"It's this thing called physics and specifically, astrophysics.... The gravity of nearby planets and the sun would have a far more drastic effect on the smaller pieces" Spoken like a business major.
the mystery clears up; today's NYT has a graphic of the risk by alcohol level vs age; the.05 to.08% risk is mainly in younger drivers. as well as a lot of the 0 to.05% risk, too. the online version also cuts it by time of day; would it be a surprise to see that alcohol related deaths at all ages tend to be around midnight, plus or minus a couple of hours?
so you do know there are two studies after all, you just don't understand that two different studies of two different things are going to come out with two different numbers. i.e.
"a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense." is not going to be the same number as
"a gun in the home makes it 2.7 times more likely that a family member will become a homicide victim in the home." so you think that they should both be the same number. Yeah, that's a good critique there.
Keep working at it. Not everybody understands things the first few times they read them. I can see why you'd figure you need a gun to get by.
"[Sir Francis Galton] developed mental tests that were a series of objective measurements of such sensory abilities as keenness of sight, color discrimination, and pitch discrimination;... Galton's (1869, 1883) theory of intelligence was simplistic; People take in information through their senses, so those with better developed senses ought to be more intelligent." - IQ Testing 101, Alan S. Kaufman, p.19
since when do roach motels use glucose? they use scent attractants, either food scents or pheromones. using taste as an attractant in a roach motel makes no sense at all. once the roach has his tongue or feet or whatever he tastes with stuck to the glue it hardly matters whether he's attracted or not. it's gotta be scent. I don't think any critters can smell glucose (or sucrose or fructose). similarly, how would a mutation to make glucose aversive help at all? the regular roach is standing there with his tongue or feet or whatever stuck thinking "yum, glucose, i'm happy", while his mutant buddy is stuck there going "not me, i'm never going to do this again"? and finally, why would anyone use glucose for this kind of thing, rather than cheaper sucrose?
well, 97% of the denialists don't actually believe in their denial; they're either directly working in an industry that causes AGW, are paid by such an industry to say there is no AGW, are simply cranks enough to argue the opposite of what everybody else says, have such a high opinion of their own brilliance that they honestly believe that 15 minutes of surfing rightwing talking point depots on the web will enable them to solve all the mysteries that researchers in the field can't, are so consumed with liberalophobia that they just know that AGW must be wrong if Al Gore thinks it's true, and/or believe anything their authority figures, from Glenn Beck to the WSJ editorial pages, tells them. Of course, there's a huge amount of overlap between all these categories.
bass ackwards. The assertion under examination here is the denialists' claim that the little flat part at the end is evidence that AGW is now a thing of the past. "The world temp has stabilized and DROPPED."
Error bars for each mean are not relevant because we're not trying to compare individual yearly means of daily data points, or whatever; instead each yearly mean is one data point, and a REAL scientist will know that the central limit theorem tells us that the set of these means will tend towards normal distribution regardless of the standard error or normality of an individual mean, so that one subset of means can be statistically compared to another subset. It's a statistical analysis of the frequency of similar plateaus found during 40 years of warming, compared to the current plateau cited as evidence that the warming has terminated. If such plateaus are hardly ever seen, then this current one suggests something new is happening.
And given that 4 such plateaus are seen with no evidence of a stop or change in the overall rate of warming over 40 years, you don't have to actually do the math to state with statistical certainty that the current plateau is no more conclusive of an end to warming than any of the previous ones were. The fact that you can see the graph and still argue with this completely intuitively obvious point is ample evidence of bias to the point of cognitive impairment.
Of course, since statistical tests can't argue against each other, they do have to show the same result just more or less powerfully, so you were nearing the truth with your initial observation; it just meant the opposite of what you think it meant. If the error bar on each individual year is so high that you can't hypothesize a statistically significant difference between the observed means, i.e. the line "is a flag line", then it is absolutely and completely obvious that the last X points can't be "more flat" signifying that "The world temp has stabilized and DROPPED" can they?
I hereby postulate that any post beginning with "To a REAL scientist" is going to be goofy.
The Kellerman study has been thoroughly discredited from many angles, including the fact that it used neighborhoods with high criminal populations, and counted rival gangs as someone you know. It even counted, for example, if you had a gun in the house, never used, and a rival gang-banger of your son's came in and shot somebody. Your gun had nothing to do with the violence, but it's counted towards Kellerman's total. On the other hand, if you pointed a gun at the bad guy and he fled, that was not counted as defensive gun use. There are many other problems with the study. It would take a whole article to detail them all.
