If a potential employer ever asked me for my Facebook password, I can plausibly say that I have no Facebook account, which they can verify by searching under my real name.
If a potential employer asks for your Facebook password, the proper response is, "Fuck off."
Yes it's sad that she was attacked for her criticisms, but it's sadder that she did not take responsibility, or stand her ground.
The original attack was sadder, and even sadder is for the courts to punish her for it, whether she hired a lawyer or not. Sounds like she's just an average person expressing an opinion that doesn't want to deal with a court hassle for something so mundane. I think you're unfairly blaming the victim here.
Reading few analysis about the judgement : the court did not make the condemnation for the article but only for the title ("A place to avoid in Cap-Ferret : Il Giardino"). [..] So yes, of course, seemingly against free-speech decision but not really as dramatic as many of you try to depict it.
That's bad enough as is. Where is the merit in this decision?
People keep praising Ron Paul yet everything I have ever seen on his actual policies scare me more than Cheney working with Obama to create what laws should be enforced.
Paul recent budget had a net increase in spending and a net reduction in income.
You're probably thinking of Paul Ryan, or possibly even Rand Paul, Ron Paul's son. Ron Paul is out of politics and not submitting budgets.
[logical fallacy (ad hominem) omitted]
It's not a logical fallacy or ad hominem to point out a blatant disregard for scientific principles. You can take this position, but you will be called on it.
I have seen the "skeptics" of climate change state that the independent investigations were, as you have said, "a whitewash" yet they've never provided a shred of credible evidence to support that statement.
That's a lie. I've outlined twice already what was done. I even said that "at least one report dinged him on the data withholding and the WMO graph". You have not refuted or even disputed any of it, but instead came back and tried to excuse it as standard science. Now you come belatedly and ask for new evidence, while refuting none of the old.
At this point the basic charges as I've outlined them aren't in dispute. What's left is personal judgment on the issue. I can point to a prominent scientist like Muller who were outraged by the issue, but I can't force somebody to change their mind who sees the same evidence and shows indifference because they're defending a political cause.
Prove it (let's just get this out of the way: blogs & op-eds do not count as evidence).
Right, you try to dismiss evidence out of hand, even though one of the biggest critics and one of the primary movers in this controversy, Steve McIntyre, details the vast majority of his work on his blog.
I've heard reports that the number of scientific papers being retracted is rising in all fields of study, so I have to ask:
How do you know that what occurred at the CRU is not "within normal bounds of science"?
A sincere argument for greater scientific transparency starts with new rules that apply generally to all scientists in all fields of study regardless of who pays for their research (public or private funding). That's how you raise the bar for scrutiny when you genuinely care about the quality of science.
This is sophistry. The behavior I outlined is inexcusable, as it exemplified actions completely against scientific principles. This isn't some new or changing standard. All you're doing is weakening science by defending this garbage because it fits your political position.
The American Traditions Institute is not genuinely interested in greater scientific transparency, they're just interested in casting doubt on a specific scientist (and his specific field of study) because they have deemed his research "heresy" to their politics.
Maybe they aren't, but it goes beyond the American Traditions Institute. As Climategate showed, there was plenty of rotten science to be uncovered, which Mann was deeply involved in. There are legit skeptics, and it starts with Steve McIntyre's original and continuing work on exposing the flawed foundations of the "hockey stick" and other abuses.
Relax, dude.
And invest in some personal hygiene. Just because you're a genius recluse doesn't mean you have to look like one.
There were at least 5 independent investigations launched as a result of Climategate and none of them found any evidence of scientific malpractice. That is to say the emails didn't reveal anything about Climatology that isn't happening in every other branch of scientific research.
If what occurred at CRU is within normal bounds of science then science is in a sad state of affairs. What kind of scientist withholds data on the grounds that somebody will find fault with their work? What kind of scientist would rather delete said data than see it released? What kind of scientist asks other scientists to delete email discussions on a public report of global impact regarding the environmental issue of the day? What kind of scientist chops off proxy data that shows a discrepeancy and splices in non-proxy data in its place?
The answer to all of those questions is Phil Jones. If you think a whitewash of 5 reports makes all of this ok, then you don't care about science. That he wasn't, at a minimum, fired for misconduct speaks volumes. That to this day he is still defended as a legitimate scientist shows the problems with the politics of climate science as a whole.
By the way, at least one report dinged him on the data withholding and the WMO graph, but he was never held accountable to the extent he should have been.
Just add the word "game" to your searches for "go", and you will find mostly relevant matches.
Nope. Mann's work, just like every other scientist on the planet, should be judged on the basis of what he has published.
If the email revealed wrong-doing in generating those published results, that should also be part of the judgment.
You can't pretend like Climategate didn't reveal a bunch of nasty stuff that should not have been going on (intentional lack of transparency, deleting data, subverting peer review, and chopping off inconvenient data that showed discrepancies in published graphs). It's better for this to have been aired than kept under wraps, even if it some of it was taken out of context (no, global warming isn't a massive hoax, but it isn't "settled" science, either).
Climategate was email leaked from CRU. Too bad something similar didn't happen at UVA. We need more transparency, not less.
Who told you that? It's about finding the simplest answer that will suffice. If the evidence points to things being more complicated, you need a more complicated explanation. It has nothing to do with plausibility.
You're definition is the correct one, of course, but to say it has nothing to do with plausibility is incorrect. What is found plausible or implausible is often based on the complexity of the explanation.
Or spelling Nazis (grammar).
The Judeo-Christian God may or may not exist; that's a philosophical question and not a scientific one.
In that science is evidence-based reasoning, science can be applied to the claims, and the Judeo-Christian God looks like any number of mythologies that Christians would snort at.
As Albert Einstein said: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
You should try reading the article where that quote comes from. Einstein completely rejected the idea of a Christian god or of any personal god. He was speaking of a more general, higher-level religion more in line with Buddhism, or as Einstein called it, "cosmic religious feeling":
"In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself."
I reject Einstein's notion of "religion", as he wants to define it, because it comes with too much baggage. Instead I prefer secular humanism, though it's pretty close.
There are four articles here with Einstein's writings on science and religion. The quote comes from the third:
"But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. "
In relation to the topic at hand, evolution, from the same article:
"We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity. One need only think of the systematic order in heredity, and in the effect of poisons, as for instance alcohol, on the behavior of organic beings. What is still lacking here is a grasp of connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order in itself."
Of course a modern knowledge of biochemistry and DNA completely supports this view.
No, not at all. Because rather than reducing the difficulty of the problem, you now have the increased difficulty of explaining the origin of the unknown intelligent agent. You've gone a step backwards.
Occam's Razor is about finding the most plausible answer. If the most plausible answer is "intelligent design", then Occam's Razor applies. True, you now have a new problem to solve, but that doesn't mean you can just discount the first step. As an example, intelligent design is the kind of thing we're looking for in the search for extraterrestrial life.
That said, I'm an atheist and believe the evidence is very much in favor of random, natural evolution over intelligent design.
Dynamically binding, you realize the magic. Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy.
