Pretty engaging so far. Sort of like Game of Thrones if you took all the magic away. Does have a few pacing issues and people like interrupting each other, and the soundtrack is not to my taste, but it's very watchable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6j5bDoga9Y
Monday, 2 November 2015
Work like a Swede
"The truth" appears to be that they're a good thing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34677949
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34677949
The LHC is super cheap
"The LHC cost each British citizen £1.65 in 2015. I’ll bet you spend more on peanuts. Cancer research comes to about £2.80 per person, yet cancer costs us £250 per person per year. That’s not very good accounting. We each are taxed around £134 on all publicly funded research per year, equivalent to only 0.44% of GDP. This is the lowest level of investment of any of the G8 countries. If your measure is Nobel prizes, then we have more in the sciences than all bar America. The comprehensive spending review looms just over the horizon, and the science budget is set, like so many other public endeavours, to be cut by up to 40%."
"For me there is no conflict between the arts and science, we need and thrive on both. But here’s the rub: art blossoms when economies are strong, and doesn’t itself generate great wealth. Pure scientific research is a public investment and builds economies. Cutting the science budget is pruning the roots of a tree."
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
By Dr Adam Rutherford
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/01/science-is-vital-british-legacy-contact-mp
"For me there is no conflict between the arts and science, we need and thrive on both. But here’s the rub: art blossoms when economies are strong, and doesn’t itself generate great wealth. Pure scientific research is a public investment and builds economies. Cutting the science budget is pruning the roots of a tree."
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
By Dr Adam Rutherford
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/01/science-is-vital-british-legacy-contact-mp
""Today's announcement represents an important landmark in thetransition of Reaction Engines from a company that...
""Today's announcement represents an important landmark in the transition of Reaction Engines from a company that has been focused on the research and testing of enabling technologies for the Sabre engine to one that is now focused on the development and testing of the world's first Sabre engine," said Mark Thomas, managing director of Reaction Engines."
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34694935
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34694935
The cult of ignorance
"English unfortunately doesn’t have a precise word for the German “Fachidiot,” a narrowly specialized person accomplished in his own field but a blithering idiot outside it. In any case, a surgeon is basically a skilled auto mechanic who is not bothered by the sight of blood and palpitating organs... We need the surgeon’s skills on pain of agonizing death, and reward him commensurately, but that does not make him a Voltaire."
http://billmoyers.com/2015/10/29/the-gop-and-the-rise-of-anti-knowledge/#at_pco=cfd-1.0
http://billmoyers.com/2015/10/29/the-gop-and-the-rise-of-anti-knowledge/#at_pco=cfd-1.0
Sunday, 1 November 2015
Science is in bad shape, apparently
I'm cautiously skeptical, but it's good to listen.
"Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
...failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. [JAC: These are studies in which exposure to a stimulus before taking a test can dramatically affect the results of that test.] Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.
Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. [JAC: Many experiments, particularly in organismal biology, are not repeated, nor form the basis of subsequent research. And the dodgy results can be seen by looking at obvious errors in published papers—papers that are not withdrawn or corrected.
...consider 1,000 hypotheses being tested of which just 100 are true (see chart). Studies with a power of 0.8 will find 80 of them, missing 20 because of false negatives. Of the 900 hypotheses that are wrong, 5%—that is, 45 of them—will look right because of type I errors. Add the false positives to the 80 true positives and you have 125 positive results, fully a third of which are specious. If you dropped the statistical power from 0.8 to 0.4, which would seem realistic for many fields, you would still have 45 false positives but only 40 true positives. More than half your positive results would be wrong.
John Bohannon, a biologist at Harvard, recently submitted a pseudonymous paper on the effects of a chemical derived from lichen on cancer cells to 304 journals describing themselves as using peer review. An unusual move; but it was an unusual paper, concocted wholesale and stuffed with clangers in study design, analysis and interpretation of results. Receiving this dog’s dinner from a fictitious researcher at a made up university, 157 of the journals accepted it for publication.Dr Bohannon’s sting was directed at the lower tier of academic journals. But in a classic 1998 study Fiona Godlee, editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal, sent an article containing eight deliberate mistakes in study design, analysis and interpretation to more than 200 of the BMJ’s regular reviewers. Not one picked out all the mistakes. On average, they reported fewer than two; some did not spot any.
