As a kid and a teenager it seemed like things were progressing. I expected that by this time we'd have rolled back our puritan attitudes and be more like Europe. Now Europe is apparently more of a puritan state than the US was and the US is worse than ever.
Why do you associate adolescents having unfettered access to hardcore, typically trashy/demeaning/reductive pornographic fiction with "progress"? It is not puritan to say that the developing adolescent is better off with realistic/artful depictions of sex, frank conversation/education, and ideally healthy + safe + consensual + fun sexual experiences with real human beings, rather than isolated screentime with extremely compelling fictional sex videos. Not just emotionally, but also in terms of actually developing physiologically (e.g., look at rates of erectile dysfunction in young, healthy men).
To me, this is progress -- like with alcohol, it was neither ideal to ban it nor to send kids to school with alcoholic cider (done regularly in France throughout the 20th century). Progress can mean balancing protecting the young with letting adults make their own choices.
Just so long as they don't get to see any tits or arse then they'll be fine.
There is a world of difference between various levels of pornography. I.e. static images, tasteful nudes, hardcore stuff, and at the far end: multiple high-definition videos simultaneously playing extreme fetishes.If you look at what the latter does to the brain and the future sex-life of kids who grow up with this stuff, you might understand that it's a very important distinction.
For example, look at the erectile dysfunction/sexual dysfunction rates in young men -- it's a problem that is essentially unique to highspeed online porn video watchers, with its associated supraphysiologic dopamine surges and ensuing tolerance.
It is not an MRI. It's magnetoencephalography, which is very very different than Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It's much more analogous to an EEG (electroencephalography), and a more portable version is is impressive but not nearly as impressive as shrinking the liquid helium-cooled magnets needed for MRI would be.
How is this different than the Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach pioneered at McMaster medical school in the 60s (and since adopted worldwide)?
As students at Mac, we often got a kick out of seeing even our fiercest crtics at schools like the University of Toronto slowly come around to our pedagogy, but with subtly different names of course (ie, case-based learning).
It works great for medical school, and I think would also apply well to graduate school, where you have pressure to obtain results or not embarass yourself on the wards to drive your learning -- often jokingly called "Shame-based learning" in medicine. On the other hand, the students that I met that used PBL during their undergrad often had frighteningly large gaps in their knowledge if they weren't interested in a particular topic. And PBL is not at all suited to giving grades out, which is not a problem at med school which are almost exclusively pass-fail, but does not help you sort the wheat from the chaff at an undergrad level.
It always struck me as intentional that there is far too much focus around global warming because its complexity lends itself to endless debate/FUD about the relative contributions of the solar cycle/volanoes, etc, the differences between climate and weather, and so on.
Ocean acidification alone would probably justify more than even the most extreme carbon-policies that are being negotiated, but it's almost never discussed publicly -- probably because anyone with a glass of water and pH meter can demonstrate the cause and there's so much less room for manufactured doubt.
Dog wants to go outside? No need to stop playing with your virtual animals! International travel? You can stay immersed in the same game world the whole time! Hip millennial friends invite you to come socialise? Don't forget to bring the screen!
But seriously, the ad is stunning for its honesty. Normally, video game ads go to pains to avoid reminding you of what it feels like to see another human staring blankly at a screen, but this ad was basically one example after another. Always the 3rd-person, with almost no focus on the 1st-person experience... amazing.
Contrary to the click-baity Telegraph article linked, the brains were not shrinking -- there was a correlation between the most strongly linked genes to Alzheimer's and relatively smaller/thinner areas of the brain associated with things like memory and executive function. There was also a correlation between these thin areas and reduced ability of the tested children.
If reproducible, this result would be absolutely shocking. Our current understanding is that the genes in questions (APOE 4) are not even associated with early-onset Alzheimer's, only late-onset, and even then the association is so weak that screening is unjustifiable.
Ask and ye shall receive. Here's a meta-review of some of the best and biggest studies comparing vegetarians to health-conscious omnivores. Almost all studies showed a longevity benefit, and pooled they found a significant longevity beneift. This is a nice plot of the risk ratio as the study data is cumulatively pooled.
