Seriously, in the grand scheme of all that Ford is doing right (in comparison to the rest of the U.S. carmakers) why can’t they simply bring over the good cars they already make. No, not just the über-rare Focus RS, but the rest of the Foci over in Europe are cars that people might actually want to drive and would give them a nice jump on the future CAFE standards.
So the media, being handed a scientific breakthrough story, are falling over themselves to call this thing the missing link. But since evolution is a slow, incremental, and continuous process that really isn’t a great term for the primate skeleton that was unvieled this week. My favorite comment on this story so far has to be one by user DeafDumbBlind on slashdot… “Great, 2 more gaps created in our fossil records.”
“3/27/2009, 6:23am: Never mind about the eggplants. Probably should find another hobby. Thankfully, a man in my retired position can afford to do that.
3/31/2009, 11:44am: Painting landscapes now. I did one of the Smoky Mountains. Not-half bad.
3/31/2009, 1:39pm: Improved Smoky Mountain painting by putting Brian Urlacher in it. He’s milking a cow.”
“As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous “dark matter” to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct proof could be found that it actually exists. Even if it does exist, dark matter would be unable to reconcile all the current discrepancies between actual measurements and predictions based on theoretical models. Hence the number of physicists questioning the existence of dark matter has been increasing for some time now. “
I’m no physicist, but I have a pretty good grasp of the scientific method and of statistics, and if your theory requires massive forces that you’ve been unable to actually detect despite decades of trying, then it might be that your theory needs revision.
I know that the Einstein relativity-based model of the “large” things in the universe is incompatible with the quantum model of the “small” things, even though both have been tested and shown to work. I understand (somewhat) how string theory might bridge the gap between the two models, but I can’t recall what it says about dark matter. Regardless of whether string theory ever develops into a standard testable model, it’s time to dump this whole dark matter thing and start looking for better answers.
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