The article says that surgical tools are left in in about 1 in 10,000 operations, so I'd say they're already taught to count the number of tools used before and after. Obviously this method works very well, but isn't perfect, and probbably can't be made perfect by just telling people to "Just count the damn instruments".
The point is that in something as important as a surgery you want multiple things to fail before you have a bad result. This approach is often referred to as "Defense in Depth", and was originally a military strategy. Anytime lives are at stake you should strive for redundancy in your system. In this case that redundancy is using RFID to make sure the count wasn't off.
They already have surgically implantable RFID chips. Vets implant them all the time.
I know that you're right, so there must obviously be a way to sterilize the chips that doesn't de-activate them. The question I have is, is that process they use to sterilize these chips compatible with the methods used to sterlize surgical equipment? i.e. it could be that the chip sterlization method uses a chemical sterlization process that isn't normally used in hospitals (or some other non-standard sterilzation method). It may be impractical to use that same method in a hospital to sterilize the instruments.
and i'm not saying it is! all i'm saying is caste system is given much more importance outside india than india itself.
So what? Major problems in a society are often given more attention outside the society than in it. I'll bet you more people outside of Saudi Arabia are upset about the freedom of women than are upset inside Saudi Arabia.
People with greater than average skill are always derided by the masses. Or, as Einstein put it: "Great thinkers will always face violent opposition from mediocre minds." Just because someone might be more perceptually evolved is no reason to cast them away.
They laughed at Einstein.. but they also laughed at bozo the clown. (And in actuality, respected scientists didn't laught at Einstein). What makes you think you're Einstein, and not Bozo?
This wasnt mentioned as evidence, just some random thoughts. I am allowed to have random thoughts without some rationalist inquisition knocking on my door, am I not?
Well, when you have random thoughts maybe you shouldn't present them in such a manner as it looks like you're trying to defend the idea of telepathy. Given that you mentioned these random thoughts in the context of a discucussion about what science is, I think it's quite normal for someone to call you on that and say it's not scientific, and in fact violates the exact point he was JUST trying to make. In short, if you don't want others to question your beliefs I suggest you keep them to yourself, or only talk about them to other people who don't like to question any beliefs. Posting publically on Slashdot is the exact place you DON'T want to discuss something if you don't want to defend yourself.
Your general problem is that you've started with belief, not evidence. When you can't find any evidence you make up reasons why you can't find any. That might be fine if there were a well tested theory that predicts the existence of the thing you can't find. The existance of neutrinos were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli more than 25 years before they could be experimentally confirmed (neutrinos are very hard to detect). There is no such theory that predicts telepathy. All instances of it can be explained through co-incidence, fraud, or just chance.
The question is, why believe in telepathy when no one can provide any evidence for it? Do you believe in other things that you don't have evidence for, like pink unicorns on Mars? Believe things because there's evidence for it, not because you want to.
Re:My High School psychology class Experiment...
on
Virtual Worlds and ESP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Everyone scored between four to six right answers except for one kid who on all three tests scored between twelve to fifteen correct answers.
Yah, and when I was in high school I measured the acceleration do to gravity, g, and found the published value to be off by 20% by my experiment. Obviously there's nothing wrong with my experiment, and someone wrong with the published value of g.
Didn't Infocom implemented their "database query system" (which eventually became their famous text-adventure game engine) using a virtual machine they called the Z-machine? As far as I know that system predated Java and C# by a few decades
While I'm sure Infocom invented an interpreted language to create text adventure games, I wouldn't put this in the same class as Java or C#. How is this any different from creating the bash shell that interprets bash scripts?
Since no one's really defined what "mind reading" is clearly (and if you do, generally it's done to the point where it no longer completely matches what people imagine it as) you don't actually have two explanations.
I would say the vast majority of people would agree that "mind reading" would involve some form of communication outside of the 5 senses. What you're talking about is "mind prediction", which isn't the same thing, and isn't particularly unusual. If your spouse hasn't eaten in 10 hours on a saturday night, and you both like to eat cheeseburgers, it's not really paranormal to both be thinking of going to get a cheeseburger.
Why do you need telepathy to explain this, and not just that people in similar situations that've lived together for years tend to think similarly? We aren't as different and unique as we think we are.
