Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt.
It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...
In college we used to joke that animal behavior should be called animal misbehavior. We literally had one member of our lab group that could work with the mice and get sensible results. Neither of the guys could get any data that made sense, one of the women owned a cat and none of the results she had made any sense, and the fourth person (a woman) had no problem.
I'm not sure if anybody suspected that rats reacted differently to how men and women smell, but only women were allowed to work as rodent caretakers or be in the rodent room at my school. Our professor showed the guys the room once, but we weren't allowed to talk, since she thought it was men's voices that set the rodents on edge.
In case anybody is wondering what our experiment was, we were measuring whether caffeine affected the VO2 of mice. Their oxygen consumption pegged anytime any of the guys handled them.
I just wanted to add another anecdote (because the plural of anecdote is, as we all know, data) that your profess isn’t the only one. I’ve heard a few similar stories about guys not being allowed to enter the rodent living chambers besides an initial, introductory visit in the past.
This is really interesting. Clearly they're trying to control for sensitive variables that make little sense even to them, and yet they're still using rodents as subjects and publishing studies likely without mention of these oddities. Not saying everyone is doing it wrong, but wow.
You have to allow for some level of pragmatism. They found a method that seems to provide better data without actively biasing their results. Rodents make convenient test subjects, and no scientist wants (or more likely it doesn't even occur to them) to include an unproven methodology in their published work.
Are they publishing "make sure only [female name] handles the mice"?
Or do they just publish, "X caused effect Y"?
Frankly, identifying why it requires a female, or female non-cat owner sounds like it may be more interesting than whatever other result they are working on...
If results were thrown out because of a confounding factor then it would hopefully be mentioned in the paper.
I've had a similar thought about these little insights. There are literally thousands of times more biology undergrads than there are people doing biology research. Biological experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. There are so many confounding variables, data is hard to collect, etc, that experiments bomb as often as they succeed.
A lot of these experiments are extremely well supported, so you might actually be able to discover something novel if you were able to track the failures.
Anyways, I don't do anything with biology anymore, but I strongly believe that biology is a field where citizen scientists could make a meaningful impact.
I wonder how practical it would be to automate all the rodent handling/experimenting? Because that seems like it'd be the only way to properly remove such unaccountable influences, like people smelling of cat/giving off different smells and thus influencing the reactions of the animals.
Couldn't it also be possible that rodents reacting like that is the result of established practices? I.e.: Rodents get only handled by females, rodents adapt to that female smell while reacting differently to the male smell due to its unfamiliarity?
Then you would have to deal with the effect of subjecting the mice to such a degree of control, precision of action, predictability of environment, and other factors. As was found with the 'Rat Park' experiments in the 70s, experiments on rats in cages are not informative about the behavior of rats not in cages. It is tremendously difficult to study systems as complex as living animals, and we ignore "unimportant" factors at our peril. How different would our society be if the Rat Park experiments, which showed that rats addicted to cocaine will naturally ween themselves off of the drug when provided with a stimulating social environment, was reported on first instead of the one we heard about instead that claimed cocaine was so addictive that a rat which takes a dose becomes inescapably addicted and will dose themselves with it until they die? (Which they will.... if they are locked in a cage and the alternative is just living in a miserable cage.)
Even automation would not solve this issue. If these results are scent related, then it is quite possible that different automation methods would produce different scents, or even the same method, in a different environment / location.
But you could at least use the same automation methods across different study groups within the same study, eliminating potential confounding variables between your groups.
Fwiw I have been assured that Big Pharma will swap out a set of mice (or whatever the test species is) as a way to find the results they're looking for. This was told to me by someone who does research for Big Pharma. Someone who I have no reason not to trust.
I didn't go to a research University, and I'm fairly sure none of the staff used mice as a model organism. I think they were merely used in student experiments.
Now some of those students may have published work as part of their senior capstone, however it's pretty unlikely. You need a lot of knowledge to get to the point where you can publish something meaningful in biology. If you were to publish a work as an undergrad, you are probably working on a professor's project or with a less complicated topic.
The problem isn’t having variables you can’t control. The problem is not recognizing these variables, or recognizing them and being too lazy to control for them, and then drawing unwarranted, overly broad hypotheses.
There’s a reason psych has a bigger reproducibility problem than any other field.
> when you have more variables than you can control
Worse: isn't this always true? Specific breed of mice, humans working with them, temperate, trace differences in food, light patterns, sounds (including sounds beyond human range)...
This is also naive. In that case you won't be able to publish your results in prestigious journals and your career will die out.
That said, you do learn not to act 100% confident. You need to say "This suggests that" instead of "This proves that", etc.
Anyway, the solution to reliable data is simple: Have multiple competing groups try to repeat the work as closely as possible.
Now that you have something to hang your hat on, you come up with some theory/model to explain the phenomenon. Even better, come up with multiple competing such models. From these you deduce some precise prediction that is checked against future data.
All of this was well known a few generations ago...
> This is also naive. In that case you won't be able to publish your results in prestigious journals and your career will die out.
Charlatan fortunetellers aren't owed careers as scientists -- if they can't produce reliable, predictive models because they utterly fail to control experiments,then they should have their careers destroyed.
We've seen enough damage from corporate leaders and politicians relying on guides to reading chicken entrails masquerading as science.
Sure, just be aware of what you are saying. Over 99% of what gets published is like this. Generations have wasted their careers producing misinformation. It all needs to be redone since these practices began (in some areas of research this is at t=0). Etc.
Consider the consequences of what you're demanding: You'd basically outlaw any research on complex systems. Everything in biology, sociology, archeology, climate science, etc. Is that a reasonable response to the problem at hand?
No, I would bifurcate research into two classes --
Let's call it 'science' and 'hunches'. (I'm sure marketing people would think of a better name.) There's nothing stopping you from publishing hunches; there's nothing stopping the same journals from publishing science and hunches. It would just be the case that we'd treat publishing a hunch as science as fraud, because you're outright lying about how sure you are.
