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5,585 | In the recycling rules for my community, there is an instruction to thoroughly wash all glass, plastic, and metal containers before depositing them into the recycle bin for collection. Is this step really necessary for the recycling process to occur (or occur without delay)? I've heard that recycling facilities already wash all glass, plastic, and metal material using very effective methods anyhow; why then would the items need to be washed twice? | Here are comments from two of the major recyclers in Australia: From VISY : To rinse or not? Ever feel like you are wasting a ton of water
while rinsing out your recyclables? According to VISY, it is not
necessary to rinse out containers, but you do need to make sure all
food scraps are removed. From SITA who recently took over WSN: Rinse the containers to make sure they are clean and won't attract
pests. From Planet Ark (respected environmental group) One of the most
common questions about recycling is how clean do jars, cans and pizza
boxes need to be before they can go in the recycling bin. Small amounts of food left don’t interfere with the glass and steel
recycling process. Scrape all the solid food scraps out of jars and
cans and then put them in the recycling bin. If you’re concerned about
having left over food in the bin you can lightly rinse out your jars
and cans. Using left over washing up or rinsing water is best as
there’s no point wasting good water just to wash recycling. Looking at the different methods of processing: Aluminium Heating the aluminium to a temperature of 700°C changes it into a
liquid state. It is then cast into ingots, ready for delivery to
rolling mills where they are milled and remade into new products. Glass The single-colour cullet is put onto a conveyor belt and goes through
a special process called beneficiation, which removes contamination
such as bottle tops, metals, ceramics and labels. The cullet is then
crushed and sent to a glass furnace where it is added to the mix. Plastics The plastics are either shredded, chopped or ground and then washed to
remove further contaminants. The plastic is melted and pushed through
an extruder, a bit like an old fashioned mincer or a spaghetti maker.
It is then cooled and pressed through a die and chopped or pelletised
into granules. It is then ready to be made into new products. It would appear that neither bugs nor food scraps would put a spanner in the works. I assume there would also be some sort of prewash before it got to that stage. It appears that a thorough rinse would be a hygiene thing for your own garbage bin, but not going to affect the process. However it is necessary to remove solid food object. | {
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5,611 | My dad claims that even as toddlers, my sister and I knew which toys to play with. For example, I would always pick up toy guns, Action Man, and other similar toys. She would always pick up Barbie. He also claims that this happened while we were very young, around 2 years old, before having been exposed to advertising and social biases. Is there any evidence that boys behave like stereotypical boys and girls behave like stereotypical girls absent social conditioning? | This has been studied in 2002 and 2009 at Texas A&M on monkeys and toddlers respectively, and the findings were that boys are genetically programmed to like trucks and girls to like dolls. Findings from another study at Emory University, Atlanta in 2008 on monkeys also concluded the same. The technique in the 2002 study on vervet monkeys was criticized by the Emory team (2008) who chose a different approach on rhesus monkeys. The Texas team measured individual time spent with masculine and feminine toys shown to the subjects separately while the Emory team showed them masculine and feminine toys together and left the monkeys to choose between them I have some original references to the mentioned studies and some media reports so far. 2009 study on humans From: Alexander, G. M., Wilcox, T., & Woods, R.* (2009). Sex differences in infants’ visual interest in toys. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, 427-433. In the research project funded by the National Science Foundation,
psychology professor Gerianne Alexander used technology to track the
eye movements of 30 infants ranging in age from 3 months to 8 months
old. Alexander’s team set a doll and a truck in a puppet
theater-styled box several feet in front of the babies, who were in
car seats. The subjects couldn’t verbalize their preferences for the
toys, but visual tracking monitors measured how long they fixated
their attention on particular toys during two 10-second intervals. The
girls favored the dolls, while the boys preferred the toy trucks. “The existence of these innate preferences for object features coupled
with well-documented social influences may explain why toy preferences
are one of the earliest known manifestations of sex-linked social
behavior,” Alexander explains in a paper titled “Sex Differences in
Infants’ Visual Interest in Toys,” published in the journal "Archives
of Sexual Behavior." 2002 study on vervet monkeys titled Sex differences in response to children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus) from Evolution and Human Behaviour Volume 23, Issue 6, Pages 467-479 (November 2002) Abstract Sex differences in children's toy preferences are thought by many to
arise from gender socialization. However, evidence from patients with
endocrine disorders suggests that biological factors during early
development (e.g., levels of androgens) are influential. In this
study, we found that vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus)
show sex differences in toy preferences similar to those documented
previously in children. The percent of contact time with toys
typically preferred by boys (a car and a ball) was greater in male
vervets (n=33) than in female vervets (n=30) (P<.05), whereas the
percent of contact time with toys typically preferred by girls (a doll
and a pot) was greater in female vervets than in male vervets (P<.01).
In contrast, contact time with toys preferred equally by boys and
girls (a picture book and a stuffed dog) was comparable in male and
female vervets. The results suggest that sexually differentiated
object preferences arose early in human evolution, prior to the
emergence of a distinct hominid lineage. This implies that sexually
dimorphic preferences for features (e.g., color, shape, movement) may
have evolved from differential selection pressures based on the
different behavioral roles of males and females, and that evolved
object feature preferences may contribute to present day sexually
dimorphic toy preferences in children. From the media report In 2002, Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University and Melissa
Hines of City University in London stunned the scientific world by
showing that vervet monkeys showed the same sex-typical toy
preferences as humans. In an incredibly ingenious study, published in
Evolution and Human Behavior, Alexander and Hines gave two
stereotypically masculine toys (a ball and a police car), two
stereotypically feminine toys (a soft doll and a cooking pot), and two
neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) to 44 male and 44
female vervet monkeys. They then assessed the monkeys’ preference for
each toy by measuring how much time they spent with each. Their data
demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater
interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet monkeys showed
significantly greater interest in the feminine toys. The two sexes did
not differ in their preference for the neutral toys. The original 2002 studies were tried on rhesus monkeys in 2008 by a different team which also concluded that when given a choice between stereotypically male “wheeled toys” and stereotypically female “plush toys”, male rhesus monkeys show strong and significant preference for the masculine toys. Horm Behav. 2008 August; 54(3): 359–364. Janice M. Hassett, Erin R. Siebert, and Kim Wallen, of Emory University http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ Socialization processes, parents, or peers encouraging play with
gender specific toys are thought to be the primary force shaping sex
differences in toy preference. A contrast in view is that toy
preferences reflect biologically determined preferences for specific
activities facilitated by specific toys
We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135
monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys,
like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys,
while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in
preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush
toys differed significantly between males and females We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally
influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by
social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans. Criticism of the 2002 study by the Emory team (2008) and alternate approach as below The one previous study of nonhuman primates’ interactions with human
toys did not make subjects choose between masculine and feminine toys
simultaneously available and thus could not directly measure
preference. Instead they compared the relative proportion of
interaction times with singly presented toys as a proxy for preference
(Alexander and Hines, 2002). Comparisons between sexes found that the
proportion of males’ toy interactions directed to masculine toys was
greater than the proportion of females’ interactions directed to
masculine toys.A similar, but opposite, difference was found for the
proportion of interactions directed towards feminine toys, suggesting
clear between-sex differences in preference for masculine and feminine
toys similar to that seen in humans. We investigated toy preferences in rhesus monkeys living in a 135
member long-term stable outdoor group by presenting the group with
multiple trials of simultaneous access to different two toy
combinations of multiple toys: one putatively masculine and one
putatively feminine. We present here striking evidence of a sex
difference in rhesus monkey preference for human gender-stereotyped
toys paralleling that reported in humans, suggesting that gender
differences in toy choice may reflect evolved sex differences in
activity preferences not primarily resulting from socialization
processes. | {
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5,661 | This is an age old debate that i have with a coterie of friends; without backing up with much scientific fact. It's all recently been based on arguments of experience. Is it possible that utilizing the air conditioning in the car has a greater impact on fuel consumption/efficiency over having the window rolled down in a car? | Mythbusters visited this topic in both episode 22 and episode 38 : Episide 22 PARTLY CONFIRMED * Tests were performed under varying conditions (55 mph versus 45 mph). The 55 mph test used a computer to estimate fuel efficiency based on air intake, not actual fuel consumption, and showed A/C was more efficient. The 45 mph test consisted of running the tank until it was empty, and showed open windows were more efficient. Because the original tests were inconclusive, this "urban puzzle" was revisited in episode 38: It is more fuel efficient to use air conditioning when the car is traveling approximately 50mph or more. Otherwise, windows are more fuel efficient. Episode 38 PARTLY CONFIRMED The fundamental flaw in the MythBusters’ test was that the point where the drag becomes powerful enough to inhibit a car’s performance with windows down was inside their 45 – 55mph margin at 50mph. Going less than 50mph it is more efficient to leave your windows down, but going greater than 50mph it is more efficient to use your A/C. In comments Lagerbaer suggested that this Makes sense from a physical point of view: A/C fuel consumption impact should be independent of actual velocity, whereas the drag effect of an open window will grow with the velocity (friction forces in general scale at least linearly with velocity) While Michael Edenfield suggested the excellent point that Since the physics concepts involved are the same for all cars, I suspect that more rigorous experiments would produce a different "cut-off point" than 50mph, but the answer to the OP's question is still "AC is better over x mph, worse under x mph". – Also nic noted that 50 mph is approximately 80 km/h for those who use sensible units for speed. † † I'm from the U.K. where we use m & mph for road signs and odometers, but metric for pretty much everything else. *8') | {
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5,701 | I read this webcomic today: From: abominable.cc I have no idea where the author got his factoid about the billion heartbeats. But it sounds interesting. The examples I can think of (rabbits, humans, elephants, said hummingbird) seem to support the theory that bigger creatures both have a slower heartbeat and live longer. Is there really such a trend, or am I missing the counterexamples? And if yes, how close does it come to the "one billion" number? | YES, there is some truth behind the " 1 billion heartbeats " claim. And when I say "some" I mean the creator of the comic didn't just make it up out of thin air. While it's not literally true that all animals get 1 billion heartbeats before they die, a relation between metabolic rate (which is related to heart rate) and life span has been observed. San José State University - Animal Longevity and Scale : Heart rate and life expectancy in mammals and humans: Life expectancy and total heart beats per lifetime in mammals
and humans: As a corollary, the basal energy consumption per heart beat and heart mass may be the same for all animals . This suggests that the life span is predetermined by the basic energetics of the living cells, and that the apparent inverse relation between life span and heart rate reveals the heart rate to serve as a marker of the metabolic rate. This may be exemplified by considering the vast range of physiological cardiac parameters between one of the smallest, the shrew weighing 2 g, and the largest extant mammalian, the blue whale of 100 000 kg. Despite a difference of many millions in body weight, heart weight, stroke volume, and total blood pumped per lifetime, the total oxygen consumption and ATP usage per unit mass and lifetime are almost identical together with the total number of the heart beats per lifetime. [ Source ] Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale As animals get bigger , from tiny shrew to huge blue whale, pulse rates
slow down and life spans stretch out longer, conspiring so that the
