Sing Along Time

Sing along to the tune of "Daisy" (Bicycle Built for Two):


Face hug space bug,
Implant me with Xenomorph
I'm just fine now,
chest burst - sent the monster forth.

It might be a huge disaster
split up, we'll find it faster
but you'll look best, cocooned in the nest
of an alien Xenomorph.


Whatever it was that possessed me to write this, it was gone when I woke up.

Did some filing at work today

I did some filing at work today.

No, really. My keyboard tray has some wicked-sharp metal sliding brackets, cleverly positioned to extract a bit of flesh from my knuckles should I be the least bit careless. After getting bitten again last night, I finally got fed up and decided to do something about it.

I ask myself, "Why did I wait so long?"

Now I Get It

Back when I played D&D, we had a special place for that most silly sounding weapon: the Bohemian Earspoon.

My wife recently related to me that an earspoon is a tool once used for cleaning the ear, and putting the wax so acquired to other industrious uses (Eeeewww!)

So the suggestion is that a large polearm be used for cleaning the ear is kind of funny (at least if it's not your ear!), and was obviously intended to be a joke all along.

Now it get it! :-)

280,951 Post-It Notes

280,951 Post-It Notes, and a lot of spare time.


EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Or click here to view it full screen (worthwhile).

Science is Flattening

Science is Flattening, at least that what the Flat Earth Society would have us believe. 
 

John Lynch links to this Guardian article about the resurgence of the FES, which is actually a very fair and open treatment of the topic. Here is a tidbit from the front page of the Flat Earth Wiki:

Throughout the years it has become a duty of each Flat Earth Society member, to meet the common Round Earther in the open, avowed, and unyielding rebellion; to declare that his reign of error and confusion is over; and that henceforth, like a falling dynasty, he must shrink and disappear, leaving the throne and the kingdom of science and philosophy to those awakening intellects whose numbers are constantly increasing, and whose march is rapid and irresistible. The soldiers of truth and reason of the Flat Earth Society have drawn the sword, and ere another generation has been educated and grown to maturity, will have forced the usurpers to abdicate. Like the decayed and crumbling trees of an ancient forest, rent and shattered by wind and storm, the hypothetical philosophies, which have hitherto cumbered the civilized world, are unable to resist the elements of experimental and logical criticism; and sooner or later must succumb to their assaults. The axe is uplifted for a final stroke - it is about to fall upon the primitive sphere of the earth, and the blow will surely “cut the cumberer down!”

The FES is nothing if not ambitious. Their Wiki contains a number of interesting explanations of common arguments against the Flat Earth hypothesis, of which I shall present a few:

On High Altitude Photography

Most amateur pictures of the earth are not doctored. Flat Earth Theory holds that there is elliptical curvature from the edge of space, one hundred miles in altitude. Any photograph showing a curved elliptical horizon from very high altitudes poses no affront to FE.
...
Curvature results from the fact that on a flat earth we are looking down at the circular spotlight of the sun. A circle is always curved in two dimensions. When looking down at the circular area of the sun's light upon the earth we see elliptical curvature.

On Occam's Razor

Occam's Razor asks us which explanation makes the least number of assumptions. The explanation which makes the least number of assumptions is the simplest explanation. Occam's Razor works in favor of the Flat Earth Theory. Several examples exist below.

What's the simplest explanation; that my experience of existing upon a plane wherever I go and whatever I do is a massive illusion, that my eyes are constantly deceiving me and that I am actually looking at the enormous sphere of the earth spinning through space at tens of thousands of miles an hour, whirling in perpetual epicycles around the universe; or is the simplest explanation that my eyes are not playing tricks on me and that the earth is exactly as it appears?
...
When I walk off the edge of a chair and go into free fall while observing the surface of the earth carefully the earth appears to accelerate up towards me. What's the simplest explanation; that there exists hypothetical undiscovered Graviton particles emanating from the earth which allows them to accelerate my body towards the surface through unexplained quantum effects; or is the simplest explanation that this mysterious highly theoretical mechanism does not exist and the earth has just accelerated upwards towards me exactly as I've observed?

On Undersea Cables 

Q. If a cable company put down a cable its length would have to be longer than predicted (by round earth geometry) if the world were flat. If somebody put down a bunch of cables and found that they were longer than they'd expected, wouldn't they tell somebody?

A. But the cables are always longer than expected. It's just explained by underwater currents, soil irregularity, winds and errors in placement, et cetera. And somewhere in that is lost a mistake caused by a slight misunderstanding of the Earth's shape

This last one is actually quite testable. All it would take is a bit of data about undersea topography, the chord length between points on a sphere, and the actual amount of undersea cable laid down. I wonder if anyone in the FES has bothered?

[Coincidentally, the beautiful image on the left is currently on my computer desktop.]












