Mythbusters is Pseudo-Science at its worst. They claim a veneer of authenticity, but make broad assumptions based on very limited and highly flawed experiments with no controls groups. It's an entertaining sideshow at best.
Seriously, the xkcd author has a huge point here. You want to improve understanding and respect for science in this country? Start with the basics. When the most common response to "why do you believe X?" is "because I performed/witnessed an experiment demonstrating it", then we can shift the discussion to proper experimental methods and bookkeeping. So what if the experiments are sketchy and their methods wouldn't pass muster in any journal, and as a result some people believe things that aren't true? By simply educating people as to the value of experiment, you've already won 90% of the battle.
Mythbusters is fighting the good fight for science and you should respect that.
The most obvious evidence for this has, to me, always been the way in which the results of IQ testing, and thus the conclusions as to which groups of people are "inherently" smarter or dumber, always seems to perfectly track the pre-existing prejudices of that time and culture yet change as the pejudices of that time and culture change!
In the early days of IQ testing, it was Italian and Irish immigrants who did poorly and were assumed to be "innately" inferior, exactly as everyone already believed. 80 years later, does "The Bell Curve" similarly find that Italians are inferior? No! It instead perfectly reflects the cultural biases and stereotypes of the time in which it was written, yet still claims that these are "innate" differences unaffected by culture. Math testing in the United States suggests women are worse at math, yet testing in South Korea doesn't show that at all -- weird, in the U.S. we stereotype women as worse and testing bears this out, in SK it's the opposite, but culture supposedly has nothing to do with it. They didn't have IQ testing in the mid-1800s, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it would show the "innate" intelligence of the Chinese railroad workers matching the contemporary prejudice against them, the exact opposite of their stereotyped "innate" intelligence today.
And remember, the conclusions made by all of the people claiming these differences depend entirely on the IQ test testing "innate" intelligence and only "innate" intelligence, i.e. that which cannot be learned or altered by culture/education. Because their whole point is to show that there is no point to trying to change these "innate" facts. Affirmative action, programs to interest women in math and science, these are all fools games because you can't change "innate" intelligence. That they've never created such a test where your score cannot be improved via coaching and preparation, shows they fail from the beginning. That their conclusions always track the specific cultural biases in which the testing takes place, and no longer as soon as you step out of that context, shows they fail in the end, too.
And yet people, always from the groups at the top of the social totem pole, argue that their culture, with its particular biases/prejudices, is unique in history in that it alone represents the true "innate" capabilities of the people within it. Call this my prejudice, but I find it very hard to take the field seriously as a result.
What you call "better", I call "bloat"! I like my OSes how I like my poetry, streamlined and with everything extraneous removed. A wise man once said that the process of creating is done when you have removed everything you can. Clearly, then, Syllable is the best thing ever.
Just as an example of its power, watch as I use Syllable to compress not only every Haiku, but every poem of every type ever, down into 3 poems!
Sex.
Death.
Life.
And for the enterprising Syllabist, you can probably guess that even this can be reduced down to a single poem, the one and only poem that you'll ever need:
True that! It doesn't really matter if some other women are afraid of mice or not or if they don't care about toilet seats if the one you're with threatens to cut your junk off in your sleep if they fall into the toilet, or if you look at other women, or try to leave. (please help).
I'm not frightened by mice in the least. I think they're adorable. Even when I find them someplace unexpected, my reaction is usually "Awww". Even after one of the fuckers has bitten me.
Rats, on the other hand, are a different critter. For one, compared to mice they're huge. Also compared to mice, they're much more likely to be aggressive if they're even close to cornered. And they look evil.
Though pet rats or lab rats don't bother me. Even the rats scurrying around the tracks in the NY subway don't bother me as they go about their business. Strange rat in my house, though, that's freaky.
Oh yeah? Well I've seen an NFL linebacker jump five feet straight up when he saw a mouse. Then a woman grabbed it with her bare hand and bit off its head. Then she looked right at me and said "That's what'll happen to you if you leave the seat up again."
guess whose anecdotal experience I tend to trust more?
Probably not the anecdotal experience that was obviously just made up... for shame.
Does this mean that the comet was in orbit around Jupiter or that it was merely in an orbit that was very similar to Jupiter's (in relation to the sun).
The astronomer in the article said that the comet was in orbit around Jupiter -- ergo moon, not simply an object in a similar orbit around the sun.
Yes, it did. A planet like Jupiter may actually have been essential for complex life to develop on Earth.
