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Comment Re:New bands? (Score 1) 361

Division bell from the early 90's - let's face it Pink Floyd just keep getting better, even when they are not together as a band. Floyd and the Beetles were unusual in that they both had two musical geniuses writing their stuff, most other bands consider themselves lucky to have one.

Comment Define: Market (Score 1) 249

Market-based solutions, by definition, do not require government intervention.

An economic market is not a place or a thing, it's a set of rules that govern trade (eg: property law). Forget what you have been taught by Fox news and think about it for two seconds, how is a market even possible without property law?

Comment Principia Mathematica and unprovable truths. (Score 1) 235

"Infinite" in actualized physical terms is meaningless

Set theory is the basic logic maths is built on, it didn't change much for over 2000yrs. About a century ago people like Cantor, Godel, Russell, and many others started looking at set theory and infinities. The line of enquiry culminated with Godel's incompleteness theorem showing that any and every set of things is dependent on something else outside the set, add what is outside the set and you still have something else outside the new set. Godel's discovery that maths is "incomplete" (contains unprovable truths) destroyed what Russell and others had been trying to do with their Principia Mathematica- show that all mathematical truths can be mechanically derived from a set of fundamental axioms (Newton's "clockwork universe").

In other words Godel discovered that (maths says) the Universe (with a capital U) is "turtles all the way down" (and up).

Comment Imperfect does not imply useless. (Score 2) 525

If the results match your prediction, then yes that's good evidence, do it a few more times and we've got something serious to talk about.

You mean like climate models correctly predicting phenomena before the phenomena was observed in nature, such as, "Stratospheric cooling", "polar amplification", and the global cooling effect from a large volcanic eruption ( AKA Mt Pinatubo). There are dozens of "blind predictions" for those who care to actually look at the forecasting (and hindcasting) skill of aggregate climate models.

At the end of the day, all of science is a model, the question is why do people who obviously haven't looked at climate models doubt their utility? Why do others doubt the evolutionary model of life, or the tectonic plate model? - Those kind of doubts do not come from scientific skepticism, they come from industry funded propagandists such as the heartland institute and are then disseminated through the opinion pages of papers such as the wall street journal.

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