bascule

If they're institutionalized it doesn't matter if they're recidivist or not. Here's a Time article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html Ytz-pP8p1Bg

I don't know. Has jail proven particularly effective at reducing recidivism rates? Maybe if it's a jail like this: http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article3509456.ece I have not expressed any support for her so far.

Or it touched upon a common generational aversion to sexual impropriety. I personally find this ruling appalling. If a sex offender is acting out, give him therapy; don't throw him in jail.

If they did their time, and are suspected of a mental illness but have otherwise done nothing wrong, they should be institutionalized, not thrown in jail. Unless you're a fan of "thought crime"

Which must somehow make them invalid? Another way of phrasing it is to say that they are woefully incorrect but oft repeated claims made by individuals similar to yourself, which is to say someone who is not well-studied in the science but would like to have a dialogue with those who are. There is a large and vocal crowd of people trotting out the same, incorrect arguments based on specious reasoning or outright falsehoods. They are attacking the science in an unscientific manner and deliberately spreading falsehoods about the science, even after they have been informed the information they have been spreading is incorrect. Like it or not, in this thread you have demonstrated yourself to be among this large and vocal crowd of people, which is to say that for all intents and purposes you a climate science denier.

I suppose I also forgot being naked in your own home with no intent for people outside to see.

This is worse than I've ever realized: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history Apparently the founding fathers didn't support the separation of church and state. Anything less would be "a denial that this was a nation founded under God." It's not slavery, it's "triangular trade" (and yes, I also learned about triangular trade in school... however it was in the context of a slave trade). The civil rights movement had "unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes". I really don't know how to interpret this except thinking that the Texas textbooks are now firmly in the hands of some bible-thumping racists.

Shouldn't these people be institutionalized rather than jailed? Also... sex offender is such a broad category. It can apply to ridiculous cases of statutory rape, such as an 18 year old having sex with a 16 year old, or even cases where minors make sexually explicit pictures of themselves available either through MMS (i.e. mobile phone text messages w\ pictures) or over the Internet. I think the entire nature of a "sex offender" needs to be revised.

I ran into this article today: http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil_sb#ixzz0oDpV3szG Not to poison the well, but it's written by a guy who's an obvious proponent of Penrose/Hammeroff. I could go through and point out the numerous fallacies and falsehoods in this article, but I'll just focus on one: Many computer scientists take it on faith that one day machines will become conscious This is a very common argument surrounding this school of thought, and one I see commonly made by evolution deniers as well. They try to equivocate faith with science, and ascribe a religiosity to their beliefs. However, this belies the fact that we have seen no evidence to date of nonclassical, distinctly quantum mechanical behavior in the brain. It simply does not exist. If there's any "faith" to be had, it's proceeding with the assumption that the brain is a classical physical system. Call that faith if you will, but proponents of Orch-OR have a different hypothesis, namely that the brain does operate with distinctly quantum mechanical behavior. They even claim to know where such behavior is taking place, and have found a way to falsify their claims. However, they have not done the necessary experiments to look for evidence of their claims. It's as if they've done everything it takes for their ideas to be scientific, but can't actually find the evidence that supports their claims. However, that doesn't stop them or their supporters from claiming proponents of the computational theory of mind are "wrong." To me, that's true faith, and an arrogant one at that. The computational theory of mind falls perfectly in line with mainstream neuroscience. It's Orch-OR and other quantum mind hypotheses that are suggesting an extraneous element not known or understood by mainstream neuroscience. "These techno-utopians should pay closer attention to developments in neuroscience"... the obvious ad hominem aside, the author of this article says that, then advances Orch-OR which is a hypothesis not wells supported among mainstream neuroscience.

Nope. Kim Jong Il was using his Ion Control Powers, otherwise known as ICP:

You don't need to lay cable. You can get a leased line from a telco who has already done that. Once you have a leased line, you'll either need to pay for internet service through that telco or get a peering agreement with another ISP. This is actually quite feasible if you have a large apartment building or condo. With enough people sharing the bandwidth, you can actually get faster service more cheaply than going through a major cable or DSL provider: http://trueslant.com/kylebrady/2010/04/08/be-your-own-isp/

Some things have changed. Others have stayed the same. I am really sick of people who equivocate the two parties. While on a broader, more ecumenical scope, America does have a conservative party and an ultraconservative reactionary party, that doesn't change the fact that there are indeed rather substantial differences between the two. While I think it'd be great if America actually had a bona fide liberal progressive party instead of shoving the progressives into the big tent then bitch and complain whenever they propose anything more than moderate legislation, I'll settle for the Democrats for now.

