Zagorath
@Zagorath@quokk.au
- Comment on New clean energy comes out. *look inside* It’s just boiling water again… 4 hours ago:
This page’s “Life cycle CO2 equivalent (including albedo effect)” page says Nuclear is just a hair worse than onshore wind in the median case, significantly worse than both on- and offshore wind in the worst case (worst for both types), and slightly better in the best case. In best case, hydro actually beats nuclear.
Also, TIL tidal power isn’t commercially in use. I swear we were learning about it in school 20 years ago, and were not even told then that it wasn’t viable.
Including the effects of albedo seems rather straightforward and worth doing. Of course it neglects some more complicated factors, like opportunity cost of staying on fossil fuels in the meantime for the 20+ years it takes to build nuclear. A convenient part of the reason that the biggest proponents of nuclear tend to be those politicians and special interests who also support fossil fuels.
- Comment on Is this a rope hanging under a helicopter? 2 weeks ago:
Yup. I’ve got two main stories in evidence of it, but I’ll just share one here because the other is much longer.
Both Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey were early members of the creator-owned streaming platform Nebula. Creators literally have an ownership stake in the business, and are paid out a slice of revenue based on their viewership.
But early on, when it was still taking the shape we know it in today, Grey and Kurzgesagt were members with an ownership stake. They left it a long time ago citing “creative differences” (or some vague nonsense like that). From little pieces that have come out on the rare occasions that existing Nebula creators have said something about it, apparently those two were less interested in the vision of Nebula as a place where multiple creators support each other in growing their collective revenue; instead they wanted to take more of a parasitic approach where they could profit off of the backs of other, smaller creators. Because the then-co-owners weren’t interested in that, Grey and Kurzgesagt ended up leaving.
I can share the other if you’re interested, but chiefly, it demonstrates that Kurzgesagt is deeply mistrusting, a quality known to map to mistrustful people, and it shows Dettmer behaving in a very dishonest way towards a fellow creator who went by Coffee Break (now Coffeezilla).
- Comment on Is this a rope hanging under a helicopter? 2 weeks ago:
He is an entertainer
I’ll preface this by saying I don’t particularly like the direction the channel has gone. He’s sold out big time, as described by many comments above (both literally, by selling the channel to VC, and metaphorically, by selling out whole videos and the integrity of their content to advertisers as the Tom Nicholas video explains). And his ties to grifters like Colin Grey and Philipp Dettmer (of CGP Grey and Kurzgesagt fame) definitely don’t work in his favour.
But that said, I think this comment you made is a bit reductive. He has a PhD in effective science communication. He can legitimately claim expertise in communicating science to the public via YouTube in a way most popsci content cannot. Obviously not the same as doing scientific research himself, but he also doesn’t claim to be doing that.
- Comment on Correlation implies causation 3 weeks ago:
Same link without the tracking parameter.
- Comment on We're losing 4 weeks ago:
That’s how Wikipedia works. Each language is an entirely separate article, maintained by entirely separate people. Not a simple translation of English Wikipedia.
- Comment on We're losing 4 weeks ago:
Wikipedia has entirely different versions in different languages. This page is on the English Wikipedia.
- Comment on We're losing 4 weeks ago:
Clockwise order isn’t the same as reading order
Yes, I know. That’s what my comment is criticising.
- Comment on We're losing 4 weeks ago:
Yeah that seems to be how Wikipedia does things. It tripped me up earlier today on a different page. Bizarre. Just go left to right, top to bottom. Reading order.
- Comment on Ada Lovelace 5 weeks ago:
You said
maybe Einstein, but we have proof of [Lovelace’s] discoveries and they’re not at all abstract in the contemporary world!
The implication behind this is that we don’t have proof of Einstein’s discoveries and his are abstract in the contemporary world. But neither of those are true.
- Comment on Ada Lovelace 5 weeks ago:
I’m not sure what you mean. Einstein’s theories are not without proof or purely abstract. Without them, satellites’ clocks would get noticeably out of sync with earth’s, which would (among other things) render GPS absolutely useless.
