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This isn't anything new . Also people with epilepsy have it particularly bad

Both Oxford and Cambridge offer a BA course in Mathematics.

It's very common for research universities to take students from around the globe. This isn't unique to the US, either. For example, here's some Oxford's PhD students in CS:

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/...

It's a very positive thing, actually. Provincialism doesn't improve research.

There is a "new BMI formula" here:

http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/t...

Tall people get a slight bonus on BMI, but less than you might think, and the measure doesn't seem to be much better than the old BMI.

You are 3D, but if you're healthy, you grow preferentially along one axis.

BMI gives some rough, useful information and correlates decently with obesity:

http://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detai...

It is known that for tall people, BMI overestimates obesity, but that just knocks you down from a BMI of about 28.3 to 27.3, still way too high.

http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/t...

You're not obese, but you are almost certainly overweight, since you are not a body builder.

That's not a judgment, it just should encourage you to get your actual body fat measured (a few dollars for calipers), and then take steps to get it down to some reasonable level. You should aim for less than 20% (you're probably somewhere around 25%). Also have regular physicals and check your blood pressure.

Judge her by her own words, not edited snippets of them. It's the job of an ethicist to appreciate ethical dilemmas before they become practical reality. I'm not completely convinced, however that she hasn't crossed the line into advocacy of some truly disturbing proposals.

did you know that london tube officials are considering a scheme whereby passersby will be able to help stop runaway trains by pushing others onto the tracks, thereby saving the lives of countless others. It's true. I read it in the daily mail.

The article makes it sound like she's the head of some team of scientists actually working on how to make this happen. Maybe philosophy journalism is actually worse than science journalism.

If you look at her other posts she doesn't seem to be a complete nutter.

That was true in the past but an increasing number of researchers are suggesting it won't be in the future - . I actually welcome the day when machines can take care of all of the necessities (and a lot of the rest). The way we organise the economy will have to change though, and we can expect complete carnage while people get used to that...

Trying to rally the public with "if you get a scrape you will die" is pretty much fear mongering. And fear mongers can fuck right off.

I think that you should read up on the development history of penicillin, even though you're an anonymous coward.

The second patient ever treated with penicillin had this case history :

With the help of Charles Fletcher, a young doctor at the Radcliffe Infirmary, on 12 February 1941, Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman, became the first patient to be treated with penicillin. He had scratched his face on a rose bush, the wound had become infected and the infection had spread. Fletcher injected him with penicillin regularly over four days, and within 24 hours he was greatly improved.

Remember - this was a patient who was considered so likely to die from his disease that giving him the second ever human dose of penicillin. The treatment was considered his only realistic chance of surviving (and he did survive, for 2 weeks, until they ran out of supplies.)

By the way, he was dieing hard, not dieing easy.

The ignorant who are willing to learn, once they have learnt science rules, will forgive him. i don't think you can accuse Dawkins of not advancing the understanding of science. that was his job for a while http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/previous-holders-simonyi-professorship/professor-richard-dawkins

As a man who is 6'6" and 255, I have a place in mind where they can stick these new seats.

I'm only 6' 1" and 230, the biggest pain for me is my knees hitting the seat in front of me. Since I have only a 36" inseam, I am seeing 30" between my back and the row in front of me beautiful in theory. In reality, I know my shins are longer than 6", so I am still puzzled on what they are measuring here.

At 6'1" and 230 your Body Mass Index is over 30 - obese.

At 6'6" your BMI is just below 30, overweight but not quite obese.

The airlines suck, but they are not the only problem. You both probably thought you were just " big men" but basically normal.

FWIW, the BMI scale was invented before calculators etc., existed, so it's rather oversimplified. There is an alternative, which better represents BMI of tall and short persons. It gives lower BMI values for tall persons, but higher BMI values for short persons.

Of course, even using this BMI scale, the 6'1" person comes in at around 29 (overweight, but not quite obese). The 6'6" person comes in at just over 27 (somewhat overweight). Neither of them is in the "normal" BMI category, even on the scale which is kinder to tall persons.

This is a working paper by two guys. "Working paper" means it has not undergone any kind of review. The paper itself does not appear to be online.

Osborne's cv is here: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mosb/MAOsborne.pdf Can anyone find Frey's CV?

