Regruntled.com

Science Made Stupid is a hilarious parody of science.

 

At the end of the Creosote era, two new classes arose to challenge the ruling reptiles - birds and mammals.

The success of the birds was due in large part to their development of the feather. As you may recall from chapter 2, Galileo demonstrated that a feather falls more slowly than a lead weight. Being covered with feathers thus gave the birds a definite advantage over the flying reptiles, which were covered with lead weights.

There is a toolbox of programming techniques inspired by evolution, variously called evolutionary algorithms or genetic algorithms.  The techniques mimic evolution and borrow a lot of the terminology.  The basic idea is to make a bunch of guesses (a population) as to the solution of a problem, and see how well the guesses work (apply a fitness function).  Then you throw out the bad guesses and keep the good ones (natural selection).  You combine some of the old guesses into new ones (reproduction) and make a few random changes (mutations).  Lather, rinse, repeat.  As you do this over and over again (multiple generations), the guesses get better and better.

The picture shows an antenna that NASA developed using an evolutionary algorithm.  The bent-paper-clip shape is the result of trial and error and natural selection, not theory and calculation.

The Biologic Institute argues that the participation of the programmers constitutes “guidance” to the evolutionary algorithm, and that, by analogy, if an evolutionary algorithm requires guidance by programmers, then evolution in nature also requires some sort of guidance or intelligent design.

I’d like to make a couple of points here.  First, if the algorithms work, the Creationists will argue that the differences between evolution and evolutionary algorithms imply that evolution doesn’t work.  On the other hand, if the algorithms don’t work, the Creationists will argue that the similarities between evolution and evolutionary algorithms imply that  evolution doesn’t work.  Creationists are not intellectually serious people.

Second, NASA was trying to design an antenna, not settle a theological question.  There is a tradeoff between the cleverness of a program and the time it takes to run it.  If you want an answer tomorrow morning and you have a hundred computers that you can use overnight, you need a clever program.  If you have 10,000 computers and can wait a few weeks, not so much.  If you’re Mother Nature and you can experiment on  a million organisms for a million generations, maybe survival is all the guidance you need.

While looking at the dot in the center, move your head towards and away from the screen.  Trying looking at different parts of the picture while you rock back and forth.  What I find interesting about this illusion is that it only works away from wherever you’re focusing.  We know that the fovea is physiologically different from the rest of the retina; this illusion suggests that it is computationally different as well.

It’s hard to believe, but if you hold an index card up to the screen, you can verify that all the lines are straight.

I stumbled on something at the Healing Whiteness blog: indigenous science.  For example:

Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the senses, including the spiritual and psychic.

What I find interesting about this is the attempt to appropriate the word “science” for something that is explicitly not scientific.  In fact, the blog has a list of the ways that indigenous science  differs from real science.  It reminds me of Creation Science, which is religion posing as science, and Scientology, which is gibberish posing as science.  If someone wants to reject science, fine, I don’t agree but I can respect the position.  But rejecting science in principle while hanging on to the labels is just pathetic.

Speaking of healing whiteness, I think I’ll go work on my tan.

There is actually one grid that is rotating, but it looks like there are several independently rotating grids.  See this site for more examples.

 

The BBC reports that cows are magnetic:

 

Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.

 

The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle, but could tell that the animals tended to face either north or south.

 

Kim Komando pumps up a slow news day with some hysteria about digital drugs:

 

However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files (”doses”) that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.

 

But it doesn’t end there. You’ll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.

 

Try out the video above.  It’s an interesting visual effect.  I often get a similar effect when I’m hiking in the woods.  If I walk along the trail at a steady pace, looking forwards, the vegetation is always moving from the center of my visual field towards the edges.  My eyes compensate and habituate.  Then when I stop, my eyes and brain keep doing what they were doing.  Now it looks like things are moving away from me.

Here is an interesting illusion. The image above is static, but it appears to move. For me, it works better if I move my eyes around the image.

This stationary image appears to wave without effort. The elemental illusion is our revised version of the peripheral drift illusion, in which the direction of illusory motion is black-to-dark-gray and white-to-light-gray (Kitaoka and Ashida, 2003). In this image, blue and yellow correspond to dark gray and light gray, respectively.

Not much of an explanation. I note that the letters all have black and white shading, and that the shading varies from letter to letter and from group to group. The motion seems to come from the cues in the shading. I have no idea what ECVP means, or if other letters might work too. If it works with numbers, I could generate some really irritating sudokus.

I also note that this illusion survives resizing. I reduced the image a bit to fit in the blog, and the illusion still works.

A ferro-fluid consists of magnetic nano-particles suspended in a liquid. The particles are small enough that Brownian motion keeps them from settling to the bottom. If you apply a magnetic field, the particles will move. Surface tension keeps the particles from jumping out of the liquid, so the particles drag the liquid along with them.

Here there are two metal cones standing in a pool of ferro-fluid. Each cone has an electromagnet under it, to create a variable magnetic field.