Tag: science

So, astrology is now science?

That appears to be a possibility in light of this latest science news:

Researchers studied 400 people and matched their personality type to the season when they were born. The scientists claim people born at particular times of the year have a greater chance of developing certain personality traits. They said this was because the seasons had an affect on certain chemical substances in the brain, such as dopamine and serotonin, which control mood. They discovered that babies born in the summer were much more likely to suffer mood swings when they grow up.

In contrast, those born in spring tended to be excessively positive, upbeat and optimistic. They also found that those born in the autumn were less likely to be depressive, while winter babies were less likely to be irritable.

As the scientific research progresses, it would be interesting to map these “chemically generated seasonal personality types” to the various astrological signs and see how well they match. It would certainly be amusing to see the expression on the faces of various science fetishists upon learning that they were henceforth to be deprived of one of their favorite rhetorical devices.

Universal order is restored

John C. Wright celebrates the recataloging of the Solar System and the astronomical return to reason:

Take THAT, you vile Pluto-Haters!

I, for one, rejoice that Planet X is once again a planet! I welcome our new Mi-Go overlords, I applaud the hideous and unspeakable Fungi from Yoggoth, cheer the colony of semifourthdimensional yet cowardly organisms from Palain VII while they are busily dextropobopping, acclaim the forward military base of the hivequeen creatures we call ‘Wormfaces,’ and greet the resting place of Kzanol the Slaver, who will arise an obliterate the Earth!

(Hmm … wait a minute…. I wonder if there is a downside to this ….)

Pluto is once again a planet, eight years after being relegated to the status of dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). At least, that is, according to the audience at a debate at Harvard. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicists (HSCFA) debated the topic “What is a planet?” The debate was needed following the confusion that arose once Pluto was deemed too small to be a planet. The defining characteristics of a planet (a round thing which orbits the Sun and has ‘cleared the neighborhood’ around its orbit) “baffled the public and classrooms around the country,” according to the HSCFA. “For one thing, it only applied to planets in our solar system. What about all those exoplanets orbiting other stars? Are they planets? And Pluto was booted from the planet club and called a dwarf planet. Is a dwarf planet a small planet? Not according to the IAU. Even though a dwarf fruit tree is still a small fruit tree, and a dwarf hamster is still a small hamster.”

I have to admit, I do very much enjoy my household. When I announced that Pluto’s planethood had been restored to the lunch table, the news was greeted with a rousing cheer.

“Hurray!”

“Wait, why are we cheering?”

“Because Pluto is a planet again!”

“Oh, okay. Hurray!”

One can learn a lot about an individual by virtue his position on Plutonian planethood. Anyone who opposes it on the grounds of the usual specious logic cited or pedantic, overly literal planetary definitions is probably an atheist, has a high Asperger’s Quotient, possesses a lamentably insufficient respect for tradition, and should therefore be regarded with all due suspicion.

As humanity did not deem Tom Thumb any less a man for being small, it cannot in good faith deem Pluto any less a planet for being miniscule or icy or devoid of atmosphere. I applaud, therefore, the result of the Harvard debate and accordingly insist that the International Astronomical Union alter its formal position on the matter.

The number of planets in the solar system is nine. It is not ten, or eleven, or eight, except in that one then proceedeth to nine.

Gladwell gets it wrong… again

The 10,000 hours rule is determined to be considerably exaggerated:

Recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.               

A recent meta-analysis by Case Western Reserve University psychologist Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues (including the first author of this article for Slate) came to the same conclusion. We searched through more than 9,000 potentially relevant publications and ultimately identified 88 studies that collected measures of activities interpretable as deliberate practice and reported their relationships to corresponding measures of skill. (Analyzing a set of studies can reveal an average correlation between two variables that is statistically more precise than the result of any individual study.) With very few exceptions, deliberate practice correlated positively with skill. In other words, people who reported practicing a lot tended to perform better than those who reported practicing less. But the correlations were far from perfect: Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports. So, deliberate practice did not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the performance variation in these fields. In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.

To put it bluntly, it’s bullshit. You will NEVER rise to the top of any skill-related activity through nothing more than determination and practice. I have played far more than 10,000 hours of soccer in my life, and while I am an effective club veteran’s team player, I still don’t have one-tenth the soccer ability that some of the club juniors had by the age of 13.

