Entertainment stuff from the week 10-16/11/14

Hi cometeers,


It's official!

Humanity has landed on a comet!

'Rosetta Live: #2 The descent'
http://youtu.be/NSv6ZBZtzRA

'Rosetta Live: # 3 Touchdown'
http://youtu.be/u_91ALEmMEc

If you want another look at that tattoo, btw, then here's a close-up:

'Rosetta Tattoo'
http://tapejarascience.tumblr.com/post/97399648175/rosetta-tattoo-dr-matt-taylor-of-the-european

'Science Bulletins: Rosetta Mission Lands Probe on Comet'
http://youtu.be/890hTEhRIak

'rosetta blog'
For everything you want to know about the mission :-)
http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/


So that's something humanity can feel deeply proud about.

Here's something humanity can feel deeply ambivalent about:

'Philae conspiracies: Because there isn’t enough s**t on the internet already?'
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/11/philae-conspiracies-because-there-isnt-enough-st-on-the-internet-already/

A Grauniad journaloust went out of her way to find a shitty story to draw in morons to their readership.

{So what's new?} :-P

Incidentally, comets are too loosely packed to be used a spaceship. Just in case you were thinking that ;-)


And now for something humanity can feel deeply ashamed about... even while staying close to the prime subject :-/


'Kim Kardashian Ass vs Feminism'
http://youtu.be/q18AO43S0cM

I saw this 'story' on the BBC website, and i immediately thought "oh, Thunderf00t, you must do a video on this!" ...if nothing else, then for therapy's sake.

The horrendous slut-shaming sexists who wrote the article, even proudly boasted that they'd made the project leader cry... for wearing a shirt... that a female friend had made for him!

"The outcry has evidently hit him hard though. During a press briefing this morning, he broke down in tears and apologised for his choice of clothes."

'#BBCtrending: Rosetta physicist's 'sexist' shirt'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-30055278

If a woman wore a shirt with naked men on it, would it be OK to harangue her for it? No - it wouldn't.

Has all the feministing been feeble speculation about whether a woman would be allowed to do that? No - it hasn't.

Puh-lease. This shit has to stop.

Bullying someone over their choice of clothing (that's what 'the outcry' is a euphemism for) is just not on.

Ironically, this is exactly the kind of thing that discourages people from going into STEM.
http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2m8trp/polygon_cofounder_chris_plante_condemns_comet/cm1zw3z

"Oh no - i'm not going into STEM - i mean that guy over there was so awesome that he was the first to put anything man-made on a comet, and look at the awful way they treated him" - something someone could think

Where was all the praise for the women involved? Where was all the credit, encouraging people to follow in their footsteps?

As weirdly creepy as it is to effusively praise one population more than another, at least it's not the mirror similar - ganging up on one population more than another, and vilifying them instead.

"How does Kathrin Altwegg have 23 publications and two books to her name if sexist shirts keep women from entering tech????? Because it's easier to say men are keeping women out of tech than it is to give praise to the women already in tech. That's how. I'm sorry Kathrin. I'm sorry that instead of people looking to you and saying "You are a credit to the scientific community" they're effectively saying "You don't count because shirt"."


Oh, and btw, notice that the BBC got that story from Twitter. That's right - journalists don't do their own stories any more - they just plagiarise miserable bigots via social media.


Dear FSM.

Please make hacks do some work, for a change. RAmen.

Tap


'Corruption across EU 'breathtaking' - EU Commission'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26014387

National governments are extensively corrupt, according to an EU report. But the study data is limited in veracity, because it is based on survey data.

{Please note, EU-phobes, that this is corruption that exists across the EU - not corruption perpetrated by the EU. That's the difference between pointing out that there's mouse shit on your kitchen floor; and dropping your knickers, curling one out, and then boasting about your own!}

The survey asked people in sampled companies from countries across the EU (they couldn't sample non-EU countries because it was an EU-done survey) whether they, personally, had been involved in corruption, and whether they thought there was a problem with corruption, in the country in which they lived.

Obviously, the former question is far more useful, because the latter asks people to judge by rumour, rather than actual personal experience.

Importantly, the report found corruption to be greater at a smaller scale (regional and local) than at a national scale, which contradicts the idea that fragmentation of countries for people's 'independence' would lead to a more just world!

Also, conflicts of interest are very poorly patrolled, apparently. This comes as no surprise to me. Inevitably, the department responsible for preventing corruption, across the entire EU, is tiny, and utterly underpowered for the task.

That too, is unsurprising, given how lax national and regional governments are with corruption control.

This report seems highly ironically timely, considering an article two weeks back, about the anti-corruption enthusiasm of the current Chinese government!


In other news:

In a bizarre attempt to crackdown on pedestrian safety, police in New Jersey have sent a copper out, dressed as Donald Duck, to catch drivers who don't yield to pedestrians when they're trying to cross the road. Inevitably, the sight of an anonymous guy in a giant Donald Duck costume didn't garner much sympathy from drivers, who just sailed on past. I think the funniest part of this story is the quote from one driver: "They told me that I was getting a ticket for not stopping for a duck," she said. "But it scared me. I'm a woman." LMAO. 'I'm a woman'. All women are scared of ducks!? Helen Lovejoy, eat your heart out. "Won't somebody please think of the anatophobic women??" :-D [stands on chair and shrieks]
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/criticism-over-donald-duck-pedestrian.html

An inevitable-in-the-end accident has happened in India, where an uninformed member of staff went too close to an MRI machine with a gas cylinder. The famous thing about MRI machines, is the hugely powerful magnetic field which 'due to the unique way magnetic fields are funded' fades away to almost-nothing at as little as a metre from the machine. What this means, is that you can be in the next room, and not feel the field at all, but if you walk through the door, and wander too close, it will vigorously grab anything metallic that might be on you. Gas cylinders are, of course, made mostly of steel, and so you can imagine what happened - they got too close, and ended up pinned to the machine, behind this huge, heavy lump of metal. It costs a lot of money to turn an MRI machine on, and a lot of time too, so they're usually just left on. It's not a nice experience for anyone waiting around for someone who knows where the off switch might be!
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/unfortunate-mishap-with-oxygen-cylinder.html

I learned, this week, that the UK's House of Commons pays a fixed contract for gardening, which means the contractors employ someone to pick all the leaves of the trees in the New Palace Yard, rather than to simply sweep them up after they've fallen. Because they get paid for all gardening in one, they choose to save time instead of money, by removing all of the leaves while they're stuck in place, and easily collected! Presumably, they know this won't damage the trees' buds, and compromise their chances of surviving the winter. I mean - they're not the gardening equivalent of Atos, are they? :-D
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/authorities-defend-decision-to-manually.html

Yay! The seven Italian geoscientists who were prosecuted over their bureaucrat employer's misleading earthquake diplomacy, have been freed of their prosecutions. The man who really did cause trouble, however - Bernardo De Bernardinis - the official at the Civil Protection Department, who was responsible for telling people whether it was safe or not, has been given a two-year sentence for causing the death of some, but not all, of the 29 victims involved in the trial. Outrageously, it was the geologists who copped the blame, through misleading journalism, for his incompetence (they were compelled only to make announcements through him) when he told the public that no earthquake was coming. The geologists gave no such advice, but he thought it would be nice if he relaxed everyone a bit. Poor diplomacy costs lives.
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/11/laquila-decision-against-geoscientists-overturned/

Here's the space story that got sidelined by Rosetta and Philae - the news of the first observations of Oort Cloud objects' surfaces! The Oort Cloud is a theorised cloud of objects, way beyond Neptune, 100000 times as far as Earth is from the Sun, where comets (for example the one that Philae landed on) are thought to come from and return to, in huge looping orbits around the Sun, taking as long as 50 million years. When comets are close to the Sun, the stream of solar particles whips up dusty ice, obscuring the surface. Philae and Rosetta will get much better views of the one they're on, but it's still fascinating to see 'inactive' distant comets' surfaces. The researchers say the two so-far seen are similar to asteroid belt objects, but are bluer in colour.
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-surfaces-oort-cloud.html

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'Why Isn't The Sky Purple?'
http://youtu.be/R5P6O0pDyMU

'Shelf Life Episode 1 - 33 Million Things'
The first episode of the AMNH's new series, exploring the 33 million items in its collection
http://youtu.be/5NR-xl7W0vo

'Perturbed polymers - surprising solvents'
http://youtu.be/FxZdS5cUILU

'US map flashes with lightning strikes of 2011'
Notice how the lightning follows weatherfronts, as they progress across continental North America.
http://youtu.be/QXk2zF6qCxk

'Giant sunspot returns – and it's bigger and badder than ever'
http://tapejarascience.tumblr.com/post/102775056310/giant-sunspot-returns-and-its-bigger-and

