Burly.Thurr

https://twitter.com/cpayneonaplane/status/508021423508844544/photo/1

Original Source

spitecho:

k-lionheart:

allonsyohanna:

jaclcfrost:

u think i am walking around the house with a blanket around my shoulders because i cold but in actuality it is my cloak and i am on an adventure

the fridge: there and back again

The microwave: the desolation of left overs

The liquor cabinet: an expected journey

boesed:

laughinghieroglyphic:

Whoa. The MLA has officially devised a standard format to cite tweets in an academic paper. Sign of the times.

ebooks, Horse. (horse_ebooks). “Leg Butt” 18 Nov 2011, 12:38 PM. Tweet.

hanwearspants:

ventriloquisthief:

slowking-s-thompson:

boyexemplified:

fastcompany:

Ka-Pow: Watch These Fish Cannons Shoot Salmon Safely Over Dams

Salmon have serious swimming skills—some travel thousands of miles to return to their original homes to breed. But even though they can jump as high as 12 feet in the air, they can’t manage to get over massive concrete dams that we have built to block their journeys back to their homes. Now one new idea could give them a boost. The plan involves whisking the fish through a long vacuum tube at speeds up to 22 miles per hour and then shooting them out the other end like a cannon.

Read More>

fuck we’ve made this planet weird

fuck yeah salmon cannons

I expect someone to make a weapon out of this someday. Just wait.

thanks for all the fish

PEW PEW PEW

A few too many years under the Deutsche Demokratische Republik can wreak havoc on a moral compass.

The pharmacy has nixed all tobacco products one month early.

laughingsquid:

Video of a Large Ship Being Beached After Quickly Squeezing Between Two Smaller Boats

It’s funny. I’m the statistician, but I’m more skeptical about statistics, compared to these renowned scientists.

The quotes

Here’s one: “You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”

Ahhhh, but we do have a choice!

First, the background. We have two quotes from this paper by E. J. Wagenmakers, Ruud Wetzels, Denny Borsboom, Rogier Kievit, and Han van der Maas.

Here’s Alan Turing in 1950:

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

Wow! Overwhelming evidence isn’t what it used to be.

In all seriousness, it’s interesting that Turing, who was in some ways an expert on statistical evidence, was fooled in this way. After all, even those psychologists who currently believe in ESP would not, I think, hold that the evidence for telepathy as of 1950 was overwhelming. I say this because it does not seem so easy for researchers to demonstrate ESP using the protocols of the 1940s; instead there is continuing effort to come up with new designs

How could Turing have thought this? I don’t know much about Turing but it does seem, when reading old-time literature, that belief in the supernatural was pretty common back then, lots of mention of ghosts etc. And at an intuitive level there does seem, at least to me, an intuitive appeal to the idea that if we just concentrate hard enough, we can read minds, move objects, etc. Also, remember that, as of 1950, the discovery and popularization of quantum mechanics was not so far in the past. Given all the counterintuitive features of quantum physics and radioactivity, it does not seem at all unreasonable that there could be some new phenomena out there to be discovered. Things feel a bit different in 2014 after several decades of merely incremental improvements in physics.

To move things forward a few decades, Wagenmakers et al. mention “the phenomenon of social priming, where a subtle cognitive or emotional manipulation influences overt behavior. The prototypical example is the elderly walking study from Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996); in the priming phase of this study, students were either confronted with neutral words or with words that are related to the concept of the elderly (e.g., ‘Florida’, ‘bingo’). The results showed that the students’ walking speed was slower after having been primed with the elderly-related words.”

They then pop our this 2011 quote from Daniel Kahneman:

When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief . . . The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.

And that brings us to the beginning of this post, and my response: No, you don’t have to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. Wagenmakers et al. note, “At the 2014 APS annual meeting in San Francisco, however, Hal Pashler presented a long series of failed replications of social priming studies, conducted together with Christine Harris, the upshot of which was that disbelief does in fact remain an option.”

Where did Turing and Kahneman go wrong?

Overstating the strength of empirical evidence. How does that happen? As Eric Loken and I discuss in our Garden of Forking Paths article (echoing earlier work by Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn), statistically significant comparisons are not hard to come by, even by researchers who are not actively fishing through the data.

The other issue is that when any real effects are almost certainly tiny (as in ESP, or social priming, or various other bank-shot behavioral effects such as ovulation and voting), statistically significant patterns can be systematically misleading (as John Carlin and I discuss here).

Still and all, it’s striking to see brilliant people such as Turing and Kahneman making this mistake. Especially Kahneman, given that he and Tversky wrote the following in a famous paper:

People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics. The prevalence of the belief and its unfortunate consequences for psvchological research are illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a questionnaire concerning research decisions.

Indeed.

Having an open mind

It’s good to have an open mind. Psychology journals publish articles on ESP and social priming, even though these may seem implausible, because implausible things sometimes are true.

It’s good to have an open mind. When a striking result appears in the dataset, it’s possible that this result does not represent an enduring truth or even a pattern in the general population but rather is just an artifact of a particular small and noisy dataset.

One frustration I’ve had in recent discussions regarding controversial research is the seeming unwillingness of researchers to entertain the possibility that their published findings are just noise. Maybe not, maybe these are real effects being discovered, but you should at least consider the possibility that you’re chasing noise. Despite what Turing and Kahneman say, you can keep an open mind.

