Random Thoughts

Perfect Rebuttal  Wouldn't it be nice if you could find a perfect rebuttal, a perfect test of truth, a piece of evidence which perfectly, completely and utterly negates what a witness has said in court.  I have found such a rebuttal.  It is a litmus test for perjury.   I have recently discovered a most peculiar fact of law which has been staring me in the face for very many years.  The reason, perhaps, that I did not notice it before is that my focus was more on the forensic scientific methods, rather than the lawyerly methods of proving that there has been a…

Big data is the current trendy phrase that covers many different areas.  Big data describes equally well having a huge volume of data generated in a short period of time (like molecular simulations of DNA), having a huge volume of data that needs to be indexed and archived (like PubMed or Web of Science), or wanting to analyze different types of data that wasn’t collected for a given purpose (the CI-BER project uses a variety of data types collected over the years to study a neighborhood in Asheville, NC). The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) exists to…

When the members of a choir sing their heart beats are synchronized, according to a study from the Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg. The pulse of performing choir members tend to increase and decrease in unison.  In the research project "Kroppens Partitur" (The Body's Musical Score), researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy are studying how music, in purely biological terms, affects our body and our health. The object is to find new forms where music may be used for medical purposes, primarily within rehabilitation and preventive care and the research group says they were…

Speaking With a Forked Tongue My regular readers will likely have noticed that I thoroughly enjoy chasing down the truth behind things which are commonly accepted as facts.  I am fortunate to have the gift of being able to spot cracks in arguments as well as glaciers. I am currently heavily engaged in a legal matter concerning a witness in court who, shall we say,  seems to have been somewhat uninterested in assisting the court in its determination of the true facts. There is a phrase about not telling the truth, not now so common as when I was a child, but still in frequent use: "…

Party Like It's 1776 "These colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states" Employed in the service of my country abroad during the whole course of these transactions, I first saw the Constitution of the United States in a foreign country. Irritated by no literary altercation, animated by no public debate, heated by no party animosity, I read it with great satisfaction, as the result of good heads prompted by good hearts, as an experiment better adapted to the genius, character, situation, and relations of this nation and country than any which had ever been proposed or…

In 1974 there appeared the book A Bridge Too Far, which, tells the story of Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied attempt to break through German lines at Arnhem across the river Rhine in the occupied Netherlands September 1944.  The title comes from a comment made by British Lt. Gen. Frederick Browning, deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, who told Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery before the operation, “I think we may be going a bridge too far.” During my working days at the J.J.Thomson Physical Laboratory in Reading, I sometimes heard technicians complaining about…

NPR has a trivia show called Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me and host Peter Sagal is surprised that they don't get Republicans on it. Well, it's a comedy program and on NPR you are only allowed to be funny about Republicans, not as one.  Sagal also seems perplexed as to why NPR has the reputation for being politically one-sided, the same way some in the Republican party wonder why they have the reputation for being more religious; it's true. But it's no surprise they think they are balanced. While the political skew of listeners seems to be pretty well known, the advertising handouts for NPR…

"And why do we measure areas with square centimeters ?" "Because it would be much harder to fit in there round centimeters, silly!" (From a conversation with my daughter)

University of New Mexico professor Geoffrey Miller is a social/evolutionary psychologist so it's no surprise he is clueless about people - like what it takes to have the willpower to get a Ph.D, beyond his own subjective opinion. And it's even less of a surprise he made an unscientific conjecture. He may have been surprised anyone noticed. If social and evolutionary psychologists aren't finding racism in office clutter or in eating meat or telling us we evolved to like a car grill they don't get much attention. Unless it matches a confirmation bias, no one believes that surveys of psychology…

Architectural Folly And Trumpery In 1984 Prince Charles provoked controversy when he called a proposed extension to London's National Gallery a "monstrous carbuncle". What is good and what is bad about architecture?  Science and engineering can tell us how strong a building is, but not how beautiful or ugly.  Psychology might help, but should we have regard to science when we design a building ? ...  there is one prize that the profession does its best to avoid winning. The Carbuncle Cup, for the ugliest building of the year, was launched by Building Design magazine in 2006, "…