Well, it shouldn't be a question of some random person pulled of the Internet vs. the scientists *working on the project*. It should be a matter of what an educated person would think if all the pros and cons were laid out impartially then intelligently explained to him.

The problem with GP isn't that he thinks that ITER is a "massive and pointless waste of money" that will "never lead to a practical source of energy." The problem is that he hasn't explained the reasoning he used to arrive at that conclusion, and shown that he has thoughtfully weighed the contrary argument. He may well have done so and formed a very sound opinion of the project. We just don't know.

While I am sure there are occasional situations where it might be advantageous to be thought foolish and incompetent, in general this is likely a bad thing.

It's like being thought *weak* in military terms. There in tactical situations you'd like the enemy to underestimate your strength, strategically it's better to be thought stronger than you actually are. If a hostile country is considering violating some treaty they have with us, we'd want them to think our intelligence agencies will catch them red-handed. Once they actually go down that road, we'd want them to think our agencies are completely incompetent.

Right.

If physicists don't have a proper answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing" then they should stop pretending they do by the deceit of changing the definition of "nothing".

The issue of whether anyone has a "proper" answer -- indeed, if there is a "proper" answer -- turns on the ambiguity of the word "why". We use that word in three very different senses.

When we ask, "why is the sky blue?", we are asking "by what lower-level phenomena is the sky seen as blue?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that is static (or very short duration) in time and varies over the reductionist depth of phenomena: photons are scattered by air molecules, some of them enter your eye, trigger certain receptors in the retina, this is processed by the nervous system causing a sensation that your brain has been culturally trained to associate with the symbol "blue".

When we ask, "why did the Challenger explode?", we are asking "by what causal chain of events, one after the other, did the Challenger explode?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that extends over time and is fairly static in reductionist depth: politics prompted a launch in cold weather, cold weather caused the O-ring to warp, the warped O-ring caused hot gas to leak, boom. We want a time sequence that (in this instance) stays at the level of everyday experience, doesn't go in to the quantum mechanics of the O-ring or the grand historical narrative of humanity's existence.

When we ask, "why did Alice go the dance with Bob?", we are asking "what motives and values prompted Alice's decision?" We want an explanation of the desires and actions of intelligent agents, not a story about the atoms that make up her body.

When we ask "why is there something rather than nothing?", some people are looking for "God did it" -- the third type of answer. But there can't be an intelligent agent before there is something, so the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

Some people are looking for the second type of answer: they want some cosmological causal chain of events as to how space and energy came to be. But any causal chain of events would be a thing, not nothing, so again the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

What we have here is a proposed answer in the first sense, lower-level phenomena.

If you're looking for cause-over-time or motive as an answer to "why is there something rather than nothing", you've fallen into a linguistic trap around the ambiguity of the word "why".

You are supposed to read it and think "people should act this way",

Yes, with the genocide and the slavery and the misogyny and the mock executions of sons by their fathers, what a fine world it would be if we followed the moral example of the Bible.

You seem to think that Harvard divesting from fossil fuels will cause companies like Exxon-Mobil to collapse overnight.

This is largely a symbolic action. If many other institutional investors follow suit, it's *still* not going to stop companies from pumping natural gas out of their wells, any more than divesting in gold mining would cause gold mines to stop taking gold out of the ground. The last thing a troubled business would do is starve a cash cow.

What divestiture *might* do, in the most wildly optimistic scenario imaginable, is divert a *tiny* fraction of the world's investment in developing new energy stocks toward renewables. Were that to lead eventually to electricity shortages, the price of fossil fuels would automatically rise. That would attract plenty of new investment. A modest rise in prices would swamp any conceivable stock price effect of divestiture, even if all the universities in the world did this.

Finally, as an MIT alum who's taken courses at Harvard, people who manage to land a professorship at the country's oldest and most prestigious university are usually pretty damned smart. That doesn't mean "always right", but it does mean that they probably understand the practical effects of such a move better than you apparently do. This is a university that has managed to build the largest endowment of any educational institution in the world: over 32 *billion*. If that were *market capitalization*, it'd put them on S&P's list of the 100 largest companies in the world. Halliburton's only worth 30 billion.

A women may be less likely to be murdered but more likely to be raped.

That's mostly because the FBI doesn't consider prison rape to be a crime; I think the estimates I hear are typically around 200,000-300,000 male prison rape victims a year, which comes close to making the rape stats 50/50. There's also very little interest in figuring out the underreporting rate for male rape victims in open society; hell, in many places it isn't even a crime for a woman to rape a man because of the way rape was defined.

