1) Science denial is destroying our societies, our civilization. Various vested interests, usually right wing ideologues find various scientific facts and information contrary to their agenda, so through propaganda they are orchestrating the public into denying this science.

2) We are seeing this with regard to the COVID virus, where a range of denial is being promoted, ranging from absolute denial the virus exists, to different levels of denial, such as only some people are vulnerable to the virus, to facilitate business as usual.

3) For a long time, to promote business as usual, vested interests have been promoting the denial of the climate and ecological crisis through propaganda. The aim being to create a large enough body of public denial to prevent action which can change anything.

4) We have seen similar patterns over a long time, such as when tobacco companies promoted denial of the emerging scientific evidence of how harmful and addictive tobacco smoking was. This further denial uses exactly the same methods.

5) Understandably, the public can't be educated about everything and have to rely on experts to inform them of concerns about threats to public safety. Malicious vested interests take advantage of this by using pseudo-experts to misinform the public.

What is carbon capture? And how does it work?

While carbon capture is regularly discussed in the media, no one really ever explains what it is.

Below is a quick thread discussing the technology behind traditional carbon capture 👇

Carbon capture is broadly the "capture" of CO2 emissions from a power plant or other type of industrial facility.

Technology is connected to the "tailpipes" of these facilities and is used to remove CO2 from the plant exhaust.

Once the CO2 is removed from the plant exhaust, it is typically pressurized and sent under ground for permanent storage.

This step is called "sequestration" and is why experts often talks about "carbon capture and sequestration" or "CCS".

So how do you "capture" the CO2 molecules from exhaust?

Currently, one of the most economic forms of carbon capture is called "amine-based" capture.

An "amine" is a special liquid chemical which selectively grabs on to CO2 molecules.

To get the amine to grab on to the CO2, the amine is put into the top of a large column, while the exhaust is put into the bottom of the column.

The exhaust bubbles up through the column, and the amine drips down.

The liquid amine and gas exhaust mix in the column.

It is astonishing that most of cognitive science ignores an obvious reality. That there are two kinds of humans.

Tomasello has a very credible hypothesis that what distinguishes humans from the great apes is the inclination towards shared intentional behavior. What is innate is the disposition and like personalities, it is what defines our cognition as we grow.

If cognitive preference is so critical in cognitive development then why is it that we seem to have completely ignored the difference in cognitive preferences between men and women?

Humans are that species of primates that wandered out into the savannah. The savannah is different enough from a dense jungle to exert the evolutionary pressures that encourage the development of planning and forecasting skills.

Furthermore, human infants required a disproportional amount of effort to rear. This meant the specialization of roles between women who were responsible for rearing offspring and men who were responsible for bringing home the bacon. Failure in either implied death.

If you shine light of high enough energy on to a metal, electrons will be emitted from the metal.

The Nature versus Nurture is a debate about scientific doctrine. It is a debate about the correct way of explanation for cognition.

The Representation versus Non-Representation shares the same debate. It is also about the correct way of explanation for cognition.

It is also the difference between thinking in nouns versus thinking in verbs. Nature and Representation have deep roots in Western thinking. It is a functionalist and reductionist way of thinking that meets its limits when analyzing complex adaptive systems.

It is perhaps due to this Western bias that concepts from the study of complex systems have had little traction in modern society. It is of course, more than a Western bias, but a human bias to seek out simple causal explanations of this world.

But the world is complex and messy. Spiral dynamics which is an evolutionary model of individuals and society explains how models of the world shape ourselves and our civilization.

11 BIG IDEAS OF PHYSICS

via @BlasMoros of @LTCWRK

(Thread 👇)

1. Galilean Relativity

We can never fully grasp, define, or understand a system we are part of.

“Distance provides perspective” and wisdom in life is often about perspective.

2. The Laws of Thermodynamics

The study of the large-scale behavior of systems exchanging work and heat with connected systems or their environment.

- The Transitive Law

- The Law of Conservation

- The “Contrast Advantage” Law

- The “Absolute Zero” Law

3. Newton’s Laws of Motion

Describe how objects in the world move and react to forces.

- The Inertia Law: An object at rest, stays at rest

- Force = Mass * Acceleration (F = ma)

- The Law of Reciprocity: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction

4. Complexity

A complex system exhibits emergent behavior due to the collective interaction of many individual agents according to simple rules.

Complex systems are sensitive to original conditions, influenced by feedback loops, and buffeted by random outside variables.

From a truther friend 🙏
💥👇💥 Thread 💥👇💥
Now at last some good News!

