruse is quite controversial among evolutionists. Personal attacks have been part of the evolution-creationism debate since the beginning. But to dismiss an argument because the author made a mild (for these debates) personal attack in a parenthetical is not playing by the rules of logic, either.
I know I can weasel my way out of Jury Duty yet I feel compelled to perform my service truthfully because of the many individuals before me who fought for this right. Amen! In my home state, they have the "one day/one trial" rule. If you don't get picked for a jury the first day, you're done until the next time you are called. And if you get picked for a jury, but the trial is delayed, you're done. If you do sit on a trial, at the end you are done, and your chances of getting called again are downweighted for a while. The idea is that if people know that they won't be asked to sit in a jury pool for several trials, or be asked to come and sit in the jury room for a week doing nothing, they won't be as likely to attempt to evade.
I suspect that most appointees feel that it is inappropriate to publically criticize your appointer. My general impression is that all appointees wait until they have left office. I think being an appointed official has much more of a "team player" aspect than an ordinary civil service job. Perhaps Carmona and others feel like they can do more good in their jobs, pressuring from within, rather than taking their concerns public and getting fired.
I think Douglas MacArthur takes the cake for uniformed personnel engaging in Congressional political theater. And he was an actual soldier.
In any case, I disagree that political appointees should not air their differences with their (former) employers. "Shut up and follow orders" is not democracy.
As to political aspirations, Wikipedia does reference a report from an Arizona TV station from August 2006 that Carmona might be seeking political office. However, Google doesn't find any other web references or news references to this. If he ever was seeking office, he does not seem to be now.
Good lord, RTFA in the NY Times linked in the parent. He was being asked to tone down or not release reports on sex education, second-hand smoke, etc. In other words, public health concerns. The global warming aspect came into it when he was invited to a meeting on global warming. He said he didn't know why he was invited, except possibly as someone who had scientific training. When he refused to dismiss it as merely "liberal agenda", he wasn't invited back. To me, that's among the least important items mentioned in the article.
First of all, he has resigned. He is no longer in office. He's not blowing off his duties, he's unhappy with some of the tasks he was asked to perform. I think I've heard of senior military officers complaining after they resigned about orders from the Commander-in-Chief. Are they angling to be politicians too? Being appointed to a position (and that's what SG is, not a promotion from within the ranks of an officer corps) does not remove one's obligation to provide accurate information and good-faith opinions. To be constantly told to suppress scientific information and praise his Highness George II in speeches does not seem appropriate. (Neither was Clinton's firing of Jocelyn Elders.)
Global warming only seems part of a "liberal agenda" because so many conservatives have decided that, in a competition between facts and ideology, ideology must win at all costs. In my not-so-humble opinion, the conservatives denouncing global warming as part of a "liberal agenda" are the equivalent of the Lysenkoists in the Soviet Union who denounced the "bourgeois science" of genetics. I hope everyone remembers where those people ended up in the history books.
Actually, I think that the duties of the office of SG would be to provide unbiased information to the Administration and the general public, not to be required to give speeches lauding the President.
My impression is that employment contracts are the exception in the US for permanent, non-executive, non-union employees. Most employment handbooks that I've seen state explicitly "this is not a contract of employment".
Like many US states, Texas is an "employment at will" state. I have heard that non-competes are difficult to enforce in Texas, and without a signed non-compete on file, I can't imagine that any such suit could succeed (IANAL, etc). Even with a non-compete in place, there is no guarantee that the court will enforce it. These sorts of threatened suits are usually just that: threats. Unless the OP has some sort of super-top-secret knowledge in his/her head, I can't see how such a suit could ever succeed.
The Florida woman whose case is described in the SFgate article did not misconfigure her phone it seems. According to this this story:
"[W]hen Waller called 911 through Vonage, her broadband phone service provider, all she got was a non-emergency sheriff's recording. She ran to a neighbor's house and finally got through to a 911 dispatcher.