It is the case that several fields would get (almost entirely) moved from science to hunches, but that would be good! The label will match what's inside.
If we have this split in the product lines, if we have these two tiers (models where we're really sure and complex systems where we only have a working hunch), then we should just own it and put that on the tin.
All I'm asking is people stop labeling composite wood as lumber -- and understandably, a lot of people selling composites act like that would make the sky fall.
Hardly, there's a real demand for both products and both serve a real need. Let's just be honest in our marketing and stop conflating the two.
Just like precision without accuracy, but if you get accuracy you know you have a problem, but with only precision you are hopelessly misled.
If it was a strict trade-off, I would agree that the answer was somewhere on the middle. But it isn't. Most of the things that give you precision will also give you accuracy. The few things that let you exchange one for the other look too much like cheating, and seem to always have much greater impacts on accuracy than on precision.
> Most of the things that give you precision will also give you accuracy.
This is absolutely false - digital clocks are a common example. Precise to the second (or millisecond, or more!) but only as accurate as their setting.
Calculations also give precision without accuracy, like my package of tortilla chips - 13oz (368.5g) They took a measurement or specification precise to the ounce, multiplied by 28.3495, and got 368.5.
Accuracy and precision are independent variables, and the utility of either is usually limited to the order of magnitude of the other. With either "accurate to the second with a precision of milliseconds", or "accurate to the millisecond with precision to the second", you should only report a measurement to the second (or possibly a more precise measurement with an error range).
Do they have different meaning to you? They are the same thing unless there is some scientific meaning that makes them different of which I'm not aware. i.e. Theory in Science means a different thing than what it means to a layman person.
Precision is how fine a measurement is (i.e. being able to measure temperature to thousandths of degrees versus tenths), whereas accuracy is a measure of how closely your results much the objective truth. So you may have a very precise thermometer that measures to thousandths of degrees but it may not be accurate because it's calibrated such that it always reads exactly two degrees higher than it should. Meanwhile a thermometer that can only measure to a tenth of a degree is more accurate and less precise than the one just mentioned if the shown figures reflect the true temperature.
In common usage, these words mean the same thing, but scientists often give words specific meanings in order to make their research and ideas less ambiguous.
Definitions are even more important in non-scientific fields such as philosophy or math where meaningful reasoning of abstract structures and ideas would be next to impossible without giving them concrete definitions and stating your assumptions.
Remember that definitions are arbitrary, so to understand an author's argument or idea, you must seek out the author's definitions.
Hopefully that clarifies some of the discussion going on in the comments here.
I get it, these are specific definitions within a given field. I looked at the definition of both precision [1] and accurate [2] and each would use the other as a synonym, which made it a bit confusing as to what he was talking about.
[1] pre·ci·sion:
noun
the quality, condition, or fact of being exact and accurate.
[2]ac·cu·rate
(of information, measurements, statistics, etc.) correct in all details; exact.
"accurate information about the illness is essential"
synonyms: correct, precise, exact, right, error-free, perfect; More
Standard English dictionaries often don't have the precise definitions used in specific fields, which only leads to more confusion for laymen, but any good introductory Chemistry lab textbook should be able to get you up to speed on experimental science definitions.
I did read the article. I didn't see that it was peer reviewed nor a repeated study, scientifically speaking. The last few paragraphs also give some (typical) scientific distance on the rhetoric that it will revolutionise ALL past rat experiments. It's still worth a read though.
What I found:
* It is a science story about findings presented at a meeting. The story is published in Nature, which does do very prestigious peer reviewed papers, but the findings and the story itself are not peer reviewed.
* Within the same institution, the head of the lab repeated the experiment.
* Some other actually peer reviewed papers with female researchers, rats and ketamine show positive influences.
I don't think that peer review is a very good metric in this case. Those peers could lose their jobs if rodent research is proven to be unscientific. Requiring research on the scientific merits of rodent research to be peer reviewed is like asking the plumber's union to write the building code. In many American municipalities, the code really is written by the plumbers, and the plumbers write in that water pipes must be copper, just because copper cannot be installed by a non-professional. I don't see why rodent researchers would not do the same type of corrupt and anti-truth tactic for their own professional protection.
While I think that you meant your comment to be taken at face value (ie, "disbelief is not an option") you should realize that from a different starting point it also fits well as a scathing attack on the state of modern science.
Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher
Absolutely. The statistics are text-book standard, and the research is peer-reviewed and published in a major journal, so as Kahneman said about the now discredited priming studies, "You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."[1]
It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents
And possibly not just rodent experiments! We may even want to re-evaluate the weight we put on statistical claims across a broad range of fields. I think Gelman covers it well in his article "I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical evidence": http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/03/disagree-alan-turing-dani...
Its already known that past experiments with rodents are problematic. A number of studies could not be repeated, and it took a while before they twigged that it was the higher proportion of female scientists. The rationale in the article I read was that the rats were more stressed when the males were around, and disguising the smell mitigated it like they found in this new study.
Another similar problem was mice in maze experiments, which also could not be repeated. The experimenters were using mazes with sand on the floor rather than hard bases, and it turned out that the earlier experiments were not measuring the memories of mice; instead their ability to sense vibrations from their footsteps and helped with location senses.
Whatever the Holy Wikipedia says about the distinction, isn't it funny, not to say something else, that we use the same words for two/three concepts that are, supposedly, completely different and vary independently? I'm a male identifying as female expressing as male, aka sex:gender:gender-expression.
Because, you know, people were so dumb until social-constructivism landed on Earth like the Messiah no-one expected. And we need to be re-educated. Or else.
What baffles me most is the insistence that one can build any kind of objective distinction based on subjective experiences, that is, what one feels. We're all capable of sadness, joy, excitement, and what not. But we can not build any kind of categorization (read diversity) of people based on these concepts/states of mind. I don't identify as sad, although I'm sad from time to time. No one does. Companies can not be forced to hire more sad people, for the sake of diversity. Yet, now, it's compulsory to have more people hired because they report some sort of internal and inaccessible state of mind which they express using words used for categorizing people based on the shape of their genitalia.