Thanks Rob Osborne - From the scientists mouth. Officially its the flu.From natural news .com
“I have a PhD in virology and immunology. I'm a clinical lab scientist and have tested 1500 "supposed" positive

HOW TO STAY YOUNG:

Starve-destroy-recycle-eat-build-eat-build-starve...

The human ecosystem (our internal environment) has the same processes as the environmental ecosystem. Destruction & Reconstruction is a universal process. This is how we stay young.

We should take our cue from the senolytic processes of nature. A coppiced Hazel tree is near immortal.

Too much destruction (chronic calorie restriction) and too much growth (hyperfunction/ constant eating) are both bad and lead to derangement.

'A single bout of resistance training induced rapid clearance of senescent cells in muscle' h/t @Mangan150

"Conc: Rapid senescent cell clearance of human skeletal muscle during resistance exercise seems to associate with enhanced in situ phagocytosis. High protein availability accelerates resolution of muscle inflammation and promotes muscle increment after training" h/t @SPKP1124

Ok people, the current hype in #Science around #Archaeology research in #Chiribiquete and #LaLindosa in #Colombia, albeit deserving, it's a clear example of how scientific discovery is colonised and monopolised. We need to have an awkward conversation

As a Colombian expat in #Science, I was always surprised with how places like Chiribiquete were pretty much unknown overseas, considering their scientific, cultural and biological value, and that almost any Colombian has heard about them 2/n

The last couple of weeks I started an increasing trend of people in "developed countries" talking about discoveries of ancient paintings in the Amazon, and managed to trace back the source to this paper from April

As people started reacting more and more to it, media coverage started popping up. At that point a narrative was clear: A British-led expedition just discovered a trove of paintings from the heart of the Colombian Amazon

The discovery was so F&%$ unbelievable that they kept it under the wraps until a @Channel4 documentary was shot and produced to be released later this month

In physics, energy is that which is causally invariant or symmetric with respect to time. Said differently, energy is never created or destroyed, it is conserved in the universe.

Now there is a question about information. Is information causally invariant? Does information remain the same with respect to time? To understand this, let's first understand what energy is, then attempt to understand what information is.

The strange thing about energy is that it is this universal currency that seems to be interchangeable between the different forces in nature (i.e. electromagnetic, strong, weak and gravity). It is that thing that makes change possible.

Now let's assume that the universe is computational in nature. That is, anything we see in nature is a consequence of computation. That is, there is computation underneath the physics that is driving the universe to change.

What does it mean then that information is conserved in this computational universe? Also, how is energy conservation related to information conservation?

Colleagues, we need to talk about the damage that endless zooming can do. Every day I see new opportunities to join in this or that online discussion or conference, and each invitation is becoming a burden 1/... #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter

For many of us, online conferencing is the main form of contact we have with others. But it's a stripped down form of contact which demands a particular focus and concentration. Colleagues tell me every day that it's more intense, and thus tiring, than IRL interaction 2/...

Communication is attenuated because many of the usual social and symbolic cues that tell us where we are, what our role is, how to interact and respond, are missing. This is especially awful if our interlocutors have their cameras switched off and we're talking into a void 3/...

But we also lose the rest and reset time between events. Instead of those precious minutes on a train to read, or a brisk walk between venues, even just a chat around the coffee pot, we are increasingly leaving one meeting to log on to another 4/...

We do so with no other backdrop than our own four walls, in one chair, glued to a screen, unable to reach out. Our symbolic and social worlds have shrunk. @PostEurope told me it's a form of torture, but that's literally true: a stress position we maintain for days 5/...

Azar just released a delusional, alternative history of Covid testing in the US. I’m mad because our testing failures allowed this outbreak to blow-up. We can’t fix our system if we ignore where it is broken. I suspect @PublicHealth agrees.

My fact-check on remarks @HHSGov 🧵

“It is indisputable that the United States has built the most extensive testing system and strategy of any major country,” says Azar.

False. Several countries have had percent positivity ~1% whereas US has never been below 5% and is >10% today. Refs KCDC & USA @JohnsHopkins

"The federal government got out of the way of test development in safe and sensible ways,” says Azar.

False. In Feb, CDC & FDA blocked labs from testing as the disease spread exponentially. I broke this story👇🏼& wrote more like it as the year wore on.

Azar defends questions about why the CDC refused an early German test vetted & distributed by WHO, by saying it was ‘unapproved’ & beneath us.

False. Top US researchers in my stories vetted several tests as early as Feb,& found that the one recommended by WHO was ideal.

