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In the case of torture, I'm apt to rule on the side of caution. I guess that makes me an "extremist" in regard to not torturing people. I don't much care for the opinions of those who think torture is some kind of gray area.

I haven't read Lomborg's book but I've read the Copenhagen Consensus (perhaps more aptly titled the Lomborg Conjecutre) I think that should give a fairly accurate view of his positions, through the amazing power of peer review! If there's something to what Lomborg is saying, certainly I should find it there, right? Sadly I did not. Lomborg and his economist cohorts who pushed out the Copenhagen Consensus didn't exactly factor in the facts when constructing their viewpoint. They completely downplay any human penalty in climate change, and thus deprioritize it completely. As I said earlier, climate change induced water vulnerability has the potential to threaten the lives of half a billion people over the next two decades. This figures nowhere into the Copenhagen Consensus's analysis.

Here's an interesting story: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/11/agent.tapes/index.html

I'm quite happy to have a skeptical high-ranking government official undergo the process and rule one way or another. That's what happened with waterboarding and Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin. He had himself waterboarded, and decided it was torture. Sadly this thread seems to be devolving into a big semantic argument over what constitutes torture... According to the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, torture is... http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm I don't see how you can argue that waterboarding doesn't fall under that definition. Waterboarding causes severe mental suffering, enough that those who voluntarily undergo it can last about half the time of those who are tortured for the purposes of extracting a confession.

A quick runthrough of the problems in your argument: You claim "waterboarding works" because it obtained a single positive result, but do not give any reasoning as to why that same positive result couldn't be achieved without torture. How many successful confessions do you think have been extracted through traditional approaches? Can I pull a number out of my ass and say hundreds of thousands if not millions? You're holding up a single result as evidence "waterboarding works" but don't give any reasoning as to why you think that because it worked in this single case instance that it will ever work in the future. As far as I can tell you seem to think this single positive result outweighs the thousands of people we've tortured in vain, but that might be a simple moral difference between you and me.

Torture may get people to talk, but it doesn't get them to tell the truth. It gets them to say whatever they think will make the torture stop. They'll say what their interrogators want to hear. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1322866 Thus far I have not seen anyone undergo waterboarding and emerge to claim that it is not torture. But I guess your definition of torture may vary. At the very least the only government official I've seen give a firsthand opinion on the matter claims it's torture.

This company claims to have combined tritium gas with tiny spheres of a phosphor gas which can be mixed into paint-like coatings. They claim 12+ years of lighting at $0.35 for an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper's worth (or 0.25 Euros for an A4 sheet of paper's worth, to use more ecumenical units): http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:MPK_Co%27s_Litroenergy

So when you say "Waterboarding Works", you meant that waterboarding has worked, once, in a case instance, never mind the untold people who we tortured in vain. You're saying that a single case of success outweighs the moral indecency of torturing thousands of people? And why state it in the present tense. Isn't "Waterboarding Worked" more appropriate? If your topic isn't fallacious, it's certainly spun. Waterboarding is torture. How do we know it's torture? Caught in a similar predicament to yourself about whether waterboarding was torture or in some sort of odd gray area, Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin put his on ass on the line, and had himself waterboarded. Unlike the prisoners we've tortured with waterboarding, Levin had the opportunity to stop his torturers at the instance of the slightest distress. What was his reaction? "Waterboarding is torture." If you think waterboarding isn't torture, maybe you should have yourself waterboarded.

Composition fallacy. Just because torture made someone tell what was apparently the truth in a case instance does not mean that torture coerces truth in the general case. How many people have we tortured in vain? That said, torture is torture. It's inhumane. It's wrong. Possibly because dismemberment is a disgusting, inhumane practice more befitting the work of terrorists than those who claim moral superiority over them.

Scheme is simplistic. It's also one of the most powerful languages in existence. A language's simplicity is a strength, not a weakness. C++ is possibly the most complex language in existence. It embeds a templating tool which is in itself a Turing-complete functional language with immutable state. This should not be considered a good thing. C++'s complexity is what lead to (comparatively) simple languages like Java. And the idea of equating Java with simplicity sickens me... I'm going to guess what you're trying to say is that in larger programs you will encounter more hot spots which are CPU hot spots, either due to algorithm design or deficiencies in the language interpreter itself. Far and away inefficient algorithms are going to be the main source for hot spots. Simply looking at algorithmic complexity and finding a more clever solution often alleviates hot spots. Beyond that, there are many alternatives. You can always create a C extension and rewrite the hot spots directly in C. This may lead to an attitude of "Why not just write the program entirely in C? Then it will be fast!" The simple answer to this is that writing correct and complex programs in C (or C++) is substantially more complex than writing them in a higher level language like Python. Perhaps that's why it's one of the 3 languages that Google allows and endorses for development, including C++ and Java? Notice PHP isn't on that list... For the purposes of finding employment I would recommend Python's sister language Ruby. The two share uncanny similarities and for all intents and purposes two flavors of the same language. Ruby is best known for the Ruby on Rails web development framework, which is perhaps the most lucrative language for web developers. Rails salaries run in the $100k+ range. Fortran is an abysmally imperative language which lacks the overwhelming majority of modern language features like garbage collection, closures, and higher order functions. On the Paul Graham scale of Blub to Lisp, Fortran is definitely in the extreme Blub category. I spent 5 years doing support work for people using a scientific model written in Fortran, and it was truly depressing. Having worked with what I consider "better" languages (and ones which are perhaps closer to the actual math they're attempting to use) it was really sad to see all sorts of things they didn't want to deal with getting in the way of their research. This includes things like: compiler errors, linker errors, exceeding arbitrary internal limits of the Fortran compiler, memory errors, solving algorithmic complexity problems, and features with conditional support among various Fortran compilers. Languages like O'Caml (and for parallel programming, JoCaml) and Haskell provide speed, simplicity, and easy mapping between the underlying mathematics and the program being developed. Unfortunately it seems the scientific programming community is sticking mostly to Fortran, C, and C++, for reasons of supporting legacy code, as far as I can tell. Try Intel Visual Fortran. It's among the fastest Fortran compilers available for x86, and there's a Windows version: http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/compilers/220040.htm

