Insofar as that statement isn't gibberish (that is: not very far) it's anti-science.

Here's a question for you: is it a "scientific fact" that the impact of an extraterrestrial body occurred at the KT boundary and cause the mass extinction associated with that world-wide discontinuity in the geological record?

A fair majority of scientists concerned with the question certainly think so. But there are some notable hold-outs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

People whose area of expertise is directly relevant to the question at hand, who bring up cogent if not compelling counter-arguments, alternative interpretations of the evidence, facts that appear to be in contradiction to the impact theory, and so on.

Yet they don't have a crowd of anti-scientific loud-mouths calling them "Denialists" or accusing them of being shills for "Big Paleontology."

They sometimes get into heated discussions at scientific meetings, but that's the way science works: there is no limit on the questions we can ask and if we have evidence and Bayesian argument we get a seat at the table, no matter how wigged out the ideas might seem ab initio.

Only in the area of AGW has the arena become a completely political one, where anti-scientific loudmouths compete with shills for Big Hydrocarbon, and everyone ignores the serious question, which is: given its almost certain human activity is adding about 0.25% to the Earth's energy budget (1.6 W/m**2) and we have almost no idea how the climate will respond to that (despite what climatologists sometimes claim about their unphysical models) how do we best respond?

There is a loud and well-funded contingent who believe in "abstinence only" solutions, despite those having failed in every other case they have been applied to (drugs, alcohol, contraception...)

There are green-energy people promoting solar, wind, algal biodeisel, biomass, and other carbon-neutral forms of energy generation and storage.

There are people working on better battery tech (Heinlein's "shipstones").

There are people saying we should seriously consider nuclear power as the only currently known working alternative to base-load coal.

There are people saying we should investigate geo-engineering to stablize CO2 levels.

And there are people saying that since we don't know what is going to happen we should do nothing (see: Shills for Big Hydrocarbon, above)

All of that important stuff in the middle gets drowned out by the anti-scientific loud-mouths and bullies allied with the first and last of those groups, who do nothing but spew gibberish like "climate change is a scientific fact" as if that added something to the debate rather than helped to quell the debate we should be having.

"Scientific literacy" is not or should not be knowledge of discoveries, but a willingness to practice the discipline (not method) that is science: the discipline of testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference. If you aren't practicing that discipline, you are almost certainly an enemy of science, because that is the natural state of the human mind.

I use Python both professionally and for fun (and C and C++ professionally) and don't get this impression at all. Major upgrades to shipped languages take time. The willingness to impose one-time incompatible changes for the sake of long-term improvements takes guts, and can certainly go wrong, but can very well be worth it.

As someone who worked in C and C++ pre-standardization, I recall (perhaps erroneously) that the new standards broke a fair bit of existing code, albeit in minor ways. And of course Microsoft's broken C++ compiler in Visual Studio 6 resulted in a vast amount of borken code when they finally caught up to the rest of the world.

That said, I haven't moved to Python 3 yet, although I believe all the libraries I really care about have now migrated. I tend toward late-adoption, though, and my sense of the Python community is that everyone accepts we are eventually going to move to 3. Big changes take years, so it's no surprise that lots of developers are still on 2.x. The real watershed will be when a few major libs (wxPython, say) drops 2.x support.

In contrast, my impression of Perl 6 is that it's the language of the future, and always will be. It appears so different from Perl 5 that it's a little weird the same name is being used, and it has mostly resulted in sucking the oxygen out of Perl 5 development.

Reading between the lines, it looks like it is a thin layer of mixed carbon and hydrogen with a structure that they have not yet properly characterized but which they have shown has the properties required for transparent electrodes in solar cells.

Specifically, they say the properties of the layer can be controlled by the properties of the polymer they start with, which suggests that it partakes in the polymer's nature, which would mean it is more than just a single layer of carbon atoms.

They may be being cautious and simply saying it is "graphene-like-enough" for this application, but having not fully characterized it may not want to claim it is "truly" graphene, which is a fairly vague term for a variety of single-sheet carbon materials that may have a variety of defects, in just the same was as "paper" is also fairly vague (from tissue to construction.)

https://github.com/kogmbh/WebO...

I like Dojo in part because it attempts to make all the core widgets accessible. From:
http://dojotoolkit.org/referen...
"Dojo has made a serious commitment to creating a toolkit that allows the development of accessible Web applications for all users, regardless of physical abilities. The core widget set of Dojo, dijit, is fully accessible since the 1.0 release, making Dojo the only fully accessible open source toolkit for Web 2.0 development. This means that users who require keyboard only navigation, need accommodations for low vision or who use an assistive technology, can interact with the dijit widgets."

No, but Rpy can.

I've used R, and it really has a lot of strong points, but I prefer to access it these days via Rpy, which gives me all the power of R along with everything else I get from Python (other libraries, better application development frameworks, etc.)

