Cap'n Refsmmat

Right here: So, in summary: On the basis of a confession, the investigators stopped DNA testing. That confession was found to be coerced in a trial. The confession was false. At the time they ordered the DNA testing stopped, all they knew was that a confession existed and they coerced it out of the suspect. What does this demonstrate? Police put false confidence in confessions. Police coerce people to make confessions, even when they are innocent. Some people confess to crimes they didn't commit without coercion. (See, for example, cases in which numerous people confess to the same, well-publicized crime.) Police believe confessions are all that is necessary in court; when they have a confession, they don't need DNA evidence. Is this a problem? Yes. Police interrogate people, get a false confession, don't bother getting other evidence, and then are surprised when it turns out their suspect is innocent. Settled?

Is it possible for an earthquake to shorten the length of a day as well as increase it?

Right. Their policy isn't the only thing that matters. One of the other criteria Mr Skeptic quoted was "Does Fox publish a trustworthy description of events?" Once we've freed them from corporate bias through policy, do we see that what they say has happened is reasonably accurate? Of course, the Glenn Beck controversies are an interesting subject. Fox may be using them as a ploy to get more viewers -- "everyone loves a scandal!" -- or they might just not care. I dunno.

I love it when your quotes contradict you. Gravity! It works!

Ah. I see you're thinking of this bit: In other words, the moon's gravity is what causes tides. But it doesn't life water straight up; it pulls the water sideways through the oceans toward it, in the parts of the planet not directly facing the moon. In those areas, the Moon's gravitation is perpendicular to the Earth's, so they do not oppose each other at all. Hey! Another case where your source doesn't support your arguments at all.

Are smaller numbers within reach to random processes? I'm trying to understand why there must be a boundary here. Why is efficiency a constraint? Surely all that matters is if information generation can happen at all, because the timescales involved here are absolutely immense.

What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with editorial freedom. And it doesn't matter if it "helps," or what exactly it helps to achieve; editorial separation is one of the criteria for a news source "of record" as listed in Wikipedia. By definition, editorial separation "helps" a news source be one of record.

From what I've gathered, it looks like they use a special sort of nuclear reactor to make radioactive molybdenum out of uranium, and the technetium comes from molybdenum as it decays radioactively. Congratulations! You're nuclear-powered now!

I like Richard Jeni's dating method. (slightly inappropriate, so don't play it loud at work) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0IzOznacNo

You've missed my point. It's not how you mix news and editorials. It's how you separate the people who write the news (and publish the opinions) from the people who write their paychecks. Le Monde grants tenure so journalists can be free to pursue any story, or write any editorial, without fear of being fired for having the wrong opinion or troubling the wrong people. Television networks can hardly afford to do so when they're at the mercy of audience ratings and advertisers. Does Fox News have a policy to let presenters and journalists be isolated from management?

The editorial policies are probably the sticking point. I don't know how CNN, Fox, and the rest handle it, but I'm reasonably certain that if you're a presenter or host, you don't have editorial freedom to say whatever you want regardless of what the head honchos think. Newspapers like Le Monde give tenure to their journalists to prevent them from being fired over matters of opinion. (Le Monde is the French newspaper of record.)

Cursory Googling indicates this is likely to be a hardware problem. Also, you can go to C:\WINDOWS\Minidump for "minidumps", which are extra-detailed information about what went wrong at the time of the crash. Find the latest one and see if you can attach it here. (You might want to put it in a Zip file first if it's really big.) The minidump usually can tell you what hardware is at fault. Or, instead of uploading, check out this article: http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/01/17/analyzing-windows-crash-dump-or-minidump-with-whocrashed/

Why does it matter? The point of this thread is whether Fox is a news source "of record." The legitimacy of Fox in general should be discussed elsewhere.

I didn't think I was talking about "legitimacy." We've been talking about what makes a news source of record, not what makes a "legitimate" news source, whatever that means.

Are we talking about "legitimate" or of news sources "of record"? And which criteria does the NYT not meet?

Actually I was working on my summer job at the time, but apparently the cat disapproves. Now you know the sort of hardships I go through when trying to fix your bugs.

First step, of course, is to find the number of moles of NaOH you're talking about there. When you're dealing with chemical reactions, work in moles. Make sure the chemical equation is balanced, then use the coefficients to tell you the ratios between reactants. You know, the one with the 2 in front takes twice as many moles, etc. Then use the definition of molarity. Show me where you get stuck if you can't work it out.

What sort of research did you do at this university?

Of course. But I think there's a big difference between bias in what you report -- say, the Times neglecting to report something negative about someone they like -- and bias in the facts you make up. A tabloid often contains rumors, but a news source "of record" at least tries to tell the truth, even when it's only the truth that supports their position.

Then nor can Fox be. What's your point? I'd agree with Wikipedia on the criteria: The New York Times has a reputation as a newspaper of record because it is considered authoritative; that is, if the Times said it happened, it probably did. The trouble with Fox is that their accuracy is often called into question. I don't think the criteria you listed in your first post are what are required to become a news source of record; rather, they're characteristics that sources already established as such have. For example, tabloids like The Daily Mail meet all three of your criteria, but they are often sensationalist, inaccurate, or focused entirely on celebrity gossip. They may get exclusive interviews with celebrities, break new stories (e.g. the John Edwards scandal), and follow the same format as other news sources, but nobody considers them sources of record. If their articles were more consistently accurate, less sensationalist, and focused more on major world events rather than minor celebrity events, they may become sources of record.

Just curious -- why >500 bits? is that an arbitrary distinction or is there some meaning there? Also curious -- by excluding "imported information," do you mean that any example system cannot have some "repository" of information already available to it? For example, a cell with already-meaningful DNA, using that DNA and random mutation/duplication/whatever to generate new information.

Change of rotation [math]\neq[/math] change in moon's orbit. You have still not substantiated the claim that the Moon is affected in the slightest by earthquakes. Hint: one cannot change the moon's orbit without applying a force. In the case of tides, the force applied is gravity, and it results from water sloshing about on Earth. What's the force on the Moon from an earthquake? Earthquakes don't move billions of gallons of water around the planet. Earthquakes slightly shift some mass around on the Earth, but they can shift it in, out, up, down, or whatever direction they want. So you'd also have to demonstrate that earthquakes all have the same kind of effect.

Or maybe the Lunar Laser Ranging program is necessary because of tides? What's wrong with tides as an explanation?

And you have in no way demonstrated that the transfer of angular momentum is due to earthquakes. In fact, the sentence you quote ends by disagreeing with you: Tides.

I was imitating g-f when he cited his NASA source. I'm not entirely surprised at the unit error, anyway, since that's a bit funky.