Except politics of course. We all know everyone else is wrong.
Chemistry, and science in a broader sense. When you hear ‘woah a new medicine has been found that could cure cancer’ it’s most likely 'we have developed a new gadolinium based compound that has shown efficiency in penetrating cancer cells and could be used to deliver drugs to these areas, however it has not been tested in humans because it kills rats faster that it cures cancer"
Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science. They just translate some foreign language into words that suits them.
Medical science or research in general, it’s all spun around to get clicks.
When people think there’s a new “superfood” or “recommendation” from doctors every week, they stop trusting doctors. In reality, the processes and recommendations are very robust and take lots of time and research to change. A study will say that “we might want to look into X” and news will run with “groundbreaking study: x is the sole cause of y”.
I’m not even an expert. Like you said “Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science”
Things that kill cancer include:
- Fire
- Polonium
- High-test peroxide
- Most strong acids
- Chlorine
Of course, they also kill everything else.
That’s what radiation + chemotherapy does too. The whole goal is for the treatment to kill the cancer faster than it kills the human.
I had to do an assignment in college about news report headlines vs what was said in the abstract vs what was said in the conclusion. Basically finding out how many news reports just skimmed the abstract. Kinda shocking tbh.
Sadly I can only upvote this once
Corsets. They were not uncomfortable or restrictive, and they did not make women faint. Only the Victorian equivalent of the Kardashians were into dangerously tight lacing – for regular women, they were just a fitted support garment, no worse than spanx. I’ve worn them for 25 years as a late-Victorian reenactor. They’re actually really nice for back pain.
On the other hand, hoop skirts were immensely dangerous, and women were burned to death when their skirts caught an open flame (of which there were many), were dragged to death when their hoops caught in coach wheels as they disembarked, and fell to their deaths when the wind caught their hoops and sent them flying Mary Poppins style from rooves and balconies.
Corsets were fine; hoop skirts were a death trap.
I was thinking of gettingy ex-wife a hoop skirt for her birthday.
On the same note, knight’s armour was hot but not hard to move in. IIRC is weighed about as much as a modern soldier’s gear does all together.
I have an adage that “the locals are never stupid”; all historical things are going to have been well-adapted for the person who commissioned them, given the available materials and techniques. Even hoop skirts were I imagine comfortable enough when not on fire or caught in something. (And if an accident happened, well, she was lucky to have survived that far)
They’re actually really nice for back pain.
Eh. The problem is that the way they work is by taking strain off muscles. In the long term, that ends up weakening the muscles that you need to support your torso. In most cases, the best thing you can do for back pain is physical therapy.
Not necessarily, if your back pain is caused in part by heavy breasts. Imagine wearing a school backpack on your chest all day every day, and how that would strain your back and shoulders. Then try wearing a hiking backpack instead with a hip belt. It redirects where the weight is resting on your body. The average women’s corset in the 1800s was strengthened with paper or cording or sometimes whale balleen, a material similar to heat sensitive plastic, which are not really materials rigid enough to limit your movement much. Historical corsets were designed to redistribute the weight of breasts to the hips, for most women it was meant to provide support to the breasts first and foremost, and smoothing a tummy roll or giving a smidge more definition in the waist was just a bonus. Working women who wore corsets in kitchens and laundries and schools or farms had no issues with weaker core muscles.
If I see one more article about knitting where the photos are clearly crochet, or vice versa, I swear to god…
It’s the same with electronics and people holding the hot part of a soldering iron
Interesting. I was taught that “knitting” was the word for all needlework techniques.
IT Security
This is a huge one in movies and TV shows especially, but part of the problem is that IT security, or counter-security, is not a great spectator event. It’s very dry, does not involve a lot of flashing lights or even really anything on screen except in many cases a command prompt or progress bar, and is in most cases not a quick process.
That said, Mr. Robot, while not perfect, did a really good job of being a more realistic portrayal.