Kellerman's study was also not formally peer-reviewed, and he still refuses to provide the raw data for outside analysis.
Other studies show between 100,000 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, far outnumbering gun deaths even counting suicide.
Japan has far more suicides, yet no guns. Explain. And, in a free society, who are we to legislate that someone can't kill himself by his desired means as long as he doesn't injure another in the process?
Well, while the "Kellerman" study may be thoroughly discredited, necro81 is talking about Kellermann here. I'm not entirely trying to be funny; if you Google Kellermann and gun study or whatever you come up with a lot of scholarly analysis, generally supportive; but if you Google Kellerman [sic] and gun study or whatever you come up with zillion gun-addled crazies saying crazy things (note: I don't mean average gun owners or second amendment purists, or such; but if you've ever posted on Slashdot or elsewhere that "Kellerman [sic] has been thoroughly discredited, well..... ) Kind of like trying to get an idea of Albert Einstein by Googling "Ablert Einstien" and ignoring the suggested correction
For one thing, there were two main relevant Kellermann studies, 7 years apart. Plus others, which seem to have slipped past the gunloooons' radar. (Referring to them as though they were one study is very powerful marker for the "Kellerman" pathological discussions)
For another thing, neither of them "used neighborhoods with high criminal populations", except that when you look at homicides, you find they are correlated with criminal populations. To put it another way, if you want to study homicides, you'd have a difficult time if you look at towns where there are no homicides. Related is the complaint that "Kellerman selected mostly black households/neighborhoods". The gist of the studies is that he took Seattle, Cleveland, and Memphis, depending upon the study, and looked at ALL homicides in a home, ALL homicides, or ALL shooting homicides in the city or cities, depending on the study for several years. As Kellermann said once, he did not choose the victims, just counted them afterwards. While the residents of those cities are probably aware they have a higher crime rate than the average little upper middle class town, I think they'd be a little upset at being called "high criminal populations".
For another thing, the "someone you know" category you mention was actually clearly defined as "family member or intimate acquaintance". I suppose "rival gang-banger of your son's" might be an intimate acquaintance of yours (or even a family member) but do you really think cases like that are a significant fraction of the total homicide rate, even in these "high criminal" cities?
For another thing, you "gun was counted"/"gun was not counted" thing shows a complete lack of understanding of the study. It was a simple 2 X 2 case/control design: did the house contain a gun or not, versus was anybody in the house shot to death or not? Using all homicides at home as the cases, and a randomly selected home in the same neighborhood where there wasn't a homicide as the control. So if your handgun chased away the bad guy, then you'd see fewer homicides in homes with guns. And if your intimate acquaintance gangbanger friend of your son shot you without use of your gun, well then your gun isn't really do
yeah, that's the "skeptic" position alright; 1) I have here a ton of studies which disprove AGW 2) studies which disprove AGW are not funded or published
That's every grad student, postdoc, or junior faculty member's nightmare; that no matter what you present, some big shot who disagrees can always shake his head and go "No, not convincing enough yet, needs more evidence". Obviously, you can always say that, no matter how much evidence is presented. Of course, this means that this sort of "criticism" is meaningless. There are not only people out there who need more evidence that smoking is bad for you, there are people out there who need more evidence that we landed on the moon, that they can't control the lotto results with their mind, that microorganisms exist... everything.
Every time I see something like that in the AGW field, I ask the "skeptic" for a more precise suggestion re what is missing, what kind of experiment needs to be done, and/or what kind of evidence might convince them (as good scientific practice would suggest; you frame a question and decide a priori what the possible results would mean, then do the experiment. You are not entitled to just wait until the results come in, then decide what you would find positive and what negative after seeing them.) and not once have I gotten any result more specific than "More evidence" or "Something convincing". I do get a few replies like "Nothing would ever convince me!" apparently with no self-consciousness or understanding of how that makes them a faith-based denialist. At least it's honest, though more than intended no doubt, and probably describes the folks who don't respond also.