Both R and Python are real programming languages that are going to be completely useless to non-programmers, so neither of them is a SAS replacement, but of the two, I'd choose Python+Rpy over R for flexibility, power and ease of use (the latter is of course a strongly personal preference... if you really think like a traditional stats geek R will likely seem nicer, as it is clearly created for and by such people.)

"Variety" is probably a better word than "race" or "species". The "biological species concept" is extremely poorly defined, which is a bit of an embarrassment for a field largely based on a book called "The Origin of Species".

Like all concepts, the boundaries of a "species" are fuzzy, and the only really precise dividing line is the attention of the knowing subject. In many cases this is unprobelmatic: almost any knowing subject looking at the same population would draw the edges between species in the same way. There are, however, many cases where different people will draw different edges for different purposes.

Again: this is no different from any other concept, although people who don't get out much will often insist that the edges they choose to draw by an act of selective attention are "real" and everyone else's are "wrong".

In the extreme case, in the plant world, ubiquitous hybridization results in populations that are practically all genetically unique individuals, and the species concept breaks down entirely.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition. ...
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
    It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus. ..."

So, the academics you knew were from before the "Big Crunch". Such people advised me, from their success, and meaning well, to get a PhD. But the world I faced was post-Big-Crunch and so their advice did not actually make much sense (although it took me a long time to figure that out).

More related links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

From: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
---
Why does anyone think science is a good job?

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.

Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. ...

Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.

Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India.
---

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"This was a 4-y, population-based, double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial. The primary outcome was fracture incidence, and the principal secondary outcome was cancer incidence."

Eating a lots of vegetables and fruits and mushrooms can also reduce cancer risk (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's summary works like "Eat To Live" with many references). I've found by eating more fruits and vegetables that my skin tone has changed from pale to having more color (even in winter). Adequate iodine can also help prevent cancer.

Reducing risk of incidence is not the same as cure though. Sorry to hear about you father getting cancer. Once you get cancer, everything is iffy, so cancer is best avoided preventatively. Fasting may also help in some cancer situations, and it also helps with chemotherapy by protecting cells from the toxic chemicals (since fasting seems to causes many normal cells to go into a safe survival mode but cancer cells generally do not). And eating better may hope prevent recurrence. In general, the human body is always developing cancerous cells, but generally they are dealt with by the immune system. So boosting the immune system could help with some cancers and there are many ways to do that -- but again, it is all iffy once cancer is established.

See also for other ideas:
http://science-beta.slashdot.o...

I agree supplements and natural sunlight are probably better choices than tanning beds --although there may still be unknowns about how the skin reacts to sun or tanning beds and produces many compounds vs. supplements. I also agree conventional tanning beds are not tuned to give lots of vitamin D.That is unfortunate, even if they produce some. See also about other tanning choices (and supplement suggestions):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
"If you choose to use a tanning bed, the Vitamin D Council recommends using the same common sense you use in getting sunlight. This includes:
Getting half the amount of exposure that it takes for your skin to turn pink.
Using low-pressure beds that has good amount of UVB light, rather than high-intensity UVA light."

BTW, if you look into chemotherapy for cancer, for many cancers you'll find it is of questionable value relative to the costs both in money and suffering, where is on average may add at most a couple months of life on average if that. Chemotherapy can apparently even sometimes make cancer worse:
http://www.nydailynews.com/lif...
"The scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B which boosts cancer cell survival."

It's hard to know who to trust regarding medical research results or interpretations:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"

Good luck sorting it all out. I've suggested creating better tools for medical sensemaking, but still not time to work on them...

While you make a good point, nutrition works right now (along with exercise, good sleep, a less stressful lifestyle, avoiding hazards like smoking, community connectedness, and so on like in "Blue Zones"). The rest of life extension is just a hope that maybe we can create new technologies. Also, for most people, if they can make it in good health to 100+ years old via such well-proved things, they will then be around for more breakthroughs in the next 50+ years.

Also, probably most invasive life extension technologies for extreme longevity could also be turned into biological weapons (like rewriting DNA or reorganizing the brain). So, we may end up with technologies that could allow people to live in good health for 1000s of years, have any skin color or nose shape they want, and people will use them to kill off everyone else that has a different skin color or nose shape then they currently have (which would be very sadly ironic). Improved nutrition does not have that existential risk associated with it for the most part.

http://www.corporatecrimerepor...

Fines or imprisoning CEOs do little to change the pattern of relationships and values and policies that make an organization what it is, any more than a human body loosing some skill cells or even brain cells usually changes how a person behaves very much.

Seriously, why should any corporate communications have any expectation of privacy? Corporations with "limited liability" are chartered for the public interest. 150 years ago, US Americans put such creatures on very short leashes because they had seen what trouble resulted from big British corporations in the American colonies. Individuals have now lost pretty much all informational privacy due to large corporations and the current internet. Why should bigger more powerful creatures than humans like corporation have more privacy in practice than humans? See also David Brin's "The Transparent Society". Any argument that corporations need privacy (like for salaries or payments for services) for some sort of commercial advantage is trumped by the public interest in understanding what corporations are doing and also that if all corporations were transparent there would be a level playing field. Granted, it would require new ways of doing business, but books like "Honest Business" also extol the value of "open books". Or perhaps corporations should be forced to choose -- if they want limited liability for shareholders then they need to be transparent; if every shareholder accepts full responsibility for all actions of the organization, then they can have privacy?

