Economics is actually very much a science! They make empirical studies of the world, and test them to see if they hold up.

No, they make wooly models about how they believe the economy works, perform math which has terrible assumptions and overly huge margins of error, and pass it off as objective fact.

How you interpret economics is dependent on how you want to believe economics works. It is not an objective science in any sense of the word.

And it never has been.

Increasingly, some economists are starting to understand that a lot of their base assumptions are simply wrong.

Economics is a coarse model of human behavior with a zillion simplifying (and axiomatic) assumptions built into it.

I'm going with "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".

Which isn't so much a paranoid delusion, as it is a prevalent sentiment.

How can you say that and yet still buy such devices? It's not like one doesn't have a choice...

And how much crap is installed on Android you can't disable (or know is there) without rooting your phone?

How much crap on Windows phone? I bet you can neither disable nor know it's there.

Your BlackBerry?

So, please, tell us, how are Android, Windows or BlackBerry phones any better? Can you prove none of them has something similar?

I very much doubt you can.

You can choose to not have a device at all, but I have my doubts you can choose a phone which doesn't have similar security holes you know nothing about.

If it is sub-intelligent, then it might meet some definition of "life," but would have no impact on life here.

Oh yeah, what if they're tasty? Some Cerulian maple-bacon pig or something. ;-)

But, more importantly, if we find life on another planet (or wherever), of any form, intelligent or not, that in and of itself would have a huge impact on life here even if we couldn't get there.

Because the answer to "is there life anywhere else" will have been answered, and the people who loudly say there is only life on this planet will be proven wrong.

And, if we know there's like here, and then confirm there's life elsewhere ... given the size of the universe, you would more or less have to conclude that life is pretty widespread.

Even if it was unintelligent, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would be utterly monumental in a lot of different ways.

To me, I don't think you can overstate just how big of a deal that would be. Because it would be a complete game changer in a lot of ways, and lay rest to the notion that Earth is singularly unique in that regard.

I just don't see such a discovery having 'no impact'. Not even a little.

but I don't think we should rule out the possibility

Not only shouldn't we, we simply can't, because we have no way of knowing.

There is no scientifically valid way to rule out life forms which are unlike our own, because we don't know what they would require or thrive on.

The same as when people say "but why aren't we searching for life which is unlike us", the answer becomes "because we don't know how". There's no basis on which to conclude anything other than "well, we couldn't live there".

At best, we can say a planet is uninhabitable by us, but we really cannot say it is uninhabitable by life we can't even imagine and which is significantly different from what we know.

Anybody who tries to tell you there is no chance of life as we don't know it existing someplace is saying much more than they actually know.

Except subtraction existed long before we had the concept of negative numbers.

Gronk the caveman knew if he had two deer, and gave one to Grue, he had one deer. He most certainly wasn't adding -1 deer.

"Maths is a science"

Um, no. There's a reason why you get a BA in Math, not a BS.

Well, I'm going to call BS on that one.

I know numerous people with a BS in Mathematics. In fact, I have one. I've only seen the mathematics department as part of the science department, and I don't know anybody with a BA in mathematics.

If you are claiming mathematics isn't a science, then I'm going to say you're full of it.

You know what's not a science but uses a lot of math? Economics, which is 3 parts ideology and 1 part math.

In what way is String Theory testable or measurable?

As far as I understand, it's complete conjecture, exists outside of anything you could actually test ... and therefore fails the science test.

In some people's eyes. To other Ukrainians he was democratically elected and represented their views. Are you so sure that his pro-EU replacement was democratically elected? We only get part of the story here in the West, although I *hope* it's more honest/unbiased than the other side of the story.

Another way to look at it:

Reagan went from $1T to $3T = +200%
Bush Sr went from $3T to $6T = +100%
Clinton went from $6T to $5T = -17%
Bush Jr went from $5T to $11T = +120%
Obama went from $11T to $17T = +55%

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Or, the low-fi approach ... set a timer on your smart phone, or buy a dollar store timer, or just come back in an hour.

As nerdtacular as a dryer which talks to your phone via bluetooth (or whatever) sounds ... I'd rather not pay more for my next dryer in order to have this feature. Because for me it's utterly pointless.

There is no real need for this, it's just something which sounds like it might be cool.

It just sounds like technology for the sake of technology, and all "ZOMG, what did people do before the dryer called your phone?".

It's a solution in search of a problem.