I see no point saying more without being able to read the paper, but I can't help notice the weasel words "at risk" in the published summary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm1JuukxhLQ
with this running
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/
instead of kinect

Pieces are already written, all it needs is someone to put it together.

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/
did it 5 years ago

I will point out that cherry picking extreme, narrow, simplistic crude aspects of religion is going to create a fun house mirror distortion.

If you want better academic data on the subject I might recommend Oxfords’ “Explaining Religion” http://www.icea.ox.ac.uk/large-grants/explaining-religion/

Or, if that is too much, a good lay article can be found here: http://www.economist.com/node/10903480

A cool game with more potential than was realized.

On a more serious note, you can build genomes in any molecular editor. Try the open source Coot.

Or, use your favorite text editor (GATACGGTACAT....). This commercial gimmick software is not newsworthy, even here.

If you can't make a robot without realtime video processing work in those specs you're doing something wrong.

I am a computer vision scientist and my day job involves writing computer vision algorithms, often realtime ones. Back when I started I was working on an SGI O2, which at the time was a decent machine because while it was slower than a PC in raw FLOPS, it had zero copy video I/O and more memory bandwidth than Jesus.

I love your dismissiveness of "you're doing something wrong".

It's possible to get a realtime system running on MicroVAX 3400, which can't even memcpy a live video feed in real time (see RAPID, Harris and Stennett, 1990), but it is very hard and works with few algorithms.

Doing anything full frame is hard. Sure ASL interpretation was possible a while back (600MHz PIII, http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/publications/2002/Lockton02/lockton02.pdf) which would be comparable to this SoC, but it wasn't easy. It also has quite serious restrictions on things like background sleeves and watches. Making it better will require more advanced algorithms and more computation.

It's still not possible to do "real" SIFT in realtime on a CPU, though simplified versions can run "reasonably" fast on a phone. Still the realtime phone based systems use all sorts of faster, complex algorithms, often involving heavy doses of machine learning (like FERNS) in order to save runtime computation.

Systems like PTAM can now run in realtime in an OKish way on a high spec phone, with lots of very careful engineering by experts. More recent, advanced ones like DTAM require a PC with a decent GPU.

So if you think wanting a PC to do vision means "you're doing something wrong." than you're talking out of your ass.

As a Creationist, how do you account for the 52,800 years of leaf layers found in this Japanese lake? Time-capsule’ Japanese lake sediment advances radiocarbon dating for older objects

Nice take on ethics of artificial wombs

The problem is, no one has developed software that you walk around a building with a video camera, and it becomes a quake level. So unless they did that, I'd be interested in how they find out what is not traversable.

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZiSK7OMANw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mimAWVm-0qA

You can study both. I did that degree almost a quarter of a century ago (it was called Mathematics and Computation then) at the suggestion of one of my teachers and its one of the best choices I ever made.

Please be aware of the strong deficiencies in the Ugandan trial referenced here:
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/05/when-bad-science-kills-or-how-to-spread-aids/

At this moment in time there appears to be no compelling argument for broad scale circumcision across the population.

There's no argument at all for circumcision of children. Please stop mutilating children. Just stop.

Adult men can make their own decision whether to cut their cock off.

The less AIDS argument does not hold up. Full fucking stop.

You could start here, but there are a variety of criticisms of these studies, which explains why so few organizations take them seriously.

IO will destroy you

Io from mythology, Diskworld, D&D, Jupiter, ... which one?

The study relies heavily on prior studies done on adult men in Africa, the scientific validity of which has been very strongly criticized:

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/05/when-bad-science-kills-or-how-to-spread-aids/

The three WHO Africa studies did not survive review:

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/05/when-bad-science-kills-or-how-to-spread-aids/

http://www.publichealthinafrica.org/index.php/jphia/article/view/jphia.2011.e4/html_9

Not application:

http://www.theafricareport.com/index.php/20120711501815186/southern-africa/zimbabwe-concern-over-high-hiv-rates-among-circumcised-males-501815186.html

http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pdf/CR22/CR22.pdf (botton of p135)

Also, infection of men by heterosexual sex is the least important transmission vector in the West, nor does circumcision apparently influence the infection of women by men:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60998-3/abstract

Besides, how rational is it to tell men that they must be circumcised to prevent HIV, but afterwards they still need condoms to be protected from STDs?

