If I'm choosing a uniformly random real number between zero and one, then zero probability events will happen all the time. I can't simulate that process in the real world, but then, that's true of much (most?) of mathematics as well... but in any case, "probability zero" only means "impossible" over certain spaces.

Admittedly, those spaces may include the physical world, though it's hard to really be sure. If the universe is infinite after all, then every moment of existence is arguably another zero-probability event.

True, but I said an uncountable number of outcomes, whereas the axioms you list only hold up to a countable number of sets. For example, if you're choosing a random integer, then yes, I agree, an integer with a probability of zero will never occur.

On the other hand, if you're choosing, say, a random (real) number between zero and one, with uniform probability, then every possible outcome has zero probability -- but there's still a 1/10 chance that I will choose a number in the range [0.15, 0.25]. In that case, only masses of events have probability, so saying an event has probability zero is not the same as saying it's impossible.

Not necessarily. It may be that there are an uncountable number of possible outcomes, and each individual outcome has a zero probability, but large sets of them collectively still have positive probability. At least, models exist where this makes sense...

A few vacation photos, over a hundred tourists, scattered across the internet, equates to "a for profit geo-tagged database?"

1. The article doesn't seem to imply that violence was used. 2. Under the circumstances, what procedure should they have used to "politely request" that Google leave them alone?

Your second point ought to nullify your first one. Also, who is it about, if you're contending that it "isn't about" the actual people most directly affected? It's just about Google and their profits, then, or what?

I'm not especially opposed to Google's behavior on this issue, but I also don't understand why everyone is jumping all over these people and calling them idiots just because they don't want to participate.

And if someone recommended a job candidate to you, saying "Over a thirty-year career he has proven himself countless times," would you interpret that as meaning "There is a theorem published in a mathematical journal stating that he is correct an uncountable number of times"?

Oh, please. You really think this reaction is because we're secretly thinking "Oh no, if third-graders really apply critical thinking to some of our greatest scientific theories, they will realize all the flaws and won't believe in it"? Evolution has stood up to an awful lot of critical thinking over quite a long time (as scientific fields go).

There are excellent ways to teach critical thinking via evolution. For example, you could start with early understanding of natural selection, and show how the idea of "slow and steady progress" was replaced with punctuated equilibrium because a variety of observations and theoretical models showed that was more accurate. Or look at other ideas that have been gradually refined, and show the evidence that was used to reach the current understanding.

If, on the other hand, you're going to stand in front of a bunch of little kids and teach them established fallacies to trick them into thinking that the current understanding is not really supported by the evidence, then that is a bad thing. No one here is worried about actual, genuine, evidence-based critical thinking. The problem is that what IDers call "critical thinking" is just "repeating falsehoods that the hearers are too young / inexperienced / uneducated to recognize".

Alright -- I misread you as making a stronger statement than you were actually trying to. But I still disagree with you: the paper you pointed to, as shadowbearer and I both pointed out, is not about global warming, and is not trying to be. So:

is not accurate. The paper you pointed to is not about global warming. The abstract doesn't mention global warming at all, and the summary you pointed to only mentions global warming as a potential cause of the rising sea temperatures (the paper is claiming to show that about 2/3 of the rise is due to aerosols, leaving 1/3 from other causes). The point is that neither one is about whether global warming is happening, all that is being asked is whether this specific regional rise can be attributed to global warming, to which the answer is apparently "not entirely".

So: unless a paper that is actually about the "global warming thesis" says otherwise, there's really no reason to think that the paper has any relevance to that issue, at least without a much stronger justification. (And, again, if it did have relevance to such a hot-button issue, it seems like they'd advertise that fact, rather than leaving it out of the abstract entirely...)

Al Gore is neither here nor there. I'm concerned about what qualified climatologists would have me believe. When one of them says it's unclear (unclear as in "it might not be a big deal at all", not as in "we can't give a year-by-year calendar of exactly how severe the consequences will be", which is obviously true), then let me know. But even if you aren't a "denier" personally, doing things like posting articles that aren't really relevant to global warming and saying they "don't support" global warming is still misleading and falsely encourages the meme that there is still a lot of debate about whether global warming is real.

