I wonder if the FBI read Slashdot? I bear a moderate similarity (in profile) to the man in the white cap. Same hair, same nose, etc. However, I have a water-tight alibi - I was 16,000km away and in bed at the time.
If you are buying these so regularly off the newsstand wouldn't a subscription be more economical? Usually a subscription is less than half of the cover price.
I also like the library for "The Economist" which is quite pricy, but has a high density of informative and in depth articles and if I ever had a subscription there is no way I would keep up with their weekly publication.
We get the Skeptical Inquirer - http://www.csicop.org/si/ - "the official journal of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Six times per year Skeptical Inquirer publishes critical scientific evaluations of all manner of controversial and extraordinary claims, including but not limited to paranormal and fringe-science matters, and informed discussion of all relevant issues..."
Also, Cook's Illustrated - http://www.cooksillustrated.com/ - which has some nice "evidence based" cookery with a bit of "Consumer Reports" thrown in. We ignore the note from the publisher each issue which is just crazy talk....
And Consumer Reports - http://www.consumerreports.org/ - their technology reviews are not always as well informed as I would like them to be, but they try to maintain a level of unbiasedness that is quite admirable.
Yeah, it is great that we can always count on our elected politicians to do what is demonstrably best for society rather than play to the emotional responses of the population in an attempt to retain power. It's nice to have real leaders who try to do what is right or refrain from doing anything if there is no clear option to improve the situation.:-)
That sounds a bit like an emotional argument again. Will we as a society be better off if we fund education via method "a" or method "b"? Regardless which one funds "leeches" and which one funds the "overwhelmed". I suspect that there is some value to not-incentivizing leech-like behaviour, but it is also probably true that there is a point of diminishing returns where the costs in implementing systems to avoid any leeching can become dramatically greater than the costs of the leeching in the first place.
The difference is that there will be a limited total amount of bitcoins compared to the unlimited amount of dollars (or euros) that the government can print whenever it wants. So your bitcoins would not lose their worth as fast as your dollars or euros.
If widely adopted, this might be good to provide an incentive to save, but might be bad in providing an incentive to hoard. Most economies suffer when the currency doesn't move around - one perverse positive effect of inflation is that it provides an incentive to spend or invest your capitol so that your money under the mattress will not lose its spending power due to inflation.
A "watt" is a unit of power, or a rate of energy use. One watt is one joule per second (it is also one volt times one amp - units can have many ways of expressing themselves - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt ). Thus as you say:
41MW is a rate of [energy] flow, not a measurement of volume. This is a 2 dimensional vector.
This is not a "2 dimensional vector", it is a pure magnitude, though I suppose you could call it a one-dimensional vector as it could be negative or positive giving at least a sense of "direction", though of course the zero-value is fairly arbitrary.
[MW] are made up of volts, amps, without time. It is an instantaneous measurement of flow at a specific instant in time, not over a span of time.
Well, amps are a rate of charge, so that has time built in right there. Watts can be instantaneous or averages over a span of time, just like speeds.
41MWh is a volume of energy usage.
I wouldn't call it a "volume" as that has a lot of geometrical intellectual baggage associated with it, but this is correct that a rate (watts) multiplied by a time (hours) gives an amount (in this case an amount of energy as you say).
41MW per hour is the same as above. These are 3 dimensional vectors. They are made up of volts, amps, and time.
No, 41MW per hour is not the same as 41MWh. A rate (watt) divided by a time (per hour) gives a rate of change of the rate - analogous to an acceleration. Since energy is not a vector, the rate of change of energy (power) is also not a vector, and neither is the rate of change of power. This "watts per hour" is virtually always an error, and not actually of any use to anyone.
41MW hours per hour would be a rate of accelerating power consumption, this is like 9.8 meters per second per second for gravity.
Not really, as you mentioned above, MWh (often written as MW hours) would be a unit of energy, so "MW hours per hour" is an energy per time measurement, or a power. In fact the "hour" parts simple cancel meaning that "41MW hours per hour" would be exactly 41MW.
