Earth Round. Mask Good.
Hell I'd be happy with: Science = reproducible, Faith = exactly consistent with unfeeling random chance.
Everything else can come out of those two principles.
What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#42Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly re…
As someone who learned about the electrical meaning of impedance matching in school, where impedance is a commonly discussed fundamental quantity in circuits (it’s the AC equivalent to resistance), I have always tried to avoid using the term outside of engineering circles to avoid confusing people. This is the first I’ve ever heard someone deliberately apply it to a disparate array of phenomena but I have to say that…
I've used it to discuss organisational dynamics. Most recently, for a small startup trying to establish a service agreement for a large enterprise customer, and the differences in values, expectations, processes etc that hampered the relationship, which we termed an "impedence mismatch" and all the engineers in the room at least nodded.
Labelling certain problems this way, dispassionately and without rancour, really took heat out of the discussion, which assisted in finding solutions. In such circumstances, differences are bridgeable with understanding, which inevitably provokes jokes about certain people being transformers, being tightly wound etc.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#43Error bars to uncertainty of facts presented. Confidence. Sometimes I think the bandwidth/delay product is insufficiently appreciated but I can't quite say why. Db are widely misunderstood. And RMS. Without a reference, 2x bigger is meaningless. Likewise s/n ratio is misunderstood. Scale free can be OK, but usually not. People need to know that cells don't have walls and are not bags of liquid. At the scale we're tal…
And that biology in general is extremely random. School teaches it as a bunch of little machines.
Evolution should have been taught as applied statistics and stochastic effects. Using language of implied determinism by genes was a suicide move to the religious. It's applied probability folks, "more successful" is on average. Selection pressure is on average.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#44After a 20 year run the Annual Question blog stopped the following year https://www.edge.org/annual-questions
Yeah, lot of interesting questions and answers there. Sad to see it no longer continued.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#45Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly re…
Op here. Absolutely my ideas when I posted.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#46Error bars to uncertainty of facts presented. Confidence. Sometimes I think the bandwidth/delay product is insufficiently appreciated but I can't quite say why. Db are widely misunderstood. And RMS. Without a reference, 2x bigger is meaningless. Likewise s/n ratio is misunderstood. Scale free can be OK, but usually not. People need to know that cells don't have walls and are not bags of liquid. At the scale we're tal…
What is wrong with the cell wall idea. Yes it is a lipid double layer, but it seems to separate the inside and outside quite well (you need all those channels to get stuff in)
Yea,those channels. They're complicated and x ray crystallography only broadly supports a thesis they are little holes. There's all kinds of weirdness going on, opening and closing by twisting under voltage and other stimuli. If you think it's a little pipe or even like a stomata (which is a macrocellular structure in plants which have cell walls in real sense) you've been led down the metaphor too far. Or, so I am told. I'm not a cell biologist.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#47Formal Logic and Argumentation
I find it amazing that people can argue endlessly about conclusions or personal judgements, especially when morals are concerned, without any effort to discover the premise upon which the disagreement rests. I think people should learn about argumentation as a method to discover truth and agreement, rather than a competition.
I’m not highly knowledgeable in this domain, just a person that would like to have more productive and less emotional or moralistic conversations.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, by association, F = m*V^2 The risk of serious injury in an accident increases exponentially with speed. This is especially true for pedestrian victims.
You probably mean E = 1/2 m v^2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy#Kinetic_energy_...
Ah, yes. The perils of making comments at 2 AM.
I stand corrected.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#49Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly re…
> that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in.
It‘s afaik not the DNA transporting the information, but epigenetics. Eg everything around the DNA deciding what parts to read/ignore.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#50Base Rate fallacy. The gist: consider a yes/no test that has a small chance of being wrong (false positive and false negative). Examples: spam filter, virus filter, pregnancy test, testing for another illness, etc. How well it performs in reality depends enormously on the real ratio of yes vs. no. Example: Spam filter is 99% correct, 1% false positive and equally 1% false negative. That sounds good! And it is - IF yo…
Also: Simpson's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox