2) I never said mammograms, I said self-inspections. And I was there in the 1990s when college campuses had public health representatives giving detailed instructions on how to perform breast self-exams. Since then, doctor's offices have been flooded with hysterical women convinced that they have breast cancer, so they have done away with this recommendation.
3) Many recent studies say that alcohol-based sanitizers are useless, as the alcohol evaporates in a few seconds and does not kill very many germs anyway. The alcohol has to be at a high concentration for it to be effective, but people do not like higher concentrations because it irritates the skin. I work in public health.
4 and 5: check "Dr. Spock's Baby & Child Care". At the time, the medical establishment treated this as the bible of child rearing. Anybody who did not follow Dr. Spock's guidelines was considered a retrograde idiot.
6) Does not contradict anything I said. The recommendation reversal stands.
7) I was at seminars by dermatologists recently who said this stuff. The American Academy of Dermatology today says to avoid sunlight and to get vitamin D only through artificial supplements: "Get vitamin D safely through a healthy diet that may include vitamin supplements. Don't seek the sun." Source: http://www.aad.org/skin-care-and-safety/skin-cancer-prevention/be-sun-smart/be-sun-smart
8) My dad was part of the studies that promoted hormone replacement therapy in the 90s. Today, it is a dirty word.
10) Check http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/ecocenter/air/EcoCenter-Air-Acid-Rain-and-Our-Ecosystem.html?c=y&page=2 "In the late 1970s, researchers surveyed 217 lakes above 2,000 feet in the Adirondacks and found that 51 percent were highly acidic. The news was so grim that scientists began attempting to breed more acid-tolerant strains of trout. One New York State employee compared the area to Death Valley. A decade later, a larger study that included 849 lakes higher than 1,000 feet found that 55 percent were either completely devoid of life or on the brink of collapse."
11) If you can find a source today that argues high-carb, low-protein diets are good, let me know. They would be far outside the mainstream establishment today. My specialty is obesity and diabetes research.
12) Psychologists used to promote sex therapy until the mid-1980s, but you won't find anyone advocating it today.
"For someone who is bitching about science, you sure don't have a fucking clue what is going on."
Actually, I am a scientific insider with a PhD. Having insider access has shown me how arbitrary the scientific reasoning process is. People have their agendas, and getting grants is all about putting on a provocative sales pitch. A typical grant identifies a threat to society, and how this research will be the salvation. I have been to more than one seminar where a scientist debunked some opposing theory, then repeated all the exact same mistakes to promote their own, and the room gave a standing ovation. I thought it was done in parody, but they were serious. It made me realize that the scientific establishment can be no smarter than fundamentalists in trailer parks.
- 1970s: the earth will turn into an iceball. 1990s-: the earth will turn into a fireball. - 1990s: every woman should examine their breasts in the shower. 2012: leave it to doctors. - 2008: people should use hand sanitizer and eschew hand washing. 2012: people should wash hands and eschew sanitizers. - 1960s: babies should not be held or breastfed by their mothers, because they will fail to develop as individuals. 2012: all babies should be breast fed, the longer the better. - 1960s: babies should sleep on their stomachs all the time to avoid SIDS. 2012: babies should never sleep on their stomachs to avoid SIDS. - 1990s: every person over age 50 should get a colonoscopy. 2010: improper colonoscopies are causing thousands of infections and perforations. - 1960s: everybody should have a sun lamp to receive an adequate dose of light in the winter. 2012: Sunlight should be avoided at all costs. When going to the mailbox, coat yourself in a thick layer of sunscreen. - 1990s: All women over age 60 should receive hormone replacement therapy. 2012: Nobody should get hormone therapy. - 1970s: the Earth will run out of food by 2000, and billions of people will starve. 2012: The obesity epidemic is unstoppable, therefore fat children should be taken away from parents. - 1970s: acid rain will turn North America into a treeless desert, due to the relentless march of industrialization. 2012: where are the factories? - 1980s: people should eat high-carb, low-protein diets because protein causes diseases. 2012: people should eat high-protein, low-carb diets because carbs cause diseases. - 1970s: Free love, free sex. Family is an antiquated, useless institution. 1980s-: Family values! AIDS!
Why not build a museum on the history of hoaxes propagated by leading scientists? Over the years, scientists were absolutely sure that some doomsday event would happen. They were sure that the 1910 Haley comet would extinguish all life on Earth; some flu pandemic would kill billions of people because we are "overdue"; the earth is supposed to heat to a fireball, or cool to an ice ball; genetic "degeneracy" would take over the human race; killer bees would wipe out humanity; nuclear war is a certainty; the list goes on.