Not only that, from what I can tell the African trials were an exercise in how not to conduct a reliable scientific study and it's a mystery that everyone takes them so seriously. Some of the screw-ups were pretty spectacular - the circumcised group had additional counselling on condom use and safe sex compared to the control and weren't allowed or able to have sex for a relatively large proportion of the study period. Others were more subtle. For instance, they terminated the trial early and circumcised the control group, supposedly because the benefits were so great that they couldn't ethically leave, and this kind of early termination has been shown to cause researchers to find effects that did not in reality actually exist in trials like this one.

They also noticed that the rate of HIV infection amongst the members of the study decreased after the end of the trial and somehow concluded that this was the result of circumcision somehow becoming more effective over time, despite the fact that this could just as easily be caused by (for instance) their exposure decreasing as they got older for unrelated reasons and the lack of a plausible mechanism through which this would happen. They then extrapolated out this decrease into the future and quoted this extrapolated figure prominently as evidence of the effectiveness of circumcision. That prominent journals and institutions were willing to buy into this is truely bizarre.

I have an old Mac running Tiger, and I can tell you this: Apple stops providing security updates after a certain number of OS releases. And now, Snow Leopard is the next one up to be discontinued.

You can still use all your programs, but I hope you don't mind being hacked and having your identity stolen. It's all part of The Apple Experience (TM)!

Maybe try googling " lifetime risk car accident america" and reading the very first link:

http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/trasnsportpop.html

They give annual US odds at 1:~6200 and lifetime odds of 1:~80.
*sighs*

Google "Average US electricity Use'. EIA reports the average as 11,496 kWh/year.

Tennessee was highest at 16,716 kWh and Maine the lowest at 6,252 kWh, for state averages.

From these two documents, it seems mostly a matter that you in the Netherlands use a huge amount less electricity for space heating and cooling, combined with fewer energy-intensive appliances such as dryers, and when you do have them, they're more efficient.

The documents also showed that, on average, electricity use is tending up in the Netherlands, while it's tending downwards in the USA.

And then, disillusioned, the engineer turns his thoughts to other things.

When Bernard Haykel asked the engineers and scientists among the numerous fundamentalist Islamists he interviewed what it was about Salafi thought that appealed to them, they pointed to its intellectually clean, unambiguous and all- encompassing nature (personal communication, September 2007).

Check this shit out: a bunch of trans-humanists who think artificial intelligence is the biggest threat ever, so they want to slow it down by working out plans in detail to sabotage Intel. You gotta keep in mind that nerds are nuts, and engineers are terrorists alot more than other people.

HAHHH! Found the article! http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/lenny/NPG01_Orrell.ps

Well, it looks like certain professionals are actually over-represented in general, but it also appears my original statement is both valid and applies to highly educated people too. I guess it makes sense that the sense of hopelessness is even greater when you have no prospects despite being highly educated. So, while my supposition about their motivations for getting a specific degree could very well be wrong, the marginalization aspect at least has some evidentiary basis. Engineers in particular (doctors to a slightly lesser extent) are apparently attracted not to a guarantee of paradise but to the rigidly enforced structure of extremist religious groups. They were also in abundance in their support of Mussolini, Hitler, and are currently over-represented in the Aryan movement, the far Christian right, and Hindu fundamentalist groups (to name a couple). The whole "preaching about blowing people up getting you into heaven" doesn't carry all that much weight, since the same types of people are drawn to non-religious violent movements too. It's about circumstances and the hope of structure and order.

http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf

The point still stands: The simple act of preaching hate does not create killers. A lot of other circumstances are necessary, and foreign "adventures" are historically a major contributing factor to spikes in terrorism. Religion is not a cause, it's a symptom.

Apart from any other argument, you do a fair job of deifying the Scientific Method.