It goes without saying that this field of research is tricky -- evidence is never iron-clad and you can always find a study or two to support your biases. But, as a medical student and someone interested in nutrition, I'll go out on a limb and say that there is no diet except the Mediterranean diet that has so much supportive evidence of health benefits. (Prove me wrong!) But in any case, this should be enough to at least stop the FUD about vegetarianism causing everything from diabetes to psychosis as per above. It's at least not causing harm.
Now, the question is -- will bacon-loving Slashdot rejoice that a citation request was answered, or continue on with the usual group-think?
The current fires in Alberta are unlikely to have been exacerbated by suppression, said Spies. Boreal forests differ from the temperate forests further south in that they have a longer fire cycle, lots of fuel and tend to burn intensely. But their occurrence in the normally wet month of May is highly unusual and “consistent with what we expect from human-caused climate change”, according to a local scientist.
When you are selling an expensive patented antibiotic and competing against less expensive OTC silver, will you spread the joy that silver is more effective?
I'm not sure where you live, but here in Ontario we have a law that all prescriptions must be automatically replaced with generic versions unless otherwise specified by the physician (very rarely). And guess what? There have not been many new antibiotics discovered in the past 15 years, so the vaaaast majority prescribed are generic. We further make use of all sorts of topical antibacterial solutions containing iodine and hydrogen peroxide, for example.
In other words, if there was any validity at all to what you were saying, physicians would jump at the chance to prescribe silver.
I've read hundreds of the best and biggest nutritional studies, and here's my quick and dirty what nutritional "science" has actually proven beyond doubt (mostly from country-country comparisons and massive epidemiological studies):
--Trans fats are poison, there's no good amount.
--Processed sugar is bad, there's no good amount.
--Rapidly digested processed carbs are nearly as bad as sugar.
--Red meat is either bad or neutral, but processed red meat is definitely bad -- avoid.
--Complex carbs are ho-hum, don't overdo it.
--Saturated fats are ho-hum, not bad but better replaced by good unsaturated fats.
--Most unsaturated fats (especially in nuts/olives/fish) are great, eat as much as possible.
--Fresh fruits/vegetables are great, eat as much and as many different types as possible.
The ideal diet as we currently know it from available evidence is essentially the Mediterranean diet, which is the only intervention that is consistently and clearly linked to longer and healthier lives. Note that an American-Vegan diet with adequate protein intake is closer to it that the typical fast-food, red-meat, fruit/vegetable-free, processed-sugar heavy disaster that most Americans consume.
My point is that I agree mostly with your summary, but it's not as simple as blaming carbs -- many countries that do better nutritionally eat more carbs than the US (though they're typically complex) -- and there's no reason to villainize vegans and worship bacon from a nutritional stand-point like so many in the geek culture do. Except to be instantly modded up to +5, that is.
You can find extremist nutters in every religion, but the root of country-wide religious warfare is always economic and political, first and foremost. The difference between Islam and Christianity in terms of modern-day violence has everything to do with the fact that the Middle East has been continually torn up by colonial powers and local warlords, whereas most Christian countries enjoy relative stability.
I'm proudly agnostic, but if you read through any of the holy texts, you'll find more than enough justification for violence if you're motivated to -- Islam isn't unique. It's the readers' lives that are the determining factor in extremism.
Clearly because government run medicine is so much better, right?
The US pays its doctors some of the highest salaries in the world, publishes the most and best medical research in the world, and also charges its patients the most in the world.
You can find the best and worst care in the US. For the rich who want the best care -- American or not -- the US is their destination of choice. It's just that the rest of the developed world gives a damn about providing decent care to the vast majority of citizens who are not rich. By focusing on that, they take care of the rank and file and still leave the opportunity for the richest to travel abroad to pay through the nose for better care, so nobody really suffers.
And as the poster below points out, medical tourism is not exactly the best metric of your system's quality. India and Mexico aren't exactly shining models of medical care.
If this had happened in Texas (another state that produces a lot of oil, though in general doesn't have all the natural resources Alaska has), those $1.2 billion would amount to... less than $45 for each of it's 27 million inhabitants.
I think that you're forgetting that Texas produces about 8x as much crude as Alaska. If they had setup a similar fund we would be talking about at least $400 per year. Not too shabby.
Now, if either state had followed Norway's lead and kept most of the oil profits for themselves, we would be talking about substantially larger amounts of dividends or savings. Norway's fund is now approaching a trillion dollars in value -- for a country with a population one fifth that of Texas's, and approximately the same level of crude production.