Or we could talk about the history of public health recommendation flip-flops. Parents should never pick up, hug, or breast-feed their babies, except now we should breast-feed them until they are 5 years old. Babies should be put on their stomachs, except now they should never be put on their stomachs. Everybody should get a flu shot, except that they never work. Nobody should ever wash their hands, but just use hand sanitizer; but wait, this year, they should wash their hands. Every woman should squeeze their breasts in the shower, but now only doctors should. Every man over 50 should get a colonoscopy, except the procedure does more harm than good, since nobody bothers to clean the probes and they puncture intestines.
Microsoft made the exact same announcement about "discontinuing support" for XP when they came out with Vista. Nobody took the bait, and Microsoft quietly continued supporting XP.
Since NASA doesn't have much of a future with the shuttle retired, is this their ploy to get funded for more manned space flights? This announcement doesn't sound particularly new, they've shown the same kind of pictures before.
Clusters of cancer cases happen all the time. There are condominiums in Florida where the incidence of cancer is 10-100 times higher than the national average. But, when we consider what kind of people live in them (retirees from New York), then the incidence is the same as would be expected for old people. It is important to adjust for factors. Also, clusters can occur at random due to chance alone. If one selects 1000 high schools, then some of them will have an unusually high number of pediatric cancer cases due to chance.
This relates to a famous statistical problem, “How many people can be in the same room until there is a better than 50% chance that there will be at least one shared birthday?”
The best way to approach this problem is to calculate the compliment, “What is the probability that there are no shared birthdays?”
When there is one person in the room, the probability is 1.
When there are two people, the probability is 364/365, since there are 364 other birthdays to choose from.
When there are three people, the probability is (364/365) * (363/365).
And so on, until there are 22 people, at which point the product becomes.4927028. At that point, there is a less than 50% chance that there are no shared birthdays. By the same token, there is a better than 50% chance that there is at least one shared birthday.
The Tokyo area is said to be the world's largest city with 30 million people. Do you announce "DANGER!!!" and have 30 million people stampede for the exits? Or do you gradually raise the alert level, so there is a more gradual departure? That would be a tough decision for the leaders.
When speaking to a non-English speaker, they become all respectful and agreeable if you talk to them in English. But if you go through the trouble of learning their language, then their attitude becomes more disrespectful, and they get all mad when you do not act exactly like one of their kind. I've been brought up bilingual, but I say what's the point? It hasn't led to great jobs or any of the other hype that schools would have us believe. (And I am not anti-education, I am getting a PhD in a technical topic.)
In India and some other countries, any college graduate is often called an "engineer". By this definition, all our politicians are engineers. Similarly, the definition of an "intellectual" is often very broad in non-Western nations, encompassing businessmen, plumbers, or nurses.
But going by the narrow definition of "engineer", do we really want geeks with no people skills, no training in humanities or social science, to become our nation's leaders?
So will this be a new toy with which to violate Japanese airspace, and have the Japanese in a tizzy? Then Japan could waste more resources on buying F-22's and fancy radars, which will benefit US but leave the Japanese fuming that they are paying the price for the standoff between two powers.
Has anyone explored the possibility of associations between solar activity and volcanic activity? Is it possible that, say, the amount of neutrinos hitting the Earth can influence the mantle?
What if you go to some famous school, but all the good jobs are reserved for the "insiders" who have been going there for generations? Outside of this crowd, other employers may feel intimidated by your background and not want to hire you. Not all employers want a super-smart employee. Or if they do hire you, they may set you up for failure, because the boss wants to laugh about firing someone who went to a prestigious school.
I went to a prestigious school, where everything people said had many layers of meaning, and everything was an advanced mind game. It took me a long time to trust simpler people who really mean what they say; people couldn't understand why I was so "paranoid". Well, I was in an environment where you had to be.
Never said it did. The risk factors for the disease cannot realistically be alleviated. The repeated experience of public health policy makers has been that telling people to "eat less" and "get more exercise" is useless. But nobody has come up with better ideas, so that remains the "recommendation".
No matter how hard terrorists try, what if there is a disease that will wipe out 1/2 of the world's population in our lifetime anyway? This disease causes people to spontaneously fall into comas, go blind, become covered in open sores, spontaneously lose limbs, and die horrible deaths. And no, I am not talking about AIDS.
The media, public opinion, and policy makers have shown no interest in this incurable disease.
