Stand with 🇮🇱 🇺🇦
Older Retired White Guy. Buddhist.
"Non nobis solum"
Likes trees better than people. Books better than trees.
"We Be The Humans"
Joined Aug 2018
🔥 🔥 🔥
This Gel Could Prevent Wildfires.
The nontoxic, biodegradable gel can be sprayed on vegetation as a long-term fire retardant.
The gel is based on cellulose, plant fiber, and uses materials already approved for use in food, drug, cosmetic and agricultural products. It will last through an entire fire season, then slowly degrade. It can be sprayed by a firefighter on the ground or in larger amounts from a plane or helicopter.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/gel-could-prevent-wildfires-180973278/
"Not Even Wrong"
More no good, horrible, downright wrong "science"
A recent paper claims that people who sleep in a room with artificial light - but not natural light - have a 28% greater chance of getting diabetes. If that sounds as crazy as claiming Mexican sugar will give you diabetes but American sugar won't, yeah, there is no plausible biological mechanism for any of it, it is just correlation.
News. New Evidence Against Dark Matter, Carbon Footprint Of Higgs Bosons, Data Transmission Record & more
By Sabine Hossenfelder
In Defense of Basic Science
The system now favors those who can guarantee results rather than those with potentially path-breaking ideas that, by definition, cannot promise success… In a climate that discourages such work by emphasizing short-term goals, scientific progress will inevitably be slowed, and revolutionary findings will be deferred.
By Kian Faizi
https://caltechletters.org/viewpoints/in-defense-of-basic-science
Does Science Need History?
A Conversation with Lorraine Daston
"it seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, ‘Who are we?’
~ Schrödinger
Most Americans do trust scientists and science-based policy-making – freaking out about the minority who don't isn't helpful
Key among these findings: people perceive others as trustworthy if they appear to be caring, honest and competent.
By John C. Besley
Researchers Report Decoding Thoughts from fMRI Data
A method appears to be the first to noninvasively reconstruct language from brain activity.
"The system is not decoding language word-for-word, but rather discerning the higher-level meaning of a sentence or thought."
By Grace van Deelen
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/researchers-report-decoding-thoughts-from-fmri-data-70661
Paper:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.29.509744v1.full
(Each one of these is worth reading)
Caltech Letters Year in Review: Our 5 Favorite Articles of 2021-22
Here at Caltech Letters, we’ve wrapped up another fantastic year of bringing science out of the lab and into context.
How do mushrooms become magic?
"Within Psilocybe alone, there are close to 150 hallucinogenic species distributed across all continents except Antarctica. Yet, the fungal species in which these 'magic' compounds occur are not always closely related. This raises interesting questions regarding the ecological pressures that may be acting to maintain the biosynthesis pathway for psilocybin."
In Science, “The Fate Of What We Say And Make Is In Later Users’ Hands”
Unfortunately, Lemire is wrong on both points: the received wisdom about science is hopelessly naive and, far from being a univocal opponent of the importance of expert opinion, Feynman was himself rather confused about the role of iconoclasm in science.
by Joseph Shieber
The Nobel Prize is typically handed out for great scientific work, but some prizes backfired. A few prizes were given out for discoveries that turned out to be woefully incorrect. One was awarded for a barbaric procedure that incapacitated thousands of people.
Scotty Hendricks
Are Women Really Better At Words? The Science Answer ??
"The caveat in the accuracy is that the female advantage depends on the leading scientist: Female scientists report a larger female advantage, male scientists report a smaller female advantage."
https://www.science20.com/news_staff/are_women_really_better_at_words_the_science_answer-256271
Paper:
The Transformations of Science
The present world’s preeminent system of thought now takes science as a central pillar and wields its authority to great consequence. But the story of how that came to be is, as one might expect, only barely understood.
By Geoff Anders
https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/10/10/the-transformations-of-science
Hey let's bust a few science headlines, shall we?
What is spooky action at a distance? Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in Ukraine, and more.
With Sabine Hossenfelder
New Folks
Some of my favorite Hashtags
#CoSoBooks
#CoSoMusic
#CoSoScience
#CoSoSec
#CoSoEnvironment
#CoSoPhilosophy
Just type them into the search box, (just above the text entry box),
And a new column will appear on the right, you can then "pin" that and make it permeant.
Yet another example of very bad science journalism.
Eighteen pitfalls to beware of in AI journalism.
We noticed that many articles tend to mislead in similar ways, so we analyzed over 50 articles about AI from major publications, from which we compiled 18 recurring pitfalls. We hope that being familiar with these will help you detect hype whenever you see it.
https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/eighteen-pitfalls-to-beware-of-in
and
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sayashk/ai-hype/ai-reporting-pitfalls.pdf
When meta-analysis goes wrong.
A recent study on homeopathy shows reminds us that meta-analysis, can look superficially solid yet still produce nonsense.
"And yet meta-analyses are fucked. Fucked, as Inzlicht said, because the scientific literature is fucked: the literature is full of bad studies, and regardless of how well you do your meta-analysis, if the studies you put into it are bad, your conclusions will be bad as well."
Stuart Ritchie
The US Is Measuring Extreme Heat Wrong.
Recent studies have revealed flaws in the heat index. With rising temperatures and humidity, maybe it’s time for a more holistic approach.
Gregory Barber
https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-is-measuring-extreme-heat-wrong/
(I say we combine K and total water vapor pressure)
To Watch:
The New Meta-Materials for Superlenses and Invisibility Cloaks
"A metamaterial has custom-designed micro-structures which give a material new properties. These micro-structures are typically arrays that resonate at specific frequencies, and that interact either with acoustic waves or with electromagnetic waves. This way, metamaterials can be used to control sound, heat, light, and even earthquakes."
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-new-meta-materials-for-superlenses.html
Removing author fees can help open access journals make research available to everyone.
"A community of nearly 50 researchers and international scientists make up Seismica’s editorial team. McGill Library covers the technical costs for Seismica, including DOI registration, preservation, web hosting and management of the manuscript submission platform."
By Jessica Lange
Scholarly Communications Librarian, McGill University
Stand with 🇮🇱 🇺🇦
Older Retired White Guy. Buddhist.
"Non nobis solum"
Likes trees better than people. Books better than trees.
"We Be The Humans"
Joined Aug 2018