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illconsidered | November 23, 2009So I'm back from Fiji, actually for over a week now, and while I could get internet there but chose not to, I have yet to get internet here in our new home in Vancouver. Bloody Telus. I only arranged for it 3 months ago...I did get an iPhone though, so email and basic webbing is covered for a while.
Anyway, glad to be home, tons to catch up on, hope the internets flowed along without me and all that. I hear the conspiritorial cat is well out of CRU's bag and the jig is up on the Global Warming hoax. I guess the Greenland ice sheet will be well refrozen by now, and the sea levels have…
gregladen | November 23, 2009I recommend the following two blog posts for the latest thinking on the conspiracy to force the anthropocentrical global warming conspiracy on the conspirators.
Hacked emails, tree-ring proxies and blogospheric confusion
...As has been pointed out numerous times, nothing in the stolen emails and other documents that found their way onto the Internet last week in any way challenges the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But a lot of the material does deal with one particular subfield of climatology, dendrochronology, the science of which appears to confuse just about everyone who…
cortex | November 23, 2009Via Vaughan Bell, comes this wonderful essay by Tom Stafford on confabulation and creativity:
In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories--their thoughts and wishes--rather than true memories. This is of course dysfunctional, but it is also creative in some of the ways that make improvisation so funny: producing an odd mix of the mundane and impossible. When a patient who claims to be 20 years old is asked why she looks about 50, she replies that she was pushed into a ditch by her brothers and landed on her…
agelman | November 23, 2009I added a few entries recently. Currently, we have the following (in no particular order):
Mister P
The Secret Weapon
The Superplot
The Folk Theorem
The Pinch-Hitter Syndrome
Weakly Informative Priors
P-values and U-values
Conservatism
WWJD
Theoretical and Applied Statisticians
The Fallacy of the One-Sided Bet
Alabama First
The USA Today Fallacy
Second-Order Availability Bias
The "All Else Equal" Fallacy
The Self-Cleaning Oven
The Taxonomy of Confusion
The Blessing of Dimensionality
Scaffolding
Ockhamite Tendencies
Bayesian
Multiple Comparisons
gregladen | November 23, 2009Interview by Jimmy James Bettencourt
It was dark and the streets were wet as I pulled out of the ER where I had seen enough carnage for the night and found the highway heading straight into town. Right away there was a sense of trouble and randomness in the air as police cars careened desperately across the on-ramp and onto the grassy median in pursuit of something a bit more exciting than a box of donuts. Their flashing lights caused most of the cars on the ramp to squeeze sheepishly to the side, allowing me to pull around them and get out onto the road five minutes quicker.
I was going to…
agelman | November 22, 2009Seth reports on a report, funded by the sugar industry, that found bad effects of a diet soda additive called Splenda.
The background of the study is a delightful tangle. Seth reports:
One of the authors of the Duke study is a professor of psychiatry, Susan Schiffman. An earlier study of hers had pro-Splenda results. . . . Drs. Abou-Donia and Schiffman admitted that some of the results recorded in their report submitted to the court were not actually observed or were based on experiments that had not been conducted. . . .
Results in the report that were based on experiments that had not been…
gregladen | November 22, 2009Fellow Sbling Chad Orzel's book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, just might be out in time for you to give it to your dog for Christmas!
I don't know what the book is about, but then again, neither does your dog, really. Anyway, check it out, there is a picture of it here.
pharyngula | November 22, 2009Every year, L'Oreal selects women who have made significant contributions to community service and awards their organization a substantial grant of $5,000. There are ten honorees this year, and they've all got good stories to tell. You also have a chance to vote on one of the ten, and the winner of that popularity contest will get an additional award of $25,000 — read their nominations and you'll see that they all could use it, and you should vote for whatever cause you find most worthy.
However, I will gently nudge you in one direction, suggesting that if you don't find that any one cause…
cortex | November 22, 2009Last week, a team of computer scientists led by Dharmendra S. Modha announced what sounded like an impressive breakthrough for neuroscience-inspired computing:
Using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. This is equivalent to 1,000 cognitive computing chips each with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses, and exceeds the scale of cat cerebral cortex. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time…
agelman | November 22, 2009A colleague sent me an article by Harry Selker and Alastair Wood about the rules for comparative effectiveness research ("evidence-based medicine") in the House and Senate versions of the health-care bill. The key point:
The [Senate] Finance Committee bill also includes language requested by industry lobbyists (pages 1138-1139) that threatens to withdraw federal funding for 5 years from any investigator who publishes a report on research funded by the proposed institute that is not "within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence." Determinations regarding such consistency…
agelman | November 22, 2009Christopher Nelson writes:
Check out the GDP chart under "The New Triad" here:
It's supposed to compare GDP in China, India, and the US for three time periods but for my money, it's composed wrong. The bars should be for the years, not the countries. That way we could see total GDP in each year and how it was composed of the respective GDPs. It would even be fairly easy to scan across and see how the country's GDP grew or shrank. What's there is just confusing.
I agree. Better to put time on the x-axis if possible. Then you don't need a bar plot at all, you can use a line plot, which I…
gregladen | November 21, 2009The vote was 60-39 to bring the health care bill to debate. The Republicans failed to stop health care insurance reform on procedural grounds.
details.
gregladen | November 21, 2009Julia ended up with a minor concussion today.
Too many face palms during the movie 2012!
But seriously folks, we did just watch the movie 2012, and I can make a few comments on it. I'd like to start out by making a list of academic and applied areas that were butchered by the movie:
Ship building
Geosciences (all of them)
Aerodynamics
Physics (all areas)
Geography
Archaeology
Political Science
Psychology
But otherwise, it was fun. The premise of the movie is that the Mayans had it right: At the winter solstice 2012, which is the end of the 13th cycle of the current Long Count, the world…
gregladen | November 21, 2009Do not do this at home. This is for certified scientists only. Do not put your finger in this.