Cap'n Refsmmat

Why does a miracle imply the existence of a Christian god, rather than merely implying that there are parts of reality we do not fully understand? God is not the only explanatory option; it could be any other force that we don't yet understand, including natural ones. "I don't know why that happened" doesn't mean "God must have done it." Not until we understand the universe well enough to eliminate every other possibility.

Here's some empirical data for you: http://abcnews.go.com/US/alaskan-eats-frozen-beer-survive-days-snow-drift/story?id=15090905#.T4-CsI5gvUU

Creative Commons recommends against using their licenses for software, since the language was designed for creative works (writing, photographs, etc.) rather than software: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

You probably should, though, since Excel is known to give incorrect results on many statistical tests: http://www.practicalstats.com/xlsstats/excelstats.html

I think this thread is done.

Do you think it would be beneficial if there were a license to release academic code under, with provisions prohibiting commercial use without permission but allowing academic use? I don't know of any software licenses designed with this use in mind.

Most of the open source licenses require those adapting or redistributing the code to retain a notice indicating that original copyright belongs to the original author of the code. There's also the CRAPL: http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

If you go to the blog dashboard, go to Tools -> Export and you can download a file of all your posts. It's some sort of special format; you might be able to find a reader program. Let me know when you're ready for me to nuke the site.

I could delete it entirely and let you create a new one. Would that work?

Is the process even parallelizable? If there's no way to split the task up into separate simultaneous units, there's no way to use all 24 possible cores. Adding more memory won't help either, unless there's something that needs to be put in it -- and if so, Matlab would gladly use more memory.

I doubt the plan is to analyze the content of every single email, text message and phone call. If you just track who's talking to whom, you can easily determine who the interesting people are, and watch them more closely. To quote something I have written elsewhere on the Internet: Giving the government the power to read your email, tap your phone, and record your porn usage isn't bad simply because it's embarrassing. After all, the data will likely only be seen by a computer. But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, or even get a job -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions. In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't respond to the "nothing to hide" argument as though their conception of privacy is right and having nothing to hide really is an excuse. This article is rather good: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Then please do the original author the courtesy of giving him credit and linking to the original source.

What exactly is wrong with that? That's your profile picture. Right now you have three accounts: Vastor, Vastro, and one with an incomplete registration from Facebook with no name. Neither Vastor nor Vastro are connected to Facebook at all, so if you can't log into those accounts, just use the "I forgot my password" link to have a new password emailed to you.

What happens if you go here and set a password? http://www.scienceforums.net/index.php?app=core&module=usercp&tab=core&area=password

The above formula approximates X / Y by taking the average of the division at points to the left and to the right of Y. It's a very informal limit.

What do you mean by "can't login"? Do you get an error?

They do in Europe.

The Calorie used in measuring the energy in food is actually a kilocalorie, which is 1000 times more energy than the amount you describe. That makes it somewhat more believable.

Are these homework problems?

In many cases, the entire result of a paper is based on "We did a model on a computer and got result x". Or "I wrote a program which implements this algorithm, which I only sort of vaguely explain, and used it to analyze this data." In those sorts of papers, seeing the source code is the only way to evaluate the science. I recall reading a paper that analyzed the statistical analyses performed in several scientific papers, finding that many scientists made errors in the spreadsheets they used to analyze their results. If the scientists had not disclosed their spreadsheets, these errors could not be discovered. Refusing to disclose source code would be worse.

Units. Suppose I measure the energy in joules, mass in kilograms, and velocity in meters per second. A joule is a kg m2 / s2. mc2 has the same units as a joule, whereas mc3 does not. Hence it is impossible for E to be equal to mc3. That'd be like saying "1 meter = 3 kilograms per fortnight".

No such person has willingly subjected themselves to scientific testing and demonstrated their claims to be true.

Why not? There are legitimate physiological and neurological differences between genders.

What evidence do you have that this is true? Most states recognize the right of doctor-patient confidentiality and only allow limited disclosure of medical information if, for example, the patient has a transmissible disease that is a danger to society (e.g. the patient has HIV and wants to sleep around), or the patient breaks the criteria you list above. See also: http://www.enotes.com/healthcare-reference/doctor-patient-confidentiality Now, is there anything you want to discuss, or do you just wish to air your complaints on SFN? SFN isn't a personal blog; please see rule 8. There are better places to complain.

When our models become too complex, we generally invent abstractions to cover up the details. For example, computing the motion of an object in some complicated situation can be very difficult or impossible using only algebra and arithmetic, but with clever use of calculus, the problem can become trivial. And once you've learned how to do calculus, you don't have to worry about the derivations and proofs of all its theorems -- you just apply the results and solve problems. The same goes for more complicated results in physics as well. For example, parts of fluid dynamics are much simpler when you use complex analysis. The mathematics of complex analysis took many years to develop, and it was quite a painful course to me to take in college, but once you have the results, you can turn horrifying integrals into trivial ones and understand fluid dynamics much more easily. So if we find that reality is just too complicated for our current theories to explain, we'll invent new mathematics and tools to describe it. Perhaps the mathematics will take years to develop and explore, but once it's worked out, scientists can use it to make new discoveries. Of course, this applies well to physics, but not necessarily to disciplines like biology, where you're not always building a mathematical model but just trying to make sense of complicated phenomena. A given biological system might just be too complicated to figure out in one piece. But we have the advantage of computers and simulations to help us explore the complexity.