Slashdot Mirror

here

and how about this one, quote: "The vast sums of money involved can compromise legitimate economies and have a direct impact on governments through the corruption of public officials."

This found via a casual one-minute google search.

All you can do is mock and ridicule, because you don't have the education needed to participate in such a discussion.

Please provide a credible citation which shows that roundup is not carcinogenic.

https://academic.oup.com/jnci/...

It refers to Glyphosate rather than Roundup, but I believe in the time period Roundup was by far the most popular brand and still under patent protection.

DNA isn't subject to resonance.

Except that it has been demonstrated that DNA can be damaged by resonance. And that analysis involved MRI systems, which operate way down in the MF, HF, and VHF bands.

Think about it for a minute. What would it be like if none of that were valid? Well, wind at 10mph doesn't kill you, and wind at 12mph doesn't kill you; but what about 11.7793mph? Only one way to find out!

For a counterargument, being hit by a bullet at 1 MPH doesn't ever kill you, because it bounces off your skin. But at the right angle, being hit by a bullet at a high enough speed doesn't kill you because it makes a hole straight through the bone on either side of your body, but at a lower speed, it bounces off your rib cage and does more damage that kills you.

And for wind resonance on structures, higher speeds may actually result in less resonance than lower wind speeds.

In other words: we've already done testing. We even did testing on rats with cell phone radiation cranked up to ridiculous levels--which, on one hand, did cause some problems; but on the other, they used Sprague-Dawley rats for lifetime toxicity studies, which is bad methodology. I'm not surprised ridiculously-high-powered radiation at any frequency is harmful: you wouldn't stick your face in a microwave oven, unless you were completely stupid.

Those studies were on cell phones in the sub-2GHz band. They tell us very little about the effect signals in the 28 GHz or 39 GHz band. Using them as a reference is like saying "This car didn't kill me when it hit me at 5 MPH, so it won't kill me at 50 MPH." :-)

Well, ackshully...

It turns out they do!

https://academic.oup.com/aob/a...

Consider this, also from the summary:

"showed premature thinning of the brain cortex"

That means it is supposed to happen later, but is happening earlier.. but is that really bad? Perhaps that means they are more advanced in some ways.

The thing is our ability still to determine how kids learning what state the brain is in is still primitive enough that I question the degree to which they are able to truly determine what is truly bad or not for them long term...

I do not see how access to a transformative learning device can be bad in the end, except from the standpoint of removing kids from some physical activity. As long as they get some movement and physical exercise, I say let them have as much screen time as they want.

In 20 years, mark my words, scientists will be reversed on this just as they are on everything else they tell people and kids to stay away from.

"Consistent with many volumetric studies, marked thinning was noted in prefrontal cortex. Prefrontal cortex has received much attention in the field of cognitive aging as it has been noted that older adults can perform poorly on tasks that require executive functions presumed to rely on prefrontal cortex, among other structures (Moscovitch and Winocur, 1995; West, 1996; for a critical review, see Greenwood, 2000). Thus, it is possible that early age-related alterations in this region could contribute to age-related declines in executive processing tasks such as working memory tasks (Salat et al., 2002a). The present data are consistent with this possibility."

Source

Okay for anyone wanting the whole story. Here is the story on the left. And then here is the story on the right. Now the story on the left is based on this paper.

I highly suggest folks read the paper and then read the stories. This side by side that's being presented as "Oh look, they're contradicting themselves!!" Is massively deceptive and smart people shouldn't fall for it.

The original requires a computer to fool an expert in the domain who is aware that they are participating in the turing test.

I don't know where you got that idea. The original involves an interrogator trying to determine which of two subjects is a man, and which is a woman.

https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238

Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.

1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.

Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.

2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.

Says who? There's plenty of research supporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.

3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?

No complaints. Maybe eliminating fossil fuel use entirely is a bit of a stretch, especially given our dependence on plastics and petro-chemicals, but a significant reduction needs to start now. But when thirty-six percent of the food we grow is fed to livestock, you're fooling yourself if you think that you can do that while advocating for meat consumption.

4) Also how about we stop destroying existing forests and start re-planting them?

Great idea. But then, where will we get the farmland for animal feed?

5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?

Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.

6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?

While -some- religious groups have population growth greater than average, most do not. The most influential variables in the United States are youth, fertility, and immigration. So, feel free to complain about the Mexicans, but the religious nutjobs, not so much.

Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t

Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products
https://academic.oup.com/iwc/a...

Consumer products today should be produced with the aid of UX experts and UX studies, so that they are intuitive enough that manuals are not required. Features that are too advanced to be understood without the assistance of a manual should never be compulsory to use, and regarded as customizations for expert users who will research themselves.

No product these days should ever require a manual - we have the tools available to make it possible to produce products intuitive enough that manuals are unnecessary. If you'd like some help learning about it yourself, I suggest you read Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" and Don Norman's books for more extensive advice. If your everyday consumer product requires a manual, you're a failure as a designer. The only exceptions to this are really, crazy advanced products, and even then a lot more could usually be done to make them easier to use.

If you want a book on Android, you can buy several, there's no shortage.