Expectation: “Oh my God. They’re hacking the system! Deploy counter measures!!! furious typing”
Reality: “So, we sent out a phishing test email and had a 61% click rate…”
We had the opposite problem. Mandatory training by an external company. They sent an email to everyone urging us to click here and do the training, otherwise our company might not be certified!
Even ignoring the pushy text, the entire mail looked sketchy as fuck, generic company name, low res logo of our company badly photoshopped into a banner.
So everyone ignored this obvious spam and our company lost the certification.
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I love the notion that you get notified for being hacked, and that you have anti-hacking counter measures that need to be manually activated to take effect.
61%!? What subject line are you using!?
I’m not actually in IT in my org but I remember one they sent out was “FWD: Your Medicare Benefits Package is Maturing” followed a few days later by an actual company wide shame email from the CIO about the click rate.
Yeah… boomer companies.
Probably “Your Microsoft account password needs reset” sadly
IT-Sec can be pretty interesting if you know what someone is doing. I agree with you.
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I never understood why it was called Mr. Robot but he was a human?
It’s explained later in the story
spoiler
It`s his dad’s computer repair store’ name. Or the one Elliot wants to see it as (in case of classic unreliable narrator moment).
Did you watch the show?
Mr Robot was his dad’s electronic store.
With „code“ very often just being HTML source of some random site the effects people found.
Which is why Mr Robot was an outstanding show. Everything they showed was plausible and they didn’t throw around random terms to sound nerdy.
Watching the show Tehran and the high intensity coding sequences are python functions like DOOR.OPEN() and try/except clause’s that contain nothing more than logging output.
So far, the only “hacking” scene I’ve ever truly appreciated was that time in Matrix Reloaded, where Trinity used nmap to scan for open ssh ports, then used a fake “sshnuke” tool to exploit a real sshv1 crc32 vuln. Enough accuracy to make me appreciate the effort.
Have you seen Mr Robot? I appreciated the attention to detail. Still some small bits of magical god tier abilities, but it was done really well.
Ah, I forgot about Mr Robot. Yeah - that was really accurate in a lot of ways.
I saw that one. I always stopped the frame to look at the code. It never disappointed.
Hacking scenes in shows and movies were always my favorite because of how hilarious they are.
I feel like my python coding is being attacked here.
If you can abstract a nation state’s high security power facility into a module as simple as that, you have nothing to worry about!
Came here to say this.
Linguistics.
A stupefying proportion of what mass media and everyday people think they know about linguistics and languages is wrong. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate corrections.
I would love to know more! Feel free to vent.
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I love this! Please be angry about more language things.
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Wait, why is “I’m a man with mental illness” bad while “I could care less” isn’t a problem? What’s the difference? Is it about efficiency because the idea could be conveyed with fewer words by saying “I’m a mentally ill man”?
I’m just a layman, but I find it really confusing.
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I never considered that there is a difference in implications and saw the two sentences as basically identical. Thanks for explaining it.
This is quality ranting, which the world needs.
All but the last four were new to me, so thank you!
Very interesting! I had no idea “tenth” comes from “tithe”. So was it common to tithe ten percent of your income or where’s the connection?
Also, shouldn’t the ur-language debate be focused on African languages, unless you don’t know that humans emerged from Africa into the rest of the world?
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At first I was going to say the “would of” crowd hates you, but now they’re probably going to cite this post in every argument.
What kind of sentences would you even have to construct to use “would of”?
I would of explained it but I could care less.
Absolutely. Fucking. Everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
This is amazing! I had no idea there was an actual term for this. But yeah I frequently encounter flat out misinformation in most news sources and always have the thought: “If I know these parts are BS, how many of the things I’m not familiar with are also BS?!”
I’m not a pilot but it really irritates me when the media reports that a pilot “crash landed”.
A crash is an uncontrolled collision with terrain, other aircraft, birds etc.
When a pilot attempts to land in emergency circumstances, it’s just that- an emergency landing.
Sully didn’t crash the plane on the Hudson river, he performed an emergency ditch manoeuvre which pilots train for.