What if scientists say that half of Americans will get this disease in the next 10 years, 1 out of 4 Chinese are already affected by it, and 1 out of 3 Nepalese are affected? Maybe we are in the midst of the 21st Century Black Plague, and nobody realized it.
What if I said I know a developmentally normal 2-year-old human who did not recognize his mother after she was away for a week? By contrast, my cats recognized me immediately when I came home after a month.
I went to a brand-name school myself. But does it really confer an advantage? It seems to confer as much jealousy as opportunity. There are employers that shun graduates of overly prestigious schools, because they assume the graduates are "overqualified" or won't fit into the company. There are bosses that enjoy making a show of setting up a _____ graduate for failure. And I've known plenty of graduates of famous schools that were unemployed or otherwise unsuccessful. I've read articles that say 90% of Harvard MBAs are unsuccessful in their careers.
The designation of schools as "first tier" or "second tier" is largely meaningless at the graduate level. What matters is the reputation of particular departments, particular professors. In my field (biostatistics), there are schools that are not famous as a whole, but have outstanding departments (U. of Washington); and vice versa, famous schools with small and/or terrible biostat departments (Yale, Berkeley, UCLA).
Also, graduates of prestigious schools are burdened with an expectation that they will travel to London, Dubai, wherever, to pursue a high-profile career. What's wrong with living life as a well-adjusted local person, rooted in a particular city? A graduate of a prestigious school who chooses to put roots down in a given city will face ostracism from locals, plus sneers from their own school's alumni.
Do tech companies support trade sanctions against China? Are they diehard supporters of labor unions? Affirmative action? Do they support $500 recycling fees for computers? Do they support increases in welfare? Greater government regulation of business? If the answer to all these is no, then tech companies are right wing indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Global cooling theory was claimed by serious scientists in the 1970s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
2) I never said mammograms, I said self-inspections. And I was there in the 1990s when college campuses had public health representatives giving detailed instructions on how to perform breast self-exams. Since then, doctor's offices have been flooded with hysterical women convinced that they have breast cancer, so they have done away with this recommendation.
3) Many recent studies say that alcohol-based sanitizers are useless, as the alcohol evaporates in a few seconds and does not kill very many germs anyway. The alcohol has to be at a high concentration for it to be effective, but people do not like higher concentrations because it irritates the skin. I work in public health.
4 and 5: check "Dr. Spock's Baby & Child Care". At the time, the medical establishment treated this as the bible of child rearing. Anybody who did not follow Dr. Spock's guidelines was considered a retrograde idiot.
6) Does not contradict anything I said. The recommendation reversal stands.
7) I was at seminars by dermatologists recently who said this stuff. The American Academy of Dermatology today says to avoid sunlight and to get vitamin D only through artificial supplements: "Get vitamin D safely through a healthy diet that may include vitamin supplements. Don't seek the sun."
Source: http://www.aad.org/skin-care-and-safety/skin-cancer-prevention/be-sun-smart/be-sun-smart
8) My dad was part of the studies that promoted hormone replacement therapy in the 90s. Today, it is a dirty word.
9) NASA scientists predicted this. See: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/19/nasa-scientists-predicted-new-ice-age-1971
10) Check http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/ecocenter/air/EcoCenter-Air-Acid-Rain-and-Our-Ecosystem.html?c=y&page=2
"In the late 1970s, researchers surveyed 217 lakes above 2,000 feet in the Adirondacks and found that 51 percent were highly acidic. The news was so grim that scientists began attempting to breed more acid-tolerant strains of trout. One New York State employee compared the area to Death Valley. A decade later, a larger study that included 849 lakes higher than 1,000 feet found that 55 percent were either completely devoid of life or on the brink of collapse."
11) If you can find a source today that argues high-carb, low-protein diets are good, let me know. They would be far outside the mainstream establishment today. My specialty is obesity and diabetes research.
12) Psychologists used to promote sex therapy until the mid-1980s, but you won't find anyone advocating it today.
"For someone who is bitching about science, you sure don't have a fucking clue what is going on."
Actually, I am a scientific insider with a PhD. Having insider access has shown me how arbitrary the scientific reasoning process is. People have their agendas, and getting grants is all about putting on a provocative sales pitch. A typical grant identifies a threat to society, and how this research will be the salvation. I have been to more than one seminar where a scientist debunked some opposing theory, then repeated all the exact same mistakes to promote their own, and the room gave a standing ovation. I thought it was done in parody, but they were serious. It made me realize that the scientific establishment can be no smarter than fundamentalists in trailer parks.