Its nice of you to rant about how someone else is wrong, but next time, calm down and actually get it right yourself........ But it left me a pedantic place to respond;)
Conductors can be very picky about their batons, and very small weight differences can be very significant. As much as it seems like conducting is a pretty easy task, in fact it can be quite physically demanding and baton design can be very important.
âoeThe normal consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits.â The committee claims that there is no such thing as âoenormalâ, and there are no existing âoenormalâ people (i.e., people existing in the average). For example, no one has 2.3 children.
That's pretty funny: "The Board of the College of Patapsychology, Wilson writes, offered one million Irish pounds to anyone who can produce “a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary.”"
Any challenge that uses Playmates of the Month as examples has a lot going for it.
I don't. The point is that a professional magician is specifically trained in deception and trickery. When a magician offers you a chance to win some of their money, it is safe to assume that the game is hopelessly rigged in their favour. That is what magicians do.
I don't disagree, but in this case the question is whether it is Randi rigging things in his favour or the universe (or dare I say "God":-) rigging things? Does Randi run around messing up all the tests of the true dowsers who try to win the challenge (even those tests conducted by other people on the other side of the world?) or is it the universe that messes things up by the simple physical mechanism of dowsing not actually working to find things?
Personally I figure the reason nobody has manage to claim the money is that nobody being tested actually has the ability that they claim to have had rather than Randi managing to rig the tests so that actual effects are being hidden.
Randi is a Fundamentalist Materialist. Just about as annoying as the other Fundamentalists, in his own way, though he certainly has a charming side as well. But you are right, objectivity? He has none, he has faith in materialism just as unquestioning as the faith others hold in supernaturalism.
He's been putting out this 'reward' offer for something demonstrably 'paranormal' many years. A counter-offer was also made, many years ago, for something demonstrably 'normal.' Neither reward has been claimed and likely neither ever will be.
Do you have a link to this "normal" award terms? I have a whole bunch of things that I am confident I can demonstrate under all sorts of controlled conditions. For a $10,000 or larger prize I would even be willing to travel to try to collect it.
I can't conceive of a way of creating a test of "normal" that would be thought of as such by the "general public", that would not be trivially easy to have happen. Almost by definition, "normal" is the expected behaviour, and while there are a lot of things in the universe that might be "unexpected", there are even more that actually do come out the way they are expected to come out, most of the time.
I suppose perhaps that you could demand that the claimant demonstrate some "normal" effect (like the pattern of night following day) for all time, or the acceleration of gravity being about 10m/s^2 for all objects and not being satisfied unless EVERY object is tested or EVERY day unto eternity is experienced. If that is the case it isn't really a "counter-offer" as the JREF challenge is to demonstrate an effect in just one finite series of tests.
In my opinion, one of the great things that the JREF challenge does is to force the claimant to clearly state what it is that they think they can do, and how that can be distinguished from not being able to do that. It forces some clarity into the claim.
Utter horseshit. The protocol is agreed upon by both parties. i.e. you propose a test, I make a counter proposal and we negotiate on points until it is agreed upon what you claim, how it should be demonstrated and in what conditions to our mutual satisfaction. It's actually in JREF's interests to accommodate any reasonable demand so that the applicant is entirely satisfied with the test protocol and can't trot out some bullshit excuse afterwards to explain their failure.
I'm pretty sure JREF is well used to applicants pretending that skeptical mindbeams or the position of furniture or the sun through the window somehow interfered their amazing powerz which worked in other, less controlled circumstances.
Most of the test that I have been aware of start out with performing the demonstration unblinded so the claimant can be assured that none of test conditions are interfering with their "powerz". So the dowser can walk through the course and with their magic rods and watch them work 100% for each bucket of water or bucket of non-water (or whatever) they claim to be able to detect. Then the test starts by mixing up the buckets and covering them each with a cloth (or whatever double-blinding system that the claimant agreed to), and their ability invariably falls to that dictated by statistics.
Actually I was just picking on the original poster for a typo.