Saying “crash landing” is an oxymoron. What the reporters usually mean is something along the lines of, “The pilot attempted an emergency landing on rough terrain but was unable to successfully bring the plane to a complete stop before crashing into trees.”
“The pilot attempted an emergency landing on rough terrain but was unable to successfully bring the plane to a complete stop before crashing into trees.”
Yeeeaah, thats crash-landing…
i see your point tho…
Apparently, the media spices up the headlines, to get immediate attention
Attempted troll failed
Why would that be a troll? Even if their opinion is wrong, it’s still an opinion. Being wrong doesn’t make one a troll. I am pretty sick to death of people calling everything “trolling”.
Hacking, and counter hacking.
One of the best representations was in Mr Robot, but all the rest usually looks like the movie Hackers.
I get it though, it isn’t really flashy enough when it is realistic.
Sneakers remains probably the best representation.
Love that movie…
It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.
I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.
The NET is…fun…
That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.
Oh God, that reminds me of that ncis scene when they’re getting hacked, so two people start using the same keyboard to be quicker to defend against the hackers.
And then in the end someone just unplugs… something? The might even just be the screen, who knows, and that fixes everything
Ah Two Idiots, One Keyboard. I’ll never not laugh when watching that.
What’s funny is there’s definitely ways to make it more realistic while also being flashy/interesting. The stories told on the podcast Darknet Diaries are plenty interesting! It’s often fantastical feats of social engineering.
What are your thoughts on the Adventure Time version?
Limitless writers: “We got his hard drive!”
Me: “That’s a power supply! From a desktop! He was using a laptop!”
I wish the drug in that movie was real
I’ve found that basically every topic I’m knowledgeable in is usually portrayed badly in most media. I imagine it’s the same most basically all fields.
I really enjoyed Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books as over-the-top trashy fun. Then I tried reading Digital Fortress and I just couldn’t. I just kept screaming in my head “That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!” and at that point I realized what art historians must feel about the Robert Langdon books.
Historians: All histories are fiction. Objective truth is illusory. Every narrative is the subjective product of its author and context, with no tangible bearing on reality.
Historians watching any film remotely connected to their field: Well that never fucking happened!
So they’re right lol
I once visited the church in Paris that features in the Da Vinci Code. They were absolutely not happy with all the tourists asking about the book.
The only thing that’s reliably portrayed realistically is things that a screen writer would know.
Sorry no, a screenwriter should know how a computer keyboard works, but a screenwriter wrote the 2 nerds, 1 keyboard scene in NCIS. I think they’re just idiots.
Yes, but what if the keyboard is in hacking mode? /s
Funny enough, rumour has it that that one was part of a contest to write the stupidest hacking scene.
Yep! It’s known as “The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect”.
Anything to do with space. I’m so sick of hearing about what newly observed thing has scientists baffled and is definitely absolutely unquestioningly hyper advanced intelligent extraterrestrials.
Every time they say that “scientists are baffled”, I think that they’re just talking to the stupid scientists.
Scientists are baffled as to why people are asking them about aliens again.
Especially the geologists.
The more baffled the scientist the better the science…
I only look at the best science of course.
I’m a scientist myself, and I’m baffled at how my toaster always pops the bread out when it’s perfectly done. I don’t think science will ever figure out how that works.
Ah yes, if we can’t currently explain it then logically it must be aliens.
Same with most creationism arguments, really.
“I have no explanation for this yet, therefore magic”, to loosely quote Forrest Valkai.
Trans people in sports
Or anything to do with trans people at all
Heavily politicised issue though. Imo, the whole trans issue should’ve never been politicised.
I mean you’re right, but even given that, the media still just gets it wrong, often deliberately so, because misinformation is the political goal of many folk involved in the “conversation”
I swear these people will let the rich steal their food and housing while they look the other way and blame the nearest minority for their problems
All other things being equal people are gonna pick the fight they think they can win. In the US if you’re taking on the rich and powerful you’re taking on one of the largest standing armies in human history, the police. If you’re taking on trans people you’re taking on a tiny minority that’s loathed by a large percentage of the population.
