And who proved the Piltdown Man hoax? Was it your fire and brimstone sermon delivering priest? Was it your friendly neighbourhood law firm Dewy Chetham and Howe? Was it the Member of Parliament? Or was it a member of House of Lords? Who showed Piltdown Man hoax?

It was another scientist, buddy, another scientist. The track record of correcting their mistakes, is pretty good for scientists. In fact they are the ones with a very good working system to correct their own mistakes. How many religious heads have been proven wrong by others in the same fold?

Think about it, "Onward Christian Soldiers!" cried Britain. "God is with us" claimed Germany. Both sides had chaplains who sent their soldiers to kill the other side. At the end, was there any religious head who came out and said, "We were wrong!"?.

My point is, all of them go wrong. But science has a self correcting process.

The phrase "One investigator who happens to be right" assumes one would be able to tell who is right and who is wrong immediately as it happens. The consensus is agreeing who got reproducible provable results.

People who do not understand science, who want to game the system are intentionally gaming the system. They bring in rules used in philosophical debates and legal arguments into science. Equal time for both sides works ok in philosophy and in courts. But not in science. Let us say one side has tons and tons of data and the other side is waving hands. Giving equal time to both is doing a great injustice to the side with data.

If one side is just asking questions, raising doubts, etc and the other side is actually answering the questions and clearing the doubts, it is a great injustice to give equal time to both. It takes much longer to answer questions than to raise them.

One should gain standing to raise doubts. Getting funding from industry groups with vested interests is not getting the standing. Must publish in the relevant field, get peer reviewed papers. Must risk reputation gained by hard long work to raise questions.

The creativity distribution obeys a very strong version of the power law [*1]. What it means almost all the brilliant scientific breakthrough comes from very few scientists. Creating incentives for creativity will make the scientists use all that creativity in getting the incentives, innovative proposals, truly genius grant applications etc. Take for example, the true innovation in understanding the "evolution of cooperation". On the face of it "survival of the fittest" and "nature red in tooth and claw" would seem to discourage cooperation between individuals. But many species including our own are highly cooperative. How come? The ground work was done by one guy (Maynard Smith?) in "Evolutionarily Stable Strategies". One guy conducted a tournament of strategies in 1980s in U Mich (Axelrod?). One guy won it, (Anatol?) tit-fot-tat. I think Richard Dawkins played a catalyst by bringing together a biologist and an economist. They were both working on the same cooperation problem but were unaware of each other's work because they used different terminologies. Then a whole bevy of scientists refine the understanding of Iterative Prisoners Dilemma problem to the present level where we can explain how cooperation evolved.

All I am saying is this emphasis on leadership and creativity is a little too much. Leads to "All Chiefs and no Indians" problem. Good, strong, independent thinking followers are as important to science as leaders. And we need an order of magnitude more followers. If anything we should reduce the incentives for creativity so that only truly creative people shine through.

[*1] Power Law: aka 80-20 law. 80% income by top 20% of earners, 80% of crime by 20% of criminals etc.

Hung processes and the accompanying error messages are always iffy. Is it any worse than "core dumping" or "kernel mode panic"? What irritated most people was how often applications crashed.

The first thing you do when you capture enemy weapon systems is to root the device and flash the ROM. I heard cyanogenmod already has boot loaders for M1A1 Abrams tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle and Nimitz class aircraft carriers.

Bayankaran, please don't scare me ;-) I know many Enterprise software coders write very bad software. They don't have a good grasp of writing proper SQL queries. They constantly cut/paste code. So much of dumb hardwiring it is not even funny.

You know, if you keep building more and more high ways the cities will sprawl uncontrollably. Al Gore warned us about it back in 2000. (If he had not, he would have, I mean at least it is the sort of thing he would have warned about). Now we have sprawled to some 500 million light year diameter. When you face that impossibly long commute, remember that prophetic sage.

In India many colleges and universities offer Master/Bachelor of Computer Applications degrees. It started out teaching simple Word, Excel, dBaseIII, FoxPro. Now a days they have added PeopleSoft and Oracle too. Some colleges add things like Ansys, ProE, ProSteel, Fluent, Ansoft HFSS etc.

