Category Archives: Science & Tech

We Be Stoopiderer

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One of the amusing parts of following the Ferguson riots was watching TV people turn themselves into pretzels avoiding the obvious. You’re simply not allowed to notice vast swaths of reality. When it comes to race, you could find yourself living in Steve Sailer’s basement if you slip and notice something. That makes reporting on human activity nearly impossible. This story is a good example.

Technology may be getting smarter, but humans are getting dumber, scientists have warned.

Evidence suggests that the IQs of people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have declined in the last decade.  Opinion is divided as to whether the trend is long-term, but some researchers believe that humans have already reached intellectual peak.

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998. And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak. Between the 1930s and 1980s, the average IQ score in the US rose by three points and in post-war Japan and Denmark, test scores also increased significantly – a trend known as the ‘Flynn effect’.

This increase in intelligence was due to improved nutrition and living conditions – as well as better education – says James Flynn of the University of Otago, after whom the effect is named.

Now some experts believe we are starting to see the end of the Flynn effect in developed countries – and that IQ scores are not just levelling out, but declining.

Scientists including Dr Flynn think better education can reverse the trend and point out the perceived decline could just be a blip. However, other scientists are not so optimistic.

Some believe the Flynn effect has masked a decline in the genetic basis for intelligence, so that while more people have been reaching their full potential, that potential itself has been declining.

Some have even contentiously said this could be because educated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people.

Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential.

He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

Dr Lynn predicts that if this trend continues, we could lose another 1.3 IQ points by 2050.

Michael Woodley, of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, claims people’s reactions are slower than in Victorian times, and has linked it to a decline in our genetic potential.

It has previously been claimed that quick-witted people have fast reactions and Dr Woodley’s study showed people’s reaction times have slowed over the century – the equivalent to one IQ point per decade.

Jan te Nijenhuis, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, says Westerners have lost an average of 14 IQ points since the Victoria Era.

He believes this is due to more intelligent women have fewer children than those who are less clever,The Huffington Post reported.

Dr Woodley and others think humans will gradually become less and less intelligent.

But Dr Flynn says if the decline in IQ scores is the end of the Flynn effect, scores should stabilise.

He thinks that even if humans do become more stupid, better healthcare and technology will mean that all people will have fewer children and the ‘problem’ will regulate itself.

The study referenced in the story does not appear to adjust for race. Logically, if you increase the number of people from low IQ populations, average IQ will fall, so the population explosion in Africa  probably accounts for most of it. But, you’re not allowed to point out that Arabs, for example, like marrying their cousins, which lowers IQ over a few generations. Britain is now 4% Arab and those Arabs account for a third of the genetic defects.

That said, maybe there is an adjustment for race in the study, but buried in such a way as to make is hard to notice. The researcher in question does not seem to be hobbled by political correctness, so who knows. We could be getting dumber and the dumb are out-breeding the smart. Both claims would be easy to accept, based on observation of Western societies and immigration.

War on STEM

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Progressives are not just obsessed with destroying competitors. They seem determined to pull down the pillars of civilization. Their destruction of the America health insurance system is a great example. There’s no reason to explain the mayhem they are causing, other than a desire to destroy. It is possible that it is just gross incompetence, but it sure looks deliberate. This piece in IBD the other day is a good example. All of these results were predicted and avoidable. Yet, here we are.

Another example is the continued assault on the STEM fields.

Tracy Van Houten has always been infatuated with space. Over the course of two decades and two degrees, that love took Houten from a pre-engineering class in high school to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she works as an aerospace systems engineer on groundbreaking projects like the Mars Curiosity Rover.

Like many female engineers, though, the 32-year-old mother of two has encountered challenges one might expect in a field where nearly 90% of professionals are men. Colleagues have occasionally asked Van Houten — sometimes the only woman in the room — to take notes during meetings and plan work parties. At times she feels her ideas aren’t acknowledged or heard.

Van Houten must also make difficult choices in order to juggle work and family — a balance male engineers may not feel as compelled to achieve. When her second child was a year old, she turned down the opportunity to join a team operating Curiosity once it landed on Mars, because of the grueling schedule.

