Correction. "Impeached a president because a lying about a BJ". Yes, Bill was impeached. Look it up.
More precisely, he was actually impeached on two different charges due to actions on the Paula Jones sexual harrassment case (which was settled out-of-court, arguably because Paula Jones couldn't continue the case due to her massive legal expenses):
* perjury: the one everyone remembers, lying under oath regarding sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky
* obstruction of justice: the one everyone seems to forget, regarding Clinton's pressuring of Lewinsky to give false testimony in court and obstruct the investigation
Zachary D. Blount, Christina Z. Borland, and Richard E. Lenski*
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824
Contributed by Richard E. Lenski, April 9, 2008 (received for review March 26, 2008)
The role of historical contingency in evolution has been much debated, but rarely tested. Twelve initially identical populations of Escherichia coli were founded in 1988 to investigate this issue. They have since evolved in a glucose-limited medium that also contains citrate, which E. coli cannot use as a carbon source under oxic conditions. No population evolved the capacity to exploit citrate for >30,000 generations, although each population tested billions of mutations. A citrate-using (Cit+) variant finally evolved in one population by 31,500 generations, causing an increase in population size and diversity. The long-delayed and unique evolution of this function might indicate the involvement of some extremely rare mutation. Alternately, it may involve an ordinary mutation, but one whose physical occurrence or phenotypic expression is contingent on prior mutations in that population. We tested these hypotheses in experiments that "replayed" evolution from different points in that population's history. We observed no Cit+ mutants among 8.4 x 1012 ancestral cells, nor among 9 x 1012 cells from 60 clones sampled in the first 15,000 generations. However, we observed a significantly greater tendency for later clones to evolve Cit+, indicating that some potentiating mutation arose by 20,000 generations. This potentiating change increased the mutation rate to Cit+ but did not cause generalized hypermutability. Thus, the evolution of this phenotype was contingent on the particular history of that population. More generally, we suggest that historical contingency is especially important when it facilitates the evolution of key innovations that are not easily evolved by gradual, cumulative selection.
Anyway, it's an interesting find, but I wonder, why did they not wait until they finished their investigation of the event? It says that they're still figuring out if the change was a random, incredibly rare mutation, or the result of many small changes. Why not wait until you get the whole story to announce your discovery?
It's science -- there's pretty much always going to be open questions, and you can be rest assured that seeking the answer to the questions they listed will only result in more questions. If you wait until you get the whole story before publishing, your field will be long dead before you publish anything. Science works by having people publish interesting results as they get bits of pieces of the whole story, allowing others to explore the story as well.
What if you slowly replace each brain cell that dies with a synthetic replica of a brain? Eventually, your mind will be synthetic or a machine, but if that machine is not you at what point do you loose your consciousness?
Btw, the terminology for this is a "Moravec transfer," named after the person to first devise it, CMU robotics professor Hans Moravec:
Actually, if you include the entire US government (not just the federal government), defense spending (including war spending and veteran spending) is 14.3% of the total budget:
From 2003, we have 10-23% rape statistics, some raped multiple times. The verall treatment of victims and their accusations is simply mind numbing. Further, about 2/3 women in the study reported sexual harassment. I have to wonder why the nation isn't boiling over this.
This doesn't make it ok of course, but to put it into context here are the statistics for colleges, which are more-or-less the same age group as people in the military:
Get back to me when the government puts a decent size fraction of what they spend on the military into energy research, healthcare, education and career retraining.
They already do spend a "decent size fraction" on the things you mention:
A couple weeks ago the official pricing structure for the MSI Wind in the US was announced, which I think alters your analysis quite a bit, as the version of the MSI Wind with Linux will be less costly than either the Eee or the Vostro:
http://blog.laptopmag.com/msi-wind-revealed-10-inch-mini-notebook-to-hit-us-in-june
The Linux version, running Novel's SUSE, will have 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. It will retail for $399. The Windows XP version will have 1GB RAM, an 80GB hard drive, and Bluetooth, retailing for $549. However according to MSI a base configuration of the Windows XP product will be available for under $500.
