The more insanity crops up the more I start getting predictions for the near future:

• There is going to be a baby boom about 9 months after this block of quarantine time. It’s going to be a batch of unplanned but economically predicted kids and their overall upbringing will probably reflect this.
  
• Flip side: There is simultaneously, after quarantine, going to be a notable increase in people getting the snip/getting their tubes tied as they realize they don’t want any more fucking kids. There are parents with multiple children right now who just aren’t capable of handling them all day every day without childcare or school as breaks. Even parents with one child are often struggling.

• There are going to be online schadenfreude compilations of people 1) virtue-signalling on social media that they’re going out and living their life as normal, because Freedom, and then 2) images, posts, and GoFundMes indicating that the person did indeed get infected.
• There are going to be people who lie about why their friends and family died. They will insist it was something unrelated. The harder people insisted that this was a hoax illness or that they deserved to continue doing as they pleased, the harder they will pretend their relative’s new lifelong lung problem was pneumonia that onset from… nothing in particular. Flu. Bad luck. Nothing to do with COVID.

• There are going to be a ton of divorces/breakups. No surprise there. China’s already experiencing this.
• There has been some talk of romantic confessions among quarantined roommates and I hope the cute stories are real.

• We are going to see a huge uptick in people who were previously mentally healthy experiencing new, scary symptoms of anxiety and depression. People whose teeth are grinding, jaws are clenching, who are experiencing weight changes, intrusive negative thoughts, listlessness, the works. A lot of them are not going to easily identify or understand what’s going on because this will be new to them. A lot of them are probably going to be the same people that said mentally ill people need to “calm down” or “cheer up” and a lot of them are going to be the type to resist therapy. It’s going to be rough and we’re going to have to be the bigger people.
• I’m serious. We’re going to have to be the bigger people. Because a lot of these people are not going to be comfortable accepting help or admitting that have spent their lives being dismissive of something serious and legitimate. You can remind your Aunt Bethany how shitty she was to you after you had to take a semester off for your depression, but in the same conversation, hand her some resources she can use to get her own help.

i don’t know who needs to hear this right now but the tomb raider reboot is free on steam until 3/23/20 (tomorrow at time of writing)

Tomb Raider and Temple of Osiris free on Steam today (March 23) 

Other freebies: As usual, there are two free games (Watch Dogs, The Stanley Parable) this week on the Epic Game Store, and new free games every Thursday.   

Bottom of the 9th: A digital adaptation of a fun little dice game about baseball is free for a limited time on the Apple Store and on Google Play.  And you can have a free Steam key if you contact the developers.  See this page.  

losing my mind over this

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

Have you ever wondered why most navies cover the propellers of their new submarines while awaiting launch?

Simple: Acoustic profiling. 

You see, naval engineering is such a well understood science, a naval engineer can, with relative ease and relying on both technology and experience, determine the underwater acoustic resonance of a propeller while in movement simply by looking how the blades are shaped and how many are integrated into the design, enabling the profiling of the boat into a database to allow easier detection by passive sonar, since you no longer need to discriminate from normal underwater sounds to detect a submarine, and instead can simply look for a known frequency, making detection far easier for an enemy navy.

That’s why is highly surprising when in an official photoshoot navy/dock personnel completely fail to cover up the propeller, since all the design effort that goes into a propeller, almost all of it focused on making its detection harder, is thrown into the trash the moment you allow it to be photographed, like what the germans did recently with their newest Type 212 sumarine

Of course, many old submarines don’t abide to these rules, mainly because they use old propeller designs that are so well researched it’s just not worth it to cover them up.

Or simply because the propellers are so damn dirty it’s difficult to properly gauge how their design works.

Of course, detecting an modern submarine sailing underwater is still the hardest thing any navy can set itself to do nowadays, regardless of what they know or don’t know about the shape of a propeller, but anything than can help make this monumental task easier is extremely welcomed, so handing it over in such seemly innocent way is something professional navies USUALLY strive to never do. 

Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.

This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.

• At least two dozen people have been falsely convicted due to “Bite Mark Analysis”. 
• “Burn pattern analysis” put an innocent man to death in Texas
• “Blood Spatter analysis” such as that shown on the TV show Dexter is actually completely unreliable even according to the US Department of Justice
• Forensic hair comparison is also widely believed to be junk science and the FBI is currently reviewing convictions based on hair analysis due to the unreliability of their results
• Handwriting analysis has an unreasonably high error rate, by some accounts as high as 43%
• Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, are notoriously unreliable and based on bad science. Even though everybody knows this, they are still constantly being used in criminal investigations among other places.
• Toxicology labs can be poorly supervised and badly run, producing false and even fraudulent results
• Due to sloppy procedure at many labs and lack of regulation even DNA testing is often unreliable
• Even when correct results are produced, genetic profiles may be less useful than we have been lead to believe
• Fingerprinting analysis is not foolproof and actually has not been thoroughly tested, as this Frontline special discusses

Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.

Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.

HEY REMEMBER WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THIS TWO YEARS AGO? SPECIFICALLY THE PART ABOUT FBI REVIEWING ITS FORENSICS HAIR ANALYSIS CASES? WELL THE RESULTS ARE IN AND WHOOPS: EVEN THE FBI ADMITS THAT IT’S BOGUS NOW

In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one. 

Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:

Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.

So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.

the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation

It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies. 

Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another. 

ALL OF THIS