Interesting Stuff Thread

cavedave

Who objects to painful tests on animals?

more information for theist/atheist and even pro choice/pro life debates

swampgas

A recent xkcd cartoon lead me to google "stopped clock illusion". This has a pretty cool name - chronostasis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis

Now I'll have to turn off the second hand on my clock widget, as I can't stop looking at it ...

ShooterSF

swampgas wrote: »

A recent xkcd cartoon lead me to google "stopped clock illusion". This has a pretty cool name - chronostasis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis

Now I'll have to turn off the second hand on my clock widget, as I can't stop looking at it ...

Wow. For years i always wondered if clocks were actually sentient and only bothered when they were looked at cool to know im not the only one that experiences it

shizz

Aye, I've often experienced this but never really thought anything of it.

Mickeroo

Started a thread in Zoology already but thought it might interest some here too. There's been a genus of fish named after Richard Dawkins in Sri Lanka: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/sri-lanka-names-new-fish-for-uks-dawkins/story-e6frf7k6-1226427511980

Dave!

Hopefully this doesn't make anyone's head explode... From the Irish Times today

Scientists not giving human life its meaning

JOE HUMPHREYS

Tue, Jul 17, 2012

WHEN IT comes to science I’m with Bob Geldof. The DNA discoverer Prof James Watson told a Dublin audience last week that scientists could find a cure for cancer within 10 years and my first thought was: So what, if we are only going to live our crummy lives the same way? And for every you or I who gets an extra few cancer-free years, so will a Kim Jong-un or a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Incidentally, I’m also with Geldof in knowing “absolutely f***-all” about science (his words, naturally, not mine). I still remember the withering look my father, an engineer by training, gave me when I tried to convince him I could create a perpetual motion machine out of a sequence of large and small cogs.

At least I’m scientific enough to know these first two points may be related. I studied humanities and feel more at home in that camp and am therefore prone to downplaying the achievements of science.

Yes, technology lets me download excellent Philosopher Zone podcasts from Australian national radio ( tinyurl.com/ 829lpkc) but it has also lumbered me with the life-draining experience of maintaining four email accounts while also monitoring Facebook, Yammer and Twitter.

Anyone who knows a bit of history, moreover, will be wary of scientists’ claims that they are making the world a better place. Simply knowing more than the next man does not give you the higher moral ground.

Ludwig Wittgenstein put it best: “Wisdom is all cold and . . . you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.”

I had practical experience of this last week when I watched a BBC documentary showing Michael Mosley swallow a tiny camera to stream images of his digestive system from top to bottom. It was interesting but it didn’t make me a better person.

This may all seem self-evident. In fact, I hope it is self-evident, but it needs repeating because

of the way we are being love- bombed by science through the likes of Euroscience Open Forum 2012, the conference at which both Watson and Geldof spoke.

To its credit, Esof 2012 contained a diverse programme and the one event I got to – a mesmerising reading of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen by Rough Magic Theatre Company – explored this very issue of the interplay between science and morality. However, the overarching narrative of Esof 2012 was that science is a marginalised and under- appreciated activity, which could not be further from the truth.

The scientific community has enormous influence, in some cases is extraordinarily well funded and it is capable of “capturing” the world economy and global politics in the same way international finance does – and with the same lack of accountability.

Just think of the power wielded, for example, by some of the world’s largest technology and pharmaceutical firms.

The main cause of unease last week, though, was the way Ireland Inc was so keen to genuflect before the men in lab coats. They might hold the key to economic recovery but there is another type of recovery – a recovery in values and convictions – which they may, inadvertently, help to undermine.

I mean, what is it we really need in this country at the moment? Progress in broadband or in moral standards?

The science fraternity will cry “false dichotomy” but what it tends to overlook is the impact its work has on long-cherished value systems. I’m not talking about religion only. All belief systems – including belief in human rights and the dignity of the individual – face a real threat from scientific discovery or, perhaps more accurately, exaggerated claims on its behalf.

Take advances in genetics, for example. Rightly or wrongly, they have encouraged us to see things in a deterministic fashion. Now more than ever we tend to view our moral transgressions, not as matters of personal responsibility but rather as the inevitable product of traits we inherited from our parents.

