And most people will focus on the person in the above stories that confirm their bias.
I'd love to see these sorts of study first released with the blind terminology, so the claim would be, "X causes Y". Blind the demographic variables too. Let the reviewer evaluate THAT and see how much of the actual review is based on the quality of the data and the analysis rather than the bias of the reviewers.
This study was obviously pretty questionable, even on a cursory look. As I said at the time of the original article (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3077857&threshold=3&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=41148355):
"A randomized controlled trial is by far the best means of proving causality, but a strong dose-response curve is a good secondary indicator. In this case, the data don't seem to support the contention of the abstract very well....
There are a couple of striking things: the percentage of males jumps markedly as the regularity of cannabis use goes up, and the initial IQ drops. So this study shows that young men with slighlty lower than average IQ are more likely to engage in regular cannabis use, and this may or may not result in a further decrease in their IQ over time."
This was apparent after about five minutes of looking at the paper (admittedly, I'm reasonably experienced at this, but you'd expect the people who reviewed the paper to be as well.) That it got passed by reviewers and published in PNAS is a travesty.
Cube farms are cheaper than offices, Open office layouts are cheaper than cubes.
The difference in developer productivity is at least a factor of two between cubes and offices. It may be as high as a factor of ten in some cases. So you waste a lot of money on salary--which is the dominant expense in development shops by a very large factor--by having cubes rather than offices.
So the answer is clearly anything but money. If it was just about money (the least money for a given work product) small teams of developers in good conditions would be strongly favoured.
Businesses are not run to maximize productivity, they are run to maximize manager's feelings of power and control.
They first have to select specific wavelengths and then--it sounds like--frequency-shift them.
To call this "heat" is a deliberately misleading statement designed to elicit precisely the question you are asking, as that will attract much more of our most limited resource--attention--to this otherwise interesting but essentially esoteric work.
"Heat" in ordinary parlance is constituted by vibrational modes that obey the principle of equipartition, which this "heat" manifestly does not.
Any one who says the data doesn't support the vaccine is an idiot or a liar. That data is pretty well documented.
Nothing like adding a nice little anti-scientific ad hominem to your day.
The data are pretty well restricted to deaths from "flu and pneumonia", so no one actually has a clue what the death rate from influenza is, in the normal course of events. We have slightly better data on outbreak years, but from an overall public health perspective you'd think the CDC would actually have a reasonably good estimate of the total number of deaths prevented each year before recommending a universal vaccine that has about a 1 in a milliion rate of serious neurological complications (much worse in some years... now convince me that next year isn't going to be one of those years...)
There is an argument to be made for flu vaccines, but the case is no where near as open-and-shut as it is for smallpox and the like, and fleeing the realm of science to hurl insults is not a good way to resolve the issue.
This is the dirty little open secret of the anti-flu business: no one knows how many people die of the flu. The number is certainly not zero, but it is equally certainly not the full tally of "flu plus other things that present similar symptoms that are not the flu".
So the question remains: "Why doesn't the CDC keep tabs on overall deaths from the flu?" and the answer is: "It is not economic to do a proper diagnosis of every fatality from 'flu and penumonia'."
The real question is: why so much hype around flu shots, whose effectiveness varies from year to year but is never over 75% (and sometimes is considerably less) when every now and then a problematic batch produces a risk of about 1 in a million of serious neurological consequnces? The risk of death from "flu and pneumonia" is about 1 in a million amongst healthy adults, so the risk of death from flu is lower than that.
There is an argument to be made for flu shots amongst health care workers, the elderly, and possibly the very young (risk goes up dramatically below the age of 5), but the case is much harder to make--except possibly for herd immunity--amongst healthy adults.
When I worked in a hospital I got my flu shot. Now that I don't, I don't.
If divorce rates are increasing (which I suspect they are),
There's this amazing thing called a "search engine" that you can type "queries" into. If you'd spent two minutes doing that you'd have found that what you "suspect" is wrong. Divorce rates have been flat for decades, and may even be decreasing a bit (can be tricky to tell because divorce rates drop in poor economies.)
