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Miles O'Brien was canned from CNN a month ago, along with the entire science and technology staff. The lastest Jennifer Aniston rumor takes precedence over science and technology at CNN. O'Brien recently wrote this op-ed for space.com: http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive09/obrienoped_0119.html Truth is, we have done nothing to equal (much less top) the accomplishments of Apollo. And even worse, we haven't tried. We did something truly great, but then walked away from it. We had lightning in a bottle — and we opened the lid. Not that I'm biased or anything, but ... nice piece, Miles, and best of luck.

Kyrisch: Infinity is not a number. Don't treat it as one. iNow: Correct. The sum of all integers, [math]\sum_{n=-\infty}^{\infty} n[/math] is not an absolutely convergent series. The terms can be rearranged to give whatever answer one desires. The correct answer is of course 42.

Nicely done.

By analytic continuation of the Riemann zeta function, [math]\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} n = -\,\frac 1 {12}[/math] Ask any physicist.

No, not at all. Science is flanked by unquestioning religious faith on one side, where there is but one truth, new age "enlightenment" (post-modernism, pyramids and crystals, ...) on the other. Solipsism is on yet another plane. What distinguishes science from all of these is a belief (a very well justified one, IMNHO) that there is something out there called reality and that supernatural explanations are not needed.

In other thread, Phi said Said topic is a bit of a sidebar (not quite off-topic, but close) to the discussion in that thread. Rather than discuss said topic there, how about a new thread? My take: Science also entails a belief system (otherwise, why not solipsism?) In a word, that belief system is realism or naturalism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a fairly good entry on realism, naturalism, and scientific realism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/, and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/. One key difference between the scientist's belief that reality is real and the religious' belief that their religion is real is that the scientific faith is inherently laden with questioning which religious faith must be at some level unquestioning. Scientists know that their current explanations are at best provisionally correct and at worst flat-out wrong, while the religious know that their beliefs are correct. Aside: If we had a philosophy of science forum this thread would be a perfect entry. (Hint, hint)

Calling people names is a childish thing to do. It is done for two reasons: to belittle and to get a rise. I'm short, which of course led some to call me "Shorty" ages ago. That didn't work because it didn't get the desired ballistic response. Suppose that instead of asking what is wrong with the term evolutionist, Pete had come in as a creationist and used the term derogatorily. Post #2: Backfire. Post #3: Bingo! You had to defend those misrepresentations in part because iNow went ballistic in post #3. His response there is part of the reason some creationists continue to use the terms Darwinist and evolutionist. The ballistic response derails the debate. Many of you missed my point. Just as a ballistic response to a label derails your side of an argument, usurping the label can derail the opponent. That is exactly what happened in cosmology. "Big bang" was invented as derogatory term. The big bang cosmologists usurped the label. Doing so took a weapon away from the steady state cosmologists and it made the steady state cosmologists look stupid.

The opposite sides in a debate are often labeled. Labels can be useful when they properly encapsulate a whole lot of verbiage on one word. There was an interesting debate at the end of the 19th century, the Quaternion Wars, between those who advocated the use of Hamilton's quaternions versus those who advocated the use of Heaviside's/Gibb's vector analysis. The debate between the quaternionists and the vectorialists spanned 20 years across multiple technical journals. Pick almost any controversial topic. The various sides will have labels. Even more relevant to the topic at hand is the debate between the steady state and big bang cosmologists. Hoyle coined the term "big bang" as a derogation. Lacking a good name for themselves, the big bang cosmologists usurped that label. Usurping a label invented by the other side in a debate is a very adult way of attacking the use of said label. Note well: I specifically picked post #3 as the point where things started going downhill, not post #2. Phi made the point regarding "evolutionist" implying a belief in evolution in post #2, and he did so succinctly and without a bunch of childish rhetoric.

1. There isn't a huge fraction of the population that doubts the existence of gravity, or thermodynamics, or 1+1=2. 2. The vast majority of laymen cannot understand general relativity, or the Navier-Stokes equations, or Lie algebra. You are a hypocrite talking about labels. From post #2 in this closed thread Labels, even very derogatory labels, are apparently perfectly OK when you are the one using them, iNow.

I'll see if I can dig up some references to back this up. IIRC, alcohol abuse represents a net loss to society while tobacco abuse is the other way around. In short, alcoholics have a much greater tendency to lose their jobs and live for years on the dole while tobacco smokers keep working until they drop dead the day after they retire.

Taking a child to a doctor is the first line of treatment. Refusing to take a sick child to a doctor is to deny even the possibility of treatment. It doesn't matter what their rationale was because it was irrational and irresponsible. They failed to carry out their are responsibility as parents.

Agreed. Parents who refuses to subject their children to some experimental procedure are not committing child abuse. The focus of this thread should be on procedures that all reasonable people (a long-standing legal concept) would deem to be prudent, necessary, and within financial reach in sustaining a child's life.

Why are you arguing so, Lance? Agriculture to the extent that enabled the development of cities developed around grain. Not breadfruit, not sweet potatoes, not bananas. Grain stores for a long period of time. Sweet potatoes - a few weeks under ideal (cool and dry) conditions. Bananas? It didn't take me long to find this: Breadfruit Origins, Diversity, and Human-Facilitated Distribution (pdf). Breadfruit was domesticated about 3500 years ago. Sweet potatoes are an even more recent addition to the limited Polynesian suite of domesticated plants (~2000 years ago). Agriculture grew in the Levant and China because both regions held a large number of useful species susceptible to domestication and because the human population grew large enough to make the hunter-gatherer lifestyle untenable (our ancestors killed off the wild game). Many of the internet searches lead me to the book recommended by Swansont in post #13, Guns, Germs And Steel by Jared Diamond.

