Goes to my point about throwing away data points that disagree with your hypothesis being bad science.

At the time, the science was solid.

To date, no one has disproven this, and from my point of view the “Global Warming” crowd are really the “impending Ice Age deniers”.

Your guest talks about faulty science from the anti-Evolution/anti-Global Warming crowd.

That doesn’t seem to be exclusively on one side.

I hear a lot of discussion about “Greenhouse Gases” that completely ignores the huge variations of solar output (which incidentally track warming trends closely).

That sounds like bad science to me: throwing away data that disagrees with your hypothesis.

And the thermal mass of the oceans is significantly greater than that of the atmosphere, but we focus on atmospheric gases while ignoring oceanographic phenomena, such as costal desalinization.

Again, “good science” doesn’t involve cherry picking your data points.

And gratuitously bashing Fox News? Really?

Loosen up your red bandana… it’s not meant to be tourniquet to your brain.

Rather that presenting well-reasoned arguments, you’ve decayed into tired mantras and cliches… Fox News isn’t so much relevant to this discussion as it is a rallying cry in the “us versus them” monologue of division.

Fox News was one of the few outlets to report that Russian climatological data had been forged, and that University of East Anglia had been cherry picking data that disagreed with their models.

That they disagree with your agenda doesn’t mean they lack relevancy or value in this debate.

If your science is indeed solid, it will undermine the position that you claim Fox has, rather than you needing to undermine their credibility with unsubstantiated attacks and innuendo.

(Other than the fact that it would offend Jane Fonda’s sensitivities?)

It’s renewable, it doesn’t generate carbon, it doesn’t use fossil fuel, it isn’t unpredictable (like wind or solar)…

Electric cars and nuclear power seem to be the ideal union… yet you don’t even consider it.

Pursuit of truth? … or an agenda…

Honestly, Justin, get out of that show.

Am I confused, or perhaps Justin was being facetious? I couldn’t quite tell.

1) $1,000 genomes. I think you were right on about the risks of Doctors (and maybe others) using this info improperly and incorrectly. Unfortunately it is like any other new development. Professionals are bound to use something new in a way it shouldn’t be. And not necessarily in a malicious way… just out of ignorance. And people will both be critical that Doctors are using it too much as well as not enough. Hopefully, the majority will be wise enough to use the info sparingly as it becomes more available to minimize the abuses that can occur. Its just a natural cycle for anything new.

2) Caffeine: Move aside Nostradamas… Woody Allen has you beat! The movie Sleeper has a famous scene about how in the future, they realized that smoking, alcohol, and red meat are all GREAT for you! Well, red wine is proven good… now coffee in excessive quantities…. my only question is, when do I start smoking at my steak dinner?!?

Your responses seem to be emotionally tied to a certain line of questioning in physics and anything that does not agree is seen as disrespectful to you…
There are two separate issues here:
1. You are often wrong.
When you’re wrong about something, I sometimes provide the correct explanation.
You accuse me of being closed minded, and of rejecting “anything that does not agree” with me.
This is hypocritical nonsense, because you’re the one unswayed by clear, powerful, logical argument.
1. You are often disrespectful.
Being so often wrong, you seek a sorely lacking justification for these contrarian beliefs.
So, you put down the out-crowd of “scientific elites”.
You escape the cognitive dissonance of the unknown by burrowing in a nest of quack science.

So far I’m winning.
You feel the need to prove your position by keeping score.
You ignore the losses and tally only the wins.
You point to success over fools as evidence for your superiority over your opponent and their stronger argument.
So pitiful.

The LHC is running.
No, it’s shut down for the winter.

A real gem, that one.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/12/403005/energy-efficiency-lives-debunking-rebound-effect-and-breakthrough-institute/

- Faithful listener – McSchane

You are wrong. Electric cars are are better (even when coal powered) than gasoline powered cars. Research it, see what The Sierra Club and the American Lung Association and actual studies have found rather than you incorrect from the hip statements! Point: Gasoline refining uses ELECTRICITY, about 6kWh per gallon. So an electric cars cut out that process and all the pollution associated with the gas, drilling, spilling, and burning, while using that same amount of electricity per mile.

That said, I agree that we need more renewable electricity generation, but EVs do not need to wait for it. Related: EV drivers are far more likely to be solar panel owners or buy renewable energy from their utility provider.