I knew you were razzing him about his error - but I guess you were to subtle for me (or perhaps more accurately I was too stupid for you). I thought you were just razzing him for forgetting the (-) in the exponent, whereas you were going for the difference between -31 and +1031 (and the +30 for the sun of course.)
I was feeling pretty good for a while when the AC said I was so smart, but I guess praise from an AC isn't worth much....
If you're bored and use that energy to play guitar and cook, it will make you happy. But if you watch TV, it may make you happy in the short term, but not in the long term.
One difference is that I can actually create something using a laptop or mobile device while away from home. For example, I have a 10" laptop on which I code Python programs as a hobby while riding a bus to and from work. I can't very well play the guitar or cook in such a situation.
You're just not being creative enough! A hibachi would easily fit on the bus....
"...The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.
Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?..."
I think the correlation/causation problem is valid, however the article did mention some other studies, one of which seemed to indicate that the mere exposure to science terms just before taking the survey caused people to view the date-rape in a more negative manner. This would seem to be pretty strong evidence for a causal connection.
9x10^31 is not 1000 orders of magnitude greater than 2x10^30, it is only about 45 times bigger (assuming I haven't made another bone headed arithmetic error like everyone else in this thread trying to show off how much smarter each of us is than the last person.....)
I suppose the same nagging question would be left if they were not "of the faith", yes?
Even moreso, in fact.... since in such cases, one would not even be able to attribute it to how a person's faith may have caused their own mind to somehow induce healing in ways that are currently not understood by science.
I think you are probably going to far in the "not understood by science" type of mindset. In virtually every disease, the body does attempt repair and/or combat the infection, etc. There are mechanisms that attempt to work against cancers, bacteria, viruses, and trauma. It is no great surprise that even with very serious illnesses occasionally these mechanisms are effective. Few of these mechanisms have anything to do with the mind somehow inducing healing (in fact I recall a recent study showing that "positive attitude" has no effect on medical outcomes, though of course I'm not going to site it or anything like that).
In any case - how could you ever set criteria for "miraculous" recovery? If you find people who survive 100% fatal illnesses there are a number of viable explanations: a) there was a miracle recovery, b) the illness was misdiagnosed and was not the fatal one you thought, c) the illness is in fact not 100% fatal. I guess that case (a) implies (c) since once you have someone not dieing from the illness, by definition it is not 100% fatal, regardless of the reason for survival.
No medical diagnosis can be made with 100% confidence
True... but when you see things like tumors or cysts when you're doing an examination, which is later confirmed by ultrasound, and they don't seem to be of a type that would naturally just go away, and their presence is supposedly confirmed by a second technician's examination, and when a followup is done several months later, so that the surgeon will know the full extent of material that needs to be removed in case there was any change, there's suddenly no trace of them sort of makes you go... "huh"?
I'm certain that there's a perfectly natural explanation for stuff like this, but when it happens to somebody you personally know and you watch them go through this whole ordeal, in the end, while you're certainly happy for them in how things turned out, there's still that nagging question left in your mind of "how the fucking hell did that happen?"
I suppose the same nagging question would be left if they were not "of the faith", yes?
Obviously, these were not the type that "would naturally just go away", almost by definition.
My initial reaction to that is 1) Both of those fees are ridiculous, and 2) a competitor could cut those fees in half and put Kickstarter out of business. How complicated is it to run a website like this anyway?
But I'm not a business person, so perhaps someone can explain to me why I'm wrong.
Startup costs for this type of thing are probably pretty high, and Kickstarter also doesn't get any money (that they get to keep anyway) until a project is funded. I don't know how much money it costs to processes a bunch of credit card transactions and then refund them, but it is probably non-zero (or do they just put a hold on the money until the project meets its goal and then process it then?) Thus KS has costs associated with non-funded projects that have to be covered by the fees charge to the funded projects. KS might be in the position now that they are fairly well known to start doing the CC processing themselves, but using Amazon probably saves a whole bunch of hassle and builds on the accounts most people already have with amazon.