number of heartbeats during an average stay on Earth tends to be roughly the same, around a billion. Mysteriously, these and a large variety of other phenomena change with body size according to a precise mathematical principle called " quarter-power scaling " . [...] It might seem that because a cat is a hundred times more massive than a mouse, its metabolic rate, the intensity with which it burns energy, would be a hundred times greater. After all, the cat has a hundred times more cells to feed. But if this were so, the animal would quickly be consumed by a fit of spontaneous feline combustion, or at least a very bad fever. The reason: the surface area a creature uses to dissipate the heat of the metabolic fires does not grow as fast as its body mass . To see this, consider a mouse as an approximation of a small sphere. As the sphere grows larger, to cat size, the surface area increases along two dimensions but the volume increases along three dimensions. The size of the biological radiator cannot possibly keep up with the size of the metabolic engine. Things behave differently at different scales, but there are orderly ways -- scaling laws -- that connect one realm to another. Metabolic Rate and Kleiber's Law : The first accurate measurements of body mass versus metabolic rate in 1932 shows that the metabolic rate R for all organisms follows the 3/4 power-law of the body mass , R ~ M 3/4 This is known as the Kleiber's Law . The reasons behind the power law are not yet fully understood , although there are of course theories. But since the OP's question doesn't actually ask for an explanation I feel it's okay to leave it to the interested reader to click through the links above and below to learn more about the proposed theories (plus, I believe it would make my answer just unbearably long if I include them in my post) . More: Biophysics - New Clues to Why Size Equals Destiny Life's Universal Scaling Laws [ PDF ] Phylogeny and metabolic scaling in mammals [ PDF ] Rest heart rate and life expectancy [ Abstract ] Similarity in the number of lifespan heartbeats among non-hibernating homeothermic animals [ Abstract ] Animal Life Spans | {
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5,722 | Last year, I read on a newspaper that a research found that we do not need, or should not, clean our ears as the earwax comes out naturally and sticking in cotton swabs can damage our ears. Is my information accurate? Can anyone provide a summary and reference to the actual research? | First of all: is it true that earwax (or cerumen ) comes out naturally from the ear? Yes it is. The purpose of ear wax is to trap particles that may enter the ear from the outside, and bring them out of the ear canal. From S. Gelfand - Essentials of audiology Cerumen is a waxy substance that is supposed to be in the ear canal, where it serves lubricating and cleansing functions and also helps to protect the ear from bacteria, fungi, and insects. The cerumen is produced by glands in the cartilagenous portion of the ear canal and migrates out over time. [cut] Impacted cerumen is an accumulation of wax in the ear canal that interferes with the flow of sound in the eardrum. Impacted cerumen occurs naturally in many patients who produce excessive amount of cerumen, which builds up over time. It is also the fate of many Q-tip wielding patients who inadvertently pack cerumen farther back into the canal (and frequently against the eardrum) in an ironic attempt to clean their ears Should earwax be removed? The American Academy of Otolaryngology says not to, unless it presents a medical risk. From their website When should the ears be cleaned? Under ideal circumstances, the ear canals should never have to be cleaned. However, that isn’t always the case. The ears should be cleaned when enough earwax accumulates to cause symptoms or to prevent a needed assessment of the ear by your doctor. This condition is all cerumen impaction, and may cause one or more of the following symptoms: Earache, fullness in the ear, or a sensation the ear is plugged Partial hearing loss, which may be progressive Tinnitus, ringing, or noises in the ear Itching, odor, or discharge Coughing Various methods exist to remove cerumen. Wikipedia lists: A number of softeners are effective; however, if this is not sufficient, the most common method of cerumen removal is syringing with warm water. A curette method is more likely to be used by otolaryngologists when the ear canal is partially occluded and the material is not adhering to the skin of the ear canal. Cotton swabs, on the other hand, push most of the earwax further into the ear canal and remove only a small portion of the top layer of wax that happens to adhere to the fibres of the swab. There is also quite a bit of literature on the matter. This paper (bear in mind that it was written in 1990, so it may not be reflecting the current situation), surveys 289 practitioners about "the methods of removing ear wax [...] and the incidence of associated complications" . Ear wax removal: a survey of current practice - Sharp et al. 1990 The 289 replies received (92% of the study group) indicated that each doctor saw an average of nine patients (range five to 50 or more) requesting the removal of ear wax per month (table I). The initial medical assessment was made by 179 general practitioners
(62%). No medical assessment was made by 23 (8%); these patients were referred directly to the practice nurse. The remaining 87 (30%) offered examination by either the doctor or nurse. The most used method of wax removal was syringing a ceruminolytic agent (something that melts the wax, such as oil or bicarbonate or special formulations), either done directly by the doctor or by a nurse. The paper reports that Complications had been experienced by 105 practitioners (38%) and included perforation, canal lacerations, and failure of wax removal. The removal of occlusive wax improved hearing by a mean of 5 dB over the frequencies analysed. and concludes that: About 44000 ears are syringed each year in the area and complications requiring specialist referral are estimated to occur in 1/1000 ears syringed. The incidence of complications could be reduced by a greater awareness of the potential hazards, increased instruction of personnel, and more careful selection of patients. A more recent systematic review of clinical trials can be found in The safety and effectiveness of different methods of earwax removal: a systematic review and economic evaluation. - Clegg et al. 2010 They analyzed 22 randomised controlled trials and 4 controlled clinical trials, using different types of softeners, with or without irrigation. They report that: On measures of wax clearance Cerumol, sodium bicarbonate, olive oil and water are all more effective than no treatment; triethanolamine polypeptide (TP) is better than olive oil; wet irrigation is better than dry irrigation; sodium bicarbonate drops followed by irrigation by nurse is more effective than sodium bicarbonate drops followed by self-irrigation; softening with TP and self-irrigation is more effective than self-irrigation only; and endoscopic de-waxing is better than microscopic de-waxing. AEs ( adverse events ) appeared to be minor and of limited extent. Results of the exploratory economic model found that softeners followed by self-irrigation were more likely to be cost-effective [24,433 pounds per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY)] than softeners followed by irrigation at primary care (32,130 pounds per QALY) when compared with no treatment. Comparison of the two active treatments showed that the additional gain associated with softeners followed by irrigation at primary care over softeners followed by self-irrigation was at a cost of 340,000 pounds per QALY. When compared over a lifetime horizon to the 'no treatment' option, the ICERs for softeners followed by self-irrigation and of softeners followed by irrigation at primary care were 24,450 pounds per QALY and 32,136 pounds per QALY, respectively. They conclude that: Although softeners are effective, which specific softeners are most effective remains uncertain. Evidence on the effectiveness of methods of irrigation or mechanical removal was equivocal. Further research is required to improve the evidence base, such as a RCT incorporating an economic evaluation to assess the different ways of providing the service, the effectiveness of the different methods of removal and the acceptability of the different approaches to patients and practitioners. | {
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5,727 | Patients with incomplete spinal cord injuries experience quadriplegia and paraplegia. With therapy, some portion of the patients will recover the ability to walk, either aided or unaided. Yet some of the treatments date back to Hippocrates. (See this NIH page .) Patients are asked to keep a positive mental attitude, in order to increase both the speed and degree of their recovery. Is there research that demonstrates the effectiveness of positive patient attitude, or would patients recover the same regardless? Or, put another way, is the "Can Do" attitude of sports movies real, or is this the stuff of legend? | First of all: is it true that earwax (or cerumen ) comes out naturally from the ear? Yes it is. The purpose of ear wax is to trap particles that may enter the ear from the outside, and bring them out of the ear canal. From S. Gelfand - Essentials of audiology Cerumen is a waxy substance that is supposed to be in the ear canal, where it serves lubricating and cleansing functions and also helps to protect the ear from bacteria, fungi, and insects. The cerumen is produced by glands in the cartilagenous portion of the ear canal and migrates out over time. [cut] Impacted cerumen is an accumulation of wax in the ear canal that interferes with the flow of sound in the eardrum. Impacted cerumen occurs naturally in many patients who produce excessive amount of cerumen, which builds up over time. It is also the fate of many Q-tip wielding patients who inadvertently pack cerumen farther back into the canal (and frequently against the eardrum) in an ironic attempt to clean their ears Should earwax be removed? The American Academy of Otolaryngology says not to, unless it presents a medical risk. From their website When should the ears be cleaned? Under ideal circumstances, the ear canals should never have to be cleaned. However, that isn’t always the case. The ears should be cleaned when enough earwax accumulates to cause symptoms or to prevent a needed assessment of the ear by your doctor. This condition is all cerumen impaction, and may cause one or more of the following symptoms: Earache, fullness in the ear, or a sensation the ear is plugged Partial hearing loss, which may be progressive Tinnitus, ringing, or noises in the ear Itching, odor, or discharge Coughing Various methods exist to remove cerumen. Wikipedia lists: A number of softeners are effective; however, if this is not sufficient, the most common method of cerumen removal is syringing with warm water. A curette method is more likely to be used by otolaryngologists when the ear canal is partially occluded and the material is not adhering to the skin of the ear canal. Cotton swabs, on the other hand, push most of the earwax further into the ear canal and remove only a small portion of the top layer of wax that happens to adhere to the fibres of the swab. There is also quite a bit of literature on the matter. This paper (bear in mind that it was written in 1990, so it may not be reflecting the current situation), surveys 289 practitioners about "the methods of removing ear wax [...] and the incidence of associated complications" . Ear wax removal: a survey of current practice - Sharp et al. 1990 The 289 replies received (92% of the study group) indicated that each doctor saw an average of nine patients (range five to 50 or more) requesting the removal of ear wax per month (table I). The initial medical assessment was made by 179 general practitioners
(62%). No medical assessment was made by 23 (8%); these patients were referred directly to the practice nurse. The remaining 87 (30%) offered examination by either the doctor or nurse. The most used method of wax removal was syringing a ceruminolytic agent (something that melts the wax, such as oil or bicarbonate or special formulations), either done directly by the doctor or by a nurse. The paper reports that Complications had been experienced by 105 practitioners (38%) and included perforation, canal lacerations, and failure of wax removal. The removal of occlusive wax improved hearing by a mean of 5 dB over the frequencies analysed. and concludes that: About 44000 ears are syringed each year in the area and complications requiring specialist referral are estimated to occur in 1/1000 ears syringed. The incidence of complications could be reduced by a greater awareness of the potential hazards, increased instruction of personnel, and more careful selection of patients. A more recent systematic review of clinical trials can be found in The safety and effectiveness of different methods of earwax removal: a systematic review and economic evaluation. - Clegg et al. 2010 They analyzed 22 randomised controlled trials and 4 controlled clinical trials, using different types of softeners, with or without irrigation. They report that: On measures of wax clearance Cerumol, sodium bicarbonate, olive oil and water are all more effective than no treatment; triethanolamine polypeptide (TP) is better than olive oil; wet irrigation is better than dry irrigation; sodium bicarbonate drops followed by irrigation by nurse is more effective than sodium bicarbonate drops followed by self-irrigation; softening with TP and self-irrigation is more effective than self-irrigation only; and endoscopic de-waxing is better than microscopic de-waxing. AEs ( adverse events ) appeared to be minor and of limited extent. Results of the exploratory economic model found that softeners followed by self-irrigation were more likely to be cost-effective [24,433 pounds per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY)] than softeners followed by irrigation at primary care (32,130 pounds per QALY) when compared with no treatment. Comparison of the two active treatments showed that the additional gain associated with softeners followed by irrigation at primary care over softeners followed by self-irrigation was at a cost of 340,000 pounds per QALY. When compared over a lifetime horizon to the 'no treatment' option, the ICERs for softeners followed by self-irrigation and of softeners followed by irrigation at primary care were 24,450 pounds per QALY and 32,136 pounds per QALY, respectively. They conclude that: Although softeners are effective, which specific softeners are most effective remains uncertain. Evidence on the effectiveness of methods of irrigation or mechanical removal was equivocal. Further research is required to improve the evidence base, such as a RCT incorporating an economic evaluation to assess the different ways of providing the service, the effectiveness of the different methods of removal and the acceptability of the different approaches to patients and practitioners. | {
