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Erik Vance
Berkeley, CA
Recent Activity
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Erik signed the petition | -
Erik signed the petition | -
Erik commented on the article |The military did not invent the internet. The first code was written at CERN in Switzerland. It was only adopted by the military much later. Hence, the fact that it's not classified.
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Erik commented on the article |Good points, all. Ben, the thing I've noticed about science communication is that it works really well when people are open to it and nothing is at stake. I learned about antimatter in a very similar way to your example. But there isn't and anti-antimatter lobby pumping money into a debate. It's when these debates get political that scientists fail. They are simply too accustomed to winning debates by trying to create "the perfect data set." The problem is that normal people don't want to read it.
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Erik commented on the article |I would not have thought so, but their website made a persuasive argument.
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Erik commented on the article |The Heartland Institute is driven by policy, not science. Most of their climate writers have policy backgrounds (by that I mean they have never collected or analysed data). This means that they are part of the policy discussion, not the scientific one. There are policy polemics on the left as well, but I would not hold them up as experts in climate science but rather messaging, government, and law.
This is a difference that a lot of people don't get. It's like calling Bill O'Reilly or Racheal Maddow news. They are editorial. The Heartland Institute doesn't publish in refereed journals, so they are not a great source for unbiased information. By the way, I would never accuse them of trying to hide this fact - they seem up front about being a strictly policy group. I just keep that in mind when I read them.
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Erik commented on the article |Fun fact: The design of these trains came from a Japanese engineer and bird watcher. It was inspired by a bird called the kingfisher.
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Erik commented on the article |Doubt it. Oil leaks don't tend to keep together over long distances like that. The speed with which this came on suggests something local. If it is a poison, it may be that it has already cleared the system by the time of the autopsy (not that thanyone can afford to do too many of those).
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Erik commented on the article |
I am sad to say that while I was once a professional biologist, I had to google "menhaden." Turns out that they are one of the many crashing ocean fish (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/menhaden.htm). Seems like that has been going on a while and this is recent.
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Erik commented on the article |I am not at all an expert in Massachusetts ecology. However, I know that they are very serious about protecting wetlands and that environmental impact reports have more power than in almost any other state. I also know that because of the boggy terrain, you have more frogs to begin with. Where I live they either don't exist or only vocalize underwater.
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