I find it very interesting that the people here arguing that telepathy exists sound suspiciously like the same people who believe in ID.
First off, we've got the missunderstanding of current scientific theory. ID people talk about how evolution violates the 2nd laws of thermodynamics (they missunderstand thermodynamics). Telepathy people talk about how telepathy is possible because of quantum entanglement (communications is impossible through quantum entanglement). In other words, the argument is that "ID/telepathy must exist because of stuff I don't understand, but heard some guy on the radio talk about one time"
Then we've got the "god/telepathy of the gaps" argument. ID/telepathy must be true because we don't understand everything. That opens up the possibility (and investigation) for telepathy/ID right? It's true that science doesn't provide all the answers. But just making up stuff you like in deference to what we already know isn't science. I don't know what it is exactly. Religion?, superstition?, mysticism?, take your pick. It's just a bad way of understanding the world we live in.
It's kind of sad that for a lot of people out their that science is just another form of mysticism. To these people science is just a collection of facts, and the scientist are just weird witch doctors who gather them. Nevermind that science is a process of seperating truth from fiction. Science is just a way to not fool yourself.
So, if the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance, then that tells me that telepathy is possible.
You should have paid a little more attention to quantum entanglement. No communication is possible using quantum entanglement. You CAN use it to create an unbreakable encryption scheme, but you need a seperate channel of communication to actually send the information.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist?
It's not really that telepathy couldn't exist. It's that no one has even shown it to be real in any way. Why do we continue to waste money on something we have no evidence for, is predicted by no theory, and has never stood up to previous experiments? If you had told someone from 200 years ago that you could communicate with people across the globe in real-time, they'd probably think you were some kind of sorcerer.
Even 200 years ago we knew about communcation via light, and we knew it travelled very rapidly. In fact I think someone even invented a system of communication via lighthouses (I forget the details).
Democracy and freedom are not the same thing, and the one does NOT by default lead to the other.
I think you're exactly right, and that's why the founding fathers of the US gave us the bill of rights. They knew that democracy didn't grant freedom and had to be something explicitly addressed as one of our highest laws. They were all specifically designed to protect the rights of the minority over the tyranny of the majority. They also made it hard to take away these rights by creating a difficult (but not impossible) process to amend the constitution.
Obviously democracy isn't perfect. It took almost 100 years for the US to abolish slavery, and really we still haven't recovered from its effects yet. India is a very different place that the United States. It's still extremely conservative when it comes to sex, and the cast system is directly opposite the egalitarian values of the US. I don't think it should be surprising that they're still trying to control access to new ideas from the western world. In the end it won't matter, especially in a less restrictive country like India. You can't stomp out the rest of the world even NOW, and we're becoming more connected every day. Just think about how different the world is going to be in only 50 years.
So what? If you're going to up the sampling rate why not go directly to 44khz stereo
Because stereo would be a complete waste of bandwidth and processing power (one microphone, one speaker), and the human voice doesn't get anything near 22khz in frequency. Normal speaking voices have an even lower cutoff frequency. The CD standard is great for music, but complete overkill for sending voice.
If the entertainment value of the lottery is worth it to you, then by all means go for it. I will be willing to bet that if you took a poll at the local lottery stand, you'd find, though, that over half don't have a red cent in any type of retirement account.
I agree with your general sentiment that people don't value saving money enough, and spend too much money on stuff they really don't value as much as they think they will. But I don't think this has much to do with the lottery, and more to do with the value system in our society of wanting things right now rather than thinking if you really need it.
However, if the fantasy value of winning is what you consider entertainment, then I'd suggest that the person either cannot do math, or they are able to delude themselves. I am not a fan of either possibility.
Have you ever been to a movie and "deluded" yourself into caring about the characters? You know it's not real, but it's fun nonetheless. I don't see much difference between that and the lottery. It is possible to keep two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, but still know which one is real. The problem only comes when people can't distinguish between the fantasy and reality.
I'll trust your math is right (though I take issue with getting a steady 6% over such a long period of time), but there's still an implicit assumption that there's something wrong with buying fantasy in your argument. You can make the exact same argument for buying anything. Why buy that cup of coffee on the weekend when you could invest the money? Don't spend an extra 20 cents on the quality tomatoes that taste better and you'll enjoy more because you could invest it and make more money in 40 years.