Maybe. However in addition to capturing bodies that could have threatened earth, Jupiter also attracts objects from the Oort Cloud etc. that would not have been any threat to Earth otherwise. The jury is still out on whether Jupiter is actually a net positive.
Sounds like Twitter is trying to cover their butts.
"No officer lawman sir, That is not our terrorist message, and we don't have anything to do with it. All the messages belong to the person who wrote them."
They don't need that kind of CYA. None of the places that do claim to own everything you write are held accountable for that kind of thing. They throw in a few disclaimers, and at the end of the day they might be asked to take something down but they aren't going to be prosecuted for having hosted a terrorist message whether their TOS automagically claims ownership or not.
I think that they just realized that they can basically ask for every relevant right they need in their TOS anyway, so they can earn some cheap good PR with their users just by giving up on their plans to publish "The Poetry of Twitter" without having to pay any of the twit authors.
Please stop saying "[just|merely|only|nothing but] semantics" in common language, as they are anything but insignificant, by definition.
Semantics are important in that they are about how words convey meaning, in the case of an adjective, what properties the word implies about the object being . When we're talking about something with known and agreed upon properties, and trying to reverse our way to what word we should use to classify it, and the words in question don't account for this case, then that is a useless exercise in semantics.
Viruses are different than every other living thing, and every other not-living thing. The argument is basically over whether the inadequate definition of "alive" should be jiggled to include or exclude viruses. In neither case will this change a single agreed upon property of the virus. Where the specific meanings of "alive" are important, you will have to account for how the virus is different in either case.
In other words, you can define something as meaning "important", but you can't define something as being important. Note that there are two "something"s there -- a word, and a thing which you assign a word to.
Semantics are useless here because ultimately this is an issue of classification, and the real world simply doesn't comply with our desire for clear classifications.
All that is required is a change in flux, and a wire moving through a constant magnetic field is a change in flux. You can think of a 'change in area times field over time' as 'length times field times change in position over time'. The wiki page on Faraday's law of induction shows how you arrive at the velocity-based component of induced emf.
That said, if you move a wire through it, you'll generate one hell of an electic field, but only while the strength of the magnetic field through the wire is changing.
Wait, if you move a wire through an unchanging field (perpendicularly), you'll induce a current, right? You'll also induce one if you hold a wire still in a field whose strength is changing.
Yes you're right. What actually induces the current isn't exactly the magnetic field, it's magnetic flux. The induced voltage is proportional to the change in magnetic flux over time, and flux is magnetic field times area, and so flux per unit time can also be described as a length times a velocity. Think of it as the moving wire carving out an increasing area, constituting a change in flux. You don't have to actually vary the magnetic field strength itself.
Fail. He's making fun of himself for not getting it, QM terminology to an extent for sounding like made-up words to those who don't get it, and also White Zombie.
You have to be pro-active with these things. If you're only reactive then it's already too late and the curve just to catch up to your competition is even harder, makes it look even more impossible, making you give up more easily.
Your post has convinced me to be pro-active, but then I realized that I'm simply reacting to your post and am thus already too late to be pro-active.
Scientist: We were unable to find any lawyers that were transparent to laser light, so they were all destroyed during the experiment and no superposition was observed. Scientist: HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Most games in multimon scenarios really need odd number of displays; 5 is better than 6 in this case (and you just know some people will say this is unusable, because of monitor bezel in the center)
Somehow I doubt it supports exactly 6 monitors.
Though on the other hand I went to buy a bomb shelter from this vet with one arm, and he told me that it'd withstand a 40 megaton blast... no more... no less.
Yeah, because the researcher was obviously looking over the reporter's shoulder when they were writing their copy. Also, there's zero chance whatsoever that the reporter had started with a more accurate but less punchy title, and an editor who understood even less decided to change it. Clearly anything on the printed/electronically distributed page is a direct reflection of what the researcher explicitly wanted to be printed. No scientist has ever been shocked to find that an article about their research directly contradicted what they had explicitly told the reporter. This is because the reporter, who is always fully devoted to accurately representing the science, makes sure to continue consulting with the scientist at every point of authoring their article, and doesn't just phone up the researcher to ask a few quick questions and get a few sound bites then hang up and write whatever they want. And of course -- okay I can't go on.
