I guess I shouldn't be surprised by all the non-sequitur hate this comment is getting from anonymous cowards. I don't generally reply to comments, but the ones here are so hateful and stupid it seems worth putting a word in.

No one asked anyone to do gay porn, for the illiterate amongst you. No one was asked to make out with anyone. You're going to have to address what I wrote rather than your fevered imaginations to get any traction, I'm afraid.

We frequently do films that cast actors as psychopaths, murderers, clowns, and worse, and no one ever objects, so any suggestion that playing a gay person is exceptionally offensive against the morals of the actor requires that it be more morally repugnant for them to play a gay person than a murderer. That is... odd.

Seriously, in one film there were half a dozen murders on screen. No one objected. Yet someone objected when given the option to play a gay person. If you don't see a problem with that, you're kind of screwed up.

Absolutely. The difficulty is that "action" has to get past a fence of anti-science, anti-technology, anti-capitalist nutjobs who say on the one hand that a) we face a civilization-ending event and b) we must not use various well-known and ready-to-go solutions to the problem, but instead must embark on an unproven revolutionary program that "changes everything!"

Nuclear power, carbon taxes, and research in to carbon sequestration are the obvious immediate responses to climate change.

The first two are practical, proven and ready-to-go. The latter is a backup plan.

Instead we have left-wing idiots protesting oil pipelines, because that's where the donation dollars come from.

With regard to carbon taxes: we have to tax something to fund government. Even righties who just want to use government money to bomb brown people generally agree with that. We can tax income, or we can tax carbon emissions. Who but a raving anti-wealth socialist would want to tax something good and wonderful like income when we can tax some basically nasty like carbon emissions instead?

I work in tech in a very liberal Canadian city and have a bunch of gay friends, and sometimes get lulled into thinking the world is a big happy accepting place.

Then I step outside the downtown bubble, just by a few miles, and I'm stunned by what I sometimes encounter. I do a little writing for a group that makes short films, and we had a shoot where one of the actors didn't show up. He was part of a couple, and I suggested we recast the part using a woman who didn't have a part yet, so the couple would be gay but everything else would be the same. The film was about relationships and this couple was fighting about stuff. There might be a hug at the end, but nothing more overtly affectionate than that.

The young, professional woman I suggested this too looked at me with her eyes literally wide with horror and said, "I'm sorry, I can't do that. I'm really straight."

In that situation it wasn't my place to berate her for her bigotry, particularly as I didn't think until much later of the correct come-back: "You're really earthbound, too, but I bet you'd play an astronaut if I asked you to."

So yeah, while to so many of us this is a done deal, our gay friends and family still have to walk around every day wondering when they are going to encounter that kind of horrified rejection, and while at least they don't get beat up as often as they used to it still has to be pretty awful for them.

If anyone wants people like Tim Cook to stop making a big deal about being gay (and really, don't we all want that?) they should make sure to be accepting and matter-of-fact about the gay people all around us, whose much-talked-about "agenda" involves living happy, fulfilling lives.

A generation of rabid opposition to nuclear power is wrong, as is using climate change as a stick to beat global capitalism with rather than saying, "Hey, all we need is a carbon tax and we'll be done" (this is what the evidence in the Canadian province of British Columbia shows, anyway, but who cares about evidence when you're busy fighting global capitalism?)

I don't see that this experiment is any different from a photon reflecting between parallel partially-silvered mirrors. You see a range of arrival times at the detector, despite the wavefunction being "fragmented" by multiple reflections.

So this won't do anything to advance measurement theory. It is an interesting example because of the exotic circumstances. Your description is extremely good and quite plausible, although I haven't read the paper either.

This is interesting, as there has been a huge fight in Canada about whether heavy oil sinks or floats (the answer seems to be: sinks, at least after some processing by sun/wind/flotsam/etc) but it has been presented to the public as if there was something special about that.

Whereas these results seem to indicate that a very substantial fraction of ordinary light crude sinks, so there is no particular additional danger posed by bitumen.

Or, alternatively, men are being sold a bill of goods, as they always have been, about their prospects in a particular profession (soldiering comes to mind) and the poor weak-minded little dears that they are, they are buying into it, resulting in huge amounts of effort going to waste as boom turns to bust and men bear the personal cost of society selling them nonsense.

But of course, no one, anywhere, ever cares about men. After all, men have full and complete autonomy and are never in any way influenced by societal pressures or the social construction of masculinity. Men die earlier, commit suicide vastly more often, are the primary victims of violent crime, are killed on the job far more frequently... and it's all because of the bad choices they, as perfectly autonomous individuals make. What other reason could there possibly be?

This is a general problem with the way people infer origin dates from sparsely sampled distributions: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

The earliest anatomically modern human fossils date from about 195,000 years ago, and people often say on this basis that anatomically modern humans appeared about 200,000 years ago, which is statistically illiterate at best.

