Science

On the Persistence of Witches

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In the pre-scientific western world, sudden outbreaks of disease were often attributed to witches or other human agents of the supernatural. In many parts of the non-western world today, witchcraft is still feared and blamed. The need to seek human scapegoats for disease and general ill fortune seems part of our psychological makeup. Even in the  contemporary  West, we still seem to have the same psychology although in a different  costume.  

The twin cases of the world-wide collapse of amphibian populations and the colony-collapse disorder which affected the world’s bees, show the modern world’s need to find human scapegoats for natural disasters. In both cases human actors were initially blamed for the dire effects of diseases caused by  microorganisms.

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Why Snake-Oil Ideas Spread

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Via Ars Technica comes a link to a paper which seeks to explain with game theory why people continue to use unscientifically proven and usually useless medical treatments such as folk  remedies  or “alternative” medicine.  

The researchers created a  model to explain this behavior based on humans’ genetically programmed behavior to  imitate. This  surprisingly  simple model shows that quack cures spread simply because their ineffectiveness means that people must use them more often and for longer times. This in turn means that more people see the use of quack cures than they see the use of effective cures, which creates more  opportunities  for imitation. In short, every person who uses a particular cure becomes an advertiser for that cure. The longer the cure takes and the more elaborate the cure, the more people accidentally advertise it.  

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Getting Rid of Styrofoam Packing Molds

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Unfortunately, getting new electronic equipment usually means ending up not only with the boxes but also fairly large chunks of molded styrofoam packing.

I unpacked two gadgets this weekend and when I went to throw away the styrofoam I found that the four big pieces would take up nearly two thirds of my trash bin. Even chopping them up, no easy task, only reduced them to a third of the trash can and I didn’t have that much room left.  

So, I made napalm.  

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Environmentalism and the Death of the West

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A comment on a New York Times story on the new Indian car, the Nano [h/t Instapundit]:

Somehow, we need to get the “developing” countries to quit copying our disasters in the first world. Showing real respect for the quiet life in villages would be a help. How about a Discovery Channel series on “The Truly Sustainable” – showing village life wherever it can be found, and not focused on “gosh, no plumbing”, but on – “this clan has lived here for 1,000 years…’ – and showing community dynamics.

Obviously, the writer has never had cholera.  The scary thing about this comment is that it showcases a school of thought more common than not on the far Left (25% most left).

Here we see the culmination of the Left’s evolution from technophiles to technophobes. Only a politically driven collective  delusion  could cause an educated person to believe that 1,000 years of cultural stagnation is more important than preventing the enormous suffering and death caused by sewage-borne illnesses.  

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Using a Square Wheel

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Huge amounts of intellectual horsepower have gone into trying to figure out how the ancients built giant stone structures like the  Pyramids  or Stonehenge. Over the past 200 years archeologists, engineers and  physicists  have all chipped in to try to solve the problem.  

They should’ve asked a retired construction contractor from Michigan.  

I find the part where Wallington rolls a 300 lb block like a log especially interesting. He’s using a square wheel. Over the years, I’ve seen lots of discussions of square wheels as geometric oddities or sources of humor but it never occurred to me, or apparently anyone else, that you could use a square wheel to roll a heavy square block as if it were a cylinder.  

I’m sure the ancients had a lot more work cutout for them than Wallington’s experiments show. For example, they would not always have had smooth and level hard surfaces to move things one. Yet, it’s easy to see how the basic ideas could be used in almost any environment with a little work, like laying down paving stones.  

On a related note, have you ever wondered how you go about drilling a square hole?