Quite a few of them don't even know that it's Homo sapiens sapiens!

I believe in the US that's called "checks and balances."

If you're in any kind of commercial transport and you're seriously injured by fault of the driver, owner, maintenance, etc., covering your health care is likely to be the least of what the insurance does. Particularly in the US.

I imagine the laws governing cars are much like those for boats, but less enforced for individuals. If you're the skipper of a boat you can share costs with guests/crew/passengers but those costs cannot be more than the consumables used on the trip and they cannot pay you for your time. As soon as you accept payment for your services you need commercial permits, your boat has to meet more stringent standards, etc.

If publishing a paper is the requirement to be a scientist, it's not surprising that stuff like what Wakefield pulled gets by. Wakefield was trained as a physician, not a scientist. His "research" was conducted unethically, on children, without approval. It's generally believed now that the whole thing was a fraud perpetrated to boost his interest in a competing vaccine company.

Wakefield was trained as a physician and operated as a con man. He wasn't a scientist. I agree with you that scientist-celebrities aren't necessarily the best scientists. Especially the "scientist"-celebrities. Part of the problem is that many of them aren't scientists at all, but are perceived that way because people have the strangest criteria for dubbing someone a scientist.

A list of the most highly cited papers was released recently. All the top papers were tools and techniques. Discoveries like the structure of DNA were well down the list.

The tool builders get recognized pretty well where it counts.

You mean the physician (not a scientist) who started the anti-vax movement?

Other than the bad example, your point is good.

It is wrong to say science seeks truth, because it gives a false impression of what science is. Science looks for theories that make the most accurate predictions. If a particular theory tuns out to have problems, that's part of the process of finding one that does.

Too many people, including a lot of not-so-good scientists, regard "scientific truth" as something that actually exists. Some experiment, or a journal article, or a hundred years of experience seems to show something, therefore it's true. Way too many people also insist that science is just another kind of religion.

He (or more likely his scientific advisor) has it right. You've mixed up the explanation of it a bit.

The idea with a superposition is that something, usually something small, can be in more than one state at once. If I take your unpowered cell phone camera and expose it to some weak radiation, such as the CMB, some of the molecules in the photo sensitive layer will donate an electron and some won't. Before you look, you can say that each of those molecules is in a superposition of electron-yes and electron-no. That means that each of the electron wells technically contains every possible combination of electrons, which means that the ccd itself is simultaneously in a superposition of representing every single image it can, at the same time. Naturally if you actually measure the image the superposition will collapse into one of the more likely states, with overwhelming probability, a black image with some sparse noise.

You can also say that the photo-sensitive layer is encoding every book that has ever been or ever will be written, in the handwriting of every person who has ever lived.

While it's technically true-ish, at least if you believe certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, it's also pretty meaningless.

Certainly. I beat him to producing this art last time I turned my phone off.

Nope. They're taking an unpowered CCD and saying that the little bit of energy hitting it from the CMB technically puts each sensor site into a superposition of all it's possible states. You can duplicate this art by turning off your phone. And people have been doing so for ages by storing their unexposed film in dark canisters.

If you look at it, it destroys the "art" of course.

Nonsense. I've had leaders of at least three major Christian sects tell me that the bible is the literal word of god, written down by divinely inspired men. Including the pornographic poem in the middle of it.

There are plenty of radical Christians who interpret the bible literally, including the nasty parts. There are just fewer (by no means none) who care to die for their convictions.

Christianity is older than Islam. It had some pretty nasty times, then it mellowed. It seems to be getting more violent again though.

Murder rates per 100,000 per year (2012):

France: 1.0
USA : 4.7

Looks like France is doing something right in the overall department too.

"Queue" means to line up. You "queue up" people. You cannot "Cue up" people. You can "cue people" though, which means to give a signal. In summary, you are the idiot, not the GP. The metasummary is that it's entertaining to watch two ACs call each other idiots.