...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) willing to ask any question whatsoever, including, "Is this such a good idea?" It can take us a long time to get there, because we are only human, but the door is always open, however long it takes for us to walk through.

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 years is just the perfect example of faith-based thinking. That was the point I was trying to make, and it seemed to me entirely reasonable to quote some of the crazier stuff in the Koran to say, "If they take this at all seriously, it is plausible that they have no problem believing babies can be dropped safely, and for the same reason." Unfortunately I did let my anti-Islamic feelings run away with me.

So your diagnosis that I "just took the opportunity to launch an anti-Islam rant" is off the mark. It was an attempt to launch an anti-faith rant using Islam as an example. The distinction is admittedly subtle, and in any case I clearly failed in my intent.

I can appreciate our BB overlords not wanting this thread to degenerate into a religious flame-fest, but that appreciation wanes when I look at the post just up the way, quoting Ben Stein saying far more hateful things about people like me than anything I have ever said about Muslims, Christians or any of the multiplicity of beliefs-without-evidence that have influenced so much of our world's history.

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 Bible is just full of them.

For example, here is Deuteronomy 21:10-14 on the rules for raping prisoners of war: "When you wage war against your enemy and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take some of them captives, then if you see a comely woman among the captives and take a liking to her, you may marry her. You shall bring her into your house, where she shall shave her head, pare her nails, and discard the clothes which she had when captured. Then she shall stay in your house and mourn for her father and mother for a full month. After that you may have intercourse with her; you shall be her husband and she your wife. But if you no longer find her pleasing, let her go free. You must not sell her, nor treat her harshly, since you have had your will with her." Really, what could be more compassionate than that?

I once argued with a Christian who claimed that the Bible prohibited the rape of prisoners, and cited this passage. It was never clear to me why he thought that a passage detailing the rules for raping prisoners was a prohibition against it.

Then there is our acceptance of ourselves, from the son of god himself: "If your hand is your undoing, cut it off... and if your foot is your undoing cut it off... and if it is your eye, tear it out..." (Mark 9:43-47). Jesus never mentions what to do if your brain is your undoing, but I think we can see in Stein the recommended action.

But perhaps Stein believe the literal word: "Everything is possible to one who has faith." (Mark, 9:23). Everything, that is, except reaching rationally justified conclusions based on evidence.

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.

If someone waved those passages around and claimed that they were somehow instructive about what all Christians believe, or how they live their lives, you would probably point out that their statement lacked nuance and an appreciation for the diversity of Christian thought, belief and practice.

Actually, I wouldn't, and for the life of me I can't think why anyone would think otherwise. That's why I put in the nasty remarks about Christians as well, hoping that it would be clear that I was being critical of FAITH, rather than Islam in particular.

All people who believe in "Religion X" for all values of X are indeed nuts.

Faith is a form of insanity. Sometimes harmless, sometimes not.

Islam specifically is amongst the more harmful forms of faith in the world today, and that's saying something, given the run that Christians give them for the prize. Islam is more dangerous than Christianity right now in part because many Muslims have not yet started ignoring their holy book in the way Christians have been for the past couple of centuries. If there is hope for Islam it is from the Suffis, because failed mystics are famously good at reading whatever they want into the text.

Islam needs that badly, and there are many voices within the Islamic community today who are arguing for this. They don't do so in the same language I do, obviously, but they are actively trying to make Islam more humane because as it is practised today it frequently is anything but humane.

If you're unaware of the struggles for women's rights within Islam, then you are unaware of a great deal. Most formerly Christian nations have fortunately become sufficiently secular in the past few hundred years to broadly recognize that women have the same rights as men, however imperfectly those rights are protected. I know of no self-identified Islamic or formerly Islamic country where that is the case, although some are better than others--I'd far rather be a woman in Syria than Saudi Arabia, for example.

Turkey might count as a formerly Islamic country that has built a strong secular nation, but it has done it by exactly the same means as Christian nations did: rejecting or ignoring the literal word of God as it applies to the proper treatment of women.

There is concern about the growth of Christianity in public life in the United States for the same reason, and rightly so. Faith is toxic. If this happened to be a story about Christian's dropping their babies off 15 m heights I would have written an equally scathing response to it, and would have probably had someone point out that "Christians don't believe any of that stuff, really." But in fact some of them do, and even those few are enough to make the world a far less happy, far more dangerous place for all of us.

Even those who don't believe in any particular passage from the Bible or the Talmud or the Gitas, do believe that you can and should believe things without evidence, or even contrary to evidence. That is what faith is, and it seems to me that only a person operating on the basis of such a completely bankrupt epistemology could possibly claim that no baby has been harmed in centuries of dropping them from a great height.

The faithful claim there have never been any injuries.

The faithful also claim that God dictated a book thrgh th mth f chrsmtc lltrt trdr, nd tht prt f wht Gd wnts s t knw s tht blvrs wh fl t by th cmmnd t "strk ff thr hds" whn thy "mt th nblvrs n th bttlfld" nd nstd d fghtng wll g strght t Prds whr "shll flw rvrs f wtr ndfld, nd rvrs f mlk vr frsh; rvrs f wn dlctbl t ths tht drnk t, nd rvrs f clrfd hny" whl nblvrs wll sffr trnl trmnt. (47:1-16) Thy r f crs n gd (r shld tht b bd?) cmpny wth rgrd t ths knd f blf.

Th fthfl ls blv, "Mhmmd s Gd's pstl. Ths wh fllw hm r rthlss t nblvrs bt mrcfl t n nthr." (48:29) nd my bslt fvrt: "Mn hv thrty vr wmn bcs Gd hs md th n sprr t th thr, nd bcs thy spnd thr wlth t mntn thm. Gd wmn r bdnt. Thy grd thr nsn prts bcs Gd hs grdd thm. s fr ths frm whm y fr dsbdnc, dmnsh thm, frsk thm n bds prt, nd [chsts] thm." (4:34)

Whch cn nly b tppd by: "Y r ls frbddn t tk n mrrg tw sstrs t n nd th sm tm: ll prvs sch mrrgs xcptd. Srly Gd s frgvng nd mrcfl. ls, mrrd wmn, xcpt ths f whm y wn s slvs. Sch s th dcr f Gd. ll wmn thr thn ths r lwfl t y, prvdd y crt thm wth yr wlth n mdst cndct, nt n frnctn." t ds nt sy hw n crts fml slv wh s mrrd t smn ls "wth yr wlth n mdst cndct." Chrstns n th ld Sth wr svd frm ths dffclty by nt hvng th lgl blty t mrry th slvs thy rpd.

[ll qts frm th Pngn Clsscs trnsltn by N. J. Dwd, xcpt tht hv chngd th wrd "bt" t "chsts" whr ndctd, s th rbc wrd cntns smlr mbgty rgrdng th ntr f th pnshmnt.]

So given that they believe all or some of that, yeah, I have no problem with the idea that they believe no baby has ever been harmed by dropping them 15 metres into a blanket. Let's see: s = 0.5*g*t**2 => t ~ sqrt(3) ~ 1.7 s so v = 17 m/s or about 60 kph (40 mph).

What could possibly go wrong? If you have faith.

JCCalhoun @123: Arguably true, which I didn't realize until I did a little apres'-rant refection.

t s stll th cs tht lmpng nrltd sss tgthr ds nt d th fmnst cs ny gd. t cnfss n ss tht s lrdy cnfsd ngh, nd th drppng cntmpt n bth sds f th fnc sn't dng nyn ny gd (ys, glty hr t.)

If we could all agree that:

1) Humans have a biological tendency toward polygamy

2) This tendency tends to devalue women's autonomy and men's autonomy in different, and class-dependent, ways

then we could move on to address the various ways in which different forms of social organization devalue different people's autonomy.

And let's not kid ourselves: lower status men have their autonomy threatened by humanity's tendency toward polygamy as well. Women got the vote in Britain only about sixty years after men did, and men got conscripted and shipped off to die in senseless wars for quite some time after that. Systemic violence against almost everyone is routine in may societies, and there really seems to me to be nothing about capitalism that makes it particularly worthy of note in this respect.

So to bring capitalism into the issue seems to me a bad move on both rhetorical and logical grounds.

Feminists would be more convincing on this issue if they didn't say things like, "misogyny embedded in capitalist patriarchy". As if there were no misogyny amongst the New Guinea natives we read about here last week who found pigs a useful currency for buying women.

Misogyny isn't caused by capitalism. Capitalism is just another form of human social organization, and offhand I can't think of a single form of human social organization anywhere that does not contain elements of misogyny. Without ignoring a truly vast amount of information about human beings it is untenable to claim that capitalist societies are even particularly bad when it comes to misogyny. Tribal societies tend to be much worse, for example.

