Vertically separated in the same cup without a physical barrier.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Easter Island findings change everything we know about the Earth’s mantle.
The Sound Of Settled Science
In 2003, UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom and I published a study of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)—also called “secondhand smoke” or “passive smoking”—in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Using data from the American Cancer Society’s prospective study of 1 million adults, we concluded that ETS exposure was not associated with increased mortality.
Since that conclusion flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that had long driven state and local bans on smoking in public places, our study understandably sparked a controversy in the public health community. But the intensity of the attack on us in the pages of a medical journal—by critics who were certain that our study had to be wrong but typically failed to provide specific evidence of fatal errors—vividly illustrates what can happen when policy preferences that have taken on the status of doctrine override rational scientific debate.
A recent study by American Cancer Society (ACS) researchers underscores that point by showing that, contrary to what our critics asserted, the cancer risk posed by ETS is likely negligible. The authors present that striking result without remarking on it, which may reflect their reluctance to revisit a debate that anti-smoking activists and public health officials wrongly view as long settled.
Because there’s no grift in “likely negligible”.
Neil Degrasse Tyson is the Kamala Harris of Science
What a complete moron:
Neil Degrasse Tyson on @elonmusk in September 2024:
“Hasn’t done anything that NASA hasn’t already done” . . . . pic.twitter.com/Yu6W5xgYdu
— Nic Cruz Patane (@niccruzpatane) October 15, 2024
If you were ever looking for a sign of why not to always trust “scientists”, this is your sign.
Related: Useless woke California bureaucrats are jealous of Elon Musk’s accomplishments so will put their pettiness into overdrive to stifle American progress. An intrepid reporter should ask Gretchen Newsom and Caryl Hart if they hate all African-Americans or reserve such venomous antipathy for just Musk.
Criminalizing Science Fraud
We’ve seen the way that the scientific establishment went after purveyors of entirely scientific doubts about Covid policy, cancelling those it could and censoring those it couldn’t cancel. The venality, dishonesty, and sheer lust for power and control that marked the Covid response – together with a deeply unimpressive record of actually getting the science right themselves – suggests that our science authorities are not to be trusted with policing science fraud, particularly as they’re often purveyors of fraudulent science themselves.
Yet there really is a problem. Science currently faces a “replication crisis.” in which vast numbers of published results don’t hold up when examined. Whole disciplines (*cough* social psychology *cough*) are so riddled with fraud as to be useless. And the public’s faith in science, which the “fraudbusters” of ORI were trying to preserve, has taken an enormous hit as a result.
Well, every successful system accumulates parasites, and American science has been enormously successful. But now it has accumulated a parasitic load that is rendering it weak and sick. So what do we do?
Follow The Science
Follow the money: Clinical trial ‘guinea pigs’ say they’re incentivized to lie
Private companies in Canada are recruiting thousands of often economically desperate test subjects each year, using incentives that some experts say are both exploitative and push participants to lie.
____________________________________________________________________________Seized with anxiety after days of painful cramps and bloody stool, Franco answered a call from the research company that had been dosing him with an experimental medication in exchange for money.
A staffer told him their tests showed one of his organs was inflamed and that a doctor needed to examine him.
“Is this something, like, permanent?” Franco asked.
“I’m not a doctor,” said the staffer. “I can give you the basic information of what I know … Because of the results that we got, you can’t continue on the trial, OK?”
“I mean, I don’t have an option, right?” Franco replied.
Like many professional clinical trial participants, Franco normally stays quiet about the side effects he experiences. He only gets paid in full if he completes the entire study. Leaving early because of an adverse reaction means he’ll forfeit more than $15,000.
Private companies in Canada are recruiting thousands of often economically desperate test subjects each year, using incentives that some experts say are both exploitative and push participants to lie. When that happens, data that Health Canada uses to approve drugs for the marketplace can be compromised.
Franco and his peers are part of an underground society of so-called “professional guinea pigs” lured by cash, referral bonuses, loyalty points, and other perks advertised by private companies to encourage
them to sell their bodies for pharmaceutical research. […]The government’s inspections of the trials themselves are limited. While Health Canada approves more than 1,000 trials every year, only a small fraction is inspected.
In a statement, Health Canada said it rigorously oversees clinical trials and works to protect the health and safety of participants.
