Unfortunately, most of the newspapers in Canada are owned by one company, CanWest Global, which has exerted its editorial control over city papers so they match the the political leanings of its owners (first helping the Liberal party, now the Conservatives).

In their world, politicians acting on voters wishes is 'buying votes', while lobbyists using the promise of campaign contributions to get favourable legislation passed is 'Democracy in Action'.

It's the same kind of logic that makes 30 copies of crappy pop songs worth over a million dollars.

I'm talking about backwards causation as a general principle.

Says who? What is the definitive study of backwards causation? I'd like to see some sources which claim that violating causality would not cause experimental problems. What about simple particle physics experiments where we are working on microscopic scales?

You're not understanding my point. I didn't say the calculations or experiments would be difficult. I said that in any experiment where future events would have to be taken into account, you couldn't make definitive statements about your results. If I do an experiment to show A causes B and future events can also cause B, there is no way for me to state definitively that a seemingly positive result is caused by A and not some future event I can't control for. This is what makes causality so essential for science.

This seems to be a poor understanding of time reversal symmetry. Particle physics works if you run time forward, or if you flip its sign and run time backwards. But that does not mean the same thing as what you said above. You can look at an experiment with each event in reverse, but you can't, for instance, say that event 2 was caused by event 1, but event 1 was caused by event 3. It only can follow the laws of physics if the causal order is 123 or 321.

The idea of 'backwards' causation has obvious major problems. First of all, you run into causal paradoxes. But more importantly, if the outcome of your experiment rests on future events, how can you do science? Every result becomes meaningless because you don't know if a future event caused it.

What the fuck are you talking about?

It's the same stupid bullshit I heard in 1999. Every time year X is cooler than year X-1, the same idiots come out claiming we're 'through the peak' and global warming is over. Do they know that regular global cycles act on top of global warming? Do they understand that two data points is not a trend?

Honestly, the fact that stupid shit like this gets +5 informative just shows how ignorant this community is when it comes to climate science.

They are not suggesting making the exit smaller, they are suggesting that an obstacle is placed further from the door to reduce the number of paths to the door and keep the number of people trying to push through the exit at any given time to a minimum. See Fig. 18 in the arXiv paper if you want to look at a diagram of this.

Interestingly enough, these results seem to have been known for a while (probably based on anecdotal evidence). I distinctly remember my fluid mechanics teacher telling our class almost exactly the same thing in 2006, explaining that a crowd headed for the exit behaved in similar ways to a fluid trying to pass through a small opening.

The equations describing gravitational waves do result from a simplifying approximation of Eintstein's equations, but it's the sort of simplifying approximation that really has to be quite accurate in many circumstances.

In fact, IIRC, it is the exact same approximation often used when looking at EM radiation from a source: the approximation is that the source is small, localized and far away from you.

Their example fails because they chose a number that has no significance on its own without including a unit of measurement. If you search 58.44 grams, instead of just the number, you get plenty of relevant results. And look at what happens if you take a famous unitless number from chemistry and do a google search. Again, plenty of good results.You can try it with the speed of light as well. A search for 3x10^8 yields nothing, but 3x10^8 m/s gives you the Wikipedia page for Speed Of Light. And as far as I can tell, Google gives you good results for useful numbers in Mathematics like the golden ratio. So I don't see what the problem is.

Hey, as long as they include this kind of hard-hitting news, I'm sure there will be some people who will pay for a subscription.

More bullshit. It was already illegal to spy on Americans without warrants, you idiot. That's why the Telecoms BROKE THE LAW when they allowed Bush to tap phones without warrants. That's why they needed votes from spineless politicians like Obama to grant them immunity.

Do you even read the fucking articles you post before you lie about what they say? Or even the damn title?

Money Quote:

I don't give two shits about what failed amendments he voted for. In the end he was asked to vote on a bill that offered immunity for telcos and he did. If he cared the least bit about keeping the telecoms accountable, he would have voted against the bill itself. End of discussion.

What's frightening is that there are 4 people who modded you up without reading the article you posted.

It also doesn't help that there is an entire industry which exists to provide talking points to people too ignorant or busy to care about issues that affect them. The best opinion polls can do is tell you which side has the better PR machine.