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5,848 | I just saw this picture in Learn Something Every Day and thought of you. Some of the sites I've found reason it with gravity but doesn't explain very well. | How exactly the different intrinsic and extrinsic factors interplay to shape real mountains is an active field of research. Thus, it's not possible to say exactly how high a mountain could become on earth. However, there are several limits to that. First, there is the issue of rock stability itself. Rock has a limited compressive strength, but quite a bit of weight (relative rock density is on the order of 2.5), so if a mountain becomes too high, the rock at the base will simply crumble or melt from the pressure. Terzagi (1962); Géotechnique, Volume 12, Issue 4, pages 251 –270 calculated the theoretical height of the tallest vertical cliff as H=strength/weight[N/m^3] , which comes out to about 7.5 km for granite . Of course, a mountain is not a vertical cliff, and when you double the Granite value, you get the about 15km in the OP (full disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure how exactly adding slopes on the side gets you a factor of 2, but I'm running out of time here). Note that the above formula takes into account the weight of the rock, which means that smaller planets can have higher mountains. In reality, these numbers are not readily achievable on earth. There are numerous intrinsic factors that limit rock stability - cracks, folds, etc., as detailed in e.g. Cruden (2003). The shapes of cold, high mountains in sedimentary rocks. Geomorphology 55:249 , or in Schmidt and Montgomery (1997). Limits to relief. Science, 270:617 . Furthermore, it has been argued in Brozovitch et al. (1997). Climatic Limits on Landscape Development in the Northwestern Himalaya. Science 276:571 that it is really erosion through glaciation that ends up limiting mountain height. The interaction between tectonism and erosion produces rugged landscapes in actively deforming regions. In the northwestern Himalaya, the form of the landscape was found to be largely independent of exhumation rates, but regional trends in mean and modal elevations, hypsometry (frequency distribution of altitude), and slope distributions were correlated with the extent of glaciation. These observations imply that in mountain belts that intersect the snowline, glacial and periglacial processes place an upper limit on altitude, relief, and the development of topography irrespective of the rate of tectonic processes operating. This has recently been supported by Egholm et al. (2009). Glacial effects limiting mountain height. Nature 460:884 , who do a more large-scale analysis. The abstract of this paper which summarizes the above much better than I do: The height of mountain ranges reflects the balance between tectonic rock uplift, crustal strength and surface denudation. Tectonic deformation and surface denudation are interdependent, however, and feedback mechanisms—in particular, the potential link to climate—are subjects of intense debate(1, 2). Spatial variations in fluvial denudation rate caused by precipitation gradients are known to provide first-order controls on mountain range width, crustal deformation rates and rock uplift(3, 4). Moreover, limits to crustal strength(5) are thought to constrain the maximum elevation of large continental plateaus, such as those in Tibet and the central Andes. There are indications that the general height of mountain ranges is also directly influenced by the extent of glaciation through an efficient denudation mechanism known as the glacial buzzsaw(6, 7, 8, 9). Here we use a global analysis of topography and show that variations in maximum mountain height correlate closely with climate-controlled gradients in snowline altitude for many high mountain ranges across orogenic ages and tectonic styles. With the aid of a numerical model, we further demonstrate how a combination of erosional destruction of topography above the snowline by glacier-sliding and commensurate isostatic landscape uplift caused by erosional unloading can explain observations of maximum mountain height by driving elevations towards an altitude window just below the snowline. The model thereby self-consistently produces the hypsometric signature of the glacial buzzsaw, and suggests that differences in the height of mountain ranges mainly reflect variations in local climate rather than tectonic forces. Here's the link to ref#5 , which doesn't unfortunately, calculate the maximum theoretical height of a mountain. I guess geologists may mention these things in talks, but not in high-end journal publications. In summary: The 15km limit may be plausible, but it's unlikely to ever be attained by real-earth mountains, even the 10km ones that hide from most of erosion in the sea. | {
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5,857 | I received the following email today: Kids are putting Drano (a blocked drain substance) tin foil, and a
little water in plastic drink bottles and capping it up - leaving it
on lawns, in mail boxes, in gardens, on driveways etc. just waiting
for you to pick it up intending to put it in the rubbish, but you'll
never make it!!! If the bottle is picked up, and the bottle is
shaken even just a little - in about 30 seconds or less it builds up
enough gas which then explodes with enough force to remove some of
your extremities. The liquid that comes out is boiling hot as well. Does Drano really do this? Have any instances of these "attacks" ever occurred? | Sodium Hydroxide (which is the active ingredient in many drain cleaners , including Drano ( Drano MSDS Here )) does indeed react fairly violently with aluminium to produce Hydrogen gas. 2 Al + 2 NaOH + 2 H 2 O → 2 NaAl(OH) 4 + 3 H 2 The Sodium Hydroxide breaks down the passivation layer that naturally forms on the surface of aluminium due to it's reaction with atmospheric oxygen. It's my understanding that: The Sodium Hydroxide dissolves the passivation, which allows the NaOH and H 2 O to come in direct contact with the Aluminium metal. The Aluminium reacts to give NaAl(OH) 4 , and hydrogen as a gas ultimately ending up with a lot of heat, hydrogen gas, and various aluminium hydroxide species. I do not know if it has been used maliciously as described, though. To clarify, in the configuration used in the "prank" (vandalism?) described in the OP: The aluminium and sodium hydroxide are not mixed initially inside the bottle. Basically, there is some sodium hydroxide solution in the bottom of the bottle, and the aluminium foil piece is hung/balanced above the solution in a manner where jostling/tipping the bottle will cause it to fall into the sodium hydroxide. Therefore, the reaction is triggered by the bottle being moved, and it could (theoretically) sit for a significant amount of time before being triggered. It is probably quite hard to control the reaction speed with commercial drain cleaners but it is clear that it can sometimes be fast enough to be dangerous. My chemistry vocabulary is really rusty. Corrections welcome! | {
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5,861 | I had an argument with a work colleague. He claims that me cycling to and from work is less environmentally friendly than driving because I will eat more as a result of expending more energy. I have to take 2 showers a day (1 at work, 1 at home). He claims that these are more wasteful than the fuel required to drive 25km every day. Can anyone point me to any evidence for or against this claim? | This calculation is pretty much worst-case for the bicycle. It doesn't take into account that food production has actually stored CO2 from the atmosphere which is now just released back, while fuel was originally underground and its CO2 is added to the carbon cycle. Neither does it take into account mercury/other emissions, nor the wear-and-tear in cars and bicycles, nor the enormous benefits if the bicyclist doesn't even own a car. A vegetarian bicyclist certainly wins, for a meat-eater it depends. The question is what the bicyclist eats to get the required energy. Estimated from calculations below and this table : WIN (1): chicken, milk, eggs, herring, tuna, farmed salmon or (just about) any vegetables WIN (2): half vegetables, half some other fish or pork WIN (3): 30% beef, 70% vegetables LOSE : a lot of lamb or shrimp; (2) or (3) with too little vegetables Note that the fractions above are of energy, not weight. Image by Pulpolux !!! on Flickr. CC-BY-NC 2.0 And here's the calculation. The initial assumption is that the choice between car and bicycle doesn't affect the amount of other exercise. In practice, it might be different, but this is the only way we can calculate. Car CO2 emissions for the average new car in 2006 were 167.2 g/km , so let's assume this amount. For 25km the car pollutes 4.18 kg CO2. Bicycle The extra food may be significant Riding a bicycle uses up 1.62 kJ/(km∙kg) . Let's assume the rider weighs 80kg, which is below or above average for a male depending on country . Allow 20kg for bike, clothes etc. and we have 100kg. Thus the 25km takes 4050kJ total -- that is 967 kcal. Now, the food CO2 equivalent per kcal depends a lot on the type of food . For example: soy 0.07g/kcal chicken 1.67g/kcal beef 13.82g/kcal So, the CO2 equivalent from the extra food needed for cycling would be: 0.068 kg for soy 1.6 kg for chicken 13.4 kg for beef The extra shower doesn't really matter The bicyclist also takes an extra shower. Let's use the same assumptions as a CBC campaign : Assumes average shower time in Canada of 7.6 minutes (Source: Ipsos-Reid poll for GoBlue.org, 2008), average shower flow of 15 L per minute, and five showers per week. Also assumes 0.06 kWh electricity to heat one litre of water, and 22 g CO₂eq produced per kWh electricity used (Source: BC Hydro). For 7.6 minutes the water usage is 114 liters, which requires 6.84kWh to heat. The CO2 equivalent from taking the shower is thus 0.15kg. This is just 3.6% of what the car is using so it's quite negligible. The total For most foods other than pork, beef or lamb, the total energy consumption is below what the car uses. For example, eating only chicken, the bicyclist's total would be 1.75kg, which is significantly less than the car. The limit where the bicycle pollutes more than the car is if the food creates more than 4.17 g/kcal CO2 equivalents. So the bicyclist can easily afford to eat some beef, if the main energy source is vegetables. | {
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5,993 | One argument used to support the idea that the age of the earth is on the order of 10,000 years old (the 'young earth hypothesis') is that radiocarbon dating is confounded by the fact that the levels are not stable, and that the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is still increasing in our current atmosphere. This argument is presented by Dr. Kent Hovind and his ministry of Christian Science Evangelism in two writings posted at his website, (www.drdino.com) : Wrong assumptions in C-14 dating methods . Does carbon dating prove the earth is millions of years old? In [2], Dr. Hovind states: Present testing shows the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere has been
increasing since it was first measured in the 1950s. No sources were provided of course, thus I'm interested in knowing: Are the current levels of carbon-14 on the rise? and how can one test for this? | Background There are two major sources of 14C in the atmosphere: solar radiation affected by sun spots (small magnitude, decadal time scales) earth's magnetic field can deflect solar radiation (effect has a larger magnitude and occurs on millennial time scale) nuclear weapons tests (large magnitude effect, can change quickly, affected by technology and politics) There are also sources of CO2 that is depleted in 14C relative to the atmosphere. Atmospheric 14C can be reduced by the release of low 14C carbon, because this input dilutes the atmospheric signature. Because 14C has a half life of 5000 years, only 0.5^(age_x/5000) times the initial 14C will remain at age_x. CO2 that is depleted in 14C comes from: The burning of fossil fuels is the most important source of 14C depleted CO2 Historically, increased soil temperatures and reduced glacial coverage have released depleted CO2 from soils The circulation of the ocean brings 'old' CO2 from the deep ocean to the surface, where it exchanges with 'new' CO2 in the atmosphere. There are two major sinks of CO2 from the atmosphere, these sinks remove 14C CO2 in proportion to its atmospheric concentration: photosynthesis (plant and algae), some of which is buried or sink in the ocean being dissolved in the ocean Finally, the average time that a molecule of CO2 remains in the atmosphere is between 5 and 200 years (IPCC 2007 table 2.14) , so after an anomalous change, the concentration of 14C in the atmosphere will return to equilibrium with sources and sinks over time. This can be seen in first figure below. In the figures below, the y axis is Δ14C. Δ14C is the per-mil (parts per thousand) deviation in the 14C content of CO2 relative to the pre-weapons testing atmosphere (c. 1950). Further introduction and technical references can be found at Dr. Fiona Petchy's website, references with a global change emphasis can be found at the Radiocarbon in Earth System Science Short Course website . Answer [14C atm ] has been declining since the bomb spike 14C increased sharply (first figure) from the 1940s through the early 1960's due to the peak in nuclear tests. Since the atomic weapons ban treaty, atmospheric 14C levels have been steadily declining, but the rate of this decline has been slowing as atmospheric 14C reaches equilibrium with other sources and sinks. This is primarily the result of: the uptake of CO2 by the biosphere (plants, plankton) exchange with older CO2 in the ocean and the release of CO2 from fossil fuels into the atmosphere (radiocarbon depleted in fossil fuels). A classic paper on this is Nydal and Lövseth (1983), who report records of 14C in the atmosphere - observed at a range of sites from 78N to 21S between 1960 to 1981. They demonstrate that the shape of the 14C 'bomb spike' is consistent across latitudes as well as the expected effects of atmospheric mixing between hemispheres and between the free atmosphere and the ocean surface. Measurements at the ocean surface are relatively lower because this is where CO2 from the atmosphere is being exchanged with CO2 from the ocean, which much older and more depleted on average. [14C_atm] continues to decline Plenty of recent studies demonstrate that the decline continues to present. For example, Levin and Kromer (2004) provide a more recent analysis demonstrating that this trend continued into the 2000s: The looooong (50ky) view 14C has been declining over longer time scales as well, as explained by Hughen et al 2004 , resulting from a combination of changes in the earth's magnetic field, the release of 14C depleted CO2 from the deep ocean, and the coupling of atmospheric 14C-CO2 uptake by plants and old C release from soils that occurred during glacial retreat from 12ky ago to present. For consistency with the above figures (keeping time from left to right), the direction of the x-axis in the figure below (years before present) is reversed. Original data available from NOAA . You can see the decline in 14C_atm that has accompanied the melting of the ice sheets (the last glacial maximum occurred approximately 20-25kya). Hughen, K.; Lehman, S.J.; Southon, J.R.; Overpeck, J.T.; Marchal, O.; Herring, C.; Turnbull, J. 2004. 14C Activity and Global Carbon Cycle Changes over the Past 50,000 Years. Science 303(5655) Nydal, R., and K. Lövseth (1983), Tracing Bomb 14C in the Atmosphere 1962–1980, J. Geophys. Res., 88(C6), 3621–3642, doi:10.1029/JC088iC06p03621. Levin, I., B. Kromer, H. Schoch-Fischer, M. Bruns, M. Münnich, D. Berdau, J.C. Vogel, and K.O. Münnich, 1994. δ14CO2 record from Vermunt. In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A. Levin, I., Kromer, B., 2004. The tropospheric and delta 14C level in mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (1959–2003). Radiocarbon 46, 1261–1272 | {
