They type of mercury does not cause mercury poisoning at that does level. It is effect from the body within 24 hours.
It's important to note that because these moron will the go on and say vaccines cause mercury poisoning; which is not possible.
That is not why vaccines don't cause mercury poisoning. What you said was a sane point a decade and a half ago.
It's not now, because, thanks to these idiots, they stopped using any mercury at all in 1999.
Asserting that vaccines, back then, could give you mercury poisoning was like asserting that nuclear power plants produced radioactive electricity. Absurd? Yes. Impossible? Only for people with the slightest amount of intelligence.
Asserting that current vaccines can give you mercury poisoning is akin to asserting that diesel generators can give you radioactive electricity. There...um...there's no radiation...I don't know what...I can't...what...my brain hurts...
We've passed the 'impossible for stupid people' point a while back, and now we're at the point where you have to be very ignorant and very stupid.
Agreed, but as continued research has shown for lead, for example, there are quantifiable effects to subclinical exposure. There are definite personality changes that go along with lead levels that are lower than those that cause traditional lead poisoning.
Yes, but mercury levels have only gone down in the last couple of decades, while autism has skyrocketed, so it's rather absurd to even ever consider them as a cause of any sort.
If anything, the lack of heavy metals corresponds to more autism in the last 50 years. (This is obviously meaningless, but clearly indicates the anti-vaccine people were not operating sanely to start with.)
The levels necessary for this kind of shift are much lower than normally thought of for heavy metal poisoning, and since exposure accumulates, it seems prudent to avoid any unnecessary ingestion of mercury, lead, or other heavy metals.
Heh, good luck with that.
But, seriously, I'm all for not using mercury anywhere we don't need it, and, as I said, the only reason we need to 'preserve' vaccines at all is a health-care system that is utterly unable to control costs as the health insurance insure sucks them dry.
Let's not have any preservatives at all. Safe or otherwise. Make the damn vaccine, refrigerate it, inject it within a day or two. It's not rocket science. We are not the third world. We can ship refrigerated things anywhere in the US in a day.
Yeah, the whole concept was bogus, I was just pointing out that it was a moving target, and that almost no kid under 10 was ever given a mercury-preserved vaccine, so we have a huge 'control group' for the original claim.
And autism has just continued to go up, even for kids under 10.
What ESP actually means is perceiving things beyond the known and/or physical senses. It's the ability to perceive things without direct stimulation of sensory organs.
Those two sentences are two entirely different things. Let us look that them separately:
What ESP actually means is perceiving things beyond the known and/or physical senses.
Let's look at that and/or for a second. That has three total combination: unknown but physical senses, known but non-physical senses, and unknown and nonphysical senses. I think we can all agree that there are not any 'known but non-physical senses', so let's drop that.
So what you actually said was 'unknown but physical senses' or 'unknown and nonphysical senses'. Which obviously reduces down to 'unknown senses of any sort'.
It's the ability to perceive things without direct stimulation of sensory organs.
This is entirely counter to your first statement, where you said that ESP does include things sensed by 'physical senses' (As long as it's not known), presumably via 'direct stimulation'.
If we're now excluding 'unknown but physical', you have now said 'ESP is perceiving things with unknown and nonphysical senses.' (Which is stupid, because ESP, by definition, does not use senses.)
"Perception" is only tautologically a "sense" for certain senses of "sense", which is not the sense meant by ESP.
Um, no. The word 'sense' is not in 'ESP', the word extrasensory is in ESP. Extrasensory means outside the senses, which rather makes your entire comment about that sort of 'sense' very strange, as you just defined a type of 'sense' to mean exactly what you wanted ESP to mean, when in actuality you should do the opposite, because ESP must be 'beyond' senses.
However, getting off 'extrasensory' for a second, what you're confused about is the meaning of perception. Perception is interpreting your senses. That is literally what it means. It's not a tautology, sense and perception aren't the same thing, you can sense something without perceiving it, but you can't perceive something without sensing it.
If you want to assert that somehow people can learn information without outside sources, and that that's ESP, well, okay, that actually would be ESP.
But every single test of 'ESP' is actually testing whether people can sense something (and hence perceive it). Granted, they're testing if someone can sense it in a way that should not be possible, but they're testing if they can sense it non-the-less.
Here, the test is 'Can people sense things before they happen, and if so can they interpret those senses into accurate perception?'.
None of the ESP tests are seeing if people can obtain enlightenment or figure out the exact distance to the moon or whatever it would mean to just 'perceive' something with no actual sensory source. They're instead looking for new senses, which makes ESP incredibly poorly named.
The Randi Foundation did in fact find someone who had a power beyond normal humans, although he wasn't trying for a million dollars because it was not, strictly speaking, 'supernatural'.
Arthur Lintgen claimed that he could recognize classical music based on looking at the grooves with his eye...and he can, almost entirely flawlessly. No tricks. Proven in a scientific double-blind study.
But he doesn't have, or claim to have, superpowers, just amazing knowledge of classical music and the ability to recognize patterns in the record grooves and match them to music.
And at this point, he's done the trick so often he can often identify which publishing company made the record simply by the exact color and texture of the record, and figure out the music by looking at it...and as he knows all major recordings, so he can then hilariously pretend to identify the conductor and even the exact date it was recorded by glancing at the record.
But he really just knows 'This is Beethoven 3rd, and the record is from publishing company X, and the only time they published that is..'
Although, to mention blackjack...if you have a 3% chance of guessing the next card, you have a way better chance of winning than an extra 3%. Especially if, when you're wrong, you're 'close'. Alternately, you could know the next card with 1005 assurance, and still not win the hand.
This is what I mean by the '3%' being a little screwy. Foreknowledge 3% of the time does not equal winning 3% more of the time.
No, wait. Actually you'd get bounced in short order and barred from the casino.
Not if you play smart. Casinos know what you could possibly be cheating at.
