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(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
Why would a Wookie, an eight-foot tall Wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does NOT MAKE SENSE! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does NOT MAKE SENSE! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does NOT MAKE SENSE! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
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?
This article is from March.
"13 things that do not make sense"
Why would a Wookie, an eight-foot tall Wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does NOT MAKE SENSE! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does NOT MAKE SENSE! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does NOT MAKE SENSE! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Not only that... it's not much of a year end list... being published in March of 05 after all.
/. around the same time 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense
Heck, this was even on
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
All right! Always room for a little mindless, irrelevant editorializing, right?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Since the last time it was posted on /.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
"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
Firstly as somebody pointed out at the FIRST line and last lien it is writte "19 march 2005"... That is quite the start of the year. Second, as 4th position again some homeopathic non reproducible experiment, and cold fusion (13th). This rather sound like "unreproducible" research rather unexplicable stuff. I think jsut for a kicker I will have a look around to see what happenned as follow up from those... But since the only stuff we heard recently on homeopathy was the lancet(?) study, and since homeopath would jump on the gun for any study proving homeopathy works, I won't hold my breath. Probably again badly washed up test tube. I tell you, experiment on basophile are cursed :).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Why is this embarassing? Does that have any bearing on the science of the issue?
...
Physicists consider it embarassing when their existing theories make predictions that are off by more than a few orders of magnitude. The apparent effect of dark energy is something like 50 orders of magnitude larger than what current theories predict. I heard a cosmologist call this one of the most spectacular failures of modern physics, even if it doesn't have much bearing on our daily lives.
I am not a physicist, please correct me if this is inaccurate
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Why is this embarassing?
Because you mistakenly think you know all the answers.
But physics isn't about answers, it's about questions, and far from being an embarassment this problem is simply a Nobel waiting for its recipient. The most famous opportunity in physics.
KFG
This is getting ridiculous. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed a precipitous decline in the quality of stories here (not that they were USDA Grade A to begin with), accompanied by more frequent-- and more obvious-- trolling on the parts of the "Editors".
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to), but the editor who let a sneaky jab at free markets into the story text itself needs to be smacked. That was a troll, period. A blatant, bridge-dwelling, club-wielding troll.
No, I take that back. All the "Editors" need to be smacked. This is getting fucking ridiculous.
SlashDot: Trolls for nerds, stuff that was reported on the AP Newswire 5 days ago...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
We need more journalism like this in the popular media, to teach our kids that we don't know everything, and that some frontiers of knowledge haven't yet been pushed beyond their reach.
The evolution/creation/intelligent-design debate has taken on the nature of trench warfare; the opponents believe that the least enemy victory will spell doom for their way of life, so they dig in and protect every axiom of their belief system no matter how fragile or poorly supported. As a result, young people are told that nothing in their religion's official interpretation of Holy Writ is open to question. In school they are told the same thing about the current geological, paleontological and cosmological dogma.
I'm sure that many church leaders honestly believe that if kids are encouraged to doubt and question, they will lose their nascent faith, and perhaps discourage others. Likewise many educators assume that students who doubt and question current scientific beliefs will never become scientists, and undermine others who might.
The contemptible response is that those who question religious doctrine are branded as nonbelievers, and those who question scientific doctrine are dismissed as ignoramuses. Nothing goes so far to discourage the development of the scientific and spiritual leaders of the next generation.
Healthy skepticism, not jaded cynicism, should be encouraged everywhere if there is to be true advancement in any field. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and neither are knowledge and wisdom.
Women.
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/
Your justifaction is the suggestion that anecdotal evidence is better than systematic evidence, which is what quacks have always said when the systematic evidence reveals them to be quacks.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
This article states that "A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon..." in the question about constants. I never knew about this, so off to google. According to one web page, bacterial life-forms were involved in the process of running these reactors. This idea isn't mentioned in the wikipedia article. Well, at least the wikipedia article does mention about the alpha constant, and says, "there is no physical reason why it should be exactly constant."
Software freedom...I love it!
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?
It would only then look uniform if you were are the center of it, and it all spread out from where you were.
