You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Science’ tag.
It is a video week here at DWR for better or worse. Sometimes you just want to share cool stuff with people, the Rationalist Anthem fits nicely into that category.
Going down to haggle at the local Farmer’s market is a weekly ritual for many urban dwellers. A recent study also indicates that the markets could be a contributing factor do our sense of fairness and altruism.
“They found that even sharing of money with a stranger in a psychological experiment was more common in societies were people got most of their food from markets, rather than growing it themselves, and in societies that embrace world religions.
In all there were 2,100 participants in the experiments, from communities ranging in size from 20 to 10,000 people, including hunter-gatherers, farmers and people who work for a wage.”
It is nice to see finally, that religions might actually be of some good in the overall picture. Here at DWR the opinion is the sooner they go away the better. However, the findings of the study seem to indicate that subscribing to a “world religion” could be a positive factor when deciding how fair to be to strangers. I guess, the buring the heretics and apostates comes later. :)
“Natural selection would never favour it in these large contexts, but it might work anyway,” Henrick said. “If that’s true, then hunter-gatherers and people in the smaller-scale societies should behave like people in large-scale societies” in the anonymous interactions modeled in the economic games.
Their study showed the opposite, Henrick said.
“In our view, it’s actually pretty tough to get people to co-operate in large-scale societies, and it took a lot of cultural evolution over millennia, probably, to get the right set of norms and institutions to internalize the notions of fairness and mutually beneficial exchange,” Henrick said.”
Sharing is never an easy thing as this study points out. I’m glad I live now and there is a modicum of altruism in people these days, as I suspect my career as a hunter-gatherer would be nasty, brutish and short.
Now in star trekkian like language fresh from the LHC webpage:
Full steam ahead!
Following the completion of the campaign to improve the reliability of the cabling for the new Quench Protection System, the main dipoles and quadrupoles of the eight LHC sectors have now been commissioned up to a current of 6 kAmps. In the early hours of Sunday 28 February, the beams were circulating again in the LHC: the longest run in CERN’s history has just started!
The beams are interfacing appropriately within acceptable parameters! Excellent. :)
Just Spreading the word here at the quaking in their boots err..Word Press Blogosphere.
Just a quick note, a wordpress blogger Micheal Hawkins had their blog removed at the spurious threats issued by the quack below. Reposting in the name of free speech and keeping quacks firmly in the cross hairs of skeptical inquiry and criticism.
Andreas Moritz is a cancer quack
Category: Skepticism
Posted on: February 18, 2010 5:07 PM, by PZ Myers
The Prime Quack has been identified: Andreas Moritz. He has admitted to getting WordPress to pull Michael Hawkins’ blog, and is also threatening me, now.
Michael Hawkins,
You may blame me for having your blog pulled. WorldPress had to remove your blog because otherwise it would have faced a hefty lawsuit, given the nature of the defamation campaign you had launched against me, and having positioned your blog link second place on the search engines.
I have not yet decided whether to sue you for defamation. I have asked my attorneys to assess the damages your defamation campaign has done to my work, business, and reputation since your blog has been up. I know that they are significant, but if they turn out to be an excessive loss of revenue and reputation and/or if I see any more defaming publications by you or your blog friends against me or Dr. Makoney, I will not hesitate to launch an expensive lawsuit against you that you will not forget for a long time. I have collected all the data of your blogs and publications involving me. Your last email to Dr. Makoney clearly shows that you are instigating a new defamation campaign, at least against him.
My investigations show me where you live and where you study (Augusta, Amine), and if I hear or see any further activities that involve me or Dr. Makoney you will need to hire a good attorney to defend your slanderous actions and campaigns.
My close friend, Dr Deepak Chopra, who in addition to Dr Makoney and myself have been viciously attacked by your friend, the fish zoologist, PZ Myers, are considering a lawsuit against him. Slander is slander, whether it is done online or offline. If your friend is wise, he will immediately remove those blogs from his site.
Just in case you are not aware of it, below are stated the laws that protect people like me against people like you.
Sincerely,
Andreas Moritz
Hmmm, misspelling names seems to be an epidemic among quacks. It’s also interesting that he’s openly threatening an expensive legal campaign against Hawkins.
If the threats of lawsuits and his own crazy snakeoil site aren’t enough to convince you that he’s a loon, consider that he was written up favorably on NaturalNews.com (you may recall Mike Adams, whose mind snapped under the weight of our criticism). Michael Hawkins wrote up an angry rebuttal to Moritz, as did I. He’s not a good person.
Moritz is a cancer quack. He is an evil man who takes advantage of others’ pain for his own profit.
Here’s what he says about cancer.
