OT: science, technology engineering, mathematic and medical thinking skills have arty-crafty components

I'm glad I wasn't born a century ago.

I get to live twice as long, and ten times as well.

That seems pretty effective to me.

Clifford Heath.

ond interesting paper

le.

John Larkin doesn't know much about art, and even less about art criticism.

Most people - John Larkin is clearly excluded here - know enough about art and artists to distinguish between successful artists, who reliably produce works that many people like (not always the same people from work to work) and the residual population of aspiring artists, who don't.

Sturgeons Law is more generous - he only claimed that 90% of everything was junk. John Larkin - as an art critic - is clearly part of the 90%.

It's remarkably effective in practice, and the world is a much better place than it was even a few decades ago.

Sadly, NT would prefer it to be a rather worse place, but one that he would like better.

Someone recently suggested that there should be journals that publish failed experiments. That makes enormous sense.

Peer review would be fun too.

But probably not to publishers. Who is going to read them?

Peer review is never fun. It's a chore. Nobody likes doing it - which is why people as peripheral as I am get to do it from time to time - but it is accepted as a responsibility, if one that gets dodged quite frequently.

his is

s wrong. In medicine generally, the figure is 90 something percent.

place.

It's an advance for sure. Due to a mixture of things: medical research, fin anial development, the time to put various improvments in place, developmen ts in car design, all sorts of things. Obviously medical research has broug ht positive results, but it's been a very miss & sometimes hit path. Now th at we can do better, we need to.

NT

You misinterpret. All the other things became possible because *people live longer* because medicine and basic hygiene stopped them dying young.

When everyone died at 50-60, we didn't take the time to even get properly educated - not if we wanted to see our grand-children. So we certainly couldn't do the other things too.

Clifford Heath.

this is

er

is wrong. In medicine generally, the figure is 90 something percent.

r place.

inancial development, the time to put various improvements in place, develo pments in car design, all sorts of things. Obviously medical research has b rought positive results, but it's been a very miss & sometimes hit path. No w that we can do better, we need to.

And the reason we now do it better is that medical research has been - to s ome extent - taken out of the hands of doctors who are trained (for their o wn psychological health) to make up their minds quickly, and not ratiocinat e about the process after the event.

The scientific method depends on the idea that you could be getting somethi ng wrong - and might just have killed a few patients in consequence - so th e people who do that sort of thinking have to be at some remove from the sh arp end.

Big studies, spread over lots of doctors and even more patients, help get t hat kind of depression-avoiding separation.

this is

er

is wrong. In medicine generally, the figure is 90 something percent.

r place.

finanial development, the time to put various improvments in place, develo pments in car design, all sorts of things. Obviously medical research has b rought positive results, but it's been a very miss & sometimes hit path. No w that we can do better, we need to.

Obviously there are a bunch of factors, of which living longer is one. More efficient practices is another leading to shorter working weeks. Hard to a dvance much when almost 100% of the population is working excessive hours i n fields growing crops. How you can get 'you misinterpret' from that I don' t know.

NT

ter place.

financial development, the time to put various improvements in place, deve lopments in car design, all sorts of things. Obviously medical research has brought positive results, but it's been a very miss & sometimes hit path. Now that we can do better, we need to.

some extent - taken out of the hands of doctors who are trained (for their own psychological health) to make up their minds quickly, and not ratiocin ate about the process after the event.

hing wrong - and might just have killed a few patients in consequence - so the people who do that sort of thinking have to be at some remove from the sharp end.

that kind of depression-avoiding separation.

It's one reason certainly. Scary that we agree on something. There have als o been many advances made in less rigorous ways - those also have their pla ce.

NT

Yes. But the peer review prior to publication consists of sending the draft out to a handful of experts in the field and asking for comments. These can range from helpful suggestions to downright rude insults depending on the quality of the paper and the mood of the reviewer.