Given the annaul return from investments in the S&P 500, he would have done much, much better if he simply invested his fortune in 1982, the first year we have a good public number from:
"[Donald Trump's] self-described net worth jumped from $200 million in 1982, to the $8.7 billion he estimated his net worth to be today.... if Trump had merely invested that $200 million in the S&P 500 (500 of the largest companies in the US), he would have averaged an 11.86% annual return and ended up with $20 billion."
You tell that healthcare costs are down. After the ACA, my healthcare premiums DOUBLED. Fucking... Doubled.
Hello over there, Americans! While you bicker about whether the ACA increased premiums or brought healthcare costs down (or both or neither), the rest of the developed world enjoys per capita overall spending that is a fraction of yours, and with much better overall health outcomes. Maybe you could simply agree that a truly "socialized" system of medicine would be a great improvement on either the pre- or post-ACA American healthcare system and drop the partisan crap?
The concern about infertility is real, but what has the experts worry is the cost to IQ:
The new series of reports by 18 of the world’s foremost experts on endocrine science pegs the health costs of exposure to them at between €157bn-€270bn (£113bn-£195bn), or at least 1.23% of the continent’s GDP.
“The shocking thing is that the major component of that cost is related to the loss of brain function in the next generation,” one of the report’s authors, Professor Philippe Grandjean of Harvard University, told the Guardian.
“Our brains need particular hormones to develop normally – the thyroid hormone and sex hormones like testosterone and oestrogen. They’re very important in pregnancy and a child can very well be mentally retarded because of a lack of iodine and the thyroid hormone caused by chemical exposure.”
There's nothing desirable about reduced IQs and massive health costs (unless you make money on healthcare or benefit from a dumb populace, that is).
The proposed ban was not based on sound science, just scare tactics from European greenies.
The proposed ban was largely the result of research showing that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have incredible costs to human health. We're not talking some vague feel-good argument about the birds and the bees -- we are talking about lost IQ points and health costs that run into the hundreds of billions:
The new series of reports by 18 of the world’s foremost experts on endocrine science pegs the health costs of exposure to them at between €157bn-€270bn (£113bn-£195bn), or at least 1.23% of the continent’s GDP.
As Ars points out, if even a fraction of the economic loss attributed to these chemicals could be reduced, the net result could easily be far more valuable than even the most wildly optimisitic projections for the value of the TTIP agreement.
But that is clearly not the case. Look at the data for life expectancy by age for the US from 1850-2011. [infoplease.com] Yes, life expectancy at birth was nearly half what it is now but the gap narrows considerably if you survived past 20. That is to say, most of the increase in life expectancy at birth comes from curing the childhood illnesses from which many died very young. And while far fewer people lived to 90-100 than now, living into the 70s-80s was not exactly uncommon.
What makes you think that the same trend applied to hunter-gatherers? The lifestyle of those born in 1850 likely has no resemblance to the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers.
Next question -- ever consider that maybe the roughly 50% of people who died around or before age 20 may be a population that's much more vulnerable to "chronic diseases of civilization"? Maybe the reason there weren't many type-2 diabetics or sufferers of congestive heart failure in their 50s is because the people most prone to such diseases were long since in their graves.
One thing i never see discussed anywhere is the contribution to obesity made by fluid retention - which i suspect is considerable.
I'm somewhat stunned that you don't think the medical community would notice that. Fat is famously less dense than water, so if obesity was caused by water retention rather than excess lipids (within adipocytes and elsewhere) then there would be a noticeable difference in density.
To evaluate it, all you need to do is have people of various sizes jump in a pool and try to float. My guess is that more fat, the more buoyant. You seem to be implying the opposite.
Spriometry is used by respirologists to basically measure how much air you can suck in and then blow out (among other parameters like lung inflation, exhale velocity, etc.). It was essentially invented around 1846 by John Hutchinson who believed its best use would be by the insurance industry as this volume was strongly correlated to premature death -- the less air you can blow out, the less time you have left! Hence the name for this quantity that we still use in medicine today: vital capacity.