I suspect that Isaiah was renamed Nano in response to Intel's Atom. Small 4 letter names for small cpus. (I guess).
Believe it or not, AMD is also coming out with the Puma mobile platform in the coming weeks, intended to compete with the Nano and Atom. 4-letter names galore!
Did you know that if a solar flare had occurred during the original Lunar Landing, everyone would've died?
Did you know that a rogue wave can strike without warning, rapidly sinking an ocean-going vessel and killing everybody on it? It's happened many times already. Clearly, for safety's sake we must put an end to putting humans on ocean-going craft, regardless of whether or not they volunteer for it.
Its sad that bureaucracy has caused an entire team to become disillusioned with the competition.
What's weird though is that in a post by the same person at the Southern California Selene Group earlier that day, instead of blaming bureaucracy she said that their reason for disillusionment was their opposition to human space missions (and the idea that the Google Lunar X Prize could support that), and their (somewhat belated) realization that the Google Lunar X Prize was intended to promote commercialization of space. I personally think they were being terribly silly, but you can read the post for yourself:
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/teams/scsg/blog/some-serious-thinking-at-the-southern-california-selene-group
n my first blog, I wrote why Harold Rosen formed the Southern California Selene Group. In short, he and I registered our team to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE to demonstrate that a low-cost space mission to the moon could be accomplished and could lead to lowering the cost of some future robotic missions to planetary moons. Plus, we intended to have fun! Harold and I both are strong supporters of space science and robotic space exploration. (For one, I'm an astronomy and cosmology enthusiast.) We love the kind of work that JPL is doing, for example. But we most definitely are not in favor of human space missions. That is not our goal, nor do we support such a goal.
The Team Summit turned out to be a real wakeup call. In the Guidelines workshop that I attended just last Tuesday, the cumulative effect of hearing all day from Peter Diamandis, Bob Weiss and Gregg Maryniak that the "real purpose" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE was to promote the so-called commercialization of space (which I took to mean highly impractical stuff like mining the moon and beaming power to the earth, as shown in one of GLXP kickoff videos), humanity's future in space, etc. etc., took its toll. I couldn't help but think "what am I doing here?" When I spoke to Harold about it on the phone later, he agreed - no way did he want to be involved in promoting a goal he does not believe in.
I was discharged from service in 1998, medically, from wounds received during "peacetime" counter-terrorist activities. I continued working with the government, but this time without a sidearm.
I don't see wave after wave of people trying to storm our beaches, rape our infidel women or blow up idolatrous symbols of capitalistic greed over here.
How many americans had they killed? A big fat zero.
Not quite...
http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/chronology.html
September 11, 2001 - Terrorists hijack four U.S. commercial airliners taking off from various locations in the United States in a coordinated suicide attack. In separate attacks, two of the airliners crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, which catch fire and eventually collapse. A third airliner crashes into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, causing extensive damage. The fourth airliner, also believed to be heading towards Washington, DC, crashes outside Shanksville, PA., killing all 45 people on board. Casualty estimates from New York put the possible death toll close to 5,000, while as many as 200 people may have been lost at the Pentagon crash site.
Oct. 12, 2000 - A terrorist bomb damages the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39.
Aug. 7, 1998 - Terrorist bombs destroy the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In Nairobi, 12 Americans are among the 291 killed, and over 5,000 are wounded, including 6 Americans. In Dar es Salaam, one U.S. citizen is wounded among the 10 killed and 77 injured.
June 21, 1998 - Rocket-propelled grenades explode near the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
June 25, 1996 - A bomb aboard a fuel truck explodes outside a U.S. air force installation in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. 19 U.S. military personnel are killed in the Khubar Towers housing facility, and 515 are wounded, including 240 Americans.
Nov. 13, 1995 - A car-bomb in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia kills seven people, five of them American military and civilian advisers for National Guard training. The "Tigers of the Gulf," "Islamist Movement for Change," and "Fighting Advocates of God" claim responsibility.
