Scientopia

"Leaning in", where have I read that before... ah, got it: > I have no problem with leaning in. Really I don't. If you are going to puke on someone's shoes, you had best lean in a little, lest the spatter hit your own glorious footwear. [..] But if it's real, substantive change we're after, then we'd best be talking about organizing and collective action. http://scientopia.org/blogs/thusspakezuska/2013/09/13/you-lean-in-to-p…

That's why best practices for human studies is to manage projects like this in the context of an Institutional Review Board. It's required for "federally funded projects, clinical trials, and those who seek publication in peer-reviewed journals." (quoting http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/22/crowdfunding… ). It's not required for a company, but if it doesn't exist then I think it's okay to assume that they are not following the highest ethical guidelines. Back in 2010, the company "23 And Me" caused an uproar because they were gathering data without an IRB. They instead got a post-hoc review when, during a publication peer review, they were asked about the missing IRB. Their board said basically that since the data isn't traceable to an individual, it falls outside of the requirements for an IRB. People are still pissed off about this. See http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2013/02/21/plos-genetics-blew-i… . I agree - the IRB exception must be done before the data is gathered, not afterwards.

If you have failed to grok vi[m], you need two things. First, to understand just a little of two other editors, ed and TECO. Second, to know that vi's real modes are not what the naïve user, and sadly most documentation, call ‘modes’; they are line mode (ed mode) and visual mode (TECO mode). ed is a line editor based on search-and-replace using regular expressions. To edit existing text, you typically locate it with a search and change it with a replace. Sometimes you refer to nearby lines with .±n addressing, and sometimes by absolute line number (having printed a few lines with the ‘n’ command); and sometimes you change entire lines (with ‘c') rather than doing a replacement; but really, search-and-replace is where it's at. vi's line mode, which you enter with ‘Q’ or more commonly one-off with ‘:', is just ed on steroids. TECO is a character stream oriented editor, or, if you prefer, a programming language for manipulating streams of text. http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2010/11/30/the-glorious-horror-of… is a decent short introduction. TECO text manipulation functions have an optional count, a function name (one or two characters), and an optional argument terminated by ESC. That should already look familiar; vi's visual mode is watered-down TECO. Sure, many of the functions have different names — vim's ‘h’ and ‘l’ are TECO's ‘r’ and ‘c’ — but some are the same: ‘i’ followed by an argument (i.e. some text) terminated by ESC is the function that inserts its…

"Impossible matter"? What's "impossible" about it? That we don't know what it is, and that it isn't predicted by our current models, doesn't make it "impossible." It means we're going to need to extend our models, which we've been doing on a regular basis for hundreds of years. Rob Knop sums this up nicely: "In the face of evidence otherwise, many still insist that most of the Universe must be made up of baryonic stuff that interacts with other baryons and our familiar photons. Is this not just as much hubris as insisting that the Earth, where we live, must be the center about which all the other Solar System bodies orbit?" (http://scientopia.org/blogs/galacticinteractions/2011/08/14/in-which-i… The dark matter hypothesis seems to have a great deal of explanatory power. The antigravity hypothesis, like other MOND theories, has a good fit for the specific phenomenon it was designed to tackle, but doesn't explain a lot of the other things that dark matter does. Ethan Siegel has a good post on "What Dark Matter's Alternatives Must Do" (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/08/what_dark_matters_alte… which points out some of the stuff that dark matter explains and rival theories don't (e.g. temperature fluctuations, hydrogen/helium ratio). He does presciently note that 'antimatter has negative mass' could explain more than traditional MOND theories but claims that this impacts…

More info: http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/tag/cantor-crank/

I don't see many "I quit!" or "don't go!" essays from science, but you do see scientists expressing concerns about continuing to accept so many PhD students who won't have a clear career path. This seems especially true in biotech, though part of their concerns seem to be about how the new students will compete with them for grant dollars... see http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2013/01/28/shut-off-the-phd-tap… for an example.

Somebody managed to save it. http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2013/10/15/volunteer-postdoc-wa…

I found this post to be an interesting description of Banach-Tarski, if anyone is as confused as I was: http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2012/01/06/the-banach-tarski-non-…

I read through the compression FAQ and found it quite interesting. I had never heard the counting argument before, but it's very intuitive. Part of the FAQ is a collection of crazies claiming that they have created novel compression techniques. One entry is about Jules Gilbert, but it ends abruptly. I googled him and found that the crazy continues.... >I am afraid that I am not a fan of Google. They are gay-friendly and also they suppressed lot's of stuff about Obama before he was nominated, and again, before he was elected. http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2010/08/13/969/

The paper is behind a paywall, but this 2009 Scientopia post has some more interesting details: http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/2009/07/17/friday-weird-science… It sounds as though the ethical aspects of the experiment were considered pretty carefully, for example.