"1846 The water spirometer measuring vital capacity was developed by a surgeon named John Hutchinson. He invented a calibrated bell, inverted in water, which was used to capture the volume of air exhaled by a person. John published his paper about his water spirometer and the measurements he had taken from over 4,000 subjects,[2] describing the direct relationship between vital capacity and height and inverse relationship between vital capacity with age. He also showed that vital capacity does not relate to weight at any given height. He also used his machine for the prediction of premature mortality. He coined the term vital capacity, which was claimed as a powerful prognosis for heart disease by Framingham study. He believed that his machine should be used as an acturial predictions for companies selling life insurances"
"Not every vaccine is created equal and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others... I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things"
I, for one, proudly agree with the wise governor that some vaccines shouldn't mandatory for children. Like the shingles vaccine -- expensive and marginally effective, and practically useless if you're under the age of 60. I don't know why'd I'd ask my parents to decide on this vaccine call for me when I hit the age of 60 but his point is valid.
But god, I hope he's not referring to Mumps, Measels, Rubella, and the like!
That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime?
It's not pretty. Essentially, the C-H bonds in methane are vulnerable to radical reactions. This allows for a variety of removal processes, many leading to the formation of water vapour and/or CO2 itself.
While that may not sound so bad, don't forget that water vapour is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases when it's found in the atmosphere, which is why, for example, the effective carbon emissions of intercontinental flights are so significant. So the end result is methane, an awful greenhouse gas, lives a relatively short life but ends up as either a worse or slightly less awful different greenhouse gas. In other words, methane stinks!
As free, open-source learning software (that I've loved for years), it seems right up Slashdot's alley. Except for the fact that this Anki didn't pay for slashvertising.
In summary:
Over Fishing entire species to near extinction: Fine.
Kill one clam that turns out to be really old add to our understanding of the oceans and climate: Evil, arrogant, and self-centered!
WTF?
Ever notice how much efforts police will make to safely sedate and transport a cow that's loose on the highway? Even one that was heading (and will continue to head) to a slaughterhouse?
The reality is that the vast majority of people are not comfortable with killing animals and simply can't handle the idea -- let alone the sight! -- of it. Just the information given on this clam in TFA is enough to rouse people's sympathy and make its death seem tragic. But, as is true for war, the idea of millions of something dying is incomprehensible and therefore inconsequential. Especially if the dying is out of sight and out of mind.
It's for this reason that I can understand and respect the perspectives of hunters and vegetarians alike. But it's quite sad when people can't face the reality of their own actions.
Slashdot Mirror
As a kid and a teenager it seemed like things were progressing. I expected that by this time we'd have rolled back our puritan attitudes and be more like Europe. Now Europe is apparently more of a puritan state than the US was and the US is worse than ever.
Why do you associate adolescents having unfettered access to hardcore, typically trashy/demeaning/reductive pornographic fiction with "progress"? It is not puritan to say that the developing adolescent is better off with realistic/artful depictions of sex, frank conversation/education, and ideally healthy + safe + consensual + fun sexual experiences with real human beings, rather than isolated screentime with extremely compelling fictional sex videos. Not just emotionally, but also in terms of actually developing physiologically (e.g., look at rates of erectile dysfunction in young, healthy men).
To me, this is progress -- like with alcohol, it was neither ideal to ban it nor to send kids to school with alcoholic cider (done regularly in France throughout the 20th century). Progress can mean balancing protecting the young with letting adults make their own choices.
Just so long as they don't get to see any tits or arse then they'll be fine.
There is a world of difference between various levels of pornography. I.e. static images, tasteful nudes, hardcore stuff, and at the far end: multiple high-definition videos simultaneously playing extreme fetishes.If you look at what the latter does to the brain and the future sex-life of kids who grow up with this stuff, you might understand that it's a very important distinction.
For example, look at the erectile dysfunction/sexual dysfunction rates in young men -- it's a problem that is essentially unique to highspeed online porn video watchers, with its associated supraphysiologic dopamine surges and ensuing tolerance.
It is not an MRI. It's magnetoencephalography, which is very very different than Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It's much more analogous to an EEG (electroencephalography), and a more portable version is is impressive but not nearly as impressive as shrinking the liquid helium-cooled magnets needed for MRI would be.
How is this different than the Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach pioneered at McMaster medical school in the 60s (and since adopted worldwide)?
As students at Mac, we often got a kick out of seeing even our fiercest crtics at schools like the University of Toronto slowly come around to our pedagogy, but with subtly different names of course (ie, case-based learning).
