I generally have a release deadline every 2 weeks or so. I have some code I've been building on for 8 years; and some I've re-invented and re-written so many times I shudder to think what might have been accomplished with the time I'd have saved if I hadn't tried to take a shortcut the first time I wrote it.
If there is anything that my job has firmly beaten in to me it's that doing it right saves you time over taking the shortcut; and not even down the road, but right there, the first time. The stupefyingly huge savings in maintainability and reusability are just gravy.
It sounds to me like I would say you write bad code, and I'd recommend trying to write the best code you can because it will get things done faster. Salesmen promising customers unreasonable things won't change, so it's no reason to make things worse. If the things they sell are truly unreasonable, in that they cost more to do than someone pays, and they don't get fired, then your management is incompetent. In that case, you're screwed, but still no reason to make it worse.:)
Re:XML uses a binary format
on
Tim Bray Says RELAX
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You could certainly make XML vastly more compact if you had some table of tags mapped to 2-byte codes. You're not the first to have such an idea, and I and others will be happy to use it... as soon as you've got it standardized, implemented, and as widely accepted as ASCII. Point being, I, and everyone I've never even met who will ever touch some particular XML file, already has a text editor.
We also all have some way of decompressing files in several standard compression formats, which will squash the XML down to the same size as your custom scheme, if storage space is an issue, which it generally isn't. There's all manner of custom schemes one can use to do various things better when one defines the platform. When you want to inter-opperate well, you need to use the capabilities that already exist on only semi-known systems.
Generally we don't actually make customers use new specialized tools. We take advantage of the new specialized tools they already have. I'm pretty sure not one of my customers ever got a browser to read my documentation; I wrote it in HTML because they've all got browsers already.
I deal every day with programmers who don't think they have time to deal with things like correctness, algorithms, data structures, or maintainability. In their panic to create something adequate in a given time, they invariably run over time and create something inadequate. They'd have been much better off doing it the "right" way, because the whole reason it's called the "right" way is it's the fastest way to get the bloody job done.
Like it or not, writing code that has to be done on some deadline, and work, is how commercial (and much non-commercial) coding is; at the moment, at all previous moments, and for all future moments. So learn to write good code in that environment or get a different job; don't write bad code and blame it on obvious truisms.
Why, because you've been confused by that? Because anyone has ever been confused by that ever? So you see:
cout << "You are a bazooty head";
and you think, obviously, that is supposed to shift the bits of the standard output stream left by "You are a bazooty head"?
I wouldn't even call it an overloaded operator except in an overly technical sense. It's an operator that means two different things, and while that may in general be a bad idea, in this case the possible contexts for those meanings are so different, it's not anything close to a problem.
Now I'm sure people will deluge me with examples of cryptic, intentionally obtuse code that dumps the results of shift expressions directly to streams, and thus abuses this construct to create confusion. That's not the point. In decently written code, it's not a problem.
"We all have our reasons for outlawing certain things. Are China's laws just? Who knows..."
I do. They are not just. Yes, different governments censor different things. Does this mean there is no difference between them and we must throw up our hands and refrain from making any judgements? Of course not. Reasonable people can reasonably differ about which censorship is raesonable. But when a major focus of a governments censorship rules is to outlaw criticism of than government, I gotta say: What are you, stupid? Of course that's unreasonable censorship.
Well, every Egyptologist I've heard has come across like "Wow, the ancient egyptians were the coolest civilization ever! They achieved all these totally amazing things long before anyone else" and generaly seems to have set their sights on being the one to figure out something about how they did it that no one else has.
Also note that it's only the outer, top stones that appear to be concrete, so they still would have needed all the tech for moving the solid stones around. And that the concrete would need to cure for days, which would be a lot easier to manage on the ground, so you could cure a lot at once, then move them into place.
Manpower was definitely an issue! Sure, it's a theocracy, getting workers to show up is no problem. Keeping them alive long enough to get anything done is a huge expense. We're talking an enormous labor force working for decades on a project of no (earthly) societal value. All those workers must be housed and fed. Given the tech level of the time, and the need to get it done before the Pharoah died, you'd have to do the job with maximum efficiency to avoid pushing the whole society past the point of collapse in the process. By a common therory, a line the Old Kingdom eventually went over.
