Did you mean to reply to me? I'm a little confused by what you said. I can't connect my comment to your reply.

Yeah but practically all of the anti-vax people are fully vaccinated, because they had parents who weren't asshats. Darwinism wouldn't weed out the right individuals, although it would weed out their genetic lineages.

"then your only rational choice"

Aha, and therein lies the problem.

Awesome. Well done.

Today I had someone arguing that circumcision causes autism (I know, I know, but they said it). I told them circ rates are declining while autism rates are apparently rising. They said "Correlation does not imply causation!" and I scratched my head before saying "Yeah, but causation does imply correlation". They then went to special pleading, so I considered the point won.

"unless you set a 20 year alarm so you never forget a booster shot! "

So, go see a doctor at least four times during my adult life? That's a standard that I can meet. When you see a doctor, they check your immuno records. For those who don't currently see a doctor once every five Presidential terms, let's find a way to get them more medical care.

Your mom's womb is pretty darn sterile.

You've obviously never met his mom.

Yeah yeah. Certainly a good programmer who writes perfect code with faultless discipline can write C++ code with no memory leaks. I totally agree. But that is the rare case, not the common case. Or, at least, memory leaks are fairly common in C code. Memory leaks in C++ were the #1 most famous kind of bug. Memory leaks in Java are so rare that I can only think of one in fifteen years of programming -- and that one was long ago due to circular data structures which today are garbage collected.

The original claim was it's actually *easier* in Java/C# to leak memory which I claim is plainly wrong.

Do the antivax people have a thing with Jews?

Also: Today someone told me that circumcision causes autism. I laughed but they were serious.

good cite

You can't be serious.

If I 'never think about it' in C++, my memory will explode in no time. If I 'never think about it' in Java, then maybe in some cases eventually my memory might explode, perhaps. That's not what 'easier to leak in Java' means to me.

"Short term"? I guess so, for some very large values of "short".

But there is no such thing as a free market. Yet most people still agree that competition helps drive [pun] the economy.

Personally I have found Mendeley frustrating to use anyway. Seemed more interested in shiny features than working well. Wasn't very good at maintaining its bibtex file (which could be a problem using it with other programs) and expected you to have digital references only.

JabRef is a great multiplatform reference manager which combines excellently with Docear for writing a paper/thesis/dissertation (Docear lets you organize your references and annotations as part of your outline). I have also found it worth it to run PDF-XChange Viewer under WINE. It is unfortunately not open source but it supports any feature you can think of for annotating PDFs and integrates nicely (with a bit of non-windows setup) with Docear.

Zotero is another great reference manager. I have also heard good things about BibDesk (OS X only).

Tried technology... Funny, but I think you just nailed the problem. And it's more within the scope of philosophy of science than anything else. The point is: our civilisation still has no idea how to fund applied science.

There are three main areas of science. Two are well understood and funding for them is well organized. The third one, perhaps most interesting, is a big unknown from the management side.

Disclaimer: I'm looking at this from the other side of the pond and applying my local experience. I wish to do applied science but have no funding mechanisms available for that.

We know how to deal with basic science. You have an idea, a hypothesis, whatever, you want to research it. You have no idea whether it's useful for anything - it's not really important to you. OK! Show that it will expand our general knowledge in a meaningful way. Funding is generally civilian (through the government in most cases). The results are judged using your publications. If you can get published and others cite you, you have increased our knowledge, congrats. Someday someone may build something useful that would be impossible without your work. Cool. The hypothesis is the core.

We know how to deal with R&D. You have an idea how to do something well known better using new technology. Or something new, using known technology. Show that you have a good chance of succeeding, then you get the funding. You might get some funding from the government, from the military, commercial R&D also fit here. If it seems to be a likely success, you get the money. The funding is based on weighing ROI (or other metrics) against the risk of the project - higher, if the technology is new. You may fail, that's accepted, but the risk should be relatively low - you know what you are doing. The application is the core.

Then we have the applied science. You have an idea that some well grounded scientific theory might be useful for a certain application. There's nothing out there proving that yet. You want to find out whether your idea is right. The application is clear, the theoretical side is clear (you need a theory here, not just a hypothesis, otherwise it's basic science), but neither is the core. The risk of failure is very high - if you knew it will work it would be R&D - but you focus on the application, not just gathering knowledge, it might not be very publishable, it might not increase general knowledge much - so, not basic science either.

We have no idea how to fund and manage something like this. Even though this is the road towards real breakthroughs. R&D is only incremental. Basic science has no direct application. Applied science is what moves us ahead. The risktakers mostly lose, but the ones who succeed move us forward to the next era of technology.

In this case the Pentagon seems to have decided that R&D is unlikely to provide the required advantage. R&D is predictable. It is a part of the race between armor and weapon. Protection gets better, but threats develop as well. The only thing that could jump ahead is a radical new idea. Something new that would be very hard to counter. Applied science. But the Pentagon had no management tools, procedures, etc. to handle something like that. So, procedures aimed at R&D were used. A prototype was required from the start - wrong. The decision on whether to continue funding the project was delayed until a prototype could be tested - wrong again.

It is a far more general problem. We need to learn how to conduct applied science in a responsible way. How to create research milestones that make sense and that allow the project to be halted (without prejudice - as a sunk cost) as soon as it becomes obvious that the proposed approach does not show a good chance of success. There are counterexamples, but in general this is something we don't seem to be able to do in a consistent way.

That's the only reason the money could be called "wasted". It made perfect sense to try these approaches. But letting them go this far and generate such costs - that's a proof that management of this type of projects is an art we simply haven't grasped yet.

This is one of those things which would sound wholly reasonable if you weren't comparing the EXECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS for being homosexual to whether every smalltime shop is legally compelled to service their weddings. The former is so many orders of magnitude worse that I am amazed we are even making the comparison. Any influence a boycott can have in one of those countries is worth a thousand times what it can have here. In fact boycott or not I offer a decent person should avoid doing business in those countries just because of the sheer moral discomfort of being in any way remotely affiliated with them.