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According to the data, people with guns in their homes are 5x more likely to be shot than people without guns in their homes. So while guns might deter an attacker, in real life it's much more likely that someone in the house gets angry and shoots someone (2x as likely), or gets depressed and shoots themselves (10x more likely), and those deaths vastly outnumber the lives saved by the presence of the gun. And yes, people who are angry or depressed, but don't have a gun, could attack using a knife, etc., but the data there is clear, too - gun attacks have much higher fatality rates than knives, bats, etc. Because people who are shot die most of the time, people who are knifed or hit with a bat very rarely die. Or as an ER nurse put it a while ago, "people who arrive with knife wounds walk out. people who arrive with gunshot wounds are carried out."

This statistic is well known. Odd how it doesn't come up in these discussions too often.

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/...

Correction: I put the wrong URL in the links about plankton. The correct URL for the paper comparing plankton to land plants is http://plankt.oxfordjournals.o...

Last I checked, planting a few trees won't affect CO2 levels. Plankton does almost all of the co2 conversion.

Where did you check? According to this paper, far from doing "almost all of the CO2 conversion," plankton does less than half: "the global net primary production from phytoplankton is given as 45–50 Gt C/year. This may be compared with current published estimates for land plants of 45–68 Gt C/year and for coastal vegetation of 1.9 Gt C/year."

Earh is 50 kiloparsecs from the Large Magellic Cloud, 778 kiloParsecs from the Andromeda Galaxy. And 2 Megaparsecs from this newly discovered galaxy. Apparently. KKs is an isolated spheroidal galaxy-- not a satellite of the Milky way, Andromeda or even Triangulum, nor is it clustered with other dwarf galaxies in the local group.
The paper says

Since 2008, only three galaxies had been newly discovered in a spherical shell between radii 1 and 3Mpc around the Local Group. Two of them are dIrrs, UGC 4879 (Kopylov et al. 2008) and Leo P (Giovanelli et al. 2013), and the third one, KK 258 (Karachentsev et al. 2014), belongs to the transition type dTr with minimal but detectable gas and young stars. Here we report the discovery in this volume of a dwarf spheroidal system KKs 3 ([KK2000] 03 = SGC 0224.3–7345 in the nomencla- ture of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database) at a distance of D = 2.12 ± 0.07 Mpc and well removed from any other known galaxy.

So the interesting feature isn't that it's close. It's that it's distant from any galaxy.

The low surface brightness object KKs 3 with J2000 coordinates: RA = 02h24m44.s4, Dec. = â'73*30'51" was detected in full sky surveys by Karachentseva & Karachentsev (2000) and Whiting, Hau & Irwin (2002) as a potential dSph galaxy neighbouring the Local Group.

It was discovered in 95 by an African doctor who just guessed and saved 7 out of 8 people;

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

something wasn't right about this though.

http://jvi.asm.org/content/75/...

the who was skeptical and it's only been in the last few months when it's been approved, when it was used out of desperation that the protocol has gained any traction. there are billions at stake with an EBOV vaccine, just as there was in 1948 with the polio vaccine.

"Klenner's paper (Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. J. South. Med. and Surg., 111:210-214, 1949.) on curing 60 cases of polio in the epidemic of 1948 should have changed the way infectious diseases were treated but it did not." - Robert Cathcart

Now look at these three:

http://en.ird.fr/the-media-cen...
http://orthomolecular.org/libr...
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...

There's a reason there's no HIV vaccine and it's the same reason there never will nor can be an EBOV vaccine - Coxsackie viruses are different and if you ignore their RNA encoding and subsequent biochemical expression you're gonna have a really bad day. The second paper above explains why they cannot work, see Keshen's disease in Wikipedia, it's the Coxsackie virus disease we figured this out from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

There's no need to mess around with blood, honest and antibodies are not the reason it works - what do antibodies need to do their job - think!. Look at recent work in the field, Google (scholar) "selenium" with words like "hiv", "ebola", "cancer" and pay attention to the work of the last 4-5 years and especially THAT 1995 Zaire paper - the only time Pauling ever posted to the net. Thanks for the warning Linus, you clever clever boy. Now there was a Doctor.

http://scarc.library.oregonsta...

If you don't get the booster, you run the risk of getting the disease and dying.

Nice way to fall for the lies. Everything is just soo dangerous and trying to kill you. The terrorists are full of these diseases and we must let the TSA inject shit into everybody who walks down the sidewalk.

So you are saying, what, because some vaccines Are not permanent, why bother getting it?