The last little detail?!?! It's a thousand miles of river, some of which is too swampy to even navigate, and you want to send vast boats with tanks on stilts so they can come back and use the water... well, what you're going to do with the water that can't just as easily be done by muscle power is unclear to me, but I guess that's another detail. I'd assumed that the water power was intended to make things easier somehow. I can't see that acomplished by any scheme involving rowing a thousand miles up river, no matter what you do when you get back.
"the Giza stones come from a quarry that was several miles away."
By barge. If you're going to propose moving comparable mases of water a thousand miles in tanks the egyptians didn't have the tech for, surely you can let them move the blocks down river by barge, as everyone assumes they did. You spoke of water-powered elevators, so I assumed you were wanting to use the water power only for the final lifting part. Yes, some of the pyramid stones were bigger, and they moved them overland further than the NOVA guys. It is theorized the Egyptians had more than 12 guys. Again, more guys, longer levers, what's the problem?
There's still a huge number of solid stone blocks involved; only the upper, outer blocks appear to have been cement (those not needing to bear much weight, I'd note) Bronze chisels are worth hanging on to, to keep using or to beat into something else. Broken pottery is trash. Archeological finds are disproportionately, if not exclusively, trash; besides of course huge structures that can't be carried off, like pyramids.
"navigate upriver to where water elevation is present, say, some water falls"
Hundreds of miles away.
"Fill up elevated ship-borne tank at bottow level of water falls, then navigate downriver, empty tank at Giza location."
How much water is this boat going to hold? The mass of water in the boat has to be accounted for by the "hull sinking lower in the river and displacing exactly as much more water than it did before. That's going to be huge ship (in a shallow river), and if you do everything with perfect efficiency, it will raise the same mass of stone as you have water by the height of your tank above the water line. That's not a lot to show for a whole ton of guys pulling on oars, even ignoring the hydrological and navigational impossibilities. Why exactly should these guys not be pulling ropes and pry-bars.
"every time archeologists try this method it gets them nowhere, even with a team of 20 people pulling."
I'm not sure where you get that idea. In the famous NOVA special, 12 guys moved a 1.5 ton block easily. I've heard various discussions of how the old kingdom could get a large enough workforce together to move enough blocks fast enough. But I've honestly never heard the suggestion that they couldn't have moved the blocks at all. You get more guys and a bigger lever; what's the problem?
My roof is not a very good place for casting a lot of concrete blocks that need to set for a few days. On the other hand, between a single 2000 lb block, and 2000 lbs of sand, which would you rather move to my driveway from miles away with a wheelbarrow?
The blocks are not contiuous with one another, but fit too tightly to have had a mold removed from between them, so they must have been moved at least a little. Also there is not a heck of a lot extra room near the top of an under-construction pyramid for blocks to be spending days and days drying. My deduction would be that they cast the blocks on the ground and hauled them up. While hauling the blocks up the pyramid looks to us like very hard work, it would have been a small part of the work involved to haul the thing all the way from the quarry, many miles away. I'd further deduce they used cement only for the upper blocks not because moving the lower blocks into place was much easier, but because the lower blocks needed to be stronger.
Sandy, dry soil, lower than the surface of the river, yet mysteriously above the water table. I'm not buying it.
"This is but one way to harness water power in the absence of natural elevation. There are others"
There are various ways to use water to store energy (by pumping it up a hill/tower), but without a difference in elevation, water doesn't have any energy. But if you're going to pump water up, why not just pull stone up, and skip the inefficiencies? I'm having a hard time envisioning anything simpler that a whole bunch of guys pulling ropes and pushing levers. And there's quite a bit of evidence that a huge number of guys were present, so I'm not feeling much need to look for exotic explanations whereby they were just watching some amazing mechanism do the work.
Yes, we do know. The rate of actual terrorists is far too tiny to possibly produce any statistically significant results. If every terrorist ever ordered the snack pack with orange soda and paid cash for their ticket, etc. etc., they would still be a tiny fraction of the people that fit that profile.
Long rivers don't make for readily available hydraulic power. Steeply descending ones do. The Nile at Giza is an extremely lousy power source.
This discovery indicates some of the very top blocks were concrete, but they still had to move a lot of blocks.
Earthen ramps, wooden rollers and a huge number of guys pulling on ropes is a perfectly reasonable way to get the blocks up. It just takes a huge number of guys. Since other evidence indicates the presence of a huge number of guys...
