If you left the comment on the feed of a journalist who said that about the miners, I might laugh at that; "just desserts" can be rewarding, as we see time and again in movies.

If you left that comment on the feed of a journalist who never said that, I think that's being a jerk. It's a mistake to hold person A responsible for the actions of person B when person A had nothing to do with it, even if they share the same label.

And if you were a coal miner who got fired, saw that reporter B made a comment about learning to code, then got fired...and you offered sympathy to reporter B instead of throwing their words back at them? You would have my admiration and respect. Okay, might not mean much if you're unemployed, but tweeting "Learn to code" at someone isn't going to help your employment status, anyway.

I gave up on Skype a while ago and moved to Jitsi. Accessible through the web, free, open source. Don't even need an account to start a call.

Makes me wonder how they stay afloat. I hope they are not recording my calls!

Maybe we should ditch the 24/7 news cycle, too. Where does this need for breaking news come from, anyway? Very, very few stories suffer for being held back for a couple days or a week to confirm facts, or to spend time putting the story in context.

I agree with the need the distinguish between the scientific method and "Science", and I would argue that scientific literacy is just as much about understanding the scientific method and applying it broadly as it as about knowing a collection of scientific facts.

That being said, what alternative to psychology do you propose? I will not argue that psychology has ruined lives. I am sure other fields (including the harder sciences) have similar dark spots on their records. Starting from the premise that given a lack of evidence all possibilities must be considered equally probable, new sciences use observations to make hypotheses. These hypotheses represent the best use of available evidence. They may be wrong, but they tip the scales towards certain possibilities, i.e., they increase our confidence that a given outcome is true.

People often discount the results of studies due to flaws in the study design or execution. These flaws are valid critiques, and they certainly need to be addressed in future work. However, if you do not present evidence showing that these flaws significantly impact the results, our original premise above says it is equally likely that the flaws do not impact the results. Therefore, what justification is there for ignoring the results? No study is perfect (I have yet to read a paper in chemistry or physics which is above reproach, including all the ones I've written), but I feel that disciplines closer to everyday life experience much more frequently this situation.

This may be the difference between science and religions. Science says that if everyone follows the scientific method, humanity will eventually arrive at the truth. It does not say that the current scientific understanding of the world is the truth, or that any individual living today will ever know truth. This distinction is vital, and perhaps not emphasised enough, likely due to the type of people mentioned in the previous paragraph who use criticism as a way to ignore results that they don't like, as opposed to accepting results they don't like as being the current "best guess" while using valid criticism to dig deeper in the future.

Wait, what? When did that happen?

To quote Chief Justice Marshall from Foster v. Neilson in 1829: “In the United States, a different principle is established. Our constitution declares a treaty to be the law of the land. It is, consequently, to be regarded in courts of justice as equivalent to an act of the legislature, whenever it operates of itself, without the aid of any legislative provision. But when the terms of the stipulation import a contract—when either of the parties engages to perform a particular act, the treaty addresses itself to the political, not the judicial department; and the legislature must execute the contract, before it can become a rule for the court.”

If a treaty is "equivalent to an act of the legislature" (or even requires legislature to execute!), and acts of legislature are subject to the Constitution, how can a treaty supersede the Constitution? I would be curious if you have more modern case law which overturns this (I know the Court evolved a lot during the first 50 years or so).

Even assuming this is true for the moment, I'm not going to pretend it will be the case forever. I know enough talented Chinese researchers who are doing good work, and I see enough papers in high-quality journals with all-Chinese author lists, to see the shift coming. Either we play together, or we risk losing.

Fine, and one can say that about any field. Teachers? The good ones are the ones with a passion for teaching. Scientists? The best ones are those with a passion for learning. You don't need to recruit those because they will naturally find their field.

But what if you need 100 programmers/teachers/scientists, and you only have 10 who are passionate about it? Your task (as a society) is to fill the remaining 90 positions with people who can do the work. Which requires attracting people whose first instinct (and possibly passion) is a different field. That doesn't necessarily imply they can't be good programmers/teachers/scientists, but they may need nudging to realize this.

I am genuinely interested if you have an article to share on this. I spent a lot of time last year looking at peer-reviewed scientific literature studying the effect of nutrition on illness prevention and cure, and I don't remember seeing anything about vitamin D and the flu (either for or against). So I didn't even realize this was a thing.

This is something I've noticed, too. If I go for a while (even only a few days!) without free sugars, all desserts taste incredible. If I've been eating non-fruit desserts and snacks fairly regularly, I'm often disappointed by things like simple cakes and cookies and prefer denser, more concentrated desserts like cookie dough and brownies.

I was thinking about this a couple months ago and did a double-blind taste test with my girlfriend (Mexican coke in a glass bottle vs. American coke in a plastic bottle). Neither one of us identified one as tasting better than the other.

YMMV.

I am not sure that is true. Young forests might (ignoring any carbon release from soil or decomposing biomass that disturbed the previous forest on the site, but of which should not be ignored), but an individual old tree will consume a lot more carbon than an individual young tree. Stephenson et al published a nice paper in Nature about that back in 2014.

From the authors: "Thus, large, old trees do not act simply as senescent carbon reservoirs but actively fix large amounts of carbon compared to smaller trees; at the extreme, a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree."

The observational evidence we have collected shows the global temperature reached one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels in 2017 (the difference between the global mean surface temperature from 1850-1900 and 1987-2017...Figure 1.2 from the recently released IPCC special report "Global Warming of 1.5 C"). Previous studies have found solar activity and volcanic eruptions to be of minimal impact, in particular over the past few decades.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, on the other hand, have been increasingly steadily since pre-industrial times. Scientists, being sceptical by nature, are quick to point out to each other that correlation does not equal causation. Through the use of increasingly sophisticated methods and models, they are now reasonably sure that carbon dioxide is one of the primary drivers (though methane and nitrous oxide are not something to forget about). Incidently, these models include water vapor, but water vapor doesn't explain the temperature increase, so no, I would not consider that a pollutant.

Carbon dioxide, at the concentrations we are currently seeing it, does seem to be negatively (for us) impacting the environment. So yes, despite that it is necessarily for life on this planet, I would start calling it a pollutant. "Good for you" and "bad for you" is often a matter of concentration.

I've applied for jobs across the world. In my experience, organizations in the United States are the worst with not telling you anything. Organizations in east Asia, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand have given me responses the majority of the time, even if it's a simple, "Thank you for your interest. We have decided to hire a candidate who more closely matches our needs at this time."

Although I do get responses from organizations in the United States, too (maybe ten percent of the time).

I agree with this. I've lived in central Africa, the upper Midwest US, and a Nordic country.

The mosquitoes in central Africa (city and rural areas) were definitely less bothersome than summer in rural areas in the other two places. On the other hand, occasionally you come down with malaria.

I've lived in the US. I've lived in Europe. And I've lived in sub-Saharan African countries.

The US is not even close to a third world country with respect to its infrastructure.