(Part 2) Best products from r/EverythingScience

I would highly recommend Patient HM about the effects of the surgery on one man.

This is an excerpt from a new book by Josh Mitteldorf and Dorion Sagan:

Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old-And What It Means for Staying Young

The book the movie was based on is Awakenings. I indicated the other book in the comments, but I'll link it again for you, it's called Asleep.

https://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Science-T-Jaynes/dp/0521592712

He was working on his new book that came out recently.

Thing Explainer

My daughter bought me that book. Normally I don't read non-fiction but that book really blew me away.

http://www.amazon.com/Family-That-Couldnt-Sleep-Medical/dp/081297252X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453292314&sr=1-1&keywords=the+family+that+couldn%27t+sleep

Now do it with a 3V lithium 123A!

Then do it with a 12V A23!

12V would be really fast I bet!

Meh, I'm hearing a lot of Y2K in this. It's their job to worry and wring their hands over traffic jams and insufficient port-a-potties, but really, the U.S. is a big, big place, and Nebraska is a big, big place, and the total solar eclipse is a big, big thing covering a big, big swathe of a very large continent. I'm sure that if you go to Grand Island, you'll be able to find a gravel county road somewhere to pull over and watch the show. The only problems might be if you needed a hotel room, but you can take a popup tent to any of the state parks and recreation areas in the area that offer tent camping. The RV hookups with water and electric fill up fast, but IME the tent camping spots fill up last, and for an event like this, the rangers can be very accommodating about putting tent overflow in that meadow over there even though it's not really designated.

Get a Nebraska gazetteer, it tells all the county roads. https://www.amazon.com/Nebraska-Atlas-Gazetteer/dp/0899333281

Bookstores in NE sell them, by the Rand McNally road atlases. Sometimes gas stations on the Interstate sell them, too.

It saves you from being at the mercy of Google Maps, too, who don't always know what the hell they're talking about.

That's a semantic argument. He presents it as science and is a scientific reporter/editor. He cites actual science and reports on actual scientific topics. To the public, it's indistinguishable from science.

Just as with global climate change and evolution, it's important for the scientific community to actively distance themselves from racist fodder like this. From Amazon, the book currently ranks #22 in Physical Anthropology, #35 in Genetics, #51 in World Civilization and Culture, and #15,828 overall. So it's getting attention.

Certainly. You aren't racist ... but.. black lives matter dont understand black people are racist too. You aren't one of those crazy anti science global warming denialists... but ... celebrities and nazi pedophiles, right? And denialists shouldn't be picked on because because they are pointing out some science is dodgy. And while you can split hairs by carefully saying " I didn't say" this or that, it was carefully implied which allowed you to imediately deny that was your intention when you are called on it. Please read the book, follow it with https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062 and https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebook/dp/B004R1Q2EG

No one's mentioned red dwarf yet? this is actually my favourite episode, and there's also a full novel based on it.

This sounds depressingly similar to the plot of one of Michael Crichton's early novels, The Terminal Man.

Right down to the closed-loop system, detecting disapproved brain states and stimulating to disrupt them.

For those of you who haven't read it, the implant system uses brain pleasure terminals to disrupt seizures. What the brain learns from this is that it gets pleasurable stimulation whenever it seizes, so a positive feedback loop starts up.

In the book the subject's seizures include sexual assault and murder.

Should you read every book that presents a new idea just to judge for yourself if that is an idea worth undertaking or whatever?

There's been a lot of religions in human history (most which have long since died off). Should you necessarily read every religion's works to understand the religion and its followers, and to determine if it's the right one in your mind (etc)? The bible is certainly the basis for the largest religion (and a partial basis for the second largest, although the Quran is much more influential to them). But let's not neglect the Hindus and Buddhists (I don't even know what their religious books are, or how many their are).

Are we even constraining ourselves to modern religions? Maybe the ancient Greeks or Romans had it right, but you won't know because you didn't study them yourself (sure, they died off, but that's just because other people decided that they were the "wrong" religions -- by your logic, you should be deciding this for yourself). What about the Norse? Or that ancient Egyptian religion?

