The father of the Experimental Method wasn't around when the Catholic Church turned his writings into dogma, but anybody who cares to read the Schoolmen (it is a hard read) knows that Aristotle was no Aristotelian.

The argument from superior intelligence doesn't hold water either. Newton was one of the most intelligent men who ever lived but he had some strange ideas, arising from the application of a very high IQ to false premises. As per his own quote, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and so despite our inferiority, we can see further than they can.

Incidentally, as a good laugh, Wikipedia references Prime Mover as primum movens. The author of the article doesn't seemingly know that Aristotle wrote Greek, not Latin.

I'm posting to undo accidental moderation on a different post. Your arithmetic is wrong by a factor of 15. 100W by 15 rooms is 1.5kW, which would result in an annual cost of $2500 or thereabouts.

You don't understand this electricity grid thing, do you? It isn't "dumped on the grid". It gets used. While it supplies power to the grid, either other generation has a slightly smaller load or there is a minute voltage rise (which causes things like ovens to warm up a tiny bit faster so they reach desired temperature a little quicker.) This is the whole concept of the grid - lots of generation that comes on at different times and is carefully managed to meet the load requirements. Has it occurred to you, for instance, that when a conventional generator is down for maintenance it takes power from the grid to supply lighting, heating and equipment? We don't say it is useless because it has to be shut down periodically.

In effect, isn't there a risk that following your idea will simply mean that you will vote according to who buys the most online votes, whether by advertising or direct corruption? In this country (the UK) there is a long history of people voting for extreme parties or positions in elections that do not seem to matter. We believe that our representatives have not only the right, but the duty, to identify what is best for their constituents rather than simply to follow whoever shouts loudest.

In case you didn't know, and the dragging of your knuckles must make it hard to use Google, we're Indo-Europeans. That's right: we share our ancestry with the current inhabitants of India. And if you speak English, you will know that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic all derive from Indo-European roots, so you share a linguistic and cultural heritage with Indians. As a typical Brit - i.e. my extended family has roots in "Celtic" ancestry as well as Saxon, Norman, Indian, Iranian, Jewish, Russian and French - and that's just the ones I know about - I'm very happy about that.

Then there is the recently discovered fact that we "white" people are about 6% Neanderthal while black Africans are not. So are those Indians.

And don't get too involved in the history of the West of England, South Africa or the United States. There was an awful lot more interbreeding than you bigots like to imagine. The average white inhabitant of the English town of Bristol inherits about 8% of Afro-Caribbean genes. The average white South African? The average redneck? I'm guessing the same. The South African white supremacists had ways of dealing with the embarrassing off-white babies so many of them had when the right recessive genes lined up on the chromosomes.

So, basically, go back to wearing funny hoods and burning crosses, ae1294. That old DNA sure is no friend to the John Birch Society.

There will be at least one camera using silver halide film to produce 6x6 B&W negatives at my daughter's wedding, and I will ensure those negatives are properly fixed and cleaned, and stored in archival grade envelopes. We still have perfectly legible photos of my mother as a small child. She is over 90, so that beats 80.

Glass plates are even better. After years of storage the gelatin is pretty dried out and exposure to quite high heat levels still leaves the image legible.

Mind you, nothing beats iron (from ink made with iron + oak gall extract) on vellum or papyrus for long life at reasonable density (clay tablets fail the density test.) When doing commercial work in the City of London my father would sometimes bring home leases or contracts from the 1600s. They required very careful opening and handling, but they were perfectly readable once you grasped the character encoding.

The one that dropped $7 billion on trades recently? Oh dear.

Some of this is due to fashion and some of it to what has looked at times like a concerted negative PR attack from the competition. The Playbook on which I'm writing this is a convenient and useful tablet. RIM is now like Apple was at OS 9.2, except BB 7.1 isn't as bad as 9.2 was. Perhaps they will emulate Apple. Perhaps they will sink without trace.

Still, old people like me who like real keyboards may hope to pick up a 9900 or a 9790 for silly money later this year. The 9790 is a small, convenient, well built and specified phone which would have been eye-opening - in 2010.

Psychology at least is science. People do proper experiments with controls and properly defined methodologies, they analyse the results statistically, other people reproduce them, modify them, confirm or deny the results. That is science.

My one time supervisor in psychology, Max Hammerton, once demonstrated to the British Association that "hard science" often is not, with his graph showing how the estimated size of Pluto had decreased with time. The reason is that when it was discovered (a) there was a desire to use it to account for discrepancies in the orbit of Neptune and (b) it was the only planet discovered by an American. So the estimate taken for the published size was at the very top of the estimated range. Subsequent measurements were more accurate and tended to the real value, but because of the pressure of history (and from American astronomers) were also at the top of the estimated range.

It was a neat demonstration (and the subsequent row over the downgrading of Pluto to a dwarf planet still arouses the ire of some astronomers - things have not improved).

Basically this was an early demonstration of the correctness of the article referenced in the story, and of the fact that even "hard" sciences have a lot of fluff in them

It would be more correct to say that the editing occurred then. The original stories are very much older, and much of the material is a re-telling of the stories of very ancient cultures. I wouldn't be surprised if parts of Bereshit/Genesis date back to the time of the drying out of the Middle East, ca. 5000 years ago.

Incidentally the Wikipedia article amused me. While superficially even handed it contains this line:

The problem lies in finding a way to unite the patriarchal theme of divine promise to the primeval history

The problem, of course, only exists in the minds of people who want it to be God-inspired. To anybody else there is no problem: there isn't one.