Similarly, if we found out precisely how the brain gives rise to consciousness, that wouldn't mean thinking per se didn't exist.
The "phenomena are not real" crowd have two basic moves, which contradict each other.
The first is, "We can reduce phenomenon X to cause Y, therefore phenomenon X doesn't 'really' exist" (because they for some reason believe that only their atomic terms to which they want to reduce everything 'really' exist--no explanation for this surreal prejudice is ever given)
The second is, "We cannot reduce phenomenon X to cause Y, therefore phenomenon X doesn't 'really' exist" (because they have assumed ab initio that only their atomic terms 'really' exist, and therefore anything that cannot be reduced to them must not 'really' exist.)
Self-contradictory 'arguments' against free will, which attempt to get people to use their free will to voluntarily change their minds regarding the obviously existing phenomenon of free will are of the latter type.
The utility of Kuhn's analysis is that he at least vaguely recognized that the sciences have two basic moves available: to make arguments reducing phenomena to known causes that flow from existing atomic terms; and to introduce new atomic terms (wave functions, tectonic plates, genes, subconsious motivations, germs.) He vastly over-stated the differences between these two moves in day-to-day science. They both happen all the time, and the distiction between "normal" and "revolutionary" science is fairly blury in practice.
If you study, on the other hand, semiconductor physics, friction, or material physics you'll find half a dozen offers for well paid positions in industry research labs in no time.
Don't. Make. Me. Laugh.
"Semiconductor physics" is a huge field, and "materials science" is even broader, and only a few tiny niches are hot at any moment, and if you don't luck into one of those you may as well have spent a few years putting a more precise limit on a particular branch of the decay of a non-existent particle (which is what I did for my PhD.)
When I was a student there were two particularly big things in semiconductor physics: molecular beam epitaxi and gallium arsenide. By the time I graduated both were passe', although I knew one student who just squeaked in under the wire and got a good job on the basis of his graduate work in MBE.
Tribology (friction) certainly has some appeal currently, particularly in medical devices and implants, but that's today. I would never advise a student to go into a particular field simply based on the current prospects for jobs, because I know too well that the jobs may not be there in three or five (or ten) years.
From another perspective, there is no shortage of scientists: there is a shortage of scientists who fit the unbelievably narrow specificatoins that hiring managers put on open positions (the so-called "purple squirrel" phenomenon.)
On top of this, there is this relentless chorus of educators and policy-makers continually screaming that we need more educated people in general and more people with science and engineering degrees in particular, preferably at the PhD level--because a Masters is pretty much an admission of failure in the sciences--while the hard reality is that threads like this are full of two pieces of generally sound advice for people with PhDs looking for jobs outside of the hundred-to-one odds of tenure-track appointments:
1) apply to universities in support capacities, where smart people are valued even if their degree isn't in the immediate field of application
2) lie about having a PhD.
Those are good pieces of advice unless you present yourself very, very carefully. I've been fortunate to be able to leaverage my PhD into some amazingly cool stuff and also fortunate that I've got the right attitude and skills to run my own business, which I did for about a decade. But I broke into the commerical software market during the dot-com boom where they'd hire a dog if had some coding experience. Unless you've had comparable good fortune, the thing that the OECD and others are all telling you should do--get a PhD so you can get a good job--is actually a significant impediment to getting a good job.
Almost everyone here knows this, but almost no one going into a PhD program realizes it because of the sytematic hype-machine promoting higher education as the road to riches.
Most Harley's are quieter, most rock concerts are too.
The long-term plan no-doubt involves nuclear-electric propulsion, because using 21st century technology to solve problems using stone-age bash-head-with-rock strategies is what modern science and technology is all about.
The sad thing is that there are people who are smart enough to work on this stuff but so stupid they think doing so is a good idea, and whose response to anyone pointing this out is some moronic, cowardly gibberish along the lines of, "Yeah, who do you think is going to protect you from the Bad Guys [TM] when they come for your scarce resources?" instead of, "You're right, we have the means to create universal abundance so we don't have to worry about scarce resources any more..."