The reality of the world is that you can't really read and research everything for yourself. There's nothing wrong with falling back on other people's shorter, more digestible summaries, provided that you take care to find quality ones and a diversity of opinions. And reading their holy books won't tell you that much about their modern religions. It doesn't really matter what the Bible or Quran says, for example, if the followers do something entirely different. Not to mention that reading and researching for yourself does not require reading the holy book. There's plenty of more modern texts, for example, that have a much less biased explanation of modern religions, their belief sets, and how they have evolved -- this goes far beyond what the Bible alone could tell you about these religions.

Reading the bible to figure out if it's right is like reading Mein Kampf to figure out if Hitler's ideas were good ones. It's far too biased, missing in objective knowledge, and omits crucial things. If you want to actually study a religion, you need more than that. You need someone who can point out when "facts" stated differ from historical accounts. You need someone to remind you when a passage conflicts with an earlier one. You need someone to detail when details are actually carry-overs from older religions. A proper religion studies textbook would do a lot more to critically analyze a religion than reading their holy book. An example of such a book is A History of God by Karen Armstrong.

As an aside,

>If you know Tyson, you'll know he's not an atheist, he's agnostic.

That's bullshit. Agnostic isn't a view point alone. The actual divide is "agnostic atheist", "gnostic atheist", "agnostic theist", and "gnostic theist" (most people are either agnostic atheists or gnostic theists). Typically among intelligent people, the default for when you don't know is to assume it doesn't exist. And that's the case for almost everything, really. I can't be entirely sure that unicorns don't exist. I don't have proof for it. Yet I don't think they exist. Tyson is an agnostic atheist who avoids the term "atheist" because it has strong negative connotations in the US (a huge number of people say that they wouldn't vote for an atheist, for example).

Stephenie Seneff is an unqualified hack. I'm going to just copy/paste from one of my previous times criticizing one of her papers. This was specifically a paper she published connecting autism to roundup.

>So, just a few of the red flags in it. First, the author seriously cites Andrew Wakefield for some of her evidence. Andrew Wakefield, for those who don't know, is the man who published deliberately fraudulent papers to link autism and vaccines, and started the vaccines=autism scare. Seriously citing his papers in anything other than a study about bad science and vaccine denialists is about as big of a red flag as it gets.

>Second, she cites Giles Eric Seralini, who is another "scientist" who publishes incredibly flawed papers pushing his viewpoint on GMOs. While having an agenda isn't necessarily enough to get a paper discounted, the agenda plus the enormous methodological, statistical, and analytic flaws in his papers is enough.

>Seneff herself is a computer scientist from MIT, and has a previous paper in the same journal blaming autism on both aluminum and acetaminophen.


>In short, you should probably avoid citing Seneff, because a fairly cursory inspection of what was published reveals that it is utter crap.

>A couple red flags from the journal it was published in. Entropy is a pay to publish journal. Thats not always bad, but it is something that should be looked at with some suspicion. Additionally, it has some motivation to accept any article because the money is only due if it is published.

>More damning however, is that they have a rotating set of "guest editors" who approve their articles. The man who approved this one is Prof. Dr. John W. Oller, who has written a book on Autism that was so bad, Andrew Wakefield wrote the forward to it.

She has a long track record in pushing bad science in pay to publish or fringe quack journal. When the article says that she is "Dr. Seneff is a respected scientist", they forget to mention that she is respected among the same set of people who respect Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Anything she says should be taking with several dump trucks of salt.

As I pointed out earlier in the tread the "editing" of climate science has for a long time been apart of the Republican way of addressing climate change.
Philip Cooney chaired the Council on Environmental Quality in the Bush administration. Before that he had been lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. He doctored various government climate reports to downplay scientific consensus and had to resign in 2005. He was then hired by ExxonMobil.

Here is Andrew Revkin's account of the affair: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/politics/editor-of-climate-reports-resigns.html

Instead of arguing about the solutions from an ideological view point, we argue about the science. Chris Mooney, at the Washington Post, wrote an interesting book about the subject that came out in 2005, The Republican War on Science. It is well worth reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Republican-War-Science-Chris-Mooney/dp/0465046762

And this even goes further back as you can see if you listen to Erik Conway's lecture on the "Merchants of Doubt: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV6A4CZkOXg&t=186s