Here's one of those rarest of things : a matter in which I side with the government and against the EU. Not being able to influence society is kindof what being in prison is all about, isn't it ? Caveats : the prison population is too high, more effort on rehabilitation and crime prevention, etc., insert usual lefty comments here. :)
Currently, prisoners are not eligible to be included in the register of electors, except for unconvicted prisoners on remand - those in custody pending trial - and those who were sent to prison for contempt of court or for not paying a fine. Since 2005, the UK government has been in breach of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that its blanket ban breached the right to free and fair elections.
Now Justice Secretary David Lidington has reportedly prepared plans which would allow some prisoners to vote. A senior government source told the Sunday Times: "This will only apply to a small number of people who remain on the electoral roll and are let out on day-release. These are not murderers and rapists but prisoners who are serving less than a year who remain on the electoral roll. No-one will be allowed to register to vote if they are still behind bars."
According to the latest figures, only 4,023 prisoners were allowed out on temporary licence in the last three months - just 5% of the prison population of over 85,000. Mr Humber, who represented more than 500 prisoners in their human rights case to win the vote, said that he doubted that extending rights to such a small group of prisoners would satisfy the European court.
He said: "There will no longer be a blanket ban, but giving just a few hundred prisoners the vote seems like the wrong side of the line. In some ways it's a very cynical attempt. It's trying to do the bare minimum and falling short."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41803722
Monday 30 October 2017
A UV telescope on a sounding rocket
I never heard of flying a telescope on a sounding rocket before.
“DEUCE is about being able to better understand if and how star-forming galaxies ionized the early universe,” said Nicholas Erickson, a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder working with the project. “This ionizing light has never been measured accurately in hot stars, and DEUCE will make the first calibrated measurement of it, telling us the contribution stars could have had to helping ionize the universe.”
Over two flights, DEUCE will look at two young, bright stars — first Beta Canis Major and later Epsilon Canis Major — using a telescope sensitive to ultraviolet light. These stars are close enough that their light reaches Earth before being fully absorbed by interstellar gas, allowing the scientists to measure the amount of starlight to see if it’s enough to significantly contribute to the amount of ionized gas in the IGM.
http://go.nasa.gov/2A0adUq
“DEUCE is about being able to better understand if and how star-forming galaxies ionized the early universe,” said Nicholas Erickson, a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder working with the project. “This ionizing light has never been measured accurately in hot stars, and DEUCE will make the first calibrated measurement of it, telling us the contribution stars could have had to helping ionize the universe.”
Over two flights, DEUCE will look at two young, bright stars — first Beta Canis Major and later Epsilon Canis Major — using a telescope sensitive to ultraviolet light. These stars are close enough that their light reaches Earth before being fully absorbed by interstellar gas, allowing the scientists to measure the amount of starlight to see if it’s enough to significantly contribute to the amount of ionized gas in the IGM.
http://go.nasa.gov/2A0adUq
Changing views of the Ankylosaurus
Ankylosaurus 2049 will be pink, feathery, sarcastic and slightly camp. Or possibly moody and dystopian...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/laelaps/presenting-the-new-ankylosaurus/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/laelaps/presenting-the-new-ankylosaurus/
All hail !
I did not know drifts of hail were a thing.
Officials in the central Argentina province of Cordoba said a fierce hailstorm struck several towns Thursday afternoon, dumping as much as five feet of hail in just 15 minutes.
https://weather.com/news/news/2017-10-27-argentina-hailstorm-cordoba
The aftermath of a storm which dumped up to five feet of water and hail in Argentina has been revealed in images released by the World Meteorological Organisation. Officials said a fierce hailstorm hit towns in the central Argentinian province of Cordoba on Thursday afternoon, leaving roads closed and vehicles unable to move. The incredible photos show fire fighters rescuing cars stuck up to their windows in hailstones and a road swamped in debris.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/argentina-hail-storm-terrifying-extreme-weather-cordoba-south-america-a8025056.html
Officials in the central Argentina province of Cordoba said a fierce hailstorm struck several towns Thursday afternoon, dumping as much as five feet of hail in just 15 minutes.
https://weather.com/news/news/2017-10-27-argentina-hailstorm-cordoba
The aftermath of a storm which dumped up to five feet of water and hail in Argentina has been revealed in images released by the World Meteorological Organisation. Officials said a fierce hailstorm hit towns in the central Argentinian province of Cordoba on Thursday afternoon, leaving roads closed and vehicles unable to move. The incredible photos show fire fighters rescuing cars stuck up to their windows in hailstones and a road swamped in debris.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/argentina-hail-storm-terrifying-extreme-weather-cordoba-south-america-a8025056.html
Saturday 28 October 2017
A university professor's letter to the Daily Fail
Dear Witchfinder General
I am writing to turn myself in as what your paper would consider a biased professor.
I discuss the details of refugee law with my students, whereas your paper referred to the “problem” of Jewish refugees “pouring into the country” and depicted recent asylum seekers as rats.
I ask students to look at EU and human rights laws on LGBT equality, whereas your paper referred to “abortion hope” after a “gay gene” was found.
I discuss the risk that far right extremism poses to human rights, whereas your paper cheered “hurrah to the blackshirts”; and I outline the importance of the rule of law, whereas your paper shrieks that judges it disagrees with are “enemies of the people”.
Despite all this, I can only dream of receiving the huge sums from the EU that your editor Paul Dacre has obtained. _
I can only salute your paper’s commitment to the truth, in spite of its many losses and settlements in libel cases and the frequent readers’ complaints it provokes.
Yours sincerely,
Steve Peers
Professor of Law, University of Essex
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/satire/professors-letter-daily-mail-going-viral/27/10/
I am writing to turn myself in as what your paper would consider a biased professor.
I discuss the details of refugee law with my students, whereas your paper referred to the “problem” of Jewish refugees “pouring into the country” and depicted recent asylum seekers as rats.
I ask students to look at EU and human rights laws on LGBT equality, whereas your paper referred to “abortion hope” after a “gay gene” was found.
I discuss the risk that far right extremism poses to human rights, whereas your paper cheered “hurrah to the blackshirts”; and I outline the importance of the rule of law, whereas your paper shrieks that judges it disagrees with are “enemies of the people”.
Despite all this, I can only dream of receiving the huge sums from the EU that your editor Paul Dacre has obtained. _
I can only salute your paper’s commitment to the truth, in spite of its many losses and settlements in libel cases and the frequent readers’ complaints it provokes.
Yours sincerely,
Steve Peers
Professor of Law, University of Essex
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/satire/professors-letter-daily-mail-going-viral/27/10/
Friday 27 October 2017
Artificial mini rock pools to save lil' sea creatures
Mini rock pools are being created by scientists trying to protect sea life from the boom in manmade sea defences. Aberystwyth University researchers have drilled holes the size of a family baked bean can into a breakwater made of smooth granite blocks. The blocks had attracted few intertidal creatures. But the new holes were swiftly colonised by fish, anemones and important reef-building honeycomb worms.
They have also designed an experimental form of concrete, dubbed Reefcrete. The hope is that this material will attract creatures to colonise sea walls. Conventional sea walls are often inhospitable for sea life because they are smooth; they don't trap water at low tide (unlike a normal rocky shore). They are often also too alkaline.
The Reefcrete is made with less cement than usual. It is held together by hemp fibres which act in a similar way to steel re-enforcing bars in buildings. Tests so far have shown that Reefcrete encourages more seaweed to grow than regular sea walls. The seaweed provides a home for a greater variety of animals. Research is continuing to see how the hemp fibres stand up to the test of time.
Another form of Reefcrete uses waste shells from a local seafood shelling factory. Discarded shell are classed as waste and must be disposed of in landfill or burned. The scientific team suggests they could be incorporated into sea walls as a binding material instead. The shells would create a rougher surface more suitable for sea life.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41665459
They have also designed an experimental form of concrete, dubbed Reefcrete. The hope is that this material will attract creatures to colonise sea walls. Conventional sea walls are often inhospitable for sea life because they are smooth; they don't trap water at low tide (unlike a normal rocky shore). They are often also too alkaline.
The Reefcrete is made with less cement than usual. It is held together by hemp fibres which act in a similar way to steel re-enforcing bars in buildings. Tests so far have shown that Reefcrete encourages more seaweed to grow than regular sea walls. The seaweed provides a home for a greater variety of animals. Research is continuing to see how the hemp fibres stand up to the test of time.
Another form of Reefcrete uses waste shells from a local seafood shelling factory. Discarded shell are classed as waste and must be disposed of in landfill or burned. The scientific team suggests they could be incorporated into sea walls as a binding material instead. The shells would create a rougher surface more suitable for sea life.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41665459
Breakthroughs are not only for the young
We found that the highest-impact work in a scientist’s career is randomly distributed within her body of work. That is, the highest-impact work has the same probability of falling anywhere in the sequence of papers published by a scientist. It could be the first publication, appear mid-career, or emerge last. This result is known as the random impact rule.
https://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/2384-science-paths
https://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/2384-science-paths
Thursday 26 October 2017
Tuesday 24 October 2017
A better team to make new Star Trek episodes
Dear CBS,
Hire these people. That is all.
Thank you,
Rhys.
P.S. In case it isn't obvious, I don't want to give them a bigger budget to do what they're doing anyway. I want you to get them to write a proper mainstream brand new Star Trek show with the correct ethos, unlike that nonsense STD thing you've got going on that could have been prevented had someone worn appropriate protection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCBuaTnDsQs
Hire these people. That is all.
Thank you,
Rhys.
P.S. In case it isn't obvious, I don't want to give them a bigger budget to do what they're doing anyway. I want you to get them to write a proper mainstream brand new Star Trek show with the correct ethos, unlike that nonsense STD thing you've got going on that could have been prevented had someone worn appropriate protection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCBuaTnDsQs
The Silmarillion
Abhijeet Borkar recommends role-playing reading The Silmarillion as though you're a 16 year old elf having a history lesson in Rivendell. Stephen Phillips sent me the audiobook, insisting that it should be heard, not read. Both are correct. The narration by Martin Shaw (a.k.a. Judge John Deed http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0789864/) is just swoon-inducing. At one point I stopped being able to read scientific papers because I kept getting Shaw's narration voice in my head, which was no bad thing except that it's very distracting. Honestly he could be talking about his favourite textile patterns and I'll still be listening. Why isn't there a Shaw-themed text-to-speech program ? I want one.
But he isn't talking about his favourite textile patterns here, he's talking about elves and dark lords and dragons and epic tales of darkness and woe. It's a glorious, bizarre book, at times as dramatic as anything you'll ever read; at other times like the really boring bits in the Bible ("and so-and-so begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so the yellow-bearded, who was afterwards called Milibobolovian by the Eldar but Nenugaranthian The Unwieldy by mortal men...."). It really does help to pretend it's a dramatised history lesson, not a story.
And I have to say that Tolkein should have just hired external help for names. Yes, I know he was a linguistic expert, but I don't care : he was bloody rubbish* at naming things ! I completely gave up trying to remember which elf with a silly name beginning with an F he was on about. Let's not even mention Gothmog. I mean, for the lord of the Balrogs we get a gothic cat, for heaven't sake.
* With notable exceptions.
What this needs is a full-on illustrated companion. A full atlas showing the routes of various people's over the many ages of Arda. Family trees of the major families. Short biopics of every character so that I can remember who the hell everyone is. That sort of thing.
I had to listen to (pretty much) everything twice to understand what the hell was going on. But now I've finished it, and this displeases me because it's bloody good. Can't help but think that George R. R. Martin is nothing but a hack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cewrXmpA2hc
But he isn't talking about his favourite textile patterns here, he's talking about elves and dark lords and dragons and epic tales of darkness and woe. It's a glorious, bizarre book, at times as dramatic as anything you'll ever read; at other times like the really boring bits in the Bible ("and so-and-so begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so the yellow-bearded, who was afterwards called Milibobolovian by the Eldar but Nenugaranthian The Unwieldy by mortal men...."). It really does help to pretend it's a dramatised history lesson, not a story.
And I have to say that Tolkein should have just hired external help for names. Yes, I know he was a linguistic expert, but I don't care : he was bloody rubbish* at naming things ! I completely gave up trying to remember which elf with a silly name beginning with an F he was on about. Let's not even mention Gothmog. I mean, for the lord of the Balrogs we get a gothic cat, for heaven't sake.
* With notable exceptions.
What this needs is a full-on illustrated companion. A full atlas showing the routes of various people's over the many ages of Arda. Family trees of the major families. Short biopics of every character so that I can remember who the hell everyone is. That sort of thing.
I had to listen to (pretty much) everything twice to understand what the hell was going on. But now I've finished it, and this displeases me because it's bloody good. Can't help but think that George R. R. Martin is nothing but a hack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cewrXmpA2hc
Monday 23 October 2017
Why is this deer licking a fox ?
TLDR : We don't know.
Was the buck simply nibbling on a plant behind the fox? Had the fox happened to hop in front of the buck’s face? Lowe dashed into his apartment to grab his camera, and made it to the window to catch the deer taking another lick. The fox, docile in the shade of its antlered friend, wasn’t just tolerating the apparent cleaning, Lowe realized. “It looked like it was actually enjoying this,” he says.
There’s a temptation to describe their interactions as mutually beneficial, in line with the natural world’s other astounding instances of species-to-species symbiosis. When Lowe first saw the buck and fox together, for example, he was reminded of underwater “safe zones,” where “predators and prey all line up to get cleaned” by small fish that munch on parasites... Neither Cove nor Roemer, who spent years studying island foxes earlier in his career, however, are convinced licking does much for the ecological fitness of deer, foxes, or cats.
Both researchers suggested what might be a more obvious benefit for the foxes and cats: Getting licked feels good. “Maybe deer are getting those hard to reach places,” Cove says. As for the deer, ocean breezes cover islands—foxes and cats included—in salt. Cove has a theory that deer on islands particularly might be lured into the cleanings by a little extra seasoning.
Roemer doesn’t buy the salt theory, either: If plants and rocks are also coated by the breeze, he reasons, it wouldn’t make sense for a deer to go through the trouble of tracking down a moving, claw-possessing island resident for tastiness alone.
https://trib.al/StKwoyI
Was the buck simply nibbling on a plant behind the fox? Had the fox happened to hop in front of the buck’s face? Lowe dashed into his apartment to grab his camera, and made it to the window to catch the deer taking another lick. The fox, docile in the shade of its antlered friend, wasn’t just tolerating the apparent cleaning, Lowe realized. “It looked like it was actually enjoying this,” he says.
There’s a temptation to describe their interactions as mutually beneficial, in line with the natural world’s other astounding instances of species-to-species symbiosis. When Lowe first saw the buck and fox together, for example, he was reminded of underwater “safe zones,” where “predators and prey all line up to get cleaned” by small fish that munch on parasites... Neither Cove nor Roemer, who spent years studying island foxes earlier in his career, however, are convinced licking does much for the ecological fitness of deer, foxes, or cats.
Both researchers suggested what might be a more obvious benefit for the foxes and cats: Getting licked feels good. “Maybe deer are getting those hard to reach places,” Cove says. As for the deer, ocean breezes cover islands—foxes and cats included—in salt. Cove has a theory that deer on islands particularly might be lured into the cleanings by a little extra seasoning.