The health agency said it aims to publish new regulations in spring 2025 that will “align with international best practices regarding trial oversight,” including changes that “would result in direct regulatory oversight of third parties involved in conducting clinical trials.” Health Canada did not say what those regulatory changes would be.
Follow The Science
This new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Feral Feminisms presents “femmegimp strategies for navigating and negotiating cultures of undesirability through the creation of queercrip p*rn and collective care.”
One such strategy is via “glitter bath,” which is where a femmegimp takes a bath infused with glitter in order to “bathe in femmegimp excess.” Creating p*rn from the glitter bath helps achieve “queercrip flourishing.”
The author discusses the “transformative pleasure in reveling in the excesses of femmegimp joy.”
Of course, the author also took pictures of her reveling in “glittery femmegimp joy,” which the totally serious peer-reviewed journal published (and which I have blurred).
I’m Going To Miss The Gulf Stream
Tonight On Fight Night
The Sound Of Settled Science
Wrongthink
I can think of a couple of issues besides plate tectonics where scientists have not lived up to the ideals mentioned. Can you?
One aspect of science, however, is a good model for our behavior, especially in times like these, when so many people seem to be sure that they are right and their opponents are wrong. It is the ability to say, “Wait—hold on. I might have been wrong.”
Not all scientists live up to this ideal, of course. But history offers admirable examples of scientists admitting they were wrong and changing their views in the face of new evidence and arguments. My favorite comes from the history of plate tectonics.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Mysterious ‘Dark Oxygen’ Discovered at Bottom of Ocean Stuns Scientists
Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth’s ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life.
This unexpected discovery upends the long-standing consensus that it takes photosynthesizing organisms to produce the oxygen we need to breathe.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Everyone knows that in recent years climate change has fueled floods, storms, and drought, making them much more common and intense. For instance, a 2023 Pew Research poll found that 84% of Americans believed that climate change had contributed to worsening floods, storms, or drought in their local communities.
The widespread public belief in climate change as a cause of the weather events that we experience and see on social media is nowadays conventional wisdom. It is a fact so obvious that it barely needs to be supported at all.
As renowned climate scientist Michael Mann explains, the detection of climate change is as simple as “turn on the television, read the newspaper or look out the window to see what is increasingly obvious to many.”
Given these apparently undeniable realities we might wonder why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) spends so much time and effort on assessing the science of the detection and attribution of changes in climate. Well, for the IPCC at least, science still matters.
Given widespread popular beliefs and media-friendly experts willing to cater to those beliefs, many are surprised, shocked even, to learn that the IPCC has arrived at conclusions on extreme events and climate change that are completely at odds with conventional wisdom and popular opinion.
The Sound Of Settled Science
We found an Excel file on the internet used for marketing
We did no quality control
We did not even check the data
But we did use it to develop a new approach to hurricane normalization
We arrived at results contrary to every other study
Science! ⬇️
Remember Acid Rain?
Bjorn Lomborg- Another environmental scare debunked: Acid rain killing all forests was the main environmental scare in the 1980s. A new half-century study shows acid rain doesn’t kill trees— actually, trees grow more with acid rain!
Science Direct- What happens to trees and soils during five decades of experimental nitrogen loading?
Honey, I Finished The Internet
A good interview if you’re looking to kill a couple of hours: Black Holes, Aliens & How The World Ends
The Sound Of Settled Science
Intelligent Design: Michael Levin on Consciousness, Cognition, Biology, Emergence
…what she had discovered was that if you look at the nascent ectoderm that later will regionalize to become face and mouth, you know, eyes and mouth and all of that, that, um, uh, that, uh, early, early on before all the genes turn on that, um, uh, determine where all those things will go.
The bioelectric pattern within that ectoderm looks like the face. It, it shows you where all this stuff is going to go.
Fascinating stuff.
The Sound Of Settled Science
THE GULF STREAM COULD SHUT DOWN, TRIGGERING A NEW ICE AGE!!!
The Sound Of Settled Science
A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe challenge established ideas about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.
Led by researchers from Penn State and utilizing the NIRSpec instrument on JWST as part of the RUBIES survey, the international team identified three enigmatic objects dating back to 600-800 million years after the Big Bang, a time when the universe was just 5% of its current age. They announced the discovery on June 27 in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The scientists analyzed spectral measurements, or intensity of different wavelengths of light emitted from the objects. Their analysis found signatures of “old” stars, hundreds of millions of years old, far older than expected in a young universe.
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, who started Pergamon Press…