It works great for medical school, and I think would also apply well to graduate school, where you have pressure to obtain results or not embarass yourself on the wards to drive your learning -- often jokingly called "Shame-based learning" in medicine. On the other hand, the students that I met that used PBL during their undergrad often had frighteningly large gaps in their knowledge if they weren't interested in a particular topic. And PBL is not at all suited to giving grades out, which is not a problem at med school which are almost exclusively pass-fail, but does not help you sort the wheat from the chaff at an undergrad level.
It always struck me as intentional that there is far too much focus around global warming because its complexity lends itself to endless debate/FUD about the relative contributions of the solar cycle/volanoes, etc, the differences between climate and weather, and so on.
Ocean acidification alone would probably justify more than even the most extreme carbon-policies that are being negotiated, but it's almost never discussed publicly -- probably because anyone with a glass of water and pH meter can demonstrate the cause and there's so much less room for manufactured doubt.
Dog wants to go outside? No need to stop playing with your virtual animals! International travel? You can stay immersed in the same game world the whole time! Hip millennial friends invite you to come socialise? Don't forget to bring the screen!
But seriously, the ad is stunning for its honesty. Normally, video game ads go to pains to avoid reminding you of what it feels like to see another human staring blankly at a screen, but this ad was basically one example after another. Always the 3rd-person, with almost no focus on the 1st-person experience... amazing.
Took some digging, but here is the original study (paywalled).
Contrary to the click-baity Telegraph article linked, the brains were not shrinking -- there was a correlation between the most strongly linked genes to Alzheimer's and relatively smaller/thinner areas of the brain associated with things like memory and executive function. There was also a correlation between these thin areas and reduced ability of the tested children.
If reproducible, this result would be absolutely shocking. Our current understanding is that the genes in questions (APOE 4) are not even associated with early-onset Alzheimer's, only late-onset, and even then the association is so weak that screening is unjustifiable.
Citation required.
Ask and ye shall receive. Here's a meta-review of some of the best and biggest studies comparing vegetarians to health-conscious omnivores. Almost all studies showed a longevity benefit, and pooled they found a significant longevity beneift. This is a nice plot of the risk ratio as the study data is cumulatively pooled.
It goes without saying that this field of research is tricky -- evidence is never iron-clad and you can always find a study or two to support your biases. But, as a medical student and someone interested in nutrition, I'll go out on a limb and say that there is no diet except the Mediterranean diet that has so much supportive evidence of health benefits. (Prove me wrong!) But in any case, this should be enough to at least stop the FUD about vegetarianism causing everything from diabetes to psychosis as per above. It's at least not causing harm.
Now, the question is -- will bacon-loving Slashdot rejoice that a citation request was answered, or continue on with the usual group-think?
Global warming is a real issue, obviously, but in this case, wrong environmental issue to be going after.
There's at least some merit in laying blame on both:
The current fires in Alberta are unlikely to have been exacerbated by suppression, said Spies. Boreal forests differ from the temperate forests further south in that they have a longer fire cycle, lots of fuel and tend to burn intensely. But their occurrence in the normally wet month of May is highly unusual and “consistent with what we expect from human-caused climate change”, according to a local scientist.
When you are selling an expensive patented antibiotic and competing against less expensive OTC silver, will you spread the joy that silver is more effective?
I'm not sure where you live, but here in Ontario we have a law that all prescriptions must be automatically replaced with generic versions unless otherwise specified by the physician (very rarely). And guess what? There have not been many new antibiotics discovered in the past 15 years, so the vaaaast majority prescribed are generic. We further make use of all sorts of topical antibacterial solutions containing iodine and hydrogen peroxide, for example.
In other words, if there was any validity at all to what you were saying, physicians would jump at the chance to prescribe silver.
I've read hundreds of the best and biggest nutritional studies, and here's my quick and dirty what nutritional "science" has actually proven beyond doubt (mostly from country-country comparisons and massive epidemiological studies):
The ideal diet as we currently know it from available evidence is essentially the Mediterranean diet, which is the only intervention that is consistently and clearly linked to longer and healthier lives. Note that an American-Vegan diet with adequate protein intake is closer to it that the typical fast-food, red-meat, fruit/vegetable-free, processed-sugar heavy disaster that most Americans consume.
My point is that I agree mostly with your summary, but it's not as simple as blaming carbs -- many countries that do better nutritionally eat more carbs than the US (though they're typically complex) -- and there's no reason to villainize vegans and worship bacon from a nutritional stand-point like so many in the geek culture do. Except to be instantly modded up to +5, that is.