I’ve been on Internet too long that I still don’t know which side you stand on. And that’s exactly the issue.
This is a very complicated problem. Not as straightforward as either side thinks.
This is a very complicated problem
No it isn’t. There is not a single sport in which trans people have been shown to consistently have advantage, let alone advantage significant enough to make meaningful competition impossible. Trans folk hold no world records, very few national records, and are under-represented in sports compared to how many trans people there are in society. On top of all of that, when trans folk do participate, on average, they under perform compared to their cis peers.
There is nothing complicated about it, just a lot of deliberate misinformation
It was politicized because the right is running out of people they can acceptably hate.
The sun is not yellow!
The yellowish is due to the effect of dust and water on the atmosphere as sunlight passes through it.
It better be white for us to see so many colors. Except in mexico, sun is orange in mexico.
Yeah, now would you know when you cross the border if there wasn’t that orange-sepia tint?
Oh yeah - where does superman get his powers from then? Checkmate!
Ok, so what colour is the sun?
I think the most concise answer is “white.” Expanding a bit, we can say “pretty much all colors with very specific exceptions; mostly green.”
The Sun emits electromagnetic radiation spanning the spectrum. Sunlight feels hot to your skin because it contains infrared light, and it causes skin cancer because it contains ultraviolet light. It produces basically every wavelength in the fairly narrow visible spectrum–with some notable gaps; if you measure the sun’s spectra you’ll see gaps in the rainbow, because something something astrophysics something something electron orbitals something something specific wavelengths. Those gaps are characteristic of the elements the Sun is made of, which is how we can measure the chemical composition of even very distant stars.
You may know that some stars appear blue, some appear orange or red. Take a look at Orion, for example; his left shoulder is the very red star Betelgeuse, where his right knee is the bright blue Rigel. But nowhere in the sky will you find a star that looks green. that’s because stars that make more green light than red or blue–like our sun–also make lots of red and blue light, so to our eyes (which evolved under a green-peaking star), they appear white.
The sun appears yellow–or even orange or red near sunrise or sunset–when seen from Earth’s surface due to refraction because of our atmosphere. Viewed from Earth orbit, our star appears white.
This makes me want to learn about space. Colorful stars? That blows my mind. I wish we had colorful stars in the sky so bad.
We do. Like I said, look at the constellation of Orion. Some of the stars look red, others look blue. Most are just tiny points of white light, either because they’re so faint that your cones don’t register, or they’re a mid-tone star like our sun which appear white to our eyes.
Nuclear energy. I’m a dilettante (software engineer by background) but I find the topic absolutely fascinating and have educated myself on a diet of papers and books about the topic.
I find this topic particularly infuriating as the media feeds on and sells irrational fear on the topic, actively preventing a real solution we have to climate change TODAY, yet refuse to take.
I think they’re perfectly safe, but I don’t think we have a good way of storing the waste. Just leave some highly reactive stuff underground for a few hundred to thousand years? That sounds like a recipe for disaster at some point, that is a freakin long time
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
We know how to solve it. We just don’t want to.
I’m not sure about the situation in Germany, but the US built a large facility in a mountain to put all the waste in one spot and fear mongering meant it went unused.
Instead, waste is spread across the country in multiple redundant spots, wasting money and making it harder to secure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
Suppose you didn’t bury it and just stacked up heaps of those nuclear flask thingies and wrote on them “waste we didn’t know what to do with”.
Suppose this went on for several hundred years until a better solution was found, and by that time there was many thousands of those flasks.
I bet our descendents would be glad that we had left them with those rather than continuing to pump waste we didn’t know what to do with into the atmosphere.
Eh, I don’t think that aspect is a problem per se. We certainly understand now why we started to use coal and fossil fuels back then. We didn’t have the technology or knowledge for something better or the understanding of the consequences back then. It’s the same. They’ll understand.
I don’t have a problem with nuclear energy other than that it is expensive relative to other technologies such as solar or wind. Maybe some of the reason it is so expensive is precisely because of the FUD the media spreads on the topic. I think new technologies that gain widespread use are often the ones that are most profitable so in that sense solar beats out nuclear.
media feeds on and sells irrational fear
on the topicFixed it for you. 😀
It is expensive relative to solar and wind. I agree!
You’ll notice, I hope, that in another comment in this thread I concluded that we need lots and lots of solar and wind. I’m ALL in on renewables; they’re great!!
But the (dirty) secret of renewables is that it’s got external cost associated with it. I can build a gas plant, or a nuclear plant, and I broadly get the advertised generation capacity out of it. I can steer this up or down (also with nuclear; one of many misunderstandings people hold on nuclear is that it’s not steerable)
When I build a wind turbine park, I can also in aggregate get an advertised rating out of it - in a windy area I multiply the capacity all the turbines by 45%-ish and that’s what I’ll get out of these turbines in a year. It’s remarkably precise.
The challenge is that a heat-based plant is steerable up and down (between 0 and its capacity), in the moment, on demand. Renewables are only steerable down (between 0 and whatever the wind wants to do right now).
And then many say “well we just need to build a LOT of turbines (and/or solar) and then we will always have enough”. Or they say “well, we will need some adjustable, backup capacity”.
And that’s valid - but… We have a lot of wind today - enough that we can feel confident about estimating what “a lot of wind capacity would do”. And we would still have complete wind/sun-less days with zero output, even if we build massive over-capacity.
Ok, some say, then let’s invest in distribution - so I can source masses of renewable power from even further away. Yup, although all simulations show even with insane investments in distribution interconnectors, you end up with days of no power from anywhere AND you’ve now to spend on inter-connectors.
Let’s store it then! Well, sure, but now you’ve got to build an absolutely insane amount of batteries (heavy metal strip mining and very expensive, and probably more than we can actually conceive to make) or you’ve got to make very expensive pumped storage (we don’t have enough areas where pumped storage can be located).
If you want 50Hz (or whatever your local equivalent is) ALL THE TIME, there are external costs to renewables: Massive investment in distribution, massive investment in energy storage, massive over-building capacity etc.
So when you build renewable capacity, you are adding these external costs elsewhere. That’s why many grid-planners advocate for a different model: Guaranteed capacity.
Ie.: “I guarantee between 0 and 1000 GW, on demand; if I can’t meet the requested requirement, I pay a fine based on the size of the miss”. If you forced renewable capacity towards “guaranteed capacity”, these investments would have to be made in association with the build of the renewable capacity, either by leaker gas plants, storage, distribution networks etc.
So what’s happening right now is these externalised costs to renewable capacity are being absorbed elsewhere. When you add the cost of guaranteeing the capacity, nuclear no longer looks expensive.
Or you accept that hospitals will be burning diesel fuel and the rest of our world shuts down at random times. Travel to Johannesburg if you want a sense of what the world feels like when the power goes out in an entire neighbourhood to load-shed.
So I’m not arguing against renewables - if they could get us all the way there, at the sticker price, I’d not make an argument for nuclear.
But I do not believe you can - and as originally discussed, this is based on reading an unseasonable amount of papers and literature about grid planning, renewables and nuclear energy.
So for me, it comes down to: What do you want to do to guarantee that frequency is maintained 24/7? Gas peaker plants? Nuclear? Storage?
None of the options to go from “we have power 90% of the time” to “we have power 100% of the time” are that enticing. Nuclear power is the least bad. If 20-25% of our capacity came from nuclear, the price of guaranteeing 100% frequency-hold drops dramatically. Any other alternative seems worse.
Yeah, I am vaguely aware of the energy storage costs(externalities) that can be associated with solar and would agree that grids need some sort of way to have a baseline supply that should include nuclear. Do you have an idea or numbers of how much more expensive nuclear is vs solar and whether the solar figure includes it’s externalities?