According to the CDC's site: Even though children who haven't received DTaP vaccines are at least 8 times more likely to get pertussis than children who received all 5 recommended doses of DTaP, they are not the driving force behind the large scale outbreaks or epidemics. However, their parents are putting them at greater risk of getting a serious pertussis infection and then possibly spreading it to other family or community members. So it isn't the unvaccinated that are the problem.

In a study done by Oxford University for all pertussis outbreaks in San Rafael California between March and October 2010, 81% were completely up to date on their vaccinations, 8% were unvaccinated, and 11% were partially vaccinated. So people are hyping up the fear for something that isn't even the problem. If you want a prevention, then you need to focus on making a better vaccine, not forcing more people to take risks for something that is ineffective.

That is not how viruses work. If you are immunized the virus gets killed by your immune system and you do not become a "carrier".

And here we have a completely ignorant statement from someone who wants to tell me what to put into my body. Here are some links to the evidence that you do become an unknown carrier after getting the pertussis vaccine. Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model and Whooping Cough Study May Offer Clue on Surge

Surprise, surprise, the state is now in the midst of a whooping cough outbreak.

Surprise, surprise, the resurgence of whooping cough isn't due to anti-vaxxers ... yet. It's due to acellular pertusis vaccine losing its effectiveness with time and not stopping those infected from transmitting the virus. But, by all means, go on with the alarmism so that when the cause really needs to be taken seriously no one will believe it.

The one someone threw at me in the last week or so was about a medical article.

Popular news headline: Marijuana Use Causes Brain Damage Confirmed

University press release title: Adolescents most at risk of brain damage from long-term, heavy cannabis use.

Actual research article title: Effect of long-term cannabis use on axonal fibre connectivity

It's not just expertise that makes you think that the news is misleading. Often times the news actually is misleading, intentionally. I'm not saying the American news media are collectively guilty of lying to the American public, but I think that collectively and severally they deserve a fair trial.

Your link is misleading. Yes, marijuana does not do good things to developing brains — there are much better studies which demonstrate this. There is no similar evidence which suggests that either moderate use or use beginning in adulthood has the same effect.

Here is the actual study in question. Do note that their average test subject started at age 16 and smokes five joints per day. From the article,

The association presents compelling evidence for white matter reacting differently to cannabis exposure commencing during adolescence compared with adulthood...

One joint does not a pothead make. You've pretty much already missed the boat for pot-related brain damage, but your knee-jerk antagonism against cannabis users is equally as dumb. Even if everything you imagine to be true about cannabis use was in fact the truth,

I think that THC use and Texting while driving should have the exact same penalties as someone who has .08 BAC.

This does not follow. There is no objective evidence suggesting that marijuana is equally impairing, and suggesting that any amount of use or exposure to THC is equivalent to being dangerously impaired is simple prejudice.

I'm curious if this'll be an all-or-nothing thing, or if there are degrees of gradation. Pain itself serves good in that it prevents one from doing things that cause it, so we don't injure ourselves.

The article at http://brain.oxfordjournals.or... has a short section titled "MRS5698 does not alter normal nociception". That section says, "MRS5698 tested at the highest effective dose had no effect in tests that measure the acute thermal nociceptive component of physiological pain: tail flick and hot-plate (Fig. 2H and I)."

Wikipedia says,

Nociception (also nocioception or nociperception) is the encoding and processing of harmful stimuli in the nervous system,[1] and, therefore, the ability of a body to sense potential harm.

Any doctors here - does that mean pain from danger still is felt, just not chronic pain from damaged nerves?

There are a growing number of studies showing long term psychological damage associated with administered anaesthesia on infants. Being part of the club (I had multiple surgeries as an infant), this is of particular interest, to me.

Just do a search, you come up with some pretty serious data.
http://bja.oxfordjournals.org/...

Lets see if we can hold a rational discussion without the bullshit. Since the sock puppets are out censoring everything not proGMO and bolstering everything proGMO I'm not confident, but lets give it a try.

Problem with your statement: Invalid generalization. Centuries of study show us that many homeopathic cures do work. As an example, I have a medical doctor who suggested drinking camomile tea to help me sleep, and it works. He could have prescribed a man made chemical to do the same thing with much worse side effects, but he's a great doctor. As another example, Willow bark is a known pain reliever and anti inflammation herb. It's so good in fact that we created a mimic called Aspirin. Scientists look to nature all the time and try to mimic properties we find naturally, and try to synthesize those natural things. So yeah, homeopathic cures are very well proven in the general sense. Natural remedies and poisons are so good that we try very hard to synthesize them for mass consumption and use as well as monetize them.