February 1993 - A bomb in a van explodes in the underground parking garage in New York's World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding 1,042.
Dec. 21, 1988 - A bomb destroys Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 people aboard the Boeing 747 are killed including 189 Americans, as are 11 people on the ground.
April 1986 - An explosion damages a TWA flight as it prepares to land in Athens, Greece. Four people are killed when they are sucked out of the aircraft.
December 1985 - Simultaneous suicide attacks are carried out against U.S. and Israeli check-in desks at Rome and Vienna international airports. 20 people are killed in the two attacks, including four terrorists.
November 1985 - Hijackers aboard an Egyptair flight kill one American. Egyptian commandos later storm the aircraft on the isle of Malta, and 60 people are killed.
October 1985 - Palestinian terrorists hijack the cruise liner Achille Lauro (in response to the Israeli attack on PLO headquarters in Tunisia) Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, wheelchair-bound American, is killed and thrown overboard.
Actually the researchers themselves aren't saying anything at all about "thinking machines" -- that was just added by the blog summary. In fact, if you had read the document describing their plans, you would have seen that it doesn't even include the words "thinking," "AI," or "intelligence." All they want to do is create an Internet-accessible database of ontologies and ways for ontology-related services to interoperate. Your smears of them as "unethical" and "parasites" are completely uncalled for.
What is keeping NASA and the ESA from working together to create a tiny habitat to send to mars? I'm not talking anything fancy. How about sending a plant to Mars and keeping it alive? You have all the challenges of putting a living organism into space, getting it to mars, landing it on mars, and getting a habitat inflated, powered up, and surviving, all without having to risk the life of a human being.
Interesting story: dot-com billionaire Elon Musk was planning on funding something like this personally, but decided to just start his own rocket launch company (SpaceX) when he realized how absurdly overpriced the current launch market was. I imagine he still has that project somewhere on the backburner, though. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Space-related_activities
In 2001, Musk had plans for a "Mars Oasis" project, which would land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith.[13] He put this project on hold when he discovered that launch costs would dwarf the mission development and construction costs for the project, and decided to work on lowering launch costs by founding SpaceX. His long term goal is that SpaceX helps humanity become a true spacefaring civilization.
That version has parts redacted "because it does not want to aid in educating terrorists or encourage further acts of terrorism." For example, the "lessons" jump directly from 12 to 18 without showing anything in between. The Smoking Gun seems to have the unedited version:
If you stored the wrong number (instead of just making a typo or braino) and have not realized it yet, you will be happy to realize that the amount is $600,000, not $600 million.
Hah, yeah. I think I had started typing something like $0.6 million, and made a slight braino.
Has the electric universe theory made any headway in offering a viable alternative to currently accepted cosmology? Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.
Nope... as far as I've been able to tell, the electric universe "theory" is still purely in the realm of pseudoscience, being touted by various internet quacks. Of course, many of its proponents also believe that the empirical scientific method is some sort of outdated relic of a bygone era, so I'm not really sure what sort of standard they should be judged by. I'm actually really curious about where CMEF, the organization which gave Eric Lerner the $600 million in funding, got its money from. Their website doesn't seem to have that info, although it looks like they're trying to raise private funds via the interweb.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you elaborate on where in the Rockefeller Report it says that?
Correction. "Impeached a president because a lying about a BJ". Yes, Bill was impeached. Look it up.
More precisely, he was actually impeached on two different charges due to actions on the Paula Jones sexual harrassment case (which was settled out-of-court, arguably because Paula Jones couldn't continue the case due to her massive legal expenses):
* perjury: the one everyone remembers, lying under oath regarding sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky
* obstruction of justice: the one everyone seems to forget, regarding Clinton's pressuring of Lewinsky to give false testimony in court and obstruct the investigation
Mostly-naive question: What are your thoughts on the reboost potential of the SpaceX Dragon (assuming they get it up and running)?
Also, what ever happened to the possibility of using solar-powered electrodynamic tethers to reboost the ISS?