Here’s a couple of good papers and articles on the topic:
-
A systematic review of the costs and impacts of integrating variable renewables into power grids - a large meta-study from Nature Energy showing that the externalised additional cost of integrating 1 MW of renewable production hits £40/MWh between 75% to 85% renewable penetration. Beyond that no studies have been done, but already at this level, renewable would be more expensive than nuclear (at auctioned build-prices today).
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Real-World Challenges with a Rapid Transition to 100% Renewable Power Systems - finds that even if you set the Value of Lost Load to £40,000/MWh in a 100% renewable grid, you’ll still get power outages after 2030. It’s not equivalent to externalised cost of renewable integration, but is a heavy indicator that without forcing massive fines on renewable providers, the reserve capacity won’t be provided (it’ll be cheaper for them to just pay the fine). The study finds that a fine of £4 million (!) per required-but-not-fulfilled MWh is needed to encourage providers build the reserve capacity (through distribution, storage etc.).
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How much can nuclear power reduce climate mitigation cost? - shows that nuclear will lower the cost of getting to zero carbon electricity product by 40%+, compared to refusing to use nuclear energy production.
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Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems - shows some of the challenges of the assumptions that people make in thinking renewables will get us all the way there.
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Projected Costs of Generating Electricity - shows that, all costs considered, nuclear remains an extremely cheap way to create energy, even up against renewables.
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Local Complementarity of Wind and Solar Energy Resources over Europe: An Assessment Study from a Meteorological Perspective - shows that at least in Europe, wind and sun don’t anti-correlate (in other words, we’re not going to get energy from the sun on non-windy days and energy from the wind on cloudy days. Also shows there are many periods (days long) in Europe where we have don’t get neither sun nor wind. So storage will have to last us days across Europe.
Many of these articles refer to many other articles you may find interesting.
Overall, my point is that it does us (collective “us”, not just “you and me”) no good to argue that “it’ll be alright if we just commit to renewables”. One has to argue against these peer reviewed studies, done by experts in the field, many collecting and meta-reviewing many other studies, to argue that “renewables will be enough”.
And these are not “cooky studies” in “cooky journals”. Nature, Cell, Joule are some of the most respected journals, with the highest impact ratings and the authors & their reviewers have studied these topics for years.
I’m all for more renewables! But it won’t be enough!
I agree that idealistically on a broad scale the world should use nuclear as a tool in getting to a net zero energy generation. However, on a local level at least here in the US, I’m not sure that the political reality of building nuclear power is feasible. I also concur that more than nuclear plants are needed but applying that idea on a local level doesn’t make currently sense for the US.
Since the US is, according to the Energy Information Agency, already at about ~20% for both Renewable and Nuclear technologies, I think it makes sense to push for whatever is currently the cheapest to displace the remaining Fossil Fuel power generation. While I am sure nuclear could be made cheaper here, I don’t realistically think it will happen based on our current political reality. It seems slightly more realistic to me that Solar and other renewable energies will continue to expand.
-
AI.
First it was people who write for a living getting really excited about writing about how the AI that can replace writers was going to end the world.
Now it’s people who write for a living getting really excited about writing about how that thing that writes can’t actually replace writers and sucks and shouldn’t be invited to your birthday party.
Both of which are pretty far off base from actual research papers being published on the topic.
It gets me wondering if perhaps people who write for a living may be biased in their coverage of the technology that can replace writers.
But whatever the reason, the one thing that’s clear is that 98% of the articles people are reading online about AI are the equivalent of paid writer hallucinations.
AI is a lot sexier than “math and programming.” AI makes headlines/clickbaits a lot better than “Probabilistic Computation Graphs”.
I will admit that I have been enjoying the resurgence of thought experiments involving ethical computing, rules for AGI (eg Asimov’s 3 rules for robotics) and discussions of Kurzweil’s singularity.
