Science is wrong by definition, most of the "neckbeards" I've met understand that but are unlikely to express it as eloquently as Asimov. Skepticism is a fundamental skill for scientists and engineers alike, sensationalism is a fundamental skill for journalists and professional propagandists...err, I mean,...lobbyists. If you can't tell the difference then you really should hand in that vintage geek card you have on display.
Bottom line is, the worker drones still know they can be fired on a whim while they plaster a fake smile on their face.
I've had 15yrs experience as a blue collar labourer and 20+ years experience as a degree qualified "IT" professional. If you are a seasoned professional yourself and feel you are being treated as a "worker drone" then I'm pretty sure your boss is not to blame. Begging for respect on Slashdot isn't going to help you obtain it in the office, you have to earn it through your words and deeds.
And no that does not mean "sucking up to the boss". It's your professional duty to do what I wish every public servant on the planet would learn to do - speak truth to power without fear or favour. If your boss does not respect that then the arrogant prick is tarnishing the reputations of the individuals who make up his team, including yours..
Having said that, it does appear that some of the activities conducted at the board level of multi-nationals such as "mission statements" could be undertaken by a studious pre-schooler.
Why does everyone seem to think that a school spending $200 per student / per year for a piece of equipment is a "bad thing"? I'm not saying there aren't other higher priorities for the school budget, what I'm saying is that if education was funded properly in the first place $200/yr/student would not be seen as a "waste" by a reasonable person. It's only seen as an extravagance because they are given fuck all money for anything else, including well educated teachers!!!!
Today's internet is a great way to teach kids how to learn for themselves, it's a natural human skill that should be rewarded/encouraged in children and continuously sharpened in adulthood. Adults only need to steer a child's natural curiosity and offer guidance on how to "look up" a new subject of interest. The internet is conceptually no different to the way my parent's/teacher's told to me to "look it up" in the dictionary, the atlas, or the "family encyclopaedia" back when I grew up in the 60's. Of course, the internet is cheaper, has a broader range of content, is more relevant, more up to date, more detailed, and more convenient than any encyclopaedia. In fact it comes much closer to the "sum of mankind's knowledge" than any bricks and mortar library ever built or dreamt of, why wouldn't you want every student to have unfettered access 24x7?
As an example of that, my 4yo granddaughter has a habit of getting up at 4.30am, sneaking into mum and dad's room to retrieve mum's ipad, then retreating back to her own room to browse youtube videos. That might not sound an 'educational activity' but she is doing what a 4yo does best, feeding her insatiable curiosity.
Exaggerating the severity of the alleged crime to further her career is not her job, she is not a defence attorney she is a public prosecutor, she should be sacked.
This is a country where family members might, and occasionally do, bribe the local clerk to have you declared dead of natural causes, so they can take over your land and other belongings. Biometrics can't solve that...
WTF? That's the problem biometrics were designed to solve. Say my family asserts I'm dead and goes to court to claim their rightful inheritance. I turn up, press a grimy thumb on the judges notepad and say "match that", case closed! The idea that better identification makes it easier for someone to steal your identity is pure nonsense. The reason your example scenario doesn't happen regularly in the west is precisely because we already have well established systems to uniquely identify individuals, a practice that goes at least as far back as William the Conquer and his Doomsday book
If you don't have a reliable way to identify property owners then you can't have reliable property law. If you don't have reliable property law then you can't have capitalism. Of course, outside the west the unwashed masses often do not have any officially recognised ownership of the land they have lived on for centuries/millennia. That lack of legal recognition is the reason multi-nationals can and do buy/lease huge chunks of land from third world governments and then hire mercenaries to rid "their property" of "lawless vandals and trespassers".
Your incorrect, the Queen does not pick them, she simply rubber stamps their appointment, in the same way she rubber stamps a general election and a new parliment. Tell me, when was the last time the Queen refused to use that stamp, when did she actually "choose" to do anything other than her cerimonial duties? Aside from that, I was talking about Australlia where senators are elected rather than appointed by the government of the day.