In France or Austria, you don't have Catholics try and persecute Protestants.
I guess you intentionally didn't mention Ireland in this sentence?
In Israel, you don't have Reform Jews or Orthodox Jews trying to obliterate each other.
What about the assasination of the Prime Minister of Israel by a Jewish extremist, for starters?
You can find extremist nutters in every religion, but the root of country-wide religious warfare is always economic and political, first and foremost. The difference between Islam and Christianity in terms of modern-day violence has everything to do with the fact that the Middle East has been continually torn up by colonial powers and local warlords, whereas most Christian countries enjoy relative stability.
I'm proudly agnostic, but if you read through any of the holy texts, you'll find more than enough justification for violence if you're motivated to -- Islam isn't unique. It's the readers' lives that are the determining factor in extremism.
Clearly because government run medicine is so much better, right?
The US pays its doctors some of the highest salaries in the world, publishes the most and best medical research in the world, and also charges its patients the most in the world.
You can find the best and worst care in the US. For the rich who want the best care -- American or not -- the US is their destination of choice. It's just that the rest of the developed world gives a damn about providing decent care to the vast majority of citizens who are not rich. By focusing on that, they take care of the rank and file and still leave the opportunity for the richest to travel abroad to pay through the nose for better care, so nobody really suffers.
And as the poster below points out, medical tourism is not exactly the best metric of your system's quality. India and Mexico aren't exactly shining models of medical care.
If this had happened in Texas (another state that produces a lot of oil, though in general doesn't have all the natural resources Alaska has), those $1.2 billion would amount to... less than $45 for each of it's 27 million inhabitants.
I think that you're forgetting that Texas produces about 8x as much crude as Alaska. If they had setup a similar fund we would be talking about at least $400 per year. Not too shabby.
Now, if either state had followed Norway's lead and kept most of the oil profits for themselves, we would be talking about substantially larger amounts of dividends or savings. Norway's fund is now approaching a trillion dollars in value -- for a country with a population one fifth that of Texas's, and approximately the same level of crude production.
Given the annaul return from investments in the S&P 500, he would have done much, much better if he simply invested his fortune in 1982, the first year we have a good public number from:
"[Donald Trump's] self-described net worth jumped from $200 million in 1982, to the $8.7 billion he estimated his net worth to be today. ... if Trump had merely invested that $200 million in the S&P 500 (500 of the largest companies in the US), he would have averaged an 11.86% annual return and ended up with $20 billion."
You tell that healthcare costs are down. After the ACA, my healthcare premiums DOUBLED. Fucking... Doubled.
Hello over there, Americans! While you bicker about whether the ACA increased premiums or brought healthcare costs down (or both or neither), the rest of the developed world enjoys per capita overall spending that is a fraction of yours, and with much better overall health outcomes. Maybe you could simply agree that a truly "socialized" system of medicine would be a great improvement on either the pre- or post-ACA American healthcare system and drop the partisan crap?
The new series of reports by 18 of the world’s foremost experts on endocrine science pegs the health costs of exposure to them at between €157bn-€270bn (£113bn-£195bn), or at least 1.23% of the continent’s GDP.
“The shocking thing is that the major component of that cost is related to the loss of brain function in the next generation,” one of the report’s authors, Professor Philippe Grandjean of Harvard University, told the Guardian.
“Our brains need particular hormones to develop normally – the thyroid hormone and sex hormones like testosterone and oestrogen. They’re very important in pregnancy and a child can very well be mentally retarded because of a lack of iodine and the thyroid hormone caused by chemical exposure.”
There's nothing desirable about reduced IQs and massive health costs (unless you make money on healthcare or benefit from a dumb populace, that is).
The proposed ban was not based on sound science, just scare tactics from European greenies.
The proposed ban was largely the result of research showing that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have incredible costs to human health. We're not talking some vague feel-good argument about the birds and the bees -- we are talking about lost IQ points and health costs that run into the hundreds of billions:
The new series of reports by 18 of the world’s foremost experts on endocrine science pegs the health costs of exposure to them at between €157bn-€270bn (£113bn-£195bn), or at least 1.23% of the continent’s GDP.
