> CS at least potentially has a built-in reality check that pure math lacks

The truth is that in many parts of CS it's easy to publish a tissue of lies because there is no policy of publishing source code with algorithms, you just publish timings for the one case that worked and graphs of the output for the trivial case that nobody else cares about. (I'm sure lots of people in graphics will be nodding their heads at this right now...) Mathematicians, on the other hand, are expected to provide proofs, and reviewers actually check those proofs (really! they actually check them! it's not at all like CS were someone goes "oh, that's plausible" and lets it go), unless you can find a crackpot journal like El Naschie's.

> At worst, libraries have paid to subscribe.

You got to the heart of the matter. Ultimately this is the primary complaint that Baez is directing at Elsevier. There's also the issue that it makes a bit of a mockery of the publication process and suggests some things need improving. But Baez is a long-time campaigner against high journal prices and I think that was one of the reasons he felt so strongly about this issue. Elsevier distribute this journal as part of a larger package that libraries pay for and it bulks up the apparent size of that package, ripping off libraries.

The Bogdanov affair is a little different. I did PhD research in theoretical physics but I was a bit unsure about the work of the Bogdanovs. There were bits of it that I could nitpick at and say it was definitely mistaken, but overall it was a little tricky to judge the bigger ideas without being a specialist in their particular subfield. The Bogdanovs had some smart people fooled. It's a very good hoax.

El Naschie's writing looks like nonsense even to non-specialists (though I guess you still need a degree in mathematics or physics). There's no way it could fool even beginners in the areas his work covers. That makes it all the more astonishing that he survived with Elsevier for so long. Apathy I guess.

25% of people claim benefit from painkillers and you think there's a scam?

It may be that there's no significant effect from painkillers and the 25% corresponds to people reporting random changes in their pain.

But it also may be that 25% respond really well to painkillers.

From this data, there's no way to tell.

For me, ibuprofen is a miracle drug for my migraines. I'm one of the lucky people for whom ibuprofen seems to act at source and lessen the underlying problem (probably some form of inflammation) rather than just masking the pain. Ibuprofen is a miracle drug.

"endorphine release" is just pop-science mumbo-jumbo that's almost as bad as alternative medicine. Yes, endorphins exist. Yes, they bind to opioid receptors. People just mumble these words as a universal explanation for countless phenomena when in actual fact very few of these phenomena have been shown definitively to be associated with endorphins, and in some cases there is good evidence that endorphins are not associated.

Same goes, I might add, for the association between sugar and hyperactivity in children.

Vitamin C generally doesn't help with colds.

> the MacBook Air ONLY has its form factor going for it

That's like saying that the only thing going for drills is that you can make holes with them.

The cool thing about Moffat is that he can straddle genre and non-genre writing. He knows how to write a (very entertaining) sitcom and yet knows science fiction. He can appeal to the geeks and the non-geeks. What's good about Russell is that he got non-geeks interested using a bunch of methods from family drama to guest stars like Kylie Minogue, but at the cost of losing the geeks to some extent. I think Moffat might be able to keep *everyone* interested.

(We're talking Doctor Who here. By geek I mean people vaguely interested in space, aliens, monsters, time travel and so on, not just hard core nerds.)

The original series had *some* contradictions and *some* discontinuities. But it was consistent enough that there were stories. Without any shred of consistency there is no possibility of dramatic tension because at any moment anything can happen. Almost all good storytelling requires some kind of internal logic, some reason why B follows A and why X chose to do Y. In Russell T Davies finales anything can happen at any moment. They are simply random sequences of events with no connection. They are pure spectacle, worse than even the trashiest movies produced by Hollywood. This is acceptable in a musical, but then the musical is the lowest form of art, something that Davies seems to aspire to writing, except that he probably can't write the music or the words.

Consider Moffat's "Blink". It was one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time. In fact, one of the best short horror/science fiction shows I've seen. It laid down some rules (you gotta keep looking) and as a result the audience knew what horrible outcome seemed inevitable and was drawn into the story. By comparison, Davies' writing is just brown sludge, the science fiction/horror equivalent of mixing all the paints of the palette until you get something indistinguishable from the color of a turd.

Even your hypothesis is overly complicated. There's a human behavior that explains every single feature of the story and is very common in humans. It's called 'lying'.

Oh dear. You must be one of those people they call "young". Everything you say about Doctor Who applies only to the last four seasons. It always used to have at least a hint of coherence and logic (not too much admittedly), we always used to worry about the Doctor running out of regenerations (this added a certain tension to the story) and you know what? The daleks never used to appear in the season finale because there was no such thing as a season finale. What you've been watching isn't Doctor Who, it's more like "Carry On Up The Doctor - the Musical". (But you'll be too young to remember the Carry On movies.)

Sadly, no matter how cruel and vicious one's invention, there will always be some sickly do-gooder who finds a way to abuse it for the good.

For some reason I'm not finding single reference to "Temherte Slaq" in a document about unicode convincing evidence that anyone uses a "sarcasm mark".

> They're doing something right if the show has gone on this long

Davies is responsible only for 4 years of that success. Note that I'm not criticising the series as a whole, but the finale (and other Davies writing). The best episodes of each series are almost universally recognised as not being those written by Davies. I have to credit Davies with resurrecting the series, but the best thing Davies did was hire Moffat and others as writers.

As usual, it was a Russell T Davies campy almost-but-not-quite musical cheesefest. Just about any fact about Doctor Who that you thought was canonical was blatantly ignored. The greatest sin of all was throwing away a regeneration. For god's sake. Regenerations are probably the most precious thing in the Doctor Who universe and Davies thought he'd end his Who career (after all, he doesn't have to fix the plot holes he made) by simply throwing one away for a completely dumb plot twist. Of course it doesn't matter now that no rules are followed any more. And could anything have been more sickly that seeing all of the Doctor's wannabe lovers (and their pathetic families) fawning after him? The whole finally was nothing but laughable. The scene of the Tardis towing the Earth was beyond laughable. The faster Stephen Moffat takes over, the better.