Um, casting some of the stones from concrete doesn't mean the pyramids weren't massive projects requiring huge numbers of workers. I don't see how it explains the tightness of the stones particularly; they couldn't have been poured in-place if that's what you're thinking, or there wouldn't be any seperation at all. I'm not celar what theories you think this one piece of the puzzle invalidates, or why you think Egyptologists are corrupt schemers uninterested in new data.
A series of different empires occupied similar territory over a span of more like 3000 years. The Pyramids were all built by the first one, over a fairly short period.
I don't think you apreciate the time scales involved.
A true skeptic would have wonder about the fact that there is no possible way the Mayans, or any humans, or, heck, any mammals, could have been aware of the meteor.
The meteor hit the earth, and its crater filled in long before humans evolved. It is detectable today by extensive statistical analysys of large scale gravitometer and magnetometer surveys, coupled with detailed mapping of geological deposits. There is nothing unique about the impact site today.
"Mayans weren't just another civilization with astronomy. They had the most accurate astronomy of any preindustrial/preglobal culture, including Egypt (which aligned the Great Pyramid more accurately along the Earth's axis than did the British in setting the Greenwich Line a century ago)."
"Classical" Western astronomy is preindustrial, and had a substantially correct model of the solar system. The Greenwich meridian was selected considerably more than a century ago, and if someone made an error drawing a line, it's not because their understanding of astronomy was not as good as the Egyptians. I cannot accept describing the Mayans Astronomy as "accurate", as the world is not a flat plane, let alone supported by jaguars.
To calculate the region of the sky the meteor came from, we'd need to know the impact time to within something like an hour. We know it to within about 5 million years; maybe.
" as we've heard before, there's 'lies, damned lies, and statistics'."
I've certainly heard that before. It is very popular quote, but always with people who want to ignore that the statistics don't support them. Interesting, that.
But in any case, I didn't say anyone should force anything on you. I said that, hypothetically, if owning a gun increased your risk more than not owning one, then obviously that fact would not be irrelevant, but would actually imply owning a gun was stupid.
"I am quite confident that my chances of being killed in a gun accident are very remote"
Glad to hear it, though I wonder how many people killed in gun accidents would have said the same thing the day before?
"my chances of my home being invaded are less than remote (as these crime rates continually rise)"
No, actually crime rates both rise and fall. Lately they've been mostly falling, and in most (US) places are at historic lows. It would be hard to call the risk of home invasion anything but remote. Heck, even non-gun-owners have more chance of being killed in a gun accident thatn in a home invasion. But hey, that's just a statistic, and we know what they say about those.
"in my judgment the risk of owning guns is worth it for the security it gives me in case of crime"
OK. I'm just saying, I don't know the particulars of your case, but, statistically, almost everyone who makes that judgement is wrong.
"If you're going to remove citizens' ability to defend themselves, then the State should be wholly liable for any criminal activity that happens. That means that every time someone is robbed, the State should be required to immediately pay out millions of dollar in damages (and pain and suffering)."
Will you be paying out millions if someone steals your gun and uses it to shoot someone? Actually, forget that, if you're "wholly liable", you're getting the chair.
In response to which some people made dumb jokes (it's slashdot, dumb jokes are always in context) at the expense of young-earth creationists. Which were funny, because YECs are ridiculous. Others defended the YECs because how dare we make fun of others beleifs. I is this idea I feel needs a righteous smack-down. The concept that we must respect others ideas no matter how crazy they are is downright dangerous.
"Isn't that kind of what is goes on here? Let's ridicule those that believe differently than we do." No, let us ridicule those who insist on ridiculous things. If you are insulted because I say your "core beleifs" are ridiculous, oh well. I do not ask anyone to take my beleifs seriously just because I beleive them. In many cases I beleive them because there is good evidence for them, which may ocf course be a reason for a rational person to agree with me. But I ask no one to beleive, or even respect, anything at all just because I say so.
"If your life hangs in the balance, statistics about accidents just aren't important."
If your life hangs in the balance, statistics about accidents are (obviously) a matter of life and death. For example, what if owning a gun increased your chances of being killed by a gun accident by a factor many, many times the chances of the gun being useful in a home invasion. Then owning the gun would obviously be stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally have a release deadline every 2 weeks or so. I have some code I've been building on for 8 years; and some I've re-invented and re-written so many times I shudder to think what might have been accomplished with the time I'd have saved if I hadn't tried to take a shortcut the first time I wrote it.