'London Finale 2014 Monday Hot Shot Rojer Tecau Peya Soares'
http://www.atpworldtour.com/Media/Video-Landing/*/Tennis/Media/Videos/Uploaded/2014/11/10/London-Finale-2014-Monday-Hot-Shot-Rojer-Tecau-Peya-Soares.aspx

'London Finale 2014 Tuesday Hot Shot Lopez Granollers'
http://www.atpworldtour.com/Media/Video-Landing/*/Tennis/Media/Videos/Uploaded/2014/11/11/London-Finale-2014-Tuesday-Hot-Shot-Lopez-Granollers.aspx

'European space robot Philae criticised for parking in comet’s disabled bay'
“Sure, they wanted to be near the front of the comet because it was ‘more convenient’, but it’s reserved for disabled drivers for a reason you know.”
http://newsthump.com/2014/11/12/european-space-robot-philae-criticised-for-parking-in-comets-disabled-bay/

'Bankers’ wrists starting to get really sore'
"With fines and a severe talking to also part of the punitive action, some bankers have told us that maybe manipulating the market for their own selfish ends might not be worth it. Maybe."
http://newsthump.com/2014/11/13/bankers-wrists-starting-to-get-really-sore/

'Man finds Jesus on piece of chicken'
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/man-finds-jesus-on-piece-of-chicken.html

'Virgin Mary holding Jesus spotted on tree trunk'
I don't think the pareidolia lulz will ever run dry :-D
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/virgin-mary-holding-jesus-spotted-on.html

'Samson Da Barbarian'
http://youtu.be/NRh7W-Bsg5g

'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Salmon Cannon (HBO)'
http://youtu.be/l9qA8c-E_oA

'The Chaser's Media Circus - Season 1 Episode 5'
http://youtu.be/tAZ5f2ClHIs

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word of The Week: confabulation -- discussion, communication; or in Psychology, the fabrication of false memories, whether deliberate or accidental, to fill in gaps in one's memory. Confabulation is very common after popular events that were not actually witnessed by many e.g. in the case of the thousands of people who claim to have seen the first aeroplane hit the first World Trade Center tower, in 2001, even though no-one knew to look, until after it had happened.

Etymology Of The Week: 'botulism' -- meaning the disease caused by Clostridium botulinum bacterium's eponymously named toxin; derived from the latin 'botulus' for 'sausage', as the first identified case related to infected sausages

Quote Of The Week: "I'm not going to spend the next ten minutes of your life trying to make religion look ridiculous, because i don't think i could if i tried... There is nothing i can say about religion which makes it look any sillier than the light in which it happily paints itself... Even with my most mean, sarcastic, liberal-smartarse head on, i can't come up with anything as remotely ridiculous as magic biscuits that turn into chunks of Jesus!" - Mitch Benn - IFS 171 - Unicorns vs Narwhals!

Fact Of The Week: In Alfred Hitchcock's production of the film 'Psycho', which he filmed using his own TV crew because no film crew would support him, the 'blood' in the shower scene is actually Bosco Chocolate Syrup. In grayscale, the brown was indistinguishable from red. Many viewers misremembered the red colour, despite it never being recorded in colour in the first place! This is another example of psychological confabulation, resulting in a false memory.

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff

'Question of the Day: Revisiting the Spaghetti Racquet'
http://www.tennis.com/gear/2013/02/question-day-revisiting-spaghetti-racquet/46306/#.VF_mFcmPMe0

'Facepalm'
http://imgur.com/gallery/7FjGi
.
.
.

Entertainment stuff from the week 3-9/11/14

Hi double-halves,


The long-awaited documentary about James Randi is here!

'Exposed: Magicians, Psychics and Frauds'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04ndsb3

"This entertaining film chronicles Randi's best debunkings of faith healers, fortune tellers and psychics. It documents his rivalry with famed spoon-bender Uri Geller, whom Randi eventually foiled on a high-profile television appearance. Another target was evangelist Peter Popoff, whose tent-show miracles and audience mind-reading were exposed as chicanery when Randi revealed a recording of Popoff's wife feeding him information through a radio-transmitter earpiece."

I suspect it'll only be able available on iPlayer for a month or so, so if you can, make the most of it.


"This is why Britain is the best country in the world. Well done, Steve."

'Leisure centre winner is Steve'
https://twitter.com/SnoozeInBrief/status/531084321738616832

The frustrating thing about this story, is that it's absolutely true...

'Steve snaps up free membership prize'
http://www.wlct.org/WLCT/selby/news/steve-snaps-up-free-membership-prize.htm

It reminds me of a closing quip from Stephen Fry, on QI, wherein he iterated that a team had been commissioned with naming a new University-College chimera in Bradford:

"When a market-research team was asked recently to come up with a new name for the merger between a university and a college in Bradford, they took three months, this company, to suggest the following alternatives: University of Bradford, The University of Bradford, or Bradford University. Their fee was £20,000."

'Series 1, Episode 8'
https://sites.google.com/site/qitranscripts//transcripts/1x08

To think that people name their own kids, free of charge. Fools!

No University ever got bullied for having a silly name. They're less worth the expense :-D


Y'know when 'reports' say 'the Media' does a good job, broadly-speaking, of reporting Science?

Well, i'm going to present this is an example of how they're so abysmally wrong:

'U.K. paper posts the year’s worst story on dowsing'
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/11/u-k-paper-posts-the-years-worst-story-on-dowsing/

When a bunch of ignoramuses at, for example, the Kent and Sussex Courier credulously report the facile claims of dowsers as if they're scientific... that is atrocious Science reporting!

Dowsing is a find-by-magic superstition, that uses sticks and coat-hangers and things as props, as part of a deception into thinking that stuff can be found without actually looking. Most famously, in recent years, it's been perpetrated by people like Jim McCormick, who've used it to sell useless plastic things to military forces and police, so that when little Salim's daddy goes out into the field bravely looking for bombs to save people from, he's much less likely to come back in fewer than 72 pieces!
{Yes, i use macabre humour occasionally}

Additionally, every time a quack is featured in a 'debate' about the I-SCAM industry; or a pharma sales rep is featured in a 'debate' about prescription; or an antivaccer is featured in a 'debate' about how to kill children with avoidable diseases while simultaneously insulting autists as 'broken' by medicine; or an MP for Health sends homeopathic propaganda to the Chief Medical Officer and doesn't get lambasted for it -- that's utterly shit Science reporting!

There's much more to reporting Science than just cherry-picking the things that Science found to be true, as if Science magically finds only true answers. [splutters with incredulity]

The way the scientific method works, is to distinguish true ideas from wrong ones, by accruing evidence that either substantiates or falsifies them. This necessarily means testing lots of ideas - the majority of which, are going to be wrong.

This is why it's so absurd that the Brownian-Conservative incarnation of the EPSRC requires researchers to state what their findings are going to be, before they've actually found them, in order to get the funding that would allow them to find their findings!

"The EPSRC's obsession with impact will lead to funding things that are mediocre and incremental because you can't accurately predict the outcome of fundamental research. Either that or it will lead to some scientists simply telling lies." - Prof Tony Barrett, head of synthetic chemistry at Imperial College London and leader of 'Science for the Future'

And what also makes it so absurd that cultural excrescences like Dowsing are not seen as functionally anti-scientific, in encouraging people to accept it as true, despite research having found it to be wrong.

Part of the scientific method necessarily involves calling wrong ideas wrong, as well as right ideas right - doing so is part of the same process.

That's why it's bad Science reporting to gullibly report that dowsers "...are always trying to refine the science aspect because it is a scientific thing although not universally regarded as such"

No - it's not a scientific thing - it's a pseudoscientific thing, that is not universally regarded as such, but should be.

And that's why it's also incredibly bad Science reporting to go to town on the subject of Naturopathic fraud, as if it were not already known to be entirely risible:

'Alternative to health: The Telegraph does a totally credulous piece on naturopathy'
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/11/alternative-to-health-the-telegraph-does-a-totally-credulous-piece-on-naturopathy/

Remember that the Torygraph is a national newspaper, owned by the multi-millionaire Barclay brothers. They have all the resources necessary to fact-check their content (they are worth £6 billion). And yet somehow this sentence gets through:

"Aside from nutritional therapy, acupuncture and biopuncture (in which the needles contain homeopathic injectibles), she uses infusion therapy (“if your digestion isn’t working properly there is a malabsorption of nutrients”)."

There is no such thing as nutritional therapy. Telling people to eat a healthy balanced diet is not therapy.

Quackupuncture - 'health by a thousand cuts' - is a pointless (punintended) threat to health, by putting lots of holes in the one organ of the body most key to keeping germs out.

Biopuncture is even more nonsense, because it combines one superstitious ideology with another one, based on a completely different fictional universe (like throwing a pokeball forward and seeing Gandalf jump out)

Homeopathic 'injectibles' is nongrammatical because there is only one ingredient in homeopathy -- water.

