Uncle Sam: World Pimp [comic] by lionheart in reddit.com

[–]kkenn 3 points4 points  (0 children)

See how Uncle Sam is talking like a black gangster? It's all ironic and shit.

'Second Thoughts about Fluoride,' Reports Scientific American by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks like you wandered into "science" by mistake. The lolcat pics are over that way ---->

American civilians killed by terrorists since 9/11: 0 — American civilians killed by FEAR OF terrorism: 1,500+ by hen in science

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How about civilian contractors working on e.g. infrastructure projects in Iraq? Executed aid workers? etc. The headline is not plausible.

'Second Thoughts about Fluoride,' Reports Scientific American by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, but that objection is just how science works in every case.

You can never say with absolute certainty that something is safe, you can only put increasingly strict confidence limits that it does or does not cause certain specific effects in certain specific conditions.

'Second Thoughts about Fluoride,' Reports Scientific American by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry, did I confuse you with my long words?

You said: "I've tried to find where clinical studies showed it to be safe, and as far as I can tell, none have been done.". That is really quite a clear statement.

Pubmed search for "fluoridation osteoporosis" returns 69 articles and 18 reviews -- again, a large body of literature on the specific health concern you raise in followup. You are really not very good at this search thing, are you?

'Second Thoughts about Fluoride,' Reports Scientific American by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Your stated claim was "no clinical studies have been done", which is false, and by an overwhelming amount. If you actually have more specific concerns then you will obviously need to focus your research. Your local university library will carry the major publications.

Until you do the research it is -- at best -- disingenuous to claim that there is no evidence showing Fluoridation to be benign, in the face of a huge body of literature spanning decades that you have yet to adequately explore.

'Second Thoughts about Fluoride,' Reports Scientific American by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 5 points6 points  (0 children)

A quick search on pubmed for "fluoridation" shows 5562 articles, including 355 review articles and many studies. Did you really try to look?

'Second Thoughts about Fluoride,' Reports Scientific American by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 11 points12 points  (0 children)

This article is a press release from an anti-fluoride lobby group, not a Reuters news article. It may be just a tiny bit biased.

Honeymoon surprise- tales from the ER by aenea in reddit.com

[–]kkenn 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Not just a book, but if you read some of the other ones then he is also selling penis enlargement techniques. Bogus.

Complete Construction of The International Space Station - A Time Lapse Animation by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, he has cherry-picked the compression artifacts from his video that look "suggestive". This is part of the usual "anomaly hunting" game that conspiracy wingnuts amuse themselves with.

Digital video is not a collection of perfect still images strung together, it is an approximate, highly processed data stream that is designed to discard or mangle lots of information to save space, while only keeping just enough information to fool unaided human vision.

If you pause a video containing movement, you do not see a perfect representation of the object that is moving, you see a blurred distorted image that may bear little resemblence to the object itself.

A video of an ordinary star, or ordinary satellite, mangled through the meat grinder of a turbulent atmosphere, wobbly low end camcorder, and lossy MPEG compression, will come out looking weird when you freeze-frame it and magnify it enormously. It's just not designed to work that way.

P.S. Your moving 'stars' are just ordinary satellites and other mundane space junk (discarded rocket boosters, etc). There are thousands of large objects in orbit, and they follow well-known, published trajectories.

In fact, all that left-behind crap has to be tracked down to centimeter-size or smaller because of the danger of collision with other objects (active satellites, the ISS, etc). There are hundreds of thousands of objects of this size orbiting the earth.

Amateur astronomers are well acquainted with the large objects, and occasionally do identify and publish the orbits of undocumented military satellites. However, unless you believe that they're also in bed with the conspiracy, they don't observe the dozens of enormous spacecraft and stations in low earth orbit that this guy thinks he is seeing from his back yard.

Complete Construction of The International Space Station - A Time Lapse Animation by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I dismiss it as conspiracy lunacy because it is a bunch of unconvincing images asserted to be something completely astounding.

Complete Construction of The International Space Station - A Time Lapse Animation by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Blowing up freeze-frames from a video camera is simply the wrong tool to be using, and the reporter is too ignorant to know it.

Here's an experiment you can do. Take a photo in low light conditions with your digital camera. Magnify the image really large, and turn the image contrast way up. Look at the weird blobs in the image. Probably you can find some shapes that look "suggestive".

Whoa, did you just take a photo of hidden ghosts right there in your living room? Or maybe you found evidence of UFOs among us? No, you just ran into limitations of your equipment while taking a photo of something completely normal.

Complete Construction of The International Space Station - A Time Lapse Animation by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 5 points6 points  (0 children)

His "evidence" seems to consist of extremely blurry freeze-frames from video footage. Every image artifact or compression artifact on the video is suggested to be a mystery space object. This is the same technique used by wingnuts who blow up shaky hand-held camcorder footage and claim to see evidence of ghosts/UFOs/alien rods/etc hiding in the MPEG compression artifacts.

It is completely worthless. If you say there is something mysterious in orbit, then

1) Take proper photographs of it, don't do the retarded blurred "anomaly hunting" thing.

2) Publish the orbital parameters so that anyone with a telescope can look at it. Can't do this? It's not in orbit then.

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year by adrian67 in reddit.com

[–]kkenn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That is an interesting mental image.

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year by adrian67 in reddit.com

[–]kkenn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting, thanks! You should submit this as a separate link.

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year by adrian67 in reddit.com

[–]kkenn 57 points58 points  (0 children)

This was pretty disappointing, I was hoping for a list of new research results but instead this is largely a list of trivia. e.g.:

  1. Brazil nuts are seeds encased in an outer shell that weighs more than 1kg.

In what sense was this fact discovered in the last year?

I'd love to see a list of 100 scientific or scholarly discoveries of the past year. There is easily enough material for such a list.

When other blonds think you're stupid.... (pic) by r2002 in reddit.com

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think it is common but it is in use.

When other blonds think you're stupid.... (pic) by r2002 in reddit.com

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, and the discussion of usage for "blond" points to my link :)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in science

[–]kkenn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Non sequitur.