If you have a 3%, your best bet would be to go to Vegas and play roulette, is very close to even odds at about 48%, so can nudge to 51% and which it is not possible to cheat at, and the casino is not watching for 'cheaters' in any statistical sense. They are watching for people lying about their bets, and the couper and the person being in on it together, but there's nothing that could possible tell them that someone is winning 51% of the time, or even even flag it if it did notice. Individual people win 51% of the time all the time. Probably 30% of the people walk away from roulette having won 51% of the time. They don't bar people for that, that would be horrible publicity.
Although I'm not really sure what a '3% edge' actually means. Is that 3% in all dimensions, or just one? Is it 47/53% if you pick red vs black, or it is +3% that it will land on a certain specific slot, or what, exactly? If they have a 3% extra chance of getting the color right, and a 3% extra chance of getting the odd/even right, and 3% extra chance of getting the number right, and a 3% extra chance of getting the group of four right...they've got like a 70% of getting everything right. Something is really screwy here.
Assuming it's +3% to a specific 50/50 axis: The problem is, unless you're starting with a lot of money, it's going to be very slow. Safety-wise, you should only bet about 5% of your money at once, and even that's a little risky. This means on 100 spins, you will make 5% more money.
As each roulette spin tends to take about a minute, in an hour you've made 60 spins, which means you've earn between 3% of your seed money. Which is an awesome hourly rate if you walked in with $100,000 and made $3000. It's a pretty shitty one if you walked in with $100 and made $3. Hell, with the price of a plane ticket and hotel room, it's a pretty shitty rate of $30 an hour...you're looking at 4 hours a day just to cover room and board!
Technically, craps is closer odds, and sometimes you can place side bets exactly at odds, although only after placing another bet at slightly worse odds, but a) it's easier to cheat at, so they might assume you are cheating, and b) it's insanely complicated. Although, as an added bonus, as there are a lot of really really stupid bets, they're used to some people 'slowly losing' while others lose very quickly, so are less likely to notice someone 'slowly winning'. (Unlike roulette, where all bets are 'reasonable', they are within 5% of breaking even so everyone 'slowly loses'. Well, unless they deliberately bet all their money.) Also, craps is much faster, so might be worth learning...just make sure you place each bet clearly and keep your hands away so you don't get accused of cheating.
Do not, under any circumstances, play blackjack, which will get you banned. Although, believe it or not, automatic card-counter detectors probably wouldn't notice. All counting cards does is tell you when you can, statistically, win, so detector systems notice people who join or leave suspiciously, or bet high (When they can win) and low (When they can't) suspiciously. If you just have a extra 3% chance of winning, period, and don't change your bet, they probably won't notice, but don't risk it. Alternately, you can go to Atlantic City, where casinos cannot ban you for winning, period. (They avoid blackjack card counters by reshuffling the deck after every hand.)
Yes, but you're assuming that either all precogs are very intelligent. (Or so precognitive that they see that it would be a mistake to demonstrate their talents, which is indistinguishable from 'very intelligent'.)
And then you also want us to believe that these studies are correct, which also require there to be stupid precogs who don't know enough to hide.
So, essentially, you believe there are people with almost no psychic powers that require a lot and lot of testing to discover, and everyone else is either smart enough or psychic enough to hide their talent, and there's never been anyone in the middle who happily goes around bragging about how he can win the lottery or bankrupt the roulette wheel whenever he wants to and is invited on all the talk shows?
Promise yourself that, if you win the lottery, you'll buy a strip club and hang out there for a year. The strippers will be required to have body paint with your winning numbers on them.
Never dabble in statistics - the experts will roundly berate you and correct you even if you *THINK* you're doing everything right.
Indeed. I was about to make a post a minute ago about cherry picking results, and tried to figure out how some coin flipping thing. I said 'If you flipped a coin 10 times, and got all heads, that's a 0.1% chance'. (I believe I got this correct. It's 50% to the tenth power. 50% the first time, 25% the second, divide by half each time down to 0.0976%) Then I said 'So if you run that experiment 500 times, you get a 50% chance of one of them being all heads.' (This is where I think I was wrong.)
Then I went to find out how many few times you'd need to get a 50% chance of 10 in a row if you didn't stop on the 'boundaries' of the experiment, if you weren't running a 'ten flip experiment' repeatedly, if you were just flipping. And I found this...which said you needed 1500 flips to get a 50% of ten in a row. (Look at the n=10 graph.)
I wrote that down...and then looked at my math that said you needed 500 flips for 50% and you'd even get it on a boundary.
And I said 'Well, obviously I've run into something about statistics I don't understand' and didn't finish that post. Statistics is complicated, especially if you're talking about multiple experiments.
When PhD's can't even work out things like the Monty Hall Problem properly, you just know it's not something you can throw an amateur towards.
I probably couldn't work out the Monty Hall problem if someone told it to me, but I do actually understand the correct answer. I even once built a simulator in an online game that would randomly switch or not, and keep track, and ran it, and, sure enough, 2/3rds of the time you should switch.
Now that I thought of that, I wish someone would write a 'statistics calculator', where people could put in the various odds of specific things happening, and then it would run simulations to show you the actual results. You tell it the starting odds, let it run, and then look at the results column and it would essentially tell you how often you'd expect that to happen.
Yes, you can figure that out mathematically, but no one understands the math. It's much easier if people could have put in the starting conditions for, say, this experiment, ran a simulation of it happening 100,000 times, and said 'Hey, look, these results happened 3000 times by pure chance.'. You could even single-step through the simulation if you wanted.
I 'extrapolate the future' a lot. I can start toasting something and walk right back into the kitchen right as it finishes without consciously paying attention to the time.
Of course, I suspect I'm unconsciously paying attention to the time.
It's wrong to call it 'ESP' because ESP is a null term. It means 'perceiving things beyond the senses', which is idiotic.
If we can actually perceive the future, that's a sense. If we can see inside sealed boxes, that's a sense. If we can read minds, that's a sense. There are senses we don't know exist, but they are, in fact, senses. (If they exist, that is.) No one is perceiving 'beyond' their senses.
Not only is ESP is a nonsensical term, it's a 'category' that doesn't really have anything to do with each other. It's basically 'any special powers that people have ever ascribed to humans' all lumped together. (Except 'magic', which gets lumped under 'supernatural', which makes no sense as a category either.)