One of the very few exception to the monarchy staying "hands off" the government is her role in breaking the "double dissolution" senarion. If the PM refeused to call an election the Queen can sack them and call an election herself. That exact senario played out here in the 1970's when Gough Whitlam refused to call an election after his budget was rejected twice by the senate.
Yep, and quality papers is what they should be competing for. The journal ranking systems used by univisities (not just in Norway) are designed to give more weight to journals that have a long track record of doing that. This is why the Nature and Science journals at at the top of the list, their long publishing history and track record of quality papers speaks for itself. A low ranked journal will stay a low ranked until it's track record is such that it can be deemed a reliable source. If it does nothing to improve it's record then it follows it will never be respected.
A good article that pushes science forward, even if published in a minor journal, should weigh significantly in your favor for tenure, and a lousy article, even if published in a major journal, should not.
The "impact factor" of individual papers is generally weighed by the number of citations, not the name of the journal.
The more they get paid, the easier they are to bribe. Money becomes less of a thought, they don't see the problem with getting a trivial sum from someone, it isn't helping them much.
Mate, read the logic in what you wrote - how the hell do you bribe someone with something you say they don't want? Having said that I actually agree that most politicians don't care about money, they care about power. Money is a powerful tool but political power trumps it.
True, but if your an honest speculator, it's likely BC's will be dirt cheap in the short term, how badly the exchange rate is hurt in the long term depends on how public this guy's flogging becomes. Silk Road was THE "leading brand" in the online black market, their successful branding campaign was their biggest PR problem, their demise will be noted briefly, the market will return to BAU, if it has not done so already.
I'm all for recreational drugs but the silk road guy has been charged with advertising and paying for a hit on his employee. In this scenario the silk road owner is the alledged "dick-tator" who is ordering the whistle-blower's assassination.
In the Westminster system the same dead locked funding scenario is called a "double dissolution". It's a constitutional trigger for a general election, the theory being that if the government of the day can't get their agenda funded by a hostile senate, then we pick a new government/senate that can at least keep the fucking lights on. What's the point of electing a bunch of public servants if they stubbornly insist on derailing the delivery of public services?
Probably a loan guarantee, it's the same thing as military 'aid' to Israel/Egypt, the 'aid' goes directly from the US government to the US arms supplier. The recipient country pays the money back to the US government. If the recipient nation is run by a strategically cooperative dictator then non-payment may be overlooked/forgiven.
Yeah, just keep trashing this place, we don't need it, we will have that 8 billion seat interstellar transport ready any day now. When will space cadets understand that if we can't rebuild the life support system on our current circum-stella spaceship, we can't possibly build a brand one into the boot of your imagined interstellar ship.
Wildlife is thriving because of the lack of humans, the contamination affects their health but nowhere near as much as living amongst humans does. Wildlife also thrives in the Korean DMZ, to them a carpet of land mines is safer than living with humans.
the problem is that not everyone can afford health care
You do realise that in Australia a 1.5% levy on income tax covers the cost of a "free" health system for all Australians (taxpayer or otherwise), our system also has significantly better medical outcomes than the US system. For a family of four that works out to close to 1/10th of what an American pays for similar cover. In fact you guys already pay a similar per-capita amount on health through your taxes. With the better economies of scale you have in the US that should easily be enough to ensure nobody goes bankrupt due to medical expenses (which is the real point of any health insurance scheme). Why the hell do you (or your employer) then need to go and pay another 9X that amount to a private middle man?
Oh, and lets not blame it on the doctor's hourly rates, our home grown doctors still drive around in nice cars and live in the "leafy avenue" part of town.
"Debate club" is an excellent description! We have something unique here that is so far ahead of the game it looks old fashioned. Slashdot is not a "news" site and never has been, if I want to read a good a news site then I will go to the BBC. The slashdot "story" is just a summary of the (alleged) topic up for debate, it points to one or more articles that are already fine examples of traditional news publishing such as the BBC and invites the reader to express and defend their opinion on it.
