Interesting Links for 12-10-2015

[andrewducker]

• Joss Whedon Says He Made More From ‘Dr. Horrible’ Than 1st ‘Avengers’
  • (tags: JossWhedon movies Money internet avengers viaSwampers )
• What effect does cannabis have on academic performance?
  • (tags: marijuana students achievement )
• How did people bake before thermometers?
  • (tags: cooking temperature history )
• Meryl Streep lays into Rotten Tomatoes for

Comments

[steer]

Thanks for the link to the story about the structural engineer -- genuinely excellent.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's an amazing story - and a great example of everyone doing the right thing (once they realise there's a problem).

[steer]

Absolutely, I can't imagine how awful and terrified he must have felt. Interesting to see him reason (quite coldly) about suicide as a possibility.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. A horrible situation to be stuck in. Not the kind of situation that the mind copes well with.

[steer]

Re: Replicability -- it's much harder than you think

[andrewducker]

Oh, I'm sure it's harder with some subjects than others. And replicating it when you're dealing with specific machine configurations clearly isn't going to go well.

But with the state of worries about quality of research I suspect that replication is going to be something that there's a bigger and bigger demand for.

[steer]

I suspect that replication is going to be something that there's a bigger and bigger demand for.Hmm... yes and no. My original degree is physics and to some extent I still have the mindset. A lot of famous studies were non-replicable

[simont]

Because I am still friends with the people who I worked with then I still have access to the subversion repository and it has not been shut down. Had it been shut down the code would be gone except for local copies on my machines.

This is the sort of thing that DVCS improves on, of course - if you'd started a similar project today, you might (I'm guessing) have naturally used git rather than svn, in which case any local copy lying around on any machine or backup you could find would have automatically come with a copy of the complete history, and the availability of the upstream server wouldn't be so critical.

Of course that wouldn't solve the rest of the problems, like the scripts not running right in up-to-date Perl and similar bit-rot. But it would be a start, at least.

[bart_calendar]

So, wait, the study says that a drug known to hurt short term memory has a negative effect on memory retention.

I'm shocked to find gambling in this establishment.