P.S.  Some commenters thought that I was disparaging Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman.  I wasn’t. Turing and Kahneman both made big contributions to science, almost certainly much bigger than anything I will ever do. And I’m not criticizing them for believing in ESP and social priming. What I am criticizing them for is their insistence that the evidence is “overwhelming” and that the rest of us “have no choice” but to accept these hypotheses. Both Turing and Kahneman, great as they are, overstated the strength of the statistical evidence.

And that’s interesting. When stupid people make a mistake, that’s no big deal. But when brilliant people make a mistake, it’s worth noting.

The post I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical evidence appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

Fortune cookie

viele-katzen:

marina-and-the-dragons:

spread-hope-inspire:

Tribute to Steve Irwin, a guy who genuinely loved nature and animals.

This man was beyond real

"Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first."
- Steve Irwin (r.i.p.)

my mate

unclewhisky:

comedownstairsandsayhello:

tigerhazard:

jamdoughnutmagician:

there is not one search term here that isn’t magical

i know ive reblogged this before at least twice but i decided to read through the entire thing this time and im in pain from how hard i am laughing please forgive me

If I ever stop reblogging this call EMS immediately.

I’m torn between “did a ghost do my taxes,” “are there fraggles in my body,” “who is solar system,” “cant see legs,” and is sarah palan made of crab meat.” Any one of them could be a Chip Zdarsky tweet.

buy this print!

A couple of comics about Edward, the Black Prince. I love that a man who was brutal in many ways was celebrated as "the Flower of English Chivalry" even into the 1900s. That's from a towering statue in Leeds, where I am headed for this year's Thought Bubble Festival! Love Leeds, love Thought Bubble, love the Black Prince, love his statue. I admit that last year I was proud of myself for identifying the figure from afar - it's all that bullet shaped armour around his head (amiright), a style we all wish would come back.

Also, glory be! New shirts! I am so glad to be stocking the store with new things. The Venus one is not in yet, but coming, but head on over to check out the rest. Deck yourselves in them, deck your friends, deck whoever! Just click the link:

buy this print!

I thought of this as a three panel gag, because it is very silly like a three panel gag. But who are we kidding, this is the business of silliness, right?

Boy this Beat Car is a real dudefest! Have some Beat Ladies.

Researchers discuss how the microbiome might play a role in anxiety, depression, and autism.

Daily life in cities tends to differ from daily life in small towns, especially by who we interact with. The MIT Senseable City Lab and the Santa Fe Institute studied this social aspect — individuals' contacts by city size — through anonymized mobile phone logs. As expected, those in cities with greater populations tended to have more contacts. However, when the researchers looked at who knew who, the results were more constant.

Surprisingly, however, group clustering (the odds that your friends mutually know one another) does not change with city size. It seems that even in large cities we tend to build tightly knit communities, or 'villages,' around ourselves. There is an important difference, though: if in a real village our connections might simply be defined by proximity, in a large city we can elect a community based on any number of factors, from affinity to interest to sexual preference.

Read the full paper for more details.

Tags: communication, MIT Senseable City Lab, mobile, social

Award-winning horror writer David Nickle has been repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to have a frank and serious discussion of HP Lovecraft's undeniable racism; people want to hand-wave it as being a product of Lovecraft's times, but it is inseparable from Lovecraft's fiction. Read the rest

Nearly all the body's cells contain identical DNA. So why does a neuron grow up so differently than a liver cell? Proteins, says Akhilesh Pandey, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University.

In the September issue of Smithsonian magazine, we see how archaeologists can explore underground without digging it up. Vince Gaffney heads a project that has given us a sort of three-dimensional map of what’s underneath the land surrounding the most mysterious place in Britain: Stonehenge.

Gaffney’s latest research effort, the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, is a four-year collaboration between a British team and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Austria that has produced the first detailed underground survey of the area surrounding Stonehenge, totaling more than four square miles. The results are astonishing. The researchers have found buried evidence of more than 15 previously unknown or poorly understood late Neolithic monuments: henges, barrows, segmented ditches, pits. To Gaffney, these findings suggest a scale of activity around Stonehenge far beyond what was previously suspected.

Read about what they found, and see plenty of pictures and graphics to explain the project at Smithsonian. -via reddit

(Image credit: Henrik Knudsen)

One thing is for sure: it would contain a lot more explosions. Prepare for animated Bayhem.

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August 20th, 2014: SEXT: im a tree and ur another tree. we blow sex dust all over each other + ppl sneeze and get hayfever. ur so turned on rn with my sex dust – Ryan

optimysticals:

partysoft:

usagov:

Image description: On Saturday, the Navy christened a new research ship the “Sally Ride” after the first U.S. woman and youngest person in space. It is the fifth current ship named for an astronaut. 

Photo from the U.S. Navy

the person doing the christening is dr. tam o’shaughnessy, ride’s partner of 27 yrs. sally ride was not just the first woman and youngest person in space: she was also the first lesbian in space - likely, the first lgbtq person in space.

I know we shared this before but finding out that this ship was christened by Dr. Tam O’Shaughnessy was something that required re-sharing.