ecoli

then what do you mean?

I've brewed pale ales, and a dark blueberry bitter. Looking to branch into more/different styles soon. Yeah, it's definitely a nation-wide phenomenon. In fact, I'm leaving on a trip sunday to travel to breweries in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan and meet up with some other beer nerds. I'm gonna end up at Michigan summer beer fest at the end of the week. My liver is gonna hate me, but I love microbrews. My girlfriend's mom makes paneer and yogurt, and claims that it's not difficult. I don't think paneer is actually fermented though, you just need vinegar. Yogurt is easy because you just add your yogurt cultures to whole milk and keep it warm for a few hours.

have them play this men's bathroom etiquette game... they'll get it eventually: http://gamescene.com/The_Urinal_Game_game.html

speak for yourself... I find (for example) the AI in Starcraft very difficult but in CIVIII easy. Mostly because, I think, the AI can move faster than I can. The mouse really slows me down, and I like to think. I'll stick to turn based-games.

Anybody else on SFN an amateur (or professional?) fermenter? I've been making beer (malt extracts only so far) for less than a year, and think it would be cool to start making cheeses - though this sounds a lot tougher. Who else dabbles in fermentation?

I say bs. War, by itself is rarely good for an economy... if you want to jumpstart manufacturing it would be better to run deficits to build up plants, make random things and destroy them (though I don't really like this idea either), rather than making guns and tanks and sending the most productive members of society overseas to die (in addition to destroying productive output). Sometimes war is necessary, but not to jumpstart an economy. in economics terms, this is called the broken window fallacy War does motivate innovation, though I hardly think that's a justification.

Lots of controversy over at Scienceblogs.com. Apparently, someone thought it would be a good idea to start up a nutrition blog authored by... PepsiCo . This isn't a joke. The scienceblog authorship isn't taking this lightly and some have already quit. What do you think? A golden opportunity for SFN blogs?

I guess you missed point that markets might be overestimating gov't on this one. Here's an alternative perspective that's just as much part of "Econ 101" as Kurgman's conjecture: He's basically saying that bond markets are doing well, when compared to other types of markets. After all, a government never has to declare bankruptcy as long as it runs the printing presses. Now before you jump to attack me, I'm ONLY making the point that trying to place teleological explanations to market movements seems to be an exercise in futility. I haven't seen unambiguous data that rules out either model... economists seem to be retrofitting their favorite models and ignoring when there prediction fails. I don't think Krugman is the exception (certainly plenty of Austrians are). Time will tell on this one, though I don't know of anyone who believes in suffering for it's own sake... just that what we perceive of as pain is the economy shedding access that deficits and debt created. It's possible that the extra debt can tide us over until real recovery can begin, and the increased productivity will make up the difference for the debt. It's also plausible that the debt will not lead to increased, sustainable, productivity but to investor mistakes... which can occur simply because people tend to be less cautious when gambling with cheap or borrowed money. This is why Austrian economists think that business cycles tend to aggregate around depressed interest rates. Again, I didn't say anything quite so teleological despite your insistence on putting words in my mouth. My point is actually this: even the few people who did predict the housing crisis did so using very different models. I think it would be a bit arrogant to assume, therefore, that we know why markets act the way they do... that they're acting rationally at all, or that we can predict future economic performance based on current market indicators - which seems to be what you're suggesting with bond rates: that market wisdom is showing that the US gov't will be able to pay back they're debts. I should remind you that markets also predicted that US homeowners would also be able to pay off their mortgages. but neither is it apparent that markets are demanding that printed money is manna from heaven. And even if markets do make such demands - so what? The wisdom of markets/crowds only goes so far. That's a fine hypothesis, but like I said... the outcome doesn't exclude the possibility that the OPPOSITE of your hypothesis is true: That the gov't did too much. The outcome would look the same, especially from a general standpoint though I'm sure economists would quibble about the details and draw no consensus. Yes... this is my argument why Paul Krugman lets his economic policy be affected by politics. I don't think this should surprise you, though... it's true for many economists nor do I think this is a controversial claim. If you thought I was making a different claim about Krugman... something like "his policies are wrong because he displays partisanship" than you would be mistaken, because I didn't say that.

When lucid dreaming, you know that you're dreaming. In an experience machine you'd have no idea. Nick Bostrom is a proponent of the simulation argument and thinks that there is evidence our universe is a simulation.