For example, there's nothing under the current laws of physics that prohibits mind reading. All you have to hypothesis is that minds emit something that other people can pick up on. We have never detected such a thing, but it's no more impossible than radio. (I mean, no one's asserted they can read minds FTL.)
Meanwhile, something like precognition actually does violate the laws of physics as we know them.
Using a term like ESP, and investigating them as if they were some single thing, is a very good indicator of lack of scientific rigor. It's like if the term was 'float', and you investigated hovercrafts, superconducting antigravity theory, magnets, and people who claimed they could levitate to see if 'float' was possible.
That's an even better example, but I didn't want to use it.
Yeah, you can actually figure out how plausible a scientific position is the more the facts change and people (are forced to) accept the new facts, but then still argue the same conclusion.
And it's not really even the same 'conclusion'. It's past the conclusion. It's the same 'So now that we've figured that out, the thing we should do is...'
If I stand there and argue, on a trip, that we should drive down, say, highway 141 to get to Gainesville, and it's pointed out that highway 141 doesn't go to Gainesville, and so I argue that we should drive down 141 to get some Taco Bell, and it's pointed out that there's a Taco Bell on the actual route to Gainesville, and then I argue that Gainesville is a stupid place to go and we should go to Lawrenceville down 141 instead, and it's pointed out while that's technically possible, that's not a very good way to get to Lawrenceville...
At some point, people really should realize I obviously have a motive to drive down 141, because every single plan I invent involves driving down 141.
Likewise, at some point people need to realize the climate change deniers have some sort of motive to not do anything about climate change. (What that motive is is rather obvious if you look at the funding sources.)
But even if you knew nothing who was funding that, it's clear there is some motive, because every. single. one. of their conclusions is 'We shouldn't do anything', no matter what facts they've decided to finally accept. It might exist, it might not, it might be us, might be the sun or volcanoes, it might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, whatever it is, we sure as heck shouldn't demand people change their behavior, ever.
Same with the anti-vaccine crowd. First it was mercury in vaccines, then it was this study, now I'm sure some other bogus thing will come up. But every single solution is 'less vaccines'. Actually, if you look real close, you'll see every single solution is 'traditional medicine bad, alternative medicine good'.
People who sit and argue the same 'problem solution' despite the problem constantly changing are dishonest, and not scientists, and people need to stop listening and call them out on it the very first time they do that.
Another good example of badly-applied data. Someone goes on a shooting rampage on a freeway. RandomInnocentGuy gets arrested, because he's been seen in the area previous to this incident, with video evidence! Of course, no need to mention the fact that he's been commuting on that route for the last two years, and the same video shows him merely passing through the area where the shooting occurred. The data is all good, but it's also irrelevant.
There is exactly one common failure point of people wrongly convicted: They have bad overworked public defendants.
That's it. Talking about anything else is pointless. Complaining that a certain kind of circumstantial evidence gets used is pointless.
The hypothetical you mentioned, or the actual case someone else mentioned where someone was wrongly convicted of murder because they simply had violent writings (And didn't even have the medical knowledge to pull off such a murder.).
It's nothing to do with what categories of evidence are allowed, and can't be fixed by worrying about that...someone could have just easily just seen your hypothetical guy, or the guy's writings could have been public.
The problem is that, as we constantly reduce the time and resources that public defenders have to do their jobs, we will get more and more wrongly convicted people. (And more and more guilty walking away because someone in in jail for their crime, so it's two miscarriages of justice.)
The only solution I see, thanks to the rich nearly completely controlling society, is to bar anyone from practicing criminal law except public defenders. Everyone gets one, and that's it.
We'd see the system fixed so fact people's heads would spin.
I'm pretty cynical about chicken pox vaccines myself. Chicken pox is not life threatening in children. Let's save the vaccination schedule for the vaccines that are actually important. If someone reached 16 without getting chicken pox, then give them the vaccine so that they don't develop them as an adult, which can be dangerous.(1)
Flu vaccine, OTOH, is a good vaccine for the segment of the population that could get very sick from it. The elderly, people already in bad health, people with AIDs, etc. But that vaccine isn't ever 'scheduled' anyway, so people already get it if they want or not.
1) I'm actually of the opinion we should systematically stamp out various diseases by sudden and epic levels of vaccine, so at some point, for two decades, we need to vaccinate all children for chicken pox, and watch it essentially vanish.
But chicken pox is way down the list of diseases to do that too, and we don't have infinite resources. At the very least, HPV is above it. And it's much better to work 100% on one thing, because the point isn't to 'reduce' a disease, it's to fucking smallpox it off the face of the earth, so no one ever gets it ever again. Only when we're sure it's gone do we move on to something else.
Yes, it was dumb to use thimerosal. It's an yet another example of our medical industry trimming every last dime. There's not really a lot of reason to use preservatives at all...we're not selling them at the damn grocery store. Keep them refrigerated, produce them somewhat local.
OTOH, it was also dumb to propose that as a reason for autism. We know what mercury poisoning looks like (Think 'mad as a hatter'...that's mercury poisoning), and that ain't it.
Mercury's not good for you, heavy metals aren't good for you, but it's rather incomprehensible it would cause autism...for one thing, autism is on the rise, whereas heavy metal exposure has gone dramatically down since the 1960s and we invented the EPA and actually stopped poisoning ourselves. Yes, there were less diagnoses of autism back then, perhaps much much less, but statistically, if early heavy metals exposure caused autism, something like a tenth of people over 70 would have autism, and I think we'd notice that now even if we hadn't diagnosed them back then.
Hell, back then, children were eating lead paint chips off the wall and touching mercury in science class.
For the nay-sayers, no, I don't eat tuna or other high-mercury fish, either, for the same reason. And, IAAN (I am a neuroscientist).
I have to wonder how many of those people who blamed it on mercury with no evidence, and distributed things blaming it on mercury, continued to eat fish, and one serving of fish can give you more mercury than an entire line of childhood vaccines could even hypothetically do. I wonder how many of these crackpots were fish and chicken vegetarians, and thus their kids had more fish and more mercury than normal children who also ate cow and pig and whatnot.