Roemer doesn’t buy the salt theory, either: If plants and rocks are also coated by the breeze, he reasons, it wouldn’t make sense for a deer to go through the trouble of tracking down a moving, claw-possessing island resident for tastiness alone.
https://trib.al/StKwoyI
The point of play isn't to earn a tasty treat : it's to stop yourself going mental
Playing is a "costly" activity because birds spend a lot of time doing it when they could be getting food, finding shelter, or doing other things to make survival more likely. From an evolutionary perspective, there has to be some benefit to play if it costs so much. But that benefit, as these researchers discovered, is complex and oblique. Crows played with the ropes because it was fun. Getting better at poking food out of a tube was only a secondary effect.
Crows may play simply because it helps them gain generalized problem-solving skills. Of course, that doesn't entirely explain one of the often-documented habits of crows, which involves goading cats into fights. In the video below, you can see how a crow pokes and pecks at two cats until they fight, then eggs them on.
That video is hilarious.
Similar videos show crows working together to get cats to fight, and tweaking dogs' tails to make them freak out. In a sense, the crows are treating these unwitting mammals as tools. They've learned the exact things that will drive cats and dogs mad (namely, pecking their backs and tails), and seem to enjoy the results.
What, exactly, is the "reward" for doing this? There may not be any specific thing that the birds are learning from these activities. Possibly all they get is momentary amusement at the idea that they can make other animals do things.
Maybe "not being bored" is reward enough ? I mean, that's the reason I read the article... not because I thought it would make me better at problem-solving or deliver me a tasty treat. Maybe they don't play to learn. Maybe they play because their brain demands it else they go insane from boredom.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/scientists-investigate-why-crows-are-so-playful/
Crows may play simply because it helps them gain generalized problem-solving skills. Of course, that doesn't entirely explain one of the often-documented habits of crows, which involves goading cats into fights. In the video below, you can see how a crow pokes and pecks at two cats until they fight, then eggs them on.
That video is hilarious.
Similar videos show crows working together to get cats to fight, and tweaking dogs' tails to make them freak out. In a sense, the crows are treating these unwitting mammals as tools. They've learned the exact things that will drive cats and dogs mad (namely, pecking their backs and tails), and seem to enjoy the results.
What, exactly, is the "reward" for doing this? There may not be any specific thing that the birds are learning from these activities. Possibly all they get is momentary amusement at the idea that they can make other animals do things.
Maybe "not being bored" is reward enough ? I mean, that's the reason I read the article... not because I thought it would make me better at problem-solving or deliver me a tasty treat. Maybe they don't play to learn. Maybe they play because their brain demands it else they go insane from boredom.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/scientists-investigate-why-crows-are-so-playful/
Friday 20 October 2017
Battle of the brains
Thrashing the measly 1.2kg human brain are the following species: dolphins at 1.5-1.7kg, elephants and blue whales at 5kg and killer whales at roughly 6kg. But, the biggest brain of them all is the sperm whale’s, weighing a mighty 7kg. Many dispute the relevance of this, arguing that a brain-to-body mass ratio is more informative of intellect. Taking this into account, we would still lose; in this instance to the treeshrew because this humble creature has the greatest brain-to-body mass ratio of any species.
There are two major cell types in the brain: neurones, the more widely recognised brain cell, and glia, the lesser-known brain cell.... animal studies determine that, as intellect rises, the glia-to-neurone ratio also increases. Therefore, an indicator of brainpower could be an individual’s glia-to-neurone ratio, possibly because each neurone receives more glial attention and so operates more efficiently. If this were deemed an accurate measure of intelligence, the Minke whale would be the smartest species, having the highest glia-to-brain ratio of any species – 5.5 times greater than humans’.
Although the human neocortex is the largest, the dolphin’s is more elaborately folded resulting in a larger surface area, a distinct mark of increased processing ability. This demonstrates two parallel, but possibly equally potent, methods of mental processing, suggesting that humans and dolphins are of fairly equal ability in some higher-order tasks.
Neurogenesis is the process of making new neurones, a type of brain cell. Teleost fish perform neurogenesis at an astonishing rate up to 100 times higher than mammals, even during adulthood. Humans fall considerably short in this capacity, meaning we lose this brain battle to 96 per cent of fish, species such as anchovies, sea horse and carp.
Yeah, humans are pretty shite. But we did manage to invent cake, and I don't see any other species doing that. So we clearly win.
http://bit.ly/2gwHUb9
There are two major cell types in the brain: neurones, the more widely recognised brain cell, and glia, the lesser-known brain cell.... animal studies determine that, as intellect rises, the glia-to-neurone ratio also increases. Therefore, an indicator of brainpower could be an individual’s glia-to-neurone ratio, possibly because each neurone receives more glial attention and so operates more efficiently. If this were deemed an accurate measure of intelligence, the Minke whale would be the smartest species, having the highest glia-to-brain ratio of any species – 5.5 times greater than humans’.
Although the human neocortex is the largest, the dolphin’s is more elaborately folded resulting in a larger surface area, a distinct mark of increased processing ability. This demonstrates two parallel, but possibly equally potent, methods of mental processing, suggesting that humans and dolphins are of fairly equal ability in some higher-order tasks.
Neurogenesis is the process of making new neurones, a type of brain cell. Teleost fish perform neurogenesis at an astonishing rate up to 100 times higher than mammals, even during adulthood. Humans fall considerably short in this capacity, meaning we lose this brain battle to 96 per cent of fish, species such as anchovies, sea horse and carp.
Yeah, humans are pretty shite. But we did manage to invent cake, and I don't see any other species doing that. So we clearly win.
http://bit.ly/2gwHUb9
Thursday 19 October 2017
Giving people responsibility does not make them become responsible
Democracy, instead, requires treating people as citizens – that is, as adults capable of thoughtful decisions and moral actions, rather than as children who need to be manipulated. One way to treat people as citizens is to entrust them with meaningful opportunities to participate in the political process, rather than just as beings who might show up to vote for leaders every few years.
Yeah.... the trouble is, that really doesn't seem to actually work.
Every day, people demonstrate that they are capable of learning. People master new languages, earn degrees, move to new cities, train for jobs, and navigate the complexities of modern life... People study things that they care about and where knowledge helps them to accomplish things.
Yeah, but I'm forced to ask, "has the author met people ?". Because cherry-picking examples of good things people do is nice, but ignores the fact that people do Bloody Stupid things on a regular basis too.
Last summer, I served on a grand jury in Westchester County in New York State.... Everyone in the jury took their responsibilities seriously, following the district attorney’s directions, asking questions of witnesses, participating in the deliberations, and voting...
Anecdotes are not evidence.
Of course, the ‘best and the brightest’ led the US into the Iraq War, the subprime mortgage crisis, and a raft of bad education policies; the track record of epistocracy in recent years is, at best, mixed.
Let's just ignore all the scientific advances then. Or the fact that people are really quite bad at selecting capable leaders, which gives me little confidence that they have much hope of understanding complex economic issues (or would want to). They have ample opportunity to learn about who they're voting for, but they still insist on making insane choices. If they can't even do that, what hope is there that they'd be more capable about direct decision making ? Not to mention recent disasters when they were actually given such a direct choice.
No, I'm afraid this whole thing is an oversimplification. Giving people more power isn't a magic bullet to make them educate themselves.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-rule-by-the-people-is-better-than-rule-by-the-experts
Yeah.... the trouble is, that really doesn't seem to actually work.
Every day, people demonstrate that they are capable of learning. People master new languages, earn degrees, move to new cities, train for jobs, and navigate the complexities of modern life... People study things that they care about and where knowledge helps them to accomplish things.
Yeah, but I'm forced to ask, "has the author met people ?". Because cherry-picking examples of good things people do is nice, but ignores the fact that people do Bloody Stupid things on a regular basis too.
Last summer, I served on a grand jury in Westchester County in New York State.... Everyone in the jury took their responsibilities seriously, following the district attorney’s directions, asking questions of witnesses, participating in the deliberations, and voting...
Anecdotes are not evidence.
Of course, the ‘best and the brightest’ led the US into the Iraq War, the subprime mortgage crisis, and a raft of bad education policies; the track record of epistocracy in recent years is, at best, mixed.
Let's just ignore all the scientific advances then. Or the fact that people are really quite bad at selecting capable leaders, which gives me little confidence that they have much hope of understanding complex economic issues (or would want to). They have ample opportunity to learn about who they're voting for, but they still insist on making insane choices. If they can't even do that, what hope is there that they'd be more capable about direct decision making ? Not to mention recent disasters when they were actually given such a direct choice.
No, I'm afraid this whole thing is an oversimplification. Giving people more power isn't a magic bullet to make them educate themselves.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-rule-by-the-people-is-better-than-rule-by-the-experts
Wednesday 18 October 2017
Trump’s war on knowledge
I'm letting the bizarre comment about "6000 years of feudalism" on the OP pass, because the main gist of the post (especially the linked article) is spot on. As usual, pretty much everyone believes something weird and unscientific... but just because a weird belief does not equate to hostility towards all of science, that does not preclude the existence of a genuine anti-science perspective. That certainly does exist.
Originally shared by David Brin
“There has always been a disturbing strand of anti-intellectualism in American life… but never has an occupant of the White House exhibited such a toxic mix of ignorance and mendacity, such lack of intellectual curiosity and disregard for rigorous analysis (despite his untested boast that his IQ is “one of the highest,” certainly higher than Obama’s and a host of other worthies’).”
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/10/12/trumps-war-on-knowledge/
“The experts are terrible,” Donald Trump said during his campaign. “Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have.” … except, that it’s another lie. Almost every measure of national and international health, peace, prosperity etc has improved and guess what, the folks who know stuff actually know stuff.
Yes, America’s lower middle class has felt things slip. But the villains are the Rupert Murdochs and Donald Trumps who are rebuilding feudalism. Read this article! Then parse the right’s central mythos! It goes like this:
We all know that: "Just because someone is smart and knows a lot, that doesn't automatically make them wise."
But after 25 years of Fox hypnosis, this true statement has been twisted into something cancerous:
"Any and all people who are smart and know a lot, are therefore automatically unwise."
I am astonished it’s not been clearly and openly elucidated. The first statement is true. The second - jibbering loony - is now a core catechism of the confederacy.
Of course, blatantly, the average person who has studied earnestly and tried to understand is wiser (again, on AVERAGE) than those who deliberately chose to remain incurious and ignorant. When cornered, even the most vehement alt-righter admits that. But cornering them takes effort.
Hatred of universities and people with knowledge and skill now extends from the war on science to journalism, teaching, medicine, economics, civil servants… and lately the “deep state” conspiring villains of the FBI, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military officer corps.
This bedlam serves one purpose, to discredit any “elites” who might stand in the way of a return to feudalism by the super rich, which was the pattern of 6000 years that America rebelled against.
The Confederacy has always been a tool to restore feudalism. only this time it has done what it could not do in the 1860s. Taken Washington.
Trump is not the disease, he is a surface symptom.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/10/12/trumps-war-on-knowledge/
Tuesday 17 October 2017
Reliability is not the same as completeness and this is very, very important
Apparently it can spot sharks with a 92% reliability rate. Now, as I understand the term "reliability", that means that 92% of the things it identifies as sharks will actually be sharks. Which is quite different from saying that it has a completeness of 92%, in which it manages to spot 92% of the sharks present.
Also, it can drop a floatation aid to help swimmers. Very good, but this means the next version of Baywatch will have the lowest ratings of any TV show ever.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-australia-41640146/a-bird-s-eye-view-of-sharks
Also, it can drop a floatation aid to help swimmers. Very good, but this means the next version of Baywatch will have the lowest ratings of any TV show ever.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-australia-41640146/a-bird-s-eye-view-of-sharks
Monday 16 October 2017
Brexit needs a delay so everyone can see how truly shit it is before they have to actually eat it
I'm no fan of either Clarke or McDonnell, but this is the most sensible proposal in Parliament since the referendum. It's a "have your cake and eat it" scenario, if the amendment is voted in. The EU will stop us getting a deal - it demonstrates that the union is strong and not easily broken, and retains the UK economy inside it.
Via Stephen Phillips.
Ken Clarke, the veteran pro-EU Conservative, increased the pressure to do what is necessary to strike an agreement, ahead of the Prime Minister’s surprise dinner with the EU’s top officials. An amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill, co-tabled by Mr Clarke, would put into law Ms May’s plan for a two-year transition period - preventing Brexit if that transition is not agreed.
Asked if MPs could stop a no-deal Brexit in that way, he vowed: “Parliament can veto anything it wants.” Mr Clarke – who insisted he was not trying to reverse Brexit, if there was a workable plan – said “only a handful of hard right-wing Eurosceptics think no deal is desirable”. In fact, it would have a “catastrophic effect” on the British economy, he said, describing it as “complete fantasy, la-la land, going down the hole with the white rabbit”.
Yesterday, John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, said there were “enough sensible people in the House of Commons” to prevent the growing risk of a no deal exit. Mr Clarke, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, agreed, saying: “This is a parliamentary democracy – parliament can do practically whatever it likes.”
Even if parliament did vote down a no deal exit, it would need the rest of the EU to agree to extend the two-year Article 50 process - ticking down to exit on March 30, 2019 - or for it to be revoked. The Prime Minister has insisted that, at the end of the negotiations, MPs will have only two options - to support whatever deal is on offer, or to accept no deal.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-no-deal-brexit-veto-ken-clarke-brussels-trip-leave-eu-conservatives-amendment-john-a8002506.html
Via Stephen Phillips.
Ken Clarke, the veteran pro-EU Conservative, increased the pressure to do what is necessary to strike an agreement, ahead of the Prime Minister’s surprise dinner with the EU’s top officials. An amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill, co-tabled by Mr Clarke, would put into law Ms May’s plan for a two-year transition period - preventing Brexit if that transition is not agreed.
Asked if MPs could stop a no-deal Brexit in that way, he vowed: “Parliament can veto anything it wants.” Mr Clarke – who insisted he was not trying to reverse Brexit, if there was a workable plan – said “only a handful of hard right-wing Eurosceptics think no deal is desirable”. In fact, it would have a “catastrophic effect” on the British economy, he said, describing it as “complete fantasy, la-la land, going down the hole with the white rabbit”.
Yesterday, John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, said there were “enough sensible people in the House of Commons” to prevent the growing risk of a no deal exit. Mr Clarke, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, agreed, saying: “This is a parliamentary democracy – parliament can do practically whatever it likes.”
Even if parliament did vote down a no deal exit, it would need the rest of the EU to agree to extend the two-year Article 50 process - ticking down to exit on March 30, 2019 - or for it to be revoked. The Prime Minister has insisted that, at the end of the negotiations, MPs will have only two options - to support whatever deal is on offer, or to accept no deal.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-no-deal-brexit-veto-ken-clarke-brussels-trip-leave-eu-conservatives-amendment-john-a8002506.html
Reality is not as subjective as Brexiteers think it is
Just for the sake of a nice little comparison. From the article below :
The book The Power of Positive Thinking introduced the notion that you can shape reality by mere “affirmations”. It has many adherents, as does the more recent nonsense of The Secret, which ascribes similar potency to “visualisation”. I suppose snake oil of this sort might help some people get through the day. But it is no basis upon which to govern a country – or to negotiate a country’s exit from a vast commercial and geopolitical alliance. Wishing upon a star is not enough for a successful departure from the EU.