But, based on the evidence from NHTSA itself, though, hard to argue for this on the evidence of any kind of dose-response curve: % of fatalities involving
0% alcohol: 62%
.01 -.07% alcohol: 6%
.08% or more alcohol: 32% (including.15% or more alcohol: 21%. )
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810985.pdf Table 4 Holds for national figures and for what looks like every state. "In 2007, 84 percent (12,068) of the 14,447 drivers with a BAC of.01 or higher who were involved in fatal crashes had BAC levels at or above.08, and 55 percent (7,974) had BAC levels at or above.15. The most frequently recorded BAC level among drinking drivers in fatal crashes was.16."
Note that this already skewed result is not corrected for number or drivers or miles driven. Given the relatively small percentage of drivers who are out there with.15% alcohol and the relatively small number of total miles driven which are driven at this level, this makes the real increased risk per mile or per driver even higher at this level. Fact is, when you think of it, if you have a blood alcohol of.15%, you're an unusual specimen to start with, and if you're trying to drive home that way, you're very unusual. That's six drinks in an hour for that hypothetical 160 pound man.
However, certainly nothing there suggests that dropping the limit to.05% will do anything at all. Consider this simple hypothetical normalization for frequency at lower alcohol vs no alcohol, since we don't have the total number or drivers and/or miles by alcohol level to get actual per capita or per mile risk: Exclude the group with.08 or greater alcohol; these are clearly increased risk, but we want to differentiate between the 0 alcohol and.01 to.07 group: These two groups represent a total of 68% of fatalities. How does the ratio of fatalities between the two groups compare with a hypothetical ratio of miles driven or drivers between them? If we guess that 62/68, or 91% of drivers or miles with less than.08% alcohol, are in the 0% alcohol group, and 6/68, or 9% of drivers or miles with less than.08% alcohol, are associated with alcohol between.01 and.07; then normalizing the above fatality figures calculates that there would be 0 increased risk per mile or per capita associated with that level of alcohol. I don't know what the true percentage of drivers or miles by alcohol level is, but that approximate 9:1 split between no alcohol and.01-.07 alcohol seems in the ballpark to me. You'd have to come up with a much lower percentage for these (currently legal, note) slightly impaired drivers and/or miles driven to make any impact on the fact that the vast, vast majority of the risk in in the super-drunk ranks.
This isn't surprising, though. Previous studies didn't find that some minute amount of alcohol suddenly makes crashes and fatalities shoot up. It's not even vaguely proportional to alcohol level. What they found is that the bulk of crashes and fatalities are associated with a tiny fraction of drivers with very high blood alcohol. And, when they look at other parameters, these folks tend to have a whole parcel of antisocial and risky behavior; hyperaggression, depression, criminal convictions, history of violence, no driver's license, no insurance, no registration, dangerously unmaintained vehicles etc. Maybe the pathology causes the alcohol consumption; maybe the alcohol consumption causes the pathology; maybe both. Most people have heard the folk wisdom that some folks get aggressive when they're drunk, other folks get suicidal, etc. But the whole package is quite literally an accident looking for a place to happen.
I've suggested to them that they watch a pot of water that's heating up on a stove and imagine that's the atmosphere, but they never come back and say "Now I get it". I fear "getting these points through to the public" is a bit like getting them through to our pets.
You link is more appropriately related to the whole "It's not warming, it never was warming, it was warming but it stopped, it's cooling, it was warming but now it's cooling, scientists said it was cooling now they say it's warming, the warming is cyclic, the warming is natural, the warming is the sun, mars is warming too, the science is not there, consensus is not there, consensus means nothing, it's a fraud, it's a plot, Al Gore has a big house, Al Gore flies in airplanes, Al Gore is fat, it's cosmic rays, it's volcanos, it's urban heat islands, warming is good for plants, it can't be warming because january was cold in my state, CO2 is not a poison, there is only a tiny fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere and the manmade portion is even tinier, the CO2 in the atmosphere already absorbs all the IR, IR emissions have nothing to do with the earth's temp, CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't absorb IR like it does in the lab, it's all computer models, computer models will predict whatever you want them to, computer models can't even predict current climate, water is a more significant greenhouse gas, when the temperature rises the clouds will reflect the heat, the antarctic sea ice is growing, the warming will be minimal, the warming is too expensive to fight, we are better off adapting to the warming, it's too late to do anything about the warming, AGW is a plot against third world development, AGW steals money from charitable works, the earth is warming but it's only a couple of degrees, it was warmer in the middle ages, it was warmer millions of years ago, warming causes CO2 to rise not the other way around, you have no proof, it needs more study, why would you risk disaster proved by economists' calculations over the remote risk of scientific predictions, what about Climategate?" community than working climatologists.
