About that rat and High Fructose Corn Syrup study.

[elfs]

Ars Technica has an awesome takedown of the methodology, leading to the conclusion that the study is "suggestive" but hardly definitive. I have to agree with the reporter that the photo of the lab students looking "sciency" was indeed awesome, however.

I'm reminded of this comic, only backward.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Well, Penicillin was more serendipity. ^_^

Perpetual motion had to be impossible, or Conservation of Energy went out the window. Since everything in physics from Newton onward kinda needs Conservation of Energy (and Momentum), it was a given early on that perpetual motion wouldn't work. (Unless there's no friction, which is a different ball of wax. Oh, and Special Relativity pulled 3 conservation laws into a single Conservation of Matter-Energy/Energy-Momentum.)

Everything else fits into my, "Look at nature. Try to unify things into a common model. Then whack the bajeezus out of the model to try and break it." ^_^

My, "95% or better," statement more applies to statistical data. You can take a dataset containing nothing of points on a circle and fit a line to it that has 70% correlation to that data. This is just one reason why the bar is pretty high when correlating statistical data to a model. When the model is nonlinear, the idea of a "percent correlation" gets tricky; sometimes 95% can be too low.

And, really, percent-correlation is just a convenient number that says, "How much does this data look like noise?" The closer to 0%, the more the data looks like it's purely (Gaussian) random.