So, if you want to be a competitor you need to have enough resources to get started and then convince the potential project people to use you rather than KS due to your better rates. As a project person, you need to decide if using the "new guy" will give you better payoff compared to KS, which would be a function of not only their fee structures, but also their popularity with your potential backers. Right now KS certainly would win based on their visibility/popularity and I don't think cutting their fees in half would make up for the lower visibility of the competitors for most projects.
With that said, there seem to be a healthy number of other options:
Unless the target is reached, the project never sees any money. If anything, this is an incentive to put the target low. I don't know what incentives/disincentives other than a loss of reputation there are to not take the money and run once the project has been funded however. It seems like most highly successful projects have fairly substantial reputations going into the process.
All laptop users are required to run on battery power throughout the day until 20% and then they plug in.
Is that really the most efficient use of the laptop battery?
Probably not as it can "wear out" the expensive battery sooner.
However it might make some sense in terms of shifting electricity use away from the peak hours of solar generation and high electricity prices. In a grid-tied system with time-of-use pricing, you want to minimize the use of electricity during the highest priced times (working hours typically), so shifting them to later in the day might be economically and environmentally a positive move.
None of this is an argument for increasing your power use by running extra processes on your systems.
I've heard that people put one above and below the tongue to look like they have a tongue piercing. The swallowing could just be accidental. Not sure if it works for the tongue, but I've seen it work with ear lobes.
A classmate of my son was doing exactly this when she managed to swallow a pair of them - this was as a fourth grader as I recall. She ended up shipping out to the big-city "children's hospital" for a few days so that they could recover them, costing society big bucks in transport, housing, and medical expenses. A complete ban might be overkill, but limiting their access seems reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the FBI read Slashdot? I bear a moderate similarity (in profile) to the man in the white cap. Same hair, same nose, etc. However, I have a water-tight alibi - I was 16,000km away and in bed at the time.
So you SAY. Can anybody verify that?
If you are buying these so regularly off the newsstand wouldn't a subscription be more economical? Usually a subscription is less than half of the cover price.
I also like the library for "The Economist" which is quite pricy, but has a high density of informative and in depth articles and if I ever had a subscription there is no way I would keep up with their weekly publication.
http://www.economist.com/
We get the Skeptical Inquirer - http://www.csicop.org/si/ - "the official journal of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Six times per year Skeptical Inquirer publishes critical scientific evaluations of all manner of controversial and extraordinary claims, including but not limited to paranormal and fringe-science matters, and informed discussion of all relevant issues..."
Also, Cook's Illustrated - http://www.cooksillustrated.com/ - which has some nice "evidence based" cookery with a bit of "Consumer Reports" thrown in. We ignore the note from the publisher each issue which is just crazy talk....
And Consumer Reports - http://www.consumerreports.org/ - their technology reviews are not always as well informed as I would like them to be, but they try to maintain a level of unbiasedness that is quite admirable.
Yeah, it is great that we can always count on our elected politicians to do what is demonstrably best for society rather than play to the emotional responses of the population in an attempt to retain power. It's nice to have real leaders who try to do what is right or refrain from doing anything if there is no clear option to improve the situation. :-)
That sounds a bit like an emotional argument again. Will we as a society be better off if we fund education via method "a" or method "b"? Regardless which one funds "leeches" and which one funds the "overwhelmed". I suspect that there is some value to not-incentivizing leech-like behaviour, but it is also probably true that there is a point of diminishing returns where the costs in implementing systems to avoid any leeching can become dramatically greater than the costs of the leeching in the first place.
The difference is that there will be a limited total amount of bitcoins compared to the unlimited amount of dollars (or euros) that the government can print whenever it wants. So your bitcoins would not lose their worth as fast as your dollars or euros.
If widely adopted, this might be good to provide an incentive to save, but might be bad in providing an incentive to hoard. Most economies suffer when the currency doesn't move around - one perverse positive effect of inflation is that it provides an incentive to spend or invest your capitol so that your money under the mattress will not lose its spending power due to inflation.
