Typographical rules are sometimes based on empirically proven ease of reading, but much more often they are simply tradition or aesthetic preference. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it gets annoying when such accidental habits are declared absolute truths or, worse, justified with made-up history. And that is the case with the often-heard claim … Continue reading “Extra Spacing After Sentences”
Category: Science
Science, history & philosophy
Low Quality Preference
L-worlds: The curious preference for low quality and its norms is a delicious November 2009 Sociology Working Paper by Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi at the University of Oxford. They noticed a curious contradiction between the usual assertions on reciprocal behavior and the empirical situation in their native Italy. Theoretically, everyone should prefer to receive … Continue reading “Low Quality Preference”
Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma
Medical doctor and Guardian writer Ben Goldacre has been busy promoting his new book, Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients. You can watch him in What doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe, listen to him in a Nature interview podcast, and read the edited excerpt The drugs don’t work: … Continue reading “Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma”
The State of Junk Science
Here’s a little snapshot on the state of junk science and junk science reporting. Most articles are from September 2012, as this topic has received a lot of attention lately. Alok Jha’s False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scientific research offers a grand review of these lamentable issues, especially in psychology and other medical … Continue reading “The State of Junk Science”
The Lack of Flying Cars
David Graeber’s essay Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit opens with a complaint that should resonate with all science fiction fans: Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any … Continue reading “The Lack of Flying Cars”
Ubiquitous Robot Surveillance
Charlie Stross’s recent speech How low (power) can you go? is a fascinating and terrifying glimpse into a future where tiny computerized sensors have become ubiquitous thanks to ever-greater circuit density (Moore’s Law) and energy efficiency (Koomey’s Law). Stross performs back-of-the-envelope calculations for all his projections to ensure they are somewhat realistic, but in the … Continue reading “Ubiquitous Robot Surveillance”
Simulated Life
Computational biology reached a milestone last week. Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute presented the first software simulation of an entire living organism, albeit an extremely simple one: the single-cell bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium. The simulation models M. genitalium’s metabolic functions and all of its 525 genes (for comparison, multicellular organisms can … Continue reading “Simulated Life”
Distrust Observational Studies
There is now enough evidence to say what many have long thought: that any claim coming from an observational study is most likely to be wrong – wrong in the sense that it will not replicate if tested rigorously. Thus opens the 2011 paper Deming, data and observational studies by S. Stanley Young and Alan … Continue reading “Distrust Observational Studies”