And infusion therapy... well i don't think i need to go any further, do i.

That any of this can get published in a broadsheet newspaper, is a indicator that reporting of Science by 'the Media' is not 'good'. That all of it got past the team, and the editor, is a dramatic repudiation, refutation, and castration of the statement!


On the plus side, this subject made me think of Ben Goldacre. So i checked his blog. And looky here, he's got a new book out. Yay!

'I totally just touched my new book: Collected Journalism, out next week!'
http://www.badscience.net/2014/10/i-totally-just-touched-my-new-book-collected-journalism/

And here's the intro:
http://www.badscience.net/2014/10/my-new-book-is-out-today-here-is-the-introduction-hooray/

I must get this for Winterval!

{Yes - i'm still calling it that, just to piss off the Daily Fail and Daily Diana :-D }


In-and-on-or-around-this-date-or-time-of-year:

The 8th of November marks the 49th anniversary of the Race Relations Act, in the UK, which banned racial discrimination in public places in Britain. Regarded as weak legislation, it did little to counter racism-based behaviour, but was a progenitor of later, more effective legislation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Relations_Act_1965

The 9th of November marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which came to symbolise the emotional barrier between people of East and West, as well as their physical division, and the emotional divisions between peoples in similar situations, around the world.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-08/25-years-since-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/5877218


In other news:

'Man in charge of nation’s finances struggling with concept of ‘half’'
“Instead of us giving them £1.7bn, and then them giving us £850m, we’re just going to give them £850m and call it quits.”
http://newsthump.com/2014/11/07/man-in-charge-of-nations-finances-struggling-with-concept-of-half/

It says something quite staggering, that a parody web-site has a more veracious insight into current affairs, than the leading News organisations, doesn't it :-D
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29956289
http://tapejarascience.tumblr.com/post/102174853960/george-osborne-half-the-evening-boris-got

Let's have some more of that then, LOL:

'Tesco wondering if George Osborne fancies having a go at their books'
“It’s really very simple. If someone is capable of getting people to pay exactly the same amount they always did for something, but convincing them he’s actually saved them 50%, then we’d really like to talk to them.”
http://newsthump.com/2014/11/08/tesco-wondering-if-george-osborne-fancies-having-a-go-at-their-books/

'Complaints at ‘Sexy UKIP politician’ Halloween costume'
"The costume features tobacco-yellow cuffs, a joke ‘never-empty’ pint glass, and cut off shirt to reveal a fake beer belly."
http://newsthump.com/2014/10/29/complaints-at-sexy-ukip-politician-halloween-costume/
Reference: http://mashable.com/2014/10/28/sexy-ebola-halloween-costume/
{The original costume idea was actually a fake}

'Pyongyang claims Kim Jong-un recovery so spectacular he’ll soon be able to fly'
“The Dear Leader is literally the greatest human being who ever lived,” said a North Korean spokesman. “His capacity for healing is beyond normal people. His legs have healed so brilliantly that he will be able to fly very soon.”
http://newsthump.com/2014/11/06/pyongyang-claims-kim-jong-un-recovery-so-spectacular-hell-soon-be-able-to-fly/

Even more comedy. A Green MP has made a total embarrassment of himself, by signing a homeopaths' petition to compel the WHO to send shaken water to Ebola sufferers in Africa! Like a typical polly, he gave the pathetic excuse that it was late at night when he signed it. So he was tired... tired and emotional, too? :-D
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/homeopathy-for-ebola/

Pope Frank - head of one of the world's largest, most valueful businesses - has condemned members of his own, for making it too much like a business, having sacked a Church Court official who had been caught offering to facilitate marriage annulments for cash.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/pope-sacked-church-official-for-selling-annulments/ar-BBd9QGj?

And Frankie also gets a follow-on from last week, on the basis of the science-denial stuff. He might accept evolution as a thing; but he also thinks that exorcism is a thing. Y'know - the flagrant abuse of mentally ill people, by culturally ill people who think that possession by fictional demons is a thing that actually happens! So Religion's still dragging its arse along the ground, even into the 21st century. Well done, lads - you're working hard to avoid ever receiving that much-demanded respect :-D
http://news.discovery.com/history/religion/why-the-pope-shuns-creationism-but-supports-exorcism-141105.htm

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'Stunning New View of Planetary Genesis'
http://youtu.be/ta7-pA2yOGY

'Black hole merger'
http://youtu.be/wOOKt59TlXk

'John Lewis Christmas ad secretly highlights plight of trafficked sex workers'
http://newsthump.com/2014/11/06/john-lewis-christmas-ad-secretly-highlights-plight-of-trafficked-sex-workers/
Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29906347

'The sordid truth of #MontyThePenguin's sex life | Shed Science'
http://youtu.be/nua1aQeFF0s
{Definitely watch this one, LOL. But read the newsthump article first}

'BEER CAN LEVITATION!!! IT REALLY WORKS!'
http://youtu.be/JZxT8nnQC70

'Philpot Lane Mice'
http://youtu.be/RjcIZHRFtWg

'Conductive Glass'
http://youtu.be/fMZDstzxWQA

'Robot arms recreate feeling of alien presence'
This is actually quite interesting. If it's this easy to deliberately fool yourself into thinking that someone else is acting, and not you, then it must be very easy for people to accidentally persuade themselves that their own actions were in fact determined by someone else's, for example in automatic writing, channelling the dead, etc. It doesn't make what those people do OK, but it could explain how they've convinced themselves that it's OK.
http://youtu.be/V5e1a699jq4
More: http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/11/additional-evidence-that-ghosts-may-be-all-in-the-mind/

'Thrush song shares harmonies of human music'
http://youtu.be/J1Sq76xvGso

'All About That Base (No Acid)'
http://youtu.be/IAJsZWhj6GI

'Le Mémo (Aude Gogny-Goubert et Loïc Bartolini)'
http://youtu.be/0VMmARiGkDw

'The Chaser's Media Circus - Season 1 Episode 4'
http://youtu.be/Ff4GVprc2t4

'World of Batshit - #3: Chemtrailer Trash'
Ahahah 19:29 is 24-carat example of superstition! Do a thing, see a thing; erroneously conclude that the done thing caused the seed thing. LOL!
http://youtu.be/IcyplG14dec

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word Of The Week: sangfroid -- composure or coolness shown in danger or under trying circumstances

Expression Of The Week: 'to the nines' -- meaning 'to the highest degree' / 'to perfection'. Makes most sense when considering the french version, in which 'nine' ('neuf') clearly also means 'new' ('neu'/'neuf'/'nouveaux'). The english etymology, through 'nigon' also indicates that it the number 'nine' comes from 'new' through Greco-Latin, back to Proto-Indo-European.

Journalist Quote Of The Week: "A pod of dolphins stunned lucky sailors with their aquatic acrobatics on Saturday afternoon. Around 20 of the mammals played in waters off Sandbanks for around an hour, delighting viewers. The same group could also be spotted from Southbourne earlier that morning, where many walkers reported catching a glimpse of the animals as they strolled along the beach."
{If journalists aren't good at scientific investigation or language, then what are they good at?? :-D }

Scientist Quote Of The Week: “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” - Richard P. Feynman

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff

'Notable effigies from Lewes's Bonfire Nights'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29915270

'Instant paranormal: The ubiquitous use of camera apps'
http://web.randi.org/swift/instant-paranormal-the-ubiquitous-use-of-camera-apps


'BBC1 Best Of Carrott Confidential 88. Part 1'
http://youtu.be/5s87Df0gA-c

'BBC1 Best Of Carrott Confidential 88. Part 2'
http://youtu.be/ojyiEpED4ms

'BBC1 Best Of Carrott Confidential 88. Part 3'
http://youtu.be/nv2479X9_bg

'BBC1 Best Of Carrott Confidential 88. Part 4'
http://youtu.be/pX5GaNEX0F0
.
.
.

Entertainment stuff from the week 27/10 - 2/11/14

Hiya cannibals,


So, Hallowe'en has been and gone. Or, Samhain (pronounced saw-hin) as it used to be known.

Maybe that's where the stage trick of samhain a woman in half comes from? :-P


The SGU's 'Truth or Fiction' round was excellent, this week, with extra-special guest Richard Saunders (yes, this one) in the guest seat:

SGU#486 (skip to 58" in, for the quiz)

Theme: Archaeological Horror

#1) In the El Sidron cave in Spain, archaeologists found the remains of 12 Neanderthals, three children, three teenagers, and six adults. All 12 were killed, butchered, and eaten raw by other humans. 

#2) Italian Egyptologist Girolamo Segato discovered a method for preserving flesh by turning it into stone. His process of petrification from almost 200 years ago remains a mystery and has never been duplicated.

