I'm sorry, but there are lots of bogus points in here. First of all, no one is arguing that the scope or impact of funded science should be anything less than great. The question is who should decide it. It seems the republicans want to take the awarding of scientific grants out of the hands of peer review, preferring that politicians micromanage the appropriation of research grants. Personally, I think that will lead to an end of basic science. Politicians are bound by their sponsors whom for the most part have an interest in public funding of applied rather than basic research.

This particular research is not about ecology or the environment, or some squishy bleeding heart first world problem. It's about the relative value of sexual and asexual reproduction. This particular snail can reproduce in either fashion, and it raises fundamental questions about when and why sexual reproduction would be preferred. It will likely lead to a deeper understanding of the genetic mechanisms that underlie sexual recombination, and how they relate to the success of progeny. Sounds like it's got some scope to me. The competition for grants is so stiff within science today that it's highly improbable that narrow research aims will be awarded. The fundamental question you need to ask yourself is "should basic science be funded, or should the only funding available be for applied science." My answer is an emphatic yes to basic science. It has proven its value beyond all doubt. Further, I personally feel that the applied work should be forced into the private sector as anything with a 5 year pay off will be funded naturally by the market anyway.

You also sing the praises of defense funding. I agree, many great discoveries have been funded by, say, DARPA. However, break it down by dollar spent. Because the money isn't allocated by peer review, but rather the whims of some brass, I personally don't feel it is efficiently allocated. Our impression when dealing with ONR (for example) is that they had absolutely no clue what they were interested in as a research aim, and had no clue what we were actually doing. They just thought we had some cool "high tech looking" stuff. Further, we as researchers didn't really care about their misguided scientific goals. It was sort of an unspoken understanding that we were doing cool stuff, and they had money to burn or else they wouldn't be getting anymore. All the while, the NIH is strapped with many of their institutes floating below a 10% award rate. Most of the reviewers would like to fund, say, 30-40% of the projects. Imagine if a quarter of that defense money was allocated by experts how much more efficiently it would be spent.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

snails are voracious crop pests and quick reproducers as well - I would think that figuring out their mating habits would be really important.

Steve Moore is a sensationalist doofus.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Can't reproduce. Is it a problem just with the YouTube embed?

We already give women (and men) control over their reproductive habits. It's pretty apparent that a large portion of these men and women don't deserve that control, since they reproduce without any thought or consideration to their impact on the rest of society. If everyone were mature and responsible, there would be no such thing as abusive or negligent parents. Parenthood should be a privilege, not a right. As an aside, in 2010 the divorce rate in the U.S. was over 50%. If 50% of married couples aren't even mature or responsible enough to sustain a marriage, how can these people be expected to raise mature and responsible children? Hell, how many of those couples had kids before they divorced? You ask me to have faith in people but the numbers really don't give me any reason to.

As for these young men, I'm guessing they had lousy parents who never taught them to respect other people or the law. That's probably why they raped a girl, peed on her unconscious body and took pictures of it all. If they hadn't been caught, do you really think they would have regretted their actions and turned themselves in? No, they would have just continued life as usual, grown up, had kids and raised them with the same twisted values. It's a vicious cycle that exists because we have no regulation over reproduction. Instead of wasting taxpayer money trying to rehabilitate them (and very likely fail; the vast majority of sexual predators can't break their habits), why not just end the cycle right then and there? Humanity is hardly on the verge on extinction, so getting rid of the trash and cleaning up the gene pool would only help make life better for future generations.

All that said, you're right that issues like poverty, lack of education, etc, are all relevant here. But would those still be issues if everyone were raised to be contributing members of society, as opposed to worthless parasites that exist solely for the sake of existing? There are a finite number of jobs and classrooms out there. There aren't enough to accommodate every living person. That's why we need population control. If you extend yourself beyond your own means by having kids you can't afford to feed or send to school, you're just making the problem worse.

