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No, most radioisotopes do not bioaccumulate: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1... . So the health-related consequences of the Fukushima reactor meltdown are basically nil. Also the ocean is LARGE - there's plenty of water there to dilute the few hundred kilograms of dangerous isotopes that have leaked so far.

A better way to put this IMHO is that automobile transportation just isn't scalable enough.

I came to this realization that this is really a scale problem a few months ago. I generally citibike (bike share) to work, and was feeling pretty smug about it for a period of time. I still use mass transit on occasion though, and one time I was on a packed train and some dude comes on with a bike. It took up the space of about 4, maybe 5 people. Biking, while far better than a car-which I also noticed that 5 bikes took up the space of 1 car, while taking up a space of approximately 5 cars, which clogged 3 lanes for almost the entirety of 2 rows, still just did not have anywhere near the density or scale of mass transit. Getting the entirety of the population on a bike isn't going to work either (at least not for megascale cities like NYC). A typical subway train can and does, fit about 1200 people on it during rush hour. Next time you are stuck in traffic (or just look on google images for pictures of traffic jams: https://daily.jstor.org/wp-con... ) try and count the number of cars you can see in front of you. For me it was about 200-250. At least when I was driving, it was safe to assume that most of these were only singly occupied, some had 2, a few had more in them, but the vast majority of these cars had only a driver. That means that this massively expensive piece of infrastructure, for as far as the eye could see, still did not have the capacity of a single NYC subway train. That blew my mind a bit.

I am not saying that we need to ban cars, or bikes, but we certainly need to encouraging and *improving* mass transit.

> You may criticize the prediction under one scenario: If the temperature change is = 0C. +/- 0.46C Then there is no global warming.

Fixed it for you.... Here's my response
https://www.jstor.org/stable/p...

So the long help belief was that women's monasteries, which they obviously knew existed, just sat there twiddling their thumbs? I suspect people are projecting their modern biases pretty damn hard there. Back then life was hard, and it is pretty solid common sense that gender was much LESS of an issue, as survival was a little higher up the priority list.

Really, I googled "women monasteries illuminated manuscripts" and I found a book from 2009 about the subject (fifth result, the four before that were all about this article). Its introduction reads: "Although the majority of scribes who can be affiliated with women’s monastic manuscripts were themselves, in fact, women monastics, a number of their male contemporaries also contributed to monastic manuscript holdings". So it is actually the other way around: we knew about women scribes.

It is either (post)modern bias or just marketing ("look, we found something new, something none could believe"!) or probably both.

Doesn’t matter what it says; it’s not the position of the Treasury. You can pay off all dollar denominated debts in dollars, but a private party cannot be compelled to accept those dollars in any specific form, whether it be cash or Google Pay. They must only accept dollars, as opposed to Rubles or Euros or what have you. Refusing banknotes is perfectly within their rights as a business. Dollars are a medium of exchange, banknotes are a means of payment.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4...
https://www.treasury.gov/resou...

You'll find the problem in the cost of goods and services, and ultimately the value of a dollar. In other words, inflationary effects and cost of living increases.

That is absolutely, 100% not true. As in false. As in bullshit.

https://benjaminstudebaker.com...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4...

A foundational requirement of secret ballots is that a voter cannot disclose their vote to someone else.

This is very insightful and true. But there's another distortion risked by staggered voting days. Later voters would have the advantage of knowing early votes. This could skew turnout in close elections. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2...

Imagine later-day districts happen to be more Republican. Close elections would spur Republicans to vote who would otherwise have abstained. Democrat abstainers in early-day districts would have missed this spur because they had less information that the election was going to be close. So later-day votes would count slightly more.

Perhaps staggered voting days could work if somehow exit poll reporting could be suppressed. You know, without breaking the constitution or physics.

According to Michael Moore they've got free and "incredible healthcare"......

Even that's total bullshit.

Before the Revolution

Prior to the Cuban Revolution, Cuba ranked fifth in the hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, second in per capita ownership of automobiles and telephones, first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. Its income per capita in 1929 was reportedly 41% of the US, thus higher than in Mississippi and South Carolina.

