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Recent Comments by MilkmanDan
 | comment listing type: Top Sift for Dec 9th, 2009Friends O' the Sift Top New Videos by Vote                Subscribe Top 15 Sifters of All Time Top 15 Sifters of the Past Week 15. Seric
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Climategate: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails
>> ^MilkmanDan: I just mean that the burden of proof needs to be on the AGW supporting people
That's birther logic.
Science is not about perfection, it's about the best available hypothesis. AGW opponents have not yet put forth models which work better than the models being used by supporters of AGW, therefor AGW is considered the consensus scientific opinion. None of these models are perfect, but we should still use the best ones, even if some folks don't like the implications.
How can you expect me to take these folks seriously, much less award them correctness by default, when Ball supports ,the trivially falsifiable, urban-concrete-island hypothesis for GW?
I disagree that it is "birther logic". Saying that Obama is not a US citizen is an extraordinary (extraordinarily stupid) claim. Those that would make the claim should expect to be required to prove it for us to take them seriously. Clearly they cannot.
The idea of Global Warming is not a particularly extraordinary claim in and of itself. Suggesting that most of the warming comes from human-caused CO2 emissions is more notable, and suggesting that unless we curtail those emissions we will cause catastrophic and irreparable harm to the global climate (sunburn, melted ice caps, dead polar bears, tornadoes, hurricanes, and broken ocean currents) is extraordinary. That doesn't necessarily mean it might not be true, but I don't think it is at all unreasonable to require clear objective evidence and some amount of proof that they understand the system well enough to account for present conditions based on past data, or even showing that they are capable of providing predictions of future conditions that actually pan out.
Mac or PC: The age old battle continues
Sam Harris: Why Do We Need Religion?
He has studied meditation, and I imagine that is where his own personal experience with what he would suggest associating with the word "spirituality" comes from. I personally think that however you get into that mental state, it is basically just some element of our psyche that clears our thinking, instills confidence and a sense of being at peace, and makes us feel like we understand our situation in the world.
I somewhat agree with you that using older words that have had a much broader umbrella of definitions in the past is quite possibly counter-productive. But, I think that there probably is a physical or chemical "spiritual center" in our brains that is essentially taken advantage of by most religions, probably more objectively studied through meditation, and will in the future be understood better in medical or psychological terms just as he says.
I think it is possible that in the future we could associate that element of our brains with the word "spiritual" just as we associate nervous system responses to lack of food or water with "hunger" or "thirst"; which wouldn't be so bad.
Luke Skywalker has OCD
Mac or PC: The age old battle continues
Climate Change - Those Hacked E-mails
However, I agree with crillep that a reasonable criticism to make is that the leak does tend to suggest that these people were not particularly interested in the scientific method and making a hypothesis but being just as open to proving that hypothesis incorrect as correct.
A much bigger concern of mine from the fallout of this leak and the 'climategate scandal' is the information that apparently the CRU destroyed all of their raw, original temperature data that was fed into their climate models. Personally, I cannot come up with any reasonable explanation for that action. At best, gross incompetence; at worst, indication of fraud. A good scientist should want all of their starting data, processes, and plans to be completely open so that what they've done can be repeated and confirmed. That is hard to do when the original data magically disappears.
Ghastly homophobic Ugandan law supported by US fundie group
"Homophobic" just doesn't cover it here; "hate-o-phile" gets closer.
Climategate: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails
...While I agree with that in theory, I challenge you to name one scientific institution which makes all its employees e-mails, code and raw data sets public.
The fact of the matter is that we live in an IP crazed world, and universities and research institutions hold on to intellectual property because their presidents/boards of directors/funders require them to.
Every idea is guarded, and yes, this does significant harm to the scientific process, but that has nothing to do with whether or not the CRU is committing scientific fraud.
THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS HERE IS IF CRU IS COMMITTING FRAUD, no amount of ad-hominem will make their findings fraudulent, only pre-existing suppressed scientific evidence can do that.
