Interesting Links for 10-11-2014

[andrewducker]

• Sunshine can slow weight gain and diabetes symptoms - irrespective of Vitamin D levels (In mice)
  (tags: sun weight health vitaminD mice )
• 'MI6 chief and shamed diplomat raped me' claims alleged victim of VIP paedophile abuse ring
  (tags: mi6 abuse rape )
• Dear America, when your police are instituting no-fly zones to prevent media reporting of

Comments

[bart_calendar]

I still think scientists are wrong about the dinosaurs. We are constantly finding species we thought were extinct a long time ago. It's not inconceivable at all that a few pockets of dinos were still around at some point with humans. In fact, the fact that nearly every single culture on earth has myths about giant reptiles of one type or another highly suggests that while rare a few were hanging around.

Also there is some type of giant turtle that can adjust it's own body temperature to swim everywhere that is pretty much considered a dinosaur even though it's living today.

[lil_shepherd]

Why shouldn't the dinosaurs have gone on evolving over the 65 million years since that particular mass extinction? Well, in fact, they have because... birds.

Birds are our contemporary dinosaurs - certainly their closest living relatives. And the tiny shrew-like mammals we are descended from lived with dinosaurs. Not only that, but mammal-like reptiles developed earlier than the dinosaurs, way back in the Permian, and there aren't any of those around today, either, any more than there are ammonites or trilobites.

Other than that, I don't really see how anything of any size could be hidden anywhere on Earth currently or in the couple of million years anything classified as Homo has been around.

[gonzo21]

Or indeed the humble Crocodile, which could be argued is a surviving dinosaur?

[lil_shepherd]

They certainly evolved from the same group - the archosauria - and are more closely related to each other than to modern lizards, snakes etc.

However, though related, what separates them in a classification sense is that crocodiles and their relatives have and had legs that splay to each side (particularly noticeable when the animal is at rest) while a defining characteristic of the dinosaurs is that they had an erect posture with their legs 'locked in' underneath them, like modern mammals, whether they walked on two or four legs. Of course, crocodilla never invented endothermia or feathers, which the theropods, at least, did.

They are also the answer to your point about 'big lizard' legends - they are widespread and the places where they don't live (being ectothermic) had cultural links to places where they did exist, such as Egypt...

Edit: Sorry, that wasn't your point but Bart's. I do apologise. Mea culpa.

[danieldwilliam]

The establishment child abuse scandal looks even more rotten than the words establishment chid abuse scandal suggest.

I wonder if Sally Bercow might end up getting her money back.

I have a dim memory of a child abuse scandal bringing down the government and more in Denmark? or Holland?

Specifically on the involvement of the secret services, what is the point of breaking our own structure of civil liberties to protect our children from the menace of communism or Islamic jihad if the very people we entrust with their protection then rape them and use the powers we have delegated to them to cover up their crimes?

[gonzo21]

Yeah, it's looking so big, and so bad, that I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of the fascist state tools that have been brought in over the last few years are specifically intended to help them keep control as and when they ever lose control over this story.

Because there are not many things that will bring the British people out onto the streets to form mobs with pitchforks, but I think a child sex abuse scandal in Westminster might just be the one thing that triggers the collapse of Westminster.

[danieldwilliam]

Yes.

And the fact that they have been so circumspect about the inquiry process makes me wonder if lots and lots and lots of people are involved.

If it were half a dozen and then a few dozen people who had helped with the conspiracy I wonder if they'd have been quietly told their time was up and given the option of doing the decent thing before the police arrived.

But the more this rattles around the more I think it might be dozens and dozens of abusers and hundreds of people involved in the cover up.

[gonzo21]

It is looking more and more like it goes right to the top, and I would lay good money on a bet that Thatcher knew about it all.

And if so, that is deadly for the Tory party. They're done. I would expect they'd have to shut down the party and set up a new one.

But, this being the Tories, if that comes out they will have dug up enough dirt to destroy Labour too. So I expect our political masters have set up a suicide pact, with guns pointed at each others heads.

I'm not sure it will ever unravel. I think journalists will start turning up dead before it comes out.

Mythconceptions

[alitheapipkin]

I have lost count of the number of times the Boy has pointed out that viking helmets never had horns to me, more or less every time one is ever shown on the TV or crops up somewhere he looks online... I didn't know it was a opera costume designer had to thank for them though!

[nancylebov]

Would you be willing to mark studies based on simulated situations the way you mark rodent studies?

I feel like I want to go out and lie to a scientist, a journalist, and a headline writer.

[andrewducker]

The situations aren't being simulated here. The children were actually lied to, and being lied to actually caused them to lie more later on.

[doubtingmichael]

It still seems like kind of a simulation here. It shows that if a stranger lies to a child, they are more likely to lie back to that stranger a few minutes later. I'm not saying it's a bad study, but going from its evidence to "parents, if you lie to your kids, they'll become liars" is quite a jump.

Clearly, it would be much better to find some pathological liars and ask them what their children are like. There is no possible failure mode with that idea.

[andrewducker]

I'm _totally_ open to "That's a hyperbolic headline." - and the article agrees that it's a stretch.

But pretty much all experiments are simplified, because it's the only way to isolate variables. So if people don't like that, I'd rather they just didn't read anything to do with any social science.

[kerrypolka]

Clarke, played here by Keira Knightly, worked at a time when female cryptanalysts were unheard of.

Er, what? The vast majority of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park were women.

[andrewducker]

Could they mean "Up until the war" there?

I don't know much about the codebreakers - how much of their work was the theoretical "How to break codes" stuff, and how much was "Carry out the codebreaking algorithms that the really smart people have worked out for us"? - If Clarke was one of the "really smart people" then that would be different.

(But I don't know - I'm just grasping here.)

[kerrypolka]

No, it was definitely during the war, because most of the clever men in Britain were being military officers instead of codebreakers. I've just read a really good book on Bletchley Park which is why that jumped out at me. They recruited clever maths graduates of both genders but again mostly women because there were more clever women available than clever men. It sounded really unusually egalitarian and meritocratic (which makes sense because that's what you want in your secret codebreaking manor house, a big pile of smart people), which is why that sentence in the BBC article was so weird.

[andrewducker]

Makes sense to me.

Very odd!