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The Science Forum

1. Art and Culture • Re: underwater photography
   Just noticed this thread, so sorry for not entering earlier. When snorkel diving, there is a bit of a problem with photography. It sounds very basic, but the problem is holding the camera still. On automatic, the camera tends to have a slower shutter speed, while the snorkeller is in a kind of 'free fall' making it hard to be still. The result tends...
2. Politics • Re: Polarized: No new information, no desire to understand
   This struck me as a telling graphic. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0 ... o-extreme/ The chart above is from the invaluable people at Voteview, who use data on Congressional voting to measure political positions and polarizations. What it shows is what should be obvious, but much of the Beltway chattering class still refuses to acknowledge:...
3. Business & Economics • Re: a long term trend crosses a mark
   What would you recommend we do to decrease the risk involved? Statistics: Posted Posted by iNow — Sat May 19, 2012 11:47 pm
   
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4. Business & Economics • a long term trend crosses a mark
   http://news.investors.com/article/61188 ... opouts.htm Basically, it discusses the fact that people with college but with less than a four year degree are now unemployed at a higher rate than people with high school but no college at all. And it tries to set that up to be Obama's fault as a lefty somehow, as is usual for that species of rightwing rag,...
5. Philosophy • Re: methodological naturalism
   marnixR wrote: so how do you answer accusations that, by sticking to what science can investigate, you miss out on the things that it excludes itself from attempting to investigate ? For any given phenomenon, typically there will be myriad possible rational causes - that are amenable to the scientific method - and an essentially infinite number of...
6. Coffee Shop • Re: Acronym Game
   astrolabe Ancient star taker returning orientations latitudes and basic ephemerides Statistics: Posted Posted by Ophiolite — Sat May 19, 2012 3:17 pm
   
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7. Philosophy • Re: methodological naturalism
   The exclusion of consideration of potentially supernatural causes is inherently non-scientific. Methodological naturalism is an approach of convenience. If we entertain supernatural causes as a possibility it becomes extremely difficulty, from a practical standpoint, to establish that the supernatural is involved. A consideration of what we do know and...
8. Philosophy • Re: methodological naturalism
   so how do you answer accusations that, by sticking to what science can investigate, you miss out on the things that it excludes itself from attempting to investigate ? Statistics: Posted Posted by marnixR — Fri May 18, 2012 3:07 pm
   
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9. Anthropology & Archaeology • Re: Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 years ago
   marnixR wrote: ...if people were in South America well before Clovis times, we've yet to find their traces in North America... (Meltzer 2002, 2004). wasn't there a theory that the initial migration might have followed a coastal route, in which case traces of habitation may have been covered over by subsequent sea level rises - time for a spot of...
10. Philosophy • Re: methodological naturalism
    Mm.. Isn't a non-natural/ssupernatural cause, by definition, beyond the realms of Science? Scientists shoyld perhaps keep an open mind to the possibility of an as yet unknown, or unknowable, factor being causal in phenomena. But this doesn't equate to believing in the thing in the absence of evidence. No scientist worth their salt would do...