A common assertion from feminists is that women have to make choices that men do not face. There’s never a mention of the reverse. Men certainly face choices women do not face. Both are a product of biological reality, but determined to be a social construct, because, well, you go girl.

Yet, Van Houten remains a dedicated engineer, and that’s not always common according to a new survey. For the past several years, two researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have surveyed 5,300 women with degrees in engineering. They found that females frequently leave the profession because there aren’t enough opportunities for career advancement, or because they need to fulfill parenting or caregiving responsibilities in the absence of family-friendly work practices and policies.

The research indicates that leaning in to an engineering career may not lead to leadership prospects or a lifelong vocation, as women may hope. Instead, these women find themselves working for unfriendly or even hostile supervisors who show little interest in helping them advance professionally or designing a flexible work schedule to accommodate family obligations. The survey respondents also reported being discouraged by antiquated attitudes expressed by male colleagues and feeling isolated in a “male-centric” workplace.

Notice how men are supposed to accommodate women by “helping them advance professionally.” Maybe that’s good business. Maybe it is something a smart business owner should do. Who knows. What this is, however, is a childish demand by girls unprepared for the real world. Suck it up toots.

Women, in fact, comprise about 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female. In Fouad’s survey, a third of the women who left the field in the past five years did so to take care of children at home. Twelve percent reported a dearth of opportunities to advance in their career.

Engineering, for example, is not sales. The value of an engineer is cumulative. A woman who leaves her job for five years to raise kids is coming back to work, not just having missed five years of working. She is now behind the college grads in many cases. Her peers have advanced to supervisory positions. Odds are, the mom returning to work has better options outside of engineering.

To help both employees and their employers address these problems, SWE recently published a “playbook” that offers suggestions on how to better integrate work and personal commitments. Among the recommended policies are flexible scheduling practices, maternity and adoption leave, and on-site health and wellness resources.

Fouad, along with Bierman, believes that companies must start evaluating their policies for both sexes in order to effectively change attitudes in the workplace. As more men feel comfortable insisting on a sensible schedule, such requests will become the norm and not just the domain of female employees. Similarly, as more women view engineering as field that accommodates and encourages all of its professionals, they may increasingly join its ranks.

It’s not hard to see where this is going. The diversity rackets started the same way. First they sent out “helpful” play books. Then they sent out letters reading, “Nice company you have there. Too bad is something were to happen to it.” Not long after, the HR departments were flooded with women and minorities running diversity clinics. Jesse Jackson is out shaking down Silicon Valley. The more subtle types will be demanding engineering and technology firms start hiring girls – or else.

Put another way, it is convert, or else.

From the Mailbag

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The comment feature of this WordPress template is not the best. I chose this template because it is plain and easy to navigate. I hate overly complex sites with loads of web scripting. National Review and the Daily Caller are horrible to navigate because of the ridiculous scripts they have running, all intended to jam ads in your face. I went for simple and that means the commenting space is limited.

Readers have made some points I’d like to address so I figured a post addressing some of the comments would be worthwhile. Here are a few:

fodderwing writes:

There’s a big dif between having one’s questions answered and having them answered satisfactorily. That Fred is still asking is not necessarily evidence that he has ignored the “libraries full of books,” but may only be telling us that the books give unsatisfactory answers.

Satisfactorily to whom? It seems that millions of people have had no trouble finding the answers Fred says are elusive. John Derbyshire has addressed all of his points hundreds of times. Further, these answers are more than satisfactory to the people interested in evolutionary biology. They are, in many cases, axiomatic.

fodderwing continues:

I have my own unanswered questions about evolution, but the real lazy wusses in my view are the ones who get defensive when I ask. After reading Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box I thought it best to let him ask the hard questions, I would stick with the easy ones. I have read many answers to his “black box” concept, absolutely none of which seemed sincere or for that matter particularly well thought out. As for my easy questions, those are the ones that really frustrate people as the usual responses can probably best be summued up as “why can’t you just believe, man, like the rest of the smarter set? There is such overwhelming evidence, so many libraries full of books … “

If someone keeps asking you to explain why water is wet and ice is cold, you will begin to think that they are uncommonly stupid, have an agenda, or are passive-aggressively challenging your aptitude. If it is the first case, there’s only so many ways to explain something. Once you have exhausted them all, you give up. The world needs ditch diggers and hod carriers too.

