How many papers can we find that have been rejected because all the authors are male?

I wouldn't be surprised if it had happened, but I don't remember reading of any examples. Maybe it's my forgetful male memory? ;-)

In any case, can anyone cite other examples (in either direction)? If they exist, it might be interesting to look into the stories.

Indeed, though there is often a more insidious effect. Suppose there's a claim that treatment T is effective for medical condition C, but it's actually a "placebo effect". If one study showed a (perhaps small) effect, and other studies showing no effect aren't published, a lot of money can be made selling T to customers. If the true negative results are published, the makers (and prescribers) of T lose that income.

This is one of many reasons for the low level of publishing "negative" results. Another reason is linguistic: In English and most other human languages, it's hard to make a clear distinction between "Our study showed no effect" and "Our study didn't show any effect". Most listeners won't hear a difference between negating the object and negating the verb, and the media frequently reports the former as the latter. Managers of scientific organizations are as prone to this problem as the rest of us are. "We want studies that show results, not studies that don't."

And, of course, there's the general cultural resistance to "negativity". This easily explains why many pseudo-scientific beliefs persist centuries after they've been disproved.

An even more widespread problem is that there are a lot of true negatives that aren't in the literature.

Of course, this is a problem in most scientific fields, not just the "soft sciences" like psychology. I'm occasionally impressed by a researcher who publishes descriptions of things studied and found to be not significant, but this doesn't happen very often.

This has been understood for some time. As others have mentioned, various military orgs have used teams with varied color vision as a way of "seeing through" camouflage. Biologists have suggested that the variety in human color vision is adaptive, giving our hunting ancestors' teams an improved chance of spotting spotting prey against various backgrounds, and the addition of dogs (with their very different color vision from ours) improved this teamwork. This is all hypothetical, though, since (as far as I know) it hasn't actually been tested scientifically.

Back in high school (in the 60s), I had a science teacher who did a good illustration of it all. He made the usual demo of a spectrum using a prism, on a sheet of white paper. Then he had students come up and mark the visible ends of the spectrum, covering up each student's marks with another sheet of paper before the next student made their marks. The result was two columns of dots that didn't line up at all; their variants was around 10% of the width of the spectrum. I'd made marks that I could identify, and saw that my UV mark was right at the average point, while my IR mark was one of the farthest out. This explained some things I'd already noticed about the ways that different people saw colors.

This has been known to the photography industry since color film was first produced. Different varieties of film (and now CCDs) have different sensitivities, and different photographers have different preferences for brands of film based on this.

One of my funny personal anecdotes on the topic was once (in Jr High, as I recall), I asked some visitors why the front-left panel of their car was a different color than the rest of the car. They gave me a funny look, then said the car was all black, which everyone else present agreed with. I objected that only that one panel was black; the rest of the car was a deep red. This got me more funny looks, and the fellow who owned the car said that the car had been in a minor accident that damaged the front-left panel, so it was replaced. After that, my family thought I had something called "black-red color blindness" (which is odd, because I was actually the only one without that defect ;-). I was taken to an optometrist, who verified the "condition", but assured my parents that it wasn't a significant problem, and didn't need treating. Actually, there was a simple treatment: glasses that block near-IR light, and I've accidentally got several sunglasses that do just that, making for oddly muted reds.

As I got more into photography, I eventually noticed that my eyes have slightly different color vision, with things looking slightly bluer in the left eye and slightly redder in the right eye. This seems to be extremely common, actually, though most people don't notice it until it's mentioned and they start trying to spot it in different lighting condition. (Hint: It's often easier to spot in lower-light conditions, and difficult in full sunlight.)

Oh, I dunno; a number of fiction writers are probably going to use it as a model for some characters, and then having fun pointing out that they're a realistic interpretation of something that has in fact lived on Earth. A conventional alternate-universe plot would put their intelligent descendants in contact with us weird primates, who never developed on their world because their ancestors ate all the primates.

