Sciency filmlets 280517

Berluddy 'ell, isn't yer man's blog called Science Matters? Doesn't he go drifting off-topic into song and dance a bit too often. Okay, okay, leave me alone. But I take your point. Some neat recent science stuff on youtube

• Steve Mould [prev on dyslexia] on why crystals (including metals) are imperfect and so likely to fail.
• Which led to a recent SloMo Guys doing something silly with mousetraps and a trampoline.
• Blowing up oobleck - non-Newtonian fluids [bloboprev]. Shooting oobleck.
• Oxidation doesn't have to be explosive.
• Don't do this at home - wear three pairs of gloves
• Crossing Antarctica more efficiently than Shackleton. Backstory.
• This Spring I read and commented upon Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. One of his key themes is that thinking is hard: decision making required energy. A whole school built up, dozens of PhD theses were submitted about Ego Depletion. This is the idea that denying yourself a treat requires will-power and that consumes enough energy to compromise your thinking about a subsequent cognitive task. This whole field is probably nonsense - can't be replicated - on stilts a farrago of wishful thinking, publication bias and flabby statistics.
• Did someone mention statistics? Let's try Simpson's Paradox explained. Playing card probability till minute 7; then five minutes relating that to quantum entanglement. The last half of the 35 mins is about the peculiar penis of the red-footed tortoise Chelonoidis carbonaria.