Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Science
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I discovered today that vibrators were originally invented for medical use. An excellent article in the Guardian describes the history of the invention of the vibrator, in the context of an interesting new movie called Hysteria, which gives a fictional account of the life of its inventor. The vibrator, it turns out, was invented before…
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Apparently an Australian company has developed a Star Wars style speeder bike to the point where it can hover and move, and has posted video footage to prove it. I think I deserve one of these for being me. There needs to be more of this kind of development. Where is my jetpack? My AT-AT…
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… for questioning the science. Ironic, don’t you think? All this thinking about Flood got me contemplating global warming, so I wandered through some global warming-related sites and ended up at the infamous Watts Up With That, where I found two egregious examples of poor science, made particularly annoying by their patronizing tone and vicious…
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I have been collaborating on some research to assess levels of internal exposure to Cesium in residents of Minamisoma, Fukushima prefecture, and today the results have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (paywalled), along with news reports in the Washington Post amongst other media outlets. Minamisoma is a small town located…
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I’ve been burnt twice in the past two weeks by a strange graphics handling problem in Stata and Microsoft Office. In the spirit of presenting workarounds and warnings for obscure software problems that I stumble upon, I think I should report it here. The basic problem is simple and very nasty: charts produced in Stata…
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I’m doing some research work at the moment on a certain country, and have identified a negative relationship between inequality (measured using the Gini index) and all-cause mortality. I’m not at liberty to identify the country, or the details, of course. This negative relationship means, in essence, that the more unequal a small area becomes,…
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This weekend all atomic clocks will add an extra second of time to keep track of … something. This is cool! I’m moving house on Sunday, I could use the extra second of sleep. The Guardian reports on the issue, and some of the commenters provide some excellent examples of a healthy cynicism towards science.…
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I’ve decided to begin a long-term research project aimed at understanding the underlying epidemiology of Dungeons and Dragons. This research project will consist of a series of (hopefully) increasingly complex simulations of battles between D&D PCs and various nemeses, to answer some key questions in character development and perhaps also to investigate some key controversies…
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Today, doing a little task in R, I had cause to look up the following “warning” that appeared after compiling a script: Warning message: In readLines(file) : incomplete final line found I couldn’t figure out what this warning meant, because the script ran fine, so I did a web search and I came across this…
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While enjoying my traditional Saturday morning bludge, I seem to have stumbled on an unusually rich treasure trove of internet links, each capable of sparking its own chain of reading and contemplation that could keep me going all day. It’s not standard practice at the Faustusnotes School of Propaganda to simply post up links, but…
Compromise and Conceit 