On The Burden of Proof

Q. Isn't the burden of proof on you to prove it?

A. No. You're the one claiming that NASA can send men to the moon, robots to mars, and space ships into the solar system. We're not claiming those things.
...
You're the one making all of these fantastic claims. You're the one claiming that earth orbit exists, government contractors can land man on the moon, send robots to mars, and that we can do all of these amazing never before done things.

The burden is on you to prove these things to us. You're the one making the claim. The simplest explanation is that NASA really can't do all of that stuff.

If two people are having a debate, should the burden of proof rest on the shoulders of the person who make the most complicated claim, or should the burden of proof rest on the shoulders of the person who makes the simplest and easily observable claim?

In a discussion on the existence of ghosts should the burden of proof be on the group mumbling "just because you can't see something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist," or should the burden of proof be on skeptics to prove that ghosts *don't* exist?
...
The burden of proof is always on the claimant and never on the skeptic. The burden of proof is on you.

I'll answer that. You don't get to be a skeptic just because you do or don't believe in something. Skepticism requires honest understanding of the facts; it requires credible hypotheses; it requires evidence that rises above a reasonable threshold of crackpottery. It is not the burden of the skeptic to explain to every crackpot why the pot is cracked. Indeed, answering an irrational query with rational arguments can be something of a fool's errand. That doesn't mean the skeptics shouldn't try, just that the skeptic is not responsible for the willful irrationality of the crackpot.

Why yes, that IS a severe side effect

Found via Improbable Research:

Medical attention for Tikosyn

Richard Simmons PE Crudade Victorious!

A year ago I wrote about Richard Simmons PE Crusade , and there is recent news of considerable progress. MetaDeb tells me that the legislation is now included in this years No Child Left Behind package. This news come from a recent Today Show interview with RS, but I haven't been able to confirm this thru any other source in a casual search. I'm hopeful that it is true.

Richard Simmons' appearance on the Today Show also included this surprising appearance together with William Shatner:



I say that is surprising, because with simmons and Shattner together, I did not know it was possible to fit that much HAM into a single television studio. ;-)

Depressing News for Grad Students

From Discoblog:

Alien Math Shows Why Grad Student Doesn’t Have a Girlfriend

 PS: This is old news to most grad students.

The smell of asparagus

I like it when science and humor cross-pollinate, but sometimes it's even funnier when it's completely serious. You just can't make up stuff like this:

Br Med J  1980;281:1676-1678 (20 December),
doi:10.1136/bmj.281.6256.1676

A polymorphism of the ability to smell urinary metabolites of asparagus.

M Lison, S H Blondheim, R N Melmed

The urinary excretion of (an) odorous substance(s) after eating asparagus is not an inborn error of metabolism as has been supposed. The detection of the odour constitutes a specific smell hypersensitivity. Those who could smell the odour in their own urine could all smell it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus, whether or not that person was able to smell it himself. Thresholds for detecting the odour appeared to be bimodal in distribution, with 10% of 307 subjects tested able to smell it at high dilutions, suggesting a genetically determined specific hypersensitivity.

Discoblog has a longer exposition on the topic:

NCBI ROFL: Asparagus, urine, farts, and Benjamin Franklin (Part I)

Hula-Hoops, Confidence Intervals, and Invisible Men

In addition to doing statistical analysis, a big part of my job is explaining the meaning of the results. I am privileged to work with a lot of really smart people on all manner of biomedical and translational research. However, "really smart" does not always mean that everyone is highly numerate; some people just are not good at expressing themselves that way. That's OK too, not everyone can be expected to be good at everything, but it does present a special challenge sometimes when I need to explain something statistical to someone who has difficulty understanding. Somewhat surprisingly, the toughest questions are not about the most complex mathematics. Instead, the hardest questions to answer are often on the most basic concepts.

Case in point, a few days ago I was asked to define a confidence interval for a client who needed to be able it explain the concept to yet another colleague who was asking her. Here I have someone not-too-numerate needing to explain it to someone else likely not-too-numerate, and it's important, so I needed to give a clear and simple definition for her to understand and pass on.

A bit of background before I give my definition; this was relating to an observational study on clinical data, and we have a large number of means, standard errors, and confidence intervals to report. All intervals presented at at a 95% confidence level.

A confidence interval (CI) is a range of values that is likely to contain the actual value we want to know. For the purposes of this paper we have made a lot of single value estimates, or point estimates, of the means and slopes in which we are interested. Although this is not a random sample, we hope that this patient sample is an unbiased representation of a larger group of similar patients. If we were to repeat the study with another group, we would hope to get similar results, as opposed to very different findings. Confidence intervals represent a reasonable range of values that might be the true value that represents the entire population, and not just the single sample we happen to have. The confidence level is the probability, here 95%, that the true value we are trying to determine is actually within the interval.

