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Interesting Stuff Thread

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Comments

  • #422
    Agonist
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,329 ✭✭✭Agonist


    Dave! wrote: »
    This is a great and rather extensive interview with Michael Shermer (Skeptic magazine) about all sorts of paranormal and supernatural issues

    broken link

    It's in 12 parts, each 10 mins long... so rather extensive :D

    I'm only on part 2 but they've covered out of body experiences, angels, god, evolution...

    Give it a listen :)

    <3 Michael Shermer

    Anyone know where I can find this video now?


  • #423
    pts
    Registered Users Posts: 576 ✭✭✭pts


    Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution:
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527441.500-horizontal-and-vertical-the-evolution-of-evolution.html?full=true&print=true


  • #424
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    Just saw this on Bad Astronomy (excellent blog btw. Highly Recommended.)

    2094362910104237032S600x600Q85.jpg
    Decoy flares are infrared countermeasures used to protect aircraft from being detected by infrared homing missiles, i.e. those that detect heat sources like a jet engine. Like a plane’s guardian angels, the flares create false heat targets that confuse the guidance system of an enemy aircraft’s infrared missiles. Apart from being a simple and effective defense mechanism, they’re also surprisingly beautiful. No wonder they have been nicknamed angel wings.

    The FSM is a guardian angel.


  • #425
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    Agonist wrote: »
    Anyone know where I can find this video now?

    Not sure if this is/was the original video but it is quite good.



    Quality could have been better though.


  • #426
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    Now this is what I called golden, gave me right a auld chuckle.:)


    Anthony Watts, the person behind the anti-science site "www.wattsupwiththat.com" and the brains behind the surfacestations.org project. Commissioned hundreds of painstaking volunteers to analyse the accuracy of local weather stations and temperature measurements. His argument was that many stations were in dubious locations (true) and that these erroneous measurements would greatly exaggerate the effects of Global Warming.
    Let's ignore for a second the insignificance of these "errors" to the global picture and that data is usually adjusted to account for this sort of stuff. Scientist are pedantic so they like to eliminate as many sources of errors as possible. So, Menne et Al set about quantifying the error produced by the raw data of these stations. Turns out there was a bias acting on the temperature records, only that it was cooling bias.


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  • #427
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    Nature recently published an excellent article entitled "The Real Holes in Climate Science". Well Worth a read for anyone interested in knowing exactly where the climate science stands.:)

    Edit : Editorial is good too.


  • #428
    iUseVi
    Registered Users Posts: 1,435 ✭✭✭iUseVi


    http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/01/what_colours_were_dinosaur_feathers.php

    Birds really are dinosaurs!


  • #429
    cavedave
    Registered Users Posts: 2,164 ✭✭✭cavedave


    Religious people are more altruistic then non religious people after reading a religious passage. But much the same otherwise
    Altruism on Amazon Mechanical Turk


  • #430
    GLaDOS
    Moderators, Regional East Moderators Posts: 23,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭GLaDOS


    Pagan Gods and legends which bear similarities (a lot in some cases!) to the birth of Jesus

    http://www.atheists.org/Pre-Christian_Christmas_Stories_with_Other_Gods

    Cake, and grief counseling, will be available at the conclusion of the test



  • #431
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    Just got a email linking this video. Think its good for providing perspective.:)
    (Not the biggest fan of the music, though.)



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  • #432
    Blank_
    Registered Users Posts: 35 ✭Blank_


    Discussion between Thunderf00t (active atheist youtuber) and Ray Comfort (banana man !).
    It just hurt when every answer from Comfort is "We dont know so God created it" :(



  • #433
    Flamed Diving
    Closed Accounts Posts: 6,609 ✭✭✭Flamed Diving


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIGCWyXL7VE

    To post to YouTube video copy what comes after the '=' (but before the '?') and paste it inbetween a YouTube tag:



  • #434
    Blank_
    Registered Users Posts: 35 ✭Blank_


    I fixed it, thanks!


  • #435
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,395 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    To embed the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIGCWyXL7VE, post as follows:

    [HTML]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIGCWyXL7VE
    [/HTML]


  • #436
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,395 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    In Lausanne, Switzerland, computer scientists have been building a system which simulates evolution within robots. Last year the little fellas figured out how to send misleading signals to each other, effectively "lying", to help horde resources to themselves.

    This month, they showed that predator bots were able to learn how to hide against walls and then approach prey bots from the latter's blind side, while the prey bots learned to avoid walls and retreat backwards from approaching predators. The most interesting thing was that they managed to do this over 125 generations, and with the equivalent of only 15 working neurons. More on this here -- with video goodness:

    http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/robots-display-predator-prey-co-evolution-evolve-better-homing-techniques

    The full peer-reviewed article is here.


  • #437
    Dades
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 25,557 Mod ✭✭✭✭Dades


    How long before they invent a religion? ;)


  • #438
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    Dades wrote: »
    How long before they invent a religion? ;)

    Now that would be fricking awesome!!


  • #439
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,395 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    Dades wrote: »
    How long before they invent a religion? ;)
    Well, they've already figured out how to lie to each other to gain preferential treatment.

    If that's not the start of a religion, then I'm the pope.


  • #440
    Pompey Magnus
    Registered Users Posts: 5,406 ✭✭✭Pompey Magnus


    Homeopathy sceptics have staged a mass "overdose" of homeopathic remedies, in a bid to prove they have no effect.