And when climatologists claim that global warming will kill everyone on earth unless we give trillions of dollars to the climatologists, then that point will be relevant. But a lot of the research is being done by people who do not have a serious personal investment in people believing global warming is a danger when it is not. And while many suggestions for possible ways to deal with the issue would be expensive to implement, by and large that money would not be funneled into the pockets of the people making the suggestions. (Disclaimer: yes, there are greenwashing companies that would like you to buy their products. That is not where the bulk of the credible climate research is coming from, however.)

Then it's a good thing that that's not what people are saying. Certainly they might say "You don't understand it [or, more commonly, 'You're misinterpreting it'] because you haven't acquired the necessary background in the field". But if you're going to say that someone who has devoted their life to studying this is completely wrong in their conclusions, and yet you're not willing to put in the work to establish yourself as at least minimally competent and credible in that area of research, then it's unreasonable to be offended when they say you don't understand.

In any case, if you are willing to develop the background, the relevant research is readily available. In fact, even as a layman, if you look around (say, on Google) you can find point-by-point discussions of common "legitimate questions" about global warming. These things aren't secrets, and your implication that the scientists involved are ignoring and dismissing questions while asking for more money is a total straw man.

Who is closing their eyes more? GP, who (legitimately) dismissed your paper as being about regional climate, not global average temperature, or you, who are dismissing all of the peer-reviewed papers that talk about global climate (which don't agree with your claim), and instead choosing to focus on one paper about a specific region? The fact that "the tropical north atlantic" is a pretty big region doesn't excuse it.

Do you think it's just never occurred to the researchers who study global climate change that maybe they should be incorporating information like this in their work? Or that the paper you cited really does disprove global warming, but every single climatologist forgot to mention this in any published research (including the paper itself... talk about seriously underselling your research...)

I've read a number of "I was there! I remember the panic!" posts over the years on slashdot, and yet I've still never seen any of them who were able to point to any significant body of actual scientific research that supports it. Media distortion of scientific research is easy to find. Can you point to actual scientists (preferably peer-reviewed) who were suggesting this was a serious danger?

Since the claim is evidently that there was a "panic" about the whole thing, realistically to support it you'd need a fairly broad citation list, at least several papers (or a couple papers that cite several others)... but I'd be interested to see if there was more than one, or even one paper, that both (1) shows evidence that global temperatures are cooling, and (2) makes any kind of prediction that this trend will continue in such a way as to pose a serious danger (not necessarily an absolute doomsday prediction, a serious suggestion would suffice, but it should be a serious suggestion and not just "we should probably study this some more to see if..." -- otherwise it in no way compares to the level of widespread confidence among climatologists today on global warming).

Pointing to old media articles is not a substitute for this kind of evidence, nor is "I was there and I remember" good enough unless there is some additional evidence that what you "remember" is scientific consensus and not media alarmism.

I wasn't blaming anyone or anything in particular. Just relating my experience, which agreed with the original poster. You're saying something is impossible, but it happened to both of us. If you think I should blame my "specific C++ environment", well that's fine with me, but I'm not sure what you're trying to defend right now, I'm not trying to attack anyone or anything, I just don't think that the original poster was necessarily bullshitting about their experience.

Just because you are confident of your own correctness doesn't mean everyone else is lying about their experience. You can suggest alternate explanations for those experiences without insulting everybody and saying everyone who has seen this issue is bullshitting (and again... why would we be bullshitting about this? What could there possibly be to gain by tricking people about something like that?)

Or, more succinctly: Just because you think you're right, doesn't mean you have to be a jerk.

Ehm... that's a nice theory, but I second GP's experience in finding otherwise in practice. I don't know the specific reasons -- maybe there were memory fragmentation issues and it wasn't really STL's "fault" -- but I was doing some large-for-my-laptop (with 3GB ram) data processing, and initially used vectors for everything. I eventually had to give up and rewrite it all with arrays just like GP, because I kept having difficult-to-debug and impossible-to-fix memory issues as a result.