I have great faith in it myself; it has been demonstrably useful during recent history, and I expect it to continue to be. However -- the view that all truth can be mechanistically derived by following this particular philosophy is fundamentally an act of "faith". Empirically, it is a useful and reasonable faith -- but that doesn't change what it is. Kurt Godel did everyone a favor by rigorously proving that truths exist in any system which cannot be proven within that system -- that there are unprovable truths. They might even be expressible, and recognizable to us as true -- but ultimately require going "outside the system" to prove them. What is most interesting to me is what this means for the human mind -- we (often easily) recognize certain things as true which cannot be mechanically proven to be -- a fact which many mathematicians and philosophical sorts have argued to be a demonstration that our minds are not mechanisms.

I don't find "faith", as a concept, incompatible with science. In fact, I find it necessary -- the mathematics demonstrates that my mind cannot prove itself to be consistent, if it is a mechanism. I still have faith that it is suited to its purpose, though, and use it anyway. I cannot prove that the Scientific Method can distinguish every truth and every falsehood under the right conditions -- in fact, I would suspect it cannot. I still have faith it will be a useful tool tomorrow, and I cannot suggest a better alternative at present. I can't even prove that the real number system is completely characterized and described, but it suits my purposes to believe that to be the case.

I consider agnosticism to be a reasonable position, but don't have major problems with people believing something to be true rather than saying "I don't know". To me, it isn't something that science even enters into -- it is the wrong tool for the job. Religion isn't the only area that this applies to, either; most of sociology, law, philosophy, art, music -- heck, even the experience of taking a hike in the woods (for me) -- all of these things that make up "the human experience" are not reducible to science. We can theorize, but we cannot produce fully deterministic models of these things and the individuals involved. Even the science of understanding and applying these things seems fundamentally different ( http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/lesbrule.html ). One might easily argue that this distinction means these things are "not science". I'm OK with that point of view -- but it does not follow that they are "incompatible with the philosophy that underlies science". They're just something that science is not intended to address.

Chess in 672 bytes

How many k? One. One k. Not two k, one k. And here it is.

Cheers,
Ian

I'm not really impressed by either. Wolfram made some very good software but then wrote that wretched book which was primarily a mix of either wrong ideas or unoriginal ideas. There was a strong failure to credit the work others had done with cellular automaton. I couldn't tell if that was due to his ignorance or his general self-promotional tendencies.

As to the Lifeboat Foundation I lost minimal trust in them after they got in bed with Pam Geller http://lifeboat.com/ex/boards (yes, that's Pamela "Obama is a Muslim with a Fake Birth Certificate" Geller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Geller#Birther_views). If that weren't enough they've been involved in fear mongering about the LHC http://lifeboat.com/ex/particle.accelerator.shield. There are however other groups that are dealing with exisential risk threats in a serious and useful fashion. The Future of Humanity Institute http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ which is affiliated with the University of Oxford, and headed by the very bright Nick Bostrom thinks about existential risk issues in general. Meanwhile, there are organizations focusing on specific concerns. For example, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is focused on dealing with detecting and dealing with large asteroids. They have the advantage of also having a very clever name. Internet cookie to anyone who can figure out why they are called that without searching.

Engineers of Jihad

This is certainly not a new idea. It is sometimes referred to as the "rapture of the nerds" version of a technological singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a big fan of the idea and one of the major proponents.

As to the actual feasibility, I ran across Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap a little while ago, which discusses the possibility given our current knowledge of how the brain works. It provides dates on how long Moore's Law would have to continue based on varyingly optimistic assumptions about how much work is necessary to actually emulate a brain.

Overall, I think there are two main problems with expecting immortality via brain uploading: (1) 40+ years is a very long time to assume Moore's Law for and (2) even if we can emulate a human brain, scanning an existing one and transferring it into a computer may not be possible.

This is certainly not a new idea. It is sometimes referred to as the "rapture of the nerds" version of a technological singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a big fan of the idea and one of the major proponents.

As to the actual feasibility, I ran across Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap a little while ago, which discusses the possibility given our current knowledge of how the brain works. It provides dates on how long Moore's Law would have to continue based on varyingly optimistic assumptions about how much work is necessary to actually emulate a brain.

Overall, I think there are two main problems with expecting immortality via brain uploading: (1) 40+ years is a very long time to assume Moore's Law for and (2) even if we can emulate a human brain, scanning an existing one and transferring it into a computer may not be possible.

which would make the Scientific Method itself a tool with limited but useful application. Or rather, it would prove that there are discoveries in our Universe that can be made that are impossible to arrive at via the Scientific Method.