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/105/23/7899 Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli
Zachary D. Blount, Christina Z. Borland, and Richard E. Lenski*
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824
Contributed by Richard E. Lenski, April 9, 2008 (received for review March 26, 2008)
The role of historical contingency in evolution has been much debated, but rarely tested. Twelve initially identical populations of Escherichia coli were founded in 1988 to investigate this issue. They have since evolved in a glucose-limited medium that also contains citrate, which E. coli cannot use as a carbon source under oxic conditions. No population evolved the capacity to exploit citrate for >30,000 generations, although each population tested billions of mutations. A citrate-using (Cit+) variant finally evolved in one population by 31,500 generations, causing an increase in population size and diversity. The long-delayed and unique evolution of this function might indicate the involvement of some extremely rare mutation. Alternately, it may involve an ordinary mutation, but one whose physical occurrence or phenotypic expression is contingent on prior mutations in that population. We tested these hypotheses in experiments that "replayed" evolution from different points in that population's history. We observed no Cit+ mutants among 8.4 x 1012 ancestral cells, nor among 9 x 1012 cells from 60 clones sampled in the first 15,000 generations. However, we observed a significantly greater tendency for later clones to evolve Cit+, indicating that some potentiating mutation arose by 20,000 generations. This potentiating change increased the mutation rate to Cit+ but did not cause generalized hypermutability. Thus, the evolution of this phenotype was contingent on the particular history of that population. More generally, we suggest that historical contingency is especially important when it facilitates the evolution of key innovations that are not easily evolved by gradual, cumulative selection.
Anyway, it's an interesting find, but I wonder, why did they not wait until they finished their investigation of the event? It says that they're still figuring out if the change was a random, incredibly rare mutation, or the result of many small changes. Why not wait until you get the whole story to announce your discovery?
It's science -- there's pretty much always going to be open questions, and you can be rest assured that seeking the answer to the questions they listed will only result in more questions. If you wait until you get the whole story before publishing, your field will be long dead before you publish anything. Science works by having people publish interesting results as they get bits of pieces of the whole story, allowing others to explore the story as well.
As I recall, he said the V2 being used as a weapon was "his darkest day" because he wanted it used for space travel.
"The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet." -- von Braun after hearing about a V-2 launch towards England
What if you slowly replace each brain cell that dies with a synthetic replica of a brain? Eventually, your mind will be synthetic or a machine, but if that machine is not you at what point do you loose your consciousness?
Btw, the terminology for this is a "Moravec transfer," named after the person to first devise it, CMU robotics professor Hans Moravec:
http://everything2.com/?node=Moravec+Transfer
Actually, if you include the entire US government (not just the federal government), defense spending (including war spending and veteran spending) is 14.3% of the total budget:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/
This doesn't make it ok of course, but to put it into context here are the statistics for colleges, which are more-or-less the same age group as people in the military:
http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/scs/salt7.html * One out of four women will be sexually assaulted on a college campus.
* One out of eight women will be raped while in college.
Get back to me when the government puts a decent size fraction of what they spend on the military into energy research, healthcare, education and career retraining.
They already do spend a "decent size fraction" on the things you mention:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/
* Military spending: $730.8 billion
* Education spending: $848.2 billion
* Health care spending: $925.0 billion
http://blog.laptopmag.com/msi-wind-revealed-10-inch-mini-notebook-to-hit-us-in-june The Linux version, running Novel's SUSE, will have 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. It will retail for $399. The Windows XP version will have 1GB RAM, an 80GB hard drive, and Bluetooth, retailing for $549. However according to MSI a base configuration of the Windows XP product will be available for under $500.
I suspect that Isaiah was renamed Nano in response to Intel's Atom. Small 4 letter names for small cpus. (I guess).
Believe it or not, AMD is also coming out with the Puma mobile platform in the coming weeks, intended to compete with the Nano and Atom. 4-letter names galore!
What can the astronauts do better than the autonomous systems we've put on Mars?