If it is the other two, then you are dealing with a dishonest person. In both cases they are concealing their agenda, which is to sow doubt in your mind about your knowledge of the subject. This form of argumentation is common with the anti-science crowd, which makes it a campaign to spread ignorance. It is why the response from science these days when asked these sorts of questions is this.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it again. I have no quarrel with creationists or intelligent design people. These beliefs are not science, but the world will not spin off its axis of people believe that stuff. We get enough oogily-boogily from the Left and their war on science and reason. Christians would be wise to not follow their lead.

Bones writes:

Whatever else Fred is or isn’t, he isn’t a phoney. He’s always been upfront about his life. Fred comes from a mildly prominent Virginia family, but he was born in the coal mining town of Crumpler, West Virginia and spent a lot of his youth in rural West Virgina and Northern Alabama. He has a high regard for the people in the parts of Appalachia where he grew up. The ‘down home’ writing style he sometimes adopts is simply a literary device, used by people such as Joel Chandler Harris and many others.

Fred has an excellent command of the English language. He is making writing mistakes these days because he was hit in the face with shrapnel in Vietnam and his eyesight has deteriorated. He is now blind in one eye as the result of his latest eye surgery.

You may not like Fred or the stuff he writes. He may or may not know what he’s writing about. But ‘phoney’ is no more than name-calling

It is name-calling and I’m proud of my ability to use nouns. Without name calling, we would still be riding those big things in that place or whatever. I think Fred is a big phony and I have no qualms about saying it. At least you know where I stand.

I could be all wrong on that. Maybe his act is harmless and sincere. We all don a mask in public and maybe that’s just how Allah made him. I don’t know and I can’t know. All I can go on is what I see and my own sense of these things.

james wilson writes:

There are several factors. Jews, especially the ones you are describing, have no great affection for the country (I am increasingly sympathetic to that state of being). That being so they always have an exit strategy and a tradition of using it, so they continue to indulge their opinions–which are life itself to them–without restraint. And if the block is busted, well, they’ll once again be the first to sell. This strategy has worked well for them in recent times except for that miscalculation of 1933-45. But Montaigne wrote that even opinion is of force enough to make itself be espoused at the expense of life. No one contributes more to opinion than Jews, with less regard for the consequences.

A couple of points here. Steve Sailer points out frequently that Jews dominate certain industries and are wildly over represented in the millionaire and billionaire clubs. The thing is, Jews dominate transactional industries like the entertainment business, retail and the law. You don’t see a lot of Jews in construction, agriculture, mining or manufacturing. These are industries that require planning and investment to mitigate events currently over the horizon.

Is that cultural? Maybe. The old line was that Christians did not let Jews own property so they had no choice but to go into banking and commerce. That was always nonsense. Jews in Europe left the farm for the village 2,000 years ago. It is more likely the result of being a distinct minority that has often needed an exit strategy. Loading up the furniture and money is a lot easier than packing up the cattle or the fame land.

The other point is the Jewish relationship with the state. This has often been the justification for persecuting Jews. They were accused of dual loyalties, with loyalty to the tribe overriding all else. If you look at the world today, that seems like a shrewd position. Being an American citizen carries little value. Abroad it is a burden and home it is becoming a liability. We treat illegal alien invaders better than our own poor.

The Jews seem to have it right. Governments and countries come and go. Why sacrifice for a concept that has so little utility? America may have been a special place long ago, but today it is just a slab of land with a bunch of people living in it. It’s every tribe for himself, so to speak, whether we like it or not. Only a fool clings to his patriotism these days.

Deck writes:

The second law of thermodynamics puts the lie to evolution. Evolution is atheistic dogma dressed up as science, nothing more. Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, There is no God.” The vituperation coming out of Pisco shows Fred hit a nerve. Read, In The Beginning by Walt Brown.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy. Put another way, the natural process is for the complex to decay into the simple. The final result is complete randomness.

