As most rational /. readers must have noticed, the expression "correlation is not causation" is mostly used by ignorant apes looking for a quick +1. Science stories get tagged with it even when the story itself is only about the effect, and points out multiple causes, or in a story about the discovery of an indicator, as if it had implied bromophenol blue causes acidity. The expression seems to have been entirely taken over by people with no knowledge of science or logic, and it's usually used as a strawman argument against the science (and through that proxy against more evil things, often environmentalism or socialism (as biology, medicine and social sciences, etc., are considered socialist, as opposed to the libertarian idiocy so many Slashdotters believe in)).

The harmfulness of "correlation is not causation" is thus two-level: on the one hand, it drowns /. in illogical and retarded drivel that too easily gets modded "+5, insightful", on the other hand, it's usually put forth in defence of potential harmful practices in real life. Remember, there's only a correlation between smoking and an untimely death.

Oh, and what can we do about it? Personally, I pledge to use my modpoints by modding down whichever comment that first makes use of the meme in every science story, whenever I have modpoints. And you will know me by "-1, redundant" or "-1, off topic", whichever seems most applicable.

This: http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/204737

Twitter is one amusing oddball. One comment (a flame) against him, and now he "outs" me as a destructive troll.

We have a contender here: susano_otter.

I'm re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in 16 years or so. I should perhaps make a joke about how many times it's mentioned that certain hobbits are queer and gay, but I won't. It's a good book, despite how overrated it is by its most fanatical followers. That's what sets it apart from some other major pop culture cult phenomena, like Star Wars, or worse: Serenity, which frankly are garbage if you try to take them seriously (OK, here I'm being far too kind to Serenity, since it's garbage also if you take it as pure entertainment).

No, what I wanted to say is just what a masterstroke it was to write Tom Bombadil out of the movie. That's one redundant character if I ever saw one. Hell, it's Tolkien's very own Jar-Jar Binks. It really was worth destroying the ambivalent tone and the entire hobbit character development in the beginning of the book just to get rid of him as well. The movie started out extremely rushed, though. Perhaps it would be better to follow the book until Bombadil showed up, and then do some Braindead style lawnmower action on him, just to make sure he never turns up again.

Also, Tolkien should have recognised the fact that he was no poet.

I just had my first attempt at a Slashdot story submission rejected. It was about OpenOffice.org 2.1 being released. No, it's not a big deal for me; I even included a flamebaitish remark about OOo's speed. Still, interesting to see how godawfully slow this site is to get the so-called "news" to the front page. Now I know they knew the news some time ago. Perhaps they publish with OpenOffice.

Just look at the discussion in the OS X for cheap wind-up powered third world 128 MB laptop declined article. Slashdot has finally become even worse than OSNews! Even worse than the BBS discussions between Amiga fanbois and PC apologists!

Half of the commenters are rabid fanboys of one OS or the other, and so are most of the moderators. Where's the technical discussion? How the fuck can someone seriously think that OS X would be easy to use and come with the iApps suite at 1 GB of storage, when OS X demands 3 GB just for the default install? And how the fuck can someone think KDE would be much easier on the RAM requirements?

I refuse to contribute to such a discussion. Fuck them. This site used to be technical. These days, it's just moronic.

And I knew it before it hit the /. frontpage. At the moment I'm writing this, it's still not there. But of course, when Apple has a widely-published PR campaign, it's up there soon enough. Is this irrefutable proof that /. is fucking shit these days?

News that's old, trolls that hardly matter.

And I mean this, you notice the advantage of reading Slashdot with a +6 troll and flamebait modifier.

Oh, and my opinion: IQ testing is an interesting subject. The method of developing a test actually depends on the predictability of its result, in a way: You have a bunch of people with "known" and different levels of "intelligence", and develop the tests from how well they are able to sort the participants out. Do a search for Alfred Binet if you want to know more.

There may be many reasons for why women are found to be less intelligent than men. One thing is that the tests necessarily are skewed, since they are supposed to measure something we don't know what is, can't define, but still somehow believe we can recognize. If IQ tests show that men are more intelligent than women, then it's also caused by men being perceived as more intelligent than women, and the tests being created with a bias to show this. The science behind IQ tests is rather good, but never objective, since there's no object to measure.

Anyway. If some dork thinks he can be proud of himself, as a man, because the tests show men to be more intelligent than women, or whites more than black, or whatever, he should remind himself that there's probably some black women out there who are more intelligent, and bigger and stronger, than him.

And that's really all there is to say about this.

Oh no. I actually put a bit of work into a comment today. There was more than one sentence, and it wasn't just some wisecrack or joke. It was really serious (but quite banal).

And: I thought I had a slim chance of FP. But it was obviously just something wrong with /. and my comment didn't show up at all. And neither did the 200+ comments that had been submitted or not in the meantime.

Heh, 200+ comments, and no one to read them? Sounds like an improvement.

