What are you working on? April 2012

David_Gerard

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

I've been on holiday for the past two weeks. I had a to-do list this long, so of course I did other stuff. Most of what I actually achieved was working on two cover-status articles for RationalWiki.

Freeman on the land - like the sovereign citizen movement with less guns and white-supremacism. They've actually achieved slight notice in the UK, with legal magazine Benchmark even running a feature on them ... which was entirely rewritten from the RW article. Hopefully this article will help keep some of the desperate from being fooled.
101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe - a point-by-point refutation of a Creation Ministries International Gish gallop. This one required actually searching out papers from creationist pseudojournals. The intended audience is people miseducated into creationism who have an Internet connection and are capable of reading and thinking. I have been told by some that the current approach would actually have worked on them, so this article might indeed make the world a better place.

I have other "what have you been working on?" to post, will do so when I have them to link.

Freeman on the land - like the sovereign citizen movement with less guns and white-supremacism. They've actually achieved slight notice in the UK, with legal magazine Benchmark even running a feature on them ... which was entirely rewritten from the RW article. Hopefully this article will help keep some of the desperate from being fooled.

Oh dear, these people. We have them over here too; I could go on for a while about the online arguments I've gotten in over their nonsense, but I'll sum their ineptitude by saying: they gave their website an Irish name, but got the grammar wrong. It doesn't really mean anything.

2gjm14y

What does this actually mean? There seem to be two obvious interpretations. (1) "The expected number of surviving children of a person with the mutation was 10x that of a person without it." That's pretty hard to believe[1]. (2) "Over some unspecified number of generations the average number of descendants per person with the mutation was 10x that of someone without". Isn't that a really silly metric? (Consider a typical very-slightly-beneficial mutation. With probability modestly over 1/2 it gets fixed in the population, and then "people with this mutation left infinity times as many descendants as people without it".) Not to mention that "at the time" then doesn't make much sense. What am I missing here? [1] Most credible approximation to this that I can come up with: first lactose tolerance becomes widespread, then non-human milk becomes an important food source, then lactose intolerance becomes a big big handicap and people without it could easily have 10x fewer surviving offspring. But here the real heavy lifting is done by whatever process gets lactose tolerance widespread in the first place, and there's no explanation for the alleged 10x advantage during that period.