At the same time, your generalization attempts to claim that GMO foods are proven to be perfectly safe, and we have no equivalent studies compared to homeopathic remedies. Hybridization is not the same thing as Genetically modified where foreign genes are spliced into seeds and foods. People constantly try to claim that because we have hybridized for thousands of years, we know and understand the impact of splicing fungus genes into corn, or insect genes into tomatoes. Which is wrong, the latter techniques are very new and we don't have long term studies. We do know that sometimes things go terribly wrong (and if you don't like that one there are plenty).

People want to know where GMO in terms of these odd gene splices happen, and quite frankly if there is no proven harm there should be no harm in a label. At the same time, since society has become the lab experiment with many of these modifications it should be made easy to track where things go wrong.

Lets not forget that a large reason for GMO seeds is to increase yields by protecting plants from pests. We are already seeing super pests that can bypass the built in GMO protection and creating a much larger threat to agriculture than existed previously.

Even cooler -- or, really, hotter -- is thermoregulating plants. The sacred lotus maintains a nearly constant, well-above-ambient temperature in its flowers for several days while they're most fertile.

I mean shit, look at Al Gore, if there was a list of everybody on the planet sorted by personal carbon consumption, he'd probably be in the top 1%.

Gore is carbon neutral isn't he?

I don't care how energy efficient his 20 bedroom house or his private jet are;

Gore doesn't have a private jet.

both inevitably consume a LOT more energy than your typical person's luxuries.

How does a jet consume energy without existing?

In a small contained lab environment we can sit there and measure how much of a greenhouse effect different gases have, but historical data doesn't even so much as show a correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change.

That's not true for any of the past 420 million years

IIt doesn't appear to harm ocean life

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.

plant life, or land animals either

Bullshit

as during one of Earth's "greenest" periods in history we had 20 times the present atmospheric CO2, really fucking massively sized insects, dinosaurs, and more.

Kind of irrelevant. We have existent species now. Those are the ones that have to be able to live. Really fucking massively sized insects, and dinosaurs are already dead.

Other data suggests that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow rises in climate, not the other way around

Nope:
CO2, increasing since about 1750.
Temp, from about 1900.

As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap.

Well, we've got a lot of science now, so we don't need to base our decisions on what you think.

It's entirely possible that the higher CO2 we're seeing is yet another rise following a climate change that we had no part in.

No it's not. It's from the combustion of fossil fuels.

And by the way, the arguments for stopping climate change so that we can save the economy are also incredibly stupid and self defeating.

Bullshit

We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.

Bullshit. Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP

Meanwhile we have seen on well more than one occasion where stupid economic decisions cause global long term collapse. Hurting the economy for what is probably much ado about nothing is therefore pointless

The 10 state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saw their combined economies increase by 1.6 billion in the first three years. Oh, the pain! The pain! Ouch! Stop the hurt!


Why did /. vote this bullshit +5, interesting? I would have thought anti-science grandstanding was antithetical to "news for nerds". This place really has dropped in discernment over the past few years hasn't it. .

There's no need to wait and see. This idea is foo'd up for all the same reasons that HAM radio operators have a statistically significant higher incident of cancer. Why everyone is racing to drop the broadcast power of cellphones. And, why putting your head in the microwave is generally considered a bad idea.

Are you going glow green, set off radiation detectors at airports, or erupt in blisters and boils? No, but just because it isn't ionizing radiation doesn't mean its harmless.

It's a problem because it's clearly fucking systemic, and caused by social factors.

It's not just "fewer women that men" enter the career.

It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"(this article) It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

Bad social norms?

This from a country on the cusp of electing a woman to lead the most powerful country and military on the planet.

Inversely, where is all the screaming and yelling from the nursing or day-care industry that is traditionally dominated by women?

What, no class-action lawsuits against the construction industry for blatant favoritism towards the male gender?

Either the women need to start standing up and using vehicles to enact change or enforce laws that prevent sexism, or the rest of us need to shut the fuck up already.

It's a problem because it's clearly fucking systemic, and caused by social factors.

It's not just "fewer women that men" enter the career.

It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"(this article) It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

Bad social norms?

This from a country on the cusp of electing a woman to lead the most powerful country and military on the planet.

Inversely, where is all the screaming and yelling from the nursing or day-care industry that is traditionally dominated by women?

What, no class-action lawsuits against the construction industry for blatant favoritism towards the male gender?

Either the women need to start standing up and using vehicles to enact change or enforce laws that prevent sexism, or the rest of us need to shut the fuck up already.