The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY
Unfortunately, no tool can be more reliable than the person operating it, and there is a wealth of empirical data demonstrating that untrained (ie typical) handgun owners are extremely unreliable.
Handgun proficiency is hard. Anyone who has even moderate experience with firearms knows this, and knows that handgun proficiency declines dramatically under pressure and when the person has not been actively, regularly and recently (as in, the past few weeks to months) training for combat/emergency response. This is why cops are required to maintain proficiency through regular training, and it's easy to find firearms experts who are critical of how low those proficiency standards are.
People who argue for concealed carry and the use of handguns as a defensive tool for untrained or poorly trained individuals who are not required by law to undergo weekly or monthly refreshers are arguing for something that is dangerous, unreliable and virtually useless as a means of defense against attack of any kind.
Again: anyone familiar with the actual proficiency requirements for the effective use of handguns in emergency situations is an advocate for strictly limiting them to highly trained individuals who undergo regular proficiency maintenance. To argue otherwise is simply to declare your ignorance of the vast amount of empirical data that demonstrates just how hard it is to use a handgun reliably.
Every government that's ever existed on Earth has been corrupt, to one degree or another.
Saying "all governments are corrupt" is either an observation that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, or an imputation that the gross and rampant corruption that Americans experience every day is somehow of no greater concern than the tiny bits of corruption the rest of us in the developed world experience.
Either option marks you out as kind of a twit, y'know?
The problem with terrorist is that little can actually be done to stop it.
The much, much bigger problem is that there are a small number of people who are getting very rich selling the illusion that they can do something to stop it. If it wasn't for the opportunities to funnel money into the pockets of unproductive generators of dead-weight losses in the security/industrial complex terrorism would simply be a minor nuisance, akin to traffic accidents.
It is the quislings who make terrorism so problematic.
The rate of gun ownership in Canada is about half what it is in the US, with 22% of households having guns vs your 45%. In Canada, only about 2.3% of households have handguns (under very restrictive conditions and with limited magazines) as opposed to about 25% of American households.
The rate of gun suicide in Canada is about equal to that in the US, which is significant because the primary purpose of owning a gun is to kill yourself: that is the most common use of guns against humans in both the US and Canada, and why wouldn't we identify the most common use as the purpose of the tool?
The really interesting thing, though, is that the rate of gun homicide in Canada is less than 20% of that in the US (0.7 per 100,000 vs somewhat more than 4 per 100,000)
One intriguing possibility that would explain this difference is that while we have lots of guns, we have very few handguns and virtually no assault weapons.
This is intriguing because handguns and assault weapons are designed specifically to kill other people, and the difference in gun use between Canada and the US is specifically in the use of guns to kill other people.
Anyone who isn't a gun nut can see this, and is at least very intrigued by the possibility that Canadian-style near-elimination of handgun and assault weapons from the United States might lead to a factor of five reduction in gun homicide. Unfortunately many people (the ones I've designated "gun nuts") think this would be a bad thing.
So you're right: the problem is not the guns. The problem is the nuts.
what's the core problem, here? tools that move people? we have so many of those. just outlaw anything that could move people? go all 'london' as an over-reaction?
the core problem is people are crazy and act out.
if all cars were gone tomorrow, loonies would still travel.
Strip all the bullshit away, and what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."
The difficulty seems to be that the people who think like this live in a world of mechanical cause and effect in which every individual death has a definite mechanical cause that is never related to the easily availability of a tool for killing people.
They don't seem to be able to grasp that making something easier means there will be more of it, so they aren't able to understand that easy availablity of guns neccessarily and inevitably leads to more people being killed by guns.
A precisely equivalent claim is: "Cars don't travel, people travel. Banning cars won't stop people from travelling. And lots of people who don't own cars still travel. I know someone who doesn't own a car, and they take the subway all the time. So eliminating cars won't change a single thing!"