I find this next one very disturbing (my emphasis):
Fraud is very likely second to incompetence in generating erroneous results, though it is hard to tell for certain. Dr Fanelli has looked at 21 different surveys of academics (mostly in the biomedical sciences but also in civil engineering, chemistry and economics) carried out between 1987 and 2008. Only 2% of respondents admitted falsifying or fabricating data, but 28% of respondents claimed to know of colleagues who engaged in questionable research practices.
And one more, which is pretty disturbing as well:
Christine Laine, the editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, told the peer-review congress in Chicago that five years ago about 60% of researchers said they would share their raw data if asked; now just 45% do. Journals’ growing insistence that at least some raw data be made available seems to count for little: a recent review by Dr Ioannidis which showed that only 143 of 351 randomly selected papers published in the world’s 50 leading journals and covered by some data-sharing policy actually complied."
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/science-is-in-bad-shape/
"Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
...failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. [JAC: These are studies in which exposure to a stimulus before taking a test can dramatically affect the results of that test.] Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.
Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. [JAC: Many experiments, particularly in organismal biology, are not repeated, nor form the basis of subsequent research. And the dodgy results can be seen by looking at obvious errors in published papers—papers that are not withdrawn or corrected.
...consider 1,000 hypotheses being tested of which just 100 are true (see chart). Studies with a power of 0.8 will find 80 of them, missing 20 because of false negatives. Of the 900 hypotheses that are wrong, 5%—that is, 45 of them—will look right because of type I errors. Add the false positives to the 80 true positives and you have 125 positive results, fully a third of which are specious. If you dropped the statistical power from 0.8 to 0.4, which would seem realistic for many fields, you would still have 45 false positives but only 40 true positives. More than half your positive results would be wrong.
John Bohannon, a biologist at Harvard, recently submitted a pseudonymous paper on the effects of a chemical derived from lichen on cancer cells to 304 journals describing themselves as using peer review. An unusual move; but it was an unusual paper, concocted wholesale and stuffed with clangers in study design, analysis and interpretation of results. Receiving this dog’s dinner from a fictitious researcher at a made up university, 157 of the journals accepted it for publication.Dr Bohannon’s sting was directed at the lower tier of academic journals. But in a classic 1998 study Fiona Godlee, editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal, sent an article containing eight deliberate mistakes in study design, analysis and interpretation to more than 200 of the BMJ’s regular reviewers. Not one picked out all the mistakes. On average, they reported fewer than two; some did not spot any.
I find this next one very disturbing (my emphasis):
Fraud is very likely second to incompetence in generating erroneous results, though it is hard to tell for certain. Dr Fanelli has looked at 21 different surveys of academics (mostly in the biomedical sciences but also in civil engineering, chemistry and economics) carried out between 1987 and 2008. Only 2% of respondents admitted falsifying or fabricating data, but 28% of respondents claimed to know of colleagues who engaged in questionable research practices.
And one more, which is pretty disturbing as well:
Christine Laine, the editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, told the peer-review congress in Chicago that five years ago about 60% of researchers said they would share their raw data if asked; now just 45% do. Journals’ growing insistence that at least some raw data be made available seems to count for little: a recent review by Dr Ioannidis which showed that only 143 of 351 randomly selected papers published in the world’s 50 leading journals and covered by some data-sharing policy actually complied."
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/science-is-in-bad-shape/
Saturday, 31 October 2015
Stock response to conspiracy theorists
In which Christopher Butler deals with conspiracy theories really quite superbly. Original thread :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChristopherButler/posts/862PCsRM3S8
His comment (shared with kind permission) :
I'm going to put this as kindly as I can: your brain has been hijacked by what might best be described as an aggressive virus of the mind. And I understand this very well because to be really honest, I used to be very deep into to this kind of shit.
And it is very well polished, very rehearsed, very attractive mounds of obfuscating bullshit.
Consider this a kind of confession to the people who follow me on G+. They may be a little surprised by this, but in much the same way that the testimony of an ex-holy roller/faith healer who finally sees reason can be illuminating, maybe this will help somebody understand why the conspiracy-bullshit paranoia is so hard to shake off once it takes hold of an otherwise sound mind.
Long story short(er): I was very into and excited by all things conspiracy, weird, paranormal, etc. For years and years. I read everything. I watched everything. I talked to everyone.
Skipping to the end...
Back in the earlier days of podcasting, I had a short lived but popular little podcast called The Noosphere, and it dealt with aliens, UFOs, monsters, demons, conspiracy, etc. We had pretty solid guests (people you've heard of in the 'conspiracy' genre) and despite it being a ridiculously long show (around 2 hours), people seemed to love it.