A "watt" is a unit of power, or a rate of energy use. One watt is one joule per second (it is also one volt times one amp - units can have many ways of expressing themselves - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt ). Thus as you say:
41MW is a rate of [energy] flow, not a measurement of volume. This is a 2 dimensional vector.
This is not a "2 dimensional vector", it is a pure magnitude, though I suppose you could call it a one-dimensional vector as it could be negative or positive giving at least a sense of "direction", though of course the zero-value is fairly arbitrary.
[MW] are made up of volts, amps, without time. It is an instantaneous measurement of flow at a specific instant in time, not over a span of time.
Well, amps are a rate of charge, so that has time built in right there. Watts can be instantaneous or averages over a span of time, just like speeds.
41MWh is a volume of energy usage.
I wouldn't call it a "volume" as that has a lot of geometrical intellectual baggage associated with it, but this is correct that a rate (watts) multiplied by a time (hours) gives an amount (in this case an amount of energy as you say).
41MW per hour is the same as above. These are 3 dimensional vectors. They are made up of volts, amps, and time.
No, 41MW per hour is not the same as 41MWh. A rate (watt) divided by a time (per hour) gives a rate of change of the rate - analogous to an acceleration. Since energy is not a vector, the rate of change of energy (power) is also not a vector, and neither is the rate of change of power. This "watts per hour" is virtually always an error, and not actually of any use to anyone.
41MW hours per hour would be a rate of accelerating power consumption, this is like 9.8 meters per second per second for gravity.
Not really, as you mentioned above, MWh (often written as MW hours) would be a unit of energy, so "MW hours per hour" is an energy per time measurement, or a power. In fact the "hour" parts simple cancel meaning that "41MW hours per hour" would be exactly 41MW.
Its nice of you to rant about how someone else is wrong, but next time, calm down and actually get it right yourself. ....... But it left me a pedantic place to respond ;)
That I can agree with....
There are already lighted batons being sold and used. Evening outdoor performances are a common venue.
http://www.etsy.com/listing/49330319/needlelite-lighted-conductor-baton
Conductors can be very picky about their batons, and very small weight differences can be very significant. As much as it seems like conducting is a pretty easy task, in fact it can be quite physically demanding and baton design can be very important.
This is what I was thinking of: http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/tag/pataphysics/
âoeThe normal consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits.â The committee claims that there is no such thing as âoenormalâ, and there are no existing âoenormalâ people (i.e., people existing in the average). For example, no one has 2.3 children.
That's pretty funny: "The Board of the College of Patapsychology, Wilson writes, offered one million Irish pounds to anyone who can produce “a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary.”"
Any challenge that uses Playmates of the Month as examples has a lot going for it.
I don't. The point is that a professional magician is specifically trained in deception and trickery. When a magician offers you a chance to win some of their money, it is safe to assume that the game is hopelessly rigged in their favour. That is what magicians do.
I don't disagree, but in this case the question is whether it is Randi rigging things in his favour or the universe (or dare I say "God" :-) rigging things? Does Randi run around messing up all the tests of the true dowsers who try to win the challenge (even those tests conducted by other people on the other side of the world?) or is it the universe that messes things up by the simple physical mechanism of dowsing not actually working to find things?
Personally I figure the reason nobody has manage to claim the money is that nobody being tested actually has the ability that they claim to have had rather than Randi managing to rig the tests so that actual effects are being hidden.
Randi is a Fundamentalist Materialist. Just about as annoying as the other Fundamentalists, in his own way, though he certainly has a charming side as well. But you are right, objectivity? He has none, he has faith in materialism just as unquestioning as the faith others hold in supernaturalism.
He's been putting out this 'reward' offer for something demonstrably 'paranormal' many years. A counter-offer was also made, many years ago, for something demonstrably 'normal.' Neither reward has been claimed and likely neither ever will be.
Do you have a link to this "normal" award terms? I have a whole bunch of things that I am confident I can demonstrate under all sorts of controlled conditions. For a $10,000 or larger prize I would even be willing to travel to try to collect it.
