As a practicing mathematician and statistician I really don't think the publicly available data is suitable for any weekend warriors to do their own analyses. The data that is available, I fear, will have been "cleaned" to ensure consistency with local dogma rather than to ensure suitability for analysis.

Nice and concise, the US was lucky in WW2 in that we did not exit with ravaged infrastructure. jellomizer wrote a nice summary.

This is pretty consistent with economic models that claim we are all competing for the same jobs, with the attendant sloppy back and forth to equilibrium.

Do you think they think they can build 'em up faster than rising oceans can swamp them? And how hard is pouring tons of sand on coral on the coral? Where is the outrage!

"You can make a Slashdot signature quote seem authoritative by attributing it to a famous person" - Sun Tzu

Citation? My references attribute this to Buddha.

Mine this set and I'll bet you find ONE (1) real statement and 10 that use that statement (directly or indirectly).

Well, so you can convert those pagan heathens to the proper admiration and worshiping of His Noodliness, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of course.

The genetic algorithm (GA) has proven (3B years of testing) to be incredibly powerful, able to solve problems that are not even on the table at the beginning of the run. As soon as we create a system that can evolve using GA, and that can replicate itself physically, we need to worry. Even with human interventions, computer viruses are annoying, wait till someone successfully writes in a good GA and it finds its way into a manufacturing system.

Actually, the most unusual location was in the undressing room at a strip club, which happened to be where the computer was sitting. My buddies waiting on the floor while I disappeared into said undressing room were unimpressed with my excuse for going there. "Yeah, right!" was the general response when I told them.

1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from?
A coffee shop in Estes Park, where I wrote code that had to be modemed back to Minnesota using an old 4-prong phone connection (had to find a converter from the new-fangled RJ14 plug).

2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program?
Using an HP9825 to emulate a TI59 so I could more quickly develop the program.

3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?
Probably that same HP9825, a calculator with a card reader, a pen plotter and an 80-character display (that's right, one line of code visible at a time).

4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?
Not really an application, but I once wrote a Monte Carlo simulation to answer the question, "how long after a [specified] nuclear attack would it be until the radiation on the ground would have dropped far enought to allow the Russians to force workers at gunpoint to enter the area if they only needed the workers to function for 15 minutes?" Had to do that one on an HP41C.

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.