This time, it's my comment #512. Of course, the comment itself is of no particular interest (as usual), but it's a round number. I remember the days when 512 KB RAM was enough to play games on the PC. They were crap games, though.

My last comment was my comment 486! The fact that it's modded flamebait (being suitingly anti-Apple) is reason enough to celebrate.

I wonder if my next comment will be a Pentium? Well, I guess that depends on whether my comment was an SX or a DX. If the former, I'll need a comment 487 to evolve.

Sometimes, during metamod, I find little gems like this. And I have to decide whether 'interesting' is fair. Well, is it? It's definately not correct, but when some dickless pagan with no sense of humour moderates it 'flamebait', it's probably fair to give it an 'interesting' mod. Oh, and the moderation made me laugh a bit as well.

So, brave moderator: Fear not.

I'm now modding off topic OS X karma whores off topic. It should take a bit more than writing OMG Apple r0xx0rz s0 l33t w4nk w4nk to get a +5 in a discussion about Sun's Opteron HW.

So I finally have mod points again, and there's a new discussion about global warming. It's another occasion when slashdotters can show their scientific insight to be on par with the rest of the people out there -- the janitors, the waitresses, the scientists, the clowns and the teachers, and everyone else not reading Slashdot. Most people have little understanding of science, and that goes for slashdotters as well.

I'm not a scientist myself (although I do have six years of university education), but I'm a bit fed up with the apologists writing things like ' I'll believe in global warming the minute "scientists" find something to agree on'. As if it's not proper science if there's little consensus, and if there's no One True Way. If there is just one un-scientific lesson science can teach us, it must be that consensus can be wrong. Science is work, and work in progress, not a collection of undeniable truth. I'm not going to be more specific than that, since different sciences have to have different methods, and I'm not going to exclude even for example history or sociology just because they don't fit in with the methodological demands of physics, which also completely fails to explain historical or social phenomena. So let's just be vague about it, and say science is about trying to explain stuff. Falsifiability gives a way to test whether a theory or hypothesis can explain what it claims to explain, and is therefore usually demanded in the more serious hard sciences.

The fact that claims like 'There is not going to be a climate change, so we should do nothing to prevent one' is more easily falsifiable than 'There is going to be one, if we don't prevent it by not burning so much fossil fuel' does not make it any more scientific, though. Both are (most of the time) uninformed opinion. So is mine. I fear climate change, and I base my fear on the fact that CO2 levels have been rising steadily since measurements were started (pdf with graph linked here), and that the weather is changing (just ask the insurance companies). Therefore, I find the first kind of uninformed opinion most irritating, and I'll mod accordingly. I'm not abusive, though.

I've written earlier that I dislike the rampant abuse of 'overrated' in discussions like this one, so I feel I have to apologize for giving one to this. But what else could I do? It was modded up twice as 'insightful', but it doesn't have any insight. Neither is it a troll, maybe not even completely wrong. Perhaps we can't really affect the climate. Perhaps we can. Anyway, what made me mod it down was the following:

I think its rather presumptuous to assume man can have any impact on the weather. But maybe some of you fear that we could lower the global temp if we all opened our refregerator doors in unision. A volcano can dump more greenhouse gasses in an hour than man can produce in a year. We can little affect the global climate fir good or bad. We can only go with the flow.

The second sentence is disgustingly condescending, but the rest of the reasoning is purely mythical (oh, and I see from the replies that his comment has got that the volcano thingie was just plain wrong). What's the insight in this? There's none. This is just a belief.

---
Oh, and I also apologize for not writing better (intellectually) about science. English isn't my first language, so it's often hard enough for me complete sentences. I think I was just trying to say that some people should have a bit more respect for people trying to understand things they don't understand themselves.

Dagbladet.no, Norway's second largest website, with 187 million pageviews last month, released some interesting statistics for browser use. This is an ordinary tabloid newspaper, so users should be pretty ordinary too. It seems like Mozilla/Firefox are less popular than most of us thought -- at least in Norway:

1. MSIE 6.0, 85.37 %
2. MSIE 5.5, 3.31 %
3. MSIE 5.01, 2.09 %
4. Opera 7.54, 1.54 %
5. MSIE 5.0, 1.40 %
6. Mozilla Firefox 0.10, 0.89 %
7. Opera 7.23, 0.66 %
8. Mozilla Firefox 0.9, 0.65 %
9. Opera 7.50, 0.46 %
10. Netscape 5.0, 0.40 %

I find it more interesting that OS X still hasn't taken over older Mac OSes, and is less popular than Linux. But even put together, the "alternative" OSes are almost statistically insignificant:

1. Windows XP, 62.14 %
2. Windows 2000, 22.42 %
3. Windows 98, 7.42 %
4. Windows NT, 4.0 3.82 %
5. Windows ME, 1.96 %
6. MacOS, 0.78 %
7. Linux, 0.60 %
8. MacOS X, 0.40 %
9. Windows 95, 0.35 %
10. Macintosh PPC, 0.04 %