More televisions per capita than the US after the 1950s US economic boom years?

After about 60 years of communism/socialism:

In 2016, Cuba ranked 68th out of 182 countries with a Human Development Index of 0.775, much higher than its GDP per capita rank (95th).

Cuba is down to 33rd in the world in life expectancy.

Hell, even that's probably bogus given the way the Cuban government cooks health statistics, all the better to bamboozle the Michael Moores of the world.

Yay socialism!

Any country where the population is limited to 1500 kcal/day because of poverty and has to walk everywhere is going to wind up healthy. :-/

Are you saying that you believe that women, in general, are attracted to the same sorts of incentives that men are?

If so, here are a couple of studies for you: http://commons.wikimannia.org/...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2...
This final one is not exactly related to employment, but shows that women, in general, make decisions based on different criteria from men:https://smallbusiness.chron.com/difference-marketing-strategy-towards-men-women-15438.html
None of this says that the choices women make are inferior to the choices men make...they are just different.

Claims with no citations? You're either an idiot or an outright troll/liar.

A small sampling of the citations linked in the post in question:
http://www.city-journal.org/20...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Ben...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publ...
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abst...
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short.

Claims with no citations? You're either an idiot or an outright troll/liar.

A small sampling of the citations linked in the post in question:
http://www.city-journal.org/20...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Ben...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publ...
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abst...
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short.

Claims with no citations? You're either an idiot or an outright troll/liar.

A small sampling of the citations linked in the post in question:
http://www.city-journal.org/20...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Ben...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publ...
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abst...
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short.

... and is known as the 'age of the captain' problem, introduced by Gustave Flaubert, a french writer.

It's been used to study how children in elementary school react to word problems. It has notthing to do with maths.

See e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3...

If you want you can join the Democrats or Republicans. Just pay your fee. Turn up to meetings. Vote on local issues. If you can convince other grass roots members of a cause you can make changes. No senior member of the party has to approve your membership. You are allowed to disagree.

To join the Chinese Communist Party you have to be selected by the committee. Only one in ten applicants are accepted. They want to see that you are a hard worker and fairly smart, but also that you will do what you are told and not cause trouble. But if you are admitted, then that goes on your CV and makes it much easier to get good jobs. If you do not get in you will soon hit a glass ceiling and be excluded from any senior role.

Completely different from western countries.

Here is a nice article on some personal experiences of joining the party.
https://daily.jstor.org/commun...

The Cernovich cite has hyperlinked text to his external references:

https://medium.com/@Cernovich/...

For example:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2...

If there is any particular assertion he makes that you find incorrect, can you refute it through argument?

It's not a zero-sum game. When super productive people come to the US they can increase job opportunities for those around them. Look at this list of nobel laureates from the US many of them were not born in the US. You can't convince me that most of them they aren't making those around them better off than they otherwise would have been.

In the other extreme in the Mariel boat lift about 125,000 workers were added to Florida in a very short time. These folks wee not H-1Bs, they were citizens because of the asylum. The change in employment among Americans in Florida was basically zero. Don't get me wrong, a lot of people got really upset about it, but there wasn't a radical change in employment for those already in the US. You can read about it here.

Look into SAT scores for upper income blacks. Strangely they correlate to around the SAT scores of low income whites. There is something going on more than just income alone.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2...
http://isteve.blogspot.com/201...

I work with a lot of Africans and blacks. There are cultural differences for sure, many of the africans don't want to associate with blacks due to cultural differences.

These results have not been confirmed by other ice cores, notably the nearby GISP2 core.

the potential for rapid climate change during interglacial periods remains one of the most intriguing gaps in our understanding of the nature of major Quaternary climate change.

In other words, this is a one off and not supported by other relevant data.

Ok, if it is a known practice, cite it.

Originalism. It's not hard to find.

Find me some supreme court decisions that disregarded amendments in favor of what the Founders thought. Or appeals court decisions. Or circuit court. Or traffic court.