We can all agree that anyone who made such an argument would have to be insane, but incontinent gun-addicts make it all the time.
I'm glad some one else will say what I've always said, PHP is a three-headed Satan baby. When the seventh seal was broken and the seventh trumpet sounded, PHP leaped out of the womb and ate its mother, the whore of Babylon.
Thanks for that awesome metaphor!
Every single time that delightfully deep and correct analysis of PHP's shortcomings is mentioned someone who doesn't know anything about language design chimes in with this ridiculous, "Yes but no language is perfect!" line. As if "every well-designed language consists of an intersection of compromises between incompatible ideals" is in any way an answer to, "PHP is fractal of bad design."
I'm not totally sure why anyone thinks "no language meets some impossible standard I've just made up in my head" is relevant to the obviously true claim that "some languages are better than others, and all languages are MUCH better than PHP."
But do please continue to spout ideology-addled "corrections" that contradict reality. It amuses the hell out of the rest of us to watch you do it. And keep on losing those elections while you're at it!
Right. and the headline is a little misleading, it's a "new" explanation only if you weren't following; since it was announced in late 2010.
My impression is that they've done a secondary calculation using a different technique from their original detailed finite element one, and that this new approach agrees within error of their previous work, which does count as new, and important, although I agree the article manages to obscure the history pretty effectively. Which is funny given how much history it recounts.
The Committee for Supporting the Ridiculous Kabuki Theatre that Passes for Environmental Policy Discussion would like to extend its gratitude to you for stepping up and posting the mandated reply to the inevitable idiot who comments that "windmills kill birds" twenty years after the major changes to windmill design substantially mitigated the problem.
The Committee estimates that there are still roughly 3.2 billion idiots on Earth who have not updated their beliefs from the 1980s, and appreciate that while the task of replying to every single one of these unmitigated morons is arduous, tireless volunteers like yourself will eventually have replied to each and every one of them at least once by 2075.
By that time, it is estimated that the average idiot will have been corrected at least 5 times, and that perhaps as many as 1% of them will have updated their beliefs in light of reality. While this number may seem disappointingly small in fractional terms, remember: it is still upwards of 30 million human beings whose tiny little minds have been changed by pointing out just how stupid they look when repeating falsehoods from several decades past.
Actually I like this system : for a long term project to succeed, it requires it to be consistent, non-partisan and well done
This is as much about regional as partisan politics, although both have a role. The US is a relatively weak federation in important respects, and the ability of regional power bases to disrupt national policy is considerable.
In science and technology, this usually appears as pork for supporters: various bits of the space shuttle (most famously, the SRBs) had to be made in particular states to garner the support of the appropriate senators.
For single-site projects, like the superconducting supercolider in the '80's, everyone was for it until a specific site was identified, at which point everyone but the representatives from that state (Texas, I think), and that concerted opposition was enough to kill it.
In the case of Yucca Mountain, the representatives from Nevada (notably Harry Reid) were able to concentrate their opposition, while no one was particularly zealous in favour of it.
So in the US, single-site projects that have high political or economic costs or benefits to the state involved tend to fail. This is built in to the US system of regional representation.
As such, local storage of waste--which would eliminate the decidedly non-negligible transport risk--is likely the only viable solution for Americans, because your government is structurally incapable of sustaining any other solution.
Slashdot Mirror
. But when a peon.. whoops, excuse me, the proper term is "an employee", turns the tables on them, well, we can't have that, can we.
I believe the correct terminology in the current version of NewSpeak is "job consumer".
How about whether high IQ folks are more likely to smoke pot or dumb ones?
The data suggest lower IQ males are more likely to start smoking pot: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3077857&cid=41148355 (and kudos to the guy who responded to that comment by suggesting pot smoking turns women into men!)
And most people will focus on the person in the above stories that confirm their bias.
I'd love to see these sorts of study first released with the blind terminology, so the claim would be, "X causes Y". Blind the demographic variables too. Let the reviewer evaluate THAT and see how much of the actual review is based on the quality of the data and the analysis rather than the bias of the reviewers.
