Sortocracy is sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them. It is the only political system that allows people to escape bad governance: People can vote with their feet.

Any attempt to "reform the political process" is doomed for the reason pointed out by Machiavellli:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.

Any system that does not allow people to experience a new order of things by voluntary assortation is doomed to the political equivalent of theocracy: Imposing a single social theory on unwilling human experimental subjects. You must allow for consent to experimental treatment of human subjects and you must allow for control groups to evidence causality.

There is going to be a revolution.

Oh good grief. 15 years after the DotCon implosion, when industry leaders and Congress responded to the collapse in tech employment by ramping up H-1b guest worker visas, we're supposed to believe this is news?

I"m not sure I'd say TUTOR was an ok language for the day. It didn't even have local variables. Local variables were so controversial that I had to leave the University of Illinois and get a job as a system programmer with CDC to add local variables to TUTOR.

And in other news, the virus purportedly renders people unable to think rationally about epidemiology. Scientists are baffled as to why a virus would do such a thing, although they professed a mysterious urge to share bodily fluids with those around them and denounce as "sciencephobic" those who shunned their advances.

You guys should contact Peter Thiel's Breakout Laboratories that funded a just-completed study of a physical model of a tornado with the potential of generating electricity -- baseload electricity at that -- from ambient heat.

Here are the most recent photographs and short video of that scale model which, at full scale, would be called an Atmospheric Vortex Engine.

While the public facing human resources people may be clueless, the hiring process is anything but clueless. The hiring process select for candidates that are con artists. At a fundamental level this is because the people who are creating the hiring process are con artists.

If a group of people wanted to exclude homosexuals from their territory, paying the relocation costs of anyone who wanted to emigrate, how big must that group be before you would permit them to have their own way of life?

CNN Reports: "A Vectors Without Borders physician back from West Africa tests positive for Ebola at a New York hospital."

Khallow writes:

And it's worth noting here that despite whatever the American Physical Society or the US Department of Energy has said about cold fusion in 1989, research continues.

In the US it continues among professors emeritus that are dying off now at an epidemic rate.

They aren't really in the way now. I don't expect conservative, perhaps hide-bound institutions to embrace every new concept that comes along, even if in theory, that's their job.

A graduate student who attempts to so much as replicate an existing experiment is putting his entire career in jeopardy, starting with the Texas A&M fiasco where the APS took seriously allegations of fraud against such a graduate student's thesis of fraud. Those allegations were made by a "science journalist" whose main claim to fame is a diet book

There is a huge distance between embracing speculative theories and blanket rejection of experimental results.

It may well have been that no one ever actually refused to look through Galileo's telescope. But the behavior of the scientific establishment toward experimental results is clearly a pattern which, even if nothing of substance is behind cold fusion phenomena, is indictable. (Read "Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed" by Charles Beaudette for multiple examples of such behavior.)

Theories are not experiments. Popperian falsification applies to experimental falsification of theory -- not theoretic falsification of experiment, which is impossible. Indeed, even experiments do not falsify other experiments except to the extent that they demonstrate a hypothesized explanation of experimental error is true. Here again the pattern of behavior by the true believers in fashionable interpretation of physical theory demonstrate time and time again they have made errors reckless that they make the errors of Fleischmann and Pons in their neutron measurements look trivial.

Where do you think, for example, the APS "embraced" experiments by Caltech et al sit on Fig. 3 of Storms's paper?

Clue: They're so far outside anything remotely intellectually honest that they fall way off to the left of the figure -- and _this_ is what your estemed authorities used to claim Fleischmann and Pons were guilty of fraud, incompetence and/or delusion.

High income college educated whites vote Republican.

73% of Asian Americans voted for Obama in the last election.

If NPR can put even more college educated white techies out of work by importing even more Asian techies, they'll get more of existing whites voting Democrat and more immigrants who are known to vote Democrat even at high income levels.

Ever looked at the way former H-1b visa holders vote once they traverse "the path to citizenship"?

I'll put it this way: They certainly aren't going to vote for a candidate who will cut funds to NPR.

See Los Alamos nuclear chemist Ed Storms's peer reviewed paper published in the German counterpart of the British "Nature":

Status of Cold-Fusion (2010)

You're on.

Storms claims that there is no good theory to explain the excess heat measurements. He does not deny that the experiments he surveys are overwhelming evidence for the fulfillment of Ramsey's criterion.

The prediction market Intrade judged cold fusion to be replicated.

One might argue that because Intrade is a real-money prediction market, that it is less valid than Ideosphere.

However, what is going to happen to Ideosphere's reputation if it judges cold fusion to be false and, later, the NYT, WSJ, WashPo and the Secretary of Energy along with all of its national labs is saying it is true -- when a real money exchange had it right years before?