Oh, you want to see it in an American legal context? Most especially you'll want to look at the criticism of the Dred Scott decision for the most infamous example.

More recently, well, there other sources of information as to the patterns and practices of your average self-proclaimed originalists.

It's a bankrupt and destitute moral philosophy.

Or less than 160 containers on one of these.

Would you actually accept that or would you just punt saying lucky guess.

In the 20+ years since "Global Warming" became "a thing", there should by now be plenty of successful predictions. If you can cite just 3, I'll concede, that the discipline is not entirely hopeless.

Ca has indeed experienced an extended drought and is now seeing floods

Both happened before — and I do offer citations.

Weather in a lot of places has been getting steadily stranger.

Yeah, and asteroids are passing closer and closer more and more often — must be all of that bovine meteorism (pun intended).

Diamonds and oil are well known examples of large organizations being quite capable of agreeing to keep prices high, to avoid a competitive spiral.

Except there's tons of evidence that OPEC members cheat on their quotas as soon as prices rise. This is pretty much what you would expect from greedy members: first lie to the other members' faces and then grab as much of the excess profit as you can.

I think this is what's mistaken about the modern claim that because competitive entities are sociopathic, they must be restrained from outside. The counter-claim is that multiple sociopathic entities competing against one another to satisfy demand restrain each other. The cheating among OPEC members is a nice manifestation of this counter-claim.

[ And, of course, in reality the truth lies somewhere in the muddle. But for phone carriers where consumers can switch relatively easily (and port their phone numbers), the latter seems to deliver. ]

Friendship and feelings are not things that add to the bottom line.

Except they actually are.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25...
http://www.baylor.edu/business...

But I'm sorry - you were saying something, BB-8?

"Aid and comfort" is a fairly well-defined legal term, and simply praising a terrorist group or act would not meet the necessary criteria for it beyond a reasonable doubt. And this specific case where someone just named something after a terrorist group would be laughed out of court here.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/7...

Rob

There's an interesting book called Kellogg's Six Hour Day by Hunnicutt. Here's the synopsis:

"Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom."

The employees grandfathered into the 30-hour week stayed on it until they retired in the 1980s. A 30-hour week gave employees more time for clubs, gardening, sports, family, etc. When you think about how wealthy we are in, say, energetic terms (useful work extracted from an ox vs cubic meter of natural gas), it's amazing how much time and capital we spend on destructive bullshit like sitting in traffic or paying people to do our taxes because the system is too complicated (we're paying a tax on paying taxes ffs). Just unbelievable how needlessly dumb the world is in light of automation, nuclear power, blah, blah, blah.

The ancient Greeks viewed labor as a necessary evil that got in the way of more enlightened pursuits [1]. This is not to say they condoned laziness, but TPS reports, patent lawsuits, and $ModernBullshit are not the highest forms of civilization. Why we focus on metrics like GDP -- which in no way accounts for quality, or whether the "work" should even be done -- is absolutely beyond me. In the end, complex, industrial civilization is still relatively new compared to the species' time on the planet, so we're still trying to figure this out.

[1] = https://www.jstor.org/stable/6...

Are you incapable of using Google?

http://freakonomics.com/2012/0...

http://journals.cambridge.org/...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/21...

Slavery was law not because the government demanded it but because the (white) people did.

- slavery was law because it was acceptable for slavery to exist. There were black slave owners as well, by the way, plenty.

Today slavery is not acceptable for vast majority of people so to say that many businesses would have slaves simply because the laws regarding prohibition of slavery would disappear is disingenuous. There are *always some* people who would own slaves, laws or no laws. Vast majority of businesses today do not discriminate not because of laws but because it is bad for business.

My point stands, people must be able discriminate if they wish so, it is their right. Most people would not discriminate as business owners because it is bad for business. A business discriminating today will face PR nightmare in the social media and other news. IF they do not care about it then it must not be that relevant for vast majority of their customers because a business will very rarely take a hit to the bottom line for any type of ideology.

