• The causation comes not from going to museums but from the feeling of being lucky.
• The causation exists because of the negative effects induced by the alternative activity proposed to those who didn't go to the museums
• In the museums the guide talked about tolerance and most of the students never had heard about this concept. So it was what was said not the contact with the art itself.

For me unfortunately a scientific claim made about humans is accepted if and only if it seems reasonable.

If small differences in the floating-point precision make your results vary a lot it is a sign that your computation is useless. For in this case your model is producing more random noise than information. Concerns about reproducibility are obviously frivolous in this case.

I don't believe Syria gov't has used chemical weapons any more than that Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction...

How long will it take for people to suspect on what the read/watch on mainstream media?

Isn't enough to remember that the last time the U.S. blamed the Syrian government for a chemical weapons attack, that claim was debunked?

The bad argument here is to argue that GMO is just like genetic selection, just pushed a bit further.

Of course it is not. Nobody is against genetic selection, neither in Europe not anywhere else.

You have exposed many theories on the psychology of superstitious people.

But do you have an explanation of what makes a self-described "full-fledged skeptic, atheist, and rationalist" come to the conclusion that you "come[s] across as a bullying figure, eager to attack and ridicule, willing to distort and even invent evidence - in short, the sort of person who will do anything to prevail in a debate, whether by fair means."

Thanks,
apol

I at least only have myself to blame for not having secured or backed them up

Of course you are not free from intrusion or backup failure if you put your files in your hard disk. It is a question of betting in your competence or in Google's. And it is reasonable to imagine that most people would consider Google more competent than themselves. And of course you can back up your gdoc data, see for instance:

http://www.dataliberation.org/
http://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup

I can't count on the availability of a constant internet connection

You can work offline, see:
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1628467

Of course it is OK to criticize some decisions of Youtube, but bashing it like this seems childish, unfair to me. No other company has done as much for free speech (by far IMO).

I sincerely hope the EFF can one day have 10% of the impact Youtube has had to defend our rights worldwide.

In particular among the corporate world, no company is close to Google in the defence of freedom and openness. The fact that some times they give in to government pressure does not change that. I believe it is in our interest to recognize that fact, even when urging Google to do better.

Leave Israel alone, and they'll leave you alone.

Unless of course you are a Palestinian, having the bad luck to live in the land God gave to the chosen people.

Clearly people at CERN have no compassion for the lawyers.

Nice example of two commonly used fallacies formulated by the so-called sceptics in the name of science.

• No scientific evidence implies the claim is false or probably false.
• If it is placebo, it is specificity can be ignored, placebo being something that can be isolated from the rest of the treatment.

It is amazing how often the self entitled sceptics fail to use the same standard of rationality depending on whether they are supporting or attacking their beliefs.

apol

Is it only me or are there other people persuaded that the violence in this episode is the everyday rule, not an accident, and that the only thing that was exceptional in it was that employees of an important Western company were murdered?

Otherwise of course we would never know about this video. Why would the army have to care about civilians killed in Fallujah or anywhere else if the reporting that they were armed insurgents suffices, with rare exception such as this one?