I’ve just skimmed the paper and I can’t see quite the problem you describe. The paper in essence says that if the likelihood of an event is less than one divided by the number of possible opportunities then we can regard it as operationally impossible. This seems a plausible working definition and it does not say that such a thing is impossible, merely that it isn’t worth spending scarce resources on it.

Of course if you can quote the context for your assertion, I might change my mind.

A couple of thoughts:

If I am standing in the centre of Stonehenge in approximately 1000BC and wanted to get to say the Avebury circle to catch up with some old Uni mates, how on earth am I supposed to know where the fr!g the Rollright Stones are let alone use them to guide me down to Wiltshire?

I am perhaps the least qualified archaeologist in the developed world, but can’t this douchebag see that the 1500 currently known ancient sites were most probably surrounded by 10s if not 100s of other sites equally important to people in the past, which have since disappeared without trace? Pretty clever of them to make sure that the only ones not built on/buried under roads/pillaged by future generations would be the ones that fit this Woolworthian pattern.

I thought I’d remembered they used the locations of McDonalds restaurants. Not what it says. Maybe that was another time.

I consider the complaint about -some- critics of the significance of human society’s actions for the planet’s climate is valid. Someone finds a couple of glaciers that are larger, not smaller, than last measured, or observes that it’s been a distinctly cold winter so far this year, and that’s their argument. But it isn’t an argument, it’s just a data point contrary to others, like Uncle Sidney who smoked sixty cigarettes a day and lived to be seventy.

Except it doesn’t wreck the argument at all. He still used
presumably non-mystical sites of a chain of shops to produce a similarly precise geometric pattern. You might not like the dig at the global warming deniers (fair enough) but it doesn’t change his argument even a little bit.

Or is it just that its statistically probable that with 1500 dots that some of the dots will line up?

Good ol’ Daily Mail

That’s like the Family Guy episode when Peter says he gets excited watching a film (movie) when someone in the film actually says the film’s title.

Chiefio may perhaps support Badscience.net (does he?), he sure does not support AGW. If he’s supportive of Ben Goldacre’s work, perhaps he should put his own work under scrutiny. For example, he may start to learn the difference between temperature and temperature anomaly.

And the populartechnology list of supposedly peer-reviewed papers that are skeptic of AGW contain papers that…well…are either not peer-reviewed, are from Energy&Environment (which is like the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons: as long as the message fits, you can get loads of rubbish published), are not even close to skeptical of AGW, or are critical of minor details.

Oh, and even if all those papers WERE truly skeptical, they’d still constitute a few isolated examples, compared to the total body of work.

Climategate showed that supposed ‘skeptics’ throw all skepticism overboard when they can twist a message to fit the desired outcome. In short, when they can apply bad science…

The ‘extra-terrestrials must have done it because the natives can’t possibly have been clever enough’ theory is not only nonsense but also covers some rather unsavoury racist assumptions. In that way, maybe it’s refreshing that someone’s finally used it about Britain instead of some far-off place where the indigenous people are dark-skinned. Or maybe it’s just irritating.

Time to rev up the local warmers again and introduce more bits of cognitive dissonance

Of course, just saying that a black cat is white must mean that the black cat IS white. Right? “…vast amounts of comprehensive evidence …”? That must be the IPCC reports? Problems boys…
rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/06/systematic-misrepresentation-of-science.html

Comprensive evidence? Have a look at the latest comprehensive Bolivia evidence, from one of your chief fellow supporters:
chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/ghcn-gistemp-interactions-the-bolivia-effect/

And then we have “… a few isolated examples …”
www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html

Of course, this must be the wrong sort of evidence from the wrong sort of people… and a few ad homs will suffice to sweep it under the Guardian rug once again. However in these Post-Climategate times it is probably not a good idea to mix Bad Science with bad science.

The ley line guy was describing how supposed energy points lie in straight lines, when my friend pointed out that a modern wind generator happened to lie right on one of the principal lines on his map. My friend was amazed how his observation was immediately and without critical thought added to the accumulated confirmatory evidence.

I wasn’t so impressed

Slight nitpick. You write

Researcher Tom Brooks analysed 1,500 prehistoric monuments, and found them all to be on a grid of isosceles triangles…

Surely if they were all on a grid of triangles then that would be impressive. The charge is that he cherry-picked his data, right?

emil79,

It all depends what you mean by `straight’. On a curved surface, we normally work with geodesics, ie shortest paths. On a sphere, the geodesics are great circles, like the equator and the Greenwich Meridian.