If you were on one side, it would look hotter on the side it came from and cooler on the side it went to after passing you.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to),
An unregulated free market didn't lead to Microsoft, because we don't *have* an unregulated free market
in the United States. In a real unregulated market, without things like patents, and the bazillions of dollars worth of government restrictions and regulations required to start a business, there would be a lot more competition for MS. It would actually be much harder for monopolies like MS to become overwhelmingly powerful in a real free market, because it would be much easier to set up shop and compete with them on a level playing field.
Of course some people say that there would be no innovation without patents... I contend that such an assertion is not true, and that the lack of artificial government granted monopolies (patents) would result in a constant "arms race" situation where companies would be forced to innovate constantly or die. Look at how military technology advances... the US is forced to constantly work on developing better battle technology exactly because there is no way to prevent our competitors from using what has already been invented. I mean, it's not like we could patent the nuclear bomb and keep Russia, China, India, Pakistan, etc. from using it...
Give us a real free market sometime, and let's see what happens... until then it's all just speculation, because we damn sure don't have anything approaching a free market now.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Well I am a chemist and a mass spectrometrist who in my youth used to regard Bieman as an almost godlike figure. Well he was wrong. The MS results were of limited sensitivity. The most likely form microbial life in Martian soil would take is to be dormant spores waiting for the rare periods when liquid water becomes available. These spores could be in a very low level in the Martian soil well below the level that would produce sufficent quantities of organic compounds to be detectible by MS.
The LR experiment is very sensitive. Levin was able to use it to show the presence of microorganisms in Antarctic ice cores, which could not be detected chemically, but which could be confirmed by the standard microbiological procedures of plating out. Lunar rock from the Apollo mission gave no false positives in the LR experiment.
All the recent results from Mars probes showing both evidence for the existance of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past and for evidence of the presence of water now, all serve to support the claim that the original Viking biology results provide a strong indication that microbial life is present on Mars. There is a case to answer. Now is the time for NASA to invest in sending a chiral LR experiment to Mars to further investigate and hopefully come up with some conclusive answers.
It's "Placebo".
The placebo effect is brilliant.
Homeopathists think they're being devalued when their remedies are described as "basically [lacebo", and are wont to say "It's not placebo, it actually works!"
What they don't understand is that Placebos actually work too, and in many cases they work really well, as does prayer and even sheer bloody mindedness, both of which are cheaper than homeopathic remedies. All science can say is "The power of the mind is a wonderful thing". But that's why the baseline for real medicines is "better than placebo", which is a lot higher a baseline than "better than nothing".
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
markets which are more free produce more wealth for the participants
EDIT: markets which are more free produce more wealth for some of the participants
A truly free market is like a sport without any rules. The winners are the people with bigger bats. It encourages participation to an extent; there is more to gain for the people who succeed. But eventually it bottoms out as people realize they don't really want to lose their arms wrestling with the 800 lb. gorilla who, without any competition, suddenly has no incentive to be nice to anybody and starts running around burning houses down.
Seriously. How many people knew an old couple where the husband was really sick, and literally holding onto life as long as the wife survived, and when the wife died, that guy pretty much said 'To hell with it' and just...died? It happened to my great-grandparents.
Pretending there is no mental aspect to health is silly, and pretending that homopathic medicine is anything but that is silly.
As for 'prayer'...we still don't have any evidence that prayer works if the patient doesn't know about it, so it's basically the placebo effect, too. (There have actually been studies of this sort done, where churchs prayed for randomly selected individuals from elsewhere, or not, but the results have been inconclusive.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
> > 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
> Does it make more sense to steal money from people who are earning it and give it to others?
a) I don't think he said or implied any such thing.
b) How much of the distribution of wealth in our society is the result of people "earning it", as opposed to some people getting opportunities that others don't? Has Bill Gates really worked any harder than the average sharecropper, or did his inherited wealth, lucky break, and stranglehold on the market give him a wee bit of a leg up?
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?
> Too bad there aren't any of them.