Or with this well-known one about the absurdities of English spelling:

Yeah; I once worked in a lab that had a bunch of those. The blazes did a lot of damage to the lab. Myself, I'd prefer a machine that runs cool, especially one that's in my hand or lap, or is left running unattended on a shelf. Sometimes those marketing slogans backfire ... ;-)

Well, I've been using both linux and Mac for 15 years or so, and I'd found that Macs are often even more frustrating than linux (or other unixoid systems). Thus, when my earlier Macbook Pro was dying, I got a new one with the fancy new "Retina" display. It supposedly had twice the resolution (4x the pixels) as my older Macbook, but it was configured to mimic a tiny screen (or one with giant pixels ;-). It took me several months of googling, tweaking, swearing, etc. to stumble across useful info for reconfiguring it so I can now get 6 usable Terminal windows on the screen, though with slightly fewer rows and columns than the old one gave. I'm sure it can do better, but I've become resigned to the idea that this is probably the best it can do with its marvelous hi-res display. Much of the frustration, of course, is that questions on Mac forums tend to get oh-so-friendly answers that might be summarized as "Don't worry your pretty little head about it; It Just Works." You do get a bit of this from the linux crowd, but there are also folks who like to show off their knowledge to noobs, so if you act like a noob, they give you useful information, and further details if you don't understand something.

The main frustration with linux systems is that it has been difficult to get them with hi-res displays. I've read a number of explanations of why this is. My pocket "smart phone" has as many pixels as the big screen on my home linux box; we should be able to get laptops with about the same resolution and thus many more pixels. OTOH, the linux laptops I've used have come out of the box with the software using the the screen's full resolution, so if you have good eyes, you don't waste time hunting down instructions on how to turn off the "accessibility" stuff.

YMMV, of course; different people have different kinds of knowledge and interests. Marketing aside, there never has been any such thing as a "general purpose computer".

Yeah; methinks we're seeing the symptoms of a serious humo[u]r deficiency here. These things have a long history in the English-speaking world. Many of us are quite aware of the ridiculocities that can easily be found in the English language, and a lot of humo[u]rists have gotten audiences laughing by mocking some of the stupider things in our language. This especially applies to the irregular plurals, which of course are derived from plural forms that were once regular (and still are in German), but which became relics a millennium or so back when our ancestors settled on just the -[e]s as the plural marker, but stubbornly insisted on keeping a few hundred of the old plurals around to confuse children and foreigners.

Maybe we should collect a list of links to some of the humorous things that have been written on the topic, and refer people to the list when they post complaints like we've been seeing here. Anyone wanna take on the task?

FTFY. ;-)

A number of people have voiced that idea here an elsewhere, but it's a bit of an odd argument. Saying that climate research should only be done on Earth is a case of basing all your science on a single case study. But if we really want to understand climate, we should be studying all the atmospheres that are available to us, not just this one planet's atmosphere. And historically, NASA has been a major launcher of space probes, especially those aimed at other planets.

We even have an excellent near-twin of our planet close at hand: Venus is very nearly the same size at Earth, but has a climate that would be instantly fatal to nearly every living thing on Earth. Now, obviously Venus's temperature is partly due to being closer to the sun, but simple physical calculations show that the equilibrium temperatures of Venus and Earth should be much more similar than they are. So most of the different has to be for reasons other than solar input and radiative loss. We understand some of this, but not everything, and somehow I don't think we'll fully understand Venus's climate by restricting our climate research to just our own planet.

It's also interesting that Mars has a climate that is more similar to Earth's than Venus's, though it has the additional difference of lower gravity, resulting in much less atmosphere. Again, NASA has been directly involved in nearly everything we've learned about the Martian climate until fairly recently.

Anyway, I for one would encourage NASA to continue to be involved in climate studies, not just here on Earth, but on all the available worlds that have climates. Basing our behavior on a "sample of one" isn't a very intelligent approach. If we really want to understand how climates work, we should be collecting data from all of the available atmospheres. We really don't want our climate to shift in the direction of Venus or Mars, after all, and the best way to prevent that is to learn why they're the way they are and why ours is different. Historically, NASA has been a major player in what we have learned about the subject.