Yet this is precisely what the exasperated Jiminy Crickets of Brexit are demanding of chancellor Philip Hammond. On Thursday, John Redwood tweeted: “The Chancellor must get the Treasury to have more realistic, optimistic forecasts & to find the money for a successful economy post Brexit.” Nadine Dorries, meanwhile, complained: “We need a ‘can-do’ man in the Treasury, not a prophet of doom.”
And with the NewsThump post (http://newsthump.com/2017/10/16/government-demands-weather-forecasters-should-make-their-storm-warnings-more-patriotic-and-optimistic/) from earlier :
The British government have told meteorologists to simply think more positively and optimistically when issuing forecasts ahead of an impending storm. A number of outlets including the Met Office and their Irish counterpart Met Eireann have issued storm warnings ahead of ex-hurricane Ophelia, prompting a swift backlash from leading Tory MPs who by sheer coincidence just happen to be Brexiters.
Conservative MP John Redwood issued a statement this morning saying, “When I read the weather forecast every day I want to see an optimistic one. When an ex-hurricane is due to hit parts of the country, as it is due to later today, I don’t want to read about ‘dangerously high winds this’ and ‘torrential rain that’ – I want us all to be a bit more positive about the whole thing. That is the only way to make the storm not happen.”
It's just insane how accurate the supposedly satirical source is.
The Guardian article continues :
For daring to look at the small print of Brexit and failing to declare the whole process “doubleplusgood”, Hammond is now pilloried by the faction within his party that, whatever its numerical strength, shouts loudest. A senior Tory told me recently that what the country needed was not a new centre party but a proper Conservative party. His point was that the Tory movement, once remorselessly committed to the business of government and the hard realities of office, had sailed off into the seas of ideology, captured by a gang of pirates seeking the imagined treasure of Brexit Island.
Hammond is hated by his enemies because he puts fact before emotion, and refuses to join in the feelgood fantasia. It is bleakly ironic that those who are working hardest to mitigate the most damaging consequences of Brexit are routinely accused of undermining the whole process. If only the chancellor would think positively, it would all be fine. Wouldn’t it?
Now, there are some situations where everyone pulling together reshapes "reality", in a sense. If everyone agrees the political system isn't working, then it doesn't work (even if that system seems sensible from a logical point of view). And vice-versa, if everyone believes an irrational system actually works, then it does work. Alas, economics does not exist do deeply within a belief system. No amount of "being positive" will affect it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/15/philip-hammond-brexit-chancellor-hard-eu-exit
The book The Power of Positive Thinking introduced the notion that you can shape reality by mere “affirmations”. It has many adherents, as does the more recent nonsense of The Secret, which ascribes similar potency to “visualisation”. I suppose snake oil of this sort might help some people get through the day. But it is no basis upon which to govern a country – or to negotiate a country’s exit from a vast commercial and geopolitical alliance. Wishing upon a star is not enough for a successful departure from the EU.
Yet this is precisely what the exasperated Jiminy Crickets of Brexit are demanding of chancellor Philip Hammond. On Thursday, John Redwood tweeted: “The Chancellor must get the Treasury to have more realistic, optimistic forecasts & to find the money for a successful economy post Brexit.” Nadine Dorries, meanwhile, complained: “We need a ‘can-do’ man in the Treasury, not a prophet of doom.”
And with the NewsThump post (http://newsthump.com/2017/10/16/government-demands-weather-forecasters-should-make-their-storm-warnings-more-patriotic-and-optimistic/) from earlier :
The British government have told meteorologists to simply think more positively and optimistically when issuing forecasts ahead of an impending storm. A number of outlets including the Met Office and their Irish counterpart Met Eireann have issued storm warnings ahead of ex-hurricane Ophelia, prompting a swift backlash from leading Tory MPs who by sheer coincidence just happen to be Brexiters.
Conservative MP John Redwood issued a statement this morning saying, “When I read the weather forecast every day I want to see an optimistic one. When an ex-hurricane is due to hit parts of the country, as it is due to later today, I don’t want to read about ‘dangerously high winds this’ and ‘torrential rain that’ – I want us all to be a bit more positive about the whole thing. That is the only way to make the storm not happen.”
It's just insane how accurate the supposedly satirical source is.
The Guardian article continues :
For daring to look at the small print of Brexit and failing to declare the whole process “doubleplusgood”, Hammond is now pilloried by the faction within his party that, whatever its numerical strength, shouts loudest. A senior Tory told me recently that what the country needed was not a new centre party but a proper Conservative party. His point was that the Tory movement, once remorselessly committed to the business of government and the hard realities of office, had sailed off into the seas of ideology, captured by a gang of pirates seeking the imagined treasure of Brexit Island.
Hammond is hated by his enemies because he puts fact before emotion, and refuses to join in the feelgood fantasia. It is bleakly ironic that those who are working hardest to mitigate the most damaging consequences of Brexit are routinely accused of undermining the whole process. If only the chancellor would think positively, it would all be fine. Wouldn’t it?
Now, there are some situations where everyone pulling together reshapes "reality", in a sense. If everyone agrees the political system isn't working, then it doesn't work (even if that system seems sensible from a logical point of view). And vice-versa, if everyone believes an irrational system actually works, then it does work. Alas, economics does not exist do deeply within a belief system. No amount of "being positive" will affect it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/15/philip-hammond-brexit-chancellor-hard-eu-exit
Sunday 15 October 2017
An AI that can distinguish hate speech from harmless banter, based on context
Instead of focusing on isolated words and phrases, they taught machine learning software to spot hate speech by learning how members of hateful communities speak. They trained their system on a data dump that contains most of the posts made to Reddit between 2006 and 2016. They focused on three groups who are often the target of abuse: African Americans, overweight people and women. For each of these, they chose the most active support and abuse groups on Reddit to train their software. They also took comments from Voat -- a forum site similar to Reddit -- as well as individual websites dedicated to hate speech.
The team found that their approach contained fewer false positives than a keyword-based detector. For example, it was able to flag comments that contained no offensive keyword, such as 'I don't see the problem here. Animals attack other animals all the time,' in which the term 'animals' was being used as a racist slur.
Interesting. But can it differentiate between hatred and momentary outrage ? What about hate that's been provoked and/or is justified, i.e. hating Nazis ? What about in countries where violent political action might actually be required, e.g. those under the rule of a brutal dictator ?
I'm no free speech absolutist - totally free speech is a fundamental impossibility - but only a fool would pretend that the situation isn't horribly messy.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149562-this-ai-can-tell-true-hate-speech-from-harmless-banter/
The team found that their approach contained fewer false positives than a keyword-based detector. For example, it was able to flag comments that contained no offensive keyword, such as 'I don't see the problem here. Animals attack other animals all the time,' in which the term 'animals' was being used as a racist slur.
Interesting. But can it differentiate between hatred and momentary outrage ? What about hate that's been provoked and/or is justified, i.e. hating Nazis ? What about in countries where violent political action might actually be required, e.g. those under the rule of a brutal dictator ?
I'm no free speech absolutist - totally free speech is a fundamental impossibility - but only a fool would pretend that the situation isn't horribly messy.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149562-this-ai-can-tell-true-hate-speech-from-harmless-banter/
Saturday 14 October 2017
All this has happened before
Wow.
In 1939, the German American Bund organized a rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When Academy Award-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry stumbled upon footage of the event in historical archives, he was flabbergasted. Together with Field of Vision, he decided to present the footage as a cautionary tale to Americans. The short film, A Night at the Garden, premieres on The Atlantic today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/
In 1939, the German American Bund organized a rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When Academy Award-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry stumbled upon footage of the event in historical archives, he was flabbergasted. Together with Field of Vision, he decided to present the footage as a cautionary tale to Americans. The short film, A Night at the Garden, premieres on The Atlantic today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/
Dirk Gently 2
Yayyyyyy ! New season !!!
I'm a huge fan of season 1. I guess by rights I should hate this : an Americanised version of a British cult sci-fi ? A radically different depiction of Dirk to the one I had in my head ? Doesn't bode well... but... it all works. It's got the spirit of the books in spades. Exactly the right balance of sci-fi and outright surrealism; wacky and stupid exactly when it needs to be in just the right amounts, told intelligently. Exposition comes just when it's needed, and not a moment sooner or later. And (minor spoiler) the hostage exchange scene in episode 2 was the best I've ever seen : neither side know who they are, who the other side is, who the hostages are, or why they're exchanging them. Brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=196&v=GTp2qOnoRug
I'm a huge fan of season 1. I guess by rights I should hate this : an Americanised version of a British cult sci-fi ? A radically different depiction of Dirk to the one I had in my head ? Doesn't bode well... but... it all works. It's got the spirit of the books in spades. Exactly the right balance of sci-fi and outright surrealism; wacky and stupid exactly when it needs to be in just the right amounts, told intelligently. Exposition comes just when it's needed, and not a moment sooner or later. And (minor spoiler) the hostage exchange scene in episode 2 was the best I've ever seen : neither side know who they are, who the other side is, who the hostages are, or why they're exchanging them. Brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=196&v=GTp2qOnoRug
Wikipedia has too many incomprehensible science articles
The Wikipedia article for the electroweak force consists of a two-paragraph introduction that basically just says what I said above plus some fairly intimidating technical context. The rest of the article is almost entirely gnarly math equations. I have no idea who the article exists for because I'm not sure that person actually exists: someone with enough knowledge to comprehend dense physics formulations that doesn't also already understand the electroweak interaction or that doesn't already have, like, access to a textbook about it.
Probably a person who just wants to find one equation and can't be bothered to open a textbook. Ever since the academic world discovered that books don't have a Ctrl+F function, things have gotten worse.
Is this elitism? Is it just scientists writing like scientists? Have no doubt that a great many scientists are terrible at communication, but we can also imagine a world in which Wikipedia would attract the scientists that actually are good at communication. There have to be some that aren't otherwise occupied with writing books about string theory.
Wiki's articles cover the whole two dimensional parameter space of readability versus depth : it's not that there aren't any very good science articles, it's that there are too many of the extremes. The majority tend to be either so short as to be meaningless, or so technical as to be meaningless. The latter probably accounts for pretty close to 100% of mathematics articles (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficient), most of which I can't understand. The former makes up a high fraction of even slightly obscure astronomy articles (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish_galaxy). If you want a very broad overview of a big topic, say, cosmology, wiki tends to be very good. But try and dig deeper and it's like tunnelling through a field landmines.
No doubt yes, there are some good science communicators that aren't using wikipedia for whatever reason. But good review articles are hard to write from scratch. Small snippets which are scarcely longer than dictionary articles are easy, and so is adding a single equation. Planning the structure of a publically-readable review, however, takes a lot more time : it requires someone who's already very familiar with the topic, preferably an "insider" to have a general sense of which papers are well-accepted and which should be left out. Even then it involves a lot of careful reading of many different technical papers. Chances are, most of those who can do this are going to write independently of the anonymous wikipedia.
And before anyone asks, I'm going to be spending most of this weekend preparing a lecture course, so there. :P
https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/ne7xzq/wikipedias-science-articles-are-elitist
Probably a person who just wants to find one equation and can't be bothered to open a textbook. Ever since the academic world discovered that books don't have a Ctrl+F function, things have gotten worse.
Is this elitism? Is it just scientists writing like scientists? Have no doubt that a great many scientists are terrible at communication, but we can also imagine a world in which Wikipedia would attract the scientists that actually are good at communication. There have to be some that aren't otherwise occupied with writing books about string theory.
Wiki's articles cover the whole two dimensional parameter space of readability versus depth : it's not that there aren't any very good science articles, it's that there are too many of the extremes. The majority tend to be either so short as to be meaningless, or so technical as to be meaningless. The latter probably accounts for pretty close to 100% of mathematics articles (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficient), most of which I can't understand. The former makes up a high fraction of even slightly obscure astronomy articles (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish_galaxy). If you want a very broad overview of a big topic, say, cosmology, wiki tends to be very good. But try and dig deeper and it's like tunnelling through a field landmines.
No doubt yes, there are some good science communicators that aren't using wikipedia for whatever reason. But good review articles are hard to write from scratch. Small snippets which are scarcely longer than dictionary articles are easy, and so is adding a single equation. Planning the structure of a publically-readable review, however, takes a lot more time : it requires someone who's already very familiar with the topic, preferably an "insider" to have a general sense of which papers are well-accepted and which should be left out. Even then it involves a lot of careful reading of many different technical papers. Chances are, most of those who can do this are going to write independently of the anonymous wikipedia.
And before anyone asks, I'm going to be spending most of this weekend preparing a lecture course, so there. :P
https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/ne7xzq/wikipedias-science-articles-are-elitist
Friday 13 October 2017
Telling the truth is sabotage, say Brexiteers
This is the kind of logic we have to deal with :
The chancellor has described as "bizarre" and "absurd" accusations he is talking down the economy. Philip Hammond had been criticised for saying that the Brexit process has created uncertainty.
It objectively, factually has created uncertainty. There is no way of avoiding this.
This week former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson called for Mr Hammond to be sacked, saying he was unhelpful to the Brexit process. Lord Lawson said "what he [Mr Hammond] is doing is very close to sabotage".
That's a bit like saying he's guilty of sabotaging the Gunpowder Plot. Not that a Brexiteer could understand that.
Mr Hammond said the government would not spend taxpayers' money preparing for a "no-deal" Brexit until the "very last moment". He said he wouldn't take money from budgets for other areas such as health or education just to "send a message" to the EU.
One former minister, David Jones, has said billions of pounds should be set aside in November's Budget for a "no deal" scenario. He argued that if this did not happen it would be seen as a "a sign of weakness" by EU leaders who would think the UK was not serious about leaving the EU without a deal.
They really would rather get us out of the EU than actually provide health and education. Good grief.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41608243
The chancellor has described as "bizarre" and "absurd" accusations he is talking down the economy. Philip Hammond had been criticised for saying that the Brexit process has created uncertainty.
It objectively, factually has created uncertainty. There is no way of avoiding this.
This week former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson called for Mr Hammond to be sacked, saying he was unhelpful to the Brexit process. Lord Lawson said "what he [Mr Hammond] is doing is very close to sabotage".
That's a bit like saying he's guilty of sabotaging the Gunpowder Plot. Not that a Brexiteer could understand that.
Mr Hammond said the government would not spend taxpayers' money preparing for a "no-deal" Brexit until the "very last moment". He said he wouldn't take money from budgets for other areas such as health or education just to "send a message" to the EU.
One former minister, David Jones, has said billions of pounds should be set aside in November's Budget for a "no deal" scenario. He argued that if this did not happen it would be seen as a "a sign of weakness" by EU leaders who would think the UK was not serious about leaving the EU without a deal.
They really would rather get us out of the EU than actually provide health and education. Good grief.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41608243
Self-knowledge is so limited we sometimes get out own emotions wrong
This explains why it took the whole of Star Trek IV for Spock to work out the answer to a simple problem.
