They supposedly waited all those years for the right script to come along.

But it seems like a kind of superficial gimmick. And most SF doesn't deliver any culture at all - art, music, religion, politics, etc - unless it directly relates to the plot.

What we need is someone who will do for SF what Tolkien did for fantasy.

+1, wooshie

That's an open question, but we certainly aren't going to create it by running current applications on ever-faster computers. The singularity is an ignorant fantasy.

"If the shooting in Ferguson was captured on video there would have been no protests."

I would say that that is wishful thinking for Ferguson and other cases like it.

The different eyewitnesses reported seeing different things. And that's what with video evidence as well: People with a negative view of the police will interpret it one way, people with a negative view of the race/class/culture/dress/whatever of the perpetrator will interpret it another way. One person sees police brutality, another person sees justifiable use of force. What we perceive is theory-laden.

In many of the cases the video evidence will only harden people's points of views and make people more extreme because they will simply not understand how the other side can "ignore" the "truth" when it is right there on the video.

It has won't be being so hard after you has will have been being studying it more.

Or as Yoda would say it, it so hard after you studying it more has will have been being has won't be being.

has won't be = periphrastic perfect future passive contrafactual modal participular infinitival indicative of "is"

Change you name to Kim Putin, and no one will mess with you.

Broke and his defense team quit without explanation. Can't imagine any connection there, eh?

Uhm, you're supposed to notice this before you sign, not after you go bankrupt.

Sorry, the limit is 1 conspiracy theory per post.

Source of my .sig.

Another team tried it with Star Wars discs and coundn't reproduce the effect.

That's just deflection. Grayson still wrote about Depression Quest and Zoe Quinn with no disclosure of the conflict of interest. That's a lack of journalistic ethics. It would never be allowed for example at the New York Times or any other respectable newspaper. The article is still up, it's right here: http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indi...

For comparison, let me quote to you from the New York Times Ethical Journalism handbook, which all journalists must follow in order to remain employed there:
"Clearly, romantic involvement with a news source would foster
an appearance of partiality. Therefore staff members who develop
close relationships with people who might figure in coverage they
provide, edit, package or supervise must disclose those relationships
to the standards editor, the associate managing editor for news
administration or the deputy editorial page editor." (p. 9)

Did Grayson do anything comparable? No. And why would he? Kotaku has no comparable ethical standards!

He meant about this matter. He is also wrong.

He is wrong because he makes the mistake that a finding of no statistically significant result means the result doesn't provide evidence.

To see this is wrong imagine you initially thought people were probably (but not certainly) likely to react to these pictures in a racist way. Scientists perform larger and larger surveys never surveying every person but failing to find any statistically significant difference with arbitrarily large populations (assume for simplicity there is an arbitrarily large number of humans). No matter how likely you found the question initially at some point you will find the result so improbable if the claim is true that it provides enough evidence to reject the claim.

Statistical significance is a trick for giving a gauge of how persuasive you should find the result given your priors. Since different people have different priors it's not usually useful to assume a certain prior probability distribution of results, e.g., the probability that people are at least X% more likely to judge a black woman negatively when breastfeeding. So we tell people the significance of a study and if they want to know how it affects their beliefs they figure out just how surprising a result of that kind with that level of statistical significance is on their model if the claim is true and if it is false. Theoretically they could apply bayes theorem to that...in practice we use a more heuristic approach. To see this has to be true note that no study will shift your belief if you think it is already true with probability 1 or 0.

Then again this is almost impossible to teach in a full year stat course so few people who don't already know this are likely to understand.