Just as in the old model, the unknown band down the road wouldn't have gotten signed.

The concept of business has been around just long enough (longer than anyone alive) that people take it for granted. A sense of entitlement has arisen where we have somehow gotten the idea that business is the natural order of things. Almost like a machine where you put your hard work in on one end, and cold hard cash comes out the other end - and if it doesn't, then it must be somebody else's fault.

This is no more apparent than in the publishing industries. For a couple of generations they fell into a business model that worked so well for them - the ability to reproduce and control the supply of creative works on a physical medium; and be able to stick a large margin on it, enabled by marketing drives - that they begun to believe that being paid for somebody's creativity is the normal way of things. How they have forgotten that the service they provided was in an absolute sense, extremely new and so fundamentally reliant on a handful of fleeting technologies that are neither natural or fundamental to the works that they published.

Now it is normal to listen and to share music and other media, in the same way that it wasn't 20 years ago. The same way that 20 years ago it was possible to control the supply of music on a magnetic tape or plastic disc in the same way that it wasn't 50 years before that.

The talent, skill, experience and hard work required to create things that other people find interesting or entertaining is no less appreciated now than it ever was; but the talent, skill, experience and hard work required to then turn that into a viable business is a completely separate thing that should not be taken for granted, and one must adapt to the way things are now; not the way they used to be, in order to be successful.

If you are a creative person and you find a way to make a living doing what you love best then you should be grateful for having that chance. If you can't stand the idea of people appreciating your work without paying you - then find something else to do.

When an atheist/agnostic is wrong, they learn.

When a creationist is wrong, they declare a jihad, they have a crusade, they excommunicate.

and they may take up to 600 years to issue an apology when they are wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apologies_made_by_Pope_John_Paul_II

Science is just a tad bit quicker to admit when they're incorrect.

And +1 to the idea that agnosticism or non-theist is a more accurate stance to take than atheism. But yeah, it's hard to dismiss that a term that was once considered negative often gets turned around into a positive one and that's the term that gets used due to the fluidity of language.

Nerd is hardly an accurate term to describe someone, but Nerd is a previously derogatory term that has been turned around into a positive one.

I disagree with Dawkins though. Atheists/agnostics have to be the better people, that's why I've never appealed to the idea of militant atheism. Certain people, IMO, merely want revenge against religion because of the atrocities inflicted by religion and there is a fine line between justice and revenge.

I don't want revenge. Freedom of religion is a good thing, but then again, so is separation of church and state. People can believe whatever they want to, but when it comes to governance, we *have* to govern based on reproduce-able facts, not faith.

excellent, once you are exposed to the reasoning like this, it helps build the chain of trust people use in the scientific method -- reproducibility

So i was playing saints row the third earlier today and save for some reflections and the quality of some of the textures and lighting it's not far off, in fact i am pretty sure next generation consoles will be able to reproduce most of this and more without modification (reflections are still tricky, but you can fake those)

This is complete bullshit - a kung-fu version of people fainting and being cured at the alter of a super-church. Until we see someone launching a flying kick and then just stopping mid air like they hit a wall, then fuck right off. Nothing here is not reproducable by the likes of Derren Brown.

Claiming that revelation is the only way to know anything is an absolute knowledge claim.

Claiming that God revealed to you that revelation is the only way to know anything is a justification by circular argument.

The claim is that without God you can't know anything. The proof that God exists in this argument, because we do know things, is the impossibility of the contrary.

God himself has not been established and so cannot be reliably used as the fulcrum of an argument. Even among those who believe in God, there is little consensus as to his nature and attributes. I realize that you think you have it right while others have been wrong, but billions of other Christians have no doubt thought exactly the same. Until someone has something demonstrable, I do not care. "God" is just a word that people ascribe whatever definition justifies their beliefs to. Trying to build upon "God" is like trying to build a house upon a foundation of Jello.