I wonder how many of them, after years of being 'sure' it was the mercury in vaccines, because mercury was an evil evil evil thing, now worry about mercury since it's been removed from vaccines. Although a lot of the anti-vaccine people don't even appear to know that.
It's the same reason they moved from 'mercury poisoning' when vaccine companies stopped using it and autism didn't go down.
This is exactly the same sort of 'science' as 'intelligent design'...it's 'invent a position and desperately scrabble around for any possible reason it could be true, and latch onto it until someone disproves it, and then latch onto something else that proves the same thing.
Hey, look,it's a moron who's out of date and hence peddling the old junk science.
Mercury has not been used in vaccine preservation since 1999, you moron. Because of idiots like you claiming the mercury was causing autism (Mercury does not cause autism, it causes quite recognizable mercury poisoning, which is much closer to insanity than autism), the companies stopped using it.
The sample size of 'non-immunized kids' based on their original claim is 100%.
Why? because they originally claimed it was the mercury preservatives in vaccines, and, what's more, they claimed they could cure some of the autism that way by using heavy-metal-poisoning treatment.
As such, vaccine companies stopped almost entirely using mercury-based preservatives in 1999.
Autism has not gone down, and the quackery has moved on to claiming the vaccines themselves are causing the problem, despite no one even vaguely knowing how this could work. (The mercury theory was based on bad science, the current theory doesn't appear to be based on anything at all.)
Alternatively, law enforcement could accept that search history can have even less relevance to your actions than a shirt with a marijuana leaf logo on it. At least with the shirt, you have to choose to put it on, but it still has little bearing on whether or not you actually do pot.
Um, law enforcement are actually looking for connection to crimes when they check your browser history.
When they find such evidence, it is their job to give it to the prosecutor.
It's the jury's job, or perhaps the judge's job, to decide that a mystery writer who searched for how bloodstains spray is probably not that relevant to some random guy who got shot down the street, whereas the fact that a person who'd researched how to kill someone with antifreeze the day before the wife divorcing him got killed with antifreeze, and then attempted to delete his history, probably is relevant.
I've very baffled as to people who somehow think people should have infinite privacy rights on their computer. (I suspect some people have a lot of porn or something.) When the police are investigating crimes, they get search warrants and actually attempt to locate evidence of that crime, including 'means', which includes 'Does the suspect know how to commit this crime?'.
I know slashdot went OMG THEY'RE TRYING TO CRIMINALIZE KNOWLEDGE, but, uh, no they aren't. They're simply using the fact that someone went and deliberately gained the knowledge of how to commit a crime the day before a crime as evidence that person committed the crime. If they'd searched his computer and found 'How do I rape women without getting caught?' or 'How do i build a nuclear bomb?' instead, he'd be fine, because he's not a suspect for those things.
That isn't to say that the government isn't spying on shit like that, and I disagree with that, but that's not what happened here, where a perfectly reasonable police investigation found perfectly reasonable evidence that the guy had the means to commit the crime, and moreover, had deliberately gained it the day before someone did commit the crime.
There were no 'reading materials' in that case at all. It was writing by Masters that were used to convict him. So your entire point is, um, stupid, and utterly unrelated to issue of reading how to commit a murder before a murder is committed.
The only 'reading materials' involved were him having a newspaper clipping of the murder. (Which, assuming he doesn't have a time machine, presumably he read after the murder was committed.)
The problem with that crime is that the courts managed to get nonsensical and idiotic psychological 'expert witness' testimony and managed to convict an innocent someone based on their writings and drawings.
What that actually demonstrates is that psychologists are often completely and utterly full of crap and the prosecution will just shop around until they find one that's full of the crap they want, and that we should never ever convict someone based on solely what a psychologist has decided is 'true' about them.
None of that has anything to do with 'reading materials'. None of the lessons from that case apply here at all...they didn't pay some psychologist to say that he was disturbed, and convict based on that.
Nope, not exactly. Besides, unless you do some cute things like playing with system time and installing from old disks, its trivial to show that you recently reinstalled. Not to mention the lack of any evidence of activity on the machine.
Well, yes, but 'I previously installed Bioshock and the DRM screwed my DVD up, so I reinstalled Windows, although I never really got around to doing anything because my wife got murdered the next day' is much less incriminating than 'I overwrote the first sector of the hard drive with 0s and the rest with random data (Which is not really encrypted data, I promise) for no reason at all.'
This is sorta stupid anyway, though. Anyone smart enough to do crap like this is smart enough to have a perfectly innocent, used for several years, enough porn to make it look real, computer, that has done no searches like that at all. In fact, it would have planted searches that make it look like the victim was afraid for her life...from someone else. The murder searches were instead done using a Live Boot CD.
OTOH, smart people often do very stupid things, and end up wiping their computer after the murder, which is just about as stupid as can be. Half the time it doesn't work, so it's just more evidence they're guilty, and even when it does, it's very suspicious.
My work could (in theory, if never practice) involve handling medical data, so I have to (by law) encrypt my drive, and have done so for several years now.. and have been a sideline encryption geek for a while now, so I maybe I was wrong to assume this part was obvious.
No, a lot of people don't know how it works, and make the reasonable assumption that it's your password encrypting the drive.
I encrypt my laptop, too. If you had access to it, you'd have access to via web sites, including a few ecommerce ones. While the sites don't store credit card information (Because, duh, you're not supposed to), anyone knowledgeable with PHP could probably hack in something that emails all the CC info to them in an hour. (Or, hell, they could just get into our credit card processor and directly distribute money to themselves.)
Strangely, legally, I don't have to do this. If we actually did store the CC numbers anywhere, we'd need to encrypt them, but the law doesn't appear to worry about computers with the ability to hijack the process.
All people really should encrypt their computers, period. Especially if it's a laptop.
Simply so they don't have to worry about people walking off with access to every single thing they've ever had access to online. Or that idiots won't rummage through your mail when you're out of the room.
It's not to keep 'the government' out...it's for the same reason you put locks on your door.
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They type of mercury does not cause mercury poisoning at that does level. It is effect from the body within 24 hours.
It's important to note that because these moron will the go on and say vaccines cause mercury poisoning; which is not possible.