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6,010 | Is there any consensus as to how many words are in the average adult's vocabulary? Over the years, I've come across various factoids and blurbs online and in magazine articles that have made statements like, "The average adult has a vocabulary of 20,000 words." And if there is a consensus, how was such a number arrived at? Is the "20,000 words" claim (or whatever it happens to be) just a guesstimate or are these numbers arrived at in a more mechanical and, ideally, reproducible procedure? Have then been any formal studies in this vein? | Short answer: NO Details: There are a few problems with using a dictionary to estimate vocabulary size which Thorndike pointed out as early as 1924 in The Vocabularies of School Pupils . In short, using a dictionary will always result in an overestimation, and using bigger dictionaries will lead to even larger overestimations. This phenomenon is known as the big dictionary effect . The testyourvocab site runs into related problems. Word selection is based on headwords, leading to the dictionary-based problems noted above. It also fails to use pseudowords to compensate for humans' uncanny ability to overestimate their own ability , a.k.a. illusory superiority. The inclusion of pseudowords on a checklist (yes/no) test is generally considered (e.g. Eyckmans (2004) Measuring receptive vocabulary size ) to be the only way to make the test reasonably reliable because it ensures that a minimum level of word knowledge is enforced when claiming knowledge (i.e. one can really identify the form of the word). There are other problems. Which level of word knowledge do you set as the cut off point for accepting that a word is part of someone's mental lexicon? Simply form identification (I've seen it before, but I have no idea what it means)? Full productive use (I can use this word appropriately in any context without hesitation)? The project at vocabularysize.com is attempting to refine measurement techniques as well as establish norms. One unique aspect of this project is that they are trying to measure different aspects of word knowledge separately and then later combine them to come up with a more accurate measure of vocabulary size. For example, when testing the word nation , most people would assume that national , nationalistic , antirenationalisation , etc are also known because of normal morphological processes involved in creating the related words. However, morphological awareness grows just as vocabulary size does. Here's an unlikely example to illustrate: if two people know the same 5,000 base words, the one with the ability to recognise the most common 100 affixes in English is going to have a smaller vocabulary size than the one who knows the most common 200 affixes in English. This is an oversimplified example because it implies that measuring word types (unique forms) is more valid than word families (base word + inflections + derivations), which is not a particularly useful way of measuring, but you get the idea. One's mental lexicon can't be measured just in terms of ' how many words '. It must be measured by looking at a variety of aspects dealing with knowledge of form, meaning, collocation, register, syntactic roles & constraints, etc. So, to answer your question directly, no . There are too many problems defining concepts such as word and know to confidently state something like " There are x number of words in your vocabulary ". What is more likely is to rate someone's vocabulary abilities, in terms of recognising various aspects of word knowledge or using those aspects productively, against age-based norms. There's also interesting work in psycholinguistics with reaction times in lexical decision tasks which hint at the interconnectiveness of one's mental lexicon which could also be used to rank subjects. Both approaches, though, would be more akin to standardised test scores which serve to rank rather than measure absolutely. how was such a number arrived at? There are a variety of methodologies, most centred on sampling from dictionaries which is unreliable. Despite early knowledge of this problem (Thorndike 1924), vocabulary size tests which have sprung up over the last 100 years have often tended to use this methodology. This is one reason why there are so many estimates which vary so widely. A good overview of the issues involved in accurately measuring vocabulary size can be found in Nation, I.S.P. (1993) Using dictionaries to estimate vocabulary size: essential, but rarely followed, procedures . Language Testing , 10 (1), 27-40. The most important points are that great pains must be taken to avoid oversampling from higher frequency words which tends to happen when using dictionaries as a source. Is the "20,000 words" claim (or whatever it happens to be) just a guesstimate or are these numbers arrived at in a more mechanical and, ideally, reproducible procedure? Some tests are more rigorous and valid than others. Measuring the vocabulary size of infants and very small children, for example, has seen very good gains in precision and accuracy, mostly because a fairly complete list of all words they could possibly know can be constructed. This becomes impossible as one learns more words. Most claims of adult vocabulary size are based on reproducible procedures, but the variance in estimates can usually be traced back to differences in defining the concept of word and the level of word knowledge tested. Remember, early IQ tests were basically vocabulary size tests, so there are many attempts out there which have norms, validation studies, etc. Many of them are quite useful as a ranking or discriminating measure, but are less useful to answer the more academic question of absolute vocabulary size. Have then been any formal studies in this vein? Yes, lots. Some of the first were: Holden, E. S. (1875). On the number of words used in speaking and writing . Bulletin of the Philosophical Society of Washington , 2 , 16-21, 28. Kirkpatrick, E. A. (1891). Number of Words in an Ordinary Vocabulary . Science , 18 (446), 107–108. Other important studies include: D’Anna, C. A., Zechmeister, E. B., & Hall, J. W. (1991). Toward a meaningful definition of vocabulary size. Journal of Reading Behavior: A Journal of Literacy , 23 (1), 109-122. Dupuy, H. J. (1974). The rationale, development and standardization of a basic word vocabulary test. US Govt Printing Office, Washington DC . Schonell, F. J., Meddleton, I. G., & Shaw, B. A. (1956). A study of the oral vocabulary of adults . Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Seashore, R. H. (1933). The measurement and analysis of extent of vocabulary. Psychological Bulletin , 30 , 709-710. Seashore, R. H., & D., E. L. (1940). The measurement of individual differences in general English vocabularies. Journal of Educational Psychology , 31 , 14-38. I've got a list of 30-40 studies, so I won't bore you with the rest. In closing, perhaps the reason why measuring vocabulary size and debates about it have persisted for so long is that early IQ tests were essentially vocabulary size tests and people still tend to equate knowledge of arcane or obscure words as a sign of intelligence or other socially desirable traits. Although there is some correlation between vocabulary size and other traits, the strength of that correlation is often not as strong as people would assume, and it also doesn't imply any sort of causality. Full disclosure: I'm part of the vocabularysize.com project | {
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6,114 | During the athletics world championship, a commentator mentioned casually during the marathon discipline that humans are faster over long distances than all animals.
I'm unsure if this can be said generally. Obviously some individuals cannot run, so consider the speed of the fastest individuals of each species. Were there any scientific experiments performed to compare humans and animal? Alternatively, are there medical/biomechanical reasons upon which one can base this statement? Additional research turned up the following Nature abstract : Here we assess how well humans perform at sustained long-distance
running, and review the physiological and anatomical bases of
endurance running capabilities in humans and other mammals. Judged by
several criteria, humans perform remarkably well at endurance running,
thanks to a diverse array of features, many of which leave traces in
the skeleton. The fossil evidence of these features suggests that
endurance running is a derived capability of the genus Homo,
originating about 2 million years ago, and may have been instrumental
in the evolution of the human body form. Take this as proof that this question is trickier than it looks. The following articles also seem to support this theory: Born to Run , The Human Body Is Built for Distance . The main factor seems to be temperature, which complicates an objective comparison of specific mammals . Standard ambient temperature is from my knowledge around 25° C. It seems this a temperature where it gets tricky for horses and especially sled dogs to keep up with our best marathon runners. On even longer distances, likely even more. Probably a doubled marathon distance will already change the whole mammal endurance ranking. It would be interesting to see how desert/steppe animals like camel/antelope/cheetah do compared to dog/horse/human. | We just need to look at sled dogs and do a little math. In 1986, Susan Butcher broke Rick Swenson’s record, set in 1981, by
completing the 1049+ miles in 11 days. 1049/11 = 95 miles per day. This dwarfs a marathon, and marathon runners don't pull sleds. However, there are other races where we manage 71ish miles per day. This is for the Self-Transcendence , which purports to be the longest foot race on the planet. The Iditarod is in particularly cold climates. There is a case of 100km being ran in 6:13. 100km is 62 miles, which starts to get into the Iditarod range. Someone also ran the AT, 2000ish miles in 50+ days . None of these accomplishments conquer the mile eating 95 miles per day that Iditarod champion dogs accomplish. Most speculation I read is that the dogs outperform us only the in the cold. However there's no comparable opportunity in warm climates (sledding requires snow, but if someone has an example, I'll include it.), so it is not clear that this is due to the dog being unable vs. humans not having a reason/method/desire to race dogs long distances in warmer climates. Dogs can certainly handle warmer location in day to day living, for instance Dingos exist across hot and inhospitable areas , such as the Simpson desert in Australia . One reason that this is significant, is that it's contrived. Humans are the only species to create physical challenges where people train for a large portion of their lives just to accomplish this purely contrived challenge. The only animal I've been able to find that beats us is an animal we have harnessed to compete to the same end. The comparison breaks down with most other animals, not because they aren't fast, but because it's not accurate to compare an olympic marathon runner with the average (as opposed to the best) kangaroo. But it's not really possible (within ethical contrants) to find the "best" kanagaroo. Yet even in this contrived contest, we are not the best. If you compare the average human, we would fare less well, but that comparison is also harder to achieve, as we'd have to have numbers on what the average human can run. The other animal that came to my mind is the ostrich. Unfortunately all I have found so far is wikipedia . Still looking for more on this, however the cites look good so: People race Ostriches in Africa O.o When being pursued by a predator, they have been known to reach speeds
in excess of 70 kilometres per hour (43 mph), and can maintain a
steady speed of 50 kilometres per hour (31 mph), which makes the
Ostrich the world's fastest two-legged animal. These birds blow us away in both short and long distance running (we can't even come close to a sustained 31mph) and they handle a 104 degree F range of temperature. , which is not as great as ours, but is much above "cold only" climates. Kind of makes me want to see an ostrich marathon :) | {
