On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 11:22 PM, JD <jd1008@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Listen Robert, you can disagree on the usefulness>
and utilization for solving large problems.
But that hardly grants you the license to disparage
another member of this list.
If you do not think your comment:
> If you think flops is a good measure of the science you can do, youis at least disparaging, if not outright nasty.
> should probably be in a different business.
Please refrain from making them.
No. Sorry. You listen.
You repeated a mindless refrain as if you knew what you were talking about, when, in my never sufficiently humble opinion, you don't know what you're talking about. If that's disparaging you, so be it.
Money that could be going to actual science is being wasted because of the kind of clueless cheerleading that bureaucrats love and that you have put the weight of your opinion behind.
This is a technical forum, not a debating society. Science is awash already in useless flops.
In one of these long-running public debates, I pointed out to a national decision-maker how relatively meaningless and frequently wrong NOAA's hurricane season predictions have been. Guess what? The most recent forecast was wrapped in all kinds of weasel words. That won't stop them from drawing their paychecks and burning megawatts producing useless pictures.
The Wall Street Journal recently published a totally meaningless computation from the Department of Energy about the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico moving up the East Coast. What did they advertise as the scientific basis for the calculation? The money that had been dumped into the code over the years ($100 million) and how many hours of "supercomputer" time it took. The calculation was junk, but because huge resources had been spent on it and it made a nice color plot, the Wall Street Journal published it.
It's not just about opinions and your sense of good manners. The flops-are-good mantra is ruining computational physics, and everyone goes along with it, even though the emperor has no clothes. You might not have liked what I said, but it accurately reflected my feelings on the subject. If you can't respect that, then why should I respect you?
Robert.
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