This study was obviously pretty questionable, even on a cursory look. As I said at the time of the original article (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3077857&threshold=3&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=41148355):
"A randomized controlled trial is by far the best means of proving causality, but a strong dose-response curve is a good secondary indicator. In this case, the data don't seem to support the contention of the abstract very well....
There are a couple of striking things: the percentage of males jumps markedly as the regularity of cannabis use goes up, and the initial IQ drops. So this study shows that young men with slighlty lower than average IQ are more likely to engage in regular cannabis use, and this may or may not result in a further decrease in their IQ over time."
This was apparent after about five minutes of looking at the paper (admittedly, I'm reasonably experienced at this, but you'd expect the people who reviewed the paper to be as well.) That it got passed by reviewers and published in PNAS is a travesty.
Cube farms are cheaper than offices,
Open office layouts are cheaper than cubes.
The difference in developer productivity is at least a factor of two between cubes and offices. It may be as high as a factor of ten in some cases. So you waste a lot of money on salary--which is the dominant expense in development shops by a very large factor--by having cubes rather than offices.
So the answer is clearly anything but money. If it was just about money (the least money for a given work product) small teams of developers in good conditions would be strongly favoured.
Businesses are not run to maximize productivity, they are run to maximize manager's feelings of power and control.
No.
They first have to select specific wavelengths and then--it sounds like--frequency-shift them.
To call this "heat" is a deliberately misleading statement designed to elicit precisely the question you are asking, as that will attract much more of our most limited resource--attention--to this otherwise interesting but essentially esoteric work.
"Heat" in ordinary parlance is constituted by vibrational modes that obey the principle of equipartition, which this "heat" manifestly does not.
Any one who says the data doesn't support the vaccine is an idiot or a liar. That data is pretty well documented.
Nothing like adding a nice little anti-scientific ad hominem to your day.
The data are pretty well restricted to deaths from "flu and pneumonia", so no one actually has a clue what the death rate from influenza is, in the normal course of events. We have slightly better data on outbreak years, but from an overall public health perspective you'd think the CDC would actually have a reasonably good estimate of the total number of deaths prevented each year before recommending a universal vaccine that has about a 1 in a milliion rate of serious neurological complications (much worse in some years... now convince me that next year isn't going to be one of those years...)
There is an argument to be made for flu vaccines, but the case is no where near as open-and-shut as it is for smallpox and the like, and fleeing the realm of science to hurl insults is not a good way to resolve the issue.
Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
Right, so how many died of the flu?
0? 53,692?
This is the dirty little open secret of the anti-flu business: no one knows how many people die of the flu. The number is certainly not zero, but it is equally certainly not the full tally of "flu plus other things that present similar symptoms that are not the flu".
So the question remains: "Why doesn't the CDC keep tabs on overall deaths from the flu?" and the answer is: "It is not economic to do a proper diagnosis of every fatality from 'flu and penumonia'."
The real question is: why so much hype around flu shots, whose effectiveness varies from year to year but is never over 75% (and sometimes is considerably less) when every now and then a problematic batch produces a risk of about 1 in a million of serious neurological consequnces? The risk of death from "flu and pneumonia" is about 1 in a million amongst healthy adults, so the risk of death from flu is lower than that.
There is an argument to be made for flu shots amongst health care workers, the elderly, and possibly the very young (risk goes up dramatically below the age of 5), but the case is much harder to make--except possibly for herd immunity--amongst healthy adults.
When I worked in a hospital I got my flu shot. Now that I don't, I don't.
If divorce rates are increasing (which I suspect they are),
There's this amazing thing called a "search engine" that you can type "queries" into. If you'd spent two minutes doing that you'd have found that what you "suspect" is wrong. Divorce rates have been flat for decades, and may even be decreasing a bit (can be tricky to tell because divorce rates drop in poor economies.)
Similarly, if we found out precisely how the brain gives rise to consciousness, that wouldn't mean thinking per se didn't exist.
