>> ^Trancecoach:

you're so right. I know nothing about being inspired by the mysteries of the universe, or becoming so enthralled that I pursued a masters and a doctorate, not in an effort to get answers, but to ask wiser questions... And I know nothing about the federal government slashing the funding of crucial social programs that have measurable and direct impact on people's lives -- like whether or not they have enough money to eat, or whether or not their child gets the medical attention they need...
And, surely, I've never thought at all about the hundreds of thousands of orbital debris objects from NASA's abandoned or lost equipment or spaceships that are orbiting earth or items as large as 10kg re-entering the atmosphere to fall god-knows-where (to say nothing of all the hardware that was left on the moon).
There's certainly nothing I can say about the ongoing "civil wars" in which our planet is continuously engaged, be it on the basis of race, status, gender, wealth, resources, or just some petty bullshit argument on a website! No, I'm certainly nowhere near smart enough to understand deGrasse-Tyson, or your scintillating brilliance that you demonstrate in your stunning ability to recognize irony versus sarcasm, and knowing just when to let it go.


>> ^Yogi:
>> ^Trancecoach:
ad hominem will get you everywhere... while I play the tiniest violin for you and Dr. deGrasse-Tyson...

Dude you didn't WIN anything here stop trying to take the high road, you're not smart enough to understand what in the hell he's even talking about.



Yeah don't be an adult, just make shit up so you can win an argument. Do us all a favor and stop trying to be a cynical bastard, you're bad at it.

>> ^Trancecoach:

ad hominem will get you everywhere... while I play the tiniest violin for you and Dr. deGrasse-Tyson...


Dude you didn't WIN anything here stop trying to take the high road, you're not smart enough to understand what in the hell he's even talking about.

ad hominem will get you everywhere... while I play the tiniest violin for you and Dr. deGrasse-Tyson...

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^Trancecoach:
Very quaint. Too bad life doesn't work that way.
Like, at all.>> ^Yogi:
>> ^Trancecoach:
Still -- we got plenty of problems on this planet to work out before we continue exporting our junk, waste, and pollution to other planets and the intervening spaces. Seems like we need to get our own house in order before we start pouring the foundation for a new one...

What if our galvanizing our educational system as a result of our space exploration leads to changes in how we power everything? What Neil is talking about is changing everything, a small push that leads to a dramatic shift in everything. Suddenly because we put our minds to it and it's necessary for space travel we have Cold Fusion. We have weather machines, we have clean waste disposal. A world where technology and science works towards a specific goal but has a multitude of other effects.
You can basically draw any sort of technological advances we've had in the 20th century and point it towards our government and NASA working towards something else. Why don't we try doing it again...seriously it doesn't even cost that much as he points out.


It did work that way is what I and Mr. deGrasse-Tyson is saying. Please though dismiss any counter idea by calling it "quaint" doesn't make you seem like a douchebag at all.

In reply to this comment by spoco2:
*promote this because it be awesome :

Thank you for the promote. You're the best!

>> ^bareboards2:

@ChaosEngine, you are absolutely right. Context does matter.
I haven't gone into another aspect of my (much thought about) logic around this language issue -- although I did allude to it above -- but it is indeed about context.
I have no problem with the word girl being applied to grown women IF IF IF in the same CONTEXT, you would use the word boy for a grown man.
That is why your wife calls her women friends girls -- just like @longde called his friends boys. Same context.
My personal internal test for whether it is (unconsciously) sexist or not to call a grown woman a girl is to change the gender and ask myself -- if this were a man, would I call this grown man a boy under the same circumstances. If the answer is yes, then hey, go for it. CONTEXT does matter. I am with you 100%.
But I'll say the same thing to you -- go through one day doing that. Change the gender. When you hear "man", change to "boy" and see if that doesn't feel WRONG to you. When you hear "girl", change to "woman" and see if your internal landscape doesn't shift the tiniest bit.
Thank you for the first respectful response I have gotten to my point here. I really really appreciate it.
I also would be interested in hearing your wife's response to all my posts. That would be fascinating.


