Science is Cool....

[Fish]

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

Why should I care?:

[Fish]

Rationality, and why Spock is full of shit....



Why Spock is Not Rational

Star Trek’s Mr. Spock is not the exemplar of logic and rationality you might think him to be. Instead, he is a “straw man” of rationality used to show (incorrectly) that human emotion and irrationality are better than logic.

Here is a typical scene:

MCCOY: Well, Mr. Spock, [the aliens] didn’t stay frightened very long, did they?

SPOCK: A most illogical reaction. When we demonstrated our superior weapons, they should have fled.

MCCOY: You mean they should have respected us?

SPOCK: Of course!

MCCOY: Mr. Spock, respect is a rational process. Did it ever occur to you that they might react emotionally, with anger?

SPOCK: Doctor, I’m not responsible for their unpredictability.

MCCOY: They were perfectly predictable, to anyone with feeling! You might as well admit it, Mr. Spock: your precious logic brought them down on us!

Of course, there’s nothing logical about expecting non-logical beings to act logically. Spock had plenty of evidence that these aliens were emotional, so expecting them to behave rationally was downright irrational!

I stole this example from Julia Galef’s talk “The Straw Vulcan.” Her second example of “straw man rationality,” or Hollywood Rationality, is the idea that you shouldn’t make a decision until you have all the information you need. This one shows up in Star Trek too. A giant space amoeba has appeared not far from the Enterprise, and Kirk asks Spock for his analysis. Spock replies, “I have no analysis due to insufficient information . . . The computers contain nothing on this phenomenon. It is beyond our experience, and the new information is not yet significant.”

Sometimes it’s rational to seek more information before acting, but sometimes you need to just act on what you think you know. You have to weigh the cost of getting more information against the expected value of that information. Consider another example from Gerd Gigerenzer, about a man considering whom to marry:

He would have to look at the probabilities of various consequences of marrying each of them—whether the woman would still talk to him after they’re married, whether she’d take care of their children, whatever is important to him—and the utilities of each of these. . . . After many years of research he’d probably find out that his final choice had already married another person who didn’t do these computations, and actually just fell in love with her.

Such behavior is irrational, a failure to make the correct value of information calculation.

Galef’s third example of Hollywood Rationality is the mistaken principle that “being rational means never relying on intuition.” For example, in one episode of Star Trek, Kirk and Spock are playing three-dimensional chess. When Kirk checkmates Spock, Spock says, “Your illogical approach to chess does have its advantages on occasion, Captain.”

But something that causes you to win at chess can’t be irrational (from the perspective of winning at chess). If some method will cause you to win at chess, that’s the method a rational person would use. If intuition will give you better results than slow, deliberative reasoning, then rationally you should use intuition. And sometimes that’s the case, for example if you have developed good chess intuitions over thousands of games and you’re playing speed chess that won’t permit you to think through the implications of every possible move using deliberative reasoning.

Galef’s fourth principle of Hollywood Rationality is that “being rational means [not having] emotions.”

To be sure, emotions often ruin our attempts at rational thought and decision-making. When we’re anxious, we overestimate risks. When we feel vulnerable, we’re more likely to believe superstitions and conspiracy theories. But that doesn’t mean a rational person should try to destroy all their emotions. Emotions are what create many of our goals, and they can sometimes help us to achieve our goals, too. If you want to go for a run and burn some fat, and you know that listening to high-energy music puts you in an excited emotional state that makes you more likely to go for a run, then the rational thing to do is put on some high-energy music.

Rationality done right is “systematized winning.” Epistemic rationality is about having the most probably true beliefs, and instrumental rationality is about making decisions that maximize your chances of getting the most of what you want. So, as Galef says,

If you think you’re acting rationally, but you keep getting the wrong answer, and you keep ending up worse off than you could be, then the conclusion that you should draw from that is not that rationality is bad. It’s that you’re being bad at rationality.

I’ll return to the subject of the intelligence explosion shortly, but I want to spend two more chapters on rationality. There are laws of thought, and we need to agree on what they are before we start talking about tricky subjects like AI. Otherwise we’ll get stalled on a factual disagreement only to later discover that we’re really stalled because we disagree about how we can come to know which facts are correct.

[Fish]

It's pretty amazing to think that not even 60 years ago, organ transplants were future medical fantasy...

[Fish]

The nocebo effect. The placebo effect's evil twin brother. It's basically the phenomena that one's health can be negatively affected by strong beliefs, even when the subject is not actually physically affected in any way whatsoever.

Research is starting to show some really startling conclusions due to this effect. And today's awful and dishonest media is causing a great deal of it. Pseudo science contributes a great deal to the nocebo effect, making people believe they're sick and in need of some magic pill, when they actually aren't. And it's much easier to prove than you'd imagine....