The "phenomena are not real" crowd have two basic moves, which contradict each other.
The first is, "We can reduce phenomenon X to cause Y, therefore phenomenon X doesn't 'really' exist" (because they for some reason believe that only their atomic terms to which they want to reduce everything 'really' exist--no explanation for this surreal prejudice is ever given)
The second is, "We cannot reduce phenomenon X to cause Y, therefore phenomenon X doesn't 'really' exist" (because they have assumed ab initio that only their atomic terms 'really' exist, and therefore anything that cannot be reduced to them must not 'really' exist.)
Self-contradictory 'arguments' against free will, which attempt to get people to use their free will to voluntarily change their minds regarding the obviously existing phenomenon of free will are of the latter type.
The utility of Kuhn's analysis is that he at least vaguely recognized that the sciences have two basic moves available: to make arguments reducing phenomena to known causes that flow from existing atomic terms; and to introduce new atomic terms (wave functions, tectonic plates, genes, subconsious motivations, germs.) He vastly over-stated the differences between these two moves in day-to-day science. They both happen all the time, and the distiction between "normal" and "revolutionary" science is fairly blury in practice.
If you study, on the other hand, semiconductor physics, friction, or material physics you'll find half a dozen offers for well paid positions in industry research labs in no time.
Don't. Make. Me. Laugh.
"Semiconductor physics" is a huge field, and "materials science" is even broader, and only a few tiny niches are hot at any moment, and if you don't luck into one of those you may as well have spent a few years putting a more precise limit on a particular branch of the decay of a non-existent particle (which is what I did for my PhD.)
When I was a student there were two particularly big things in semiconductor physics: molecular beam epitaxi and gallium arsenide. By the time I graduated both were passe', although I knew one student who just squeaked in under the wire and got a good job on the basis of his graduate work in MBE.
Tribology (friction) certainly has some appeal currently, particularly in medical devices and implants, but that's today. I would never advise a student to go into a particular field simply based on the current prospects for jobs, because I know too well that the jobs may not be there in three or five (or ten) years.
From another perspective, there is no shortage of scientists: there is a shortage of scientists who fit the unbelievably narrow specificatoins that hiring managers put on open positions (the so-called "purple squirrel" phenomenon.)
On top of this, there is this relentless chorus of educators and policy-makers continually screaming that we need more educated people in general and more people with science and engineering degrees in particular, preferably at the PhD level--because a Masters is pretty much an admission of failure in the sciences--while the hard reality is that threads like this are full of two pieces of generally sound advice for people with PhDs looking for jobs outside of the hundred-to-one odds of tenure-track appointments:
1) apply to universities in support capacities, where smart people are valued even if their degree isn't in the immediate field of application
2) lie about having a PhD.
Those are good pieces of advice unless you present yourself very, very carefully. I've been fortunate to be able to leaverage my PhD into some amazingly cool stuff and also fortunate that I've got the right attitude and skills to run my own business, which I did for about a decade. But I broke into the commerical software market during the dot-com boom where they'd hire a dog if had some coding experience. Unless you've had comparable good fortune, the thing that the OECD and others are all telling you should do--get a PhD so you can get a good job--is actually a significant impediment to getting a good job.
Almost everyone here knows this, but almost no one going into a PhD program realizes it because of the sytematic hype-machine promoting higher education as the road to riches.
Most Harley's are quieter, most rock concerts are too.
The long-term plan no-doubt involves nuclear-electric propulsion, because using 21st century technology to solve problems using stone-age bash-head-with-rock strategies is what modern science and technology is all about.
The sad thing is that there are people who are smart enough to work on this stuff but so stupid they think doing so is a good idea, and whose response to anyone pointing this out is some moronic, cowardly gibberish along the lines of, "Yeah, who do you think is going to protect you from the Bad Guys [TM] when they come for your scarce resources?" instead of, "You're right, we have the means to create universal abundance so we don't have to worry about scarce resources any more..."
he is just a smart businessman preying on people's fears.
