fascism
–noun
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly
suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive
nationalism and often racism.
Courtesy of Dictionary.com
Lack of brain function courtesy of Fox News.
The scenario which scares me is: the idiots vote Sarah Palin into office, and she prevents control of greenhouse gases until a massive global catastrophe
Unlike the Obama administration, Sarah Palin supports nuclear power, which is currently the best way we have to reduce greenhouse gases.
I doubt Sarah Palin supports anything, she will playback any tape inserted into her drive by the conservative thinktanks (as long as it doesn't interfere with her down-to-earth common sense mavericky image). Government bad, businesses good...
For a wonderful introduction to peer review, you could do worse than read this:
http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/corres.pdf It is an exchange, carried out over several years, between a man who believes he has solved quantum field theory, and the reviewers who carefully look through his papers when he tries to publish. They come up with good points and ways to improve the paper, but he resubmits and resubmits until he finds somewhere that accepts it. Along the way, he gets increasingly rude and angry, while the reviewers remain polite and engage carefully with him.
My favourite part is that it's published on the guy's personal website, although he really doesn't come out of it well.
Some of the reviewers don't seem too polite:
In spite of its pompous language, this paper is, in fact, less rigorous, from the mathematical point of view, than ordinary perturbation theory which can be found in any good textbook or review article.
No relevant problems of contemporary QFT are considered in this paper. I recommend its rejection.
Anyone who has attempted to get a scientific paper published has run into these guys - rude, opinionated, and lazy reviewers. It's not just cranks who get these responses, either.
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
Climate science is not nearly as hard as modern physics. A mining engineer with a BA in math can poke holes in climate science papers. It seems to me many of their problems arise from bad use of statistics and mathematics, which are not fields where climatologists are experts.
But in doing so, they've removed the global-warming signal (the long-term trend)!
In time series analysis all trends and other nonstationarities in the series must be either explained or removed by preprocessing before regression can be attempted. Because they don't have anything that would explain the warming trend they filter it out then obtain a good model for the rest of the variation of global temperature by correlating it with the ENSO phenomenon with lag 7. Of course the slight warming trend is still there. This just means it's not explained by El Nino. I don't really see how this contradicts any climate change science.
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!
Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
Removing noise doesn't sound right, but differencing time series is a legitimate technique for processing time series in order to remove autocorrelation so that the resulting time series is stationary (has statistical properties that are constant in time). Notice that at that point they are working with 12-month running mean data, so have effectively integrated their time series to remove some of the noise.
I know sports games are popular, but MMOs require a lot of time and devotion. If you care enough about a sport to play it with others online and devote months or years of your life playing it, why not pick up a ball a play the real thing outside, with friends?
Because playing a sports game is not the same as playing the sport. Many people like sports that in reality they have no physical ability or coordination for.
Am I the only one here who doesn't want the collective impulses of 1 million 15 year olds impacting my game experience? Instead of theorizing about how awesome it would be to have a server with 5 million people on it at the same time, why don't they try to design a game that would actually be fun to play with 5 million other people on your server.
The same reason they can't design a game that's fun to play with 5 people on the same server without one of them being a spambot, one of them using a trainer to cheat, one of them only speaking in Chinese, one of them being +20 lvl higher but constantly killing you just for fun, and one of them bombarding you with racist abuse.
I busted my ass at Georgia Tech, took an average of 18+ hours, and graduated in 8 semesters in mechanical engineering (which is virtually unheard of, it is a defacto 5 year program for all engineering degrees) with a 2.2ish GPA. Which is really more of a testament of the classes I failed because I didn't have to pass them that semester to stay on track (and I didn't drop anything) and my NO HOMEWORK policy (which basically started me at a 'B' or 'C' in every single class I took). I also spent almost every weekend racing bicycles for Georgia Tech, and drinking copious amounts of beer.
That sounds like you didn't work hard at all and graduated with very average grades. Is it surprising someone who actually does their homework and doesn't spend all their weekends on extra-curricular activities can get better grades?
Yes! God forbid anyone worry about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's diameter.
Obsessing over the decimal digits of pi won't teach the students anything. It also makes math teachers look like morons.
Don't expect that your users stay in one place. Do expect that they sometimes travel to other countries.
I was going to suggest this, then realized his users are likely to be Americans.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