That is not why vaccines don't cause mercury poisoning. What you said was a sane point a decade and a half ago.
It's not now, because, thanks to these idiots, they stopped using any mercury at all in 1999.
Asserting that vaccines, back then, could give you mercury poisoning was like asserting that nuclear power plants produced radioactive electricity. Absurd? Yes. Impossible? Only for people with the slightest amount of intelligence.
Asserting that current vaccines can give you mercury poisoning is akin to asserting that diesel generators can give you radioactive electricity. There...um...there's no radiation...I don't know what...I can't...what...my brain hurts...
We've passed the 'impossible for stupid people' point a while back, and now we're at the point where you have to be very ignorant and very stupid.
Agreed, but as continued research has shown for lead, for example, there are quantifiable effects to subclinical exposure. There are definite personality changes that go along with lead levels that are lower than those that cause traditional lead poisoning.
Yes, but mercury levels have only gone down in the last couple of decades, while autism has skyrocketed, so it's rather absurd to even ever consider them as a cause of any sort.
If anything, the lack of heavy metals corresponds to more autism in the last 50 years. (This is obviously meaningless, but clearly indicates the anti-vaccine people were not operating sanely to start with.)
The levels necessary for this kind of shift are much lower than normally thought of for heavy metal poisoning, and since exposure accumulates, it seems prudent to avoid any unnecessary ingestion of mercury, lead, or other heavy metals.
Heh, good luck with that.
But, seriously, I'm all for not using mercury anywhere we don't need it, and, as I said, the only reason we need to 'preserve' vaccines at all is a health-care system that is utterly unable to control costs as the health insurance insure sucks them dry.
Let's not have any preservatives at all. Safe or otherwise. Make the damn vaccine, refrigerate it, inject it within a day or two. It's not rocket science. We are not the third world. We can ship refrigerated things anywhere in the US in a day.
Yeah, the whole concept was bogus, I was just pointing out that it was a moving target, and that almost no kid under 10 was ever given a mercury-preserved vaccine, so we have a huge 'control group' for the original claim.
And autism has just continued to go up, even for kids under 10.
What ESP actually means is perceiving things beyond the known and/or physical senses. It's the ability to perceive things without direct stimulation of sensory organs.
Those two sentences are two entirely different things. Let us look that them separately:
What ESP actually means is perceiving things beyond the known and/or physical senses.
Let's look at that and/or for a second. That has three total combination: unknown but physical senses, known but non-physical senses, and unknown and nonphysical senses. I think we can all agree that there are not any 'known but non-physical senses', so let's drop that.
So what you actually said was 'unknown but physical senses' or 'unknown and nonphysical senses'. Which obviously reduces down to 'unknown senses of any sort'.
It's the ability to perceive things without direct stimulation of sensory organs.
This is entirely counter to your first statement, where you said that ESP does include things sensed by 'physical senses' (As long as it's not known), presumably via 'direct stimulation'.
If we're now excluding 'unknown but physical', you have now said 'ESP is perceiving things with unknown and nonphysical senses.' (Which is stupid, because ESP, by definition, does not use senses.)
"Perception" is only tautologically a "sense" for certain senses of "sense", which is not the sense meant by ESP.
Um, no. The word 'sense' is not in 'ESP', the word extrasensory is in ESP. Extrasensory means outside the senses, which rather makes your entire comment about that sort of 'sense' very strange, as you just defined a type of 'sense' to mean exactly what you wanted ESP to mean, when in actuality you should do the opposite, because ESP must be 'beyond' senses.
However, getting off 'extrasensory' for a second, what you're confused about is the meaning of perception. Perception is interpreting your senses. That is literally what it means. It's not a tautology, sense and perception aren't the same thing, you can sense something without perceiving it, but you can't perceive something without sensing it.
If you want to assert that somehow people can learn information without outside sources, and that that's ESP, well, okay, that actually would be ESP.
But every single test of 'ESP' is actually testing whether people can sense something (and hence perceive it). Granted, they're testing if someone can sense it in a way that should not be possible, but they're testing if they can sense it non-the-less.
Here, the test is 'Can people sense things before they happen, and if so can they interpret those senses into accurate perception?'.
None of the ESP tests are seeing if people can obtain enlightenment or figure out the exact distance to the moon or whatever it would mean to just 'perceive' something with no actual sensory source. They're instead looking for new senses, which makes ESP incredibly poorly named.
There's always Arthur Lintgen, who has a pretty cool, but entirely explained, power. And the Randi Foundation proved he had it.
The Randi Foundation did in fact find someone who had a power beyond normal humans, although he wasn't trying for a million dollars because it was not, strictly speaking, 'supernatural'.
Arthur Lintgen claimed that he could recognize classical music based on looking at the grooves with his eye...and he can, almost entirely flawlessly. No tricks. Proven in a scientific double-blind study.
But he doesn't have, or claim to have, superpowers, just amazing knowledge of classical music and the ability to recognize patterns in the record grooves and match them to music.
And at this point, he's done the trick so often he can often identify which publishing company made the record simply by the exact color and texture of the record, and figure out the music by looking at it...and as he knows all major recordings, so he can then hilariously pretend to identify the conductor and even the exact date it was recorded by glancing at the record.
But he really just knows 'This is Beethoven 3rd, and the record is from publishing company X, and the only time they published that is..'
Although, to mention blackjack...if you have a 3% chance of guessing the next card, you have a way better chance of winning than an extra 3%. Especially if, when you're wrong, you're 'close'. Alternately, you could know the next card with 1005 assurance, and still not win the hand.
This is what I mean by the '3%' being a little screwy. Foreknowledge 3% of the time does not equal winning 3% more of the time.
No, wait. Actually you'd get bounced in short order and barred from the casino.
Not if you play smart. Casinos know what you could possibly be cheating at.
If you have a 3%, your best bet would be to go to Vegas and play roulette, is very close to even odds at about 48%, so can nudge to 51% and which it is not possible to cheat at, and the casino is not watching for 'cheaters' in any statistical sense. They are watching for people lying about their bets, and the couper and the person being in on it together, but there's nothing that could possible tell them that someone is winning 51% of the time, or even even flag it if it did notice. Individual people win 51% of the time all the time. Probably 30% of the people walk away from roulette having won 51% of the time. They don't bar people for that, that would be horrible publicity.