The argument is intended to establish the existence of God as a necessity for rational discourse. As far as what Christians believe about God, our beliefs about Jesus Christ, who He is, what He came here to do, His attributes and nature, etc, are universally agreed upon by almost everyone. The idea that there is all this infighting amongst Christians about who or what God is is false. The division has to do with various minor doctrines, most of which are not consequential to the core doctrines.

You are correct that the laws of nature could change in 5 seconds, but we have testable, reproducible results by basing our work upon those laws (or our best approximation of them) and that is more useful to me than the formless, shifting apparition which you implore me to love and fear in their place.

It's interesting that you formulate the dichotomy as either God or science, implicating that science is functioning for you as a sort of stand-in for God. After all, isn't it where you find your explanation for reality? Don't you place your faith in its omnipotence to find every answer and solve every problem? So yes, to know God you will have to displace the idol, but not science itself. Sir Issac Newton certainly didn't see it that way. He saw science as something which demonstrated Gods glory and did not conflict with his research. Obviously his view benefited all of mankind many times over.

@shinyblurry

Claiming that revelation is the only way to know anything is an absolute knowledge claim.

Claiming that God revealed to you that revelation is the only way to know anything is a justification by circular argument.

Believing that God cannot tell a lie is accepting a circular argument. We have only God's word that he cannot lie and liars claim to be honest all the time.

God himself has not been established and so cannot be reliably used as the fulcrum of an argument. Even among those who believe in God, there is little consensus as to his nature and attributes. I realize that you think you have it right while others have been wrong, but billions of other Christians have no doubt thought exactly the same. Until someone has something demonstrable, I do not care. "God" is just a word that people ascribe whatever definition justifies their beliefs to. Trying to build upon "God" is like trying to build a house upon a foundation of Jello.

You are correct that the laws of nature could change in 5 seconds, but we have testable, reproducible results by basing our work upon those laws (or our best approximation of them) and that is more useful to me than the formless, shifting apparition which you implore me to love and fear in their place.

Wow. I'm not here to argue whether or not evolution is true or not; thought I was clear about that. You're welcome to it over at talkorigins.org I, for one, don't think evolution is falsifiable since it isn't reproducible. I didn't say it didn't happen. Just that it isn't falsifiable. I can find evolutionists who both disagree with me and agree with me. It's just my position. Since the scientific method requires experimentation to prove the theory, well, I think there is a problem there. You don't. OK. I'm good with that. >> ^PalmliX:

You can't apply the scientific method to evolution!?!? How exactly do you think the theory has come to exist? Without the scientific method there would be no theory of evoloution.
Of course the scientific method is in the hands of imperfect human beings, we created it, who else's hands would it be in? Yes humans are imperfect and that can sometimes lead to bad science, but the answer to bad science isn't no science, it's more science.
Should we just give up on science all together because humans aren't perfect? How else do you suggest we separate fact from fantasy? Truth from fiction? I really find your philosophy troubling because it seems to suggest that since we can't know everything, right away, perfectly, that we might as well not try?
Also I really don't care about some inane argument Dawkins made that has now been refuted. As I've said before, he's just one man and at the end of the day his opinions really don't matter, his thoughts on evolution in no way change the facts of evolution or the validity of the scientific method in general.
It's a silly semantic game that you play when you say 'I didn't hear Keller say there is or isn't a god, or evolution is bunk' etc... Yes he didn't use those exact words but the larger issue at hand is the same and you know it!
Finally, evolution isn't falsifiable? I stopped taking science after grade 10 and I can already think of a couple ways evolution could be falsified. For example, if we found an organism that couldn't have been formed from the evolutionary process, or if we found the fossil of an animal that existed in a time that would have been impossible by evolutionary predictions. I'm sure biologists have come up with a lot more.
>> ^silvercord:
In this clip I don't hear Keller say there is or isn't a God. I don't hear him say that evolution is bunk or not. I hear him saying that Dawkins argument is spurious for several reasons.
As I understand it, the scientific method requires that something must be falsifiable; evolution is not. I'm not saying evolution doesn't happen, just that you can't apply the scientific method to it. Also, the scientific method is always in the hands of humans. That is the fly in the ointment. Humans are hugely fallible. The method may be perfect, but the handlers aren't.
I think it would be beneficial to watch the entire talk so that Keller isn't being made the problem for pointing out the problem. There is a problem and it isn't Keller or me. It isn't you either. It's the fallibility of humans not being taken into account in this equation.

