That’s enough psikeyhacker bashing. Anymore will incur warnings.
Harsh, dude. Why you cops always gotta kill our buzz?
split p&j, we’re still waiting for your alternate theory so we can discuss it.
I’m still waiting for their seismograph data from post #696.
I’m not holding my breath.
In this thread? No, I cannot nor did I pretend to. I am (and was) speaking generally. I can say from experience that the scientific literacy on this board is excruciatingly low, while the grasp of politics and the law is very good (if not top notch), fact, I’d say that the resident legal eagles do this place a great service. In regards to scientific literacy, I can give you several examples of why I feel the way I do, feel free to dig through the SDMB archives to find them but I can remember them clear as day:
In the Trayvon Martin threads, there were a host of posters that claimed that Trayvon Martin was high and under the influence of marijuana when he was murdered because he had ~5 ng/mL of blood of carboxylated THC. Further, the posters attempted to link the presence of marijuana in his blood to precipating the tragic outcome between him and George Zimmerman. I attempted to explain that carboxylated THC is not only less lipophilic, less likely to cross the blood brain barrier but has 10% of the agonist activity to the CB1 receptor than the non-carboxylated form. Basically, at the concentrations found, carboxylated THC would not even bind to the receptor. At all. I tried to explain that that the Kd (i.e dissociation constant) for THC-COOH to the CB1 receptor would likely be in the very high micromolar-to-low molar range (keep in mind, a high is produced at ~ 100 ng/mL of non-carboxylated THC) to produce a high, assuming it was able to cross the BBB in the first place. This point was lost on the posters here and they continued to believe he was under the influence of marijuana (which, of course, jives with their own view of African-Americans but I digress) and used DUI cut-offs at 5 ng/mL of carboxylated THC to “prove” the point that Trayvon was impaired. While the DUI cut-offs were technically correct in the legal sense, the biology, the science, and the thesis that Trayvon was impaired by marijuana at the time of his murder was lost on the posters here. And, frankly, I imagine, it still is.
In the Trayvon Martin threads, there were a host of posters that claimed that Trayvon Martin was just as culpable because he was an nearly an adult. He turned 17 years old three weeks before he was murdered. I posted a peer-reviewed paper from from the prestigious journal PNAS showing that the frontal cortex does not mature until the age of 25. Not only did I go over the methodology of the paper but I tried to explain that the frontal cortex is what governs executive functions such as right and wrong and that the only person who was a mature adult was George Zimmerman. That, too, was lost on the posters here.
In the Arafat thread, nearly all (not just a host) of the posters believed that the radiation found by the Swiss scientist was too small to cause polonium poisoning and compared it to the amount of polonium found in a cigarette. While the amount found was small in the present, I attempted to explain the topic of half-life and how a small measure of radioactivity in the present meant, given the short half-life of polonium, suggest a deadly dose at the time of his death in 2004. I even hand-calculated the >20 half-lives to show this and asked and encouraged other posters to contribute. The was completely lost on the posters here.
In the Arafat thread, I pointed out that the Russian paper - which found negligible amounts of polonium in contrast to the Swiss study which found statistically significant amounts of polonium - did not use an experimental control. It’s a very simple concept that I am certain you’re familiar with: if you test for the presence of compound X using instrumentation, you use a blank to measure the background for contaminants and instrument error. You subtract the background with the reading of compound X to get the true measure of compound X in your sample. Easy-peasy right? Nope. The posters fixated on a line in the materials and methods section where the Russian scientists loaded polonium into the detection equipment. Further, the posters claimed that the polonium was a control. It was not. It was a calibration standard. I tried to explain the difference between a calibration standard and a control, and, even another scientist - bless his heart - came to back me up on this point. Unsurprisingly, this was lost on nearly all of the posters here.