The new style is like every other mainstream site because it's coming from a long publishing tradition. Things are set into columns, the columns surround by pictures in a way that's both easy to READ and eye-catching. The newspaper tradition does not expect the reader to insert their own comments within their carefully layed out columns.. Slashdot's format begs the reader to WRITE something. At Slashdot the comments are the content, take the focus away from them and it will rapidly devolve into just another link farm..
Put another way, if the active Slashdot commentators liked the traditional feedback formats of newspaper publishers then there would be no reason for Slashdot to exists. Sites like the BBC would keep the eyeballs on their own site. The comment system is Slashdot's "value add", without it, it's toast. Make it look like a traditional comment system that's normally provided by the real news sites and people will just comment directly on the real news site.
There's a reason people like me came here in the late 90's and are still actively commenting, it's not support for Slashdot in the way one supports a football club, it's support for a genuine alternative to the traditional publishing meme. One that has the ability to turn a story into a conversation, which is something I think is desperately needed to counter the undue influence of the incontestable propaganda statements known as "opinion columns" that dominate the MSM, particularly in the US.
Glad you posted directly. We're a hard crowd to please, after a very brief look my main objections are...
1. Use the whole width of the screen. The narrow width gives the individual comments a ridiculously tall aspect ratio which destroys the flow of the thread. The threads need to stick out like dogs balls for an old fart like me to follow them.
2. Get rid of the pictures on the front page or give the option of a list format that reflects the style of the current front page, thumbnails perhaps?.
Like many other loyal fans, the reason I have posted well over 5K comments, a few stories, and the occasional small donation in the past 10+yrs, is the comment system! There are a billion sites where I can post comments at strangers, but other than chat rooms full of sexually frustrated people, this is the only site where I can hold a conversation with them.
Slashdot will never be the "cool kid", but this "new look" is like Sheldon picking out his own suit, even the geeks are shaking their heads in bewilderment.
Damage to what reputation? - The peace prize has always been a political statement, need I remind you that Kissenger is on the list of recipients. Unlike the scientific prizes, peace prizes are more typically awarded for words than deeds.
No brand or flavour would be edible if it were not for the packaging.
- The 'air' is pure nitrogen, it keeps the contents fresh for months rather than hours.
- The inflated bag protects the contents from being crushed during transport.
Nothing new here, the IRA regularly called Scotland yard to claim responsibility just prior to their attacks, they even had a system of secret code words to prove who was talking. There's no point to an attack if the terrorist tries to hide responsibility, and a claim of responsibility after the attack can be disputed. Like the animals who hacked a solider to death in a busy London street and then started talking to CCTV cameras about 'why', these people want the whole world to know who they are, and why they are pissed. There will be people in Kenyan who sympathised with the 'cause' (at least before the attack), unsurprising if the operation started leaking with so many people involved.
Terror doesn't work, and probably never will, it simply makes the vast majority who survive more determined to kill you. By that I mean, who off the top of their head can remember the stated reason for the murder above? - Most of us don't care, they have gone so far past the point of 'reasonable', we simply dismiss the message as the ramblings of a madman and demand they be removed from OUR society. That's why the mall attack is big news in the western world, we can relate to the situation because nothing says "OUR society" like a giant shopping mall does.. A 'terrorist' attack that wipes out an entire mud-brick town in nearby Sudan or Mali will be uniformly ignored by the MSM.
A quick check of WP says that the largest meta-study found no correlation, they found what they claimed to be "statistical errors" in the 20 studies that did find a correlation. To me that doesn't say "no", it says the evidence we have to date is weak (unless there's a much larger set of "error free" papers backing the "no correlation" side).
Personally I think there is a grain of truth in it, and my ex-wide who worked in ER for several years (as a cleaner) swears by it. However the moon doesn't actually create freaks from otherwise normal people, rather it provides just enough light for existing freaks to wander about at night and hurt themselves/others. I wouldn't expect the effect to be noticeable in a modern city hospital because city lights outshine the moon anyway. Weather also plays a huge role in the number of freaks wandering around at night, like everyone else, they (mostly) have enough sense to get out of the rain and are much more active on warm nights than cold. According to my ex-wife and her co-workers, a full moon on a hot and humid Saturday night is the perfect freak storm in a rural (or beachside) ER, statistically you're more likely to be murdered on a hot humid day than any other day.