As Ars points out, if even a fraction of the economic loss attributed to these chemicals could be reduced, the net result could easily be far more valuable than even the most wildly optimisitic projections for the value of the TTIP agreement.
But that is clearly not the case. Look at the data for life expectancy by age for the US from 1850-2011. [infoplease.com] Yes, life expectancy at birth was nearly half what it is now but the gap narrows considerably if you survived past 20. That is to say, most of the increase in life expectancy at birth comes from curing the childhood illnesses from which many died very young. And while far fewer people lived to 90-100 than now, living into the 70s-80s was not exactly uncommon.
What makes you think that the same trend applied to hunter-gatherers? The lifestyle of those born in 1850 likely has no resemblance to the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers.
Next question -- ever consider that maybe the roughly 50% of people who died around or before age 20 may be a population that's much more vulnerable to "chronic diseases of civilization"? Maybe the reason there weren't many type-2 diabetics or sufferers of congestive heart failure in their 50s is because the people most prone to such diseases were long since in their graves.
One thing i never see discussed anywhere is the contribution to obesity made by fluid retention - which i suspect is considerable.
I'm somewhat stunned that you don't think the medical community would notice that. Fat is famously less dense than water, so if obesity was caused by water retention rather than excess lipids (within adipocytes and elsewhere) then there would be a noticeable difference in density.
To evaluate it, all you need to do is have people of various sizes jump in a pool and try to float. My guess is that more fat, the more buoyant. You seem to be implying the opposite.
Spriometry is used by respirologists to basically measure how much air you can suck in and then blow out (among other parameters like lung inflation, exhale velocity, etc.). It was essentially invented around 1846 by John Hutchinson who believed its best use would be by the insurance industry as this volume was strongly correlated to premature death -- the less air you can blow out, the less time you have left! Hence the name for this quantity that we still use in medicine today: vital capacity.
"1846 The water spirometer measuring vital capacity was developed by a surgeon named John Hutchinson. He invented a calibrated bell, inverted in water, which was used to capture the volume of air exhaled by a person. John published his paper about his water spirometer and the measurements he had taken from over 4,000 subjects,[2] describing the direct relationship between vital capacity and height and inverse relationship between vital capacity with age. He also showed that vital capacity does not relate to weight at any given height. He also used his machine for the prediction of premature mortality. He coined the term vital capacity, which was claimed as a powerful prognosis for heart disease by Framingham study. He believed that his machine should be used as an acturial predictions for companies selling life insurances"
"Not every vaccine is created equal and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others... I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things"
I, for one, proudly agree with the wise governor that some vaccines shouldn't mandatory for children. Like the shingles vaccine -- expensive and marginally effective, and practically useless if you're under the age of 60. I don't know why'd I'd ask my parents to decide on this vaccine call for me when I hit the age of 60 but his point is valid.
But god, I hope he's not referring to Mumps, Measels, Rubella, and the like!
That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime?
It's not pretty. Essentially, the C-H bonds in methane are vulnerable to radical reactions. This allows for a variety of removal processes, many leading to the formation of water vapour and/or CO2 itself.
While that may not sound so bad, don't forget that water vapour is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases when it's found in the atmosphere, which is why, for example, the effective carbon emissions of intercontinental flights are so significant. So the end result is methane, an awful greenhouse gas, lives a relatively short life but ends up as either a worse or slightly less awful different greenhouse gas. In other words, methane stinks!
As free, open-source learning software (that I've loved for years), it seems right up Slashdot's alley. Except for the fact that this Anki didn't pay for slashvertising.
In summary: Over Fishing entire species to near extinction: Fine. Kill one clam that turns out to be really old add to our understanding of the oceans and climate: Evil, arrogant, and self-centered! WTF?
Ever notice how much efforts police will make to safely sedate and transport a cow that's loose on the highway? Even one that was heading (and will continue to head) to a slaughterhouse?
The reality is that the vast majority of people are not comfortable with killing animals and simply can't handle the idea -- let alone the sight! -- of it. Just the information given on this clam in TFA is enough to rouse people's sympathy and make its death seem tragic. But, as is true for war, the idea of millions of something dying is incomprehensible and therefore inconsequential. Especially if the dying is out of sight and out of mind.
It's for this reason that I can understand and respect the perspectives of hunters and vegetarians alike. But it's quite sad when people can't face the reality of their own actions.