I can't conceive of a way of creating a test of "normal" that would be thought of as such by the "general public", that would not be trivially easy to have happen. Almost by definition, "normal" is the expected behaviour, and while there are a lot of things in the universe that might be "unexpected", there are even more that actually do come out the way they are expected to come out, most of the time.
I suppose perhaps that you could demand that the claimant demonstrate some "normal" effect (like the pattern of night following day) for all time, or the acceleration of gravity being about 10m/s^2 for all objects and not being satisfied unless EVERY object is tested or EVERY day unto eternity is experienced. If that is the case it isn't really a "counter-offer" as the JREF challenge is to demonstrate an effect in just one finite series of tests.
In my opinion, one of the great things that the JREF challenge does is to force the claimant to clearly state what it is that they think they can do, and how that can be distinguished from not being able to do that. It forces some clarity into the claim.
Utter horseshit. The protocol is agreed upon by both parties. i.e. you propose a test, I make a counter proposal and we negotiate on points until it is agreed upon what you claim, how it should be demonstrated and in what conditions to our mutual satisfaction. It's actually in JREF's interests to accommodate any reasonable demand so that the applicant is entirely satisfied with the test protocol and can't trot out some bullshit excuse afterwards to explain their failure.
I'm pretty sure JREF is well used to applicants pretending that skeptical mindbeams or the position of furniture or the sun through the window somehow interfered their amazing powerz which worked in other, less controlled circumstances.
Most of the test that I have been aware of start out with performing the demonstration unblinded so the claimant can be assured that none of test conditions are interfering with their "powerz". So the dowser can walk through the course and with their magic rods and watch them work 100% for each bucket of water or bucket of non-water (or whatever) they claim to be able to detect. Then the test starts by mixing up the buckets and covering them each with a cloth (or whatever double-blinding system that the claimant agreed to), and their ability invariably falls to that dictated by statistics.
Actually I was just picking on the original poster for a typo.
I knew you were razzing him about his error - but I guess you were to subtle for me (or perhaps more accurately I was too stupid for you). I thought you were just razzing him for forgetting the (-) in the exponent, whereas you were going for the difference between -31 and +1031 (and the +30 for the sun of course.)
I was feeling pretty good for a while when the AC said I was so smart, but I guess praise from an AC isn't worth much....
If you're bored and use that energy to play guitar and cook, it will make you happy. But if you watch TV, it may make you happy in the short term, but not in the long term.
One difference is that I can actually create something using a laptop or mobile device while away from home. For example, I have a 10" laptop on which I code Python programs as a hobby while riding a bus to and from work. I can't very well play the guitar or cook in such a situation.
You're just not being creative enough! A hibachi would easily fit on the bus....
1. Narrow study group.
2. Highly questionable conclusions.
3. Suspected publication bias.
All in all -1 Overrated story.
Psychology is hard. Even if you are interpreting your subjects' behaviour correctly (a very big "if"), the idea that they are representative of "humans" in general is probably wrong.I think this article was mentioned on Slashdot a while back - http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/
"...The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.
Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?..."
I think the correlation/causation problem is valid, however the article did mention some other studies, one of which seemed to indicate that the mere exposure to science terms just before taking the survey caused people to view the date-rape in a more negative manner. This would seem to be pretty strong evidence for a causal connection.
And this one is also widely relevant: http://xkcd.com/882/
.....is almost 5.0 x 10^1000 times heavier!
ten to the thousand? Wow, that's a big number.
9x10^31 is not 1000 orders of magnitude greater than 2x10^30, it is only about 45 times bigger (assuming I haven't made another bone headed arithmetic error like everyone else in this thread trying to show off how much smarter each of us is than the last person.....)
Even moreso, in fact.... since in such cases, one would not even be able to attribute it to how a person's faith may have caused their own mind to somehow induce healing in ways that are currently not understood by science.
