http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sWJuQD0cL8

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm2Jrr0t ... _embedded#!

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Was going to watch it... but it's Dawkins.
I'd have to sit and watch the Pope for an hour to maintain the balance.

[LIFTED]. Watch it. It's not Dawkins.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1

Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us

Interesting read.

[LIFTED] headline is [LIFTED], first reply says it all

Or indeed perhaps this commenter hits the nail even more firmly on the head:

Regardless of the headline, it does raise some good points about the scientific community; noble ambitions wrapped up in a necessary need to make money.

I think if a community is targeted for criticism it is the multi-national pharmaceutical companies, big business, inadequately-fettered capitalism. It's a reason for not pumping your kids full of Ritalin at the first sign of being bored during maths, but the highlighting of scientific study doing its job, owning up to its mistakes, does nothing to make me go, yeah those boffins, what a load of bankers.

Heard the pope apologise for condom-bashing recently? Damaging prejudices that aren't open to correction - the religious approach would be to shout-down those saying the drug is harmful, to stick rigidly to the nonsense about LDL and HDL cholesterol for fear of being seen to be wrong. It cost the company 21 billion to own up the mistake and they were still willing to do it? That's a victory for science, and indeed a vindication of capitalism and arguably the litigation culture; it would have cost them more to put the drug on the market.

This makes me mad. Not the pope, not you, but the fact that it's even an issue.

If you're not Catholic, then don't listen to the pope. Why listen to someone you know you're not going to agree with? Or if you choose to listen, don't bloody complain that he doesn't agree with you!

If you are a good Catholic, then you are faithful to your one wife and you don't need condoms to protect you from venereal disease.

If you're a bad Catholic that f*cks around, then why should you listen to the Pope about condoms anyway? I'm pretty sure that infidelity is higher up the list of things you're going to hell for.

They also protect you from having a baby. No, unfortunately it's not a bad thing to criticise someone with very weird and damaging ideas, especially when the potential victims of those ideas may not be aware that there's any alternative to kowtowing before a religious despot.

So does abstinence, which is the Catholic way...

The problem is that a lot of scientific research isn't altruistic - quite often, people want to achieve something for money or glory.

When I was working in a lab, I was near the starting point of a project. The idea was to figure out whether boosting the amount of a protein in the body would help protect against the lung damage caused by smoking. The end-point would be that you could take a supplement whilst smoking which would mitigate the effects of the smoke. The supplement would, obviously, not be free.

Whilst doing research, a lot of published papers were charging large amounts of money to access the article. We're talking £30-50 for some of the articles I was after. Yet I could look through the library's journals and find the article and print it off for free. Why? Why charge ridiculous amounts for something that IMO should be free?

In terms of medications, I've had patients on medication that has then become discontinued. Why? Because it's not profitable for the drug company to produce. Hence, people suffer despite a perfectly good solution to their problems.

(good one)

amen - preach it father, you preach from that infallible moral compass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 2n7vSPwhSU

From George Takei's Facebook page.