Although I'm not really sure what a '3% edge' actually means. Is that 3% in all dimensions, or just one? Is it 47/53% if you pick red vs black, or it is +3% that it will land on a certain specific slot, or what, exactly? If they have a 3% extra chance of getting the color right, and a 3% extra chance of getting the odd/even right, and 3% extra chance of getting the number right, and a 3% extra chance of getting the group of four right...they've got like a 70% of getting everything right. Something is really screwy here.
Assuming it's +3% to a specific 50/50 axis: The problem is, unless you're starting with a lot of money, it's going to be very slow. Safety-wise, you should only bet about 5% of your money at once, and even that's a little risky. This means on 100 spins, you will make 5% more money.
As each roulette spin tends to take about a minute, in an hour you've made 60 spins, which means you've earn between 3% of your seed money. Which is an awesome hourly rate if you walked in with $100,000 and made $3000. It's a pretty shitty one if you walked in with $100 and made $3. Hell, with the price of a plane ticket and hotel room, it's a pretty shitty rate of $30 an hour...you're looking at 4 hours a day just to cover room and board!
Technically, craps is closer odds, and sometimes you can place side bets exactly at odds, although only after placing another bet at slightly worse odds, but a) it's easier to cheat at, so they might assume you are cheating, and b) it's insanely complicated. Although, as an added bonus, as there are a lot of really really stupid bets, they're used to some people 'slowly losing' while others lose very quickly, so are less likely to notice someone 'slowly winning'. (Unlike roulette, where all bets are 'reasonable', they are within 5% of breaking even so everyone 'slowly loses'. Well, unless they deliberately bet all their money.) Also, craps is much faster, so might be worth learning...just make sure you place each bet clearly and keep your hands away so you don't get accused of cheating.
Do not, under any circumstances, play blackjack, which will get you banned. Although, believe it or not, automatic card-counter detectors probably wouldn't notice. All counting cards does is tell you when you can, statistically, win, so detector systems notice people who join or leave suspiciously, or bet high (When they can win) and low (When they can't) suspiciously. If you just have a extra 3% chance of winning, period, and don't change your bet, they probably won't notice, but don't risk it. Alternately, you can go to Atlantic City, where casinos cannot ban you for winning, period. (They avoid blackjack card counters by reshuffling the deck after every hand.)
Yes, but you're assuming that either all precogs are very intelligent. (Or so precognitive that they see that it would be a mistake to demonstrate their talents, which is indistinguishable from 'very intelligent'.)
And then you also want us to believe that these studies are correct, which also require there to be stupid precogs who don't know enough to hide.
So, essentially, you believe there are people with almost no psychic powers that require a lot and lot of testing to discover, and everyone else is either smart enough or psychic enough to hide their talent, and there's never been anyone in the middle who happily goes around bragging about how he can win the lottery or bankrupt the roulette wheel whenever he wants to and is invited on all the talk shows?
Promise yourself that, if you win the lottery, you'll buy a strip club and hang out there for a year. The strippers will be required to have body paint with your winning numbers on them.
Never dabble in statistics - the experts will roundly berate you and correct you even if you *THINK* you're doing everything right.
Indeed. I was about to make a post a minute ago about cherry picking results, and tried to figure out how some coin flipping thing. I said 'If you flipped a coin 10 times, and got all heads, that's a 0.1% chance'. (I believe I got this correct. It's 50% to the tenth power. 50% the first time, 25% the second, divide by half each time down to 0.0976%) Then I said 'So if you run that experiment 500 times, you get a 50% chance of one of them being all heads.' (This is where I think I was wrong.)
Then I went to find out how many few times you'd need to get a 50% chance of 10 in a row if you didn't stop on the 'boundaries' of the experiment, if you weren't running a 'ten flip experiment' repeatedly, if you were just flipping. And I found this...which said you needed 1500 flips to get a 50% of ten in a row. (Look at the n=10 graph.)
I wrote that down...and then looked at my math that said you needed 500 flips for 50% and you'd even get it on a boundary.
And I said 'Well, obviously I've run into something about statistics I don't understand' and didn't finish that post. Statistics is complicated, especially if you're talking about multiple experiments.
When PhD's can't even work out things like the Monty Hall Problem properly, you just know it's not something you can throw an amateur towards.
I probably couldn't work out the Monty Hall problem if someone told it to me, but I do actually understand the correct answer. I even once built a simulator in an online game that would randomly switch or not, and keep track, and ran it, and, sure enough, 2/3rds of the time you should switch.
Now that I thought of that, I wish someone would write a 'statistics calculator', where people could put in the various odds of specific things happening, and then it would run simulations to show you the actual results. You tell it the starting odds, let it run, and then look at the results column and it would essentially tell you how often you'd expect that to happen.
Yes, you can figure that out mathematically, but no one understands the math. It's much easier if people could have put in the starting conditions for, say, this experiment, ran a simulation of it happening 100,000 times, and said 'Hey, look, these results happened 3000 times by pure chance.'. You could even single-step through the simulation if you wanted.
I 'extrapolate the future' a lot. I can start toasting something and walk right back into the kitchen right as it finishes without consciously paying attention to the time.
Of course, I suspect I'm unconsciously paying attention to the time.
It's wrong to call it 'ESP' because ESP is a null term. It means 'perceiving things beyond the senses', which is idiotic.
If we can actually perceive the future, that's a sense. If we can see inside sealed boxes, that's a sense. If we can read minds, that's a sense. There are senses we don't know exist, but they are, in fact, senses. (If they exist, that is.) No one is perceiving 'beyond' their senses.
Not only is ESP is a nonsensical term, it's a 'category' that doesn't really have anything to do with each other. It's basically 'any special powers that people have ever ascribed to humans' all lumped together. (Except 'magic', which gets lumped under 'supernatural', which makes no sense as a category either.)