There's a very good reason that virtually every ancient religion has a sun and/or a moon god, they were observed to rule the natural cycles around them. Modern city/urban life obscures most of those observations and people are left wondering why the hell stone age people went to the effort of building places like stone henge.
I think it's pretty much the same reason our modern society went to the effort of building the LHC or the Hubble telescope, ultimately they were trying to understand the world around them. Knowing where and when to turn up for an "all you can eat" buffet is a very deep behaviour in evolutionary terms, creatures as diverse as apes, jellyfish, corals, bears, and crocodiles make good use of it.
In most cases we are at a complete loss when it comes to explaining these things in detail. For example, how do crocodiles "know" to gather an hour or so before fish become trapped on a flooded river ford? - The brief event (filmed by Attenborough) only happens right at the peak of a king tide. AFAIK, nobody (including Attenborough) has a clue how the hell the crocs tell the difference between a high tide and a king tide BEFORE it arrives. In ancient times people just accepted that (say) the crocs inexplicable ability to predict king tides was due to "divine knowledge".
Humans are the undisputed masters of observing and exploiting patterns, however the root cause of the pattern is often irrelevant to it's utility. Ancient people would have simply observed the crocs (a wise defence behaviour anyway) and been alerted to the imminent fish bounty by their behaviour, some would have been mauled/taken by crocs when they went after the fish, lucky escape stories would abound, semi-random rituals would rapidly emerge to appease and thank the crocs. Next thing you know everybody wants a row of granite crocodile gods adorning their pyramid's driveway, and virgins are feeling nervous.
Slashdot Mirror
Science is wrong by definition, most of the "neckbeards" I've met understand that but are unlikely to express it as eloquently as Asimov. Skepticism is a fundamental skill for scientists and engineers alike, sensationalism is a fundamental skill for journalists and professional propagandists...err, I mean,...lobbyists. If you can't tell the difference then you really should hand in that vintage geek card you have on display.
Bottom line is, the worker drones still know they can be fired on a whim while they plaster a fake smile on their face.
I've had 15yrs experience as a blue collar labourer and 20+ years experience as a degree qualified "IT" professional. If you are a seasoned professional yourself and feel you are being treated as a "worker drone" then I'm pretty sure your boss is not to blame. Begging for respect on Slashdot isn't going to help you obtain it in the office, you have to earn it through your words and deeds.
And no that does not mean "sucking up to the boss". It's your professional duty to do what I wish every public servant on the planet would learn to do - speak truth to power without fear or favour. If your boss does not respect that then the arrogant prick is tarnishing the reputations of the individuals who make up his team, including yours..
Having said that, it does appear that some of the activities conducted at the board level of multi-nationals such as "mission statements" could be undertaken by a studious pre-schooler.
Why does everyone seem to think that a school spending $200 per student / per year for a piece of equipment is a "bad thing"? I'm not saying there aren't other higher priorities for the school budget, what I'm saying is that if education was funded properly in the first place $200/yr/student would not be seen as a "waste" by a reasonable person. It's only seen as an extravagance because they are given fuck all money for anything else, including well educated teachers!!!!
Today's internet is a great way to teach kids how to learn for themselves, it's a natural human skill that should be rewarded/encouraged in children and continuously sharpened in adulthood. Adults only need to steer a child's natural curiosity and offer guidance on how to "look up" a new subject of interest. The internet is conceptually no different to the way my parent's/teacher's told to me to "look it up" in the dictionary, the atlas, or the "family encyclopaedia" back when I grew up in the 60's. Of course, the internet is cheaper, has a broader range of content, is more relevant, more up to date, more detailed, and more convenient than any encyclopaedia. In fact it comes much closer to the "sum of mankind's knowledge" than any bricks and mortar library ever built or dreamt of, why wouldn't you want every student to have unfettered access 24x7?
