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TJ Radcliffe
Personal blog · tjradcliffe.com · on HN as tjradcliffesciencemath
TJ Radcliffe writes No Question Left Unasked, a personal blog at tjradcliffe.com about science and math. Since 2014, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “Why Speculation About MH370 is Evidence of Innumeracy”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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43mentions?
3HN people?
2014–2015first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Why Speculation About MH370 is Evidence of Innumeracy2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-03-24
What Hacker News says?
> I cannot count the amount of times I've read about scientists in the past getting ridiculed for some "crackpot" theory only to be vindicated later. I can, and it is a much, much smaller number than either: 1) a theory was widely accepted because "it just made sense" and turned out to be false (bloodletting, Aristotle's physics, caloric, aether, bad air causing disease...) or 2) a theory being ridiculed and it turn…
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on “How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?”Submitted Some Notes on Orbital Mechanics as a story · 30 points
HN discussionThe problem is that major air disasters are so incredibly rare that whatever happened is by definition enormously improbable. That means the speculative landscape is fantastically broad: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364 Occam's Razor is only useful when one hypothesis stands out above all the rest in prior plausibility. In the case of major air disasters no such single hypothesis is favoured. Almost any prior, up…
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on “How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?”Submitted A Closed-Form Argument about Climate Change as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe answer to the headline question is: "very". Speculation on the location of MH370 is evidence of innumeracy, at best. Insanity, at worst: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364 tl;dr: because air disasters are incredibly improbable, the range for speculation is almost completely unbounded, and therefore the probability that any particular speculation is correct is vanishingly small.
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on “How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?”Submitted Why Speculation About MH370 is Evidence of Innumeracy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEvery human ability has a natural distribution of what for a better word we can call "talent". This is as true of running or tennis as it is of coding. To claim otherwise is to tell people who aren't naturally very good at tennis that they are moral failures for not working hard enough at it, which is insulting and demeaning as well as false. Furthermore, there is evidence that the ability to code is non-linearly de…
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on “The programming talent myth”> So, let's not pretend that we know what is going on here. Absolutely. When we make bold assertions like "X would Y" we are bringing a huge amount of personal bias, baggage and most of all ignorance to the table. It blinkers us to the vast range of possible realities that our impoverished imaginations (and our imaginations are always impoverished) are incapable of conjuring. As an exercise, before posting "X must b…
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on “With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce”Wonderful! The descriptions of the accretion disk images are particularly good. Recently for an abstract art project I wrote a simple gravitational lens simulator to distort an image as if there was a 10 Earth mass black hole between the viewer and the objects: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/test1.... It was a quick hack to explore the idea, and I'm pretty sure important details aren't right,…
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on “Raytracing a Black Hole”I've just completed a screen-writing course, and wrote a feature-length screenplay as part of that process, and was struck by how much like technical writing it was. A screenplay is not a story the way a novel or short story is, but rather a technical description of a story that allows the various people involved to do their jobs: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1666 Screenplay structure is so tight and formal it's al…
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on “Software engineers should write”These are reasonable criteria. I also tend to be very sensitive to failure to correct for multiple hypotheses, as this is something I see all the time, particularly when people start sub-setting data: "We looked for an association between vegetables in the diet and cancer incidence, but only found it between kale and lung cancer." This happens all the time, and people report such associations as if they were the onl…
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on “Science’s Biggest Fail”This is a really nice example of how a "simple" problem can take years and a great deal of tinkering to find a workable solution. I've been thinking about--and building--bookshelves for a lot of years, and only recently came up with a design that I really kinda like: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1499 The optimal balance between imagining and prototyping is a fascinating problem, and seems to depend sensitively on t…
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on “Slow, flexible and cheap: Six years of development to create a rubber hexagon”I've read two responses to these events that nicely cover this question from what amount to opposite sides, although the distance between them is small: 1) Ross Douthat in the NYT, saying "In this sense, many of the Western voices criticizing the editors of Hebdo have had things exactly backward: Whether it’s the Obama White House or Time Magazine in the past or the Financial Times and (God help us) the Catholic Lea…
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on “Google Is Donating €250k to Charlie Hebdo”Je suis Charlie: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1704 If you're not, too bad. But all you have to do is stand up. You can do it whenever you want, however you want, but you can always do it.
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on “Google Is Donating €250k to Charlie Hebdo”The additional data point really makes obvious how steady the Arctic sea ice was up to somewhere between 1990 and 2000: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1634 (just a quick replotting and refitting of the data, as the graph in the paper linked from the article doesn't really give a clear sense of how far in the past this new data point is).
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on “American scientists unearth lost 1960s polar satellite images”My novel "Darwin's Theorem", which is about stories, evolution, religion and science, is available for free: http://tjradcliffe.com/darwins_theorem/darwins_theorem.epub It's character-driven pure speculation on big ideas.