I often think there's a subset of people that have scripts to search Hacker News for 'gender' or 'sex' just so they can get involved with a "I identify as a rare breed of pineapple" and "muh gender" type of comment.
The only thing that's funny is that on a thread about lab rats reacting differently to male or female lab workers, people feel the need to start a holy war about topics as pointless as this one.
yes it is, and in this case I think we're probably still figuring out the actual cause
But one assumes that in this case the cause might be that the pheromones that people all hopped up on testosterone give off is different those given off by people who aren't .... those people would likely be cis-males, trans-males who've transitioned, trans-females who haven't transitioned, and some trans people who are currently transitioning in either direction .... we don't really have one exact word that encompasses those categories
Right, but wehat you detect is the eye colour, not the genes that cause it. Similarly with the rats they detect the pheromones in a male's smell, not the XY chromosomes. So suggesting they detect the XY chromosomes isn't helpful.
Probably not, but why is that so far fetched? They'd just need to be dissolving it with chemicals, backed up by a neural network to identify the sequence (rat's brain, anyone?). That's kind of how smell works in general to begin with.
As for why rats may develop the ability to sequence XX vs XY - if rats with the ability to do so were killed far less than those without, then rats would quickly evolve the ability to do so. This could happen if males were the ones killing rats and not females. Actually, skip the 'probably not' I began with - it's a perfectly likely explanation that may or may not be true based on further study.
Or there could be a signaling molecule specific to sex that directly interacts with some receptive system in the animal. Maybe it's nose? DNA sequencing would be an awfully slow signal given the technology available to the organism...
You appear to be conflating several identifiably distinct things (e.g. identity, sexual orientation, role in society) under the label of "gender" and then wondering why people seem to treat them differently even though you've applied the same label to all of them. The contradiction is an artifact of your measurement technique.
It's still a developing field of study, but AFAIK the current thinking based on the evidence is that gender roles are largely social constructs while gender identity is at least partly based in biology (that is, the brain has some innate conception of gender even if many of the implications of those genders are filled in by society). And sexual orientation is yet another separate thing.
>If you believe gender is a complete social construct
IIRC the nature-nurture studies show that nature is atleast 50% of the cognitive result on growing up. Atleast since the studies also binned a lot of stuff into "nurture" without much consideration as long as it's not nature. It might be more.
Thinking that gender is a purely social construct is just backwards to everything we've discovered in modern science. People can be gay because of their upbringing but most of the time that is just how they are. Same with transsexuality, it's mostly how people are not how they want to grow up, which should receive utmost respect. (though on the other hand, if CRISPR advances more we might have a "gay cure" and a "trans cure". Especially the ethical debate of a "trans cure" would be interesting)
> Some of this feminist/transhuman thinking, [...] are not rooted in reality
Luckily not all feminists. My sister has been one of those hardcore feminists but after having a situation in which she had to decide between getting a good grade and fighting for injustice against women, she changed her attitude that she should not fight against injustice like that if she can't uphold her principles in all situations.
Her reaction to this study now, relaxed, would probably have been different a year ago. I think a lot of people might react badly to the study and I'll keep an eye on it.
Reactions to studies are a study of humans in of itself already, observing the acceptance of data by a specific group can tell a lot about a group. Like pheromones can tell a rat a lot about a person.
Sorry what I really meant was that "I think we're probably still figuring out the actual cause of why the rats behave the way they do"
In general I don't think it's as simple as being one way or the other, some people certainly seem to innately feel they were born into the wrong gender, and just want that set right, while there seem to be other people for whom it seems to be fluid, that want to be able to choose and change. I don't see it's much of any of the rest of our business other than we should make them welcome in society just like anyone else.
As far as it being a 'social construct' I think the whole thing that "people with XX chromosomes must be women and people with XY must be men, or alternatively people born with penises ...." is obviously a social thing - likely tied to rigorous western sex roles and trying to force people into them - other cultures have provided places for people with differing genders - Fa'afafine, Hijra etc and traditionally treated them differently than in the west ... so yes definitely a 'social construct'
When people think of each other as blank slates and make progressivism the only acceptable viewpoint, maybe those inclined towards social conservatism just come out doing this "progressive in name only" thing, LARPing the themes of the last century in lieu of a consistent set of values.
Yes, it's terrible. Make sure none of the following list apply to you or anyone you care for.
>If you’ve ever taken antibiotics, had a vaccine, a blood transfusion, dialysis, an organ transplant, chemotherapy, bypass surgery or joint replacement, you have benefited from animal testing and research. In fact, practically every drug, treatment, medical device, diagnostic tool or cure we have today was developed with the help of lab animals.
>Many diseases that once killed millions of people every year are now either preventable, treatable or have been eradicated altogether. Immunizations against polio, diphtheria, mumps, rubella and hepatitis save countless lives and the survival rates for many major diseases are at an all-time high thanks to the discovery of new drugs and the design of sophisticated medical devices and surgical procedures.
You seem to have responded to the parent comment as if he or she was making an appeal on the grounds of ethics of animal testing. (And for some reason, people have engaged with you on this, as if that's what's going on.)
But the linked video isn't about that at all. It's about the pitfalls of using rodents for testing and trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from the results. In other words, an argument that is squarely on topic with regard to the original article. Or in other words further, that using rodents is "a horrible testing method"―to repeat what the original commenter wrote before you derailed the thread.
Your commenting as if this discussion is about the ethics of animal testing and the comments of you and those who've responded (including the one I'm writing now!) have been—and are contributing further—to a massive waste of effort and attention.
I don't buy the argument/implication that it's somehow hypocritical to oppose something while actively benefiting from it, as long as one is upfront about that fact.