Settlement. Colonization. Civilization. Science is a wonderful thing (I'm a scientist myself), but some things are even grander than science.
Did you know that if a solar flare had occurred during the original Lunar Landing, everyone would've died?
Did you know that a rogue wave can strike without warning, rapidly sinking an ocean-going vessel and killing everybody on it? It's happened many times already. Clearly, for safety's sake we must put an end to putting humans on ocean-going craft, regardless of whether or not they volunteer for it.
Sigh. It's too bad people can't bother to respond instead of just modding me "Troll."
What's weird though is that in a post by the same person at the Southern California Selene Group earlier that day, instead of blaming bureaucracy she said that their reason for disillusionment was their opposition to human space missions (and the idea that the Google Lunar X Prize could support that), and their (somewhat belated) realization that the Google Lunar X Prize was intended to promote commercialization of space. I personally think they were being terribly silly, but you can read the post for yourself:
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/teams/scsg/blog/some-serious-thinking-at-the-southern-california-selene-group n my first blog, I wrote why Harold Rosen formed the Southern California Selene Group. In short, he and I registered our team to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE to demonstrate that a low-cost space mission to the moon could be accomplished and could lead to lowering the cost of some future robotic missions to planetary moons. Plus, we intended to have fun! Harold and I both are strong supporters of space science and robotic space exploration. (For one, I'm an astronomy and cosmology enthusiast.) We love the kind of work that JPL is doing, for example. But we most definitely are not in favor of human space missions. That is not our goal, nor do we support such a goal.
The Team Summit turned out to be a real wakeup call. In the Guidelines workshop that I attended just last Tuesday, the cumulative effect of hearing all day from Peter Diamandis, Bob Weiss and Gregg Maryniak that the "real purpose" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE was to promote the so-called commercialization of space (which I took to mean highly impractical stuff like mining the moon and beaming power to the earth, as shown in one of GLXP kickoff videos), humanity's future in space, etc. etc., took its toll. I couldn't help but think "what am I doing here?" When I spoke to Harold about it on the phone later, he agreed - no way did he want to be involved in promoting a goal he does not believe in.
I was discharged from service in 1998, medically, from wounds received during "peacetime" counter-terrorist activities. I continued working with the government, but this time without a sidearm.
Thank you for your service to our country.
I don't see wave after wave of people trying to storm our beaches, rape our infidel women or blow up idolatrous symbols of capitalistic greed over here.
It's too bad Europe can't say the same.
Not quite...
http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/chronology.html September 11, 2001 - Terrorists hijack four U.S. commercial airliners taking off from various locations in the United States in a coordinated suicide attack. In separate attacks, two of the airliners crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, which catch fire and eventually collapse. A third airliner crashes into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, causing extensive damage. The fourth airliner, also believed to be heading towards Washington, DC, crashes outside Shanksville, PA., killing all 45 people on board. Casualty estimates from New York put the possible death toll close to 5,000, while as many as 200 people may have been lost at the Pentagon crash site.
Oct. 12, 2000 - A terrorist bomb damages the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39.
Aug. 7, 1998 - Terrorist bombs destroy the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In Nairobi, 12 Americans are among the 291 killed, and over 5,000 are wounded, including 6 Americans. In Dar es Salaam, one U.S. citizen is wounded among the 10 killed and 77 injured.
June 21, 1998 - Rocket-propelled grenades explode near the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
June 25, 1996 - A bomb aboard a fuel truck explodes outside a U.S. air force installation in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. 19 U.S. military personnel are killed in the Khubar Towers housing facility, and 515 are wounded, including 240 Americans.
Nov. 13, 1995 - A car-bomb in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia kills seven people, five of them American military and civilian advisers for National Guard training. The "Tigers of the Gulf," "Islamist Movement for Change," and "Fighting Advocates of God" claim responsibility.
February 1993 - A bomb in a van explodes in the underground parking garage in New York's World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding 1,042.
Dec. 21, 1988 - A bomb destroys Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 people aboard the Boeing 747 are killed including 189 Americans, as are 11 people on the ground.