No but it means 97% of scientists making a living in the field. Much as 97% of football players who are playing in a pro team is probably more reliable than "97% of football players" for whatever you want to measure.
All these liberals who think global warming will be bad for us don't realize what an advantage it will be to have all 4 poles close to each other, making a lucrative new tourism attraction.
Of course the Antarctic sea ice is going to grow as the rising temperature evaporates more water from the rest of the globe, as long as Antarctica itself remains below freezing. The same as frost forms around the door of my fridge only in the summer, even though the temp of the door seal is actually slightly warmer in the summer, along with the temp of the rest of the kitchen, because it's still just below 32 F.
of course climate change will shift the poles, they come from a fairly cold region, and warming will make them move from the Midwest to places like Alberta.
The smallest leap of faith being that humans will be able to solve any problem, rather than that we have a problem that we ought to avoid? Human societies have made transparently disastrous decision and run themselves into the ground in the past in many ways. What happened to the Norse in Greenland? The Easter Islanders? The Third Reich? The difference being that this time the scale of the problem is greater, the scale of the potential society to get damaged is greater, and the underlying structure of said society is more complex and vulnerable. Although I would certainly like to hear more about the leftist bias of those who study climate and economics, particularly how that shows up in the models. Some piece of code that says "If CO2 > 0 then do; workers_of_world.unite; workers_of_world.own(means_of_production);end;" perhaps?
and every time Itunes updates, it cheerfully assumes I'll install Safari as well. and let's not forget adobe. i look at one pdf, and reader uses 25% of my cpu until I reboot (or pull the plug with task mangler). gotta get around to getting one of the lightweight pdf viewers.
if you own an iphone, you're not supposed to own windows. you're supposed to buy a mac. they're doing it for your own good. just like microsoft helps you, by periodically improving windows so that it cripples the operation of programs which compete with their programs.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's this thing called physics and specifically, astrophysics. ... The gravity of nearby planets and the sun would have a far more drastic effect on the smaller pieces"
Spoken like a business major.
the mystery clears up; today's NYT has a graphic of the risk by alcohol level vs age; the .05 to .08% risk is mainly in younger drivers. as well as a lot of the 0 to .05% risk, too.
the online version also cuts it by time of day; would it be a surprise to see that alcohol related deaths at all ages tend to be around midnight, plus or minus a couple of hours?
so you do know there are two studies after all, you just don't understand that two different studies of two different things are going to come out with two different numbers. i.e.
"a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense."
is not going to be the same number as
"a gun in the home makes it 2.7 times more likely that a family member will become a homicide victim in the home."
so you think that they should both be the same number. Yeah, that's a good critique there.
Keep working at it. Not everybody understands things the first few times they read them. I can see why you'd figure you need a gun to get by.
"[Sir Francis Galton] developed mental tests that were a series of objective measurements of such sensory abilities as keenness of sight, color discrimination, and pitch discrimination; ... Galton's (1869, 1883) theory of intelligence was simplistic; People take in information through their senses, so those with better developed senses ought to be more intelligent."
- IQ Testing 101, Alan S. Kaufman, p.19
since when do roach motels use glucose? they use scent attractants, either food scents or pheromones. using taste as an attractant in a roach motel makes no sense at all. once the roach has his tongue or feet or whatever he tastes with stuck to the glue it hardly matters whether he's attracted or not. it's gotta be scent. I don't think any critters can smell glucose (or sucrose or fructose). similarly, how would a mutation to make glucose aversive help at all? the regular roach is standing there with his tongue or feet or whatever stuck thinking "yum, glucose, i'm happy", while his mutant buddy is stuck there going "not me, i'm never going to do this again"?
and finally, why would anyone use glucose for this kind of thing, rather than cheaper sucrose?
"With enough time, a million monkeys typing randomly at keyboards will surely type the Linux kernel source code."
Well, if you believe in evolution, that's pretty much how it happened.
you know, you can already make your own food, out of dirt, water, and sunlight.
well, 97% of the denialists don't actually believe in their denial; they're either directly working in an industry that causes AGW, are paid by such an industry to say there is no AGW, are simply cranks enough to argue the opposite of what everybody else says, have such a high opinion of their own brilliance that they honestly believe that 15 minutes of surfing rightwing talking point depots on the web will enable them to solve all the mysteries that researchers in the field can't, are so consumed with liberalophobia that they just know that AGW must be wrong if Al Gore thinks it's true, and/or believe anything their authority figures, from Glenn Beck to the WSJ editorial pages, tells them. Of course, there's a huge amount of overlap between all these categories.
bass ackwards.