- 1970s: the earth will turn into an iceball. 1990s-: the earth will turn into a fireball.
- 1990s: every woman should examine their breasts in the shower. 2012: leave it to doctors.
- 2008: people should use hand sanitizer and eschew hand washing. 2012: people should wash hands and eschew sanitizers.
- 1960s: babies should not be held or breastfed by their mothers, because they will fail to develop as individuals. 2012: all babies should be breast fed, the longer the better.
- 1960s: babies should sleep on their stomachs all the time to avoid SIDS. 2012: babies should never sleep on their stomachs to avoid SIDS.
- 1990s: every person over age 50 should get a colonoscopy. 2010: improper colonoscopies are causing thousands of infections and perforations.
- 1960s: everybody should have a sun lamp to receive an adequate dose of light in the winter. 2012: Sunlight should be avoided at all costs. When going to the mailbox, coat yourself in a thick layer of sunscreen.
- 1990s: All women over age 60 should receive hormone replacement therapy. 2012: Nobody should get hormone therapy.
- 1970s: the Earth will run out of food by 2000, and billions of people will starve. 2012: The obesity epidemic is unstoppable, therefore fat children should be taken away from parents.
- 1970s: acid rain will turn North America into a treeless desert, due to the relentless march of industrialization. 2012: where are the factories?
- 1980s: people should eat high-carb, low-protein diets because protein causes diseases. 2012: people should eat high-protein, low-carb diets because carbs cause diseases.
- 1970s: Free love, free sex. Family is an antiquated, useless institution. 1980s-: Family values! AIDS!
Why not build a museum on the history of hoaxes propagated by leading scientists? Over the years, scientists were absolutely sure that some doomsday event would happen. They were sure that the 1910 Haley comet would extinguish all life on Earth; some flu pandemic would kill billions of people because we are "overdue"; the earth is supposed to heat to a fireball, or cool to an ice ball; genetic "degeneracy" would take over the human race; killer bees would wipe out humanity; nuclear war is a certainty; the list goes on.
Or we could talk about the history of public health recommendation flip-flops. Parents should never pick up, hug, or breast-feed their babies, except now we should breast-feed them until they are 5 years old. Babies should be put on their stomachs, except now they should never be put on their stomachs. Everybody should get a flu shot, except that they never work. Nobody should ever wash their hands, but just use hand sanitizer; but wait, this year, they should wash their hands. Every woman should squeeze their breasts in the shower, but now only doctors should. Every man over 50 should get a colonoscopy, except the procedure does more harm than good, since nobody bothers to clean the probes and they puncture intestines.
Microsoft made the exact same announcement about "discontinuing support" for XP when they came out with Vista. Nobody took the bait, and Microsoft quietly continued supporting XP.
Which plan lets you spend only $4 a month?
Since NASA doesn't have much of a future with the shuttle retired, is this their ploy to get funded for more manned space flights? This announcement doesn't sound particularly new, they've shown the same kind of pictures before.
Will they need to steam-clean the carpets and repair the blinds first?
Washington DC has had roundabouts since 1791, when the city was built modeled on European cities.
Clusters of cancer cases happen all the time. There are condominiums in Florida where the incidence of cancer is 10-100 times higher than the national average. But, when we consider what kind of people live in them (retirees from New York), then the incidence is the same as would be expected for old people. It is important to adjust for factors. Also, clusters can occur at random due to chance alone. If one selects 1000 high schools, then some of them will have an unusually high number of pediatric cancer cases due to chance.
This relates to a famous statistical problem, “How many people can be in the same room until there is a better than 50% chance that there will be at least one shared birthday?”
The best way to approach this problem is to calculate the compliment, “What is the probability that there are no shared birthdays?”
When there is one person in the room, the probability is 1.
When there are two people, the probability is 364/365, since there are 364 other birthdays to choose from.
When there are three people, the probability is (364/365) * (363/365).
And so on, until there are 22 people, at which point the product becomes .4927028. At that point, there is a less than 50% chance that there are no shared birthdays. By the same token, there is a better than 50% chance that there is at least one shared birthday.
They kept saying that maglev trains will be everywhere by 1985, and that there will be cities in space by 2010.
The illustrations showed them using black land-line telephones and mainframes that spit out hexadecimal ticker-tape, too.