#3) Archaeologists examining the prehistoric remains of dozens of butchered adults in the Sacred Ridge region of Colorado have concluded that the butchers were all children, indicating that they wiped out the adults of their village in a single orgy of blood, perhaps as revenge for the practice of child sacrifice. 

#4) Scientists examining the fully articulated and deliberately buried remains of a 3,000 year old Scottish man and woman discovered that they were actually reassembled from the remains of 6 unrelated people.

So there's something to ponder, before/while you read on...


Next up: a disaster ... well, two!

On Tuesday, the 28th of October, Orbital Sciences lost a supplies rocket - Antares - which was a crucial part of their $2 billion deal to resupply the International Space Station, in place of the public sector.

On Wednesday, the Russian State project picked up the tab, and delivered 3 tons of food, fuel and other items to the ISS.

As expected, there was much speculation about the effect of this disaster. Could a private company weather the storm of such huge infrastrcture losses? How would the shareholders react? Orbital Sciences' share price lost 15% of value in the wake of the event.

And what did this say about the safety of space flight? With an 8% failure rate, how would Space X and other companies comply with their self-serving interests to engage in commercial space tourism, if 8% of customers won't come back? An accident like this, but causing deaths, could really throw a spanner in their works.

On Friday, the 31st of October, Space X's space plane exploded, killing one of the pilots, and with the other escaping by parachute. More than 500 people have already reserved seats—and paid a deposit on the $250,000 ticket price for a minutes-long suborbital flight on SpaceShipTwo, which can carry six passengers.

Due to this rapid succession of events, the speculation just got even more exuberant. "The developments reignited the debate about the role of business in space and whether it is or will ever be safe enough for everyday people looking for an expensive 50-mile (80-kilometer)-high thrill ride."

Personally, i just don't think private companies can cut it, in space exploration, because of the way they're funded and run. Cheap joyrides above the atmosphere are one thing; but any more than that has huge overheads, which simply can't be covered by a profit-motivated organisation. They're too short-sighted to cope with the long-term investment necessary. All of the contenders, including Space X and Orbital Sciences, have been vying for decades, by drawing huge amounts of wealth from public purses, and their huge mother-organisations. But they still haven't got their own products working properly; and certainly not in a self-sustaining way.

Space exploration, as far as i'm concerned, will always be a loss leader. A brilliant, exciting, dangerous, inspiring, scientil loss leader; but still an economic loser.


And now from that macabre double-disaster, to another kind of double-disaster. But this time, a good one:

'Lessons from the dubious rise and inevitable fall of green coffee beans' (GCB)
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/lessons-from-the-dubious-rise-and-inevitable-fall-of-green-coffee-beans/

"Plucked from obscurity and then subjected to bogus research, it’s now clear that the only people that actually benefited from GCB were those that profited from its sale. GCB had some powerful boosters, too. Once it became one of Dr. Oz’s “miracle” weight loss cures, sales exploded following two hype-filled episodes."

I take it you know of and about Dr. Mehmet Oz, right? Well, you will in a few inches time. Here's my abbreviated form of Scott Gavura's article. But please do read the whole thing.

"Oz’s promotion of GCB was so breathless and detached from the actual evidence that his actions were subsequently eviscerated by Senator Clair McCaskill during televised hearings on weight loss scams. It’s a long, sordid, ugly and yet entirely predictable story."

"Given how widespread obesity is, and how difficult it is to fix permanently, it’s not surprising that weight loss cures are fodder to those that want to sell magical cures."

"The story of GCB can’t be told without describing the pivotal role played by Dr. Mehmet Oz." "There is no other show that can top The Dr. Oz Show for the sheer magnitude of bad health advice it consistently offers, all while giving everything a veneer of credibility. That’s because Dr. Oz is a real physician – he just doesn’t play one on television. That might surprise you given his show’s content. He’s promoted homeopathy and faith healing. He’s hosted supplement marketer Joe Mercola to promote unproven supplements, and the notorious “Health Ranger”, antivaccinationist and conspiracy theorist Mike Adams. Oz has promoted ridiculous diet plans, and he gives bad advice to diabetics. Then add the long list of “miracle” foods like red palm oil, or manufactured public health scares like cell phones causing breast cancer. “The Dr. Oz Effect” was coined to describe how Oz drives product sales, but it more accurately describes how Oz’s advice wastes the time and finances of consumers that actually follow the advice he offers."

"Dr. Oz’s first episode on GCB looked at the Vinson trial" which was dodgy for a number of outlined reasons. Including being industry funded - the same company that would be marketing the product; poor publishing standards; the authors did not work in pharmacology; the trial was small and short; huge swathes of methodological data was missing, which makes replication impossible; the trial was not blinded, yet it was described as blinded!

"GCB had all the features of a bogus weight loss product. It was implausible, and backed by flimsy evidence with some serious methodological issues. Even before we knew it was fraudulent, it was clear this trial should not be used to guide treatment decisions."

"None of this was an obstacle to Oz, who declared it to be the newest panacea for weight loss, using words like “magic”, “staggering”, “unprecedented”, “cure” and “miracle pill”. He concluded his episode with an absurd “trial” in two audience members who took the supplement for five days. One reported a two pound loss, the other, a six pound loss. In doing so he illustrated one of the worst ways to evaluate a weight loss supplement: short duration of use and informed by anecdotes. It served as nothing more than an extended advertisement for the product."

"AFS subsequently sold 500,000 bottles, apparently at $50 each. And that’s how a chemist and psychologist in Pennsylvania came to be the authors of a bogus clinical trial of green coffee bean, driving millions of dollars in sales for AFS."

This is not just academic - people are putting their health on the line, for the sake of these products.

"In a hamfisted attempt to address the criticism of Oz’s first episode on GCB, Dr. Oz revisited the topic in a follow-up episode, which he called The Green Coffee Bean Project... Based on the Vinson study, Oz designed and conducted a clinical trial of green coffee bean on his studio audience... Oz didn’t obtain ethical approval to conduct the trial... Daytime TV trumps research ethics."

Oz has prior experience of doing research, and yet he's quite willing to churn out this shit. That says something about his ethics, doesn't it.

"When Dr. Oz arrived to speak at Senate hearing into weight loss scams in hearings led by Senator Clair McCaskill, he probably wasn’t expecting to be verbally disemboweled on television."

"If you haven’t watched the hearings yet, the best and smartest summary on Oz and supplements in general came from John Oliver."

"In May of this year, the FTC announced it was suing a Florida-based company (Applied Food Sciences) for its promotion of green coffee bean... Not only was the advertising misleading, but the trial itself was fraudulent" due to known data-corrupting techniques, and outright lies.

"In an amazing display of handwaving and fingerpointing, the two hired “authors” are now blaming the sponsor for the validity of the data. No apologies for the serious ethical lapse of pasting their names on research they didn’t even conduct. And yet they blame the sponsor, who was the manufacturer, who should be last group with any involvement in the data collection and analysis."

They were willfully complicit in research fraud (and yes, it really  is that) and yet they think they can pass the buck. Yes, AFS were responsible for the bullshit data, but they were responsible for making it look good, and thereby making it publishable.

"Yet there seems to be no stopping Dr. Oz. The miracles continue, even after his Senate smackdown. I’m heartened by medical students like Benjamin Mazer, who is determined to go after Dr. Oz by asking his medical regulator to take action against him. Is the Dr. Oz strong enough to deflect a regulator? Time will tell."

"So how does one avoid the next miracle cure? It’s what Dr. Oz actually admitted to under Senate questioning: There are no miracle pills that replace a proper diet that includes calorie restriction. The facts of weight loss aren’t catchy, but they are based in reality, not hype."

Eat a healthy, balanced diet; and burn as many calories as you consume. There's no other way.