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6,118 | A video on Youtube, “ BBC Building 7 Collapse ” is a televised news report from the BBC that states that WTC Tower 7 (aka the "Salomon Bros. Building") had collapsed. An overlay on the video by the uploader to Youtube, at around 0:42 in the video, states "WTC7 Collapsed? It's only 5:07pm". The video goes on to highlight the apparently live footage – which shows Tower 7 in the background, still standing . There's a whole web-site devoted to this rumour (which, I add, has a statement from Richard Porter , the head of news at BBC World). According to the timeline of the WTC fall on Wikipedia , the first impact was at 8:46am (North Tower) and 9:03 am (South Tower), and WTC Tower 7 fell at just after 5:20pm. The anchor states that they are reporting “ some 8 hours ” after the attack (i.e. around 5pm). I didn't spot any clocks in the video or more accurate measures of time. The video purports to be evidence that the BBC reported that WTC Tower 7 had fallen before the fall had taken place, and in particular: the report is apparently made at 5:07pm (i.e. 13 minutes before the tower fell); and the apparently live image in the background showed Tower 7 still standing, while the BBC was reporting that it had fallen. The video overlays state that the falling of Tower 7 was a controlled demolition, but gives no evidence supporting that conclusion. It seems to be implying that the BBC had clairvoyant reporting because a planned press release had been circulated, and that the BBC's mistake was in reading off the press release before they were supposed to. The correspondent is cut off from the news feed, which on any other day might be considered unusual, but given the chaos of September 11, 2001, I don't draw any negative inference from it. Alas the correspondent, Jane Standley, who would seem the person most able to shed light on this conspiracy theory, seems to not be a public figure anymore. No useful results show up for her on google, as others seem to have tried . First, did the BBC report the falling of WTC Tower 7 before the tower fell ? Second, if the BBC did report Tower 7's fall before the event, does that evidence support the conclusion of the existence of any nefarious conspiracy? (i.e. are there not more plausible explanations, e.g. an error by the BBC as Richard Porter has stated) | Regarding the conspiracy, this page does a better job than I could: http://www.debunking911.com/pull.htm What most likely, logically happened: While investigating and updating information on the collapse of the towers, someone at the BBC was given a report/press release that building 7 was going to collapse. [Edit: we now know they were monitoring the news from different outlets and that's where they learned of building 7.] According to the fire department, by 2:00PM they knew the building would soon collapse. Reporters KNEW this well before the collapse because there are videos of reporters talking about it before it happened. So we KNOW reporters were given information on WTC 7's imminent demise. Everyone knew the building would collapse long before it did. In fact they knew hours in advance. Then we found out, I guess around 3:00 [o'clock], that they thought 7 was going to collapse. So, of course, [we've] got guys all in this pile over here and the main concern was get everybody out, and I guess it took us over an hour and a half, two hours to get everybody out of there. (Q. Initially when you were there, you had said you heard a few Maydays?) Oh, yes. We had Maydays like crazy.... The heat must have been tremendous. There was so much [expletive] fire there. This whole pile was burning like crazy. Just the heat and the smoke from all the other buildings on fire, you [couldn't] see anything. So it took us a while and we ended up backing everybody out, and [that's] when 7 collapsed.... Basically, we fell back for 7 to collapse, and then we waited a while and it got a lot more organized, I would guess." - Lieutenant William Ryan Yes, they reported it early. Since when did a news crew screwup become evidence of a multi-national conspiracy? | {
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6,147 | I heard that the buildings were insured just before terrorist attacks. Is that true? If yes, wouldn't this be an argument for conspirationists ? | It's absolutely not true, and conspiracy adherents have no case what so ever. First of all, in the 1993 bombing, insurers paid out $510 million in that terrorist attack . That was quite a few years before the 9/11/01 event, and would blow a hole in that nut-ball idea. As if that isn't enough reality to dissuade these "adherents", the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania states (PDF) "Even after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the
Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, insurers in the United States did not view either
international or domestic terrorism as a risk that should be explicitly considered
when pricing their commercial insurance policy, principally because losses from
terrorism had historically been small and, to a large degree, uncorrelated. Thus,
prior to September 11, 2001, terrorism coverage in the United States was an
unnamed peril covered in most standard all-risk commercial and homeowners’
policies covering damage to property and contents." If anything, terrorism coverage is actually the norm, not an exception. As others have said, the hub-bub was more about who got paid what by whom. Due to the way insurance policies work, in combination with real estate laws, all the leasing of the property, and switching carriers ... It's the sort of stuff that makes a person's head swim. Sorry for being so derisive in my answer, but the whole 9/11 "truther" conspiracy is one of the most insulting, if not downright stupid, ideas that seems to percolate on the internet. They continually persist no matter what debunking is provided, and only proclaim that all debunking is part of the conspiracy. As someone that served before, during, and after 9/11, and had my life personally affected by that horrible day, it just boggles the mind how disconnected from reality some people can be. They are as deluded as holocaust deniers, moon hoax proponents, or whatever patently ridiculous nuttery people glom on to... | {
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6,180 | One of the only things that natural-food aficionados and food products mega-corporations agree on is that "probiotics" are good for you. I'm wondering if there is any reliable evidence to support the claims that consuming food or supplements with live cultures such as Lactobacillus will result in health benefits. An example is this claim made by Dannon/Danone: Consuming certain probiotics can
help strengthen the body's natural defenses by providing a
regular source of “friendly”bacteria to the intestinal tract,
helping to correct an imbalance of the intestinal microflora
and optimizing the functioning of the digestive tract’s
immune system and intestinal lining. The range of claims is quite wide — others have have made claims about improving digestion, clearing up acne, and even curing autism. I will keep this question focused on just the one claim: Is there any reliable scientific evidence that consuming probiotics can improve the immune system? | It depends on what you define as probiotics. If you are referring to the "food products mega-corporations" as you call them, the answer is most likely No , and arguments are given below. This does not mean that there are no real probiotics which have an actual effect on specific health issues. The answer of mmr gives a few examples. But again to the claims of these mega-corporations: the European Food Safety authority has researched 800 health claims of such companies, and they could not find relationships. If you prefer easy reading you may like the article Probiotic drinks do not aid health, Europe says : Products such as Yakult, which are sold at a premium over standard
yogurts, cannot be proved to either boost the immune system or aid
digestive health, it has been ruled. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has examined more than 800
health claims from food companies, including those submitted by the
multi-billion pound probiotic industry. EFSA's independent panel of scientists found that the claims that
these products could strengthen the body's defences, improve immune
function and reduce gut problems were either so general as to be
inadmissible, or could not be shown to have the claimed effect. In a separate ruling, the panel examined a dossier of 12 studies
submitted by Yakult for its own strain of probiotic bacteria,
Lactobacillus casei shirota. It found that all were inadequate to
support the company's claim that its products maintained immune
defences against the common cold. EFSA's ruling is being challenged by the industry, but if these
appeals fail the companies will no longer be allowed to market the
foods as aiding digestion or helping the immune system in future. More info on the EFSA's own site . Excerpts from the conclusions: Claim: “Healthy and balanced digestive system” (ID 1371, 4228) The claimed effects are “intestinal flora”, “digestive health” and “ingestion of cheese
containing probiotic culture Lb. paracasei NFBC 338 positively influences the healthy balance
of the gut microflora”. The target population is assumed to be the general population. In the
context of the proposed wording, it is assumed that the claimed effects refer to maintenance or
contribution to a healthy and balanced digestive system. The claimed effects are general and non-specific and do not refer to any specific health claim
as required by Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006. Claim: Increasing numbers of gastro-intestinal microorganisms (ID 864, 1371, 3073, 4228) The claimed effects are “gut health”, “intestinal flora”, “digestive health” and “ingestion of
cheese containing probiotic culture Lb. paracasei NFBC 338 positively influences the healthy
balance of the gut microflora”. The target population is assumed to be the general population. The evidence provided does not establish that increasing numbers of gastro-intestinal
microorganisms is a beneficial physiological effect. A cause and effect relationship has not been established between the consumption of the food(s)/food constituent(s) evaluated in this opinion and a beneficial physiological effect related to increasing numbers of gastro-intestinal microorganisms. Claim: Decreasing potentially pathogenic gastro-intestinal microorganisms (ID 864, 1371, 3073, 4228) The claimed effects are “gut health”, “intestinal flora”, “digestive health” and “ingestion of
cheese containing probiotic culture Lb. paracasei NFBC 338 positively influences the healthy
balance of the gut microflora”. The target population is assumed to be the general population.
Decreasing potentially pathogenic gastro-intestinal microorganisms might be a beneficial
physiological effect. A cause and effect relationship has not been established between the consumption of the
food(s)/food constituent(s) evaluated in this opinion and decreasing potentially pathogenic
gastro-intestinal microorganisms. | {
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6,187 | Is it possible that a plane hit the side of the pentagon, but did not even scuff up the grass? There are some claims of other anomalies that don't quite match the idea of a plane hitting there; like a lack of broken plane parts. Grass http://www.tradenewswire.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/misile.jpg What other plane crashes (are alleged to) look like: | Yes, absolutely a plane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th. To address the claims specifically. but did not even scuff up the grass Do you know what airplanes do? They FLY . That this is even a claim is absolutely ludicrous and seems to be grasping at straws... Mike J. Wilson does a nice reconstruction of the crash that shows this gravity defying feat quite clearly . Not only that, it has actual photographs and video from the Pentagon that not only show the effects, but even show airplane debris. In case 9/11 truthers are attempting to draw a comparison between a crash into a structure at high speed and these "examples" of crashes, they are being deliberately deceptive. The "crashes" they are using as examples happened under much, much different conditions than the 9/11 crash. I would suggest maybe the Payne Stewart crash site would be more indicative of a crash at high speed. (Image source, South Dakota Community News) Or Maybe another crater like this Tupelov crater in Iran: (Image Source, USA Today) Of course, the general nature of most pilots is to NOT crash! So if they are able to do anything when they realize things have gone into a total "furball", they will do everything to preserve their lives (like attempting to get to an appropriate speed, attitude, orientation, configuration, etc.). The extremists on-board the aircraft were not taking any of those actions, and were trying to do as much damage as possible. Thus they had throttles up, and were going at very high speed in a clean configuration when they crashed into the Pentagon (and the WTC for that matter). The pictures shown in the question are from crashes near the landing or take off phase, which has totally different parameters (and even a movie set which isn't even a real crash...). Again, highly disingenuous of the truthers... like a lack of broken plane parts Now, there is the claim there are no parts. The video by Mike Wilson shows photographs of numerous parts, so that is plainly an outright lie of omission. The photograph that truthers display as an "example" is from a long distance, and does not show the entire site either. Here are four pictures that DO show aircraft debris: (Image Sources, James Randi Educational Foundation, from other sources) Furthermore, truthers seem to be wholly unfamiliar with materials science, physics, and structures. They do not seem to know what happens when an aircraft is driven into a wall at high speed? Here is a wonderful example of a test conducted by the government many years ago with an F-4 ( YouTube Video taken from a Sandia Test as referenced in Sugano, T., Tsubota, H., Kasai, Y., Koshika, N., Orui, S., W.A. von Riesemann, D.C. Bickel, M. B. Parks, (1993a), “Full-scale aircraft impact test for evaluation of impact force”, Nuclear Engineering and Design, Vol. 140, p373-385.). As one can plainly see in that video nearly a decade before 9/11, the plane is quite effectively obliterated, only leaving very small parts. Now, if anyone sincerely wishes to find out more about what actually happened, and wants to stay with actual facts (as opposed to manufactured ones, or plain old delusions), I suggest they visit the James Randi Educational Foundation . Not only are there plenty of discussions that debunk these same tired old arguments, but one can ask the same questions again and again. And you'll get the same answer, because people demand EVIDENCE , not cherry picked half-truths. Much like here. And just for giggles, I think this comic by XKCD touches on why I have such disdain for these nutty conspiracy theories . (Source: XKCD [as if you couldn't tell]) | {
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6,228 | I've heard that apes are our ancestors (ranging from chimpanzee to bonobo to gorilla). Is this true? Can we live side-by-side with our ancestors? I always thought we used to have a common ancestor with them. In which group would our ancestors be? Homini, Hominidae, ... | Summary: Technically, we are apes. Colloquially, we didn't evolve from modern apes: we shared a recent common ancestor with them. [ Source ] From Comparative genomics of higher primates ( Max Planck Society ): The common chimpanzee and the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee are our
closest living relatives, with whom we share a common ancestor that
lived 5–7 million years ago. Humans and chimpanzees share a common
ancestor with gorillas — the other major species of African apes — that lived 6–8 million years ago , whereas the common ancestor shared
with the Asian orangutans lived 12–16 million years ago . Many species that were more closely-related to humans have lived and
become extinct since the time of the chimpanzee- human ancestor.
