Tag: science

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.

Don’t read the citations

I always find it intriguing how science posers always assume no one is actually going to read the links they provide, so they can get away with saying whatever they want. Brett Williamson posted this comment:

“Way before this debate took place Dr, Gorski laid out why the Hooker report is wrong (twice):

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/did-a-high-ranking-whistleblower-really-reveal-that-the-cdc-covered-up-proof-that-vaccines-cause-autism-in-african-american-boys/

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/08/22/brian-hooker-proves-andrew-wakefield-wrong-about-vaccines-and-autism/#comment-346695

Both blog posts make valid, well articulated points. Puts a different light on the twitter exchange I would think.”

So, naturally, I read the first link. David Gorski begins with no less than four paragraphs of an ad hominem attack on Brian Hooker, concluding with this statement: “Of course, just because Brian Hooker has demonstrated many of the
characteristics of an antivaccine crank doesn’t mean that he might not
have a legitimate criticism this time. Does he? Let’s find out.”

After complaining about Hooker mentioning past scandals of medical science in a video that has nothing to do with the published paper, Gorski goes on to point out that Hooker has not proved something that his paper doesn’t even address. He finally gets around to making one legitimate point when he notes that: “He analyzed data collected for a case-control study as a cohort study.”

That’s questionable, to be sure. But does this exonerate the CDC? Well, no, according to Gorski: “So is Hooker’s result valid? Was there really a 3.4-fold increased risk
for autism in African-American males who received MMR vaccination before
the age of 36 months in this dataset? Who knows? Probably not, though.”

Seriously, that’s Gorski’s big takedown. “Who knows? Probably not, though.” Well, obviously, in that case, the science is settled! What this demonstrates is exactly what I told Gorski at the start: statistical review is not science. What people are doing on both sides of the vaccine debate is playing statistical games in order to generate rhetorical ammo; they are not doing much in the way of actual science. And they harder they work their statistics, the more they amplify their rhetoric, the less credible they look to concerned parents and moderate parties alike.

As I’ve pointed out previously, the debate is not going to end until a large-scale double-blind study on the current US vaccine schedule is done with an unvaccinated control group. Pro-vaxxers can hide behind how that would be unethical and so forth all they want, but that is what it is going to take to convince those who are, quite reasonably, skeptical about vaccines due to the behavior of those who profit from the production and administration of them.

“Follow the money” may not be sound science, but it has historically proven to be reliable logic. 

The death knell for equality

The bell tolls for the advocates of diversity, multiculturalism, and human equality, as a study has determined that half the human capacity for learning is genetic:

The genes that determine a person’s ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person’s overall ability. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. Twin studies provide a clever way of assessing the balance of nature versus nurture….

The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins’ scores  — no matter if they were high or low — were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half of the children’s math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup.

A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion — strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities. What’s more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear
to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one
set of skills. These so-called “generalist genes” act in concert to
determine a child’s aptitude across multiple disciplines.

This should not be surprising in any way. But it is an efficient, scientific slash across the exposed jugular of ideological equalitarianism. What this means is all the attempts to bring up African children to the level of European and Asian children by educating them were wasted efforts genetically doomed to failure. While improvement is possible, equality is not.

And even attempts to breed equality through the media advocacy of interracial relations are bound to be disastrous, being intrinsically dysgenic. Sure, there always will be the occasional sports such as me, a European-Hispanic-Native American melange with astigmatism, seriously sub-optimal spatial relations, sprinter speed, and a 150+ IQ, but in general, Arthur C. Clarke’s utopian browning of the world would indicate human population that is shifted to the left on the Bell Curve, with a heavier distribution in the middle and a shorter right tail. That is the literal opposite of human progress.

(Speaking of my Native American ancestry, my brother succeeded in determining the tribe. My initial surmise was correct and it was my great-grandmother who married the Mexican revolutionary that was the full Indian. My brother doesn’t know yet if we have sufficient tribal blood to qualify for membership in the tribe, although one-eighth is enough to qualify for membership in a related one. The blood quantum requirements vary from tribe to tribe, from one-sixteenth for the Cherokee to one-half for the St. Croix Chippewa.)

While it will take years, even decades, for the populace and the political system to absorb the consequences of this scientific reality, it is another nail in the coffin of the equality myth.

Quarantine the continent

Did the USA learn nothing from the AIDS epidemic? Why is a single flight from Africa being permitted to land anywhere in the USA or Europe? Do people not realize that were it not for the fact that he didn’t live long enough to board his flight to MSP, the eight hospital workers that Patrick Sawyer infected in Nigeria might well have been in St. Paul, Minnesota?

Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse told a Congressional Hearing that the WHO is underreporting the Ebola epidemic. “Ken Isaacs, a vice president with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian humanitarian organization, also said the number of Ebola cases and deaths reported by the World Health Organization are probably 25 percent to 50 percent below actual levels.”

Isaacs told of a prominent Liberian doctor who “openly mocked the existence of Ebola” by trying to enter a hospital isolation ward with no gloves or protective clothing. He and another man who accompanied him to the hospital both died within five days, Isaacs said. At one point, Isaacs even disputed the earlier testimony of a physician from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who said his agency had provided 35,000 protective suits for health care workers in West Africa. Isaacs told lawmakers he had received an email in the last 90 minutes from a hospital in Liberia “asking us for more personal protection gear. This a problem everywhere,” he said.

Equipment might not be a problem for much longer. Finding people to wear them will. Ebola is rapidly killing off the medical personnel and shutting down the hospitals. The dead are being left to die in the street, where with a last effort, some of them crawl out to expire.

How many millions are going to have to die in the name of multiculturalism and insanity before we end it as the madness that it has always been? Africa is hapless and hopeless and it is not America’s or Europe’s job to save it. And neither America nor Europe will even be able to help it if we import its cultural dysfunctionalities and turn all of our cities into Detroits.

Perhaps we’ll be fortunate this time and the Ebola epidemic will remain
in Africa despite the medical community’s apparent determination to
spread it around the world… this time. And why are these infected Western health workers being back to their home countries? Salute their efforts to save others elsewhere, by all means, but they have no right, none at all, to put their home nations at risk.

UPDATE: “On Saturday, Guinea announced that it had closed its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia in a bid to halt the virus’s spread.”

So, if Guinea has done it, why don’t we? What can possibly be worth taking the chance of having it spread via air travel?

What does the consensus say?

Jerry Pournelle considers the veracity of some claims concerning reactionless drive inventions:

I would very much like to see a proof of principle for a reactionless drive: a way to convert angular momentum into linear momentum, angular acceleration into linear acceleration, some new cosmic principle that requires energy conservation but does not require equal and opposite reaction; and indeed I applaud NASA for doing the tests.

However, it is my understanding that the current tests have been done in air, using torsion to measure acceleration, and that is suspect to me: I’d prefer they used gravity (a swing) and a vacuum chamber. If that’s too hard to arrange, put a garbage bag around the entire apparatus.

Complex electronics produce complex force fields; it’s quite possible for a torsion spring to be affected by such a field. That’s not mysterious; but if gravity is affected I’d call it extraordinary evidence.

We can only wait for more results. But if I had to bet, so far I’d still bet that they have found a demonstration of flawed testing principles, rather than disproving Newton.

I have to confess that I am more than a little confused here. My understanding is that the correct way to determine whether science is correct or not is to take a poll of scientists in mostly unrelated fields.

Fred calls out Derbyshire and the Darwinists

Fred Reed, who is “a thoroughgoing agnostic”, poses a few questions based on his inferences from observation for the advocates of the Theorum of Evolution by (mostly) Natural Selection In Addition To A Panoply of Less Famous Evolutionary Mechanisms:

Over the years I have occasionally expressed doubts over the tenets of evolutionism which, perhaps wrongly, has seemed to me a sort of political correctness of science, or maybe a metaphysics somewhat related to science. As a consequence I have been severely reprimanded. The editor of a site devoted to genetic expression furiously began deleting any mention of me from his readers. Others, to include Mr. John Derbyshire of Taki’s Magazine, have expressed disdain, though disdaining to explain just why.

In all of this, my inability to get straight answers that do not shift has frustrated me. I decided to address my questions to an expert in the field, preferably one who loathed me and thus might produce his best arguments so as to stick it to me. To this end I have settled on Mr. Derbyshire….

  1. what selective pressures lead to a desire not to reproduce, and how does this fit into a Darwinian framework?
  2. Why should I not indulge my hobby of torturing to death the severely genetically retarded?
  3. How many years would have to pass without replication of the [Abiogenesis]
    event, if indeed it be not replicated, before one might begin to suspect
    that it didn’t happen? 
  4. What are the viable steps needed to evolve from [two-cycle insect] to [four-cycle insect]? Or from anything to four-cycle? 
  5. Does not genetic determinism (with which I have no disagreement) lead to a paradox: that the thoughts we think we are thinking we only think to be thoughts when they are really utterly predetermined by the inexorable working of physics and chemistry? 
  6. Why do seemingly trivial traits proliferate while clearly important ones do not?
  7. If one believes in or suspects the existence of God or gods, how
    does one exclude the possibility that He, She, or It meddles in the
    universe—directing evolution, for example?  

Of course, anyone here who still subscribes to believe in abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection is more than welcome to take a crack at one or more of these themselves. However, before answering any of them, I would highly recommend reading the complete article, as Fred goes into more details regarding why he is asking each of the questions there.

The bad science of food

You can’t trust scientistry. You simply can’t. Think about how many times, over the last few DECADES, you were told that eating fat and butter and cream and cheese was bad for you. Remember how fettucini alfredo was once called “a heart attack on a plate?” Then read this belated mea culpa from a doctor who admits that he has been giving out worse than useless advice to his patients for years.

Milk, cheese, butter, cream – in fact all saturated fats – are bad for you. Or so I believed ever since my days as a medical student nearly 30 years ago. During that time I assured friends and family that saturated fat would clog their arteries as surely as lard down a drain. So, too, would it make them pile on the pounds. Recently, however, I have been forced to do a U-turn. It is time to apologise for all that useless advice I’ve been dishing out about fat.

The roots of our current confusion lie in a paper by an American scientist called Ancel Keys in 1953. It covered the increasingly common problem of clogged arteries. Keys included a simple graph comparing fat consumption and deaths from heart disease in men from six different countries. Americans, who ate a lot of fat, were far more likely to have a heart attack than the Japanese, who ate little fat. Case solved. Or was it?

Other scientists began wondering why Keys chose to focus on just six countries when he had access to data for 22. If places like France and Germany were included the link between heart disease and fat consumption became much weaker. These were, after all, countries with high fat consumption, but relatively modest rates of heart disease. In fact, as a renowned British scientist called John Yudkin pointed out, there was actually a much stronger link between sugar consumption and heart disease.

But Yudkin’s warnings about sugar were denounced by a fellow scientist as ‘nothing more than scientific fraud’. He was, as one of his colleagues colourfully put it, ‘thrown under a bus’.

Meanwhile, the war on fat gradually gained momentum, to the extent that by the time I reached medical school in the Eighties, there was no mention of Yudkin’s findings. People were cutting down on dairy products and switching to sugary carbohydrates and vegetable oils. This, it turns out, was a mistake. To turn vegetable oil into margarine, manufacturers used a process called hydrogenation (gas pumped through oil at high temperature), which produces trans fats. These are the Darth Vader of the fat world: good fats turned bad.

Unlike saturated fats, there is clear evidence that trans fats damage your heart. They were found in most shop-bought biscuits and cakes until they were removed in 2007.

Think about how many people have suffered ill effects from eating a bad, science-recommended diet. The amazing thing is that this doctor clung to what he “knew” even though “I put on over two stone, despite regular exercise. My cholesterol soared past the healthy range and two years ago I discovered I was borderline diabetic.”

Observation is an important part of the scientific process. Not publishing. Not peer review. And it is eminently clear that too few people in the scientific and medical communities are observing anything.