One day at graduate school, one of Lisa Feldman Barrett's colleagues asked her out on a date. She didn't really fancy him, but she had been in the lab all day and felt like a change of scenery, so she agreed to go to the local coffee shop. As they chatted, however, she started to become flushed in the face, her stomach was churning, and her head seemed to whirl. Maybe she was wrong, she thought: perhaps she really did like him. By the time they left, she'd already agreed to go on a second date.
Still feeling somewhat giddy, she got home, put her keys on the floor, and promptly threw up. It wasn' love, after all; it was flu. She spent the next week in bed.
Barrett's detailed analyses of the findings now suggest that there is no such thing as an emotion fingerprint. Each emotion may be represented by a whole range of reactions in the brain and the body, and there is a huge amount of overlap between each one. Instead, she points out that the way we interpret our body's signals - and whether we actually feel excited or anxious as a result - depends entirely on context and circumstance, and it can be easily shaped by our expectations.
Those few physical sensations – the churning stomach and flushed face – might have been (correctly) interpreted as ‘feeling ill’ if she’d been at home, in bed, with a thermometer in her mouth. But since she was on a date, her brain instead constructed an entirely different emotion – a genuine feeling of romantic attraction – from exactly the same physical responses. (According to the classical view, in contrast, the two feelings should have been easily identifiable thanks to their own unique fingerprints.)
A stomach ache, similarly, might signal a gut infection – or, if you were away from your family, might be confused with feelings of homesickness and longing. A rushing heart beat could be interpreted as fun and excitement on a rollercoaster, or acute anxiety if you are giving the speech at a wedding. Or it might simply signal that you’ve drunk too much coffee, but physiologically, there may not be much of difference.
And of course ghosts if you're, err, feeling Dickensian :
Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171012-how-emotions-can-trick-your-mind-and-body
One day at graduate school, one of Lisa Feldman Barrett's colleagues asked her out on a date. She didn't really fancy him, but she had been in the lab all day and felt like a change of scenery, so she agreed to go to the local coffee shop. As they chatted, however, she started to become flushed in the face, her stomach was churning, and her head seemed to whirl. Maybe she was wrong, she thought: perhaps she really did like him. By the time they left, she'd already agreed to go on a second date.
Still feeling somewhat giddy, she got home, put her keys on the floor, and promptly threw up. It wasn' love, after all; it was flu. She spent the next week in bed.
Barrett's detailed analyses of the findings now suggest that there is no such thing as an emotion fingerprint. Each emotion may be represented by a whole range of reactions in the brain and the body, and there is a huge amount of overlap between each one. Instead, she points out that the way we interpret our body's signals - and whether we actually feel excited or anxious as a result - depends entirely on context and circumstance, and it can be easily shaped by our expectations.
Those few physical sensations – the churning stomach and flushed face – might have been (correctly) interpreted as ‘feeling ill’ if she’d been at home, in bed, with a thermometer in her mouth. But since she was on a date, her brain instead constructed an entirely different emotion – a genuine feeling of romantic attraction – from exactly the same physical responses. (According to the classical view, in contrast, the two feelings should have been easily identifiable thanks to their own unique fingerprints.)
A stomach ache, similarly, might signal a gut infection – or, if you were away from your family, might be confused with feelings of homesickness and longing. A rushing heart beat could be interpreted as fun and excitement on a rollercoaster, or acute anxiety if you are giving the speech at a wedding. Or it might simply signal that you’ve drunk too much coffee, but physiologically, there may not be much of difference.
And of course ghosts if you're, err, feeling Dickensian :
Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171012-how-emotions-can-trick-your-mind-and-body
China's new leader is quite scary
A long and terrifying read.
One astute insider described him as “a needle concealed in silk floss”. Everyone was taken in. When he became Communist Party leader in 2012, Xi Jinping was the compromise choice. Few inside or outside China guessed at what was coming next - five years of political shock and awe.
Since the communists fought their way to power, they had called themselves the “vanguard of the people”, an elite class whose mandate to rule came from “serving the people”. Without living by this higher code the Party had no claim to legitimacy. For the past five years, Xi’s blunt message has been: “Don’t join the Party if you want to make money.” But his problem was, and still is, that this is precisely why some of the Party’s nearly 90 million members did join up.
With an envelope of banknotes here, and a nod there, patronage is how Communist Party politics has often worked. Cleaning it up means removing not just individuals but whole networks of influence and a culture.
A fractured elite is a threat to an authoritarian regime and in pre-communist times, China’s imperial dynasties often fell victim to faction fights at court. By caging hundreds of powerful tigers at the top of the Party and army, Xi has torn up the rulebook which kept a fragile peace between the red elite after the death of Chairman Mao. Any of them might be making a speech in the Great Hall of the People one minute and dragged off to a cell the next.
“The internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war,” warn Party-controlled media.
In a recent speech he warned that the internet must not become a “double-edged sword”, allowing “hidden negative energy” to harm good governance and social stability. He has enormously strengthened the so-called Great Firewall of China, the combination of legislation and technologies, supported by legions of professional and volunteer censors, which together enable the Party to control Chinese cyberspace. Cybersecurity is now central to Xi’s definition of national security. Internet service providers and social media sites are forced to censor users, while users are encouraged to censor each other. All are denied online anonymity and those who overstep red lines are jailed.
It apparently doesn’t matter that Mao’s policies led to famine and the deaths of more than 30 million Chinese, or that Xi’s own family had been persecuted in the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution. Under Xi Jinping, dwelling on inconvenient facts of history or insulting revolutionary heroes and martyrs is now a punishable offence called “historical nihilism”
A nation of active citizens is Xi’s nightmare. Christians, Muslims, labour activists, bloggers, reporters, feminists, and lawyers have been jailed for speaking or acting on their convictions. In some cases, they have also been paraded in televised confessions, recanting their beliefs and echoing the Party line that they allowed themselves to become pawns of China’s enemies in the West. Rebranding some expressions of conscience as a threat to national security is central to Xi’s politics.
Xi’s China has so far married great wealth with great repression. If he continues to cage his tigers, clean up his comrades and silence discordant voices, the existential questions may be for others. Not since Chairman Mao has China’s dream of greatness rested so heavily on one man.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Thoughts_Chairman_Xi
One astute insider described him as “a needle concealed in silk floss”. Everyone was taken in. When he became Communist Party leader in 2012, Xi Jinping was the compromise choice. Few inside or outside China guessed at what was coming next - five years of political shock and awe.
Since the communists fought their way to power, they had called themselves the “vanguard of the people”, an elite class whose mandate to rule came from “serving the people”. Without living by this higher code the Party had no claim to legitimacy. For the past five years, Xi’s blunt message has been: “Don’t join the Party if you want to make money.” But his problem was, and still is, that this is precisely why some of the Party’s nearly 90 million members did join up.
With an envelope of banknotes here, and a nod there, patronage is how Communist Party politics has often worked. Cleaning it up means removing not just individuals but whole networks of influence and a culture.
A fractured elite is a threat to an authoritarian regime and in pre-communist times, China’s imperial dynasties often fell victim to faction fights at court. By caging hundreds of powerful tigers at the top of the Party and army, Xi has torn up the rulebook which kept a fragile peace between the red elite after the death of Chairman Mao. Any of them might be making a speech in the Great Hall of the People one minute and dragged off to a cell the next.
“The internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war,” warn Party-controlled media.
In a recent speech he warned that the internet must not become a “double-edged sword”, allowing “hidden negative energy” to harm good governance and social stability. He has enormously strengthened the so-called Great Firewall of China, the combination of legislation and technologies, supported by legions of professional and volunteer censors, which together enable the Party to control Chinese cyberspace. Cybersecurity is now central to Xi’s definition of national security. Internet service providers and social media sites are forced to censor users, while users are encouraged to censor each other. All are denied online anonymity and those who overstep red lines are jailed.
It apparently doesn’t matter that Mao’s policies led to famine and the deaths of more than 30 million Chinese, or that Xi’s own family had been persecuted in the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution. Under Xi Jinping, dwelling on inconvenient facts of history or insulting revolutionary heroes and martyrs is now a punishable offence called “historical nihilism”
A nation of active citizens is Xi’s nightmare. Christians, Muslims, labour activists, bloggers, reporters, feminists, and lawyers have been jailed for speaking or acting on their convictions. In some cases, they have also been paraded in televised confessions, recanting their beliefs and echoing the Party line that they allowed themselves to become pawns of China’s enemies in the West. Rebranding some expressions of conscience as a threat to national security is central to Xi’s politics.
Xi’s China has so far married great wealth with great repression. If he continues to cage his tigers, clean up his comrades and silence discordant voices, the existential questions may be for others. Not since Chairman Mao has China’s dream of greatness rested so heavily on one man.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Thoughts_Chairman_Xi
I do not like Trump at all
Joffrey. This man is Joffrey, but stupider. May his testicles develop leprosy and his bones dissolve internally. May half his blood boil and the rest turn to acid. Only then, when it's too late, may his mind develop a conscience so that his emotional suffering matches the physical pain.
The US president was pilloried by local officials after he threw rolls of paper towels at residents during his trip. The San Juan mayor described that incident as "abominable". But Mr Drumpf later depicted the outrage as confected, insisting to the Trinity Broadcasting Network that the crowd "were having fun" as he distributed "these beautiful, soft towels".
Damn bastard doesn't even realise what he's doing. And if he does, he's evil. Yes, evil. The hell with him.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41598616
The US president was pilloried by local officials after he threw rolls of paper towels at residents during his trip. The San Juan mayor described that incident as "abominable". But Mr Drumpf later depicted the outrage as confected, insisting to the Trinity Broadcasting Network that the crowd "were having fun" as he distributed "these beautiful, soft towels".
Damn bastard doesn't even realise what he's doing. And if he does, he's evil. Yes, evil. The hell with him.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41598616
Tuesday 10 October 2017
The future is chicken
“In the UK alone we dispose of 1,000 tonnes of feathers a week.” That’s only the tip of the iceberg – Robinson believes that across the world, 10,000 tonnes of waste feathers are produced every day.
Along with designer Elena Dieckmann, Robinson has discovered a way to turn feathers into an insulating material for buildings or a packing material for food or medicine. The pair has formed a start-up, called Aeropowder, to try and turn their invention into a commercial product.
“Currently feathers are mainly converted in this country to a low-grade animal feed called feathermeal,” says Robinson. This seems to be about the only product that uses feathers after they have been plucked. “Feathers can also be incinerated or put into a landfill. And these disposal methods do not make use of their amazing natural properties.”
It turns out that feathers are quite the wonder material. “Feathers are inherently insulating due to their structure, which is hollow keratin fibres,” says Robinson. Extra air in the fibres means less heat transfer. “What has been surprising is… how well the material has performed, and we hope to continue to make it better and better.”
Initially, the Aeropowder material – considerably easier on the nose than the animal feed – was ground down to a very fine powder. “As we continued we decided that the properties of the feathers themselves were also extremely useful – not just as an additive but when they were comprising the majority of the material.” The current form of Aeropowder’s material looks much more like a compressed brick of feathers. It’s pliant and light and doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what it’s made from.
“Building insulation has been a main focus,” says Robinson. “Our materials could be used on exterior walls, in between cavity walls or in the lofts. But we are also interested in insulating smaller consumer items… like food or medicine.”
Mmm, feathery goodness... or clothing. 1,000 tonnes per weak ought to make a LOT of chicken costumes. I mean seriously, we could create a lifetime supply for every man, woman and child in like five minutes BUT WE'RE JUST THROWING THIS ALL AWAY !!! Where's the sense in that ?!?!? WHERE ? Or pillows ? Has no-one stopped to consider how many comfy pillows we could be churning out from our feathered friends ? Hmmm ?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171010-how-chicken-feathers-could-warm-our-homes
Along with designer Elena Dieckmann, Robinson has discovered a way to turn feathers into an insulating material for buildings or a packing material for food or medicine. The pair has formed a start-up, called Aeropowder, to try and turn their invention into a commercial product.
“Currently feathers are mainly converted in this country to a low-grade animal feed called feathermeal,” says Robinson. This seems to be about the only product that uses feathers after they have been plucked. “Feathers can also be incinerated or put into a landfill. And these disposal methods do not make use of their amazing natural properties.”
It turns out that feathers are quite the wonder material. “Feathers are inherently insulating due to their structure, which is hollow keratin fibres,” says Robinson. Extra air in the fibres means less heat transfer. “What has been surprising is… how well the material has performed, and we hope to continue to make it better and better.”
Initially, the Aeropowder material – considerably easier on the nose than the animal feed – was ground down to a very fine powder. “As we continued we decided that the properties of the feathers themselves were also extremely useful – not just as an additive but when they were comprising the majority of the material.” The current form of Aeropowder’s material looks much more like a compressed brick of feathers. It’s pliant and light and doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what it’s made from.
“Building insulation has been a main focus,” says Robinson. “Our materials could be used on exterior walls, in between cavity walls or in the lofts. But we are also interested in insulating smaller consumer items… like food or medicine.”
Mmm, feathery goodness... or clothing. 1,000 tonnes per weak ought to make a LOT of chicken costumes. I mean seriously, we could create a lifetime supply for every man, woman and child in like five minutes BUT WE'RE JUST THROWING THIS ALL AWAY !!! Where's the sense in that ?!?!? WHERE ? Or pillows ? Has no-one stopped to consider how many comfy pillows we could be churning out from our feathered friends ? Hmmm ?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171010-how-chicken-feathers-could-warm-our-homes
Is reality a simulation ? No idea, because the concept is scientifically pointless
Not a bad little introduction, but I disagree with the argument that if any simulations of reality can be run, then we're likely to be living in one because there are more simulations than realities. That such simulations can be run does not automatically mean that vast numbers of simulations actually are being run. That's like saying that because we exist, other beings like ourselves must exist somewhere else. We don't have any real evidence for this at all.
More fundamentally, proceeding on the assumption that if we ourselves could advance to the point of running reality-based simulations ignores that there would be no constraint for beings like ourselves to run simulations that resemble reality in any way whatsoever. Perhaps the "real" world has no concept of mass or energy or cause and effect. And then of course one can extend this to inception-style nested simulations... leaving us with the age-old unanswerable question best discussed in a pub, "what is reality ?"
Furthermore, there is no need for super-advanced computers for any of this : I can run entirely convincing simulations of the Universe in my head by falling asleep. "Entirely convincing", of course, does not mean that if I described to you that one about the enormous duck that ate everybody you'd find it plausible in the slightest. It means that when I'm asleep the mental filters that check for consistency are disabled, so my experience of it at the time was compelling. How do we know such procedures aren't in effect anyway ?
The answer is that we don't. We have to assume that what we're seeing is the fundamental level of reality in order to make any meaningful assessment of it. If our memories are constantly being altered by malevolent programmers / capricious deities (for the "we're in a simulation argument" is identical to, "we're all part of the mind of God", except that by throwing technology at it it's for some reason more palatable to atheists) then no inferences that we make can be trusted, and everything is utterly pointless. Yet, if we're not anything more than shadows and dust, Maximus, then everything is surely pointless too...
A very good friend of mine recently asked, "why even allow this to be an assumption at all ?", i.e. why is the burden of proof on those of us who believe reality is real rather than on those who don't ? The answer to this is that both cases are fundamentally unprovable. There's no good reason to prefer one over the other based on the evidence alone, because evidence itself is inapplicable if your idea is that... well, evidence is meaningless. But by admitting that we're making an assumption, we can get on with our lives and be able to entirely legitimately call out Flat Earthers as the nutters they are whilst still allowing room for a very fundamental doubt.