To be fair to you. I rewatched the video and tried to imagine if the story involved young men being racist hipster idiots.

And I can't help but concede you probably have a point here. It's highly unlikely that these guys would have referred to males in the same position as "boys". They would probably have been initially called "dudes" and later as the story progressed referred by some non-gender specific epithet (idiots/morons/etc.)

There's an interesting societal language thing at work here, and there's probably an element of "unconscious sexism" as you put it. Generally men are raised to treat women differently. This can be "positive" (holding a door open, "never hit a girl", etc) or negative (do I really need to provide examples of this?). And it's undoubtedly leaked into language. Also to be fair to the guys telling the story in the video, "girl" is such a common euphemism for woman in society that it's kinda hard to see it as anything but equivalent to "dude", "bloke" etc.

I don't know if that's down to sexism or just evolution of language, but as I said, there is definitely a difference. Whether that difference is ultimately problematic is, I guess, personal.

@ChaosEngine, you are absolutely right. Context does matter.

I haven't gone into another aspect of my (much thought about) logic around this language issue -- although I did allude to it above -- but it is indeed about context.

I have no problem with the word girl being applied to grown women IF IF IF in the same CONTEXT, you would use the word boy for a grown man.

That is why your wife calls her women friends girls -- just like @longde called his friends boys. Same context.

My personal internal test for whether it is (unconsciously) sexist or not to call a grown woman a girl is to change the gender and ask myself -- if this were a man, would I call this grown man a boy under the same circumstances. If the answer is yes, then hey, go for it. CONTEXT does matter. I am with you 100%.

But I'll say the same thing to you -- go through one day doing that. Change the gender. When you hear "man", change to "boy" and see if that doesn't feel WRONG to you. When you hear "girl", change to "woman" and see if your internal landscape doesn't shift the tiniest bit.

Thank you for the first respectful response I have gotten to my point here. I really really appreciate it.

I also would be interested in hearing your wife's response to all my posts. That would be fascinating.

Although most of them play OK for me, the way they work has changed. Before the change I used to turn off my wifi after, lets say, 1-2 minutes had loaded to avoid using up my bandwidth quota while it loaded the whole darned thing in the background... then I would watch the 1-2 minutes and decide whether to load the rest. If I try that now, as soon as I turn off wifi the whole thing just breaks, no matter how much it thinks it had loaded.

If your connection is the tiniest bit flakey, or under unusual load, this could break things for you that would not have broken with the old loading scheme.

You could consider putting in a bug report, perhaps they'll make the old scheme optional in settings, or just fix the new one?

Reloading the page, then moving the slider to where you were up to, will generally get it going again if it does break. The old trick of clicking the slider just past where it's up to doesn't work as often as it used to.
>> ^notarobot:

Youtube embeds play slow for me too. They chunk along while loading. It's been like that for most videos for me since youtube updated the way that they stream their data a few months back.

We are capable of processing more than one thing at a time, also people are not obligated to only consider "serious" issues every waking moment of their life. We'd all commit suicide.

>> ^VoodooV:

...But the argument just seems selfish in the perspective of larger concerns...
>> ^messenger:
FWIW, I was the one who sifted the Trayvon martin videos here, so at least I'm contributing to both sides. I guess I'm surprised that Sifters would be disinclined to accept a mathematical fact about a number. That's like just "disagreeing" with relativity because you can't picture it in your mind even though it's been proven to hold on all but the tiniest microscopic levels.>> ^VoodooV:
do a google search. It's been argued forever. Only thing it proves is how far we'll go to argue ridiculous things and the fucked up priorities of humanity.
we'll argue .999... for forever (or infinitely...zing!) but try and solve things like why kids like Trayvonn Martin still get senselessly shot or try and solve how we can take care all of our citizens regardless of income level. Ehh, we'll get around to it sometime.
It reveals just how truly absurd this shit is.