My new fave quote is vis Michio Kaku regarding this
http://bigthink.com/ideas/41579

“…the Standard Model does not contain gravity…”

This is the root of all my physics rants

So you think it’s better to keep burning gasoline and not give more reasons to abandon coal? Surely you realize that not 100% of electricity comes from coal, right? That was the single most absurd thing I’ve ever heard you say.

For one, the people opting to buy an electric car are gonna be the ones who are already aware enough to get green electricity – and especially those who are already 100% green with their own solar/wind.

Thank’s for an otherwise great show!
Regards,
Mikael Grön of Sweden.

I do not think the scientific community is made up of elitists make-ity-uping stuff to get grant money, but I have predicted the Higgs boson not to exist since before the LHC was finished.
I have never said the curvature of space is nonsense, I believe this IS gravity.
I have never said that black holes are too scary to exist, but I do I doubt that they trap light.
I have never said that red shift could be anything, I have said that it is a poor measurement by which to believe the entire universe is ballooning away from itself.

You accuse me of having a personal doctrine of defiance before reason…
I think you are missing what we do here entirely.
This is not a lecture, this is not a course in physics or biology or cosmology course.
It is science news stories, sometimes un-vetted, and we don’t just read the stories, we comment, speculate, debate and perform reason.
I take opposing ideas sometimes to give them a shot at being argued, and at other times because I genuinely like them.

Your responses seem to be emotionally tied to a certain line of questioning in physics and anything that does not agree is seen as disrespectful to you…
This reminds me of the reactions I used to get from my older rants which also received lots of heated overblown criticism when I would say that natural selection didn’t seem like enough basis for evolution. I suggested that action in a parent’s lifetime would influence the genetic traits of the offspring.
I got letters such as yours, filled with outrage and emotion and was attacked for doubting natural selection as the end all explanation of evolution, and of course my failure to understand the issue was giving ammunition to creationists.
Since then the role of epigenetics and the adjustments that take place due to the childhood conditions of the father as well as the hormonal stresses of the pregnant mother have been shown to have important roles in influencing generational changes in offspring.
I received very little heat for suggesting Neanderthals weren’t killed off, but more likely bred out of existence by early humans… but it wasn’t a popular idea when I said it and since then we’ve discovered that all European races have traces of Neanderthal DNA in them…
I liked the Hobbit homo floresiensis as a new species, not a diseased island dwarf… most experts rejected the idea, but the evidence panned out in favor of new species.
The Higgs was predicted to be found with 95% certainty by people dedicated to a line of questioning…
I predicted otherwise.
The LHC is running… I’m still in the hot tub…
So far I’m winning.

Thanks for the great show!

Thanks

Justin, you are in the habit of playing victim to an imagined cult of oppressive scientific sophists.
When in fact, you’re just afraid of and/or unable to grasp the science.
You’re no brave heretic, nailing the Magna Carta to the church doors. Please!
This delusion is as transparent and permeable as the arguments you concoct to rationalize it.

You don’t understand the Higgs mechanism well enough to satisfy natural, healthy skepticism.
You haven’t studied the Standard Model enough to see the significance of non-zero W and Z masses.
It doesn’t come together in your head. It doesn’t make sense. So you reject it.

You reject it the only way you know how: label it as dogma.
Then you play the free-thinking hero fighting the preordained opinions of universities, etc.
You run in terror from the pursuit of knowledge, to hide in fear and ignorance.
I cannot blame you for this. This is not my complaint.
Many people don’t have the stomach for, of all things, particle physics!
I mean, all that math? So intimidating!

But then, you do something unethical, and, to me, fearsomely evil.
You dispense a deluge of delusional diarrhea, on the radio, for all to hear:

*pffthhhht* Ohhhh, the Higgs Boson, what nonsense, scientific elitists trying to justify their grant money!
*poomhhh* Uuuuh, the curvature of space-time, what nonsense; and black holes? Too scary to be real!
*poshputts* Mmmmh, the universe expanding, what nonsense, redshift could be anything, CMBR be damned!

Don’t you feel sorry for your listeners?
It’s bad enough that on TWIS, you go into little more depth than the headline of most stories…
Add to it this frightened, uninformed rambling…

I am worried that TWIS is making it’s listeners DUMBER, not SMARTER.

Your poor listeners do suffer, greatly.

What you call “irreverent” I call insulting, intolerant, often incorrect, and proudly ignorant.