The Tokyo area is said to be the world's largest city with 30 million people. Do you announce "DANGER!!!" and have 30 million people stampede for the exits? Or do you gradually raise the alert level, so there is a more gradual departure? That would be a tough decision for the leaders.
Has the article's author ever heard of ham radio?
A US cruise missile kills a bunch of civilians, so Europeans call it "American aggression" and act like they had no part in it?
When speaking to a non-English speaker, they become all respectful and agreeable if you talk to them in English. But if you go through the trouble of learning their language, then their attitude becomes more disrespectful, and they get all mad when you do not act exactly like one of their kind. I've been brought up bilingual, but I say what's the point? It hasn't led to great jobs or any of the other hype that schools would have us believe. (And I am not anti-education, I am getting a PhD in a technical topic.)
In India and some other countries, any college graduate is often called an "engineer". By this definition, all our politicians are engineers. Similarly, the definition of an "intellectual" is often very broad in non-Western nations, encompassing businessmen, plumbers, or nurses.
But going by the narrow definition of "engineer", do we really want geeks with no people skills, no training in humanities or social science, to become our nation's leaders?
If the waters are as muddy as they appear in the picture, how would sharks not get their gills clogged? And what is the salinity of the water?
I remember design drawings that looked like this in the 1980s.
So will this be a new toy with which to violate Japanese airspace, and have the Japanese in a tizzy? Then Japan could waste more resources on buying F-22's and fancy radars, which will benefit US but leave the Japanese fuming that they are paying the price for the standoff between two powers.
Has anyone explored the possibility of associations between solar activity and volcanic activity? Is it possible that, say, the amount of neutrinos hitting the Earth can influence the mantle?
What if you go to some famous school, but all the good jobs are reserved for the "insiders" who have been going there for generations? Outside of this crowd, other employers may feel intimidated by your background and not want to hire you. Not all employers want a super-smart employee. Or if they do hire you, they may set you up for failure, because the boss wants to laugh about firing someone who went to a prestigious school.
I went to a prestigious school, where everything people said had many layers of meaning, and everything was an advanced mind game. It took me a long time to trust simpler people who really mean what they say; people couldn't understand why I was so "paranoid". Well, I was in an environment where you had to be.
Never said it did. The risk factors for the disease cannot realistically be alleviated. The repeated experience of public health policy makers has been that telling people to "eat less" and "get more exercise" is useless. But nobody has come up with better ideas, so that remains the "recommendation".
No matter how hard terrorists try, what if there is a disease that will wipe out 1/2 of the world's population in our lifetime anyway? This disease causes people to spontaneously fall into comas, go blind, become covered in open sores, spontaneously lose limbs, and die horrible deaths. And no, I am not talking about AIDS.
The media, public opinion, and policy makers have shown no interest in this incurable disease.
What if scientists say that half of Americans will get this disease in the next 10 years, 1 out of 4 Chinese are already affected by it, and 1 out of 3 Nepalese are affected? Maybe we are in the midst of the 21st Century Black Plague, and nobody realized it.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=122611
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa0908292
http://myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=25199
What if I said I know a developmentally normal 2-year-old human who did not recognize his mother after she was away for a week? By contrast, my cats recognized me immediately when I came home after a month.
I went to a brand-name school myself. But does it really confer an advantage? It seems to confer as much jealousy as opportunity. There are employers that shun graduates of overly prestigious schools, because they assume the graduates are "overqualified" or won't fit into the company. There are bosses that enjoy making a show of setting up a _____ graduate for failure. And I've known plenty of graduates of famous schools that were unemployed or otherwise unsuccessful. I've read articles that say 90% of Harvard MBAs are unsuccessful in their careers.
The designation of schools as "first tier" or "second tier" is largely meaningless at the graduate level. What matters is the reputation of particular departments, particular professors. In my field (biostatistics), there are schools that are not famous as a whole, but have outstanding departments (U. of Washington); and vice versa, famous schools with small and/or terrible biostat departments (Yale, Berkeley, UCLA).
Also, graduates of prestigious schools are burdened with an expectation that they will travel to London, Dubai, wherever, to pursue a high-profile career. What's wrong with living life as a well-adjusted local person, rooted in a particular city? A graduate of a prestigious school who chooses to put roots down in a given city will face ostracism from locals, plus sneers from their own school's alumni.
Do tech companies support trade sanctions against China? Are they diehard supporters of labor unions? Affirmative action? Do they support $500 recycling fees for computers? Do they support increases in welfare? Greater government regulation of business? If the answer to all these is no, then tech companies are right wing indeed.