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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: RetiredNow who wrote (547977)2/4/2010 4:46:47 PM
From: RetiredNow  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1575920
 
US Evangelicals behaving badly again? Or just another effort at besmirching America's good name?

US Baptists charged with kidnapping Haitian children
telegraph.co.uk



To: RetiredNow who wrote (547977)2/4/2010 9:32:10 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1575920
 
And that measure provides for a margin of error of 0.8%.

I believe that's false precision. Its really more like "if everything is exactly as we thing it is, than the age of the universe is 13.73 billion years old +/- 0.8%", but the confidence that the assumptions behind the estimate are totally accurate is not reasonably 99.2%, even if it may be fairly high.

And we have more direct observation on this question than we do on climate. For one thing the controversial climate questions are mainly about the future, which is less certain than the past. For another we can observe radiation from many billions of years ago, we can't directly measure the temperature from the past, only proxies. Also there are less questions about data manipulation, missing data, biases, and politics in the question "how old is the universe", than there is in terms of working out likely climate change scenarios.