Move over Clapton; Carmack is God

by QuakeCon

John Carmack shows ‘Rage’ 60 fps game engine on iPhone 4
[Via AppleInsider]

Speaking at QuakeCon, id Software cofounder and video game luminary John Carmack demonstrated the company’s id tech 5 gaming engine running a Rage-themed demonstration on iPhone 4 at an impressive 60 frames per second.

[More]

60 fps on a phone! And it works on the iPad. “Incredibly cool” he says. The guy most responsible for first person shooter games is still innovating, producing games for iOS devices.

He states that Android is not there yet for developing games while the iPhone could kill anything on Xbox or Playstation. Next year could be fun for gaming on iOS.

The attack is not only unfair, misleading and unjustified but it really pisses me off

by vvvracer

Rossi’s attack on marijuana study unfair, says researcher
[Via The Seattle Times]

Republican Dino Rossi has been spending the week attacking the $800 billion federal stimulus plan pushed by Democrats in 2009 as a waste of money, pointing out examples of what he and others say is questionable spending that didn’t create jobs.

But Rossi’s latest example may have misfired. On Thursday, Rossi attacked a WSU-Vancouver professor’s study of whether marijuana can increase the effectiveness of pain-treating drugs like morphine. The study received $148,438 in stimulus grants.

[More]

Dino Rossi, demagogue and anti-science idiot? Here is the quote from his press release:

“This is one of those boondoggle projects that forces you to set aside the serious economic consequences of this so-called stimulus for a moment and just laugh at how out of touch Washington, D.C. really is,” said U.S. Senate candidate Dino Rossi. “Washington state taxpayers are tired of their money going up in smoke. This bill isn’t going to stimulate anything other than sales of Cheetos.”

Actually understanding something you are vilifying might be a useful component of a rational brain. But it is so much easier to make fun of stereotypes and things you have little knowledge of. Things that, in fact, you are definitely factually, and arguably morally, wrong about.

Like research dealing with chronic pain.

Dino, if you had any family member dealing with chronic pain, you would not be so stupid and insensitive.

My wife deals with chronic pain, something that is not only physically and emotionally draining but something that many in this country think sufferers should be able to overcome simply by force of will. This country does not like people using medication for chronic pain and makes it very hard on those seeking any sort of treatment.

Much less anyone doing any actual research. We deal with this attitude almost every day.

That is because drug usage for chronic pain has gotten caught up in the war against drugs. So, research on chronic pain is a big black hole here in the States, with almost anyone who is doing such work under extra scrutiny by those who do not even do the bare minimum to understand,

Such as Rossi.

This was a grant going to examine chronic pain research and the possible positive effects of the active ingredient in marijuana – something that is known to ameliorate some chronic instances of pain – on painkillers such as morphine. Understanding these effects and possibly developing therapies that could not only help people deal with chronic pain but perhaps lessen the need for opiates sure sounds useful. It is probably why the grant got a high enough number to get money.

As the researcher stated, the money supported several people, including the researcher himself. Three people on $50,000 a year to do research on a subject that affects millions of Americans, resulting in billions of lost earning.

And Dino makes fun of it while displaying no understanding of what is going on. It is simply material for a good laugh, for him and his followers.

Does he not realize that he has possible constituents that suffer from chronic pain? Who do not find this funny at all? Or does he not care, playing to those people who like the stereotypes, lack any understanding and really do not want anything else but the joke? I expect that, since he is a very smart man who has done this before, it is the latter.

People who simply laugh at the stereotype of the stupid researcher and useless stimulus plan. People for whom the narrative is more important than the truth. They do not want to gain any further understanding of what is happening. The simplifications brought about by stereotyping are enough to support their incorrect, and unsympathetic views.

This lack of any impulse to find out further, to understand the underlying principles of the complex world one has to deal with, is a sure sign of people who live in a Cargo Cult World. Dino, who ihas indicated he knows better, is pandering to them for purely political reasons.

Dino Rossi, demagogue and anti-science idiot. Why I vote for Democrats in this state.

Do pitchers named Larry lose more often?

In response to a comment left in a previous post on names and outcome, I actually tracked down the paper, Moniker Maladies, and read it. As often happens, the real story is much more interesting.

Actually, the paper itself is a nice demonstration of the scientific method. It takes some interesting observations made by others, forms a hypothesis and then tests that hypothesis. The testing leads to new questions that they then examine.

An important aspect of research is to examine things we know to determine if they are in fact true. That is part of how we fight confirmation bias. Simply because the work demonstrates that they are in fact true does not make the research irrelevant or useless.

Same with this paper, which does a nice job demonstrating that people whose initials match a designation of failure, fail more often than those initials lack any such congruence. And that this failure is due to something unconscious since the failure happens even when they like their initials.

