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Comment Re:Grasping at Straws (Score 1) 552

God I love how you guys (both sides) goes totally ballistic about some minor detail of a post. No point in trying to deduce what someone said, if there is the smallest amount of unfactual commentary or the slightest error, they will be bombed back to kingdom come.

The statement to which I responded was not wrong in some minor detail, but completely wrong.

How are scientists ever going to convince a doubting public when we endorse complete nonsense like this just because it doesn't contradict our favored position?

You may not like it, but science is (at least partly) about facts, and facts matter.

Comment Re:Grasping at Straws (Score 0, Troll) 552

Which of course begs the question of why if its not getting warmer all the world's glaciers are simultaneously receding a a record pace not previously observed in human history.

Really? All of them? Wow! Who knew?

At a pace never previously seen in human history? Including the end of the last Ice Age? Amazing!

With facts like yours, who could possibly doubt?

Comment Re:Time to start talking about climate change (Score 2) 114

Um, not exactly.

I'm not sure where exact comes into the picture when you use US data to talk about increasing typhoon activity (or the lack thereof) in Asia or globally. Irrelevant comes to mind.

So in your mind Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes have no correlation. OK. Go here:

http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php

Global data. Western Pacific ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) is still slightly below average for the year, and worldwide ACE is only about 75% of normal. Does that help?

Comment Re:can "do quantum mechanics" at school (Score 1) 71

No. The "wave function" is only tangentially related to the concept of whether light acts like a wave, a particle, or has some kind of duality. It is tangentially related only because as you dig into the quantum mechanical nature of the universe, you end up with this statistical function that we happen to use the word "wave" in its name.

Wow. In the words of Pauli, that is not even wrong.

First off, the wavefunction is not a statistical function. And "wavefunction" includes that "wave" word for a very good reason. You are, I suspect, perfectly capable of reading an introductory quantum mechanics text. You just have chosen not to and yet feel the need to spout nonsense as if you were an expert.

Comment Re:can "do quantum mechanics" at school (Score 1) 71

Neither the two-slit experiment nor the three-polarizing filters experiment show anything particularly quantum mechanical. Both would work just fine if light were a pure wave.

Umm.... isn't that what quantum mechanics is about? That everything can be described by a wavefunction (i.e. as a "pure wave?") Even if it weren't so, the three-polarizer experiment is an excellent demonstration of the counterintuitive properties of projections, which is key to understanding QM.

Comment Re:What did Fox News do? (Score 2) 330

The crime here is our news outlets have such blatant bias, and very little dedication to journalism and conveying the facts to the masses.

That has always been the case, the various news outlets' claims to the contrary notwithstanding. It doesn't bother me as much as the obvious willingness of people to abandon the First Amendment protections for a news source they don't agree with.

You'd think Slashdotters would be intelligent enough to separate the principle from the actors. Oh, wait. This is Slashdot. My bad.

Comment Re:college (Score 1) 448

Of course the answer is that this isn't really about the quality of teaching, it's about xenophobia.

Your mind-reading ability is astonishing! Somehow you are able to get into the minds of the people involved and you know their motivation! Have you ever considered running for office?

Actually, there is a very good psychological term for what you are doing here. It's called projection. Since you would do this from some xenophobic motivation, you assume that everyone else must, as well, since it's impossible to imagine people who think differently than you do.

Comment Re:Einstein replied "Check your measurements, son" (Score 3, Interesting) 1088

It's worth pointing out that the mass of neutrinos has never been directly measured. The "mass" to which we refer is the mass required for a mixing matrix between the neutrino flavors. A more exotic definition of "mass" would be required if the current experimental result were to hold, in such a way that neutrinos wouldn't have "mass" in the sense to which we refer today.

That's all speculative, of course, but the important point is, again, that the neutrino mass has never been directly measured. I know. I tried.

Comment Re:What kind of distance? (Score 1) 279

Been a long time since I looked into it. He may have a novel implementation of the Vicenty formulae. A computational geometry paper may publish it, but probably it is easier (and less burocratic) to do so on a smaller conference.

The Vincenty formula is just a truncated series expansion. it's fast and pretty stable except near antipodal points. It has plenty of accuracy for real-world applications. Any improvement would need to be in speed or in stability for antipodal points.

Earth

Breaking the Squid Barrier 126

An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Steve O'Shea of Auckland, New Zealand is attempting to break the record for keeping deep sea squid alive in captivity, with the goal of being able to raise a giant squid one day. Right now, he's raising the broad squid, sepioteuthis australis, from egg masses found in seaweed. This is a lot harder than it sounds, because the squid he's studying grow rapidly and eat only live prey, making it hard for them to keep the squid from becoming prey themselves. If his research works out, you might one day be able to visit an aquarium and see giant squid."

Comment Re:When... (Score 1) 599

Since real scientists don't use pejoratives like "denialist" in referring to those with whom they disagree, one is forced to conclude that you have not actually educated yourself at all, and that you are not interested in the science at all.

You might want to educate yourself a little more about science before posting nonsense like this.

Medicine

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."

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