That's my morning philosophy rant for you. Now back to science.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2016/11/it-might-be-angels-instead.html
Originally shared by Martin Krischik
https://youtu.be/tlTKTTt47WE
More fundamentally, proceeding on the assumption that if we ourselves could advance to the point of running reality-based simulations ignores that there would be no constraint for beings like ourselves to run simulations that resemble reality in any way whatsoever. Perhaps the "real" world has no concept of mass or energy or cause and effect. And then of course one can extend this to inception-style nested simulations... leaving us with the age-old unanswerable question best discussed in a pub, "what is reality ?"
Furthermore, there is no need for super-advanced computers for any of this : I can run entirely convincing simulations of the Universe in my head by falling asleep. "Entirely convincing", of course, does not mean that if I described to you that one about the enormous duck that ate everybody you'd find it plausible in the slightest. It means that when I'm asleep the mental filters that check for consistency are disabled, so my experience of it at the time was compelling. How do we know such procedures aren't in effect anyway ?
The answer is that we don't. We have to assume that what we're seeing is the fundamental level of reality in order to make any meaningful assessment of it. If our memories are constantly being altered by malevolent programmers / capricious deities (for the "we're in a simulation argument" is identical to, "we're all part of the mind of God", except that by throwing technology at it it's for some reason more palatable to atheists) then no inferences that we make can be trusted, and everything is utterly pointless. Yet, if we're not anything more than shadows and dust, Maximus, then everything is surely pointless too...
A very good friend of mine recently asked, "why even allow this to be an assumption at all ?", i.e. why is the burden of proof on those of us who believe reality is real rather than on those who don't ? The answer to this is that both cases are fundamentally unprovable. There's no good reason to prefer one over the other based on the evidence alone, because evidence itself is inapplicable if your idea is that... well, evidence is meaningless. But by admitting that we're making an assumption, we can get on with our lives and be able to entirely legitimately call out Flat Earthers as the nutters they are whilst still allowing room for a very fundamental doubt.
That's my morning philosophy rant for you. Now back to science.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2016/11/it-might-be-angels-instead.html
Originally shared by Martin Krischik
https://youtu.be/tlTKTTt47WE
Monday 9 October 2017
Review : Star Trek Discovery Episode 4
Keeping things spoiler free.
After quite some promising moves last week, episode 4 largely degenerates back into farce. Once again we have too many damn bloody great glowy things and weird camera angles. Too many really frickin' irritating Klingons speaking their stupid language and having stupid side plots that have lost what little interest they ever contained (oh, and now they eat their enemies, making them seem like even more ridiculous primitives). Too much war, not to mention a captain who's explicitly a warrior in command of a science vessel. Daft. A side-plot based on the Federation designing new weapons : no thanks ! You can't call it Star Trek and have it revolve so much around war and death - not from the word go, at least. In parts it borders on bleakness porn.
Some of you may cry, "Deep Space Nine !!!". Ah well, Deep Space Nine was more like bleakness eroticism : you actually already cared about the characters and the world they inhabited; they were trying to rebuild and explore long before the Dominion showed up. Only in the later seasons did it wholly devote itself to the war theme, by which point the treachery and betrayal actually meant something. Never mind that Gul Dukat and Garak were magnificently melodramatic. Discovery's characters, on the other hand, are plodding and dull.
After a very nice plot twist to the captain last week, he's fallen back into douchebag territory. The security officer is not only a douchebag, but a hideously, I mean seriously ludicrously stupid one as well. Come to that, virtually the entire crew are rude and obnoxious. The leader character is practically the only one who every behaves with any degree of professionalism, and her main role is basically to be condescending to everyone else by virtue of their stupidity. She has precisely two expressions : worried and smug. The rest of the crew... pointless. Utterly pointless.
And then there's the science. Yes, I know. I KNOW ! It's fiction and it doesn't have to be realistic; insert fifty seven million times Star Trek made a science boo-boo. I'd overlook this completely except... O-type stars aren't yellow, they're blue-white. Does this affect the story in any way whatsoever ? Nope. But I know full well how little effort is requires to swap the RGB values and turn a yellow star into a blue one. Unnecessary unrealism that's absolutely trivial to fix is the most annoying kind.
Rant over, you may return to the dwellings from whence you came.
After quite some promising moves last week, episode 4 largely degenerates back into farce. Once again we have too many damn bloody great glowy things and weird camera angles. Too many really frickin' irritating Klingons speaking their stupid language and having stupid side plots that have lost what little interest they ever contained (oh, and now they eat their enemies, making them seem like even more ridiculous primitives). Too much war, not to mention a captain who's explicitly a warrior in command of a science vessel. Daft. A side-plot based on the Federation designing new weapons : no thanks ! You can't call it Star Trek and have it revolve so much around war and death - not from the word go, at least. In parts it borders on bleakness porn.
Some of you may cry, "Deep Space Nine !!!". Ah well, Deep Space Nine was more like bleakness eroticism : you actually already cared about the characters and the world they inhabited; they were trying to rebuild and explore long before the Dominion showed up. Only in the later seasons did it wholly devote itself to the war theme, by which point the treachery and betrayal actually meant something. Never mind that Gul Dukat and Garak were magnificently melodramatic. Discovery's characters, on the other hand, are plodding and dull.
After a very nice plot twist to the captain last week, he's fallen back into douchebag territory. The security officer is not only a douchebag, but a hideously, I mean seriously ludicrously stupid one as well. Come to that, virtually the entire crew are rude and obnoxious. The leader character is practically the only one who every behaves with any degree of professionalism, and her main role is basically to be condescending to everyone else by virtue of their stupidity. She has precisely two expressions : worried and smug. The rest of the crew... pointless. Utterly pointless.
And then there's the science. Yes, I know. I KNOW ! It's fiction and it doesn't have to be realistic; insert fifty seven million times Star Trek made a science boo-boo. I'd overlook this completely except... O-type stars aren't yellow, they're blue-white. Does this affect the story in any way whatsoever ? Nope. But I know full well how little effort is requires to swap the RGB values and turn a yellow star into a blue one. Unnecessary unrealism that's absolutely trivial to fix is the most annoying kind.
Rant over, you may return to the dwellings from whence you came.
Brexit wasn't Canute's fault
The analogies are getting more sophisticated.
https://twitter.com/davidschneider/status/917085303957008386
https://twitter.com/davidschneider/status/917085303957008386
Africa's power distribution may do away with the traditional European grid networks
As they explored various ways to get power to their new neighbours, they realised that the grid will never supply those in Rwanda and beyond who currently lack electricity: such communities are dispersed over immense areas, and are too poor to afford such extensive infrastructure. That’s when they arrived at a grand idea: they concluded that Africa will largely bypass the grid and leapfrog over Europe and North America straight into solar – just as it did in skipping landlines, a rarity in rural Africa, in favour of cell phones.
The company would need to raise investor funding to enable them to build a team and get the technology up to par. Yet despite their discoveries on the ground, nearly everyone they approached, as Hamayun puts it, “thought what we’re doing was really risky and not scalable, because it’s Africa.” The first round of funding proved exceptionally difficult to raise, he continues, because there was no real precedent for doing technology business in Africa. “These are customers who have been underserved in every possible way,” he says.
The technology itself, it turned out, was the simplest part of getting such operations up and running. In BBOXX’s case, solar energy gathered from a panel on the roof is stored overnight, while remote connectivity over 2G cell networks allows for geolocation and performance data to be sent back to headquarters. Algorithms monitor the units’ health and allow the team to proactively replace fading batteries (usually, after about three years). Customers can also buy accessories that BBOXX designed to minimise energy use, including shavers, smartphones and a 24-inch television that consumes 11 watts of power compared to an equivalent Western model’s 24 watts.
As for payments, the team realised early on that rural customers would never be able to afford to buy a BBOXX unit outright. So they opted instead for pay-as-you-go monthly installment plans. “That removes the massive upfront barrier that’s often the case for solar systems in the developing world,” Baker-Brian says.
Five months ago, when BBOXX established an office in Rwamagana, the district where Mberabagabo lives, he was one of the first to sign up. The technology, he says, “has changed my life.” His family’s four lights have increased their sense of security against would-be trespassers, and he also appreciates that he no longer has to burn candles and lamps that emit smoke, which he knows is bad for his children’s health. A father of five, the lights mean that Mberabagabo’s older kids can read and study into the night, and go to bed later.
THERE ! ARE ! FOUR ! LIGHTS !
Sorry... carry on....
13-year-old Claude, his eldest child, says he “loves” the television that his family rents along with the box itself – their first TV. For optimal viewing, Mberabagabo set it up in a sort of home cinema room, windowless, cool and completely barren save for the TV and the benches located opposite for watching. Though transfixed by a Brazilian football match on a recent afternoon, Claude – who would like to be a teacher when he grows up – insists that the news is his favourite programme. Shy and polite, he stands by this unexpected answer, even when a foreign journalist asks him if he’s sure sports and cartoons aren’t his favourites.
“Now I’m able to know who is who in the government,” he explains. “I can ask better questions at school.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171009-rural-rwanda-is-home-to-a-pioneering-new-solar-power-idea
The company would need to raise investor funding to enable them to build a team and get the technology up to par. Yet despite their discoveries on the ground, nearly everyone they approached, as Hamayun puts it, “thought what we’re doing was really risky and not scalable, because it’s Africa.” The first round of funding proved exceptionally difficult to raise, he continues, because there was no real precedent for doing technology business in Africa. “These are customers who have been underserved in every possible way,” he says.
The technology itself, it turned out, was the simplest part of getting such operations up and running. In BBOXX’s case, solar energy gathered from a panel on the roof is stored overnight, while remote connectivity over 2G cell networks allows for geolocation and performance data to be sent back to headquarters. Algorithms monitor the units’ health and allow the team to proactively replace fading batteries (usually, after about three years). Customers can also buy accessories that BBOXX designed to minimise energy use, including shavers, smartphones and a 24-inch television that consumes 11 watts of power compared to an equivalent Western model’s 24 watts.
As for payments, the team realised early on that rural customers would never be able to afford to buy a BBOXX unit outright. So they opted instead for pay-as-you-go monthly installment plans. “That removes the massive upfront barrier that’s often the case for solar systems in the developing world,” Baker-Brian says.
Five months ago, when BBOXX established an office in Rwamagana, the district where Mberabagabo lives, he was one of the first to sign up. The technology, he says, “has changed my life.” His family’s four lights have increased their sense of security against would-be trespassers, and he also appreciates that he no longer has to burn candles and lamps that emit smoke, which he knows is bad for his children’s health. A father of five, the lights mean that Mberabagabo’s older kids can read and study into the night, and go to bed later.
THERE ! ARE ! FOUR ! LIGHTS !
Sorry... carry on....
13-year-old Claude, his eldest child, says he “loves” the television that his family rents along with the box itself – their first TV. For optimal viewing, Mberabagabo set it up in a sort of home cinema room, windowless, cool and completely barren save for the TV and the benches located opposite for watching. Though transfixed by a Brazilian football match on a recent afternoon, Claude – who would like to be a teacher when he grows up – insists that the news is his favourite programme. Shy and polite, he stands by this unexpected answer, even when a foreign journalist asks him if he’s sure sports and cartoons aren’t his favourites.
“Now I’m able to know who is who in the government,” he explains. “I can ask better questions at school.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171009-rural-rwanda-is-home-to-a-pioneering-new-solar-power-idea
Using money for happiness has a placebo effect
If you could afford it, would you ever splurge $10,000 on a pair of headphones? What about some other indulgence? Would you?
A first class transatlantic flight, if I had ludicrous amounts of cash to spend. If I only exactly the same amount of disposal cash as the flight cost, but for some reason I was compelled to spend the money on luxuries, I'd go all-out on a massive hedonistic ground-based bender.
Of course, if I had serious money I'd buy myself a flight to the ISS and/or my own island.
In one study by The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Stanford University scholars, people not only rate the same wine more highly when they’re told it is more expensive, functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI scans taken of their brains while they were drinking the wine suggest participants enjoyed the experience of drinking it more. In another study using placebo pain killers, participants who took a fake pain-killing drug that they were told cost $2.50 per pill experienced more pain reduction during a series of shocks than participants who were told the pill cost only 10 cents.
Interesting, but it would be good to compare the placebo effect by telling participants other falsehoods about the drugs : e.g. how strong is the price information compared to telling them which one is more effective ?
But how does price and perception play into our purchasing decisions outside the laboratory? If an item is twice as expensive, do buyers assume it’s twice as good? Michael Norton, a psychologist and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School says yes. In fact, we may consider the experience to be more than twice as good. We’re motivated to splurge because we’re seeking peak experiences, his research suggests.
The restaurant, or dessert or film that’s rated three stars by everyone is the safe choice while the one that’s rated with one and five stars could be terrible or could be amazing, he says. So “in this case, we find that people will gamble and pick the one- and five-star rated one, because they’re trying to get to that totally amazing experience, even at the risk of getting a really bad one... So, it’s possible that a $10,000 bottle of whiskey would be more than twice as pleasurable than a $5,000 bottle of whiskey because it’s such a peak experience way out in the extreme.”
I dunno... for reviews I tend to read what people are saying. Sometimes the reasons for poor ratings don't matter to me. It also (strangely) seems to depend on where the reviews are written and their subject matter. I tend to trust game reviews (by actual people, not magazines) but I view hotel and restaurant reviews much more skeptically.
“The feeling of happiness that you get when you accumulate material things is fleeting. Like other types of things, it’s less and less rewarding each time,” says Joshua Cartu.
Indeed !
“By buying Ferraris I get be to part of a community of very special, interesting people that have the same passion as I do.”
HEADDESK
While most of us will never be able to afford to fly a fighter jet or race a Ferrari, researchers suggest that desire to build ‘the experiential CV’ can account for more modest splurges, like staying at an ice hotel, or seeking out something strange to eat, like bacon-flavoured ice cream.
“Material goods are less of a signifier of social position today. The deluge of material goods means that they are not as rare or scarce or luxurious as in the past,” she says. “There is a greater value in experiences and the narrative around goods as justifying their cost and giving them status.
No argument there.
And here’s the simplest reason of all: people splurge on luxury goods because they think it will make them happy. Norton, who co-authored Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, says that the amount of happiness you get from spending money will depend on how you spend it and not necessarily how much... he suggests spending money on experiences rather than things. “Most of us seem to be maxed out on the happiness we can get from stuff alone."
But there might be an even better way to get your kicks. Norton’s research proves that giving to others can make us happier people. “It’s not that when you buy things for yourself they don’t make you happy in the moment. Of course they do. That’s why we buy them. It just doesn’t seem to add up to much happiness over time,” he says. “Giving to others seems to add up to happiness over time.”