This report actually does a fairly comprehensive examination of something that has been know about since the lat 80s– that people like things that remind them of their name, especially if the first letters match. This is am empirical observation that was called the name-letter effect – NLE.

Now, it was not possible to tell if the positive NLE was due to unconscious connections or “do a few people named Jack deliberately move to Jacksonville for its Jack-resembling appeal”? To answer this, the authors of the paper asked an interesting question: If positive NLE exists, does a negative NLE where initials correlate with failure? As no one would purposefully choose to fail, this might clear up the question of unconscious drive or not.

So, this paper examines the negative aspects. Was there still a correlation even for things which people would not consciously choose? A batter does not want to strike out. Turns out there is, which seems to shore up the hypothesis that NLE comes from unconscious desires rather than conscious.

By applying some straightforward logic to a puzzle, they have helped unravel the correlation and identified something that we did not know or understand before. While the effects may not be huge, they do appear to be real.

This study does not really prove why this happens. I mean, a priori, why would having the first name Karl mean you strike out more? Is it simply an unconscious fear of failure that produces the results or something else?

They looked at the statistics for almost 6400 players from 1913 to 2006. Those guys whose names started with K struck out about 1.5 more times every 100 at bats than anyone else. This may not sound like a lot but it is statistically quite robust. an attempts to remove possible confounding effects, such as age of the batter, etc. did not remove the correlation.

They looked at grades, 15,000 of them. Names from E to Z were scored as ‘Other’, while they examined people with A, B, C or D grades. What they found people whose initials were ‘As’ or ‘Bs’ had similar GPAs as ‘Other’ but people with initials that were ‘C’ and ‘D’ had significantly lower grades.

But, one obvious problem here is that it is not possible to separate out some confounding factors. Perhaps umpires do not like people with an initial K and call them out more. Or maybe teachers give people with C or D initials lower grades. That is, their performance is also determined by others.

So their next study was ‘Do students achieve initial-congruent grades, or do teachers assign initial-congruent grades?’ They essentially asked a large group of students to rank each letter of the alphabet – thus giving insight into how they ranked their initials with all the other letters. They then examined the correlation of GPA with initials.

What they found was that those who had A or B as an initial, and liked those initials, had high GPAs. If they did not like their A or B initials, they had lower GPAs. This indicates that there can be a conscious negative effect. The grades were determined by how the student felt.

Interestingly, for C or D individuals, those with the lowest GPA were those who actually liked their initials suggesting an unconscious effect.

They also looked at law school admissions to get an idea of real world consequences and found something similar. As they state:

The first four studies suggest that people whose initials match objectively undesirable performance outcomes perform worse than people with other initials. Moreover, these studies dem- onstrate this effect in real-world situations that have important consequences: Strikeouts, grades, and graduate schools can affect salaries, status, and careers.

All their work so far was mainly archival instead of creating their own data. So, the fifth study was one they did themselves. They gave a group of people a task to complete. If they succeeded at the task, they could click a named button and get a chance at a prize of more than $100 – big prize button. If they failed, they could click another named button and get a chance at a prize of less that $100 – small prize button.

The two buttons could have irrelevant names (i.e. X and Y), positive-name congruence – the big prize button could match the initial of the subject (i.e. T for Toby), or negative-name congruence – the small prize button could match the initial of the subject (i.e. T for Toby),

The trick was that the task was impossible to perform, so nobody should pick the big prize button.

When the buttons were named with irrelevant initials (i.e. X and Y), the participants finished about 5.3 of the 10 tasks. When there was positive-name congruence, they finished the same number . But when there was negative-name congruence, the number of completed tasks dropped significantly.

As the authors state:

Thus, participants performed especially poorly on the anagram task when the prize for failure matched participants’ first initial.

So across 5 quick studies, these authors were able to demonstrate several instances where there were negative consequences passed upon initials. The effect is not large but it is statistically significant.

Why the self-fulfilling prophecy? This paper shows it to be unconscious but an unconscious need to fail? Their conclusion starts:

The five studies reported here suggest that name liking guides the pursuit of initial-resembling performance outcomes, even when those outcomes are explicitly negative.

This is an interesting phenomenon. Even when they consciously like their initials the outcome was similar.

Still a rare disease

by Todd Huffman

‘Wider impact’ of brain disease
[Via BBC News]

A new form of brain disease, similar to Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, could affect more people than previously thought, researchers in the US say.

It had been thought that only people with one genetic profile were vulnerable to the prion disease VPSPr. But in an Annals of Neurology study, Case Western Reserve University experts found people with all three possible gene patterns are affected by VPSPr.  

[More]

It is a wider impact of a very rare disease. The headline made me think that we should really worry.

This particular form of the disease, VPSPr, is not caused by eating contaminated meat. The prion protein can come in two different forms, one with a valine (V) and one with a methionine (M) amino acid at a specific position. Since each of us has two copies, there are three combinations: VV, MM and MV.