In this environment, relativism has also become a more attractive proposition. We have less and less faith in our ability to adjudicate between competing value claims. Above all, however, science’s inexorable march towards atomising everything lends weight to the idea that life has no meaning – beyond perhaps the survival of the species.

This isn’t to say scientists should stop discovering stuff. That would be plainly ridiculous. However we urgently need a debate around what values we are capable of holding on to, if not upholding, in a more scientifically literate world.

Wittgenstein’s maxim “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is commonly invoked by scientists who wish to shut the door to any discussion of morality or ethics.

Wittgenstein’s formulation was published when he was in his early 30s,though, and he spent the rest of his life disavowing it, acknowledging that you could not be human without engaging in fuzzy, unscientific, value-laden talk. In later life, when people came to him for advice, he would reply: “Just improve yourself; that is all you can do to improve the world.”

Maybe I am being a bit unreasonable, but the human part of me – the part that sees people as ends in themselves and not just means to an end, that sees value in friendship and love and that knows good and evil are facts and not just perceptions – says good riddance to Esof 2012 and longs instead for a week-long conference on the meaning of life.

Compared to that, the nature of life is, well, interesting.

© 2012 The Irish Times

Sarky

What, is he just wallowing in self pity over his choices in life and trying to pass the blame on to science? None of that makes much sense. All of it hurts to read.

Opinicus

I'm honestly tempted to just transcribe this video word for word and send it in as a reply to that.

"Rambling incoherent" sums it up perfectly.

fitz0

Dave! wrote: »

Hopefully this doesn't make anyone's head explode... From the Irish Times today

When he admitted to knowing 'f*ck all about science' he should probably have stopped writing an article on science.

It's a fairly moronic piece.

Turtwig

Ahh God cover up, cover up, cover up!!!

I love it how people think they can write stuff based on their own uninformed drivel and think they're somehow making a worthy article or contribution to some from of debate. But seriously if we do ever invent a time machine I'm sending all these idiots back to the time of there illusion where we humans somehow had better values and morals than we have today to see how they actually fear.
Appeal to tradition is single handedly becoming the fallacy that irritates me the most.

magicbastarder

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/07/17/no-peeking-2/

Opinicus

What you've just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling incoherent article were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone who read it is now dumber for having done so. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.

Just sent that off to the letters page. Somehow I don't think it will get printed though.

Alright

For primary rainbows there is a consistent angle of 42 degrees from Sun to top of rainbow (red color) to observer.

From Yahoo Answers: “The reason why the rainbow is curved is because all the angles in the water drop have to be just right for the drop to send some sunlight to you, standing on the ground. So, with the sun *behind* you, only those water droplets that have the same angle formed by you, the drop, and the sun (this angle happens to be approximately 42 degrees) will contribute to the rainbow. Other droplets send their light somewhere else, and if you move to a different location, new droplets are needed to make the rainbow you see in the new location.

This is a nice link with some good pictures
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/rbowpri.html

and just for fun :pac:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6HsiixFS8

magicbastarder

pannable 360 of the LHC.

http://lightbox.time.com/2012/07/12/interactive-panorama-step-inside-the-large-hadron-collider/?hpt=hp_c2#end

robindch

^^^ Crumbs, I misread that for a sec as the "Parable of the LHC".

hmm.... suggestions?

Hotblack Desiato

There shall in that time be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base, that has an attachment. At that time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock.

robindch

Turns out that companies producing homeopathic products paid one Claus Fritzsche, an online "journalist", to smear anybody who criticized homeopathy. Especially Edzard Ernst, the University of Exeter professor who's done most of the hard, real research into homeopathy.

http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2012/07/german-homeopathy-companies-pay-journalist-who-smears-uk-academic.html

Quackometer wrote:

A consortium of pharmaceutical companies in Germany have been paying a journalist €43,000 to run a set of web sites that denigrates an academic who has published research into their products.

These companies, who make homeopathic sugar pills, were exposed in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in an article, Schmutzige Methoden der sanften Medizin (The Dirty Tricks of Alternative Medicine.)

This story has not appeared in the UK media. And it should. Because it is a scandal that directly involves the UK’s most prominent academic in Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

The newspaper accuses the companies of funding the journalist, Claus Fritzsche, to denigrate critics of homeopathy. In particular, the accusation is that Fritzsche wrote about UK academic Professor Edzard Ernst on several web sites and then linked them together in order to raise their Google ranking. Fritzsche continually attacks Ernst of being frivolous, incompetent and partisan.