:)
If there is anything that my job has firmly beaten in to me it's that doing it right saves you time over taking the shortcut; and not even down the road, but right there, the first time. The stupefyingly huge savings in maintainability and reusability are just gravy.
It sounds to me like I would say you write bad code, and I'd recommend trying to write the best code you can because it will get things done faster. Salesmen promising customers unreasonable things won't change, so it's no reason to make things worse. If the things they sell are truly unreasonable, in that they cost more to do than someone pays, and they don't get fired, then your management is incompetent. In that case, you're screwed, but still no reason to make it worse.
You could certainly make XML vastly more compact if you had some table of tags mapped to 2-byte codes. You're not the first to have such an idea, and I and others will be happy to use it... as soon as you've got it standardized, implemented, and as widely accepted as ASCII. Point being, I, and everyone I've never even met who will ever touch some particular XML file, already has a text editor.
We also all have some way of decompressing files in several standard compression formats, which will squash the XML down to the same size as your custom scheme, if storage space is an issue, which it generally isn't. There's all manner of custom schemes one can use to do various things better when one defines the platform. When you want to inter-opperate well, you need to use the capabilities that already exist on only semi-known systems.
Generally we don't actually make customers use new specialized tools. We take advantage of the new specialized tools they already have. I'm pretty sure not one of my customers ever got a browser to read my documentation; I wrote it in HTML because they've all got browsers already.
I deal every day with programmers who don't think they have time to deal with things like correctness, algorithms, data structures, or maintainability. In their panic to create something adequate in a given time, they invariably run over time and create something inadequate. They'd have been much better off doing it the "right" way, because the whole reason it's called the "right" way is it's the fastest way to get the bloody job done.
Like it or not, writing code that has to be done on some deadline, and work, is how commercial (and much non-commercial) coding is; at the moment, at all previous moments, and for all future moments. So learn to write good code in that environment or get a different job; don't write bad code and blame it on obvious truisms.
Sorry, long day
Why, because you've been confused by that? Because anyone has ever been confused by that ever? So you see:
cout << "You are a bazooty head";
and you think, obviously, that is supposed to shift the bits of the standard output stream left by "You are a bazooty head"?
I wouldn't even call it an overloaded operator except in an overly technical sense. It's an operator that means two different things, and while that may in general be a bad idea, in this case the possible contexts for those meanings are so different, it's not anything close to a problem.
Now I'm sure people will deluge me with examples of cryptic, intentionally obtuse code that dumps the results of shift expressions directly to streams, and thus abuses this construct to create confusion. That's not the point. In decently written code, it's not a problem.
Ah, yes
"[your quote], whereas plain concrete gets to this strength after several days."
Did you not read the whole sentence you were quoting or did you just not expect me to?
"We all have our reasons for outlawing certain things. Are China's laws just? Who knows..."
I do. They are not just. Yes, different governments censor different things. Does this mean there is no difference between them and we must throw up our hands and refrain from making any judgements? Of course not. Reasonable people can reasonably differ about which censorship is raesonable. But when a major focus of a governments censorship rules is to outlaw criticism of than government, I gotta say: What are you, stupid? Of course that's unreasonable censorship.
Well, every Egyptologist I've heard has come across like "Wow, the ancient egyptians were the coolest civilization ever! They achieved all these totally amazing things long before anyone else" and generaly seems to have set their sights on being the one to figure out something about how they did it that no one else has.
Also note that it's only the outer, top stones that appear to be concrete, so they still would have needed all the tech for moving the solid stones around. And that the concrete would need to cure for days, which would be a lot easier to manage on the ground, so you could cure a lot at once, then move them into place.
"Manpower was not an issue."
Manpower was definitely an issue! Sure, it's a theocracy, getting workers to show up is no problem. Keeping them alive long enough to get anything done is a huge expense. We're talking an enormous labor force working for decades on a project of no (earthly) societal value. All those workers must be housed and fed. Given the tech level of the time, and the need to get it done before the Pharoah died, you'd have to do the job with maximum efficiency to avoid pushing the whole society past the point of collapse in the process. By a common therory, a line the Old Kingdom eventually went over.
The last little detail?!?! It's a thousand miles of river, some of which is too swampy to even navigate, and you want to send vast boats with tanks on stilts so they can come back and use the water... well, what you're going to do with the water that can't just as easily be done by muscle power is unclear to me, but I guess that's another detail. I'd assumed that the water power was intended to make things easier somehow. I can't see that acomplished by any scheme involving rowing a thousand miles up river, no matter what you do when you get back.