What's so different about spending $1 a week on a lottery ticket than buying a beer every so often? You don't need either of them to survive. But for the people who enjoy beer or the lottery, it's worth the very small amount of money. Obviously it's a good idea to save money for so many reasons I can't list. But if you're not spending money to enjoy yourself I think you're going to be a pretty miserable person.
If these proteins are so bad, and so easy to genetically engineer out, then from an evolutionary standpoint, why do we have these genes?
The gene is linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. Obesity has only become a problem within the last hundred years or so as we've become more sedentary and gotten access to more food. Heart disease has increased because of a recent increase in saturated and trans-fats in our diet. Also, heart disease tends to kill people after they've raised children, so after you've passed on your genes. The article doesn't specify which type of diabetes this protein is linked to, but type II diabetes is linked with obesity (see obesity), and simply old age (already raised kids). Asthma is mostly caused by pollution, and possibly an overly hygenic environment during childhood (though there's genetic risk factors of course) which are both recent phenomenon.
The point is that it could easily be that this protein hasn't posed a threat to us until very recently when our lifestyle has changed drastically. The gene that produces this protein wouldn't be eliminated if in the past it posed no threat to producing offspring and raising them to maturity.
You assume there's no value in a lottery ticket beyond the actual payoff. Sorry, but you're wrong. What people are buying is the CHANCE at winning the lottery. It's a fantasy of being able to do whatever they like for the very low price of $1 or a pound. Many people judge the value of that fantasy as being worth far more than the cost of a lottery ticket. It's not about being "bad at math" as you say, but about mentally ignoring the overwhelming odds that you're not going to win, if only for a little while. That doesn't mean you don't know you're extremely unlikely to win, you just don't think about that so you can enjoy the fantasy. I don't play the lottery because I can't easily ignore the fact that I'm not going to win. Other people can do that, and as the poster pointed out it's a trivial amount of money to buy a lottery ticket. You're not really hurting yourself as what else of more value can you really spend $1 on?
With one measurement, you're totally correct. But using statistical techniques from multiple measurements you can cancel out all the random errors that occur. You can do the same thing using a GPS receiver and get centimeter accuracy from the at best 3 meter accuracy of GPS.
Scientists are famous for writing bad, but mostly functional code. The two disciplines don't have much in common, so the usually the coding end of it suffers. It's difficult for a computer scientist to write the code without understanding what's going on, and I suspect most scientists would rather pay their own grad students than some outsider who might do a better job. Coupled with the fact that FORTRAN is still used (and all the problems that come with it), and it's easy to see why the software is so far behind everything else. Hardware isn't much different. From what I've seen and heard it's often jury rigged with bubble gum and bailing wire.
Rumor has it that during the first A-bomb test, the scientists were taking bets on whether they'd ignite the atmosphere. I wonder what the odds of creating a black hole might be?
As I understand it, the "possibility" of the LHC being dangerous stems from our uncertainty about particle physics, not really from any hard knowledge. Thus there is no was to calculate the odds. The most re-assuring evidence is of course that collisions of even higher energies take place in the atmosphere all the time from cosmic rays. They're just rare enough that you'd be unlikely to ever observe one in a detector.
Well, one problem here... when you make something pass through the entire structure, in space there's a little problem with that: explosive decompression. Now that you've introduced a hole or two in your structure, all that pressurized stuff in the structure wants to get out of the structure, and spread far, far apart.
It all depends on how big the hole is, and how the material you're working with behaves. Pop a rubber balloon with a tiny hole and it explodes. Pop a rubber inflatable raft however, and the air just leaks out slowly.
I'm sure you could make a material that has less of a tendency to tear, and is also lightweight and inflatable.
Maybe passing through an occupant on the way through. That doesn't sound very safe to me.
Welcome to space. It's not safe. Neither is mountain climbing or skydiving, yet people do these activities all the time. Also you should probbably be comparing the risk of being hit by space junk with the risk of dying on re-entry or liftoff. I'd be willing to bet that the risks posed by space junk are a LOT smaller than liftoff/re-entry.
