sethjohn

You have hit upon a key distinction, unfortunately the author is intentionally muddling these two issues of 1)scientific data is missing or being withheld and 2) global warming or the skepticism thereof.

"the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared" "If there are no data, there’s no science."

There are plenty of mundane explainations for why scientists aren't providing data to people like Warwick Hughes. Perhaps Jones thought Hughes was a crank. Perhaps assembling the data was a lot of work and Jones didn't feel like going through all that work for someone he thought was just trying to raise trouble. Perhaps there were legal issues to providing the data publicly (as the article notes) that hadn't been resolved yet.

Of course Jones was wrong, all scientists should make every effort to provide data to anyone and everyone who wants it, even people they think are 'cranks'. In fact, Jones' reluctance to provide data to climate skeptics only fuels the fire of skepticism. But for the author to argue that this single act casts any serious doubt on the science of global warming is giving this incident far more importance than it deserves.

I thought through this with a friend a while ago.

The problem isn't getting the bandwidth to upload the content, the problem is getting access to content in the first place. In order to download PDFs of these papers, you need to have a subscription through your school/institution. The publishers will notice very quickly if someone starts downloading an entire journal's worth of articles.

There is something about the silver-blue glow of a Mac and it's zippy lines that seems to borrow from the hallucinogenic experience. Certainly, I've never seen while on halluginogens anything as garish, discordant, and downright ugly as the Windows primary-color scheme.

Of course, there's also the experience of seeing the world turned upside down and inside out that, in small doses, is probably good encouragement for creativity.

I am a chemist, and I like it.

I used to use webelements.com, which has the same information but is becoming more and more difficult to navigate with all the ads and subsections. I need a site that serves the same purpose as glancing up at the periodic table on my wall...except that I don't have a periodic table on my wall...so the lighting-fastness of it is great.

Your periodic table links to Wikipedia, which I just realized today has wonderful information on the elements. At first I assumed this was kind of a problem business-wise...you're linking to a competitor with much better information. Then I realized what a great tool this is as an interface for the wikipedia information on the elements. So, I've replaced the Webelements link in my bookmark bar with the Touchspin periodic table, which I will use as an interface to link to the wikipedia pages for more detailed information.

A few small points: -When I minimized the window with the elemental information in it, I couldn't ever figure out how to make it bigger again. -Some of the data is missing (% crustal abundance for Zn and many other elements). -No isotopic data which is what I am usually looking for.

Major props, in advance, to whomever can manage a high-quality recording of the talks. The podcasts are a great service for those of us who can't make it in person!

So lets assume that the costs for a successful web company are a small fraction of revenue (maybe 20%?). That's profits of 100 million a year for last-year's-Facebook.

So if this company makes 1/10th the profits of Facebook, it will take 50 years to make enough profits to cover it's current valuation. Of course, if this company is as profitable as last-year's-Facebook then their total profits will exceed their valuation after 5 years.

So I guess the question then is whether social-networking apps have the potential to generate similar revenues to the big social networking sites.

I've been frustrated lately at humorous comments and the rapid rate at which they are upmodded. A quick bit of humour can be great at cutting to the heart of the issue, but it often seems like humour comes at the expense of over-simplification. Apologies for taking it out on you though!

Yes, in fact web advertising has proved to be deep enough to support all of Google!

Of course there is a limit to the total amount of advertising dollars available and many half-good companies may not be good enough to support themselves with advertising, but there is no question that a good company can do very well on advertising alone.

Don't make too much fun unless you know the numbers. For all I know they might be generating huge profits. What makes you think their valuation is too high?

Come on, the laptops are not being given people for whom access to food, water, and protection from the elements is a problem. The point is to provide the educated working poor in 2nd/3rd world countries access to tools so that they can improve their lives.

And for these people, access to education and communication is very, very important. To take one example: farmers in rural India have a very hard time getting a fair price for their crops because they can't access price information before harvest, they basically have to just hop on a bus to the nearest big village and take whatever price is offered by the middleman that day. Poor communication leads to an inefficient economy.

If you don't think that laptops are the most efficient way to help these people out, what are you proposing instead?

Laptops provide people the means to educate themselves and communicate with each other in new ways.

Education and communication are among the best tools available to address problems such as fighting government corruption and clarifying land-ownership rights.