I think you are probably going to far in the "not understood by science" type of mindset. In virtually every disease, the body does attempt repair and/or combat the infection, etc. There are mechanisms that attempt to work against cancers, bacteria, viruses, and trauma. It is no great surprise that even with very serious illnesses occasionally these mechanisms are effective. Few of these mechanisms have anything to do with the mind somehow inducing healing (in fact I recall a recent study showing that "positive attitude" has no effect on medical outcomes, though of course I'm not going to site it or anything like that).
In any case - how could you ever set criteria for "miraculous" recovery? If you find people who survive 100% fatal illnesses there are a number of viable explanations: a) there was a miracle recovery, b) the illness was misdiagnosed and was not the fatal one you thought, c) the illness is in fact not 100% fatal. I guess that case (a) implies (c) since once you have someone not dieing from the illness, by definition it is not 100% fatal, regardless of the reason for survival.
True... but when you see things like tumors or cysts when you're doing an examination, which is later confirmed by ultrasound, and they don't seem to be of a type that would naturally just go away, and their presence is supposedly confirmed by a second technician's examination, and when a followup is done several months later, so that the surgeon will know the full extent of material that needs to be removed in case there was any change, there's suddenly no trace of them sort of makes you go... "huh"?
I'm certain that there's a perfectly natural explanation for stuff like this, but when it happens to somebody you personally know and you watch them go through this whole ordeal, in the end, while you're certainly happy for them in how things turned out, there's still that nagging question left in your mind of "how the fucking hell did that happen?"
I suppose the same nagging question would be left if they were not "of the faith", yes?
Obviously, these were not the type that "would naturally just go away", almost by definition.
Project creators need to include in their budget:
1) Kickstarter's 5%
2) Amazon's 5% (credit card processing)
My initial reaction to that is 1) Both of those fees are ridiculous, and 2) a competitor could cut those fees in half and put Kickstarter out of business. How complicated is it to run a website like this anyway?
But I'm not a business person, so perhaps someone can explain to me why I'm wrong.
Startup costs for this type of thing are probably pretty high, and Kickstarter also doesn't get any money (that they get to keep anyway) until a project is funded. I don't know how much money it costs to processes a bunch of credit card transactions and then refund them, but it is probably non-zero (or do they just put a hold on the money until the project meets its goal and then process it then?) Thus KS has costs associated with non-funded projects that have to be covered by the fees charge to the funded projects. KS might be in the position now that they are fairly well known to start doing the CC processing themselves, but using Amazon probably saves a whole bunch of hassle and builds on the accounts most people already have with amazon.
So, if you want to be a competitor you need to have enough resources to get started and then convince the potential project people to use you rather than KS due to your better rates. As a project person, you need to decide if using the "new guy" will give you better payoff compared to KS, which would be a function of not only their fee structures, but also their popularity with your potential backers. Right now KS certainly would win based on their visibility/popularity and I don't think cutting their fees in half would make up for the lower visibility of the competitors for most projects.
With that said, there seem to be a healthy number of other options:
http://mashable.com/2012/12/06/kickstarter-alternatives/
Unless the target is reached, the project never sees any money. If anything, this is an incentive to put the target low. I don't know what incentives/disincentives other than a loss of reputation there are to not take the money and run once the project has been funded however. It seems like most highly successful projects have fairly substantial reputations going into the process.
Is that really the most efficient use of the laptop battery?
Probably not as it can "wear out" the expensive battery sooner.
However it might make some sense in terms of shifting electricity use away from the peak hours of solar generation and high electricity prices. In a grid-tied system with time-of-use pricing, you want to minimize the use of electricity during the highest priced times (working hours typically), so shifting them to later in the day might be economically and environmentally a positive move.
None of this is an argument for increasing your power use by running extra processes on your systems.
I've heard that people put one above and below the tongue to look like they have a tongue piercing. The swallowing could just be accidental. Not sure if it works for the tongue, but I've seen it work with ear lobes.
A classmate of my son was doing exactly this when she managed to swallow a pair of them - this was as a fourth grader as I recall. She ended up shipping out to the big-city "children's hospital" for a few days so that they could recover them, costing society big bucks in transport, housing, and medical expenses. A complete ban might be overkill, but limiting their access seems reasonable.