That does Tycho a disservice.

Tycho was principally concerned with making accurate measurements and producing almanacs. (And indeed Kepler used Tycho's data to postulate his three laws.)

That Tycho came out in support of the Ptolemaic picture had to do with him underestimating the distance to the fixed stars - an error that even much later scientists who really should have known better have also committed. When he used his state of the art measurements to look for the parallax and failed to find it, he took it, quite reasonably, as a falsification of the Copernican picture.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

If we're eating for Kepler, we're waiting for Einstein.

At the time the Constitution was written there were already in existence thirteen different sets of property and real estate law from the thirteen different colonies - some going back 200 years. That was likely part of the reason for including the Tenth Amendment in the Bill of Rights. "Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Additionally, the Seventh Amendment regarding civil cases forbids re-examination of facts found in jury trials "in any Court of the United States, than according to common law." But what are mere technicalities like the Constitution and Bill of Rights compared to the interests of powerful corporations who are major political contributors? We will see.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

It never occured to me they were creating a "continuous" record by mixing and matching from all over the place. That's obviously daft.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Please expand.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper

Perhaps there is an 'invisible hockey stick' swinging towards our head just now.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

I don't follow American politicians' commentary on climate change, because it generally ends up as The Stupid (Not that Dutch politicians are any better).

What's the argument they're using?

From Richard Feynman's Cargo Cult Science lecture (1974)

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
...
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

In other words, it's important to publish negative results. But the problem nowadays is that not only authors won't attempt to publish negative results, it's that they probably do so out of the knowledge that journals are likely to reject negative results. And this has nothing to do with the additional problem of dishonest research funders insisting that results contrary to their strategic goals are left unpublished.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

Feynmann then talks about the problem of not attempting to replicate other people's published research. The fallacy that all worthwhile research is novel research because only new research will be published. Of course, if you don't attempt to replicate published research you may never discover that a particular piece of published research was flawed.

Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous (?) field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen" he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
...
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent-- not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.

Nearly 30 years later, things have only gotten worse along the trends that Feynman was reporting anecdotically.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper

These two dudes basically tried to go straight from basic science studies to drug development. That skips over at least two steps of the process.

That their attempts fail a lot is... not surprising, shall we say.

Orac has a takedown here.

And, unsurprisingly given the venue of publication, they don't mention that this is mainly a problem with top-tier journals who are extremely focused on novelty. Second-tier journals is where most of the replication (or not) actually happens.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

As Bill Maher said 5 years ago "The French are adults, get used to it"

keep to the Fen Causeway

Actually, we do not have state healthcare. It is mandated private insurance heavely controlled and in some cases subsidized.

The tub of shit doesn't care.  It's a fundraiser for him.

I just now saw the news on this.  I was surprised.  I figured Obama would wait until after the election to decide he was for it.

C'mon, he's a Democratic professor from Chicago who doesn't seem to go to church anymore.  There was never really any doubt in my mind that he supported same-sex marriage.  It was just a question of whether he'd ever have the stones to say so.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

640 kiloton should be enough for anybody.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

Rolla, Missouri? It does have the Missouri University of Science and Technology, which has a program in explosives technology. If Rolla is going to survive we can get there in three hours by car and have friends with a farm about 15 miles north. :-)

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."