Check out the winner of this years Ignobel prize in Literature: Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products

Science confirms it.

A guy who likes numbers.

Cute conversation. What is your political alignment?

My political ideology is that I don't believe that the single axis left/right scale has useful meaning, but to the extent that there even exists a "left" or a "right" political philosophy-- and I'm not at all sure that there is-- people ignore that coherence and cheer like a sports team: my team's right because it's my team and everything they do is right, even if last year I said that the other team was evil because they did exactly what my team is doing today.

I reject left/right, and I reject team sports politics.

https://fee.org/articles/forget-policy-politics-is-just-team-sports/
(commenting on this paper: https://academic.oup.com/poq/a... )

If there is no expectation that the eagle kill rate would exceed more than a few hundred per year then why did the wind energy lobby ask for a quadrupling of the existing levels to reach an allowed 4200 kills per year? Seems to me that they expected to exceed prior limits or they would not have asked for the limits to be raised.

I have no idea. It baffles me too. The study I noted found that the numbers killed were about triple the number reported by the energy companies, but still tiny. And the kill rate, even then, isn't even hundreds a year - nowhere close.

https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/s...

That's a blog post from someone whose professional career is not in the area of energy policy. Do you have a peer-reviewed source?

Then when natural gas leakage is taken into account, because no pipe is perfect, the greenhouse gas effect exceeds that of using coal. .

Pipes aren't perfect, but the real issue is leakage from reservoirs, depending on how they are tapped. With conventional drilling and distribution, I'm not convinced that you assertion is correct. Do you have a decent citation (not a youtube video)? Yes, I have looked at peer-reviewed sources on this.

So whilst permits may be issued for 4200 (which is per year, I thought it was over 30 years, as that would still be massively more than the observed number of deaths), it is highly unlikely that wind turbines will kill that many eagles.

If there is no expectation that the eagle kill rate would exceed more than a few hundred per year then why did the wind energy lobby ask for a quadrupling of the existing levels to reach an allowed 4200 kills per year? Seems to me that they expected to exceed prior limits or they would not have asked for the limits to be raised.

There is no CO2 savings from wind power, not yet anyway.

Citation needed.

https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The YouTube video goes through more than the problems of greenhouse gasses, CO2 and methane. It also discusses costs in dollars. The CO2 impact really gets going about 18 minutes in.

Wind and solar need storage to work. Right now and for the foreseeable future that storage is fuel. Fuel is storage. We have inherent energy storage now in the form of fuel tanks, coal piles, and uranium pellets.

And when the wind blows, those peaking plants are not on. If they are half as efficient as combined cycle, but are on less than half as often, then overall the CO2 output is reduced.

Then when natural gas leakage is taken into account, because no pipe is perfect, the greenhouse gas effect exceeds that of using coal. This is mentioned in the video. You also assume a best case scenario where wind blows half the time. Germany found out that this cannot be relied upon. They made a big deal about the wind energy they produced one year only to see a significant drop the next when the weather did not produce as much usable wind. Germany has admitted they will be unable to meet agreed upon CO2 reductions even with their past and planned investments in wind and solar.

Have you all seen the goddamn fees to use ebay? It's a disgrace.

Maybe people are using it less? I try to avoid selling on there absolutely as much as possible.
(Note: Australian here, being scammed on ebay seems far less likely than in the US)

The rapid proliferation of rampant fees is one of the many downsides of "free market" economics. It's suddenly everywhere in the US- airlines, any travel really, car repair, restaurants, concert tickets, the list goes on and on. I'm sure someone somewhere has a "fee processing fee".

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/land-of-the-fee-9780199970162?cc=us&lang=en&

With the precedent set by the Gaye vs. Thicke court case (ruling upheld by 9th circuit court of appeals this year), you are committing copyright infringement when you write a song that "feels" like some other song. Because it would be very difficult for a songwriter to listen to every song ever written and ensure that his new song does not sound anything like them, this effectively criminializes songwriting in general. If you are a songwriter in the 9th circuit, the case is already settled precedent, and anything you write may be illiegal.

" And we have yet to scientifically demonstrate chirality affects how the molecule is processed by a living system"

I hope you're fucking kidding?

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

https://academic.oup.com/toxsc...

To be so spectacularly ignorant and blithely arrogant, you're either an engineer or a doctor?

Why do people think giving money to people is a 'fix' for any problem? it's been proven not to work.

Actually it's been proven to work in poor countries. Whether it will work as well with poor people in a rich country would require more research. Unless you know of research that proves it doesn't.

https://academic.oup.com/qje/a...

even with HUGE influxes of cash (like a lottery win) people go back to being poor within just a few years.

You're not really claiming that proves UBI won't work, are you?

That is a last resort and to take that from responsible gun owners is crazy. If I wasn't home, I would want my wife to have access to a gun because while she waits for the cops, she would be otherwise defenseless.

Get a dog. It will make you safer than owning a gun will, and won't make you more likely to commit suicide or kill a family member.