- Comment on The Projected Truth 1 month ago:
Wilful control of reality in this case requires truth to be subjective
Hmm, maybe. Others have covered this and it doesn’t quite seem perfectly true, but let’s let that slide.
and conversely, if truth is subjective you can control reality
No, that definitely doesn’t follow. If truth is subjective it doesn’t at all mean you can control it. It just means that what is true for you might be different from what is true for me. The reason that’s the case isn’t a part of that equation.
- Comment on AAAAA 2 months ago:
Isn’t the left character Zelda?
- Comment on Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial 2 months ago:
I play the clarinet and I taught myself circular breathing for one particular piece. I can guarantee you it is not a standard technique. It’s not even something that you can expect a professional player to be able to perform. I think I’ve only ever seen one performer use it.
It can be handy as an option for long fast passages, to avoid needing to sneak in a breath. Much less useful for holding a single long note, because it’ll impact your embouchure and put a hitch in the note that can be disguised between notes in a faster passage.
- Comment on Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial 2 months ago:
The didgeridoo is customarily played using a technique called circular breathing. Because this involves forcing air out of the mouth using the cheeks, it is exceptionally difficult to do on instruments and in mystical styles where maintaining a specific embouchure is required. Which means it’s not practical on brass or reeded wind instruments playing most conventional repertoire.
- Comment on Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial 2 months ago:
That is, indeed the “joke”, such as it is.
- Comment on Why are people trying to raid Scientology buildings around the world? 2 months ago:
Seriously. Next time, ABC, just send me a quick DM. I’ve got your back.
- Comment on Why are people trying to raid Scientology buildings around the world? 2 months ago:
Those two organisations deserve each other.
- Comment on ABC radio kills third party internet radio streams and embedded links. 2 months ago:
I hope this doesn’t affect podcasts. Podcasting is an open standard and the ABC Listen app is a closed system.
If I can’t listen to their podcasts in my preferred podcatcher I’ll be sad, but not enough to start using another app for it.
- Submitted 2 months ago to news@aussie.zone | 12 comments
- Comment on Wild Ones 2 months ago:
Biologically speaking, there is no way to define butterfly in a way that includes everything people consider butterflies and does not also include moths.
- Comment on Literally exactly how it works, too. 2 months ago:
So uhh…sorry for this comment being as long as it is. I was initially basically just going to leave the first paragraph and then link to two or three videos demonstrating the claims. But then I wanted it to be of value even if you don’t spend the time watching the videos. And so I had to rewatch the videos myself to summarise salient points. And that led me to finding and rewatching yet more videos. And then I had to summarise those. And the comment just blew out.
The first paragraph should serve as a TL;DR if the rest is too much or not worth the time. And jump to the last paragraph for other recs.
Sabine Hossenfelder
Hey, just be very careful about her. She knew her stuff with astrophysics, but has since become very jaded even within what was once her own field, and she has a nasty habit of speaking with great authority about matters outside her expertise, and getting it wildly wrong. And often doubling down rather than adapting when corrected. And also of spreading a message that emboldens and encourages science deniers, despite not being a science denier herself.
Here’s a video about it from a former ABC journalist who I think is being overly generous to Hossenfelder at times (in particular regarding Hossenfelder’s take on trans people), but which nonetheless does a good job of laying out the problematic way she presents certain views.
And here are a few more videos that take a more directly critical approach. Professor Dave Explains’ first video. This is probably the strongest, because it makes every effort to present things from Hossenfelder’s point of view and assume she means well. One key thing this video does is point out that the fact that she comments on fields outside her expertise is not a problem. The problem comes when she refuses to properly update her beliefs (and retract claims) when she gets corrected, and she often does not sufficiently caveat her views with her lack of expertise in this subject.
Professor Dave Explains’ second video, a followup a week after the first addressing some responses to the first one.
eigenchris explains why she’s wrong about trans teens. In short, Hossenfelder plays the bothsidesism game to appear as reasonable, but to do so ignores significant amounts of evidence in favour of trans affirming care, and ignores significant problems with the limited evidence in favour of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (i.e., the idea that people think they’re trans even though they aren’t purely because it’s “socially popular") in order to present it as a reasonable view.
Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) also does a much shorter video about this trans misinformation. She also points out that Hossenfelder hides her citations behind the Patreon paywall, making it impossible for most viewers to do basic fact checking. Watson also follows up about how Hossenfelder is wrong about capitalism. The video links over to this much longer video by Unlearning Economics (a creator I have watched before and enjoyed, but I have not seen this particular video recently enough to recall it), but spends most of its runtime explaining the many ways Hossenfelder was wrong about penicillin, by falsely claiming it only took off thanks to capitalism, despite the Australian Government being one of the biggest drivers of its uptake by producing enough to use for the Australian Army during WWII (with enough leftover for civilian use), and despite numerous capitalists from the UK and US actively choosing not to invest in producing penicillin until promises of significant tax breaks for aiding in their own war effort.
Now, I’ve got my own separate problems with Watson that have led me to stop watching her. (Namely: that she seems more interested in dunking on people than actually spreading good information. The Adam Conover video was an awful hit piece, and the pinned comment was nothing but anti-union propaganda. And she refused any update, not even pinning someone else’s comment pointing out the update, after Conover put out a complete retraction of the thing Watson was dunking on him for. Not to mention the significant amount of time in that video spent dealing with style issues rather than the actual substance. Just gross.) But in these two videos she does a really good job of laying out the facts and deferring to experts who can demonstrate why Hossenfelder is problematic.
Dave has a third video. It’s much longer and might be worth watching if you’re still on the fence. It shows some of the more recent claims from Hossenfelder of her getting more and more extreme in her anti-scientific institutions takes, and then does interviews with current scientists about what they do and how it conflicts with Hossenfelder’s warped explanations.
For former academic astrophysicists who occasionally make videos about the problems with academic science or with the popular response to science, I would highly recommend Angela Collier and Dr. Fatima. Though neither are exactly the same niche that Hossenfelder purports to be in, since they don’t typically do science news reporting.
- Queensland government in ‘integrity crisis’ over alleged undisclosed affair between two ministers [during which time Minister for Sport Tim Mander moved the Olympic Sailing from Moreton Bay to the Whitsundays in electorate of Amanda Cam], opposition sayswww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 2 months ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 0 comments
- Submitted 3 months ago to melbourne@aussie.zone | 8 comments
- Comment on Batteries 3 months ago:
Maybe sometimes, especially among the bigger and more infamously privacy-invasive sites.
A lot of the time, though, it’s just that it’s the easiest way to write a website. Particularly if you’re using modern frameworks, you have to go quite a way out of your way to send static HTML that works well without JS enabled.
- Comment on Think Bold 3 months ago:
Too much pollution? Release wolves
in factoriesin boardroomsFTFY
- Comment on Protesters arrested at Brisbane pro-Palestine rally featuring banned phrase 3 months ago:
by the jews
You mean like the Jewish Australians arrested today for standing up against the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide?
- Comment on Protesters arrested at Brisbane pro-Palestine rally featuring banned phrase 3 months ago:
I thought this was, yet again, a shit article on the subject from the ABC. A total failure to provide context to explain the ongoing genocide and our government’s support of the genocidal regime that leads to local protests having a very direct, real purpose. Literally no attempt to explain the meaning of the phrase, no contextualising the use of the term “hate speech”. Not even scare quotes around that term.
It’s quite telling that there’s no by-line on the article.
Here’s a better article. It doesn’t go as far as I would like in contextualising it properly, it but it at least does the bare minimum necessary for journalistic integrity.
Also, side note: according to a Facebook post/video by Michael West Media (but not any proper article from them that I could find), those arrested included Jewish Australians.
- Comment on NSW premier told to resign after protest laws struck down by top court 3 months ago:
fr. that’s like…the whole problem.
- Comment on It's called fashion, sweaty, look it up 3 months ago:
What was her response?
- Submitted 3 months ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 1 comment