'I Authored 700 Papers. Did I Read Them All ? No.'

science 2.0  h/t Behind the Black

excerpts

• Measuring the value and the impact of a scientist on her field of research using as data her scientific papers, the number of citations these papers got, and the prestige of the scientific journals where these were published is no easy matter.
• No, I cannot even say I read all of them; perhaps I read a third. If this coming clean with my true contribution to papers I signed shocks you, please consider: I did not ask to sign those papers -it is automatic !
• the few honest scientists who stick to the idea of only signing papers to which they feel they gave a contribution would quickly end up at the bottom of the list of any scientometric index, being surpassed by the less upright ones.

Comment:

Again, I point to Bronowski's warning.  You need integrity in order to have a scientific civilization.

Extend The Bush Tax Cuts

Dick Morris TV: Lunch Alert!

Comment:

He makes some good arguments in his video.

Opposition to the Bush Tax Cuts is ideological.  The cuts themselves were not because the tax cuts were for everybody- not just the rich.  The Democrats want to exclude the rich.  The rich are not guilty of anything just because they are rich.  It all depends upon how someone gets rich.  If someone gets rich by doing wrong, then you can punish the offender.  It is stupid and unjust to punish someone who has done nothing wrong.

Doodle Bug and Ying Yang

The post about the duality of man got me to thinking about ying yang.  It is said that ying yang are complementary.  Posing the question of whether reason and faith are part of this duality brought me to the Doodle Bug story I remember reading about.

The Doodle Bug was an invention to help find oil deposits.  The inventor became discouraged and refused to believe that what his Doodle Bug was telling him.  It was telling him that there was a rich oil deposit right under his feet.  He gave up and it was later discovered that the oil really was there.  The author of that story believes it was a negative attitude that caused him to fail to believe what his instrument was telling him.

Reason enabled him to invent the Doodle Bug.  Faith turning negative is what caused him no longer to trust it.  He refused to believe, you see.  Perhaps this isn't correct in terms of ying yang, but I'd say that the opposite of faith is not the lack of faith.  If he got curious about why his Doodle Bug was giving him readings that he found puzzling, he could have investigated that circumstance.  In any event, he had to make a decision.  His decision was not to believe.

Motivation is what moves people.  He had to have been motivated not to look for causes and effects.  That is how he made the faulty choice.  Hill calls it a negative attitude.  In any event, it is a decision.  To believe or not to believe- that was the question.

So, I'm trying to reason that reason and faith are ying and yang.  You have to decide what you are going to believe.  In the end, what you believe has to be a matter of what you can't see or perceive and what you do about that.  You can keep looking or you can give up.  That's the decision.  Hill calls that your attitude- you have a negative attitude or a positive attitude.  You can choose your attitude.  The use of reason can lead you to an answer to a question.  Faith assumes it.  There has to be an assumption with faith.  You can start with an assumption and test it.  That's reason.  So, perhaps reason and faith can complement each other.  But that would also have to be assumed.

Ying yang is like in and out.  Faith is inward.  Reason is outward.  Reason tests in order to find the truth.  Faith assumes what the truth is.  But faith can be wrong.  By faith, I mean belief.  It doesn't have to be about religion.  In this context, it is only about what you choose to believe about something.  It could be what you believe about your own invention like the Doodle Bug.

In the case of Galileo and the Catholic Church, it was believed that the Earth was at the center.  But Galileo reasoned otherwise.  Faith alone did not reach the correct answer to that question.  But Galileo needed some kind of faith in order to look for and test for the answers.  And he found it.  It is ying and yang after all.

Now let's see if there's any reaction to this.

Amazing energy density of thorium

It has been said that a golf ball size chunk of thorium has enough energy for a person's lifetime.  How much matter is in this golf ball sized chunk?  It looks like it displaces about 50 ml of water.  That measurement is by volume.  How about by mass?  Looking up the density on the Wikipedia yields a mass of a little over a pound.  About 1.2 lbs.  Or 585 grams.  A pretty small mass for such a prodigious amount of energy.

Now, if an average person lives for 80 years, each year would require 50 ml divided by 80 years.  This yields only .625 ml or 7.3125 grams per year.  A trifling amount.  For reference, about 30 gm equals an ounce.  As you can see, it isn't much.

Most of the waste has a short half life and will decay to stability in 10 years or so.  Maybe an eighth of the original volume will require long term storage of about 300 years.  ( I'm relying on memory and I'm guessing on some of this, so it may be off just a little --- in any case, it can't be more than what you start with, which isn't much) So, one eighth of this already small number yields less than 1 gram per year that will have to be stored long term.  After 30 years, there will be about an ounce of the stuff.  Not very much.

This entire exercise is to show how little waste is being produced in a LFTR.  Given the fact that it produces so much energy, the cost and inconvenience of storing such small amounts of waste should be considered well worth it.

Full Metal Jacket Peace

"Private Joker educates the Colonel"

Private Joker explains the duality of man.

If faith (one amongst many attributes) is one side of the duality, what is the other? Is it reason?

Create enough confusion and you can win

I've been reading about this story for a few days now and I still don't get it.  Somehow, we are told it is a first amendment issue, but then other details get thrown into the mix.

When the excrement flies, you want to keep some distance from it.  All the same, the controversy becomes a story in itself, but what the heck is the story?  How close can you get to it and not have the excrement land on you?

At the bottom of it, a judge doesn't know how the internet works, and a guy gets arrested.  The guy who got arrested seems to have lost because the judge doesn't understand the key facts of the matter, or so it seems.  Or did he get arrested for something else?  It isn't clear to me.  And I don't have enough time to sort this out.

The judge might have gotten something right when he said something to the effect that the two guys ought to just go slug it out somewhere.  But that may be missing the point.  It isn't against the law to just write about something that is a matter of public record.  Like I said, this is confusing.

I remember what Robert Ringer wrote in his book Winning Through Intimidation.  He said something to the effect that if you lose your case in the jungle, you lose your case period.  The legal system is something to be avoided if at all possible.  The worrisome thing here is that the most innocent of things- like blogging- could land you in the brig.  Then the legal system has you and what have you done to warrant this?  That's not supposed to happen in America.

Update:

A related post here.  Which reminds me of a couple things:  1) Hitler liked to brag about how he prevented others from speaking 2) the post about the left's tactic of shut up.

Plenty of facts and evidence to back it all up.  But that may not matter anymore.

Does truth matter anymore?

When faith trumps reason, logic, and evidence- truth goes out the window.  The kind of world that results from that is a horror show.

It is worth quoting The Ascent of Man directly:

The division between him and the authority [ The Inquisition] was absolute.  They believed that faith should dominate.  And Galileo believed that truth should persuade.

This is so crucial to the times, I think.  No evidence is accepted on the issues of the day because the truth doesn't matter anymore.  The only thing that matters anymore is who has the power.

If I am right about this, we are living in dangerous times.  This cannot end well.  It will result in violence or surrender.  Neither of these possible outcomes is good.