If you have a dog, that home intruder won't even try to come into your house. Bad guys avoid dogs, but they look to steal guns

A gun in the house increases the risk to your family.

https://academic.oup.com/aje/a...

https://www.scientificamerican...

https://www.vox.com/cards/gun-...

Focusing on individual trees is the hard way to approach the problem. If you think about the ecosystem as a whole then it is pretty obvious that mature forests are carbon neutral. Sure there is new growth but that is offset by dead old growth decomposing. The biomass of the ecosystem remains about the same.

That is NOT true.

Process of decomposing is FAR FAR slower than the process of growing.
Walk through a forest sometimes. You'll find dead branches decades old. Meanwhile, a tree will regenerate such a branch within years.

Similarly, you'll find several layers of dead leaves one on top of the other on the ground - with new leaves on the trees.
And that's WITH various forest critters munching on said leaves.

Meanwhile, them "individual trees" and their individual branches and root systems ADD UP rather quickly.
And while it varies between the species, tree's grow rates keep increasing for hundreds of years before even starting to tapper off.

Hint: If the biomass remained the same, those old, wide, multi-centennial trees wouldn't exist.

You can try explicit studies like this one, that show that the pesticide isn't harmful to bees.

Or you can read some rollup articles about all the problems with Lu's study, like this one or this one.

Yeah, the problem is that actual studies on the effects of neonicotinoids on bees show that there are no effects.
Seriously. Read it for yourself.
The original study that started all these claims is bunk, too, full of twisted data and misleading analyses unsupported by data. Of all places, HuffPo produced a roundup of all the ways Lu is wrong. Read some of the linked studies there, too. Plenty to learn about bad science.

This act bans a safe, cheap, and popular insecticide for BS reasons while ignoring the actual causes of Colony Collapse Disorder.

I hear you and agree, but I doubt very much that you'll get any traction on /. with this observation, in spite of the fact that it actually has its own wikipedia page:

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

Note that this is a crisis already in the realm of openly published research results and conclusions. There isn't any good reason to think that the numbers cited in the Nature study are going to be any smaller for studies conducted by parties with even stronger (monetary or sociopolitical) vested interests, who don't even expose their results to the greater scientific community for checking and replication. And the numbers are terrible.

Look, it is only six or seven years now that we finally learned that dietary cholesterol and fat are almost completely irrelevant to heart disease, after being told nothing but the opposite for some fifty years, all of it stamped with "proven by real science":

https://academic.oup.com/advan...

Now imagine that a Dietary Protection Agency (DPA) had been created to deal with the "public health crisis" caused by high levels of fat and cholesterol in the US diet, and that they crafted regulations banning things like the open sale of cooking fats, the production of bacon, the sale of cheese and eggs. Suppose further that the "evidence" they cited to defend these draconian measures was -- precisely what was, in fact, used to support the argument that high fat = high cholesterol -- but that this data, instead of even being available to support the epidemiological study I just cited, was hidden behind a shroud of "patient confidentiality". BLTs would be a thing of the past, the sugar and carb industry and PETA would be crowing and slipping the DPA large sums under the table to ensure that the basis for its rules was never overly scrutinized to protect the meat animals that are the primary sources of dietary cholesterol, and the public would not be well served. At least with bacon and eggs, smothered in cheese sauce.

Finally, the joker who invoked "HIPPA" above as if he knew what he was talking about -- for starters, it is HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, whose purpose was to protect people from being denied insurance (for which it proved remarkably ineffectual) or employment (slightly better) on the basis of prior health history -- clearly missed the point that all published medical research is HIPAA compliant. HIPAA compliance isn't that difficult to arrange or manage in a study, and publishing methodology and results from such studies is the basis for every single published work in the field of evidence-based medicine, and even with open publication, there is a ton of non-reproducible crap that makes it out into the wild (like the cholesterol gaff, like the sugar/carb gaff) and stays there for years or even decades before independent work finally corrects it. No sane physician is going to base treatments on results from completely hidden work -- no methods, no data, just somebody saying "trust us, we've seen the methods and data and we totally believe them". That's not science, and it isn't evidence-based reasoning, it is just a glaring opportunity for confirmation bias, political bias, social bias, or plain old money to influence what should be an open process that makes mistakes all the time as it is, even when fully open.

To conclude, I honestly think the EPA doesn't get a bye on the open participation in Real Science, which involves things like peer review, reproducibility, double blind placebo controlled studies as opposed to stupid epidemiological correlations with unknown confounding variables, the open analysis of the statistical basis of claims, avoidance of data dredging, cherrypicking, and all of the other myriad aspects of Bad Science, science we don't get to see and criticize. I am quite certain

Nick Bostrom: "Superintelligence. Paths, Dangers, Strategies." https://global.oup.com/academi...

I hope your English teacher doesn't see this:

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
http://global.oup.com/about/?c...

But seriously, if Oxford didn't invent it, they are pretty much responsible for it:
http://www.businessinsider.com...

solar power is unpossible

Not a single comment has ever said that.

What they have always quite consistently said:
1- Solar PV is inefficient.
2- Solar roadways is one of the least efficient ways of making solar PV.
3- Solar roadways doesn't make sense if you have roofs that are not yet covered or land to spare.

