"To express ernest disapproval" of something (Random House); to avert by prayer; from "de" + "precari", to pray. The appearance of "deprecate" in the software-engineering community (about 25 years ago ISTR, give or take a decade) seemed magical: a solidly classical -- even slightly arcane -- word popping up in a powerfully appropriate place ("for security reasons, use of this feature is now deprecated") in the middle of a community that was notoriously indifferent to linguistic finesse. (On a whimsical study in 2003, I found that the ratio of incorrect to correct spellings of "supersede" was higher on web pages that also contained the word "megahertz". [If you're wondering, the anti-megahertz is charybdis, whose appearance on a web page almost guarantees that any supersede on that page will be correctly spelled.])

". . . to deprecate iptables . . ."? I do not think "deprecate" means what you think it means.

http://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=ADRA2B&snp=99 lists 99 SNPs in the ADRA2B gene. The following 8 of these SNPs also appear in my 23andMe results: rs3813662 rs29000571 rs4907299 rs2229169 rs29000569 rs4426564 rs28932482 rs35053873 . The available abstract doesn't say where on the gene the deletion mutation occurs, so I can't tell which of these SNPs is closest to it. (I would expect that a deletion mutation would never be a SNP.) Since they're all pretty close together, any one of them would be very likely to track the mutation over many generations.

NASA has one expert stating that the flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14 is a once-in-forty-years event, and another expert stating that this Russian meteor/meteorite is a once-in-100-years event, and yet another expert asserting that the fact that these two events happened on the same day is a coincidence. Given that the standard statistician's definition of "highly significant" corresponds to a 1% chance of coincidence, and that one day out of 40 years is 0.007%, I think the probability that NASA has spoken hastily is greater than the probability that this was a coincidence.

Can't we just agree to ignore all announcements about quantum computers that aren't accompanied by both (a) the system reference manual pages for the instructions that manipulate the quantum hardware, and (b) performance numbers for a completely specified problem?

The headline claims a revelation of "Opposition to Science", but the post itself only makes assertions about climate skepticism. If the writer really equates the two, he should try to calm down.

Why shouldn't I disable *every* root cert that I'd be surprised to find authenticating a browser session with my bank? Only a handful of root certificates suffice for nearly all of my secure browsing. Wouldn't I very much want to be alerted if an SSL session with my bank were based on a certificate issued by the Lower Slobbovian Postal Authority?

I hope this incident leads browser makers to adopt more realistic certificate husbandry mechanisms, such as alerting me when my bank's cert changes.

Let's eyeball the statistics: 60 measurements per organ (according to the abstract), times seven organs (adrenal glands, brain, gonads, heart, kidneys, liver, and spleen), times two feeding durations (5 and 14 weeks), times two sexes (male, female), time three strains of corn tested (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), equals 5040 measurement series. (Wow! 7!) So in the absence of any effect, we should expect 5040/20 = 252 "statistically significant" (p < .05) discoveries and 5040/100 = 50 "statistically highly significant" (p < .01) discoveries.

Are we learning something about health, or are we just illustrating the perils of data dredging?

Batzer is one of the researchers. He should know that in the standard evolutionary phylogenetic model, the platypus is no more closely related to birds than we are, since we and platypodes share a common ancestor that existed in the mammalian line after the mammalian line separated from birds.

While it is true that to a human a platypus looks more like a bird than does another human, it is equally true that to a platypus a human looks more like a bird than does another platypus.

And the implication that classifying it as a mammal is a mistake ("even though it is indeed classified as a mammal", rather than "even though it's a mammal") is just silly.