Links for 2012-01-06

As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging — and just as potentially transformative. These often unsung researchers are willing to spend years or even decades getting a finicky instrument to run smoothly; setting up proper controls to minimize spurious results; beating back noise that threatens to swamp their signal; and striving for an ever more painstaking level of precision — a determination and single-mindedness that borders on heroic. Here, Nature describes five such quests.

“Non-interventionism” is no more a principle than “interventionism” is. It’s not obvious to me that “never intervene” is a wiser, more sensible, more prudent or more just approach than “always intervene” would be. It seems to me, rather, to be the sort of crutch one falls back on instead of engaging in the difficult, messy business of an actual principled approach to evaluating any given situation. It allows you to escape having to know or care at all about any particular situation, because you’ve got a one-size-fits-all answer to any and every question. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul both happened to be right in opposing the invasion of Iraq, but that had nothing to do with their principled evaluation of that situation. They’re more like my friend in algebra class in high school who always said that X=3. Sometimes X did equal 3, but even when he got the answer right it wasn’t because he understood the question.

Some of my very earliest memories are from the days when my mom worked the night shift at the hospital, and my dad had to pick me up from daycare after work. He would bring me home and the two of us would have bachelor night – which ultimately meant Van Camp’s pork and beans (with hotdogs) for dinner on the ottoman, in the living room while watching “Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” hosted by Marlin Perkins. This was priceless father/son time because I knew there was no way Mom would approve of us eating Van Camp’s on the ottoman if she were home. Dad and I were having our buddy time. I can’t say if it was the “buddy time” association with “Wild Kingdom”, or just my natural aptitude for science, but that show stuck with me. I remember Marlin Perkins very vividly – sort of a Walt Disney-esque with a genuine love of nature which, perhaps, shifted him enough away from the mainstream to qualify as mildly dorky. For whatever reason his

The hubby and I like to watch holiday-themed movies over the holidays, so naturally, Die Hard made the list this year. I haven’t seen it in ages, but for a movie that came out in 1988, it still holds up remarkably well. One reason for that is the script. I was surprised at how well plot elements were seamlessly woven in. You’d think a big shoot ’em up action movie wouldn’t pay attention to details, but this one does. And we can learn from it to make our stories read just as seamlessly. Odds are you won’t write a seamless story on the first draft, but you can make it read as if you planned it that way all along.

This video shows why humans are terrible at generating random sequences. Why flipping a coin is different & introduces the concept of frequency stability