You say that like it's a bad thing... at least he's doing this in a relatively harmless way, unlike the security/industrial complex.
The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY
Unfortunately, no tool can be more reliable than the person operating it, and there is a wealth of empirical data demonstrating that untrained (ie typical) handgun owners are extremely unreliable.
Handgun proficiency is hard. Anyone who has even moderate experience with firearms knows this, and knows that handgun proficiency declines dramatically under pressure and when the person has not been actively, regularly and recently (as in, the past few weeks to months) training for combat/emergency response. This is why cops are required to maintain proficiency through regular training, and it's easy to find firearms experts who are critical of how low those proficiency standards are.
People who argue for concealed carry and the use of handguns as a defensive tool for untrained or poorly trained individuals who are not required by law to undergo weekly or monthly refreshers are arguing for something that is dangerous, unreliable and virtually useless as a means of defense against attack of any kind.
Again: anyone familiar with the actual proficiency requirements for the effective use of handguns in emergency situations is an advocate for strictly limiting them to highly trained individuals who undergo regular proficiency maintenance. To argue otherwise is simply to declare your ignorance of the vast amount of empirical data that demonstrates just how hard it is to use a handgun reliably.
"IQ is defined as what is measured by IQ tests." So it's not that it doesn't exist
The latter claim in no way follows from the former, and if your IQ was as high has mine you'd see that.
Every government that's ever existed on Earth has been corrupt, to one degree or another.
Saying "all governments are corrupt" is either an observation that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, or an imputation that the gross and rampant corruption that Americans experience every day is somehow of no greater concern than the tiny bits of corruption the rest of us in the developed world experience.
Either option marks you out as kind of a twit, y'know?
The problem with terrorist is that little can actually be done to stop it.
The much, much bigger problem is that there are a small number of people who are getting very rich selling the illusion that they can do something to stop it. If it wasn't for the opportunities to funnel money into the pockets of unproductive generators of dead-weight losses in the security/industrial complex terrorism would simply be a minor nuisance, akin to traffic accidents.
It is the quislings who make terrorism so problematic.
Guns are not the problem.
No, gun nuts are the problem.
The rate of gun ownership in Canada is about half what it is in the US, with 22% of households having guns vs your 45%. In Canada, only about 2.3% of households have handguns (under very restrictive conditions and with limited magazines) as opposed to about 25% of American households.
The rate of gun suicide in Canada is about equal to that in the US, which is significant because the primary purpose of owning a gun is to kill yourself: that is the most common use of guns against humans in both the US and Canada, and why wouldn't we identify the most common use as the purpose of the tool?
The really interesting thing, though, is that the rate of gun homicide in Canada is less than 20% of that in the US (0.7 per 100,000 vs somewhat more than 4 per 100,000)
One intriguing possibility that would explain this difference is that while we have lots of guns, we have very few handguns and virtually no assault weapons.
This is intriguing because handguns and assault weapons are designed specifically to kill other people, and the difference in gun use between Canada and the US is specifically in the use of guns to kill other people.
Anyone who isn't a gun nut can see this, and is at least very intrigued by the possibility that Canadian-style near-elimination of handgun and assault weapons from the United States might lead to a factor of five reduction in gun homicide. Unfortunately many people (the ones I've designated "gun nuts") think this would be a bad thing.
So you're right: the problem is not the guns. The problem is the nuts.
what's the core problem, here? tools that move people? we have so many of those. just outlaw anything that could move people? go all 'london' as an over-reaction?
the core problem is people are crazy and act out.
if all cars were gone tomorrow, loonies would still travel.
cars are not the problem
Strip all the bullshit away, and what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."
The difficulty seems to be that the people who think like this live in a world of mechanical cause and effect in which every individual death has a definite mechanical cause that is never related to the easily availability of a tool for killing people.
They don't seem to be able to grasp that making something easier means there will be more of it, so they aren't able to understand that easy availablity of guns neccessarily and inevitably leads to more people being killed by guns.