Or go all vegan-zombie and just eat 'grains, grains, grains...' :-D


And here's another interesting thing from Science Based Medicine. Go on, read it yourself... :-P

'Mirror Neurons and the Pitfalls of Brain Research'
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/mirror-neurons-and-the-pitfalls-of-brain-research/


In-and-on-or-around-this-date-or-time-of-year:

The 28th of October 2014 marked the 100th anniversary of Jonas Salk's birth. He was every bit the stereotypical scientist - a dark-haired, bespectacled, white lab-coat-wearing, pale-skinned man - everything feminists hate! As creator of the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), Salk seemed a miracle-worker to people of the 1950s - more than 3000 people had died, and 20000 people paralysed, in a poliomyelitis (polio) outbreak in 1952, 3 years before his vaccine became available. Most of the victims were children. A century on, and epidemiologists are seriously considering global eradication of the disease. His area - vaccination - takes the 'prevention is better than cure' mantra and makes it reality. Truly, a hero of our age.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/salks-swansong-renaissance-of-the-injected-polio-vaccine/

The 23rd of July marked the 15th anniversary of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory's launch into outer space. And this beautiful, purple picture had its 15th anniversary on the 30th of October: 6 hours of the Hydra A galaxy cluster
http://phys.org/news/2014-10-fifteen-years-nasa-chandra-x-ray.html


In other news:

Autists have indistinguishably different neuroanatomy to non-autists, according to a meta-analysis pooling information from 18 different neuroimaging studies. It's most powerful message, was that the 'accuracy' of the component analyses could be increased by lowering the sample size! This is not a good thing. usually, you see more, the harder you look - not less. This study suggests that  previous reports of highly accurate ASD ‘diagnosis’ on the basis of brain structure, were false positives caused by small sample sizes. There are hundreds of tiny studies declaring anatomical differences, which are contradicted by this study, but remember that anatomical differences are not functional differences (a point raised in my last mini-essay on brain types) and functional differences are clearly present (and indeed the defining features) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2014/10/25/autistic-people-normal-brain-anatomy/

Anti-corruption investigators in China have taken a haul of 200m yuan (£20m) from the home of the deputy chief of the National Energy Administration's coal department. There has been a big drive, in China, to counter intra-government corruption, and the State has sentenced more than 13,000 officials for corruption and bribery in the first nine months of 2014 alone. President Xi has warned that his campaign against corruption will target both "tigers" and "flies", indicating that no-one, not even senior party members, are exempt from the crackdown. China might have more to deal with; but isn't it interesting that so-called 'western' nations seem perfectly happy to tolerate corruption; especially via the revolving door between the public and private sector.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-29845257?

Misleading article title of the week's 'in other news'es: 'How often is 'antifreeze' added to food and drink?' Propylene glycol has been found at above-regulation limits in Fireball Whisky (a very nice, spicy-ginger-flavoured whisky) in the EU, where accepted limits are slightly lower than in the US - the place of manufacture. Propylene glycol is not antifreeze - it's an ingredient in it - and one that is widely used to improve the flavour of various ingestibles. As Paracelsus attributedly said, 'the dose makes the poison' and the amount at which it's found in food and drink is rarely anything to worry about. Regulators set their limits way below safe limits, anyway, so don't worry about it. Besides, the alcohol content's far more dangerous than the propylene glycol, and people deliberately buy drinks with alcohol in!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29847999

Pope Frank says evolution is a thing - and it's not just a thing - it's mandated by gawwwwwwwd. Interestingly, evolution denial (and science in general, for that matter) has been more of a Protestant thing than a Catholic one. The idea of the Big Bang (a Universal beginning) was actually officialised by an RC priest. Protestants insisted in a steady-state Universe, made perfect and unchanging, and are still, contemporarily, the leading denialists of abiogenesis, in order to displace it with the mythology of Adam-and-Eve-Creationism. So there you go. All Frankie's decree demonstrates, is that bigotry is arbitrary: "You must believe that evolution is a lie, condemned by God" / "You must believe that evolution is a fact, driven by God". It's wrong, either way.
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/10/pope-says-evolution-and-big-bang-are-a-ok-routes-when-god-still-drives-the-bus/

Do you remember the puppy-sized spider story? You know - that species of spider that's 30cm in legspan and weighs up to 170g, which is apparently about the same as some puppies? Well, the guy who discovered it has received death threats for researching it! Why? Because it's impossible to find out how individuals and entire ecosystems work, without dissection, and DNA analysis, which requires ground down muscle mass. But insects can't feel pain. They have no pain mechanism. So if it's not animal abuse to do this research, then why did people feel death threats were justified? Well, i think it's because the intitial story compared the spider to a puppy, which triggered people's knee-jerk doe-eyed-sympathy responses. See a spider, and people stand on chairs shouting "kill it, kill it, kill it!"; see a puppy, and the same people will kill you for patting it too hard :-P
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/11/haters-will-hate-if-you-kill-a-spider/

Parthenogenesis! From a huge spider, to a huge snake. Thelma - an 11-year-old, 6-metre, 90-Kg reticulated python - has given birth to six snakelets, without ever having encountered a male of her species. Because there's been no mixing of DNA, her young are clones of herself, and so must be female (like Jesus, who similarly had no male DNA) and must also be quite inbred. This means that progeny by parthenogenisis are usually less healthy, and expected to live shorter lives, than those from sexual reproduction. Scientists already knew about 10 species of snake, four species of shark, several monitor lizards, including the Komodo dragon, and two birds – zebra finch and Chinese painted quail - reproducing parthenogenetically. The term 'parthenogenesis' refers to the birth of Athena, in the mythology of the Ancient Greek Religion. She was birthed, whole, from the head of Zeus (and so should have been male too) and it is after her that the Parthenon is named - the virgin goddess.
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/10/reptile-virgin-mary/

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'Hendo Hoverboard: BUSTED'
$400,000 for a $70 toy? Puh-lease! 'Believe'. No - don't - do some skeptical investigation first.
http://youtu.be/IEBPQO4Vz1I

'John and Kevin's Sunday Papers - October 2014'
This edition is hilarious :-D
http://youtu.be/6xZr4DfHA7U

'Tinchy Stryder & The Chuckle Brothers | To Me, To You (Bruv) [Music Video]: SBTV'
http://youtu.be/EBtd3H3Qdi8

'Jay Foreman - Happy Halloween'
http://youtu.be/ivVECBxD2_A

'Queen - Love Kills - the ballad - (Montage Video)' (official)
http://youtu.be/xTPdU_07YZY

'Brian May and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra - One Night In Hell - Official Music Video'
In case you didn't know: Brian May is hugely enthusiastic about stereoscopes (see description box) So now you do ;-)
http://youtu.be/wwrAOU-J07o

'Kitchenette (Lucien Maine / Valentin Vincent)'
http://youtu.be/9fUMzkODtbg

'EPIC GIRLFRIEND PRANKS'
Macabre prank parody. Well, it is Hallowe'en... was.
http://youtu.be/G3mBiwPfz6I

'World beard champion crowned'
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/world-beard-champion-crowned.html

'Man Proposes to Girlfriend With 1,001 Hot Dogs! ft. David So'
http://youtu.be/BtxhD3O-bb0

'Carretilla extrema' (extreme wheelbarrow)
http://micro.cibermitanios.com.ar/post/101291528101/carretilla-extrema

'Cellphone use tracks holiday population shifts'
Web activity last week, and phone activity this week :-)
http://youtu.be/0SMRcUvF28w

'Floating touchscreen lets you feel virtual objects'
http://youtu.be/yQWCXN7lIwU

'This is Not a Rainbow'
http://youtu.be/9udYi7exojk

'Ghost Metal (Chemistry Trick) - Version 2'
http://youtu.be/VDMgrgSVjd8

'Levitating pumpkins! Halloween science'
http://youtu.be/xFjMznLb9y8

'Orbital's Antares rocket explodes on launch'
This was a private sector venture. But  who do you think's going to pick up the tab?
http://youtu.be/1SITo_Dz0_I

'The Chaser's Media Circus - Season 1 Episode 3'
http://youtu.be/eqS5ChkjcDU

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word Of The Week: prig -- a person who shows an inordinately zealous approach to matters of form and propriety. They see little need to consider the feelings or intentions of others, relying instead on established order and rigid rules to resolve all questions.

Etymology Of The Week: timorous -- meaning 'fearful'; comes from latin 'timere' meaning 'to fear, be afraid, dread'. In 15th century English, confused with 'temerous' which referred to rashsness; from latin 'temere' meaning 'by chance, at random; indiscreetly' and itself coming from proto-indo-european 'teme-' meaning 'dark' and being used to imply lack of knowledge/foresight.

Quote Of The Week: "Herbal medicine: giving patients an unknown dose of an ill-defined drug, of unknown effectiveness and unknown safety." - Prof. David Colquhoun

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff


Nothing is non-contemporary, this week. Just do the SGU's quiz again :-P
.
.
.

Entertainment stuff from the week 20-26/10/14

Hi Deinocheiri,


Some of the UK's population turned their clocks back an hour, on transitioning from BST (British Summer Time) to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday morning.

The really dedicated amongst them got up at 2 am to do it.

And the rest of them are going to be late for something.

In Russia, clocks went back to 'winter time' seemingly permanently, ending a three year experiment into permanent 'summer time'.

Maybe the thousands of people dying in heatwaves put them off the idea of permanent summer?

And maybe Game of Thrones put them onto the idea of a permanent winter? :-P

Interestingly, there's no clear case for the imposition of any one time standard, over any other.

Industrial economic claims will always contradict each other, as More Or Less found out, some time ago, so it all basically boils down to personal convenience.

Personally, i like having an extra hour to write this stuff in, but i don't think it's really worth it.

GMT+3 would ensure that most people living at high latitudes got up in daylight, but then winter sunclipses would occur at lunchtime.

That would make the days interesting, wouldn't it :o)


Is IKEA more generous than Norway?

