I may have actually been there at the time. That, or this is just something he does normally anyways.

Argh. Above was me. Did not mean to be cowardly.

Yep, it's all in the name. It's the PATRIOT Act. You want to be a PATRIOT don't you??

Same thing with the ridiculous "Job-Killing Healthcare Law Repeal Act" or whatever they're calling it. You don't want to KILL JOBS do you???

It's in the name, so it must be true, right?

I won't bother with many of the claims made in this review, and I'm not interested in this book, either.

The only evidence I need is that the author makes sweeping claims about philosophy of science by citing exactly one philosopher, the generally reviled Feyerabend. If the author, either of the review or the book, were serious, they would engage with the field as a whole. They would also know that philosophy of science, as practiced in analytic departments, has taken a strong stand against post-modern relativism and has able, articulate and competent writers with scientific backgrounds: Bas van Fraasen, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, Philip Kitcher, Harvey Brown, Eliot Sober, Nancy Cartwright, Patrick Suppes... I could go on.

There are real issues as well: about deductive and inductive logic, Bayesian confirmation, biomedical ethics, clinical trial structure, physical interpretation, but of course our authors prefer to dwell the disputed (and here, unsurprisingly, mischaracterized) claims of a single figure. A contrarian figure that, if anything, stands opposed to the mainstream consensus in philosophy of science, positivistic (e.g., the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and so on) and post-positivistic: that science works, works best, and likely describes real, knowable entities.

It's plenty clear both authors don't have a clue what they are talking about. That Ayn Rand is brought up only underscores this. I suggest no one wastes their time on this obvious trash. If you want good, relevant, interesting philosophy of science, any of the above-mentioned authors would do fine.

That's all good and fine if you're actually a contractor and your daily travel involves hauling around lots of tools and large hardware. Nobody's going to say people shouldn't drive trucks if they don't have a real use for them on a daily basis. But so many people (men, mostly) drive their oversized monster trucks to work every day to sit at a desk and code all day. And those trucks? Not a scratch on them. No, I don't think they've ever actually been used for construction purposes.

As for me, I don't need to get windows replaced every single day. If I do, I'll rent a truck for a day. Or even easier: have them delivered. If it's local it'll cost like $20, or about 0.05% of the cost of the gas I save annually by not driving a goddamn monster truck to work.

Wikipedia tells me that some of the people pushing this "rogue software" that masquerades as legitimate security product clear hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. These aren't the hackers of yore, hunting for vulnerabilities as a kind of intellectual exercise, or just looking to crow about their exploits on IRC. There's money to be made, not like twenty years ago, when you'd get the Stoned virus from a dial-up BBS download of an ANSI art editor and kind of think it was neat.

I want my body to be eaten by velociraptors or a T-rex - I'm not picky as to how. In the event that the human race totally fails to achieve its technological destiny and we haven't figured out to create raptors from the dinosaur blood in amber-trapped mosquitos, I guess I will settle for having my corpse cleaned with dermestid beetles, and the skeleton used in some sort of elaborate prank.

I hear it will also have support for Stalfos, Keese, and Gel.

Right--there's no problem with taking a mathematical model and tweaking the parameters until it fits experimental results.

But when you do that, it means your model is dependent on some basic assumptions. In the case of string theories, a well-known parameter is the number of spacial dimensions. If a model happens to fit experimental evidence very well, but only if there are 11 spacial dimensions, that's all well and good. But that model is useless if the assumptions are false.

We might still be able to design experiments to discover whether extra dimensions exist. Right now they're not feasible, due to the amount of energy it would take to explore those depths. But it may be possible. Of there turn out to be enough extra dimensions to fit a string theory, then we can put a check next to that parameter saying that it's consistent with reality. And that's a mark in favor of the theory.

It seems packets are being dropped by AT&T routers. A few other sites seem to be unreachable too. ZDnet has the scoop: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18064

THIRD BASE!

"You forget, Peter. I was present at an undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration."