Posts by Kracklite
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erratum
I have no opinions on the Key/crab connection.
Typo.
Thank you for your attention.
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Well, I've just got to comment on architecture.
What it is, is a cheap imitation of modernism, an ugly hat-tip to modernism that destroys what it is trying to mimic.
The sad thing is that the great modernists all received classical training and a sense of proportion and detailling was ingrained into them. Even when they rejected the overt forms of classicism, the spirit was there. This... abode... is not even modernist in any sense, it's a postmodern mish-mash of symbols of columns, cornices and so on all reduced to crass, lumpen, banal caricature. Even Donald Trump could do better - or pay for people who could do better.
(Not to say that postmodernism is all bad - Charles Jencks' home is a witty and literate compendium of details... though others may disagree.)
I blame the architecture schools - and I should know, because I teach in one. Last year, I had to explain to a colleague who teaches construction what an Ionic volute was. To this day, I still don't know why I didn't beat him senseless (it may be something to do that I'm only on contract while he inhabits the Olympian realms of tenure and ultraviolence in the staff room won't help my case much).
And God, can people stop obsessing with Key's taste in houses and crabs. Talk about snobbishness.
As the Dude would say, 'Well that's, like, your opinion, man.'
I have opinions on crabs myself, but Frank Lloyd Wright observed that doctors can bury their mistakes, but all an architect can do is recommend that the client plant ivy. There's a wide streak of aesthete in me and I think that as a matter of principle architecture should have a duty to include plenty of venustas along with the commoditas and firmitas because it's the most public of arts and the hardest to avoid.
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For those like me suffering Acute Cat Deficiency Syndrome, there is icanhascheezburger.
One of my favourite, science-heavy blogs is Peter Watts'. They guy's a 'recovering' marine biologist and hard sf writer. The title of his blog No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons says a lot about his personality.
He likes cats because they're sociopaths, he says.
Be sure to check the rest of his site too - plenty of downloads, including pdfs of his novels (especially http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm|Blindsight]]).
The short(ish) film, Vampire Domestication is a hoot - dark, tho'... and not in the way you might think.
He's also very fond of giant squid. So there is a calamari connection too...
(I wouldn't recommend Architeuthis dux as a meal though - too much ammonium ions in their flesh for buoyancy, which makes them taste like they've been marinated in urine... not that I...)
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You see the same things...
Indeed, there seems to be a consistent pattern among the various pseudoscientific cults. On one hand they claim the authority of science and bring up whatever studies they can find and misrepresent them, and other times, because they can't find acceptance among the scientific community while earnestly trying (I'm being generous here), they decide that it must be due to some conspiracy.
There's an article here by a space journalist attending a presentation by Richard Hoagland, the Face on Mars guy. The parallels are obvious, and overall it's actually pretty sad and dreary:
That kind of intense disappointment must greet conspiracy buffs virtually every day. They’re looking for some great secret message, something that gives them access to the hidden world that they know is out there. But what they often get is lame, stupid, boring—a commercial pitch to “buy my book.”
Anyway, page one here and page two here
Hoagland's book, by the way is interesting as an example of mixed pathology and manipulation, but otherwise... um, well...
Now and again I have to read this stuff as part of my research. Weep for me.
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James, you sound like an adolescent.
I'm reminded of something James Oberg said about debating UFO cultists, although he may have been quoting someone else: it's like wrestling a pig - you assume undignified positions, get covered in mud and in the end you're left with the suspicion that the pig enjoyed it.
Still, I don't mind getting down and dirty now and again. Disagreement I like if it's challenging and witty (Craig Ranapia would leave this forum a poorer place if he left, for sure), but wilful ignorance really pisses me off.
RB: James is funny, leave him be.
Wot, no telling off for me? Are all my efforts in vain?
Vote Green. Etc.
I'm definitely tempted, but I have the feeling that they'd try to ban the Sun if they found out that it was nuclear powered.
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Well, your beloved scientific process certainly appears to have broken down in the case of the Lancet study doesn't it?
No, not at all. The point is is that it is in the process. Again (and again and again...), no single paper is important. It is the accumulation of a body of verifiable facts that matters.
In fact, for the system to work, at least half of all papers published must be wrong, because every one must be challenged and prove itself in order to survive. Observations suggest hypothesis A, someone proposes hypothesis B - and when the dust is settled, one survives and is cited and the other is thereafter ignored. That is why I only care for those that have lasted and contributed to a gestalt of knowledge, not cherry picking.
great ivory towers? No thanks.
As so you will never again enter a doctor's surgery?
I prefer that as an alternative to mobs with torches and pitchforks, fortune tellers, astrologers, augers, demagogues, witch-finders, inquisitors, comissars and conspiracy theorists. They've all been tried already.
Science may be the worst possible system, as Churchill said of democracy - except for all the rest.
Now, should trials be run without due process, should an election? Oh hang on...
Wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing, as many scientists and academics prove on a regular basis.
You are obsessed with the ad hominem. The virtues of individuals do not matter, any more than the virtues of individuals matter in (basic) captitalism - as Adam Smith pointed out, if I want a pie, I depend on the baker's desire for my money, not his genorous intention to give me a pie. The legal system works much better than mob rule despite the fact that there are stupid, venal lawyers as well as saintly, brilliant ones; it could not work if it depended absolutely on the latter because there aren't enough.
You want absolute certainty, black-and white truth as if from God, otherwise everything is doubtful? Grow the hell up.
Throughout this thread I have seen the denailists use misrepresentation, misinterpretation, falsehood, Michael bloody Crichton, cherry-picking, induction, non sequiturs, paranoia and fantastic psychological projection of motives - anything but reason, and yet you consider yourselves competent to make scientific judgments.
Incredible.
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Sophistry, and disingenuous to boot.
just proof positive that we should always be skeptical of scientific studies.
"Always". No discrimination suggested.
You used the "destruction" of the Lancet study because, supposedly:
This link may appear to be way OTT at first glance but it is relevant to the discussion on GW
Despite your claim that the article is "relevant", your post is mass of inappropriately applied generalisations. It's called induction, and if you claim to respect science, then you should know that that is about the biggest logical error you can make (apart from non sequiturs and presenting an opinion followed by selected factoids cherry-picked to support it).
Many dramatic claims seem to be automatically be reported and treated as fact
Yes indeed. As is your treatment of the National Journal article.
As I pointed out, science has a self-checking process built in and long-term, errors are rooted out. I'll wait and see what happens regarding the Lancet because things are never settled overnight.
Not only are you committing the logical error of applying the particular (fatalities in Iraq as measured by one study) to the general, you are applying it to a general in an entirely different field (climatology, as it has been investigated worldwide over decades). This is even sillier than trying to say that the Piltdown Man hoax refutes evolutionary theory because at least we know that the Piltdown Man was definitely a hoax - and it has no pertience to, say, astronomy.
It is quite clear that you are ignorant of scientific method and like many ignorant people, you think that the less there is that you know, the less there is to know. The respect given to papers published in journals is not arbitrary like that given to celebreties or royalty - it is earned and it is tested.
There is professional scepticism and there are conspiracy theories. There is a difference, and it is profound. I give credence to what climatologists say about climate, knowing that the last thing they would do is "automatically" accept what a colleague says. I give no credence to conspiracy theorists.
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Doesn't it bother you that the study is apparently a load of crap?
I've read it, I'm reading it again.
It bothers me that it is apparently dubious, but I am not a statistician, I do not work in media studies and the National Journal is not exactly a disinterested publication. I would like to see more analysis - including analysis of the National Journal article.
I assume that other people here will have something to say and they may or may not have good resources. Unlike you, I do not immediately leap to embrace something that appears to gratify my prejudices.
It does bother me that you try to use induction to infer - actually to use a non sequitur - to support a solipsistic belief that scientific articles are mostly 'a load of crap'.
How are your experiments with gravity going?