In the Arafat thread, I pointed out the lack of independent observations in the Russian experiment; that is, the Russians had a n = 1. I swear to you, the said published graph didn’t even have error bars! The Russian paper measured the clothing of Arafat once, recorded the result once, and published it. I attempted to explain that in science one must make many independent observations (the minimum is typically a n=3) before coming to a conclusion on significance on a data set. Imagine, for a moment, you attempting to publish a paper with a n=1. Barring unusual circumstances, you’d be rightfully trashed in peer-review. Again, the same aforementioned scientist - bless his heart, again - came to back me up on this. This, too, was lost on nearly all of the posters here and the thread inexplicably metamorphosed from biology, experimentation, and science of the Swiss and Russian papers regarding the polonium from Mr. Arafat’s clothing into an accusatory din of anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli panic. I was accused in that thread of being the most anti-Semitic posters on the SDMB. No joke. Evidentally, I had transformed into a black Hitler, transcended time and space, overcame black racism in Nazi Germany, installed an affluent, culturally rich, technologically advanced Afrocentric majority not unlike Wakanda in Berlin, orchestrated the entire Holocaust against the Jewish people, defeated the Allies, forced a marched exodus of the world’s remaining Jewish diaspora to the frozen steppes of Siberia, transcended back through time and space to the present, and started a thread on an anonymous message board regarding Mr. Arafat’s death for the specific purpose of underhandedly trashing the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
Oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot. The experience gets even more surreal. In terms of debating online, context in a message board is everything because it lacks emotional cues that we have in real-life interactions. Thus, if someone responds to a point, that point should be quoted in context, otherwise, one could lift a sentence or a portion of anyone’s post and make it a Rorschach about anything. And, if someone is not quoting in context, the use of ellipses or <snips> should be used to denote an omission. Seems fair and reasonable, no? Well, it wasn’t reasonable, because a moderator jumped into the thread, dodging each and every scientific point that I made regarding the papers, the data, and decided to side with another poster who literally took a sentence from a middle of a paragraph I wrote, repackaged that (without ellipses or <snips>) as my comment in full, then went to town characterizing that repackaged comment to paint me - the poster - as an anti-Semite and claimed I believed in all sorts of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories which had nothing to do with the topic or the thread. This I can forgive; after all, mischaracterizing my position is simply a transparent attempt to shift the discussion from the actual points at hand to attack the poster. I have learned to accept this as part and parcel of how the peanut gallery debates when outclassed by a poster who is more knowledgeable in a subject than they are. However, the moderator did not stop there and was not just satisfied in siding with the poster but decided make a public crack about a spelling mistake I made in a post. Yeah, you heard right, a spelling mistake.
Now, you’re probably asking yourself: what spelling mistake could be so egregious for a moderator would come in to publicly embarrass a poster in that manner? I <drumroll> misspelled “you’re” as “youre”; I forgot an apostrophe. Or, perhaps in the moderator’s mind, he was simply trying to help me from being mired in the swamp of my dimwitted IQ. Who knows. But I do know this for certain: in my time here, I had never, ever seen a moderator participate in a drive-by nitpick of a poster’s minor grammar mistake (Have you? No, seriously, this isn’t a rhetorical question: have you ever seen a moderator on SDMB publically nitpick a poster for failing to use an apostrophe while simultaneously siding with another poster?); it set a horrible precedent, if an moderator can weaponize a minor grammar mistake for the sole purpose of attacking a poster’s intelligence, it says to every other poster on the SDMB, “I approve and endorse treating this poster like shit, because, as a leader of this message board, I am doing it, too”. In any case, I took it personally, I took it as flat-out bias, I took it as an unprovoked attack from the leadership here and, more importantly, I forever lost confidence that the SDMB leadership could act as an impartial arbiter.
I realized shortly after the the Arafat thread that (a) posting anything tangentially related to the Jewish people or Israel - which apparently includes all the non-Jewish, non-Israeli citizen Mr. Arafat - will bring down the righteous hammer of uneven moderation and snide remarks from the heavens as well as spittle-spewing anger from the masses and (b) the majority of those same exact posters will keep silent if other minorities (women, blacks, hispanics, etc) are trashed on this board and, paradoxically, some of those same posters (I won’t name names but they know exactly who they are) will actively perpetuate hate against minorities on this board and (c) if posters cannot challenge the science, they will attack the poster (e.g. grammar, username, join date, name-calling, insinuations that they are an anti-Semite, accusations the poster believes in anti-Israel conspiracy theories, etc.) and (d) when it comes to literacy of the life sciences this board is a bizarre mixture of Groom’s Forrest Gump, Shyamalan’s The Village, and the Ministry of Truth in the Orwell’s 1984 - ignorance is strength. Speaking of ignorance being strength, that conveniently brings us to . . .