Feynman makes a lot of good points, and certainly scientists need to do a better job of interfacing with the press. But surely you can see a difference between a scientist embellishing their research or the uses for it in order to make it more exciting for the press, and a researcher failing to correct a misconception they may not have realized the reporter ever had, and the reporter deciding on their own to embellish the research to make it more exciting. One is the scientist being complicit in bad science journalism, the other is a scientist not being all-knowing omniscient. Why would you assume that the reporter ever said anything that indicated he had this misconception? The scientist probably was careful to specify chemically inert, the reporter may have used the same phrase himself, but by the time it hits the page, it becomes "inert as in non-radioactive". One word makes all the difference.
But yeah. I guess "stop talking to the press until the press stops having misconceptions about science" is a possible solution. We wouldn't be discussing this research in that case here on/., but hey maybe that's for the best?
The only one I know of is high fever. Once it hits, say, 102 F (number kinda pulled from my arse), then you should go to the doctor regardless of what disease you think you might have because if it goes up much more it can be life threatening. I once let a sinus infection go without treatment until, waking up shivering and soaked in sweat, I realized my fever was at 103. I drove myself to the doctor, which was, er... unwise. I was actually having minor visual hallucinations, seeing bright sparkly things in the sky.
You're a fucking creep, do you know that? Move in with some Christian Scientists and die a slow painful death away from places where you can continue to give bad advice.
Please shut the fuck up. For a person who understands and respects proper medical care, "good advice" includes knowing when your situation does not require professional medical care and you're better off not clogging up the system or exposing other people with a case that will resolve itself and doctors can't do much about anyway.
If you're a healthy adult and you catch the flu and your fever doesn't get out of control, then you should just stay home and rest. This PAX attendee is obviously not a Christian Scientist who eschews medicine, you damn fool, and he went to the doctor and they told him there was no point in him coming.
So yeah, in some cases it's worth gambling because there's a life in the balance (both quotes from the article you linked), but in most cases where risk factors are low, there's no point. H1N1 is just another strain of the flu. If you catch it or any other flu, stay home and thereby prevent it's spread unless you have a serious need to get treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
Mythbusters is Pseudo-Science at its worst. They claim a veneer of authenticity, but make broad assumptions based on very limited and highly flawed experiments with no controls groups. It's an entertaining sideshow at best.
Zombie Richard Feynman would like to have a word with you.
Seriously, the xkcd author has a huge point here. You want to improve understanding and respect for science in this country? Start with the basics. When the most common response to "why do you believe X?" is "because I performed/witnessed an experiment demonstrating it", then we can shift the discussion to proper experimental methods and bookkeeping. So what if the experiments are sketchy and their methods wouldn't pass muster in any journal, and as a result some people believe things that aren't true? By simply educating people as to the value of experiment, you've already won 90% of the battle.
Mythbusters is fighting the good fight for science and you should respect that.
The most obvious evidence for this has, to me, always been the way in which the results of IQ testing, and thus the conclusions as to which groups of people are "inherently" smarter or dumber, always seems to perfectly track the pre-existing prejudices of that time and culture yet change as the pejudices of that time and culture change!
In the early days of IQ testing, it was Italian and Irish immigrants who did poorly and were assumed to be "innately" inferior, exactly as everyone already believed. 80 years later, does "The Bell Curve" similarly find that Italians are inferior? No! It instead perfectly reflects the cultural biases and stereotypes of the time in which it was written, yet still claims that these are "innate" differences unaffected by culture. Math testing in the United States suggests women are worse at math, yet testing in South Korea doesn't show that at all -- weird, in the U.S. we stereotype women as worse and testing bears this out, in SK it's the opposite, but culture supposedly has nothing to do with it. They didn't have IQ testing in the mid-1800s, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it would show the "innate" intelligence of the Chinese railroad workers matching the contemporary prejudice against them, the exact opposite of their stereotyped "innate" intelligence today.
And remember, the conclusions made by all of the people claiming these differences depend entirely on the IQ test testing "innate" intelligence and only "innate" intelligence, i.e. that which cannot be learned or altered by culture/education. Because their whole point is to show that there is no point to trying to change these "innate" facts. Affirmative action, programs to interest women in math and science, these are all fools games because you can't change "innate" intelligence. That they've never created such a test where your score cannot be improved via coaching and preparation, shows they fail from the beginning. That their conclusions always track the specific cultural biases in which the testing takes place, and no longer as soon as you step out of that context, shows they fail in the end, too.
And yet people, always from the groups at the top of the social totem pole, argue that their culture, with its particular biases/prejudices, is unique in history in that it alone represents the true "innate" capabilities of the people within it. Call this my prejudice, but I find it very hard to take the field seriously as a result.