You've just stated twice precisely the philosophical implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. We don't need additional physical discoveries to 'prove' that. See: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/implic.html

So I've both taken GR as an undergrad/grad student, and now taught it to both. My undergrad was in math, grad school physics. To understand modern GR (singularity theorems, black holes, cosmology, lensing effects etc) from a math background the subjects that really help are:

1) Special Relativity. This is an easier intro that really comes out of the end of electrodynamics courses (ie, why there's that pesky 'c' in Maxwell's equations that doesn't seem Gallilean invariant). There are outstanding lecture notes available from, say, oxford university on both SR and GR - see www.maths.ox.ac.uk and go to lecture notes for undergraduates and dig around a bit.

2) Differential Geometry. I started out with 2D shapes in 3D spaces (Geometry of surfaces) which actually taught me all I need to know about how the idea of a metric is formed etc. Then I moved on to general differential geometry (book: Differential Maniforlds by Hitchin: http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/hitchin/hitchinnotes/hitchinnotes.html) . If you can wrap your head around Riemannian geometry, moving over to the Lorentzian case isn't too hard.

Anything you can get your hands on to do with tensors will help a LOT, as all modern interpretations are based on the abstract index notation which is written in tensors.

For learning GR itself, the standard book is Wald's General Relativity. Carrol's book is pretty good too, but Wald seems to be the one that just about everyone I know cuts their teeth on.

I found GR a hell of a leap from everything I'd understood so far, so I took a long, long time reading through notes again and again until I understood the ideas behind things like connections, covariant derivatives, tensors, Christoffel symbols etc. Don't expect to learn it quickly or easily like most concepts in statistics, but rather be prepared for it to take a long time. As you probably know by now, maths is a participation sport, so really flex those muscles by working through any examples/problems you can get your hands on - that was really what made concepts sink in for me.

Let me know if I've assumed too much background (to get to these you need prerequisites like topology, analysis, euclidean geometry etc). But I'm assuming that you want to understand the modern mathematical background of curved space-times rather than just the general philosophy (if so, as someone else suggested Einstein's original book on the special and general theories is a delight to read).

There's a wonderful book called "Quantum Field Theory In A Nutshell", by a guy called Zee. It's fantastic. It's also about the most concise introduction that I've found; you might also get a kick out of reading Feynman's doctoral thesis. In short, be prepared for a whole bunch of Lagrangians (or, more precisely, Lagrangian Densities) and proofs that you see once, scream loudly, and then forget about. I don't know how much understanding of quantum mechanics you have, but you need an awful lot of it, specifically Fermi's Golden Rule. Again, as a mathematician you'll find this easier than perhaps most. I can recommend this book as an introduction to quantum mechanics, which starts from a knowledge of linear vector spaces in the Dirac notation. After that, Zee (and many, many glasses of whisky) will get you the rest of the way (inasmuch as there is a 'way', or anything at the end of it). The Higgs mechanism in particular is beautiful. You don't need to remember your curvilinear coordinates very well, but Lie algebra is vital. The trouble with particle physics is that a lot of it is phenomenological -- you'll find High Energy Physics, by Donald Purkins a very good introduction to the experimental side of it, and that side is important. Good luck!