In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people.

[#] You're also forgetting that slavery in America was an inborn condition. You weren't captured and made a slave. You were born into it. So one free black person didn't make his entire family free. Often blacks would buy their family members when they could.

54 (or about 1 percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one slave.[#]

to say that many businesses would have slaves simply because the laws regarding prohibition of slavery would disappear is disingenuous

Good lord you argue like Thunderfoot. That's not at all what I said. That's disingenuous. I suggested that without those laws businesses wouldn't have integrated then. I'm not saying if you banished the laws businesses would stop integrating now.

Some forms of Gerrymandering are actually mandated by federal law too!

The Voting Rights Act amendment of 1982 actually led to minority majority districts that are specifically designed to give minority voters a voice, then are held up as that terrible Gerrymandering boogeyman.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/79...

In fact, this is the cause of "the most gerrymandered districts" that the Wall Street Journal talks about here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Funny how there is so much noise about federally mandated gerrymandering of districts to give minorities a voice in places like North Carolina, but you hear so little about the gerrymandering in Maryland (where I live) that is controlled by Democrats.

As we've seen with antibiotic resistance, expect Round-Up resistant weeds for starters.

That's a problem with any herbicide system though, to make a long story short. Here's an article from 1992, several years before the release of Round-Up Ready crops, discussing the issue of resistant weeds. You very well can't blame GE crops for something that happens to non-GE crops. Problem is, no one talks about it when it happens to other herbicides, because then it's not a 'controversy,' it's just a problem for farmers, and no one pays attention to that. I hope you can see my problem with the typical anti-GMO talking points you've likely heard; even though some of them almost sound logical, that's only without critical context, which the anti-GMO groups never give, leading to much public misunderstanding.

Try this link for the 1896 paper: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40...

You can't "convert" someone to become a lesbian. Or straight, for that matter. Sexual attraction is fixed before birth.

Of all the bizarre ideas you have about gender and sexuality, that one is weirdest. Even Kinsey suggested otherwise.

http://link.springer.com/artic...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...

Your argument has been made much of by people seeking legal change in the status of gays/lesbians but it has shall we say a more complicated relation with actual scientific fact.

Those are the fees for a large university or library. That is full access to _everything_, all periodicals and archives organized by JSTOR. So compared to annual electronic access to all those periodicals, with electronic printing and quoting tools and privileges, it is a very, very modest cost. For smaller institutions they use a very generous sliding scale, down to and including free access for many small or strugging schools and libraries. Quoting from JSTOR's own web page at http://about.jstor.org/10thing...:

> JSTOR provides free or low cost access to more than 1,500 institutions in 69 countries.

> More than 1,500 institutions in Africa and other developing nations receive access to JSTOR free of charge or for steeply reduced fees

And if your position is that 'he identifies as black', then can he change his mind tomorrow? And if he can't, then at what age do people get to choose their 'race'? And if he can, what in the name of bloody bollocks does an outdated concept of 'race' even mean outside the industry that breeds cats, dogs and horses?

These question contain a raft of invalid assumptions.

Clearly, race is a social construct, not a genetic one, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't looked closely enough at the question. This means that to a large degree people do choose what race they are. Obviously there is no age by which people must make that choice, but that's not because there is no choice to be made, but because they're perfectly free to change their choice at any point in time. Racial identity is really just a form of tribalism, and people absolutely can choose to move from one tribe to another.

However, that in no way implies that changing tribes is easy, because what tribe you're a member of depends less on what you think than on what the other members of the tribe think. Tribal boundaries are fluid, dynamic and context-dependent, but they shift based on group decisions, not individual decisions. Witness the public hue and cry over Rachel Dolezal.

But, in fact, people do change their racial identity. A 2010 study found that going to prison can turn white people black. Specifically, people who previously self-identified and were identified by researchers as white committed crimes, went to prison, and subsequently self-identified -- and were identified by researchers -- as non-white, in most cases black.

