azgolfer

The trillion dollar stimulus package is the glaringly obvious one.

LOL - Ruby is Smalltalk, not object oriented PERL. PERL has had objects for quite a while.

Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual ????????

Never mind Richard Feynman, the guy who thinks socialism works and apologizes for Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot's murdering tens of millions is America's greatest intellectual.

Yeah, for a measly hundred billion we can get some more astronomers. Great ! It's the geniuses that do most of the science and I think they tend to gravitate there anyway.

I'm reminded of Feynman's comments on the field of gravity, back in the 60's even before grade inflation and a huge increase in the number of Phds ----------------------------------------------------------- I am learning nothing. Because there are no experiments this field is not an active one, so few of the best men are doing work in it. The result is that there are hosts of dopes here (126) and it is not good for my blood pressure: such inane things are said and seriously discussed here that I get into arguments outside the formal sessions (say, at lunch) whenever anyone asks me a question or starts to tell me about his "work". The "work" is always: (1) completely un-understandable, (2) vague and indefinite, (3) something correct that is obvious and self evident, but a worked out by a long and difficult analysis, and presented as an important discovery, or, a (4) claim based on the stupidity of the author that some obvious and correct fact, accepted and checked for years, is, in fact, false (these are the worst: no argument will convince the idiot), (5) an attempt to do something probably impossible, but certainly of no utility, which it is finally revealed at the end, fails (dessert arrives and is eaten), or (6) just plain wrong. There is great deal of "activity in the field" these days, but this "activity" is mainly in showing that the previous "activity" of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in nothing promising. It is like a lot of worms trying to get out of a bottle by crawling all over each other. It is not that the subject is hard; it is that the good men are occupied elsewhere. Remind me not to come to any more gravity conferences! ------------------------------------------------------------

Peer review is neither necessary nor sufficient for science.

from Wikipedia "After graduating, Einstein spent almost two frustrating years searching for a teaching post,"

Seems to me an a guy who couldn't get hired as a physicist had a rather large effect on physics in 1905. The hiring process is a form of 'peer review'.

IIRC Reagan proposed a balanced budget, had the Grace commision recommending large cuts in government spending/programs through privatization. This was completely rejected by Congress, and Tip O'Neal said the budget was 'Dead On Arrival'.

Sorry about that,then. I assumed it disappeared becuase you deleted it. I thought it would stay around in threads even if it was downvoted.

I wasn't talking to you. You're the guy who pulled his thread when valid arguments were brought up that didn't support your point. I'm sure that's why you feel right at home at Real Climate.

If you want skepticism go to Climate Audit or Watts Up With That, then use your brain to decide if their arguments have merit.

And if the teeter totter shows he is as light as a duck, burn the denialist !

I would say it's the proponents that are doing it wrong. The supposedly independent and objective inquiry into the climategate scandal has already had one member forced to resign (the editor of Nature, btw) http://climateaudit.org/2010/02/11/the-team-that-cant-shoot-...

and now another member looks very questionable

http://climateaudit.org/2010/02/15/more-tricks-from-boulton-...

I was just getting interested, and that was never five minutes.

That article is about one of the IPCC authors validating a 'denialists' claim. It is the climategate scientists that broke the law, but the statute of limitations had expired (it is only six months, the law is seriously flawed), so they haven't been prosecuted. Here is another example of someone going directly from the raw data and finding no warming http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2010/01/global-warming/

Because stuff like this http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article702... is now pouring out, and realclimate.org is implicated in the climategate scandal, so you might want to go somewhere else for unbiased information

Here is the most recent example of someone looking into the GISS data.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/11/giss-adjustments-in-au...

The models have obvious warming biased 'adjustments' built into them and there is no model, which when given the correct inputs at a point in time would successfully predict the climate for a following period of time. The 'Hockey Stick' graph, which eliminates the Midieval Warm period and the Little Ice Age is the most obvious sign of how bad the models are.

It's AGW that is the extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary proofs. Ridiculously bad computer models with 'adjusted' data from cherry picked stations are not proof of anything, so we have no idea what our net contribution is to the temperature. And (if we can ever prove it), whether it will continue and if it is harmful.

It's significant because we've spent billions (and almost spent trillions) on a problem that doesn't exist - AGW. And this is from one of the leaders of the movement that created a false impression of that problem.

Sensitivity to something is invariably decreased by exposure. In my life, I've gone from a picture of bare breasts being a big deal and a huge turnon, to seeing graphic movies of any kind of sex imaginable free 24/7 on the internet. I don't think there is any question that this has made the average male expect their partners to do things that their partners mothers would never have considered doing. Whether this is bad or not is a separate question.

Yeah, right. As every day their are more revelations of corruption and incompetence in 'Climate Science'. There is really no such thing. Anyone who says they can build a computer model of the climate is either stupid, ignorant or corrupt. The CRU code is laughably ugly and sloppy, yet they would have us believe that they have made an incredible breakthrough in Computer Science - they can build an accurate model of the climate !

I still say robots are far better than humans for space exploration. There was even a proposal for repairing the Hubble with them. It would have been better if they had designed it with this type of repair/upgrade mission in mind. But it is always easier for them to justify an incremental cost, along with the romantic notion of humans in space.

This could have been done for way less than 175 billion (the estimated cost of the shuttle program).

The Shuttle program has alwasy been a boondoggle. There has been not one significant piece of science that has come out of it. Robots are far better at space exploration than humans.

Microwave radiation is too low energy to cause DNA mutation, so it can't be a direct cause of cancer. Besides, wouldn't we see ear cancer more than brain cancer ?

The book 'The Big Test' explains the rise of intelligence testing and the origin of the word 'meritocracy'. Prior to intelligence testing, college admittance was very influenced by whether your father had gone to that college. The hierarchy was determined by the status of your school and the senior society you were a member of. The senior George Bush he uses as an example - a Yale man and member of Skull and Bones. He mentions another remarkable fact - until around 1910 or so, 90% of corporate CEOs were Episcopalian. A very interesting book.

Yes, and the Fannie/Frdedie mortgage meltdown IMO was the result of government 'reverse' redlining.

Yes and the brilliance of the founders was creating a very limited federal government. The aristocratic senate and the house 'of the people' had to agree. The bill would get vetoed by default. One senator could stop any bill by filibustering. The bill of rights prevented state governments from gettting out of control...

I've always thought wide screen was strange. Didn't it originally come from projecting from two movie cameras side by side ? It's terrible for closeups in movies. It seems to me the human eye 'viewport' is somewhere around 4:3

In music, one huge factor is copying people. Stevie Ray Vaughan not only knew every Albert King lick, he knew them well enough to use them in new ways. To be a good musician, you need vocabulary and facility. Learning to play other peoples licks will help you with both. Playing in front of an audience or with other musicians will give you good feedback and make you focus on the end result. Listening a lot will also help. John Scofield listened to a Miles Davis record he owned until the needle wore through the vinyl. He could play (and sing) every note on the record. Great interview with Bill Evans on learning to play http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHWaGuurUk&feature=PlayL...