Science p0rn: the garage project

The low-budget ($7,000) flick Primer is an example of the garage project story-line: some inquisitive, fairly ordinary guys cobble together an amazing or revolutionary device in their spare time. If you love science, if you've always loved science, that's a story-line that has likely resonated with you since childhood.

















Catch-phrases of note:
"You're talking about making a bigger one."
"Why can't we write like normal people?"

Is the government spying on paranoid schizophrenics enough?

Im confus

If I had you

OMFG.

FLIR

I want this toy. But the price is too high, $2,500. Maybe like most electronics, in a year or two it will become affordable.

What did the five fingers say to the face?

see more Señor Gif

Center for Inquiry Goofs the Floof

A recent press release, "The Center for Inquiry Urges That Ground Zero Be Kept Religion-Free," has been removed from the CFI site.

It was a PR fiasco, a real goofing of the floof.

Now, skeptics are a proud tribe willing to weather PR flaps, so I hope that's not the reason for CFI's change of heart. I really hope the CFI leadership simply reflected upon the distinction between being right and being right for the wrong reasons.

I live in a spam trap at Orac's site so I'll copy my comment there here:

CFI seems to define "religion" as "lies." Who wouldn't oppose lies?

However, "religion" can be a placeholder for "first person data that are uncorroborated or impossible to corroborate."

Third person data rules. But life is lived within the first person. And he is often a poor, confused, suffering shmuck about to be hit by a bus.

If Mr. First Person isn't trying to fark up our third person data set, I say we let him have his unverifiable personal experience of "transcendence" or whatever. Why not?

I can bully you into saying, "2+2=4." Or I can teach you arithmetic and allow you to figure out the answer for yourself.

Getting the right answer is important. But the method used to derive that answer is even more important, because all future answers depend upon it.

3D Graffiti Projection on a Building

Wow this is really cool.

http://graffitiresearchlab.com/

Scientology marries the Nation of Islam

Fascinating thread at Why We Protest. Apparently Farrakhan is requiring all his ministers and staff to take Dianetics courses.

This post made me lol:

Scientology = Space Opera
NOI = Race Opera

I think I see how you develop an explanation of the world and our place in it when you found a cult.

You just make up any unlikely nonsense and dox be damned.

In my cult, Grebnon made our nostrils by poking our noses with a poking stick, um, 12ty thousand years ago. How do I know this? Well, I just do.

New England Journal of Mendacity

Some loser doctors who pander to gullible rich people who Want to Believe have reviewed the evidence for acupuncture in the July 29th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

For those who don't subscribe to the NEJM, Steve Novella at Science Based Medicine has excerpts. Here's the paper's conclusion:

"As noted above, the most recent well powered clinical trials of acupuncture for chronic low back pain showed that sham acupuncture was as effective as real acupuncture. The simplest explanation of such findings is that the specific therapeutic effects of acupuncture, if present, are small, whereas its clinically relevant benefits are mostly attributable to contextual and psychosocial factors, such as patients’ beliefs and expectations, attention from the acupuncturist, and highly focused, spatially directed attention on the part of the patient."

And the author's recommendations for a hypothetical middle-aged male with chronic low back pain:

"He has specifically requested a referral for acupuncture, and we would suggest a course of 10 to 12 treatments over a period of 8 weeks from a licensed acupuncturist or a physician trained in medical acupuncture."

tl;dr: Acupuncture is crap. But tell your patients to go ahead and drop about a thousand bucks on it.

Someone commenting on Novella's article using the nick "urodovic" said this:

I e-mailed the NEJM editors and got a quick reply. Due to confidentiality issues I cannot post their exact response.

Briefly, they state that they are aware of the controversial aspect of the published article but that the ultimate judge once "the evidence" is presented, will be the reader.

OK now that just makes me rage.

Imagine if we were talking engineering or accounting rather than medicine. Someone says, "Hey the numbers in that article don't add up," and the journal editor says, "You, dear reader, can use your own math skills to calculate the correct answer."

Sorry, not good enough.

There's a right way and a wrong way to respond to valid criticism. The right way involves admitting the mistake, investigating why it happened, and making some effort to prevent it from happening again.

My email:

Dear NEJM editors,

DO YOUR JOB, BITCHES!

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE!

kthxbai,
The Tufted Titmouse

__________________________

NEJM: Even the best can publish nonsense, by Mark Crislip.
Acupuncture Pseudoscience in the New England Journal of Medicine, by Steve Novella.
Credulity about acupuncture infiltrates the New England Journal of Medicine, by David Gorski.