I would suspect alcohol also has an undesirable effect on high school graduation rates.

In the first link he says to get vaccinated; and he's only wrong if you look at it from a libertarian political perspective. In the second he says that TV weathermen should once in a while mention that a heavy storm is "consistent" with climate change (not "caused by"). That's a typical denier tactic is to imply that since we don't know which individual storms were worsened by climate change, then we can safely say that none of them were. That's exactly what Marsha Blackburn said in that video.

Actually I don't think this characterizes Nye's position at all (and the article summary sucks BTW). On a show with him, Marsha Blackburn said that "I think that Bill would probably agree with this, neither he nor I am a climate scientist. He is an engineer and actor, and I am a member of Congress, and what we have to do is look at the information we get from climate scientists." He responded that "you don't need a PhD in climate science to understand what's going on". It seems a distortion to say that he thinks "only the high priests of science should be allowed to say anything," only that you need to be scientifically literate.

You originally said that to be consistent, if I shout down someone who says X is true, I should also shout down someone who says X is false. I didn't need to bring up "authority" at all to point out what a dumb statement that was.

BTW, this was also wrong:

Consensus is part of the scientific method. You come up with a theory, test it with an experiment, publish your conclusion, and subject it to peer review where it may or may not gain consensus.

I assume you're talking about this.

That "petition" was a hoax.

"The simpleton's theory is usually correct."

Yes, be consistent... if you shout down people who are wrong, you should also shout down people who are right.

A few weeks ago I had my dog on a bike harness and we were cycling / galloping down a street in Salt Lake City (about 15 mph). Some guy was yakking on his phone and obliviously started wandering backwards off the curb into an intersection while facing 180 degrees away. I slammed on the brakes (along with someone driving a car) and my dog's leash broke off its safety hitch since he'd made a split second decision to pass the guy on his right side. The dude turned around and said, "what the hell [can't you see I'm on the phone here]?" This was in Salt Lake City; I didn't know he could have been fined $50. Although around here, they ticket cyclists for not having their bikes registered. The rules for driving in Utah are shocking to anyone from out-of-state; they were apparently written for demolition derby. I've seen safer driving in Mad Max movies. You have right of way if you think someone can slam on their brakes and leave streaks in the road without T-boning your ass. (I guess you have to, since you can never see around the guy next to you straddling the crosswalk with his Ford F300.) I'm always seeing drivers holding phones against their heads and gesticulating with their other hand to people who aren't physically present, instead of actually touching the steering wheel. (And I won't say much about the baby strollers around here, except that they're often going side-by-side in formation.)

Someone needs to sue these dicks- if I had to repair my computer for national security reasons because of someone's incompetent malfeasance, I would want to get paid for the time wasted. If you're a lawyer specializing in class action suits, this warning from the DHS is like a Superfish on a platter!

An electrical outlet is not at the boundary of a closed thermodynamic system. With an electric car, the waste heat is produced at the power plant before the energy is converted to electricity and sent on its way to you in the first place. In general heating is a wasteful use of electricity; if your utility burns fossil fuels to generate power, you'll have a lower carbon footprint from heating something with oil or gas than with electricity. That waste heat can go into your house or car instead of the air above a cooling tower miles away.

Don't buy their stock, and don't get in a car with one of their drivers.

What a pity this wasn't discovered sooner... Skyler White could have asked Saul Goodman to hire his Eastern European hacker again to launder Walt's meth money through that car wash using HTTP GET requests.

You're not supposed to do any heavy back-end work with node itself; it can handle simple database interactions and streaming etc. but anything that requires serious computation is supposed to be forked off to a separate process. Unfortunately it encourages misuse by providing a toehold for JavaScript programmers to start worming their way deeper into server processing.

This is why I love Slashdot- just make an offhand analogy to something like airplane patents in a story about patent trolls, and eventually half the comments on the page are about airplanes. Can we just add "flying machines" to the tag list?

Maybe because they were nomadic.