There is evidence that humans are slightly polygamous in our sexual behaviour. The big clue is the degree of sexual dimorphism, which tends to be more pronounced in harem-keeping species. This biological tendency might explain something about the universality of misogyny. Doctrinaire formulations about specific forms of social organization certainly do not.

Even if it is biologically-based, I am not suggesting that misogyny is a good thing, any more than the biologically-based human tendencies toward xenophobia, superstition and murder are good things. They are merely part of the way we are made, problems that any human society claiming to be civilized has to deal with. Some deal with them better than others. Liberal democracies with relatively free markets, an emphasis on capital accumulation, and a strong hint of social democracy have proven to be the best of the imperfect solutions we have come up with so far.

Hewing to the demonstrably false belief that misogyny is an artefact of certain forms of human social organization opens the door to the kind of leathal utopianism that killed far too many people in the 20th century. We really don't need to go there again.

In the meantime, perhaps we can talk about why violence against women gets so much press, when a significant majority of victims of violence are male.

The linked article is slightly misleading, as it says the core gave off a powerful burst of ionizing radiation (mostly gamma rays) which is certainly true. But IIRC the gammas weren't what killed people, it was the neutrons, which are not normally considered ionizing. They do produce ionizing radiation, but via secondary effects after spallation or neutron capture.

These incidents are amongst the very few cases where we have data on acute neutron radiation poisoning with dose estimates that are more reliable than the data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Doesn't anyone else remember back in the USSR when it was illegal to take photographs of bridges?

The United States is now attacking its own citizens for exercising exactly the kinds of freedom that it once fought long and hard to protect.

Urban living is far more environmentally friendly than rural or suburban living. Everyone has to eat, and the higher density of cities means that distribution of goods is more efficient there. There's real data on this--go look it up.

In general higher density = more environmentally friendly. So on average urban is better than suburban and suburban is better than rural, particularly given the massive impact on wildlife that rural humans have. I currently live within easy walking distance of a small town core, and my environmental footprint is the smallest it has been since I lived in LA, where I was the only Anglo who did not own a car.

In a sensible and sane future 90% of the human race will live in well-serviced urban areas, with relatively few oddballs out in the boonies tending the machines that take care of the protein and hydrocarbon ponds.

Oh yeah, and death is a kind of change, possibly curable, and taxes are one of the things we hope to avoid. In any case, taxes are an artefact of civilization. The Mehinaku for example don't pay taxes. Ergo, taxes are not a constant.

There are only two constants in history: change and hope.

"...and allows the hyperconsumptive lifestyle."

Every human society everywhere engages in some form of conspicuous consumption. Americans are just better at it than most.

We'll never see a human society that doesn't aspire to hyperconsumption. The best we can do is channel it into more sensible places, like charitable giving and what for lack of a better term I'll call charitable investment, rather than in the pure waste of SUVs and McMansions.

If everyone with adequacy issues were to compete to show how HUGE their donations to a local library or a distant village were, the world would be a better place. If on the other hand we were to make entirely unsustainable investments in trying to stamp out conspicuous consumption the world would be a vastly poorer place.

Oil prices are unlikely to remain at current price levels for long. Changes in utilization and increases in production will moderate prices in the next year or so. When people say, "Well if it's this high now, imagine what it'll be in the summer" they are missing the point that with gas at $4 - $5 per some weird measure of volume, a lot of people aren't going to be doing any more driving than necessary.

Humans are adaptable animals, and if given both motive and opportunity they will invent their way out of the end of oil. High prices are motive. Well-regulated markets and available investment capital and good education are opportunity.

There are a lot of people who are aware of the opportunities ahead.

I'm talking to some high-school kids tomorrow who've built a Stirling engine in shop class, including a dual-axis solar tracker to power it. A lot of people are doing things like this, motivated by the Standard Market Offer program in Ontario that encourages individuals to sell renewable power back to the grid. It encourages people to build clean capacity, and while rates will eventually fall to meet the rising rates of non-renewables, once clean capacity is installed it will keep on producing with relatively little maintenance.

There are days when I think we will see the end of oil without too much fuss, if some numbnuts doesn't go to war over it. O wait...

Is it a cognitive surplus or a mere attentive surplus? There is a lot more to cognition than attention, and yet the arguments here seem to be more about where people's attention is focussed than anything else.

This makes sense inasmuch as primate societies tend to be ordered by attention. That is, the alpha monkey isn't necessarily the biggest or strongest or toughest, but is the one that is most successful in commanding the troop's attention. Where and how we allocate our attention is a fundamental determinant of our social structure.

The 'Net makes it very, very difficult for a small number of voices to dominate everyone's attention they way the old media did.

But to pretend that there is much cognition going on here would be a mistake.

One measure of cognitive activity is how often someone changes their mind about something. In over a decade of active participation in a variety of forums I have seen very few instances of anyone changing their mind about anything substantive. That is, cases where there is a disagreement on a substantive issue, followed by a discussion or argument, followed by a resolution where one party has convinced the other or both have reached a different consensus view.

This suggests that while there is a great deal of activity on the 'Net, there is very little cognitive activity.

KBB @28: My concern is not with the the author's credentials but with the specific point that he is not couching his analysis in the accepted language of anthropology. You don't have to have credentials to do that.

Also, the Chomsky quote is a lot less compelling when you realize that mathematical linguists were listening to him because he was a big name with a strong brand, and that the influence of his uniformed ruminations arguably set the field of statistical linguistics back by decades. Google "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" if you don't believe this.

"except of course when it doesn't"

Yeah--I made the mistake of installing 8.04 on a machine I wanted to do some development on, processing images from a webcam input. I kinda hoped it would just pick up the cam when it was plugged in. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.

After a couple of frustrating hours failing to download stuff from presumably overloaded servers, I gave up.

I love Ubuntu for the times when I just want an appliance for word processing etc. It covers 90% of what I want a computer to do, and one day Real Soon Now it'll be as flexible as Windows. But every time I step outside the computer-as-appliance box, I wind up doing what I'm doing right now: re-installing Slackware.

Does it matter if he fails to follow the conventions and language of inaccessible 'insiders' of the anthropological world?

Yes, it does.

The specialized languages of the sciences have been developed in no small part to help us avoid certain kinds of error. Deviating from those norms invites committing those errors.

Read this stuff the way you would any travelogue. Don't mistake it for anthropology, because it is not.

they are also used as currency for buying women

Ahh, the enlightened simplicity of the Noble Savage, unsullied by the terrible Western patriarchal system of law or the horribly dehumanization of globalization. Isn't it wonderful that we can look at peoples like this and know that if only a few social institutions were changed everyone would live such pure and admirable lives?

I'm taking credit for the timing of this release: I finally got around to downloading RC4 a couple of days ago, and the pattern of Ubuntu releases is: new version is announced, I wait for the real release, I finally get fed up with waiting and download the latest release candidate, the new release is out a day or two later. At least this time I didn't bother to install the RC!

It's funny that an article that leads with a claim that shoes are "inherently" bad for your feet goes on to try to sell you a better way to make those inherently bad things.

Shoes are more than just soles, too: they provide lateral support for the foot, which is one of the things that helps our feet last seventy+ years in reasonably good shape.

It's good to see a little science injected into the process, but the shoe industry, like all fashion industries, needs a steady stream of "innovations" to justify the ridiculous prices they charge. Sometimes these "innovations" come from scientists, who may be perfectly well-meaning in their attempts to get the public better footwear. But our feet are all pretty similar, and if the global footwear industry followed the science they would all make shoes that were pretty much the same. That's death to a fashion industry.

So expect to see a surge of "proper" shoe designs if this meme gets picked up, followed by a slow decline until a few years from now there is some new "innovation" cherry-picked from some other plausible source, and a torrent of criticism about how stupid everyone is for ever having believed that shoes needed to more like bare feet.

AnnoyedCapitalist wrote @52: "And the only three people who have been officially waterboarded by the CIA don't exactly tug at the heartstrings."

AC doesn't actually make an argument, but just states a claim, so it isn't totally clear what he is arguing for. However, it is difficult to see this statement as a premise in an argument that does not have a conclusion something like, "So torturers are not so bad."

Possible intermediate premises are are things like, "It's ok to torture unsavoury people" or "So long as you only officially torture a few people while unofficially torturing hundreds more it is no big deal."

Posting purported justifications for torturers is exactly what it is to be an apologist for torturers.

Evidence, thanks for the clarification. But when you write @20, "I would say true abomination would be the change of one sex into another sex" as your justification for evading Deuteronomy's prohibition on your cross-dressing lifestyle (Deut 22:5), don't you think that you should take into account the meaning of the words as used by the people you are arguing against?

Johnny Coelacanth @3: You're damned right marijuana isn't like heroin. Heroin is a powerful and effective pain-killer, so good that even when it was banned in Canada hospitals were allowed to keep their existing stocks, and some doled them out slowly over the next decade or two to maintain them for the patients most in need. Heroin is also a pretty good cough suppressant. Too bad about the addiction thing, though.

