ITT post science stuff

[teh b0lly!!1]

this is pretty science i guess

[Starla]

Originally Posted by Cool As Ice Cream

those are pieces of lung

Your post had me go back to the doctor to see what it was. It was just some of the flesh off of my throat ripping off.

Originally Posted by reprise85

that sounds pretty gross

did you get quick tested for strep or just assuming it's strep? it sounds like really think mucus (maybe) but the pink flesh is strange. i got brownish grey strep before but it was when i was smoking. when they come out does it leave any kind of scab/opening?

They did a rapid test. I've had strep before, but never like this. In the past, I just powered through it with Vitamin C, zinc and oregano... and it didn't seem so bad. But this time, it came on very suddenly. Like one minute I was fine, and the next it's like swallowing with knives stabbing everywhere. They first had me taking ceftin, then put me on a z pak because my tonsils were swelling closed. I couldn't eat anything but smoothies all week. Today is the first day I can eat food.

Originally Posted by killtrocity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonsillolith

Here is another strange bodily occurrence that your probably experience every day but didn't know was commonplace and has a name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater

Gotta love that Google is at the point where you can search "what are those clear floaty things in my eye when I look at bright backgrounds" and get a definitive answer

Yeah that's crazy. I knew someone that had these. I cannot imagine dealing with that on a random basis.

[The Omega Concern]

Originally Posted by scottytheoneand

Cognitive bias is a serious issue in sciences. Which is why nobody should take any claims as fact until they are peer reviewed and replicated.

And even then, take it all with a big grain of sea-salt:



Big Science is broken


That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part.

[reprise85]

The article it is talking about has a lot of problems. When performing a hypothesis test, you are not saying that the hypothesis is proven or not proven. You are saying that the original hypothesis, which is the null hypothesis (aka the treatment had no effect) can be accepted or rejected. Because it is much more costly to have a false positive than a false negative, we take a very conservative approach that only if a finding is very unlikely to have happened by chance, and I mean VERY UNLIKELY, do we say we can reject the null hypothesis.

This means, even if 1 in 20 published reports of scientific findings really found nothing statistically significant and we reported in error that it did, the fact that we've taken such a conservative approach and are picking things to study in the first place that very likely are correlated at some level based on the initial research into picking the experiment in the first place, it is very likely that an additional finding of a repeated study as being not statistically significant is in fact finding just that - that the difference is not statistically significant - not that there wasn't a difference at all, or that the difference is somehow completely the opposite of the truth.

For example, this:

Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made.

Is completely wrong. It is not almost certain that one out of three positive findings is the spurious one. It is much more likely that the positive finding found something, because we take such a conservative approach, that when we do find something it is very likely that there is some difference. And a non-finding is not the same as saying there is probably not a difference - that would overwhelmingly be false, and experimental testing never proves that something is FALSE, only that we didn't find a reason to think it isn't true or we did find a reason to think it isn't true.

Of course any one test of finding a difference could be wrong, but all things being equal, if you did two tests and one was not able to reject the null hypothesis and one was, it is very likely that you can actually reject the null hypothesis, because we need an extreme value to even say we can reject it, in most cases almost 2 standard deviations away from nonsignificance, and other cases much more than that. So while, with a 5% false-positive rate we will find something that isn't actually there (to that degree) 1 in 20 times, most tests have a way higher false-negative rate - like 40%+ when there is in fact a difference, because we require such extreme scores to say yes, there's a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statis...thesis_testing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors

[D.]

fuckin' dinosaurs man

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...-study-reveals

[MyOneAndOnly]

One of my favorite crack pot theories regarding dinosaurs is the bouyancy theory, which claims that the earths atmosphere used to be much more dense. There's an interesting website which makes such a claim.

http://www.dinosaurtheory.com/solution.html

As far as I know this is not taken seriously by any experts in the field. I find the guy's argument to be terribly weak. It is essentially that there is no other reasonable scientific argument to explain the scaling of dinosaurs, so therefore the earth had a super drnse atmosphere. But science doesn't work that way. Lack of knowledge is not a valid argument in favor of something.

[duovamp]

Size is relative, that's precisely the problem. I mean rats thrive as well as humans. Are we enormous giants? Evolution isn't what works BEST it's just what works at all. I don't understand how the conditions have to be that different for such things to exist as they did. Whales vs dolphins is a good example.

[duovamp]

That guy's a moron.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Environment does set limits on size. Flying Birds have never been much bigger than a condor. Any larger and the run into a problem of lift vs their mass. However, a hundred million years ago there were gigantic flying dinosaurs. And it's not fully understood how they were able to fly. Also, the density of the atmosphere plays a huge roll on flight. None of the earths birds could fly in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Since the rise of mammals on land no species have approached the size of some dinosaurs. While large examples exist in the mammalian fossil record, giant sabor toothed cats and wolves for example, they tend to be evolutionary dead ends that dissapear when prey species are not plentiful. And they've never approached the enormous size of dinosaurs. Some Dinosaurs stayed incredibly large for more than a hundred million years.

The largest animals to ever live are current whale species. 100 million years ago there were gigantic sea creatures as well, aquatic dinosaurs, sharks, etc. Size in the oceans doesn't seem to run into the same limits it did on land.

[teh b0lly!!1]

or rather, the sea is a more fertile and wild habitat that is relatively uninterrupted by outside factors, re: humans

[MyOneAndOnly]

Here's an article that talks about the current science that explains how sauropods got so large.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic....s-super-sized/

As part of their respiratory system, sauropods had a complex network of air sacs that gave them two advantages. Not only did the air sacs allow the dinosaurs to breathe more efficiently – more like birds than mammals – but the soft tissues invaded bone to make the skeletons of these dinosaurs lighter without sacrificing strength. Indeed, even at around 100 feet long, Supersaurus has been estimated to weigh in between 35 and 40 tons. That’s quite hefty in absolute terms, but consider that the largest African elephant on record weighed about 12 tons, and the extinction rhino Paraceratherium – about 26 feet long and 16 feet tall at the shoulder – weighed about 18 tons. You’d think a dinosaur about four times as long as Paraceratherium would be much heavier – 72 tons or more – but Supersaurus and similar dinosaurs were relatively light. Air sacs allowed sauropods to escape some of the physical constraints that have limited the evolution of mammal body size over the past 66 million years.