You have no reason to believe me (because skepticism rightly dictates that if I make a claim, you're not really compelled to just take my word for it), but the truth is that I'm fairly confident that there is no 'new world order facts' or 'history' (including what you posted above) that I haven't encountered. You've no obligation to believe it, but I've probably forgotten more of this Alex Jones/ Jim Marrs / "they're comin to get us!" bullshit than you're ever going to know.
In other words, you're not going to "out-conspiracy-nut" me...or at least what I used to be. *I have heard everything you can imagine.* Not a word of your above comment was new to me. At all.
Talking to a lot of people who believe a lot of very strange things, I slowly developed a kind of model in my head that I called "The Conspiracy Pool" (or sometimes "the Paranormal Pool"). This Pool is fun to hang out in. The people who hang out around the pool are surprisingly genial to everybody else at the pool...because if you're at the pool you feel like you have access to or awareness of some hidden agenda of the government/the universe/god/the devil/whatever that makes you special and makes you the underdog. Its like a brotherhood. Everyone not at the pool is a muggle. Its a marketplace of ideas and theories and interconnecting gobbledeegook. I remember one guy claimed he was a dolphin/human hybrid, for fucks sake. Its a blast and all seems very serious when you're in the pool.
But what it also does is slowly chip away at your critical thinking skills.
The beginning of the end for me was talking to a geologist who insisted that there was evidence that there were nuclear weapons being used in ancient times. This was a man with a doctorate in geophysics. His evidence didn't make sense to me (I'm not a scientist, but I've been a very enthusiastic amateur my entire life and I'm more than a little informed when it comes to general science) Who am I to argue with an expert in his field?
But it turns out he was dead fucking wrong. I did the homework, and not a single thing he said did not have an infinitely better explanation than some high tech ancient society lobbing nukes at each other.
So the choice was to believe that there was an elaborate conspiracy of science to mislead me...or this guy had a deeply felt conviction so strong that he allowed it influence his ability to use logic. It was the latter, of course.
Here's the thing, man: there are actual conspiracies. History has shown that people conspire for nefarious ends. People suck sometimes. And a stopped clock is right twice a day. Yes, Project Paperclip brought Nazis into the US after WWII. The choice to do that is...arguable. And should be debated. On one hand, the Soviet Union...our political rival on the global stage...would almost certainly have snapped up the minds behind some really powerful technology. On the other hand...these people were part of a war machine that remains the gold standard for evil on Earth. Its a hard subject. I still don't know what was right. But then...its a rung bell, anyway.
But what conspiracy theorists don't choose to understand is that its all too easy to take some uncovered truth like Project Paperclip or MKULTRA and allow their collective imaginations to spin ghosts and demons out of the shadows there. Its easy for some fuckhead like Alex Jones to weave little bits of fuzzy data into a grand tapestry of demonic/illuminati/newworldorder panic (and I know that a lot of hardcore conspiracy people try and distance themselves from Jones...but it doesn't matter. He's the Patron Saint of your particular religion. That man is the fuckhead to end all fuckheads.) The world is forever ending. The NWO is forever coming. The demons are always just moments away from stealing your soul and your liberty and your guns. We're forever almost there and then we'll be sorry for not listening to your words of wisdom.
What it comes down to is this: its easy to feel harder than we think. But some things require thinking more than feeling.
There are mysteries in the world. To be frank, I'm still fascinated by UFOs as a topic, but not to the point of making assertions without facts. And I think that a lot of what our government does sucks and is sometimes even suspicious as hell. For all I know, there may even be people who think they control the world. But even if they do, they don't. Reality does not work that way. There is no demonic conspiracy that I need to fear. Aleister Crowley was just a perverse guy with money who wanted to bone women and pretend he was magical. Jack Parsons too. Reagan was just a guy. Obama is just a guy. Bush is just a guy. Everybody you've ever heard of is just another human being like you and me. They can be very rich or very powerful and even draw up grand designs...but they're just flesh and bone and wisp of spirit for a few brief years. In all my searching, I've never found any compelling reason to believe otherwise no matter how scary the monsters under the bed are reputed to be. And if there are monsters and grand conspiracies...so what? What can I do but deal with reality as I find it? That's what Alex Jones-types always leave out: what the fuck do you expect to do about it, really? Nothing. Just talk and talk and talk and fear and panic and surly posts on the internet about how people are "sheep" (oh, the irony). That's why all the bullshit conspiracy videos are just hosed down with dramatic, frightening music and scary graphics and edited like a Roland Emmerich movie. Its theater. Its a big show. Its fun to think you live in a scary, pre-apocalyptic horror story that you're gonna pew-pew-pew your way out of.