For example, say that we have genuinely useful medical information as a result of Unit 731 experiments and similar crimes (which may or may not be the case; I have no idea). There's no contradiction if one person supports using those existing results to save lives while simultaneously opposing further collection of such results.
Another example: I personally eat a lot of meat (keto/LCHF), but even so I might support legislation to ban killing animals for food or sport, because the personal sacrifice would only be worth it to me if it came attached to a systemic change.
> because the personal sacrifice would only be worth it to me if it came attached to a systemic change
This is the reason why. You may prefer the world to be a certain way, but you aren't willing to make any sacrifice to make it be a particular way, so it appears that you don't actually care about an opinion that you are espousing.
People who don't eat meat have a net effect on a reduced demand for meat, reducing the amount of cattle. Becoming a vegetarian doesn't stop everyone eating meat, but it helps.
[I'm not a vegetarian but I have some respect for people who are willing to stand by their beliefs]
Demand for meat is elastic. If vegetarians don't eat it the price goes down, so people can afford it more often, so the number of cattle doesn't necessarily drop.
It would be hypocritical if I were to hide that I eat meat and admonish others for doing so, but neither of those are the case. I care, but I also care about the substantial harm being done to humans by the past 50 years of low-fat diet craze, so in my mind, as much I respect vegetarians, it'd be harmful to go around blindly pushing everyone to eat less or no meat.
For me, I see the greatest impact I can personally make as continuing to work to become successful and then investing a ton of money into lab-grown meat.
Anyway, it's something I'd like to help do something about, but it's not my life's focus. If I had a magic "make everyone stop eating meat" button, I'd be tempted to press it and figure out a way to personally adapt, but ultimately I think that would cause more harm than good without a market-ready drop-in replacement that fits the same macros. That's not the same as not caring or being unwilling to make a sacrifice; it's just caring about multiple things to varying degrees and being realistic.
The problem is that the researcher is set up as a terrible straw man, and that in turn makes Adam look a bit like an asshole here, even before getting to animal testing: To start off, she claims that “you can’t [prove things wrong in] science!” … excuse me?! Science is all about [hypotheses] being proved wrong. That’s quite literally its definition.
On we go: “Everyone knows testing on rodents is practically the same as doing actual human trials”. Actually, no competent researcher thinks that. I’ll grant that it’s a fairly common misconception in the media, and one that’s definitely worth addressing.
But it’s disingenuous and counter-productive to do this by creating other misconceptions — namely about what science is (see above), and that scientists are somehow oblivious to the (very obvious!) deficiencies of animal testing. That doesn’t mean that mouse model research is useless — far from it (unfortunately). It’s a crucial first step in a lot of biological and medical research.
To be sure, Dr Raza — as an expert — makes excellent points! But so does the FDA when it mandates animal trials before human trials: Adam points to an example where a drug went to human trials and almost killed the patients even though it was safe in mice. OK. Now imagine how often that would happen if we didn’t have preliminary mouse studies.
That said, all (!) animal research scientists I know support stronger regulations on mouse research. And, although I can’t speak for the US, the regulations are already a lot stricter in the UK and Germany than claimed in Adam’s video.
> the actors behind the cartoon are reading a script written by someone...
So.. it really doesn't matter who teaches and who listens, because ultimately they're both actors reading from a script. How does that play in favor of your argument?
Not to mention the woman he's explaining to is a scientist researcher, and at the end of the video, they have Dr. Azra Raza as a guest (who is also a woman) to further solidify the arguments.
If you think you're defending anything by calling it "mansplaining" and complaining that women aren't treated fairly, you're wrong and you're not helping anyone.
Would it be any better if the genders of the actors were reversed?
"mansplain" is a gender-biased criticism of behavior. It implies that the gender of the participants is the problem, rather than the attitudes or behavior.
But apparently the mice in the study react to the gender, so maybe it's germane...
Else, it sounds like someone beat up their data until they found something worth publishing. It certainly wouldn't be the first time such an effort passed a "peer review."
This reminds me of Feynman's story of the researcher who eliminated possible variables in rat experiments one by one, to find a surprising result (EDIT: To find that rats didn't need smell, spatial relationships, taste, or vision to find the cheese -
the sound of the floor was enough) https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experi...
I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways.
In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like. Curves and lines, and strokes of different lengths and directions against the grain of the paper, have different frequency profiles; lifting and setting the pencil back down generates a tapping sound…that sort of thing.
People often don’t believe me when I tell them this, because they figure that human hearing just isn’t that sensitive, or that the sound of handwriting doesn’t convey that much information—but it does! You’ve simply never noticed or paid attention to it because you had no desire or reason to. Another animal might, for various reasons.
Once, my dad picked up my Magna-Doodle board as we stood outside my room, and started writing a message to me. I listened closely and said “…Clean your room?”—he had written “Cʟᴇᴀɴ Yᴏᴜʀ Rᴏᴏᴍ”—and I’ll never forget his perplexed look, first at me, then turning the board around to see if any light could be shining through. He still didn’t quite believe that I could do what I had just done in front of him!
That's fascinating. Reminds me of Daniel Kish, who is totally blind but navigates freely by echo location. It seems that is something humans -- at least blind ones -- are generally capable of if they work at it.
When I learned to play guitar I was perplexed that my playing sounded bad, even when playing right. Later I started to listen better and heared stuff that wasn't encoded in the tabs, but still mattered.
Also, I could smell different foods like cereals. When I was a floor above in my room I smelled people eating even uncooked stuff, and I knew exactl what. Couldn't do this anymore today
Absolutely, I found similar things studying linguistics & phonetics. You can read phonetic transcriptions of things and get the basic sounds down, but there’s no substitute for listening carefully & imitating a native speaker, just like studying performances of pro musicians. Sounds that are often transcribed the same may be pronounced differently in different languages.
I share your strong sense of smell too. I could tell you if someone was cutting cucumbers two rooms away. Dunno how long that’ll last, although my mom still has quite a nose in her early 60s, so there’s hope.