These are the graduates who end up in USA via H1-B process most of the time in HR, IT, banking projects. Quality of the graduates vary significantly. But they all make decent salaries in USA, comparable to high quality engineering grads from US schools on salaries. I have seen these programmers of questionable abilities pulling 100K to 140K a year easily.

This was the original bill they were circulating. See the section 2e that mandates the use of linear interpolation? Limits the data set to post 1900? They were dropped only after getting nationwide attention.

These legislators have been slipping such clauses into the law all the time, and this time they got caught. Otherwise they would have happily forced the value of pi to be 3.0 exact.

Do you have problems with the legislators decreeing what interpolation technique the scientists must use? Limiting the data sets they might use? Or do you modify the bill after getting caught with hands in the cookie jar and then whip up prodigal quantities of false outrage?

These film were stored in North Carolina. It is actually illegal there to predict sea level rise. There is some question about whether the law makers there banned the prediction of sea level rise or the banned sea level rise itself. But anyway these NASA scientists need to tread carefully in North Carolina.

Further research shows that the Neanderthals formed a Cave Painting Artists Association (CPAA) to protect the copyrights and the intellectual properties of these cave painters. CPAA then started suing all other people who made copycat paintings as copyright infringers. Since the early drawings were little more than scratches on the rock faces, anything anyone else did that made any scratch anywhere was deemed to be a copy cat drawing and copyright infringement. All the activities of all the people of the species ground to a halt. Unable to find food they just starved to death.

The user could log into the bank account and transfer funds to AppStore account. From there Apple could handle micro payments to the vendors. Vendors cash out from the bank. Completely skipping MC/Visa infrastructure, if the NFC terminals are iPad or iPhone based. Ideally I would like something like this emerge in Android and in iOS so that there is some real viable competition to Visa/MC duopoly.

But looks like Apple is also talking to MC/Visa. So Apple does not seem to be competing with them, rather it is also looking to get a cut like the issuing banks are doing now.

Some POS terminals will offer PIN pad and a menu "Authorize by signature or authorize by PIN". If the buyer picks "signature" it is treated as credit card transaction. Further, these changes came after lots of protest from merchants and some law suits. When banks started giving out ATM cards with VISA/MC logo, all the transactions went through credit card channel. But it was not clear if the debit cards carried the 50$ liability limit for fraudulent use. Further, since the attached checking account is drained by the fraudulent use, it was not clear how soon the money will be credited back. When this program was rolled in, it was very heavy handed, abusive and one sided.

I am really glad something like this is long over due. But I wish we are not jumping from duopoly to a monopoly.

The cost of handling transactions is steadily diminishing. There was a time it would cost you something between 49$ and 149$ to place a single trade. It dropped to well below 10$ when I was still trading. Would not be surprised if they give you money to place a trade or something now. Compare it to the debit card transaction.

When it comes to creditcard I would not begrudge the 2% to 5% fee charged to the merchants. The credit card companies are essentially advancing an unsecured loan, and it would cost the individual merchants much more to check and advance credit to their customers. (Of course it there is some real competition the percentage might come down). But it is the debit card transaction that is atrocious. Money comes from the bank, there is no risk involved. There was a very nice system, including PIN numbers to manage the POS terminals. Way back when stock trade was 49$, it was 25 cent per transaction irrespective of the size of transaction. This should have become zero. But that is not what happened.

The Visa and Mastecard combined to discourage ATM cards and the POS terminals and undermined the system. They made debit and credit card to go through the same system. And the merchants were forced to pay 2% transaction fees on risk free money transfer from one bank to another.

The time is ripe, with prepaid cards and stored value cards for really cheap and free micro transactions. It took the clout of Apple to hit the music executives on their head and make them wake up, smell the coffee and realize the days of selling single track with 10 more useless tracks for 19$ per CD are gone. It might take such a juggernaut like Apple to make the bankers come around the bend and give up their 2% commission on risk free transactions.

But I wish we are not going from the duopoly of MC + Visa to a monopoly of AppStore. Well one thing at a time. Once the bankers get used to lower fees commensurate with the cost of transactions, may be alternatives to AppStore might emerge, and the system might become more open.

I just wish I could take a nap instantly. For some reason, my brain would not shut down and go to sleep on command.