Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Come on, man.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

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Truth In Fiction

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Most researchers I know (being a reserarcher I know a few) can think of an experience like this.

IOWA CITY, IA—University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.

The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study’s final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment. According to researchers administrating the standard Y-maze test, the fucking bastard never even broke his stride during the first trial, always selecting the correct route while consistently avoiding blind dead-end alleys.

The worst flaw in most films about science is the way that important experiments always work on the first try. Lord, that would be a happy day in my lab. It cracks me up every time, though I guess it’s a reasonable trade-off against said movies being eighteen hours long.

Reader Interactions

11Comments

  1. 1.

    Sock Puppet of the Great Satan

    Biggest reason I didn’t do a PhD: trying carefully prepared, expensive experiments fail completely.

    It’s God’s way of telling you to dump the science stuff and get an MBA or a real estate license.

    One of the reasons Mythbusters is occasionally great: they show the experiments failing pathetically. They then tweak the conditions, and try again.

  3. 3.

    Rick Taylor

    From the book, Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman (the autobiography of a famous Caltech physicist)

    . . .For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on–with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

    The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

    He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

    Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using– not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

    I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

  4. 4.

    RSA

    Nice article. When I was in grad school studying artificial intelligence, one of my professors, who’d done early work in an area called reinforcement learning, described his lab’s first, long-ago efforts to solve the so-called pole-balancing problem. You have a cart on a track, with a pole attached by its bottom to the cart (all in simulation). The system needs to learn how to push the cart back and forth so that the pole balances upright. The first experiment went well; the system learned how to balance the pole easily. In fact, too easily–no matter how the system’s parameters were changed, it was always able to balance the pole. Eventually they discovered that in their simulation, the gravitational force had the wrong sign. Essentially the cart was being simulated as traveling back and forth across the ceiling, with the pole falling into a vertical position all by itself.

  5. 5.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.

    Elitist bastard.

    I would never trust a mouse like that. Running a maze should be hard work. I bet the other mice don’t trust that smug showoff rodent. He probably doesn’t even wear a Mickey Mouse lapel pin.

  6. 6.

    Delia

    Elitist bastard.

    I would never trust a mouse like that. Running a maze should be hard work. I bet the other mice don’t trust that smug showoff rodent. He probably doesn’t even wear a Mickey Mouse lapel pin.

    Yeah. All the other mice became bitter, turned to religion and guns, and started voting Republican.

  7. 7.

    Person of Choler

    Is there any topic that commenters here won’t turn into snark about Republicans?

    I used to think it was Bush Derangement Syndrome, but the symptoms of a more generalized condition may be presenting here.

    Keep it up, I enjoy watching the pathology.

  8. 8.

    merl

    I think they’re making fun of Sen Clinton, not Repukes. Pay attention, will you?
    Repubs suck.

  10. 10.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    Is there any topic that commenters here won’t turn into snark about Republicans?

    No, none whatsoever.

    At teh Balloon Juice, we are performing an experimental verification of the Third Law of Snarkification, which states that in a closed thread the amount of snark and spoof always increases.

  11. 11.

    grumpy realist

    “Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of temperature, humidity, and environment, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”

    (One of Murphy’s Laws of Technology.)

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