Edzard Ernst was the first Professor of Complementary Medicine and held the Laing Chair at the University of Exeter in South-West England. The chair was set up by Sir Maurice Laing in 1993 to provide rigorous research into alternative medicines. Laing realised that high quality research was required if various forms of alternative medicine were to become mainstream. Ernst said in an interview that Laing believed that “it was more important to conduct good research to a standard that would be acceptable even to sceptics, than to bend over backwards in an attempt to generate positive findings”.

And that is what Edzard Ernst has done over the past two decades. In particular, Ernst has pioneered and championed the idea that alternative medicine can be subject to the same rigours of evidence-based medicine as any other treatment. He has produced many systematic reviews of treatments that draw together all available evidence to assess what overall conclusions it is possible to come to. When the evidence has been positive, he has said so. But his problem has been that, for a wide range of treatments, including homeopathy, the evidence is overwhelmingly negative, non-existent, or at best, inconclusive.

This has angered many proponents of the various forms of supersitious and pseudoscientific health practices. Homeopaths in particular have been furious that Ernst has not used his Chair to promote alternative medicine. They see his results, not as scientifically objective, but as a betrayal of their beliefs.

For his efforts, Ernst is continuously attacked. The Vice-Chancellor of Exeter has been written to by foaming homeopaths. His blogs for the GP magazine, Pulse, see a hoard of homeopaths turn up for every article to shout their abuse. But most worryingly, Ernst was attacked by Prince Charles when he was critical of a politicised report into the funding of alternative medicine by the NHS, insitigated by Charles, and funded by Dame Shirley Porter. Prince Charles’s principal private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, sent a letter to Exeter that almost cost him his job.

[...]

kylith

Can I find Ernst anywhere? I feel I should thank him for, y'know, a lot.

joseph brand

Nanoparticle Completely Eradicates Hepatitis C Virus

The nanoparticle, dubbed a nanozyme, consists of a backbone made from gold nanoparticles and a surface with two biological components. One biological component is an enzyme that attacks and destroys the mRNA, which provides the recipe for duplicating the protein that causes the disease. The other biological part is the navigator, if you will. It is a DNA oligonucleotide that identifies the disease-related protein and sends the enzyme on course to destroy it.

IT-Guy

Absolutely love this Penn Jillette video, it's a funny assessment of some of the higher profile candidates for the 2012 elections in the USA. It explains the how and why of the recent use of the term 'Christian' as an amalgam of many different sects as well as an hilarious critique of Mitt Romney Almost 20 mins long but worth every second:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJGxVeQw3SE

joseph brand

Faces of our Ancestors.

joseph brand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqDZAYUT34E

The launch made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Inspirational stuff!

It's a pity the Yanks couldn't pump their money into NASA instead of their church baskets.

I wonder if the Russian Soyuz has cheaper running costs than the Shuttle?

Neil Armstrong on the embarrassment of NASA. (Retirement of the Shuttle)

mikhail

kylith wrote: »

Can I find Ernst anywhere? I feel I should thank him for, y'know, a lot.

Buy his book. Sadly, he seems to be retired, or you could pull his work email address off a paper.

Hotblack Desiato

joseph brand wrote: »

I wonder if the Russian Soyuz has cheaper running costs than the Shuttle?

Be hard for it not to, really. Shuttle had to be painstakingly refurbished after every mission, and had a lot more systems to go wrong. ~$1Bn cost per launch IIRC, Soyuz should be a fraction of that.
SpaceX reckon they can do it for a fraction too, have had great success with unmanned missions (including supplying the ISS) and are working on a manned vehicle.


http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=13441.0

In 2007, NASA signed a $719 million contract for 15 Soyuz seats (15 up, 15 down) as well as for 5.6 tonnes of cargo. That works out to nearly $48 million per seat, or $144 million for a three seat flight, but the numbers are muddled by the addition of several Progress flights. It would take three Progress flights to handle the cargo, which by some reports would total $150 million. That leaves $569 million for the 15 seats, which is $38 million per seat or $114 million for a Soyuz mission - roughly in line with the most recent tourist seat costs.