My guess is that Stewart is quite aware of the problems of sampling biases in only running clips and commentary of politicians acting stupidly. So I don't think he's saying, Watch these ten clips of politicians acting stupidly. We conclude that the vast majority of politicians act stupidly. To analyze the situation better we should take a step back and analyze the source of confirmation and other biases, and I think this is the Narrative fallacy. From Nassim Taleb's the Black Swan: When people think about 'truths' and 'facts' (political, and otherwise) it's not abstractly. We embed or image of the world into narrative and stories. We fall easy prey to the confirmation bias because it is very easy to update a narrative we already have with new information. Furthermore, we seek information that fits pre-existing narratives making it difficult to update our mental models or change our minds about things. Given that we can't escape using narratives, being honest that we're using a narrative goes a long way in being honest about our understanding. Getting back to the original point, I think this is why the Daily Show (and the Colbert Report, despite being not as funny) works where other networks fail: Where the mainstream media will deny to the death that they're telling stories, and that "facts" and "fair and balanced" reporting is really just a narrative that only approximates the 'truth', The Daily Show embraces the 'News as Narrative' concept. As a result, they make the news funny and interested that people feel comfortable with. Stewart may be guilty of confirmation biases, but by placing the news inside a specific story, he doesn't become guilty of drawing larger conclusions that looking outside the narrative might disprove. I think this is why he comes across as ideologically neutral as well. Not because the man himself is neutral, but he's knowingly trying to tell a story (and so making it a good one), where everyone else is trying to tell 'the truth' and are actually telling a bad story.

inow; Correct...but I fail to see the difference. There's a big difference between tax and spend policy and just spend policy. I think Krugman's primary policy is spending, and then to raise taxes if we have to over the long run.

OK.. but being a moderate libertarian isn't too anti-mainstream, even here (or should I say especially here?). Anybody believe in Alien abduction? 9/11 Troof? Organic produce?

And to be fair, many libs who were very vocally against war spending still are. But that does seem to have taken a back burner to other financial issues. However that could be an observation bias due to media reporting, etc (and the fact that I rarely watch/read the news anymore)

I've been trying to find the source, but I read somewhere that Krugman's defense of deficit spending changes in response to what political party the president belongs to.. much moreso than other high profile economists. Seems to suggest that politics plays some role here, more than policy. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I think Krugman would say that he supported a much bigger stimulus from the beginning. Which is true, enough Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged which is fair enough, given the politics of the thing, but it seems as if we end up with a compromise that neither side is happy with. What if the Keynesians, following Krugman were right and we needed a much bigger stimulus? What if the Austrians were right and we needed no stimulus. It seems like the outcome would be the same, given what we have.

Agreed with the last sentence, but I think one of the major fallacies has been in trying to predict the 'mind' of the market. For example, how do bond rates being lower than ever mean that markets are not concerned over long term deficits? In one of those Krugman quotes he attacks the assumption that markets are irrational... This surprises me a bit, especially considering what's been going on over the past couple years. What about the (very old) moral hazard argument? It seems to me that inflationary policies cause people to take more risks.. which can be good doing a recession, but can turn out very badly when risk is underestimated (housing bubble, for example). I know the new regulation is supposed to fix these problems, but its not coming online right away (even though deficit spending is) and doesn't guarantee that new "financial innovations" won't be found.

Great question... though it probably wouldn't be a good thing if vigilantes were allowed to kill (even if they were wanted by a government), I can't think of a reason why being on the government's payroll makes this type of murder ok, when the end result is the same.

I did this with a friend of mine the other day and was also inspired by this thread. What are some ideas/speculations that you believe, despite not being mainstream on Science Forums (please compare to SFN, only!). What's your favorite contrarian claim, that you actually believe? I'll go first 1) Cryonics is probably a good idea 2) friendly AI/ technological singularity/ transhumanism is a real possibility 3) using Bayesian analytical methods in everyday life 4) libertarian-ish political philosophy

@iNow - that last post covers a lot of economic policy. I would appreciate a more focused discussion on specific points. Perhaps focus on one quote and a bit more commentary would be helpful.

My dad makes double that, as a high school biology teacher with a masters degree and roughly 20+ years of experience. He works in a public school, in a relatively affluent neighborhood. Granted he lives in a neighborhood with really high standard of living, so he could live about the same with much less somewhere else.

quoted from the first link: Which is what I mentioned.

that is all

That doesn't seem to be the rule for animal DNA however. Has a complete genome been found for any extinct animal? These molecules tend to degrade over time even when kept under sufficient conditions of cold. Plus there's the challenge of differentiating specimen DNA from DNA found in the environment (from bacteria, mostly).

I don't think the title is clear in that case. Who's using the Stockholm syndrome to defend religious beliefs?

Agreed. In general the more specific and less general the hypothesis the better it works. Anyone can come with a general hypothesis such as "things happen" but of course this is not very useful to understand the world since your predictions can't be discriminative. Still, I find it to be a useful heuristic when trying to avoid bad heuristics (which seems to be how people wind up employing the confirmation bias - and others - in the first place. I would agree with this as well. It seems as when Stewart employs these biases, it's in jest and obviously so. However, we can test this hypothesis: how many instances of confirmation biases would we expect to observe in x hours of watching Glen Beck? I'd say maybe 5 per hour (arbitrary). So what's my confidence (prior probability) that I'll observe 5 per hour given the hypothesis that Glen Beck uses lots of confirmation biases seriously? I'll say 80% confidence rate. If I fail to see that, I'll have to downgrade my confidence and/or device a better test (to avoid sampling biases - we should expect a non even distribution of confirmation bias use and shouldn't expect that 1 hour of Glen Beck is representative). We can apply the same tools to watching John Stewart too to compare.