It's a problem because it's clearly fucking systemic, and caused by social factors.

It's not just "fewer women that men" enter the career.

It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"(this article)
It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men
It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field
It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

It's a problem because it's clearly fucking systemic, and caused by social factors.

It's not just "fewer women that men" enter the career.

It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"(this article)
It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men
It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field
It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

Oh, so it's entirely genetic, and that's why 20 years ago, the field's gender mix was almost 60-40 and now 85-15. Because genetics change dramatically over short timespans.[1] [2]

Bio-determinism bites. And it's an easy, lazy, insufficient answer. I, and others, are prepared to accept that there exist biological gender differences. But, given human history, you can't say that gender differences are strictly biological without evidence. And you can examine socioeconomic factors that influence gender-based occupation decisions. In the previous link, girls(and boys) with higher self-esteem are more likely to avoid gender-typical job roles. Rather substantially, if you can actually read the article, and not just the abstract. Primitivistic psychoanalysis suggests that people who fill gender-typical jobs are likely following social pressure, than innate instincts.

Sexism in IT is real, I mean, hell, ask a transgender person whose seen both sides. But even if that were 0% of the problem, it wouldn't imply genetic determinism.

Some citations:
Transmission rates based on infected partner's progression stage
Risk based on type of sexual act

It is difficult to get HIV from a woman. Not impossible, but the odds are very low.

Well, not that low, only half the odds, according to study 2.

Now getting HIV from taking it on the butt, it is much more dangerous

Yup. 0.08/0.04 (vaginal) vs 1.4 (annal receptive). About 20x more odds.

And then black woman have a much higher rate of HIV.

Technically, its "women in poorer communities". It happens that in the US black ethnic are often at the bottom of the social scale due to past racial discriminations, etc. but even there they are not alone at the bottom of the scale.

On all this counts, Magic Johnson is not exactly the best example.

He might happen to also be ethnically black, but given his economical situation and popularity, I doubt that he spends his time banging crack-whores. So the fact that HIV is more prevalent among the poorest section of the population has probably rather little impact.
Also, for what I know, he was only interested in women, which lack the proper biological appendage to being a risk for insertive annal (though not properly clean sex-toys might still be a potential danger).

The main reason he caught AIDS are probably due to a high number of partners combined with lack of proper protection.

In fact Magic Johnson helped bring awareness that HIV isn't exclusively targeting drug-addicts and homosexuals.

To transpose that to malware:
the fact that malware are more often found at warez sites ridden with keygen containing hidden malware, and dubious porn site running ads used by hacker to corrupt your system, DOES NOT MEAN that these are the only way a random internet user might get the computer infected by malware.
on the other hand, proper precaution will ALWAYS be a good solution to protect and diminish the risks. (virus scanner, filters, malware blocker, ad-blocker, VMs, etc.)

Any particular reason you linked back to this very article

He just messed up and made the link relative.

Green Light Drives Leaf Photosynthesis More Efficiently than Red Light in Strong White Light: Revisiting the Enigmatic Question of Why Leaves are Green

IANAB, but I think the crux of this article is on the phrase "in strong white light".

Because green light can penetrate further into the leaf than red or blue light, in strong white light,
any additional green light absorbed by the lower chloroplasts would increase leaf photosynthesis to a
greater extent than would additional red or blue light.

So perhaps green light is more effective outdoors, but in an environment only lit by artificial light, green light is probably not the most effective (unless maybe you use both a powerful white light AND a green light?).

Green/Yellow light gets more useful for the plant as light intensity gets higher.
http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/4/684.abstract

No, the OP is wrong.

http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/...

Next?

> Why reduce CO2? Higher CO2 concentration also improves crop yields.

Higher CO2 levels improve yields inside carefully tended greenhouses. In the real world plants need more than just co2, when you increase co2 you also increase the requirements for everything else like water, minerals and fertilizer - if those aren't available then the plants don't get any benefit from the extra co2. Furthermore some plants become less efficient at photosynthesis when co2 levels go up (after all they evolved in the current environment). Other plants like soy become more vulnerable to insects. Plants evolved to grow in specific temperate zones, you bump up the heat, change the weather systems (like more flash floods and less gentle rainstorms) and now the plants aren't as well adapted to grow in their environment.

Nature is a million different systems all interrelated. You poke at just one parameter and the result is never straightforward or simple.

I kinda already did?