Also try to remeber that although there's a lot of junk, it's spread out over a VERY large area. The size of human being is relatively small, so it's not terribly likely that someone would be hit by space junk.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says that surgical tools are left in in about 1 in 10,000 operations, so I'd say they're already taught to count the number of tools used before and after. Obviously this method works very well, but isn't perfect, and probbably can't be made perfect by just telling people to "Just count the damn instruments".
The point is that in something as important as a surgery you want multiple things to fail before you have a bad result. This approach is often referred to as "Defense in Depth", and was originally a military strategy. Anytime lives are at stake you should strive for redundancy in your system. In this case that redundancy is using RFID to make sure the count wasn't off.
They already have surgically implantable RFID chips. Vets implant them all the time.
I know that you're right, so there must obviously be a way to sterilize the chips that doesn't de-activate them. The question I have is, is that process they use to sterilize these chips compatible with the methods used to sterlize surgical equipment? i.e. it could be that the chip sterlization method uses a chemical sterlization process that isn't normally used in hospitals (or some other non-standard sterilzation method). It may be impractical to use that same method in a hospital to sterilize the instruments.
and i'm not saying it is! all i'm saying is caste system is given much more importance outside india than india itself.
So what? Major problems in a society are often given more attention outside the society than in it. I'll bet you more people outside of Saudi Arabia are upset about the freedom of women than are upset inside Saudi Arabia.
People with greater than average skill are always derided by the masses. Or, as Einstein put it: "Great thinkers will always face violent opposition from mediocre minds." Just because someone might be more perceptually evolved is no reason to cast them away.
They laughed at Einstein.. but they also laughed at bozo the clown. (And in actuality, respected scientists didn't laught at Einstein). What makes you think you're Einstein, and not Bozo?
This wasnt mentioned as evidence, just some random thoughts. I am allowed to have random thoughts without some rationalist inquisition knocking on my door, am I not?
Well, when you have random thoughts maybe you shouldn't present them in such a manner as it looks like you're trying to defend the idea of telepathy. Given that you mentioned these random thoughts in the context of a discucussion about what science is, I think it's quite normal for someone to call you on that and say it's not scientific, and in fact violates the exact point he was JUST trying to make. In short, if you don't want others to question your beliefs I suggest you keep them to yourself, or only talk about them to other people who don't like to question any beliefs. Posting publically on Slashdot is the exact place you DON'T want to discuss something if you don't want to defend yourself.
Your general problem is that you've started with belief, not evidence. When you can't find any evidence you make up reasons why you can't find any. That might be fine if there were a well tested theory that predicts the existence of the thing you can't find. The existance of neutrinos were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli more than 25 years before they could be experimentally confirmed (neutrinos are very hard to detect). There is no such theory that predicts telepathy. All instances of it can be explained through co-incidence, fraud, or just chance.
The question is, why believe in telepathy when no one can provide any evidence for it? Do you believe in other things that you don't have evidence for, like pink unicorns on Mars? Believe things because there's evidence for it, not because you want to.
Everyone scored between four to six right answers except for one kid who on all three tests scored between twelve to fifteen correct answers.
Yah, and when I was in high school I measured the acceleration do to gravity, g, and found the published value to be off by 20% by my experiment. Obviously there's nothing wrong with my experiment, and someone wrong with the published value of g.
Didn't Infocom implemented their "database query system" (which eventually became their famous text-adventure game engine) using a virtual machine they called the Z-machine? As far as I know that system predated Java and C# by a few decades
While I'm sure Infocom invented an interpreted language to create text adventure games, I wouldn't put this in the same class as Java or C#. How is this any different from creating the bash shell that interprets bash scripts?
I simply disagree that the election of a lower caste president means that the caste system is egalitarian.
Since no one's really defined what "mind reading" is clearly (and if you do, generally it's done to the point where it no longer completely matches what people imagine it as) you don't actually have two explanations.
I would say the vast majority of people would agree that "mind reading" would involve some form of communication outside of the 5 senses. What you're talking about is "mind prediction", which isn't the same thing, and isn't particularly unusual. If your spouse hasn't eaten in 10 hours on a saturday night, and you both like to eat cheeseburgers, it's not really paranormal to both be thinking of going to get a cheeseburger.
Why do you need telepathy to explain this, and not just that people in similar situations that've lived together for years tend to think similarly? We aren't as different and unique as we think we are.
