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Comment Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score 3, Informative) 1057

[..]

In short, people are generally classified in one of these 2 groups (good or evil):

1) The ones who believe that man is responsible from global warming. They are the "good" people.

2) The ones who believe that other factors might be involved. They are the "evil people", which must all have interests in oil companies.

[...]

Wrong.

There is a group of people who conclude that of the many factors only anthropogenic emission explain the current warming. These are called climatologists.

There is another group of people who while knowing better, spread FUD about the above. These are called "evil people", and they usually get paid by corporations. Many of them were spreading FUD about second hand tobacco smoke, CFCs, DDT, you name it.

Then there are people who believe they have proved 150 years of science wrong, or theory of relativity wrong, or heliocentric solar system wrong. These are ignorants, or fools. They forgot/ignored/haven't slightest clue that human CO2 warming atmosphere is based on very simple physics and very simple statistics, and any alternative explanation must also explain why the CO2 isn't warming atmosphere.

And finally we have people who either believe doctors, lawyers and other experts on issues they feel they can't understand properly, and people who come up with a bundle of excuses not to listen to experts if the experts tell things they don't like.

After all, no science, including climatology, is done on blogs or bulletin boards, or in op eds. If look at those, there is a flood of divergent opinions. For example in early 90s USA joined the Rio agreement to cut emissions (among other things) and majority of American were conserned about AGW. 15 years later majority believes it's a hoax, and USA hasn't done a thing. You want us to believe that's because divergent opinions are not allowed?

Comment Re:I don't understand it. (Score 3, Informative) 294

It's not correct, the location was known a year or two before Myriad was even founded ("Linkage of early onset familial breast cancer to chromosome 17q21. Science 1990"). And I think it was sequenced two years before Myriad filed the patent, and published in Science ("A strong candidate for the breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1. Science 1994") by University of Utah (a co-patenter), National Institute of Health (6 grants) and McGill University, adding "Sequences of PCR primers used to amplify each exon of BRCA1 are available upon request" as academia researchers often do.
In Europe the patent was revoked, because Myriad's screening test was found to be inaccurate and the patent prevented making improved tests.

So, no. Myriad did not add any knowledge, and the patent did prevent others adding too...
Space

Most Extreme Gamma-Ray Blast Yet Detected 128

Matt_dk sends in a quote from a story at NASA: "The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. ... Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time. ...Fermi team members calculated that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions."

Comment Re:So what about global warming ? (Score 1) 290

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not sure - some of them may be available)

Since you asked:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/tools/

and some documentation with output (for reverse engineers :)
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/model_documentation/ipcc_model_documentation.php

I believe some grants/universities do forbid open sourcing code, or even making it available, at least fro some time.

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