So, Vonage connected her to a non-emergency number that is not answered 24/7. Not a good idea. I know that in some cities (such as Denver, where I live), there is no emergency number that is widely published. I can't look one up; 911 is the only number the police provide.
How is the slow response related to the usage of 911? You left that part out of your post. If you are telling people not to use 911, please give us more detail. Most police departments explicity do not want you using any other system. For example, the Denver police department (where I live) doesn't publish a non-911 emergency number.
Believe it or not, there are commercial applications run every day that take weeks to complete one run. In particular, I'm thinking of the seismic imaging programs run by oil exploration companies. Given that a single offshore oil well can cost tens of millions of dollars, they are willing to throw both hardware and programmer time at the problem. If you can squeeze in one more iteration to refine the image before making a decision, it can be worth millions. So yeah, there are cases where algorithm choice, compiler efficiency, and fast hardware all work together.
The stuff that comes out of volcanoes is not pure mantle material. In fact, usually it's melted crustal material. Or some mixture of mantle and crustal material. Only occasionally do volcanoes cough up a hunk of mantle. More usually, we can look at pieces of mantle that may have gotten caught up in some tectonic process and been uplifted for us to see. But that's rare, and the rocks are often altered by other processes.
The mantle is under pressure because of the rock piled on top of it. It is not, as is sometimes believed, molten. And it won't goosh out like champagne when the cork is popped. Volcanoes do sometimes behave this way, but that's because they are isolated pockets of molten, gas-infused rock. When the confining pressure is removed, they do in fact goosh out lava like champagne. But that's a very different story.
I have no sympathy for anarchists. They cannot create, only destroy.
I think you're conflating the crowd that likes to show up and smash up Starbucks with people who have actually thought about how they think society should look. In this case, I don't know what this guy's opinions were. Suffice it to say, there are pacifist anarchists out there, there are violent anarchists, and there are those in between.
I suppose anarchists are like canarys in coal mines: as long as you hear them twittering and flapping around in their self-imposed cages, freedom of speech is safe.
Well, the citizens of Oceania get to see Emmanuel Goldstein for two minutes a day, so I suppose you must be right!
You do realize that not all anarchists believe in the immediate, violent overthrow of the current system? From what I can tell, many anarchists believe that the main motivation for dismantling government is to prevent people from being killed by the state. Revolutions often result in mass death, which is exactly what anarchists want to avoid. They aren't all bomb-throwing loonies.
Before 9/11, I don't think any hijacker ever had tried to pilot a plane into a building. They had always made demands and asked to be taken somewhere. In the past, those wishing to destroy the plane had always done so with bombs in the luggage. As someone else pointed out, the people on flight 93 fought back. And why did they do so? Because they received new information and acted on it. You are deriding "experts", but really this expert wisdom is just basic common sense. It's better to live to fight another day than to die for the $5 in your wallet.
I replied to another of your posts, but I see something here that I think is important. You say that this guy advocated violent overthrow of the government. How do you know this? That's not a prerequisite (despite what most people think) of being an anarchist. Have you actually read the Anarchist FAQ? I'm not an anarchist, but it's not all about bomb-throwing and cop-killing.
Unless you haven't been paying attention, American prisons are centers of torture and death. Not white-collar country clubs like Martha went to, but the real prisons that are run by the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, etc. I'm sure that the powers-that-be could get one of the gangs to get rid of anyone that they didn't like.
Secondly, this man has a wife and child. Have you ever heard the maxim "Choose your battles wisely"? Fighting this subpeona is almost certainly not going to cause the masses to rise up waving the black flag. What would be the better result: to go rot in jail leaving your family destitute, or to live to fight another day? Life is complex, and decisions aren't always easy. Anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something.
Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.
Exponentially? Theyre going to need materials and energy for that. And where is all that material and energy going to come from? Hmm... in the competition between machine life and organic life, who will win? Will the machines ever believe their ancestors were made of meat?