A precisely equivalent claim is: "Cars don't travel, people travel. Banning cars won't stop people from travelling. And lots of people who don't own cars still travel. I know someone who doesn't own a car, and they take the subway all the time. So eliminating cars won't change a single thing!"
We can all agree that anyone who made such an argument would have to be insane, but incontinent gun-addicts make it all the time.
In defense of PHP...
Your "defense" of PHP is that you know nothing about language design, so you can't see what the problem is?
I'm glad some one else will say what I've always said, PHP is a three-headed Satan baby. When the seventh seal was broken and the seventh trumpet sounded, PHP leaped out of the womb and ate its mother, the whore of Babylon.
Thanks for that awesome metaphor!
Every single time that delightfully deep and correct analysis of PHP's shortcomings is mentioned someone who doesn't know anything about language design chimes in with this ridiculous, "Yes but no language is perfect!" line. As if "every well-designed language consists of an intersection of compromises between incompatible ideals" is in any way an answer to, "PHP is fractal of bad design."
I'm not totally sure why anyone thinks "no language meets some impossible standard I've just made up in my head" is relevant to the obviously true claim that "some languages are better than others, and all languages are MUCH better than PHP."
What you actually meant to write:
I'm pretty sure he actually meant this: "Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector; however, the public sector appears frequently to lack timeliness and hospitality towards patients." (low and middle income countries)
Or this: "Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This reportâ"an update to two earlier editionsâ"includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems. Compared with five other nationsâ"Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdomâ"the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes."
But do please continue to spout ideology-addled "corrections" that contradict reality. It amuses the hell out of the rest of us to watch you do it. And keep on losing those elections while you're at it!
Right. and the headline is a little misleading, it's a "new" explanation only if you weren't following; since it was announced in late 2010.
My impression is that they've done a secondary calculation using a different technique from their original detailed finite element one, and that this new approach agrees within error of their previous work, which does count as new, and important, although I agree the article manages to obscure the history pretty effectively. Which is funny given how much history it recounts.
Wind doesn't kill loads of migrating birds
The Committee for Supporting the Ridiculous Kabuki Theatre that Passes for Environmental Policy Discussion would like to extend its gratitude to you for stepping up and posting the mandated reply to the inevitable idiot who comments that "windmills kill birds" twenty years after the major changes to windmill design substantially mitigated the problem.
The Committee estimates that there are still roughly 3.2 billion idiots on Earth who have not updated their beliefs from the 1980s, and appreciate that while the task of replying to every single one of these unmitigated morons is arduous, tireless volunteers like yourself will eventually have replied to each and every one of them at least once by 2075.
By that time, it is estimated that the average idiot will have been corrected at least 5 times, and that perhaps as many as 1% of them will have updated their beliefs in light of reality. While this number may seem disappointingly small in fractional terms, remember: it is still upwards of 30 million human beings whose tiny little minds have been changed by pointing out just how stupid they look when repeating falsehoods from several decades past.
Keep up the good work!
Actually I like this system : for a long term project to succeed, it requires it to be consistent, non-partisan and well done
This is as much about regional as partisan politics, although both have a role. The US is a relatively weak federation in important respects, and the ability of regional power bases to disrupt national policy is considerable.
In science and technology, this usually appears as pork for supporters: various bits of the space shuttle (most famously, the SRBs) had to be made in particular states to garner the support of the appropriate senators.
For single-site projects, like the superconducting supercolider in the '80's, everyone was for it until a specific site was identified, at which point everyone but the representatives from that state (Texas, I think), and that concerted opposition was enough to kill it.
In the case of Yucca Mountain, the representatives from Nevada (notably Harry Reid) were able to concentrate their opposition, while no one was particularly zealous in favour of it.
So in the US, single-site projects that have high political or economic costs or benefits to the state involved tend to fail. This is built in to the US system of regional representation.
As such, local storage of waste--which would eliminate the decidedly non-negligible transport risk--is likely the only viable solution for Americans, because your government is structurally incapable of sustaining any other solution.