Really, why would someone bother "bullshitting" about something like this? He was pointing out a peculiarity of the overheads one particular program he worked with, I don't think he was doing it with some sort of anti-STL agenda or anything...

There might be systems on which this is true, but not on the c++ libraries on my mac. When I was trying to figure out what was going wrong with my vector-based program, I got to look at a lot of vectors from within gdb, and they have a neat bucket system going on that I'm sure is very fancy and clever, but let me tell you, it is not just an array, and good luck figuring out from the data alone what is stored in it unless you already know an awful lot about the underlying implementation...

I think I mostly agree with you, and a lot of the differences in what we're saying now are a question of precisely how you define your terms -- you seem to define "fact" in a very abstract sense that means you can never claim to know any specific facts, whereas I'm very comfortable in saying, based on the evidence in front of me, that it is a solid fact that I'm sitting at my table replying to a slashdot post right now. In your terminology, that's just shorthand, and there needs to be an implied asterisk saying "subject to the collection of additional data"... well, fair enough, in a philosophical sense I see what you mean, but I don't see the advantage in adding these disclaimers to "evolution is a fact" when, insofar as anything is a fact, evolution can be said to be one, so the absolutist terminology is unlikely to lead to ambiguity.

Where I strongly disagree with you though is in your original claim I responded to: responding to "evolution is a fact," you said "welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists." No. You can say that, in your opinion, there needs to be a qualification there, since there is always more data to discover, and in a very abstract, formal sense you'd be right. But when one person is saying "X is a fact, and here is a mountain of evidence that shows it" and another is saying "Y is a fact despite mountains of evidence, because I have a book that says so," the two are not in the same intellectual territory. If you want to say the first person should be slightly more precise, that's fair, though I disagree with you on the utility of such precision in a forum like this (and with your claim that to do otherwise is a threat to science)...

I know you didn't mention Dawkins, I brought him up because he seemed to exemplify some of the traits you were criticizing, and because I don't like him very much ;) But really, if Dawkins is actually a "danger to science," then "science" deserves to fail because it is manifestly too weak to deal with even the slightest threat to its integrity. The most I think you can say is that Dawkins, and people like him, are a short-term danger to science education. And even then, I don't think they're as much of a danger to science education as people who want to put creationism in science textbooks -- despite his rhetoric, I don't think Dawkins has much chance of adding a "How we know God does not exist" section to high school biology texts...

But that's just the distinction people are trying to make here -- in talking about facts, I, and GP, weren't talking about the theory. Theory is something that tries to explain a given set of observations. But those observations still exist as independent facts. It is a fact that there was a volcanic eruption in Alaska a few days ago. There is abundant theory to explain exactly why and how it happened (and to make predictions about the eruptions in advance). But claiming the volcanic eruption is a fact in retrospect does not endanger "science."

But if you're going to push things to the point where if I say "it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun" and you say that's dogma, not data -- and that's something we can actually observe happening, every year -- then I don't think you will ever be content referring to common descent as a fact, no matter what the evidence...

I think this shows a lack of perspective. Dawkins is a jerk who should stay out of metaphysics, but he's no danger to "science" even though he sometimes misrepresents it. I don't think there's any biologist who would not be thrilled to find some new, even better explanation for common descent than is currently known, or convincing evidence that common descent is not actually a fact. If evolutionary theory was merely "dogma", any such possibility would be suppressed instead. There would likely have been a pretty bad reaction if in the early 20th century you tried to claim the sun goes around the Earth, but the imposition of that "dogma" didn't prevent the acceptance of relativity when the evidence was there to back it up...

Ehm... why do people keep responding to my post pointing out pedantic exceptions that I already specifically talked about? I said "you can play semantic games where you reconstruct the laws of gravity in a rotating reference frame and there is nothing but Occam to say you're wrong in doing that", which is basically your post except without the devil's-advocate perspective. At the end of the day, we still don't want our science teachers telling our kids that the sun goes around the Earth. Would my original point have been clearer if I used a car analogy?