Haiku is 17 times better than Syllable.
What you call "better", I call "bloat"! I like my OSes how I like my poetry, streamlined and with everything extraneous removed. A wise man once said that the process of creating is done when you have removed everything you can. Clearly, then, Syllable is the best thing ever.
Just as an example of its power, watch as I use Syllable to compress not only every Haiku, but every poem of every type ever, down into 3 poems!
Sex.
Death.
Life.
And for the enterprising Syllabist, you can probably guess that even this can be reduced down to a single poem, the one and only poem that you'll ever need:
Fuck.
True that! It doesn't really matter if some other women are afraid of mice or not or if they don't care about toilet seats if the one you're with threatens to cut your junk off in your sleep if they fall into the toilet, or if you look at other women, or try to leave. (please help).
I'd presume "Hydrocarbon-X" is some sort of kerosene-like blend of petroleum distillates.
Naw. Hydrocarbon-X is just a combustible version of Chemical X which was used to make the Powerpuff Girls.
Their rocket should be quite spectacular.
I'm not frightened by mice in the least. I think they're adorable. Even when I find them someplace unexpected, my reaction is usually "Awww". Even after one of the fuckers has bitten me.
Rats, on the other hand, are a different critter. For one, compared to mice they're huge. Also compared to mice, they're much more likely to be aggressive if they're even close to cornered. And they look evil.
Though pet rats or lab rats don't bother me. Even the rats scurrying around the tracks in the NY subway don't bother me as they go about their business. Strange rat in my house, though, that's freaky.
Oh yeah? Well I've seen an NFL linebacker jump five feet straight up when he saw a mouse. Then a woman grabbed it with her bare hand and bit off its head. Then she looked right at me and said "That's what'll happen to you if you leave the seat up again."
guess whose anecdotal experience I tend to trust more?
Probably not the anecdotal experience that was obviously just made up... for shame.
Don't forget to make some air holes (he says from bitter personal experience).
Great, as if trolls on Slashdot weren't enough...
No kidding! Our trolls are bottom-dwelling parasites at best -- these were apex predators! When you bit a troll, the troll bit back.
Does this mean that the comet was in orbit around Jupiter or that it was merely in an orbit that was very similar to Jupiter's (in relation to the sun).
The astronomer in the article said that the comet was in orbit around Jupiter -- ergo moon, not simply an object in a similar orbit around the sun.
Yes, it did. A planet like Jupiter may actually have been essential for complex life to develop on Earth.
Maybe. However in addition to capturing bodies that could have threatened earth, Jupiter also attracts objects from the Oort Cloud etc. that would not have been any threat to Earth otherwise. The jury is still out on whether Jupiter is actually a net positive.
Sounds like Twitter is trying to cover their butts.
"No officer lawman sir, That is not our terrorist message, and we don't have anything to do with it. All the messages belong to the person who wrote them."
They don't need that kind of CYA. None of the places that do claim to own everything you write are held accountable for that kind of thing. They throw in a few disclaimers, and at the end of the day they might be asked to take something down but they aren't going to be prosecuted for having hosted a terrorist message whether their TOS automagically claims ownership or not.
I think that they just realized that they can basically ask for every relevant right they need in their TOS anyway, so they can earn some cheap good PR with their users just by giving up on their plans to publish "The Poetry of Twitter" without having to pay any of the twit authors.
Please stop saying "[just|merely|only|nothing but] semantics" in common language, as they are anything but insignificant, by definition.
Semantics are important in that they are about how words convey meaning, in the case of an adjective, what properties the word implies about the object being . When we're talking about something with known and agreed upon properties, and trying to reverse our way to what word we should use to classify it, and the words in question don't account for this case, then that is a useless exercise in semantics.
Viruses are different than every other living thing, and every other not-living thing. The argument is basically over whether the inadequate definition of "alive" should be jiggled to include or exclude viruses. In neither case will this change a single agreed upon property of the virus. Where the specific meanings of "alive" are important, you will have to account for how the virus is different in either case.
In other words, you can define something as meaning "important", but you can't define something as being important. Note that there are two "something"s there -- a word, and a thing which you assign a word to.
Semantics are useless here because ultimately this is an issue of classification, and the real world simply doesn't comply with our desire for clear classifications.
All that is required is a change in flux, and a wire moving through a constant magnetic field is a change in flux. You can think of a 'change in area times field over time' as 'length times field times change in position over time'. The wiki page on Faraday's law of induction shows how you arrive at the velocity-based component of induced emf.