Boba Fett Diop: Thanks for the link to the book excerpt.

Reading the excerpt reminds me of nothing so much as "The Gulag Archipeligo," which the apologists for tyranny also attacked.

When governments cower hidden behind fences and proclaim their innocence you know they have crossed the line from stupid to evil. The very exclusion of Guantanamo from the rule of law and open public trials is proof of the crimes being committed there by the organs of the state.

Evidence, although I don't agree with you, I find your argument that Jesus was actually a woman who posed as a man an an attempt to expose the hypocrisy of Judeo-Roman society quite fascinating. Do please keep up with the interesting and informative posts.

FifthE1ement @22: "This new world of erroneous legalities that is being created is putting us all in mortal danger."

I see the terrorists have beaten you.

Fortunately, many of us are still standing up against terrorism, and refusing to give up our rights and freedoms, our legal protections and our civil society. We're even willing to protect the rights of the fallen like you along the way.

One day your children will be grateful for it.

Noen @10: God created human beings. Ergo, no.

Never assume venality when stupidity will do, and stupidity will almost always do.

Thank heaven the virus is genetically distinct!

Can you imagine the horror of a genetically indistinct one?

A sociologist of science studies the social behaviour of scientists. Probably the most famous book in the sociology of science is "Laboratory Life", which explains all scientific behaviour in terms of scientist's desire to get their name on as many published papers as possible.

Vegetarians and vegans come in all shapes and sizes.

* Some are concerned about the suffering of farm animals.

* Some are concerned about the killing of any animal that could reasonably be said to be conscious or aware of it's own life.

* Some are concerned about killing any animal at all (jains, to take an obvious example).

* Some are concerned about the environmental impact of meat farming (this is the main thing that gives me an unfulfilled impulse toward vegetarianism).

* Some are concerned about the health impact of meat eating. There is no mad carrot disease.

* Some simply don't like the taste or texture of meat.

* A few are bothered by the perception that they are eating "a corpse" or something "dead", which kinda creeps me out because it suggests they would rather eat things that are still vibrantly alive, killing them by a slow process involving some combination of cooking, mastication and digestion. I also wonder why I never see them say anything like "Tofu is dead."

All of these but the last can be given some kind of rational justification, and depending on what kind of vegetarian you are you'll feel differently about vat-grown meat. People who are avoiding meat for health purposes aren't about to run out and buy a big slab of Chicken Little.

My own feelings about this are perfectly contradictory. I think vegetarians who are concerned about animal suffering should have no qualms about eating vat grown cow. By the same logic, I should have no qualms about eating vat grown long pig. But I do.

Mostly, I think moralizing about what people eat is not so different from moralizing about who has sex with whom. There are some minimum standards that need to be legally enforced, and after that it's all a matter of taste. Trying to make rigorous sense of those tastes is probably a mistake.

In cyberspace, publication followed by ostracism seems to me a good idea for someone like this. In meatspace the context is different, and there may be people who care enough about this guy to give him some guidance. He sure isn't going to find anything of value in the righteous anger of a bunch of hostile strangers.

The 'Net offers us the opportunity to publicly shame people who behave badly, but none of the mechanisms of reconciliation with the community that more traditional modes of public shaming afford. Under those circumstances, publishing stories of people's bad behaviour and then ignoring them seems like the best course of action. Otherwise it looks uncomfortably like the spontaneous practice of Two Minutes Hate.

Takuan, Antinous: I'm not being generous, and I was not meaning to suggest this guy be given a Consequence Free Card. He's already been dumped from his position and required to apologize, although as others have noted his apology wasn't exactly heart-felt. The consequences of this action will be with him for a long time, and rightly so. I wasn't clear about it, so let me be: the direct actions taken by the people involved seem to me entirely appropriate.

But people here gleefully posting here with things like, "There's nothing quite like a moron who uses numbers to stab himself in the face" seem to me likely to stimulate exactly the kind of reactionary hostility that this guy is already full of. We're responding in a way that feeds his issues and preys on his weaknesses, and doesn't exactly show humanity at its best on our side either.

Ostracism without hate is probably the best response to people like him. It gives him nothing but a vacuum to push against.

And trust me, if he e-mailed something like that to my mother, sister or ex-wife, it wouldn't be me he'd have to worry about.

A rich society should be able to salvage every salvageable member.

Amen.

I was once this guy. The problem with people like this is that they lack the self-awareness and self-assurance to be able to see themselves in remotely reasonable ways.

It gets worse when two completely unrelated things get confused; in this case: Republican policy, and how obnoxious some Republicans are. They have nothing to do with each other, and their association just reflects confirmation bias on the part of the people doing the illegitimate associating. We saw a report here on BB a while back about a Democrat ripping atheists. No one said a word about this being "typical Democrat behaviour" despite the long history of close association between a particular type of evangelical Christianity and one wing of the Democratic party.

Religion is a disease that knows no party in America, but it's fun for a doctrinaire lefty to paint the right with a nice broad brush. It's so much easier than being part of a reality-based community.

People would rather depersonalize this guy and throw him into a box that they have marked out to contain people it's ok to hate. As soon as you find yourself thinking, "This guy deserves what he's getting" you know you've left the path of rational discourse and have entered a twisty maze of prejudices, all alike.

No one deserves to be this guy. He's sad, crippled, and miserable. And he's probably so lacking in self-awareness that he doesn't even know.

I defy you to prove me wrong.

I'm self-employed, so worry about my paycheque is built in to my life. I'm a Canadian, so no worries about health care as related to employment. I live in the "bad" area of town, which I've never been able to quite get my head around because everywhere here is so vastly much safer than where I grew up. So no worries about all the supposed degenerates out there. I live in a small town with relatively clean environment and eat mostly whole foods that aren't a matter of concern. So not too worried about any of that either.

Ergo, my stunningly high IQ is mostly intact.

But I still gave tepid support to the invasion of Iraq because I could not believe that anyone would be so profoundly duplicitous as pursue a policy that would certainly kill thousands of young American men and tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians if there was not a clear and present danger to the United States. Particularly when it was obvious that the fraud would be exposed when no WMDs were found, and the perpetrators would obviously then be punished by due process of law.

Which makes me think that having a stunningly high IQ is no barrier to being born stupid.

Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

What is the value of "access" if all it gives you is access to lies?

Why is it that they were more afraid of losing access to lies than they were of lying to the public and their employers?

They weren't suppressing doubts. They were having faith: faith that the administration was going to make it all better somehow.

Cory, that's not a wall of books. This is a wall of books!

This invites a good question: how do you rehabilitate someone like that?

Gently. And with love.

Imperfect meter is always more interesting, and Shakespeare did it often. The meter in some of his writing is so subtle and ambiguous that there is still argument about how to read things like, "To be or not to be that is the question."

I advocate the death penalty only for people who advocate the death penalty.

O wait

Stefan Jones @37: I'm assuming you were responding to me with your remark about "so left to themselves they'll work things out".

You then go on to say that not helping is as bad as "helping in the wrong way."

My question is: what empirical evidence do you have that there is a right way to help?

Can you show me one example of any nation anywhere that you consider to have been in a situation remotely similar to Haiti's today (grinding poverty, dysfunctional government, history of foreign intervention with various motives but uniformly negative outcomes) that has subsequently had its situation materially improved by foreigners "helping in the right way"?

I'm not totally ignorant of world history in the 20th century, and I can't think of any such case. But I know that in many cases nations have tried to help. Yet it has always, every single time, been in one of the indenumerably infinite "wrong ways."

Until I see an example that is plausibly similar I'm going to contend that the idea of "helping in the right way" is a phantasm, a myth to assuage the agony of not being able to do a damned thing about the suffering of our fellow-humans. Belief that there is something that could be done if only people would listen to you gives one a feeling of power in a situation where we are essentially and intolerably powerless.

There's a lot more to the current food mess than bio-ethanol, and I'd be really interested in seeing posts and news articles from three years ago from all the smug folks who are now telling us that bio-ethanol is "obviously" wrong-headed. Hindsight is so easy.

I've always been tepid on bio-ethanol because I thought it was energy-inefficient, and algal bio-diesel is so obviously superior in potential. But up until last year the "food problem" was that we were neck deep in the stuff without any efficient way to get it to the poor and hungry. We had poor farmers, too much food, and no efficient way to get it to the really poor people who needed it.

I guess there have been experts who were aware that bio-ethanol could cause a food price spike, but it certainly never filtered down even to the semi-popular media.

In any case, food prices are high now in part for the same reason that other commodity prices are high: booming demand from the developing world. What we are seeing is not a food shortage in the usual sense, but a food imbalance of a kind not totally dissimilar to what we had before, but with even less wiggle room for the poor.

