Radiology the Wei way

Intern: Hey, can I borrow your eyes to look at an X-ray? It's a shit film...

Me: Well if you're gonna do imaging on faeces, you're better off doing an MRI, because diarrhoea will look brighter on T2-weighted imaging, whereas steatorrhoea will look brighter on T1.

"Free markets"

ABC Are free markets a moral force? 25 July 2012 Is the ‘free market’ a moral entity? One of Australia’s best known free-market economists, Ian Harper, rethinks some of his views, in not so much a conversion but a revision on the road to Damascus.

While Prof Harper makes several good points, the common use of the term "free market" is unfortunate and potentially counter-productive. The term "free market" is such a semantic imbroglio ad contradictionem that it is best expunged from dialectic vocabulary. While a Pareto efficient "free market" is free from state constraints on supply and demand, this should not be confused with freedom from regulation in general; on the contrary, a Pareto efficient market actually depends upon regulation to enforce Walrasian market conditions and correct for externalities. While "the market", as a construct, is amoral by definition, the reality that it models is shaped by our choices in economic policy, wherein lies our ethical imperative.

(via ST’s wall)

Epistemological limits

New Scientist Unofficial report ramps up Higgs significance 5 July 2012

The confidence level of 7.4 sigma represents only random error and says nothing about systematic error, so I would not label it a "certainty." The importance of this distinction was dramatically demonstrated in the recent faster-than-light neutrino controversy. For this reason, I feel that 7 sigma versus 5 sigma is of little conceptual difference.

Certainty-proportional punishment

Although unpalatable, perhaps criminal punishments should be adjusted in proportion to subcategorised degrees of certainty within the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard of evidence. This principle arguably already applies when strict liability is justified in the setting of relatively minor punishment.

Global commons

As state regulation is essential for preventing tragedies of the commons, so globalisation may be essential for environmental protection.