If and when a monster emerges...I'll deal with it with as clear a head as I can manage. If you swing your sword in the dark just because you're afraid , you're going to do more harm than good.
But so far, the biggest monster I've found is the fear and paranoia we make for ourselves.
Maybe there's boogiemen out there, maybe not.
But I'm not going to live in terror of the dark like a fucking child because you copy/pasted quotes that you find scary.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChristopherButler/posts/862PCsRM3S8
His comment (shared with kind permission) :
I'm going to put this as kindly as I can: your brain has been hijacked by what might best be described as an aggressive virus of the mind. And I understand this very well because to be really honest, I used to be very deep into to this kind of shit.
And it is very well polished, very rehearsed, very attractive mounds of obfuscating bullshit.
Consider this a kind of confession to the people who follow me on G+. They may be a little surprised by this, but in much the same way that the testimony of an ex-holy roller/faith healer who finally sees reason can be illuminating, maybe this will help somebody understand why the conspiracy-bullshit paranoia is so hard to shake off once it takes hold of an otherwise sound mind.
Long story short(er): I was very into and excited by all things conspiracy, weird, paranormal, etc. For years and years. I read everything. I watched everything. I talked to everyone.
Skipping to the end...
Back in the earlier days of podcasting, I had a short lived but popular little podcast called The Noosphere, and it dealt with aliens, UFOs, monsters, demons, conspiracy, etc. We had pretty solid guests (people you've heard of in the 'conspiracy' genre) and despite it being a ridiculously long show (around 2 hours), people seemed to love it.
You have no reason to believe me (because skepticism rightly dictates that if I make a claim, you're not really compelled to just take my word for it), but the truth is that I'm fairly confident that there is no 'new world order facts' or 'history' (including what you posted above) that I haven't encountered. You've no obligation to believe it, but I've probably forgotten more of this Alex Jones/ Jim Marrs / "they're comin to get us!" bullshit than you're ever going to know.
In other words, you're not going to "out-conspiracy-nut" me...or at least what I used to be. *I have heard everything you can imagine.* Not a word of your above comment was new to me. At all.
Talking to a lot of people who believe a lot of very strange things, I slowly developed a kind of model in my head that I called "The Conspiracy Pool" (or sometimes "the Paranormal Pool"). This Pool is fun to hang out in. The people who hang out around the pool are surprisingly genial to everybody else at the pool...because if you're at the pool you feel like you have access to or awareness of some hidden agenda of the government/the universe/god/the devil/whatever that makes you special and makes you the underdog. Its like a brotherhood. Everyone not at the pool is a muggle. Its a marketplace of ideas and theories and interconnecting gobbledeegook. I remember one guy claimed he was a dolphin/human hybrid, for fucks sake. Its a blast and all seems very serious when you're in the pool.
But what it also does is slowly chip away at your critical thinking skills.
The beginning of the end for me was talking to a geologist who insisted that there was evidence that there were nuclear weapons being used in ancient times. This was a man with a doctorate in geophysics. His evidence didn't make sense to me (I'm not a scientist, but I've been a very enthusiastic amateur my entire life and I'm more than a little informed when it comes to general science) Who am I to argue with an expert in his field?
But it turns out he was dead fucking wrong. I did the homework, and not a single thing he said did not have an infinitely better explanation than some high tech ancient society lobbing nukes at each other.
So the choice was to believe that there was an elaborate conspiracy of science to mislead me...or this guy had a deeply felt conviction so strong that he allowed it influence his ability to use logic. It was the latter, of course.
Here's the thing, man: there are actual conspiracies. History has shown that people conspire for nefarious ends. People suck sometimes. And a stopped clock is right twice a day. Yes, Project Paperclip brought Nazis into the US after WWII. The choice to do that is...arguable. And should be debated. On one hand, the Soviet Union...our political rival on the global stage...would almost certainly have snapped up the minds behind some really powerful technology. On the other hand...these people were part of a war machine that remains the gold standard for evil on Earth. Its a hard subject. I still don't know what was right. But then...its a rung bell, anyway.
