I've heard that in 1992, 18-to-20-year-olds voted in larger numbers, in both absolute and percentage terms, than in any election before or since -- and they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Rock The Vote may be a tired cliche now, but it did make a difference at least once.

Your post was not tongue in cheek, and LaurieNY's response was not shrill. Classic right-wing troll tactic: say something outrageous, and when someone calls you on it, retreat behind, "Hey, can't you take a joke?" Even better if it's a woman, because then you can tack on, "... you dumb broad. Whatsa matter, PMS?"

Why is it that right-wingers always call any woman who disagrees with them "shrill," by the way? Is it that you can't stand having someone with two X chromosomes standing up to you? You know, there's a large group of people who agree with you -- I hear a lot of them hang out in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and, yes, Pakistan. Maybe you should go and meet up with them. You'd find that you have a lot in common.

Right-wing blowhards like you are invariably wimps. You might want to rip someone's head off and shove it up their ass, but you'd never dare to try.

Please. Go back to Free Republic or Little Green Footballs or whatever rock you crawled out from under and trade your macho rhetoric with your fellow Bush-worshipping Walter Mittys.

You're talking about completely different scales. The dinosaur-killer asteroid didn't end an epoch; it ended an era (the Mesozoic). The classification, from largest to smallest, is eon, era, period, epoch, and stage. I don't think anyone claims that humans are causing enough change to end the current era (the Cenozoic) but the idea that we're causing enough change to end an epoch is entirely reasonable. It's kind of like saying, "The biggest employer in my hometown just laid off a thousand people, but that doesn't mean anything because the Dow Jones is still doing fine!"

The small-agriculture lifestyle you're talking about is just as artificial, just as much an artifact of modern civilization, as agribusines delivering shrink-wrapped food product to urban supermarkets. Unless you've personally chipped spearheads out of flint and stalked wild game through a primeval forest, you don't have a whole lot in the way of bragging rights.

Army surplus outdoor survival gear: $100.

MRE's and gallon jugs of distilled water: $200.

Used AK-47 and several boxes of ammunition: $300.

Being ready when everything goes to hell and we're living in Mad Max world: priceless.

Methinks Anonymous and Roger Apocalypse do protest too much. Men who obsess about boys being "sissyfied" and "destroyed" by playing with their sisters' Barbies now and then are pretty clearly having some ... issues ... of their own.

(1) Describe the claim of causality made in the article.

(2) Give clear definitions of "correlation" and "causation," and explain the difference between the two.

(3) Explain the methods by which correlation can, in fact, be used to show causation.

Question 1 will establish reading comprehension. Questions 2 and 3 will establish whether you actually have the knowledge to use the phrase "correlation is not causation" in a meaningful way, or whether you're just mindlessly repeating a catchphrase beloved of people who are willfully ignorant about statistics and data analysis.

And if you can't answer any of the questions in a meaningful way, please just shut the fuck up already.

"Correlation is not causation" is most often used, as I said in my original post, as a catchphrase by people who don't understand statistics -- not because they can't, but because they choose not to. I mean, it's true, but it's true in the same way 2+2=4 is true: basic knowledge which is often irrelevant to the problem at hand. Critiquing a carefully designed, thoughtfully analyzed study with the dismissive use of "correlation is not causation" is like standing over the shoulder of an accountant working on a complicated tax problem and saying, "2+2=4, you know. What's taking you so long?"

"Dorkin?" Yeah, I've never heard that one before. Except for, you know, in third grade. You think you could have come up with something more original?

See, here's the thing: I post under my real name. I stand by my words. And sorry, anyone who starts off a post with a sneering "bzzt ... please try again" deserves only mockery, not serious debate.

Gould's novel Jumper is not "pulp." It's a sensitive, thoughtful story by a fine writer. The movie looks like it has nothing in common with the novel except the title and the gimmick. Unless you're one of those who automatically dismisses all science fiction as pulp, give the novel a try. And if you are one of those, well, I doubt your opinion on the movie is worth much either.

... that when the nomination is decided, the Clinton-bashers or the Obama-bashers (we've seen plenty of both on the message boards lately) will vote for whoever the nominee turns out to be. Because anyone who thinks a McCain presidency would be preferable to either of them is a fool. I would expect to have serious policy differences with either President Clinton (like I did with the first one) or President Obama, but can anyone seriously listen to the "four more years of Bush" rhetoric coming from the Republican side and doubt that President McCain would be much, much worse?

Buzz is making itself irrelevant before it even gets off the ground. This is a classic case of Big Media jumping onto a trend and trying to remake it in its own sickly, plastic image. "Here's this crazy thing all the kids are into these days, we can mass-produce a bland repackaged version and sell it back to them for a ton of money!" Sites like Digg (and YouTube, and DeviantArt, and ...) are successful precisely because they don't try to guide the content according to an MBA agenda; they let the users decide what they want to see.