Slashdot Mirror
Ruse is apparently a philosopher who is an evolutionist but has shown sympathy to creationists. Or something. Got him a warning card from the Dawkins crown, anyway.
As another commenter here has noted, it's being published in a very high-profile journal. It may be contentious, but that doesn't mean it's pseudoscience. It may turn out to be wrong, but that alone doesn't make it pseudoscience. And conspirationism? Does he believe Melott is looking for conspiracy theories? Or merely drawing an analogy to the various types of data manipulation that conspiracy hunters use to "prove" their theories. I guess the latter, but it is something of a stretch. Rather than Torbjorn Larrson's debunking, it's probably better just to go to the Alroy paper he cites. Alroy doesn't find a statistically significant peak in the frequency spectrum at a period of 27 My. I'd call this a scientific controversy rather than "pseudoscience". Sensationalist is probably a fair assessment, as it's the sort of thing that gets notice in places like Slashdot. But it is being published in a respectable journal, which means it passed at least the smell test of some reviewers.
Peer-review does not guarantee accuracy. In areas of evolving science, many papers are published in good journals whose conclusions are later determined to be in error. Some journals (I don't know if MNAS is one) are particularly willing to publish papers with novel or contentious conclusions in order to further debate on the matter.
I think the key phrase there is "philosopher of biology" (quotes in original). I don't think the author of the comment thinks much of philosophers in general. And a little google will show you that Michael Ruse is quite controversial among evolutionists. Personal attacks have been part of the evolution-creationism debate since the beginning. But to dismiss an argument because the author made a mild (for these debates) personal attack in a parenthetical is not playing by the rules of logic, either.
I suspect that most appointees feel that it is inappropriate to publically criticize your appointer. My general impression is that all appointees wait until they have left office. I think being an appointed official has much more of a "team player" aspect than an ordinary civil service job. Perhaps Carmona and others feel like they can do more good in their jobs, pressuring from within, rather than taking their concerns public and getting fired.
I think Douglas MacArthur takes the cake for uniformed personnel engaging in Congressional political theater. And he was an actual soldier. In any case, I disagree that political appointees should not air their differences with their (former) employers. "Shut up and follow orders" is not democracy. As to political aspirations, Wikipedia does reference a report from an Arizona TV station from August 2006 that Carmona might be seeking political office. However, Google doesn't find any other web references or news references to this. If he ever was seeking office, he does not seem to be now.
Good lord, RTFA in the NY Times linked in the parent. He was being asked to tone down or not release reports on sex education, second-hand smoke, etc. In other words, public health concerns. The global warming aspect came into it when he was invited to a meeting on global warming. He said he didn't know why he was invited, except possibly as someone who had scientific training. When he refused to dismiss it as merely "liberal agenda", he wasn't invited back. To me, that's among the least important items mentioned in the article.
First of all, he has resigned. He is no longer in office. He's not blowing off his duties, he's unhappy with some of the tasks he was asked to perform. I think I've heard of senior military officers complaining after they resigned about orders from the Commander-in-Chief. Are they angling to be politicians too? Being appointed to a position (and that's what SG is, not a promotion from within the ranks of an officer corps) does not remove one's obligation to provide accurate information and good-faith opinions. To be constantly told to suppress scientific information and praise his Highness George II in speeches does not seem appropriate. (Neither was Clinton's firing of Jocelyn Elders.)
Global warming only seems part of a "liberal agenda" because so many conservatives have decided that, in a competition between facts and ideology, ideology must win at all costs. In my not-so-humble opinion, the conservatives denouncing global warming as part of a "liberal agenda" are the equivalent of the Lysenkoists in the Soviet Union who denounced the "bourgeois science" of genetics. I hope everyone remembers where those people ended up in the history books.
Actually, I think that the duties of the office of SG would be to provide unbiased information to the Administration and the general public, not to be required to give speeches lauding the President.
My impression is that employment contracts are the exception in the US for permanent, non-executive, non-union employees. Most employment handbooks that I've seen state explicitly "this is not a contract of employment".