China doesn't need to read Slashdot to understand this, they just need to take highschool physics. But while you're being quite facetous about big public works projects which China are very good at, they mostly do it for busy work and utterly fail the cost benefit analysis of doing them.

Only some 1/3rd of the major logistic infrastructure projects make any sense, all the rest do is put the country in debt: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep...
Heck there's entire books describing how China builds almost entire cities that end up as virtual ghost towns: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-C...

Mind you when I lived there it was incredible to commute to work. An 8 lane highway with maybe 2 cars on it. Traffic you could only dream of.

those models don't work without dark matter, and considerable amounts of it (far more of it than the "missing" baryonic matter they found, in fact).

I agree that the dark matter seems essential, especially because it's also backed by gravitational lensing experiments as well. But in the case of dark energy, there are actually competing models that can explain the evolution of the universe without dark energy, and the main change was simply doing the math more rigorously. So the models themselves still might have some room for improvement.

American AC in Paris noted:

This is *really* cool science, but "paradigm shifting" may be a touch over the top--this isn't the first paper or study to come to the conclusion that Toxo plays a role in neurological disorders, and there are labs around the globe that have been working on this topic for years.

Yep:

• Bermoy, Webster, and Macdonald from 2000.
• Webster, from 2001.
• Webster again, from 2007.

and those are just the top three scholarly articles for a google search for "toxplasmosis rat behavior". The parent page for each of those articles links to other, related studies, as well - but the Bermoy, Webster, and Macdonald study from 2000 appears to be the first. So, no, not exactly ground-breaking, and definitely not a paradigm changer, either.

Anybody remember Stanley Prusiner (hint: he won pretty much every award there is to win in medicine - including the Nobel - for his work establishing the existence, transmissibility, and neurodegenerative impact of prions)? Remember how respected authorities in medicine laughed at him ... ?

on the other activists who keep insisting that the problem is Real Serious Now, but at the same time reject any approaches that might actually fix the problem.

I'm sure those are exactly the same people.

Iron fertilization is not a new concept and has been explored by scientists in the past. Here's what the IPCC had to say:

Iron fertilization of the oceans may be a strategy for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The idea is that it stimulates the growth of phytoplankton and therefore sequesters CO2 in the form of particulate organic carbon (POC). There have been eleven field studies in different ocean regions with the primary aim of examining the impact of iron as a limiting nutrient for phytoplankton by the addition of small quantities (1–10 tonnes) of iron sulphate to the surface ocean. In addition, commercial tests are being pursued with the combined (and conflicting) aims of increasing ocean carbon sequestration and productivity. It should be noted, however, that iron addition will only stimulate phytoplankton growth in ~30% of the oceans (the Southern Ocean, the equatorial Pacific and the Sub-Arctic Pacific), where iron depletion prevails. Only two experiments to date (Buesseler and Boyd, 2003) have reported on the second phase, the sinking and vertical transport of the increased phytoplankton biomass to depths below the main thermocline (>120m). The efficiency of sequestration of the phytoplankton carbon is low (<10%), with the biomass being largely recycled back to CO2 in the upper water column (Boyd et al., 2004). This suggests that the field-study estimates of the actual carbon sequestered per unit iron (and per dollar) are over-estimates. The cost of large-scale and long-term fertilization will also be offset by CO2 release/emission during the acquisition, transportation and release of large volumes of iron in remote oceanic regions. Potential negative effects of iron fertilization include the increased production of methane and nitrous oxide, deoxygenation of intermediate waters and changes in phytoplankton community composition that may cause toxic blooms and/or promote changes further along the food chain. None of these effects have been directly identified in experiments to date, partly due to the time and space constraints.

Emphasis mine. Personally I'd sooner explore market-based solutions before heading to geoengineering. Markets are at least theoretically the most efficient way to allocate resources. Algal carbon sequestration has in Earth's past been a method to extract large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere, and there would be a certain poetic justice to use the same technique which resulted in many of the hydrocarbon source deposits. Unfortunately what is practical for Nature may not hold true for us.

So this Haida Gwai "experiment" seems to have deposited 120 tonnes of iron into a square kilometer of ocean. The persons who did this and claimed that this was brilliantly successful did not perform any study designed to show this. Researchers who did attempt to study the experiment did not come to the same conclusions. further discussion. Generally, the ocean is a fairly large thing, and we should not expect to see large effects from manipulating any given square kilometer of it.

At the moment it seems like there's more people willing to try to sell carbon credits for dumping things in the ocean than hard evidence that dumping is effective, as your link points out. The international community seems willing to permit experimentation so long as it is properly controlled. The fundamental soundness of geoengineering is an open question, but setting that aside, the fundamental soundness of this particular strategy seems quite dubious. If you do have some more recent or higher quality studies on the matter, I'm sure I would be gratified for any correction.

Creimer in the sky with cock eggs.

https://blog.oup.com/2013/07/l...

