The Official Cricketweb Science Thread!

[Agent Nationaux]

@SS and Spark

Would you recommend those Feynman books to a novice like me? Are they difficult to understand?

[Spark]

They're probably the clearest books on their topics you'll find. He was a peerless communicator.

[silentstriker]

Originally Posted by Agent Nationaux

@SS and Spark

Would you recommend those Feynman books to a novice like me? Are they difficult to understand?

On physics? Well they teach you actual physics (Eg with math). They aren't pop-sci books which deal with ideas. The lectures are from a two year course on physics that he tried. Meaning, they are substitutes (or at least additions to) actual physics textbooks.

[silentstriker]

Newfound exoplanet may turn to dust: Planet’s dust cloud may explain strange patterns of light from its star

[silentstriker]

'Rare' genetic variants are surprisingly common, life scientists report

[silentstriker]

Acid in the brain: New way to look at brain function

[silentstriker]

Patients' skin cells turned into heart muscle cells to repair their damaged hearts

[Quaggas]

Yogurt diet leads to ‘swaggering’ mice with larger testicles

There you have it.

[silentstriker]

Haha nice.


Rewritable memory encoded into DNA : Nature News & Comment

[silentstriker]

Organic carbon from Mars, but not biological

[silentstriker]

Tiny planet-finding mirrors borrow from Webb Telescope playbook

[weldone]

Ludic fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Quaggas]

That article has a certain strawmannish quality about it.

[silentstriker]

Originally Posted by weldone

Ludic fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A third party asks them, "assume a fair coin is flipped 99 times, and each time it comes up heads. What are the odds that the 100th flip would also come up heads?"

Dr John says that the odds are not affected by the previous outcomes so the odds must still be 50:50.
Fat Tony says that the odds of the coin coming up heads 99 times in a row are so low (less than 1 in 6.33 × 1029) that the initial assumption that the coin had a 50:50 chance of coming up heads is most likely incorrect.

Yea, well in a real life scenario, it would indeed be logical to question whether the coin flip is indeed fair - we do that all the time in reality (and in science) if we get results that seem odd. But that doesn't change the odds of the situation given in the premise (e.g fair coin).

A man considers going to a job interview. He recently studied statistics and utility theory in college and performed well in the exams. Considering whether to take the interview, he tries to calculate the probability he will get the job versus the cost of the time spent.

This young job seeker forgets that real life has more variables than the small set he has chosen to estimate. Even with a low probability of success, a really good job may be worth the effort of going to the interview. Will he enjoy the process of the interview? Will his interview technique improve regardless of whether he gets the job or not? Even the statistics of the job business are non-linear. What other jobs could come the man's way by meeting the interviewer? Might there be a possibility of a very high pay-off in this company that he has not thought of?

That's not a fallacy - that's just a bad statistical model which ignores a lot of variables.

[silentstriker]

Climate change led to collapse of ancient Indus civilization, study finds