bellaire

Not at all. It is true that CO2 has never led temperature change before; that's because the massive anthropogenic CO2 spike in the data is completely unprecedented, so we don't know what happens when CO2 increases massively "on its own".

Climate scientists try to figure out whether this could affect global climate, and many say it can and probably is. This latter thing is what is being ignored.

Both are views of death are technically correct, but focusing on the former while ignoring the latter is problematic for reasons described at length in the article.

Afraid doesn't necessarily denote the emotion of fear, I think in this context we can safely say it's merely the anticipation of something which is disliked. Like, "I'm afraid if I order from Sloppy Joe's Pizzeria, I'll find another hair in my pizza."

Ostensibly, yes. However, the reality of the situation is left as an exercise for the conscientious reader.

The article specifically describes a comparison of Finland with Norway, similiar in size and ethnic composition. Apples-to-apples, as you say. Norway's education policy is much more similar to the US, and Norway's PISA results are mediocre, also similar to the US.

I agree with your post, but this:

...as meaningful as comparing a phillips screwdriver with a flathead. They're used for different purposes.

is perhaps not the best analogy. They are both for turning screws, and some people do, in fact, have strong opinions on which is better.

Unless you meant to say that a phillips is for turning screws and a flathead is for prying stuff open. :-D

Using xargs with a pipe is easier. I don't know any reason why I'd want to "save a pipe" when working at the command line.

Also note that text surrounded by asterisks in your comment become italics. Indent text by two or more spaces to reproduce text verbatim, like for code.

You can other things to show that you give a damn besides apologizing, which is kind of her point.

Would a woman apologize to another woman about the behavior of a crude man? No, because she hasn't done anything wrong. Apologizing explicitly externalizes women as being outside your group. You're saying "gee, I'm sorry one of us did that to one of you." That just reinforces the idea that "Women in Tech" are a separate entity from "People in Tech". She's asking you to stay at the "People in Tech" level.

Not-apologizing isn't a form if ignoring. There are many other things you can do than pretend to be part of the offending group so that you can apologize. If a caucasian American said to an African-American, "Gee, I'm sorry about slavery, that was really wrong of us", that would be horribly offensive, wouldn't it?

Are we all in this together or not?

Teleology was used somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The older literature was problematic because it aligned too neatly with anthropocentric ideas of goal-oriented evolution, and gave rise to nonsense objections like "Where is the missing link?" and "Why are apes still around?"

I don't doubt the integrity of the scientists who were involved with the earlier literature, but in hindsight it looks an awful lot like a teleological bias.

Build me a quantum teleporter, then we can compare masses.

Great post, more informative than the article.

As far as I know, the adaptive radiation theory is now held as correct for hominids just as it is for every other group of species. The "classical" teleological viewpoint doesn't hold up to scrutiny for the reasons you cited.

Surprising, and highly unlikely. If it's not too taxing for you, you could read the rest of the Wikipedia article to better understand when measures other than reproductive compatibility are employed.

The suggestion that color alone would be employed by modern biologists to differentiate species, to the exclusion of other more important factors, is specious.

There are two differences:

One, stuff is a positive number. If your goal is to have less stuff to be happy, you can't get less than zero stuff. It's self-limiting. If your goal is to have more stuff, there is no limit. It's always possible to have more stuff.

Second, the OP seems to indicate that having stuff wasn't actually making him happy, which is an important distinction. Actually being happy is totally distinct from feeling like you will be happy if you buy more things.

If you are actually happy because you own things, then obviously you should stick with what works for you.

From the article:

"Our ongoing research suggests that teams need a moderate level of cognitive diversity for effectiveness. Extremely homogeneous or extremely diverse groups aren’t as intelligent."

That study is exclusively with smaller groups: 3 people. The social dynamics of a 3-person group are very different than a 10-person group as in this study. This probably has much to do with the different results.

Those aren't fallacies, those are merely points with which you disagree. The appropriate thing for you to do is provide contrary evidence.

Makes sense. EFF knows the law as well as anyone, the concern here is that they could be entangled in as-yet-unknown legal disputes because of their use of bitcoin. That'd be wasteful of both bitcoin and regular currency donations.

I think it makes sense for them to step up and admit that they don't understand the law surrounding bitcoin well enough to be comfortable accepting it. There's no point in assuming an unknown-sized risk just for bitcoin when there's other things in their mission they can work towards.

I'd hate to see the EFF financially decimated merely because they accepted bitcoin donations. They are useful people, let them pick their battles.

The linked PDF is ambiguous, "penalisation of the production and making available of tools ... for committing the offences".

If this requires mens rea, i.e. they prove that your intent was for committing an offense, it's not such a big deal.

If it does not, i.e. your software merely could possibly be used to commit an offense, it's a huge deal.

From the article: "The tech supposedly makes the batteries up to ten times more efficient than their traditional counterparts, and even more importantly, the new tech is cheaper to produce."

Very real and legitimate objections based on a right to privacy aside, the main flaw with this point of view is this: "If there's almost 0 chance..."

Almost 0 is not zero. If you're monitoring 300 million people, and the chance of a false positive is, say 0.001% per person per day, that's still 3,000 false positives every day. The false positive signal far outweighs the signal from the "real" dangerous people, making the system pointless and useless. Even if it works 100% of the time on the intended targets, human operators will become too fatigued from dealing with the false positives to deal with them effectively.