Given that you might like his new site better. http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/

One thing to note: There are a lot of differences between PhDs in different fields of research. Especially in biomed research, PhD students often seem to do extremely specialized research. Therefore, what they learn during their PhD may be much less generalizable than e.g. what CS PhD students learn. I guess it depends on the definition of a PhD whether it is necessary for a certain job or not. Interesting comments here: http://scientopia.org/blogs/science-professor/2011/03/22/rat-race/

Here's a relevant article by MarkCC (PhD, Google), on "The Glorious Horror of TECO". http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2010/11/30/the-glorious-horror-of…

> vastly smarter and more knowledgeable about science than anyone here on HN Perhaps, but that's probably why the GP talked about his reputation "in medical circles". He's not any more knowledgeable about science than his major critics: http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/weil.html http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/06/science_is_irrelevant_resist… http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4431 http://scientopia.org/blogs/whitecoatunderground/2009/10/18/the-wild-w…

I probably should have submitted this one first - here is a more general discussion of The Halting Problem he wrote a few days later - http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2010/09/12/the-halting-problem/

>>> At any given time period people are always comparing the brain to their most salient piece of current technology. Exactly. Guess what ? http://scientopia.org/blogs/childsplay/2010/08/a-thinking-machine-on-m…

As you say, when it comes to the brain, there is only a modest relationship between how things feel and what damage is being done to neurons. Neurons themselves do not feel pain, so it is quite possible that you could take drugs that severely damage your brain without feeling their effects. Conversely, headaches and hangovers reflect irritation of the tissue surrounding your brain or of the nerves leading to it. While in some cases a headache can reflect a serious problem that affects or could affect the brain itself (e.g. meningitis), in most cases headaches don't imply damage to the central nervous system. I am a neuroscientist (in training, at least, in a subdiscipline that's only somewhat related but does occasionally involve drugging monkeys). There is good evidence that frequent use and probably even rare use of MDMA is bad for brains. Neurons don't necessarily die, but axons disappear. It is not clear that rare use of MDMA can cause lasting cognitive impairment in humans. While DrugMonkey is sometimes a bit of an asshole, I don't find much fault with his assessment of the current state of MDMA research in this post: http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2012/07/25/single-oral-dose-mdm… Note the caveat in the comments: although MDMA is probably neurotoxic, it is still not clear that the neurotoxicity translates to behaviorally meaningful deficits. There exist studies that have shown such deficits, but there also exist studies that have not.…

Maybe not "daily", but very frequently: here is a small selection of some of the small sites on my newsblur newsfeed list: [0] http://www.jamesaltucher.com : Much self-pity, but also sometimes quite funny. http://www.astrobio.net/latestnews_rss/news.xml : Is there life on other planets? http://kaygun.tumblr.com/ http://www.friday.com/bbum : Coding, hardware projects, generally interesting. http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/ : Insights into the education system in regard to the raising of his neurologically non-typical son. http://blog.lmorchard.com http://ex-muslim.org.uk : Oppression of atheists in the Muslim world. http://clojurefun.wordpress.com : Clojure! http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath : Bad science, denialism. http://blog.willbenton.com : Music, logic, programming, etc. http://www.groklaw.net : Maybe not "small"; detailed analysis of important legal cases. http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal : Web design. http://www.holovaty.com/ : "I'm co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator For Life of the open-source Django Web framework" http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones : Combines talented photography, photoessays, and study of the retina. http://lee-phillips.org : I regularly check my site to see if it's still working. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : Language issues; can be amusing or stupid. http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie : Freedom for women in the Muslim world. http://math-blog.com : Infrequently updated, but often…

> Instead, the scientists designed a very small, rather dense, playhouse. It looked just like a normal kid's playhouse, except that it was the exact dimensions of the average home fridge. Not only that, the house was equipped with an infrared camera on the top, which took videos of the kid while they were inside, while at the same time keeping it dark, like it would be in a fridge with the door shut. It should also be noted that the scientists teamed up with a psychiatrist, a child psychologist, and the parents to agree on the length of time the child would be allowed to cry before they helped it out. Three minutes. [1] Hmm, three minutes of discomfort in a dark playhouse doesn't seem quite as bad as drowning or being burned alive. Especially when you consider the deaths that might be avoided as a result of the research. [1] http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/2009/07/17/friday-weird-science…

I have heard it complained that we scientists don't "talk to the general public" enough. I would very much welcome specific suggestions for how to do this. That's very commendable. I am a nonmathematician who has become a mathematics teacher as part of figuring out why so few learners in the United States succeed in learning mathematics well. Here are some examples for you. Good mathematicians (some Fields medalists) with readable blogs: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/ http://www.arsmathematica.net/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/ http://wildaboutmath.com/ http://micromath.wordpress.com/ A list found by a Google search http://www.onlinedegree.net/50-best-blogs-for-math-majors/ suggests more. A few popular authors who are mathematicians write very approachable books about mathematics. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=r… http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=r… http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=r… Following links from links to the books by those authors will reveal other books by mathematicians who write for popular audiences. Best wishes in gaining readers other than your mother (like me, for instance) as you communicate your…

I would also add to your list: * http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/dbpl/ * http://arxiv.org/corr/home * http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index * http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/ * http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ * http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/ and the like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass-and-straightedge_construction Things you can't do with this tool: > Squaring the circle: Drawing a square the same area as a given circle. > Doubling the cube: Drawing a cube with twice the volume of a given cube. > Trisecting the angle: Dividing a given angle into three smaller angles all of the same size. Understanding why we can know that these things are absolutely impossible is an important part of understanding what formal systems mean and, therefore, the philosophy of mathematics as a whole. OTOH, getting into arguments with people who claim to have solved those problems is a wonderful introduction to what 'crankery' means in a mathematical context. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/09/science/genius-or-gibberish-the-stra… http://www.crank.net/maths.html http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pseudomathematics http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/tag/cantor-crank/ http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/136/how-to-deal-with-cran…