Tag: Constants and Variables
-
It’s all in the deltas
UD notes the death of Frank Drake, father of the Drake Equation estimating likely planets for intelligent life. Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using…
-
Mother-in-law, cliff
Classic mixed feelings about this headline at Eurekalert: Exposure to past temperature variability may help forests cope with climate change On the one hand they’re still running the “climate” genocide. On the other hand they’ve finally accepted that Lamarck and Lysenko were mostly right and Darwin was mostly wrong. I’m going to take this as…
-
The Endicott experiment
One of the old FOIA files on the Black Vault site is an account of an Air Force experiment in telepathy. The researchers were working out of Hanscom AFB in Mass. They built a complicated set of computing machines in an attempt to eliminate the human judgment factors in the usual JB Rhine picture-drawing experiments.…
-
Yet another grandma was right
Every fucking thing we learned in school was criminally false and wrong. Our “science” books mercilessly mocked Schiaparelli’s canals, Lysenko’s acquired characteristics, the old wives tales about stress influencing genes, and phrenology. Now, unsurprisingly, we have proof that the phrenologists were right. The shape of a face and skull does tell you a lot about…
-
Yang is dumb.
Andy is at it again, pretending to solve our problems by introducing fancy gimmicks in the “voting” system. As far as I can tell from his glitzy but vague website, he doesn’t have any actual plans or proposals for economics or industry or peace. He just wants rank-choice “voting”. Pre-Yang nasty complicated voting: Yang’s New…
-
Latest Kirn quibble
Kirn’s latest pithy point: We need a few experts on the history of experts. Such a figure could estimate their average accuracy. My guess is that it hovers between 1 and 2 per cent. If it were any higher, we would not have needed new ones every few years. This is a beautiful observation about…
-
Some fishy rambling on AI
Creativity can be measured commercially. A new product gains profit when it serves some people better than an existing product. Duane Jones emphasized the need to find your niche and defend it. An older product generally broadens and simplifies to be halfway pleasing to a broad range of cultures and places and personalities, which leaves…
-
Might be on the right track
Most research on human vs chimp misses the point. Most research focuses on physical differences like skull shape and jaw shape to explain why humans speak and apes don’t. Feedback ‘factors out’ such differences. Within modern humans there are similarly large differences in size and shape of bones, and we all speak. Here’s a physical…
-
Big money, bad science
The title is gruesomely and torturously true of Big Science itself. No explanation needed. Oddly, the correlation also applies to radio and TV shows about science. Among discussion-type shows, the elite academic “roundtable” shows and elite quiz shows like Information Please generally spewed old worn-out cliches that had been disproved for many decades. The UFO…
-
Will be interesting to watch
Japan’s former PM Abe has been shot and killed while making a campaign speech for his political protege. We constantly jabber about Historic Firsts and Unprecedented Events. This is the real thing, and this is going to throw a monkeywrench into a lot of global calculations. Abe was the perfect globalist and neocon in some…
-
It’s just QC
Chart from the latest Gallup poll: This is a good sign of sanity on the human side. Most people understand who’s human and who’s demon. There’s some predictable R/D difference on media, since media is part of DNC. But even Ds are mostly negative (30% confidence) on newspapers and TV. Last week I was puzzling…
-
Allocation, allocation, allocation
One of the programs in my bedtime playlist featured Bing singing Kokomo Indiana. Got me thinking about songs and cities and states. There were two other popular Indiana songs, Gary and Back Home. Gary and Kokomo are novelty songs, mainly having fun with the syllables, not intended as a tribute. Back Home was a proper…
-
Is vs Was
Here’s a nice clear article from Catholic World Report on the super-clear question of gender. The author runs through some of the sillier theological disputes that have divided churches, and contrasts those silly theological issues with the basic SCIENTIFIC definitions of life. Real science and real religion agree now on all important questions of reality.…
-
More Cirn Cibbles
Latest from Kirn: They’re really mainstreaming prison culture now. Everyone has to pick a gang, time outside is a privilege granted by the warden, hard drugs are available but cigs are rare, and the guards stand around and do absolutely nothing while the prisoners get violent. Mostly wrong. An excellent author like Kirn should avoid…
-
Another UFO?
Polistra and friends are greeting another UFO. This UFO may have appeared before in the dimly remembered past, but it has certainly been absent for the last three months. Rain every day. Sometimes real thunderstorms, sometimes all-day drizzle, sometimes a threat of storms. The threats and the actual storms ALWAYS came just when I was…
Polistra's Mill 