They
are collectively called hominins. One hominin is the Neandertal , whose
lineage diverged from ours 300,000–500,000 years ago. Neandertals
lived in western Eurasia, sometimes alongside our ancestors, until
they became extinct around 30,000 years ago. More: The genetical history of humans and the great apes | {
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6,237 | I remember being told that there is one and only one endurance sport in which the women's world record exceeds the men's world record, and that the sport is Long Distance Endurance Swimming. Reason being that fattier tissue on a woman's body make it easier for women to float for a sustained period of time (and also endure cold/discomfort?) The idea that women can consistently and at a world class level outperform men physically in at least one sport is appealing ... But is any of the above true? | The marathon swimming records show that men are consistently outperforming women. The same goes for many other endurance sports: the records are still held by men. What you can find however is that women are comparatively better in endurance than men: the relative difference between the times decreases. See for example the article Gender and endurance performance : The information presented in the previous two paragraphs leads to the
prediction that women might compete against men most successfully in
events lasting several hours, where overheating and glycogen depletion
are particularly common. The limited data we have so far provide
preliminary support for this idea. It has been shown that women can
sometimes finish ultramarathons in times similar to those of men who
can beat them in "short" (26.2-mile) marathons (Bam et al., Medicine
and Science in Sports and Exercise 29: 244-7, 1997). And when men and
women with equivalent marathon times are pitted against each other in
ultras, the women tend to win (Speechly et al., Medicine and Science
in Sports and Exercise 28: 359-65, 1996). | {
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6,264 | This is a question which is highly discussed on the Internet but I've been researching for a long time and I've never found any scientific proof backing this up. It's known (or at least spoken of) that intense light creates an effect called "photo-degradation," which makes colors like red fade away and turns white into yellow or brown, as can be seen on many items from our daily life. Every museum containing ancient art forbids the use of flash when taking photographs or even forbids photographs at all but some people claim this is just a rumour or an habit that has been passed down from generation to generation of museum keepers. So is it true that flash hurts art or is it only a myth? Scientific backup is much appreciated in this discussion. | Yes, it is true. Xenon arc lamps (flash tubes) are a common light source used in accelerated aging tests, and will cause the breakdown of light-reactive (or "fugitive") pigments, as well as speed up the physical deterioration of paper, canvas and similar grounds. You can do a web search on the terms "accelerated aging pigment xenon" (without the quotes) to retrieve a number of scholarly papers on the subject, among them Pursuing the fugitive: direct measurement of light sensitivity with micro-fading tests (Whitmore) and Poly (vinyl acetate) paints in works of art: A photochemical approach. Part 1 (Ferreira et al). (Most of the very recent work, admittedly, has involved pigments and binders for use in prosthetic devices -- nobody wants reverse tan lines on a very expensive artificial limb, or worse, on a facial prosthesis. The results still hold, but you'll have to page through results to find specifically art-related papers; archival testing of artists' materials is old science. See The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques (Mayer, 1940; 5th edition 1991) for an extensive discussion of pigment, binder and ground lightfastness.) No, your flash probably isn't going to do a whole lot of damage when you take a single picture. But think for a moment what you're doing when you take a flash picture: you're essentially throwing a substantial fraction of a second worth of sunlight (the quality of light -- that is, the distribution of the light's amplitude across the visible and near-visible spectrum -- is very similar) at your subject in the space of a millisecond. Now multiply that effect by hundreds or thousands of museum visitors every day for years on end. The museum might as well put the painting outside under the noonday sun. Simply filtering out some frequencies, like UV and IR, won't help with the pigment destruction; those pigments tend to break down under the influence of visible light (it's what gives the pigments their colour and brilliance), though it does help to prevent damage to the support/ground and pigment binders (oils, resins and gums are more sensitive to UV and IR damage). | {
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6,275 | I've heard the claim that "Margarine is only one molecule away from being plastic" several times. Usually from friends who think they've heard it from some reliable source. I've also read a couple books that mention this concept, without really addressing its validity. Is there any truth to this claim? EDIT Updating with this claim, as found recently on facebook: And here's the most disturbing fact... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING! Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC... and shares 27 ingredients with PAINT. | It's a bit of a confused claim. First, what is a "molecule"? A molecule is an electrically neutral group of at least two atoms held together by covalent chemical bonds. Molecules are distinguished from ions by their electrical charge. However, in quantum physics, organic chemistry, and biochemistry, the term molecule is often used less strictly and applied to polyatomic ions. [Source: Wikipedia ] Note: We are talking organic chemistry here. Basically, a group of atoms bonded together. Now, what is "plastic"? A plastic material is any of a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic solids used in the manufacture of industrial products. Plastics are typically polymers of high molecular mass, and may contain other substances to improve performance and/or reduce production costs. Monomers of plastic are either natural or synthetic organic compounds. [Source: Wikipedia ] So, there isn't one single type of plastic - and typically they are made of huge molecules. My high school chemistry teacher claimed a plastic ice-cream container was in fact a single molecule, due to all the cross-linked bonds between the long chains of atoms. [ UPDATE : This claim has been challenged. See related question . This undermines the forcefulness of the following argument, but doesn't affect its validity.] So, we can say "Water is one molecule away from being a plastic ice-cream container." or "A vacuum is one molecule away from being a plastic ice-cream container." Given that, "Margarine is only one molecule away from being plastic" is a confused claim that is both true and does not tell us anything about margarine. | {
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6,284 | I have frequently heard (even from diabetics) that diets high in sugar can cause (or at least contribute to) diabetes. Others have said it's a common misunderstanding, and there's no demonstrated causal connection between the two, but only correlation. Can eating sugar-rich foods put you at a higher risk of getting diabetes? | Type 2 diabetes is caused by an inactive lifestyle, a diet high in calories, and being overweight also contributes to the chances of getting it. (Type 1 is caused by genetics). This does not mean you can eat as much sugar as you like, because sugar is high in calories, but this is the only link between diabetes and sugar intake. So, in short, yes, excessive sugar intake can contribute to the chances of getting type 2 diabetes, but sugar itself is not the problem. Myth: Eating too much sugar causes diabetes. Fact: No, it does not. Type 1 diabetes is caused by genetics and unknown factors that trigger the onset of the disease; type 2 diabetes is caused by genetics and lifestyle factors. Being overweight does increase your risk for developing type 2 diabetes, and a diet high in calories, whether from sugar or from fat, can contribute to weight gain. If you have a history of diabetes in your family, eating a healthy meal plan and regular exercise are recommended to manage your weight. Source: American Diabetes Association . | {
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6,293 | We've all seen it in movies. A villian suffocates one of his/her victims with a pillow while they sleep, killing them in a matter if a minute or so. Whenever I've pushed my head into a pillow as far as it will go, I can still breathe. I even asked one of my friends to pretend to smother me (very realistically) and I could still breathe through the pillow. Is this form of suffocation a myth? | In Belgium there is a well known and documented case (I think it even included video footage) of an asylum seeker which died this way during her expulsion, so I guess there is at least some truth to it. Definitely also depend on other factors as the type of pillow and the force applied.
Read about the case here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semira_Adamu | {
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6,363 | In the article titled Men want more testosterone, the world needs less in the Globe and Mail on Sep. 27, 2011, Margaret Wente states: Perhaps you’ve noticed that not a single woman was involved with the reckless speculation that led to the debacle of 2008, and to the European banking crisis of today. I think, to be clear, that "involved" ought to be limited to those who were making decisions that could have contributed to – or averted – the 2008 financial crisis. Some time ago I read All the Devils are Here , which I thought was an excellent piece on the topic, and though I recall women being involved in the crisis I cannot recall who it was or to what extent they may have been involved. Is it true that not a single woman was involved in the speculation leading to the 2008 financial crisis? | Erin Callan was the Chief Financial Officer of Lehman Bros. until July 2008, when she moved to Credit Suisse. | {
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6,377 | This article on Viewzone proposes that the Earth used to be smaller, and the existing continents fitted neatly together, covering the entire globe with land. As the Earth expanded, the oceans formed, pushing the continents apart. Shortly after Wegener's continental drift theory was introduced, many people tried to piece together the continents. Some pieces (like South America and Africa) were an obvious fit, but others did not fit together because of the belief that a vast ocean had to be accommodated in the models. Sam Carey, an Australian, dared to solve the puzzle without an ocean and found that the continents fit together perfectly. The claim is also presented as a neat animation . The article goes on to claim that the center of the Earth is formed of plasma, and that gravity has increased. Is this idea supported by the evidence? | Most consequences of this theory are consistent with those predicted by the plate model -- the remaining ones are gravity acceleration on the surface ( g ) changes and actual measurements. The first one is hard to judge since the expanding Earth community cannot decide on one version -- some postulate that the matter is in some magical way created inside the planet and thus g increases with time (which is consistent with giraffes being smaller than dinosaurs, but is a total nonsense from a view of physics), some try to rescue physics saying that Earth just used to be much more dense -- yet this makes g actually decrease, what invalidates this "biological proof". Finally some claim that the gravitational constant increases with time to counteract this, but this is even less probable than a spontaneous mass creation. About measurements, there were some works in which authors were summing up some current and archival measurements around some contour placed on Earth to imply that it is growing -- however this was verified using state-of-art measuring techniques and was invalidated . There are obviously many more proofs that this idea is wrong, as listed by the Wikipedia page for 'Expanding Earth' (emphasis mine): The theory had never developed a plausible and verifiable mechanism of action, but neither had any of its competing theories.[ 1 ] By the late 1970s the theory of plate tectonics made all other theories obsolete following the discovery of subduction, which was found to be an important part of a mechanism of action.[ 1 ] Generally, the scientific community finds that there is no evidence in support of the Expanding Earth theory, and there is evidence against it : Measurements with modern high-precision geodetic techniques show that the Earth is not currently increasing in size to within a measurement accuracy of 0.2 mm per year.[ 14 ] The lead author of the study stated "Our study provides an independent confirmation that the solid Earth is not getting larger at present, within current measurement uncertainties".[ 15 ] The motions of tectonic plates and subduction zones measured by a large range of geological, geodetic and geophysical techniques supports plate tectonics.[ 16 , 17 , 18 ] Mass accretion on a scale required to change the Earth's radius is contradicted by the current accretion rate of the Earth, and by the Earth's average internal temperature: any accretion releases a lot of energy, which would warm the planet's interior. Expanding Earth models based on thermal expansion contradict most modern principles from rheology, and fail to provide an acceptable explanation for the proposed melting and phase transitions. The value of g (the Earth's gravitational attraction) is known and would change considerably with any such gains in the Earth's mass or volume, along with the Earths orbit around the Sun. Paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of the Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8% of today's radius .[ 19 , 20 ] Examinations of data from the Paleozoic and Earth's moment of inertia suggest that there has been no significant change of earth's radius in the last 620 million years .[ 21 ] | {