How to Convince People WiFi Is Making Them Sick

All it takes is an antenna on a headband. If you've got a breathless video report on the dangers of wireless internet connections, that will help your case. It doesn't take much, though, to turn an ominous hint into a real headache.

Some people consider themselves sensitive to electromagnetic fields. They report symptoms such as burning skin, tingling, nausea, dizziness, or chest pain, and they blame their malaise on nearby power lines, cell phones, or WiFi networks. A recent Slate article described such people moving to a remote West Virginia town where radio-frequency signals are banned. (The town is within the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone, an area that's enforced to keep signals from interfering with radio telescopes there—telescopes that work because they receive the radio-frequency signals constantly hitting our planet from space.)

There's no known scientific reason why a wireless signal might cause physical harm. And studies have found that even people who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields can't actually sense them. Their symptoms are more likely due to nocebo, the evil twin of the placebo effect. The power of our expectation can cause real physical illness. In clinical drug trials, for example, subjects who take sugar pills report side effects ranging from an upset stomach to sexual dysfunction.

Psychologists Michael Witthöft and G. James Rubin of King's College London explored whether frightening TV reports can encourage a nocebo effect. They recruited a group of subjects and showed half of them a clip from a BBC documentary about the potential dangers of wireless internet. (The BBC later acknowledged that the 2007 program was "misleading.") The remaining subjects watched a video about the security of data transmissions over mobile phones.

After watching the videos, subjects put on headband-mounted antennas. They were told that the researchers were testing a "new kind of WiFi," and that once the signal started they should carefully monitor any symptoms in their bodies. Then the researchers left the room. For 15 minutes, the subjects watched a WiFi symbol flash on a laptop screen.

In reality, there was no WiFi switched on during the experiment, and the headband antenna was a sham. Yet 82 of the 147 subjects—more than half—reported symptoms. Two even asked for the experiment to be stopped early because the effects were too severe to stand.

Witthöft says he expected to see a greater effect in people who had watched the frightening documentary. This wasn't the case overall. Instead, the movie mainly increased symptoms in subjects who described themselves beforehand as more anxious.

"It suggests that sensational media reports especially in combination with personality factors (in this case anxiety) increase the likelihood for symptom reports," Witthöft says.

Plenty of symptoms were reported without the sensationalist TV show, though. The antenna on the head, the researchers' allusion to a "new kind of WiFi," and the instructions to monitor their bodies closely were enough to trigger symptoms in many people who watched the other video.

Witthöft points out that his study would have been stronger if there were a third group of subjects who didn't wear the "WiFi" headband at all, but were simply told to pay attention to their bodies for 15 minutes. This kind of attentiveness might trigger symptoms on its own.

Still, Witthöft says, "I think the high percentage of symptom reports nicely shows how powerful nocebo effects are."

Though the researchers set out to show how irresponsible reports in the media can trigger a nocebo effect, they ended up showing how easy it is to make a person feel sick with just a a prop and a few choice words. Even a National Radio Quiet Zone can't protect against that.

[ThaVirus]

I was waiting on her to show her tits the entire video before I realized this wasn't posted in the Pictures forum.

[-King-]

We get an erection every hour during sleep?


Interesting...

[Planetman]

NASA’s Actual Plan to Deflect an Approaching Asteroid

Asteroids are frightening things. With the approach of QE2, a big one that would end civilization, the galaxy briefly put Earth on notice.

Thankfully, QE2 is slated to miss the planet tonight.

“Scientists have concluded that the asteroid poses no threat to planet Earth,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Friday, reassuring mankind it will live another day. ”I never really thought I’d be standing up here saying that, but I guess I am.”

But what if an asteroid were headed straight for Earth?

NASA evidently has us covered. In 2005, in a bill authorizing space-program funds, Congress asked NASA for a plan to identify, track and deflect – yes, deflect – all manner of PHOs (potentially harmful objects) that could pose a threat.

The directive, according to NASA, is known as the George E. Brown Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act, named after the late Democratic chairman of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who died in 1999 and didn’t live to see NASA’s asteroid plan on paper. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., successfully included it in the 2005 bill.

With that congressional prompt, NASA considered many science-reality options, including some that bore resemblance to film plots.

Among the solutions NASA studied were firing a nuclear missile at the asteroid, landing a nuclear bomb on the surface, drilling into the great space rock and exploding a nuclear bomb there (which Bruce Willis attempted to do in the film, “Armageddon”), and all those same strategies with conventional bombs.

The scientists also gamed out some weirder possibilities designed with more warning time in mind.