Because it truly doesn't matter to anyone other than a mathematician or a physicist.....or people who like to argue on internet message boards.

.999... either equals one, or it equals a number absurdly close to one. It just does not matter in our practical lives.

Don't get me wrong, the scientist in me loves stuff like this. But the argument just seems selfish in the perspective of larger concerns. I kinda feel the same way about the Hadron Collider. Like income inequality, there is a HUGE gap between the smartest of us, and the average citizen. I feel we should be closing that gap, instead of indulging the intellectual 1 percent.

>> ^messenger:

FWIW, I was the one who sifted the Trayvon martin videos here, so at least I'm contributing to both sides. I guess I'm surprised that Sifters would be disinclined to accept a mathematical fact about a number. That's like just "disagreeing" with relativity because you can't picture it in your mind even though it's been proven to hold on all but the tiniest microscopic levels.>> ^VoodooV:
do a google search. It's been argued forever. Only thing it proves is how far we'll go to argue ridiculous things and the fucked up priorities of humanity.
we'll argue .999... for forever (or infinitely...zing!) but try and solve things like why kids like Trayvonn Martin still get senselessly shot or try and solve how we can take care all of our citizens regardless of income level. Ehh, we'll get around to it sometime.
It reveals just how truly absurd this shit is.

FWIW, I was the one who sifted the Trayvon martin videos here, so at least I'm contributing to both sides. I guess I'm surprised that Sifters would be disinclined to accept a mathematical fact about a number. That's like just "disagreeing" with relativity because you can't picture it in your mind even though it's been proven to hold on all but the tiniest microscopic levels. [edit: I mean relativity, not 0.999..., which holds perfectly always.]>> ^VoodooV:

do a google search. It's been argued forever. Only thing it proves is how far we'll go to argue ridiculous things and the fucked up priorities of humanity.
we'll argue .999... for forever (or infinitely...zing!) but try and solve things like why kids like Trayvonn Martin still get senselessly shot or try and solve how we can take care all of our citizens regardless of income level. Ehh, we'll get around to it sometime.
It reveals just how truly absurd this shit is.

I didnt say everything was right what critics say. Thats science. However, you can start by "debunking those 450+ studies one by one, because that article you linked didnt debunk one of them but instead just tried to personally discredit 3 people who they think are too dangerous to their cause.

How about you start by debunking the thousands of studies supporting anthropogenic climate change? More importantly, what makes you think those 450+ studies are more reliable than the pro-climate change studies? Usually, when I see a debate with a vast majority of scientists on one side and a tiny minority on the other, I believe the majority. This isn't a perfect heuristic, but it's a pretty good one. Do you have any good reason to believe the heuristic fails in this instance? What is it that has convinced you the majority is wrong?

Its very easy to say what you are saying. Just like creationists. You cant debunk it. "God told me so, prove me wrong!".

What? This is the stupidest analogy ever. Saying "Look at all this peer reviewed scientific research" is somehow equivalent to "God told me so"?

And studies that try to explain this partly (Svensmarks), and thus attack the "consensus" of the corrupt, get dismissed like its some atheist in a church trying to explain how resurrection is impossible.

This is only true if atheists in church are usually dismissed using careful peer-reviewed scientific research, along the lines of this or this.

There are enough facts plus satellite data, but as long as people like you prefer to get their money taken from them (thats what this is all about, if you still havent noticed), there is nothing objective science can do about it. You have no idea how many billions the global warming market is already. Not only the "scientists" that get paid for every mention of AGW in their studies and articles by the IPCC, but also normal people who make a living by selling stuff that is supposed to decrease CO2 emissions and levels.

And of course there's no money at all to be made in debunking climate change. Dude, the oil industry pumps millions of dollars into research that criticizes the consensus. After the last IPCC report came out, the American Enterprise Institute (funded by Exxon) offered $10,000 to anyone who published an article criticizing the report. If you think money is skewing incentives on the pro-AGW side, why don't you apply the same standards to the denialist side?

