Giant Bombcast 02/18/2014

@frankiebeanz said:

Jeff is absolutely the biggest DBZ fan I know.

Jokes on you Jeff, prior to democracy mode, the start spam allows the watchers to catch up to the 20 second delay on twitch and makes directional input more accurate.

I had a Robocop toy! It was rad

@drewbert You made a Stargate reference. You're my favorite person.

This will be the first Strider game that I can't rent from a video store.

Great, now I want doughnuts.

@vinny@brad@drewbert Just to comment on peer review studies/research. As someone who is familiar with that environment, I can say that even that isn't reliable. Success in research is based on 1st author publishing, which often puts post-doctorate scientists (basically, scientists in training,) in an awkward position where their often egotistical Principal Investigator will ignore data that does not fit their hypothesis/idea, especially if money is on the line. For example, if they are doing research for a pharmaceutical company. Post-Docs need those 1st author publications, and a lot of Principal Investigators can and will strip the authorship from the Post-Doc if they aren't happy with the data. Basically, they refuse to be wrong.

Post-Docs will often fudge data because of this. The science/medical industry is very incestual, so if you piss off the wrong people, which is very easy to do, you could find yourself out of a job for doing the right thing.

With grants becoming scarce, the industry has only worsened.

Here is my advice, if the rest of the world isn't using something or eating something, you probably shouldn't use or eat it. The rest of the world is also a lot more interested in actually doing research and they also hold PhDs in much higher regard.

Anyway, food for thought! (May contain MSG)

The original Robocop is a gat-damn masterpiece.

'I did it with a penguin... I'm not rich' I love you Vinny

I think not reliable is a little much. Not 100% ironclad as any human created entity is, but obviously great stuff is still being done, yes even in America, and yes even in the money making pharmaceutical sciences. As with all things, being informed is the best bet in tackling any topic and in the sciences especially, wait till others can replicate the results. I mean if we are talking the rest of the world, we have a Nature paper from Japan being investigated right now for potential irregularities.

Don't ever put the words "Vinny" and "leaves" next to each other.

You can always find reliable info on the larger, heavely researched subjects because a consensus will form around the accurate data instead of the fudged numbers because you can't replicate a fudged experiment. There is also paper based on reviewing the literature and those help by exposing the consensus For the stuff they talked about on the podcast I'm sure you can find the right information online since those aren't obscure, small issues. Sure, you might not be able to get the truth from the scientific literature on highly specific subjects with only one or 2 studies but you shouldn't trust those anyway since there isn't consensus on the matter yet.

@huser:

It's not a bit much, it's fact. This isn't speculation. There is a lot of data fudging and a lot of PIs, especially prominent PIs are shareholders in the pharmaceutical companies that they are doing research for. With grant money being scarce, things have become volatile and desperate in a lot of labs (Not every lab, but a lot of the bigger labs.)

I wish I were making this up. This isn't chem trail bullshit, unfortunately. This isn't information that I've gathered from reading conspiracy websites or anything like that, I am very close to several people in that are in research and working at varying levels.

I do agree that there is still good research being done in the US, but there is definitely a reason to be wary about the information you are receiving. I still stand by the advice that I gave in regards to not using/ingesting things that are banned in Europe/other countries.

And let's be reasonable here, there is absolutely no reason that we should be eating the same stuff that they use to make yoga mats puffy. "Generally safe" is a broad statement.

One thing about research when it comes to chemicals (food or medical) is that even after countless tests there is no way to determine what something could do to a human being in 10 years.

They spent a bunch of time talking about Shadow Complex on this podcast... Is that really all that? I played the demo at the time and felt it was "meh".

By comparison, I played through Guacamelee last weekend and thought that was an amazing Metroidvania game, beginning to end.

Brad says stop listening if you don't want to be spoiled. Using my brain I was able to process this information and and output a command to my index finger that allowed my to pause the audio podcast. I then took it upon myself to skim through the comments to see at what time the spoilers ended.

It was a lot of effort but I'm still alive and well.

@pyrodactyl:

Right. Naturally, the longer something has been through the wringer when it comes to research, the more we'll understand it and the more reliable it is.

Even with the fudged data, eventually someone will come along and give conflicting information. This is why you'll see things flip-flop, especially when it comes to things that we eat.

Research is tough, especially when there can be many factors that influence the data one way or another.

@bread_harrity: Isn't there consequences for reseachers that put their name on bogus papers when it's shown later they've fudged the numbers?

@pyrodactyl:

Oh, definitely! In fact, I think it was either last year or maybe 2012, there was a big uproar because the government discovered that this was happening. Since the government pays for a lot of these grants, there was a backlash and this is one of the reasons why grants are getting harder to obtain.

Not in agreement with the crew's take on the shuttering of Irrational. They seem to have the most compassion for Levine, not the developers who were fired, who do not have the advantage of being an acclaimed figurehead but who did a lot of work–for which they are perhaps not fairly credited.

