Just some examples of non-normal distributed events:

• Most things related to speech and text: Distribution of letters, of words, of word length etc.pp. (a phenomenom called Zipf's Law).
• The height of the Earth's surface: It has two large maxima, one at sea level, and another one at about 10,000 feet depth.
• Income, sales, wealth and other economic numbers (Pareto's Law).
• The size of lakes, the length of rivers and other geographic numbers.

Actually, the distribution will be normal, because the IQ is defined to be normally distributed. For each task in the test, the points awarded are carefully tested with many probands, and the weights calculated until the resulting score has a normal distribution.

There is not reason why a distribution in general should be normal, and many of them aren't.

You mean, it tries to start services and also logs the events that happen during the startup? How barbarishly un-UNIX-y!

It might be one of the problems with the U.S. discussion about Global Warming. It's impossible in the U.S. to separate the actual global warming (2014 set a new global temperature record) from the politics. Everyone who argues that there is a global increase in temperature (the global warming), is immediately suspected of having an agenda, and the agenda has to be Big Government or Communism or some other scarecrow.

So arguing that there is no global warming, that the global warming has stopped, that it is not man-made or that it is a non-issue, because it will actually benefit us, is seen as some way of defending Freedom[tm], and many libertarian leaning people and a lot of conservative ones feel a mission to cast doubt on solid science, because defending Freedom is always good work, right? And because the science itself is quite solid (we can actually measure the heat trapping properties of different levels of the components in the atmosphere, and we have a good way to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide and methane we release in the atmosphere), the doubt is cast either on the researchers (they are accused to have an agenda, they are called liars, they are suspected to conspire against us all...), or on the immediate conclusions. Models are called misleading, every new discovery how to more correctly assess an effect gets hailed as proof that the evil climate scientists are wrong again etc.pp..

Try to separate the science and the politics! And yes, denying the science on whatever level is at first an attempt to politice the science.

But it's the best we can have. And there are still ways to test theories about historical events. If you can predict future archeological finds from your hypothesis, then there is a possibility that your hypothesis about the historical facts is close to the truth. If you find an ancient document agreeing with the hypothetical account for some event, then it's quite possible that the events happened in the way the hypothesis stated. And if for instance an archeological experiment shows that some object that was thought to be a tool for a certain task proves to be quite inadequate for the task, then there is reason to doubt the hypothesis about that object.

Yes, we can't build a time machine and go back in time to check. But we can make educated guesses about it. We can't also travel to a quasar and check if our theories about the behaviour of quasars are right, but we can make educated guesses about them, and there is no reason to throw out everything we hypothetize about quasars or call research into quasars pseudo-science, just because we can't get there.

A douchebag is a tool, thus you are redundant.

The assumption is completely different: We assume that our whole infrastructure is adapted to the climate state about 30-50 years ago. A change in the climate, how favourable it might be in the far future, means at first rebuilding and adapting. We have to clear whole countries like the Maledivas or the coral island states of the Southern Pacific, because they will be under water. We have to resettle the population of Florida and Bangladesh, because most of the land will turn into ocean or swamp. We have to give up all current beach site property, because the beach will be somewhere else. Real estate prices will shift tremendously, power balances will have to be balanced anew. Whole cultures have already crumbled because of subtle climate changes, and today, about 75% of the world populations are living in regions which will be directly affected by climate change. Maybe after some decades, all will be fine, and we might be able to farm in Antarctica, or some deserts have turned into wet lands, but until then, there will be turmoil.

Actually, intuition is the narrative mind at work. We tend to convert every information, every knowledge into narratives, and if information or knowledge are incomplete, we fill in the holes with bits that make a good narrative. This process is called intuition.

René Descartes begs to differ.

Everyone except some pantheists is an atheist. Only some of them think that there is one god more which doesn't exist.

An ideology is just a modernist way to have a religion without having too many discussions about the hairstyle of the Supreme Being.

In many ways, Maoism or soviet style Stalinism are religions in about the same way we consider Confucianism or Taoism a religion. They are closed belief systems with a fundamental set of dogmata, they appeared preconceived by their founding fathers and all following discussions were just about how to correctly interpret the holy scriptures.

Or as my mother (artist herself) uses to say: symmetry is the beauty of the poor.

What we see her is that words or terms don't mean anything by itself, even if we try to agree on a meaning. Every word needs a theory, an enclosing concept to mean something. Beauty within the theory of biological fitness means something very different from beauty within the aesthetics of mathematical theorems. Only within the frame of a theory, a term has any meaning at all.

Most fruitless discussions about the true meaning of a term result from the fact that both sides can't agree on the theory within which the term should be valid, and most fruitful discussions about the same result in the foundation of a theory all sides can agree on.

USB was a standard developed by Intel in the first place to be put into the South Bridge. Apple was one of the first adopters though. So yes, even without Apple, USB would have become ubiquitious, part of every Intel chipset.

Almost a decade ago? Wow! When I was a child three decades ago, I read a book from the 1960ies, where this theory already was put forward -- based on evidence from excavations in the 1930ies. What is really interesting is the new evidence which is not based on cultural artefacts.

So you are advocating getting rid of caffeine and sugar, of glutamine and perfume, of acetylsalicylic acid, sodium carbonate and all those little substances that help us to overcome some unpleasant moments. No more tea, no more pepper, no more chili for us, because this is just getting us high!