Yes you're right. What actually induces the current isn't exactly the magnetic field, it's magnetic flux. The induced voltage is proportional to the change in magnetic flux over time, and flux is magnetic field times area, and so flux per unit time can also be described as a length times a velocity. Think of it as the moving wire carving out an increasing area, constituting a change in flux. You don't have to actually vary the magnetic field strength itself.
"Then you don't know how much energy I put into it -- provably!"
"No, but I can bound the amount of energy at 'not enough'!"
Fail. He's making fun of himself for not getting it, QM terminology to an extent for sounding like made-up words to those who don't get it, and also White Zombie.
That was funny, damnit. Lighten up.
You have to be pro-active with these things. If you're only reactive then it's already too late and the curve just to catch up to your competition is even harder, makes it look even more impossible, making you give up more easily.
Your post has convinced me to be pro-active, but then I realized that I'm simply reacting to your post and am thus already too late to be pro-active.
"This is amazing! I'm coming/not-coming at the same time!"
"Nice try. I observed you ejaculating three seconds into it."
Scientist: We were unable to find any lawyers that were transparent to laser light, so they were all destroyed during the experiment and no superposition was observed.
Scientist: HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Most games in multimon scenarios really need odd number of displays; 5 is better than 6 in this case (and you just know some people will say this is unusable, because of monitor bezel in the center)
Somehow I doubt it supports exactly 6 monitors.
Though on the other hand I went to buy a bomb shelter from this vet with one arm, and he told me that it'd withstand a 40 megaton blast... no more... no less.
Yeah, because the researcher was obviously looking over the reporter's shoulder when they were writing their copy. Also, there's zero chance whatsoever that the reporter had started with a more accurate but less punchy title, and an editor who understood even less decided to change it. Clearly anything on the printed/electronically distributed page is a direct reflection of what the researcher explicitly wanted to be printed. No scientist has ever been shocked to find that an article about their research directly contradicted what they had explicitly told the reporter. This is because the reporter, who is always fully devoted to accurately representing the science, makes sure to continue consulting with the scientist at every point of authoring their article, and doesn't just phone up the researcher to ask a few quick questions and get a few sound bites then hang up and write whatever they want. And of course -- okay I can't go on.
Feynman makes a lot of good points, and certainly scientists need to do a better job of interfacing with the press. But surely you can see a difference between a scientist embellishing their research or the uses for it in order to make it more exciting for the press, and a researcher failing to correct a misconception they may not have realized the reporter ever had, and the reporter deciding on their own to embellish the research to make it more exciting. One is the scientist being complicit in bad science journalism, the other is a scientist not being all-knowing omniscient. Why would you assume that the reporter ever said anything that indicated he had this misconception? The scientist probably was careful to specify chemically inert, the reporter may have used the same phrase himself, but by the time it hits the page, it becomes "inert as in non-radioactive". One word makes all the difference.
But yeah. I guess "stop talking to the press until the press stops having misconceptions about science" is a possible solution. We wouldn't be discussing this research in that case here on /., but hey maybe that's for the best?
The only one I know of is high fever. Once it hits, say, 102 F (number kinda pulled from my arse), then you should go to the doctor regardless of what disease you think you might have because if it goes up much more it can be life threatening. I once let a sinus infection go without treatment until, waking up shivering and soaked in sweat, I realized my fever was at 103. I drove myself to the doctor, which was, er... unwise. I was actually having minor visual hallucinations, seeing bright sparkly things in the sky.
Man, I would have never thought that chicks at PAX were that easy....
They aren't, until they catch the fucking flu!
You're a fucking creep, do you know that? Move in with some Christian Scientists and die a slow painful death away from places where you can continue to give bad advice.
Please shut the fuck up. For a person who understands and respects proper medical care, "good advice" includes knowing when your situation does not require professional medical care and you're better off not clogging up the system or exposing other people with a case that will resolve itself and doctors can't do much about anyway.
If you're a healthy adult and you catch the flu and your fever doesn't get out of control, then you should just stay home and rest. This PAX attendee is obviously not a Christian Scientist who eschews medicine, you damn fool, and he went to the doctor and they told him there was no point in him coming.
So yeah, in some cases it's worth gambling because there's a life in the balance (both quotes from the article you linked), but in most cases where risk factors are low, there's no point. H1N1 is just another strain of the flu. If you catch it or any other flu, stay home and thereby prevent it's spread unless you have a serious need to get treatment.