I mean, Jeff's comment that "If the creator doesn't have his heart in that project any more, should he be then tethered to these people for life?" (emphasis mine) came across as callous; that the focus of the discussion is Levine ("he seemed a man with a lot on his mind") and not the studio and its devs seems to be missing the forest for the one tree.

Just my 2 cents.

I'm glad that Vinny liked the RoboCop remake, I did too!

Also, Jeff is wrong, the original RoboCop is NOT a long movie. It's a pretty short movie. Well, average length, I guess.

All the conspiracy talk at the end reminds me about how I'll be in the clutches of Big Pharma for the rest of my life because I have a recently diagnosed and incurable health issue that requires treatment, again for the rest of my life. Boy, I sure am happy that I was unlucky enough to have the Crohn's Disease gene, or whatever it is that actually causes this.

So, yeah, torn between distrust of corporations and putting my health in the hands of science. I sure as hell am not going to go with alternative "medicine." Bunch of hippie-ass nonsense, that.

I have no idea what happened, I must have missed something when they started talking about corporations, conspiracies, everything being fucked... really weird. They rarely express political opinions.

I approve though.

@pyrodactyl:

Unfortunately, this doesn't happen very often and papers slip by and get published. The end result is that everyone is being punished for it and it's just making things even worse for people working in research.

It's already an underpaid and under appreciated profession as it is, but as in most situations like this, when an environment becomes volatile, people do desperate things.

Here is a minor example of the stuff that occurs:

A post-doctorate friend of mine, we'll call him Phil, came up with an idea along side their PI, Phil did multiple experiments, came up with interesting data, wrote the paper, edited the paper. Phil had maybe 2 or 3 people helping them with smaller experiments, but my friend did 95% of the work. That's very common.

The paper gets reviewed and published. When this person viewed their paper on PubMed, what should have been 4 additional people (including the PI) became like 10-12 people. Phil realistically should have been the only 1st author on this paper, but was suddenly sharing a 1st authorship with someone that wasn't in the original group of scientists. This extra 1st author did NOTHING and chances are, if asked, this person couldn't answer any questions about the paper.

This PI is notorious for doing this stuff, but no one says anything because he is a very prominent MD/PhD.

How did this affect Phil? Since this was one of his only 1st author papers, it now looks as though my friend is incompetent to potential employers. It diminishes the work that he put into it and looks like it took an army to write this paper for Phil. It could potentially ruin his career.

Why did this happen? Because Phil didn't fudge data on a paper that was tied into a pharmaceutical company. The PI owns 25% of this company. He actually did what a proper scientist would do, he did the research and gave accurate data that revealed that the medication, in most scenarios, did nothing for the disease it was treating. The PI didn't like the results.

The medication isn't killing people, but it isn't really helping people either. I won't say what disease the medication is supposed to treat, but I assure you, it's a serious one.

I now find myself looking forward to The Adventures of Small Business Man each week!

@lucasrizoli: it very likely wasn't his call to make. When they needed to, 2k Marin was made, so if that team wasn't going to get axed anyway they would probably have retained them under the same name with different leadership and tried to spin off another Bioshock 2 situation. I'm with Jeff in that it's kinda shitty to put all of this on Levine as if he personally fired 200 people because he was bored, that's just not how it works.

@lucasrizoli: Is not like he is getting promoted. Or that his job was a simple management one without any artistic input.

@phished0ne said:

Be better at the game.

Also @jeff I LOVE the intro's there fantastic.

Is there malfeasance in the sciences? Sure. As I said, any human creation is going to have to deal with being imperfect. Is there perhaps more in highly competitive environments where large amounts of money are involved? Seems obvious. Does that then mean the entire endeavor is unreliable? No. And it seems to me you agree with that. Which was my only point. Saying the whole field is not reliable seems a bit of a stretch.

Even going with the completely cynical view, OTHER labs have a vested interest in contradicting your results in a highly competitive funding environment to drive their own agendas. It's not an ideal scenario, or frankly even great. It might be messier and take longer to get to the actual truth, but the chaff gets separated from the wheat eventually. As I said and you seem to agree with, being informed is the best bet against any wildly speculative or, even worse, fabricated claim. This would be true even if scientists were all saints, as even then they would still be prone to honest mistakes. And this from someone who also knows several people in research in industry and academia.

EDIT - And I agree with you tacitly on the yoga mats. As I don't know the research on the matter, I'll go with the the broader scientific consensus, but not necessarily because the chemical itself is used in yoga mats. And I certainly agree about the difficulty of human trials. Context is hugely important as we learn more about things like the microbiome of a person's gut bacteria contributing to metabolism, that more of a dose may not be better, and HOW a chemical is delivered is no less important than how much and how long the exposure is. And of course we have Peto's paradox which might blockade meaningful translation of cancer studies in animal models to humans. Biological scientists today are probably where physicists were about a century ago only just now realizing how little they know.