This is a popular misappropriation of physical science to biological science. This line of argument has been addressed many times in many places. Here’s one I found just by entering “second law of thermodynamics” in a search engine. The fact that it remains popular with creationists underscores my point about Fred Reed. There’s no amount of facts and reasoning that will ever satisfy the creationist. Therefore, why would I or anyone else bother trying?

Denmark is full of Danes

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Imagine a group of people that deeply believe in the Great Pumpkin. So much so, they have not only developed a religion and culture around it, everything that defines them is based in the existence of the Great Pumpkin. Their culture and social structures would collapse if they discovered the Great Pumpkin was myth. The news is full of people who would die for their religion so this should not be a terribly difficult thought experiment.

Now, flip around the other way. Imagine a group of people that have based everything about their existence on the belief that the Great Pumpkin does not exist. Unlike atheists, these people have actually managed to build a viable culture and institutions around the absolute faith in the Great Pumpkin being a myth. Everything they are is based on it. Tolerance for any Great Pumpkin-ism is impossible because it is essentially a denial of their essence.

Now, let’s assume these people know of one another and are within travel distance of one another. The former group, let’s call them the Positives, are going to be hell bent on converting the latter group, that we’ll call the Negatives. On the other hand, the Negatives are not interested in converting the Positives. The mere fact that these people are able to tolerate Great Pumpkin belief means they are capable of denying everything that makes up the very being of a Negative. Therefore, part of the Negative belief set is they want to destroy the Positives.

Now, replace the Great Pumpkin with race.

That’s where things stand in America when it comes to race. Most people accept that race is a real thing and different people come from different parts of the world. For most people, it is a casual awareness that does not animate their life. They think about it when they see a sign for Martin Luther King Boulevard or a bunch of a Spanish guys hanging out on the corner. Others take it more seriously as an academic or intellectual pursuit, while others take it too far and become bigots.

The other side of the fence we find the race deniers. Everything they believe, their sense of self and their world view, is based on race being a myth. The trouble is they are facing a mountain of scientific evidence that contradicts their belief. The mountain is not only growing, it is growing rapidly. Studies like this one seem benign to normal people, but they are a stake through the heart of a race denier.

Economists at the University’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) have looked at why certain countries top the world happiness rankings. In particular they have found the closer a nation is to the genetic makeup of Denmark, the happier that country is. The research could help to solve the puzzle of why a country like Denmark so regularly tops the world happiness rankings.

Dr Eugenio Proto and Professor Andrew Oswald, based in the Department of Economics, found three forms of evidence for a link between genetic makeup and a nation’s happiness.

Firstly they used data on 131 countries from a number of international surveys including the Gallup World Poll, World Value Survey and the European Quality of Life Surveys. The researchers linked cross-national data on genetic distance and well-being.

Dr Proto said: “The results were surprising, we found that the greater a nation’s genetic distance from Denmark, the lower the reported wellbeing of that nation. Our research adjusts for many other influences including Gross Domestic Product, culture, religion and the strength of the welfare state and geography.

The second form of evidence looked at existing research suggesting an association between mental wellbeing and a mutation of the gene that influences the reuptake of serotonin, which is believed to be linked to human mood.

Dr Proto added: “We looked at existing research which suggested that the long and short variants of this gene are correlated with different probabilities of clinical depression, although this link is still highly debated. The short version has been associated with higher scores on neuroticism and lower life satisfaction. Intriguingly, among the 30 nations included in the study, it is Denmark and the Netherlands that appear to have the lowest percentage of people with this short version.”

The final form of evidence looked at whether the link between genetics and happiness also held true across generations, continents and the Atlantic Ocean.

Professor Oswald said: “We used data on the reported wellbeing of Americans and then looked at which part of the world their ancestors had come from. The evidence revealed that there is an unexplained positive correlation between the happiness today of some nations and the observed happiness of Americans whose ancestors came from these nations, even after controlling for personal income and religion.”

For the race deniers, this is like seeing the Great Pumpkin walking down the strete in full view of everyone. This study is not abstract correlations. This is hard genetic science. More important, if a small localized population of humans in the heart of Europe can have some weird genetics that manifest in personality and culture, groups walled off from Europe by oceans and mountains are going to have even more unusual mutations that distinguish them from the rest.

The race deniers will be undone by the fact Denmark is full of Danes.

