benl

There's a lot of back-and-forth in this thread about whether this disproves AGW or not.

Before people get too invested in these arguments, it might make sense to step back for a second or two and ask yourself the question:

"What is the null hypothesis?"

As far as my understanding goes, in order to be doing good science, the null hypothesis must be that there is no phenomenon to explain. So the qustion we should be asking is: "is this evidence consistent with, or does it refute, the null hypothesis?"

As far as I can tell, this evidence is consistent with the null hypothesis. While that is interesting, it's not super-important, so we should all save our passion and debating time for evidence that potentially refutes the null hypothesis. That kind of evidence is much more important to find and pore over...

* [edit] fixed a few typos

It's amazing what a little fact checking can do for your perspective.

After watching 'An Inconvenient Truth', I was quite affected by the supposed plight of the Polar Bears. So I did a bit of research, and I found out two fascinating facts:

1. Polar Bear populations have increased massively over recent years.

2. Polar Bears as a species are older than the last time the Arctic Ocean was free of ice.

At that point, I began to suspect that I was being sold something.

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Firestar, Michael Flynn

Don't worry -- I didn't call you a communist. I can cite counter-examples without name-calling.

"the costs of raising meat (which, in effect, only the wealthy can afford to eat)"

I guess the 99 cent hamburger must also be part of my delusion, then.

You've got it backwards -- the very reason that food is plentiful is that there is profit to be made in growing and selling it.

Your statement:

"food isn't scarce for most of us and few have problems acquiring it and the ability to produce it can't be easily collected in the hands of a few, anyone can grow their own food"

is directly contradicted by the millions who starved to death when food production was collectivised under various profit-hating communist regimes.

Profit is the world's way of signaling that you are doing something in an efficient, effective, and long-term sustainable way.

So, given that health care is one of the most fundamental individual needs, profit most definitely should be the goal.

But health care is not the most fundamental need -- that would be food. I find it puzzling that people don't apply the same arguement to this need. Why not say that profit shouldn't be the goal of the food industry? And that supermarkets are immoral for making a profit at the expense of hungry people? Well, because it's clearly nonsense, of course.

But I wonder if it would seem like nonsense if we lived in a world where there was no free market in food supply. We might worry that greedy corporations would only be interested in serving expensive foods to rich people.

So much for Disaster Capitalism (http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine) then, huh?

This is an incredibly poorly thought out piece. Right from the beginning:

"Imagine what would happen if GM and Ford collaborated to invest in the components and architecture of a better public transport network -- and then licensed it for free to cities, states, and countries."

What? This is a completely bogus analogy with Google's browser strategy. A better public transport network in no way benefits GM/Ford to anywhere near the same extent that a better browser benefits Google. In fact it would quite possibly be detrimental to their business.

Give me a break. This post, and an number of the other Knol-is-bad commentary pieces floating around, boil down to not much more than "Google owes me/my friends a living".

This quote is priceless: "The company whose mission is to 'organize the world's information' is straying into 'monetizing the world's information'"

And how, precisely, is Google supposed to organize the world's information without monetizing it?

Some people need to calm down. If it's true that Google are inflating the PageRank of Knol pages, then they're damaging their most valuable product -- high quality search results. And it is well within their rights to do that if they choose.

Firestar by Michael Flynn. It's a little-know book by a little-known author, but it's the best near-term space sci fi I've ever read.

This is a sad moment for me. ACC was the first science fiction author I ever read, and it wouldn't be an understatement to say that he changed my life.

His novels stimulated to think in a new way and to break free of the religious shackles I'd been brought up with.

Thanks.

Well it may be natural to feel that way, but it sure ain't rational.

OK, look, I'm going to try and reply to this in the politest possible way, but sometimes I find that difficult when faced with statements like this.

I really don't understand where people get off preaching about other people's business decisions. In what way is Dell installing whatever software they like, on a computer they build and sell, "wrong"?

What law of nature states that computers shouldn't have logos on them? The non-t-shirt-turing-machine-no-logo law? I haven't heard of that one.

OK, I'm done now. I'm perfectly happy that you make aesthetic and technical decisions about software and hardware, but don't go calling people who engage in voluntary trade "wrong", or telling them what they should or shouldn't do.

Just Don't Buy It.

I'm not sure whether any of these are anti-trendy or not, but here are a few things I found myself doing in a project I've been working on recently:

* It's an online bookmarking system, and I didn't add tagging. I found that the UI step to add tags was a bit of a usability burden, and that I never actually used them to find stuff again anyway.

* I wrote it in Perl. Definitely not trendy, but it's fast, dynamic and (with mod_perl) stupidly easy to deploy.

* I rolled my own JavaScript libraries and wrestled with cross-browser issues rather than using jQuery, prototype, or some such. Why? To learn the nitty-gritty details of DOM manipulation and browser compatibility.

* I de-normalised the database from the start. Why? Because it enabled me to build a simple, light and fast object-oriented table wrapper without the overhead of dealing with associations, joins, and so forth. For any structure that does require a table join, I use database views to make it look like it's a simple table to the application.

This argument doesn't refute anything. All it demonstrates is that succinctness is not the only thing that enables a language to be powerful. I'm not sure anyone has ever made that claim.

The fact that there are other things, such as sensible syntax, that can affect a language's power should come as a surprise to no-one.

Good article, but it doesn't mention where these emmigres are going. Anyone know?

With all due respect, I suggest ignoring that teacher.

This is the 'precautionary principle' which, while it sounds all nice and sensible on first hearing, is actually a recipe for justifying all kinds of mindless nonsense.

"Vaccines might cause Autism -- best not immunise my kids against that killer disease measles."

"WiFi might cause cancer -- best not put wireless networks in schools"

"Industrialiation might cause global warming -- best not let poor countries build power plants"