New Robocop's pretty sweet, you guys....

Paul F. Tompkins - Haunted Food bit from 2007:

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Stromboli/3zMXRi?src=5

Wow.

I'm training my brain dawg!

There was NO DOTA talk this episode!!!! Yay!!!!

The rampant trolling of Pokemon is a testament to the Internet and the fact they've beaten four gym leaders is a testament to how easy Pokemon is.

For anyone interested in reading any more about the pharmaceutical interests in published papers stuff, I can highly recommend "Bad Pharma" by Ben Goldacre, its got a lot of detailed information and statistics on the influence of pharmaceutical companies of medical journals and doctors.

Edit: Just thought I should point out that I have no connection to the book, just thought it was an interesting read, and also it isn't alternative medicine advocacy bullshit, more about medical research reform.

@huser:

"Dick Jones" is actually disgruntled Beverly Hills police department Captain Andrew Bogomil. He did all the legwork on the Alphabet crimes only to be shown up by a smooth talking cop from Detroit. Cashing in favors and using his connections, he got a job at OCP, all with an eye for vengeance. Using his savvy and new position, he devastated the local economy of Detroit all while ensuring corrupt politicians kept the police departments underfunded. That "Beverly Hills" cop watched all his buddies eat it one after another as the police found the heat [was] on, on the street.

Unfortunately, that success went to Dick's head and he tried to take on Buckaroo Bonzai. We know how that ends. With him flying out a window, his body claimed by OCP, used in cryogenic experiments to keep the Old Man alive. Eventually finding himself thawed by Federation scientists and joining Starfleet.

But, when did he get his ass to Mars?

Good podcast as usual.

I thought the whole argument regarding people who stopped playing CoD and are interested in Titanfall a little weird though. As someone who's been playing various online shooters since Rainbow Six on PC, I've just about seen it all. The way Titanfall handles traversal is more than enough to put it on my radar as something new and potentially groundbreaking. It's the same reason I was interested in Mirror's Edge and Brink before I realized those games were not for me.

I don't really see what my lack of interest in CoD games has to do with my interest in Titanfall. Nor do I see what point Jeff was trying to make. That some people on the internet are loud mouth hypocrites? No shit, talk about low hanging fruit.

The one game that had amazing traversal and was completely shit on by it's own community was Tribes: Vengeance

Man was that game fun to just get around in. You had jet packs, physics styles "skiing" over and down hills, and a freakin' grappling hook so you'd grab a flag while sliding along the ground at max speed, then shoot off the grapple at something and swing right around to go back to base.

It was awesome and a complete financial failure.

Great Lumosity.com ad. :P Vinny's small business man is the best.

@humanity: I tried my hand at one of the Tribes games back in the day. I remember enjoying it a fair amount but I was not very good at it. I liked the jetpacking around the best for sure...to be honest after all these years I forget exactly why I didn't play much more than a month or so.

I feel like I should explain, as someone who has been pretty much rooting for the new Robocop to fail - and is very pleased that it's getting bad reviews - why my having such an opinion is not necessarily illogical, or malicious.

Unlike a bad Robocop sequel/videogame/breakfast cereal, the outcome of a Robocop remake, if it is successful, is to replace the original in history. To become the default that people will go to from now on when they want to see "what Robocop is all about," watching it on Netflix or 8k holocube or brain stem movie insinuator for years to come.

And the original really deserves to be that default - both for its cultural significance, and its incredible quality. (Having seen it for the first time in 2006, nostalgia doesn't play a part in this appreciation.)

So, I don't want the new Robocop to flop out of hate, I want it to flop out of love for the original film.

Or, if not flop, at least prove fleeting and irrelevant. Which it seems like it will be.

So... all is right with the world!

The purpose of a remake is to present an alternate take on a core story or concept, not replace the thing it's remaking. Just like new productions of well-trodden plays, the attraction is what new direction the makers take the same source material.

It sounds like your sole issue with the new Robocop is that you're going to have to clarify "...I mean the old one" when you tell people you love Robocop.

Whatever, Jeff.

I tapped out after MW2 and only checked in on the franchise by playing some of the campaign of Black Ops 1 and some of 2 and I still left exclaiming, "NOPE!", and continued with not ever getting back into those games again...but guess what, insane mobility, verticality, and shooting in giant ass robots just happens to be enough of a difference to play a game that is heavily influenced by the gameplay pace and feel of Call of Duty.

Try painting with a little bit of a thinner brush when laying down your assumptions like that

Did it occur to anyone that if a food is haunted, that means it must've been in close proximity to a corpse at some point in time? No way I'm eating that shit, the ghost has nothing to do with it.

Also I heard a story about Twitch Plays Pokemon on NPR not fifteen minutes ago as I drove home from work. Crazy!

@hobozero: "Jellico" got involved in some Trek related time travel mishap.

If that's what that is, as opposed to being some purported pancake poltergeist, then holy hell no.