In the many, many, many threads that are allowed on the SDMB that trash African-Americans and blacks in other countries as low IQ animals, I tried to explain that just because a person has a gene, doesn’t mean it is expressed. I used epigenetics as an example to show how environment can temper genetic expression. I posted a paper on suicide victims having BDNF silenced via histone methylation. I hoped this would show how environment can influence genes but sadly, it did not. When this failed, I pointed out examples using the agouti gene and linked to studies showing temperature-dependent changes in coat color in cats and rabbits. This concept, too, was completely lost on the posters here.
In the many, many, many threads that are allowed on the SDMB that trash African-Americans and blacks in other countries as low IQ animals, I attempted to explain that a polymorphism is simply an iteration of a gene. That it is extremely unlikely that a single polymorphism could make someone smart. I attempted to explain that because polymorphisms are mostly silent mutations, because a host of genes interact to precipitate what we form intelligence, and because genes can be influenced by environment, it is not even reasonable to assume that a single polymorphism - even if it is enriched in certain geographical regions - gives any person an intellectual edge over another. This, too, was lost on the posters here, in fact, it was so wasted on the posters here, that I was bequeathed my first and only Pit thread in 14 years because I dared to side against anti-black hate cloaked as fighting ignorance.
In the many, many, many threads that are allowed on the SDMB that trash African-Americans and blacks in other countries as low IQ animals, one poster dragged out a gene called HMGA2 and claimed that it resulted in larger brain sizes. The poster then conflated larger brain sizes with higher intelligence. Not only did I link to a scientific, peer-reviewed article that found no such correlation but I also went further to explain that even if brain size did correlate with intelligence (which it does not) all men would be smarter than women because men, on average, have bigger brain sizes. I pulled out Michael Jackson’s autopsy report (he had recently died at this time), linked to it as a cite, and pointed out that his brain size was bigger than Einstein’s. If brain size were an indicator of intelligence, even if were doing this height-to-weight, Michael Jackson would’ve been smarter than Einstein. I even went further to point that both brains - MJs and Einsteins - were >100 grams below the average of the weight of a male brain. So, basically, both were stupid if we’re going by weight alone or weight-to body-mass. Undaunted, that poster decided to goal-post to another gene, then when I shut that down, the poster went to another gene, and another, and another. I gave up playing whack-a-mole and exited the thread. Of course, not only were my explanations wasted here and the cites thereof but in the face of anti-black hate masquerading as bubblegum science, the moderators, sadly (but unsurprisingly), remained silent.
In the many, many, many threads that are allowed on the SDMB that trash African-Americans and blacks in other countries as low IQ animals, posters cited an article regarding a set of qualitative twin studies that claimed if you control for environmental factors (i.e. parental income, education, etc etc) that the environment has little effect on the outcome. This, of course, was used a battering ram to hit home that the point that “Even if you give blacks all of the money and opportunities in the world they’ll still be stupid as shit”. Now, of course, they didn’t say that but, rest assured, that’s exactly what was tacitly implied. I tried to explain that the cites were flawed: you cannot control for environmental factors because there is a biological underpinning that cannot be easily measured. To address this in detail, I pointed to a quantitative twin study that did the former and by measuring the methylation of CpG islands in monozygotic twins; the researchers found that starting from pre-adolescence, twins diverge in their genetic expression profiles as they age. In other words, twins that grew up in the same environment had differentially expressed genes; further, the study found this divergence increased as the twins aged. You can have twin A and twin B that live together, have the same environment, have the same gene but one expresses it and the other does not; it is environment that tempers whether genes are turned on, turned off, turned up, or turned down. I tried to explain that when measuring as something as complex as intelligence, you cannot control for environment due to this complex, biological underpinning, therefore the posted cites rightly belonged in the overflowing dustbin of flawed qualitative studies on intelligence. This, unfortunately, was wasted on the posters here.
