Slashdot Mirror
(Yet) Another Year End List
gordonb writes "New Scientist has yet another of those endless end-of-year lists, "13 things that do not make sense", including such topics discussed on Slashdot this year as the placebo effect, dark energy, and the ever-popular cold fusion. I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless."
The placebo effect does work! A friend of the family is a hypochondriac (I used to be a BAD one), and always has the same cold or disease as someone else. I told her that the trick to fending off hypochondria is to gently tap the underside of her chin 5 times slowly and the symptoms will go away.
:)
Guess what? It worked. I just made it up but I told her I heard about it on a medical show. The power of the mind is amazing, but it has taught me how easily duped we humans are. I guess this means don't trust anyone until you know what their end desire is.
This is an interesting article, but it seems common for them to say that these unknown "problems" might all boil down to bad research -- and I believe that could likely be the answer for many. "Bad research" covers all science conundrums: either you misread the results, or previous bad research gave you an incorrect theory.
Problems solved
FTFA: But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.
I was under the impression that Inflation is caused by a certain energy value of the Higgs field. Did I miss something and Higgs field is no longer the savior of Inflation?
http://www.antilli.com/ - can anyone make sense of this?
The thought just occured to me, that if Slashdot is gonna be posting all these 'best of the year' type lists... then maybe Slashdot should compile its own 'best of' list?
Privacy is underrated!
Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical.
Well no duh. Did they think it was dancing angels? We only use morphine as a pain reliever because it is a analogue of some naturally occuring molecules in the human body. And the placebo effect also tells us that there is some messaging between the brain and body and that thinking about stuff can effect that messaging. We may not know much of the details, but these articles the keep feigning ignorance of the placebo effect borders on pseudo science.
"Demon Haunted World"(well, techincally "Science as a Candle in the Darkness") which I am currently slogging through. He discusses a lot of there same "phenomenon" such as placebos and this, my personal favorite:
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says
Actually, earlier than even the "WoW" signal(sometime in the 60s IIRC) a bunch of Soviet scientists convened a conference to discuss how they swore they found intelligent life because they found a long, continuous perfect sine wave somewhere out in space. Turns out it was a quasar, a hithero unkown phenomena, but the Soviets made laughing stocks out of themselves by assuming first it was aliens instead of a more mundane explanation...
Monstar L
Inflation actually solves several problems, at the expense of predicting an infinite number of unobservable phenomina (whole parallel universes with differing physical laws). By Occam's Razor, absolutely any alternate explanation to inflation is to be preferred - I can claim the Flying Spagetti Monster did it, right after He invented time travel, assisted by exactly 144,000 seraphim, whose names, in order of mightyness, start with Larry, Moe, and Curley Sue, and I've still proposed a theory that generates fewer unprovable hypothesi than an infinite number of undetectable "alternate' universes.
That's just for Guth's original work. Hawking tried to give some more backing to it, and had to postulate an unobservable second time dimension, an unobservable imaginary property to this second time axis, and as it turned out a way to apply a whole new form of math that involved rotation, ala trigonometry, without the negative quadrents existing to rotate through (since he dropped the negative half of the regular time axis fifty pages back). Even the totally mind boggleing concept of rotating vectors through dimensions that he had already rejected as non-existant didn't actually get rid of the infinite number of unobservable predictions problem, as Hawking finally acknowledged. Hawking was roundly criticized for treating imaginary in the mathematical sense as meaning imaginary in the common sense, and has since admitted he made both that and a few other mistakes in the papers behind "A Brief History of Time". If you know of someone who has done a better job, by all means, give a link, but all the ones I've seen seem to make the untestable predictions problem worse, not better.
That's precisely what's wild about inflation - it makes an infinite number of untestable predictions, and is still considered science for the testable ones. It does explain a few things very well (like homogeneity), so it's probably on the right track somewhere, but the real thory we need (IMNSHO) is going to explain why the universe looks superficially like the classic Big Bang model, deal with the ways the very early universe deviates from that classical model, fully (and not partially or selectively)include QM in the first few femtoseconds, and either prove that some physical constants are non-random, or show that they don't, at the least, have to be random and so don't have to spin off so many untestable predictions.
Who is John Cabal?
Hmm, inflation eh? Here's another wild idea - What if during the big-bang the energy released was so much that it actually *increased* the speed of light itself, till it finally slowed down and settled..? :-)
http://efil.blogspot.com/
I'd like to see someone explain the process that created a cosmic ray (reference) with energy (51 Joules) comparable to a brick being dropped on your foot.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Almost every person that make minimum wage now will make more in the future (teenagers) or has made more in the past (retirees).
The poverty level is relative. The poverty level in the US would be solidly middle class in other places.
The minimum wage puts people out of work, as supply and demand would suggest (labor costs go up, so businesses use less labor). Is it better to be poor or unemployed?
> > Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
> I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly would cause one direction to be hotter than another direction?
AIUI, the distribution of the CMB radiation is a reflection - literally - of the distribution of matter in the universe when things cooled down enough for the universe at large to be transparent to radiation.
If the universe had been perfectly isotropic at that time, then the radiation would in fact be isotropic as well. But then we'd have trouble explaining the clumpy distribution of matter. But matter is clumpy, and the CMB ratiation is anisotropic, so we feel safe in concluding that the initial universe was not.
Then the question becomes, why is it exactly this anisotropic. Apparently our best model of the big bang says that the CMB should be somewhat more anisotropic than it is, and inflation solves the problem neatly.
When I first heard about it I thought it reeked of epicycles (for fitting observations to an arbitrary theory), but from what I've read the inflation hypothesis explains a lot more stuff than just the CMB radiation anisotropy, so it's in good graces with most of the cosmology community.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
However, this 'And there has to be special circumstances', is exactly the kind of crap psychics got away with for fifty years 100 years ago.
If homeopathy works, it is a medicine. Medicines have demonstratable effects on illnesses and the body. If a homeopathic medicine made from X has an effect on condition Y, it should repeatably have that effect.
And, more to the point, there is no way to do a double-blind test when homeopathy 'doctors' refuse to accept others can do exactly what they are doing and end up with the same 'medicine', so patients can either be given that medicine or given water, and watched.
Or, hell, just make a big batch of it and hand it over to a hospital for the study.
And the reason they act like this is because they know that if that were to happen, it would be demonstrated that giving people pure water and telling them it's a homeopathic remedy produces exactly the same effect as giving them the homeopathic remedy.
Which isn't the least bit surprising, because homeopathic remedies are pure water. But, hey, there are places willing to do the studies, and in fact have done the studies.
And, no, the study in the article doesn't prove anything. A single study with a weird result isn't proof of anything. There have been 'guess which way the coin flip will go' studies where a person got 65% of them right, but that doesn't prove anything, because other studies have been unable to replicate them.
Of course, now that a study has gone their way, they'll be even less likely to help with research that will prove homeopathy to be a big bag of crap.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?