Beware. This can be a huge time sink!
In a mast year, a mature blue oak may produce more than 100,000 acorns -- more than 10 times the annual average -- and is likely to produce few or no acorns in a poor year.That's close to my (handwave) estimate of a million acorns over the life of a large oak tree. (100 years of productive life at 10,000 acorns per year gives a million acorns.)
The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn't.
Benjamin Franklin, in Paris on a diplomatic assignment, suspected that Mesmer's patients did indeed benefit from the strange ritual because it kept them away from the bloodletting and purges of other Paris physicians.
The commissioners designed a series of ingenious tests in which some subjects were deceived into thinking they were receiving Mesmer's treatment when they were not, and others received the treatment but were led to believe they had not. The results established beyond any doubt that the effects were due solely to the power of suggestion.
When that comment came over the e-mail and I read it, I just was dissolved, I really couldn't believe in my lifetime I would ever hear the president of one of these institutions say what he wrote.
I said, 'You know, this problem may not be fixable.' And Bob Brown is an engineer, and engineers have a different view of the world. And he was very offended, actually. He said, 'Nancy, this is MIT. We're engineers. Engineers solve problems.'
He totally changed my life and the lives of all women in science for generations to come.
She was the single greatest save I have ever been part of.Here is NPR's record of his talk on a chapter from Better called The Bell Curve
"The nurse won't let me." "Don't tell her," he said, and deftly turned taking care of herself into an act of rebellion.The New Yorker has several of his articles online:
The batch below came from googling for "You see. That is why we never do double-blind testing any more. It never works!"
I first found that quote in Richard Dawkins's Introduction to John Diamond's Snake Oil in A Devil's Chaplain.
Perls Before Swine
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