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Comment Re:He is not good at handling social conflicts. (Score 1) 177

He was referring to BP donating $500mil to his alternative energy research lab at UC Berkeley in 2007, two years before he got the job. He was understandably excited about what the new money was going to get his lab.

From your article:

"The institute to date has launched 68 programs in five research areas: feedstock development, biomass depolymerization, biofuels production, enhanced hydrocarbon recovery and the socio-economic impacts of cellulosic biofuels development. More than 300 researchers are working to develop affordable and renewable sources of energy. And the program has produced a 320-acre energy farm that works as a "living laboratory" for developing promising biofuel feedstocks and studying greenhouse gas emissions. "

And the problem with that is...?

Comment Re:Can you spell W H I T E W A S H ? (Score 2, Informative) 701

I've done my own research and read the emails. The researchers there may be dicks, yes, but nothing nefarious was going on. Climateaudit and Wattsupwiththat are both tend to cherry pick data points that don't agree with the overall assessment, and then say "OMG THE WHOLE THING IS WRONG BECAUSE COLORADO'S WEATHER ISN'T GOING NUTS!"

Blogs are not the place for reputable criticism. I could just as easily point you to http://realclimate.org which are actually scientists at CRU, NOAA, and NASA to debunk all of your conspiracy theories. I would like (and have searched for, but maybe just not hard enough) published, peer reviewed evidence that climate science as we know it is actually incorrect. Not just Mann, et al (who do sound like they are douchebags), but the entire rest of the field.

Comment Re:Can you spell W H I T E W A S H ? (Score 1) 701

I'm just saying, you are making some huge claims here. I'd like to see the evidence for those claims from a reputable source. Where is the paper showing that the "Natural Null Hypothesis" (which means, I assume, that it is just nature?) has a better correlation? Is the math correct and appropriate? Is all of the research and data that came to that conclusion correct? Is correlation really the appropriate statistical test? (I doubt it is, there are far too many factors at play)

Please cite your sources for this vast conspiracy for scientists to "scare you into getting more funding". And while this is a highly political issue, it certainly doesn't seem to me that it is the scientists who are the ones making it such. The tinfoil hats and Al Gore (et al) are.

Comment Re:Can you spell W H I T E W A S H ? (Score 1) 701

"The alleged climate scientists involved in Climategate need to spend some quality time behind bars for they have perpetrated a number of obvious frauds and continue to do so, they used political methods to silence other scientists who had different results, they pass off poor statistical correlations as settled science (no such thing) when the Natural Null Hypothesis has better statistical correlation, even worse they have unnecessarily scared the global population with their doomsday soothsaying all driven by their own political agenda to secure additional funding (which they succeed at quite well for fear works to extract money from politicians who don't think critically especially those who live life basking in the internal brain drugged up endarkened ignorance of faith based beliefs)."

Citation please.

Comment Re:screening for young engineers (Score 3, Informative) 228

Nope, you're wrong. Alcohol is a depressant. Just because you may "feel stimulated" because of the effect it is having on your brain does not mean that your body is actually treating it like a stimulant, it is just targeting your inhibitions so you "feel more stimulated". Anything that depresses areas of the brain is a depressant.

Comment Re:Maybe... (Score 3, Insightful) 127

Yes because NASA never invented anything we use every single day.

We get HUGE bang for our buck in NASA. If you want to cut wasteful spending, you could cut NASA's budget several dozen times over from the military and they'd barely feel it. NASA is probably the best example we have of a government organization gone right, and all people seem to want to do is cut it because they don't understand how science works. Things like NASA exist because all of their inventions came out of necessity of the incredibly complex things they were doing. Those inventions make billions of dollars for many companies. We probably wouldn't have invented half the stuff NASA has come out with because the current stuff we had was "good enough" for life down here on Earth.

Comment Re:Religion (Score 1) 892

To be fair to the AI researchers, they had no idea how the brain worked because neuropsychologists had no tools to figure it out back then. Now the psychologists have a slightly better understanding of how the brain works (though they are still in the dark about most things), and some of that has been put back into AI.

AI also wouldn't have seemed to fail so hard if not for Minsky and Papert publishing that there was no way a perceptron could solve the XOR problem, killing the field for ~25-30 years. Thankfully, it was solved by adding more perceptrons and reignited the field.

Comment Re:Religion (Score 1) 892

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is valid. If you tell me there is an invisible dragon in your garage, you better have some damn good evidence to back that claim up. In a slightly more realistic assertion, if you tell me that vaccines cause autism, then you also better have some damn good evidence to back that claim up. Extraordinary claims cannot be treated on equal footing as an ordinary claim because taking extraordinary claims at face value can be far more dangerous.

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