Except that for his followers, it works. Bullshit is always pretty transparent, because it's not intended to stand up to critical examination. People believe it -- or more accurately they *go along with it* -- because they want to feel like it is true.

It wouldn't have changed a thing. Everybody knows you "leave the gun, take the cannoli". The reason he kept his supposedly untraceable gun with him was he intended to be caught and wanted there to be no doubt that he was the guy. He even had his manifesto printed out and ready for the cops to find.

This appears to me to be a calculated attempt at propaganda of the deed. Propaganda of the deed is supposed to incite "the spirit of revolt". This is not supposed to end with him being caught; he knows perfectly well killing one CEO won't change things. Other people are supposed to copy him.

Deliberately getting caught is an interesting twist. If there had been an extended manhunt, the public focus would have been even more on the perpetrator, and when he was eventually caught after a long and satisfying search it would be over. The fact that it wasn't that hard to catch him means that the frenzy wasn't done building yet, and puts more focus on his motives than his identity.

I think the 3D printed gun was intended to underscore the fact that there's nothing the establishment can do to stop anyone who has got the idea of direct action into his head.

Read this guy's biography on Wikipedia. He's no dummy; I think he thought through every aspect of this to maximize its impact.

Why would these people be credible on aviation topics? That said, I have no doubt there are drones all over the place. I've been seeing people *launching* the things for years now.

As for drones being noisy, that's true, but even a quadcopter be pretty faint if they're flying at 400 feet. Also, a party with what they call "national means" wouldn't have any trouble altering the firmware of the drone to make it capable of flying higher; some drones limited to 400 feet are capable of reaching 500m. Other things you could do in firmware is enable the devices to fly autonomously, which would require special licensing. You could easily mod the camera to take IR pictures.

Suppose you had a drone modified to fly at 400 feet with a 48 megapixel camera and a 80 degree FOV. This would yield a resolution of roughly 2 cm/pixel, better than the currently speculated US spy satellite capabilities. If I were China I would sure be doing this, but even if China *is* doing this, they'd just be a needle in a haystack among the million unlicensed consumer drones in operation in the US. There probably are nefarious actors operating out there, most of what people are seeing isn't them.

Since much of what has been reported as drone incursions are apparently general aviation aircraft, that could get very interesting.

Politicians love an issue that gets people excited but can't be solved.

I once saw a Fox News station showing a picture of a UFO trailing sparks over Manhattan. It was Jupiter with the Galilean moons off to one side.

I heard it reported as absolute fact that Iran had a drone carrier off the US coast and was sending fixed wing drones over New Jersey. It's mass hysteria.

I have no doubt that foreign actors are using drones to get intelligence on US sites, but if the foreigners have any sense they're hiding in plain sight among the roughly million hobby drones being operated by US citizens. It's just one of the disadvantages of trying to secure a largely free country.

I dunno. I think there probably needs to be a kind of emotional literacy. I always told my kids when they were growing up, "Listen to your feelings, but don't believe them." The reason is you need to be aware of how your feelings are coloring your judgment before you can even apply any critical thinking skills you have.

"I am a high status individual because of my superior genes."

I never said it wasn't rambling nonsense. But it works for him.

I don't think papers with bullshit *results* are common. I think what's common is papers that aren't very interesting where that fact is obscured with language you could describe as bullshit, because it's intended to shape your attitude toward a boring result.

An interesting result is one that challenges expectations or common sense assumptions, but any program that pursues such results will *inevitably* produce mostly boring results. Still, boring is not the same as useless; it's important for someone to check things. It's far better to be able to cite a boring result than it is to rely on an common sense assumption, because sometimes common sense was wrong.

This is actually effective communication. You just have to see what is being communicated.

We were taught to write as if we were destined to write legal briefs or user manuals for some complicated product. As students we were judged on our ability to relate facts and concepts clearly and to arrange them into a memorable or persuasive structure.

A human doing this is like a dog walking on its hind legs. You can train any dog to do that, but it's not natural. Our paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved a set of cognitive skills that *could* construct or critique a persuasive essay, but that's not something they ever did or had use for. I think human communication started with simple stuff like this: be afraid of that animal; the tribe on the other side of the hill is bad; I am one of you; I am a strong leader; don't mess with me. In other words things that communicate emotions and attitudes towards things. Stuff that goes right from the language centers of the brain into the reptilian brain without critical processing.

In other words, I believe bullshit is the original form of human communication. It remains far more prevalent than we are aware of, because we seldom *study* it; it's a perfectly natural behavior for us to produce and consume it. And it remains incredibly powerful. Even something that's complete gibberish when translated into a fabric logical propositions can do a potent job of painting an emotional picture of who is in the tribe and who is out; who is on top of the tribe and who's at the bottom.

"Leveraging" is corporate speak.

But then you come the occasional landmark paper, and suddenly the writing gets a lot better.

I've puzzled over this: is it cause or effect? Does a landmark paper get cited because it's better written, or does it get better written because the author expects people to read it? I think it's effect. When an author knows he's got a winner, he dispenses with the frippery. With pressure to publish to pad your CV, most papers are half-baked or nothing burgers, and the lack of substance is routinely disguised with inflated language. Clear writing comes across as cheeky.

I think it's become a kind of fashion. My company was submitting a research proposal in conjunction with a well-known lab at Harvard. I took it upon myself to edit the final proposal draft, so I streamlined the overblown academic prose from the Harvard group. The Harvard PI told me to revert it back. He acknowledged that my version was better writing, but the proposal reviewers were used to bad academic style and if we didn't write the science parts that way we'd look inexperienced. The technological part of the proposal on the other hand had to be well-written because it was stuff the reviewers wouldn't be familiar with.

Well, yes, the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for the discovery of ivermectin *to treat worm infections*. Ivermectin is absolutely a great drug for a helminth infection. That doesn't mean it's sensible to jump to the conclusion it's good for viruses.

Anti-parasitic drugs like ivermectin *are* perennial candidates for anti-viral use because they have potent physiological effects and often shut down viral replication in a petri dish. But that's a very low bar to pass; in the human body the dynamics of the drug don't necessarily allow you to achieve those effects without dosing so high it would harm patients more than it helps. That's an absolutely normal result when testing a drug that shows promise in vitro.

It's not ivermectin fear-mongering to say that it's not a cure-all. Research into ivermectin for viral diseases is ongoing, and perhaps it will work for some of them -- dengue is apparently a promising application.