Those included flying a spacecraft near the asteroid for a long time to act as a “gravity tractor” and pull it off course (deemed ineffective, unsurprisingly); using a large mirror to focus sunlight and “boil off” some material from the asteroid; a spacecraft “rendezvous” with the asteroid to “boil off” some material using a “pulse laser”; landing on the asteroid, drilling into it, and “eject[ing] material from PHO at high velocity”; “attach[ing]” a spacecraft to the asteroid and pushing it out of the way; and what NASA called the “Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect” – altering the reflectiveness of a rotating asteroid and counting on the “radiation from sunheated material” to push the asteroid off course.
NASA charted how effectively each method could push a gigantic space rock off course.
The blue horizontal lines show different scenarios and the momentum change needed to deflect them. The top line (F) shows the amount of momentum change needed to deflect a comet with short (nine to 24 months) warning. The bottom lines, A1 and A2, show two scenarios for “[t]he 330 meter asteroid, Apophis, before its close approach to Earth in 2029.”





The winner: nuclear bomb. For a fast-approaching comet, the only recourse may be drilling into it and detonating a nuclear bomb, as the top line in the top graph shows.
But, in general, NASA favored simply firing a missile at a space rock and detonating it nearby. Landing on the asteroid, or drilling into it, would make for a better explosion, but NASA was wary of fragmenting the big rock.

Unfortunately, nuclear explosions in space are banned under a 1967 U.N. space treaty, so other nations would have to sign off on the plan.

From the 2007 NASA report to Congress:

In the impulsive category, the use of a nuclear device was found to be the most effective means to deflect a PHO. Because of the large amount of energy delivered, nuclear devices would require the least amount of detailed information about the threatening object, reducing the need for detailed characterization. While detonation of a nuclear device on or below the surface of a threatening object was found to be 10-100 times more efficient than detonating a nuclear device above the surface, the standoff detonation would be less likely to fragment the target. A nuclear standoff mission could be designed knowing only the orbit and approximate mass of the threat, and missions could be carried out incrementally to reach the required amount of deflection. Additional information about the object’s mass and physical properties would perhaps increase the effectiveness, but likely would not be required to accomplish the goal. It should be noted that because of restrictions found in Article IV of the “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space,” including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, use of a nuclear device would likely require prior international coordination. The study team also examined conventional explosives, but found they were ineffective against most threats.

So there you have it: The government’s plan if an asteroid approaches is to shoot a nuclear missile at it. The planet has George E. Brown, Dana Rohrabacher and NASA to thank.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics...hing-asteroid/

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Fish

The cells of warm-blooded animals produce heat during metabolism. A large animal, such as an elephant, has so many cells inside its body producing heat that the problem becomes getting rid of excess heat. With a small animal, however, heat is lost much more quickly to the environment and the problem becomes getting enough energy to stay warm. In fact, a warm-blooded animal smaller than a hummingbird (or shrew--they are about the same size) could not exist because it could not take in food fast enough to keep itself warm.

Green Energy, replace your heater with a box filled with hummingbirds and nectar, with a fan on one side.

Save the World!!!

[AussieChiefsFan]

[redfan]

First ever footage of an oarfish in the wild.

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/natur...h-in-the-wild/

skip to 7:00

[jiveturkey]

Originally Posted by Fish

WTF?



Huge Hole Found in the Universe

The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise.

The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.

Astronomers don't know why the hole is there.

"Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota.

Rudnick's colleague Liliya R. Williams also had not anticipated this finding.

"What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe," said Williams, also of the University of Minnesota.

The finding will be detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

The universe is populated with visible stars, gas and dust, but most of the matter in the universe is invisible. Scientists know something is there, because they can measure the gravitational effects of the so-called dark matter. Voids exist, but they are typically relatively small.

The gargantuan hole was found by examining observations made using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, funded by the National Science Foundation.

There is a "remarkable drop in the number of galaxies" in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus, Rudnick said.

The region had been previously been dubbed the "WMAP Cold Spot," because it stood out in a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation made by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe (WMAP) satellite. The CMB is an imprint of radiation left from the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning of the universe.

"Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6 to 10 billion light-years from Earth," Rudnick said.

Photons of the CMB gain a small amount of energy when they pass through normal regions of space with matter, the researchers explained. But when the CMB passes through a void, the photons lose energy, making the CMB from that part of the sky appear cooler.

I wonder if it's anywhere near the Great Attractor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor

[hometeam]

I can ID everyone in this pic except the guy who looks like the dad from Family Guy, the GIANT mustache guy, and the person who pops in between Hawking and Teller.

CP HELP ME

[hometeam]

The guy between Hawking and Teller could be Fry.

ohhh BILL NYE?

[aturnis]

I don't see anyone resembling Peter Griffin... Where do you see this guy?

[Stewie]

The mustachioed guy could be Nikola Tesla.

[Fish]

Everyone is born an asshole. Some grow out of it...