Tom

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• Favorited EpiSurveyor: Saving Lives with Open Source on Boing Boing Gadgets
• Commented on Al Gore: The Climate for Change
  Antinous: Nope. Sorry it comes across that way--you should have seen my original draft of that note, before I toned it down! Ok, back to the drawing board......
• Commented on Al Gore: The Climate for Change
  Preamble: Apocalimatologists are doing a great disservice to both science and the environment by attempting to create and leverage fear for their own political gain, particularly given that the science they are basing their arguments on is not of sufficient...
• Commented on The Roots of Psychopathy
  The distinction between "hard" and "soft" science is an artifact left over from a historical misunderstanding of the nature of logical inference. No Bayesian would make such a distinction because we understand that the underlying logic of science is the...
• Commented on Billboard Liberation Front and Wachovia Bank
  A bus kiosk here had an ad for a local casino that showed a woman in the casino with an expression of near-hysterical glee, as if she'd won big. Someone had added a word-bubble on the glass covering the ad,...
• Commented on The Roots of Psychopathy
  #11 Man On Pink Corner: Why don't you think that objective reporting of facts has a place in scientific papers? Ignoring facts is unscientific. Studying, reporting, categorizing, analyzing, questioning and testing facts is the basis of science. I really can't...
• Commented on Election: Is This the Beginning of America's "Fourth Republic"?
  If the War Between the States was fought by the North on civil rights grounds, why was the Emancipation Proclamation not fully issued until the war had been going on for almost two years? And why was the initial version...
• Commented on Election: Is This the Beginning of America's "Fourth Republic"?
  Yeah, the "obligatory community service hours" in Ontario have been surprisingly non-fascist. One of my kids is doing his by teaching the younger kids at his dojo, which gives him a good job reference as well as some excellent experience....
• Commented on Chart of marijuana-related ballot initiatives for 2008: big wins
  The "make it the lowest priority" props bug me. I appreciate that they may be a practical move to put the U.S. on a slippery slope toward full decriminalization, because after a decade of putting pot behind bicycle license fines...
• Commented on The US Presidential Election: Open Thread
  As a Canadian I'm really looking forward to seeing President Obama inaugurated. He is by the accounts I've read a compassionate pragmatist, and based on the quality of his campaign he's a competent executive, capable of choosing advisers wisely and...
• Commented on Air Force Aims to 'Re-Write Laws of Cyberspace'
  Iamcantaloupe @ 15: actually, I DO add an apostrophe to abbreviations. So do lots of other people. It is a legitimate typographical convenience, about which grammar books differ. Many agree that "funny looking" abbreviations can be pluralized with an 's....
• Commented on $20 kit produces trillions of universes
  Modusoperandi @41: My French is just barely adequate to read papers in nuclear physics journals, but I guess your theory holds. Jack Ipseity @45: Your understanding of Kant is almost certainly better than mine, as I came to Kant by...
• Commented on Overaggressive spam filter
  You have a collection of privates?...
• Commented on $20 kit produces trillions of universes
  Modusoperandi @23: Personally, I've not had any trouble getting laid in the past decade or so. Just sayin'. Sfazzios @21: Yeah, I kinda winced when writing "pure states", but it seemed the simplest way of getting the point across, despite...
• Commented on $20 kit produces trillions of universes
  Sfazzios @11: As explanations of many-worlds go, yours is reasonably clear. It is still, unfortunately, incomplete, as it does nothing to account for why we never experience a superposition as such, but rather only pure ("collapsed" in Copenhagenist jargon) states....
• Commented on Wonkette: Jesus people pray that false idol will save God’s economy
  It's good to have a reminder that it isn't just the Right that is so skilled at sloppy thinking and gross equivocation in the name of confirming their own biases. It seems such a universal property of humanity that I'm...
• Commented on Long profile of Dean Kamen, discusses his Stirling engine
  Stirling engines are theoretically simple and efficient, but present massive practical problems. Because the Stirling cycle is a hot gas cycle they face a huge problem with parasitic heat losses. Gases have low heat capacity and low thermal conductivity compared...
• Commented on James Howard Kunstler on economic meltdown
  Commodifying risk is a perfectly useful form of economic activity. One well-known form is called "insurance", and there are many others. While it is true that the paper tail has been wagging the real-economy dog in the past few years,...
• Commented on Cartesian dualism -- the latest weapon in the war on Darwin
  Dualism gets us nowhere with regard to explaining anything because the notion of a "supernatural explanation" is an oxymoron. Explanations that do not violate elementary consistency conditions are invertible: if we say that A explains B, then by studying B...
• Commented on Reason on why Republicans need to get their clocks cleaned in 2008
  1UP: I agree the Dems are an unsavoury lot. My point was just that it is incomprehensible to me that anyone would believe what you're saying about the GOP. As to the Dems being against balanced budgets, I seem to...
• Commented on Reason on why Republicans need to get their clocks cleaned in 2008
  #36: "How exactly would the party of entitlements lure people who believe that most entitlements create a sub-strata of people who are perpetually dependent?" The Republicans, a party of entitlements, have managed to do this by consistently saying one thing...
• Commented on True nature of science fiction and fantasy books revealed through photoshopped covers
  I really enjoyed the first Covenant books when I was a teenager. What I liked was the moral problem of how to act in a world that was arguably unreal (I was a recovering Christian) and I identified strongly with...
• Commented on Personal endorsement for Anne Lagacé Dowson, candidate in Westmount-Ville-Marie, Quebec
  The NDP supports a "mixed proportional" type of electoral reform, which has been recently rejected by voters at the provincial level in Ontario. It gives greater power to party leaders, as they will appoint a certain number of candidates to...
• Commented on Great opening lines from sf
  Orwell, as always, is hard to beat: "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." We are immediately told this is a familiar world (it is April, they have clocks) but something has changed...
• Commented on Tor writers on free ebook giveaways as a book-sales tool
  I think someone needs to learn a little about the nature of science. "Scientific" does not mean "absolutely precise", which is what his comment about having to control for every little thing seems to imply. It means, "empirically reproducible and...
• Commented on Canadian DMCA is worse than the American one
  Letter just sent to the Ministers of Industry and Heritage in response to their e-mail regarding the new bill: Dear Ministers, Thank you for the update. Unfortunately, the proposed bill contains one major aspect that contradicts any claim to "balance":...
• Commented on Ben Stein: "science leads you to killing people"
  ...science leads you to killing people. Could we please disemvowel this guy? Noen: "After the Manhattan Project people began wondering if that wasn't a mistake." That's one of the differences between scientists and the people-who-believe-without-evidence. Scientists are (in principle, eventually)...
• Commented on Baby drop ritual
  Antinous, On reading the story I was first and foremost struck by how the belief that it is possible to drop babies off a 15 m tower and catch them in a sheet without any injuries happening for hundreds of...
• Commented on Ben Stein: "science leads you to killing people"
  Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place... Just to make that guy in the thread about dropping babies off of high towers happy... There is certainly nothing like love, compassion and empathy. The...
• Commented on Baby drop ritual
  Is wearing a burqa or chadri is 100% cultural too, but that doesn't stop many Muslims from presenting it as a Muslim practice. Do you love that too? Ok, I've been irritable about crazy people hurting their babies enough today....