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How the World Map Looks Wildly Different Than You Think

Is Most Published Research Wrong?

dannym3141 says...

"As flawed as our science may be, it is far and away more reliable than any other way of 'knowing' that we have."

I'm going to be polite and assume you have narcolepsy and just happen to fall asleep during the bits that challenge your own viewpoint.

The theory about global warming may yet prove to be untrue - that i cannot deny; some other as yet unknown factor may be found. But the likelihood that thousands of scientists have p-hacked and fudged their way to a false positive in this case is more like 10 sigma.

In the past I have always told you - do not listen to 'a' scientist because one scientist could be a liar. Listen to many, many scientists.

Global warming isn't a pop-science article one small group put together, nor is this video the only argument you need to deny the theories of gravity, relativity or the spherical earth. Perhaps the tinfoil hat was rustling during the important final part of the video but if the alternative method of deduction is 'some crap bob heard on youtube' then I think i'll take my chances with the scientists.

bobknight33 said:

Well that pretty much makes the global warming myth just that a myth.

Good Role Model Teaching Kids to Work Through Emotional Pain

dannym3141 says...

The message is morally unambiguous - life is tough, don't give up, all those other feel good messages. No one worth mentioning disagrees with that.

The context in which it is delivered is morally ambiguous because it deals with things like fighting, training through pain, stuff like that.

Some kids benefit a lot from tough love and painful life lessons. Believe me when i say some kids are ruined by it. I assume this gentleman understands that and probably doesn't treat every kid the same way.

Wisdoms like "to toughen him up", "make a man of him", "for his own good" and the like can remind people of how their own abusers or bullies would excuse their behaviour. Obviously this video has nothing to do with that kind of thing, but you can understand how it might be more obvious to some than others.

That all probably sounds strange if you've never been bullied or treated like that, but yeah, that's what the video brought to my mind.

How to never have a serious poison ivy rash again.

dannym3141 says...

I've only ever heard of poison ivy on TV or in books, but are you seriously telling me that in hundreds of years, no one ever thought to just wash it off with a rag?

BladeLess Fan - How to Make it - Dyson Fan DIY

The Tyler Tabor Story

dannym3141 says...

Well said... what kind of society needs a reason to care after watching that? Is that what the human race has 'advanced' to after all these years?

iaui said:

I think the anger and disgust I feel at this abhorrent systemic breakdown can be partly summarized in the quote by the news anchor at ~12:07:

"I saw documentation of [various examples of gross negligence]. Why should you care? Well, every day Corizon dispenses health care you pay $339,000 whether it does it's job or not."

WTF. Seriously, the news anchor just said that Corizon was involved in destroying fellow humans and then said that the reason you should care about it is that it costs you money.

There's something deeply wrong here. There's something deeply wrong with for-profit prisons. There's something deeply wrong with for-profit healthcare. And if the only reason a society would care about someone's intense suffering and death is that it might cost them some money then there is something deeply wrong with that society.

How can you Yo-Yo without the string attached?

dannym3141 says...

I like these and I'd just sat back to enjoy the rest of the video when it finished and played an advert for itself. 1/4 of the whole video was a self promo - not a great look.

5 of the Worst Computer Viruses Ever

dannym3141 says...

This sounds very familiar both by name and action. I'm sure I had it or something very similar once, but I had Windows (whatever version) on CD. In the end, I think I just reinstalled windows from CD (which at the time couldn't be written to even if I'd wanted) which overwrote the old infected MBR.

Having it on CD doesn't even given me a decent time frame on the version or virus, because my dad was either building computers or modding and playing with them since Acorn. I used to put annoying 7+ disk stuff like the Indiana Jones and Monkey Island games onto CD as backup, so it's reasonable to think we might have done it with Windows.

Maybe that was many years later and a different virus, but when I read "form.a" I shuddered involuntarily.

MilkmanDan said:

I suppose it is hard for any pre-internet virus to compare in terms of damage to these 5, but one that stands out in my mind:

Form (circa 1990 or so), and its variants like Form.A would infect the boot sector of your hard drive, and from there could infect any floppy disk that you used on the computer. Most PCs at the time would try to boot from a floppy disk left in the drive, which would spread the infection.