Following the Torygraph's claim that a UN report shows IKEA (the flat-pack shop from Sweden) to have donated more money to countering the contemporary Ebola epidemic than Norway, Spain and Luxembourg, More Or Less have investigated:

'MoreOrLess: Screening for Ebola 24 Oct 14'
https://twitter.com/TimHarford/status/525879686178418689

You won't be surprised to hear that the claim is false. But what you hear after that might make you slightly more cynical about IKEA!


You might remember me being snarky, last month, about a guy trying to sell a book, off dodgy DNA research into who 'Jack the Ripper' might have been.
{There's insufficient evidence even to support the idea that it was all one person}

Well, i just got even more snarky, because some scientist bloggers who work in the area have noticed an error in the research, that renders his (the author's) shallow claim completely empty.

'Jack the Ripper mystery: Back to square one'
http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/10/jack-the-ripper-mystery-back-to-square-one/
{As if they ever got off it in the first place!}

The molecular biologist he employed to do the DNA analysis - Dr Jari Louhelainen - incorrectly classified the all-important genotype as '314.1C' which should have been '315.1C'.

The '314.1C' type is present in only 1 in 200,000 people, whereas the '315.1C' type is present in 9 out of 10 people! So what seemed to suggest Kosminski was more likely to have been a murderer, turns out to actually say nothing at all.

This is a highly technical, very specific area, that i would not have noticed. And this is what peer review is for.

When you're dealing with intricate science, understanding what every word letter and number means, can make the difference between understanding it and having no idea what you're dealing with.

In contrast, with a contentless subject, like Theology, anyone can call themselves an expert e.g. the leader of ISIS, who has a Theology degree and PhD in Islamic Studies.

Consequently, pseudoscientific journals like 'Answers Research Journal', the 'Journal Of Cosmology', 'The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine', etc, should not be considered scientific, even though they are peer-reviewed - the peers merely form an echo chamber of superstitious nonsense - they don't care about quality of evidence, or necessarily evidence of any kind!

Remember: peer review is not the end of the scientific process - replication is. The results published in pseudoscientific journals can not be replicated under scientifically rigorous conditions, no matter how many 'peers' rally around to repeat a mantra of "damp sugar is medicine".


In other news:

For decades, a pair of impressive dinosaur arms have hung in the Natural History Museum's dinosaur exhibit. They are the arms of a species called Deinocheirus mirificus, and impressive they are, too. Absolutely massive, and tipped with gigantic claws, the sign opposite them warns visitors not to presume that they are carnivores' arms. And indeed, discoveries in the last half-decade have revealed the rest of Deinocheirus' bodyplan to consist of dumpy legs, broad feet, a sail-bearing humped back, and head with a long snout and a beak. And also, a stomach filled with plants and fish. Dr Yuong-Nam Lee said: "We did not know their function before, but the long forearms with giant claws may have been used for digging and gathering herbaceous plants in freshwater habitats." Give enough time, and something will evolve to fill any niche.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29729412?

A Chinese medical doctor, and outspoken critic of CTM (Chinese Traditional Medicine) pseudomedicine, has issued a Randi-style challenge to TCM practitioners, to demonstrate that they can actually do something. The specific challenge he's suggested, is to determine with 80% accuracy, whether a woman is pregnant (there's little leeway there) and at least one person has already taken him up on the challenge. Some TCM-ers think they can work out whether someone is pregnant, by checking their pulse. Obviously, pulse-checks have a real world value, but there's no evidence it can be used to distinguish pregnant people from non-pregnant people! Obviously, these quacks are going to fail; but what will the excuses be, when they do? Special pleading's bound to be the #1...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-tcm-challenge/

Swedish police have announced that they will be paying a man 16,000 kronor (£1,370 or $2,200) in compensation, for impounding alcohol that they had seized from his home, unjustly. But that's not what the compensation's for. This is: while impounded, some of the wine, beer and cider had passed its best-before date, and five bottles of vodka and ten bottles of gin had been drunk... and replaced with water! I'm pretty sure there must be a rule about the police not drinking contraband... mustn't there?!?
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/police-to-pay-man-compensation-after.html

A recent study of American middle school students found that they have, on average, a *lower* degree of digital technology savvy than their middle school teachers. Adults tend to exhibit the belief that 'the younger generation' has an innate propensity for understanding and utilising digital technology, but this isn't actually true. Many kids (moreso than adults) do not know how to do a good Google search, or to use software to solve problems. This is because kids do not use them, whereas the teachers do, to make their work easier. There's been a campaign, in the UK, to get children obligatorily taught coding, which i think completely misses the point that contemporary ICT (coding included) is often arcane and useful to few, whereas general ICT skills are useful to everyone and still neglected, as if it were 'common sense' and/or like sex education - people are too embarrassed to learn/teach about how to do a Google search.
http://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/springer-select/digital-native-fallacy-teachers-still-know-better/36752

The tale of the unincredible shrinking goats of the Italian Alps. Alpine Chamois are a species of mountain goat, whose statistics have been tracked, amongst many others of course, for the last 30 years. Researchers have found that their body size has fallen by 25% in those 30 years, correlating with a 3-4 degrees C increase in temperature, where they live. Factors that are known to influence body size include nutrition abundance, temperature (due to the thermodynamics of maintaining a body) and predation (larger individuals are usually easier to catch) but nutrients have not become less abundant over this period, so it's either hunting or temperature changes as part of climatic change (probably both) that has caused the change. The researchers noted that Chamois have changed their behavioural habits - resting more - which suggests that temperature is discouraging them from activity that could cause them to overheat.
http://phys.org/news/2014-10-goats-indicator-climate-affects-animal.html

With funding from the US Department of Homeland Security, John Heidemann, research professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) et al have studied the phases of activity of the world's IP addresses, across 24 hours. There are 4 billion IPv4 internet addresses, and Heidemann and his team pinged about 3.7 million address blocks (representing about 950 million addresses) every 11 minutes over the span of two months, looking for daily patterns. To see a GIF and a video, showing the fluctuating activity, follow the link:
http://phys.org/news/2014-10-scientists-track-internet-usage-pulses.html

A cubic metre of copper has become the coolest in the universe, for a record-breaking 15 days, at just six milliKelvins - that's -273.144 degrees Celsius! The feat was accomplished at the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), a particle physics laboratory in central Italy gathering scientists from Italy, the United States, China, Spain and France.
http://phys.org/news/2014-10-absolute-copper-cube-chillingly.html

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'Richard Saunders - Dr. Duarf Ekaf's Horoblescope (Oct 2014)' (my upload)
http://youtu.be/t0sxmFne2Fs

'Viral Comets: Truck Saves Plane' (Captain Disillusion)
http://youtu.be/h0pIZH-W6b4

'When Veritasium gets it Wrong! - Trial by EXPERIMENT!'
http://youtu.be/3Ev_k__U3Io

'Politics in the Animal Kingdom: Single Transferable Vote'
http://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI

'Mile of Pi - Numberphile'
Pi is, as far as we know, a non-repeating figure, meaning its decimal places random (or at least pretty damn randomish) so when Matt's pointing out sequences, and absences of 4s, just remember that that is what you get from (maybe complete) randomness! And that is why statistical significance is important to research, and why it's not good enough to expect anecdotal claims to be believed - if the phenomenon's not repeatable, there's no reason to think it real.
http://youtu.be/0r3cEKZiLmg

'Oldest genitals reveal how ancient fish had sex'
Thirty-three seconds of sheer pleasure :-D
http://youtu.be/e_QzepsXGYk

'Why is the Sun Yellow and the Sky Blue?'
http://youtu.be/NafbGOQBlQs

'Seaborgium Chemistry - Periodic Table of Videos'
http://youtu.be/0WbFkXJwCaY

"My Vote, My Voice, My Right" by Roy Zimmerman
http://youtu.be/6-X-uBIqeVM

'Slow news day'
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/man-who-contacted-local-newspaper-about.html

'Football club's mascot reprimanded for swearing at own fans and challenging them to a fight'
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/football-clubs-mascot-reprimanded-for.html

'21 Local Newspaper Stories That Could Only Happen In Kent'
I'm pretty sure they could happen anywhere else LOL
http://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/kebab-nearly-kills-dog

'Salamander Pile-up'
http://tapejarascience.tumblr.com/post/100988273110/salamander-pile-up-image-and-text-credit-joe

'SHE BLINDED ME WITH A CAPELLA SCIENCE (Live with Thomas Dolby)'
http://youtu.be/A5NIQrmvPIM

'Marc Abrahams: A science award that makes you laugh, then think'
http://youtu.be/FFG2rilqT2g

'DOUGHNUT BURGER RECIPE'
Mad ozzie humour :-D
http://youtu.be/NB4SeCHU-BQ

'The Chaser's Media Circus - Season 1 Episode 2'
http://youtu.be/qgYA051-f9Y

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word Of The Week: concupiscence --  a strong desire, especially sexual desire; lust

Etymology Of The Week: 'boot'/'reboot' -- meaning the 'starting'/'restarting' of a computer; comes from the term 'bootstrap' which was originally used (in the context of computing) as a term for the code that a computer starts itself by. A bootstrap is a loop at the toop of a boot, employed in a paradigm of futility - 'to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps' which seemed apt to the task computers have to do when they 'boot'

Quote Of The Week: “The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” - Otto Pfleiderer, 1902

Fact Of The Week: There is a dorid nudibranch (sluglike sea thing) - Goniobranchus reticulatus - that lives around the Philippines. It is hermaphroditic, and so all members of the species have penises, but after mating, the penis sloughs off! That means it has a detachable penis. Don't worry, though - it grows back within 24 hours.