Maybe people in the field know better, but I've seen an awful lot of claims like this and even in the semi-professional literature there seems to be a strong tendency to assume origin dates based on "date of earliest discovery plus a bit", which is just the wrong way to do it.

There is no generally-agreed-upon "scientific concept of species". The "Biological Species Concept" is a well-know and highly contentious artifact. It is clearly useful, but how it is defined varies enormously from person to person and across sub-fields.

This variation doesn't matter much in practice, but it gives philosophers who for some unfathomable reason want there to be just one BSC fits. They seem unaware that concepts are tools used by knowing subjects to understand objective reality, so different subjects with different purposes will tweak the tool as appropriate, much the way a carpenter and a plumber are apt to use different types of hammer.

Sure, but that has zero bearing on the degree of concern people should have about the epidemic potential of Ebola in any country with a first-world health care system (Nigeria, say, or parts of the US outside Texas.)

The thing fearmongers like the GP are all about is the attempt to create a sense that Ebola could actually be spreading like the flu, which is so trivially false it isn't even worth mentioning. Yes, PPEs that include good respiratory protection should be part of the standard patient-handling protocol, and all due care should be taken to avoid droplet transmission, but Ebola's almost complete lack of aerosol transmission is and will remain a substantial barrier to the population risk the disease poses: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

I just tried to exclude all BH postings (using the "excluded terms" thing in the options settings) and when I do I don't see any stories at all. Is his name somehow attached to every single story on /.?

There is an excellent theory to explain the "excess heat" measurements: the people doing the research are some mixture of dishonest and incompetent. This theory also has the nice features that:

a) it is consistent with the spectacularly incompetent work we see whenever anyone attempts to carefully document an experiment, such as the one on the Rossi device we have seen recently

b) it is consistent with the litany of results that require well-established phenomenology to be turned off, for example the need to magically suppress neutrons and gamma rays that would otherwise be produced in any nuclear reaction or its aftermath, regardless of its origin.

After a quarter of a century with no reproducible results and no "positive" experiments that do not require the magical suppression of other laws of physics to account for the lack of radiation, no other theory is close to as plausible as this one.

Cold fusion has been heavily investigated. There is one striking thing about all of the supposed "positive" results: they are physically impossible.

Suppose I said I had invented a car that ran on water, and that my claimed proof was that I had driven this car along the streets of a distant city. I give a talk on my results and show a map of the route.

A person in the audience interrupts and says, "Hey, I know that city! That's my home town! The route you've shown is impossible: you say you drove it between 4:30 and 5:30 PM on Tuesday June the 6th, which is in the middle of rush-hour, and you've shown yourself going the wrong way on half-a-dozen one-way streets! Why didn't you collide with anything?"

I reply: "This car runs on water! Weren't you listening? It doesn't collide with other cars, because it is propelled by water!"

You would be correct to suspect that you need not take my claims very seriously after that, and this kind of exchange is typical of cold fusion talks.

I saw Pons give a talk at Caltech, where one of my colleagues interrupted with the question, "Where are the neutrons? You say you don't see any radiation because all the energy comes out in high-energy alpha particles, but if you make alpha particles move with that energy through the palladium lattice you will get neutrons? Where are they?"

Pons answered: "New physics."

But alpha particles don't care what made them move, and more than a car cares what fuel it runs on. You can't just invoke "new physics" and say that the lack of neutrons or gamma rays doesn't matter, because you aren't really invoking new physics, you are throwing out old physics: you are saying that high energy alphas don't produce neutrons, even though that would require all of nuclear physics to be wrong.

So while I agree that new phenomena are often difficult to reproduce and we should be cautious about dismissing them on that basis, cold fusion, after twenty-five years of testing, has proven to be:

a) impossible to reproduce (there is no reliably reproducible experimental setup)

and

b) what experiments that have claimed positive results have always (to the best of my knowledge) required almost all of nuclear physics to be wrong to explain the absence of radiation.

I cannot think of any other phenomenon that eventually proved to exist that shares anything like this history of failure. Maybe Lister's work on sterile technique in surgery, which had a decade or two of rough handling? But even it was frequently reproducible, even if not universally so, and it didn't contradict any well-established, empirically founded, reasonably comprehensive theories of the time.

No, it really doesn't. It's too hard to transmit, and almost certainly will remain so.

Saying it has "the potential" to wipe out half of humanity is mindless fear-mongering. The US has more guns that people, and therefore it is true to say that guns in the US have "the potential" to kill everyone, but I don't see anyone panicking about it, just arguing whether 30,000 deaths per year is an acceptable loss. To use "potential" in the sense you are is almost completely meaningless.