Could Barack Obama decide to be white? Sure. He could decide to self-identify as white, and he could announce that to the world. The response would be a mixture of bafflement, outrage and laughter, and no one would buy it, because his tribal membership is too strongly and publicly established.

Race is a load of meaningless crap.

Any notion of genetic, objective race is meaningless crap, sure. But tribal identity is very, very far from meaningless. For many people racial identity is a central part of their individual identity. Identity is powerful... people befriend, ostracize, even kill over identity.

Note that I'm not saying this is good, or right, or in any way desirable. We'd all be a lot better off if everyone discarded racial identity from their personal worldviews. But that's not the world we live in, and calling it meaningless, ostrich-like, is foolish.

While claiming to be a new approach, a glance at the early Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society indicates that this idea is very old. The modern journal's move to "cohesive stories" was in many ways a reaction to the initial idea of listing observations and discoveries. Hence, the table of contents of the first issue (March 6, 1667) includes:

- An Account of the Improvement of Optick Glasses at Rome
- Observations ... of a Spot on one of the Belts of the Planet Jupiter
- Motions of the late Comet predicted
...
- Relations of a very odd Monstrous Calf
- A Peculiar Lead-Ore in Germany
- the New American Whale

Perhaps the final item before the list of new books and "lately dead" anticipates the change to cohesiveness: - Narrative concerning the success of Pendulum-Watches at Sea

What's the motivation for replacing humans in various jobs with a robot?

To cut costs and/or improve quality.

The outcome is going to be terrible

Possibly. Then again, maybe not -- you've seen what the open Internet did for information (which is now easily available to most people at very low cost); perhaps robotics can do the same for goods and services.

"But what about all those people who will lose their menial jobs", you ask? They'll have to find some other way to make a living, is the answer. But with manufactured goods and services practically making themselves, that shouldn't be so difficult to do -- if nothing else, the government could put a tax on automation and use a portion of the wealth they generate to provide every citizen with a guaranteed stipend. People would then have time to learn more advanced skills that would make them employable again, or they could just become (effectively) retirees, and do things they enjoy rather than do menial work most of their lives. Either way, they wouldn't starve.

Of course that will require some political will, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. Our society has absorbed changes of similar magnitude before, it can probably do so again.

You could have been doing this years ago if you live in some of the southern states

I did not realize New Jersey, Road Island and Ohio were southern states (http://www.jstor.org/stable/4093513?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

I don't have polling data, but it does pass the sniff test to assume that one form of magical thinking, inculcated from birth, would tend to make the personality more at-risk of accepting other magical-thinking proposals.

Well, there are some studies which suggest what you say is true, but there are other scientists and psychologists who have claimed that supernatural beliefs and superstitions are "hard-wired" into humanity. Many anthropologists have argued that some sort of supernatural beliefs were necessary for the foundation of complex societies, but there's disagreement about the exact role or types of beliefs and their effects.

On the other hand, regardless of upbringing, there seem to be specific psychological traits that are highly correlated with religiosity, such as lower intelligence or various personality traits. There have been literally hundreds of studies on this stuff, and your proposal that various superstitious thinking may be related to and/or substituting for religious thinking has been studied for close to 40 years.

There seem to be no clear answers and a lot of contradictory studies about whether paranormal/supernatural beliefs are basically innate or mostly affected by psychological traits or intelligence, or whether nurturing children affects those tendencies in significant ways.

The only thing I can say is that people have believed weird nonsense throughout history, and even if you expunge various myths and bogey men, people will find other weird nonsense to believe -- whether it's aliens or conspiracy theories or whatever. You can even look at demographic stats and polls for other countries -- participation in institutional religion is very low in Europe, and many countries have relatively high numbers there of people who are nominally atheists, but various other types of occult and superstitious elements are exceptionally popular.

Bottom line: decreasing religious indoctrination of youth may have some impact on overall belief in "magical thinking," but many people will still find various weird things to buy into as adults. Aside from natural cognitive tendencies of humans to "ascribe meaning" to random or natural phenomena and such, religion is historically about defining social groups as well as beliefs, and there's a lot of evidence that people will buy into all kinds of weird crap if it seems like the stuff that most of the people around them are into.

