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This was a useful article. Consider making it easier to find by submitting it to the main blog.
Thank you for writing up your insights.
In response to
Clean work gets dirty with time
Thank you. It is entertaining to think about research which is not 'bad' as criticised today, but inefficient due to a once obvious reason, or just incomplete enough to make more work for future scientists:)
Yeah, the involuntary (?) creepiness factor of some series shoot up for me too after coming in contact with LW. On the other side, I appreciated Person of Interest so much more...
Try 'The tale of Guzman's family' in Ch. Maturin's 'Melmoth the Wanderer'. A bit like some stories by O'Henry, and with a happy end. Oddly modern language, considering. I found it incredibly moving and clear (although I cannot see how selling one's soul to the devil is any worse for it than murdering one's entire family).
In response to
Value of Information: Four Examples
Okay, VoI aside, how would you bet in the following setup:
There are three 5 copecks coins, randomly chosen. Each one is dropped 20 times (A0, B0, C0). Then a piece of gum is attached to the heads of Coin A (AGH) & it is dropped 20 times; to the tails of Coin A (AGT); to the heads (BGH) or tails (BGT) of Coin B, & to the tails of Coin C (CGT). Coin C is dropped three times, and the gum attached to the side which appeared two of them. Then, Coin C is dropped twenty times (CGX). The numbers are as follows: A0: heads 14/20, AGT heads 10/20, AGH heads 7/20. B0: heads 8/20, BGT heads 8/20, BGH heads 8/20 (I guess I need to hoard this one.) C0: heads 10/20, CGT heads 11/20, CGX heads 14/20. To what side of Coin C was gum applied in CGX?
Different subjects do seem to require different thinking style, but, at least for me, they are often quite hard to describe in words. If one has an inclination for one style of thinking, can this inclination manifest in seemingly unrelated areas thus leading to unexpected correlations? This blog posts presents an interesting anecdote.
And true for me! Thank you! I have the feeling that 'I've been talking in prose my whole life':)
Although, since we grow our own comb, and the grains can be quite uneven, I confess I sometimes start in the middle.
How does this compare to your ability to think of major research questions in various subfields? It's possible that it's just harder to keep up with current research, either because keeping current is always hard or because there's more stuff you have to know now compared to the past. The examples I hear the most about in physics are models for particle physics beyond the standard model, macroscopic models of gravity and dark energy, and the gigantic muddle over how high temperature superconductivity works.
I don't think I've thought really hard about questions in more than two subfields of botany. There are hard questions which seem to just snowball since Darwin's times, but from what I can tell, there's a major line of research (comparing various groups of plants using progressively complex machinery), from which theories branch off without much re-weighing after initial rejection.
In response to
Value of Information: Four Examples
Where do you get the exact "half-chance of nothing because you don't play"? How do you decide to play or not, given a favorable outcome of the test run?
In response to
Value of Information: Four Examples
But what if your friend offers you to stick the gum to any other coin and let you see which way it lands, to get a feel on how the gum "might" affect the result*, and then offer you this deal? How would you calculate Vol then?
- I ask because I often run into the difference between "physiological" and "ecological" approaches. In the first instance, you might study (for example) "Plant X with/without Fungus Y0 and/or Bacteria Z0" microscope slides, where you carefully inoculate X. In the second, you make slides from X collected in the wild, with who-knows-what growing in it, and have to say if it has Y1 or Z1 or anything at all. I mean, having a previous "physiological" study at hand sure helps, but...are there any quantitative estimates on how much?
In response to
Boring Advice Repository
For parents who have trouble making the kids go to bed on time, like I do myself:
These past two nights, I lured the kid into bed with "Aurora Borealis" made with three really garish coloured rhinestones and a small flash-light (and with a plate of water & a plate of water and vegetable oil, since I was curious about how the images would change). Put the rhinestones on the floor or into the plate (they float between water and oil, but if you press on them, they sink) and direct light onto them (swishing them around, holding the light closer or farther, nudging them - sometimes, in water/oil, they overlapped) so that there is a reflection on the ceiling. (You can just oil them, it gets a sharper gleam than non-treated 'stones.)
I am going to buy some identical ones and try coating one with colourless nail polish, one with oil, and try adding salt to the water (or glycerine... or chlorophyll solution in ethanol... or benzene...) to see if there will be some change in my "Aurora". Good thing the kid is five and I have some time to brush up on my optics:)
In response to
Open thread, Sep. 12 - Sep. 18, 2016
If much effort should be invested in the initial search for hypotheses/explanations, before they are weighed against each other, then how come there are apparently so few cases where more than two major hypotheses are proposed?
I mean, I don't know much about the history of physics, but I do remember being surprised by the (relatively) many models of the Structure of the Atom we heard about in chronological order. And there used to be lots more Trees of Life, back in the XIXth century. But I cannot, on the fly, think of crazy-but-who-knows things of today (well, except for the Search for Ancestors of Angiosperms, it just goes on).
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Short Online Texts Thread
"The Perfect Food and the Filth Disease: Milk-borne Typhoid and Epidemiological Practice in Late Victorian Britain" J. S. Williams. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Vol. 65, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2010), pp. 514-545. If anyone's interested but cannot access the article, PM me and I will send you a copy (made by print-screening the pages from 'net and assembling the images into a .doc file).
A verbose, but on the whole interesting read on an uphill battle fought in 1860-s - 1890-s to have adulterated milk recognized as public health risk. Includes a "subplot" which would make a wonderful period-drama detective story (the typhoid outbreak in London, 1873).