Just as long as he doesn't get his hands on Galaxy Quest. Some things are sacred!

It would be all like "Give up! Surrender!"

"Political Scientist" is a colossal oxymoron.

Whatever this guy and Thomas Friedmann (and alas! Terry Pratchett) say, the world is not flat. Algebraic equations of degree higher than linear (and even - gasp - other than polynomials entirely) are needed to describe how it works. Algebra is the bare minimum to comprehend how functions work. It is telling that TFA doesn't even mention differential equations - the real basecode of the universe. A grounding in algebra provides the most basic of tools to understand graphical representations of a dynamic multivariate world, even without calculus.

That a political scientist would emphasize "lies, damn lies, and statistics" as the pinnacle of mathematics is unsurprising.

NASA Goddard is near Baltimore. They lost power in the storm and are operating under "Code Red": http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/

Quite likely other misbehavior blamed on the leap second is actually the result of the storm (or like Pirate Bay, some unrelated crash).

How is it possible that 300 messages into the thread nobody has suggested starting (and ending) with Galaxy Quest?

It depends on the figure of merit and on the measure of central tendency being applied to it. "Average" can mean different things. If the distribution is skewed, the arithmetic mean will always lie to one side or the other of the median.

Stuart Smalley seems the poster child for Dunning-Kruger and related effects.

In related news, 46% of Americans believe themselves "above average".

Astronomical data are background limited. The noise is as interesting as the signal, and many sources lie beneath the noise and are only visible through coadding. The gain and read-noise of LSST's detectors will be tuned similarly to other astronomical cameras because these parameters are governed by the experimental design.

Lossless Rice compression should be around R of 2-2.5 (http://arxiv.org/pdf/0903.2140.pdf) with lossy compression of reduced data products falling between R of 3 to 5 depending on the quantization selected (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.1179.pdf).

There will be no delta frame advantage since the compression is governed entirely by the noise (i.e., entropy) due to the sparse signal in astronomical data and the noise is a combination of gaussian and poisson (shot noise) sources that varies from exposure to exposure.

In fact, a key goal of the project is precisely to look for differences between each frame and a baseline static sky so the differences must be preserved in great detail.

A career in the sciences is far less likely to be touched by fraud than more commercial endeavors. "Follow the money" as they say. Each discipline is its own community, however, and the level of political infighting, the need to struggle for funding, the publication pressures, etc, vary greatly. External pressures are different, too, but condensed matter physics is about as far from the front lines of the culture war as one can get :-) I do wonder what mythical past the recent critics of science (and of academia in general) are comparing us with. Government funding has always been in the mix. Corporate funding has always come with strings attached. Read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle to get a sense for the underlying drama of research as a creative exercise. A good bit of luck is needed to follow the narrow path to tenure. (I stepped off long ago.) A good bit of luck is needed to bubble to the "top" of any organization of any type. The difference with the sciences is that there are innumerable interesting detours and niches along the way. Having a graduate degree in a STEM field is an advantage for pursuing many future options. And the journey has been a hell of a lot of fun! Ultimately the question becomes "compared to what?" How will you put food on the table if you forgo grad school? And is a seat at a smaller table enough for you?

Blame the WSJ for the tropes here about physicists and "culturomics". The lead author of the linked paper is an economist. The WSJ article also mingles information from other publications. On the other hand, Steven Pinker has (rather persuasively) argued for a physical model underlying the structure of language (and not just in English): http://stevenpinker.com/publications/stuff-thought

I read through the 4-pointers and didn't see a citation to the original paper. This appears to be it: http://maxwellsci.com/print/crjss/v2-255-261.pdf It has precious little to do with any of the grandiose claims being attributed to it. TFA and the scores of echoed "See? I told you democracy was a scam!" articles are aggressively misconstruing the meaning of this. The paper is a couple of years old and the author appears to have no special expertise in this field.

It's a tradition on slashdot to not read the article, but has anybody of any political persuasion here actually clicked the link? It's a piece of crap designed to be echoed around the internet. So far I've been unable to locate the cited research from either this article or in any of its echoes or by searching directly. The word "smart" is something added to create heat, the phrase used is "leadership skills", and there is no indication how such skills are gauged in either the simulated voters or the simulated candidates. Nor any mention that the voters only get to choose between two starkly different candidates - this is a rather binary decision to simulate. It is insipid to blame the voters for the candidates produced by the major parties.

Pluto (the dog) was named after Pluto (the planet), not the other way around.

See (for instance):
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/hall_tour/spectrum/non_flash_index.html

This isn't about an imposed classification, it is about a family tree. Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than either are to snakes. Snakes are more closely related to birds than either are to turtles.

That is, these guys:
http://www.wolaver.org/animals/crocodile-plover.jpg

share a *much* more recent common ancestor than these two:
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/02/images/salamander-pgoebeil.jpg
and:
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090630160120/uncyclopedia/images/2/2f/Geico-gecko.jpg

You are more closely related to a goldfish than the goldfish is to a shark:
http://rlv.zcache.com/goldfish_bowl_tshirt-p23514656184174989535jn_400.jpg

http://bit.ly/nknQ00

Some of these comments are isomorphic to this review of Richard Dawkin's history of your family tree:

http://creation.com/review-the-ancestors-tale-richard-dawkins

If you're going to do this, run it in the opposite direction as a geothermal (well, selenothermal) heat pump. Yes, yes - still need to establish a cold sink. But the value of all these ideas depends on the detailed engineering, not on slashdot opinion mongering.