For example, there's nothing under the current laws of physics that prohibits mind reading. All you have to hypothesis is that minds emit something that other people can pick up on. We have never detected such a thing, but it's no more impossible than radio. (I mean, no one's asserted they can read minds FTL.)
Meanwhile, something like precognition actually does violate the laws of physics as we know them.
Using a term like ESP, and investigating them as if they were some single thing, is a very good indicator of lack of scientific rigor. It's like if the term was 'float', and you investigated hovercrafts, superconducting antigravity theory, magnets, and people who claimed they could levitate to see if 'float' was possible.
That's an even better example, but I didn't want to use it.
Yeah, you can actually figure out how plausible a scientific position is the more the facts change and people (are forced to) accept the new facts, but then still argue the same conclusion.
And it's not really even the same 'conclusion'. It's past the conclusion. It's the same 'So now that we've figured that out, the thing we should do is...'
If I stand there and argue, on a trip, that we should drive down, say, highway 141 to get to Gainesville, and it's pointed out that highway 141 doesn't go to Gainesville, and so I argue that we should drive down 141 to get some Taco Bell, and it's pointed out that there's a Taco Bell on the actual route to Gainesville, and then I argue that Gainesville is a stupid place to go and we should go to Lawrenceville down 141 instead, and it's pointed out while that's technically possible, that's not a very good way to get to Lawrenceville...
At some point, people really should realize I obviously have a motive to drive down 141, because every single plan I invent involves driving down 141.
Likewise, at some point people need to realize the climate change deniers have some sort of motive to not do anything about climate change. (What that motive is is rather obvious if you look at the funding sources.)
But even if you knew nothing who was funding that, it's clear there is some motive, because every. single. one. of their conclusions is 'We shouldn't do anything', no matter what facts they've decided to finally accept. It might exist, it might not, it might be us, might be the sun or volcanoes, it might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, whatever it is, we sure as heck shouldn't demand people change their behavior, ever.
Same with the anti-vaccine crowd. First it was mercury in vaccines, then it was this study, now I'm sure some other bogus thing will come up. But every single solution is 'less vaccines'. Actually, if you look real close, you'll see every single solution is 'traditional medicine bad, alternative medicine good'.
People who sit and argue the same 'problem solution' despite the problem constantly changing are dishonest, and not scientists, and people need to stop listening and call them out on it the very first time they do that.
Another good example of badly-applied data. Someone goes on a shooting rampage on a freeway. RandomInnocentGuy gets arrested, because he's been seen in the area previous to this incident, with video evidence! Of course, no need to mention the fact that he's been commuting on that route for the last two years, and the same video shows him merely passing through the area where the shooting occurred. The data is all good, but it's also irrelevant.
There is exactly one common failure point of people wrongly convicted: They have bad overworked public defendants.
That's it. Talking about anything else is pointless. Complaining that a certain kind of circumstantial evidence gets used is pointless.
The hypothetical you mentioned, or the actual case someone else mentioned where someone was wrongly convicted of murder because they simply had violent writings (And didn't even have the medical knowledge to pull off such a murder.).
It's nothing to do with what categories of evidence are allowed, and can't be fixed by worrying about that...someone could have just easily just seen your hypothetical guy, or the guy's writings could have been public.
The problem is that, as we constantly reduce the time and resources that public defenders have to do their jobs, we will get more and more wrongly convicted people. (And more and more guilty walking away because someone in in jail for their crime, so it's two miscarriages of justice.)
The only solution I see, thanks to the rich nearly completely controlling society, is to bar anyone from practicing criminal law except public defenders. Everyone gets one, and that's it.
We'd see the system fixed so fact people's heads would spin.
I'm pretty cynical about chicken pox vaccines myself. Chicken pox is not life threatening in children. Let's save the vaccination schedule for the vaccines that are actually important. If someone reached 16 without getting chicken pox, then give them the vaccine so that they don't develop them as an adult, which can be dangerous.(1)
Flu vaccine, OTOH, is a good vaccine for the segment of the population that could get very sick from it. The elderly, people already in bad health, people with AIDs, etc. But that vaccine isn't ever 'scheduled' anyway, so people already get it if they want or not.
1) I'm actually of the opinion we should systematically stamp out various diseases by sudden and epic levels of vaccine, so at some point, for two decades, we need to vaccinate all children for chicken pox, and watch it essentially vanish.
But chicken pox is way down the list of diseases to do that too, and we don't have infinite resources. At the very least, HPV is above it. And it's much better to work 100% on one thing, because the point isn't to 'reduce' a disease, it's to fucking smallpox it off the face of the earth, so no one ever gets it ever again. Only when we're sure it's gone do we move on to something else.
What should happen is that someone who's kid got sick from lack of vaccination should sue him for everything he owns.
Yes, it was dumb to use thimerosal. It's an yet another example of our medical industry trimming every last dime. There's not really a lot of reason to use preservatives at all...we're not selling them at the damn grocery store. Keep them refrigerated, produce them somewhat local.
OTOH, it was also dumb to propose that as a reason for autism. We know what mercury poisoning looks like (Think 'mad as a hatter'...that's mercury poisoning), and that ain't it.
Mercury's not good for you, heavy metals aren't good for you, but it's rather incomprehensible it would cause autism...for one thing, autism is on the rise, whereas heavy metal exposure has gone dramatically down since the 1960s and we invented the EPA and actually stopped poisoning ourselves. Yes, there were less diagnoses of autism back then, perhaps much much less, but statistically, if early heavy metals exposure caused autism, something like a tenth of people over 70 would have autism, and I think we'd notice that now even if we hadn't diagnosed them back then.
Hell, back then, children were eating lead paint chips off the wall and touching mercury in science class.
For the nay-sayers, no, I don't eat tuna or other high-mercury fish, either, for the same reason. And, IAAN (I am a neuroscientist).
I have to wonder how many of those people who blamed it on mercury with no evidence, and distributed things blaming it on mercury, continued to eat fish, and one serving of fish can give you more mercury than an entire line of childhood vaccines could even hypothetically do. I wonder how many of these crackpots were fish and chicken vegetarians, and thus their kids had more fish and more mercury than normal children who also ate cow and pig and whatnot.