There is no question that one will improve with practice. But one does not achieve superlative mastery through practice alone. Talent matters, and it matters more in certain activities. No amount of practice will make the average individual into a mediocre sprinter; sprinters are born, not made. Nor will 10,000 hours of practice turn a 5’7″ man into an NBA center or a plodding wordsmith into Shakespeare.

Moreover, the entire concept is fundamentally based on a questionable foundation. Recall that the Swede and his colleagues asked various musicians at a single German academy to estimate how much time they’d spent practicing their instruments since the time they began playing it as children. That wasn’t science, that didn’t even rise to the level of credible polling.

The vanishing black hole

Laura Mersini-Houghton is taking the “women ruin everything” mantra a little too far in literally destroying huge swaths of science fiction, albeit not in the usual manner:

Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren’t bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don’t exist.

By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.

“I’m still not over the shock,” said Mersini-Houghton. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.”

For decades, black holes were thought to form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity to a single point in space – imagine the Earth being squished into a ball the size of a peanut – called a singularity. So the story went, an invisible membrane known as the event horizon surrounds the singularity and crossing this horizon means that you could never cross back. It’s the point where a black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it.

The reason black holes are so bizarre is that it pits two fundamental theories of the universe against each other. Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear. Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes emit radiation. Since then, scientists have detected fingerprints in the cosmos that are consistent with this radiation, identifying an ever-increasing list of the universe’s black holes.

But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. She and Hawking both agree that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation. However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass. So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.

Before a black hole can form, the dying star swells one last time and then explodes. A singularity never forms and neither does an event horizon. The take home message of her work is clear: there is no such thing as a black hole.

Well, this is a little embarrassing now, isn’t it? How reliable can we consider the science that was used to show that nonexistent entitities emit radiation? I shall be very interested to see what Stickwick makes of this. And if singularities never form, what are the philosophical implications of this for the technocult of the Singularity and the rise of posthumanity?

Then again, as disappointing as it may be to be informed that black holes are bound to disappear from the science fiction of the future and go the way of Martians, steamy Venusian colonies inhabited by green-skinned babes, and other now-abandoned SF tropes, perhaps a fundamental reimagination of the fabric of space time will lead to some interesting new concepts with which we can play.

UPDATE: Astrophysicist Brian Koberlein says Ms Mersini-Houghton is wrong, black holes do exist, and women should stay out of science and remain in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, where they belong. Or something more or less to that effect in Yes, Virginia, There Are Black Holes.

The cults of faux science

Jenkins, Thiele, and Douthat need not worry. There is no deficit of cults these days, they simply tend to sell themselves in the “science” market rather than the “religion” market. As Steve Sailer observes correctly, this is hardly new:

Today, for example, it seems obvious that Freudianism was a cult, but it was treated with immense respect in post-WWII America. Vladimir Nabokov had the aristocratic self-assurance to scoff publicly and repeatedly at Freud, but how many other men of reputation dared?

For example, few called Stephen Jay Gould a cult leader, but the man who told his followers — “Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow; more important, understand it as the center of a network of implication: ‘Human equality is a contingent fact of history’” — can perhaps be understood as the type of soothsayer who tries to hijack the prestige of science for his own anti-scientific purposes in the tradition of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, and L. Ron Hubbard.

Indeed, how can one possibly look at either the global climate change cult or the “marriage equality” cult or the magic geography cult or the politically correct pinkshirts and conclude that people are any less disinclined to believe in bizarre and obvious nonsense than 100 or 200 years ago? To say nothing of Keynesianism, which is quite literally nothing more than Freudian concepts applied to economics.

It’s a little surprising that no one ever notices the link between Freud and Keynes, but this is most likely because it seems almost no one besides me ever seems to bother actually going back to read the original source, The General Theory of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money rather than a) an Austrian critique or b) a Neo-Keynesian extrapolation.

Even those few who get it, such as the author of “Keynes on the Relation of the Capitalist “Vulgar Passions” to Financial Crises” (PDF), don’t seem to trace the Freud-Keynes link back to its source. Consider:

“It is shown that, generally speaking, the actual level of output and employment depends, not on the capacity to produce or on the pre-existing level of incomes,
but on the current decisions to produce which depend in turn on current decisions to invest and on present expectations of current and prospective consumption. Moreover, as soon as we know the propensity to consume and to save (as I call it), that is to say the result for the community as a whole of the individual psychological inclinations as to how to dispose of given incomes, we can calculate what level of incomes, and therefore what level of output and employment, is in profit-equilibrium with a given level of new investment; out of which develops the doctrine of the Multiplier….

