Protip: use the Jenny phone number for any loyalty programs you don’t want to sign up for. I use 512-867-5309 as the alt ID and it works every time.

Scientists: we can’t understand why global warming is so much worse than our models predicted!!

Yep that one is true as well. Paul is a vegetarian and didn’t want a song about non vegetarian food. He didn’t have a problem with parody in general, just that specific instance. Geez, I know way too much trivia about Weird Al :)

Edit: the song was created just never released.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Pot_Pie

That he does. The only snafu he had was with Coolio for Gangster’s Paradise. Apparently the label said yes but didn’t actually check with Coolio and he wasn’t happy about it. Weird Al apologized for the mixup and they made peace with it later. Weird Al said the only star that has consistently turned him down was Prince, who didn’t find the whole parody thing funny.

Nirvana famously said they knew they had made it when Weird Al did a parody of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

This is Spinal Tap. The cast does the commentary in character, as if they’d just discovered many years later that Rob Reiner was making fun of them rather than it being the serious documentary they thought it was. They spend the whole movie talking shit about him and it’s hilarious.

Anvil: the Story of Anvil. Such a touching movie by itself, the commentary by the director, a childhood friend of the band, adds more depth and pathos to the story. My wife and I watched the movie and then rewatched it immediately with the commentary even though it was past midnight and we would normally be in bed. The story is just that gripping.

Second the mention of Tropic Thunder made in another comment. RDJ improvising the whole commentary in character is amazing and will increase your estimation of him as an actor, if that’s even possible.

Their next big revenue stream will be Brawndo.

This. And layoffs.

Good example and well explained. We should team up on a book on science for lay people!

Your point about specifying the null hypothesis and the p value is very important. Another way studies can fail is if you pick 20 different variables, like you mentioned, and then look to see if any of them give you p<0.05. So in your example, we measure smiling and 19 other factors besides being told jokes. Let’s say the weather, the day of the week, what color clothes the person is wearing, what they had for breakfast, etc. Again, due to statistics, one of those 20 is going to appear relevant by chance. You’re essentially doing 20 experiments in one so again you’ll get one spurious result that you can report as “success”.

Experimental design is tough and it’s hard to grok until you’ve had to design and run your own experiment including the math. That makes it easy for people to pass off bad science as legitimate, whether accidentally or on purpose. And it’s why peer review is important, where your study gets sent to another researcher in your field for critique before publication.

There’s other things besides bad math that can trip you up like correlation vs causation, and how the data is gathered. In the above example, you might try to save money by asking subjects to self report on their smiling. But people are bad at doing that due to fallible memory and bias (did that really count as a full smile?). Ideally you want to follow them around and count yourself, with a clear definition of what counts as a smile. Or make them wear a camera that does facial recognition. But both of those cost more money than just handing someone a piece of paper and a pencil and hoping for the best. That’s why you should always be extra suspicious of studies that use self reporting. As my social psych prof said, surveys are the worst form of data collection. It’s what makes polling hard because what people say and what they do are often entirely different things.

I like that and will start using it. We’re all pretty helpless after birth and before death, so being able bodied is just a temporary phase in the middle, for those lucky enough to not be born with a disability or acquire one in the middle of life.

Plus people rarely know in advance that they might become disabled later in life, so they are shooting themselves in the foot by protesting when they are lucky enough to be able bodied in the present day.

P<0.05 means the chance of this result being a statistical fluke is less than 0.05, or 1 in 20. It’s the most common standard for being considered relevant, but you’ll also see p<0.01 or smaller numbers if the data shows that the likelihood of the results being from chance are smaller than 1 in 20, like 1 in 100. The smaller the p value the better but it means you need larger data sets which costs more money out of your experiment budget to recruit subjects, buy equipment, and pay salaries. Gotta make those grant budgets stretch so researchers will go with 1 in 20 to save money since it’s the common standard.

P<0.05 means one in 20 studies are relevant just by chance. If you have 20 researchers studying the same thing then the 19 researchers who get non significant results don’t get published and get thrown in the trash and the one that gets a “result” sees the light of day.

Thats why publishing negative results is important but it’s rarely done because nobody gets credit for a failed experiment. Also why it’s important to wait for replication. One swallow does not make a summer no matter how much breathless science reporting happens whenever someone announces a positive result from a novel study.

TL;DR - math is hard

Is that where the idea of witches reciting incantations while mixing potions comes from?

Did they check in the ball pit?

We’d like you to be “agile” by following these very specific and rigid set of rules and procedures.

https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/faac743b-d8e5-472a-9b4a-30e75f5f2eb5/gif

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Brotato

They’re deeply troubled that it got out.