You forgot the most salient point: At that temperature, the styrofoam was so soft (though not quite melted) that after removing the lid, it collapsed on itself. So she "spilled" the coffee by assuming that the cup would retain its shape without a lid. Since it was so hot, it did not, the cup collapsed, and she was burned.

Scandals rarely are. Someone gives or receives money, favors, or information inappropriately. It's the perceived degree of impropriety that makes something scandalous, not how commonly it occurs.

That said, this one does seem pretty tame.

Virtually all studies (and there have been many) have shown that people with diabetes who use glucose meters regularly are at markedly reduced risk of complications than those who do not.

WRT the OP, unless you are advocating that the FDA should allow home genetics testing provided it is held to high standards, your analogy does not hold. As stated, it seems that you are implying that people would be better off without home glucose meters. a proposition that is demonstrably false.

A utility function or cost/benefit tradeoff isn't a matter of opinion. If your situation and available information dictates that a certain decision is rational, then we aren't talking about you.

The whole point is that, given a concrete, rational analysis of any particular situation, studies show that people have cognitive biases which induce them to select the wrong choice. The examples given are some of the more popular ones.

It's not just a matter of people using different mathematical models. Decision making is an inherently emotive process, and pretending human beings are, on the whole, totally rational decision makers is a fantasy. That said, we are perfectly capable of making rational decisions if we are trained how to do so and disciplined enough to follow through, but the power of cognitive biases should not be understated.

Yeah, punctuation, wow. I mean, here's a sierpinski triangle generator:

32.times{|i|i.upto(31){|k|putc~k&i>0?32:35};puts}

Oh, wait. That's Ruby. I meant to say:

<?for($n=33;$k=--$n;print~\xf5)for(;$k;)echo-$n&--$k?~\xdf:~\xdc;

Oh, sorry! That's PHP. My bad... here we go:

print map($%&$_?$":'#',0..~($%=$_)),$/for-32..1

There we go... You're right, Perl is so much worse!

The point is, of course, you can write ugly code in any language, or you can write beautiful code in any language. Python actually is fairly legible nearly all the time...

n=32

while n:print''.join('# '[-n&k>0]for k in range(n));n-=1

but that comes at the cost of added verbosity and reduced flexibility . Whether that's better is a matter of taste, not of fact.

This was done as a free summer course. Language bigotry aside, offering a course to learn another language outside those taught in the standard curriciulum, especially one which costs students nothing, is a win for everyone.

I see what you are saying, but I don't agree. You are reversing the evidence in your assertions. There is no evidence that life has existed in the past on Mars. If there were, that would be fantastic, and many people believe such evidence will be forthcoming, but as of right now, there is none that is accepted in the mainstream.

As to your other point, the very fact that life on Earth has come close to extinction, and yet survived, so very many times indicates that there is an empirical (not theoretical) basis for my claim that life (in some form) tends to bounce back. The mechanism is the fact that bacterial and archael life forms live deep within insulated areas of Earth's crust and retain relatively (geologically speaking) modern genes for traits such as aerobic respiration. Survivorship bias does not imply that in some situations there are no survivors, that is a misapplication of the idea.

Now, it's certainly possible that life could be extinguished in a short geologic time span, that I don't refute. And of course, in around a billion years the sun's total radiative output will make life all but impossible on Earth's surface. But in the mean time, evidence suggests life is incredibly hardy.

I suspect, anyway, that we are talking at cross-purposes. The topic was sustainability vis a vis human activity. You rightly point out that we are not in total control, that things can go awry without our intervention. Nature is indeed a chaotic system. However, I suspect you do not disagree that we can choose to avoid certain paths that would inevitably lead to our own destruction. We probably can't avoid all of them, as we are not omniscient, but my main point is that it behooves us to think about it, and to attempt to act responsibly, not in a sense of maintaining the natural state of the world as a static equilibrium, but merely to survive as best we understand how.

Tyson's entire point is that alien life, even life that appears to do things we associate with intelligence and language, may be so different from us that we are fundamentally unable to communicate, just like us and worms. What if their language is undetectable (or even absent) and their intelligence is inscrutable? He's assuming radical differences rather than assuming any similarity.

>> It can kill itself on a whim, and has come close to doing so in the geological past.

I'm not sure what you mean by "close to" killing itself. In the geologic past, life itself has survived rapid toxic oxygenation, the complete freeze-over of the planet's surface, and the complete sterilization of surface life including boiling off the world's oceans. Microbial life still survived that last one in insulated rock miles below the surface. What catastrophe are you proposing we could induce that would do worse?

>> In the long run, nature is a chaotic, not a homeostatic system, and "balance with nature" is an oxymoron.

Now I invite you to read my comment again.

Aside from semantic arguments about what "balance" means, it's true that nature is a state of constant change.

When people talk about sustainability, they're acknowledging that humans can have an impact on nature, or more to the point, on our ability to sustain our own species. It's pretty fair to say that no matter how royally we mess things up, the biosphere will probably eventually "recover"... it'll simply be drastically different.

So, given that we can be agents of change in nature, it's not unreasonable to consider not only whether we can simply survive as a species, but whether we can or should show restraint with respect to the effects we have on the rest of the natural world.

McCarthy seems to be of the opinion that efforts thus far have been not just ineffective, but actually harmful to ourselves. That is to say, we're better off allowing progress to happen naturally without "artificially" trying to mitigate it. Others would appear to disagree, or at least still consider the pursuit of sustainability, in the popular sense, worthwhile.