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Heading as a gift
Feedback is a lover of a truly impactful headline. The one where the first few words are completely bizarre and you think it can't get weirder, only for the headline to go further and further with each subsequent word until you're left wondering if you're reading a news source or a lost James Joyce novel.
November 29 in online music magazine Stereoguma beautiful example of the form appeared: “Grimes DJ Trip to Immortality Influencer's Mushrooms with Special Guest Mr. Beast“If you're confused, fear not: we'll spend the next few paragraphs explaining what's going on.
Let's start on the left. Grimes is a musician whose albums often have a sci-fi theme. The 2020 climate-themed release was called Miss Anthropoceneand her debut Geidi Primes was a tribute (albeit misspelled) to Frank Herbert. Dune.
Meanwhile, Brian Johnson – tech millionaire who decided that he wanted to live forever, devoting most of his time to experimenting with ways to extend his life. This included exercise (good), diet changes (good), taking an immunosuppressant called rapamycin, which is commonly used for people who have had organ transplants (he stopped that), and eventually planning to upload his mind into an AI (of course).
The story is that Johnson took magic mushrooms and measured a bunch of biomarkers during a live broadcast. Grimes was invited to play music while he did so. While YouTuber MrBeast didn't end up showing up, others did, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and tech journalist Ashley Vance. If we ever went crazy from psilocybin mushrooms, we'd prefer to have an experienced therapist and loved one in the room. But we're sure Johnson knew what he was doing.
video events are available online. The duration is just over five and a half hours. Feedback should have kept track of all this in a spirit of due diligence, but unlike Johnson, we know we're going to die one day and we're not going to waste all that time.
Unthinkable questions
This may be the start of a new recurring Feedback theme: “Questions We Never Thought to Ask.” Reader Keith Adkins spotted our first piece of this kind, and all we can say to anyone who tries to follow it up is: good luck.
Keith saw article 2014 V Folia parasitologicalwhich, as the name suggests, is dedicated to parasites. One of these parasites is Toxoplasma gondiiunicellular organism, infects cats and there is present many people and who may be associated with mental illness for example, intermittent explosive disorder. Hence the question in the title of the article: “Does the prevalence of latent toxoplasmosis and the incidence of Rh-negative individuals correlate with the national rate of road traffic accidents?”
As Keith says, “The answer seems to be, 'Not if you control the statistics properly.' But what a question. Can anyone top this?
Graphics from hell
Sometimes there are no explanatory images. In its long and uneventful career in science journalism, Feedback has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what researchers were trying to convey in the complex graphs they provide. Looping flowcharts, color-shaded histograms in monochrome—you name it, we were a little confused by it.
However, the figure in a recent article in Scientific reports takes the cookies, and indeed the entire cookie tin. Reader Jim Santo pointed this out, noting that “it's just bullshit,” but we've seen it before. Published on November 19The purpose of the study was to describe an artificial intelligence-based system to assist in the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders. Feedback doesn't have much of an opinion about the study itself, and it wouldn't matter if we did because the journal retracted this December 5th.
Feedback anticipated this after seeing scientists discussing the article on social media, so we hastily downloaded a copy. The key point is Figure 1, which purports to be “Overall System Operation Presented as an Infographic.” It has to be seen to be believed.
In the center is a woman with a small child on her lap. It looks like her feet are set in concrete. The child points to a bubble with the words “MISSING VALUE and functional features.” To the right is another speech bubble that says “Historical Medical Frimble and Environmental Features.”
Elsewhere there is a pink blob that could be a damaged bean, which appears to represent “7 TOL Llne storee”. There is also mention of the “Feksectorn Factor” and an inexplicable bicycle with spikes.
As the magazine notes in its rebuttal, it's all generated by artificial intelligence, but Feedback has found that we're looking at it with ever-increasing interest. There is a mention of “Totalbottl” at the bottom of the picture, and we wondered if an explanation could be found at the bottom of one of them. As for the bicycle, we can only assume that someone was taken for a ride.
Feedback will say this for Scientific reports: This one of the fastest rollbacks we've ever heard of. It often takes years for journals to retract erroneous papers. Retraction Watch reported on December 3 that dozens of documents psychologist Hans Eysenck may have to be abandoned due to “dubious data” and other problems, not least bizarre claims that some people have a “cancer predisposition”. To understand the glacial speed at which all this is happening: Eysenck died in 1997.
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