"the Giza stones come from a quarry that was several miles away."
By barge. If you're going to propose moving comparable mases of water a thousand miles in tanks the egyptians didn't have the tech for, surely you can let them move the blocks down river by barge, as everyone assumes they did. You spoke of water-powered elevators, so I assumed you were wanting to use the water power only for the final lifting part. Yes, some of the pyramid stones were bigger, and they moved them overland further than the NOVA guys. It is theorized the Egyptians had more than 12 guys. Again, more guys, longer levers, what's the problem?
There's still a huge number of solid stone blocks involved; only the upper, outer blocks appear to have been cement (those not needing to bear much weight, I'd note) Bronze chisels are worth hanging on to, to keep using or to beat into something else. Broken pottery is trash. Archeological finds are disproportionately, if not exclusively, trash; besides of course huge structures that can't be carried off, like pyramids.
"navigate upriver to where water elevation is present, say, some water falls"
Hundreds of miles away.
"Fill up elevated ship-borne tank at bottow level of water falls, then navigate downriver, empty tank at Giza location."
How much water is this boat going to hold? The mass of water in the boat has to be accounted for by the "hull sinking lower in the river and displacing exactly as much more water than it did before. That's going to be huge ship (in a shallow river), and if you do everything with perfect efficiency, it will raise the same mass of stone as you have water by the height of your tank above the water line. That's not a lot to show for a whole ton of guys pulling on oars, even ignoring the hydrological and navigational impossibilities. Why exactly should these guys not be pulling ropes and pry-bars.
"every time archeologists try this method it gets them nowhere, even with a team of 20 people pulling."
I'm not sure where you get that idea. In the famous NOVA special, 12 guys moved a 1.5 ton block easily. I've heard various discussions of how the old kingdom could get a large enough workforce together to move enough blocks fast enough. But I've honestly never heard the suggestion that they couldn't have moved the blocks at all. You get more guys and a bigger lever; what's the problem?
My roof is not a very good place for casting a lot of concrete blocks that need to set for a few days. On the other hand, between a single 2000 lb block, and 2000 lbs of sand, which would you rather move to my driveway from miles away with a wheelbarrow?
The blocks are not contiuous with one another, but fit too tightly to have had a mold removed from between them, so they must have been moved at least a little. Also there is not a heck of a lot extra room near the top of an under-construction pyramid for blocks to be spending days and days drying. My deduction would be that they cast the blocks on the ground and hauled them up. While hauling the blocks up the pyramid looks to us like very hard work, it would have been a small part of the work involved to haul the thing all the way from the quarry, many miles away. I'd further deduce they used cement only for the upper blocks not because moving the lower blocks into place was much easier, but because the lower blocks needed to be stronger.
Sandy, dry soil, lower than the surface of the river, yet mysteriously above the water table. I'm not buying it.
"This is but one way to harness water power in the absence of natural elevation. There are others"
There are various ways to use water to store energy (by pumping it up a hill/tower), but without a difference in elevation, water doesn't have any energy. But if you're going to pump water up, why not just pull stone up, and skip the inefficiencies? I'm having a hard time envisioning anything simpler that a whole bunch of guys pulling ropes and pushing levers. And there's quite a bit of evidence that a huge number of guys were present, so I'm not feeling much need to look for exotic explanations whereby they were just watching some amazing mechanism do the work.
Yes, we do know. The rate of actual terrorists is far too tiny to possibly produce any statistically significant results. If every terrorist ever ordered the snack pack with orange soda and paid cash for their ticket, etc. etc., they would still be a tiny fraction of the people that fit that profile.
Long rivers don't make for readily available hydraulic power. Steeply descending ones do. The Nile at Giza is an extremely lousy power source.
This discovery indicates some of the very top blocks were concrete, but they still had to move a lot of blocks.
Earthen ramps, wooden rollers and a huge number of guys pulling on ropes is a perfectly reasonable way to get the blocks up. It just takes a huge number of guys. Since other evidence indicates the presence of a huge number of guys...
"Are there pictographs showing hundreds of slaves pushing/pulling a giant slab up the face?"
Yes, though in pictographs it's a bit hard to tell the difference between slaves and religious zealots.