I tend to the philosophy that, "you can't take it with you, but you can save it for later". Seek some measure of financial security first, but not to the extent of living in miserly squalor or boredom. Occasionally splurge on experiences; large one-off costs don't really matter much in the long term. Purchase products that you're likely to actually use and not gather dust. Take occasional risks, but spend most of the time watching Netflix with a nice cup of tea and if possible an adorable dog. And if anyone says, "one more drink ?", always say yes. Unless you're about to collapse, or worse. Then stop.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171006-the-psychology-behind-spending-big
A first class transatlantic flight, if I had ludicrous amounts of cash to spend. If I only exactly the same amount of disposal cash as the flight cost, but for some reason I was compelled to spend the money on luxuries, I'd go all-out on a massive hedonistic ground-based bender.
Of course, if I had serious money I'd buy myself a flight to the ISS and/or my own island.
In one study by The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Stanford University scholars, people not only rate the same wine more highly when they’re told it is more expensive, functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI scans taken of their brains while they were drinking the wine suggest participants enjoyed the experience of drinking it more. In another study using placebo pain killers, participants who took a fake pain-killing drug that they were told cost $2.50 per pill experienced more pain reduction during a series of shocks than participants who were told the pill cost only 10 cents.
Interesting, but it would be good to compare the placebo effect by telling participants other falsehoods about the drugs : e.g. how strong is the price information compared to telling them which one is more effective ?
But how does price and perception play into our purchasing decisions outside the laboratory? If an item is twice as expensive, do buyers assume it’s twice as good? Michael Norton, a psychologist and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School says yes. In fact, we may consider the experience to be more than twice as good. We’re motivated to splurge because we’re seeking peak experiences, his research suggests.
The restaurant, or dessert or film that’s rated three stars by everyone is the safe choice while the one that’s rated with one and five stars could be terrible or could be amazing, he says. So “in this case, we find that people will gamble and pick the one- and five-star rated one, because they’re trying to get to that totally amazing experience, even at the risk of getting a really bad one... So, it’s possible that a $10,000 bottle of whiskey would be more than twice as pleasurable than a $5,000 bottle of whiskey because it’s such a peak experience way out in the extreme.”
I dunno... for reviews I tend to read what people are saying. Sometimes the reasons for poor ratings don't matter to me. It also (strangely) seems to depend on where the reviews are written and their subject matter. I tend to trust game reviews (by actual people, not magazines) but I view hotel and restaurant reviews much more skeptically.
“The feeling of happiness that you get when you accumulate material things is fleeting. Like other types of things, it’s less and less rewarding each time,” says Joshua Cartu.
Indeed !
“By buying Ferraris I get be to part of a community of very special, interesting people that have the same passion as I do.”
HEADDESK
While most of us will never be able to afford to fly a fighter jet or race a Ferrari, researchers suggest that desire to build ‘the experiential CV’ can account for more modest splurges, like staying at an ice hotel, or seeking out something strange to eat, like bacon-flavoured ice cream.
“Material goods are less of a signifier of social position today. The deluge of material goods means that they are not as rare or scarce or luxurious as in the past,” she says. “There is a greater value in experiences and the narrative around goods as justifying their cost and giving them status.
No argument there.
And here’s the simplest reason of all: people splurge on luxury goods because they think it will make them happy. Norton, who co-authored Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, says that the amount of happiness you get from spending money will depend on how you spend it and not necessarily how much... he suggests spending money on experiences rather than things. “Most of us seem to be maxed out on the happiness we can get from stuff alone."
But there might be an even better way to get your kicks. Norton’s research proves that giving to others can make us happier people. “It’s not that when you buy things for yourself they don’t make you happy in the moment. Of course they do. That’s why we buy them. It just doesn’t seem to add up to much happiness over time,” he says. “Giving to others seems to add up to happiness over time.”
I tend to the philosophy that, "you can't take it with you, but you can save it for later". Seek some measure of financial security first, but not to the extent of living in miserly squalor or boredom. Occasionally splurge on experiences; large one-off costs don't really matter much in the long term. Purchase products that you're likely to actually use and not gather dust. Take occasional risks, but spend most of the time watching Netflix with a nice cup of tea and if possible an adorable dog. And if anyone says, "one more drink ?", always say yes. Unless you're about to collapse, or worse. Then stop.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171006-the-psychology-behind-spending-big
Sunday 8 October 2017
STOP KILLING PANGOLINS YOU TWATS
Dammit people, leave the poor things alone ! Or if you must, farm them. Don't go around bloody exterminating these adorable creatures.
This week, Chinese customs executed the largest-ever seizure of pangolin scales, confiscating 3.1 tons of them from smugglers. According to Chinese state media, the scales were hidden in a container arriving from Africa, and registered as timber. Customs officers discovered the scales—from about 7,500 pangolins—in 101 woven plastic bags hidden aboard the ship; they’re worth more than $2 million on the black market.
Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in China and Vietnam; in southern China, each animal can go for up to $1,000 in restaurants. They are also consumed as bush meat in many parts of Africa. But most of their worth comes from their scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine to cure everything from asthma to reproductive problems; even cancer.
Experts aren’t sold on the healing power of pangolins, though. “Pangolin scales are made of the same stuff as your fingernails,” says Pepper at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Contrary to the beliefs of some, they hold no medicinal value.”
https://qz.com/874854/chinas-insatiable-thirst-for-pangolin-scales-is-fed-by-an-international-black-market/
This week, Chinese customs executed the largest-ever seizure of pangolin scales, confiscating 3.1 tons of them from smugglers. According to Chinese state media, the scales were hidden in a container arriving from Africa, and registered as timber. Customs officers discovered the scales—from about 7,500 pangolins—in 101 woven plastic bags hidden aboard the ship; they’re worth more than $2 million on the black market.
Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in China and Vietnam; in southern China, each animal can go for up to $1,000 in restaurants. They are also consumed as bush meat in many parts of Africa. But most of their worth comes from their scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine to cure everything from asthma to reproductive problems; even cancer.
Experts aren’t sold on the healing power of pangolins, though. “Pangolin scales are made of the same stuff as your fingernails,” says Pepper at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Contrary to the beliefs of some, they hold no medicinal value.”
https://qz.com/874854/chinas-insatiable-thirst-for-pangolin-scales-is-fed-by-an-international-black-market/
Advanced methods of mirror construction for exoplanet detection
Nice merchandise, but I am highly skeptical.
The ExoLife Finder, or ELF for short, will be the world’s first telescope to create surface maps of the nearby exoplanets, including Proxima b. ELF is a circular array of sixteen 5-meter (16.4 feet) mirrors and uses the thin “printed-mirror” technology that finding life signatures depends on. With a total diameter of about 25meters (82 feet), ELF is large enough to begin a dedicated program of imaging dozens of exoplanets within 25 light years of Earth and will enable a new field of exoplanetary and exolife research.
Nowhere is it stated what advantages ELF will have over the other giant telescopes being proposed/constructed that are already at much more advanced stages of technical and financial development. Well OK, it's got some new lighter mirrors, yay, but ELT will have a filled 30 m mirror whereas ELF will have a 25 m ring of mirrors i.e. with a great big hole in it.
Typical telescope mirrors are many centimeters thick and take a long time to polish. We have been developing a new way to make very large telescope mirrors by taking thin, inexpensive, fire-polished window glass and slumping it in a specialized kiln that allows us to make very accurately shaped paraboloids. Surprisingly, the fire-polishing process to create typical window glass makes it incredibly smooth. When we combine this with electronic "muscle" Electroactive Polymers, we can create mirrors that are never abrasively polished that are orders of magnitude smoother and lighter-weight than traditional large scale telescope mirrors.
OK, that's quite interesting.
Our team lead by Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina and Dr. Jeff Kuhn have created a unique algorithm that will be able to image these exoplanets and see things like continents, oceans, and life. Assuming we are looking at exoplanets similar to Earth, we will see in their atmospheres molecules like water (H₂O), oxygen (O), methane (CH₄), carbon dioxide (CO₂), and ozone (O₃), and on the surfaces - colonies of photosynthetic organisms or even thermal waste from civilizations not much more advanced than humans.
I don't see how that's possible. The diffraction limit will be about 100x greater than the size of Earth at the distance of Alpha Centauti, so imaging continents and oceans ? How ? Time to investigate the linked presentations...
EDIT : OK, the presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pec4CMijEh4&feature=youtu.be) is better. It's not direct imaging, it's a fancy reconstruction based on the albedo variation as the planet rotates (both around its own axis, if not tidally locked, and around its parent star). This works if you have enough signal to noise and contrast ratio, and enough data points (i.e. you need to observe the planet through its whole orbit, so results take years to achieve). Oddly they don't discuss the telescope requirements until near the end of the talk (~14 minutes), but this may be because the conference from which the talk comes. For Earth you'd be able to reconstruct the broad outlines of the continents, but we're still talking of images of only maybe a dozen or so pixels across. A 20m+ telescope that takes years to make an image of a few pixels - that I'm much less skeptical about. So I revise my status from "highly skeptical" to "highly cautious, but intrigued".
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exocube/exolife-finder-a-new-telescope-to-find-life-on-exo
The ExoLife Finder, or ELF for short, will be the world’s first telescope to create surface maps of the nearby exoplanets, including Proxima b. ELF is a circular array of sixteen 5-meter (16.4 feet) mirrors and uses the thin “printed-mirror” technology that finding life signatures depends on. With a total diameter of about 25meters (82 feet), ELF is large enough to begin a dedicated program of imaging dozens of exoplanets within 25 light years of Earth and will enable a new field of exoplanetary and exolife research.
Nowhere is it stated what advantages ELF will have over the other giant telescopes being proposed/constructed that are already at much more advanced stages of technical and financial development. Well OK, it's got some new lighter mirrors, yay, but ELT will have a filled 30 m mirror whereas ELF will have a 25 m ring of mirrors i.e. with a great big hole in it.
Typical telescope mirrors are many centimeters thick and take a long time to polish. We have been developing a new way to make very large telescope mirrors by taking thin, inexpensive, fire-polished window glass and slumping it in a specialized kiln that allows us to make very accurately shaped paraboloids. Surprisingly, the fire-polishing process to create typical window glass makes it incredibly smooth. When we combine this with electronic "muscle" Electroactive Polymers, we can create mirrors that are never abrasively polished that are orders of magnitude smoother and lighter-weight than traditional large scale telescope mirrors.
OK, that's quite interesting.
Our team lead by Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina and Dr. Jeff Kuhn have created a unique algorithm that will be able to image these exoplanets and see things like continents, oceans, and life. Assuming we are looking at exoplanets similar to Earth, we will see in their atmospheres molecules like water (H₂O), oxygen (O), methane (CH₄), carbon dioxide (CO₂), and ozone (O₃), and on the surfaces - colonies of photosynthetic organisms or even thermal waste from civilizations not much more advanced than humans.
I don't see how that's possible. The diffraction limit will be about 100x greater than the size of Earth at the distance of Alpha Centauti, so imaging continents and oceans ? How ? Time to investigate the linked presentations...
EDIT : OK, the presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pec4CMijEh4&feature=youtu.be) is better. It's not direct imaging, it's a fancy reconstruction based on the albedo variation as the planet rotates (both around its own axis, if not tidally locked, and around its parent star). This works if you have enough signal to noise and contrast ratio, and enough data points (i.e. you need to observe the planet through its whole orbit, so results take years to achieve). Oddly they don't discuss the telescope requirements until near the end of the talk (~14 minutes), but this may be because the conference from which the talk comes. For Earth you'd be able to reconstruct the broad outlines of the continents, but we're still talking of images of only maybe a dozen or so pixels across. A 20m+ telescope that takes years to make an image of a few pixels - that I'm much less skeptical about. So I revise my status from "highly skeptical" to "highly cautious, but intrigued".
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exocube/exolife-finder-a-new-telescope-to-find-life-on-exo
Escape violence by becoming a Viking, because irony
Hundreds come to recreate Viking culture - and take part in fierce, competitive battles. Many are drawn by a passion for history. But, for a significant number, it’s a way of escaping their past - a past scarred by violence.
The irony of escaping a violent past by pretending to be a Viking is headache-inducing. But then, this isn't about history. These Vikings are all about tolerance and diversity :
Qanun Bhatti is the chief trainer of the Ulflag Vikings in the UK. He suffered abuse as a child, when he was six years old. Growing up in London in the 80s and 90s, he says he was victimised for being Asian and Muslim, picked on at school and attacked by skinheads. Qanun believes joining the Vikings has healed him.
“Being able to let out my frustrations and aggression in a controlled manner is very beneficial for me.”
Qanun has experienced racism within the Viking world, too. People have commented that he should be playing the part of a slave, on account of the colour of his skin, he recalls. But according to Qanun the true Viking message, which the Jomsborg Vikings try to promote, is one of tolerance and diversity.
“Vikings were so curious about anything that wasn’t the norm, it was part of their special culture. They were inveterate explorers. If someone walked in and was a different skin colour, rather than being: ‘You are different to us, we are afraid,' they’d be like: 'Wow, who’s this? We want to know about this person because they are different to us.’ They were excited.”
They'd also have said words to the effect of, "hand over the gold or we'll rape your house and burn your family", or something. But meh, it seems to be having a positive effect. Can't argue with the evidence.
Norman Hewitt struggled for a long time to be accepted as Jomsborg’s first black Viking. His first job was to convince himself. “It’s not really my scene. I thought there weren't any black Vikings because we weren't taught anything like that back in school.”
In the early 90s in London, he was embroiled in the world of football hooliganism. He was persuaded by a friend to join the Jomsborg Vikings. This gave him a new focus and outlet for his physical aggression. On joining and doing some research, he decided to take the Arabic name of Bin Yusof, to reflect that Vikings mingled with North Africans.
Norman fights less these days, but remains an international training officer for the Jomsborg Vikings, where he is held in high esteem.
Igor Gorewicz has been organising the battles at the Wolin Festival in Poland since the late 1990s. He says he has seen it transform the lives of hundreds of men. The change can take effect after just a week of Viking martial training, he reckons.
The Viking code is all about creating strong men who know how to behave well, says Igor: It allows you to be a tough man, while still respecting others. It also allows someone to escape the baggage of their past because one's Viking reputation rests purely upon their actions in the Viking world.
“In all the cases I know, when they join our society, after a short time, they stopped talking bullshit.”
Look, if getting people to dress up in chain mail and hit each other with blunt swords helps generate a better society, then by God I shall buy front-row tickets.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/viking_club_where_men_fight_their_demons
The irony of escaping a violent past by pretending to be a Viking is headache-inducing. But then, this isn't about history. These Vikings are all about tolerance and diversity :
Qanun Bhatti is the chief trainer of the Ulflag Vikings in the UK. He suffered abuse as a child, when he was six years old. Growing up in London in the 80s and 90s, he says he was victimised for being Asian and Muslim, picked on at school and attacked by skinheads. Qanun believes joining the Vikings has healed him.
“Being able to let out my frustrations and aggression in a controlled manner is very beneficial for me.”
Qanun has experienced racism within the Viking world, too. People have commented that he should be playing the part of a slave, on account of the colour of his skin, he recalls. But according to Qanun the true Viking message, which the Jomsborg Vikings try to promote, is one of tolerance and diversity.
“Vikings were so curious about anything that wasn’t the norm, it was part of their special culture. They were inveterate explorers. If someone walked in and was a different skin colour, rather than being: ‘You are different to us, we are afraid,' they’d be like: 'Wow, who’s this? We want to know about this person because they are different to us.’ They were excited.”