I guess that many variants didn't really do much of anything particularly bad, but I got Form.A one time and it nuked the Master Boot Record (like virus #5 in the video) of my PC. Since DOS / Windows (3.1 at the time I think) wouldn't boot, I (mistakenly) assumed that it had formatted my hard drive, and then lost all of my data by reformatting.

I remember a span of about a year where any 3.5 inch floppy disk being passed around offices or schools in my home town had a roughly 80% chance of being infected with Form.A. So that seems like a pretty impressive infection and spread rate, without advantage of being able to spread through the internet!

Is Science Reliable?

dannym3141 says...

You can find examples of that throughout history, I think it's how science has always worked. You can sum it up with the saying 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' - when something has been so reliable and proven to work, are you likely to believe the first, second or even 10th person who comes along saying otherwise?

If you are revolutionary, you go against the grain and others will criticise you for daring to be different - as did so many geniuses in all kinds of different fields.

I think that's completely fair, because whilst it sometimes puts the brakes on breakthroughs because of mob mentality, it also puts the brakes on spurious bullshit. I'd prefer every paper be judged entirely on merit, but I have to accept the nature of people and go with something workable.

SDGundamX said:

Another problem is the "expert opinion" problem--when someone with little reputation in the field finds something that directly contradicts the "experts" in the field, they often face ridicule. The most famous recent case of this was 2011 Nobel Prize winner Dan Shechtman, who discovered a new type of crystal structure that was theoretically impossible in 1982 and was roundly criticized and ridiculed for it until a separate group of researchers many years later actually replicated his experiment and realized he had been right all along. This web page lists several more examples of scientists whose breakthrough research was ignored because it didn't match the "expert consensus" of the period.

Britain Leaving the EU - For and Against, Good or Bad?

Britain Leaving the EU - For and Against, Good or Bad?

dannym3141 says...

“What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

Tony Benn said that. If the only choice I have is to leave now or never again, then I opt to leave a non- (possibly anti-) democratic system.

I'd stay for the protection it gives us from the Tories, but then I'd be making a lifetime choice based on a 4 year (or less!) problem. I'd stay for "togetherness" but that is just a nice word to describe a bunch of people that intentionally humiliated Greece for the sake of flexing muscle, dooming them to non-recovery for a pound of flesh.

Why You Literally Can't Overcook Mushrooms

CGP Grey - You Are Two (Brains)

dannym3141 says...

When right brain picks up a Rubik's cube because it was asked to, left brain has no knowledge of that. So when the Rubik's cube is passed into the hand controlled by left brain, how does left brain know to even receive the item? Is it acting on habit - i.e. it's so used to cooperating with left brain and body parts that it accepts things left brain offers? And in that case, is the incorrect explanation from left brain influenced by what it thinks right brain wants? For favourite colour - is each side influenced by what it thinks the other prefers?

I suspect viral marketing techniques like anthropomorphising body parts is taking away slightly from the truth. It's a fun conclusion that captures the imagination to say that there are two entities, one in thrall to the other, but we are talking about a malfunctioning brain so the conclusions need careful consideration. These type of things can be a little economical with the truth to paint a better picture, I know the physics ones are on occasion.

Brian Greene on how The World Will End

dannym3141 says...

Do you own an exercise ball?

noims said:

I'd never heard it called a Galilean Cannon before, but I was doing this with two of my kid's ball this week. Kids love it, but adults are completely confused by how powerful it is.

Balance, say, a tennis ball on a basketball and drop them from chest height, and it goes so far that you will probably lose your tennis ball.

Can You Solve the Bridge Riddle?

dannym3141 says...

By a process of elimination - you know you can't do it with just the 1 minute guy ferrying everyone because 10+5+2=17 so no time for 2 return trips even at 1 minute. That made me realise two big numbers had to cross together without a big number ferrying it back. Then i just fiddled until i found a way to bring the lantern back from their trip without using up 5 minutes.

However i spent 15 minutes thinking about it, so me and 2 minutes sprinted across to safety.

garmachi said:

It took so long to set up that I didn't try to work it out and simply waited 3 seconds for the answer, which by the way, was very clever!

Anyone try to do the math first?



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Beggar's Canyon