This is what happens when you have metrics. You create a metric like "impact factor", and before long people will figure out ways to maximize "impact factor" that have nothing to do what the metric was originally supposed to measure. Hyperfocusing on metrics like that ends up undermining the things you really value in favor of increasing your scores.

This happens all over the place. Games in every game find ways to increase their score in ways that the game designers wouldn't really consider valid. Universities do things simply to make their "US News" ratings go up, not because they will make themselves better. Students figure out ways to raise their grades that have nothing to do with mastering the material of the course. Heck, the entire US (and world?) economy suffers from this; the most reliably rich people are the ones who manipulate money transactions, and do absolutely nothing with the underlying reality that money is supposed to be an abstract representation of.

People strive to improve the things that they are rewarded for and that they are evaluated on. When you focus too much on the wrong thing, people will do the wrong things in response.

There is lots of evidence. Look up "Bullet Cluster" on the net for the closest thing to a single "smoking gun". Or, for a mention of the Bullet Cluster and lots of other evidence (and not even all of it), watch this: http://vimeo.com/4559703

First it's "90%" of the mass of the universe, then it's "70%", then we're back to "98%", then there's dark energy, then the fractions change again, and again, and again.

This is not a correct characterization of the history of Dark Matter.

First of all, if you really studied Physics in university, then you ought to know something about uncertainties. If not, then, shame on the people who gave you your degree.

The history of dark matter includes observations on different scales that include different amounts of "missing mass". On some of those scales, we have accounted for some of the "missing mass" with different things-- e.g. some (smallish) fraction of the missing mass in galaxy clusters turned out to be in very hot intracluster plasma (which can be seen in X-rays) (and, even though it's a smallish fractoin, it's more mass than all the stars in the galaxies!). Something like 2/3 of the "missing mass" from cosmology-- which, incidentally, was always considered one of the weakest constraints on dark matter, since the uncertainties on the most basic parameters like the Hubble Constant were HUGE until the end of the 20th century -- turned out to be Dark Energy (which in fact might not be a thing, but a pointer to a flaw in our physics).

The numbers changed, yes. But uncertainties were huge to start with, so there's no surprise that the numbers changed. Trying to claim that the changing of the numbers indicates that the theory isn't making sense is a standard rhetorical technique that somebody who claims to know something about science should be ashamed to use.

Until some physicist demonstrates that dark matter is still required to explain measurements when the theory used is the full general relativistic model with speed of light delay included, I'm just going to automatically assume that dark matter is bullshit.

Go look up the Bullet Cluster.

The gravitational lensing values used in the calculations of where the mass is in that cluster come out of General Relativity.

Dark Matter is not like the luminiferous aether.

The luminiferous aether is a substance that was invented to explain something that seemed missing from our theories (specifically, what it is that the speed of electromagnetic waves given by Maxwell's Equations is relative to). It made predictions, those predictions were tested, and so the idea was tossed out.

Dark Matter is a substance that was explained something that seemed missing from galaxies and clusters of galaxies (specifically, there wasn't enough mass there to explain why they held together given how fast things were moving). The idea of Dark Matter made predictions, those predictions were tested, and they *confirmed* Dark Matter.

There's nothing magic about Dark Matter. And the lines of evidence are more than just some equations that don't balance out.

More here: http://365daysofastronomy.org/2010/06/26/june-26th-dark-matter-not-like-the-luminiferous-ether/

Weakest of the three? Perhaps, but the competition is strong!

Heh... of course when the on-board sound card simply *doesn't work* with something (I'm thinking Second Life Voice under Linux, which granted is a huge mess because of the way it's put together), and it does with an add-on card or USB card, then, yeah, I can sure as heck tell a difference! I haven't needed expensive cards for the add-on, just something that doesn't use the Intel chipset.

This article is pretty ignorant.

To be fair, two things are true. One, Second Life has a woefully steep learning curve. Two, it's hard to find the things you'd really want to find in Second Life. Two is connected to One.... There are lots of people doing lots of creative and interesting things in Second Life, but it takes a fair bit of experience, or somebody leading you around, to know how to find them.

The writer of this sloppy piece did a quick dash and look, almost willfully avoiding putting in the most minimal effort it would take to really find out what's there. It would be like somebody "trying to figure out what this web thing is all about" by starting at http://www.com/ without knowing about sites like Google. Again, yes, the web is more mature and as such it's far easier to find what you're looking for... but that is how distorted the picture this article paints is.

Yes, the sorts of things you're interested in will often not be easily or readily found. But once you start figuring out how to find them, there's all kinds of great stuff going on.

Two things I'm involved with-- which, thus, are the sorts of things I'm interested in-- are science and theater. My theater group is at http://www.avreptheater.com/ , and my science group is at http://www.mica-vw.org./ If you want to see evidence of a whole bunch of people showing up at once at something that at least I consider interesting (although I'm extremely biased), check this out: http://www.pookymediafilms.com/2009/05/dr-knop-talks-astronomy.html