Um, casting some of the stones from concrete doesn't mean the pyramids weren't massive projects requiring huge numbers of workers. I don't see how it explains the tightness of the stones particularly; they couldn't have been poured in-place if that's what you're thinking, or there wouldn't be any seperation at all. I'm not celar what theories you think this one piece of the puzzle invalidates, or why you think Egyptologists are corrupt schemers uninterested in new data.
"the Egyptian empire ran some 7,000 years"
A series of different empires occupied similar territory over a span of more like 3000 years. The Pyramids were all built by the first one, over a fairly short period.
Not that I disagree with you generally, but the Post-Its Patent was for the adhesive formula.
The milage tax would "punish" SUV drivers less than the gas tax. Not to call you ungrounded in logic or anything. Oh, what the hell: you're an idiot.
I don't think you apreciate the time scales involved.
A true skeptic would have wonder about the fact that there is no possible way the Mayans, or any humans, or, heck, any mammals, could have been aware of the meteor.
The meteor hit the earth, and its crater filled in long before humans evolved. It is detectable today by extensive statistical analysys of large scale gravitometer and magnetometer surveys, coupled with detailed mapping of geological deposits. There is nothing unique about the impact site today.
"Mayans weren't just another civilization with astronomy. They had the most accurate astronomy of any preindustrial/preglobal culture, including Egypt (which aligned the Great Pyramid more accurately along the Earth's axis than did the British in setting the Greenwich Line a century ago)."
"Classical" Western astronomy is preindustrial, and had a substantially correct model of the solar system. The Greenwich meridian was selected considerably more than a century ago, and if someone made an error drawing a line, it's not because their understanding of astronomy was not as good as the Egyptians. I cannot accept describing the Mayans Astronomy as "accurate", as the world is not a flat plane, let alone supported by jaguars.
To calculate the region of the sky the meteor came from, we'd need to know the impact time to within something like an hour. We know it to within about 5 million years; maybe.
" as we've heard before, there's 'lies, damned lies, and statistics'."
I've certainly heard that before. It is very popular quote, but always with people who want to ignore that the statistics don't support them. Interesting, that.
But in any case, I didn't say anyone should force anything on you. I said that, hypothetically, if owning a gun increased your risk more than not owning one, then obviously that fact would not be irrelevant, but would actually imply owning a gun was stupid.
"I am quite confident that my chances of being killed in a gun accident are very remote"
Glad to hear it, though I wonder how many people killed in gun accidents would have said the same thing the day before?
"my chances of my home being invaded are less than remote (as these crime rates continually rise)"
No, actually crime rates both rise and fall. Lately they've been mostly falling, and in most (US) places are at historic lows. It would be hard to call the risk of home invasion anything but remote. Heck, even non-gun-owners have more chance of being killed in a gun accident thatn in a home invasion. But hey, that's just a statistic, and we know what they say about those.
"in my judgment the risk of owning guns is worth it for the security it gives me in case of crime"
OK. I'm just saying, I don't know the particulars of your case, but, statistically, almost everyone who makes that judgement is wrong.
"If you're going to remove citizens' ability to defend themselves, then the State should be wholly liable for any criminal activity that happens. That means that every time someone is robbed, the State should be required to immediately pay out millions of dollar in damages (and pain and suffering)."
Will you be paying out millions if someone steals your gun and uses it to shoot someone? Actually, forget that, if you're "wholly liable", you're getting the chair.
"This is a fucking article about dinosaurs!!!"
In response to which some people made dumb jokes (it's slashdot, dumb jokes are always in context) at the expense of young-earth creationists. Which were funny, because YECs are ridiculous. Others defended the YECs because how dare we make fun of others beleifs. I is this idea I feel needs a righteous smack-down. The concept that we must respect others ideas no matter how crazy they are is downright dangerous.
"Isn't that kind of what is goes on here? Let's ridicule those that believe differently than we do."
No, let us ridicule those who insist on ridiculous things. If you are insulted because I say your "core beleifs" are ridiculous, oh well. I do not ask anyone to take my beleifs seriously just because I beleive them. In many cases I beleive them because there is good evidence for them, which may ocf course be a reason for a rational person to agree with me. But I ask no one to beleive, or even respect, anything at all just because I say so.
"If your life hangs in the balance, statistics about accidents just aren't important."
If your life hangs in the balance, statistics about accidents are (obviously) a matter of life and death. For example, what if owning a gun increased your chances of being killed by a gun accident by a factor many, many times the chances of the gun being useful in a home invasion. Then owning the gun would obviously be stupid.