The assertion under examination here is the denialists' claim that the little flat part at the end is evidence that AGW is now a thing of the past. "The world temp has stabilized and DROPPED."
Error bars for each mean are not relevant because we're not trying to compare individual yearly means of daily data points, or whatever; instead each yearly mean is one data point, and a REAL scientist will know that the central limit theorem tells us that the set of these means will tend towards normal distribution regardless of the standard error or normality of an individual mean, so that one subset of means can be statistically compared to another subset. It's a statistical analysis of the frequency of similar plateaus found during 40 years of warming, compared to the current plateau cited as evidence that the warming has terminated. If such plateaus are hardly ever seen, then this current one suggests something new is happening.
And given that 4 such plateaus are seen with no evidence of a stop or change in the overall rate of warming over 40 years, you don't have to actually do the math to state with statistical certainty that the current plateau is no more conclusive of an end to warming than any of the previous ones were. The fact that you can see the graph and still argue with this completely intuitively obvious point is ample evidence of bias to the point of cognitive impairment.
Of course, since statistical tests can't argue against each other, they do have to show the same result just more or less powerfully, so you were nearing the truth with your initial observation; it just meant the opposite of what you think it meant. If the error bar on each individual year is so high that you can't hypothesize a statistically significant difference between the observed means, i.e. the line "is a flag line", then it is absolutely and completely obvious that the last X points can't be "more flat" signifying that "The world temp has stabilized and DROPPED" can they?
I hereby postulate that any post beginning with "To a REAL scientist" is going to be goofy.
The Kellerman study has been thoroughly discredited from many angles, including the fact that it used neighborhoods with high criminal populations, and counted rival gangs as someone you know. It even counted, for example, if you had a gun in the house, never used, and a rival gang-banger of your son's came in and shot somebody. Your gun had nothing to do with the violence, but it's counted towards Kellerman's total. On the other hand, if you pointed a gun at the bad guy and he fled, that was not counted as defensive gun use. There are many other problems with the study. It would take a whole article to detail them all.
Kellerman's study was also not formally peer-reviewed, and he still refuses to provide the raw data for outside analysis.
Other studies show between 100,000 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, far outnumbering gun deaths even counting suicide.
Japan has far more suicides, yet no guns. Explain. And, in a free society, who are we to legislate that someone can't kill himself by his desired means as long as he doesn't injure another in the process?
Well, while the "Kellerman" study may be thoroughly discredited, necro81 is talking about Kellermann here. I'm not entirely trying to be funny; if you Google Kellermann and gun study or whatever you come up with a lot of scholarly analysis, generally supportive; but if you Google Kellerman [sic] and gun study or whatever you come up with zillion gun-addled crazies saying crazy things (note: I don't mean average gun owners or second amendment purists, or such; but if you've ever posted on Slashdot or elsewhere that "Kellerman [sic] has been thoroughly discredited, well..... ) Kind of like trying to get an idea of Albert Einstein by Googling "Ablert Einstien" and ignoring the suggested correction
For one thing, there were two main relevant Kellermann studies, 7 years apart. Plus others, which seem to have slipped past the gunloooons' radar. (Referring to them as though they were one study is very powerful marker for the "Kellerman" pathological discussions)
For another thing, neither of them "used neighborhoods with high criminal populations", except that when you look at homicides, you find they are correlated with criminal populations. To put it another way, if you want to study homicides, you'd have a difficult time if you look at towns where there are no homicides. Related is the complaint that "Kellerman selected mostly black households/neighborhoods". The gist of the studies is that he took Seattle, Cleveland, and Memphis, depending upon the study, and looked at ALL homicides in a home, ALL homicides, or ALL shooting homicides in the city or cities, depending on the study for several years. As Kellermann said once, he did not choose the victims, just counted them afterwards. While the residents of those cities are probably aware they have a higher crime rate than the average little upper middle class town, I think they'd be a little upset at being called "high criminal populations".
For another thing, the "someone you know" category you mention was actually clearly defined as "family member or intimate acquaintance". I suppose "rival gang-banger of your son's" might be an intimate acquaintance of yours (or even a family member) but do you really think cases like that are a significant fraction of the total homicide rate, even in these "high criminal" cities?