So to my mind the core of the problem really hasn't changed, and it is that we don't have a better way of getting food to the poorest people other than something like:

1) Donate aid money to possibly corrupt charities
2) Charities spend money on food and perks
3) Food is shipped to corrupt receivers in country with poor and needy people
4) Food is sold on the open/black market in country with poor and needy people

For government aid, much the same process is used, but with the corrupt charities cut out and replaced by corrupt government officials. People who advocate for doing more of this kind of thing seem to me as blind as those who think that invading Iran will bring peace and stability to the Middle East. The sure sign of a doctrinaire moron is the belief that when your ideologically favoured policy fails, the correct solution is to do more of it.

The charity/aid system is entirely unresponsive to the needs of the people at the bottom, who have no way of even expressing their needs because in the market needs are expressed in dollars and these people don't have any.

Unfortunately, no better mechanism than markets have ever been found for organizing humans. If there had been, those better ways would have come to dominate our social organization instead of markets, which have deep and obvious flaws. We know with certainty that any form of top-down, centralized organization is poor, and that ethno-centric warlordism is far worse. Yet those two are the main competitors for markets as means of social organization.

Democracy itself has always been an uneasy balance between listening to "the people" and listening to "the people's money", and again, the people who are in need here have so little money that they have very little democratic influence, even without the long history of egregious external interference in Haitian politics.

So my own position on all this is: I don't have a clue what the solution is, and am deeply distrustful of anyone who says they do. External interference has not always been badly motivated, but it has always ended badly.

This suggests that poor Haitians might actually be better off if we simply had the courage to leave them alone for a while. Certainly nothing else has worked, and it's kinda curious that the one place in the Caribbean that is the most isolated (Cuba) seems the least at risk for this kind of abject poverty, despite being a command economy of the most idiotic and vicious kind run by perfectly ordinary psychopaths who have their opponents jailed, tortured and killed for simply speaking their minds.

Why should the city get to decide the sole intended use of artefacts in public spaces? And why should no benches in a public space be sleepable-onable? My entirely respectable late father--M.D., F.R.C.S, and quite a few other letters besides--was known to fall asleep on a bench on occasion.

The park my house faces has loads of benches, and sometimes people sleep on them, sometimes people sit on them, and sometimes people have sex on them (I'm not totally sure about that last, but I have observed one couple having a discrete and fully-clothed boink in the lea of large plinthe raised to commemorate a long-dead minister, out of sight of, well, everybody but me. So it's entirely plausible that the benches get used for it now and then.)

Providing the public with a diversity of options as to how they use their public spaces seems to me sound social policy, and if there is a problem related to people sleeping on benches it seems to me that the problem is not fixed by eliminating the ability of benches to be slept upon. If the problem, for example, is that people sleeping on benches tend to be injection drug users and their discarded needles are a health hazard, a solution might be to ensure that safe injection sites exist. Unless, of course, you're willing to ignore the vast amount of data suggesting drug addition is a medical problem, not a moral problem.

I admit to personal bias here: I once spent an uncomfortable night in Vancouver Airport sleeping on the floor due to the specially-designed "useless for sleeping" vinyl-sling-seated "benches" provided for travellers. The people who designed them clearly hated humanity, and probably their mothers besides.

And yeah, Christopher Alexander rocks. Buildings and public spaces for people to live in! What a radical idea.

It's a remarkable feature of the human brain that narrative is far more compelling than data, to the extent that telling a plausible story about what is going through the bug's mind is seen as being more important than presenting evidence of this purported effect.

Although observation is the beginning of science, it isn't the end. "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote", so if you want to claim it works please offer some data, not anecdote and not theory.

The experiment is so easy to perform that I might even do it myself when the weather gets warm enough for there to be actual bugs around (there is still snow in my back garden today, although only in small patches.)

Brutality and nationalism are the result of inadequacy and fear, not greatness.

Brutal, nationalistic countries are not great nations. They are brutal and nationalistic.

Openness to dissent and support for diversity, accessible democratic processes, and the rule of law are the touchstones of great nations.

The really horrible hideous thing is that I knew what brand off coffee it was before they said it. The name just popped into my head, like the unspoken word of god.

I've been pwned! Fortunately by advertisers for a product I was too young to buy then, and have no interest in buying now.

A friend graduated from high school a year or two after me and on the other side of the country. We compared yearbooks--from the early '80's--a while ago.

They had exactly the same people in them.

Same clothes. Same hair. Same looks. I could look at some guy in her yearbook and say, "Oh, yeah, that guy's name is Darren. He's a stoner jock with a funny nickname like 'Wingnut'. He's pretty full of himself and hangs out mostly with guys a year younger 'cause everyone his age thinks he's a loser," and she'd say, "Actually his name was Wayne."

I dunno if it's creepy that Canadian society was that homogeneous, or reassuring that despite the distance we all have something in common...

Good engineering education is very failure-focussed. I once had a course with a title something like "Power Generation and Use" which was really "1001 Ways to Fuck Up a Steam Plant." This is typical.

Software "engineering" is rarely worthy of the name, and is so far as I know still a legally prohibited term in some jurisdictions. One way to tell if a person is an engineer writing software or just someone who knows a bit about programming is to ask them if they're familiar with Stephen Flowers' Software Failure, which is still probably the best book in the field.

The difference between the security mindset and the engineering mindset is more about what kinds of failure we are concerned with. Security experts seem more concerned with human process failures, as in the examples Schneier gives, rather than failures of the physical system, which are more what keep engineers up at night.

The engineering attitude can be a useful one to have. After living in LA for a while in the early '90's I managed to miss both the Rodney King riots and the Northridge earthquake because I evaluated the city as a collection of failures waiting to happen, and wanted to avoid that feeling of being really, really dumb you get that comes from dying in an entirely predictable event.

CKD: Thanks, I didn't know that! The assignee on the patent is still listed as "Hughes Electronics Corporation", which was the reason for my belief.

Although Boeing may only own this patent by acquisition, they have other methods patents of their own that are equally egregious.

It looks like a Hughes patent, not a Boeing one. I couldn't find any Boeing patents that looked related to this subject.

Regardless of who did it, as Mr. Scott might have said, "Y'canna patent the laws of physics Captain!"

At least you shouldn't be able to.

What is wrong with this thread (which I've been reading with considerable interest, my old backpack being in need of replacement...)

Chris: to many Christians, "pagan" == "Satan". Anything that has "supernatural power" and is not from God is ipso facto satanic.

It kinda makes sense if you're willing to gloss over the oxymoron that is "supernatural power".

I'm a software patent holder from back in the days before I became enlightened. I recently have been struggling with the temptation to get involved in the software patent process again, because a lot of the work my company does involves data analysis in genomics, and I recently came up with a novel algorithm that has yielded excellent results from previously recalcitrant datasets.

The pros are nominal: with a patent, I have the chance to sell or license the technology, or get investment in my company from any VC's foolish enough to still go down that particular path. The odds of being able to realize any of those gains are long. I've worked for a number of startup companies that had patented software, and they are all gone now, in part because they could not survive in an environment where patent costs are so high, the process is so long, and the rewards are so problematic.

The cons are unequivocal: patents are not cheap. The costs can easily run to $25k, and the process can take three to five years. For a small company, that may as well be forever.

The benefits are dubious: a patent is nothing more than a license to sue. To enforce a patent you have to have pockets deep enough to make a plausible threat. Patent actions that go to court typically cost $3 to $5 million. It's true that most companies are relatively scrupulous about playing fair with other people's patents, but it only takes one to ruin your whole day.

Furthermore, most software patents are easily circumventable. It's a very rare case where you can define an algorithm so narrowly as to be useful, but broadly enough to cover all the minor tweaks and twiddles that could be used to achieve similar results.

On the other hand, the very idea of "equivalence" between two algorithms is problematic, which leads to what amount to multiple patents covering very nearly identical ground. The field that my one software patent is in (image guided surgery) is well-known for having a patent landscape that's an absolute mess. This has been solved by larger companies cross-licensing everything from each other, which effectively excludes smaller players. So much for innovation.

Patenting is a game played by inventors and won by lawyers.

As such, I'd be delighted if SCotUS strikes down or otherwise radically limits the scope of software patents. It would simplify my life enormously, reduce the risk that anything I do violates anyone else's patents, and remove the temptation to waste my own time on patent pursuit rather than actually making money analysing data and inventing new algorithms.

Environmental disaster stories are so much like psychic predictions. In this thread there has been much panic and even a claim that crops will start failing "soon". How delightfully, unscientifically vague.

I'm pretty familiar with SI units, and even a little familiar with the funny system the US uses, but I'm not sure how many days, weeks, months, years or decades are in a "soon".

In the meantime, coral reefs may be recovering, although no one ever figured out why they have been declining. The Great Lakes, which in the '60's and '70's were going to be dead "soon" have recovered faster than anyone believed possible. Almost like nature behaves non-linearly.

