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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
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 /.
"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
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.
> 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.
Funny about that... The current minimum [wage] places a family below the federal poverty level, unable (as Wal-Mart's chairman put it) to shop even at Wal-Mart.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
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!
Bit more complicated than that -
Inflation could have been caused by a phase change in the Higgs field, but this is a necessary-not-sufficient part of the explanation for the observed features of the universe. Then one also has to find a reason for the phase change and why it happened to have the precise characteristics needed (there's some fine tuning of parameters required in order for what we see today to pop out the other end of this process).
Then there's of course the root question of whether the Higgs field itself exists, though a lot of the Standard Model would have to be junked in order for it not to exist.
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.
> 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