Is this evidence that we can see the future?
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
"In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type."
"The image's eventual position was selected at random, but volunteers guessed correctly 53.1 per cent of the time. That may sound unimpressive – truly random guesses would have been right 50 per cent of the time, after all."
Really? Go away. - I'll skim the paper for any other stomach-churning pseudoscience.
The sentence right after that addressed the seeming insignificance of 53.1%:
> But well-established phenomena such as the ability of low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks are based on similarly small effects, notes Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who has also blogged about Bem's work at Psychology Today.
1200 images, 636 guessed "correctly", binomial distribution has variance np(1-p) =300, sd = sqrt(300)~17.
So this particular result is just outside 2 standard deviations from the mean. Woop-tee-do, get off my HN front page.
And no, it is 100 people, not 1000: http://www.dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
2) New Scientist is a long-standing, respectable magazine. Their explicit goal is to popularise science, and they do that rather well. Sure, reading a New Scientist article about quantum physics is no substitute for doing a physics degree, but for those who don't have the ability, desire or opportunity to do so, at least it gives them a glimpse of something fascinating. You may find it's not useful to you, but you can't argue that it's not a great publication for a fair number of above-average intelligence people out there.
3) If you are going to attack an article, do so in an intelligent manner. What you wrote there is the magazine-targeted equivalent of a lame ad-hominem. "Omg, X is such a loser, his articles should never make the front page of HN."
You are of course correct when you say that many people enjoy reading it. I just expected most of the readers of HN to have studied science to a high-enough level to be aware that much of what is written in New Scientist is, not wrong, but perhaps immature.