I wonder how many of them, after years of being 'sure' it was the mercury in vaccines, because mercury was an evil evil evil thing, now worry about mercury since it's been removed from vaccines. Although a lot of the anti-vaccine people don't even appear to know that.
It's the same reason they moved from 'mercury poisoning' when vaccine companies stopped using it and autism didn't go down.
This is exactly the same sort of 'science' as 'intelligent design'...it's 'invent a position and desperately scrabble around for any possible reason it could be true, and latch onto it until someone disproves it, and then latch onto something else that proves the same thing.
That is not anywhere near how science works.
Hey, look,it's a moron who's out of date and hence peddling the old junk science.
Mercury has not been used in vaccine preservation since 1999, you moron. Because of idiots like you claiming the mercury was causing autism (Mercury does not cause autism, it causes quite recognizable mercury poisoning, which is much closer to insanity than autism), the companies stopped using it.
And yet, hey, look, autism? Not gone down.
The sample size of 'non-immunized kids' based on their original claim is 100%.
Why? because they originally claimed it was the mercury preservatives in vaccines, and, what's more, they claimed they could cure some of the autism that way by using heavy-metal-poisoning treatment.
As such, vaccine companies stopped almost entirely using mercury-based preservatives in 1999.
Autism has not gone down, and the quackery has moved on to claiming the vaccines themselves are causing the problem, despite no one even vaguely knowing how this could work. (The mercury theory was based on bad science, the current theory doesn't appear to be based on anything at all.)
Alternatively, law enforcement could accept that search history can have even less relevance to your actions than a shirt with a marijuana leaf logo on it. At least with the shirt, you have to choose to put it on, but it still has little bearing on whether or not you actually do pot.
Um, law enforcement are actually looking for connection to crimes when they check your browser history.
When they find such evidence, it is their job to give it to the prosecutor.
It's the jury's job, or perhaps the judge's job, to decide that a mystery writer who searched for how bloodstains spray is probably not that relevant to some random guy who got shot down the street, whereas the fact that a person who'd researched how to kill someone with antifreeze the day before the wife divorcing him got killed with antifreeze, and then attempted to delete his history, probably is relevant.
I've very baffled as to people who somehow think people should have infinite privacy rights on their computer. (I suspect some people have a lot of porn or something.) When the police are investigating crimes, they get search warrants and actually attempt to locate evidence of that crime, including 'means', which includes 'Does the suspect know how to commit this crime?'.
I know slashdot went OMG THEY'RE TRYING TO CRIMINALIZE KNOWLEDGE, but, uh, no they aren't. They're simply using the fact that someone went and deliberately gained the knowledge of how to commit a crime the day before a crime as evidence that person committed the crime. If they'd searched his computer and found 'How do I rape women without getting caught?' or 'How do i build a nuclear bomb?' instead, he'd be fine, because he's not a suspect for those things.
That isn't to say that the government isn't spying on shit like that, and I disagree with that, but that's not what happened here, where a perfectly reasonable police investigation found perfectly reasonable evidence that the guy had the means to commit the crime, and moreover, had deliberately gained it the day before someone did commit the crime.
Sigh.
There were no 'reading materials' in that case at all. It was writing by Masters that were used to convict him. So your entire point is, um, stupid, and utterly unrelated to issue of reading how to commit a murder before a murder is committed.
The only 'reading materials' involved were him having a newspaper clipping of the murder. (Which, assuming he doesn't have a time machine, presumably he read after the murder was committed.)
The problem with that crime is that the courts managed to get nonsensical and idiotic psychological 'expert witness' testimony and managed to convict an innocent someone based on their writings and drawings.
What that actually demonstrates is that psychologists are often completely and utterly full of crap and the prosecution will just shop around until they find one that's full of the crap they want, and that we should never ever convict someone based on solely what a psychologist has decided is 'true' about them.
None of that has anything to do with 'reading materials'. None of the lessons from that case apply here at all...they didn't pay some psychologist to say that he was disturbed, and convict based on that.
Nope, not exactly. Besides, unless you do some cute things like playing with system time and installing from old disks, its trivial to show that you recently reinstalled. Not to mention the lack of any evidence of activity on the machine.
Well, yes, but 'I previously installed Bioshock and the DRM screwed my DVD up, so I reinstalled Windows, although I never really got around to doing anything because my wife got murdered the next day' is much less incriminating than 'I overwrote the first sector of the hard drive with 0s and the rest with random data (Which is not really encrypted data, I promise) for no reason at all.'
This is sorta stupid anyway, though. Anyone smart enough to do crap like this is smart enough to have a perfectly innocent, used for several years, enough porn to make it look real, computer, that has done no searches like that at all. In fact, it would have planted searches that make it look like the victim was afraid for her life...from someone else. The murder searches were instead done using a Live Boot CD.
OTOH, smart people often do very stupid things, and end up wiping their computer after the murder, which is just about as stupid as can be. Half the time it doesn't work, so it's just more evidence they're guilty, and even when it does, it's very suspicious.
My work could (in theory, if never practice) involve handling medical data, so I have to (by law) encrypt my drive, and have done so for several years now.. and have been a sideline encryption geek for a while now, so I maybe I was wrong to assume this part was obvious.
No, a lot of people don't know how it works, and make the reasonable assumption that it's your password encrypting the drive.
I encrypt my laptop, too. If you had access to it, you'd have access to via web sites, including a few ecommerce ones. While the sites don't store credit card information (Because, duh, you're not supposed to), anyone knowledgeable with PHP could probably hack in something that emails all the CC info to them in an hour. (Or, hell, they could just get into our credit card processor and directly distribute money to themselves.)
Strangely, legally, I don't have to do this. If we actually did store the CC numbers anywhere, we'd need to encrypt them, but the law doesn't appear to worry about computers with the ability to hijack the process.
All people really should encrypt their computers, period. Especially if it's a laptop.
Simply so they don't have to worry about people walking off with access to every single thing they've ever had access to online. Or that idiots won't rummage through your mail when you're out of the room.
It's not to keep 'the government' out...it's for the same reason you put locks on your door.
The best defense is probably to not murder people.