    Protesters ate whole bottles of tablets at branches of Boots in places such as Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London, Leicester, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

    They have asked the pharmacy chain to stop

    Link

    James Randi would be proud :pac:


  • #441
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    The Scale of the universe. :)


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  • #442
    sionnach
    Registered Users Posts: 2,543 ✭✭✭sionnach


    States ranked by religiousness with accompanying statistics:

    http://i.imgur.com/kpb5A.png


  • #443
    Dades
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 25,557 Mod ✭✭✭✭Dades


    sionnach wrote: »
    States ranked by religiousness with accompanying statistics:
    Very interesting. :)

    Certainly appears to show a vague red to green gradient as the religiosity gets lower.

    Cape Cod ftw!
    LOL at the Nevada divorce rate. :p


  • #444
    Agonist
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,329 ✭✭✭Agonist


    A very interesting article on the thirst for spirituality by a very erudite man, George E. Vaillant. It's not pro or anti religion - it's more scholarly than that, although with his opinions he could not be a believer.

    http://www.msmonographs.org/article.asp?issn=0973-1229;year=2008;volume=6;issue=1;spage=48;epage=62;aulast=Vaillant

    Positive Emotions, Spirituality and the Practice of Psychiatry

    Introduction

    As the 21st century begins, a great many people - especially in the English-speaking world - are in search of some kind of common spiritual ground. On the one hand, science, increasing education and intolerance for patriarchal dogma has led to a steady erosion of the membership in mainstream churches and temples. On the other hand, this shift toward secularism has created an equally steady increase in evangelical, Pentecostal and unabashedly emotional New Age religions. Many of the best sellers of the last five years in America have been based either on the popular search for the spiritual or the rejection of the religious in a secular world.

    In an effort to scientifically validate this thirst for spirituality, I wish to build on the relatively new scientific disciplines of cultural anthropology, ethology (animal behaviour) and neuroscience - all of which study the so-called positive emotions such as awe, love, joy, hope, faith/trust, forgiveness, gratitude and compassion. Positive emotions, per se , are present in most mammals and have been experimentally shown to help humans behave communally and to learn more quickly (Lyubomirsky et al ., 2005). Surprisingly, spirituality is virtually indistinguishable from these positive emotions and is, thus, rooted in our evolutionary biology. Because these emotions are also the same ones for which most religions strive, spirituality is a common denominator for all faiths.


  • #445
    Galvasean
    Registered Users Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    Here's one for you the next time someone tries to say that the 'Cambrian explosion' was an act of God:
    http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055818728

    Basically evidence of complex locomotion in animals has been found dating before the Cambrian period, meaning that relatively coplex animals are older than previously assumed.


  • #446
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig




    Sometimes when you learn something new you feel a tinge of guilt. Pascal was an awesome genius. I never knew that and I had just assumed that because of the sh1ttyness of his wager that he couldn't have been that bright. (This from someone who has written code in Pascal and not even realised who it was named after :o)


  • #447
    Coriolanus
    Registered Users Posts: 4,879 ✭✭✭Coriolanus


    My God. That's brilliant.


  • #448
    darjeeling
    Registered Users Posts: 962 ✭✭✭darjeeling


    On Radio 4's 'Great Lives' this week Richard Dawkins paid tribute to evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton. Hamilton was hugely influential in his field, pioneering the gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins would go on to bring to a wider public and scientific audience. Listen here for a few more days.


  • #449
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,395 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    ...and while we're on Radio 4, the website for Melvyn Bragg's excellent 'In Our Time' series had a facelift this week and the full archives back to 1998 have been made available. The website is here:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/archive/

    It's well worth a look.


  • #450
    MrPudding
    Registered Users Posts: 9,788 ✭✭✭MrPudding


    Saw this yesterday, thought it was interesting and could spark some heated debate in medical circles.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8497148.stm

    I would like to see more research on this topic.

    MrP


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  • #451
    Turtwig
    Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    An independent researcher recently tested the assumption that a stronger level of religious faith meant a safe and peaceful society.

    It concludes :
    :eek:
    (Well I cherry picked this bit:) Eitherway it's the opposite of what religious folk would have assumed. :))
    Conservative religious ideology is a probable contributing causal factor of societal dysfunction.

    Naturally this guy is getting alot of slander and attacks. This requires alot more research. What'll be interesting to see is that if other impartial researchers can replicate these results. That's when we'll know just how rigorous and accurate this research was. I've no doubt though that some religious group will try to get their own biased study published first. Interesting times ahead...

    And in other religious related news, faith schools have a 25% higher abortion rate. The researcher postulated that this was because of the increased potential for additional shame that students would feel in a faith school environment. Due to the strict ethos of the schools. Note though that the authors think it has little if anything to do with the level of religiosity of the students
    themselves.
    *Note : I cannot find the paper yet, so I can't honestly say whether above article is accurately representing the scientists finding. Take it with a pinch of salt as we all know how bad the media can sometimes be.*
    **Note Note : I found one that dates back to June 2009, surely that can't be the one the journalist is referring to?

    Finally tonight, a paper recently published in Nature describes a discovery regarding converting skins cell of a mouse into neurons : no need for stem cells!


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