Fake Science

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The documenting of junk science is hardly new. I recall reading skeptics taking on nonsense studies back in the 1980’s. I’m old and my mind is slipping, but I think the term “junk science” was in use back then, but I may be misremembering. Alar is probably the first example I recall reading about, where the “science” turned out to be complete nonsense. DDT is the most famous example.

Still, the debunking of pseudo-science has a long history. It is generally tangled up in some cause, claiming to be about fending off an emergency. Anthropomorphic Global Warming is looking like the Godzilla of all junk science. Everything about it is fanciful, even the labels. The shadow of Rachel Carson will be with us forever.

The rise of the fake nerd has only made it worse. Fake nerds, as I have written about before, are all around us these days. Pretending to be “tech savvy” or really into technology is one part of it. Another is the use and abuse of statistics. The sporting press is being over run by guys with a couple of stat classes, carrying on like they are Bill James. Nate Silver is making a career out of it.

The mistake all of these guys make is in thinking statistics are science. Science uses statistics, but it also uses hammers and blow torches too. No one calls a carpenter a scientist or a geek, yet the typical carpenter is more empirically minded than most of these nerds. He understands cause and effect. He also understands that correlations can be misleading, so they must be treated with care.

Anyway, fake science has become the religion of the fake nerd cult. Take any amount of wishful thinking, slap on some statistics, scientific jargon and you have catnip for the fake nerds. This story is a great example.

The human race is really starting to feel the consequences of their actions. One area we are waking up to is the massive amount of pesticides we spray (especially in North America) on our food that has not only been linked to human disease, but a massive die off in the global bee population within the past few years.

A new study out of Harvard University, published in the June edition of the Bulletin of Insectology puts the nail in the coffin, neonicotinoids are killing bees at an exponential rate, they are the direct cause of the phenomenon labeled as colony collapse disorder (CCD). Neonicotinoid’s are the world’s most widely used insecticides.

Right away you see one of the hallmarks of fake science. That’s the apocalyptic warnings about humans living better than they deserve. In this case, it is the use of chemicals to ward off horrible plagues and produce more food.  Then you have the “case is closed” assertion that tells you the case is anything but closed. The fact that science is an ongoing debate is lost on the fake nerds.

For this study, researchers examined 18 bee colonies at three different apiaries in central Massachusetts over the course of a year. Four colonies at each apiary were regularly treated with realistic doses of neonicotinoid pesticides, while a total of six hives were left untreated. Of the 12 hives treated with the pesticides, six were completely wiped out.

This is an example of the classic logical fallacy they used to teach kids back in the olden times. It goes like this. If A then B, therefore if B then A. This is the error of affirming the consequent. In this case, overuse of this pesticide results in fragile bee colonies. There may be many reasons for fragile bee colonies. At best, this study suggest there may be a relationship between pesticides and fragile bee colonies.

Real scientists, like this guy, understand that there can be many causes to a single observed phenomenon. Those causes can interact with one another to mask and amplify their effects. Teasing out the true causal relationships is difficult. Correlations can help locate causes, but they often lead us down a blind alley. That’s the plight of the fake nerd. They believe they are empirically minded, but fall for this sort of nonsense all the time. The result is a flood of junk science.

The Threat of VGM

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Anything to do with the climate now has such a bad odor that most people just assume all of it is a hoax. Years of lying to people about global warming have discredited the field in the eyes of the public. That and the true believers are nut. It turns out that the real threat was never humans. It is volcanoes!

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming.

Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.

UTA researchers used radar techniques to map water flows under ice sheets and estimate the rate of ice melt in the glacier. As it turns out, geothermal heat from magma and volcanoes under the glacier is much hotter and covers a much wider area than was previously thought.

“Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers,” UTA researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The geothermal heat under the glaciers is likely a key factor in why the ice sheet is currently collapsing. Before this study, it was assumed that heat flow under the glacier was evenly distributed throughout, but UTA’s study shows this is not the case. Heat levels under the glacier are uneven, with some areas being much hotter than others.

We have always been at war with Volcanic Global Warming.