I agree with you. I can often hazard a reasonable guess at what people are typing or writing based on the sound, and of course, hearing the touch tone sounds of a phone makes it relatively easy.
Similarly, I will often turn off all the lights and navigate around my house/room by pure touch and sound, which is surprisingly easy given how much credence we give to sight as the paramount sense.
That's amazing. What about chalkboard writing? I imagine that would be louder, have more protracted strokes and the patterns could become more easily absorbed through watching the board.
I should add though, that "clean your room" would be a pretty safe bet in most parent/child relationships.
My point is more that it’s not amazing, just something most people wouldn’t notice or think to try. Chalkboards were possible but harder, I think because of the distance—you don’t get the frequencies that don’t carry as well across a room. I could never really do it with whiteboards because they’re much quieter. And yeah, “clean your room” was definitely a safe bet, haha, then again we rely on context all the time when listening to speech too.
I used to hear transistors very clearly. One of the things I knew as a kid from anther room or sometimes even from outside was if someone had their TV on. The noise was so high pitched that I didn't even consider it a noise. I just knew and didn't think much about it.
One weird memory is that I remember detecting objects in silent and dark room at home if they were like 10cm from my head. Even with eyes closed. I'm not sure if it's real or kids magical thinking. But it could have been very high pitched/ambient noise echoing from surfaces.
What you heard was probably not transistors but the flyback transformer that TVs use to generate the high voltage needed by cathode ray tubes. They generally operate around 16-18kHz, in the high range of human hearing that young people can hear easily but most people lose that ability as they age.
> One weird memory is that I remember detecting objects in silent and dark room at home if they were like 10cm from my head. Even with eyes closed. I'm not sure if it's real or kids magical thinking. But it could have been very high pitched/ambient noise echoing from surfaces.
I think that's something that is common, but I have no idea what it's called.
If you hold something (especially if it's sharp) up to someone's forehead but not close enough for it to make contact with them, they will get this weird sensation building up in their forehead. Or at least I and a lot of the people I've tried it with have. It wasn't in a completely dark room so I bet you could see the shadow through your eyelids but it's still pretty weird.
Modern society has a nasty side effect to forbid us to experiment with sophisticated yet intuitive notions.
Simply learning drumming made my sense of touch, balance, and a ton of other parts of my brain extremely more acute and potent. Not dissimilar to when you grok induction on trees, all of a sudden a lot of things become clearer. Well similarly with a lot of focused attention to your senses you'll start to notice patterns and relationships that are invisible otherwise.
Subconscious sensing is what was on my mind. Intuition in a way... not doubting it could be pure Ear related skill, just wondering what all you have considered so far...
Well, I am unusually sensitive and intuitive, but I believe it’s entirely because I inherited certain physiological and psychological traits from my parents—I am honestly not much more than a combination of the two of them.
I never did manage to trace Feynman's story back to a source, but nevertheless, also something Derek Lowe repeatedly covers for biology/chemistry on "In the Pipeline": a lot of the 'cell lines' or 'reagents' used in lab work turn out to just not be what they're supposed to be, either because they never were or they degraded into something else in storage or something. So to give a recent paper he blogged, there's something like 30k papers using "immune system cells" which are actually just HeLas; presumably the cell lines in question got contaminated or swapped somewhere along the way, but that raises the question of what any of those papers mean...
And of course there are similar issues with mice. You have all the different strains which are genetically different, but they'll also be genetically changing over time through drift & selection & mutations, so your Wistar-XXX may not be the Wistar-XXX from 50 years ago. Or mice chow - sure, the label may say it's the same but when was the last time you checked? (Think about that paper about how all sorts of lab animals, supposedly fed constant diets and under constant controlled environments, keep getting fatter over the past century. Something is changing; what? Genetics? Food composition? Micronutrients? Lab infections? Microbiomes? Measurement tools themselves?)
You can run A/A studies in the sense of permutation tests or bootstraps where you shuffle individual mice which weren't treated and see how often you get a 'significant' result; this is how you can see stuff like litter or cage or room effects (ie mice housed close to each other will respond more similarly to each other, and woe betide you if you do your 'randomization' by selecting from different cages rather than selecting from different individuals!) eg "Design, power, and interpretation of studies in the standard murine model of ALS" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.654... , Scott et al 2008, subsamples data from their 'control' mice to empirically estimate pseudo-effects and the null distribution. This is equivalent to raising two batches of mice and comparing. More interesting are multi-lab attempts at eliminating that heterogeneity and getting consistency in results, the most recent example being _C. elegans_ life extension - it turns out to be incredibly hard to harmonize labs in terms of measurements, environment, and results, and that's for well-established effects in model organisms which are about as simple as possible.
Unsurprisingly, there's a ton of heterogeneity which means it's easy to violate your statistical assumptions (i.i.d. being more important than normality here, I think) and so you get a lot of false positives. It's similar to the brain imaging issue: the assumption of spatial locality and Gaussianness is not really true and drives a lot of false-positive _p_-value inflation. There are really quite a lot of problems with animal studies, so it's not a surprise that they wipe out spectacularly when transferring to human.
I keep a list of systematic reviews & meta-analyses I run across at https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ#fn95 One of the most impressive ones, I think, are sepsis treatments: ~150 sepsis treatment experiments in humans based on mouse/rat experiments, and all of them failed: "Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases", Seok et al 2013 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/9/3507.full.html
Well worth reading through the archives, IMO, even if you're not a chemist or biologist (I'm not). Quite aside from the methodological issues and the realities of working in the pharmacorp industry, Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" series about dangerous chemical compounds is... a blast.
"They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats."
But what Young discovered, according to Feynman was infinitely more vital.
"In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats."
> She and Gould suspect that the antidepressant effect is the result of a specific interaction between ketamine and the male odour in the mouse brain.
Wow, this is a really fascinating study, and goes to show how evaluating psychoactive drugs can be so difficult. There are so many confounding variables that it's very difficult to know what is causing an effect.