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff

'A VERY BRITISH CULT starring Richard Herring Emma Kennedy Miranda Hart Alex MacQueen'
http://youtu.be/Cmn4YuP5YVo


'24 Carrott Gold: Live in Birmingham - Episode 1 (2004)'
http://youtu.be/S6RW4xxUIoE

'24 Carrott Gold: Live in Birmingham - Episode 2 (2004)'
http://youtu.be/JaYEjNgBs8k

'24 Carrott Gold: Live in Birmingham - Episode 3 (2004)'
http://youtu.be/oxs2172ukp8

'24 Carrott Gold: Live in Birmingham - Episode 4 (2004)'
http://youtu.be/lbCwa4jKHdY

'24 Carrott Gold: Live in Birmingham - Episode 5 (2004)'
http://youtu.be/uE0TzI9f2xM
.
.
.

Pseudo-neuroscience -- 'Is your brain male or female?' No!!

Date Started: 5/10/14                             Date Completed: 25/10/14                          Date Published: 25/10/14


What is it with people making up arbitrary and completely bullshit-based ways to divide humanity? From sexism to religion, to racism, to quackery - they all involve hallucinations of false categories - all of the supposed discontinuities between them are baloney.

Here's a diagram of what an idealised discontinuity looks like:
http://tapejarascience.tumblr.com/private/99248925900/tumblr_nczatxpOaa1rdco3z

Whether it's segregating 'empathisers' and 'systemisers', 'males' and 'females', 'lefts' and 'rights', 'extroverts' and 'introverts', 'thinkers' and 'feelers' or any other arbitrary categorisation*, there seems to be plenty of people willing to tell you which one you're in. The evidence does not support any of them.

Whenever a study reinforces the science of 'we're all smudged in together' it just gets ignored. But if a study on 6 people, in an MRI scanner, suggests that men think differently about bananas than women do, all the sexists jump up and thrust it into the public gaze. This causes what's known as measurement bias - where perceptions are biased by seeing more of one thing than another. Consequently, large numbers of people take these puerile ideas seriously.

In this mini-essay-inspiring article, there's an example of self-deception at work, in the way the authors write:

"We are all a mix of the two, but most of us are more one than the other. Men tend to sit more along the systemising end of the spectrum, women at the empathising end, though there are plenty of exceptions."

Imagine if this were blood types instead of brain types. If you are blood group A, you can receive blood from Os and As, but not Bs or ABs. If you do, you can die. There are clear dividing lines between Os, As, Bs, and ABs. That is because the types are real. You either have the 'A' antigen on your erythrocytes or you don't. End of story. The fact that sexists have to blather about there being "plenty of exceptions" indicates that the categories are almost useless in describing reality, and certainly useless at boxing everybody up into different compartments, without leaving anybody out or double-boxing anyone!

Spectrums and types do not go together.**

Presenting this kind of junk as science is essentially no different to instructing racism: there are no Races, because there are no discontinuities between populations A and B that would make sense of them. They have differences, yes, but that doesn't mean they're completely different Races. After all, no two individuals are the same. Are we all our own Race? Are we all our own sex? It's bullshit, all the way, from people who concentrate on the junk and ignore the science, to prop up their factionalistic prejudices, whether Racist or sexist, or of any kind.

"So perhaps we'll be seeing pink pain killers for girls and blue ones for for boys..." the article ends. And white ones for Whites and black ones for Blacks? Bullcrap. Wiser people already know reality doesn't work that way.

Imagine if the systemising-empathising remark had been made in the context of racism:

"We are all a mix of the two [races - Black and White], but most of us are more one than the other. [Whites] tend to sit more along the systemising end of the spectrum, [Blacks] at the empathising end, though there are plenty of exceptions."

The obvious inference being that Whites can do the smart jobs, and Blacks all the menial stuff. Is it not much more obvious, now, that this sexism is merely being glossed over with caveats like "there are plenty of exceptions"?

The whole point of employing descriptive terms, is that that descriptive term applies to all that we apply it. Tautology is tautologous.

What's the point of saying that men are more 'systemising' (or Whites are more 'systemising' for that matter) if it's as wrong as often as it's right?

Even if it were actually true that studying all of the people in the world revealed those categorised as White to be marginally more 'systemising' (whatever that means@) than those categorised as Black, what would that really tell you? Jamie getting 87% on a test and Chris getting 85% doesn't mean they're poles apart, and worthy of streaming.

If there is no clear distance between two groups, then there is no discontinuity; and if there is no discontinuity, then they are not really separate groups; and if they are not really separate groups.... what's the point in treating them as if they are?!?!?!

I shall reiterate: there are differences between men and women; but there are differences between men and men too, and between women and women. There are also differences between Euro-African peoples, Amero-African peoples, Amero-Euro-African peoples, Asio-African peoples, and Afro-African peoples. But none of these differences are consistent and broad enough to justify treating whole populations on the basis of them.***

To do so is crass, derivative, and divisive. It indicates a lack of willingness to consider the true complexity of the real world, and a disturbing willingness to oblige others to obey personal moral-intellectual failings.

It can hardly be considered respectable, therefore, for an entire BBC team to justify employment through asking the fatuous question 'Is your brain male or female?'. The answer should obviously be "no - it's just a pink squidgy thing that does essentially the same as everybody else's". That the task of providing a specious answer has been given to the previously-vigorously-maligned Horizon franchise comes to me as no surprise!

If you're a fan of astrological (geocentrist) hogwash, you might think that arbitrarily carving humanity up into meaningless pseudo-types is perfectly fine. Maybe even fun. Victims of it don't. Remember that every factionalistic hatred in the world is funded by such sentiments - that 'us' being on 'our' side, and 'them' being on 'theirs' is a perfectly fine and 'natural' way to be. That questioning and undermining ideologies dependent on unsubstantiated beliefs about the very nature of people is either anathema or unnecessary, and that people who insist on doing so are just billowing hot air.

But in actual fact, as in this mini-essay's subject example of sexist nonsense, it is the factionalists who are issuing those thermally charged exhalations. It is the people who wish others to think that the ways in which we casually distance our understandings from facts are perfectly fine, who go to the effort of enforcing the aforementioned measurement bias, to deceive others into thinking that they are right. And when other people do think they're right, they conclude that they themselves must have been right all along. Other people wouldn't have believed them otherwise. Would they?

If you've had the misfortune to watch the 'IYBMOF?' programme, linked above, you could have noticed that it was full of such vacuous stereotype reinforcement. And in general, the first three quarters of the hour are complete bullshit. Unlike most Horizons, however, the programme manages to end well, with what seems like Alice Roberts doing the heavy lifting. But that doesn't excuse the pseudoscience-ridden rubbish about completely different species; and all the kinds of poorly-conducted and low-powered studies, that were featured in the first three quarters of the programme! Plus, as if to target me, and make me even madder, they trot out another false-dichotomy stereotype: the 'left brain'/'right brain' rubbish. Geepers...

If you're feeling masochistic and/or want to know just what a terrible so-called 'Science' programme looks like, then watch it for yourself. But if you don't want to, or can't, then i've put a text rundown in the 'Extras' section.

There is no such thing as 'an empathiser' or 'a systematiser'; there is no such thing as a 'male brain' or a 'female brain'; there is no such thing as a 'left brained person' or a 'right brained person'; there is no such thing as a 'thinker' or a 'feeler'. We are all all of these things, to varying degrees.

All people can do empathy (except the perfectly sociopathic) and all people can systemise; all people can reverse park and change a nappy; all people can be logical and creative; all people can think and all people can feel.

In fact, there is no such thing as a 'superstitionist' or a 'scientist' in the sense of categories of people who are distinguishable from each other by a discontinuity. Whenever i refer to "superstitionists" (and boy, have i!) i simply mean 'people who have blithely received superstitions' - not people who are utterly unscientific. All people can pick up dodgy ideas, while trying to be scientific, and reciprocally, even the most dedicated Newage machine looks both ways for evidence of traffic when crossing the road! [ref.]