The Trouble with Fake Nerds

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Being a nerd has become the cool kid thing to be. The media people in Washington now call their big gala the “nerd ball” because it attracted all of the policy wonks. The fact that few of these people can do basic mathematics does not matter. They wear the right costumes and strike the right pose so they can pretend to be bookish nerds. Every  liberal pretends to be a science fan, even though none of them have any background in science, especially the human sciences.

But, fads are what they are and no group is more faddish than the Left. The trouble with this one is that incredibly stupid ideas get passed around like settled science, to use a common refrain. Here’s a good example from Tech Crunch, a site that caters to the fake nerd crowd.

Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign.

The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs.

Rather than paving streets and driveways with asphalt, the Solar Roadways panels would theoretically be able to decrease our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels by generating massive amounts of clean energy. Panels are made from ruggedized glass and connect to one another through a mesh network, so that even if one panel fails the system will notify repair crews that it needs to be replaced.

Actually, the theory is nonsense. Asphalt is black and that means it absorbs sunlight readily. The light is converted into heat, which is why the road is smoking hot in the middle of summer. It is also why the snow melts away even when it is below freezing, once the road is exposed. The road is converting close to 100% of the sunlight into heat. Solar panels, on the other hand, convert about 15% of sunlight into electricity. For that reason alone you have a huge loss of energy using solar panels instead of asphalt.

Then you have the issue of storage. If you want to use solar to light the roads, then you have to store the energy because lighting them in the daytime is stupid. That means batteries. They have a loss of energy, but they also cost a boatload of money and have to be replaced regularly.

We’re not even at the hard parts. Building a road from solar panels would require new materials capable of handling the massive abuse that comes from being driven over by trucks and cars. Those materials could not be smooth as the cars would fly off the roads in the rain.

Anyone with a mastery of basic science would spot this as nonsense, but the fake nerd trend means these people get to con a bunch of fake nerds into “crowdfunding” their alchemy. There’s always good money in pretending to be the smartest guy in the room.

Fake Safety

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The wearing of helmets while cycling is a new thing. People started putting them on their kids in the safety scares of the 1990’s. Then they because a weird fashion statement for middle aged people. The pros started wearing them, so the amateurs started wearing helmets, for the same reason they wear jerseys. The fact that they look stupid and probably don’t work does not matter.

A leading neurosurgeon has controversially claimed that cyclists who wear helmets are wasting their time.

Henry Marsh, who works at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, said that many of his patients who have been involved in bike accidents have been wearing helmets that were ‘too flimsy’ to be beneficial.

He made the comments while speaking at the Hay Festival during a discussion with Ian McEwan, whose 2005 novel Saturday featured a neurosurgeon.

He cited evidence from the University of Bath that suggests that wearing a helmet may even put cyclists at greater risk. The research showed that drivers get around 3 inches closer to cyclists who wear helmets because they perceive them as safer.

He said: “I ride a bike and I never wear a helmet. In the countries where bike helmets are compulsory there has been no reduction in bike injuries whatsoever.

Of course not. Think about the ways you can crash on a bike. One is you just fall over to the side while not moving. Unless you strike your head on a curb or rock, you bruise an elbow and that’s it. Since this is less likely than falling down the stairs and we don’t wear helmets walking around the house, it makes no sense to wear a helmet on a bike to mitigate against this possibility.

Another way to crash is you hit something and go over the bars. That’s going to hurt, but you’re much more likely to break an arm or wrist than break your melon. That’s why broken arms and wrists are vastly more common than broken heads. More important, that flimsy piece of plastic is not saving your head if you take a direct hit.

The other possibility is you get hit by a car. A broken melon is the least of your worries in that case. The sudden deceleration is going to cause a lot more damage than just cracking your skull. of course, that bit of plastic and foam is not going to matter, other than to make it a bit easier to identify your body. That’s always been the real benefit of wearing a motorcycle helmet

“I see lots of people in bike accidents and these flimsy little helmets don’t help.”

Mr Marsh said that he had been riding his bike for 40 years, wearing a cowboy hat, and had only fallen off once.

“I have been cycling for 40 years and have only been knocked off once. I wear a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I look completely mad.”

Cyclists travel around 3.1 billion miles each year in Britain. Lights and reflectors are a legal obligation after dark, and reflective jackets an increasingly common sight.