And rape rates in some other 1st-world countries are HUGELY higher--but nobody here cares apparently: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

The numbers may say so, but they comprise only official data. In more advanced countries, the case must be that less rapes go unreported, so the figures may be closer to reality, while not so in the US. Consider the Japan rates, which are among the lowest, while having a strong culture of sexual harassment, (it's the same culture that created things like RapeLay): http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/as.2007.47.5.811?uid=3737664&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21106029734881; http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1373&context=jil;http://ijo.sagepub.com/content/45/3/278.short.

I was going to comment on the fact that a large proportion of the poor pay no income taxes

You all need to just stop with this nonsense already. When a poor single mother buys a $2.50 loaf of bread to make her kids sandwiches, 55 cents of that is going to pay the income taxes of the people in the production chain of getting that loaf of bread to the grocery store shelf. The income tax system imposes an effective but hidden retail sales tax-equivalent of 22%, which is incredibly regressive.

until the property tax rate is increased or a levy is passed to cover it, nobody will be paying extra for this :spring breaks: Where will this money come from that pays for everything associated with providing the education? Please don't say "Obama money". And don't say "print it" - that makes her loaf of bread go up in price.

For pow(a,b), [a,b real numbers], you are essentially calculating:

  a^b = (e^log(a))^b) or pow(pow(e, log(a)), b) which is e^(b*log(a)) or pow(e, b*log(a)) where e is the base of the natural logarithm.

What you have in your table are the values for e^x and log(x), like any good book of logarithms of ancient times. Precision according to your needs. For quick lookup you can even index the mantissa in a b-tree if your table is huge.

Then it becomes very quick:

step 1: look up log (a) in the table, interpolate if needed.
step 2: calculate b * (value in last step).
step 3: lookup up e^x where x is the value at step 2 in your table, interpolate if needed.
step 4: profit! as you now have your result.

And as a bonus, you are sure the result is within the precision of your table immediately, within the error of your interpolation.

Note that interpolation for exp(x) is quite fast. There are some exotic methods out there as well for interpolating exp(x) and log(x), as per this abstract which are quite efficient if you need high precision. For 10 digit precision you could easily fit both your tables into 8k.

The Civil War was not about the oppression of slaves (contrary to popular belief). It was about the crushing of dissent.

I never said what the Civil War was about. I was merely responding to what appeared to be a complaint about the South's way of life having been destroyed; if that's what they were referring to, much of that way of life should have been destroyed, so the destruction of that way of life wasn't a bug, it was a feature.

Sadly, although the 13th Amendment to the US constitution finally added one more freedom that the Constitution defended, the "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" clause left a rather large loophole through which several states snuck (not that the North was a land of rainbows, magic ponies, and racial equality).

(And not that the Southern states were paragons of freedom even for white people, especially white people who wanted to teach slaves to read and write or didn't particularly want to participate in patrols hunting down runaway slaves.)

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

Like I would use those exact words in an actual trial. Strawman.

The legal argument would point out that it's the prosecutions job to prove that John (let's give him a name) is on my friends list because he's a drug dealer and not, as I claim and can prove, because we're both in the same club and share a hobby.

If you think people haven't been sent up on cases that flimsy, you're not part of the reality-based community.

Strangely, I trust the system. Not 100%, but largely. Everyone with three working brain cells knows that innocent people get convicted sometimes and it's a scandal. However, I understand enough statistics to see not just the mistakes, but the system as a whole. Every system has mistakes. What is important is how the false positive and false negative rates are. If I am innocent, is my chance to be falsely convicted 50%, or 5%, or 0.5% ? People posting here seem to thing it's closer to 50% than to 0.5%.

Well, it turns out we're both wrong, but you more than me. This study came up with a 3.3% (or 5% depending on how you crunch the numbers) false conviction rate.

invoke you legal rights at every opportunity and keep the so-called "criminal justice" system as far away from you as possible.