Yeah, just wait - ten years from now some organic chemist will be thinking about some weird nonsensical reaction like that and, that'll be the story of how Ultra-PCP was first discovered and synthesized.
It's interesting to think about what this could mean for people. We use these mice because they often are convenient models for humans. Are our moods are just as affected by combinations of lots of little things like these - smells, hormones, chemicals in the cleaners, hair products etc.
On the scary side imagine being able to use this for evil. Spray something like this on your product to manipulate people's hormonal system to respond to it, maybe trigger affection towards it. Even worse, spray it to induce rage or hate for example.
Thanks, started to listen to it. Interesting stuff.
Heh, the question about the better soccer teams from countries that have higher toxoplasmosis infestation rates. Pretty silly correlation.
Also interesting the idea that males infected with toxo are more attractive to females and since it can spread through sperm it is now a symbiotic relationship. I knew about risky behavior and on, but this was a new thing I haven't heard about before.
Then oxytocin being "exploited" by dogs and pets is strange. Just waiting till the latest phones and cars are sprayed with something that also triggers that.
> Are our moods are just as affected by combinations of lots of little things like these - smells, hormones, chemicals in the cleaners, hair products etc.
I didn't mean only that we feel happy when we smell lavender or something like that, but more drastic things. Others mentioned toxoplasmosis, something like that basically. Now imagine being able to control and tailor that. Or something like rabies where it induces rage for example.
there is a published study showing that loud rock music cures type one diabetes in mice, along with 400-500 other therapies, none of which work in humans. There are two main vendors for these diabetic mice; for some reason, mice from one vendor develop diabetes at a different rate and certain kinds of studies work better in them. "Everything" cures cancer in mice. Skilled animal researchers can manipulate most mouse studies to skew results in their favor. But it is the best we have in many cases...
That's what they do on CSI, but that's not how it works in real life. I'm not a chemical engineer, so I can't explain why this doesn't work, but I've proposed this approach and various variations on it to some engineers for other purposes and got all sorts of explanations why it wouldn't work which I didn't understand; but the underlying concept was that you can't just take a sample of whatever and deconstruct and reconstruct it at will.
Lying on the floor of a club curled up drooling all over yourself in a dissociated state doesn't sound very appealing to me. I'd keep that for controllable environments.
This is because it increases the danger of drug use and could cause death. But no one has ever said not to mix uppers and downers because it wasn't fun.
It's long been thought that a large percentage of studies on mice can not be replicated in humans because we are such different species but we use mice because it is cheap.
Some larger animals might be somewhat closer but a.) much more expensive b.) more ethically challenging to kill/drug something more intelligent at the scale at which we do mice
An acquaintance of mine did work in medical studies with mice and he quit after a few years because he said one handled the mice so much that he grew attached to them and could not bear to kill them at the end of the trials anymore.
On the other hand we eat pigs and octopus and those are pretty smart creatures.
I bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up. I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.
You might find being vegetarian easier than you think. It's a little more effort while you learn new recipes, and depending on where you live you'll have less choice when you dine out, but I have been (mostly) vegetarian for the last two years and found it surprisingly easy. :)
I went vegetarian a couple of years ago, and friends keep asking me whether it's been hard to adjust.
Truth is, 99% of any difficulties have been social rather than related to my own appetite.
Giving up meat in itself was much easier than I expected, but I still haven't become comfortable with people quizzing me about my reasons.
Even when people are well-meaning and genuinely curious, they always end up asking these questions just when you're having a meal together. It's hard not to come off as preachy when you're talking about farming practices at the exact moment when steaming plates of meat arrive at the table!
Then there's the thing of going to someone's home and having them make different food for you. Even if they're super nice about it, I still feel like a bit of a burden.
It's reinforced my respect for vegans. Being a vegan while having an active social life takes a strength of character and bloody-mindedness that I don't think I have.
This is something of a pet peeve of mine. Somebody will post a hunting video or whatever and people, who otherwise enjoy meat, will freak out watching an animal die. The irony is that the way these animals die, with a clean lung shot or whatever, is a vastly more humane than the stuff the mass production meat you buy at the store is put through. They live their lives in the wild open and free as they see fit. And after a few seconds it ends with their brains so full pumped of endorphins that they likely don't feel a thing.
Compare that to store meat and you're looking at things that lived in cramped uncomfortable quarters and spent their lives being pumped full of antibiotic agents just to try to prevent them from becoming too sick before they're sent off a slaughter line where all their senses are going to inform them well ahead of time what's coming. And then enter in things like the growth hormones we use (that have been banned in much of the rest of the developed world) that often result in ongoing pain and other issues for the animals again before they're lined up for slaughter. Then there are straight up sadistic things like foie gras. That involves force feeding animals, generally ducks, to increase their liver to ~10x its normal size by shoving a pipe down their throat and jamming in "food" over a period of many weeks.
Cooking that lobster (or hunting deer or whatever else) is vastly more humane than supporting our meat industry. Like many things that happen on scale, ethics are quickly replaced with an insatiable lust for profit. I enjoy traveling and something I like more than anything else is to go into a chicken and rice shop and see some chickens freely pecking about around the shop. We should understand where our food comes from, and give it the respect it deserves. That doesn't mean not killing it, but it does mean giving it as reasonable a life as possible in the interim.
One of the experiences which led to me becoming a vegetarian was ordering a whole lobster and being forced to pick it apart bit by bit. It's easy to forget/dismiss that the "stuff" inside your lobster roll was ever a living, breathing, thinking being. However, when you're handed the whole animal, told to crack it open and stuff it into your mouth, it's a very different story.
On the other hand, I have gutted and butchered whole animals before, and still happily eat meat.
Good on you for sticking to your morals though. I don't mind vegetarians or vegans or whatever, but the one group that really annoys me is people who eat meat, but get upset seeing animals get butchered.
