Science

Junk Science Warning Signs: Part I

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So, commenter Tatyana asked about how a layman can discern the signals that indicate that a discussion has left the realm of rigorous thought. I thought I’d set down some thoughts on that over the course of a couple of posts, starting from the extreme left tail of the distribution and working my way in to stuff that’s more mainstream, could possibly be true, but ought not to be pounced on because there’s a lot more work to be done before a conclusion is reached.

So, to start out with, I’ll tackle something that’s obvious to me as being in the looney science bin: the attacks on the Large Hadron Collider. As I mentioned before, my little online Science Fiction group ran afoul of the utter nutbars in the “LHC Will End the Woooorld” camp. I dug a little deeper into the “some scientists” whom the anti-LHCers cite. I uncovered that the most prestigious scientist whom they could quote was a German biochemist I’d never heard of named Otto Rössler.

So then I dug a little deeper into Professor Doctor Rössler’s record, and came up with quite a lot. Unfortunately, it was quite a lot of utter rubbish. I see that rubbish cited all over the Internet, so I tried to set the record straight. After the jump is the blog post I made, mostly for my SF group’s amusement, about how I was able to tell Rössler was a crank. Enjoy.

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Mean Dogs

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My Grandfather used to say that if you wanted to take the measure of a man, look at his dog.

A person’s personality gets expressed in their interactions with their dogs, which in turn shows up in the dog’s behavior. Someone with mean dogs is probably mean themselves even if they wear a great big smile. Someone with cowardly dogs is most likely a bully. Someone with uncontrollable dogs, is probably undisciplined themselves.  

Like a lot of folk wisdom, it works better in small  communities  where people get to watch an individual deal with a lot of dogs over time. It’s harder to make the judgment with just one meeting but even so I’ve found the advice a good rough rule of thumb for evaluating people I’ve just met. My initial impressions from their dogs seem to prove true more often than not. I even query people about their dog’s history so I can judge just how much influence they had on it. If they got it from the pound as an adult, then the animal’s behavior probably doesn’t reflect their own. If they raised the dog as a puppy, then it probably does.  

Unfortunately, this goofy little study doesn’t demonstrate what the article’s title claims. The study doesn’t actually seek to  correlate  training with behavior but merely correlates owners’ responses to their behavior. The study doesn’t take into account the very real possibility that dogs with genetic  aggression  or aggression induced by the previous owner evoke an aggressive form of training in response.  

The Oxygen Crisis!

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OMG! We’re  exhausting  the planet’s oxygen supply by not being Marxist and letting intellectuals run everything!

I’m really hoping that’s some kind of any-idiot-can-post section of the Guardian.

It does raising an interesting side-point. Burning carbon-based fuels does consume oxygen. Conversely, the production of oxygen consumes CO2. If CO2 levels rise then oxygen levels have to decrease. Now the change in oxygen levels will not be large. CO2 comprises only a tiny part of the total atmosphere. The current hysteria is caused by raising CO2 from  0.028% to 0.038%. Oxygen comprises 21% of the atmosphere, so the decrease in oxygen would be trivial but still measurable.  

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Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin

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Not for sale

Chicken Neck!

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The Segway has nothing on the Chicken.