April 1986 - An explosion damages a TWA flight as it prepares to land in Athens, Greece. Four people are killed when they are sucked out of the aircraft.
December 1985 - Simultaneous suicide attacks are carried out against U.S. and Israeli check-in desks at Rome and Vienna international airports. 20 people are killed in the two attacks, including four terrorists.
November 1985 - Hijackers aboard an Egyptair flight kill one American. Egyptian commandos later storm the aircraft on the isle of Malta, and 60 people are killed.
October 1985 - Palestinian terrorists hijack the cruise liner Achille Lauro (in response to the Israeli attack on PLO headquarters in Tunisia) Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, wheelchair-bound American, is killed and thrown overboard.
Actually the researchers themselves aren't saying anything at all about "thinking machines" -- that was just added by the blog summary. In fact, if you had read the document describing their plans, you would have seen that it doesn't even include the words "thinking," "AI," or "intelligence." All they want to do is create an Internet-accessible database of ontologies and ways for ontology-related services to interoperate. Your smears of them as "unethical" and "parasites" are completely uncalled for.
Interesting story: dot-com billionaire Elon Musk was planning on funding something like this personally, but decided to just start his own rocket launch company (SpaceX) when he realized how absurdly overpriced the current launch market was. I imagine he still has that project somewhere on the backburner, though. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Space-related_activities In 2001, Musk had plans for a "Mars Oasis" project, which would land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith.[13] He put this project on hold when he discovered that launch costs would dwarf the mission development and construction costs for the project, and decided to work on lowering launch costs by founding SpaceX. His long term goal is that SpaceX helps humanity become a true spacefaring civilization.
> you ignorant slut. who the hell are you to be calling anyone names?
Uh, sorry?
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/jihadmanual.html
Here's the chapter listing: Title, Opening Pages, And Introduction (11 pages)
First Lesson: General Introduction (4 pages)
Second Lesson: Necessary Qualifications And Characteristics For The Organization's Member (7 pages)
Third Lesson: Counterfeit Currency And Forged Documents (3 pages)
Fourth Lesson: Organization Military Bases "Apartments-Hiding Places" (4 pages)
Fifth Lesson: Means of Communication And Transportation (15 pages)
Sixth Lesson: Training (3 pages)
Seventh Lesson: Weapons: Measures Related To Buying And Transporting Them (5 pages)
Eighth Lesson: Member Safety (5 pages)
Ninth Lesson: Security Plan (12 pages)
Tenth Lesson: Special Tactical Operations (7 pages)
Eleventh Lesson: Espionage (1) Information-Gathering Using Open Methods (10 pages)
Twelfth Lesson: Espionage (2) Information-Gathering Using Covert Methods (15 pages)
Thirteenth Lesson: Secret Writing And Ciphers And Codes (17 pages)
Fourteenth Lesson: Kidnapping And Assassinations Using Rifles And Pistols (23 pages)
Fifteenth Lesson: Explosives (13 pages)
Sixteenth Lesson: Assassinations Using Poisons And Cold Steel (8 pages)
Seventeenth Lesson: Interrogation And Investigation (15 pages)
Eighteenth Lesson: Prisons And Detention Centers (2 pages)
If you stored the wrong number (instead of just making a typo or braino) and have not realized it yet, you will be happy to realize that the amount is $600,000, not $600 million.
Hah, yeah. I think I had started typing something like $0.6 million, and made a slight braino.
Has the electric universe theory made any headway in offering a viable alternative to currently accepted cosmology? Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.
Nope... as far as I've been able to tell, the electric universe "theory" is still purely in the realm of pseudoscience, being touted by various internet quacks. Of course, many of its proponents also believe that the empirical scientific method is some sort of outdated relic of a bygone era, so I'm not really sure what sort of standard they should be judged by. I'm actually really curious about where CMEF, the organization which gave Eric Lerner the $600 million in funding, got its money from. Their website doesn't seem to have that info, although it looks like they're trying to raise private funds via the interweb.