As for the 'Ted Talks' I kind of ignored them for a number of reasons:
1. No reason to believe that they're peer reviewed.
2. Audio would be incredibly rude where I was at the time.
3. I'm a visual learner - listening to youtube lectures is painful for me.
4. My conclusion from the earlier 3 was that the latter 3 would be more the same. On reaching home, I confirmed this.

Anyways, some more articles on antibiotic growth promotion:
It improves growth, but not enough to justify the cost in chickens grown in clean & sanitary environments
The Mode of Growth Promotion by Antibiotics
The European ban on growth-promoting antibiotics and emerging consequences for human and animal health. link
Alternatives to Antibiotic Use for Growth Promotion in Animal Husbandry link
Effect of Abolishment of the Use of Antimicrobial Agents for Growth Promotion on Occurrence of Antimicrobial Resistance in Fecal Enterococci from Food Animals in Denmark link
Antibiotic Usage in Animals link

Conclusion: The cattle industry isn't feeding billions of dollars of antibiotics to their animals for fun.

Please stop repeating something like it is new. Since its origins the concept is called "the schizophrenias". We knew that 100 years before now: http://schizophreniabulletin.o...

Perhaps you and other people like you knew this, but the rest of us that are included in that 'We' did not.

Please stop repeating something like it is new. Since its origins the concept is called "the schizophrenias". We knew that 100 years before now: http://schizophreniabulletin.o...

It has been done during the 1995 Kikwit Ebola outbreak in Zaire. They tried it on eight patients and only one died. I have found no indication that any health care workers were infected.

Just in case anyone is curious, here is the actual paper: http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

Between 6 and 22 June 1995, 8 patients in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo, who met the case definition used in Kikwit for Ebola (EBO) hemorrhagic fever, were transfused with blood donated by 5 convalescent patients. The donated blood contained IgG EBO antibodies but no EBO antigen. EBO antigens were detected in all the transfusion recipients just before transfusion. The 8 transfused patients had clinical symptoms similar to those of other EBO patients seen during the epidemic. All were seriously ill with severe asthenia, 4 presented with hemorrhagic manifestations, and 2 became comatose as their disease progressed. Only 1 transfused patient (12.5%) died; this number is significantly lower than the overall case fatality rate (80%) for the EBO epidemic in Kikwit and than the rates for other EBO epidemics.

Say you've been told you have Ebola but have read this. What do you do?

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

Say, "oh, it sounds too risky, I'll tough it out"? I'm guessing not.

Any chance this is astroturfing for the company with the Ebola drug? The natural antibodies are a fierce competition to what is now a multi billion dollar market.

Dying the flu generally requires complicating conditions. Most people survive it just fine. Ebola is scary because most people don't survive it.

Following that logic, ebola is not scary simply because most people don't ever catch it.

Or are you arguing that since it's not your ass, you not being elderly, pregnant or a small child - fuck those weaklings dying in hundreds of thousands each year from a disease "Most people survive it just fine".

And again... Most people DO NOT GET THE FLU each year but simple common cold.
"3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 250 000 to 500 000 deaths" comes to 8-10% fatalities.
That's about 3 kids dead in a class of 30 children. Every year.
But it's spread out across the globe and it happens mostly in "third world" countries so - fuck those weaklings.

Back in winter of '96 I had a case of actual flu.
As a teenager, wasn't really in an "at risk group", other than maybe having my immunity lowered.
Unfortunately, my doctor wasn't in that day and I was sent home (by a rather young doctor, rather fresh from the med school) with a prescription for cough syrup instead of a penicillin shot.

That night I had a fever of +40C, and ended up barely breathing by the morning.
Had to sit in a semi-reclined position to be able to breathe as it was difficult for me to do that while sitting or lying down.
Had to lean on my mother's arm to be able to walk to the doctor's office in the morning, about 200-300 meters downhill (mostly) from where I live.

There it turned out that I practically had a heart attack - an inflammation of the myocardium.
Ended up staying over at the hospital for couple of weeks and having tests and booster shots for next half a year - though I was "fixed" after couple of shots of penicillin, getting out of the bed and walking to the bathroom by myself that very night with no difficulty at all.
By tomorrow I felt ready to go home. Still had to stay though.

Funny thing is, during all my stay at the hospital doctors never figured out what was wrong with me. They were looking for congenital heart conditions, trichinosis... only much later as I kept being fine did they take a look back at the original symptoms and figured out that it was all a viral inflammation of the heart muscle.

THAT'S influenza!
"Most people" catch a cold and call that "the flu".

On Melatonin, this study says there is no decrease in testoserone production.