I wonder what would even qualify. Can it be a free market if the government (or some other organization) regulates coinage? Outlaws putting your thumb on the scale? Outlaws cartels?
OTOH, what if the government bugs out and companies do form cartels? Is it still a free market?
What's the definition of a free market? Where do we draw the lines on this kind of stuff?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Four replies, none of which address the argument.
Claim: Free markets make perfect sense! They are the most logical, sensible system.
Counterclaim: If you're on the top of the pile. Those being crushed on the bottom might reasonably feel otherwise.
Counter-counterclaim: [sarcasm] Yeah, because it isn't like everyone benefits from the freemarket system. Only the Waltons benefit from their stores. Not the millions of poorer people that are able to afford more goods and live better lives because they can afford cheaper goods.
Counter-counter-counterclaim: [paraphrased, for the benefit of those who missed the point] Some people can't even afford to shop at Wal-Mart.
Are you people unaware that people go hungry in the USA, which prides itself as being the richest, freest, fairest nation in the world?
Do you really think an unconstrained market would improve their lot?
Do you think they deserve to be crushed under the weight of the machine?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Nah, he'd start insisting that we call them "GNU/Free markets".
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Well, I should qualify the statement first. I meant "moderately" raising the minimum wage. If you raise it too much at once, then yes, it could.
The point is that if an employer is making so little money from an employee that paying them a decent wage is going to kill profits - then the business was never sustainable in the first place. The idea that companies are making profits solely because of the low minimum wage is absurd. It would mean that their business is actually about making razor thin margins off bad workplace conditions - rather than selling a product or service.
I'd like to see ANY real evidence for this rhetoric that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Seriously. Those are the people making bold claims that need to be proved.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Why?
Because all water has, before it starts, many more molecules of other stuff.
And hence the fact that, statistically, you have 5000 atoms of X, you also got 10,000,000 of all sorts of stuff. Poisons, additives, all sorts of crap.
Including 1,000,000 of the stuff you started with.
You heard that right. My tap water has more, for example, arsenic already in it than homeopathy will ever add to it. More arsenic floats in my nose and enters my bloodstream every day via the muscus membranes there every day than any homeopathic remedy.
Have you ever heard of 'parts per million'? You'd be amazing at the crap that's around in tiny amounts. Adding a few parts per billion does nothing, not even if you stir it with a special spoon in the special direction under the special light, or whatever hocus-pocus homeopathics are using.
And you wouldn't believe the amount of the cup you drink every time you take a sip. Plastic, glass, ceramic, metal, whatever, you're drinking it.
It is, at best, literally equivilent to handing someone a grain of salt and saying 'Put this in a glass of water and you'll get better'. If that would make you better, you'd be better already, because there is more than that much salt in the 'purest' water. (And, of course, many times there is actually no salt handed out at all.)
The argument that 'some still exist' is like refuting the claim that 'you can't blow a candle out a mile away' by the fact that, statistically, you will hit it with a few air particles. Well, yeah...but it gets hit with more than that by itself.
It is not medicine. It is a magic spell. As also evidenced by the fact that only 'believers' can make it.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
No. I don't mean a few molecules, I mean that some contain active ingredients in significant concentrations, of the order of 0.1% or more. Sometimes a lot higher - this, for example, is a 10% extract of arnica that I (quite anecdotally) find useful for bruises. (An occupational hazard.)
A "1X" solution is 10% concentration. If you Google for homeopathic 1X, you'll see many products made with these high-concentration extracts.
That's not to say that do or do not work. I don't consider myself a defender of homeopathic theory in any way. But I'm really disappointed to see self-described "skeptics" continually misrepresent it. Not all homeopathic remedies are extremely dilute.
Nor is it considered, in homeopathic theory, enough to simply create a very dilute tincture, like putting a grain of salt in a glass of water; first a fairly concentrated salt water would be prepared, then that solution diluted, and so on. The solution must be "prepared", shaken in some certain way, at every step. That theory may be absolute bullshit, indeed that's where I'd put my money. But intellectual honesty requires that we criticize it as it is, not set up strawmen.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood