If the context is they are asking me a puzzle question that I need another language to answer then yes, I'm ok replying to that in another language. Indeed, in your own words failing to understand that context and so not be able to answer would be "insanity" although I'd prefer the milder "showing a lack of lateral thinking".

True, but my point is that things other than crypto do have a component of "real" value that is not based purely on what's fashionable at the moment. Gold's value is never going to drop to zero in the foreseeable future because it is useful and this real value adds some stability. Bitcoin's value could drop to zero tomorrow without any problem at all because it literally has no practical use - although the technology on which it is based is useful, at least until Quantum computers render it useless too.

This seems like backwards thinking. They link the aging and premature deaths to increased stress hormones and then seem to imply that the nightmares are the cause of this stress. However, given that stress can cause nightmares surely the most likely cause is some underlying stress and both the nightmares and premture deaths are symptoms of that? Instead of attempting to treat the nightmares they first need to show that there is no underlying cause of stress leading to both nightmares and aging because if there is some underlying cause of stress that's probably a lot easier to fix.

My UK driving licence doesn't have a photo so it would require considerable hallucination to be able to scan it into a facial recognition database!

carfeully --> carefully....clearly the article is right!

Like many words in English is has more than one meaning. It can still be used in the original sense that you describe and it seems like that the "diligent" meaning grew from a specialized use of the more general interpretation i.e. doing what is right, meaning working hard and carfeully.

The purpose was to find an odd number that could be written without an 'e'. The context implied but did not specify that the language was English. Failure to question implied assumptions is a result of a lack of lateral thinking, not insanity.

Not really. Many currencies used to be on the gold standard - UK notes still have/had written on them the phrase "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of X pounds" although it is only there for historical reasons and you can't turn up at the Bank of England and demand your gold any more! In addition to this, fiat currencies are backed by the government that issued them and so their value is also based on the power of that state to control and affect our lives.

However, bitcoin is based exactly as you describe: it rests solely on the value that someone else attaches to it and that is exactly why it is likely to be worthless one day. Stable fiat currencies have powerful governments backing them, stocks and shares represent a portion of a (hopefully) useful and profitable company and so have an intrinsic value but crypto has nothing but a wing and a prayer backing it. Of course stocks and shares and even fiat currencies have values that are affected by wishful thinking but their value is not based purely on wishful thinking like that of crypto.

There are odd numbers which don't have the letter 'e' in them, for example: trois, cinq or fünf

Yes both fascists and communists are highly authoritarian - they have to be otherwise nobody would do what they wanted - but both have clear political ideologies. The communist wants the state to own everything and to enforce "equality" amongst workers, the fascist wants their nation and/or race to be supreme. Trump is definitely authoritarian but doesn't really fit either of those two definitions: he just wants his will to be supreme so really he's a despotist...at least as long as he is the despot.

Perhaps, but the obvious response is: sure, I'll do that after you resign as president due to your ties to Russia.

...should the tariff be for that chip on your shoulder?

This is a huge improvement - when I was a grad student cosmologists used to give talks where the errors were on the exponent.

Probably the same place the first study found its 5,000 people. The population is not shrinking that fast! However, why do you have to replicate the first study? Perhaps you can test a hypothesis from the first study using a smaller, targetted study or by specific analysis of previous studies? That's my point: exact replication does not teach us anything new, you learn a lot more from testing the claims of previous papers using better data or different approaches.

As a particle physicist who worked at CERN for many years you are completely wrong when you think that we do not reproduce and build on previous experiments. New accelerators generally have at least two major experiments on them, the LHC has ATLAS and CMS, which are completely independent of each other and have radically different detector designs in order for them to be able to confirm discoveries although the agreement is usually that when one experiment wishes to publish a major discovery the other experiment has a ~1 week period to indicate that they are ready to publish too: this is to prevent a mad rush to publish leading to shoddy work, simply to be first. For the Higgs AT:AS triggered the period and CMS, whose analysis was almost ready too, got ready fast and the discovery was jointly shared between the two experiments with two consistent and independent measurements.

However, the LHC did more than that because when you first turn on a new accelerator the first thing you do is establish the physics that we already know is there. This is what I meant by building on prior results. After the Tevatron found the top quark it would have been a waste of effort and money to build a second Tevatron to confirm that (although again there were two experiments DZero and CDF that both saw it). However, with even more energy the LHC can produce even more top quarks than the Tevatron and we both confirmed the Tevatron results and then improved on them. So we _do_ replicate previous studies, even in particle physics where accelerators are expensive, but we do not _just_ replicate: we also significantly improve on prior work.

Exact replication is not "unglamorous" it is a wasted opportunity to improve on the result. If you are not going to add anything new to the sum of human knowledge then yes, your study is objectively much less valuable than a study which does improve our knowledge. It is also much easier to do. We should strive to do better than those who went before us, not to just do the same as they did!

Yes, fraud is increasing but it is connected to particular fields, generally medicine which is very importantly NOT science and where the differences make it much more susceptible to fraud because, while science's aim is understanding, medicine's aim is to cure people. This means that medicine is happy with correlation: give a person X and it cures them of Y is great medicine, whereas science's goal is causation: why/how does giving someone X cure them of Y? It's a subtle but critical difference between the fields which makes science much less susceptible to fraud.

Even ignoring the fact that, so far at least, the evidence that fraud is increasing is primarily confined to medicine rather than science, the fact that it is increasing is NOT evidence that science's methodology is flawed. It is simply evidence that there are more people willing to commit fraud out there and the fact that we are catching more is potentially evidence that our methodology is actually working - although not conclusive evidence because we do not know how many we miss e.g. because the results are irrelevant and so never used and hence tested by anyone.

Many of the cases, as the article you linked states, are associated with new open access journals that do not have proper peer review or academic standards in place, even for the ones that are not just out and out scams motivated by the shift to publisher-pays that lets scam journals earn money. Again, this is not due to scientific methodology failing but due to governments pushing an open access publishing model which, while it does have benefits, as we are finding out now also has some significant downsides. Specifically the high cost to publish in reputable open access journals is driving some researchers in poorer countries to turn to these cheaper, predatory journals that have little to no peer review.

None of these are problems that replication studies will in any way shape or form help with.

Theortically yes, in practice no because the other difference between a mouse click and a human sentence is that a mouse click is specific: if I right click a file and select delete it is unambiguously clear that I mean to delete that file. If I tell the computer "Delete the file." that sentence does not specific which, exact file I want to delete. To do that I have to specify an exact path or I have to first open a folder which again requires specifying which exact filder you want to open.

Then there are the ambiguities of spoken language e.g. how do I verbally differentiate between "J.py" and "Jay.py" or the "C", "See" and "Sea" directories? Human language is simply not designed with the precision that a computer requires and adding that specificity lowers the bandwidth considerably.