As someone who studied forestry at the agricultural university in the Netherlands (yes, there is forest in the Netherlands...) I claim there is no need to forego on wood as a construction material. The only thing that needs to go is the clearcut method of forestry with its accompanying monoculture and age-based rotation. Something like the German 'Dauerwald' (http://forestry.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/4/375.full.pdf) can be used instead. These forestry methods don't destroy the habitat while still giving a steady stream of timber. They are suitable for small-scale as well as large-scale forestry. As an added bonus the forest becomes less sensitive to storm damage (always a bonus with the increasing amount of energy in the atmosphere), insect damage (due to the larger variety of trees as well as the richer habitat) and diseases.

I love how on Slashdot how threads frequently go, Poster A:"Well, this is true (with not citations)" Poster B: "No, that is wrong (with no citations)." Poster C: "No, B is wrong because they provide no citations (still no citations for A or C)". No one is providing concrete numbers or citations. You chew someone out for not being concrete, but then turn around and still are no concrete yourself, making vague comparisons because the word "argument" gets used in a lot of places that have no relevance to the issue. I would assume that most people who actually cared about the subject would take a quick Google search because it is a heavily researched topic.

But of course, since people around here can't look things up for themselves, and assuming that the posts they like are right without proof but posts they don't like must be wrong without proof... you can try looking at studies like this one and compare it to totals of alcohol tax revenues here. Now of course the revenue from tax is not the total cost, because there is a lot of money spent on enforcing laws, economic impact on businesses dealing with the laws, and people finding ways around the laws (even legal ones like driving to a different location, with impact on local business). But the result is that throughout the US $4 billion gets collected in alcohol taxes in the 90s, when estimates of cost impact show the vast majority of impact is on non-government individuals who do not get help from the government with the collected taxes. And the vast majority of those impacts (71% in the US study cited in the study) are from lost work because people miss work or become injured in a way that doesn't contribute to work, or that government gets less tax revenue when someone dies. The actual direct impact to government programs is estimated at under a billion dollars. And that is using numbers that are said to be over-estimated when looking at what happens when people actually stop drinking.

And this still doesn't address the issue that most of the taxes are collected from people not contributing to the problem, with a quarter if the people causing half the problems (e.g. a citation, more give numbers all over the place on this, so exact numbers are not available, but agree that most damage done by small portion). Some of this should be obvious considering how many people drink but do not drink and drive, have liver damage, etc. Nor does do the numbers change that the government isn't applying the money in a way to stop damage. If the societal damage were taken serious, there would be a lot more research and implementation of programs to stop people from drinking too much, and actually fixing problems... but that is not how government works except the most obvious cause-effect problems.

Find me any new vaccines that have a double blind placebo study.
Here is three from a simple google search. http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Yes, some new vaccines have their performance compared to existing vaccines for the same drug. The existing vaccines have been compared to placebos already... No need to test for placebo performance as it already been confirmed that the established drug is better than placebo, what you really care about is if the new drug is even better or why bother with the new one.

Also find me some scientific studies that show and follow children who get multiple different combinations of vaccines over the course of 10-15 years.

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/...
Check of the 15 sources on that paper. And a simple google search will give you way more than that...

Find me any new vaccines that have a double blind placebo study.
Here is three from a simple google search. http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Yes, some new vaccines have their performance compared to existing vaccines for the same drug. The existing vaccines have been compared to placebos already... No need to test for placebo performance as it already been confirmed that the established drug is better than placebo, what you really care about is if the new drug is even better or why bother with the new one.

Also find me some scientific studies that show and follow children who get multiple different combinations of vaccines over the course of 10-15 years.

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/...
Check of the 15 sources on that paper. And a simple google search will give you way more than that...

Find me any new vaccines that have a double blind placebo study.
Here is three from a simple google search. http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Yes, some new vaccines have their performance compared to existing vaccines for the same drug. The existing vaccines have been compared to placebos already... No need to test for placebo performance as it already been confirmed that the established drug is better than placebo, what you really care about is if the new drug is even better or why bother with the new one.

Also find me some scientific studies that show and follow children who get multiple different combinations of vaccines over the course of 10-15 years.

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/...
Check of the 15 sources on that paper. And a simple google search will give you way more than that...

"But hey, lets just ignore the experts?"

Why not, that's what most of the other experts have done!!!

I have found articles saying the sweetener industries own studies shrink organs and cause cancer in numerous organs.

I have found other studies saying that sweeteners can cause leukemia. I have also found studies that say that sweeteners can cause insulin problems, raise blood sugar level and increase the risk of obesity and diabetes.