These folks need to stop their media blitz and go find the data that they are so sure exists, anything else is psudo-scientific nonsense, and is undeserving of attention.
I don't disagree, and I actually think that it is fine for them to keep data, methods, etc. private while they are being studied. But at the point that they want anyone to take action on them, it has to be opened up. I just mean that the burden of proof needs to be on the AGW supporting people, and if they want us to take action to prevent "catastrophic climate change" at some point in the future, they had better be able to show beyond any reasonable doubt that:
A) Our current use of fossil fuels and other energy sources that emit CO2 and other gases contribute to a greenhouse effect AND
B) The effects of CO2 output and any increased greenhouse gases will have serious, major implications in the climate, and those implications are fully understood and provable.
For item B there to be proven, the prediction models have to be complete and reliable. People using Keplerian formulas can tell you where the moon or other satellites will be in the sky 10 days, 1 year, or 100 years from today with almost perfect accuracy. Weathermen are frequently wrong about what the temperature will be tomorrow. I know that isn't a completely fair analogy, but the I think that the Global Warming models need to stand up to this level of scrutiny and a lot more, particularly if they want us to take major actions based on them.
Climategate: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails
So much of global warming science comes from computer climate models. The problem with modeling something as complex as climate with computers is that it is nearly impossible to understand the whole system well enough that you can isolate one experimental variable to vary and compare to a control group. As time goes on, we keep learning about more and more variable inputs to the whole system of climate. Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and other gases create a greenhouse effect. The sun has a periodic sunspot cycle and other random (as near as we can figure) fluctuations.
Climate Science is a good thing, because we will gradually learn to understand more and more of those contributing variables. But before anything radical is done in reaction to computer models, those models have to be proven viable. One way that can be done is to feed old, recorded data into the model and see if it can accurately "predict" the past.
For that to be done, the system that the computer models use must be fully disclosed, open, and accepted.
Johannes Kepler came up with some scientific, mathematical equations to describe the physics of how bodies in space interact with gravitational pull. By applying those equations, we've sent men into space and to the moon, maintained orbits of satellites, and done all sorts of fantastically useful things. Until climate science can take data from 2 decades ago and accurately describe what happened 1 decade ago, I think it makes sense to be at least a little skeptical in our reactions to what those models say will happen 10-100 years from now.
Our Small World
First, I was surprised how large our moon was in comparison to Earth (relatively speaking -- if I were to draw relative sizes of how I guessed they compared, I'd have pegged the moon with half the diameter). Then, I was surprised that the sun wasn't larger in comparison to the planets (I'd have guessed 30% bigger diameter). And then my mind was blown by the sun, an object so immense that it is basically beyond the limit of my human comprehension, being dwarfed by other stars.
I guess the scientific part of my mind has always been best suited towards understanding Biology. With animals there is variation between members of a species, but their physical characteristics generally fall into a bell curve without an extremely high standard deviation; the tallest human to ever live won't be orders of magnitude larger than the shortest. I guess I had been tempted to think of celestial bodies as falling into groups like "species" in animals: asteroids, planetoids, solid planets, gas giants, stars. Clearly I'll have to rethink that, because there aren't many ants the size of a house running around.
I wonder how the physics of things like solar flares, etc. works on those super massive stars -- do their flares scale up in size in a direct linear scale with diameter or mass, or are any increases bound by a more logarithmic scale?
Anyway, thanks for the good sift!
Amazing Kenyan contortionist makes his first TV appearance
I'm rather baffled at how that routine is even physically possible without missing a few vertebrae.
A hilarious take on Matrix Reloaded (Rifftrax)
You shall, like, not pass... OK?
Loop the Loop in a real car
So very cool to have my assumptions be proven wrong, and lots of fun to watch!
Use your head to increase the range of your car remote
George Carlin vs. Fred Phelps