Stuff

i. I started writing this post because I felt that I had to share this (click to view full size):

From abstrusegoose. But I decided that I might as well add a few other links as well.

ii. The Cochrane Foundation has just published a new review article on on ‘Pharmacotherapy for mild hypertension’ – it seems that the benefits of treatment are not as great as they have been made out to be. Via this slate article.

iii. (From Razib Khan’s pinboard feed:) How “god” evolved.

vi. In case you haven’t seen it:

v. Voyage of the James Caird. I may have linked to this before, but I don’t think so.

“The voyage of the James Caird was an open boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean, a distance of 800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi). Undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions, its objective was to obtain rescue for the main body of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17, trapped on Elephant Island after the loss of its ship Endurance. History has come to consider the James Caird’s voyage as one of the greatest small-boat journeys ever accomplished.”

Here’s an image:

1500 kilometres and 16 days in a boat like that. And don’t think the trip was over when they reached the shore; those of them who could still travel had 36 hours of continuous travel across the mountainous and glacier-covered island in front of them before they were able to reach their goal, an inhabited whaling station in Stromness.

iv. I haven’t read this, but I assume that it may be of interest to some of you: Intelligence – A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.

Love versus infatuation

This is brilliant:

Teach both?

…nah, probably a bad idea.

Link.

Why indeed?

Link.

If only…

Alt text: “it feels awesome.” Link.

(When it comes to the first four panels of the above strip, my life mostly resembles the guy on the right – granted perhaps except from the first one. When it comes to the last two panels, my life mostly resembles the guy on the left. Of course part of the reason is that I’m often not reading what I’m supposed to be reading.)

What you do -/ what other people notice

A lot of what we do in our lives is little else but posing for the camera – and all too often, people like Calvin’s dad are the guys watching the pictures. Or, perhaps even more often, they’re the guys not watching the pictures (as David Foster Wallace put it, you’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do).

A belated thank you to Plamus for his kind words in this comment. I left two responses after that, but in neither of them did it even cross my mind that I ought to thank him for his kind words, insted focusing on the ‘correctness’ of the statements.

I’m a very self-centered individual and it’s an aspect I should be working far more with than I am. Even if the guy with the camera probably doesn’t notice one way or the other.

I’ve been looking for that one!

Link. I was considering writing a blog post about why I disliked the Scientifica book I’ve been reading, but I pretty much thought the book wasn’t worth the effort. Anyway, now I don’t need to, the comic above illustrates the problem perfectly. The alt text is: ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m being mocked.’ And that’s exactly the feeling I’ve been having when reading that book. If I’d actually been careful enough to take serious notice that it did in fact say “Chief Consultant: Associate Professor Allan R. Glanville” on the cover, not a chance in hell I’d have bought it. If people need to tell me on the front cover of the book that a professor or a PhD has contributed/written the stuff, well that’s a good signal I don’t need to read it. Though I missed it this time. In my defence, I was in time trouble, there were only a few copies left and it was quite cheap. The only upside is that a curious child would probably find the book quite interesting, so if I ever have children… The book isn’t too complicated, it just doesn’t contain a shred of material worth buying a book for and you feel like you’re being mocked while you’re reading it. It’s like most of the stuff in the specific topic pages (it deals with specific topics and devotes a couple of ‘pages’ – most of which is just eye candy – to each topic) is either in the first three lines of the relevant wikipedia articles or more or less irrelevant to ‘what you want to know about this subject given that you’ve just bought a book which also deals with this subject’. It has very few math formulas, despite spending, what, 100+? (120? 150? don’t remember, don’t want to open the book and look it up. I think there are 80 pages or so on the subject of physics. Maybe there are 10 formulas in that section of the book altogether, despite ‘dealing with’ subjects such as general relativity, quantum physics and string theory, among other things) pages on physics and maths and I frequently felt more stupid after reading about the specific topic than I had before I started reading it, especially regarding areas where I knew some stuff already. Maybe a good book for a smart curious black 12 year old ghetto-child unfamiliar with the world of science. Emphatically not a good book for adults who’ve read a couple of scientific studies before opening that thing. It’s a bad place to obtain knowledge about the areas treated and it’s dangerous because it gives the reader the illusion of knowledge, because some of the stuff isn’t actually all that bad (though still bad).

Thanks again to Plamus for introducing me to the Abstruse Goose comic. The funny thing is that I can use and laugh at comics such as this one even though I’m far from the primary target group (I don’t watch tv – besides a bit from online sources & the very occasional DVD. But then again, perhaps I am part of the primary target group; it’s likely the guy in the comic doesn’t either … ‘any more’ at least..).

…and don’t even get me started on effect sizes…

xkcd. Here’s a bit more.

Arguments

Smbc.

A few comics

1.

(click to view full size. Found here. I am thankful to Zach Weiner for bringing the existence of this comic to my attention)

2. Right now I feel like this is one of the best Zach ever made:

3. xkcd:

Here’s the list. Some of them are surely more debatable than others, but if people’d read this I consider it unlikely that they’d not be less misinformed on average. Less would actually do too; the children in the comic actually seem to somehow all have learned how to read. That’d be a great improvement on it’s own, schoolchildren that could actually read, whether they read wikipedia articles or not.

4. Dilbert:

I read smbc, xkcd, dilbert regularly and – less frequently – J&M. Anybody out there who has found other great online comics I should be reading?

The word ‘probably’ is ‘probably’ not necessary…

Link. A few others to add to the list:

“The title of our paper changed three times because it was impossible to massage the data enough to prove what we set out to prove initially.”

“Our results are actually completely bogus under settings (X, Y and Z), all of which applies to the real world, but we know that pretty much no one who’ll read a paper like this actually cares anyway.” (one word: Macroeconomics)

Along the same lines: “This paper actually has no real-world applications…”

“I primarily wrote this paper in order to make my mother proud.”

“In five years, the results of this study will be completely (obsolete/useless/disproven).”

“We deliberately omitted the significant variables (X, Y and Z) from our model in order to be able to publish at least a dozen follow-up studies along the way.”

“We are very glad and grateful that (supposedly prestigious journal X) was willing to publish our results as we tried to publish them a lot of other places first without luck…”

“We consider this paper a great contribution to (relevant theory X), even though we know perfectly well that most sane people out there would rather get hit by a bus than being forced to read this crap.”

“I would never have sent this paper to publication if the paper’s conclusions regarding the importance of career path dependence in the labor market were incorrect…”

“Our models’ main problems are primarily a result of an effect closely related to our main finding that most editors are grossly underpaid, namely that it would be a lot easier to get a paper published by bribing the editor than it would be to do it by actually writing a decent paper.”

Some really weird (disturbing?) pics, bunny suicide edition

I bookmarked the site where I found the pics a while ago, intending to blog it at some point. Can’t remember how I got there in the first place. Some of them remind me a bit of Gary Larson’s strips, even if his material is unquestioningly of much higher average quality.

I’d sign that

Jorge Cham.

The Far Side

Ok, so it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned Gary Larson’s wonderful comics…

Next time some geek you know have a birthday party, there’s one present (/s)he’ll with some probability forget to put on the list: This. If that geek is you, remember to put it on the list, if it isn’t, just remember that this is a very good present option. No, I have not been paid anything by Larson or anybody else to post this (I’d wish…), but if you’re the type of person who’d love Larson’s comics, in my opinion it’d really be a shame if you never got the chance to be exposed to his wonderful work.

Here’s one sample (click to view in a higher resolution):

Here’s wikipedia’s article about the comic strip. I’ve said it before: If you don’t get Larson’s comics, you’ll never really get me.

Compromise

Link.