Plenty of junk is weeded out without ever being published. Some prestigious journals are rather careful about what they publish.

A sad example from history is the poor Russian chemist Belousov in 1951 who discovered the canonical oscillating redox reaction that was so counter intuitive to everything chemists believed at the time that his paper was rejected out of hand and the simple recipe he gave untested.

Belousov was posthumously awarded the Lenin medal for his work but gave up science because nobody would believe him or look at his ground breaking work. Eventually a student Zhabotinsky was given it as a project and repeated the experiments successfully getting them publicised via a meeting in Prague. When news reached the West the trick was a favourite for schools lectures as a chemical clock that went tick-tock tick-tock for quite a while. Until then they only went "tick".

Very few artists get rich unless some random oligarch takes a real fancy to their output. Comparatively few make a decent living. Some who are now very famous names scraped along barely surviving from day to day.

Only the best (or strictly most sought after) arists become rich and famous and the majority (but not all) of them have done something noteworthy to have gained that following and acclaim.

There are a few though that I would not give houseroom to.

Some novel stuff clearly does involve real creativity and innovation.

OTOH a full ash tray or an unmade bed is basically just trying it on to see what you can sell your trash for once you have a famous name.

You must read the wrong art critics. I have seen some pretty savage reviews of bad modern art.

Not really. I think good artists actually share a lot in common with old school pcb layout guys in using spatial visualisation and imagination.

I have seen some really crap art but most of it was OK (and I did go fairly regularly to the Royal Academy summer exhibition for a while). The worst in terms of being vastly overpriced were some very badly made neon signs by a certain famous for being infamous modern artist.

It doesn't agree with your prejudices - that is entirely different.

Some of the most famous experiments ever have been null results.

The Michelson-Morely experiment to measure the ether drift failed miserably to detect any ether at all. But it was a massive triumph in experimental excellence an a prelude to relativity.

Likewise for the Eotvos experiment to look for a difference between inertial and gravitational mass. Again a null result.

Just because the experiment didn't give the result that people were expecting doesn't mean it failed. It is the experiments that gave results that refute the existing paradigm which are remembered forever.

BTW we would be up to the eyeballs in worthless reports of failure to reproduce the infamous Fleischmann & Pons cold fusion experiment by now if everyone who tried it wrote just one A4 report.

Publishing complete junk does no-one any good.

Ensuring that all the data obtained in medical trials is available for inspection makes good sense otherwise there is a tendency to cherry pick only those trials which show what the researchers want to see.

A properly run failed experiment isn't junk.

A joural of failed experiments would guide future experimenters, and be an interesting test of published "successful" experiments.

We sometimes go experiments that apear to be failures, but contain unappreciated effects that turn out to be valuable later.

Right. And other trials that didn't find the same causality stay hidden. Information is lost.

And millions of people still buy Superball lottery tickets.

I intended to synthesise 2,4-dinitrophenyl oxalate (the cyalume patent glostick compound) but the nitrogen blanket failed and I ended up with useless impure brown gunge. How is that of any use to anybody?

You might enjoy "The Journal of Irreproducible Results"

Such experiments usually *are* published in the literature - at least in the hard sciences. Failure to find the ether drift for example. It is hard to think of a more famous null result experiment.

I am in favour of keeping the data mainly because you may be able to trawl through it later and pull signal out of noise in any large dataset once you actually know what it is you are looking for.

Challis had observed Neptune a month earlier than its recognised discoverer and would not have bothered looking at all but for Airy's intervention to make him do it. He had seen it first but lack of good charts and time meant he didn't recognise the fact. Adams predictions were spot on but Urbain le Verrier had the same result and a more willing German observer who confirmed his prediction on 23 Sept 1846.

National lotteries are a voluntary tax on the innumerate.

A boomer dreams about owning a Cadillac like how he dreams about owning a boat, because out there, beyond the breakers...her lawyers can't find him

And it has a CD player

whoosh