3) The dream-like images referenced in Lennon’s song lyrics were inspired by imagery from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland. “The images were from Alice In Wonderland,” said Lennon in 1980. “It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty

So maybe creimer's mother bought a cock egg and it turned into creimer hence him now producing cock eggs in order to reproduce.

I don't think that list is comprehensive, rather there is an explicit allowed and explicit disallowed with definitions for each, but none of that excludes these from being used. And these particular pesticides have no alternative for certain organic crops that would be allowed under the current rules in both the US and the EU, as stated by the organic lobby itself to the EU:

http://www.ifoam-eu.org/sites/...

A whitepaper about their toxicity to bees can be found here:

https://academic.oup.com/jinse...

[citation needed]

Here are a few to start from. You can follow their references cited sections to thousands of related studies.

Associations between diet and cancer, ischemic heart disease, and all-cause mortality in non-Hispanic white California Seventh-day Adventists
Fraser 2009 Am J Clin Nutr September 1999 vol. 70 no. 3 532s-538s

Dietary Relationships With Fatal Colorectal Cancer Among Seventh-Day Adventists
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. David A. Snowdon, Ph.D., M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 74, Issue 2, 1 February 1985, Pages 307–317

Coronary heart disease mortality among Seventh-Day Adventists with differing dietary habits: a preliminary report
Roland L. Phillips, Frank R. Lemon, W. Lawrence Beeson, and Jan W. Kuzma. Am J Clin Nutr October 1978 vol. 31 no. 10 S191-S198

Diet and Lung Cancer in California Seventh-day Adventists
Gary E. Fraser W. Lowrence Beeson Ronald L. Phillips. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 133, Issue 7, 1 April 1991, Pages 683–693.

Association Between Reported Diet And All-Cause Mortality: Twenty-One-Year Follow-Up On 27, 530 Adult Seventh-Day Adventists
HAROLD A. Kahn Roland L. Phillips David A. Snowdon Warren Choi. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 119, Issue 5, 1 May 1984, Pages 775–787.

Dietary and hormonal interrelationships among vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists and nonvegetarian men.
B J Howie and T D Shultz. Am J Clin Nutr July 1985 vol. 42 no. 1 127-134

Animal product consumption and mortality because of all causes combined, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer in Seventh-day Adventists.
Snowdon. Am J Clin Nutr September 1988 vol. 48 no. 3 739-748.

Mortality Among California Seventh-Day Adventists for Selected Cancer Sites
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. Lawrence Garfinkel, M.A. J. W. Kuzma, Ph.D. W. Lawrence Beeson, M.S.P.H. Terry Lotz, M.S.P.H. Burton Brin, M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 65, Issue 5, 1 November 1980, Pages 1097–1107.

Diet and Serum Cholesterol Levels A Comparison between Vegetarians and Nonvegetarians in a Seventh-day Adventist Group
RAYMOND O. WEST, M.D., M.P.H. and OLIVE B. HAYES, M.P.H.. Am J Clin Nutr August 1968 vol. 21 no. 8 853-862.

Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men
Mills, P. K., Beeson, W. L., Phillips, R. L. and Fraser, G. E. (1989), Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men. Cancer, 64: 598–604.

[citation needed]

Here are a few to start from. You can follow their references cited sections to thousands of related studies.

Associations between diet and cancer, ischemic heart disease, and all-cause mortality in non-Hispanic white California Seventh-day Adventists
Fraser 2009 Am J Clin Nutr September 1999 vol. 70 no. 3 532s-538s

Dietary Relationships With Fatal Colorectal Cancer Among Seventh-Day Adventists
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. David A. Snowdon, Ph.D., M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 74, Issue 2, 1 February 1985, Pages 307–317

Coronary heart disease mortality among Seventh-Day Adventists with differing dietary habits: a preliminary report
Roland L. Phillips, Frank R. Lemon, W. Lawrence Beeson, and Jan W. Kuzma. Am J Clin Nutr October 1978 vol. 31 no. 10 S191-S198

Diet and Lung Cancer in California Seventh-day Adventists
Gary E. Fraser W. Lowrence Beeson Ronald L. Phillips. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 133, Issue 7, 1 April 1991, Pages 683–693.

Association Between Reported Diet And All-Cause Mortality: Twenty-One-Year Follow-Up On 27, 530 Adult Seventh-Day Adventists
HAROLD A. Kahn Roland L. Phillips David A. Snowdon Warren Choi. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 119, Issue 5, 1 May 1984, Pages 775–787.

Dietary and hormonal interrelationships among vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists and nonvegetarian men.
B J Howie and T D Shultz. Am J Clin Nutr July 1985 vol. 42 no. 1 127-134

Animal product consumption and mortality because of all causes combined, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer in Seventh-day Adventists.
Snowdon. Am J Clin Nutr September 1988 vol. 48 no. 3 739-748.

Mortality Among California Seventh-Day Adventists for Selected Cancer Sites
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. Lawrence Garfinkel, M.A. J. W. Kuzma, Ph.D. W. Lawrence Beeson, M.S.P.H. Terry Lotz, M.S.P.H. Burton Brin, M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 65, Issue 5, 1 November 1980, Pages 1097–1107.

