The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience but it is true: You know far less about yourself than you feel you do. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. It is the consistency of information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion — we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Science
Aside
Income Inequality Explained
Via NPR: Read more →
It Would Be Important to Get There and There is Probably a Way
I often say, “Well, it’s just over on the other side of that canyon. So all we have to do is go.” It is always surprising to me that other people would expect me to tell them how we’re going to get there directly. That it is not enough to say, “Well, it would be important to get there and there is probably a way. Let’s go.” — Doug Engelbart Read more →
Kids Should Study Math and Science, Say Adults Who Never Studied Math or Science
The New York Times has been editorializing recently on the nation’s need to enlarge our pool of science and math students, with a particular focus on girls and minorities, and to encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive. Here’s a list of the members of the NYT editorial board, including academic major(s), which I obtained from their online bios. See if you notice anything unusual. Andrew Rosenthal, Editor (American History) Terry Tang, Deputy Editorial Page Editor (Economics, Law) Robert B. Semple Jr., Associate Editor (History) David Firestone, Projects Editor, National Politics, the White House and Congress (Journalism) Vikas Bajaj, Business, International Economics (Journalism) Philip M. Boffey, Science (History) Francis X. Clines, National Politics, Congress, Campaign Finance (none listed) Lawrence Downes, Immigration, Veterans Issues (English, Journalism) Carol Giacomo, Foreign Affairs (English Literature) Mira Kamdar, International Affairs (French Literature) Verlyn Klinkenborg, Agriculture, Environment, Culture (English Literature) Juliet Lapidos,… Read more →
We’re Still Smarter Than You Are
Teens from Asian nations dominated a global exam given to 15-year-olds, while U.S. students showed little improvement and failed to reach the top 20 in math, science or reading, according to test results released Tuesday. — Why Asian teens do better on tests than US teens – CSMonitor.com Why am I not shocked by that? Because Americans on the whole are dumb and lazy. We have lots of dumb, lazy parents raising dumb, lazy kids. The average American kid doesn’t compare well academically to the average kid in an Asian country where academics and hard work are valued, or to the average kid from a small, homogenous European country where it’s easier to get everyone pulling in the same educational direction. The U.S. is a big, diverse country and the average academic results are pulled down by a lot of dummkopfs. But still, the smartest people in the world are… Read more →
Waving Bibles at Scientists
The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that a public school district was legally justified in firing science instructor James Freshwater, who waved a Bible at his students, distributed religious pamphlets and talked about creationism in evolution lessons. Personally, I’d fire him just based on the look of smug, benevolent certainty on his face. He doesn’t look like a man who struggles with doubt, which is the essence of science. Read more →
See You in Hell, Game of Thrones Fans
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles had a telescope pointed at Saturn this week. Anyone who wanted to could stop by and have a look. “It looks like I thought it would look,” one observer remarked. HA! He wasn’t impressed AT ALL by the fact that better men than himself built a device that lets him see things a BILLION miles away. This same idiot later pronounced himself “blown away” by the deaths of several make-believe characters on a TV show called Game of Thrones. If your Facebook and Twitter feeds look anything like mine this morning, you know that unfortunately this is just one idiot out of many. One of the reasons America is circling the drain is people’s inability to distinguish fantasy from reality until reality hits them like a pitchfork in the guts.… Read more →
But THIS Guy, He Might Be For Real
High Dropout Rates for STEM Majors is NOT a Problem
The University of Colorado has a $4.3 million grant to research the “problem” of 40 to 60 percent attrition rate among STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors. Someone is missing an obvious point here, which is that there should be a large dropout rate for STEM majors. Incompetent technologists and engineers create disasters. The music department, the English department, the philosophy department, etc., etc., can graduate their incompetent students without worrying that they’re going to build a collapsing bridge, blow up a space shuttle, disintegrate a Mars orbiter — you get the idea . . . Read more →
Why is There No Progress in Exercise Science?
Why can’t someone invent a workout you can do, say, once a year and still see excellent results? There is no progress in exercise science. We can put a man on the moon, a rover on Mars, but we can’t develop a once-a-year, high intensity workout? Very disappointing. Read more →
Aside
Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science — a commencement speech from 1974 in which Feynman explains in a clear, entertaining way what real science is all about.
There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about. — John von Neumann
“Keep it Simple,” Nobel Prize Winner Advises
I soon was taught that [Linus] Pauling’s accomplishment was a product of common sense, not the result of complicated mathematical reasoning. Equations occasionally crept into his argument, but in most cases words would have sufficed. The key to Linus’ success was his reliance on the simple laws of structural chemistry. The -helix had not been found by only staring at X-ray pictures; the essential trick, instead, was to ask which atoms like to sit next to each other. In place of pencil and paper, the main working tools were a set of molecular models superficially resembling the toys of preschool children. We could thus see no reason why we should not solve DNA in the same way. All we had to do was to construct a set of molecular models and begin to play — with luck, the structure would be a helix. Any other type of configuration would be… Read more →
Theories Have Four Stages of Acceptance
Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so. — J. B. S. Haldane Read more →
Bye-Bye, Bevatron
If you drive up the hill to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one thing you can’t help noticing is the large (approx. 125,000 sq.ft.) circular pit where the Bevatron is in its final stages of demolition. The Bevatron, as its name suggests, was used to make beverages. For example, the Bevatron could take enormous quantities of tequila, triple sec and lime juice, smash them together at the speed of light, and produce an excellent batch of margaritas. Wait, what? I’m now being informed that the Bevatron was in fact a particle accelerator put into operation in 1954 and used in the work of multiple Nobel Prize-winning physicists. Bye-bye, Bevatron. Read more →
Null Hypothesis
Fair or Balanced
What needs changing is the way the media deals with the conflicting claims of science and pseudoscience. You can’t be “fair and balanced.” You can only be fair or balanced. To be fair is to tell the truth; to be balanced is to tell a truth, tell a lie, and then let the public determine which is which — and this, of course, isn’t fair to anyone. People are busy! They have jobs to attend, children to raise, hobbies to pursue. They can’t go out and investigate every last crazy claim. They deserve a media unashamed of telling the best truths it can. — James Randi Read more →
Something Out of Nothing
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. — Stephen Hawking I still don’t get it. This is the one question that really gives me a headache: Why is there anything at all instead of absolutely nothing — no time, no matter, nothing? For the universe to create itself out of “nothing,” doesn’t there have to be something? Read more →
Nice Guys Finish Last
You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist. But nice guys end last, is what Leo Durocher said. If you want to lead a nice happy life with a lot of recreation and everything else, you’ll lead a nice life. — Richard Hamming Read more →