As an example of that, my 4yo granddaughter has a habit of getting up at 4.30am, sneaking into mum and dad's room to retrieve mum's ipad, then retreating back to her own room to browse youtube videos. That might not sound an 'educational activity' but she is doing what a 4yo does best, feeding her insatiable curiosity.
Yep, choose your battles wisely. (re:sig).
Exaggerating the severity of the alleged crime to further her career is not her job, she is not a defence attorney she is a public prosecutor, she should be sacked.
This is a country where family members might, and occasionally do, bribe the local clerk to have you declared dead of natural causes, so they can take over your land and other belongings. Biometrics can't solve that...
WTF? That's the problem biometrics were designed to solve. Say my family asserts I'm dead and goes to court to claim their rightful inheritance. I turn up, press a grimy thumb on the judges notepad and say "match that", case closed! The idea that better identification makes it easier for someone to steal your identity is pure nonsense. The reason your example scenario doesn't happen regularly in the west is precisely because we already have well established systems to uniquely identify individuals, a practice that goes at least as far back as William the Conquer and his Doomsday book
If you don't have a reliable way to identify property owners then you can't have reliable property law. If you don't have reliable property law then you can't have capitalism. Of course, outside the west the unwashed masses often do not have any officially recognised ownership of the land they have lived on for centuries/millennia. That lack of legal recognition is the reason multi-nationals can and do buy/lease huge chunks of land from third world governments and then hire mercenaries to rid "their property" of "lawless vandals and trespassers".
Who's fault is that?
Your incorrect, the Queen does not pick them, she simply rubber stamps their appointment, in the same way she rubber stamps a general election and a new parliment. Tell me, when was the last time the Queen refused to use that stamp, when did she actually "choose" to do anything other than her cerimonial duties? Aside from that, I was talking about Australlia where senators are elected rather than appointed by the government of the day.
One of the very few exception to the monarchy staying "hands off" the government is her role in breaking the "double dissolution" senarion. If the PM refeused to call an election the Queen can sack them and call an election herself. That exact senario played out here in the 1970's when Gough Whitlam refused to call an election after his budget was rejected twice by the senate.
A paper should stand or fall on its own merits.
Yep, and quality papers is what they should be competing for. The journal ranking systems used by univisities (not just in Norway) are designed to give more weight to journals that have a long track record of doing that. This is why the Nature and Science journals at at the top of the list, their long publishing history and track record of quality papers speaks for itself. A low ranked journal will stay a low ranked until it's track record is such that it can be deemed a reliable source. If it does nothing to improve it's record then it follows it will never be respected.
A good article that pushes science forward, even if published in a minor journal, should weigh significantly in your favor for tenure, and a lousy article, even if published in a major journal, should not.
The "impact factor" of individual papers is generally weighed by the number of citations, not the name of the journal.
The more they get paid, the easier they are to bribe. Money becomes less of a thought, they don't see the problem with getting a trivial sum from someone, it isn't helping them much.
Mate, read the logic in what you wrote - how the hell do you bribe someone with something you say they don't want? Having said that I actually agree that most politicians don't care about money, they care about power. Money is a powerful tool but political power trumps it.
True, but if your an honest speculator, it's likely BC's will be dirt cheap in the short term, how badly the exchange rate is hurt in the long term depends on how public this guy's flogging becomes. Silk Road was THE "leading brand" in the online black market, their successful branding campaign was their biggest PR problem, their demise will be noted briefly, the market will return to BAU, if it has not done so already.
I'm all for recreational drugs but the silk road guy has been charged with advertising and paying for a hit on his employee. In this scenario the silk road owner is the alledged "dick-tator" who is ordering the whistle-blower's assassination.
In the Westminster system the same dead locked funding scenario is called a "double dissolution". It's a constitutional trigger for a general election, the theory being that if the government of the day can't get their agenda funded by a hostile senate, then we pick a new government/senate that can at least keep the fucking lights on. What's the point of electing a bunch of public servants if they stubbornly insist on derailing the delivery of public services?