Oh, absolutely. This is not a joke and if you get into trouble with the law, you should understand that it's an adversial system and from the moment they mark you as a suspect, the police is not your friend anymore.

But no need for this ridiculous paranoia, either.

Sit in court sometime and see the flimsy cases that ordinary citizens are convicted under. Judges don't laugh at cops or prosecutes -- they're all colleagues, with the same government signing their checks.

I've been to court, mostly as part of my previous job, the rest as a visitor.

You forget a detail: Yes, the judges and prosecutors are colleagues - and so is the defense lawyer. If you have sharp eyes and ears you can spot the inofficial conversation going on between these three parties. A conversation you're excluded from because you are not "one of them".
But one of those players is on your team. If you need to put words into the judges mouth, make them come through your lawyer.

I'm not sure of the providence of this citation but it looks authentic.

It's a paper from 1980 about a haulout event in 1978.

The highlighting is done by a person in the pay of the heartland institute, so it likely to be pushing a particularly unscientific agenda. But the paper exists in the scholarly literature. You can often check out the provenance of scholarly papers if you have an internet connection and access to google scholar.

Consider that this might be a normal behavior pattern amongst walruses.

From the first line of your linked paper: In October-November 1978, several thousand living walruses came ashore in at least four localities on St. Lawrence Island where they had not been present before in this century.

There's a strong implication in that that it is not normal behavior.
Note also that the Walruses themselves were not normal: Nearly all of the dead were extremely lean, having less than half as much subcutaneous fat as healthy animals examined in previous years.

I am quite humble about my understandings of their natures. You would do well to be equally humble.

Okay, The scientists at USGS have said that this is due to the retreat of the sea ice, and you humble claim that this is wrong?
I'm not sure that you're using this word "humble" correctly.

It appears for example that this walrus statement comes mostly from the WWF.

It appears to most people that it comes from the US Geological Survey. But the initial findings were by scientists working for NOAA's Aerial Surveys of Arctic Marine Mammals.

That is not a scientific organization but rather an environmental activist organization.

WWF fund and perform a lot of conservation science. But it was the USGS, which is a scientific organization that published the link to climate change.

I am not saying they are wrong but they have a history of very biased analysis.

Such as?

The most extreme example I think would be the application of the Drake Equation to species extinction rates.

I must have missed that press release. Do you have a link to it?

The author of the equation itself disavows it.

I didn't know that. Where did you read that?

That is how you get numbers like "5 million species extinct this year." They're using the drake equation. No organization that uses that equation with a straight face can be taken seriously. Period.

It's not obvious how the Drake Equation, which calculates the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which radio-communication might be possible, could be made to yield "5 million species extinct this year." And that number seems about two orders of magnitude greater than the largest of estimates I've seen. The WWF speculates that we might be losing [10,000 per year](http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/), which is nearer three orders of magnitude lower than that number.

So I look forward to you pointing me to this press release that makes all their other work not to be taken seriously in your eyes.

Because I can't find it.

Can you substantiate this? Every time somebody has said this to me and they've gone into specifics, it's been bullshit.

You know, it's good that you come to me instead of the morons you've been talking to you, because I can definitely substantiate this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

See, the reason "Silicon Valley" (meaning the tech industry) is allowed to play this game is because they're willing to let the NSA upskirt your private information and communications. And since they've already got their hand up your dress, they're going to cop a little feel for themselves, you know? So the US Government is happy, the corporations get to make a shitload of money from your private information and communications, and they get to keep playing their little tax game.

If you had a government worth a damn (like during the trust-busting era), they wouldn't allow companies like Apple to perpetrate their little willful fraud.

Now, the next time somebody tells you about Apple and the government playing footsie to protect Apple's tax advantage, I hope you won't continue to say it's bullshit.

Same here. Which anti-trust laws? Be specific.

Same here. Now when somebody asks you "Which anti-trust laws is Apple violating?" you'll be able to tell them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

http://www.jstor.org/discover/...