They'd also have said words to the effect of, "hand over the gold or we'll rape your house and burn your family", or something. But meh, it seems to be having a positive effect. Can't argue with the evidence.
Norman Hewitt struggled for a long time to be accepted as Jomsborg’s first black Viking. His first job was to convince himself. “It’s not really my scene. I thought there weren't any black Vikings because we weren't taught anything like that back in school.”
In the early 90s in London, he was embroiled in the world of football hooliganism. He was persuaded by a friend to join the Jomsborg Vikings. This gave him a new focus and outlet for his physical aggression. On joining and doing some research, he decided to take the Arabic name of Bin Yusof, to reflect that Vikings mingled with North Africans.
Norman fights less these days, but remains an international training officer for the Jomsborg Vikings, where he is held in high esteem.
Igor Gorewicz has been organising the battles at the Wolin Festival in Poland since the late 1990s. He says he has seen it transform the lives of hundreds of men. The change can take effect after just a week of Viking martial training, he reckons.
The Viking code is all about creating strong men who know how to behave well, says Igor: It allows you to be a tough man, while still respecting others. It also allows someone to escape the baggage of their past because one's Viking reputation rests purely upon their actions in the Viking world.
“In all the cases I know, when they join our society, after a short time, they stopped talking bullshit.”
Look, if getting people to dress up in chain mail and hit each other with blunt swords helps generate a better society, then by God I shall buy front-row tickets.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/viking_club_where_men_fight_their_demons
Friday 6 October 2017
Civilization wasn't a mistake
I find much of this article wholly perverse and utterly alien to my way of thinking. It presents a very one-sided view of civilisation as nothing more than an elaborate but oppressive dictatorship; almost depicting taxes as worse than murder. The purpose of technology, down to fire and writing, is nothing but control. Civilisation was entirely built on the backs of slaves that served cruel elites. Technology is divorced from science with an absurd crudeness because the author fails utterly to define what science is. Keyne's quote about abandoning the love of money being a route to happiness is badly misinterpreted, or at least poorly chosen : the article says he thought happiness would come from more abundant wealth, but in the quote he he says very clearly that it's money perceived as social status that should be changed - a completely different condition !
I am not so sure the consensus on "the neolithic being a disaster for everyone who lived through it" is as strong as the article claims. Francis Pryor's Britain BC and Home (see also Paul Kriwaczek's Babylon, and many others I can't think of off the top of my head) certainly don't give that impression and nor do any of the other archaeologists he quotes. Of course it wouldn't have been very nice compared to what we're used to, and of course there would certainly have been plenty of horror stories in various places. But this universal disaster portrayed in the article ? I rather doubt it. Or more accurately, it concentrates heavily on Mesopotamia, which may be a problem.
Via Matt Hall.
Originally shared by Ancient History Encyclopedia
Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better? https://buff.ly/2ghlNCh
#prehistory #oped #ancient
https://buff.ly/2ghlNCh
I am not so sure the consensus on "the neolithic being a disaster for everyone who lived through it" is as strong as the article claims. Francis Pryor's Britain BC and Home (see also Paul Kriwaczek's Babylon, and many others I can't think of off the top of my head) certainly don't give that impression and nor do any of the other archaeologists he quotes. Of course it wouldn't have been very nice compared to what we're used to, and of course there would certainly have been plenty of horror stories in various places. But this universal disaster portrayed in the article ? I rather doubt it. Or more accurately, it concentrates heavily on Mesopotamia, which may be a problem.
Via Matt Hall.
Originally shared by Ancient History Encyclopedia
Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better? https://buff.ly/2ghlNCh
#prehistory #oped #ancient
https://buff.ly/2ghlNCh
Tesla to the rescue ?
If he'd like to throw in a few million to a beleaguered telescope while he's at it...
Renewable energy entrepreneur Elon Musk says he could rebuild Puerto Rico's shattered electrical infrastructure with his solar energy technology. The vast majority of the island territory remains without power, weeks after it was hit by Hurricane Maria.
On Twitter, Mr Musk said his technology, which powers several smaller islands, could be scaled up to work for Puerto Rico. The island's governor responded to Mr Musk with the message: "Let's talk".
"Do you want to show the world the power and scalability of your Tesla technologies? Puerto Rico could be that flagship project," the Governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41524220
Renewable energy entrepreneur Elon Musk says he could rebuild Puerto Rico's shattered electrical infrastructure with his solar energy technology. The vast majority of the island territory remains without power, weeks after it was hit by Hurricane Maria.
On Twitter, Mr Musk said his technology, which powers several smaller islands, could be scaled up to work for Puerto Rico. The island's governor responded to Mr Musk with the message: "Let's talk".
"Do you want to show the world the power and scalability of your Tesla technologies? Puerto Rico could be that flagship project," the Governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41524220
Exploring WWII shipwrecks in 3D
Very cool project.
New 3D images of one of the world's best known World War Two dive sites have been released to the public. British merchant steam ship SS Thistlegorm was hit by a German bomber in 1941 and lies on the bed of the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt. The Thistlegorm Project, led by the University of Nottingham, could help to preserve its valuable remains. Director Dr Jon Henderson said the shipwreck deserved to be seen by the wider public.
Dr Henderson, from the university's School of Archaeology, said: "The thing about underwater sites and the importance of underwater cultural heritage is that the only people who've ever seen it are divers. However, we are now at a point where we have the technology to reconstruct these sites."
The university said the photogrammetric survey was one of the largest ever carried out on a shipwreck, with 24,307 high resolution pictures taken during 12 dives at the site. The university said the underwater archaeological project was one of the first to utilise 360 video, which will allow people to experience what it is like to dive to the wreck.
Dr Henderson said the wreck had no legal protection and needed to be properly recorded. "Carrying out a baseline survey (such as this) of exactly what's there is the first step in doing that," he said. "We can then chart changes over time and look at what we need to protect."
The 3D model can be viewed here :
http://thethistlegormproject.com/3d-photogrammetry-survey/
And the 360 video here :
http://thethistlegormproject.com/360-underwater-video/
Wish I could get this working on my headset...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-41511171
New 3D images of one of the world's best known World War Two dive sites have been released to the public. British merchant steam ship SS Thistlegorm was hit by a German bomber in 1941 and lies on the bed of the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt. The Thistlegorm Project, led by the University of Nottingham, could help to preserve its valuable remains. Director Dr Jon Henderson said the shipwreck deserved to be seen by the wider public.
Dr Henderson, from the university's School of Archaeology, said: "The thing about underwater sites and the importance of underwater cultural heritage is that the only people who've ever seen it are divers. However, we are now at a point where we have the technology to reconstruct these sites."
The university said the photogrammetric survey was one of the largest ever carried out on a shipwreck, with 24,307 high resolution pictures taken during 12 dives at the site. The university said the underwater archaeological project was one of the first to utilise 360 video, which will allow people to experience what it is like to dive to the wreck.
Dr Henderson said the wreck had no legal protection and needed to be properly recorded. "Carrying out a baseline survey (such as this) of exactly what's there is the first step in doing that," he said. "We can then chart changes over time and look at what we need to protect."
The 3D model can be viewed here :
http://thethistlegormproject.com/3d-photogrammetry-survey/
And the 360 video here :
http://thethistlegormproject.com/360-underwater-video/
Wish I could get this working on my headset...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-41511171
NASA's plan to visit Mars in 1976
One path would see moon missions continue more or less indefinitely, growing ever more capable and culminating in a permanent lunar base in the 1980s. Alternately, NASA might repurpose Apollo hardware to build, launch, and maintain an evolutionary series of space stations in Earth orbit.
The space station path appeared pedestrian compared to the lunar base path, yet it offered great potential for long-term future exploration. This was because it promised to prepare astronauts and spacecraft for long-duration missions in interplanetary space. In 1965-1966, NASA advance planners envisioned a series of Earth-orbiting space workshops based on the Apollo LM and the Saturn IB rocket S-IVB stage. Apollo CSMs would ferry up to six astronauts at a time to the workshops for progressively longer stays.
In keeping with the evolutionary approach, the first piloted voyage beyond the moon might have been a Mars flyby with no piloted Mars landing. The piloted Mars flyby spacecraft, which would have carried a cargo of robotic Mars probes, would have been built around the Mission Module tested in Earth orbit. The mission might have commenced as early as late 1975, when an opportunity to launch a minimum-energy Mars flyby was due to occur.
As they raced past Mars in early 1976, the four flyby astronauts would have released automated probes and turned a suite of sensors mounted on their spacecraft toward Mars and its irregularly shaped moons Phobos and Deimos. They would have reached their greatest distance from the Sun in the Asteroid Belt, so asteroid encounters would have been a possibility. As their Sun-centered elliptical orbit brought them back to Earth's vicinity in 1977, they would have separated in an Apollo CM-derived Earth-return capsule and reentered Earth's atmosphere.
Dammit, that's a better vision than any space station.
http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2017/09/a-new-step-in-spaceflight-evolution-to.html
The space station path appeared pedestrian compared to the lunar base path, yet it offered great potential for long-term future exploration. This was because it promised to prepare astronauts and spacecraft for long-duration missions in interplanetary space. In 1965-1966, NASA advance planners envisioned a series of Earth-orbiting space workshops based on the Apollo LM and the Saturn IB rocket S-IVB stage. Apollo CSMs would ferry up to six astronauts at a time to the workshops for progressively longer stays.
In keeping with the evolutionary approach, the first piloted voyage beyond the moon might have been a Mars flyby with no piloted Mars landing. The piloted Mars flyby spacecraft, which would have carried a cargo of robotic Mars probes, would have been built around the Mission Module tested in Earth orbit. The mission might have commenced as early as late 1975, when an opportunity to launch a minimum-energy Mars flyby was due to occur.
As they raced past Mars in early 1976, the four flyby astronauts would have released automated probes and turned a suite of sensors mounted on their spacecraft toward Mars and its irregularly shaped moons Phobos and Deimos. They would have reached their greatest distance from the Sun in the Asteroid Belt, so asteroid encounters would have been a possibility. As their Sun-centered elliptical orbit brought them back to Earth's vicinity in 1977, they would have separated in an Apollo CM-derived Earth-return capsule and reentered Earth's atmosphere.
Dammit, that's a better vision than any space station.
http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2017/09/a-new-step-in-spaceflight-evolution-to.html
May is looking very tired
I suspect May will limp on for a little while, but this is probably the beginning of the end.
Theresa May has said she has the "full support of her cabinet" after a former party chairman said there should be a Conservative leadership contest. The PM insisted she was providing the "calm leadership" the country needed. There has been leadership speculation since Mrs May's decision to call a snap general election backfired and the Conservatives lost their majority.
Grant Shapps says about 30 Tory MPs back his call for a leadership contest in the wake of the general election results and conference mishaps. But his claims prompted a backlash from loyal backbenchers, several of whom called on him to "shut up".
The Conservative conference this week was meant to be a chance to assert her authority over the party, but her big speech was plagued by a series of mishaps, as she struggled with a persistent cough, was interrupted by a prankster and some of the letters fell off the conference stage backdrop behind her.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-41519601
Theresa May has said she has the "full support of her cabinet" after a former party chairman said there should be a Conservative leadership contest. The PM insisted she was providing the "calm leadership" the country needed. There has been leadership speculation since Mrs May's decision to call a snap general election backfired and the Conservatives lost their majority.
Grant Shapps says about 30 Tory MPs back his call for a leadership contest in the wake of the general election results and conference mishaps. But his claims prompted a backlash from loyal backbenchers, several of whom called on him to "shut up".
The Conservative conference this week was meant to be a chance to assert her authority over the party, but her big speech was plagued by a series of mishaps, as she struggled with a persistent cough, was interrupted by a prankster and some of the letters fell off the conference stage backdrop behind her.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-41519601
Fighting hate with nasty truths
Mr Drumpf was unimpressed with Mrs Cruz’s intervention and lashed out on Twitter. He attacked the mayor’s "poor leadership" and also suggested she was being "nasty" to him at the behest of his Democratic opponents.
Speaking to Univision, she wore a T-shirt with the word “nasty” printed on while accusing Mr Drumpf of lacking “common courtesy” and labelling him a “miscommunicator-in-chief”.
“What is really nasty is that anyone would turn their back on the Puerto Rican people. When someone is annoyed by someone claiming lack of drinking water, lack of medicine for the sick, and lack of food for the hungry, that person has problems too severe to be explained in an interview.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/05/nasty-mayor-matching-president-trump-aggressive-media-game/
Speaking to Univision, she wore a T-shirt with the word “nasty” printed on while accusing Mr Drumpf of lacking “common courtesy” and labelling him a “miscommunicator-in-chief”.
“What is really nasty is that anyone would turn their back on the Puerto Rican people. When someone is annoyed by someone claiming lack of drinking water, lack of medicine for the sick, and lack of food for the hungry, that person has problems too severe to be explained in an interview.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/05/nasty-mayor-matching-president-trump-aggressive-media-game/
Let's make a battery of capacitors, just to annoy grammar Nazis
A new type of battery could let people charge gadgets, appliances and electric vehicles in seconds. British start-up Zap&Go has developed carbon-ion supercapacitors that allow rapid charging. The current version is not able to store much power, but the company hopes future generations will store much more.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-41419838/carbon-ion-battery-could-mean-rapid-charging
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-41419838/carbon-ion-battery-could-mean-rapid-charging
Thursday 5 October 2017
The dark matter radio
That's a new one on me.
The dark matter radio makes use of a bizarre concept of quantum mechanics known as wave-particle duality: Every particle can also behave like a wave.Take, for example, the photon: the massless fundamental particle that carries the electromagnetic force. Streams of them make up electromagnetic radiation, or light, which we typically describe as waves—including radio waves.
The dark matter radio will search for dark matter waves associated with two particular dark matter candidates. It could find hidden photons—hypothetical cousins of photons with a small mass. Or it could find axions, which scientists think can be produced out of light and transform back into it in the presence of a magnetic field.
At its heart is an electric circuit with an adjustable resonant frequency. If the device were tuned to a frequency that matched the frequency of a dark matter particle wave, the circuit would resonate. Scientists could measure the frequency of the resonance, which would reveal the mass of the dark matter particle. The idea is to do a frequency sweep by slowly moving through the different frequencies, as if tuning a radio from one end of the dial to the other.
“Shielding the radio from unwanted radiation is very important and also quite challenging,” Irwin says. “In fact, we would need a several-yards-thick layer of copper to do so. Fortunately we can achieve the same effect with a thin layer of superconducting metal.”
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/a-radio-for-dark-matter?utm_source=main_feed_click&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=main_feed&utm_content=click
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/a-radio-for-dark-matter?utm_source=main_feed_click&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=main_feed&utm_content=click
The dark matter radio makes use of a bizarre concept of quantum mechanics known as wave-particle duality: Every particle can also behave like a wave.Take, for example, the photon: the massless fundamental particle that carries the electromagnetic force. Streams of them make up electromagnetic radiation, or light, which we typically describe as waves—including radio waves.
The dark matter radio will search for dark matter waves associated with two particular dark matter candidates. It could find hidden photons—hypothetical cousins of photons with a small mass. Or it could find axions, which scientists think can be produced out of light and transform back into it in the presence of a magnetic field.