Diet and Serum Cholesterol Levels A Comparison between Vegetarians and Nonvegetarians in a Seventh-day Adventist Group
RAYMOND O. WEST, M.D., M.P.H. and OLIVE B. HAYES, M.P.H.. Am J Clin Nutr August 1968 vol. 21 no. 8 853-862.

Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men
Mills, P. K., Beeson, W. L., Phillips, R. L. and Fraser, G. E. (1989), Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men. Cancer, 64: 598–604.

[citation needed]

Here are a few to start from. You can follow their references cited sections to thousands of related studies.

Associations between diet and cancer, ischemic heart disease, and all-cause mortality in non-Hispanic white California Seventh-day Adventists
Fraser 2009 Am J Clin Nutr September 1999 vol. 70 no. 3 532s-538s

Dietary Relationships With Fatal Colorectal Cancer Among Seventh-Day Adventists
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. David A. Snowdon, Ph.D., M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 74, Issue 2, 1 February 1985, Pages 307–317

Coronary heart disease mortality among Seventh-Day Adventists with differing dietary habits: a preliminary report
Roland L. Phillips, Frank R. Lemon, W. Lawrence Beeson, and Jan W. Kuzma. Am J Clin Nutr October 1978 vol. 31 no. 10 S191-S198

Diet and Lung Cancer in California Seventh-day Adventists
Gary E. Fraser W. Lowrence Beeson Ronald L. Phillips. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 133, Issue 7, 1 April 1991, Pages 683–693.

Association Between Reported Diet And All-Cause Mortality: Twenty-One-Year Follow-Up On 27, 530 Adult Seventh-Day Adventists
HAROLD A. Kahn Roland L. Phillips David A. Snowdon Warren Choi. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 119, Issue 5, 1 May 1984, Pages 775–787.

Dietary and hormonal interrelationships among vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists and nonvegetarian men.
B J Howie and T D Shultz. Am J Clin Nutr July 1985 vol. 42 no. 1 127-134

Animal product consumption and mortality because of all causes combined, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer in Seventh-day Adventists.
Snowdon. Am J Clin Nutr September 1988 vol. 48 no. 3 739-748.

Mortality Among California Seventh-Day Adventists for Selected Cancer Sites
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. Lawrence Garfinkel, M.A. J. W. Kuzma, Ph.D. W. Lawrence Beeson, M.S.P.H. Terry Lotz, M.S.P.H. Burton Brin, M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 65, Issue 5, 1 November 1980, Pages 1097–1107.

Diet and Serum Cholesterol Levels A Comparison between Vegetarians and Nonvegetarians in a Seventh-day Adventist Group
RAYMOND O. WEST, M.D., M.P.H. and OLIVE B. HAYES, M.P.H.. Am J Clin Nutr August 1968 vol. 21 no. 8 853-862.

Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men
Mills, P. K., Beeson, W. L., Phillips, R. L. and Fraser, G. E. (1989), Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men. Cancer, 64: 598–604.

[citation needed]

Here are a few to start from. You can follow their references cited sections to thousands of related studies.

Associations between diet and cancer, ischemic heart disease, and all-cause mortality in non-Hispanic white California Seventh-day Adventists
Fraser 2009 Am J Clin Nutr September 1999 vol. 70 no. 3 532s-538s

Dietary Relationships With Fatal Colorectal Cancer Among Seventh-Day Adventists
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. David A. Snowdon, Ph.D., M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 74, Issue 2, 1 February 1985, Pages 307–317

Coronary heart disease mortality among Seventh-Day Adventists with differing dietary habits: a preliminary report
Roland L. Phillips, Frank R. Lemon, W. Lawrence Beeson, and Jan W. Kuzma. Am J Clin Nutr October 1978 vol. 31 no. 10 S191-S198

Diet and Lung Cancer in California Seventh-day Adventists
Gary E. Fraser W. Lowrence Beeson Ronald L. Phillips. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 133, Issue 7, 1 April 1991, Pages 683–693.

Association Between Reported Diet And All-Cause Mortality: Twenty-One-Year Follow-Up On 27, 530 Adult Seventh-Day Adventists
HAROLD A. Kahn Roland L. Phillips David A. Snowdon Warren Choi. American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 119, Issue 5, 1 May 1984, Pages 775–787.

Dietary and hormonal interrelationships among vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists and nonvegetarian men.
B J Howie and T D Shultz. Am J Clin Nutr July 1985 vol. 42 no. 1 127-134

Animal product consumption and mortality because of all causes combined, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer in Seventh-day Adventists.
Snowdon. Am J Clin Nutr September 1988 vol. 48 no. 3 739-748.

Mortality Among California Seventh-Day Adventists for Selected Cancer Sites
Roland L. Phillips, M.D., Dr. P.H. Lawrence Garfinkel, M.A. J. W. Kuzma, Ph.D. W. Lawrence Beeson, M.S.P.H. Terry Lotz, M.S.P.H. Burton Brin, M.P.H. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 65, Issue 5, 1 November 1980, Pages 1097–1107.