See, the problem is "vertical integration". You can't control both the product, the store that sells the product, the insurance that covers the product, the consumables (media) that plays on the product and on and on down the distribution chain. Even making both the hardware and the software is arguably a violation of anti-trust. But when you start to also own the only store that sells software for the product and have a vested interest in every bit of software that runs on the product you've crossed so many lines that Apple should have been broken up into several companies long ago. Same with Microsoft and many others. They're not just over the line, they're WAY over the line. The technical term is an oligopoly. They are anti-competitive and they destroy entire markets. Oligopolies are what happen in fascist countries.

I hope you appreciate the time and energy I spend disabusing you of your notion that "it's bullshit". And I hope you enjoyed edification as much as I enjoyed providing it.

And here's Murphy's douchebag, right on schedule.

Science right in your face.

DDT bans did exactly what they said they would.

(Also DDT is still in use for malaria control, not that we have that in the US where it's banned).

I have no delusions that I convinced you of anything. But it's nice to have someone to smack down for being a perfect example when they must have known I had this sort of evidence handy..

Of the top ten States in terms of strictest gun laws, 7 have the lowest number of gun deaths.

Got a source? I can cite plenty to show the opposite:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/states...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10...

International:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...

Transport of guns across state lines hamper efforts.

That's the talking-point advocates use to defend their failures. But it really doesn't explain why crime rates show a relative increase, and these facts don't stop them from advocating those stronger restrictions, that don't work and keep killing people. It's insanity. They refuse to live in the real world.

Most if not all illegal guns in Canada, guns in the hands of criminals, come from America.

I'm sure plenty of Canadians buy guns from the US, and never use them to commit crimes, too.

I'm betting criminals in Canada buy US-made cars pretty often, too.

People have been predicting outcomes for years. There was a story a couple of months back about something similar. And here's a link to a group that stated 75% success predicting the outcome prior to oral arguments, back in 2004 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4099370?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104566455723. I can't comment on the relative academic merits of either though.

Positive Mood and Susceptibility to False Advertising

Even though you're more aware of the fact that the advertising is false, you're still more likely to form a positive image of the brand as a result of being happy. I have, without being fully informed about "true" advertising, mentally extrapolated that to apply to all advertisements.

This idea is at least a little corroborated by this older study which suggests happier moods implies a greater uptake on simple advertising messages.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41...

http://jlr.sagepub.com/content...

http://works.bepress.com/leah_...

http://www.npr.org/2009/08/28/...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03...

http://www.literacytrust.org.u...:

Educational programming has also aimed to elevate knowledge of texts and literacy as in the programmes Barney and Friends (Guofang, 1999) and Reading Rainbow (Wood and Duke, 1997), which offer content on reading books and raising childrenâ(TM)s knowledge of books. This is important since researchers at the University of Sheffield have also suggested that pre-schoolers who develop an ability to talk about texts become familiar with literacy and have greater success with learning to read once they enter school (Hannon, 2000; Hannon, Weinberger and Nutbrown, 1991). "

See, what happened to those days was that gradually, colleges realized they could keep raising prices past what the government could pay, because they knew families of students could pay more. Colleges built palaces to "education", dormitories with gold plated faucets, gymnasiums, new buildings that were completely unnecessary simply because they could. All the while, tuition kept going up - the government saw that tuition was increasing at universities, so they'd raise the amount of subsidy, then the college would raise tuition above that to the point where families were bled just as much as before. Eventually, the bottom dropped out, the government said enough is enough, and held or dropped subsidies. Colleges, so used to 10% pay raises for tenured professors and unwilling to live with 20 year old dorms, screamed - "they're cutting our funding!" - so they just saddle their students with the maximum loan allowance they can - because they know they can get it - just to keep the gravy train coming. The more the government allows students to borrow, the more money colleges will charge.

It's economics at work. It's called Rent Seeking Behavior. If there is money to be gotten, it will be.

Here's a journal paper someone wrote on it.

Here's a bunch of resources on this from a think tank.