But even if you ignore all that: I'll take those odds. Rape has the lowest occurrence rate in the US of any violent crime, and not only that, it's declined the most over the last decade or two as well. Men are several times more likely to be KILLED. Last time I checked, that was worse.

By the way: case clearance rates for female homicide victims are higher than for male homicide victims.

You can either listen to the gender issues folks, who make it sound like violence against women is a HUGE CRISIS, or you can read the BJS statistics. Women have been, and continue to be, a protected class in the US.

At least in the US, women kill more men than women.

Also, while gender issues folks are more than happy to do all sorts of mental gymnastics for other things: nobody is willing to touch "why do men commit robbery more?" with a ten foot pole because then they'd have to admit that traditional gender roles for men are still very much in place, men are judged heavily by their economic status, and men are committing crime by and large to house, feed, and clothe their families.

Lots of assistance for single mothers out there, like WIC. Single dads? Shit outta luck.

Guess what percentage of the US homeless population is male? Depending on the area, anywhere from 67% to 80% (NYC, for example, is 82%.) Oh, and the percentage of women in homeless shelters is higher than the percentage of homeless women total, showing women are better served.

Male privilege, my ass.

Colbert noted. "I see the Norwegians gave Snowden 30 Nobel Prize nominations. The guy's practically a war criminal - I don't understand how they could put him up for the same prize they once gave to Henry Kissinger."

That whooshing sound you hear? That's Colbert's satire going right over your head. If the Kissinger/peace prize reference didn't tip you off, consider that he said it at the same event that he said "I'm sure that under enhanced liberty you can have all the privacy that you want, just like under enhanced interrogation you can breathe all the water you want."

There have been a small handful of truly major revolutions in the history of medicine (aseptic surgery, vaccines, antibiotics) and clinical genome sequencing will be such a revolution.

Clinical medicine is useful and all, but not great basic science.

Many Americans don't even accept evolution or global warming yet.

No germane to the point.

Pretending that where we are is the furthest we'll ever get is not constructive and not correct.

A curve which approaches a line asymptotically will make its big progress early (taking t as the horizontal axis) and small gains afterward. It will still get closer, but not in a way that makes a big change. It's a reasonable hypothesis that science will approach the maximum possible knowledge of the world in the same fashion.

There is a limit on how much human beings will ever be able to observe, and how much human beings will be ever to able to calculate. (If we blow it and ruin our spaceship and die off in the next century or two, which is quite possible, we may be close to that limit already.) If science is not approaching this maximum possible knowledge, it's a failure; if it is approaching this maximum possible knowledge, then there is less and less left to possibly know. The amount of possible knowledge is not infinite.

No. She didn't win a lawsuit.

She filed a lawsuit, "a case where two or more people disagree and one or more of the parties take the case to a court for resolution", an "attempt to gain an end by legal process; a process instituted in a court of law for the recovery of a right or claim". She got what she wanted. How is that not winning a lawsuit?

The actual Kozinski ruling suggests that actors HAVE a copyright in the final work despite decades of copyright law to the contrary.

That's sensible. A film actor is a co-creator of a work; if musicians covering a song have a copyright interest in a sound recording, it is inconsistent for film actors playing a scripted role to not have a copyright interest in a video recording.

This could finally establish the principle that people have a copyright interest in photographs of them in any but the most mundane situations; that's a principle that could resolve issues around "revenge porn" and around people getting upset around photos of them being posted on social media without their consent (see the hostility around Google Glass).

I didn't claim to be a power user, but I would consider myself above average as far as normal computer using folks. I don't write programs, but it can write advanced Excel macros. I've never built a PC from scratch but I've torn down my laptop all the way and can upgrade anything. I'm an advanced user but no expert. And I'll be fully honest - never even knew alternate UI's existed until folks started posting about them here in regards to Win8. I never needed to know because I was always able to customize Windows to do what I wanted. So, if I have never heard of replacement UIs, chances are, most non-IT users don't, either.

A lot of times I just am working with a mouse and don't have hands on a keyboard. I have a Razer Naga with 19 buttons I often don't need the keyboard. Just clicking the x was so much easier than having to click and drag down to emulate touch. Yes, we are talking about minor effort, but when you do it dozens of times a day it's just annoying. And that's just the start.

It's just absurd to have to use a mouse to emulate touch which was designed to emulate a mouse to begin with. It is like translating something from French to English and then translating it back to French. WTF is the point.