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This link may appear to be way OTT… I wonder how many GW studies are as badly flawed as the Lancet study. Quite a few would be my guess.
A non-sequitur in fact: ‘I have counted no cattle in the field, therefore there are no oranges in the orchard.’
"scientific studies"
Cower before my deadly quotation marks, foolish mortals!
almost certainly a complete load of shit.
Someone will remind you of that the next time you refer to any study.
their personal biases can creep into their work
As Richard Feynman once said, science is the art of not fooling yourself.
This is so egregiously ignorant, I’ll have to split my reply into several parts:
First, scientific method is designed to override any personal biases. As I explained in another thread, peer review and reproducibility are essential. Observations and/or experiments must be repeated in order to elevate an hypothesis to a theory. The Annals of Improbable Research, which sponsors the Ignobel prizes has/had a rival called The Journal of Irreproducible Results and that title is hilarious if you know how science works. If a result isn’t reproduced, it’s worthless. Science is a collective but fiercely competitive activity. It is not conducted by lone celebrities who then dazzle everyone with their insight and are universally applauded and never questioned. That’s demagoguery.
Second, as a corollary to that, the perceived integrity of any single scientist of team is irrelevant, as are spurious character attacks on individual scientists. All of their professional colleagues are breathing down their necks. If one is found to have a liking for rubberware and livestock, then if the results they found are reproduced, it’s unimportant. If the results are not reproduced, then it is also unimportant.
Third, as a corollary of that, scientific fraud is a problem and it does occur… until someone attempts to replicate results. There are certainly high profile cases to point at, going back to the Piltdown Man. However, the competitive nature of science ensures that a fraud will be found out sooner or later. It is simply impossible to put something forward that is contrary to the laws of nature and not have it found out.
OK, fourth, or two-A or whatever. No broad phenomenon is dependent upon one result or paper. Gregor Mendel’s studies of the genetics of peas are statistically too good to be true – it is possible (but, I hasten to add, unproven) that he massaged his results. However, there are so many studies supporting the theory of genetic inheritance that even if he made everything up, genetic inheritance is a proven phenomenon. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of scale in claiming that one or two errors or discrepancies refute an entire theory; observation or experimental proof (meaning trial or test) is always matched to the specific hypothesis.
Where there are suggestive results and wishful thinking involved, there will be a persistence of sorts, but it’s eventually sidelined – witness the case of ‘cold fusion’. There are still people who cling to that, but rather than being censored by nasty people in white coats and black helicopters, they simply are unable to produce reproducible results and are consequently sidelined.
I honestly do not know what the case would be with the Lancet, but I’d rather see peer papers than a Neocon newspaper’s.
Science is a ruthlessly competitive business, as is all of academia. Make a mistake and you may as well smear yourself in BBQ sauce and leap into a sharks’ feeding frenzy. I often quip to friends that Inspector Morse was a hopelessly inaccurate police series because the homicide rate in a university would never be so low.
Sometimes the sharks are slow, but when we’re dealing with not an isolated observation but a phenomenon that’s been observed over decades (again, consider the matter of scale and breadth and coherence of observations), then a truly absurd conspiracy theory has to be erected to account for it. Still, there are Flat Earthers about even today, and don’t get me started on the manifold idiocies of the ‘They faked the Moon landings!’ loons…
(Is there someone who takes Richard Hoagland, the ‘Face on Mars’ guy, seriously here?)
we should always be skeptical of scientific studies.
And this is where paranoia and solipsism meet. There’s scepticism that's indicative of reasonable caution and there’s scepticism that covers complete cerebral ossification. Certainly it’s impossible to argue with someone who believes this (they usually end up claiming that I'm an hallucination and everything's fake). I do however propose an experiment: Newton was wrong, we know it for a fact. Newtonian theory does not account for discrepancies in the orbital motion of Mercury. Therefore gravitation is false. Please fling yourself off a cliff or high building and let me know what happens.
(Actually, General Relativity accounts for Mercury’s odd movement and it was in fact one of the first observational proofs of Relativity)