While tangentially related to this topic but entirely germane to scientific literacy and a paucity of curiousity, I would encourage you to take a look at BrainGlutton’s thread about Picketty’s book, I haven’t read the book yet and know no more than what I’ve read here and on the news, but what I found fascinating (and surprising) is that the only person who admitted to reading it and was kind enough to give insight into the text (See here) was conveniently ignored the posters here. No one asked him or her a single question about the text, there as no inquisitiveness or curiosity to pick the brain of a person who actually read the text, just a white-hot desire to argue, and argue they did in a tit-for-tat firefight that raged on for >100 more posts over the same trite and tired arguments.
While non-science related, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Detroit thread where I posted cite after cite laying to rest the idea that the liberal blacks suicided the city. In fact, after a pregnant pause from the posters, I was told, quite plainly that “. . . few Dopers have paid much attention to the details of Detroit’s fiscal history”. Exactly so. If you don’t know about the details of Detroit’s fiscal history, why in God’s name are you arguing for a preordained conclusion out of ignorance? The poster showcased perfectly why one should refrain from making wild accusations (or Fox News talking points) on the cause of Detroit’s state-forced bankruptcy when relatively few Dopers have “paid attention to Detroit’s fiscal history”. This concept was lost on the posters here because even after this thread, the posters continued (and still continue) to bring up the tired, boilerplate arguments that links the state-forced bankruptcy of Detroit as a sign that blacks in the Democratic party and blacks in general are incapable of self-governance. The posters routinely use the state-forced bankruptcy of Detroit as an indictment of liberal policies as ineffective, when, in reality, this is not the case. It was on the few topics that I specifically gave up trying. The ignorance there is both vast and impenetrable.
I could go on and on and on but I don’t have the time nor the inclination to go further. I apologize to you for not bothering to directly link to all of the posts themselves but I assure the data is all there in the archives. I apologize for replying so late though, in my defense, this was not entirely my choice. But I wanted to take the time to at least give you a few concrete examples on why I feel the way that I do.
Lastly, I also encourage you to look at the many, many GQ threads I’ve started over my 14 years on this board: if I don’t know something, I ask, I don’t sit on a throne of Google and Wikipedia and pretend I know every god damn thing under the sun. And, if I think I know something as a layman, I’ll will to bring to cites to validate my point rather than arguing - not debating - out of ignorance. There have been times I have brought a legal opinion as a cite as a layman (I am not a lawyer) to prove a point only to be shut down by the legal eagles on the board; I accept it and move on. There is no weakness with being wrong, after all, that’s how we grow as people.
Needless to say, I don’t trust anything that Dope has to say about science and, frankly, neither should the OP. That was the point of my original post in this thread. You could, in theory, try to add your expertise to science-related threads, but, frankly, you’d have a very hard row to hoe. However, I encourage you to do so because this board needs you and, as always, your mileage may vary. To the latter, I sincerely hope that will be the case.
- Honesty
Well, I’m convinced - 9/11 was a put-up job.
Regards,
Shodan
Nothing else in that post is on-topic.
Dear-holy-jesus-wall-of-text-meltdown, I’ve been blinded by Science.
Now if you started your post with this, it would have turned out so much better.
So low, in fact, that some claims by those who allege themselves to be scientists ought to have someone check their arithmeticso they don’t come out wrong by a few million percent.
Regards,
Shodan
Leave it to Honesty to find a way to work a discussion on racism into a 9/11 thread.
Oh, that’s easy. On any other forum you’d already have the people talking about a zionist conspiracy. Granted, it’s not technically racism, but it’s pretty close.
Honesty, I don’t see what any of those criticisms have to do with the scientific discussions about 9/11 in this thread – and, as far as I can tell, the prevaling posts in this thread (and others about 9/11) have been pretty solid, scientifically speaking.
Further, this board generally does a pretty good job of refuting the bad racial pseudo-science that you’ve mentioned. It doesn’t ban the advocates, but I think we do a pretty good job of wrecking their arguments.
Honesty, you get exactly one of those. Anything else remotely like that and that’ll be that.
No warning issued.
