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Comment: Re:Utopian playland (Score 2) 119

by BasilBrush (#43767127) Attached to: Wired Writer Imagines Google Island

I tried it. Well not quite abandoned but an unspoiled island with 3000 people. It was heaven for the first couple of years. By 7 years, groundhog day was making me look to the horizon for a passing ship. The sea, the surf and the blue skies, and the personal creativity are lovely, but after a while one needs some culture, generated by other people, with other ideas.

Comment: Re:Utopian playland (Score 5, Insightful) 119

by BasilBrush (#43765277) Attached to: Wired Writer Imagines Google Island

What people invariably want is a state which has rules enforcing human rights, and little else.

That's not what most people want at all. Most people want roads, education, defense, a framework for business, etc. etc.

It's what Libertarians say they want. Though each wants only the human rights that happen to serve them individually.

We could do away with large swaths of the legal landscape and eliminate large parts of government, both local and federal, if we could just say "do anything you want, so long as you don't infringe on the rights of others".

The problem is that huge amounts of what we do infringes on others rights. There's very often a balance between rights of one person and rights of another. That's why an awful lot of those laws were created in the first place.

Comment: Re:Yeah... (Score 1) 1012

by BasilBrush (#43763907) Attached to: 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made

I just did. And I conclude you don't realise when you are being lied to.

The paper divides research into 8 categories.

(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification
(2) Explicit endorsement without quantification
(3) Implicit endorsement
(4a) No position (4b) Uncertain
(5) Implicit rejection
(6) Explicit rejection without quantification
(7) Explicit rejection with quantification

The paper itself, reasonably compares 1-3 against 5-7.

Your denialist blog compares 1 against 5-7.
i.e. it excludes "Explicit endorsement without qualification", but includes "Explicit rejection without quantification
and it excludes "Implicit endorsement" whilst including "Implicit rejection".

Are you prepared to accept that your blog link is a lie, or are you going to join in the lie?

Comment: Re:Yeah... (Score 1) 1012

by BasilBrush (#43763205) Attached to: 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made

Superwiz, my post to you was impolite and unfair, I apologise. I'm afraid I get so many blowhards here arguing with me, I mistook you for one, and clearly you're not. Likewise with the reading of the paper bit, I'd hadn't realised the person I was responding to in the thread had changed.

Also, I did err when I said "33% didn't express a conclusion on AGW". In my head I knew it was 66/33 the other way. It just didn't come out of my fingers that way.

Until Renaissance there was no concept of a scientist.

Sure. That's why I introduced the term scholars, so I could include intelligent opinion all the way back to the ancient world. But then I brought it back to scientists, because even if there had been a pre-scientific-method consensus, it wouldn't be an equivalent to a consensus of scientists today.

Back to the topic in hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with the way the paper covered the 66% that didn't express an opinion. But rather than repeat why here, I'll just point you to an earlier message.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3760341&cid=43761331

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