For another thing, you "gun was counted"/"gun was not counted" thing shows a complete lack of understanding of the study. It was a simple 2 X 2 case/control design: did the house contain a gun or not, versus was anybody in the house shot to death or not? Using all homicides at home as the cases, and a randomly selected home in the same neighborhood where there wasn't a homicide as the control. So if your handgun chased away the bad guy, then you'd see fewer homicides in homes with guns. And if your intimate acquaintance gangbanger friend of your son shot you without use of your gun, well then your gun isn't really do
No heat, acidity; and not vaporizing, dissolving (as you remember). This has been observed for a while now.
google styrofoam and lemon juice
yeah, that's the "skeptic" position alright;
1) I have here a ton of studies which disprove AGW
2) studies which disprove AGW are not funded or published
That's every grad student, postdoc, or junior faculty member's nightmare; that no matter what you present, some big shot who disagrees can always shake his head and go "No, not convincing enough yet, needs more evidence". Obviously, you can always say that, no matter how much evidence is presented. Of course, this means that this sort of "criticism" is meaningless. There are not only people out there who need more evidence that smoking is bad for you, there are people out there who need more evidence that we landed on the moon, that they can't control the lotto results with their mind, that microorganisms exist... everything.
Every time I see something like that in the AGW field, I ask the "skeptic" for a more precise suggestion re what is missing, what kind of experiment needs to be done, and/or what kind of evidence might convince them (as good scientific practice would suggest; you frame a question and decide a priori what the possible results would mean, then do the experiment. You are not entitled to just wait until the results come in, then decide what you would find positive and what negative after seeing them.) and not once have I gotten any result more specific than "More evidence" or "Something convincing". I do get a few replies like "Nothing would ever convince me!" apparently with no self-consciousness or understanding of how that makes them a faith-based denialist. At least it's honest, though more than intended no doubt, and probably describes the folks who don't respond also.
Damn! that's more than a quarter!
But, based on the evidence from NHTSA itself, though, hard to argue for this on the evidence of any kind of dose-response curve:
% of fatalities involving
0% alcohol: 62%
.01 - .07% alcohol: 6%
.08% or more alcohol: 32% (including .15% or more alcohol: 21%. )
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810985.pdf Table 4 .01 or higher who were involved in fatal crashes had BAC levels at or above .08, and 55 percent (7,974) had BAC levels at or above .15. The most frequently recorded BAC level among drinking drivers in fatal crashes was .16."
Holds for national figures and for what looks like every state.
"In 2007, 84 percent (12,068) of the 14,447 drivers with a BAC of
Note that this already skewed result is not corrected for number or drivers or miles driven. Given the relatively small percentage of drivers who are out there with .15% alcohol and the relatively small number of total miles driven which are driven at this level, this makes the real increased risk per mile or per driver even higher at this level. Fact is, when you think of it, if you have a blood alcohol of .15%, you're an unusual specimen to start with, and if you're trying to drive home that way, you're very unusual. That's six drinks in an hour for that hypothetical 160 pound man.
However, certainly nothing there suggests that dropping the limit to .05% will do anything at all. Consider this simple hypothetical normalization for frequency at lower alcohol vs no alcohol, since we don't have the total number or drivers and/or miles by alcohol level to get actual per capita or per mile risk: .08 or greater alcohol; these are clearly increased risk, but we want to differentiate between the 0 alcohol and .01 to .07 group: .08% alcohol, are in the 0% alcohol group, and 6/68, or 9% of drivers or miles with less than .08% alcohol, are associated with alcohol between .01 and .07; then normalizing the above fatality figures calculates that there would be 0 increased risk per mile or per capita associated with that level of alcohol. I don't know what the true percentage of drivers or miles by alcohol level is, but that approximate 9:1 split between no alcohol and .01-.07 alcohol seems in the ballpark to me. You'd have to come up with a much lower percentage for these (currently legal, note) slightly impaired drivers and/or miles driven to make any impact on the fact that the vast, vast majority of the risk in in the super-drunk ranks.
Exclude the group with
These two groups represent a total of 68% of fatalities. How does the ratio of fatalities between the two groups compare with a hypothetical ratio of miles driven or drivers between them?