But helmets are not compulsory in the UK, unlike in Australia and parts of the US, yet the government encourages cyclists to wear one.

Research conducted by Dr Ian Walker, a professor of traffic psychology at the University of Bath, showed that motorists drove around 8cm closer when overtaking cyclists with helmets.

He suggested that drivers think helmeted cyclists are more sensible, predicable and experienced, so therefore the driver doesn’t need to give them much space when overtaking.

Non-helmeted cyclists, especially non helmeted “women” are less predictable and experienced, according to this study and so motorists give them more room.

That’s something experienced cyclist know. The safest way to ride on public roads is in the middle oft he road with traffic. The drivers will see you and not try to pass you at a high rate of speed. They will also see that you can’t see them. They may get pissed and blow the horn, but they are unlikely to drive over you.

Bad Science

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Even the most disconnected people know the gag about science announcing something and then the next day announcing the opposite. This is most common with food and diet, where everyday brings a new scare. If you follow the soft-sciences, then you know that most of what passes for academic research in some fields is complete nonsense that is easily refuted. This story in the New York Times goes into detail about the origin of what we have come to call junk science.

My first Raw Data column, published in January, was about the controversy over irreproducibility — experiments whose outcomes cannot be verified independently by another lab. Featured in the piece was a study by Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis that has been a source of contention since it appeared in 2005. It was called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

All scientific results are, of course, subject to revision and refutation by later experiments. The problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked.

Dr. Ioannidis’s analysis took into account several factors — things like noisy data, a small sample size or relatively lenient standards for deciding if a finding is statistically significant. His model could be applied to any area of science that met his criteria. But most attention to the reproducibility problem has been in the life sciences, particularly in medical laboratory research and epidemiology. Based on the number of papers in major journals, Dr. Ioannidis estimates that the field accounts for some 50 percent of published research.

The small sample size is a favorite of the health rackets. I wish I had saved it, but my all time favorite was a study on milk using eight Norwegian dairy farmers. I forget the details, but it had something to do with heart disease and dairy consumption. The executive summary made the claim that dairy causes heart disease. They assumed the nitwit reporters would not bother to read the study.

Another area of concern has been the social sciences, including psychology, which make up about 25 percent of publications. Together that constitutes most of scientific research. The remaining slice is physical science — everything from geology and climatology to cosmology and particle physics. These fields have not received the same kind of scrutiny as the others. Is that because they are less prone to the problems Dr. Ioannides described?

Faye Flam, a science writer with a degree in geophysics, made that argument in a critique of my column in Knight Journalism Tracker, and I responded on my own blog, Fire in the Mind. Since then I’ve been thinking more about the matter, and I asked Dr. Ioannidis for his view.

“Physical sciences have a stronger tradition of some solid practices that improve reproducibility,” he replied in an email. Collaborative research, for example, is customary in physics, including large consortiums of experimenters like the teams that announced the discovery of the Higgs particle. “This certainly increases the transparency, reliability and cross-checking of proposed research findings,” he wrote.

He also mentioned more stringent statistical standards in particle physics — like the five sigma measure I mentioned in my second column — as well as sociological factors: “There seems to be a higher community standard for ‘shaming’ reputations if people step out and make claims that are subsequently refuted.” Cold fusion was a notorious example. He also saw less of an aversion to publishing negative experimental results — that is, failed replications.

Another factor, as Ms. Flam suggests, is how constrained a field is in generating plausible hypotheses to test. Almost anything might be suspected of causing cancer, but physicists are unlikely to propose conjectures that violate quantum mechanics or general relativity. But I’m not sure the difference is always that stark. Here is how I put it my blog post:

“What about the delicate and exquisitely controlled experiments that occur in laboratories? Are hypotheses involving intracellular enzyme pathways and the effects of microRNA on protein regulation so much less constrained than, say, solid-state physics and materials science?

Everyone is being polite here. The difference is social science is not science. Physics and chemistry are science. Science relies on math to validate itself. Long before humans walked the earth, arithmetic was true. Two plus two was true at the dawn of time and will be true into the future. Social sciences rely on statistics, which they use to calculate probabilities. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is not science.