Probably a loan guarantee, it's the same thing as military 'aid' to Israel/Egypt, the 'aid' goes directly from the US government to the US arms supplier. The recipient country pays the money back to the US government. If the recipient nation is run by a strategically cooperative dictator then non-payment may be overlooked/forgiven.
Yeah, just keep trashing this place, we don't need it, we will have that 8 billion seat interstellar transport ready any day now. When will space cadets understand that if we can't rebuild the life support system on our current circum-stella spaceship, we can't possibly build a brand one into the boot of your imagined interstellar ship.
Wildlife is thriving because of the lack of humans, the contamination affects their health but nowhere near as much as living amongst humans does. Wildlife also thrives in the Korean DMZ, to them a carpet of land mines is safer than living with humans.
the problem is that not everyone can afford health care
You do realise that in Australia a 1.5% levy on income tax covers the cost of a "free" health system for all Australians (taxpayer or otherwise), our system also has significantly better medical outcomes than the US system. For a family of four that works out to close to 1/10th of what an American pays for similar cover. In fact you guys already pay a similar per-capita amount on health through your taxes. With the better economies of scale you have in the US that should easily be enough to ensure nobody goes bankrupt due to medical expenses (which is the real point of any health insurance scheme). Why the hell do you (or your employer) then need to go and pay another 9X that amount to a private middle man?
Oh, and lets not blame it on the doctor's hourly rates, our home grown doctors still drive around in nice cars and live in the "leafy avenue" part of town.
"Debate club" is an excellent description! We have something unique here that is so far ahead of the game it looks old fashioned. Slashdot is not a "news" site and never has been, if I want to read a good a news site then I will go to the BBC. The slashdot "story" is just a summary of the (alleged) topic up for debate, it points to one or more articles that are already fine examples of traditional news publishing such as the BBC and invites the reader to express and defend their opinion on it.
The new style is like every other mainstream site because it's coming from a long publishing tradition. Things are set into columns, the columns surround by pictures in a way that's both easy to READ and eye-catching. The newspaper tradition does not expect the reader to insert their own comments within their carefully layed out columns.. Slashdot's format begs the reader to WRITE something. At Slashdot the comments are the content, take the focus away from them and it will rapidly devolve into just another link farm..
Put another way, if the active Slashdot commentators liked the traditional feedback formats of newspaper publishers then there would be no reason for Slashdot to exists. Sites like the BBC would keep the eyeballs on their own site. The comment system is Slashdot's "value add", without it, it's toast. Make it look like a traditional comment system that's normally provided by the real news sites and people will just comment directly on the real news site.
There's a reason people like me came here in the late 90's and are still actively commenting, it's not support for Slashdot in the way one supports a football club, it's support for a genuine alternative to the traditional publishing meme. One that has the ability to turn a story into a conversation, which is something I think is desperately needed to counter the undue influence of the incontestable propaganda statements known as "opinion columns" that dominate the MSM, particularly in the US.
Glad you posted directly. We're a hard crowd to please, after a very brief look my main objections are...
1. Use the whole width of the screen. The narrow width gives the individual comments a ridiculously tall aspect ratio which destroys the flow of the thread. The threads need to stick out like dogs balls for an old fart like me to follow them.
2. Get rid of the pictures on the front page or give the option of a list format that reflects the style of the current front page, thumbnails perhaps?.
Like many other loyal fans, the reason I have posted well over 5K comments, a few stories, and the occasional small donation in the past 10+yrs, is the comment system! There are a billion sites where I can post comments at strangers, but other than chat rooms full of sexually frustrated people, this is the only site where I can hold a conversation with them.
Slashdot will never be the "cool kid", but this "new look" is like Sheldon picking out his own suit, even the geeks are shaking their heads in bewilderment.
That's the entire problem for me, it's like a newspaper only printing a single column down the center of the front page, why would you do that?