I've looked for epidemiological studies and all I come up with is 1 study from 1985 that purely looks at bladder cancer and says that there is no increased risk, personally I would be suspicious of an epidemiological study that is so narrowly focused.

I'd love to use sweeteners to replace sugar and it may well be safer overall, but it does not look to me based on what I've read that sweeteners are safe and may in fact not be useful in a healthy diet due to the increased risk of diabetes and the fact that they can increase cravings for sweet foods.

So, I am not ignoring the experts, I have spent some time looking at the results of the search for "epidemiological study sweeteners" and what I find does not look good.

See:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/...
http://annonc.oxfordjournals.o...
http://www.mpwhi.com/consumpti...

"Diet soda has been tied to higher risk for heart attacks, strokes, cancers, osteoporosis, tooth decay, and nervous system disorders."

There's a huge bias towards using exclusively male mice in many types of research, and the issue of higher variance in female rodent behavior (due to estrous cycle issues, among others) is well known (see eg: pdf).

There are also related problems more generally with stress and over-training in neuroscience. Experienced investigators are able to produce a much less stressful working environment for animals, so they tend to get different results from neophyte investigators even when following the same protocol. This shows up a lot when a different lab tries to replicate the work of an experienced post-doc and gets null results for the first 6 months then suddenly is able to replicate everything. Thus often is attributed to 'correcting' the protocol (often with extensive communication with the previous lab) when often I think the change is attributable to the investigator in the replicating lab becoming experienced enough to relieve stress (I don't have a great link for this, mostly just an observation from having been around quite a few labs).

Over-training is also a problem, since it often takes thousands (sometimes well into the hundreds of) to train animals in complex cognitive tasks, and it's well known from experiments in humans (and a few in non-human primate and rodent) that neural responses shift profoundly between 'trained' and 'over-trained' states, say between amateur and professional ballerinas watching videos of ballet.

However, these issues are a much bigger problem in pre-clinical research than in basic research. Our understanding of the brain is sufficiently limited that the effects we're used to seeing in basic research questions swamp the potential modulation from gender, stress and training factors (unless you're talking about stress research specifically, but they're pretty careful about controlling for these types of effect). The issue with pre-clinical research is that often the difference between the current treatment and proposed treatment is only a few percent (note: if valid, this can mean thousands of lives saved or hugely improved), and so failing to identify and control for factors such as researcher or mouse gender can overwhelm the supposed primary result.

I don't have time to go into the full thing. But for vaccines the rate hypothesis has been studied. What you're looking at is the fact that antivaxxers started with one extreme hypothesis, then when that was thoroughly discredited in the public, they shifted the goalposts to another hypothesis, "too many". Your realistic concern has been studied but you seem to be holding onto the assumption that the truth is some sort of middle ground between the scientists and the antivaxxers, it isn't. If there's truth in the middle ground its the middle ground that exists between scientists, the truth doesn't shift when a new middle ground is created by a bunch of anti-vaxxination activists.

As for global warming, it is definitely not true that "It is presented that either we need a carbon tax, or that man is not responsible for climate change. Pollution and ecological damage is rarely discussed, only the basic claims themselves".

I'm only going to talk about the scientists (none of them are saying man is not responsible). A carbon tax isn't an extreme position, what the scientists are saying is you need to reduce carbon emissions or X, Y, and Z bad things will happen. These X, Y, and Z include the pollution, ecological damage, sea level changes, temperature change, large scale droughts, etc. You implied they're all buy studying a carbon tax when in fact they're all busy studying the things you claim they don't study. A carbon tax is just one things presented as a solution, it's studied as well, though generally those studies include economists because many climate scientists don't have the expertise to perform them.

I'm talking about actual scientific research and you keep talking about how the scientists are studying extreme hypothesis by bringing up NBC, Popular Science, and Discovery Channel. Don't you think you're looking at a form of science publication biased towards extremism if you're looking at news organizations?

Essentially I believe that it could be harmful for young babies/toddlers to have too many vaccines administered at the same time - 3 vaccines during the same office visit, for example.

This source notes that:
1) Autism is not an immune-mediated disease. Unlike autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, there is no evidence of immune activation or inflammatory lesions in the CNS of people with autism [38]. In fact, current data suggest that genetic variation in neuronal circuitry that affects synaptic development might in part account for autistic behavior [39]. Thus, speculation that an exaggerated or inappropriate immune response to vaccina-tion precipitates autism is at variance with current scientific data that address the pathogenesis of autism.
and
2) Vaccines do not overwhelm the immune system. Although the infant immune system is relatively naive, it is immediately capable of generating a vast array of protective responses; even conservative estimates predict the capacity to respond to thousands of vaccines simultaneously [30]. Consistent with this theoretical exercise, combinations of vaccines induce immune responses comparable to those given individually[31].