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6,529 | My one year old daughter picked up a typical plastic supermarket grocery bag and I watched her with it briefly before taking it away, as it's common knowledge that kids aren't supposed to have plastic bags due to a risk of suffocation. After actually seeing a child with a bag, however, I wondered how much of a risk this actually is. I had a very hard time imagining my daughter being able to get her head inside of the bag to such a degree that she would actually suffocate. I'm [hopefully obviously] not advocating for any controlled experiments here! I just wondered where this common, ingrained warning comes from. How real of a danger is it when children play with plastic bags? | According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission : The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has received an average of about 25 reports a year describing deaths to children who suffocated due to plastic bags. Almost 90 percent of them were under one year of age. About 4 million children are born each year in the USA, with an infant mortality rate of 6.06/1000 live births . That's about 25000 dead infants each year, so about 0.1% of US infant mortality is due to suffocation in plastic bags. It's not a big number, obviously, but it's there (note: it may be higher if there are incidents which aren't reported to the CPSC). An older paper, Polson & Gee (1972) gives a number of case studies. | {
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6,561 | Source Stephen Fry said in the QI episode " I-Spy ": " You can't tell the age of a lobster " ( watch video ) From the American Lobster FAQ : There is no foolproof way to determine a lobster’s age . One can only make an educated guess by
looking at the lobster’s size. From Visit Maine : No one has yet found a way to determine the exact age of a lobster because it sheds its shell so often. A lobster's age is approximately his weight [ in pounds ] multiplied by 4, plus 3 years. (add to that, Lobsters might be able to live forever , as mentioned by Sandi Toksvig in the QI episode) My Question: Is body
size/weight the only biological indicator we can use to make an
" educated guess " about a lobster's age? | In many species, small granules of waste material - called " lipofuscin " - build up in the body over time. As it turns out, this can be used to measure the metabolic age of lobsters, and to give a good estimate of their chronological age. Wahle, Tully & O'Donovan (1996) found a strong correlation between lipofuscin area (corrected for carapace size) and lobster age in American lobsters ( Homarus americanus ). Metabolic age is not a precise measure of chronological age - it is affected by several other factors, including temperature, and this study controlled temperature, so they caution about using it to measure age in natural populations. Sheehy et. al. (1996) released 3-month old European lobsters ( Homarus gammarus ) (after tagging them) into the wild and then recaptured them 5.4-9.6 years later. Extrapolating from their results led them to suggest that lipofuscin concentration could age 43% of lobsters to within 1yr and 95% to within 3.5yrs - not brilliant but better than carapace length, which other studies have found only age 3% to within 1yr and 95% to within 82(!) years ( what was that about lobster immortality, again? ). Maxwell et. al. (2007) conclude: We show that neurolipofuscin concentration, measured histologically in the central nervous system of laboratory-reared Caribbean spiny lobsters, Panulirus argus , is correlated with the chronological age of both males and females. These results suggest that the neurolipofuscin technique holds great promise for use in estimating age of wild-caught spiny lobsters. Sheehy et. al. (2011) described lipofuscin accumulation as "remarkably constant" at 0.31% (by volume) per year in wild western rock lobsters ( Panulirus cygnus ). Of course, using a fluorescence microscope to measure the concentration of micrometre-sized granules in a lobster's eyestalk is a bit of effort to go to to find out how long it took your dinner to grow. | {
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6,574 | In Australia "raw milk", more commonly known as un-pasteurised milk, is mostly illegal for human consumption, except in one state, I do believe. The consensus appears to be that pasteurising the milk makes it safer to drink, but many argue (mostly farmers and a few scientists) that raw milk is safe to consume. There are many arguments and claims, but from what I've read pasteurised milk has caused more bacteria poisoning scares than un-pasteurised milk. People that grew up on a farm or still live on a farm have been drinking un-pasturised milk for decades and seem to have remained in good health. Is drinking raw milk really more dangerous than drinking pasteurised milk? | EDIT 2013/05/21 The CDC recently released statistics for the first time on raw milk consumption, and raw milk-related illnesses. They also released their own conclusions, which, ironically, don't match their own data. However, an article released a couple weeks ago, Raw Milk Reality: Is Raw Milk Dangerous? attempts to examine the best numbers available from the CDC and other sources, and does its own analysis of the relative safety of raw milk compared to other foods, and specifically, pasteurized milk. Among its findings: Dairy products, categorically, are the safest of all food types, in terms of food-borne illness outbreaks 2000 - 2007, there were 37 food-borne illness outbreaks related to raw liquid milk, affecting 800 people. Average outbreak size: 22 people 2000 - 2007, there were 8 food-borne illness outbreaks related to pasteurized liquid milk, affecting 2214 people. Average outbreak size: 277 people 2000 - 2007, raw liquid milk was responsible for an average of 100 reported illnesses per year among an estimated 9.4 million consumers of raw liquid milk, for a 1 in 94,000 chance of becoming ill 2000 - 2007, pasteurized liquid milk was responsible for an average of 277 reported illnesses per year among an estimated 246.1 million consumers of pasteurized liquid milk, for a 1 in 888,000 chance of becoming ill 2000 - 2007, raw liquid milk was responsible for 12 hospitalizations, or 1 in 6 million chance of being hospitalized due to raw liquid milk consumption The article also pulls in data from other sources to compare the relative risk of raw milk consumption with other common activities, and concludes that: Drivers are 779 times more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than raw milk drinkers are to be hospitalized for consuming raw liquid milk Air passengers are 3 times more likely to die in an aircraft accident than raw milk drinkers are to be hospitalized for consuming raw liquid milk Another recent article, Outbreaks and Illnesses from Raw and Pasteurized Milk And Dairy Products, 1998-Present looking at data over a longer time period, but for which absolute number of raw-milk consumers is not available. It shows that, for liquid milk consumption: 1998 - 2009, there were 85 food-borne illness outbreaks related to raw liquid milk, affecting 1,495 people, including no deaths. Average outbreak size: 18 people 1998 - 2009, there were 9 foud-borne illness outbreaks related to pasteurized liquid milk, affecting 2,200 people, including 3 deaths. Average outbreak size: 244 people The data from these two articles don't completely agree with each other. It's not clear where the discrepancy lies. What seems clear from my research, though, is that there has not been a single confirmed raw-milk releated death in the U.S. since the 1980s, despite CDC claims to the contrary on their web site. The CDC has even admitted their propaganda is wrong. TL;DR; / Conclusion: Using the best data currently available, strictly from a food-borne illness standpoint, consuming raw milk carries roughly 9.4 times higher relative risk than consuming pasteurized milk . But in absolute terms, both risks are incredibly small, with raw milk carrying a 1/94,000 (0.001064%) chance of illness, and pasteurized milk carrying a 1/888,000 (0.000113%) chance of illness. For many, the touted benefits of raw milk (more on that in my old answer below) are worth the added 0.000951% chance of food-borne illness . But food-borne illness is not the only risk associated with liquid milk consumption. Some other possible risks which may favor raw milk, but which are much harder to quantify, are: Pasteurized milk may contribute to many ailments, including lactose intolerance, allergies, asthma, frequent ear infections, gastro-Intestinal problems, diabetes, auto-Immune disease, attention deficit disorder and constipation ( source ). Traditional dairies in the U.S. use rBGH (which is illegal in many other countries). Consuming milk from rBGH-treated cows may increase the risk of certain cancers in humans, particularly breast and prostate cancer. ( source ) Traditional dairies, and in particular those which also use rBGH, often administer large amounts of antibiotics to their cows, which typically gets into the milk, exposing the human consumers to unnecessary antibiotics. The risks of over-exposure to antibiotics is well documented. The main concern is in making antibiotic-resistent "superbug" strains. ( source ). Note that the last two (rBGH and antibiotics) can also be avoided by purchasing organic pasteurized milk. MY OLD ANSWER; left for reference Short answer: No. In fact, pasteurized milk is often more dangerous than raw milk. Long answer: Of course, it depends. Raw milk is not inherently dangerous at all. The reason for pasteurization is not because milk is, by nature, a dangerous product to consume. Pasteurization is done for two basic reasons: 1) To kill any living contaminants, and 2) to extend shelf life. Because pasteurization kills most bacteria (good and bad) contained in the milk, it won't go bad as quickly. The down side to this is, when it does begin to sour, it goes rancid, and is no longer fit for human consumption. On the other hand, when raw milk begins to sour, it isn't actually "bad" immediately, because the live cultures in milk prevent it from going rancid so quickly. Many foods we take for granted are various forms of "sour" milk--Yogurt, Cheese, sour cream, etc. And if you consume raw milk, and it begins to sour, you can still use it to make many of these milk products . Fermentation starts digesting the milk protein casein, and digests some of the lactose. Souring of [raw] milk does not destroy any of milks beneficial properties. Treat a sample of pasteurized milk in the same way as above and putrefaction will make the milk unfit for human consumption. This is due to disease producing bacteria surviving the pasteurization process. (Emphasis in original ) And paraphrasing an Anonymous dairy farmer : Pasteurized milk gone bad will kill you - raw milk won't.....pasteurized milk rots. Now, the reason for pasteurizing milk is to kill harmful living organisms. However, it also kills most of the beneficial living organisms in the milk as well. This can, in some cases, actually lead pasteurized milk to be more dangerous than raw milk . Pasteurized milk is harder to digest, especially for those who are lactose intolerant or with digestive disorders. Today, milk is made even more indigestible by the universal practice of pasteurization, which destroys its natural enzymes and alters its delicate proteins. ( source ). Pasteurized milk has less nutritional value. ( source ) Pasteurized milk is less beneficial in boosting immune system function ( source ) Pasteurized milk is more susceptible to contamination: Due to high-volume distribution and its comparative lack of anti-microbial components, pasteurized milk when contaminated has caused numerous widespread and serious outbreaks of illness, including a 1984-5 outbreak afflicting almost 200,000 people. In 2007, three people died in Massachusetts from illness caused by contaminated pasteurized milk ( Real Milk PowerPoint , slide 30). Raw milk is useful in fighting infection, diarrhea, rickets, tooth decay, TB, asthma, allergies ( source ), diabetes 1 , Bright's disease, gastric disturbances, obesity, urinary problems, and kidney stones 2 Pasteurized milk contributes to many ailments (ironcially, many of them are also found in the list that raw milk helps treat): lactose intolerance, allergies, asthma, frequent ear infections, gastro-Intestinal problems, diabetes, auto-Immune disease, attention deficit disorder and constipation ( source ) The reason pasteurization ever caught on as a practice, was to reduce the possibility for contamination in milk. This may well have been (and may continue to be!) a valid concern, in some cases. Although the evidence is shaky, at best. The two possible sources of contamination are: Contamination passed from cow to milk As @Paula pointed out, there has been a concern that TB may pass from bovine to human. This was considered a legitimate threat in 1882, when Dr. Robert Koch discovered that bovine and human varieties of TB were deemed similar. However, Koch later changed his opinion, saying that bovine TB could not spread to humans. The professional opinion has further been adjusted since then, and the current state of affairs on bovine/human TB contamination is essentially that: [I]t appears obvious that we have arrived at a point in [the United States] when the dissemination of bovine tuberculosis is no longer a matter of serious concern. ( source ). Ironically, raw milk is actually beneficial in fighting TB in humans. Real Milk PowerPoint , slides 54-56, 58. Contamination from processing At the time pasteurization was initiated, many (if not most) of the dairies in the U.S. (and much of Europe) were filthy, and sanitation was abysmal, leading to much contamination of milk during milking and bottling. Since the invention of closed-system milking machines in the 1940s, it is possible to eliminate the most serious exposure to external contamination. Other factors affect the relative safety of raw vs. pasteurized milk as well. This site describes how a cow's diet has a strong impact on the pathogen-fighting ability of the milk produced, and as such, milk from cows fed diets heavy in heavy in grain, soybeans and cottonseed meal (common in many commercial dairy operations) must be pasteurized to be safe. On the measured safety of raw milk: Found here : Based on data in a 2003 USDA/FDA report: Compared to raw milk there are 515 times more illnesses from L-mono due to deli meats and 29 times more illness from L-mono due to pasteurized milk. On a PER-SERVING BASIS, deli meats were TEN times more likely than raw milk to cause illness ( Intrepretive Summary – Listeria Monocytogenes Risk Assessment , Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Sept. 2003, page 17). (Emphasis mine) This 132-page report examines the various scientific studies that supposedly cast a shadow over raw milk, and tries to interpret them with less (supposed) bias. The following table is taken from page 6, and shows the results of examining 70 studies purported to show the dangers of raw milk, and the various flaws in many of the reports. The paper goes on to address each of the 70 studies point-by-point. Among the findings of this report are that much of the evidence cited in the BJM article mentioned in @matt_black's answer, was flawed. Specifically, those that are mentioned in both papers: BJM Ref 1, Review p.80 - Milk-bourne illness outbreak in Scottland likely would not have been averted by pasteurization BJM ref 8, Review p.43 - Testing found no contamination in the raw milk supply BJM ref 10, Review p.41 - Contaminated raw milk was discovered, but not in milk intended for sale as raw milk. BJM ref 12,18, Review p.42 - "This is a review rather than a primary reference." and "There are no outbreaks mentioned in this review that could be said to be