You blew your cover on the internet??

Cold land masses. Uri, what game are you up to? You have been asking basically the same question over and over at this site and elsewhere for quite some time now. There aren't any bona fide meteorologists at this site or at the other places who can give you a detailed and accurate answer to your questions. There is a much better place than a site such as this where you can find the answer to these questions. Here is a picture:

Child abuse is child abuse. Parental rights are not absolute. There is no reason to invoke thought crimes (religiously-motivated child abuse is not inherently worse than other forms of child abuse) nor is there reason to invoke special privileges (religiously-motivated child abuse is not protected by the Constitution). I agree. Parents who withhold easily attainable (i.e., not overly expensive) and universally recognized (i.e., crackpots don't count) medical treatments for whatever reason are guilty of child abuse. No reason to invoke thought crimes. They harmed their children in a way that any "reasonable person" would recognize as harmful.

Livestock is one of the key differences between Africa and the Asia. Horses and cattle were amenable to domestication. Their African counterparts, zebras and cape buffalo are not. They are particularly vicious animals.

Some of you answered the question well. Some did not. None of you acknowledged that several extremely well-regarded evolutionary biologists call themselves evolutionists. This thread went ballistic in part because of some rather intolerant responses. Re-read the OP. It wasn't particularly pedantic. Re-read post #3. That's where things started going downhill. Pmb happened to hit a sore spot. Some of you are overly sensitive, but with justification. Pmb, call yourself an evolutionist and do so with pride. Dawkins and Mayr do so, and that is some very well-respected company. Do not however call others who side with you evolutionists. As you have seen, some (particularly in the US, where people who ascribe to evolution as a scientific explanation are confronted by a ridiculously large fraction of the population who reject reality) take extreme umbrage at the term.

Well, in some cases, medicine can drastically shorten your life. Medical errors kill from 44000 to 98000 Americans each year .

The heck you didn't. You implicitly equated tolerating the rape of virgins before killing them, firebombing birth control clinics, and teaching violence toward homosexuals with religious tolerance. Enthymemes are a rather nasty form of straw man argument. Can't/won't do. I don't do videos. For one thing, my speakers are toast. For another, even my speakers weren't toast, I view videos as an utter waste of my time. My reading speed is many times faster than speaking speed. Have anything in writing?

Not true. I'll use chiropractic as an example. You won't find chiropractic techniques used in conventional practice because the underlying teachings are pretty much pseudoscience. However, chiropractic may well be effective for some ailments, particularly lower back pain. While conventional medicine doesn't use chiropractic techniques, some general practitioners will refer a patient complaining of recurring back pains to go to a chiropractor. Is chiropractic, with all its pre-scientific incantations, "medicine"? Alternative medicine occasionally does becomes "medicine". Some natural remedies do work. After identifying the active ingredient, scientifically explaining why it works, and testing it to death the chemical that makes a natural remedy work will make its way onto pharmacists' shelves and into the Physician's Desk Reference. OTOH, an alternative medicine that cannot be explained scientifically and is not markedly more effective than conventional medicines does not become "medicine". It remains alternative medicine. To begin with, it has allowed our non-religious beliefs to exist. Try expressing your markedly anti-religious sentiments in a less tolerant society. You should be thankful for the First Amendment rights. Things could have gone down a different path. The Pilgrims didn't come to America to establish a country replete with religious freedom. They came to America to set up a society that had zero religious freedom, something they weren't free to do in England. Straw man. Another straw man. And yet another straw man. That's three strikes, iNow.

My, that's mighty tolerant of you. My, that's mighty tolerant of you. Be careful what you wish for. I'll ignore that this wish is highly unconstitutional. Suppose your wish comes to pass. If this doesn't result in a coup, the very next election will involve a coalition of Christians, Muslims, and Jews who will oust every legislator who voted for this atrocity. A new law will be passed in lieu of yours that treats failure to indoctrinate children into some religion as child abuse. Yeah. 'Nuff said. I'll go on to slightly less controversial grounds. Some voices of reason: Exactly. What if your doctor recommended injecting your child with hydrogen peroxide as an alternative treatment for multiple sclerosis? Not that I'll ever use it myself, but how do alternative medicines such as naturopathy, homeopathy, Ayurveda, acupuncture, herbal therapy, Reiku, ... differ conceptually from religious-motivated treatments? The alternative medicine industry is a very strange admixture of left and right, encompassing new age mysticism to Christian fundamentalism. The US Institute of Medicine undertook a study on alternative medicine. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11182 One of the first hurdles: Defining what constitutes alternative medicine. Medicine that has not been adequately tested? Medicine that has been shown to be ineffective? A significant portion of conventional medicines are either ineffective or inadequately tested, and some alternative medicines have been tested and some even apparently work. They found distinguishing between conventional and alternative a rather difficult task. Finally, More voices of reason. Kudos to both of you.

In yet another thread that was revived from the dead, Sisyphus said Is there any way to modify the default vBulletin scripts to make responding to an idle thread something subject to moderator approval (akin to posting to the Announcements threads)? In other words, some user who just came up with a witty reply to a question raised and answered 4 years ago would see a popup "Post marked as pending. This thread has been idle for a long time. Responses to threads that have been idle for 2 years or more require moderator approval."

There most certainly is. The statement is an enthymeme.