The inevitability of geographical distancing is always going to divide people, and make it difficult to care about those who are far away: people who look different, speak different languages, etc. But seeing them as across a cultural boundary, as if they're a different 'type' of person, makes it so much easier to stop caring about them. It is these kinds of cultural boundaries that peaceworkers have been striving to overcome, for a long time, with moderate success.

So thank you very much, naff team at the BBC, for casually contributing to cultivating a counter-productive, prejudicial environment for us all to live in. Onwards and downwards...

So don't worry about what that Buzzfeed Career Test told you you're going to (or should) be when you grow up, because it's all bollocks - you can be good at anything, with sufficient practice. And as dissonant as it makes me feel, that moral goes to the people at the Beeb who keep churning out Horizons, too. One day, all of you guys might actually be good at making Science programmes. And less good at churning out superstitious rubbish!

...fingers crossed :-P



--------------------------------------------- Extras

* Personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs Test, and even all those 'Which video game character are you?' kinds of tests, are just as bunkum. Very popular they might be, but they are no more scientific than the idea of left-brained and right-brainedness. We all use all of our brains. And we don't apply only 10% of it either, in case you'd been duped by that little factoid!

** As an experiment for how effectively we can all delude ourselves, in hallucinating fake 'types' over spectrums, just look at a rainbow. That's pretty much the definition of a spectrum (minus a few absorption lines) and yet everyone seems to think they can count bands of colour! Reality says that's not true. There are no 'types' of colour because they all smudge into each other. Try to zoom into the discontinuity between yellow and green, and you just find a kind of yellow-green colour. The bands are an illusion.

*** Notes for the factionalists:

Sexes are real, Races are not. You either have ovaries, or you have testicles, or you don't. # Pretending that things like 'empathiseyness' are somehow distinguishing variables is simply silly. Races are not real because there are no meaningful distinctions between populations that could rationally lead to them being considered Races. It's hopefully now a cliche to say that racists see the world in black and white, and non-racists see shades of brown. It's as idiotic to say that "these people are Black and the rest aren't" as it is to say "these people are tall and the rest aren't". Unlike sexism, which consists of false distinctions between the sexes, in a context where there are real ones, racism has no real distinctions - only false ones.

# Actual sex is determined by genomic makeup and chromosomal combination, so even gonads can be misleading to the presumptuous. But the fact that the Venn diagram of sex overlaps a little doesn't mean there isn't valid (and limited) meaningfulness to distinction between 'sexes'. Sexist prejudice exists in pretending that distinctions exist where really they do not. Discompassion for intersex and transsexual people is just as much sexist as it is to insist that women can't drive and men can't do childcare. Intersexual and transsexual people suffer dysmorphia due to this irrational and unnecessary obligation to adhere to sex types. Historically, the sex of intersex people has been re-determined by good-meaning but good-failing people, who decided on the basis of external features, thinking that, as modern sexists still do, their sex could be 'corrected' to a hallucinated ideal. There is essentially no difference between insisting that 'a proper man does [this] or doesn't do [this]' and insisting that 'a proper man has a brain type like this'. It is the cultural imposition of false types that burdens intersexual and stereosexual people, alike.

---------------------------------------------

The Horizon TV programme notes:

1" Everything in the introductory first minute is sculpted as if to answer to the question 'Is sexism OK?' with "yes" - difference as right, and similarity as wrong. They promise lots of lovely science, but none of this comes until the last 15 minutes.

3" Stats about there being more males in STEM are tritely reissued, even though they don't have anything to do with innate mental makeup. The puerile sexist attitude that life is a battle of the sexes is played out (maybe despite the presenters) with Alice representing the 'Girls' faction, and Michael representing the 'Boys' faction.

4" The typical contemporary TV pseudoscience reiterates. Tiny studies, unblinded and uncontrolled, with sample biases of people willing to be on TV, and primed with the systematic bias of sexist prejudice (for the sake of 'interviews') do not constitute anything of scientific weight. These are not experiments - they are demos - and they can be done much much better. (This is a general point that i mentioned in my Horizon-specific mini-essay - the pseudoscience in the programme). P.S. On-line studies are rife with systematic bias - the people who think they can live up to sexist expectations are much more willing to do them, and the study will thereby exhibit all the prejudices that honest researchers will not want to see!

12" / 31" A specious detour into looking at the brain itself. If the question title of the programme 'Is your brain male or female?' refers only to whether it is the brain of a man or of a woman, then surely the answer is just a tautology and must be 'yes'. There is no investigation to do, unless brain 'types' are defined as the mental product of that squidgy lump inside our craniums. See the New Scientist article 'Men and women: Different brains, same aims' (linked below) which explains how male and female physiology differs, but achieves the same result -- like walking a different route to the corner shop for a Mars bar and a copy of the Metro. Same result, different method. Assessing the brain's physical structure achieves nothing. P.S. Note that the second fallacious stint is caveated with 'the research... has been heavily criticised'. In other words, it's insubstantial and should be ignored.

14" Yes, marketing is sexist. It appeals to the sexist beliefs of the shoppers. We know. None of this assesses whether the sexism is sexism or actually just.

18" An asinine aside into researching the behaviours of monkeys, who do not have any understanding of the purposes of toys. This baffled the claimants too, btw. This research is both irrelevant and unreplicated. It also falls foul of various other fallacies that can introduce systematic bias into results. In medical research, epidemiologists know well that there are limitations in the physiology of mice - all drugs have to be experimented in humans, before sale to humans. Recently, the debate has been about having more trials involving women -- historically, trials have been mostly in men alone, because their physiology does not fluctuate over a monthly cycle, which would introduce uncertainty into data and make discovery of the truth much harder. Obviously, this means less is known about sex differences in response to medicines, which is the next challenge for medical research to assail.

24" The 'extreme male brain' hypothesis for autism is just a hypothesis, and so the meandering on this subject, with autism as extreme masculinity as a premise is insubstantial and should be ignored.

26" @ It's claimed that men are systemisers and women are not, with 'systemising' defined as a drive to analyse and order a system. For example: arranging stock on a shop floor, organising a patient's treatment schedule, separating the formula from the breast milk, tidying the toys, maintaining a housework schedule, maintaining the boss' meetings schedule, paying bills, timing when to put the different veggies on the heat, assessing which pupils are doing better and granting them representative marks, and ensuring the Dewey Decimal System is adhered to. It must be evident to all, that none of the activities women are stereotypically involved in on a regular basis depend on systemising! <s>

17"/ 36" So many parents insist that they're not instilling prejudices into their kids, but the people involved in their demo... well, i think they effectively demonstrate that people can indoctrinate prejudices into their kids without being aware that they are doing it! Especially when they are around other adults - peer pressure exacerbates adherence to cultural 'norms'. It should be noted that it is more than slightly common for modern children to be left in the care of multiple adults at, for example, a nursery/playgroup.

42" Alice goes back to the Secondary School she attended, divides the boys and girls onto opposite sides of the room, and then watches the factionalised mentality sprout forth into the conversation. Note how the blame for stereotypes comes from the kids themselves. And also that the analysis of where the stereotypes come from, comes from girls - not the supposedly-better-at-it boys.

45" At last, some sense, from Gina Rippon. She iterates the fact behind there being no basis to the idea of a brain 'type' and to the questioning title of the programme. Sex differences are dependent on culture - to the arbitrary sexist beliefs that they were accidentally indoctrinated with as a growing proto-adult. Then again, look at all the over-the-shoulder cut-away editing in Gina's interview, which is used to hide devious editing practices. I'm not saying they majorly changed what she meant, but why introduce unnecessary doubt? Well, they thought they'd get away with it -- most people are unaware that cut-aways are used to hide deceptive editing, and so there's never a substantial backlash when anyone notices it.

52" None of this, about pain or immunology, has anything to do with brain 'types'. Did they run out of material? Or were they just clamouring for ideas with which they can prop up sexism? "Any difference; any difference at all; just give me a difference damnit!"

59" A positive end to the programme. But really - why did the majority of it have to be so shit?

---------------------------------------------References and further reading:

The offending article: 'Is your brain male or female?'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29405467

New Scientist: 'Men and women: Different brains, same aims' (subswalled)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428661.500-men-and-women-different-brains-same-aims.html

New Scientist: 'Boy brain, girl brain: How the sexes act differently' (subswalled)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928021.400-boy-brain-girl-brain-how-the-sexes-act-differently.html

American Psychological Association: 'Think Again: Men and Women Share Cognitive Skills'
http://www.apa.org/research/action/share.aspx

On blood groups and real, meaningful discontinuities:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2264/
http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/blood-transfusion-risks-of-blood-transfusion

On pseudo-neuroscientific categorisations: 'Left Brained, Right Brained, or Hare Brained?'
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4418
.