Like many US states, Texas is an "employment at will" state. I have heard that non-competes are difficult to enforce in Texas, and without a signed non-compete on file, I can't imagine that any such suit could succeed (IANAL, etc). Even with a non-compete in place, there is no guarantee that the court will enforce it. These sorts of threatened suits are usually just that: threats. Unless the OP has some sort of super-top-secret knowledge in his/her head, I can't see how such a suit could ever succeed.
So, Vonage connected her to a non-emergency number that is not answered 24/7. Not a good idea. I know that in some cities (such as Denver, where I live), there is no emergency number that is widely published. I can't look one up; 911 is the only number the police provide.
How is the slow response related to the usage of 911? You left that part out of your post. If you are telling people not to use 911, please give us more detail. Most police departments explicity do not want you using any other system. For example, the Denver police department (where I live) doesn't publish a non-911 emergency number.
Believe it or not, there are commercial applications run every day that take weeks to complete one run. In particular, I'm thinking of the seismic imaging programs run by oil exploration companies. Given that a single offshore oil well can cost tens of millions of dollars, they are willing to throw both hardware and programmer time at the problem. If you can squeeze in one more iteration to refine the image before making a decision, it can be worth millions. So yeah, there are cases where algorithm choice, compiler efficiency, and fast hardware all work together.
The stuff that comes out of volcanoes is not pure mantle material. In fact, usually it's melted crustal material. Or some mixture of mantle and crustal material. Only occasionally do volcanoes cough up a hunk of mantle. More usually, we can look at pieces of mantle that may have gotten caught up in some tectonic process and been uplifted for us to see. But that's rare, and the rocks are often altered by other processes.
The mantle is under pressure because of the rock piled on top of it. It is not, as is sometimes believed, molten. And it won't goosh out like champagne when the cork is popped. Volcanoes do sometimes behave this way, but that's because they are isolated pockets of molten, gas-infused rock. When the confining pressure is removed, they do in fact goosh out lava like champagne. But that's a very different story.
I have no sympathy for anarchists. They cannot create, only destroy. I think you're conflating the crowd that likes to show up and smash up Starbucks with people who have actually thought about how they think society should look. In this case, I don't know what this guy's opinions were. Suffice it to say, there are pacifist anarchists out there, there are violent anarchists, and there are those in between.
I suppose anarchists are like canarys in coal mines: as long as you hear them twittering and flapping around in their self-imposed cages, freedom of speech is safe. Well, the citizens of Oceania get to see Emmanuel Goldstein for two minutes a day, so I suppose you must be right!
You do realize that not all anarchists believe in the immediate, violent overthrow of the current system? From what I can tell, many anarchists believe that the main motivation for dismantling government is to prevent people from being killed by the state. Revolutions often result in mass death, which is exactly what anarchists want to avoid. They aren't all bomb-throwing loonies.
From the tone of his release, it sounds like the users in question were generally morons.
Before 9/11, I don't think any hijacker ever had tried to pilot a plane into a building. They had always made demands and asked to be taken somewhere. In the past, those wishing to destroy the plane had always done so with bombs in the luggage. As someone else pointed out, the people on flight 93 fought back. And why did they do so? Because they received new information and acted on it. You are deriding "experts", but really this expert wisdom is just basic common sense. It's better to live to fight another day than to die for the $5 in your wallet.
I replied to another of your posts, but I see something here that I think is important. You say that this guy advocated violent overthrow of the government. How do you know this? That's not a prerequisite (despite what most people think) of being an anarchist. Have you actually read the Anarchist FAQ? I'm not an anarchist, but it's not all about bomb-throwing and cop-killing.
Secondly, this man has a wife and child. Have you ever heard the maxim "Choose your battles wisely"? Fighting this subpeona is almost certainly not going to cause the masses to rise up waving the black flag. What would be the better result: to go rot in jail leaving your family destitute, or to live to fight another day? Life is complex, and decisions aren't always easy. Anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something.