I want you to stop.
I want you to research rumors before sharing them as facts.
I want you to keep your unjustified and scientifically unfounded opinions to yourself.
I want you to keep your desperate negativity and childish pride off the air.
I’m tired of it.

Down with the Higgs-Boson!

LOL

[The Fukushima Disaster] opened people’s eyes [about nuclear safety].
Despite his mispronunciation (it’s foo-koo-shee-mah), I strongly AGREE with Justin!
As of September 2011, there were no deaths or serious injuries due to direct radiation exposures.
You spoke of “the terrible events that took place in Japan” as though they happened only in Fukushima.
They happened all along the cost of Japan! 125,000 buildings damaged or destroyed! Over 15,000 dead!!!
Proselytizing nuclear paranoia while thousands of bodies decompose at sea is a morbid sacrilege.
To usurp such a tragedy, wherein so many lives were lost, towards an anti-nuclear (or any) agenda is opprobrious.
Spread THAT message, not the tired old “nuclear is too dangerous” lie.
While you’re at it, pick up a copy of Power to Save the World by Gwyneth Cravens.

Anyway.. always a great show but I have a criticism for this episode regarding the “Worst science paper of the year”. In fairness, I am usually doing chores while I listen to the podcast so I may have missed something.

Your opinions on this seemed to be more based on a dislike of the theory then facts…. even made up ones by Justin! (LoL).

1) Kirsten: You said that “most births are by caesarian”. Not true. I would agree that mankind can surpass the restriction on brain size by doing that but that is not what you said. Could have just been a simple mistatement of course.

2) Justin: You harped on brain size and eugenics. Obviously, eugenics has been debunked since WWII but the idea that brain size can’t affect intelligence is wrong. Now the way eugenics tried to separate races by brain size and color, etc, was of questionable measurements and crappy science. But the basic idea that the brain of a human developed larger since the days of the early hominids is tied directly to our intelligence as well as other abilities (language, abstractions, etc). I thought it was a bit harsh to hint that these guys were following Nazis science!

3) I am not familiar with the concept of Ashkanazi (sp?) Jews being more intelligent but is it really crazy to think that as we evolve certain traits or increase existing ones that there are going to be trade-offs? You guys even talked about autism possibly being a trait that helped early man and you even talked about how the brain gave some excellent skills at the cost of ones that, at the time, might not have mattered. But the trade-off was there.

Now I’m not saying I agree 100% with the concept of the paper. But I thought you guys were putting it down for all the wrong reasons and not really giving it the criticism it needed or the discussion it deserved.

Please tell me if I missed something or if there was something not mentioned that may have been more of a factor… I would love to know if I’m wrong on this.

Anyway… Great show regardless!

Down with the Higgs-Boson!

POINT 1: Have Something?
Does CERN Have something? Yes.
They have something momentous and exciting: a years worth of physics!
This fabulous work by hundreds of scientists is worthy of our applause.
It is also worth a moment of air time to share the results.
But, they didn’t discover the Higgs Boson, right?
Well, in science, a null result is JUST AS IMPORTANT as a positive result!

POINT 2: Miscommunication.
The news media was invited to a NASA “exobiology event” that was not properly described.
The topic and contents of the lecture were not disclosed before hand.
This appears to have been a dishonest ploy to spice up the audience.
CERN did not do this.

POINT 3. Prematurity.
Wolf-Simon’s research was in the preliminary stage:
- The experiment was not reproduced by an independent party/lab.
This is no problem for the LHC, which has two labs, run by independent groups: ATLAS and CMS.
- The results were not put up for peer review prior to the press conference.
Compare this to CERN, a fountainhead of peer reviewed papers.
Every day I scroll through the long list of new, high energy physics papers pregnant with LHC data.

POINT 4. The word “Discovery”.
Incorrect use: We report the discovery of an unusual microbe [that] can vary the elemental composition of its basic biomolecules
Correct use: these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.
How is using a word correctly “even worse” than using it incorrectly?

the press release was actually released prior to the presentation as most press releases are
No. The document released prior to the presentation is called a “media invitation”:
(December 6th) http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1031281
The document I referred to, and assumed you were referring to on-air is a “press release”:
(December 13th) http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR25.11E.html
This argument over the publication dates of documents is silly!
CERN public relations can’t get away with, and has no reason to be dishonest or flamboyant.

