You forgot #0

0. A company within or supporting the IT industry that treats their own IT department as a cost-center and/or as a necessary evil. An IT industry company with a clue knows the value of IT and how to leverage it efficiently to add value to the organization and/or bottom line. Those without a clue are going to miss a lot of good opportunities, suffocate themselves by knowing enough to be dangerous, or sabotage their own operations. Based on my anecdotal experience anyhow, but I think you have to be extremely lucky otherwise and over the long term luck tends to run out. The cause of this effect I think is upper management that does not really understand the market they are managing. This can be so insidious that you may not know when to run until it's too late so it's a good idea to pay attention if you see the signs.

Thanks man, for your optimism that the scientific process will eventually make progress towards the truth. I've been getting impatient and have been missing that side of the big picture, and taking this whole scientific truth thing way to seriously! I gotta chill out - we'll get there eventually.

Though maybe we have limited lifespans precisely for the reasons you stated that it is so easy for people to get trapped in limited ideas, so it is natures way of giving us a way out. A changing of the guard if you will that eventually allows new ideas to enter and allows the religions to fall away and be replaced by new ideas. Those changes take centuries so they appear unchanging like rocks eroding in the rain.

What this has to do with making science popular? I have no idea, and maybe that is a silly quest anyhow. Some people are trapped for whatever reason and don't seem to be interested in the "truth", but rather tend to be more interested in a sense of stability in the world that does not challenge what they already are familiar with - which happens to be the antithesis of the goals of science, I think. The question "Are you a Scientist?" maybe could be replaced by "Are you committed to discovering the truth - no matter what you already believe?". I would also question whether it is really in the domain of science to sell science to those who are not interested, or whether that would be better for another field - like philosophy or religion instead. Hmm, religion's job to sell science - what a paradox that is in our society!

Hear! Hear! Do a google on "Plasma Cosmology" (which I summarized here: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1367811&cid=29416583). There is tons of activity regarding better working models of the universe than the gravity model that we now take for granted. Check this out too. I think you will love it: http://www.youstupidrelativist.com/

Science has been hijacked by mathmetitions and has now become a religion of mathmatical constructions pretending to represent reality. While they allow some computations to enable us to make predictions, they these methods do not represent the actual way that the universe functions.

Take a look at some of the revelations being brought about in Plasma Cosmology and you start to realize that there has been a free pass given to the Cosmologists to create mythological entities that shape reality in any way that they imagine. Curved space-time, black holes, big bang, neutron stars, quantum reality, quarks, gluons, etc. All of these coming from shaky logical foundations and mathematical tricks that diverge from reality. And notice that the large entities such as the big bang, black holes, and neutron stars, are completely unfalsifiable because we cannot create them in a lab. I think people are intuitively turned off by all of this because it has become a religion and anyone who questions it is ignored or attacked.

Let's get back to experimental science that can be demonstrated in the lab. The Plasma Cosmology models assume that gravity is a tiny force, and that the major force shaping the universe is actually flows of electrical energy and the resultant magnetic fields. Their predictions based on observable lab results are easily scalable up to the size of the universe and make sense without creating mythological creations such as black holes and curved space in an attempt to explain such behaviors.

We are about to see a major revolution in Science on the scale of Copernicus. Please do me a favor and at least do a little research before you start your inevitable attack on me as a straw man for your frustrations that Science has been off track for some time now.

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." Nikola Tesla, Modern Mechanics and Inventions, July, 1934

The FDA contradicts your assertion that sugar pills are no longer used. I just did a google search "placebo sugar pill site:fda.gov", and I found plenty of drugs approved this year that list a sugar pill as the placebo.

I hope it does push the panic button. It is one thing for us to defend ourselves. It is quite another for us to make another species miserable or extinct while attempting to optimize a way to defend ourselves from our own fears. Public outcry and discussion can give us pause so that we can investigate whether the effectiveness outweighs the possible ethical costs, and hopefully come up with a thoughtful solution.

I would like to know why sugar is considered an "inert" substance and so is associated with being a reliable placebo. I don't care if our diets have a lot in it already. Sugar is known to be immunosuppressive and to also stimulate the release of serotonin in the brain.

And, maybe it depends on what you are testing for whether this "inert" sugar is affecting the outcome. For example, if you are testing treatments for treating cold symptoms, it is possible that the sugar pill suppresses the immune system, thus making the cold medication look good by comparison. On the other hand, when testing treatment for a psychiatric condition, perhaps sugar actually is having a positive effect in the brain. In that case, psychologically as well as chemically, with sugar are also giving a "reward" to the brain for taking the pill, so we must also assume that the brain has nothing to do with health if we trust sugar as an inert baseline.

Our scientists and culture tend to have tunnel-vision and assume that something as supposedly harmless as a sugar pill could be considered inert chemically with respect to a very specific chemical process in the body. But in general sugar is not inert and it can in fact affect the systems being tested, thus I suggest it makes a lousy placebo that can distort data on medical treatments depending on what is being tested.

wtf indeed.

Way cool!!! I want one but google is coming up blank. Anyone know where they sell Levonos?

True what you say about the flawed premise of research being used solely to create jobs. Funding research solely as a means to create jobs is bad a idea and seems to be yet another aspect of the current trend towards short-term thinking. In addition, research created with the agenda of creating jobs has too much risk of conflicts of interest, such as the temptation to create research that clouds the issues and creates the need for further research, going nowhere. It would be better to consider research like an investment in our society that will eventually reap jobs, but not to focus directly on research as a significant and direct means to create the jobs in the short term.

Though I must point out the obvious anecdotal evidence to support the value of government involvement in research and development... "We" are communicating like "this" because of the DARPA program. So "we", via our tax dollars, have had a great success in encouraging creativity, research and learning.