Garret, I know you generally dislike pictures using HDR photography, but there is certainly a time and a place for it.
By popular demand ("this one guy asked for it once"), I've added a post index to iRi. (Also, Google has lost a lot of my pages, which sucks mostly because I keep trying to use it on my own site.)
I didn't notice this reddit link go by last month, since I don't check my referrers as often as I used to (heh), linking to my post about teaching things other than trig.
Following up on my "failed predictions" point, I point at the now widely-distributed article about the low-fat vs. low-carb diets.
The standard dietary orthodoxy predicts that the results of this study would be exactly the opposite of what happened. The predictions are wrong. Therefore, the standard model is wrong. I don't need to be a nutritionist to make this determination.
Over the past couple of years, I've been turning into a skeptic on the global warming theory, in particular the idea that mankind's actions have effectively doomed us to an uncomfortably hot planet (since the putatively required solutions are all completely unimplementable).
I will grant that my politics would seem to incline me to such skepticism, but I try to decide based on the science, not the politics. If the world truly is heading for disaster, I want to know.
It is very hard to judge a science that you have no experience in, but there is one metric that you can correctly use as an educated outsider to determine whether a scientist is on the right track or the wrong track: the accuracy of predictions. If a prediction is correctly made, it favors a theory, proportionally to the difficulty of the prediction. If the prediction is wrong, it is very solid evidence that the theory or model is wrong. This judgment can be often be made by anybody, especially when it's a question of something simple like temperature.
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