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Comment Re:did you checked the video? (Score 2) 688

What in the fuck is going on?

As best I can tell, what's happening in the UX world is similar to what happened to fashion and hairstyles in the 1970s. (Almost) everybody just went crazy overnight for some reason. Some kind of brain parasite, maybe, carried by cats or birds.

The trend will eventually recede as quickly as it arrived, as plagues always do. Then we'll see functional, user-configurable interface design come back into favor. I've given up, personally. I'm just going to stop complaining and wait it out. It doesn't pay to be the only sane guy in the asylum.

Comment Re:We've gone beyond bad science (Score 1) 703

Note that everything I said still applies if the IPCC is right but consistently unable to prove their case. Confounding factors are a massive hazard on geologic timescales as short as the ones for which we have genuinely reliable data. A ten- or twenty-year cooling trend could have the same effect as outright failure of the models.

Point being, we shouldn't put climate science and evolution in the same basket. They are not on equal footing. To pretend otherwise is to invite a cultural disaster.

Comment Re:We've gone beyond bad science (Score 2, Insightful) 703

h) The AGW "debate" in the USA closely resembles the Creation-vs-Evolution "debate", ie. a never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole against arguments that sound plausible but never stand up under scrutiny, no matter how convinced the creationists were when they were parroting them. One side has to spend vast resources to produce hard evidence, the other side doesn't feel they have any burden of proof whatsoever, they just make stuff up.

Actually it doesn't resemble the Creation/Evolution debate at all, and I get the heebie-jeebies when someone says it does. One of my favorite charities, the National Center for Science Education, has gone down this path recently and I wish there were a good way to talk them out of it.

Climate models are based on just that -- models. We could still wake up one day, slap ourselves in the forehead, and admit that our computer models are either grossly in error, or missing one or more key factors that would change their output drastically. The map is not the territory, science is not a democracy or a popularity contest, and climate modeling is not a "settled science." I don't care who says it is, and I don't care what percentage of climate scientists agree. It just isn't. Sorry, but that's not the way these things work.

On the other hand, we are absolutely not going to wake up one day and realize that we have the basics of evolution wrong. There is absolutely no possibility that we will discover that humans are not, in fact, descended from earlier hominids. There is absolutely no possibility that we will discover that we don't have ancestors in common with modern apes. That isn't going to happen. Too many independent lines of evidence have come together, making consistent predictions, providing confirmable explanations, and withstanding intense scrutiny.

My fear is that the global-warming thing will prove to be a red herring, as usually happens whenever "B...b...but 99% of scientists agree!!!11!" is the primary argument in favor of a theory. When that happens, it's going to be almost impossible to keep the Creationists and other assorted modern-day flat-earthers from gaining the influence over public education and popular culture that they've always dreamed of.

Comment Re:In Soviet USA (Score 1, Informative) 229

That's a bit of a double-edged comment, though, considering the subsidies Tesla has taken in the form of loans. When you encourage government to pick winners and losers, you can't be too surprised when they insist on doing both.

That said, good on Elon Musk for calling bullshit on this particular issue.

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