bascule

I have a theory about LSD

The Daily Show's deconstruction of Giuliani and similar statements made on Fox News was hilarious. Very much reenforces the idea of selective amnesia. The underpants bomber was a terrorist attack, but Richard Reid was not, of course! The "Terrorball" analogy had me cracking up. It would seem that terrorist attacks only happen under Democratic presidents, at least in the eyes of certain conservatives. Blatant hypocrisy at its worst.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html Google implied they, along with 20 other companies, were hacked by the Chinese government to obtain information about human rights activists. They are now saying that they are going to ask the Chinese government to let them serve unfiltered search results. If (when) the Chinese government refuses, they will be leaving China. I applaud Google on this one.

Calculus and differential equations are used extensively in signal processing and perceptual media which are heavily based on Fourier transforms.

The problems with this hypothesis is that people with damaged brains will report that they are experiencing internal problems with their thinking, not just sensory ones. Brain damage and the above provide excellent evidence that consciousness is brain-based. Well of course higher dimensions exist mathematically, but that does not mean that they exist physically.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/assembly-committee-oks-bill-to-legalize-marijuana.html Looks like the California assembly could soon be voting on a bill to legalize and tax marijuana statewide. The opposition to the bill is laced with the same cliches and fallacies that have dominated the debate for years: "We're going to legalize marijuana, we're going to tax it and then we're going to educate our kids about the harm of drugs. You've got to be kidding me,'' Gilmore said. "What's next? Are we going to legalize methamphetamines, cocaine?'' I would ask Mr. Gilmore what he thinks about the fact we legalized alcohol, tax it, and then educate our kids about the harm of alcohol. And of course his argument includes the traditional slippery slope. Legalize pot? What's next? Are we going to legalize RAPE, MURDER? It will be interesting to see what happens if this bill passes and truly puts states rights vs the Controlled Substances Act to the test. Sadly, I could see SCOTUS trying to defend CSA's constitutionality via the Interstate Commerce Clause again, even though that's patently silly.

Yes, and the result is a chemical reaction in your brain.

According to the best evidence we have today, the brain is a classical physical system: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009 No evidence exists of quantum mechanical behavior or anything involving "higher dimensions". As far as we can tell the brain is an electrochemical computer.

Are you referencing Avatar? Do you realize unobtainium has a long standing usage in science fiction long before Avatar?

Fo shizzle monizzle

And in other news, Sarah Palin will be joining them as a contributor: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/01/11/2010-01-11_sarah_palin_joins_fox_news_as_a_contributor_in_multiyear_deal.html

When did negro become offensive? I think it's more the implication that black people normally talk funny, and (in context, especially with the remark about his skin) Obama is more like a white person

"Negro dialect" sounds offensive to me. Hey Pangloss, look, it's a Democrat who's not being PC

Indeed, we need to jumpstart the economy before an elastic labor supply will really be worthwhile.

bascule; There could be nothing more explicit than the above comment, made by the investigating source Correction: there could not be worse FUD than that comment, made by some guy, on his blog. You want a more in depth reaction than that, jackson33? How about you respond to your take on Clear Climate Code's assessment of GISTEMP, considering they've reimplemented it from scratch in Python and actually duplicated its results? http://clearclimatecode.org/gistemp/ We have now converted all of the GISS code to Python. Naturally we have found (minor) bugs while doing this, but nothing else. We are currently “catching up” so that the code in ccc-gistemp reflects the changes that GISS have made to GISTEMP (such as using the USHCN version 2 dataset; see issue 7). It is our opinion that the GISTEMP code performs substantially as documented in Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J. Geophys. Res., 92, 13345-13372., the GISTEMP documentation, and other papers describing updates to the procedure. You and the blog you're sourcing are crying conspiracy when someone who has actually done the requisite legwork to reimplement the program is instead saying: no, no conspiracy. It actually works quite well. That's not even to mention the fact that neither of these sources are actually peer reviewed, but hey, I trust the people who can put their code where their mouth is much more than the ones who don't, even if they aren't peer reviewed. And hey jackson33, it'd be really great if you could actually read my posts as opposed to completely ignoring them and posting more FUD. So far this conversation hasn't exactly been productive. I will continue to repeatedly post the same scientific sources over and over again for every unsourced blog you paste here until you actually respond to them. And frankly, shame on you for posting such horribly unsourced FUD in a science thread. No, I am not going to write off climate science as a giant conspiracy. Sorry.