>> ^Yogi:

The faulty piece of equipment doesn't bother me, that's something that occurs in my everyday life and we deal with it as best we can. What does bother me is the actions of the polling people...if what this person says is true they shouldn't be there doing the polling. Show them a problem and it's their job to either fix it or decommission the machine.


It bothers me. I've been a software developer for over 10 years (professionally, technically I've been developing software for 3 decades, I know how machines work extremely thoroughly). Even considering the fact that he didn't display the input result from every option presented, this is still entirely suspect.

Regarding voting machine systems: there is literally NOTHING there that requires even a modicum of tech that's post-1985. Maybe encryption would cause a bug like this, but encryption would NOT, under any realistic circumstance, cause a reproducible user-feedback/GUI error like this, because it would be employed to store the data, not display feedback of any kind.


>> ^EvilDeathBee:

Totally.
Also, I would've said to her "No, it's NOT OK! This machine is defective!" and demanded it be removed. I wonder if it's part of the machines that got the "Experimental Patch"


Yeah me too. I would have recorded the entire exchange, as well as getting her name and the specific voting location. I would not let it go, but would probably post it and collect as much evidence as possible. "Both" parties are lying sacks of no good shit, and I don't trust any of them. I am sick of fake, self-servers running the United States at the expense of the rest of the world.

It's interesting to me that the media (at least what is reproduced in Australia) is calling it 'too close to call' while the blogs are all on Obama.

The media just seems to sell stories these days, not so much facts.

>> ^Deano:

You know this suddenly makes me genuinely concerned as to whether I've been caught doing this but they've let it go. I was working with a lady last week and I was so darn bored I just kept peeking glances, I really couldn't help myself.
After leaving I barely recall doing it until I really thought about it.
Any tips for avoidance? I'm serious! I don't want to give undue offence.

She totally noticed. Doesn't matter how discrete you think you were. She noticed. Hell, I've been behind a girl checking out her ass for split second and I could tell she knew when our eyes met. She knew I knew she knew too. Awkward.


No but seriously. Lets talk tactics. Those guys who wear sunglasses indoors during winter? Its not because they have some ugly eye infection, its because they want to look wherever they fucking please without being judged. Downsides? They get judged to be douches anyway because they're wearing sunglasses indoors in the middle of winter.

Another option is just to drill yourself into looking into her eyes. Imagine they are a pair of perfectly pert breasts and the pupils are the nipples. Downsides? She'll be able to see right into your lust filled soul. She may call the police or take out a restraining order.

Next - adopt a gay lisp, get totally up to date on fashion/clothes. Be that guy. That way you can happily look at the breasts, hell you can even comment on them, suggest clothes that might better accentuate her curves. Its pretty much all fair game when your a gay best friend. Cons - Your her gay best friend. Looking at those breasts/any breasts is all you're ever going to be able to do unless you pull the whole "I think you made me turn straight" thing which is a huge gambit.

4th - Masturbate furiously at every opportunity. Keep your libido as low as possible at all times. I personally used this method for much of my teen years with some success. Its not fool proof but its generally better than nothing. Cons - blindness (although this also serves to solve your problem).

Lastly you could just try to be yourself and hope women aren't too offended by your primal desire to reproduce. If you are attracted to her even more so than normal then consider asking her out. Perving over somebody is somewhat more socially acceptable if you are dating. Hell, maybe love will blossom. Cons - she might say no.

Thats all I got. Hope it helps.