I really hope Obama can beat Clinton. Hillary is unelectable.

I'll admit that eating food cooked in vegetable oil is both more ethical and healthy than eating food cooked in beef tallow, but... you're still eating deep fried food, which is nasty in general, and rather than beef tallow they now use a cocktail of artificial flavors. It's still disgusting. I guess I just can't relate to anyone who would even consider eating at McDonalds. Whatever it is, the Weinsteins paid $25,000,000 after seeing only 10 minutes of the movie.

This is the first time in awhile where the CIA hasn't bent over and been the administration's whipping boy. I found the change in Bush's rhetoric regarding Iran shortly after the release of the report (which he allegedly never saw) highly suspicious as well: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/12/06/countdown-special-comment-the-nie-reflects-an-unhinged-irrational-chicken-little-of-a-president/

So we have a genome filled with endogenous retroviruses: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/03/071203fa_fact_specter My question is: how do they infect the germ line?

The Copenhagen Concensus is bullshit. RealClimate had an interesting reaction: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/the-copenhagen-consensus/ Here's the facts: In 1990 there were 131 million people without access to safe drinking water. By 2025 that number will rise to 817 million (Douglas et al. 2005, Natural Hazards) Water vulnerability is an important issue that threatens the lives of millions of people. The root causes in the hydrologic cycle, and ultimately the climate system, need to be addressed.

Seconded. Even the thought of eating there makes me sick to my stomach.

i'll take my side of industrially manufactured potato strips chemically infused with artificial beef tallow flavoring and deep fried in oil EXTRA LARGE, please. they're just so delicious I can't get enough.

Okay, I scrolled down to page 2 and I see pictures. That's encouraging. I'll try to read it at some point here.

Space as a discrete, evolving network of relationships is the central theme of his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. His case involves looking at specific details of three different approaches to quantum gravity and extracting commonalities that would lead one to believe that, at the Planck scale, space is discrete. With loop quantum gravity the case is rather straightforward as space is modeled in terms of spin networks (which I believe is the same thing as spin foam... maybe Martin can explain) which are by their very nature discrete. He devotes a chapter to another of the three roads, black hole thermodynamics, arguing why a correlation between information and a the area of a black hole's event horizon (rather than its volume) implies discrete space. The case with string theory is rather roundabout as he starts off describing string theory within a continuous background. He introduces discrete entities into string theory called string bits which he explains are somehow necessary, but as I've never heard of string bits outside of his book I'm guessing most string theorists aren't going to agree that string theory necessitates discrete space. Have a look at the bit of the book I quoted earlier if you want to judge his convictions regarding his intent to express that space is discrete. His writing likens the idea that physicists are waking up to the idea that space is discrete in the same way that chemists and physicists in the 19th century started to believe in atomic structure prior to its actual observation. He's not beating around the bush here. He's flat out saying that to the best of our knowledge space is discrete.

Is it me or are those who claim climate science is politicized generally non-scientists who are trying to politicize it?

Whelp, nobody's posted my favorite Feynman quote yet: "It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama." -- Richard Feynman

I did want to interject Lee Smolin's take on this. A consistent theme of his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity is that physicists are presently in a similar state to the observation of atoms regarding the discreteness of space. That is to say: many have discovered the prerequisite knowledge which has lead them towards the impression that space is discrete. Here's specifically what he had to say on the matter: Rather than being continuous, Smolin argues that space is comprised of an evolving network of relationships.

Guess it's still business as usual for Bush: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/04/iran.nuclear/index.html THIS CHANGES NOTHING! Of course the venerable bastion of alleged liberalism, the New York Times, had this to say: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/washington/04assess.html "Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here."

Climate models continuously integrate new, scientific knowledge about the climate system and model outputs can be tested for accuracy against the instrumental record, at least for the past century or so. The Drake equation is total conjecture. It doesn't continuously integrate new information. Climate models in the '70s were highly inaccurate. They've been continuously refined for decades to improve their effectiveness. The Drake equation has not changed, nor has any new information been used to improve its accuracy. Climate models are not a single equation. They are complex systems for transforming model inputs and doing successive iterations across various grids representing either regions or the entire planet. So, that said, Crichton's main argument seems to be that climate science is driven by politics, rather than the other way around. I call bullshit.

So what exactly do you find so offensive about the man's conduct? Calling him a criminal? I recall asking you that... ...and receiving no response. The thrust of his call seemed to be that he was sick and Giuliani's workfare program cut off his access to medicare and food stamps... ...and Giuliani's only response was to question his sanity...