Science is falsifiable, but people like you just are saying the Al Gore bullshit "The debate is over" and are bringing old and already debunked arguments (even not used anymore by IPCC).

Care to point out where ChaosEngine made an old and already debunked argument? And just because science is falsifiable doesn't mean that science can never be settled on an issue. The debate about the chemical composition of the sun is over. That doesn't mean that those claims are not falsifiable.

I didnt even know theres actually a site like this that promotes discrimination of scientists by putting their own bullshit on it and claiming their are wrong and calling them childish names like Christy Crocks. Reminds me of those republican kids that invent stuff like "libtard" or "obamallama". Very objective and scientific. It gets sadder and sadder each day.

I know. Very sad. Let me play you the world's saddest song on the world's tiniest violin. Especially after you called ChaosEngine ignorant and stupid and then complained about how sad rhetoric like "Christy Crocks" is.

That you think climate science is a science that is even known well by humankind and thus can be easily proven, proves alone that you dont have a clue... Oh and btw, we are experiencing a cooling now it and will last until about 2020 to 2040. Lets see what new "scientific facts" will pop up to support your religious opinion until then.

Climate science is not a science that is known well be humankind, but it is apparently known well by coolhund-kind. Please tell us how you came up with this forecast, and why you think it is more reliable than the forecasts of, you know, actual experts.

The IPCC is an organization, that has no need to exist, if there is no AGW.

True, but irrelevant, since there is AGW.

You want to keep your job, or you want to get a better paid job... you just have to get rid of a few minor ideologies and then you have a good life for the rest of your life.

OK, so the thousands of climate scientists who claim to believe in AGW are lying to keep their jobs. Confusingly, a number of global warming skeptics are able to keep their jobs without pretending to believe in AGW. Someone needs to figure out how they managed to beat the corrupt system. Maybe they have compromising pictures of Al Gore?

Oh and btw, I think America is very easy to fool with things like this. Take the biofuel for example. It is nowhere near being actual "biofuel". It actually harms our eco-system. Palm oil, clearing of the rain forest to make space for more plantations, high food prices, waste of water, etc come to mind. Other countries like Germany are more skeptical about things like this and have proven once again, that they are right, even though your country (and many other who benefit from it) are still claiming there is also a "consensus" on this matter. How ironic.

What a pointless digression. America is not the only country in the world where scientists believe in AGW. The national science academy in Germany, your paragon for a skeptical country, has also endorsed the IPCC report. So whether or not Americans are easy to fool is completely irrelevant here. Incidentally, 59% of German people believe that global warming is due to human activity. Only 49% of Americans believe this. So maybe you're right -- Americans are easy to fool. You're just wrong about who's fooling them.

I wish some of this surprised me. It depresses me that hearing of corruption at this level does not even stir the tiniest bit of shock.

Outrage, yes. Shock? No.

@volumptuous

So liberals bring in 80 million unskilled workers and sabotage all efforts to rationally control it, and you refuse to acknowledge that liberalism could improve in even the tiniest of ways.

California now has the dumbest test scores in the country due to the success of your ideology, but everything must be someone else's fault. Very mature and accountable.

I predict that an ideology that regards itself as unable to improve will not improve.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^Payback:
>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^Payback:
Please, the two situations are ENTIRELY different.
The one is a bunch of beaten-down, disenfranchised, angry people, trying to fight back against a tyrannical, all-powerful dictators, with groups of cronies and clandestine corporate interests, which are literally ripping money from the people and passing it around, enriching the tiniest portion of their populace and using violence and rights suppression to further their evil agendas.
The other one, Arab Spring, actually has a chance of succeeding.

So true, though anyone who thinks Obama and Hillary are the dictators really needs their head examined.

Never said I was talking about elected officials.

No head examination for you then!


Arg, Sylar has returned!

they arrest the 'I'm not moving' guy at around 3:52, you can see them holding him up by his pants if I'm not mistaken