I use a car every they. I guess that makes me a bank robber. You know, could use it as a get away car.

My neighbor also suspect me of murder an cannibalism. He saw me through the kitchen window with a butcher knife and used the BBQ the whole summer. Furthermore, the other neighbors haven't been seen since beginning of the vacation period. All hard evidence...

Seriously, I don't know if you were trying to be funny or sarcastic... but I hope it was either one of those.

I would sue them for defamation, if I were one of their Tor-using customer.

It's a grave offence to imply someone is engaged in criminal activity, without actually having evidence of such activity.

Forget the tinfoil hat.

Obviously, any email discussing the existence and raising concern about highly classified programs will be also classified as such. Most likely these emails would be removed or redacted to before any review of the email could take place. I am pretty certain emails shouldn't contain highly classified information, hence the people reviewing the emails will most likely not have the security clearance to review highly classified materials. Assuming they are classified as such, not only do they not have to admit of their existence, they are not allowed to admit it.

I am really not a fan on conspiracy theories, nor do I prone propagating them. On the contrary.
Although this might sound like one, for me it feels more like standard procedures and due process that turned out to be quite convenient.

Understanding your logic, The Spiegel must be republican-biased then. Interesting.

No I don't get it and you are wrong.

Your example has as nothing to do with accuracy. I'll help you.

According to Oxford :

In other word, the accuracy of a model results tells you how good it represents the real world. What you (and all others who so kindly replied to my original comment) are referring to is precision.

So, following your example, both model A and B would be inaccurate, but model B would be more precise than model A. Using ISO terminology, model A and B would show a bad trueness, and A would be less precise than B.

Exactly correct. In addition, a believe the commenter wanted to point out that it IS an established term, albeit one not often used in the context of quantum physics.

Every one who followed a lecture on solid state physics should know what a phonon is. And I mean a first year lecture, not one of those fancy specialization.
This implies a lot of people never heard of it... but also that a lot of people did (or should have).

No. If you have stable equations, you have stable equations. Period. It only means that the result will not strongly diverge with a small perturbation.

How these equations represent the real world (ie. how accurate the results are) has nothing to do with their stability. And this is exactly what the point of the whole story is... the equations, regardless if stable or not, do not represent the observed reality.

To say you can calculate quite accurately an expected value makes no sense a all. I can only understand that they estimate the value using models and believe these models to be accurate. Any other signification is senseless and it would be pointless to argue over it.

Furthermore, you can't asses the accuracy of an estimation with a model. The model is, as you point it yourself out, what gives the estimated value. Only a measurement can validate the estimation and the model.
Their models gave prediction for the other elements and observations showed that the model was pretty much spot on. Using the same approach for Li, they assumed (or hope for) a similar accuracy. Observation now show that it wasn't the case.

But the point of the statement was that the believed it would be accurate (again, because any other interpretation of the sentence makes no sense at all). If it is not based on other results using the same model or technique, how do you believe they would have that confidence on the accuracy of their expectation?

Correct wording would have been "Astronomers believe they can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe based on their experience with other elements."

or something along those lines. The second part, i'm not sure, but the "believe they" really makes the whole point.

I'm sure there's two side to this story.

Shhhhhh. You're giving that Rayair guy new passenger mnagement idees!

You can expect a magnitude of +11.5 according to some sources. So no, definitely not visible to the naked eye. Should be easy with a good motorised telescope.

All other source I've seen mention 0.0002664... AU or approx. 40'000 km. That would be above geosynchronous orbit altitude, not below.

For example, from JPL:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c...

I'm not nostalgic. I went in university in 1999. There were no slide rules anywhere to see, I can assure you of that. But there was a lot of students quickly typing numbers on their calculator without taking a second to think if the order of magnitude even made sense.

Thing is, I doubt that a single type of calculator can be assumed as "the right one". As AC posted just before you, graphical calculator enables the resolution of complex calculus problems and can be a very powerful tool. It doesn't answer the question if it is really needed or the best for the learning process.

But back to your point, I wasn't thinking about your generation in general, but rather about engineers (and maybe physician) of your generation. Whether you consider the whole ensemble or just this particular subset, makes a huge difference. And I can assure your that engineers of your generation have a much better intuition with order of magnitudes. Sure, experience also plays a role (they are older after all), but I doubt this is the whole story. They work and think numerical problem through in a totally different way than anyone I studied with. They may also take more time to solve problems, but they mostly always get them right the first time. This is based on my professional experience and observation of a particular group of people.