It’s been years since I’ve been in the lab but it really will depend a lot on the subject matter and the type of experiment.

If it’s a subject matter that is fairly well explored and defined, the alternative hypotheses might be fairly straightforward. Take, for example, an experiment from a while ago where entomologists suspected that desert ants navigate by using dead reckoning, effectively counting their steps, remembering their changes in direction measured by a biological compass, and integrating them together, in a process similar to “fusion” in electronic position sensors.

To validate part of this hypothesis, they needed to get more granular and isolate one part of it. So, they formulated a “sub-hypothesis” that stated that the ants had some sort of innate awareness of the distance that they covered with each step, knowing the length of their legs and this their stride length, similar to how cats know their healthy body width. The experimental hypothesis would be something like:

“Altering the length of desert ant legs will result in navigation failure with longer legs causing them to overshoot and shorter legs causing them to undershoot. The navigational trajectories should otherwise be identical.”

Building alternative hypotheses for this relatively simple experiment, prior to conducting it would be straightforward, as you appear to be suspecting. They could be as simple as:

“The length of the desert ant’s legs will have no impact on their navigation because they are not directly related. This will be apparent through the ants showing no discernable difference in the paths that they take when navigating, regardless of leg length.”

“The length of the desert ant’s legs will have some impact on their navigation but, they are able to compensate for discrepancies in stride length through some as of yet unknown mechanism. This will likely be apparent in statistically significant distance-related navigation errors in their paths.”

After the experiment, the data would be analyzed and checked for a match against the established hypotheses. If there is not a good match or there is an unexpected shape to the data, further experiments may be required to see if it is an anomaly or if something else might be going on.

(In this case, it was found that, yes, desert ants have some sort of innate awareness of what their stride length should be and changes in their leg lengths throw off their navigation, as expected.)

Now, when it gets to subjects that are less clear and established, alternative hypotheses can get a lot more challenging because often the difference between the data fit that proves or disproves a hypothesis can be miniscule. Or, the data points might form a completely unexpected shape that doesn’t match currently known phenomena.

The UK government has been systematically destroying its healthcare system for a while now.

Hey. How’d you get my notes?..I forgot where I put them so if you have some kind of trick or magic, it would be most helpful.

Really? I hear it’s a steel.

The House is supposed to provide proportional representation, per the US Constitution. It has not since the early 20th century. Instead, it gives significant increased representation to people in lower population states.

JFC. What is wrong with people? I just want to write code that works, is interesting, and doesn’t have memory problems.

any change to shell scripts that isn’t posix compatible brings opinionated people out the woodwork.

Yo. Did I hear someone breaking POSIX-compatability over here?

First, I would like to give you some major props. Installing Arch, in itself, is a big deal. It is not a beginner-friendly distro. It is a very power-user friendly distro and has an incredible wiki that is helpful, at least to some degree, for many distros.

For a beginner distro, I would recommend Linux Mint for its easy transition and great focus on user experiences or Bazzite if you really want to install and get gaming.

When taking drivers in Linux, most are provided as either kernel modules (integrated into the kernel, so you don’t have to worry about installing anything) or packaged for the distro, in which case, once installed via package manager, they’ll auto-update whenever you update system packages. They are so much easier to deal with than Windows drivers (for the end user). For example, to use a Wacom drawing tablet, all one has to do is plug it in.

Fuck. My wife did work with Hanger 13 a while back. Really cool place and good people.

Someone downvoted because they don’t want to remember Bethesda’s shenanigans?

This explains our instance having perf issues.

Like Charles Manson, who was convicted of 7 counts of first degree murder, Thompson didn’t (that we’re aware of) directly kill anyone. However, Thompson’s body count was multiple orders of magnitude higher and he was given a bonus for it, instead of life in prison.

It’s the principle of committing wage theft, engaging in a contract (possibly verbal) and then keeping the promised compensation instead.

Lifetime plans are no longer available so, we’ve done you a favor and enrolled you in the pay-per-joke plan without your consent.

I wish I could have the day that I voted for.

Not to mention the fact that he nearly always renegs on “deals”.

There should be criminal penalties for that kind of shit. Letting management off the hook without any personal consequences just encourages it.

This grotesque display is part of a broader trend of class rage and Internet nihilism that justifies violence by turning innocent victims into scapegoats for moral fury. The permission structure for such ghoulishness is now fully operational. What were once the disturbing mutterings of the fringe are now public, performative, and proudly cruel.

I take issue with the author in this statement. I’m not sure how I feel about the murder of Brian Thompson but characterizing someone who commits mass murder with a pen as “innocent” is just incorrect. Committing an act that knowingly and intentionally causes unnecessary death for profit is murder, even when abstracted behind illegitimate claim denials.

This has been what adherents of the Accelerationism religion have been pushing for a while. They love to talk the talk but want other people to die for their utopia.

This is the same tactic used by the KKK to fight reconstruction…

It’s the same group of people so, shouldn’t be a surprise.