Interesting Stuff Thread

magicbastarder · 13-09-2011 09:52AM

robindch · 13-09-2011 11:01AM

^^^ Forever Blowing Bubbles?

vibe666 · 13-09-2011 02:10PM

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-scientists-inorganic-life.html

Scientists at the University of Glasgow say they have taken their first tentative steps towards creating 'life' from inorganic chemicals potentially defining the new area of 'inorganic biology'.

Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry in the College of Science and Engineering, and his team have demonstrated a new way of making inorganic-chemical-cells or iCHELLS.

Prof Cronin said: “All life on earth is based on organic biology (i.e. carbon in the form of amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars etc) but the inorganic world is considered to be inanimate.

“What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology.”

robindch · 14-09-2011 01:36PM

BBC Radio4 has just made its entire collection of the In Our Time discussion/documentary available online:

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

Sarky · 15-09-2011 05:20PM

I love it when a published paper is not only fully scientific but also biting social commentary on charlatans and liars who abuse statistics.

Turtwig · 15-09-2011 08:50PM

Go F**k yourself if you don't find this interesting.:D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkdfJ9PkRQ

legspin · 15-09-2011 08:51PM

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0915/breaking36.html

Hot water, shoft toilet paper and good dentishtry.

Genghiz Cohen · 16-09-2011 11:08AM

Ish a cry'n shame!

Mark Hamill · 16-09-2011 01:06PM

legspin wrote: »

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0915/breaking36.html

Hot water, shoft toilet paper and good dentishtry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhXA3s7aqNs

legspin · 16-09-2011 01:11PM

Ask Genghiz, he said it.

eoin5 · 16-09-2011 01:17PM

Malty_T wrote: »

Go F**k yourself if you don't find this interesting.:D

Ahhh, pattern recognition overload!

Sarky · 18-09-2011 11:47AM

Foo Fighters gig gets picketed by Westboro Baptist nutters.

Foo Fighters have a counter-protest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e5hRLbCaCs

liamw · 18-09-2011 12:33PM

In 2008, BBC cameras filmed two Swedish sisters throwing themselves into traffic on the M6. When it was shown on BBC One, nearly 7 million viewers were glued to their screens, and millions more watched it later on YouTube.

The footage was shocking. One previewer wrote "On no account miss this documentary. It opens with what is perhaps the most extraordinary footage I've seen on TV".

But this amazing footage was only part of an even more incredible story, one which could not be told at the time for legal reasons.

Now, two years later, this documentary reveals the full story of the hours just before the cameras captured that motorway footage, and the even more chilling story of what happened over next 72 hours, which left one of the sisters fleeing the scene of a crime, after she had stabbed a man through the chest.

Those who were at the centre of this fascinating legal case, including the police and Crown prosecution service, reveal the complex issues involved in both bringing charges and taking this disturbing case to trial.

A leading criminal psychiatrist, Dr. Nigel Eastman, explains the difficulties the judicial system has in achieving justice and deciding punishment when dealing with mental illness. He explains the possible causes of the womens' behaviour, and why, in his view, it could happen again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euy6vE5VsMQ

cavedave · 18-09-2011 07:45PM

Religious Belief Systems of Persons with High Functioning Autism

This paper
investigates the proposal that individual differences in belief
will reflect cognitive processing styles, with high functioning
autism being an extreme style that will predispose towards
nonbelief (atheism and agnosticism)

robindch · 19-09-2011 12:28PM

While I'm sure Benford's Law has shown up here before, applying it to economic data to test for fraud within EU economic data is a new one, I believe:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2011.00542.x/abstract

The Greeks appear to have been cooking the books. The Germans found it out.

Dades · 19-09-2011 02:01PM

Never heard of Benford's Law - took me a couple of read-thrus to figure it out, tbh!

Lucky nobody applied it to the results I cooked up for the Young Scientists exhibition circa 1990. :pac:

amacachi · 19-09-2011 03:23PM

It never ceases to amaze me how bad people are at making **** up.

Dades · 19-09-2011 03:32PM

amacachi wrote: »

It never ceases to amaze me how bad people are at making **** up.

I hope you're not referring to the results in my Young Scientist project...

liamw · 19-09-2011 07:19PM

Dades wrote: »

I hope you're not referring to the results in my Young Scientist project...

Sarky · 19-09-2011 08:17PM

I remember ages ago seeing some website for a creationist science fair. I'll see if I can find some of the projects, they were freaking hilarious...

EDIT: Found it! \o/

http://objectiveministries.org/creation/sciencefair.html

With such thought-provoking dissertations as "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)", "Women Were Designed For Homemaking", and my personal favourite, "Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria".

Further edit:

Actually, don't look around that site too much. It's depressing. Apparently reading The God Delusion causes suicide.:pac:

Further further edit: Curse you, Poe's Law! Cuuuuurrrrrse yooooooouuuuuu!

robindch · 19-09-2011 08:42PM

^^^ http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Objective:_Ministries

(cough)

Sarky · 19-09-2011 08:47PM

Well piss. I suppose it's too late to claim I did it ironically?

amacachi · 19-09-2011 08:56PM

Dades wrote: »

I hope you're not referring to the results in my Young Scientist project...

Obviously you were as good as the other speccy nerdy fucknuts at it that year. :pac:

robindch · 19-09-2011 08:56PM

Yes(*)

(*) though if it's any consolation, I remember being poe'd years ago by a very similar article...

robindch · 19-09-2011 09:26PM

Archbish says atheism is cool. Not sure if he's planning to chill himself.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8770929/Atheism-is-cool-says-Archbishop-Rowan-Williams.html

Still, he does say that his flock are "very average people".

recedite · 20-09-2011 11:00AM

robindch wrote: »

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2011.00542.x/abstract

The Greeks appear to have been cooking the books. The Germans found it out.

Benford's law seems to have been applied in 2011, with the benefit of hindsight?

Sarky · 20-09-2011 11:06AM

Orbiting the earth at high speed .gif.

Looks beautiful.

robindch · 20-09-2011 11:25AM

recedite wrote: »

Benford's law seems to have been applied in 2011, with the benefit of hindsight?

Seems so. Unfortunately.

Though not everybody's so sloppy -- I understand that Bernie Madoff's fraud was Benford-compliant.

On the topic of fraud analysis, there were a few interesting analyses of "voting" pattens from the last Russian presidential election too. If memory serves, the distribution of the final digit of vote counts per constituency was highly non-random, containing low numbers of zeros, twos and fives (what you'd expect people to avoid if they wanted things to look 'random'), and that the final two digits was even more non-random. Also, above a certain percentage of participating voters, there was a roughly linear correlation between the percentage of registered voters who voted per constituency, and the number voting for Medvedev (ie, in those constituencies where more than some roughly constant percentage of registered voters "voted", the number who appeared to have voted for the incumbent was around 100%). Don't think this made it to Freakonomics, but it should.

Sarky · 20-09-2011 11:32AM

Interesting new lead in the development of a AIDS/HIV vaccine.

Most of the paper is behind a paywall (although those of you in college shouldn't have much trouble getting the full version), and not many of the news stories about it actually mentioned the paper, but it's definitely there and not just some misrepresented overly enthusiastic story.

Ah, science. Dismantling God's punishments one plague at a time.

cavedave · 20-09-2011 11:35AM

Electoral Fraud in Russia: Vote Counts Analysis using
Second-digit Mean Tests

This paper argues that Benford for elections is not really applicable The Irrelevance of Benford’s Law for Detecting Fraud in Elections

I have not read either of them yet though. What other methods of detecting voting fraud exist?

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