And see also my comments from 2000, the relevant section copied below (sadly a lot of links there have rotted):
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

========= machine intelligence is already here =========

I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope
for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like
the duckweed, to create human (and other) life faster than other forces
can destroy it. [Well, I now in 2014 think there are also other options, like symbiosis, maybe friendly AI, and in general trying to be nicer to each other like with a basic income in hopes that leads to a happier singularity...]

Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component --
in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate
machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense
of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous
Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought".
    http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/
You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing
case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt"
their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival.

These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better
machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more
resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely
revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that
corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that
decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the
political/social process of its own ends).
    http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
Corporate charters are granted supposedly because society believe it is
in the best interest of *society* for corporations to exist.

But, when was the last time people were able to pull the "charter" plug
on a corporation not acting in the public interest? It's hard, and it
will get harder when corporations don't need people to run themselves.
    http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
    http://www.adbusters.org/campa...

I'm not saying the people in corporations are evil -- just that they
often have very limited choices of actions. If a corporate CEOs do not
deliver short term profits they are removed, no matter what they were
trying to do. Obviously there are exceptions for a while -- William C.
Norris of Control Data was one of them, but in general, the exception
proves the rule. Fortunately though, even in the worst machines (like in
WWII Germany) there were individuals who did what they could to make
them more humane ("Schindler's List" being an example).

Look at how much William C. Norris http://www.neii.com/wnorris.ht... of
Control Data got ridiculed in the 1970s for suggesting the then radical
notion that "business exists to meet society's unmet needs". Yet his
pioneering efforts in education, employee assistance plans, on-site
daycare, urban renewal, and socially-responsible investing are in
part what made Minneapolis/St.Paul the great area it is today. Such
efforts are now being duplicated to an extent by other companies. Even
the company that squashed CDC in the mid 1980s (IBM) has adopted some of
those policies and directions. So corporations can adapt when they feel
the need.

Obviously, corporations are not all powerful. The world still has some
individuals who have wealth to equal major corporations. There are
several governments that are as powerful or more so than major
corporations. Individuals in corporations can make persuasive pitches
about their future directions, and individuals with controlling shares
may be able to influence what a corporation does (as far as the market
allows). In the long run, many corporations are trying to coexist with
people to the extent they need to. But it is not clear what corporations
(especially large ones) will do as we approach this singularity -- where
AIs and robots are cheaper to employ than people. Today's corporation,
like any intelligent machine, is more than the sum of its parts
(equipment, goodwill, IP, cash, credit, and people). It's "plug" is not
easy to pull, and it can't be easily controlled against its short term
interests.

What sort of laws and rules will be needed then? If the threat of
corporate charter revocation is still possible by governments and
collaborations of individuals, in what new directions will corporations
have to be prodded? What should a "smart" corporation do if it sees
this coming? (Hopefully adapt to be nicer more quickly. :-) What can
individuals and governments do to ensure corporations "help meet
society's unmet needs"?

Evolution can be made to work in positive ways, by selective breeding,
the same way we got so many breeds of dogs and cats. How can we
intentionally breed "nice" corporations that are symbiotic with the
humans that inhabit them? To what extent is this happening already as
talented individuals leave various dysfunctional, misguided, or rouge
corporations (or act as "whistle blowers")? I don't say here the
individual directs the corporation against its short term interest. I
say that individuals affect the selective survival rates of
corporations with various goals (and thus corporate evolution) by where
they choose to work, what they do there, and how they interact with
groups that monitor corporations. To that extent, individuals have some
limited control over corporations even when they are not shareholders.
Someday, thousands of years from now, corporations may finally have been
bred to take the long term view and play an "infinite game".

More fundamental CS though: http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galle...

My proposals: https://www.changemakers.com/m...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

And also advice to Larry from that my own individual sensemaking from 2012:
"Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
https://groups.google.com/foru...

Absolutely. I've worked both with pure biologists and physicians (and biologists in a medical context) and they have dramatically different outlooks and mindsets. Many, many biologists are deeply interested in understanding what is going on, while physicians and medical-focused biologists are much more interested in finding stuff that works to solve this problem.

The divide is very similar to that between pure and applied physicists, although for some reason we don't talk about "applied biologists" (perhaps we should.) Pure physicists are simply trying to find answers to questions; applied physicists are trying to find solutions to problems. The same is true in biology.

Brain size and IQ are not particularly correlated, and I've seen at least some research suggesting that people with high IQs or more education are actually more efficient at using their brains, to the extent that there is some thinning of the grey matter in such individuals in their late teens or early 20's.

Thinking does take more energy than not, but this isn't a big effect compared to brain size: http://www.scientificamerican....