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New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest

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Re: New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest

#101

Post by johannesgoslar »

ineedasername wrote: post #47
dylan604 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, the Andromeda Strain should also teach to not so quickly use fire.

Wow, yes. It's been too long since I've read that book. It was very formative for me when I read it in school long ago, and at least twice more since, but it has to have been nearly 20 years. Have you happened to read the recent sequel, and if so how was it? I was kind of put off of Crichton by his later works after the original Jurassic Park (as usual, better than the movie) I know the sequel was not completely Crig…

The sequel also makes a good read. The human angle might be slightly overplayed, but it hits the Crichton style quite well with computer analysis, foreshadowing and the tech dread.

Of the later works, Dragon Teeth (posthumously published) is worth checking out - no high tech but more a scientific western story.

Re: New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest

#103

Post by simiones »

tasogare wrote: post #87
ajkjk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long felt that the American school system's version of the scientific method (formulate hypothesis, run experiment, collect data, draw conclusions) is totally wrong and turns people off of science. The real procedure that we should teach kids is: collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers, and only then do a experiment to test your theory. The question formulation, based on observational evid…

This is where Western and Japanese linguistics show their biggest difference. The former has a tendency to try making heavy generalizations (finding the universal properties of language/s) and prove it by crafting a few examples fitted for the task (peak armchair linguistics). In the latter, a huge amount of data is collected. I've seen at library a book with hundred maps, relatively precise, about the fine variation…

I don't think this is a difference between "Western" linguistics and Japanese linguistics. Collecting examples with relatively little explanation is traditional linguistics as it was practiced academically in Europe and Japan and probably most other places as well. You had etymology, and grammar, and many many examples for each.

However, modern/computational linguistics has started asking new questions that were simply not considered in traditional linguistics: why and how do the rules of grammar arise? How are they learned by infants? Why do human beings use language at all? How are human languages different from animal communication?

For many such questions, looking at hundreds of regional variations of certain words or grammar rules is not particularly helpful, unfortunately, though there is some work that was done based on that as well.

Re: New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest

#104

Post by tomcam »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #21
tomcam wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. Duly upvoted. If only our friends on HN were a little bit more alert to humor.

If what you want to read is a reddit kill it with fire joke thread you can just go to reddit. There's nothing wrong with wanting that, but there's no need to wish for it or encourage it here.

Man, don’t be that guy… wait, never mind

Re: New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest

#105

Post by pwdisswordfish8 »

OJFord wrote: post #102
pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #94

Non-cookiewalled version: https://text.npr.org/1026091196

Thanks. 'Your choices' doesn't seem to give any 'disagree'/opt-out choices? Nor does it claim they're only using required, functional cookies & data.

There used to be a ‘decline’ link that dumps you to the main page of text.npr.org, but at least you could have taken a guess which news item it is from the title and ID in the other link. Apparently they considered that design insufficiently user-hostile and changed it.

I expect they’re eventually going to disable the text.npr.org domain.

Re: New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest

#106

Post by makeitdouble »

srcreigh wrote: post #71
makeitdouble wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Formulating hypothesis first, even with little knowledge, is fine as long as the point is to invalidate them (basically you assume they are wrong and you’re fine spending time to prove it). It can help focus the data gathering phase, and you get two results: you can ignore your first hypothesis from now on, and you have further data to look at to formulate a decent hypothesis to expand on.

I agree in practice, but I think my point is to resist the dichotomy you are implying - that there is a "first hypothesis with little data"... vs ... the other ones..? Isn't all our knowledge little knowledge - even if it seems like a lot? Wouldn't your advice apply equally as well to your most knowledgable topic? The hard part isn't having knowledge, it's finding the hypothesis to show how your knowledge is little k…

I think we fundamentally agree, and probably have the same approach, with just a different “marketing”.

For the background of these, on a professional level I try to sell the experiments with some angle, whatever it is, even if it is intuitively wrong.

An exemple of that was a discussion around wording for a relatively delicate part of our site. We didn’t know how to approach it, and it hasn’t been touch for a very long time. So, the random hypothesis taken was that nobody reads the text anyway. We set hooks and tracking in and out of the sections to have a decent view of what’s happening, and we got enough data to come with new insights and propositions; Next phase was AB testing two changes, with expectations to have positive effect, and the tracking we set in place was to validate it went as planned. This also didn’t go fully as expected, but not that far from the mark, and we iterated.

In hindsight we could surely have just done the data collection and make hypothesis from it, but I feel the data would have been more vague and less exploitable. I don‘t trust “let’s just collect data” approaches much.

Re: New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest

#108

Post by daddylongstroke »

grawprog wrote: post #17

I've got a specimen of one of these preserved in a photoalbum from a school project from 10 years ago or so. There was no idea at the time these were in any way carnivorous. For all our knowledge, there really is so much about all the other life around us we just don't understand.

>For all our knowledge, there really is so much about all the other life around us we just don't understand.

Based on us routinely finding new organs within the human body, I would say there is a ton about our own biology that we just don't understand. I would go further and just accept that humans know or understand very few things indeed.

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