In comparison, Sony's gross revenue was 77.46Bn USD last year.

How come "Ask Slashdot" posts always boil down to "give me some ammunition for an argument with my boss" ?

To the professors out there. Textbooks don't have to be so expensive. Dover has great titles for under $30. My analysis class was taught with a Dover book and a good teacher. Worked great and saved me who knows how many hundreds of dollars.

US-CERT does and so when an article is just copy-n-pasted from the cert notice the article does too.

Those clearly aren't life forms. Otherwise we might as well just declare the hydrogen atom the dominant form of life in the universe.

And anyway the bacteria that most likely accompanied Curiosity to Mars outnumber the robots on Mars. Of course they might not have survived the trip and would be dormant (though that's more alive than a rover.)

Microorganisms dominate Earth. It's all ridiculous "make shit up" speculation, but it seems reasonable that microorganisms would dominate other places that have life. Obviously its not proof, but you only asked for evidence. microorgnisms dominate known life in the Universe, surely the burden for evidence is on those claiming that the rest of the universe is different than the bit we have observed.

If you are talking about intelligent life engaging in interstellar space travel then sure, computer brains are more likely than biological life assuming our current understanding of physics is vaguely similar to reality but that's a different thing than the "dominant form of life in the Universe".

 

FTFY

it must really bother you that the ozone layer is recovering after a global effort to fix it, huh. I mean really, it impinges on the ultra-wealthy to do whatever they want, and that's a bad thing to the likes of you...society saying enough is enough on issues that effect everyone? Horrible, it should be the 0.1% making those decisions! (misdirection is such a fun tool, eh?)

um, there can be varying degrees of something. Just because two people are attractive, for instance, doesn't mean they're equally attractive. Outright refusing to engage in honest debate however, does make someone something other than a skeptic; with so much actual data painting a relatively clear picture, if you're going to say that picture is something else then... The foundations of statistics are based on the idea that if a pattern emerges with very little deviation - very few outliers in the data - then you can be very certain (to some degree) of the conclusion. If you're going to deny the very process itself, versus the results, then we have to throw away most of what we know - not just climate change.

were I to show data that average temps on Mars increased during generally about the same time range, I could point to the cause being external (ie, something with the Sun). Thus it wouldn't be anything humans were doing. That (were there facts to back it up) would be an example of actual skepticism. Covering your eyes and yelling "I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALA" is not.

Some movie theaters backed down not Sony.

Sony of course then cancelled the release - they're pretty dumb but even they can work out that releasing your movie with a bunch of the large chains not showing it is a sure fire way to bomb at the box office. The reason for those chains not showing the movie is irrelevant to that decision.

How does that stop you using * and ? in a file name. How does that stop you using "Character 255" in a filename?

It does of course stop you using utf8 filenames.

So why can't they properly take into account time?

Because the original set up may be buried in time. You find a wind-turbine turning, the wind is blowing. Merely by measuring the speed of each how can you tell which came first? (Yes, I know ... you compare the noise profile of the respective data sets.)

But now back to dwelling exclusively on the potential problems without acknowledging any even limited usefulness of this methodology might have ...

Would you give yourself a 99% confidence interval, or only a 95%?

The question of the different criteria used in different fields of research is itself a social science question. Using OP's own criteria, they would require only 95% confidence. Obvious ... no?

[I]t deserves a more accurate headline: new statistical test can form confidence bounds for how unlikely a it would be for a new parameter to be of this magnitude if there were causation: when combined with existing test it may discredit more potential claims of causation than previously practical.

Did you really need to give it such an obviously click-baity title?

Although "suggest" is far from a confident prediction, I agree Mann is overstating the case made in the paper he cites for the claim "models suggest more frequent and intense storms in a warmed world."

However that paper cited is itself very interesting --and thanks for bringing my attention to it! It's by Kerry Emmanuel, who was one of the joint authors in that Knutson et al. (2010) I cited above --which given the range of expert opinion (ie. from Emmanuel all the way to the sceptic Chris Landsea) carries some gravitas.

What Emmanuel is doing here is "downscaling" (which is to insert more localised modelling into the global model), a technique which has been shown with regard to temperatures, to have given results which more closely match recent short-term trends (for which reason alone they are not to be preferred over long-term global models). I've not had time to study this paper in detail (I suggest you might, along with the earlier Knutson paper), but applying this technique apparently gives a different result from that of the raw global models with increases in both frequency as well as intensity. However, we must not fall victim to latest paper syndrome, I doubt this is the last word on longer-term prediction regarding tropical storm formation and intensity. I'd like to see what Landsea's team makes of this for a start. But an interesting paper nonetheless, thanks.

The reason I suggest you ought to shy away from blogs, opinion pieces and interviews in favour of the actual science as published in reputable scholarly journals, should be clear when you measure the loose language that is thrown around on those fora as compared to the mathematical accuracy required of real science. This is obvious from the previous Mann article you cite, e.g. what "if I were a betting man," (is that a serious scientific prediction or just a "vibe"), means rather vague.

If you want a serious understanding of the current science, -- if you want to know if Cook, Mann, or Watts and Mcintyre for that matter, are straying from the bona fide science; if you want something better than some filtered mythological view of the science --you have little choice but to do the hard yards and read actual papers.

Merry Christmas!