Originally, only the VV variants seemed to result in disease. But recent work found other variants involved suggesting that this particular disease may be more complex than other Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease diseases.

We still do not know what the prion protein really does. The fact that a single protein can misfold, causing other similar molecules to misfold, in a cascade that can essentially destroy the brain is disconcerting. Such a devastating stochastic event would seem to be selected against unless its incidence is simply to small to have much selective pressure. In Britain, there have been about 1500 cases of all types in 20 years, while the worldwide incidence is about 1 in a million people.

Such a low probability that the protein will misfold suggests that there would be very low selective pressures on the gene.

In addition, CJD usually affects people well past the age of producing offspring, removing them even ore from selective pressures. Now, the variant affects much younger people and might be under much greater selection except it is even less likely to appear than CJD. In addition, changing our eating habits can essentially remove the disease.

I actually interviewed with Stanley Pruisner when I was looking for a post-doc in the early 80s. He was really interested in someone who had a lot of cloning skills to find the gene for the protein – they had recently isolated it. I was not interested in doing the same thing as a post-doc that I had done as a graduate student but it would have been really interesting to work in a lab doing work that resulted in a Nobel Prize.

So does Arnie Anderson get the best grades?

NCBI ROFL: What’s in a name? Part II: Why Kevin Kouzmanoff strikes out so much.
[Via Discoblog]

Moniker maladies: when names sabotage success.

“In five studies, we found that people like their names enough to unconsciously pursue consciously avoided outcomes that resemble their names. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players whose names begin with the strikeout-signifying letter K strike out more than others (Study 1). All students want As, but students whose names begin with letters associated with poorer performance (C and D) achieve lower grade point averages (GPAs) than do students whose names begin with A and B (Study 2), especially if they like their initials (Study 3). Because lower GPAs lead to lesser graduate schools, students whose names begin with the letters C and D attend lower-ranked law schools than students whose names begin with A and B (Study 4). Finally, in an experimental study, we manipulated congruence between participants’ initials and the labels of prizes and found that participants solve fewer anagrams when a consolation prize shares their first initial than when it does not (Study 5). These findings provide striking evidence that unconsciously desiring negative name-resembling performance outcomes can insidiously undermine the more conscious pursuit of positive outcomes.”

[More]

I wonder if changing their name has any effect or if their birth name follows them forever? How does a Gregory do with grades? Does Cathy have more C-sections than Kathy? This line of research opens up so many questions.

The crazy continues

Remember when I mentioned the guys who said your Social Security card number tells which bank owns you and that we are all collateral?

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!”

Here is more about that particular flavor of nut – sovereign citizens

At the heart of their belief system: The government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth, a “strawman” that controls an account at the U.S. Treasury used as collateral for foreign debt. File enough documents at the right offices and the money in those accounts can be used to pay off debt or make purchases worth thousands of dollars.

Wikipedia has more – seems that when we went off the gold standard in 1933, we pledged our citizens as collateral to foreign banks. At the moment, that strawman is worth $630,000 at birth and a citizen – or rather a non-resident alien – if he follows the process of the leaders of this movement, can reclaim that money from the government. We are actually all covered under maritime law, as evidenced by the gold fringe on American Flags!
Even more detail from the SPLC:

At its core, the current sovereign belief system is relatively simple and is based on a decades-old conspiracy theory. At some point in history, sovereigns believe, the American government set up by the founding fathers — with a legal system the sovereigns refer to as “common law” — was secretly replaced by a new government system based on admiralty law, the law of the sea and international commerce. Some sovereigns believe this perfidious change occurred during the Civil War, while others blame the events of 1933, when America abandoned the gold standard. Either way, they stake their lives and livelihood on the idea that judges around the country know all about this hidden government takeover but are denying the sovereigns’ motions and filings out of treasonous loyalty to hidden and malevolent government forces. Under common law, or so they believe, the sovereigns would be free men. Under admiralty law, they are slaves, and secret government forces have a vested interest in keeping them that way.

The next layer of the scheme is even more implausible. Since 1933, the U.S. dollar has been backed not by gold, but by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government. According to sovereign researchers, this means that the government has pledged its citizenry as collateral, by selling their future earning capabilities to foreign investors, effectively enslaving all Americans. This sale, they claim, takes place at birth.

When a baby is born in the U.S., a birth certificate is issued, and the hospital usually requires that the parents apply for a Social Security number at that time. Sovereigns say that the government then uses that certificate to set up a kind of corporate trust in the baby’s name — a secret Treasury account — which it funds with an amount ranging from $600,000 to $20 million, depending on the particular variant of the sovereign belief system. By setting up this account, every newborn’s rights are cleverly split between those held by the flesh-and-blood baby and the ones assigned to his or her corporate shell account.