Hotblack Desiato

The eurozone's religious faultline

Richter is himself a Catholic, but an admirer of thrifty economics. "Too much Catholicism" he suggests, "is detrimental to a nation's fiscal health, even today in the 21st Century".

Delirium

Gene therapy nears approval in Europe

Europe is on the cusp of approving a gene therapy for the first time, in what would be a landmark moment for the field.

Gene therapies alter a patient's DNA to treat inherited diseases passed from parent to child.

The European Medicines Agency has recommended a therapy for a rare genetic disease which leaves people unable to properly digest fats.

The European Commission will now make the final decision.

fitz0

If such traceable things as scientific papers can get distorted and perpetuated, it's no wonder religions spread so far.

Baffling Science Hoaxes: Why Did We Believe in the Tongue Map?

Esther Inglis-Arkell

Everyone reading this has got a tongue. Everyone reading this has, probably, also heard the old adage about how different parts of the tongue taste different things. For decades, this misconception stayed alive. It was still being taught when I was in grade school. My question is; why?

We sometimes laugh at the obviously wrong so-called facts of yesteryear, especially if they can be easily checked. How could people believe that, for example, the uterus wandered around the body of a woman? That's insane. But we have our own modern myths, ones that can be easily checked and debunked, but for the most part aren't. The major one is the tongue map. Almost everyone reading this had at least one teacher who pulled out a diagram of a tongue and pointed to different areas, talking about how this one tasted sweetness and that one bitterness.

This diagram, and enduring myth, began in 1901, in Germany, were D.P. Hanig wrote a conservative little paper that mentioned that different areas of the tongue seemed slightly more sensitive to different tastes. In 1942, Edwin Boring, of Harvard, picked Hanig's ideas and ran with them in his book, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology. Some say Boring mistranslated Hanig's text. Others say he simply stressed it. However it happened, over time, different sensitivities became total ability. It wasn't until the 1970s when Virginia Collings, a physiological researcher, repeated the test and found that the sensitivities were there but made little-to-no practical difference. Even then, the myth kept chugging along for decades in actual biology programs.

I have to wonder; why. We all have tongues, don't we? We've all tasted things. What teachers were telling us conflicted directly with all our experience. It had to have conflicted with their own experience. Why did it keep getting told? I think, in part, because the truth was worth a lot less than the story. No one particularly suffered because of the myth. It didn't cost anyone anything. On the other hand, it was great small talk, or at least a good way to get kids to pay attention for about another five minutes, until the bell rang. And it's the story, not the truth, that I think is the reason it got so thoroughly debunked on the internet. Once the groundwork was laid, and nearly everyone on Earth had "heard about that somewhere," it suddenly became worth contradicting. It's interesting that debunkery, including this article, is more a triumph of one good story over another, instead of a final breakthrough of truth. Makes you wonder what other myths people could start.

Link

Hotblack Desiato

fitz0 wrote: »

What teachers were telling us conflicted directly with all our experience. It had to have conflicted with their own experience. Why did it keep getting told? I think, in part, because the truth was worth a lot less than the story. No one particularly suffered because of the myth. It didn't cost anyone anything. On the other hand, it was great small talk, or at least a good way to get kids to pay attention for about another five minutes, until the bell rang.

^^ Religion in schools is just the same. Most people regard it as a harmless myth and sure it's tradition and doesn't do anyone any harm...

kylith

ninja900 wrote: »

^^ Religion in schools is just the same. Most people regard it as a harmless myth and sure it's tradition and doesn't do anyone any harm...

That phrase always makes me think of:

Lwaxana Troi: The women of Betazed used to wear these enormous wigs with large holes in the center for tiny caged creatures... First, it was a fashion. Then it went on long enough to become a custom, a tradition. But it was uncomfortable for the woman and cruel to the animal. So, then, one day, one very formidable woman finally said so, refused to ever wear another of those wigs. Fairly soon, the custom stopped. She had the courage to stand up and fight for change.

Kivaro

“You don’t really understand how something works until you can reproduce it yourself,” says graduate student and co-author Jayodita Sanghvi.

From http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/21/big-leap-in-bio-engineering-scientists-simulate-an-entire-organism-in-software-for-the-first-time-ever/

Can't wait for Human 2.0!