Diet and Serum Cholesterol Levels A Comparison between Vegetarians and Nonvegetarians in a Seventh-day Adventist Group
RAYMOND O. WEST, M.D., M.P.H. and OLIVE B. HAYES, M.P.H.. Am J Clin Nutr August 1968 vol. 21 no. 8 853-862.

Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men
Mills, P. K., Beeson, W. L., Phillips, R. L. and Fraser, G. E. (1989), Cohort study of diet, lifestyle, and prostate cancer in adventist men. Cancer, 64: 598–604.

get hired based on merit

You mean like 80% of librarians? (2011)

Perhaps 60% of accountants? (2006)

Or do you want to opine that the professions are "catering" and 100% of the work in those fields is done by the minority of employees that are male?

There was a recent interesting paper, "Concordance cosmology without dark energy", which explained how dark energy was actually not required to explain the structure of the universe, if one just used a more accurate numerical model to simulate how the universe evolved. They even resolved a long-standing issue in cosmology whereby different ways of estimating the Hubble constant from observations gave different results. I'm looking forward to seeing how this theory develops, and how their findings are received by the rest of the cosmology community.

"There's a problem with that - you haven't explained the weird part"

I'm happy with my explanation. I read the article fully now and quite satisfied.

https://academic.oup.com/mnras...

...we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet or planetesimal fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous break-up event, possibly caused by tidal disruption or thermal processing. The minimum total mass associated with these fragments likely exceeds 106~\mearth, corresponding to an original rocky body of >100~km in diameter. We discuss the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system.

The latest dimming observations will give give more weight to this -- or maybe toss out this explanation entirely.

The so called WMAP cold spot looks to just be some sort of data error and probably does not in fact exist

Too bad because the idea was seriously cool and would have been useful for science fiction.

First off: I sincerely thank you for a reply about the issue itself.

My point is that the same household who earned the money - .vs. being given the money - would not be buying soft drinks and other low nutrition food AT ALL. It is common sense for anyone who has actually known anyone who is poor

I understand the thinking, but 'common sense' is not a great basis for reasoning, as it more than once equals 'myth'. It is a fact that buying 'the wrong things' is closely related to self-control and there is certainly a case to be made for some people having poor self control and thus both suck at getting work/getting their shit together and buying things they shouldn't buy. Research has however also shown that self-control diminishes when you are poor, due to the added stress of being poor.

See:
- https://academic.oup.com/jcr/a...
- https://thecorrespondent.com/4...

For one, I'm saying that your claim that poor people who earn money are definitely not 'ALL' going to avoid low nutrition food, but let's put that aside for a moment.
Because secondly, you are making the wrong comparison here. Not giving poor families money does not magically make them earn money. In fact, given the research above, poor families would in general experience less stress due to something like UBI, would have more self-control and make better decisions.

Keynsian economics - which you have re branded in order to make it sound better

Not really. Keynesian economics is government oriented, i.e. if the economy isn't doing well, have the government spend tax money on specific things that create jobs (large infrastructure projects are a favorite). Demand side economics is broader than that and that is where your point misses the mark. The idea of UBI in this regard is to let the people spend the money, instead of the government. A natural response to that could be: "Well then, why then not just lower taxes?"

The answer to that relates to the velocity of money. One of the main purposes of inflation and interest policy is to prevent people from saving all their money and postponing purchases. Ask an economist what the perfect consumer would look like, from an economic point of view. It would be someone who spends almost all his money as soon as he or she gets it (some amount of buffer is good to reduce volatility, but in general 'spend, spend, spend' is the credo). It just so happens that poor people (out of necessity) are the perfect consumers. Redistributing wealth to them is good for the economy.

Before I continue, this all is besides the huge benefits of reducing crime, increasing the level of education and health of the general public that things such as UBI (social security in general) achieve.

The money spent locally bit is actually quite simple. Yes, the grocery store can buy stuff from abroad. But the people working at the grocery store still get a cut. The owner of the grocery store gets a cut. The probably reasonably locally based distributor and their employees get a cut. Compare that to a trip abroad: apart from the plane ticket, all the money for the trip leaves the local economy. Poor people also don't generally engage in foreign investments, emigrating, and rare imported goods.

The trillions and trillions of dollars we have thrown at your idea since the 60's has barely moved the poverty needle.

Nixon actually wanted to do UBI, but was blocked politically (it's a very insightful read in general):
https://www.jacobinmag.com/201...

But your point is way too simplistic. You pretend that we've been applying demand si

What more worries me is does all this stuff make it to easy to decide to go to war in the first place?

It does, but it shouldn't. The standard should be "war means innocent little babies are going to die. Is this action worth it?" And the answer to that is almost always "no."

or should we keep the blood off our hands, even when that means sitting by and allowing injustice and even atrocities to occur?

Generally yes, we should keep the blood off our hands, because eventually if everybody decides they don't want blood on their hands the wars kind of stop.

Obviously it depends on what kind of ethics you practice. If you're a utilitarian or consequentialist then you're going to start trying to predict the future about how many people you're going to kill or how many people would have died otherwise. As a Catholic and therefore big on the deontological ethics I get to neatly sidestep the question by saying "killing is wrong and therefore don't do it."

