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Comment Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics. (Score 1) 576

The problem is that a lot of his uncertainty comes from systematics, not statistical error. If it was pure statistical error, then you could definitely do that based on 3 elections, but he was either going to get essentially every state right (if the systematics were small) or every state wrong by about the same amount (if they weren't).

Comment Not all scientists always use metric (Score 1) 2288

Scientists should always, always use metric.

Real scientist here... astronomer, actually. And while we often use metric, and we never ever use Imperial units, we do often use units that are the natural scale. Mass is usually in solar masses; length can be in Astronomical Units (=the radius of the Earth's orbit around the sun), parsecs, or solar radii; power is in solar luminosities. And there's a good reason - knowing that a mass-to-light ratio is 2 M_sun / L_sun tells you a lot more than knowing that it is 10000 kg / Watt.

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Comment Re:Homeopathic Medicine (Score 1) 430

Yes it is. It's not that modern medicine doesn't make mistakes, it's that it learns from them. If a treatment is demonstrated repeatedly to do no better than a placebo, or even worse to do harm, it stops being used. Homeopathy says that if it doesn't work for you, you're doing it wrong.

Comment stations not putting out enough power (Score 1) 147

Can they put some of that money into ensuring that the stations broadcast with a usable amount of power? Most of the stations seem to put out enough power for decent reception only in their immediate vicinity - places that are far enough away that the analog signal is only slightly fuzzy (but still entirely watchable) get nothing thanks to the all-or-nothing nature of digital.

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