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Scientific Research That Could Have Been Avoided
indian_rediff writes "An article from Friday's Wall Street Journal (reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) details how some of the research being done by scientists ends up simply stating the obvious. Their observations make for some interesting and hilarious reading." From the article: "Want job satisfaction? A 'careful choice of career is the key,' researchers concluded in a paper this spring in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction. People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown."
Well, experts knew this as well in medieval Europe. The reason why Columbus had a hard time getting an expedition is because advisors to the Spanish court correctly estimated the distance from Spain to India and said that the distance was too large to feasibly make the journey using a western route.
Columbus screwed up his calculations by using incorrect conversions for units of distance and thought that the trip was feasible. If he hadn't run into the Americas, his expedition would have ended with his crew dying of starvation and/or dehydration in the middle of the ocean.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Even if the combination is safe there's no guarantee that the result will be the "obvious" one. Perhaps the drugs combine in some way to cancel each other out. Perhaps they use the same receptors and interfere with each other. Or perhaps some interaction multiples the total effect (but not strongly enough to back into killing the patient territory again.)
You can argue about the relative merrit of these kinds of studies vs other more original kinds of research, but i don't think you can reasonably argue that it's useless.
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Eratosthenes (284-192 B.C.) , the librarian of Alexandria, was able to determine the circumference of the Earth to an accuracy of 0.1-0.5%. Around 250 B.C., Eratosthenes knew that on a particular day, the sun cast no shadow in a well in the modern-day village of Assouan. At the same time, on the same day, it cast a minor shadow in Alexandria - the distance between the two was known to high accuracy, and Alexandria and Assouan are almost at the same longitude. Thus, by dividing 360 by that shadow angle and multiplying by the distance, the polar circumference was measured. Eratosthenes measured it to be 40,000 km (24,855 miles), and the current accepted figure is 40,032 km (24,875 miles).
The whole article is a troll by WSJ; they're in cahoots with the crazy religious "right" and like to bash scientists, because this administration has angered the scientific community, so the GOP is in attack mode now on science and everything related; I saw a similar article the other day.
This is a poor example to quote. For instance did you know that Aspirin, Neoprxin Sodium (Aleve), and Ibuprofin (advil) all work using the same mechanism? The result is that mixing them does not have an additive effect (mostly whichever one hits the blood-stream first will take effect); however, acetaminophen (tylenol) works using a different mechnism, and can be combined with any of the above for a (somewhat) additive effect. In addition, drugs like Aleve have a self-limiting property. Taking more than ~500mg will have no effect (so you will likely notice a difference between 1 and 2 220mg tablets, but taking a 3rd won't relieve any more pain). I am not in the pharmaceutical industry, so don't take the above as gospel, but some time on Google should provide similar information.
Take the large public research university that I work for with a total annual operating budget of approximately $2.6 billion.
So you can imagine the theoretical impact of a 10% decrease in grant money. That gap ain't going to be filled by the state.