Are there matters of concern? Yes. Should we all be working to decrease our environmental footprint? Yes. Should we be supporting political changes to ensure that environmental costs are as fully internalized as possible, including changes to tax structures where necessary? Absolutely. Are fear-mongering conservatives going to continue to seize on every change and claim it proves that everything they believe is absolutely correct and everyone who disagrees with them is not just mistaken but evil? Unfortunately, probably yes.

The only difference between fear-mongering pseudo-environmentalists and fear-mongering pseudo-securitists is the class of changes that scare them. Both groups are profoundly conservative. One sees all environmental change as terrible, and the other all demographic and social change as terrible.

But kindly old Mother Nature works by killing things off in droves, and it will take a while before humans are able to compete with the mass extinctions of the past. In fact, it is very unlikely we ever will, as kindly old Mother Nature will shuffle us off well before we get the chance. Personally, I'd like that not to happen. But I'm reasonably certain that fear-mongering and hysterical responses won't increase our chances of survival. Only scientific understanding and taking personal responsibility for our own environmental footprint will.

Xodrap @102: Your purported proof of the existence of the Flying Spaggetti Monster fails. You assert without proof that the universe and everything in it is contingent. Even your definition of "contingent" depends on counter-factuals, which lots of people reject for good reason. As someone once said (Bohr, probably, although I heard it from Wheeler, I think): "An experiment that is not performed does not have a result." This is a common-place amongst a certain sort of quantum mechanic. The very notion of contingency is at least suspect.

But then, you probably believe Leibniz's Law is true too, right?

This whole thread makes me sad, although it's good to see a few people understand that if a thing is a cause it can be analysed scientifically, and if a thing cannot be analysed scientifically it is not a cause. Ergo, the notion of "supernatural cause" is an oxymoron.

Sure the mind has a firewall. It has lots of firewalls.

Scepticism, reason, logic, scientific method, Buddhist detachment and Christian charity are all firewalls of various kinds. They defend our mind against being taken in by advertising, suggestion, propaganda, fear-mongering, paranoia, and claims about Soviet-era quasi-psychic research that is surrounded by "might be"'s and "if proven"'s.

The human mind is well-known to be frequently incapable of seeing a guy in a gorilla suit but apparently we are unable to resist the influence of images inserted in every 25th frame of a film. How we can miss the flaming obvious but be unable to ignore the nearly undetectable is one of the great mysteries of psychology.

Someone clearly needs to perform an experiment in which the guy in the gorilla suit is wearing a Coca Cola logo, and ask the students if they prefer Coke and Pepsi afterwards. If there's anything to this homeopathic view of perception, in which the least discernible phenomena have the largest effects, then surely an ad on a guy who people don't even see would have the largest effect of all.

The funny thing is that the paper itself tacitly admits that the mind has a firewall. If it did not you wouldn't need all these subtle and sneaky (and mostly unproven) techniques to get around it.

Teresa @21: You can hire me for a WEEK for $5000, although merely to do custom scientific software development and data analysis in aid of bettering humanity's lot. Although I'm sure the people involved are skilled professionals, and I'm sure they have staffing, equipment and other overhead costs, $1000/hour for their services doesn't seem outrageously cheap to me.

"Man Enjoys Himself Perfectly Legally, and Pays Well for It!"

Why is this news? I mean, I can see it being on BB because it might have been wonderful for those involved, either for the pleasure or the payment. And it is wonderful that we live in a world where people can enjoy themselves in ways that might seem to some of us more than a little odd (kinky sex I can kinda understand, but don't get me started on NASCAR... those people are sick)

But what exactly about this would make him unfit to be in charge of the F1 world?

What is it about humans that makes what other people do with each other sexually so damned important? I swear I will never understand this species. Ever.

Noen: We're already most of the way to the top of the hump. The rate of population growth is slowing down and the only reason it isn't dropping faster is that increased longevity is offsetting the effects of dropping fertility.

I'm feeling optimistic today, so people like this look to me like evidence that some kind of will exists to improve the lives of women in the developing world.

Nick D: most of the world's Catholics are ignoring the guy in the pointy hat on that particular issue. Although if I believed in that kind of god I'd be praying that there is a very special place in hell set aside for him for using what influence he has to ensure the world's supply of unwanted babies won't be drying up any time soon.

Noen: people do make rational choices about population. Poor rural patriarchical people have lots of kids. Richer urban less-sexist people have fewer kids. For both groups this is a rational allocation of resources. Fortunately, for the first time in history people of the latter type are now a majority. We have become an urban species in the past year or so.

In my lifetime (probably) and your lifetime (almost certainly) the major issue facing the world will be depopulation, not over-population. It just won't be called that. It appears that the preferred name for the problem of depopulation is "population aging".

It's going to be amusing over the next decade or so watching the same brutally ignorant pundits telling us in the same breath that we are doomed because there are too many people and we are doomed because there aren't enough. Because remember: all change is BAD! That's what conservatives believe, anyway.

The most fundamental tool in stabilizing populations is investment in women-run enterprises in the developing world. The wealthier, more empowered and more educated women are, the fewer kids they have. Everyone wins, and this is a trend that can be observed in many societies, particularly free-er and more democratic ones like India.

Only if we recede into some kind of relative dark age where ignorant ideologues of the Islamo-Christian fundamentalist variety have their way with women's lives do we run any risk of not seeing populations stabilize in the 21st century.

I guess now we'll find out if BB comments get modded out of existence for being wildly off-topic!

Eustace @9: totally cracked me up.

I'd like to see someone cross-stitch a poster for Formyle's Four Mile Circus.

Kill Vorga!

Imipak @109:

Plank does not matter
if radiation reflects.
Google albedo

Ok, it should be Stephan-Boltzmann, but have you ever tried to compose a haiku with "Stephan-Boltzmann" in it? Hmm...

Stephan-Boltzmann says
nothing about summer clouds
reflecting the light

Noen: Erhlich pronouncing on the accuracy of his own predictions is a bit like those delightful cases where the cops do something nasty, investigate themselves, and much to everyone's astonishment find themselves not guilty. Or, say, Big Oil investigating climate change and finding Everything is Just Fine. :-P In fairness, Erhlich has always been such a polarizing figure I don't know where you'd look for anything resembling a dispassionate assessment, but I'm damned sure his own will be amongst the top contenders for high favourable bias.

In my understanding, fewer people are hungry today than ever before, and the largest mass migration in world history is taking place right now in China due to an economic boom, not famine. Which sounds like the opposite of what Erhlich predicted, despite the high environmental and human costs of what is actually happening.

Takuan: I'm glad you mentioned that. I just had a look at my copy of "Limits to Growth" and am amused to see their predictions for nuclear power, which should be about almost 1 TW in the US right now according to their predictions. As it happens, actual capacity in the US today is just over 100 GW. Oops.

Curiously, the Club of Rome got atmospheric CO2 just about dead on, at 380 ppm in 2000. This is uncanny, given their model assumes the widespread use of nuclear power. It's almost as if the nutjobs who suggest that CO2 released by the oceans is the primary atmospheric source were right (which I'm very sceptical of!) Or more plausibly that the "morons" like Julian Simon were right, and human technological innovation was able to utilize power way more efficiently after the oil shock of 1973.

Erhlich and the Club of Rome et al were sincere in their concerns, but were statists to the core in their beliefs about how to best deal with the end of the anomalous period of human history that has been the industrial revolution. They correctly pointed out "we can't go on like this forever" but complete missed the boat on how the future is likely to play out because they radically underestimated human adaptivity.

This is not necessarily a good thing, because some of that adaptivity has involved keeping the price of business-as-usual much lower rather than letting prices rise and making more sustainable adaptations. But the fact that the Club of Rome were wildly wrong over a period of thirty years modelling a system that is considerably simpler and better understood than the Earth's climate is a cautionary tale for all who would seek certainty where there is none.

Ok, now I'm REALLY done.

Noen: although it's true I'm not a climatologist, it's also true that climatologists are not physicists, and are often not well-versed in fundamentals. Having moved around in various areas of pure and applied physics, I have a bias toward people with a pure physics background. We are less likely to reify model assumptions.

And climate modelling is nothing but a specialized form of computational physics. Even when you can compute everything almost exactly, as in radiation transport physics, getting differential results within 1% of reality is extremely good, and absolute results are rarely better than 10% unless you add a correction parameter to make them that way, which is what GCMs effectively do.

While it's true that models can be tuned to do match the current climate much better than that, it is unrealistic to expect that a model with as many parameters as, for example AM2--which has to have energy conservation imposed internally by hand--will predict changes with very high accuracy when being integrated fifty years out.

Again: I think we should stop dumping CO2 into the air as if there was no tomorrow, because doing so imposes a very real risk that so far as our civilization is concerned there really will be no tomorrow. But the details of climate modelling are still to my mind extremely suspect.