But what conspiracy theorists don't choose to understand is that its all too easy to take some uncovered truth like Project Paperclip or MKULTRA and allow their collective imaginations to spin ghosts and demons out of the shadows there. Its easy for some fuckhead like Alex Jones to weave little bits of fuzzy data into a grand tapestry of demonic/illuminati/newworldorder panic (and I know that a lot of hardcore conspiracy people try and distance themselves from Jones...but it doesn't matter. He's the Patron Saint of your particular religion. That man is the fuckhead to end all fuckheads.) The world is forever ending. The NWO is forever coming. The demons are always just moments away from stealing your soul and your liberty and your guns. We're forever almost there and then we'll be sorry for not listening to your words of wisdom.
What it comes down to is this: its easy to feel harder than we think. But some things require thinking more than feeling.
There are mysteries in the world. To be frank, I'm still fascinated by UFOs as a topic, but not to the point of making assertions without facts. And I think that a lot of what our government does sucks and is sometimes even suspicious as hell. For all I know, there may even be people who think they control the world. But even if they do, they don't. Reality does not work that way. There is no demonic conspiracy that I need to fear. Aleister Crowley was just a perverse guy with money who wanted to bone women and pretend he was magical. Jack Parsons too. Reagan was just a guy. Obama is just a guy. Bush is just a guy. Everybody you've ever heard of is just another human being like you and me. They can be very rich or very powerful and even draw up grand designs...but they're just flesh and bone and wisp of spirit for a few brief years. In all my searching, I've never found any compelling reason to believe otherwise no matter how scary the monsters under the bed are reputed to be. And if there are monsters and grand conspiracies...so what? What can I do but deal with reality as I find it? That's what Alex Jones-types always leave out: what the fuck do you expect to do about it, really? Nothing. Just talk and talk and talk and fear and panic and surly posts on the internet about how people are "sheep" (oh, the irony). That's why all the bullshit conspiracy videos are just hosed down with dramatic, frightening music and scary graphics and edited like a Roland Emmerich movie. Its theater. Its a big show. Its fun to think you live in a scary, pre-apocalyptic horror story that you're gonna pew-pew-pew your way out of.
If and when a monster emerges...I'll deal with it with as clear a head as I can manage. If you swing your sword in the dark just because you're afraid , you're going to do more harm than good.
But so far, the biggest monster I've found is the fear and paranoia we make for ourselves.
Maybe there's boogiemen out there, maybe not.
But I'm not going to live in terror of the dark like a fucking child because you copy/pasted quotes that you find scary.
The Visit
"Though we would be curious about the aliens, some humans would rather attack them than surrender our grip on control and knowledge. This, Madsen says, is one of the things that struck him the most when making The Visit—the thin line between civilization and chaos. “If people are afraid, it’s scary how easily the varnish of civilization can be penetrated,” he says. “So little has to happen before things go into Armageddon.”"
One of the things I love about Doctor Who is that aliens arrive and everyone just goes, "meh" and gets on with life. But this looks interesting.
http://www.popsci.com/visit-explores-what-would-actually-happen-if-aliens-came-to-earth
One of the things I love about Doctor Who is that aliens arrive and everyone just goes, "meh" and gets on with life. But this looks interesting.
http://www.popsci.com/visit-explores-what-would-actually-happen-if-aliens-came-to-earth
Economic witchcraft
"After the Holy Roman Emperor forbade the confiscation of property in 1630, witchcraft persecutions declined noticeably in some places. Bamberg, Germany, which had seen an average of a hundred executions a year from 1626 to 1629, burned that year only twenty-four; none were executed the year after. The city of Cologne, which had from the outset prohibited the seizing of property, experienced the fewest executions of any region of the Empire. "
More to this than straightforward zealotry, then.
Originally shared by Assia Alexandrova
The witchcraft trial industrial complex looms large in 16th century Germany:
“Witch hunting,” wrote the historian Rossell Hope Robbins, “was self-sustaining and became a major trade, employing many people, all battening on the savings of the victims.” ... Far from the conventional image of a penniless hag, a significant proportion of accused witches, especially in Germany, were wealthy and male.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/gold-and-silver-coined-human-blood
More to this than straightforward zealotry, then.
Originally shared by Assia Alexandrova
The witchcraft trial industrial complex looms large in 16th century Germany:
“Witch hunting,” wrote the historian Rossell Hope Robbins, “was self-sustaining and became a major trade, employing many people, all battening on the savings of the victims.” ... Far from the conventional image of a penniless hag, a significant proportion of accused witches, especially in Germany, were wealthy and male.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/gold-and-silver-coined-human-blood
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