Even Google, this highly-networked Borg mind of inquiry, vastly more inquisitive than all of academia combined, has about a quarter of the 3 billion questions asked per day never asked before. Academia’s resources are extremely limited when you think about how much time and money they have available to research all but the most plausible (low-hanging fruit) assumptions–then you realize how big the void is in human understanding of anything and everything.

On another note it’s very interesting to see how positive that paper is about the benefits of apple and grape juice on healthy people.

“Impact of apple and grape juice consumption on the antioxidant status in healthy subjects.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21639820

The vast majority of biomedical research is funded through the National Institute of Health (NIH). Any corporate funding has to be declared on the paper and most researchers are loathe to take corporate funding for that very reason. To say that most research is funded by companies is basically plain wrong. Furthermore, most research put out by corporations is pretty awful and only gets accepted into low-tier journals. Academics routinely laugh at corporate research papers.

Secondly, acadamia routinely puts time, energy and money into “worthless” research projects. I’ve worked in two labs and both labs were doing “basic research” – aka research into proteins that are so far away from the clinic that they are basically worthless to medicine. In fact, most research is done on things that aren’t big-pharma drugs or compounds.

Effectively, what I’m trying to say is that I’m sure someone has done a research paper on the health effects of apple juice and it was probably funded by the NIH (aka your tax dollars). =)

So the science is actually on Justin’s side.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book sounds interesting. Day Bar’s comment is the first I’d ever heard about it.

Yeah, I’m aware of the placebo effect, and in fact I think I recall seeing an article on HN recently about how it’s getting stronger, so I won’t count that out. But I don’t know if it would be smart to disregard scientific evidence based on the hope that the placebo effect will make up the difference. 😉

And as Day Barr mentioned, the Non-Designer’s Design Book is good introduction to basic design concepts, although examples are from the print-world mostly.

@Jason There are facts and studies that placebo effect is real and can help speed up recovery. Even knowing about it won’t take it away completely. Here is an interesting (although nonconclusive) article I found: .

http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html

Also this short video on the same subject is worth a look:

The Baloney Detection Kit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUB4j0n2UDU

P.S. I think I double-posted – sorry! Please delete the previous duplicate comment.

In terms of UFOs, I think most of what you read and hear on the subject is pure silliness, which really muddies the waters and brings discredit to the entire subject. But I think there is some extremely compelling evidence, especially what’s documented in Leslie’ Kean’s book, and if it’s good enough to make Michio Kaku take is seriously, then it’s good enough for me. 😉 But if you’re not interested enough to read an entire book on the subject, the History Channel documentary that she produced covers some of the evidence from her book and at the very least is fun to watch.

If you are routing based on the hash you should use this jQuery plugin:

https://github.com/cowboy/jquery-hashchange

this incorporates the IE iframe hack so that the back button works cross browser.

Using the plugin is easy – it generates hashchange events which you listen to and then you parse the hash and route using your existing code.

– Doug Martin

@Jason, go easy on Justin regarding his eating! We all need to experiment sometimes. I’ll give you scientific proof that “hope” (not prayer!) works: the placebo effect. If Justin is happy that it’s doing him good and as long as it’s not doing him any harm, then that’s fine. Also, while I am a big UFO fan and I love the discussions about them, I’d like you to provide one piece of physical evidence that backs up the “UFO experts”. The strongest “evidence” I’ve seen is just military personnel hearsay – and you’re buying that stuff hook line and sinker. So give Justin a break if he wants to eat a fucking cactus!

http://getclicky.com/blog/274/breaking-twitters-influence-is-now-zero-facebook-wins-all-hail-the-zuck