Oddity Central - Weird Places, Odd Events, Bizarre News, Strange People and A Lot More HTML Tutorial The Skeptic Published on Science Based Medicine (18th August 2009)Harriet Hall examines the reliability and explanatory power of anecdotal reports, and biases in human perception in her article Why We Need Science: “I saw it with my own eyes” Is Not Enough I recently wrote an article for a community newspaper attempting to explain to scientifically naive readers why testimonial “evidence” is unreliable; unfortunately, they decided not to print it. I considered using it here, but I thought it was too elementary for this audience. I have changed my mind and I am offering it below (with apologies to the majority of our readers), because it seems a few of our readers still don’t “get” why we have to use rigorous science to evaluate claims. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. Science is the only way to correct for our errors of perception and of attribution. Last week one of our commenters wrote the worst testimonial yet: Another commenter wrote
64 Things Every Geek Should Know & Caintech.co.uk If you consider yourself a geek, or aspire to the honor of geekhood, here’s an essential checklist of must-have geek skills. The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. As time has gone on, the word has yet again morphed to indicate a new type of individual: someone who is obsessive over one (or more) particular subjects, whether it be science, photography, electronics, computers, media, or any other field. A geek is one who isn’t satisfied knowing only the surface facts, but instead has a visceral desire to learn everything possible about a particular subject. A techie geek is usually one who knows a little about everything, and is thus the person family and friends turn to whenever they have a question. 2. If you rolled your eyes here, that is a good thing. 1. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace Where there's water, life is possible. True, it may be very difficult and very hard to live, depending, but anyone who's driven, hiked, or camped in the American South West will have noticed that cities and ranches crop up where there's surface water or where there's been a well dug. Within the state of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, there are deserts, mesas, mountains, and forests where normally people never or rarely visit; not-so-secret places where there's water, access to a road within a day's hike, and where a fairly rugged individual may hide while remaining basically healthy, marginally well fed, and reasonably sane. In this section I'll look at two such environments, neither of which I would recommend, but one of which I'd suggest is a reasonable way to live in basic health while either on the run, hiding out from the law, old girl friends, the draft for an illegal war, putative wives and such. Where exactly? How I Would Do It Some Other Areas
cgi-bin Matrix Solver Solving a linear equation system of up to 20 unknowns. If you need some help please scroll down to the example. If not, fill the 2 boxes below , then click on the "Go" button. Example As an example, let's say you have the following 3 equations to solve for the unknowns x , y , and z : 2x + 3y + 1/3z = 10 3x + 4y + 1z = 17 2y + 7z = 46 To enter the above system into the matrix solver you enter the number "3" into the small box for the number of unknowns/equations. Into the big box for the coefficients you enter the following numbers : 2 3 1/3 1.0e+1 3 4 1 17 0 2 7 46.0 Notice that each row represents one equation. Note, that for the coefficients you may enter either whole numbers ( like 2 ), fractions of whole numbers ( like 1/3 ), numbers with a decimal point ( like 46.0 ), or numbers in scientific notation ( 1.0e+01 which is the same as 10 ). After entering all numbers click on the "Go" button. You may check the solution : Which checks out.
19 Awesome Open source games for Linux This is a nice collection of 19 open source games for Linux that contains most addictive, fun and refined games. For some of these games, also installation steps are included. Enjoy 1-Astromenace: AstroMenace is my favorite one, it is a modern 3D scrolling space shooter with ship upgrade possibilities. AstroMenace is graphically unique. I tried this game and i found it a real addictive game. Please enter the url to a YouTube video. For installation check our previous post. 2- Red Eclipse (The Successor Of Blood Frontier) Red Eclipse is a Free and Open Source game, using SDL and OpenGL which allows it to be ported to many platforms; grab a development copy from our Subversion repository and live on the bleeding edge. The game is a single-player and multi-player first-person ego-shooter, built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2, which lends itself toward a balanced gameplay, completely at the control of map makers, while maintaining a general theme of agility in a variety of environments.