To make sure I got the full meaning across, I added a bit about how to interpret confidence intervals.

Confidence intervals are very useful for interpreting the clinical importance of a finding. If the low and low ends of the interval are both clinically meaningful and not too far apart, then we can be fairly certain of a sound result even though we have some uncertainty due to sampling error. If the CI is “wide” there might be a lot of room for interpretation of what the result really means. The width of a confidence interval is directly related to the statistical significance. There is also a matter of “clinical significance” – not everything that is statistically significant is clinically meaningful, and vice-versa.

I wrote that up and fired it off in an email, but I felt like I still hadn't gotten it simple enough. I needed an easy non-technical example, and a moment of inspiration hit me; the Hula-Hoop as an analogy to a confidence interval, and an invisible man as the population the interval is trying to capture:

A simpler/sillier definition: You are throwing a hula-hoop at an invisible man. You can be pretty sure that you have actually caught the invisible man inside the hoop (95%), but you can’t be certain. If it is a big hula-hoop, you still don’t know exactly where he is. If the hula-hoop is small enough then you know almost exactly where he is, or close enough that you don’t care.


Now think about throwing “statistical hula-hoops” at the values you want to know about the general population to report in your study. You have captured most of them inside the hoops (95%), but you still don’t know precisely where they are.

Perhaps not the finest hour of statistical science, but if it gets the point across I'll still be happy with it.

[image - 100 hula hoops] 

A Holiday Message from DTA

 


 

Wee Fish

Ewe

 

A Mare

Egrets


  

Moose

Panda

Hippo

Gnu

Deer!














Hint: It helps if you sing it.

"Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose panda hippo gnu deer" 

[All photos Animals Pictures Archive]  

Many Exciting Tables

Found in an online SPSS guide (very near the bottom):

SPSS gives you many exciting tables for repeated measures ANOVA, most of which you can ignore in whole or at least in part. [emphasis added]

Wow! Not only is it an exciting statistical result, but you can probably just ignore it??? WHAT!?!

Likely anyone who isn't a statistician won't see the humor in that -  But to see these described on one hand as "exciting tables" (somehow unlikely), and "can just ignore" on the other hand is unexpected, to the the least. Trust me; the statisticians are ROTFLAO.

Creation Museum Claims Proven

Proof positive the Man and Dinosaur co-existed!

FOR NO PARTICULAR
REASON OUR STORY IS LAID
IN THE "STONE AGE" - MILLIONS
AND BILLIONS AND TRILLIONS
OF YEARS AGO - PROBABLY
BEFORE ANY OF YOU PEOPLE
WERE EVEN BORN

Check out the video for the full story:

UPDATE: The video originally linked on YouTube has since been removed. Click this link to search for a currently available version.


The Real story being Chuck Jones 1939 debut as the director of Daffy Duck - and so history was made.

No Wonder It's Endangered

The hazards of zoology!


I suppose every now and then it may accidentally shag a female of its own species. No wonder it's endangered.

[Via A Simple Prop] 

'Flammable' bras hold back Swedish female conscripts

  But isn't that what they are supposed to do?

'Flammable' bras hold back Swedish female conscripts

[Found on The Local - Sweden's News in English] You just can't make up stuff like this. Some humorously risque comments below the story too.

[Hat Tip 2 Ohiomike]

Feed Me!

Though a miracle of science - Mario Bros. horror brought to life!

Now if you will pardon me, I'm going to be hiding under my desk armed with hedge clippers until the first good hard frost. 

History of Dance

METHINKS it is time for something lighter.



Gotta love French and Saunders.

The Many Talents of Al Franken

Let's see Norm Coleman do this:


[Hat Tip 2 Pharyngula, again, dammit]

When Zombies Attack!

TimesOnline has some important news for us :

The attached study, he said, highlighted "a problem we should wake up to -- this paper shows only the harshest control measures would give us a chance." Just what might this terrifying new threat be?

In my eagerness for a story, I hadn't noticed that Neil had added a smiley face at the end of his email. And when I opened the attachment, I discovered a paper entitled: "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection".

Move over swine flu. The zombies are coming...

[Image LaughingSquid]

Scary stuff, but even worse, the first commenter writes ...

I would just like to comment about the example of Zombies from '28 Days Later'.

They weren't actually Zombies; In the movie they are listed as the Infected. Zombies in the traditional sense cannot starve to death while the Infected in '28 Days Later' can in fact starve as seen in the ending scene.
[emphasis added]

[RantMode=ON]
This just kills me. There is no way in which the movie 28 Days Later does not completely satisfy all aspects of the zombie movie genre. A few seconds of emaciated, and more importantly [IIRC, 'cause ain't watching that dog again] partially dismembered ZOMBIES at the end does not make it not-a-zombie=movie.
[RantMode=OFF]
[Hat Tip to the Sciencepunk]