James Jensen 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (105)

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 05 Apr, 2014 @ 09:10am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Global Weather Chaos

  Ah, thanks for the clarification. I'll have to read up more myself before I try to discuss such things next time.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 05 Apr, 2014 @ 09:06am

  Re: Re: Re:

  and now we have 'science' done by popular proclamation...
  
  That's an awful lot to read into what the last poster said.

• On the post: Innocence Of Muslims Actress Says Court Should Ignore Copyright Office Rejecting Her Copyright Claim

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 05 Apr, 2014 @ 09:04am

  Re: Re: Re:

  Sadly, the lack of title messed up the joke.
  
  It was supposed to read: "Mike Masnick hates it when copyright is enforced... especially copyrights that don't exist."

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 09:02pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Global Weather Chaos

  Look up chaos theory sometime. What I was talking about, and what I believe Michael was talking about, is that sense of "chaos."
  
  Increased heat causing more extreme weather is chaos theory in action: the more energetic the system, generally the more exaggerated the reaction to events both within the system and from outside. A prime example is the different states of matter: drop a solid object and it generally keeps its shape, drop a liquid and it sloshes about. Wind is the closest equivalent with respect to gases, I think.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 05:38pm

  Re: Re: Global Weather Chaos

  Chaos also implies a lack of order. While a warming climate does increase entropy it doesnt change the physics behind what causes the weather.
  
  Weather is actually the paradigmatic example of a chaotic system in the sense here. Chaos theory began when a meteorologist truncated a few digits in initial conditions of a weather simulation and got completely different results than if he'd left the digits in. What was discovered was that weather is extremely sensitive to relatively small disturbances.
  
  Increase in average temperature means and increase in the thermal energy in the atmosphere and thus an increase in sensitivity to disturbance. So the term is appropriate.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 02:13pm

  Re: Re: You could always go find Al Gore...

  If it gets too expensive, it will stop being a viable source of energy for many applications. Once it gets too expensive to be a power source for commercial electricity and transportation, we might as well have run out of it.

• On the post: Innocence Of Muslims Actress Says Court Should Ignore Copyright Office Rejecting Her Copyright Claim

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 02:04pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: This is...

  I'm reminded of a group of anarchists who met with a staunchly right-wing politician to give their support to his re-election, saying they were afraid if his opponent won people might get the idea that government could be effective.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 02:01pm

  Re:

  It likely said that people who buy into large numbers of "outlying" (for lack of a better word) theories generally disregard anthropogenic climate change. It is likely not saying that people who disregard climate change also buy into the above mentioned outlying theories.
  
  Whether that's what the paper said or not, that has certainly been my experience.

• On the post: Innocence Of Muslims Actress Says Court Should Ignore Copyright Office Rejecting Her Copyright Claim

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:53pm

  Re:

  Huh. This was supposed to be titled "Mike Masnick hates it when copyright is enforced?" C'est la vie.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:41pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: The thing I don't get

  CO2's been known to be a greenhouse gas since the late 1800's. A series of speculative handwaves were used to avoid the conclusion that too much of it in the atmosphere would heat everything up, and only when they were debunked did it become a live issue.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:37pm

  Re: Re: Re: So, ignoring climate change for a minute...

  I like Thomas Friedman's suggestion of "global weirding" for what's going on, but I doubt much that it will catch on.

• On the post: Comcast Says That If You Object To Its Merger With Time Warner Cable, You're Ignorant And Unreasonable

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:31pm

  Re: Brilliant!

  Then again, I may be biased; I'd be a SuperStar in this arrangement.

• On the post: Comcast Says That If You Object To Its Merger With Time Warner Cable, You're Ignorant And Unreasonable

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:30pm

  Brilliant!

  Anybody up for actually making this site?

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:23pm

  Re: Not Sure Why?

  My other contention is that there is a limited supply of oil. Deep sea drilling, fracking, and other tricks simply put off the day when oil starts to become like it statred in 2008, f***ing expensive.
  
  This is the problem a number of people have with many of the long-term predictions of the IPCC model: it assumes the oil supply will just keep coming, and increasing as quickly as it is now. That's just ridiculous.
  
  The consensus seems to be that peak oil started in 2005, and we've just managed to stave off the downward curve with some dirty tricks and just devoting a larger percent of the oil we extract to extracting more of it.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:18pm

  Re: Re: Re:

  Well, I didn't make up the term. It's proudly worn by the left-libertarians themselves.
  
  Scepticism about IP and proponents of a collectivistic culture as in public domain is traditional left-wing.
  
  Anti-IP libertarians think exactly the opposite is true, of course: IP is a denial of individual freedom to peaceably use information one possesses, traditionally justified by its utility to society as a whole. So, collectivistic.
  
  There is a large degree of conspiracists, which is pretty common for both sides of the extremes in the traditional political spectrum.
  
  True that.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 01:14pm

  Re: Re: Re:

  I suppose you've never encountered libertarian socialists, then? :-)
  
  Anyway, left-wing libertarians comprise the field from Tuckerite free-market socialists to capitalists who are anti-big-business and pro-equality on social issues. Good examples are Kevin Carson and Roderick T. Long. Every one I'm aware of is vehemently anti-IP, anti-surveillance, pro-equality for gays and minorities, and they all think the Republicans are complete hypocrites for slamming Democrats about "big government."

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 10:09am

  Re:

  FFS Tim, you bring up this on a website infested with right wing libertarians
  
  In my experience, it's actually left-wing libertarians who are most likely to go along with the opinions TechDirt regularly espouses.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 10:04am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: More garbage

  This is the "travel brochure" version of how science works. Start looking deeper (e.g. Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend) and you'll see that it has many exceptions.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 10:01am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: More garbage

  My definition of pseudoscience is "Any scientific discovery that is either directly or indirectly allowed to be polluted for ANY purpose other than Scientific advancement." So yes, if a scientist does his work honestly but still allows a political movement to highjack his work then it just became psuedoscience
  
  That strikes me as an unreasonably high standard for science. It's also not always a scientist's fault when their ideas are hijacked ? did Social Darwinism, which Darwin despised but was powerless to stop its proliferation, invalidate the theory of evolution? And it's certainly not the idea's fault.
  
  Your historical view of "Heliocentrism" could use some refining.
  
  My elaboration of it was oversimplified but I don't believe it differs substantively from your own. I still believe Galileo's punishment was unjust because the Church had no business getting involved in the first place. Still, he got away easy in comparison to some others.

• On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared

  

  James Jensen ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2014 @ 07:57am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: More garbage

  I dislike the term "pseudoscience" because nobody has ever found a clear way to distinguish it from real science without begging many questions.
  
  It seems to me that nearly every criterion advanced as a marker of pseudoscience has been shown to be true of some paradigmatic example of good science.
  
  Heliocentrism is a great example: what the Church did the Galileo was definitively wrong, but at the time the scientific community adopted it, there actually wasn't a lot of evidence for his position. The planets should vary in brightness far more than they do to the naked eye, and there was not yet a good theory of optics that explained why the telescope was more reliable when used for astronomy. (The prevailing theory predicted that anything set precisely at the focal point of the telescope should appear infinitely far away, which of course does not happen.)
  
  If there were actually a master scientific method that let you know when a hypothesis is irreparably refuted, the term would make sense, but there isn't and science is full of comeback kids (e.g. atomism fell out of favor for most of the 19th century). The best we can do is compare the relative status of scientific hypotheses in terms of predictive power vs. how many ad hoc alterations have had to be made to save the core idea (a la Lakatos).

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