Yes, you are correct, ice made of fresh water, when melted, will create more water than it originally displaced due to the density difference between fresh water and salt water: http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html

Wish I can help you on this one but I've never done an implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm as I've never had an applicable problem. There are cases where I thought I did where I ended up going with Markov chains or a collaborative filtering algorithm like Slope One to find optimized "optimal routes" across graphs.

Well, at the same time, racism does exist, and I don't think it's unfair to say that it's far more prevalent among American conservatives than it is among American liberals. That's certainly not to say that all conservatives are racists or even that the majority of conservatives are racists, but when it comes to the types of programs proposed in this report, the majority of the opposition is going to come from conservatives.

From the eliminative materialist perspective all problems with the mind are, by definition, caused by the brain. Eliminative materialism is the only means by which we can scientifically understand the mind, because it reduces the mind to what is fundamentally a physical system, therefore placing it within the realm of scientific inquiry. To suggest otherwise makes the mind a metaphysical system and places it outside the realm of scientific study, except for certain approaches used by disciplines like cognitive science, in which subjects are asked to report what they perceive in the context of a controlled study. However, this approach is very limited in its applications towards understanding the mind as its only practical application is phenomenology.

ArjanD, What do you make of this? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100108101435.htm

Sea ice does not affect sea levels as it displaces an equal volume of water. However, melting ice sheets, icebergs (which are fresh water), and glaciers will contribute to sea level rise. Right now, the majority of this melting is happening in the Arctic, although as I mentioned earlier there has been some melting of the Antarctic ice sheet in Western Antarctica.

I suggest reading the report I linked in the OP. They describe a vicious cycle where because one employer is using illegal immigrants, all of them must to stay cost competitive. They largely suggest that what's needed is an elastic force of low wage workers. They also suggest that if there's a legal path for a Mexican to work in the US, then they will eschew working illegally, because they will get more money by working legally without the associated risks of an illegal border crossing. Will that deter every Mexican from working illegally? Probably not. But it's certainly better than what we have now. If it is true, when talk shifts to legitimizing immigrants the opposition to illegal immigration will likewise shift to opposition to legitimizing immigrants. We've already seen the start of this with Obama's call for legitimizing immigrants who can pay their back taxes. If you insist that this is a non issue I can't really defend my position otherwise. We'll just see what the debate looks like when the time comes.

jackson33, You seem to be getting your links confused. The text you quoted does not appear on the epw.senate.gov site, but instead on this blog: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/thermometer-langoliers-lunch-2005-vs-2008/ This article discusses removal of stations from the Global Historical Climatology Network, which is not operated by James Hansen, but rather by NOAA's National Climactic Data Center. Accusations of malicious inclusion of removal of stations should be leveraged against NCDC, not against James Hansen. James Hansen merely uses GISTEMP to analyze their data. All that said, you still have zero evidence. The blog you linked to is pure FUD. Have you ever considered there might be legitimate reasons to add or remove stations from the network?

Do you have a source on that? The only significant melting of the Antarctic ice sheet I am aware of is recent melting of glaciers in West Antarctica, and is attributed to changes in ocean circulation patterns rather than changes in surface temperature. Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice is generally increasing

Distributed Hash Tables are probably the central topic in peer-to-peer systems today. There's also the P4P protocol which allows ISPs to both improve their customers' participation in peer-to-peer transfers but also more efficiently use the network.