Interesting, sort of releated: I just read a study titled Roman Catholic beliefs produce characteristic neural responses to moral dilemmas wherein the authors hooked up atheists and Catholics to MRI machines and asked them moral questions and showed there's a real difference in the thought processes and areas of the brains activated. Makes me wonder if we can never really agree on a common ethical system between the religious and the non-religious.

Actually salt doesn't contribute to high blood pressure: https://academic.oup.com/ajh/article/28/3/362/2743418/Relationship-Between-Nutrition-and-Blood-Pressure. This is something that's been shown multiple times in research for a quite a while, but can't seem to overcome this myth that's been propagated for years that it's become one of those things that everyone just "knows" and no one questions or thinks about.

Sure, salt can make your blood pressure go up, but it would be weird if it didn't. Increase the amount of sodium intake and some of that is absorbed by you cells which then take on more water to maintain a balance in concentration. This makes them swell (which is why if someone is severely dehydrated you can kill them if you give them water too rapidly) and naturally add pressure against blood vessels and increase blood pressure.

So it would be nice if the summary linked to the actual study instead of the splash page for the journal. Some of the results wouldn't hurt either.

Neuroticism was associated with thicker cortex and smaller area and folding in prefrontal–temporal regions. Extraversion was linked to thicker pre-cuneus and smaller superior temporal cortex area. Openness was linked to thinner cortex and greater area and folding in prefrontal–parietal regions. Agreeableness was correlated to thinner prefrontal cortex and smaller fusiform gyrus area. Conscientiousness was associated with thicker cortex and smaller area and folding in prefrontal regions. ... Cortical thickness and surface area/folding were inversely related each others as a function of different FFM traits (neuroticism, extraversion and consciousness vs openness), which may reflect brain maturational effects that predispose or protect against psychiatric disorders.

Eh... this is based on 500 brain scans. It's what we can do now, but there's really no reason to believe any of the findings from the study will hold.

While probably much safer than traditional cigarettes, electronic cigarettes still carry risks. For starters the flavoured ones produce toxic and carcinogenic compounds when they are vaporized. See following link for peer reviewed paper on the subject.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Here are three peer reviewed papers that show that e-cigarette vapour causes DNA damage

https://academic.oup.com/toxsc...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

http://www.nature.com/ebd/jour...

If you need a low dose of nicotine then I would suggest gum or patches would be safer than e-cigarettes but I doubt even then that it is a zero risk choice because in general there is no such thing as zero risk choice.

So it would be nice if the summary linked to the actual study instead of the splash page for the journal. Some of the results wouldn't hurt either.

Neuroticism was associated with thicker cortex and smaller area and folding in prefrontal–temporal regions. Extraversion was linked to thicker pre-cuneus and smaller superior temporal cortex area. Openness was linked to thinner cortex and greater area and folding in prefrontal–parietal regions. Agreeableness was correlated to thinner prefrontal cortex and smaller fusiform gyrus area. Conscientiousness was associated with thicker cortex and smaller area and folding in prefrontal regions. ... Cortical thickness and surface area/folding were inversely related each others as a function of different FFM traits (neuroticism, extraversion and consciousness vs openness), which may reflect brain maturational effects that predispose or protect against psychiatric disorders.

Probably not, but there's plenty of dislike in the US for Brazil's leftwing government, with plenty of attacking propaganda by US political pundits. The last time a coup happen in Brazil it was directly supported by the US. Combine that with the fact that the current president (the one they're trying to impeach) was tortured by US and UK-trained torturers, it's not that far-fetched to assume that some US citizens are also involved in these trolling campaigns (but again, I doubt it's the case for this Igw guy; he's probably just badly informed).

Seems to me this finding supports:

Epiphenomenalism --
An approach to the mind-body problem that is a form of dualism and one-way interactionism (1), assuming as it does that mental experiences are real but are merely trivial by-products or epiphenomena of one particular class of physical brain processes, real but incidental, like the smoke rising above a factory, so that physical processes can cause mental experiences but not vice versa. Compare psychophysical parallelism. [From Greek epi on + phainein to show + -ismos indicating a state or condition]

http://oxfordindex.oup.com/vie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What if you could buy all UK combinations is a what if you bought every combination for the UK lottery for rollovers - that is when it has not been won the previous draw(s)- and it turns out you are £3.2 million down.

John Haigh Probability answers some questions on the Lottery such as when does it make sense to go for one draw rather than playing in the draw weekly.

decimate means reduce by a 10th

Not necessarily.

People could say "decimate" means "blue" but that still doesn't make it right, nor contravene its etymological origins. Hard to get around "deci" in there.....

You mean like September, October, November and December? Words change.

decimate means reduce by a 10th

Not necessarily.

People could say "decimate" means "blue" but that still doesn't make it right, nor contravene its etymological origins. Hard to get around "deci" in there.....

Actually its quite easy, use a dictionary. The word's Latin origin is noted and its Latin definition is offered and noted as "obsolete". Its modern English definition merely means a great portion of.