My grandfather was a slaughterman for a while and a really good butcher. When he talked about the animals going to be killed he said he could tell many of them at the end probably knew what was going to happen to them. It clearly did bother him a bit and he did feel sorry for the animals but said it was quick and humane overall. In everyday life he hated to see animals mistreated or suffering. There’s no hypocrisy in showing some emotion, especially when it’s something you’ve not experienced before.
I watched a documentary on Horseshoe Crabs recently where the researchers were clearly very attached to their specimens talking about their personalities like they were nephews/nieces. I think they are a more bizarre thing than a lobster, but I'd never before thought giant seabugs could be cute. They are definitely cute.
That said, I'll put a lobster in a pot without hesitation. I like to put a cigarette in their claws beforehand like a last smoke before a firing squad. I appreciate their sacrifice for my butter drenched enjoyment.
Probably not any more dishonest than someone who knows that a lot of "organic" food is grown with manure, but would prefer not to see (or worse, smell) the animals actually defecating, with the feces then being applied to something they're going to eat.
Manure is widely used as a fertiliser for non-organic food as well. And there's no need for the scare quotes, because using manure is perfectly congruent with organic farming.
The manure is also applied before seeding, months before harvest. Together with rinsing, and sometimes peeling or boiling, there's really no need for the scaremongering.
If you want to be afraid of faeces, manure is the least of your problems. Foxes and other wild animals shit on every field, and they often carry parasites.
"Foxes and other wild animals shit on every field, and they often carry parasites."
I've wondered about this. Fox tapeworm is very common (30% of all foxes in many areas in North-West Europe carry it last time I checked) and (the scary part) for humans, it can cause lethal liver failure 10 years after infection. Not 'lethal' is in 'flu lethal' - like 'might cause you to die in specific circumstances, when untreated, and when you were unhealthy already anyway' - but rather 'will certainly kill you in a painful way, very difficult to diagnose, no known effective treatment'.
So the advise is 'don't eat berries or mushrooms that grow in the wild below waist height'.
However, many/most fruit farms have fruit growing at that height, and the standard cleaning procedures don't remove worms (e.g. vaccinium isn't washed at all, too fragile). I know for a fact foxes (sometimes) enter these farms, I've seen some with my own eyes. How does this work from an epidemiological point of view? When devising health warnings, are there separate measurements for incidents caused by fruit picked in the wild, and from farms? Or is this just one of those things where everybody shrugs and says 'we don't have a better solution' and hope for the best?
On the off chance anyone doing epidemiology research is reading this, this sort of situation must be common; how is that dealt with?
Very large-scale modern farming is done with manure.
I used the scare quotes because "organic" food is basically just a giant scam. Plants don't actually care if their nitrogen comes from manure or from anhydrous ammonia. Really.
Missing word above. I meant to say "very LITTLE large-scale modern farming is done with manure", but did not notice until after the editing time had expired.
It's not, I feel the same way, but it's hard to be intellectually honest. I will be a vegetarian soon I think, it's been getting harder and harder to manage the dissonance since I got a dog.
Breeds that were selectively bred in areas without carb sources for humans cannot digest starch effectively - they still are in a way genetically closer to wolves which can only minimally digest starch. (Siberian Huskies/Alaskan Malemutes that we commonly associate with Northern native peoples like the Eskimo off the top of my head)
This kind of reminds me of my dog. He was quite happy with chasing birds whenever they landed in the garden. One day he caught one and killed it.
Then he kinda ignored the corpse for about week because he didn't know what to do with it and then we removed it from the garden (since we found it by then)
The bird was probably sick anyway since my dog is one of the worst hunting dogs I've seen.
I'm pretty sure it's due to the domestic upbringing, if he had grown up on a farm and actually had to hunt small rodents then he'd probably know how to eat them.
Someone I know used to have to get a blood test every week. One of the regular testers used to hurt him, the other didn't. I'm sure it affected to the stress of the visits which operator was waiting for him. With a small sample of people doing the injecting it's hard to eliminate the effect of operator technique.
You're an ass. Comments like this make me hate people. Why does it even matter what their sexuality is? And why does that group of people need a special name
It's not his first transphobic remark. Not only does he call trans people "traps", but he also objects to using proper pronouns because "I don't like my speech being dictated". It's easy to guess what he's obsessed with and ashamed about, and it's not about his lack of ability to treat people with respect.
> is an alt-right meme and shout-out to Milo Yiannopoulos
Wait, since when? The way it is phrased, and often the discussion it prompts, is certainly transphobic/homophobic, but any context I've seen it in (which hasn't been for a good few years) has been totally divorced from the alt-right. Did I miss it getting picked up by those groups at some point?
“Are Traps Gay?” is a satirical debate within otaku and alt-right online communities, attempting to determine if being attracted to a crossdressing man is an indication of homosexuality. This debate is often discussed alongside the discussions of anime and futanari character design. On February 21st, 2015, Redditor NyaaFlame posted a thread entitled “Why Liking Traps Isn’t Gay” to the /r/anime subreddit. Later that year, on July 31st, 2015 YouTuber king rad uploaded a video in which alt-right leader Milo Yiannopoulos" “Is it gay to like traps?”[1] Yiannopoulos appears to be hearing the term for the first time. On August 10, 2015, he uploaded a video to YouTube entitled “Judge Milo Decides: Are Traps Gay?” The video receives more than 74,900 views.
No, that's an ancient 4chan meme (source: haven't been there for years).
It was a witty remark and not unsolicited. I'm wondering whether you've been digging through his profile just now, or you keep a list of people guilty of phrases like "I don't like my speech being dictated"?
Pepe is an ancient 4chan meme too, but it has a very different specific meaning now.
If you think it was a witty remark and not unsolicited, you should consider going back to 4chan, where you'll find a lot more stuff like that which appeals to you, and where you won't be so inconveniently expected to treat other people with decency and respect.
>If you think it was a witty remark and not unsolicited...