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on “Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?”The difficulty with these semi-classical interpretations of quantum phenomena is that they tend to work nicely for a few very simple cases and fall to bits when things get more complex. Bohm's quantum potential works almost perfectly for single electron atoms, in which the quantum potential simply holds the electron still, but falls apart for multi-electron atoms, which require a higher dimensional space for the qua…
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on “Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?”There's nothing magical about the required properties, so I'm not sure why anyone would describe them that way. They are no different than the properties imputed to neutrinos or the aether: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1801 The important thing about extra-galactic dark matter is there is too much of it to be made of ordinary particles: protons and neutrons and electrons. We know how many ordinary nucleons there are…
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on “Could dark matter not exist?”Dark matter is no more a kludge than phlogiston, or the lumineferous aether, or neutrinos. All of them were introduced as novel entities to explain experimental phenomena. The first two turn out not to exist, the latter does: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1801 Calling them kludges is to mistake the basic process of science for a hack. There are any number of confirmatory observations that fit the dark matter model,…
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on “Could dark matter not exist?”I've done a PhD and been an entrepreneur. The former is much harder, although "success" is almost certain if you're persistent. It is very difficult for people to appreciate how grueling an academic career can be, from grad school on. I put together this list to make the point: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588 (needs to be read to the end to see what I mean.)
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on “Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don't Think They're Smart”You don't actually need any fancy software to see what's going on if you've mastered the fine art of free body diagrams: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1374 (not related to skateboards, but those damned wobbly suitcases). And the advantage of simple free body diagrams is they are amenable to relatively simple models, frequently involving simple harmonic motion: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1410 These are teachable s…
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on “The force vectors on a skateboard during an Ollie”The scrutiny that Bell test experiments get from loophole people is always much appreciated, but the problem with Aspect's results in particular is that lovely parenthetical remark that appears in several of his figures, to the tune of "The dotted line is not a fit to the data, but the quantum mechanical prediction for this result." While it is easy to imagine selective-detection effects that mess up the results eno…
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on “There exists a classical model of the photon after all”"Getting along" is a key aspect of robustness in a relationship: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1021 Robustness is under-rated in the romantic ideals people are sold (and I do mean "sold"), which emphasize "perfection" under various guises. The romantic ideal is someone who is not just a perfect match for you, but is a unique match for you, not because of your history and shared experiences but because of some suppos…
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on “What makes for a stable marriage?”Emacs makes complex things possible and simple things hard: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=74 That post is the fifth most popular thing on my blog, all from search-hits looking for how to count words in Emacs.
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on “Stack Exchange for Emacs”Historically the Great Plains have been very dry. Well, pre-historically, from a European colonization perspective. There is a history of mega-droughts. If Europeans had arrived in the midst of the thirty-year drought in the 1700's the settlement of the West would have been quite different. So independently of the accuracy of climate models--and the hiatus is a real, non-cherry-picked feature of the Hadcrut data, wh…
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on “U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years”I've never heard the idea that no one during the Middle Ages drank water, so I'm not sure who the author is referring to when they say reputable scholars repeat this idea unthinkingly. It is notable that there seem to be no references in the post to anyone who actually believes this supposed myth. The notion that anyone believed "bad water" caused disease is also one I've never heard in a Medieval context. "Bad air"…
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on “The great Medieval water myth (2013)”I work remotely, recently moved to a new city, don't belong to a church, and have about a dozen causal friends locally (most of them gay men, via a random work-connection of my girlfriend's and the fact that the gay community is ridiculously welcoming and outgoing.) I'd say "Introverts of the world, unite!" but that would kind of defeat the purpose. I've speculated that the 150-person limit on pre-political human gr…
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on “The Limits of Friendship”The American psychologist Roy Baumeister has a very good book on evil: http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Inside-Human-Violence-Cruelty/dp/... My review of it can be found here: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1605 Short version: Baumesiter focuses on data, not imaginary scenarios, which he correctly identifies as profoundly misleading (which should be no surprise to anyone paying attention to the past 300 years of scientific…
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on “A man who studies everyday evil”The explanation is no explanation at all. It is true that water has inertia, and it is true that water has to go somewhere. It is not true that this is sufficient to explain why the water goes up. In particular, the statement "because of inertia and the fact that water is not compresible, it has to keep moving" is false. The fact that water is not compressible means that the water moving in one direction is capable…
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on “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”This article is pretty close to junk science reporting. The core argument of the recently published paper it links to ( http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/12/1416625111.full... ) is this: 1) No non-viral cause can be found 2) Viral load is higher in symptomatic animals 3) Animals inoculated with homogenized tissue from symptomatic animals almost all become symptomatic. This argues strongly for a viral cause.…
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on “Starfish are dissolving up and down the West Coast”
