THIS. With $33M a year you can fund about 8000 postdocs (NIH payscale), or 3000 professors.

Or you could directly fund your own institute, with positions that are more stable than the dreaded post-doc, but less cushy than the unfireable tenured professorship. Like Louis Pasteur [wikipedia.org] did with his Nobel money, to the enduring benefit of mankind.

Either of these would probably do much more for actual science than piling up more money on folks who are likely to have their career behind them.

AKA the IQ of an average Scotsman in the 40s, when evaluated on a modern scale.

Taking ESR seriously about anything scientific is a losing proposition. His antics on climate science are widely known (sees some piece of code that adjusts a timeseries for temperature increases, and immediately concludes that global warming is a hoax), but it's not common knowledge that he's also an HIV denialist.

If you stay on Facebook, you implicitly acknowledge that they do, because you still judge the overall value of their service to be positive despite this added "inconvenience".

What are the 3 common points between Jan Ullrich, David Millar, Bjarne Riis and Richard Virenque?

- All of them wore the Tour de France yellow jersey at some point (Riis and Ullrich won the tour outright, Virenque won the mountains classification several times).

- All of them eventually admitted to doping.

- None of them were ever caught by the so-called "drug tests". They were found out through other evidence (drug transport interception, raid on clinic, etc.)

The simple fact is that the drug tests in the 90s were a joke. They got a bit better in the 2000s, and that's how many of the later crop of dopers were caught (Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, etc.) They're still nowhere near 100%. Extraneous evidence is still a major factor in catching dopers.

Is Lance Armstrong one of the greatest cyclists of all times ? Yes he is - he won 7 Tours while all his competitors were loaded with drugs too!

Did he do it without doping? If you believe that, either you don't follow cycling much or you're 12.

And then these plants don't reproduce, and at the next generation the problem solves itself.

Terminator seeds are only a "problem" for people who don't grok natural selection.

Petrol in the UK costs about GBP 1.5 per litre. That's roughly $9 per gallon.

Mass starvation has somehow failed to occur.

Yeah, when I'm looking for a careful assessment of scientifice evidence, my first source is always uncommondescent.com (actual byline: "serving the intelligent design community").

As for your first link, it quotes one actual climate scientist saying that in the future, snowfalls in parts of England are going to be rare and exciting (the "in a few years" is from the journalist, not the scientist). Apparently you regard this statement as absolutely ridiculous on its face?

Well, global warming is expected to warm global temperatures by 2degC or more by 2100. More so on land (as compared to oceans) and more so in the Northern hemisphere. Now let's compare the average minimum winter temperatures of two cities:

London, UK: 2.7 (Dec), 2.3 (Jan) 2.1 (Feb).
Marseille, France: 4.1 (Dec), 3.0 (Jan), 3.9 (Feb).

Guess what? Snowfalls are rare and exciting events in Marseille, right now! What do you think will happen in London when daily temperatures increase by two degrees?

.... nothing. Almost all prominent climate scientists have tenure or nearly-equivalent job security.

  But thanks for the fact-free FUD, dear Mr. AC who supposedly "works in science".

You, and a bunch of other /.ers, are in urgent need of reading this.

There's a reason why uber-smart people have decided that they really needed this "dark matter" stuff.

Actually, although the guy doesn't mention it, this looks a lot like an expanded version of Richard Dawkins' "WEASEL" experiment.

As such, it does have some educational purpose: by its success (which would be impossible with an actual million monkeys experiment), it shows that evolution by natural selection (that's what the guy is doing) is very different from, and much more powerful than, simple random search. Simply because it's selective (duh), and more importantly, cumulative: you don't start from scratch at every new phenotype, you keep the good stuff you've found so far.

I wish he had highlighted this bit. That would have made his experiment much more valuable.

And yet I notice that you are posting this under a pseudonym.

If he did it the standard way, then he simply took the data and calculated the probability of obtaining the same trend, or a more extreme one, if there was no warming - i.e. if temperatures really did follow a random walk. That's called a p-value. He found that if you only consider the last 14 data points, a completely unbiased process would have a bit more than 5% probability of producing a similar (or more extreme) increase. Ergo, the trend is not significant "at the 95% level" (the professor misspoke a bit here, people would rather say "at the p=0.05 level", but presumably that's what he meant).

Of course, the doubters understood this as "Phil Jones sez warming has stopped OMG!", when what he really said was that the observed data had a bit more than 5% chance of occuring if there was no warming. Tellingly, the more educated "skeptics", who could easily have corrected this misperception, did not.

But much more than 5% of the global spending power.