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Umm... "As we know it"... both parties don't look anything like what they looked pre-Nixon.

And the obligatory xkcd link.

Hey look, it's an xkcd about you.

"Never stop buying lottery tickets, no matter what anyone tells you. I failed again and again, but I never gave up. I took extra jobs and poured the money into tickets. And here I am, proof that if you put in the time, it pays off!"

Every inspirational speech by someone successful should have to start with a disclaimer about survivorship bias.

http://www.xkcd.com/1827/

https://xkcd.com/1827/

No but the article links to many reliable sources. That is the whole point of wikipedia.

Which, in turn, use wikipedia as their source

Wikipedia is not worth its bandwidth. Use google scholar instead.

Obligatory XKCD.

To paraphrase an old skit

Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise ... and loosely applied statistics.

And to keep with the comic theme, anyone doing this type of multiple comparison analyses should be required to prove a good understanding of this xkcd comic and then publicly shamed if they fail to apply that understanding.

...But, did he use a bonferroni correction to compute his p-values, since this is a classic data dredge? Sure, his method will turn up true positives (and did, for at least one known offender) but what remains to be seen is the false positive rate and the lawsuit rate, since skewed distributions could have many causes some of which are benign and this is pretty serious defamation of character if one casts aspersions without secondary supporting evidence of malpractice.

In other words, are his "positives" really malefactors or is he picking out acne-causing green jellybeans: https://xkcd.com/882/

Worse, the study appeals to my own confirmation bias on the matter, as I'm sure that the rate of wrongdoing in the research is if anything higher than he finds it (he "detects" just under 2% possible/probable bad articles -- I would have guessed more like 5% to 10% just from sheer incompetence and inadequate power, but perhaps he corrected somehow for inadequate power although TFA doesn't really say). So I WANT to believe him, but sans bonferroni, I don't know what to to make of his p-threshold of 1/10000 applied to 5000 samples and testing multiple statistics per sample. He really needs bonferroni twice, as he dredges for out-of-bounds statistics PER article as well, for thousands of articles.

That's a valid point, especially re: the concert example in replies. Nothing more ridiculous than seeing an audience full of smartphone screens being held up, blocking the view for all (including those smartphones doing the recording - ha!).

But, I also like this counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/1314/

Well if you like creamed corn I suppose they are a good device.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences

Um, yes, that's exactly what it means. That is, in fact, the definition.

If Randall disagrees, then I disagree too. I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

Message from Bobby Tables (for the uninitiated):

https://www.xkcd.com/327/

space is up, not sideways

Actually space is mostly sideways. https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

But I agree that the extra complexity from a plane launch is probably not worth the trouble.

Why not just make a single standard NFC Pay that any phone with NFC can implement?

That question was addressed by the first post: https://xkcd.com/927/

Except for $5 dollar wrench security hole. https://xkcd.com/538/

I'm afraid that someone incarcerated and with powerful agencies annoyed with them can face far more than the infamous $5 wrench form of encryption cracking. These include legal and illegal threats to family, solitary confinement, lack of access to critical medical needs. They can also include more clearly illegal but available abuse such as rape, physical beatings, and starvation.

Same here. I used to have a group of students (from a part of the world where plagiarism is more culturally accepted) sit in the lab and work together. With me sitting just a few feet from them, I watched them as they copied code back and forth from each other's screens, so I made it clear that while they could work together in figuring out the algorithm, it was up to each of them to actually implement the algorithm. They nodded, made a gesture of following what I said, and then went right back to it again.

So, since their code ended up being identical, I gave them 0s.

After that, they stopped copying from each other while sitting in the lab, and instead took their cheating out of class. Thankfully, that was even easier to detect, since they'd have signature traits, such as the same number of irrelevant trailing spaces at the ends of specific lines. They started changing variable names and intentionally adding whitespace in irrelavant places, just to make their code look distinct. What they didn't know is that I had a plagiarism detection tool that accounted for those sorts of changes, and sure enough their code always came out as a 100% match for someone else in the class, while everyone else's would be around 20-50% (which was expected, given that there are only so many ways to implement simple tasks).

Much to my disappointment the professor refused to act on any of it, so the best I could do was give them 0s when it was abundantly clear they were cheating. Eventually they started changing the implementation enough that the tool I used no longer showed a 100% match, but at that point they were effectively re-implementing it themselves anyway, which was exactly what we wanted from them in the first place.

(or I suppose I could just use that as break time)

Like hone your sword skills :)

https://xkcd.com/927/

https://xkcd.com/1838/

So now we're having to calculate if the risk of something really bad happening onboard due to an electronic device's battery kept in the cargo hold catching fire is higher than the risk of terrorists having explosives in their laptops.

Death by terrorism is much scarier than death by a random cargo fire, and kudos to DHS for recognizing that. And for reading XKCD: https://xkcd.com/651/

Apple and Google have competing standards? We can't have that.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Except we've hijacked that cooling period and are very quickly warming. https://xkcd.com/1732/

Here's a good graph showing warming and cooling.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/

It wasn't too long ago that Firefox was viewed as an amazing browser (ob: https://xkcd.com/198/ ), far better than the alternatives, and FOSS to boot. But like it's predecessors, it got slow, bloated, and bogged down in trying to implement features too far outside the core mission of a browser. Chrome came along and snatched the performance crown and mindshare. If you have already conceded that Google is allowed to harvest all your data in exchange for free products/services, then by all means keep using Chrome. However, if you value your privacy, it is time to give Firefox another chance. It really has improved a lot in the last couple of years in terms of stability and performance, to the point where it meets or exceeds Chrome in every aspect. Give Firefox an honest chance, you might switch back.