Cancer has always been an extremely rare illness, except in industrialized nations during the past 40-50 years. Human genes have not significantly changed for thousands of years. Why would they change so drastically now, and suddenly decide to kill scores of people? The answer to this question is amazingly simple: Damaged or faulty genes do not kill anyone. Cancer does not kill a person afflicted with it! What kills a cancer patient is not the tumor, but the numerous reasons behind cell mutation and tumor growth. These root causes should be the focus of every cancer treatment, yet most oncologists typically ignore them. Constant conflicts, guilt and shame, for example, can easily paralyze the body’s most basic functions, and lead to the growth of a cancerous tumor.
After having seen thousands of cancer patients over a period of three decades, I began to recognize a certain pattern of thinking, believing and feeling that was common to most of them. To be more specific, I have yet to meet a cancer patient who does not feel burdened by some poor self-image, unresolved conflict and worries, or past emotional trauma that still lingers in his/her subconscious. Cancer, the physical disease, cannot occur unless there is a strong undercurrent of emotional uneasiness and deep-seated frustration.
Note that he has absolutely no credentials or expertise in medicine; he calls himself a “medical intuitive”. Yet he is dispensing dangerous, defeatist advice on how to manage cancer, such as recommending against chemotherapy. Have you had a loved one die of cancer? It was their fault. Do you have or have you had cancer? It’s your own damn fault for being so negative.
Switch your target from Makoney, errm, Maloney to Moritz: he’s even crazier and more dangerous.
By the way, here is Andreas Moritz.
He’s peddling something called a liver flush — you gulp down a nasty concoction of Epsom salts, olive oil, and grapefruit, and then you go lie down for a while and suffer nausea and diarrhea. If you’re really dedicated, you can poop into a colander and collect strange lumps, as much as 2″ in diameter, that he claims are liver stones flushed out by the oily glop. This will make your knees feel better.
Seriously.
The experience of arguing on the internets leads me to believe that this hypothesis counts for much of my frustration with others. :)
And no, I do not think I fall into the lower quartiles, for the record.
One of the top hits for my blog is people looking for information about Evolution. Evolution when examined in depth is an amazing process with many levels of complexity and nuance. I’m thinking though that people are not looking for all the details, perhaps just an overview of what it is all about. In that vein, I found a short little post from Brain Dunning, and the next excerpt is from his site.
Myth #1: Men evolved from modern apes.
This is the oldest and wrongest misconception about evolution. Nobody has ever suggested that one living species changes into a different living species. Some criticisms of evolution show illustrations that fraudulently purport to show what evolutionists claim: that a salmon changed into a turtle, which changed into an alligator, which changed into a hippo, which changed into a lion, and then into a monkey, and then into a human being. Of course such a theory would seem ludicrous. But it’s pure fantasy and has nothing in common with real evolution.
The diversification of species is like a forest of trees, sprouting from the proverbial primordial soup. Many trees die out. Some don’t grow very tall. Some have grown a lot over the eons and are still growing today. Trees branch out, and branches branch out themselves, but branches never come back together or combine from two different trees. The path of a species’ evolution is shaped like the branch of a tree, not a donut, not a figure 8, not a ladder. To embrace evolution, you need not — must not — think that a salmon turns into a zebra, or that an ape turns into a man. It’s simply not genetically possible.
We’ve all seen the other famous illustration, where a monkey morphs into an ape, that morphs into a caveman, that morphs into homo sapiens. If you climb back down the tree branch, you will indeed find earlier versions of man where he was smaller, hairier, and dumber, but it won’t be a modern ape. To find a modern ape, you’d need to go even further down the tree, millions and millions of years, find an entirely different branch, and then follow that branch through different genetic variants, past numerous other dead-end branches, past other branches leading to other modern species, and then you’ll find the modern ape. Never the twain shall meet.
Myth #2: Evolution is like a tornado in a junkyard forming a perfect 747.
Large Hadron Collider to restart in fall after 1-year hiatus
The magnet core of the world’s largest superconducting solenoid magnet, seen in 2007, is part of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. Abnormally high resistances were found in the accelerator’s high-current superconducting electrical connections and have since been repaired. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone/Associated Press)The world’s largest particle accelerator is scheduled to gradually start up again in November after being shut down for more than a year.
The $9-billion project was shut down on Sept. 19, 2008, after just nine days of operation. The meltdown of a small electrical connection had caused the release of a large amount of liquid helium into the 27-kilometre long tunnel, near the Franco-Swiss border. Its restart date has been delayed several times since then.
Heuer said the machine is now “a much better understood machine than it was a year ago.” CERN expects to run the collider at 3.5 TeV for several weeks until a “significant data sample” has been collected, then gradually increase the energy to 5 TeV per beam. It expects to run a test with lead ions at the end of 2010 before shutting the machine down again in an effort to get it ready to move towards its maximum power.”
—–
I have always had an interest in physics. It is a shame that numbers and equations cause my brain to 404 faster than you can say ‘system error’. I hope that that once they fire up the LHC they can start earnestly looking for the elusive higgs-boson that so far has eluded them. It would be one of those fantastic cornerstone discoveries that has the potential to change the face of physics. Grab the original article from the CBC here.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…