The Popperian Podcast:

Interviewing academics, professionals and other experts, The Popperian Podcast is a monthly podcast where Jed Lea-Henry looks into the philosophy and life of Karl Popper.

The latest episode, about medical discovery, pairs nicely with Against Method.

Today’s WaPo:

The Washington Post and KFF surveyed one of the largest randomized samples of U.S. transgender adults to date about their childhoods, feelings and lives.

There is, of course, no such a thing as a randomized sample. Samples are random, trails are randomized. Let’s not present opinion polls as high science.

Nothing beats repetition for reinforcing concepts. This week’s episode of EconTalk began with Megan McArdle describing the Oedipus trap, but ended with a discussion on science and policy that echoed concerns raised in Against Method.

Science is a good servant but a vicious master, and “just following the science” is a recipe for all sorts of disasters.

Did you know that the T in DST stands for Torture? Just ask people with school-age children. It also doesn’t save anything, it shifts hours around, so the S is for Shifting. Only, to be more precise, you should really swap the f with another t.

That’s more like it.

Swatch Internet Time may have been a gimmick, but having a universal time with shifting opening hours (why not wake up at “midnight” and have school and work start at “2am”) would be preferable to… this. That is what, in effect, the strange beasts who like DST are doing, their jobs allowing them to sleep in and start their days whenever the sun actually comes up. No such luck form farmers, bakers, doctors, and most other professions that have to deal with the physical reality.

Science can do many things, but until we all move to an indoor habitat and bask in artificial sunshine it cannot increase the number of daylight hours. Pretending that it can — and codifying it into law — is a triumph of stupidity.

Adam Mastroianni:

We all know that talk is cheap, so we tend to believe what we see more than what we hear. Your real friends are the ones who show up to help you move, not the ones who tell you how they’ll always be there for you. A good boss is the one who gives you time off when your mom dies, not the one who says, “I care about you!” and then asks you if you might have time to polish the PowerPoint between the wake and the funeral.

Unfortunately, when we want to transmit wisdom, words are often all we have.

Which continues to be an immense, unsolvable, and underappreciated problem.

Working with lymphocytes in one way or another for the last 15 years, I am obligated to link to yesterday’s xkcd comic despite at least two (probably) unintentional but still glaring mistakes: a “B” making its way into the plasma and T-reg cells. What is with this pro-B bias?

As far as discoveries go, 2023 is shaping up nicely. Yesterday we had electricity from air, today there is some movement on superconductors.

Sure, none of these will be immediately life-changing. But I vaguely remember reading about some new super-slick materials years ago, and today I don’t have to worry about how to get leftover ketchup out from the bottom of the bottle.

Progress!

From Phys.org:

In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current. Dr. Grinter notes, “Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels—as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”

1. Biotech for the win (?)
2. Or does this pave the way for a dystopian post-biology future in which insatiable human appetites deplete all hydrogen from the atmosphere?
3. Mycobacterium smegmatis becoming the savior of humanity and a household name would provide fodder for middle school humor for generations to come.

Yes, there is dire inequality in clinical trial enrollment, but this is the precisely wrong way to address the lack of diversity.

Legislating behavior leads to made-up plans that are at best a waste of an intern’s time and at worst a six-figure donation to “providers” selling their “solutions”. If you will ultimately grade on the outcome — and you should! — well, what do you care how it was achieved, provided that all the other laws and guidances were followed?

Silly, silly games.

Almost 5 years old, but still worth sharing: the first ever video of mating anglerfish.

Most of what we know about deep-sea anglerfish comes from dead animals pulled up in nets. Scientists have identified more than 160 species, but only a handful of videos exist—and this is the first to show a sexually united pair. “So you can see how rare and important this discovery is,” Pietsch says. “It was really a shocker for me.”

Isn’t nature just swell?