You should be able to see that the first post is an opening for humour. Speaking of decency and respect, the word "trap", as opposed to being an insult, is a compliment elevating a subset of transsexuals. At the risk of making a deadly faux-pas like the flagged poster, trans people do aim to have the appearance of the opposite sex right?
"Trap" hasn't had a negative meaning tied to it in our past circles (chans/Rizon), where I think it might have originated.
If someone didn't see it through that lens I could sympathize being offended by it, but even then I'd personally take it as a compliment as being "passable" ~
You said "haven't been there for years" which means you came from 4chan. So does your behavior, pretending you don't know the word "trap" or purposefully mis-gendering is an insult to transgender people. That bullshit doesn't play here. You still haven't asked any questions worth answering.
>Defamatory: "deceptive," "fooling," "pretending," "posing," "trap," or "masquerading"
>Gender identity is an integral part of a person's identity. Do not characterize transgender people as "deceptive," as "fooling" or "trapping" others, or as "pretending" to be, "posing" or "masquerading" as a man or a woman. Such descriptions are inaccurate, defamatory and insulting. (See "passing" and "stealth" as problematic terms above.)
Now you know. So stop pretending you didn't know before.
I'm not pretending to not know the word; it made sense on sight to me as "someone who fools you". Easiest term around. And that is clearly a concept of its own not a synonym for transsexuals, hence my confusion when a poster gets flagged for an affront to them.
You have actually been helpful now though, despite thinking you're slamdunking me. Passing is a bad word now too? I think I'm getting the idea; transsexuals are their own sex. But then isn't the 'trans' in the word misleading?
Next you're going explain to me that you're not a "homophobe" because you're not literally "afraid" of homosexuals, you just hate them without fearing them. That's not the way language works, and I've heard all of your arguments before. You have nothing to contribute to the conversation.
Traps were originally a feature of 4chan; something you had to look out for. I'm sure the word existed in real life too, but 4chan is how most people find it. If anything, traps existed before trans-words entered people's vocab.
There was hostility but no intended snark when I say "I'm getting the idea; transsexuals are their own sex", I was trying to rationalize why even 'passing' was unacceptable, but at a stretch I can see that passing is part of the same theme of fooling and deceiving. So trans men do strive to be women.
(sctb's request acknowledged, replying to a separate poster)
Why vouch for a post demonstrating such creepiness? And making a strange ad-hom. Nothing worth resurrecting as a HN post. I'm not even one who had flagged it.
Since you ask: it's not just me, it's science (also journalism documenting many recent and historic events) that says many homophobes are secretly gay, and it's also a popular and widely known trope and basis of many memes, which you should take into account next time you feel the irresistible urge make a homophobic joke without intending for people to assume you're a closeted gay.
Rule of thumb: If you're really not gay, and don't want people to think you're gay, then simply stop making homophobic jokes!
Your "joke" was essentially transphobic and homophobic at its core, and not even funny because it doesn't even make any sense, even if you accept all the built-in underlying assumptions (which themselves are quite transphobic and homophobic).
Using the word "gay" doesn't automatically make everything funny, unless you're a homophobe or a 12-year-old. If you really think you made a funny joke that somehow makes sense, then can you explain why it's funny, and which underlying assumptions it depends on? (Please don't. I'm just joking. It isn't funny, and you can't make it funny by trying to explain it.)
"When I grew up, being gay, being a sissy or anything like that was verboten. I disliked myself intensely and feared this part of myself intensely and had to hide it and became "Perfect Richard, All-American Boy" as a place to hide."
— Richard Chamberlain
AKA The Law of Inverse Homosexuality: The more vocally opposed a person is to homosexuality, the more likely they are to be gay themself and closeted about it.
He's the strongest, toughest, manliest man in the sports team. He might hate gays and be vocal, or even violent about it. He will remind everybody that he is completely, 100% straight. That is, during the daytime. When night falls, you can find him Where Everybody Knows Your Flame with the Club Kids and Gym Bunnies. He might be browsing Grindr with a headless torso pic. He's the self-loathing gay guy who hides behind a macho façade.
The misconception that being Transgender is merely taking homosexuality one step further.
In Real Life, homosexuality and being transgender are entirely separate concepts, as they relate to two different things. Being gay or lesbian relates to sexual and romantic attraction, and means being attracted to others of the same sex. Being trans relates to gender identity, and means self-identifying as a gender different from your body's physical sexnote . This can be expressed as being "a woman trapped in a man's body" or vice versa. However, this distinction is all too often overlooked by both straight and gay cisgendernote writers wanting to insert a little diversity into their stories.
I’m mostly straight, somewhat bi male with some socially-induced gender dysphoria.
> In Real Life, homosexuality and being transgender are entirely separate concepts
I don’t think sexuality and gender are completely dissociated. I think your self conception and the kind of people you want to look at you sexually have a lot to do with each other actually.
It’s not uncommon for us to have experiences that affect the formation of both their gender and sexual identity.
I don't really want to respond to this wall of text. I can't even bring myself to read the the whole thing. Except I want to point out that I don't care what anybody on here thinks about my sexuality. I really don't. How could I? None of this is about -me- because nobody on here knows the slightest bit of detail about my personal life.
I just had a thought that I (and evidently at least one other person) found humorous, and I felt a desire to share, nothing nobler or less noble. I was utterly shocked that it prompted a flame war that came to the attention of the mods.
Then I hope you learned something: Stop telling homophobic jokes if you have a problem with people thinking you're gay, or even if you don't. Got it? Have any problem with that?
ii) I learned something, but perhaps not what you wish I'd learned.
iii) I don't care if you think I'm gay, partly because I wouldn't care if I were gay or not, but mostly because I don't care what strangers think at all.
iv) My jokes are no more or less funny depending on the sexuality of the teller.
v) I generally don't have any problem with anything anybody thinks or says, though political winds in other countries are starting to concern me a bit, Canada's pronoun law for example. So long as we're only talking and nobody's going to jail for wrongspeak, I think there's no problem.
It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...