At its heart is an electric circuit with an adjustable resonant frequency. If the device were tuned to a frequency that matched the frequency of a dark matter particle wave, the circuit would resonate. Scientists could measure the frequency of the resonance, which would reveal the mass of the dark matter particle. The idea is to do a frequency sweep by slowly moving through the different frequencies, as if tuning a radio from one end of the dial to the other.
“Shielding the radio from unwanted radiation is very important and also quite challenging,” Irwin says. “In fact, we would need a several-yards-thick layer of copper to do so. Fortunately we can achieve the same effect with a thin layer of superconducting metal.”
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/a-radio-for-dark-matter?utm_source=main_feed_click&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=main_feed&utm_content=click
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/a-radio-for-dark-matter?utm_source=main_feed_click&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=main_feed&utm_content=click
The mysterious global cooling of 536 AD
Interesting, detailed read.
Something traumatic appears to have affected the world in around the year 536 CE. The five reports that survive for this "536 event" say nothing of an eruption. They merely describe in vague terms a sort of unusual sun dimming or atmospheric veiling. The Roman statesman Cassiodorus, for example, describes a dim moon, and a sun that lost its "wonted light" and appeared "bluish," as if in "transitory eclipse throughout the whole year."
Mediterranean texts describe the 536 event as 12 or perhaps 18 months long, but Baillie surveyed trees from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia and the U.S.A. that clearly show that the event lasted for roughly a decade. Tree rings also demonstrate that the 536 event was not a Byzantine oddity. Rather, it was vast: hemispheric or even global. Trees also reveal not one steady stretch of poor growth but a marked departure from normal growing conditions, with acute troughs and peaks. Multiple tree ring temperature reconstructions have found several of the coldest growing seasons (typically June-August) of the last two (or, in some cases, seven-and-a-half) thousand years fall within the sixth-century downturn.
The "Baillie bump," the forward-pushing of Larsen's eruptions (and now most first millennium eruptions detected in ice), placed major volcanism at each of the cooling episodes identified in tree ring data. Michael Sigl and a team of scientists recently included these results within an important synthesis of glacial volcanic eruption chronologies. It is still not clear which volcanoes erupted in 535/536 and 539/540 CE, but a cluster of volcanoes seem to have caused the downturn.
It is more difficult now to diminish the downturn or doubt that it triggered a marked, though temporary, demographic contraction in many regions of the world through its effects on plants. However, minimalist readings remain popular... A reluctance to engage with the palaeoclimate sciences and a willingness to write nature out of history have allowed historians to dismiss the significance of the 536 event for contemporary peoples.
Recently, more scientifically-minded historians, such as Michael McCormick, have offered more appropriate (if maximalist-leaning) narratives, in which cooling had moderate implications for sixth-century peoples. A vast, near-unparalleled environmental event need not have cataclysmic consequences to warrant study. Histories of resilience and adaptation to sudden and dramatic climate change should be as important and intriguing as histories of failure and collapse. This is clear in new work on the effects of the downturn, from the Yucatán to Fennoscandia, which emphasizes coping strategies and a certain hardiness in those that lived beneath the veils.
It should be emphasized that large eruptions do not simply chill the world. The effects on weather and climate are non-uniform. For instance, major near-equatorial volcanism is known to cause winter warming in North America, Europe, and Russia, but winter cooling in Western and Eastern Asia. Extratropical Northern Hemispheric volcanism cools hot and cold seasons alike. Seasonality matters too. That high latitude eruptions seem to be more impactful if they occur in summer could indicate that the 535/536 eruption happened in that season.
A few contemporary reports of despair and devastation seem hyperbolic. Did Italian mothers really eat their daughters? Did three quarters of the population north of the Yellow river really die off? Yet neither they, nor less-sensational descriptions, should be written off as lacking any grounding in the immediate post-eruption reality. Most sixth-century societies were able to absorb one bad year, but very few were able to absorb two or three. Back-to-back(-to-back) years of poor growing conditions, caused by a sharp cooling of average temperatures, were certain to take a toll.
http://www.historicalclimatology.com/blog/something-cooled-the-world-in-the-sixth-century-what-was-it
Something traumatic appears to have affected the world in around the year 536 CE. The five reports that survive for this "536 event" say nothing of an eruption. They merely describe in vague terms a sort of unusual sun dimming or atmospheric veiling. The Roman statesman Cassiodorus, for example, describes a dim moon, and a sun that lost its "wonted light" and appeared "bluish," as if in "transitory eclipse throughout the whole year."
Mediterranean texts describe the 536 event as 12 or perhaps 18 months long, but Baillie surveyed trees from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia and the U.S.A. that clearly show that the event lasted for roughly a decade. Tree rings also demonstrate that the 536 event was not a Byzantine oddity. Rather, it was vast: hemispheric or even global. Trees also reveal not one steady stretch of poor growth but a marked departure from normal growing conditions, with acute troughs and peaks. Multiple tree ring temperature reconstructions have found several of the coldest growing seasons (typically June-August) of the last two (or, in some cases, seven-and-a-half) thousand years fall within the sixth-century downturn.
The "Baillie bump," the forward-pushing of Larsen's eruptions (and now most first millennium eruptions detected in ice), placed major volcanism at each of the cooling episodes identified in tree ring data. Michael Sigl and a team of scientists recently included these results within an important synthesis of glacial volcanic eruption chronologies. It is still not clear which volcanoes erupted in 535/536 and 539/540 CE, but a cluster of volcanoes seem to have caused the downturn.
It is more difficult now to diminish the downturn or doubt that it triggered a marked, though temporary, demographic contraction in many regions of the world through its effects on plants. However, minimalist readings remain popular... A reluctance to engage with the palaeoclimate sciences and a willingness to write nature out of history have allowed historians to dismiss the significance of the 536 event for contemporary peoples.
Recently, more scientifically-minded historians, such as Michael McCormick, have offered more appropriate (if maximalist-leaning) narratives, in which cooling had moderate implications for sixth-century peoples. A vast, near-unparalleled environmental event need not have cataclysmic consequences to warrant study. Histories of resilience and adaptation to sudden and dramatic climate change should be as important and intriguing as histories of failure and collapse. This is clear in new work on the effects of the downturn, from the Yucatán to Fennoscandia, which emphasizes coping strategies and a certain hardiness in those that lived beneath the veils.
It should be emphasized that large eruptions do not simply chill the world. The effects on weather and climate are non-uniform. For instance, major near-equatorial volcanism is known to cause winter warming in North America, Europe, and Russia, but winter cooling in Western and Eastern Asia. Extratropical Northern Hemispheric volcanism cools hot and cold seasons alike. Seasonality matters too. That high latitude eruptions seem to be more impactful if they occur in summer could indicate that the 535/536 eruption happened in that season.
A few contemporary reports of despair and devastation seem hyperbolic. Did Italian mothers really eat their daughters? Did three quarters of the population north of the Yellow river really die off? Yet neither they, nor less-sensational descriptions, should be written off as lacking any grounding in the immediate post-eruption reality. Most sixth-century societies were able to absorb one bad year, but very few were able to absorb two or three. Back-to-back(-to-back) years of poor growing conditions, caused by a sharp cooling of average temperatures, were certain to take a toll.
http://www.historicalclimatology.com/blog/something-cooled-the-world-in-the-sixth-century-what-was-it
Nick Clegg is a ruthless pragmatist
Well this is confusing, even by the standards of the times.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg says people should consider joining Labour in an attempt to prevent Brexit from happening. In his new book, Mr Clegg said it was "a time of national emergency" and he told people worried about Brexit to "make your voice heard". He also said joining the Conservatives was "another route to make your views felt". Mr Clegg, the former deputy PM, lost his seat in June's general election.
"At a time of national emergency, and for as long as Parliament is dominated by Labour and Conservative MPs, it is undoubtedly true that what happens within the two larger establishment parties is of the greatest importance. So if you can't stomach joining the Labour Party, if you are ideologically inclined in a Conservative direction in any event and if you also believe that Brexit is the issue of our times, then joining the Conservatives is another route to make your views felt."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-41510253
Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg says people should consider joining Labour in an attempt to prevent Brexit from happening. In his new book, Mr Clegg said it was "a time of national emergency" and he told people worried about Brexit to "make your voice heard". He also said joining the Conservatives was "another route to make your views felt". Mr Clegg, the former deputy PM, lost his seat in June's general election.
"At a time of national emergency, and for as long as Parliament is dominated by Labour and Conservative MPs, it is undoubtedly true that what happens within the two larger establishment parties is of the greatest importance. So if you can't stomach joining the Labour Party, if you are ideologically inclined in a Conservative direction in any event and if you also believe that Brexit is the issue of our times, then joining the Conservatives is another route to make your views felt."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-41510253
The problems of statistical errors
I know nothing of forensics, though I will add a few related points.
The first is that in my own field I see people making extremely strong statistical claims based on somewhat dodgy data. For example there's this claim that satellite galaxies orbit their hosts in thin planes, which is not predicted by the standard model. Based on analysis of conventional models, claims have been made that the odds of the observations (especially of the Milky Way and our neighbour Andromeda) matching reality are something like 1 in 10,000. And I'm sure this is correct if you take it at face value and don't dig any deeper.
The problem is that there are huge uncertainties here at every level : the simulations don't take into account the gas physics, the observational uncertainties in distances (which strongly affects the narrowness of the planes), or the likelihood of galaxies interacting which has been shown can cause planes of satellites to narrow significantly. Not to mention that 1 in 10,000 isn't very impressive when you've got billions of galaxies. Or that galaxies in close proximity to each other are likely to be born in similar environments, and if these are (for whatever reason) more susceptible to forming planes, then the statistical probability that they're similar is based on a faulty assumption that they're drawn from a random population. And rather than saying, "let's see if there's some physical mechanism within the existing model that can explain the data", of which many have already been published, authors sometimes say, "the whole model must be fundamentally flawed".
This is fine in extragalactic astronomy where the worst that can happen is that one author will argue with another. Obviously if this happens in forensics then the consequences are very much worse. But I can easily believe that it could happen and I would understand why.
The second point is that I've come to the opinion that the formal error equation is bollocks. As an observer, I simply don't believe error bars that are smaller than the plotted data points - or worse, error bars that are smaller than the observed scatter when there's a clear underlying trend. In my experience, systematic effects always dominate. This doesn't mean that the results are wrong or the claims are wrong, just that I'd be automatically wary of claims of extremely high confidence in the results (with many caveats, depending on the particular data and claims being made). Not only do observers make mistakes, but sometimes the intrinsic scatter is high anyway.
The third point, which is understandable that Oliver doesn't mention, is that probability is hard. Intuitively, a test with a 99% success rate which produces a match implies there's a 1% chance that the match was false (because of the test limitations). But in reality, this simply isn't the case. : test limitations are not the only factor ! The test isn't meaningless, it's just nowhere near as good as you might think (honestly, I still have a hard time getting my head around this one) :
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2008/02/how-to-think-critically-vi/
So for all these reasons, I'm inclined to find this report credible. The chance that a test is correct is much more complicated than whether the test works. The test could function just fine and still get the wrong result, both because of the nature of statistical probability and because of not properly considering alternatives. You don't have to throw out the forensics, but you probably want to bring in a statistician too. And perhaps it would be worth considering (if this isn't done already, perhaps it is but the end section of the report suggests otherwise) giving independent forensic data to independent labs and not telling them the context of what they're dealing with. Don't tell them to identify the killer, just tell them to establish if two samples match with no other information at all. And give them also "decoy" samples so they have absolutely no preconceptions about whether a match is good or bad at all.
That's my two cents. But in keeping with the "I'm not a scientist, but..." fallacy, since I know nothing of forensics I may be talking out of my backside here. Perhaps this report is overly-selective and I'm misapplying my own experiences. The only correct way to finish the sentence, "I'm not an expert in..." is, "so therefore you shouldn't weight my opinion as seriously as an expert." Which in this case might not be a forensic scientist, but someone who's conducted large, long-term studies of the judicial system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScmJvmzDcG0
The first is that in my own field I see people making extremely strong statistical claims based on somewhat dodgy data. For example there's this claim that satellite galaxies orbit their hosts in thin planes, which is not predicted by the standard model. Based on analysis of conventional models, claims have been made that the odds of the observations (especially of the Milky Way and our neighbour Andromeda) matching reality are something like 1 in 10,000. And I'm sure this is correct if you take it at face value and don't dig any deeper.
The problem is that there are huge uncertainties here at every level : the simulations don't take into account the gas physics, the observational uncertainties in distances (which strongly affects the narrowness of the planes), or the likelihood of galaxies interacting which has been shown can cause planes of satellites to narrow significantly. Not to mention that 1 in 10,000 isn't very impressive when you've got billions of galaxies. Or that galaxies in close proximity to each other are likely to be born in similar environments, and if these are (for whatever reason) more susceptible to forming planes, then the statistical probability that they're similar is based on a faulty assumption that they're drawn from a random population. And rather than saying, "let's see if there's some physical mechanism within the existing model that can explain the data", of which many have already been published, authors sometimes say, "the whole model must be fundamentally flawed".
This is fine in extragalactic astronomy where the worst that can happen is that one author will argue with another. Obviously if this happens in forensics then the consequences are very much worse. But I can easily believe that it could happen and I would understand why.
The second point is that I've come to the opinion that the formal error equation is bollocks. As an observer, I simply don't believe error bars that are smaller than the plotted data points - or worse, error bars that are smaller than the observed scatter when there's a clear underlying trend. In my experience, systematic effects always dominate. This doesn't mean that the results are wrong or the claims are wrong, just that I'd be automatically wary of claims of extremely high confidence in the results (with many caveats, depending on the particular data and claims being made). Not only do observers make mistakes, but sometimes the intrinsic scatter is high anyway.
The third point, which is understandable that Oliver doesn't mention, is that probability is hard. Intuitively, a test with a 99% success rate which produces a match implies there's a 1% chance that the match was false (because of the test limitations). But in reality, this simply isn't the case. : test limitations are not the only factor ! The test isn't meaningless, it's just nowhere near as good as you might think (honestly, I still have a hard time getting my head around this one) :
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2008/02/how-to-think-critically-vi/
So for all these reasons, I'm inclined to find this report credible. The chance that a test is correct is much more complicated than whether the test works. The test could function just fine and still get the wrong result, both because of the nature of statistical probability and because of not properly considering alternatives. You don't have to throw out the forensics, but you probably want to bring in a statistician too. And perhaps it would be worth considering (if this isn't done already, perhaps it is but the end section of the report suggests otherwise) giving independent forensic data to independent labs and not telling them the context of what they're dealing with. Don't tell them to identify the killer, just tell them to establish if two samples match with no other information at all. And give them also "decoy" samples so they have absolutely no preconceptions about whether a match is good or bad at all.
That's my two cents. But in keeping with the "I'm not a scientist, but..." fallacy, since I know nothing of forensics I may be talking out of my backside here. Perhaps this report is overly-selective and I'm misapplying my own experiences. The only correct way to finish the sentence, "I'm not an expert in..." is, "so therefore you shouldn't weight my opinion as seriously as an expert." Which in this case might not be a forensic scientist, but someone who's conducted large, long-term studies of the judicial system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScmJvmzDcG0
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