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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It is not very reliable to use a component to build a model that has “no support from observations”.

    But it has support from observations? It’s an alternative explanation for the red shifts we observe from far away sources.

    ΛCDM has also problems. For example that two different methods of calculating the Hubble constant do not agree, or that the James Webb telescope found galaxies, that are too old. The latter was the motivation for the paper and gives an explanation for it, contrary to current models.

    Yeah, it is not generally a good idea to just throw in more components, like here a scalar.

    Well, guess what the Λ in ΛCDM is? They just put it in there to be able to fit the theory to the observation. And it’s absurd to say, that they would’ve found that in the LHC, when they also did not find dark matter particles, even though they are actively looking for those.

    Does it still explain galaxy rotations? What about other cosmological data, like equation of state parameter and such?

    They are aware of this and mention it already in the abstract:

    It remains to be seen if the new model is consistent with the CMB power spectrum, the Big Bang nucleosynthesis of light elements, and other critical observations.

    It’s quite common for research groups to do this, because their work is quite complex and takes time. They proved that their approach might have some merit and now other groups can help them going forward with it.



  • As a scientist, it is tremendously important for us, that people trust our science. We saw, what happens, if enough neglect science with Covid and now climate change. Scientists like her, who stray from their area of expertise and report false facts, just damage our reputation. I mean, you seem to have a pretty bad opinion of scientists.
    Of course people can make mistakes. That’s actually a fundamental principle of science to be wrong a lot. It’s how you handle these mistakes, that matters. Adapt your views to the new information, do not stick to wrong facts, because you don’t like to admit, that you were wrong.
    The problem with people like her is, that they gain trust by making videos about topics, where they are very knowledgeable. Then they use this trust for other content and they do not put any disclaimer about that in it. So people who watch it and are not knowledgeable in the topic of the video think, that they will get the same quality. But they don’t. We have enough misinformation swirling around, we don’t need more published by reputable persons.
    You write yourself, that she describes stuff in a way, that you can understand it. But how do you judge, if she explains a topic correctly according to the current state of science, if you have no clue about it yourself? She could just bullshit you on every video without you knowing.







  • From cooling the engine. When you are standing still and the engine is running it consumes about 1l/h. I just looked up some numbers for EVs: 100kWh battery, heating takes 1kW for every 10K temperature difference, so 3kWh in -10°C. Its higher if you use additional stuff like the heating for the seats. With 150kWh/100km consumption you lose 20km every hour you are in the heated car. I would say that’s a noticeable difference compared to no heating. I also checked how much an AC takes in summer and its about 1 to 2kW for 30°C.








  • I am trying, but it is just not well backed by data. The author goes on about diets all the time, grossly generalizing and totally ignoring, that it is also important how much you consume. They cite an example of France in the 1800s and say, that they ate more bread and butter (the link to the source not working). Okay, sure. And then they say, that they could still maintain their health easily, followed by the statement, that they exercised more, but this minor difference is not enough to explain it. Like, what are they going on about? In 1800 about two thirds of the population were working on farms, that’s not just “a bit more exercise”. And no word about food scarcity. People just couldn’t afford gluttony. Often enough they were just one bad harvest away from a famine. It’s ridiculous to assume, that they got to the same calorie intake on their bread, butter and dairy diet, that we have today with the amounts of sugar we eat and the affordability of food.

    And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight.

    That statement is just plain wrong. Let’s say a minor difference in exercise is 50kcal a day. That’s about 6min running at 10km/h. This adds up to 18250kcal a year, which translates to over 2kg of body weight in ONE year. Multiply that by multiple years and it adds up quite fast. Keep that in mind for the following statement:

    Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either.

    Well, how did people get to these cushy desk jobs? By not available cars? How did they get their groceries? How did they clean their clothes? That’s all stuff, that takes a minimum of exercise nowadays. What did they do on their free time? It probably wasn’t sitting in front of the screen with minimal movement.

    That’s just the first of these “mysteries” and the whole thing is written in this style. They take an observation and then give an explanation for it, that fits their narrative. Alternative explanations are either not acknowledged or ruled out on flimsy evidence.

    Here, from the CICO part:

    Sources have a surprisingly hard time agreeing on just how much more we eat than our grandparents did, but all of them agree that it’s not much. Pew says calorie intake in the US increased from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010. The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases.

    How are these not giant increases in calorie intake? This metric is per DAY. It adds up fast over years. We are speaking about 16kg worth of body weight in calories per year. Okay, they addressed this in the interlude:

    Studies show that people with obesity eat and expend more calories than lean people. From this study, for example, consider this sentence: “TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily.

    TDEE includes exercise. Class 3 obese is a BMI of 40, so for a 1.8m tall male, that is 130kg, lean is probably at the lower end of normal, so 65kg. Then you can calculate the basal metabolic rate for both cases, leading to 1655kcal/day for the lean and 2300kcal/day for the obese. The difference is exercise. So lean people burn ~800kcal worth of exercise while obese people burn ~900kcal, but at double the weight. Since calorie burning during exercise goes linear with weight, you can conclude, that lean people workout more than obese people. So their argument does not work.

    I never said, that it would be easy to lose weight. It definitely is hard. Your body is adapted to your lifestyle and breaking out of your habits and completely changing your lifestyle can be extremely hard. However, blaming some mysterious contaminant will not help people lose weight. Especially, when things like liquid calories tend to add a lot to your calorie intake, but your body does not really register them. Our body has evolved to control its body weight over thousands of years to a different type of diet. I do really not know, why the authors think, that subjecting it to the modern day achievements of high calorie foods and liquid calories will not affect this balance.