Antious: I am large. I contain multitudes.

Ok, now I'm really done!

In order for the sun to raise the tempature of the earth it must increase it's output. the Earth reacts quickly to the extra energy, it's not like energy released by the sun hundreds of years ago waits until today to have an effect.

This is the kind of thinking that makes easy targets for sceptics.

The effect of the sun on the Earth is more complex than just the solar constant. In the case at hand, there is an open question about the effect of the solar magnetosphere on the cosmic ray flux, which may or may not influence the rate of cloud formation.

Also, it does in fact take some time for the climate to respond to changes in insolation, due to the large heat capacity of the oceans.

It's sad to see how little reason there is on either side of this issue. "Following the money" is no more a way of doing science than is "following your religion". The truth doesn't care who is paying for the research. Nor does it care about anyone's politics. It stands and falls on the evidence, and the very fact that perfectly good peer-reviewed papers can reach substantively different conclusions based on equally plausible input assumptions means that there is a very high degree of uncertainty, and the differences are due to how different researchers value different input assumptions.

Personally, I think that the very possibility of anthropogenic climate instability is sufficient reason to scale-back our current experiment in practical climatology. As someone else pointed out here, there are lots of practical benefits to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels that go beyond reducing the risk of accidentally inducing a civilization-ending climate event. Nor is the existence of such events speculation: we know they have happened in the past ten thousand years or so, and there is some indication from ice-core data that they have happened naturally in other inter-glacials.

So it doesn't really matter to me that CO2 levels were higher millions of years ago, and frankly I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. Dinosaurs walked the Earth millions of years ago too, but that doesn't mean I'd like to wake up tomorrow and find a T. Rex in my back yard.

You folks need to learn a very simple truth: a statement is not an argument. Presenting statements as if they were arguments just makes you, and the position you think you're arguing for, look silly.

@50: I don't think you understood my comment.

Look at it this way: during the Young Dryas the vast majority of the water in the North Atlantic was NOT fresh-water outflow from Lake Agassiz. But to conclude on that basis that fresh-water outflow from Lake Agassiz was not responsible for the dramatic change in thermohaline circulation would be quite wrong.

Climates are quasi-equilibrium systems that are known to be susceptible to violent changes under relatively modest stresses. The Younger Dryas is an excellent example of this, despite the undoubted fact that it's cause was never the dominant source of water in the North Atlantic.

Likewise, simply because humans are not the dominant source of CO2 in the atmosphere, it is still perfectly plausible that anthropogenic CO2 is capable of producing quite dramatic changes in the existing quasi-equilibrium state.

@34: You only have to look at the growth of atmospheric CO2 in the past two hundred years to understand that humans are having a very significant impact on its level. To say that "soil and the ocean" are the largest producers may be true, but it isn't relevant to the debate.

There is no doubt that humans are responsible for almost all of the change in atmospheric CO2 levels in the past 200 years. Some of that human contribution may be due to changes in land use, but those are still anthropogenic changes.

I defy you to look at a curve of carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere in the past 200 years and not conclude that humans aren't the dominant factor in it's dramatic growth.

The problem is that no one knows what the effects of that growth will be. Computer models of the climate are far more dependent on assumptions than physics. This is a necessary consequence of how complex the climate is, and it isn't going away any time soon.

Complex models that depend on plausible assumptions do not produce robust predictions.

This is as much a fact as the fact that humans are the largest contributor to changing CO2 levels in the past 200 years. Complex models that depend on plausible assumptions produce predictions that are poor tools of extrapolation no matter how well they match the past. The only way to know what the effect of all the CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere will be is to wait and see.

This sounds to me like a bad plan, and I believe that for lots of reasons we should be moving to limit in absolute terms the amount of CO2 we add to the atmosphere. But we should not pretend a greater certainty than we have while doing so, and we should not label everyone who is looking more deeply into the past and future of the Earth's climate a "denialist". That just stifles the scientific process, which is the only thing that is going to help us make even near-term predictions that will aid us in adapting to the new world climate we are actively creating.

@28: This is a good question, but not necessarily the best way of putting the question. I actually became notably more sceptical about the urgency of the climate crisis precisely by asking a closely related question.

It works like this.

Either increased levels of anthropogenic CO2 will increase the heat content of the atmosphere and oceans, which will result in what I'm going to call "Direct Climate Change", or the climate will respond in ways that keep the heat content more-or-less constant, which will result in "Indirect Climate Change."

Either way, the climate is necessarily going to respond to the additional CO2.

The problem is: no one knows with any certainty to what degree climate response is going to be direct vs indirect, and no one knows with any certainty how large either effect will be in terms of changes in local weather patterns anywhere in the world. There is general agreement that seems pretty robust that polar areas will be most strongly affected, but neither the absolute size of the effect nor in many cases even the sign of the effect in terms of warmer/colder wetter/drier is reliably known for regional climates world-wide.

The only thing we can say for sure is that it is absolutely certain that the weather will not get worse everywhere, unless by "worse" you mean "different", for which there is some economic justification.

I tried to produce a robust first-order estimate of the probable magnitude of climate-response that did not depend on very fine details and assumptions of a given model, and couldn't. Nor has anyone else been able to do so, which is not at all surprising given the nonlinear feedbacks and small-scale phenomena that have important effects.

So in trying to produce an argument that would convince sceptics, I became a good deal more sceptical myself about the specific claims being made.

That said, by adding so much CO2 to the planet's atmosphere we are performing a great experiment with our only home, and this is a bad thing. We should be working vigorously toward reducing carbon emissions on the basis of risk-reduction alone. And if we are not intelligent enough to do that, well, then it sucks to be us. We should not succumb to the desire to make strong unsupported claims for the purpose of engendering panic simply because it will motivate people to "do something."

Why is 2% dehydration a bad thing? It is not an argument to say, "When we are thirsty we are already partially dehydrated." It's just a statement.

It could be interpreted in lots of ways, like: when we have 98% of our nominally optimal water level, our body sends a signal that we need to top up. Sounds pretty efficient to me, and the notion that a natural regulatory process within our body needs conscious tweaking sounds kinda suspect. Maybe our systems go off-kilter if we try to subvert the natural regulatory process by prematurely topping up. That's just speculation, but it seems no less plausible to me than the speculation that letting ourselves get down to the 98% level before topping up is somehow bad for us.

It's only if you believe for some reason that 2% dehydration (whatever that actually means--how does one measure dehydration?) is a bad thing that you would take "we are already partially dehydrated" as reason to drink before we are thirsty.

So what is the evidence? Do people who only drink when they are thirsty die earlier? Do they suffer from more illness? Are there any actual outcome measures by which they are worse off?

@5: anyone with a basic understanding of science will know that intriguing facts ought to be considered carefully. It may be just a coincidence that the Little Ice Age of the late 1600's just happened to coincide with the Maunder Minimum, a period of solar activity so low that there were essentially no sunspots. But that would be weird.

Given that fact--and remember, facts are the basis of science, not political expediency, favoured theories, or what the Bible says--it would be a major failure of the scientific community if no one followed up on mechanisms that might account for it.

And it would be anti-scientific in the extreme to say "the debate about causes is a distraction."

A distraction from what? From someone's favourite political agenda?

It is certainly not a distraction from science, which is the only thing that is going to lead to an understanding of our world and our effect on it.

The reflexive dismissal of any investigation into non-anthropogenic causes of global climate change is one half of the poison in this debate, and anti-scientific political activists are not doing humanity any favours by denying the legitimacy or relevance of scientific investigation into these questions.

The falsehoods of Big Carbon can only be countered by our best estimate of the truth, not more falsehoods from politically-motivated operatives of what amounts to just another anti-scientific agenda.

These are dried, not fossilized. Apparently the caves are extremely dry. If you wet the material it stinks.

Also, "first" these people probably aren't.

Figure it this way. Let's say people started coming to the Americas 50,000 years ago. Population growth curves tend to be exponential, which means pretty flat at the beginning and then swooping up faster as time goes on. So we can be pretty sure there were very, very few people in the Americas for the first 30,000 years or so. Also, only a tiny fraction of any evidence will happen to get preserved, and that will tend to be from relatively recent times rather than more ancient ones.

On this basis the odds of the earliest evidence we happen to have being anywhere close to the first people are pretty much nil. Expect in future to see reports of evidence of human occupation that dates much earlier than this.

This is a big problem in all areas of paleontology, and it means that those nicely reconstructed trees of life for dinosaurs and whatnot should all be taken with a very large grain of probablistic salt.

It's painful as hell to stand by and watch this train wreck happening on the other side of the border, and to be unable to participate actively in the process. From a Canadian perspective it is hard to appreciate how entirely fubar'd the American political process is.

You have to remember that up here we produce a major new political party every couple of decades. They often get absorbed into the current edition of the Conservative Party eventually, because the Liberals have effectively staked out the broad political center for so long that they are know as "the natural governing party" in some circles.

