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ecoli

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Everything posted by ecoli

  1. Is this a larger trend of Obama favoring academic experts over practical experience? Or am I making that up.
  2. Does courtroom experience matter for judgeship? If not, I gotta support a fellow New York Jew
  3. procrastinating at work. I'm gonna quit soon, just gotta get my shit together and figure out how to tell my boss
  4. I would imagine it wouldn't taste good after a while once the tannins start dissolving into your saliva.
  5. Having one stick it even easier. It's religious alright, but it's also about saving money, in some respects. Those smaller white markers must be hellava lot cheaper than the pretty, large rock ones. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedBy the way... it seems as if Arlington National cemetery doesn't crosses for head stones. Apparently, I didn't notice this when I was there, but: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/cheney.htm
  6. There are genetic alleles/ phenotypes with a lower frequency in the population than that!
  7. We lost our bees after 7 years to mites. Here's to starting over this year though!
  8. I've been getting a lot more spam than usual and the spam filter hasn't been catching it. It would be a big deal (since I haven't been able to update, really at all) but every time I get a new comment I get a notification sent to my email address. Its kind of a pain dealing with 10+ new junk mails every day to my inbox. Is there a way to either raise the filter strength or stop sending notifications to my email? I looked through the wordpress toolbox/ settings and I can't seem to find out how to do it. thanks
  9. I think Apple is justified to treat their products as proprietary. I don't they should be surprised/ have a legal basis to punish anyone when the iPad inevitably gets cracked though. They also shouldn't expect me to buy into it! are there any analogous scenarios to what Apple is doing that nobody seems to care about as much?
  10. Moontanman - I agree and that's why I asked what your estimated prior probability that the photographed (or any) UFO contains Alien life on board.. Is it 90% is it 60%??? You may be interested in the following blog posts: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/are-ufos-aliens.html http://lesswrong.com/lw/27e/but_somebody_would_have_noticed/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/
  11. cool idea, but it would depend on motivation and reference frame. I would expect rich people who are also skilled at making money would turn that 1 million into much more. They have advantage over most regular/poor people that they already have an established infrastructure for making the kind of investments that will give a high return on $1mill. On the other hand, to a billionaire, an extra $1mill isn't going to mean very much.. perhaps they would donate it to charity directly or buy another classic car. They might not see potential gains from investing an extra million as counting for very much. A poor person might be entrepreneurial enough to turn a million into much more (perhaps not in the year time limit we're restricted to), and that money would be more valuable than to an already rich person. However, even given an extra million, it takes a lot of elbow grease, good ideas and smart investing to turn a million into much more (consider, for example, the high rates of start-up failure). Then there's the not so simple fact about Prospect Theory. People think of changes in prospect framed to a certain status quo reference point, they are more risk averse when it comes to potential losses than they are to potential gains (people will take more risks to avoid losses than to pursue gains, surely a losing strategy) and they overweight the probability of unlikely events and underweight the probability of common events. You can use the theory to understand why many poor people will make lots of small bets of an improbable outcome (the lottery) rather than (more rationally) spending an equal amount on a more reliable investment. Someone who makes $400 a week will spend $5 a week on a lottery ticket (not a huge chunk of their budget) rather than putting an extra $250 in their savings account every year. Suddenly you give that person $1 mill and their reference frame shifts radically when they're used to small steady gains. They're probably more likely to lose this money is some big, "sure thing" scam. And why not take a large risk like that... it's not their money! (compared to the old reference frame, anyway)
  12. yeah and the meme had to have come from somewhere. People had the ability to fake pictures before the days of photoshop. What is your prior that these photos are legitimate evidence of alien tech/life?
  13. I actually really like this type of thought experiment. Difficult to do for social sciences, but I think we're doing pretty well. What would happen if all the rich people died at the same time? Well, ignoring political and social chaos, first we have to define what happens to the rich people's money. Is it redistributed to the people? left in banks or stocks? given to the government? Before proceeding, we should probably define the scenario better.
  14. Thanks... some posts I really do take pride in.
  15. It's not possible, because no study will be good enough for people who've already made up their mind (they already 'know' from their personal anecdotes and emotional appeals). As Offit says in the frontline vid, every time a new study comes out that disproves their claims, they either ignore it or move the goal post slightly (red herring of sorts). At the end of the video, you can hear Jenny McCarthy attacking epidemiological studies, after they failed to find any relationship between MMR vaccine, thimersol and autism rates. The goal has shifted to other, or amount of vaccines (something that was probably already controlled for) The only way that these studies are invalid is if kids that are genetically predisposed to developing autism triggered by vaccines are more prevalent in the vaccinated group, causing autism rates to rise to 'normal' levels after vaccinations. However, there's no good reason to think that people's genetic dispositions aren't lying randomly around a normal distribution in both groups. I wonder what they'll say when molecular studies start to disprove them? The whole thing is a terrible waste of resources.
  16. That's what I'm saying, Bascule. The CIA also 'knew' about the possibility of terrorist attacks against the world trade center and pentagon. You can point fingers all day about who knew what and who didn't do enough, but how many of these types of reports to officials file every week? How many of these potential disasters fail to hit, even though problems don't get fixed? You can either spend a shit ton of money tightening every screw, or recognize that some problems we'll just going to have to deal with after the fact. Pointing fingers ex post is fun, but it doesn't solve problems. Beating the same old dead partisan horse isn't going to get you very far either.
  17. It's much easier to blame a policy in retrospect for a random accident than to predict the outcomes of said policy. In other words... this isn't Obama's fault. Katrina was a disaster not because of the hurricane (we knew that was coming) but how the fallout and the Levy breaks was handled. If this oil spilled could be handled better than it currently is, please explain.
  18. Please clarify... you mean cutting in half, or decreasing the volume (And increasing density) and working in a smaller space. You're starting to move into 'not even wrong' territory
  19. This poll is not specific enough, IMO. I have zero debt but not much savings. I've only been in the workforce for less than a year. I'm also using this year to live it up a bit. I figure I have time to save money in grad school, when I'll be too busy to spend my stipend anyway.
  20. I have no idea, considering I'm not in finance and I haven't read the legislation. But I'm sure the experts at GS and elsewhere will be able to find one.
  21. the catch is that these things usually have undesirable side effects. You must factor that in with utility calculation
  22. I have a couple of fat hindu friends, despite eating a lot of spicy food. I do think there is merit to the claim about peppers being valuable to weight loss. I don't think the capsaicin has anything to do with it though... you get the same effects from mild peppers.
  23. Should it or will it The answer is probably not, either way.
  24. Definitely not... These are deceased soldiers who worked for the military. They should be buried of federal land, considering their sacrifice for the country, and allowed to be buried according to their own religious custom. Allowing/forbidding religious symbols on public land isn't an endorsement/rejection of said religion. It's simply recognizing that religion plays an important role in the lives of the vast majority of Americans. Even athiests normally have a cultural connection to a religion. I'm sure not all of those soldiers buried under a cross or star of david would call themselves theists. The point is, banning all religious symbols is usually more about cultural/ protectionism disguised as progressiveness than it is about legal principle. Just look at the religious symbol bans targeted at religious Muslims (and others) in many European countries. This is breeding anger and hostility, not respect, modernity and tolerance.
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