On the contrary; the lack of (legally enforceable) rules is one of the major reasons that English has become the world's main language for most technical uses.

Some years back, I read a good explanation of this by a French researcher, who explained why he published all his papers in English rather than French, and why his group in France used English as their "working" language. His explanation was that, in French, l'Académie Française is the government body in Paris that has the power to set and enforce the standards for the French language. The problem is that in his specialty, as in any technical specialty, it's important that the specialty develop a body of precise technical terms that is clearly understood by the others in the specialty. The major way of doing this is normally to take terms in the general language, and restrict their meaning in the technical jargon. Secondarily, words may be borrowed from other language, or new terms just made up. However, in French the Académie has the legal power to override them, declare their papers to be nonstandard French, block their publication, etc. This potentially makes it difficult for the specialists to develop a precise, unambiguous terminology that they all understand. Government bureaucrats who don't understand the specialty have veto power of their technical terminology.

The English language, however, has no such legal body in any country. This gives English-using researchers, theoreticians, engineers, etc. to discuss issues amongst themselves, and develop their technical jargon as their subject requires. New discoveries can lead to changes in terminology without the permission of the bureaucrats. So, for effective communication among specialists in a technical field, English gives them the freedom to develop jargon that fits their needs, and revise their terminology as the need arises.

If English (most likely of the American variety ;-) were to establish an enforceable set of rules, it would end this technical usefulness, and would eventually push for a shift to a different language without such restrictions.

The followups to this explanation included a number of comments from people with lots of other native language, who all basically agreed with the writer, and said that their field did the same thing.

(OTOH, I had a math prof in college who learned Rumanian, because about half the people in his specialty were in Romania, and published their preliminary papers locally in their native language. They published their main papers in English, but he wanted to follow their local discussions. He already read French and Italian, so it wasn't difficult to pick up a new "degenerate Latin" language. There are a number of other subject areas that have similar situations. Others here can probably comment on other fields with a similar mix of English and one or more local languages.)

The bad news is that, even if the court allows the case to proceed, and they win, the NSA will simply ignore the court's decision and continue their work. They're above (or beside or in a parallel universe to) the legal system.

The only real way to fight them is to find ways to expose their activities to the rest of the world. There are some technical problems with doing this effectively, such as jailing or assassination of outside investigators.

(Is there a documented, verifiable case of any "secret" government organization being limited by the courts, in the US or any other country? Yes, I've read claims that it has happened. But note that term "verifiable". Someone writing an article claiming that it has happened isn't exactly verification. ;-)

Actually, there's at least one known population of humans that expect to benefit from rising sea level: the people of Scandinavia. That part of the world is still bobbing up from the loss of the ice sheets 18,000 years ago. Historically, the shorelines have been falling by about a meter per century. This causes ongoing problems, mostly due to ports turning into dry land. A few years back, I was in Finland and visited a historic site called Mustasaari ("black island"). It's not an island at all; it's about 10 km from the water. In 1600, it was an active port, and around 1350 it probably was an island. By 1700, the town was abandoned, reverting to forest and farmland, and the newer town of Vaasa somewhat to the west had taken over as the local port. Sometimes the ports can migrate downslope, but often the shoreline change doesn't allow that, and the town just dies, as the people move to some other area that's friendlier to their boats. Every port town in the area has always had to face the fact that all their investments in port facitlities, buildings, roads, etc. will become worthless in a few generations.

So one source of humor in that area is based on how good "global warming" sounds. They'll not just be warmer, but their towns will stay put for longer, and you can pass your land and buildings on to your children. So far, the effect has been small, but supposedly measurable. The sea level will probably be nearly stable this century, though geologists predict that in another millenium or two, the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic Sea will be reduced to a set of smaller lake connected to the sea by a river.

Along most other shorelines, the story is rather different, of course.

(I've also read reports on the new species arriving on the Antarctic Peninsula. ;-)