If we guess that 62/68, or 91% of drivers or miles with less than
This isn't surprising, though. Previous studies didn't find that some minute amount of alcohol suddenly makes crashes and fatalities shoot up. It's not even vaguely proportional to alcohol level. What they found is that the bulk of crashes and fatalities are associated with a tiny fraction of drivers with very high blood alcohol. And, when they look at other parameters, these folks tend to have a whole parcel of antisocial and risky behavior; hyperaggression, depression, criminal convictions, history of violence, no driver's license, no insurance, no registration, dangerously unmaintained vehicles etc. Maybe the pathology causes the alcohol consumption; maybe the alcohol consumption causes the pathology; maybe both. Most people have heard the folk wisdom that some folks get aggressive when they're drunk, other folks get suicidal, etc. But the whole package is quite literally an accident looking for a place to happen.
And these other factors, co
I've suggested to them that they watch a pot of water that's heating up on a stove and imagine that's the atmosphere, but they never come back and say "Now I get it". I fear "getting these points through to the public" is a bit like getting them through to our pets.
You link is more appropriately related to the whole "It's not warming, it never was warming, it was warming but it stopped, it's cooling, it was warming but now it's cooling, scientists said it was cooling now they say it's warming, the warming is cyclic, the warming is natural, the warming is the sun, mars is warming too, the science is not there, consensus is not there, consensus means nothing, it's a fraud, it's a plot, Al Gore has a big house, Al Gore flies in airplanes, Al Gore is fat, it's cosmic rays, it's volcanos, it's urban heat islands, warming is good for plants, it can't be warming because january was cold in my state, CO2 is not a poison, there is only a tiny fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere and the manmade portion is even tinier, the CO2 in the atmosphere already absorbs all the IR, IR emissions have nothing to do with the earth's temp, CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't absorb IR like it does in the lab, it's all computer models, computer models will predict whatever you want them to, computer models can't even predict current climate, water is a more significant greenhouse gas, when the temperature rises the clouds will reflect the heat, the antarctic sea ice is growing, the warming will be minimal, the warming is too expensive to fight, we are better off adapting to the warming, it's too late to do anything about the warming, AGW is a plot against third world development, AGW steals money from charitable works, the earth is warming but it's only a couple of degrees, it was warmer in the middle ages, it was warmer millions of years ago, warming causes CO2 to rise not the other way around, you have no proof, it needs more study, why would you risk disaster proved by economists' calculations over the remote risk of scientific predictions, what about Climategate?" community than working climatologists.
No but it means 97% of scientists making a living in the field.
Much as 97% of football players who are playing in a pro team is probably more reliable than "97% of football players" for whatever you want to measure.
All these liberals who think global warming will be bad for us don't realize what an advantage it will be to have all 4 poles close to each other, making a lucrative new tourism attraction.
Of course the Antarctic sea ice is going to grow as the rising temperature evaporates more water from the rest of the globe, as long as Antarctica itself remains below freezing. The same as frost forms around the door of my fridge only in the summer, even though the temp of the door seal is actually slightly warmer in the summer, along with the temp of the rest of the kitchen, because it's still just below 32 F.
Gee, you don't think that might be why some people are alarmed over the concept of AGW, do you?
of course climate change will shift the poles, they come from a fairly cold region, and warming will make them move from the Midwest to places like Alberta.
The smallest leap of faith being that humans will be able to solve any problem, rather than that we have a problem that we ought to avoid? Human societies have made transparently disastrous decision and run themselves into the ground in the past in many ways. What happened to the Norse in Greenland? The Easter Islanders? The Third Reich? The difference being that this time the scale of the problem is greater, the scale of the potential society to get damaged is greater, and the underlying structure of said society is more complex and vulnerable.
Although I would certainly like to hear more about the leftist bias of those who study climate and economics, particularly how that shows up in the models. Some piece of code that says "If CO2 > 0 then do; workers_of_world.unite; workers_of_world.own(means_of_production);end;" perhaps?
and every time Itunes updates, it cheerfully assumes I'll install Safari as well.
and let's not forget adobe. i look at one pdf, and reader uses 25% of my cpu until I reboot (or pull the plug with task mangler). gotta get around to getting one of the lightweight pdf viewers.
if you own an iphone, you're not supposed to own windows. you're supposed to buy a mac. they're doing it for your own good. just like microsoft helps you, by periodically improving windows so that it cripples the operation of programs which compete with their programs.