gmonkey42

Is that David Tennant narrating? It sounds like him.

I would not like to be the one who has to write the proposal to renew that grant. "We need more money because the bears broke all our cameras."

1. In the winter above the arctic circle, there is no "next morning," it's dark all the time.

2. Also THERE ARE NO PINE TREES GROWING THERE WTF

I liked the bit with Seth's dad as the narrator, though. That was cute.

My friends invited me to eat flapjacks then see Harry Potter with them this morning and I was going to go but then yesterday I got an e-mail from one of the scientists I'm going to be working with on my thesis: he asked if I could come in today because he was going to process some samples using the same protocol that I'll need to use for my samples. So I went to the lab.

It was cool! At the end, I got to look at the slides we'd made under the epifluorescent microscope. I saw a Euglena and some amoebas! That's going to be the tricky part, learning to ID all the critters by looking at them under the microscope. I asked if there was a good reference book with pictures of them and he said "NOPE." I'm just going to have to look at known samples and practice a lot.

ALSO I'm going to use the scanning electron microscope to take pictures of some of the stuff I find. WOOO!

As seen on Feministing: a survey by Stonewall.org has been erroneously interpreted to show that the average age at which gay people in Britain come out has fallen by more than 20 years. From the linked page:

The poll, which had 1,536 respondents, found that lesbian, gay and bisexual people aged 60 and over came out at 37 on average. People aged 18 and under are coming out at 15 on average.

Which would be fine EXCEPT there's a huge bias in their sampling: people who are closeted or haven't yet figured out that they're gay are not going to respond to the survey! Therefore people who respond to this survey and are under 18 are guaranteed to have come out at an age below 18! If someone who's not out did take the survey, they would just have to say "I'm not out yet." Which is not a number, you can't use that to calculate the average. It doesn't say how they handled that but I wouldn't be surprised if they just threw out those answers, or never got any of them in the first place. Which makes the entire study worthless.

I believe that the average age has decreased, that as a result of greater public acceptance, people don't have to wait as long and can recognize that they're gay at a younger age. But this survey didn't prove that.

Read this thread on ontd_science. Then read the rest of the comments but read this thread first.

ETA: The comments are less fun now that someone replied to EVERY SINGLE ONE with the same totally unnecessary comment. Other people had already debunked it! Read the other comments before you post one! Or fifty! Oh well.*

You know what? I don't think anyone really 100% believed this. If we really believed all of humanity had six months to live, we'd start acting differently. Not sitting at our computers going "oh no, I'm so scared!" Which is good, of course; if people believed every doomsday prophecy they read on the internet and behaved accordingly, we'd all be in a lot of trouble. It's just annoying. A bunch of LJ users need to get their bullshit meters re-calibrated.

* EagainTA: Aaaaaand they've flounced. LOL.

Read this Pandagon post about environmentalism: it's not about hugging trees, it's about having a place where humans can live.

That's why this George Carlin video pisses me the hell off:


"Human arrogance" isn't what it's about. We ALREADY interfered with nature and now we're trying to stop doing it more. Speaking of arrogance, how can they think they're so much smarter than scientists, that they know about mass extinctions of the past and we don't?

Carlin: "You know what [environmentalists] are interested in? A clean place to live - their own habitat." What the fuck is wrong with wanting a clean place to live? How is that not a worthy goal? Like that's supposed to invalidate our argument, like it would be better if we wanted to preserve the environment for abstract reasons? Fuck George Carlin.

[Error: unknown template qotd]Yes. We need to hurry up and invent a warp drive so the Vulcans will come visit us and take me away from this crappy planet and back to Vulcan, where people actually value intelligence.

But seriously? Probably not. Life on other planets, probably, yeah, but making the jump from single-celled life to complex, multicellular life is pretty astronomically improbable.

I briefly put this as an edited-to-add in the first post but people already read and commented there so here's a new post.

PDF of the actual paper! WHAT? They ran an ANOVA on a discrete variable. FAIL. And they reported M-values, not p-values. What the crap is an M-value? At least the variance they found was pretty small, which justifies a small sample size but ANOVA is the wrong analysis to use when there are only seven possible values of the dependent variable! And how big can your variance get when there are only seven possible values?

The second part of the study is better, though it still has the problem of using discrete variables in an analysis that's intended for continuous variables.

Also it sounds like the students who participated in the study were involved with the psychology department somehow; they got course credit for it and psych students would be much more aware of this and more inclined to participate than students in other departments. So basically the conclusions can only be applied to undergrads who at least took a psych class, or possibly are psych majors. This is potentially a huge source of bias.

Anyway, their methods are a little screwey but I don't doubt that women who aren't inclined to be geeky would find geek stuff more off-putting than non-geeky men would, because of the widespread perception (spread by the MSM articles about this paper, for example) that geek stuff is only for boys. It's not just the MSM misinterpreting the paper, though: from the paper's discussion section on the first part of the study:

This study suggests that a student’s choice of classes or a major can be shaped by simply the appearance of classrooms, hallways, and offices—therefore, providing compelling evidence for the power of environments in signaling who belongs.

The authors of the study are claiming that it's the posters etc. themselves that are the problem. No, it's that these objects signal to people that it's more likely to be an anti-woman environment than the neutral one, due to stereotypes about geek culture - I mean, it's not as if a non-geeky workplace never discriminates against women. The underlying problem is the discrimination. It bothers me that this paper is going to be used as evidence that we can just put up some different posters and then when that doesn't result in equal representation, just blame it on our ladybrains or "opting out" or whatever other bullshit they come up with that allows the patriarchy to keep steamrolling along.

I think it's reasonable to expect some people will read the articles about this paper and institute a "no geek stuff" policy in schools and workplaces in an effort to make women feel more comfortable. That would be stupid. The only effects would be:

1. to make men resent women in the workplace more, because it would be seen as special treatment
2. to piss off the geeks
3. to really really piss off the geeks who are also female
4. to totally fail to address any of the real sexism that the geek stuff symbolizes to some women

What would be a much better solution is to educate everyone about how they might discriminate or create a hostile environment without realizing it, for example by commenting on people's appearance, giving a man credit for work a woman did, expecting women to clean up after everyone, and expecting women in technical jobs to take care of secretarial tasks. ALL of this has happened to me in molecular biology jobs in academia and industry. And it was not cool. And forbidding me from putting Star Trek crap on my desk wouldn't have changed any of it.

Once again, xkcd tells it like it is.

ETA: My interpretation is it's nothing against philosophy majors specifically; lots of people act like that. That's exactly the argument creationists use and I doubt many of them are trained in philosophy. They come up with something incredibly stupid and then accuse us of being knee-jerk and dogmatic when we point out how stupid it is.

I'll repost the hilarious videos here before the post in _scientists_ is inevitably and well-deservedly deleted:

FLUORIDE, O NOES!

You know what's sad? My nutjob dentist once started going off about the evils of fluoride in the water supply. He said it was the Nazis' idea. And you know whose fault the Nazis are, right? DARWIN.

This video was the entirety of the original post, just the embedded video with no comment. So people posted the videos below in response.

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