Unscientific
The Crippling Power of the Human Mind…
Today I read an interesting article that elicited a healthy laugh from yours truly. It seems that an Irvine, CA inventor came up with a led adorned, radio controlled, reinforced foam flying toy that had local residents crying “Alien Abduction”:
Zingali, 58, was searching for help with his radio-controlled plane. Instead he found hand-drawn plans by a poster named Stringfly for something called a saucer.
“I was told – by engineers – it wouldn’t fly,” says Zingali, a former facilities specialist who recently moved to Phoenix. “There was no airfoil, no lift, no dihedral.”
He built one anyway. It flew, but couldn’t handle the wind. So he tweaked a few things and doubled its span from 18 to 36 inches. A phenomenon was born. Soon, Orange County motorists were chasing strange lights in the sky. Orange County’s Mutual UFO Network was taking calls about erratic, flying objects. And the Web site UFOinfo.com was posting reports of “glowing orbs” in south Orange County.
One 53-year-old man reported a large glowing ball that “appeared to drip fire.” It traveled about five miles in a few seconds, he said, and left an “acrid type odor” in the air. – [OCRegister.com]
OK. Lets review. What we have here is a 3foot foam toy with leds on it and a top speed of 40mph that, from observers reports, is bigger than a house, produces an acrid smell, (somehow detectable from its cruising altitude of 400ft), travels at 3600 miles an hour, and drips fire…
Amazing how our senses/perceptions can deceive us. Absolutely amazing…
UFOs baffle O.C. earthlings – [OhGizmo/OCRegister]
Early to rise, early to grave…?
Science is better today that it ever has been. The scientific process has been refined to the highest degree ever, and studies are, in general conducted in the most objective way possible. Which is why it is all the more irksome to me when I see researchers take perfectly good study results and flush it all into the sewer with out-of-left-field conclusions:
The study, conducted by researchers from several universities and hospitals in the western Japanese city of Kyoto, revealed a link between wake-up times and a person’s cardiovascular condition.
Well that’s quite interesting…
“Rising early to go to work or exercise might not be beneficial to health, but rather a risk for vascular diseases,” said an abstract of the study.
Say what now?!?! Now hold on just a second! How exactly did you make that jump from correlation to cause? You do realise that just because there is a correlation between factor A and factor B does not mean that Factor B was caused by factor A don’t you? You are scientists are you not? What happened to the science? Where’s the objective review?
The study, covering 3,017 healthy adults aged between 23 through 90, found that early risers had a greater risk of heart conditions including hypertension and of having strokes.
However, the study also noted that early risers were usually older. – [Yahoo/AFP]
Hmm… Far be it from me to question the findings of veteran researchers, but could it possibly be that age had something to do with the increased heart disease risk factors, as opposed to their sleeping habits? Now I’m sure that the study was conducted flawlessly. But I’m having a wee problem with the interpretation of the results.
Did you poll their work habits? Maybe they are getting up earlier because they are overworked, under a lot of stress and need more time to get work done. Being overworked could also increase stress and cause heart problems right? How did they come to this particular conclusion when there are approximately a gazillion of other factors that are known causative agents for heart problems?
Sometimes, in spite of all the scientific and technological advances of the past century, I feel like I’m living in the dark ages…
Early rising no good for the heart: study – [Yahoo/AFP]
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