This one is new to me… apparently the Germans used standard railway tracks and RATO-bottle-boosted sleds to launch replica Messerschmitt Me 163’s, with variable success. Given the fuel-hoggishness of the rocket plane, anything that would get them up to speed and into the air quickly would seem to be an advantage.
It’s not uncommon that the authors of a scientific paper have to publish a correction at a later time. Even ignoring the occasional bit out outright fraud, it’s neither unexpected not unforgivable for there to be errors in math or problems in data collection or interpretation. What is a little unusual, however, is for the data to be *reversed.* Take, for example, a study from Virginia Commonwealth University, published in 2012:
The takeaway from this study was that there seemed to be a correlation between psychopathy and political conservatism. This study got some press and is undoubtedly still being used to whop conservatives over the head… “See? The science says you guys are not just nuts, but bad guys!”
Ah, but then there’s this:
Ahem (bolding mine):
The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
Whoops.
Admittedly this is not really news… the correction was first published months ago. Still, it’s interesting. Ya gotta wonder what happened with the authors… were they teased mercilessly by their fellows? Were they met with rounds of “happens to all of us?” Or, just possibly, “hey, you got a lot of people to think that conservatives are psychos, so, well done?”
What we have here is a short sci-fi film that the makers claim was written by an AI. The result is… nonsensical. Incoherent. Literally politician-like in it’s gibberishness. Still: if it’s true that this was written by a machine, I wonder if I should be a bit miffed that this screenplay got picked up before “Mass Disappearance” did…
Assuming that it is indeed machine-written, it’s not very good (if it was written by humans, trying to emulate a machine, then huzzah… y’all certainly have a future writing art-house blockbusters about gay cowboys eating pudding and other such Socially Important Works). But if it is machine-written, how long before a machine writes a *good* screenplay?
Someone has taught the Google “Deep Dream” neural network system to “repaint” images in the style of Picasso… and had it animate a number of sequences from “2001.” The results are… really rather remarkable.
In their latest effort to convince people that they are representatives of a peaceful and rational ideological system, an Islamic State “hacking group” issued a list of 8,318 people it wants to kill, 7,848 of whom are Americans. Apparently a whole lot of these people are just regular schmoes. But the list isn’t given, so you can’t look up your own name and decide whether to:
Years ago – and by years I mean a couple decades – I saw an article or paper that described antimatter production facilities that were vast in scale. Several different concepts were shown, collider rings hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers in diameter. And for the life of me i can’t remember where I saw this. Does it ring any bells? The diagrams were pretty basic.
Maybe a year and a half late, but whatever…
The price has not yet been announced, but I gotta imagine it’ll be a little bit spendy.
It’ll have *thirty* Blu-Ray disks with:
Great googaly moogaly. Dunno if the TOS episodes are the original as-aired episodes or the remastered ones with new CGI effects. Looks like the Motion Picture is the “standard” version, not the one with improved effects.
Ummm… something or other about this image seems… I dunno, “disturbing.”
“Clinton/Clark 2016: Making the world safe for the Shadows.”
The full photo reminds me of something, but for the life of me I can’t recall what.
Anyway, I’ve found my candidate of choice for this election cycle:
Where the writer argues that it’s good and proper for liberals to use violence on random other people in order to express their hatred of Trump.
Yeah. This will end well.