Author: Tim

Understanding Science

I love Science. I think that sharing knowledge and testing ideas against the real world are great ways to find truth.

But, I think Science is really misunderstood. From the evolution-creationism “debate” to “are eggs good for you?”, Science really takes some learning and education to figure out what’s meaningful and what’s bullshit.

When you see something like “Scientists discover fat gene”, what does that really mean? The average person thinks “oh, fat is genetic”, but is that really true? Sometimes, news people report a headline that says “Scientists discover fat gene”, but what actually happened was that some PhD student noticed that people with a certain gene tend to be fat, and wrote a paper. Doesn’t mean it’s right — it means someone turned in their homework.

This is something that’s bugged me for a while. If I had millions of dollars, I would probably spend some of it helping do PR for Science. Key people like teachers, news reporters, and politicians should not be scientific experts, but should understand how to ask questions of scientists and how to make decisions based on scientific information, without being thrown off by bullshit.

The real problem is that this isn’t easy to do. I don’t think anyone’s really figured out how to make the knowledge quickly digestible. The goal should be to make the principles obvious and unambiguous.

I think this article does a very good job on how to evaluate scientific articles about health, which need to be very rigorous, because they can literally result in life-or-death decisions. A lot of the principles in it can be carried over to other scientific disciplines: http://www.badscience.net/2009/09/how-to-read-articles-about-health-by-dr-alicia-white/

This is a cool resource, but I don’t think it’s useful unless you already understand the point of journals and peer review: http://eigenfactor.org/map/

Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit

I found videos of Universal’s new coaster. Looks like I’m gonna be headed there this winter when the lines are empty.

The ride up is awesome looking.

Check it out at night.

The Universal-supplied animation (probably from the company that built the thing) shows off the big swooping turns. It fills in what you can’t see from the other videos, especially the first loop. The ride is supposed to last a minute and 39 seconds, which is pretty good for a fast coaster (65 MPH). There’s also a new restraint system that doesn’t go over your shoulders. I can’t wait to not be flung out of it.

Wikipedia knows all about it.

Amazing Core Workout (or “Do you hate your body? Then do this!”)

Here’s a solid core workout that will get your core…solid. It includes such classics as:

  • Standard crunches
  • Knee-up crunches
  • Hip lifts
  • Oblique crunches
  • Side plank dips
  • Oblique leg extensions
  • Supermans
  • Bridged leg lifts
  • Pushups
  • Heel touches
  • Bicycle crunches
  • Half-up twists (I’ve heard these called “Irish boxer crunches”, they’re amazing)

As an added bonus, you get jittery pictures like

Seriously. Do this and you’ll never slouch again.

(Thanks to Kitzzy for the link)

Planning & Scheduling

My kids are aged 21 through 31 now, but we always had a family meeting every Sunday morning before we’d all clean up the house, because we have five kids and everybody has scheduled stuff.

So we’d sit down every Sunday morning and everybody would get their schedule out. The kids would have their schedules and we’d have ours and everybody would compare schedules. And if they needed a ride or they had a soccer game or they had ballet or they had a school activity, we’d figure it out.

This is why when people say that kids of successful/powerful people got there just because “they knew someone”, I have to disagree. Contacts are only part of it. You can’t grow up getting these kind of habits ingrained without it having an effect on the range and scale of things you conquer as an adult.

(via nytimes)