I find it very interesting that the people here arguing that telepathy exists sound suspiciously like the same people who believe in ID.
First off, we've got the missunderstanding of current scientific theory. ID people talk about how evolution violates the 2nd laws of thermodynamics (they missunderstand thermodynamics). Telepathy people talk about how telepathy is possible because of quantum entanglement (communications is impossible through quantum entanglement). In other words, the argument is that "ID/telepathy must exist because of stuff I don't understand, but heard some guy on the radio talk about one time"
Then we've got the "god/telepathy of the gaps" argument. ID/telepathy must be true because we don't understand everything. That opens up the possibility (and investigation) for telepathy/ID right? It's true that science doesn't provide all the answers. But just making up stuff you like in deference to what we already know isn't science. I don't know what it is exactly. Religion?, superstition?, mysticism?, take your pick. It's just a bad way of understanding the world we live in.
It's kind of sad that for a lot of people out their that science is just another form of mysticism. To these people science is just a collection of facts, and the scientist are just weird witch doctors who gather them. Nevermind that science is a process of seperating truth from fiction. Science is just a way to not fool yourself.
So, if the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance, then that tells me that telepathy is possible.
You should have paid a little more attention to quantum entanglement. No communication is possible using quantum entanglement. You CAN use it to create an unbreakable encryption scheme, but you need a seperate channel of communication to actually send the information.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist?
It's not really that telepathy couldn't exist. It's that no one has even shown it to be real in any way. Why do we continue to waste money on something we have no evidence for, is predicted by no theory, and has never stood up to previous experiments?
If you had told someone from 200 years ago that you could communicate with people across the globe in real-time, they'd probably think you were some kind of sorcerer.
Even 200 years ago we knew about communcation via light, and we knew it travelled very rapidly. In fact I think someone even invented a system of communication via lighthouses (I forget the details).
Democracy and freedom are not the same thing, and the one does NOT by default lead to the other.
I think you're exactly right, and that's why the founding fathers of the US gave us the bill of rights. They knew that democracy didn't grant freedom and had to be something explicitly addressed as one of our highest laws. They were all specifically designed to protect the rights of the minority over the tyranny of the majority. They also made it hard to take away these rights by creating a difficult (but not impossible) process to amend the constitution.
Obviously democracy isn't perfect. It took almost 100 years for the US to abolish slavery, and really we still haven't recovered from its effects yet. India is a very different place that the United States. It's still extremely conservative when it comes to sex, and the cast system is directly opposite the egalitarian values of the US. I don't think it should be surprising that they're still trying to control access to new ideas from the western world. In the end it won't matter, especially in a less restrictive country like India. You can't stomp out the rest of the world even NOW, and we're becoming more connected every day. Just think about how different the world is going to be in only 50 years.
So what? If you're going to up the sampling rate why not go directly to 44khz stereo
Because stereo would be a complete waste of bandwidth and processing power (one microphone, one speaker), and the human voice doesn't get anything near 22khz in frequency. Normal speaking voices have an even lower cutoff frequency. The CD standard is great for music, but complete overkill for sending voice.
If the entertainment value of the lottery is worth it to you, then by all means go for it. I will be willing to bet that if you took a poll at the local lottery stand, you'd find, though, that over half don't have a red cent in any type of retirement account.
I agree with your general sentiment that people don't value saving money enough, and spend too much money on stuff they really don't value as much as they think they will. But I don't think this has much to do with the lottery, and more to do with the value system in our society of wanting things right now rather than thinking if you really need it.
However, if the fantasy value of winning is what you consider entertainment, then I'd suggest that the person either cannot do math, or they are able to delude themselves. I am not a fan of either possibility.
Have you ever been to a movie and "deluded" yourself into caring about the characters? You know it's not real, but it's fun nonetheless. I don't see much difference between that and the lottery. It is possible to keep two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, but still know which one is real. The problem only comes when people can't distinguish between the fantasy and reality.
I'll trust your math is right (though I take issue with getting a steady 6% over such a long period of time), but there's still an implicit assumption that there's something wrong with buying fantasy in your argument. You can make the exact same argument for buying anything. Why buy that cup of coffee on the weekend when you could invest the money? Don't spend an extra 20 cents on the quality tomatoes that taste better and you'll enjoy more because you could invest it and make more money in 40 years.