But when crazy groups like the CCF/NDP, the Progressives, the Social Credit, Reform/Alliance and the Bloc Quebecois form they are effective at shifting the balance within and between the two major parties. The Greens might be the next force to be reckoned with if they can dump their doctrinaire lefty leader and broaden their appeal to homeless Red Torys.

So from our point of view, the American political process is almost incomprehensibly broken. We feel like we're standing on the outside and if we were just there we could do something. But we forget that unlike Canada, the United States has a completely moribund political culture.

And that is the fundamental enabler for Bush and company. They have no real opposition. It is the political class vs the people, and neither party is on your side.

I don't know what I'd do if I was an American right now. Probably join the Democratic Party and work for change from within, in the hope that a generation from now the rule of law would be restored. Or maybe attack partisans from the outside, and encourage independents to run.

Either way, it is the work of a generation, just like the Civil Rights movement was. You guys are good at this stuff, once you figure out where you want to go and have a rough idea of how to get there.

I just hope that the Bill of Rights isn't completely shredded first. Pasting it back together again would be for another generation entirely.

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem just identifies a feature of a large class of formal systems. It demonstrates that such systems must either be incomplete or contain formally undecidable propositions. All this tells us is that those formal systems do not describe reality, which came as a great tearing shock only to Platonists, who still haven't quite recovered.

Just as linguistic muddles that look like paradoxes are best resolved by asking questions about language, Gödel sentences (generally of the nature "this theorem cannot be proven within this system") are best understood as a result of incomplete isomorphism between reality and formal language. It's a brilliant proof, but in retrospect, given what a lousy language mathematics is for describing reality, the most surprising thing is that anyone ever considered it might be otherwise.

@26: No!

All paradoxes are indeed tricks of language. They play on certain common misunderstandings. The belief that "this statement is false" is paradoxical depends on a false belief about statements, truth and falsity, for example.

That said, it's perfectly possible that this guy's mental illness could be fear that he has a mental illness constituted by fearing that he has a mental illness constituted by... I see no reason why indefinite recursion shouldn't be a mental disease, and there's no inconsistency about his position. In fact, his fear would be perfectly justified!

What is at issue is not whether his fear is justified, but whether his response to what he fears is so extreme as to make him dysfunctional. For example, leaving the house does increase our chances of having an accident. On this basis, some level of concern about going outside is justified. But if we respond to that concern by never leaving the house, we are generally considered to be mentally ill (agoraphobic).

TWG: it is irrelevant to the behaviour of the United States, but it is still an important question as to what other major powers are doing. A lot of information can be found on the Human Rights Watch website. For example, some info on the EU.

With regard to the memo itself, the first few pages are essentially an argument that the President of the United States in his role as Commander-in-Chief is above the law with regard to any actions taken at his command so long as they are outside the territorial bounds of the United States.

Although it talks a lot about war, the memo also suggests that no formal declaration of war, nor the explicit approval of Congress is required for the President to exercise his powers as Commander-in-Chief. It makes reference to a number of historical cases where the President did do things that would normally be considered violations of the Constitution, but were ruled otherwise because they were done by the military at Presidential order outside of US territory.

This to me is the most chilling thing about the document: it claims not only that the President is not bound by international treaties or international law. It claims that the President is not bound by the Constitution when acting in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, and seems to argue that he can act in that capacity at any time and for any reason if he claims that the security of the United States is at risk.

Note that he does not have to prove or even make plausible the claim that the security of the United States is at risk. He just has to make the claim, and there is, according to the constitutional interpretation the memo gives, no body that is charged with or granted the legal power to review or pass judgement on that claim.

This interpretation would place the President effectively and entirely above the law with respect to actions taken by the military, even against American citizens, even within the United States. The memo does not quite go there, but there is nothing in the logic to prevent it. Fortunately, there is a great deal in American social and legal history that will at the very least slow the process down.

Unfortunately, VCs are frequently that stupid.

Having worked for a number of failed venture funded start-ups, five years ago I decided to start my own company. The initial capital cost was by some measures zero, although six months of living on debt and nerves were required to get things off the ground properly, so in real terms it was by no means cost free.

But I've never pursued VC and have no intention of doing so. I am a mercenary scientist, doing work mostly for clients who have VC, or are pursing VC, trying to take new technologies out of the lab and into the market. "Mercenary" in this context means "for money", not "military"--much of my work is health-care related, and I have a policy against working on things that kill people. I'm currently trying to find clients in alternative energy and green tech, as infrastructure has a much bigger positive impact on the world than the kind of retail health tech we spend so much money on. In this environment I see every day how hard it is for people with good technology and strong management teams to attract funding.

On this basis I tend toward the view that most VCs are ultra-conservative suits whose stupidity is the only antidote for their timidity. The only reason most of them ever get it right is that sometimes they let themselves get conned by someone who gets lucky.

They are incredibly narrowly focussed and very unwilling to invest in anything outside of their tiny comfort zone. They also like to be physically close to their money, which means when they do invest it is often in locations where start-up costs are much higher than they need to be.

They are also unwilling to do deals less than about $5 million, which is at least a factor of two more than the average Web startup will ever need. But because they are so conservative they aren't capable of innovating and creating the VC equivalent of a micro-capital model.

Finally, they have a deservedly poisonous reputation, and relations between investors and entrepreneurs are generally terrible. At a conference I recently attended this was identified by one prominent speaker as the number one problem facing the investment industry today. This drives entrepreneurs to build businesses, like mine, that do not need butt-loads of cash to thrive.

I do know some angel investors who are excellent people, who are genuinely willing to take risks and have a reflective, innovative business-style. Some VCs are trying to re-invent themselves into the angel's space. But a VC isn't just an angel in an expensive suit: it takes a major upgrade in attitude, expectations and outlook to make the transition, and so far I'm not seeing a lot of that happening.

"None" is a value of "some" for low values of "some". And see my remarks above about the value of stuff making sense in physics.

If bookshops were interested in selling books they wouldn't carry all of the second books in series and no first books.

Nominal miscategorization is just an artefact of imposing a single categorical scheme.

Almost anything can be categorized almost anyhow. The "almost" qualification is really important: reality does constrain our categorizations. But it by no means determines them.

So the same book can be legitimately categorized in dozens of different ways. Any attempt to say that one category is the best is necessarily an exercise in psychology. It's just an attempt to guess the way most people here-and-now would think was the One True Way of categorizing it.

Being aware that most books can be categorized multiple ways makes visits to the bookstore or library always a new adventure. Does The Jewish War appear in world history, ancient history, religion, warfare, Jewish studies, or classics? I have no way of telling, because I have no way of knowing what single category most people would want to impose on it.

Bohm's quantum potential is only viable if you believe that mechanics taking place in an real 6*N-dimensional space is plausible, where N is the number of particles. It all sounds very classical until you move beyond one-particle cases, and then the wheels pretty much fall off.

Given that all the theory has going for it is a certain naive classical appeal, this feature tends to take the edge off for most people. Then there's the explicit non-locality, which seems egregious even for those of us who accept there is something inherently non-local about the world.

I originally wrote a longer reply to this article, which I trashed when I realized what day it was. The gist of that reply was that these guys have definitely selected the right place to steal their scientific jargon from, as vacuum/boundary interactions are notoriously tricky. The only thing resembling a "simple" case is the Casimir force between infinite perfectly conducting parallel plates.

In this "simple" case, careful calculation shows that the the force is attractive, which we explain intuitively by saying that because some vacuum modes are excluded from between the plates, the vacuum has lower energy there, and so the plates are drawn together because that's how you minimize the energy in the system. However, for concentric spherical shells the force is repulsive, which contradicts our intuition.

Ergo, it isn't going to be worth anyone's time to debunk this joke. Even well-defined cases are hard, and in my experience trying to debunk ill-defined nonsense always results in the charlatans claiming that you haven't interpreted their pseudo-scientific jargon correctly.

One of the big differences between scientists and laypeople is that scientists tend to trust calculation and distrust intuition, while for laypeople it's the other way around. That's another reason why scientists dismiss gabble like this paper, and laypeople find it plausible.

Physicists know that progress in science has fundamentally been away from the intuitively obvious and toward the more and more weird and wonderful. Aristotle's physics was more intuitive than Newtons, which was more intuitive than Einstein's, which was more intuitive than Heisenberg's.

So scientists tend to react sceptically to anything that seems intuitively plausible, and until proven otherwise will believe that something that "just makes sense" is probably wrong.

This is ridiculous.

It's obvious that it isn't increased quantum fluctuations due to increased brain size that increase the pressure in the air around young women during puberty.

It is a combination of increased breast size and the attendant increased presence of members of the complementary sexual orientation that increases the pressure in the air around young women during puberty.

