Science 2.0

As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed probability calculations in the context of gambling and betting. A long time ago I also famously won a $1000 bet on the LHC not discovering any new physics. Below I will mention a similar bet that ended up not being agreed upon by the parties, for the sake of discussing a subtle effect one has to worry about when placing bets: the selection bias. 

read more

Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. 

That's not coincidence. The leader of the first Earth Day was not a politician, as the movement has greenwashed Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson into being, yet credible journalists and an alarming number of commenters will invoke the Earth Day site or some anonymous Snopes blogger or even Wikipedia(!) and claim the primary sources from 56 years ago are wrong. 

read more

If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from the 1970s, that's because they are. The food activist community, vegetarians and other diet groups, rebranded their beliefs as Make America Health Again (MAHA) after former Natural Resources Defense Council and pillar of the Democratic party Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. switched sides and joined Republicans in the Trump administration, but they are the same claims that were psychological platforms of progressives.

read more

On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became the first to have his pitch speed measured during a game. Rockwell International experts clocked the ball velocity at 100.8 miles per hour.

That was the fastest pitch ever recorded.

Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor leagues. In September of 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Clearly, pitchers have gotten a lot faster, due to superior training and better scouting identifying athletes who will excel at pitching and getting them to play baseball rather than basketball or something else. 

read more

Just a few years ago, there were concerns that minorities like blondes and redheads were going extinct. The future belonged to Miss Clairol because they're recessive genes and with just five generations of bad biological rolls, you could have less chance of Scottish hair than Senator Elizabeth Warren has of being Native American.
It may be that scientists just weren't seeing the signals.

Instead of going extinct, a study of 10,016 newer ancient West Eurasian genomes, plus 5,820 existing ancient sequences and 6,438 modern ones finds that red hair and fair skin have become more common over the last 10,000 years, not less. Evolution not only didn't slow down in that time, natural selection could those traits to speed up over the last 4,000 years.

read more

At what point is enforced identification with what is obviously a collapsing system called out by people on the inside of once-powerful industries?

Steelworkers once believed there was no limit to what they could grab from corporations, even autoworkers made that error. Twinkies went bankrupt to get out of union control and start over. Yet no one on the floor believe that would happen.

read more

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it, in Padova (Italy), to work with me on the PHINDER project, an EIC-funded Pathfinder grantee.
I am offering a two-year position for research in nanophotonics-powered neuromorphic computing for particle detector development at INFN, Sezione di Padova. The call will open soon, so you should watch this space if you are interested.

read more

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand pollination.(1)

read more

A graphic from the Washington Post about motorcycle deaths is making the rounds again on Twitter, and it will set off a lot of comments by people who can't put it in context, so let's go back to the source paper.

Here is what you need to know:

If you ride 15 miles every day on a motorcycle for a year, you have a 1 in 860 chance of dying.

If you fly 500 miles every day on an airplane for a year, you have a 1 in 85,000 chance of dying.

read more

During the Obama administration, the credibility of the US Centers for Disease Control went into serious decline. Though it only became evident to most how incompetent career government bureaucrats were when COVID-19 hit - they denied it was a pandemic and said the President was being xenophobic for wanting to ban travel from China(1) - those of us inside the system saw that they were long not equipped to help with much at all. If you need six weeks to tell the public lettuce has E. coli, basically five weeks after people had eaten the lettuce, you are not a public health agency, you are just a government job works program.

read more

Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups like Environmental Working Group or rich deniers like Greenpeace.

'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.

read more

Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.

read more

California government has a new proposal that could ban thousands of chemicals, even if they are natural.

California is, of course, famously anti-science. The reason lawyers who wanted to sue over weedkillers filed in San Francisco is because it is the most anti-science city in America's most anti-science state. And it worked. Juries readily believe that plants are just tiny green people so a weedkiller that only acts on a pathway not found in humans at all can still somehow cause human cancer. Even if you only sprayed it one time.

read more

Raw milk is known to be 700X more likely to cause a foodborne illness. Since evangelists for bacteria in food often hide illnesses to protect their beliefs it may be even higher.

Cheese will be safer, if it is aged long enough. Which means you are not dealing with a company that is in a financial panic. Like RAW FARM-brand raw dairy products.

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a lawyer for Natural Resources Defense Council and investor in solar gimmicks, he was adored by Democrats who shared his beliefs that science was a vast right-wing conspiracy. When he joined the Trump administration, some followed him and embraced his MAGA agenda(1), but many turned on him because he joined a Republican.

read more

In the 1960s and '70s there was a great deal of optimism about science - including tackling aging. In the following decades not much progress was made. There were studies and experiments, like low calorie efforts, but those were in mice and mice studies are only exploratory. We can't ethically wean human babies on a starvation diet, we don't make any decisions on animal models, no drug has ever been approved on those because mice are not little people.

Due to lack of progress, some argue that resilience, not longevity, should be the therapeutic endpoint. Lifespan is the wrong objective so people in the field have been targeting the wrong way.

read more

Fibromyalgia is the term for a poorly-understood condition where people experience pain and fatigue while moving but have no testable inflammation or damage. Because fatigue is a non-specific symptom, fibromyalgia becomes a 'diagnosis of exclusion', where pain persists but testable conditions are ruled out. It is said to affect about four percent of the population.

read more

The following position is a win for white. But how?


It seems like white is able to grab a knight for free. However, that would be not a wise idea, as the c4 pawn would then be free to run down to become a queen. You can easily convince yourself that 1.Nxd8? c3! wins for black. White also has its own knight en prise in the starting position, so a move not involving a knight move will result in its demise. E.g., 1.Kb6 seems a desirable attacking move to make, but 1....dxc6 2.dxc6 Nxc6! again turns the tables. 

read more

The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental Working Group(2) and more, are back in court to try and force California to accept that money is magic and rich homeowners with solar panels should be paid for electricity they send to the grid - at full retail price.
It sounds ridiculous. Imagine if a customer buys a vegetable your farm grows says they should have the right to force you to buy vegetables they grow in their garden at full retail price from them. Not the price you get, the full retail cost.

You'd laugh. You have tractors and employees and materials. Liabilities. Even more ridiculous, you helped give them the money for the land they used to grow the vegetables.

read more

Next Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, you will find a new bulky paper in the arXiv. Titled "On the Co-Design of Scientific Experiments and Industrial Systems", the work is authored by over 80 colleagues. I directed them as co-chair of WG2 of EUCAIF (with Pietro Vischia) in assembling a view of the state of the art of the techniques and the issues connected with the simultaneous optimization of hardware and software of scientific experiments in fundamental physics. Complementing that is a parallel look at a few representative tasks in industrial settings.

read more

The electric car industry is held back by reliance on conventional energy. Despite spending trillions of dollars on mandates and subsidies, solar and wind alternatives have made little difference in the share of energy filled by natural gas and oil. 

Some of that is economics. A subsidy prevents innovation because it props up the status quo, and environmentalists and the politicians they support remain opposed to nuclear power, but some is plain physics. Lithium-ion batteries are stuck in the 1990s because there are real challenges to be overcome in the next generation.

read more