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The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers 127

Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."

Comment Re:Dutch Auction (Score 2, Interesting) 574

I doubt that most of the "scalped" tickets are actually sold by scalpers. Most are probably sold by friends and employees of the event and/or venue.

Think about it--before tickets go on sale, roadies and janitors get a chance to buy premium seats at face value, maybe even with an employee discount. The performers don't care, the venue doesn't have to pay employment taxes on this unofficial employee benefit, and the employee gets some extra cash.

Comment Bell and Howell Apple II (Score 2, Informative) 269

Check out the black Bell and Howell branded Apple II on the cover. Apple was having trouble selling Apple IIs to schools, because the computer needed to have an interlock to power it down when you opened the cover to meet purchasing requirements. B&H manufactured a special Apple II with the required power interlock, a black case, black keyboard, a B&H logo in place of the Apple logo, and a B&H sticker on the bottom covering over the Apple sticker. The disk drives were also black.

There was an optional back attachment that provided a couple of additional power plugs, three line level audio inputs, and I think a video output. There was also a joystick socket on the right side of the case.

I got one of these because my dad knew a Bell and Howell distributor and bought it from him. Unfortunately mine is missing the space bar. Try and find a black Apple II space bar. Talk about unobtainium!

Comment Glass is not a slow-flowing liquid (Score 2, Interesting) 293

Window glass used to be made by blowing giant glass discs and cutting rectangles or diamonds out of them to piece together to make leaded windows. The method of blowing the glass discs resulted in glass that was often thicker on one side than the other. The person building the window would naturally orient the thicker side of each piece to the bottom of the window, to work with gravity to make the window stronger and longer-lasting.

If the glass were really a flowing liquid, then the edges of the pieces would be rounded and deformed, but they are not. They are as sharp and straight as the day they were cut.

Comment Re:Look at whose backing this (Score 1) 215

Having a way for people with simple needs to get quick medical attention and out of the waiting rooms so that people who do NOT have simple needs is a good idea.

It doesn't matter if the good idea comes from a source you think is compromised. The good idea stands on its own merits.

This is like the self-checkout line at grocery stores. I say they should go for it.

Comment Re:like trying to offer proof to a Birther (Score 0) 1093

1) People skeptical of the solidity of the science in AGW are not 9/11 conspiracy theorists. You're comparing one to the other because it makes your argument simpler. It's a meaningless and dishonest comparison. The questions don't go away simply because you call the questioner a Nazi.

2) It's not just the emails, though they are somewhat damning. People are looking at the code, and they're looking at the provenance of the information as well. It's not encouraging. It's certainly not "settled science". It looks more like "settled results".

3) Any rebuttal that begins with "you have to have a Ph.D. to understand why this number should be a 3 instead of a 4" smells funny. I don't have to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics to understand the basics of absorption line spectrums, because the explanation is straightforward and well understood. Hiding behind credentials is not a substitute for understanding thoroughly enough that you can explain the hows and whys and defend them.

I'm actually of the opinion that carbon emissions are not good, and we should do something about them. Carbon emissions make a fairly good metric for efficiency, and encouraging efficiency is a good thing. I object to grand, sweeping changes negotiated in the political sphere because once you introduce politics you can't disentangle it. Especially inside the global political sphere. Carbon emissions become a club to wield against political enemies and defend political interests, and it becomes decoupled from the environmental good.

So I'm in favor of continuing study of climatology, and to continue to work on the climate models. This is good science that we need to know. I'm in favor of establishing some kind of baseline to measure carbon emissions so we can make something like informed decisions. I object to climatologists needing to come up with doomsday scenarios to justify their funding, and I object to emissions legislation whose primary purpose seems to be redistribution of wealth. I don' think this makes me a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, nor a birther. Yet I think the current state of climatology is full of holes concealed by a lot of hand-waving.

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