Actually there was no increase due to the restrictions on gun ownership, and in fact there was no noticeable effect of any kind on crime.

The only thing that did change was a fall in the number of suicides by gun, although it is questionable how much effect the ban itself had. The thing is Australia never had mass gun ownership or high crime like the US did.

I believe a better car analogy to make your point would be, x number of people get in car accidents and y die as a result. Your analogy of comparing the ratio of drivers to driving deaths is missing a step.

In this case the rate of infection is .7% for the entire world. The chance of death is .0014%. This does not even take into account first world healthcare. With your analogy, using your numbers, the death rate by car accidents in the current year is .01%. Driving to work is seven times more deadly than this amoeba before discounting for first world standards such as sanitation and healthcare.

Moving on to the better analogy, in 2010, 5.4 million car crashes were estimated with .0328 million dying (first results on google). So the odds of death once the 'symptoms' of crashing has occurred is .6%. The odds of dying by this amoeba once infected is .2%. In this more accurate analogy, getting in an accident is three times more deadly. Again, ignoring first world standards.

Digging deep, the rate of infection in the US appears to be 13.5 diagnoses per 10,000 person-years. Running the numbers again, the death rate in the US assuming the same death rate as worldwide becomes .00027%. Given that, driving is 37 times more dangerous than this amoeba.

So which is it? Driving is seven times, three times, or 37 times more deadly? It depends on which view you choose to use. Since the outcome is the same in this case, your choice does not matter much.

Damn, I could have sworn that I saw stuff that corroborates my statement somwhere.

Intelligernce prz kthnx:
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.o...

Guys, did you know that schizofrenia is good for your brain? Your cortex gets thicker! PS: It isn't even clear what the benefits to a slightly thicker cortex are (human cortexes range from 2.4. to 2.7mm), if there any at all. In fact, most posative traits such as intelligence have been attributed to a THINNER cortex, not a thicker one! http://cercor.oxfordjournals.o...

Adding some clarity to my 2nd to the last paragraph since I realized that this was worded in a misleading way. The US has been "free" of wild polio for a couple decades. Other Western countries report similar success with the vaccine and sanitation. That said, insects and animals can carry the virus without our knowledge as can human waste though the virus would not replicate. Flies can carry the virus and contaminate humans even though the virus would not replicate in the fly. Organic material could hold the disease indefinitely under the right circumstances. This is an interesting read on that.

To further add clarity, I have repeatedly stated that I'm not anti any vaccine. I can surely seen benefits in some vaccines. Polio, Measles, Rubella, and Small Pox have all been what I consider to be successes for society.

What I have repeatedly stated is that people should understand the risks and rewards of a vaccine and be able to make an educated choice. Just like any other medical procedure, people should be able to have a choice of when and what to receive vaccines on. Companies making vaccines should be forced to provide real data on those benefits and risks instead of what we have today. What we have today is cover up, censorship, and smear campaigns so that people can't hold a rational dialogue on the subject.

Plus, Coffee is high in antioxidants and good for your heart.

You realize that some antioxidants are actually carcinogenic, and that increasing your intake of antioxidants may not have any healthful benefit, but may in fact be harming you?

Subsidies within governments. One of the ONLY reasons we form large area governments (e.g., EU, USA, USM, etc) is to facilitate the transfer of wealth from haves to have nots. A shared currency with a central taxation is the vehicle for that transfer. As soon as little subdivisions (New York(USA), South East(UK), Germany(EU)) start accounting and saying "hey, mate! We send more than we get" then they are forgetting that purpose. As we say here, and you've heard elsewhere, within my house, we are all communists (sharers and carers) but at some distance that fades to being something less sharing and caring. For some, that distance is across the street, for others, it is across the planet. When an "across the planet" type sees an "across the street" type doing well, they sometimes get jealous and send in the "boyz with bayonets" to breach that barrier. The relative homogeneity of some countries makes it easier to extend that barrier to the border, but at the same time makes it harder to push it beyond that border. The social capital benefits of homogeneity, to me, suggests that we should work to increase the perception that we are all "home boyz", rather than encouraging the Balkanization of our societies. Bottom line - don't play the "we send more than we get back card", just be glad that you are better off than those other blokes that need central help. And hope that the centrals don't get so greedy that they drive away the wealth generators. After all, the best parasite is the one that does not kill the host.