[Maxwell Smart] Missed it by THAT much[/MS]
These are not “narrow and vertically focused terms” - whatever that means - I asked Google what “vertically focused terms” are and she looked at me with pursed lips and shrugged. Undaunted in my quest to figure out what this term meant, I also asked Rosetta Stone what “vertically focused terms” means or translates to and the program, like Google, was also confused. I gave up trying. If it is what I think you’re trying to saying, I’d be talking about the influence of chronic caffeine exposure on purinergic signaling and adenosine recycling in astrocytes in the frontal cortex, I’d be talking about attractive and repulsive axonal guidance cues during brain development, commissure formation, and memory consolidation, or I’d talking about the influence of acute alpha-amanitin exposure on the temporal and sequential loading of each of the individual RNA polymerase II subunits to promoter; but sadly, we’re not talking about any of those exciting things, because these are things you can’t feign expertise by reading Wikipedia or by worshipping at the shrine of the Google search engine; instead, what we’re talking about are basic biology terms that are found in any high school biology text. So basic, in fact, that every single term that I listed in that post: experimental control, gene, cistron, enhancer, and promoter are all terms found in basic high school textbooks (See here, here, and here)
If my blackness or the aforementioned cites to high school texts (e.g. here, here and here) are not to be trusted, feel free to take any of these terms (i.e experimental control, gene, cistron, enhancer, and promoter), add high school to it, and Google it; you’ll find high school texts, worksheets, and school websites on these topics from high schools all around the country. Go ahead, google it. The fact you refer to basic, high school vocabulary as “vertically focused terms” perfectly showcases not only your complete lack of knowledge in biology but your own paucity of scientific literacy, which is great and fine, but don’t expect people who’ve been trained in the life sciences to take you seriously when you begin to pontificate on biology-related questions, problems, and issues on SDMB.
You’re a layman in the field and there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m a layman in . . . uh . . . civil engineering - I’ve accepted that and, in turn, I keep my damn mouth shut when topics arise regarding what mixtures of concrete to use on a suspension bridge or whatnot. I’m a layman in economics, so when topics arise regarding income inequality, I don’t pretend to know more than people who spent a significant portion of their life studying it (See Picketty, Warren, etc). Here, too, I keep my damn mouth shut. I’m a layman in blacksmithing, so if there are debates regarding what ratio of coal to iron to make high-quality steel, here, too, I keep my damn mouth shut. I’m a layman in physics and architecture, which means if there is a topic refuting an expert’s opinion on how the twin towers came down, I defer to the experts and keep my damn mouth shut on the accuracy of the expert’s explanation. I am a layman in law, so if I believe the jury selection in the Trayvon Martin trial was statistically improbable based on the racial and gender makeup of the initial jury pool, I defer to the legal eagles on this board who claim that the jury selection process is not a random event. I accept it, learn something new from it, and move on. In contrast, most SDMB posters do not, you guys possess in-the-mirror expertise on every subject ranging from rocket science to Mayan hieroglyphics; it is why you have your resident racists trot out their lethargic version of 20th century biology to somehow implicate that blacks are less smart and less cultured than the rest of humanity. Further, it’s your (and others) layman understanding of the science which allows you to lap it up as fact as well as the moderators’ layman understanding of the biology that allow them to see it as a “legitimate” topic for debate.
There’s nothing wrong with being wrong, Shodan, as long as we correct it, learn from it, and move on. It’s not a disease, it’s exactly the process of how how we learn and grow. In the post you cited, I used the wrong units and was corrected. I happily revised my calculations in this subsequent post. Another poster in that thread pointed out another mistake in the calculations here which I quickly corrected and thanked him for. I’m glad you included those in that drive-by nitpick ;). What’s funny is that none of those errors changed the thesis that his skull fragment was radioactive at the time of Mr. Arafat’s death. In any case, my expertise is in biology not math though I suffered through it in undergrad. 
Pearls before swine, sweetheart. Pearls before swine.
- Honesty
Nonsense and trolling are whatever the moderators decide that it is and the fact that no engineering school can model the collapse of the north tower, either physically or virtually, in almost 13 years is irrelevant.
psik
Why do you need a model or simulation when you have the real event?
The videos clearly show both towers’ collapse start at the impact point of the plane.
Why do you insist the collapse started from the bottom?
What? It’s Groundhog Day again?
Since you admit that this nonsense is irrelevant, you should probably quit bringing it up.
Bringing up an irrelevant claim after weeks while adding nothing to the discussion is also not a good idea.