But for reasons beyond me the NeuroQuantology won't publish this perfectly reasonable, classical, objective explanation for the poltergeist phenomenon, even today.

Thanks.

Placing the lintel: rocker lift the way he demo'd in the film, then roll it over.

Rolling can be accomplished much the same way as the rocker lift. Raise it higher than the receiving blocks, so it is sitting on three pillars, one at each end and on in the centre, all butted hard up against the vertical receiving blocks. Back a little material out of the pillars on the side away from the receiving blocks so the lintel rolls off the wood supporting it on the side close to the receivers. Then remove material from the near side and tip the lintel over the balance point. Considerable care is required to keep from accidentally squishing yourself, but it's really just a matter of taking your time and applying the same principle over and over again.

There are other ways of going about it, but this one would certainly work well enough most of the time.

Things wrong with the '80's:

1) Widespread cocaine use
2) The "War on Drugs"
3) Men's hairstyles

Unfortunately, one of these things is still with us...

I'm still trying to figure out if humans have souls.

Looks like a good book, but... "Impactful"?

Err... that should be cap & trade in my previous comment, not some mysterious trademarked system for capping carbon emissions. Apparently our bb overlords are aggressive about entity interpretation.

The problem with applying these methods to green construction is you've gotta be willing to ignore the time value of money. For individual builders who don't really care how long it takes to get things done, that is no big deal.

Basic economics though, which is not going away, tells us that capital will be allocated where the return is highest, and getting the same result in a shorter time means higher return. You could argue, perhaps correctly, that if we did proper accounting of environmental costs the results wouldn't be "the same" in the two cases. Until we start doing that, however, either by carbon taxes&tariffs or cap&trade, techniques like this will be primarily restricted to hobbyists.

This isn't so much a demonstration of physics as engineering. Scientists are good at conceptualizing, analysing, calculating, and stuff like that. But I've never seen anything in the graduate curriculum in physics that touches on the practice of construction, much less construction using minimal tool, small crews and large balanced forces. Scientists are good at analysing what clever guys like this come up with, but not necessarily so good at coming up with it ourselves.

With regard to the soft-ground problem: note that when he moved the barn it looked like he was using a wooden base about a metre square. A human with a mass of 50 kg and a foot size of 10 x 20 cm would have a ground pressure of about 12 kPa standing still. A 1 tonne block with a 1 m**2 base under it would have a ground pressure of about 10 kPa. So it doesn't seem like much of a problem.

In the early bits of the video when he's rolling blocks along wooden rails, he's using a technique of cutting ramped edges into the rails that match the size of the block so that is is always comes to rest balanced on a point. The cases he demonstrates are for blocks with square cross-sections, but using asymmetric profiles you can do the same thing with rectangular cross-sections, although there are practical limits that would probably prevent it from being used on relatively high aspect-ratio blocks like those in Stonehenge.

Given the losses that are typical of construction projects, I wonder if anyone has surveyed low-lying areas along the presumptive route the Stonehenge blocks were transported along? All of these balancing techniques depend on carefully opposed forces, and as soon as one of the blocks gets away from you it'll go wherever it damn well pleases, often taking a few members of your crew with it. The odds of that happening a few times in the course of construction seem high, suggesting there might be a few orphan megaliths buried in swamps along the way.

In any case, a truly wonderful thing, this.

Now yer just comin' on to me.

@29: I'm not sure what your basis is for assuming I am not a physicist, nor your basis for assuming that people who claim to be physicists are telling the truth. The Atlas guy sounds plausible to me, the "I have a physics background" guy less so, although his account of low momentum mini-black-holes is superficially plausible.

One of the most pointless enterprises on the 'Net is proclaiming your credentials, because anyone can say anything. I could say I've been actively engaged in the study of high energy cosmic ray backgrounds while working on neutrino experiments at Caltech. How could you know if it's true?

In any case, the whole argument turns on one particular theory of physics beyond the standard model being the correct one, Hawking radiation not existing, and the possibility of creating a mini-black-hole that is moving incredibly slowly (less than 0.0001 c). The phase space for such a collision is miniscule, and again: the rest of the scenario depends on pure speculation. Takuan's comparison to actions that might precipitate the Second Coming (or the 12th Imam) is dead on.

If you take this "threat" seriously you are setting a bar so low that virtually any human action whatsoever must be considered as posing an unacceptable threat to the Earth.

Ornith @71: Thanks for your thoughtful reply, but most of what you say doesn't address my question, which is: Given that you pick and choose what to take from Jesus' teaching, why not focus your ethical thinking on the principle(s) that allow you to do that, rather than giving so much weight to the scriptures?

For example, you clearly think that "progressive" is good, so "Jesus on divorce is better than what came before, and the way we handle divorce today is better than what Jesus taught." Given that you believe there is a moral teaching that is both opposed to and better than the teachings of Jesus, it seems odd to continue to use him as a moral reference.

I agree that having a person embody your morality is extremely valuable, but Jesus lived two thousand years ago and in a cultural context where not stoning a woman to death for having non-socially-approve sex was radical. So looking to him as a moral guide is not materially better than looking to a "liberal" Muslim theologian living in modern Afghanistan, say. "Better than the Taliban!" is not exactly a ringing endorsement for an ethical exemplar. There seem so many vastly better examples for a modern person to choose from--the Dhali Lama, say--that I have a hard time fathoming the persistence of Jesus.

Even if you want to use the interpretation that the greatest lesson Jesus has to teach is that we should be "as humane as possible given the historical and cultural context we find ourselves in", his historical and cultural context are so vastly different from our own that he seems a very poor choice to look to for any concrete guidance.

I'm coming back to this thread very late in the day, having spent a happy day or two off-line, and won't be saying anything more about this here, although I'll probably come back to this question in some other thread when it seems relevant.

@18: Asking "What if he's right?" about this guy is like asking the same question about a guy who is suing a construction company that is about to pour the largest block of concrete ever, claiming that it will plunge through the Earth's crust and cause a super-volcano, when there are naturally occurring free-standing rocks that are many orders of magnitude larger than the block they are proposing to pour.

@2 said it best: nothing will happen at the LHC that doesn't happen in nature on a regular basis, and a lot of stuff happens in nature that requires energies orders of magnitude above anything the LHC can reach.

So answering the question "What if he's right?" might make for a science fiction story. It won't provide any value to the public policy debate because he is not right. The probability that the LHC will destroy the universe is the same as the probability that you will destroy the universe by triggering some hitherto unknown law of physics the next time you cross the road. We probably can't prove that the probability is zero, but we can also be sure that this is just the same as the risk we take every time we go out to buy milk, and accept it as the price of living in a universe we don't entirely understand.

If I'm reading people right, lots of commenters believe that Jesus would have approved of this, and probably Buddha too. Mohammed has been left out so far, but I'll get to him in a moment.

Furthermore, there has been some suggestion that this represents the "true" message of Jesus, and I do not dispute that charity to strangers and turning the other cheek are part of message Jesus preached.

But what about the other bits? Are they true too?

For example, Jesus was very negative about divorce and absolutely forbade remarriage (Matthew 5:32 "anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.") What about the belief that all prayers offered in full and complete sincerity are granted (Mark 11:23)? Or my personal favourite, albeit non-canonical (Thomas, 114):

Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of life."
Jesus said, "Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Likewise, Mohammed said, "for those that cannot [fast] there is a penance ordained: the feeding of a poor man." (2:183) But he also said: "Believers, retaliation is decreed for you in bloodshed: a free man for a free man, a slave for a slave, and a female for a female." (2:178)

I won't talk about Buddha because I know a lot less about Buddhism and our textual evidence for what Buddha actually said is even weaker than that for Mohammed and far weaker than that for Jesus, but I'm quite sure the main point survives: some things Buddha says would seem right and admirable, others variously silly or wicked.

So here is my question: what principle that is higher than the teachings of Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha are you applying when you tease out the "true" teachings from the "historical context" or "bad translation" or whatever else you might think is the cause of all the wrong-headedness in the teachings of your chosen spiritual guide?

And given that you are clearly using that principle as your primary guide, why bother with the ancient texts at all, which have about as much relevance to modern ethics as Aristotle does to modern physics?

We know stuff now (women and men have equal moral worth, slavery is wrong...) that those guys simply did not know. Given these vast lacuna in their moral knowledge, why are they anything more than an historical footnote in any debate on modern ethics? It isn't as if we aren't willing to discard what they say any time they disagree with us. So why continue to twist our ethical discussions around the framework they laid down, with its prudery and misogyny and improbability?

You can't say we can't do ethics effectively without them, because the very fact that you are willing to jettison the bits you don't like means that you are actively and in my view quite successfully doing ethics without them.

So why bother with them at all?

I am not drunk! I am what Terry Pratchett describes as "knurd": so sober you need a few just to get normal.

"For someone who is wise one lifetime is enough, and a fool would not know what to do with eternity." -- Epicurus.