Contriving

One of my favorite quotes of all time is the one in the below image, which I've shared on G+ before.  I just came across another quote along the same lines from the estimable Charles Darwin.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

Charles Darwin

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Originally posted on Google+ · February 5, 2013

Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.

R Scott Bakker, Neuropath

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Originally posted on Google+ · February 5, 2013

I had some good ideas for some posts today while I was driving around.  And now I can't think of any of them.

Instead I'll post a few quotes.

Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.

Steward Brand, Whole Earth Discipline

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

Johannes Kepler

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Originally posted on Google+ · February 5, 2013

Now this is the kind of legal officer I'd like to have on my side.

For Newegg's chief legal officer Lee Cheng, it's a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever.

"We basically took a look at this situation and said, this is bullshit," said Cheng in an interview with Ars. "We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we'd have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents."

It’s game over for a patent troll that sued nearly 50 big retailers.

Originally posted on Google+ · January 27, 2013

Celestial navigation has guided man around the world for several thousand years. A new study suggests it could also be guiding dung beetles.

Looks like crap to me.

Celestial navigation has guided man around the world for several thousand years. A new study suggests it could also be guiding dung beetles. Marie

Originally posted on Google+ · January 26, 2013

About a minute in to this video taken from the lunar rover you kind of get a first person view of what it's like to drive around on the moon.

The weird thing to me is that because the moon is so much smaller than the earth it almost feels like you're going to drive off the edge of the moon!

H/T to Robert Krulwich for pointing this out.

Originally posted on Google+ · January 25, 2013

1. Given a sugar pill (which has no physical effect) people with certain conditions not only report feeling better, but see actual improvements in their condition.
2. Called the dose-response placebo effect, given two sugar pills, people report twice the benefit of one sugar pill (Demonstration to medical students of placebo responses and non-drug factors, Blackwell, 1972).  Interestingly, the Blackwell study also showed that pink placebo pills worked better as a stimulant and blue placebo pills worked better as a relaxant. There have been multiple other studies demonstrating this effect. See also Shapiro (1970) and the work by Moerman where he looked at clinical trials with ulcer treatments.
3. If someone believes a placebo has a negative effect, they can experience that negative effect.  This is called a nocebo. (Magne Flaten, Terje Simonsen, and Harald Olsen, “Drug-Related Information Generates Placebo and Nocebo Responses That Modify the Drug Response,” Psychososomatic Medicine, 61, no. 2 (1999): 250-255)
4. If a sugar pill is described as a muscle relaxant it will cause muscle relaxation.  If the same type of sugar pill is described as causing muscle tension, it will produce muscle tension.(Placebo-induced side effects. Shapiro, Arthur K.; Chassan, Jacob; Morris, Louis A.; Frick, Robert, Journal of Operational Psychiatry, Vol 6(1), 1974, 43-46)
5. Placebos can produce the same side-effects that the real drug the person thinks they’re taking would also produce. (Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, and Peter C. Gøtzsche, “Is the Placebo Powerless? — An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 344 (2001): 1594-1602, 10.1056/NEJM200105243442106)
6. When conducting a study, it is an error to assume that your treatment produced the improvement and everyone seeing improvement under the placebo are “only” experiencing placebo effects.  It could very well be that everyone who experience an improvement were experiencing a placebo effect. (Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, and Peter C. Gøtzsche, “Is the Placebo Powerless? — An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 344 (2001): 1594-1602, 10.1056/NEJM200105243442106)
7. Saltwater placebos administered via syringe are more effective than sugar pills. The original study is by Traut & Passarelli (1957). There’s been follow up studies since then, including “Do medical devices have enhanced placebo effects?” by Ted J Kaptchuk, Peter Goldman, David A Stone, William B Stason
8. Pacemakers improve heart function after they’ve been put in, but before they’ve been switched on. (Placebo effect of pacemaker implantation in obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy Cecilia Linde, Fredrik Gadler, Lukas Kappenberger, Lars Rydén. The American journal of cardiology 15 March 1999 (volume 83 issue 6 Pages 903-907))
9. Give people a sugar pill and tell them it’s a stimulant and they get stimulated.  Give people a relaxant but tell them it’s a stimulant and they get more even more stimulated.  Give people a relaxant, tell them it’s a relaxant and they have more molecules of the relaxant in their blood plasma than the people you gave a relaxant to but told them it was a stimulant. (Magne Flaten, Terje Simonsen, and Harald Olsen, “Drug-Related Information Generates Placebo and Nocebo Responses That Modify the Drug Response,” Psychososomatic Medicine, 61, no. 2 (1999))
10. We’re still pretty confused about the placebo effect and it’s causes.  There’s a mishmash of different things going on and we’re still picking them apart. Also, it’s really hard to design studies!