What's so different about spending $1 a week on a lottery ticket than buying a beer every so often? You don't need either of them to survive. But for the people who enjoy beer or the lottery, it's worth the very small amount of money. Obviously it's a good idea to save money for so many reasons I can't list. But if you're not spending money to enjoy yourself I think you're going to be a pretty miserable person.
If these proteins are so bad, and so easy to genetically engineer out, then from an evolutionary standpoint, why do we have these genes?
The gene is linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. Obesity has only become a problem within the last hundred years or so as we've become more sedentary and gotten access to more food. Heart disease has increased because of a recent increase in saturated and trans-fats in our diet. Also, heart disease tends to kill people after they've raised children, so after you've passed on your genes. The article doesn't specify which type of diabetes this protein is linked to, but type II diabetes is linked with obesity (see obesity), and simply old age (already raised kids). Asthma is mostly caused by pollution, and possibly an overly hygenic environment during childhood (though there's genetic risk factors of course) which are both recent phenomenon.
The point is that it could easily be that this protein hasn't posed a threat to us until very recently when our lifestyle has changed drastically. The gene that produces this protein wouldn't be eliminated if in the past it posed no threat to producing offspring and raising them to maturity.
You assume there's no value in a lottery ticket beyond the actual payoff. Sorry, but you're wrong. What people are buying is the CHANCE at winning the lottery. It's a fantasy of being able to do whatever they like for the very low price of $1 or a pound. Many people judge the value of that fantasy as being worth far more than the cost of a lottery ticket. It's not about being "bad at math" as you say, but about mentally ignoring the overwhelming odds that you're not going to win, if only for a little while. That doesn't mean you don't know you're extremely unlikely to win, you just don't think about that so you can enjoy the fantasy. I don't play the lottery because I can't easily ignore the fact that I'm not going to win. Other people can do that, and as the poster pointed out it's a trivial amount of money to buy a lottery ticket. You're not really hurting yourself as what else of more value can you really spend $1 on?
With one measurement, you're totally correct. But using statistical techniques from multiple measurements you can cancel out all the random errors that occur. You can do the same thing using a GPS receiver and get centimeter accuracy from the at best 3 meter accuracy of GPS.
Scientists are famous for writing bad, but mostly functional code. The two disciplines don't have much in common, so the usually the coding end of it suffers. It's difficult for a computer scientist to write the code without understanding what's going on, and I suspect most scientists would rather pay their own grad students than some outsider who might do a better job. Coupled with the fact that FORTRAN is still used (and all the problems that come with it), and it's easy to see why the software is so far behind everything else. Hardware isn't much different. From what I've seen and heard it's often jury rigged with bubble gum and bailing wire.
Rumor has it that during the first A-bomb test, the scientists were taking bets on whether they'd ignite the atmosphere. I wonder what the odds of creating a black hole might be?
As I understand it, the "possibility" of the LHC being dangerous stems from our uncertainty about particle physics, not really from any hard knowledge. Thus there is no was to calculate the odds. The most re-assuring evidence is of course that collisions of even higher energies take place in the atmosphere all the time from cosmic rays. They're just rare enough that you'd be unlikely to ever observe one in a detector.
Well, one problem here... when you make something pass through the entire structure, in space there's a little problem with that: explosive decompression. Now that you've introduced a hole or two in your structure, all that pressurized stuff in the structure wants to get out of the structure, and spread far, far apart.
It all depends on how big the hole is, and how the material you're working with behaves. Pop a rubber balloon with a tiny hole and it explodes. Pop a rubber inflatable raft however, and the air just leaks out slowly.
I'm sure you could make a material that has less of a tendency to tear, and is also lightweight and inflatable.
Maybe passing through an occupant on the way through. That doesn't sound very safe to me.
Welcome to space. It's not safe. Neither is mountain climbing or skydiving, yet people do these activities all the time. Also you should probbably be comparing the risk of being hit by space junk with the risk of dying on re-entry or liftoff. I'd be willing to bet that the risks posed by space junk are a LOT smaller than liftoff/re-entry.
Also try to remeber that although there's a lot of junk, it's spread out over a VERY large area. The size of human being is relatively small, so it's not terribly likely that someone would be hit by space junk.