Azar refuses to concede that other countries handled Covid better. He attributes Koreas success to less travel, invasiveness & private sector.

False. Korea's gov't marshaled the private sector & tracing success was largely from hiring tons of tracers.

Today, we are bringing other exciting results involving black holes and AI. We released a new paper:

"Black Hole Weather Forecasting with Deep Learning: A Pilot Study"

Work by Roberta Duarte (@import_robs), Rodrigo Nemmen (@nemmen) and João Paulo Navarro (from @NVIDIABrasil).

The authors used deep learning to simulate the dynamics of gas accreting onto a black hole, i.e., black hole weather forecasting.

They trained the model (U-Net) with frames from numerical solutions of the hydrodynamical equations.

Numerical simulations are time-consuming. A simple simulation can take as long as 7 days to finish. If we go with more complex simulations, this time may increase.

We want to investigate if deep learning can be a new method to simulate accurately in less time!

In the paper, they discussed two examples:

1- The model simulating only one system after learning only from this system
2- The model simulating an unseen system after training with several systems with different initial conditions

In the first example, they trained the model with a single system and analyzed how the model simulates by iterative predictions.

The result is that the model can simulate up to 8e4 gravitational time accurately with a speed-up of 30000x faster!

I recently submitted my PhD dissertation titled "Illiberalism Beyond Borders. Dissecting Russian and Turkish External Influence in Bosnia and Georgia" at @FU_Berlin. Interested in what I found? Read this thread ⬇️

To begin with, I hypothesise that illiberal external influence (IEX) is more likely to contribute to the contestation of #democracy in a given polity when it appears in the context of a favorable domestic environment and the absence of liberal external counterpressure.

I particularly scrutinise the role of domestic elites in facilitating/obstructing IEX, based on findings by J. Tolstrup, @otansey, R. Vanderhill et al. I also look at how liberal ext. counterpressure can help prevent a major contribution of IEX to the contestation of #democracy.

Between 2016-2018, I conducted 95 interviews in #Tbilisi, #Moscow, #Sarajevo & #BanjaLuka (thx to all interlocutors!). Given the increasingly unfree environment in Turkey, I didn't dare to make a trip to Ankara, but talked to local experts about Turkish IEX in BiH & Georgia.

In #Bosnia, #Ankara has engaged in illiberal sponsorship of the Party of Democratic Action for many years. However, in both Bosnia and #Georgia, Ankara mostly exerted illiberal external influence after the 2016 coup attempt, following which it exerted pressure on the rule of law.

@engexplain @nntaleb 1/10
Science is assumed to be “evidence-based” but that term alone doesn’t mean much. What constitutes good evidence? How is evidence being used? Is it supporting or refuting a hypothesis? Was the hypothesis and experimental design predetermined or found ex post facto?

@nntaleb 2/10
The reality is you can find “evidence” for almost any narrative. Limit the sample size, cherry-pick studies, etc. Systematic reviews, meta analyses, and randomized controlled trials are all susceptible to selective interpretation/narrative fallacy.

@nntaleb 3/10
At the heart of the problem is the over-reliance on simplistic statistical techniques that do little more than quantify 2 things moving together.

@nntaleb 4/10
Take Pearson’s correlation, based on covariance. Variation can increase simultaneously across 2 variables for countless reasons, most of which are spurious. Yet this simple notion of “causality” undergirds much of scientific literature.

@nntaleb 5/10
Information-theoretic (entropy based) approaches on the other hand can assess *general* measures of dependence. Rather than some specialized (linear) view based on concurrent variation, entropy encompasses the amount of information contained in and between variables.

Beyond the scientific and epidemiological reasons to doubt the lab escape theory of pandemic origin, let’s not forget that no US or allied intelligence has emerged with even a whiff of evidence that a lab was the origin by accident or intention.

To believe the lab escape theory you also have to believe the Chinese have mounted a successful, extended campaign to eliminate incriminating evidence and muzzle officials and scientists who knew or might have suspected it came from a lab.

It’s a pretty big secret to hold on to, especially for a sizeable group of people that includes an international network of scientists, other workers, and families -- many of whom are not exactly in the secrecy business.

It’s been 12 months now of intense pressure on Western intelligence services to uncover that secret. Doesn’t have to be a taped confession, slam dunk email, or official document (though that would be handy). It could be indirect evidence or suspicious behavior.

The White House in particular leaned has heavily on US spy agencies to uncover Chinese malfeasance or error. “Trump made clear...his interest in intelligence supporting the theory the virus emerged accidentally from a Wuhan