The fundamental psychological law, upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence both a priori from our knowledge of human nature and from the detailed facts of experience, is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.”

Keynesianism is nothing more than applied Freudianism. And considering the spread of its current influence, combined with the tens of millions of adherents to other, equally ridiculous false sciences, it should be clear that there is no deficit of cults these days, they just don’t have the common decency to give themselves ridiculous appellations and keep a safe distance away from sane people anymore.

Teach scientists not to rape

I found this New York Times article by a female scientist to be amusing on several levels:

My story is not unique. In July, Kathryn B. H. Clancy and her co-authors Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford and Katie Hinde published a survey of 666 field-based scientists in the journal PLoS One and reported that 26 percent of the female scientists surveyed had been sexually assaulted during fieldwork. Most of these women encountered this abuse very early in their careers, as trainees. The travel inherent to scientific fieldwork increases vulnerability as one struggles to work within unfamiliar and unpredictable conditions, but male respondents reported significantly less assault (6 percent).

I know several women with stories like mine, but more often it is the men of one’s own field team, one’s co-workers, who violate their female colleagues. The women surveyed by Dr. Clancy’s team stated that their “perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.”

The first level is the way in which the actual behavior of scientists contrasts with the way laymen are supposed to trust them. Remember, we are supposed to believe that these scientists are individuals who will only report the true and proper results of the scientific process without any bias or dishonesty or corruption because they are trained to do so. So, what can we conclude from the fact that they can’t go out into the field without raping their female colleagues? It would appear that they are not being taught not to rape, would it not?

Second, notice the way the woman blithely skips over the fact that the whole reason these “trainees” are brought along into the field in the first place is as science totty. Women in science, particularly attractive women in science, are handed every possible opportunity by their male superiors chiefly because those superiors are looking forward to the possibilities created by spending large quantities of time with them in exotic locations. It’s not an accident that this attractive woman, pictured to the right, “landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation.” She probably genuinely believes that her rapid advancement was solely because she was so “promising” and talented. This complete lack of self-awareness is perhaps understandable in a large-breasted weather girl, but it is both funny and sad that an otherwise accomplished scientist could be so inobservant.

Third, it would be very informative to know how many of the 74 percent of the female scientists surveyed voluntarily had sex with men “predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.” Based on what I know of female science majors, I would estimate at least three-quarters of them, and 100 percent of the attractive ones, did.

Of course, the push to encourage women in science is only going to cause more such sexual assaults to take place, which is one more reason why it is a bad idea. Science doesn’t need more women, especially if more women in the field are going to help transform otherwise good male scientists into rapists and sex criminals.

The Ebola exponent

This, combined with socionomics will explain why we’ve been seeing all the pandemic-related television shows of late:

Right now we’ve had more than 5,000 cases of Ebola, and at least 2,600 people have died. Some scientists, like Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University in Boston, are taking numbers like that and putting them into computer models to see where this epidemic is going. “For instance, in our modeling, by mid-October, we’re already between 10,000 to 25,000 cases,” he says.

Five thousand cases of Ebola is bad; 10,000 to 25,000 is unbelievable. And that’s where the exponential curve comes into play. “Well,
an exponential curve is a curve that doubles every certain amount of
time,” Vespignani says. And with this outbreak, cases are doubling every
three to four weeks. So if help doesn’t arrive in time — and
the growth rate stays the same — then 15,000 Ebola cases in mid-October
could turn into 30,000 cases by mid-November, and 60,000 cases by
mid-December.

Meanwhile, aid efforts are hampered, to put it mildly, by the local fauna:

The bodies of eight people, including several health workers and three journalists, have been found days after they were attacked while distributing information about Ebola in a Guinean village near the city of Nzerekore, according to Reuters.

“The eight bodies were found in the village latrine,” Albert Damantang Camara, a spokesman for Guinea’s government, told Reuters on Thursday. “Three of them had their throats slit.”

Quarantine and closing the borders, as Sierra Leone is doing, would suffice to keep Ebola out of the West. So, naturally, the globalists in office prefer to literally import the disease and expose thousands of soldiers and aid workers to it in Africa, thereby risking a global pandemic, rather than simply leave the independent African nations to their own resources and permitting the epidemic to safely run its course.

And if the World Health reports that the statistics are being underreported are correct, the exponential curve may already be in effect.

Science does not need women

Science doesn’t need anyone except good scientists who actually understand and utilize scientage.