Clearly we need free market alternatives to our national SOCIALIST roads. We should let several companies build roads side-by-side. Then the free market will decide which road is the best.

That's an interesting AP story for them to carry, albeit still an AP story. Wonder if John Stossel was involved.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/05/obama-says-republicans-cannot-have-the-keys-back-to-the-car-no-you-cant-drive.html A nice metaphor from Obama here: “After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want to keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”

You know, there's a way I could respect Republicans raising concern about the national debt. They could go "we realize the overwhelming majority of the debt was created under Republican presidents. We apologize." Or something to that effect. But when I hear Republicans hypocritically preaching about the debt all Johnny Come Lately style, I can't help but think "This debt is largely your fault. Why are you raising concern about it only after you're out of power?" If the Republicans are truly concerned about the national debt then they need to reach out to the Democrats and truly find a bipartisan solution, especially since they are, at least until November, the minority party, and one that was forced out of power after their reckless governance created trillions upon trillions of dollars in debt. Cutting taxes and starting a war? Not exactly a sound fiscal policy! But now you feel fit to whine about it. The national debt is a huge problem. I've been talking about how big of a problem it is for a long time. If we managed to pay a substantial portion of it down, we could cut everyone's taxes, which would stimulate the economy. Instead, well, it's huge. A huge amount of that money was paid to Wall Street financials, who then gave America the finger and lined their pockets with it. If you're concerned about the debt, you should be concerned about where the TARP money went. And yet now that the Democrats are talking about passing additional regulations, regulations which would end "too big to fail" by breaking up these incomprehensibly complex financials/banks/insurance companies/kitchen sink corporations, the Republicans cry out in defense of Wall Street. WHAT? The sheer level of doublethink involved here blows my mind. As an aside, I don't think the Stimulus (as in ARRA) was as good as it could've been. I think the investments we are making are good but it isn't what we needed to help the economy to recover. At this point I am firmly convinced that the main problem which is troubling America's economy is a virtual credit freeze among smaller lending institutions. TARP got the money flowing again among major institutions just fine. But try getting a small business loan from a local bank if you are a startup company. It's practically impossible right now. NPR did a piece (on All Things Considered, I believe... link it if you know it) on how you can't get a small business loan for a startup company regardless of how high your personal credit score is. The only way to get a small business loan is to at least start a company on paper and show positive revenue generation for a few years, then they will grant you a loan proportional to the size of your current revenue. Never mind bootstrapping a cash flow positive company in the middle of a recession is a hard prospect. Which really raises a very important question in my mind. There's all this leftover TARP money sitting around, financed through national debt. The Democrats are all "WTF do we spend this on? Let's buy a bunch of cool toys for our country with it" when really the goal of TARP was to unf*ck America's financial system. Yet startup small businesses are completely screwed right now, and I think it's universally agreed upon that startup companies are an essential part of the American way of life and our national success. Look at how many of the technologies which changed everyone's lives worldwide were "born in a garage" somewhere in America. I mean... Google. Enough said. Why can't they dump all that TARP money into small banks which typically deal in small business loans for the express purpose of lending it to startup companies and other small businesses who need small loans in order to get a company off the ground? Wouldn't that be a lot better than spending it on things completely unrelated to TARP's original intentions? (Note: I recently tried to get a small business loan for a startup company and found out it's practically impossible)

I'm a bit confused here. I worked mostly on a mesoscale model, and that's the knowledge I'm trying to apply here, but you're talking about this map: What's the expected granularity of the grids? The model we worked on used a fine-grained mesh, and by making the grids increasingly fine grained the accuracy of the model could be improved, albeit at the cost of increasing the compute time, as the grids where also the unit of parallelism at which computation was dispatched to our cluster. I don't really know any of the details of either CRU or GISS's models, so I don't know what "5x5" is supposed to pertain to. What are the units? I'm sure the practices used at the mesoscale don't apply to models aimed at the global level, but just reading that alarm bells are going off in my head as to the size of your grids. Can you tell me how coarse a granularity these estimates are normally performed at compared to the level you're performing them at?

I already asked that question, and you responded:

Can you please provide any sort of context about what you're talking about. Who is making the recommendations? What recommendations? In what way are they destructive? You think it's destructive to, for example, move from incandescent bulbs to LED and CFL lighting? Who is advocating what impossible remidy? Who is suggesting what "total change" overnight? I'm not sure who you're trying to argue with, but you stuck my name on your post, so I feel the need to respond.

