In a world where we live hostages of advertisement, where our email addresses and phone numbers are sold and bought by companies eager to intrude in our lives and command our actions, preferences, tastes; in a world where appearance trumps substance 10 to zero, where your knowledge and education are less valued than your looks, a world where truth is worth dimes and myths earn you millions - in this XXI century world, that is, Universities look increasingly out of place.
As
Lenin's Birthday Earth Day approaches, all of media are pillaged by public relations flaks being paid by 'green' companies who are using capitalism to promote their financial form of environmental socialism.
One thing they have in common; they claim whatever they are selling is more ethical than what everyone else is selling, and using their sticker will also make you part of the 1%. Literally. A
claim promoted by an organization that sells certification stickers, 1% For The Planet, is that companies 'certified' by them or similar groups have a 70% chance of better growth than companies who don't.
In mice, caloric restriction has been found to increase aging but obviously mice are not little people, and mice are weaned on a starvation diet. That cannot and will never happen in humans. Yet restricting calories even by 20 percent has been shown to promote longer life in animal models.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a lawyer who leveraged a name that was essentially beatified by Democrats into a lucrative career trying to promote corporate conspiracies about cell phones (cancer!), GMOs (cancer!) and vaccines(everything else!) and he had some success.
Thanks to his efforts raising money for Obama his name was floated as head of EPA at the end of 2008, but even a president-elect who was on the fence about vaccines causing autism and had advisors who believed in UFOs and that girls can't do math
told Obama that RFK Jr. was too kooky.(1)
Peter Higgs passed away yesterday, at the age of 94. The scottish physicist, a winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Francois Englert, hypothesized in 1964 the existence of the most mysterious elementary particle we know of, the Higgs boson, which was only discovered 48 years later by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
People are living better lives for longer than ever but an
EXPLORATORY study using a computer simulation says there is reason for concern; people are getting cancer younger than ever.
The authors
analyzed results of blood samples from 148,724 people ages 37 to 54 in the UK Biobank and focused on metrics 'linked' to aging, like albumin and glucose. Those nine values were put into the 'mPhenoAge algorithm to estimate biological age and that age was compared to actual age.
Urban/local/small ag is a feel-good fallacy.
There is nothing wrong with wishful thinking and aspirations, we all have harmless beliefs that get into our brains. Some home ag is clearly ridiculous - a $150 machine to grow $0.25 worth of herbs is a gimmick for the rich - but mostly it's good, slow exercise or at least good to not be on a tablet watching TikTok videos so China can harvest your personal data.
In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I spend some time discussing the apparently trivial problem of evaluating the significance of an excess of observed events N over expected background B.
This is a quite common setup in many searches in Physics and Astrophysics: you have some detection apparatus that records the number of phenomena of a specified kind, and you let it run for some time, whereafter you declare that you have observed N of them. If the occurrence of each phenomenon has equal probability and they do not influence one another, that number N is understood to be sampled from a Poisson distribution of mean B.
Wealthy countries with natural 'breadbaskets' - places where it is easy to grow food - have so much abundance they can put special labels like 'organic' on tens of thousands of products and charge more and people will spend $100 billion on them.
Other countries need science, yet it is often the case that regions like Europe dictate what science poorer nations can use. Disagree, and you cannot sell in Europe. Then they mobilize relief efforts for the countries they keep poor.
When poor people are geopolitical pawns for rich ones, can hunger ever be eliminated?
Misinformation scholarship is not new, it just got more attention due to Brexit and Trump - and that's due to the left finally focusing on an issue when it's happening on the other side.
Prior to 2021 there was little concern among the left about the anti-vax movement - because it was dominated by their tribe. Academic progressive waved away overwhelming CDC data showing a clear apolitical demarcation by trotting out surveys showing the denial was not that small.
Yet if you asked who's more likely to deny evolution, the right or left, the left reflexively declared it was Republicans. Except the different between the left and right on evolution was only 9 points - far smaller than the denial of vaccine by the left.