The clues, many sovereigns believe, are found on the birth certificate itself. Since most certificates use all capital letters to spell out a baby’s name, JOHN DOE is the name of the corporate shell “strawman,” while John Doe is the baby’s “real,” flesh-and-blood name. As the child grows older, most of his legal documents will utilize capital letters, which means that his state-issued driver’s license, his marriage license, his car registration, his criminal court records, his cable TV bill, and correspondence from the IRS will all pertain to his corporate shell identity, not his real, sovereign identity.

All you have to do is believe in this conspiracy – thus accepting that every federal judge in the US knows about it and is part of the conspiracy, all 3500 of them – and over $600,000, or more will be yours.
Talk about a Cargo Cult World supported by fantasies – really intricate fantasies but unreal all the same. Do they really think that 3500 people could keep such a conspiracy a secret? Many of these people are gobsmacked with reality when it turns out they are relieved of many thousands of dollars by the fraudsters and then have to pay the fines that come from not paying taxes. Wesley Snipes tried to escape tax evasion charges by going this route.

You know, sometimes I wonder whether there should be some sort of test to make sure people are not too far removed from reality in order to vote. But In America, even people with crazy ideas can vote. They are even paraded around on many political shows. I’m just glad none of these crazies are not voting for any of the same candidates I am.

[Listening to: Another Man Done Gone from the album "Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues" by Odetta]

Spreading misinformation

by kennymatic

Monckton vs Scott Mandia

[Via Deltoid]

Christopher Monckton is now threatening to sue Scott Mandia as well:

I also note that you have publicly accused me of “fraud”, and have widely circulated that accusation on the internet, and have expressed the intention to invite the mass media to repeat it. Since this is a serious charge, do you have any evidence to back it up, or should I add your name to that of Professor Abraham in the libel case that will be filed shortly?

Gareth Renowden responds with:

On the evidence, it is clear that Monckton is a shameless humbug, a proven liar and a hypocrite, who intentionally misrepresents the facts of climate science in order to mislead his audience. The real mystery is why this isn’t obvious to important sections of the US body politic.

Barry Bickmore has added Monckton’s latest threat to Monkton’s extensive rap sheet.

[More]

Monckton is a fraud
[Via Hot Topic]

Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, pompous peer of a parish in Kent, not content with threatening legal action against US scientist John Abraham (who had the temerity to point out the huge number of errors and misrepresentations in a talk he gave: see Support John Abraham, now 1050+ comments), has now threatened action for libel against Professor Scott Mandia. Mandia wrote a blog post in support of Abraham, inviting members of the media to consider if Monckton were a fraud — which drew a spiteful little email from Tannochbrae…

[More]

Supporting a false reality requires tireless work by those providing the misleading data needed. Continuing to speak of things that have been shown to be incorrect is a hallmark of those doing the spreading.

They rely on the confirmation bias of their followers, who will forget anything contradictory and only remember the misleading statements that support the Cargo Cult World.Here is a nice example, as Hot Topic easily demonstrates.

Why would anyone uncritically believe someone who has been shown to make inaccurate statements in the past? When they need their false views of the world supported, even by untruths.

Watching the meteors with my iPad

by Navicore

Thursday night and Friday morning is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Usually we have overcast skies covering this up, but tonight, the sky was clear.

So I took my iPad out, opened up StarWalk (using the night viewing colors to keep my might vision good) and oriented myself towards Perseus. well, Perseus was below the trees that surround us but I could easily find Cassiopeia. Close enough.

Saw lots of flashes across the sky. I might have seen them without using the iPad but it was nice to really see how their direction was based on Perseus.

Since I can just make out the Milky Way where we live, our light pollution is better than being in Seattle (The moon was cooperating tonight also by being pretty thin.). It was nice to see the meteors and to have the iPad to help me locate just where Perseus was.

[Listening to: Masters of War from the album "Odetta Sings Dylan" by Odetta]

Admitting when they get it wrong

BBC apologizes to University of East Anglia
[Via Deltoid]

Following in the foot steps of the Sunday Times‘ retraction of their bogus Jonathan Leake story, the BBC has apologized for falsely stating that UEA researchers had “distorted the debate about global warming to make the threat seem even more serious than they believed it to be”. The BBC offers the excuse “that this was a live programme being put together under the pressure of events”, which is fair enough, except that it has taken over nine months to make this simple correction, for which, surely, there is no excuse.

[More]

How refreshing. admitting a fundamental mistake in reporting. and apologizing directly. Admitting that you perpetrated a false narrative is a hard thing to do but the right one.

Often the response of American papers is to blame the reader or their sources but not to ever apologize to the people harmed. Partly why I probably read more material from the British MSM as their tabloids are clearly marked, as are the politics of the different papers. In the US, they try to pretend that they are impartial.