It was originally in a science forum before being tossed into politics. But even so, this is still a science-related message board, so when a political topic is being driven by scientific research, it's best to stick to what the research says, unless you have specific problems with it.

On the contrary, if you're looking for unscientific "as my gut tells me" type of debate on climate science, perhaps you're in the wrong place. I'm hoping people who are interested in public policy issues related to the climate system actually study the science behind our present understanding. In that regard, there are many people on these forums who are well informed. JohnB, who provided a good well-informed counterpoint at the beginning of this thread, is one of those people, and has actually taken it upon himself to analyze some raw data and come up with some numbers which are significantly different from estimates created by NASA's GISTEMP, one of the most commonly cited authorities on the global mean surface temperature, which is the very metric by which "global warming" is judged. I have absolutely no explanation for this discrepancy and I do think it's a significant result. I'd be very interested to hear NASA GISS's opinion on that. That's a very myopic view of debate, unless you're talking about a formal debate. The issue of climate change, and specifically anthropogenic climate change, is extremely nuanced, and understanding the nuances takes a lot of research. All that said, if you are interested in learning some more about climate science, there is some very good debate going on here. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I really wonder though... is there a better way to resolve the hostility involved in what should otherwise be a scientific debate? I mean, you've seen it here. You see it on TV. Al Gore is chastized by many. There's namecalling going on all over the place. James Hansen is practically a pariah at NASA now. Fox and Friends (by which I mean News Corp) have given massive coverage to the CRU controversy and made it sound like the scientific case for anthropogenically forced climate change is in shambles. Michael Mann has been implicated through his email exchanges with CRU. The IPCC has been dragged through the mud. Where did this hostility come from? Who is sowing the seeds of enmity between climate science researchers and a certain demographic of the population? Why can't this debate simply be reasonable?

You were making semantic arguments earlier, going as far as to paste the definition of hypothesis, and suggest that unless others consider AGCC to be a hypothesis they didn't understand what a hypothesis is. You wanted me to link you "data" for the express purpose of "debunking" it. Which indicates to me you don't really care about understanding the science. You just want it to be wrong. I think I have a fairly good track record of fairly examining claims on both sides of the fence in regard to climate science. Maybe someone can back me up here. When I don't know, I don't know. When I linked you IPCC AR4 you immediately looked for any words that conveyed fear, uncertainty, or doubt and ignored the rest. Why are you trying to "disprove" climate science? Since you'd never even heard of IPCC AR4 you do not appear to have much of a background in the topic. You try to understand climate science first before coming to an opinion as to whether or not it's wrong. But, as I stated earlier, your bias is that it's wrong, and you are now actively looking for information to support that bias. I can assure you climate scientists do not wear white coats. The ones I worked with liked jeans, polo shirts, and tennis shoes. What I'm really curious about is if you're truly oblivious to your own hypocrisy here. You're interpreting people pointing out factual inaccuracies in your arguments as personal attacks, while at the same time accusing climate scientists of doing the same. You claim they're actively seeking information which supports their existing theories and not considering alternatives or ignoring information which doesn't work in support of their theories, but you don't seem ready to at all entertain the idea that they might be right. Then, after all that, you wonder why there's a need to label people with "climate science denier" as you claim climate scientists are wrong while having only a tentative grasp on the issue. Before you try to claim the leading experts in any field are wrong, you should do them the courtesy of attempting to understand their field. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.

This "technology" claims to "ionize" the water using electricity alone. I suppose it assumes the water contains some electrolytes/impurities to begin with. But even then, when you run electricity through water, it makes hydrogen and oxygen gas, not "ions". Perhaps it can "ionize" some of the impurities? But even so, in what way does this add additional cleaning/sterilizing abilities over ordinary water?

"Discounting of unknown variables"? What exactly do you mean by that? The model output has a known range of uncertainties. That's standard scientific practice. You make it sound as if climate science is built on a tower of assumptions. It's just the general attitude. They start with the assumption that the science is wrong and work backwards. Then they apply an extreme degree of confirmation bias, ignoring any supporting evidence and actively looking for any words or phrases they can cherry pick to undermine the science. Projections! Uncertainties! Margins of error! Unknown quantities! Unexplained behaviors! If there is a way to educate these people as to the science, I haven't found it. They're on a cherrypicking expedition and can't seem to be convinced otherwise.

You're lucky you have that. Over here we have two parties hell bent on plunging our country deeper in debt.