First off, you don't state how much knowledge of maths and physics you _actually_ have beforehand, This makes answering the question an awful lot harder -- a 'college course in calculus' could be evaluating simple derivatives, or it could be some nasty vector calc and differential equations. In the order that they come into my head, you need to understand _intimately_ vector calculus (leading to Einstein notation -- play with it and become comfortable with it!), methods of solving partial differential equations, multivariate calculus, and how to properly play with differentials (i.e. proofs that start with statements like "df(x, y) = \partial f / \partial x dx + \partial f / \partial y dy"). You'll also need to properly understand matrix algebra, and ideally what tensors are (hint: generalisations of matricies that follow certain properties). You should be able to prove vector identities in Einstein notation, and be quite comfortable manipulating 'hardcore maths'. Honestly, just go away and play with maths until you understand it fully, you understand where it comes from, and you can use it without thinking about it at all. After that, try and become familiar with special relativity. This will be hard. Feynman explains everything very well in his lectures, but he doesn't list any problems: the best way to learn physics is to derive a true statement (like the lorentz contractions) and go away and shove it in all sorts of different situations (i.e. answer problems with it). The book by French & Taylor is commonly well-received; there are many different textbooks. Find a good set of problems, and answer them. Then, when you understand modern Special Relativity, get a large GR book -- there are many; Gravitation, or "General Relativity for Physicists" is a good one -- and read it. _Think_ about it, and answer the problems at the end of every chapter. If your book doesn't have questions at the end of each chapter, go away, and get one that does. Make sure you do them, and if you don't get something, find out why. If you can't find out why, ask someone who can. Finally, a taught undergraduate level course in GR would be a fantastic introduction after a well-defined amount of knowledge has been acquired. The lecture notes from the course at my home institution can be found here.

A specific example: Oxford

http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/computer_science/computer_science_.html

Cambridge is a less good example because in the first year they make you do other stuff:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/intro/

(20 years ago or so, CS didn't exist in the first year, so you had to apply to do something else then change subjects. Now you can spend _part_ of your first year
doing it.)

Imperial College, London:

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ugprospectus/facultiesanddepartments/computing/computingcourses

And how about Pisa:

http://www.di.unipi.it/

Oxford's campus-wide wireless LAN project, OWL, operates like a hotspot scheme with open access points and a redirection to a login page for temporary credentials when you open a web browser. If you're a student or faculty member, you can instead use Cisco Anyconnect to access the university VPN and bypass the login screen.

Not only does the university support Anyconnect on Linux clients, it also provides guidance for setting up an entirely Free Software alternative for those who would rather not download the official software. It's really quite good.

Further details at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/wireless/

If I understand correctly, this project would use Nereus-V instead of BOINC. The former transmits data through a Web browser, where the latter does so using the BOINC client. I can't say more because I don't really see how those are much different at the end of the day, but with Nereus, you connect to projects over HTTP, which they argue is easier for users than launching a pre-configured native client.

Come on, get your buzzwords right. Cloud computing is when much of the processing is done on remote servers (the "cloud"). Distributed computing is when the processing is done by ordinary desktops worldwide. That's what this is. The article makes this mistake several times, but it's not entirely their fault. The system is called the "Nereus V Cloud" despite clearly being a distributed computing program.

OK looks like my figures are a bit wrong. But after corrections the point still stands:

The NHS 2.7billion cost was just for England:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7654153.stm

Oxford uni says cost is 5 billion:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2009/090609_1.html

Tobacco tax revenue = 10.5 billion:
http://www.the-tma.org.uk/tma-publications-research/facts-figures/tax-revenue-from-tobacco/

One has also to wonder whether the 5 billion is the absolute cost or a _relative_ cost increase compared to nonsmokers.

For example it's like saying dinner X costs 5 billion. But if you must have dinner anyway and the alternatives cost 2 billion, then the actual difference is 3 billion, despite dinner X indeed costing 5 billion.

Because nonsmokers also get sick, eventually die and thus also cost the NHS money :).

For example if a nonsmoker picked a lifestyle and diet which was super healthy (say steamed fish and vegetables) but as a result ended up surviving cancers a few times (they won't die from chemo, surgery, heart disease or stroke, because they're fit and healthy) and eventually dying at 95 after lingering in a nursing home (paid for by NHS[1]) with age onset dementia or Alzheimers (because they won't die of heart disease or strokes). So a lot of people picking a long walks, steamed fish and vegetables lifestyle might actually cost the NHS more billions than smoking does ;).

I've seen some pretty bullshit cost estimates too - one actually said that potential lost earnings from a smoker dying earlier = cost to society. Given that smokers tend to die near retirement or soon after, even if they are earning a lot it doesn't mean that them dying at that point would be such a great loss to the rest of society.

Lastly I'm a nonsmoker and have never smoked in my life (except via second hand smoke ). I don't like cigarette smoke (pipe smoke actually doesn't smell that bad), but to me it seems ridiculous for governments to ban away such great sources of tax revenue while making stupid noises about "aging populations".

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-13010087
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4002953