Western leaders know full well that bringing in masses of poorly-vetted Muslim refugees is dangerous and will lead to conflict. That's the goal. Just look at TFA. Crisis => invasions of privacy. They set up the conditions for the crisis and step in to "save the day" with new losses to individual liberty and privacy.

If this were in a medical context, we'd be discussing Munchausen syndrome by proxy with Western citizens the victims and their governments their abusers.

No, Strat, we'd be discussing paranoia and why people believe in ludicrous conspiracy theories: https://xkcd.com/258/

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/386/

exactly, the survivorship bias. Like https://xkcd.com/1827/

Let's say "we're at the top," and one day in the future we have enough resources for there to simulate a universe for whatever reason, and do so, and it has enough fidelity to simulate another one within, eventually. Of the three universes' dwellers asking themselves "are we in a simiulation?" the answer is "yes" for 2 of them and "no" for 1. This ignores the possibility for branching and deeper nesting.

Now take it one step further, and say "we don't know if we're at the top." We already know that most universes are simulated... how would you bet?

Uh, no we don't. Right now we have no evidence whatsoever that a universe like ours can be simulated. You're suggesting that we're going to have four dozen husbands when we're actually somewhere very very VERY close to the zero point on the y-axis in that plot in terms of how many we have now. We have so few data points about simulating universes that we don't even know if our improvement in our ability to simulate them is linear or exponential. We've gone from Pong to Skyrim in 40 years, and nowhere on that continuum is anything that looks remotely like a simulated universe. Quite the opposite. We have arguments based on thermodynamics and Shannon's Limit that we can't simulate a universe within this universe—that it's not physically possible.

So no, we do not know that most universes are simulated. At the moment, we know of zero simulated universes.

Just say NO to GMO.

Not this again. Obligatory XKCD:- https://xkcd.com/666/.

That's interesting, but I feel that there's only one particular XKCD that *really* gets to the nub of this situation.

Merk's reference, for the uninitiated: xkcd - "Standards"

Dammit, wrong URL.

Should've been to XKCD https://xkcd.com/327/

Guess I should check my buffers before pasting and submitting stuff.

https://xkcd.com/927/

https://xkcd.com/927/

Agreed on the Higgs Boson - but we're talking about orders of magnitude more statistical support than any social science experiment has *ever* done.

I think the real concern I have is that at least with theoretical particle physics, we've got metrics that we can agree on - the speed of light, the length of a meter, the weight of a kilogram, etc, etc. With "soft sciences", not only do we have the challenge of doing statistics properly, but we have the challenge of subjective metrics.

tl;dr - https://xkcd.com/435/

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/538/

https://xkcd.com/664/

Obligatory What If: Neutrinos from supernova

A supernova at 1AU would exert about a billion times the radiation pressure on you as would a hydrogen bomb pressed up against your eyeball. Even in the absence of photons, the radiation received just from neutrinos at 1AU would be enough to give you a lethal dose.

Also don't forget quantum mechanics. Everything that is below electrons and protons isn't even directly observable.

That's exactly why string theorists get askance glances from other physicists. Also apropos: https://xkcd.com/397/

Is "social science" real science? Let's just trot this out again.

Humor aside, the lack of ability to reproduce experiments doesn't necessarily make a field of study more or less scientific. After all, you could include astronomy and climate science among those, at least to some degree. But I think you can definitely argue about some fields having more scientific rigor than others, to be sure.

XKCD 630

Wikipedia is not a source of truth. Dear God, what has the world come to when people seriously refer to wiki as a source in a political debate and really don't see anything wrong with that.

It's not a "source of truth," but the nice thing about Wikipedia is that the articles are usually is backed up by citations.

It's a good place to start if you want to find links to the actual science, and then form your own opinions.

(I am going to make the phrase "citation needed" my motto. https://xkcd.com/285/)

Ah, yes, good old machine learning.

Well, in the macro sense, it won't work. In the micro sense, it will work to some extent, at least until too many other people join you and suddenly things look appealing.

Though having apt/dnf available software mitigates risks in a way similar to having an 'app store', and is one reason why MS is pushing the Windows Store concept hard (the larger reason of course being profit).

Also, even without admin level access, untrusted software can make a mess of things, since all the stuff you care about is owned by you.(oblig https://xkcd.com/1200/). Platforms like Android and IOS that provide some concept of per application permissions mitigate that more, though generally people will click through crazy permissions too.

We all know this is insane. BeauHD's playing a game to see how many /.'ers will spend time tying to refute a preposterous article.

cf. https://xkcd.com/386/

Well, he certainly got a ton of comments and attention on this submission. Maybe that was his point, like the "one weird trick to lose weight that doctors don't want you to know" clickbait that has started to infest my local newspaper's online site of late.

Is anyone going to post the XKCD? Alright, guess I'll grab it, here.

https://xkcd.com/1838/

When everyone else is jumping off a cliff, last is the best spot to be in.

That all depends on why they are jumping. Obligatory xkcd.

Darn I was sure you were going to point to https://xkcd.com/356/

We all know this is insane. BeauHD's playing a game to see how many /.'ers will spend time tying to refute a preposterous article.

cf. https://xkcd.com/386/

We're all going to be dead in 3 years, so the article is kinda right.

For the wrong reason tho'

We all know this is insane. BeauHD's playing a game to see how many /.'ers will spend time tying to refute a preposterous article.

cf. https://xkcd.com/386/