The closest a scientific theory can get to being fact is when it becomes "dogma". Once it is dogma, any research that contradicts it must meet a higher level of confidence. So, if I claim that H. pylori causes ulcers when dogma suggests that stress causes ulcers, then I need to have results that perhaps exceed the usual 0.05 p-value threshold for submission, review and publication.

In that light, dogma now says that humans are causing global warming, the science is "settled" in that sense. Evolution is also at the level of dogma.

For my functioning x486 class machine with Descent up and running? Time to find that old joystick

The behavioral science people are actually starting to answer the ancient question raised by Aristotle, is viewed (stage) violence cathartic or stimulative? That is, does viewing stage violence (as in plays, video games, movies) cathartic (relieving inner tension to be violent (lowering the probability of actually being violent)) or is it stimulative (increasing the probability of being violent). As a statistician I have to tell you that (at least in clinical studies) the issue of causal vs correlation is very well understood to be extremely difficult to tease out of data. But I have read studies that indicate that viewing violence reduces the thresholds that hold us back by making the behavior seem more prevalent and therefore less wrong. Myself, I think error on the side of caution is wise, a position that puts me at odds with my otherwise science-loving causitive-denier libertarian friends, who, to a person, will argue that THEY aren't affected (gotta love those sample sizes of n=1). This sort of "I'm exceptional" is pretty well understood, and seems to be a factor in the poor risky decision making processes of most males through at least 25yrs life experience.

Maybe if we used electrical shock to punish people who make poor choices in video games we could train them out of it, oh, wait, that's the science in "Terminal Man".

Lots of science says "don't let kids play video games" and lots of kids deny the effect. Which do you trust?

More like Hemi-global Frying than Global Warming. Either way, I'm sure of three things. (1) It's Bush's fault. (2) The poor will be hurt the most. (3) Markets will open lower.

Understanding the role of evolution in changing the way life operates is a necessary but not sufficient condition to indicate understanding science enough that when someone says "we can cure autism by stopping immunizations" you can probably call BS and not pass a law enabling such ignorance. So, the hypothetical candidate's answer to the question "is evolution part of your personal belief system" is a good start as a litmus test for me when deciding how to vote. If the politician's answer is "no" then I would believe that they would not understand the concerns about the overuse of antibiotics and why the free market cannot protect this commons.

It's all about testing how the person approaches uncertainty and decisions and not at all about what they believe. I think that the Middle East is showing us how poorly it works to have gut-instinct religious beliefs driving government behavior.

I reserve the term "cars" for manually operated conveyances. I wonder if they get around the blind spot by an ensemble model across the time-component. As in, "the last 30 times that looked like a bicyclist, now it's a flower? I think (and act) not."

While I was in the military we joked that the reason some medical research was easier to do on soldiers than on prison inmates was that the ACLU will protect the rights of prison inmates.

I call BS. This does not show that people are unethical, just that their ethics are not simple math.

So, in the equation predicting global warming, the coefficient for "anthrogenic" causes on Jupiter is probably 0.0000 while the "solargenic" coefficient is not zero. But the solargenic coefficient on Earth should be similar to the solargenic coefficient on Jupiter (adjusting for usual square-distance laws), the scientifically interesting question is what is the ratio of these two coefficients on earth? The politically interesting question does not care about this aspect of the science, only about the absolute non-zero-ness of the anthrogenic coefficient.

I find that if I fling the whole fershlinginger microwave across the room BEFORE I remove the unevenly heated food it works much better than if I wait till I bit into the scalding icy treat. After removing the food just does not work as well.

Might one just extract all the non-DRM stuff from an open source like FireFox to create a DRM-only browser that I could use on a dumb box with no HD or permanent OS (I'm thinking a CD-bootable linux box that held just the FireFoxDRM so it could watch DRM stuff, then I'd use my old copy of FireFox with no DRM for my real life. Or is this not just about protecting users from DRM-enabled vulnerabilities?

Yes, until the compiler changes the interior of a loop thinking it was doing it right. We were engineers doing orbital mechanics, did not pay attention to the switches on the compiler, it took a greybeard who looked at our core dump (remember those?). He spotted that a line of code had been moved outside of the loop because it did not look like it was necessary to have it inside. I think the function call used used a pass by reference variable that was being changed within the function. The optimizer did not see that change so it made sense to call the function just once outside the loop. Maybe I have detail wrong (it was back in 1978 or so), but the fact that the optimizer goofed has made me suspicious of these sorts of promises ever since.

Even better is to use matrices in native form, as in (x')*A*'x meaning the vector x, the matrix A and quadratic form thereof. Very handy for teaching n-dimensional minimization (hint, take the deriviative of the term). How to write that in a formula translation language is the trick, we used t() to get the transpose, explicit typing to ensure A was a matrix and x a vector, etc. Fortran is a pretty handy form but it did not let us redefine operators like * back in the day. Now I am in R, so cannot really comment on modern Fortran.

• 0.999 = the probability that the planet is warming
  • 0.99 = the probability that it is at least 70% anthrogenic
    • 0.01 = the probability that a first world carbon tax or similar can slow the warming
    • 0.001 = probability that all first/second world countries will crash their economies to save us all (political question follows)
    • 0 = the probability that any one first/second world country will actually crash their economy to save us all.

I can guran-damn-tee you that if the "theory" that the earth is round had been politicized the way the AGW theory has been, we would still be living in hovels and never traveling out of sight of the flagpoles in the centers of our villages. Fekkin politicians fekked it up for all of us.