It used to be the case that all hurricane names from 1953 to 1978 were female because hurricanes were ‘unpredictable’ just like women (!) but that kind of sexist stereotyping became unacceptable and they decided to alternate between male and female names.
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In Ohio, there has been a disturbing rise this year in illnesses like measles that were once thought to have been defeated by vaccination programs. The Daily Show had a good segment about the dangers that the anti-vaccination movement is posing to all of us.
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A dishwasher is the most mysterious domestic appliance. You shut the door, turn it on, hear the sounds of sloshing water, and the dishes appear clean. I had assumed that it was something like a clothes washing machine in that it filled the container with water and then churned it around. But I noticed that our new dishwasher seemed to go into the sloshing sound mode pretty quickly, long before there would be time to fill the volume. So I was glad to come across this video where someone had placed a camera inside the dishwasher to reveal its secrets.
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Rob Brooks asks you to take a pop quiz:
When Jack was young, he began inflicting harm on animals. It started with just pulling the wings off flies, but eventually progressed to torturing squirrels and stray cats in his neighbourhood.
As an adult, Jack found that he did not get much thrill from harming animals, so he began hurting people instead. He has killed 5 homeless people that he abducted from poor neighbourhoods in his home city. Their dismembered bodies are currently buried in his basement.
Now, knowing what I have just told you about Jack, is it more probable that Jack is: A) A teacher. Or B) A teacher who does not believe in God?
It is quite odd how some things that should be obvious are not so purely because tradition has deadened our sensibility. For example, it has long been standard practice for medical research on animals to use only male specimens since it was argued that the presence of female hormones would add another uncontrollable variable in the testing. This seemed reasonable enough that it was uncontroversial until people started finding that when the resulting medicines were used on women, unexpected things happened. The National Institutes of Health now demands that all testing be done on both males and females, something that seems glaringly obvious now.
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One of the commonly heard aphorisms of reasoning is that correlations do not imply causation. It is good to be periodically reminded that correlations themselves can sometimes be so high as to suggest causality and this site offers a few amusing spurious correlations, reminding us to not be seduced into taking them seriously.
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He suggests that talk shows should change their format so as to more accurately reflect the weight of scientific support on either side.
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Owners of dogs don’t need much convincing to believe that their pets can sense their moods and respond accordingly. But now scientists have done something quite remarkable and that is to train dogs to lie so still that their brains can be studied in an MRI machine and their response to emotionally loaded sounds analyzed and compared to those of human subjects.
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Scientists have created a computer simulation that produces a realistic picture of the evolution of the universe, starting from just after the Big Bang to the present, compressing the 13.7 billion years into just over two minutes.
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