You can calculate the probability of you getting black jack on the next deal. You cannot prove you will get black jack. When you get into areas with loads of hard to quantify variables, statistics loses much of it value. The response to that is the creation of simplified models and studies that have no connection to reality. The result provides statistically useful results, but the difference between statistically useful and practically useful is often so large as to make them mutually exclusive.

Dr. Ioannidis said he was struck by an “arrogant dismissal” by some physical scientists of the suggestion that their field might be anything less than pristine. We won’t really know, he said, unless there are empirical studies like the recent ones in medical science.

“I have no doubt that false positives occur in all of these fields,” he concluded, “and occasionally they may be a major problem.”

I’ll be looking further into this matter for a future column and would welcome comments from scientists about the situation in their own domain.

Science is not immune from mischief. This story from last week shows how broken the peer review system is these days. Peer review is intended to weed out the junk science from the legitimate science. Experts in the field review your work, critique your methods, challenge your assumptions and look at your data. If computer generated gibberish is passing through the system it means no one is looking at this stuff. Peer review is useless if there are no peers and no review.

Good News From The Black Death

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Every society has its myths. Foundation myths not only explain how the culture came to be, but also why they are God’s special people. Up until a couple of decades ago, Americans were taught in grammar school about the Pilgrims, religious liberty and the founding of the world’s first representative democracy. Other myths justify the existing order and the traditions of the people. In the West, this means believing in the equality of man, natural rights and so forth. Myths are a necessary part of who we are.

In America, politics, popular culture and policy debate all start from the assertion that all people are equal at birth. Everything about a person is determined by environment. Even things like heart disease, cancer, and body type are negotiable, despite science saying otherwise. Of course, sex and race are ruled irrelevant. Any differences between the sexes or races is assumed to be a carryover from past sins in the culture. Public policy in areas like education are aimed at eradicating these cultural shadows.

As is always the case with religion, myths and belief, science tends to be an enemy. The HBD folks have done yeoman’s work popularizing and expanding on ideas percolating up from the sciences, particularly genetics and evolutionary biology. Still, it is a small collection of people that follow this stuff and even a smaller group that think public policy should reflect the new knowledge. Superstition is the rule, but if you are the least bit optimistic, then stories like this one should give you some hope.

Enter Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He realized that in his home country, Romania, the existence of two very distinct ethnic groups provided an opportunity to see the hand of natural selection in the human genome. A thousand years ago, the Rroma people—commonly known as gypsies—migrated into Europe from north India. But they intermarried little with European Romanians and thus have very distinct genetic backgrounds. Yet, by living in the same place, both of these groups experienced the same conditions, including the Black Plague, which did not reach northern India. So the researchers sought genes favored by natural selection by seeking similarities in the Rroma and European Romanians that are not found in North Indians.

Netea; evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain; and their colleagues looked for differences at more than 196,000 places in the genomes of 100 Romanians of European descent and 100 Rroma. For comparison, the researchers also cataloged these differences in 500 individuals who lived in northwestern India, where the Rroma came from. Then they analyzed which genes had changed the most to see which were most favored by selection.

Genetically, the Rroma are still quite similar to the northwestern Indians, even though they have lived side by side with the Romanians for a millennium, the team found. But there were 20 genes in the Rroma and the Romanians that had changes that were not seen in the Indians’ versions of those genes, Netea and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These genes “were positively selected for in the Romanians and in the gypsies but not in the Indians,” Netea explains. “It’s a very strong signal.”

Now, why should Gypsy resistance to the plague matter? Well, as a cultural matter, it does not. What matters is the free and open discussion in a mainstream science journal about genetic differences in human populations. If genes matter in disease resistance, there’s no denying they matter in other areas. More important, if observable differences are genetic, then there is little point in arguing for environmentally based antidotes. That would be like trying to talk someone out of having cancer.

Now, there are plenty of these turning up every week and that supports for the above point. What’s important here is the casual discussion of gypsies, a protected class in Europe. Even though everyone hates them, no one is allowed to mention them. They are not quite on the level of American blacks, but they enjoy a similar status. When geneticist feel free to study and report on protected classes, then maybe the Overton window is moving in the direction of rationality. Even a little movement is a miracle.