Damage to what reputation? - The peace prize has always been a political statement, need I remind you that Kissenger is on the list of recipients. Unlike the scientific prizes, peace prizes are more typically awarded for words than deeds.
No brand or flavour would be edible if it were not for the packaging.
- The 'air' is pure nitrogen, it keeps the contents fresh for months rather than hours.
- The inflated bag protects the contents from being crushed during transport.
Nothing new here, the IRA regularly called Scotland yard to claim responsibility just prior to their attacks, they even had a system of secret code words to prove who was talking. There's no point to an attack if the terrorist tries to hide responsibility, and a claim of responsibility after the attack can be disputed. Like the animals who hacked a solider to death in a busy London street and then started talking to CCTV cameras about 'why', these people want the whole world to know who they are, and why they are pissed. There will be people in Kenyan who sympathised with the 'cause' (at least before the attack), unsurprising if the operation started leaking with so many people involved.
Terror doesn't work, and probably never will, it simply makes the vast majority who survive more determined to kill you. By that I mean, who off the top of their head can remember the stated reason for the murder above? - Most of us don't care, they have gone so far past the point of 'reasonable', we simply dismiss the message as the ramblings of a madman and demand they be removed from OUR society. That's why the mall attack is big news in the western world, we can relate to the situation because nothing says "OUR society" like a giant shopping mall does.. A 'terrorist' attack that wipes out an entire mud-brick town in nearby Sudan or Mali will be uniformly ignored by the MSM.
A quick check of WP says that the largest meta-study found no correlation, they found what they claimed to be "statistical errors" in the 20 studies that did find a correlation. To me that doesn't say "no", it says the evidence we have to date is weak (unless there's a much larger set of "error free" papers backing the "no correlation" side).
Personally I think there is a grain of truth in it, and my ex-wide who worked in ER for several years (as a cleaner) swears by it. However the moon doesn't actually create freaks from otherwise normal people, rather it provides just enough light for existing freaks to wander about at night and hurt themselves/others. I wouldn't expect the effect to be noticeable in a modern city hospital because city lights outshine the moon anyway. Weather also plays a huge role in the number of freaks wandering around at night, like everyone else, they (mostly) have enough sense to get out of the rain and are much more active on warm nights than cold. According to my ex-wife and her co-workers, a full moon on a hot and humid Saturday night is the perfect freak storm in a rural (or beachside) ER, statistically you're more likely to be murdered on a hot humid day than any other day.
There's a very good reason that virtually every ancient religion has a sun and/or a moon god, they were observed to rule the natural cycles around them. Modern city/urban life obscures most of those observations and people are left wondering why the hell stone age people went to the effort of building places like stone henge.
I think it's pretty much the same reason our modern society went to the effort of building the LHC or the Hubble telescope, ultimately they were trying to understand the world around them. Knowing where and when to turn up for an "all you can eat" buffet is a very deep behaviour in evolutionary terms, creatures as diverse as apes, jellyfish, corals, bears, and crocodiles make good use of it.
In most cases we are at a complete loss when it comes to explaining these things in detail. For example, how do crocodiles "know" to gather an hour or so before fish become trapped on a flooded river ford? - The brief event (filmed by Attenborough) only happens right at the peak of a king tide. AFAIK, nobody (including Attenborough) has a clue how the hell the crocs tell the difference between a high tide and a king tide BEFORE it arrives. In ancient times people just accepted that (say) the crocs inexplicable ability to predict king tides was due to "divine knowledge".
Humans are the undisputed masters of observing and exploiting patterns, however the root cause of the pattern is often irrelevant to it's utility. Ancient people would have simply observed the crocs (a wise defence behaviour anyway) and been alerted to the imminent fish bounty by their behaviour, some would have been mauled/taken by crocs when they went after the fish, lucky escape stories would abound, semi-random rituals would rapidly emerge to appease and thank the crocs. Next thing you know everybody wants a row of granite crocodile gods adorning their pyramid's driveway, and virgins are feeling nervous.
Why do people think we Aussies talk with our teeth clenched? - Hint: there are a lot of flies in Australia.