… this whole thing wasn’t newsworthy.
If you define newsworthy as interesting enough to the general public to warrant reporting, then you may be right.
The first-year run of the LHC may be entirely uninteresting to the general public…
But, isn’t the whole purpose of TWIS to MAKE SCIENCE FUN AND INTERESTING?
Isn’t TWIS supposed to be the one place I go to find the knowledge I seek?
I want to know, what’s happening, I WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THE LHC!!!!
How can you sweep this opportunity to celebrate of the cutting edge of particle physics under the rug?!
Talk about CMS and ATLAS, what they look for, how they work, how they are different.
Talk about how high the energy levels are, why that matters for looking for heavier particles.
Talk about why they turned the LHC off for the winter, when it will be coming back online.
Talk about how they look for the Higgs, the unique signature events studied by CMS and ATLAS.
Talk about something, anything, but don’t pretend the whole year can be summed up as a dog and pony show.
You are poisoning your listeners with wrought pessimism and disdain for the scientific process!

I also read a lot of other related material to inform myself and reach my opinion, which, to make it succinct, was that this whole thing wasn’t newsworthy. The press releases, the presentations… much ado about a little bit of progress. I don’t think I was insensitive. I called it like I saw it: a physics dog and pony show. That doesn’t mean that the scientists didn’t present well. They did. It just means the content wasn’t worth all the hubbub.

I stopped listening after Kirsten badmouthed CERN for the Higgs Search Status seminar.
Kirsten, did you even read the press release?
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR25.11E.html
It was submitted to the media AFTER the full science seminar.
Comparing this seminar to the NASA/Arsenic debacle is unfair and offensive.
If you’ll recall, NASA put out a misleading press release BEFORE the seminar!

Did you watch the December 2011 Higgs Update seminar?
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1406786
Both Fabiola Gianotti (ATLAS) and Guido Tornelli (CMS) were great!
They exaggerated nothing, and presented the science without a trace of bias.
I ask that you apologize, on air, for this insensitive and ignorant insult.

40:30 Nobody, until now, has actually been able to [run a String Theory Monty Carlo simulation].
This is NOT the first computer simulation of string theory!
Monty Carlo computer simulations of string theory have been performed since the 1980s.
This article talks about the first simulation of a particular model, the IKKT matrix model.
This model is interesting because it shows evolution from SO(9) to SO(3).

43:30 It’s a nice model, but… show me a Higgs boson.
This is a horribly insinuative and foolish comment.
Sang-Woo Kim, Jun Nishimura, and Asato Tsuchiya are working on a fascinating theoretical model.
Their work is respected in the community, but obviously not by you, Justin.
Maybe you should keep your mouth shut if you don’t have anything to add.
Stop being a nay-saying jerk.

Anyway, congratulations and keep up the good work!

David Johnson
http://www.davidj.org/

Zhang Hong, a deputy editor with the Economic Observer newspaper, was fired after co-writing a March 1, 2010, editorial carried in 13 Chinese newspapers advocating the abolition of China’s discriminatory hukou (household registration) system.

China Economic Times editor Bao Yuehang was fired in May 2010 in apparent retaliation for a March 17, 2010, story that exposed vaccine quality shortfalls in Shanxi province linked to four children dying and at least 74 others falling ill.

On April 20, 2010, 10 unidentified assailants attacked Beijing News reporter Yang Jie while he photographed the site of a forced eviction. Police at the scene briefly detained the assailants before releasing them, characterizing their actions as a “misunderstanding.”
On September 8, 2010, security guards beat three reporters from Jilin and Changchun television stations attempting to cover a fire at the City College of Jilin Architecture and Civil Engineering.

http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2011/china

Yes, many Christian, namely Catholics, believe that taking the oral contraceptive pill is a sin.
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/birth-control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_contraception

Here is the paper by Margel and Fleshner:
http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/2/e000311.full

The authors were careful to include in their summary:

This study is an ecological study and thus has significant limitations with respect to causal inference. It must be considered hypothesis generating, and thought provoking.

… but you still get ignorant headlines like Is oral contraceptive pill fuelling prostate cancer?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/10/31/man-with-schizophrenia-has-out-of-body-experience-in-lab-gains-knowledge-controls-his-psychosis/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlGZalFIVrE

http://soundcloud.com/community-team/sets/twis/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter20111122&utm_content=newsletter20111122+CID_0734499512c382cf4404c32910c9f2d2&utm_source=soundcloud&utm_term=TWiS