One of the main glories of science is that it is universal, or at least approaches universality as nearly as it is possible for a human activity to do. Within a few years of Commodore Perry’s opening up of Japan to the outside world, Japanese scientists were contributing to the (then) new science of bacteriology on an equal footing with Western scientists. But that is not at all the same as saying that science needed the Japanese. It could have got on very well without them.

It is true, of course, that women are demographically underrepresented in the ranks of scientists, but so are many other groups. (This means, of course, that others are overrepresented.) This may be for more than one reason: lack of aptitude or interest, for example, or deliberate or subtle obstructiveness. But historical attempts to recruit scientists according to some demographic criterion or other have not been met with success, even as far as the advancement of science itself is concerned, and have been made by the very worst dictatorships that in other respects have been abominable. Social engineering and engineering are two very different activities. It would be no consolation to know while on a collapsing bridge and about to plunge into the deep ravine below that it had been built by a truly representative sample of the population, and was therefore a monument to social justice.

If science needed more women, it would have more women. As it happens, science observably has far more women and more men than it needs, which is why more and more people are leaving science because they don’t wish to spend all their time playing the grant game rather than doing actual science. Science got along perfectly well for centuries without much in the way of female involvement, after all.

Every time – EVERY TIME – you hear someone say “X needs more Y”, you can be absolutely certain that they are useless parasites who are only capable of political activism and useless bureaucracy.

Jack the Ripper was an immigrant Jew

It’s rather like finding out Big Ben was made in Hong Kong. But apparently, immigration has been lethal in Britain for longer than we knew:

The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer responsible for  at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in East London during the autumn of 1888.

DNA evidence has now  shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity.

A shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, has been analysed and found to contain DNA from her blood as well as DNA from the killer.

The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes.

Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match.

The revelation puts an end to the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s identity which has lasted since his murderous rampage in the most impoverished and dangerous streets of London.

It’s quite a fascinating story. And yes, the fact that the killer was an immigrant was integral to his eventual unmasking. I wonder if the English will be disappointed to learn that they cannot take credit for London’s most famous murderer. I have to confess, I always favored the Sir William Withey Gull theory. This is the face of Jack the Ripper, who, interestingly enough, was always one of the prime suspects and had been named by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in his notes.

The CDC hid the data

It’s looking as if the vaccine conspiracy theorists were correct after all. Dr. Hooker’s use of an incorrect method to tease out the data appears to have been irrelevant as it looks like he knew exactly what the CDC was hiding from the start thanks to his recorded conversations with Dr. Thompson of the CDC:

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph.D., REGARDING THE 2004 ARTICLE EXAMINING THE POSSIBILITY OF A RELATIONSHIP  BETWEEN  MMR VACCINE AND AUTISM

My name is William Thompson.  I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998.

I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information  in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased  risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.

I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue  to save countless lives.  I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated  with their administration are vastly outweighed  by their individual and societal benefits.

My concern has been the decision to omit relevant findings in a particular study for a particular sub­ group for a particular  vaccine. There have always been recognized risks for vaccination and I believe it is the responsibility of the CDC to properly convey the risks associated  with receipt of those vaccines.

I have had many discussions  with Dr. Brian Hooker over the last 10 months regarding studies  the CDC has carried out regarding vaccines and neurodevelopmental outcomes including autism spectrum disorders. I share his belief that CDC decision-making and analyses should be transparent. I was not, however, aware that he was recording any of our conversations, nor was I given any choice regarding whether  my name would be made public or my voice would be put on the Internet.

That’s an open admission, from a senior scientist, that the CDC actively engages in statistical fraud and therefore cannot be trusted with regards to ANYTHING it says related to vaccines. This doesn’t mean that all vaccines are necessarily useless or do more harm than good, but it does prove, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that any arguments that rely upon CDC data have to be junked.

Dr. Thompson admits that “there have always been recognized risks for vaccination”, but strongly implies that “the risks associated  with receipt of those vaccines” has not been properly conveyed. Those who are upset with the damage this revelation will likely cause to vaccine rates have no one to blame but the pro-vaccine scientists; the idea that deceiving parents in order to get them to vaccinate their children was a viable long-term strategy is, to put it mildly, incorrect. Once trust is broken, it is gone; this calls into question far more than the safety of the MMR vaccine for male Africans.

Logic 1, Science 0. Or rather, “Science”. Because, as I’ve been repeatedly pointing out, statistical analysis is not science.