conclusively linked to unpasteurized milk, and in most cases the suspected milk was
intended for pasteurization." 100% of the studies cited by the FDA to implicate raw milk were fatally flawed, and failed to show raw milk is dangerous. ( Response to the FDA , p. ii) Between 1980 and 2005, the CDC attributed 19,531 illness cases to pasteurized milk and milk products, 10.7 times more than to raw milk. From this we cannot determine if raw milk is safer than pasteurized, in part because there are no accurate estimates of raw milk consumers. ([ Response to the FDA , p. ii) Between 1998 and 2005, raw milk was associated with 0.4% of CDC-documented food-borne illnesses, including 831 illnesses, 66 hospitalizations, and a single death. ( Response to the FDA , p. iii,5) Clearly raw milk is not "perfectly safe," but neither is any other food. In conclusion, if you can find a clean source of raw milk from healthy, well-fed cows, it is probably safer than the pasteurized milk you can find at the supermarket. On the other hand, if your raw milk is unsafely handled, or comes from unhealthy cows, it may be harmful. But that's really just common sense--we all want to eat clean food, right? And as many others have pointed out, enforcing proper quality control on raw milk can be very difficult--although it has been done in many large-scale commercial operations, but usually along with a higher price tag. 1 Porter, Charles Sanford. Milk Diet as a Remedy for Chronic Disease . Long Beach, California, 1905 2 Professor Tyson, James. Journal of the American Medical Association . June, 1884. | {
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6,594 | Quasi-related Are there any perceptible differences between the sound quality of 192 versus 320 kbps MP3 files? Do expensive, “premium” speaker cables actually make a difference? I've heard this here and there in various casual conversations (hopefully others will also qualify this in the "commonly heard" bucket of claims), but one can also find references online: Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs. Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound. ( Wired Magazine - Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin ). Question: It is generally agreed among the serious listeners of classical music
that the best of the now obsolete vinyl LP records had a superior
tonal quality and better fidelity than any CD. Is this true, and why? Answer: For a CD
recording they take 44,100 snapshots in a minute. These snapshots are
then converted to digital information with a certain precision... You can probably see where I am going: by definition a digital recording doesn't include all the sound information... A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform... Therefore vinyl recording sound richer than CD recordings ... ( Google Answers: Vinyl LP sound versus CD sound ). The last three years have each set successive records for vinyl sales in the CD era. In 2010, 2.8 million LPs were sold, up 14% from 2009... Vinyl’s lasting appeal stems from a heady stew of nostalgia, tangibility and, perhaps most important of all, sound quality that musicians and fans often prefer to any other medium. “Digital is zeroes and ones, man, anyway you look at it,” says Chuck Leavell, keyboardist for the Rolling Stones. “Whether it’s a CD or a download, there’s a certain jaggedness to it. Vinyl wins every time. It’s warmer, more soothing, easier on the ears” ( Forbes Magazine - Vinyl vs. CDs: The Tables are Turning . One reason I'm skeptical of the quality comparison has to do with how records are made . In that video, around 1:25 the interviewee states that a master is made from pre-recorded, mixed music. This implies that it is already digitized. Around 3:10, he states that the music signal is amplified and made to vibrate the stylus cutting the record master. Thus, I see two paths from media to one's ear: Live music -> conversion from electrical signal to digital recording (file of some sort) -> conversion to amplified electrical signal to vibrate a cutting stylus -> engraved record -> turntable -> conversion back to electrical signal to vibrate speakers Live music -> conversion of electrical signal to digital recording (file of some sort) -> conversion back to electrical signal to vibrate speakers I could be wrong in this interpretation. Ideally, this question might have been tackled in a manner similar to this question on bitrate and noticeable quality -- essentially, with a Pepsi challenge between vinyl and CDs. Summarizing, Is there evidence that the sound produced by vinyl records is either a) of better quality (via some declared standard of measurement) or b) more pleasing to humans compared to the sound produced by CDs? | There is certainly a difference. The difference should not be looked for in sampling rates or performance, etcetera. The difference is in the production process. Example Please compare these two examples to have a specific idea of what the difference is. To easily see the difference, do listen to the plosives and sibilants like the letters "p" and "s" in the singing. Iron Maiden—The Number of the Beast (1982)—Vinyl Iron Maiden—The Number of the Beast (1982)—Digital Introduction Humans are not capable of distinguishing "digital" from "analog". See for example the following conclusion: In summary, then, no evidence was provided by Tiefenbrun during this series of tests that indicates ability to identify reliably: (a) the presence of an undriven transducer in the room, (b) the presence of the Sony PCM-F1 digital processor in the audio chain, or (c) the presence of the relay contacts of the A/B/X switchbox in the circuit. The tests were conducted in an amicable rather than confrontational atmosphere, and the parties departed feeling that the day's work had been worthwhile. Further carefully-conducted blind tests will be necessary if these conclusions are felt to be in error. — source However the production process of vinyls and CDs changes. Vinyl Sounds are etched on the surface of an LP. There are therefore physical limitations to how much dynamic range can be stored. In practice, too much range would result in having the needle skip the groove. Many of the engineers I spoke with noted that a wider frequency and dynamic range can be cut into a vinyl master than can be reproduced in playback. For example, extreme transients and high frequencies will distort because the stylus cannot properly track them in the disc's grooves. [...] At the other end of the spectrum, there are things to consider when working with bass and low-midrange content destined for vinyl. “Low frequencies use up the most space, especially if they're heavy and constant,” Golden remarks. “Care must be taken to control excessive low end. The lathe can cut it just fine, but if the volume exceeds a certain level, the record could skip when played back.” — source Also, there is a lot of difference in the frequency response in the external part of the disc from the inner part. In practice, inner songs will sound darker than outer songs. As a result, the inner tracks will sound duller than the outer tracks. The high frequencies “simply can't be reproduced the same as if they were cut on the outside of the disc,” Golden adds. “And no, it can't be fixed by adding extra high end. That would add more distortion to the inside cuts.” — source Albums are therefore mastered in a particular way to make the wide-dynamic-range masters "fit" on the media. This modifies the overall sound - a lot. Furthermore the media itself tends to saturate musically (in the way that a valve amp has a "musical" distortion). This is put to good use during mastering as well. CD Sounds are digitised on a CD. There are many advantages to this, like a much better dynamic range, higher frequency response and so on. However, this completely changes the mastering process, resulting in a different overall sound. (I couldn't find a citable source, however the fact that CD mastering is very different from vinyl mastering is quite obvious from Sterling Sound 's web page (wayback machine copy). Sterling Sound is widely regarded as one of the top 5 mastering studios in the world.) Conclusion Now--which one is better? It depends what you are looking for: vinyls have a characteristic sound which is probably a better fit for some kinds of music. Alternatively, other kinds of music, e.g. classical, do benefit a lot from the increased dynamic range of the CD. One of the first and largest supporters of digital audio was the classical conductor Herbert von Karajan, who said that digital recording was "definitely superior to any other form of recording we know". — source | {
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6,620 | There is a popular belief in Russia that electric heaters with an open nichrome heating element (red hot) "burn up oxygen" and "dry the air", unlike oil-filled ones. Is it true that a Joule heater with an open heating element would reduce absolute humidity (i. e. total amount of water) or amount of oxygen in a room? | Heating will have no effect on the oxygen level in the air unless something burns, which will use up oxygen. This is basic chemistry. An electrical heater heats because electrical current passes through it, not because anything burns, so oxygen levels cannot be directly affected. Most burning reactions in the normal atmosphere involve things burning in oxygen: it isn't obvious that the phrase "burn oxygen" means anything at all. This is all basic school level chemistry (so deserves a wikipedia reference). Here is the Wikipedia definition of combustion : Combustion (English pronunciation: /kəmˈbʌs.tʃən /) or burning is the sequence of exothermic chemical reactions between a fuel and an oxidant accompanied by the production of heat and conversion of chemical species. The other part of the claim that electric heaters dry the air is partially true depending on the definition of humidity. The humidity you experience is the relative humidity defined by Wikipedia as: Relative humidity is defined as the ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor (in a gaseous mixture of air and water vapor) to the saturated vapor pressure of water at a given temperature. In other words, relative humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air at a specific temperature compared to the maximum water vapor that the air is able to hold without it condensing, at that given temperature. If air is warmed in a closed room the amount of water won't change but the relative humidity will since warm air holds more water than cold air. So the air will feel dryer. Unfortunately the question specifies absolute humidity (or the total amount of water) and just heating does nothing to the amount so the answer is no, heaters don't dry the air . But i'm prepared to be generous and allow that electrical heaters will make air feel dryer . This is in contrast to oil or gas heaters which deplete oxygen and give off water and carbon dioxide (and some monoxide if not well maintained). In a sealed room you will eventually suffocate from lack of oxygen and presence of carbon dioxide. In a ventilated room an oil or gas heater will leave higher humidity than an electrical heater because they do release water but the electrical heater does not. | {
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6,647 | In a recent judgement Europe's highest court ruled that Stem Cells derived from human embryos cannot be patented (see BBC story here ). This provoked many scientists to argue that both research and the european economy would suffer as a result. The BBC report sums up the view of scientists like this (my emphasis): Scientists were concerned that the ruling would threaten the future of medical research, saying companies in Europe would be less likely to invest in research to develop therapies using embryonic stem cells. The basic claim here is that an inability to protect the results of their research will discourage investment in that research and harm the development of useful treatments. The standard idea behind patents is that governments agree a tradeoff with inventors: the inventors disclose how their invention works (so others can build on it for future social benefit) and, in return, they get a temporary monopoly on the invention so it is worth their while investing in it. The alternative view (often articulated by the open software movement ( good summary on Wikipedia ) is that patents inhibit innovation and are therefore a net economic loss to society. What research is there to analyse the overall economic cost vs. benefit of the patent system in the modern day? The specific claim that I hear is that patents are economically beneficial, that is, that benefits by and large outweigh the costs to the world's economy. | Patents are bad for innovation and the economy, more often being a substitute for innovation than an incentive for it Free-market economists don't normally believe that monopolies are good for society - except where intellectual property (IP) is involved, where they argue that some temporary monopolies are worth permitting to provide an incentive for innovation, which is good for all as it it is a major source of improved productivity. This makes some logical sense: If you were powerless to prevent copying of your ideas, you might not have much incentive to invest in creating those ideas. I would certainly have bought that idea before doing some research into it. Logic, however, isn't enough in the real world and it would be good to see some empirical evidence. I was surprised to find that there is significant evidence that patents and other forms of IP are counterproductive from society's point of view. That is, they inhibit innovation rather than promoting it. The full case end evidence is laid out in the book Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ( Free PDF , Hard Cover ). Their book summarises the case they make thus: It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty. Their work has influenced the work of Terence Kealey (see chapter 16 of his book Sex, Science and Profits ), an iconoclastic British scientist who is well known for arguing against government funding of science. He argues that most patents are bad outside the pharmaceutical industry, where government restrictions on what can be sold create an enormous barrier to innovation that only patents can fairly compensate. While no answer here can adequately cover the breadth of evidence in either of the references, some specific stories can give a flavour of the key issues. Several examples come from how major modern industries were initially held back because of patent disputes and only started to bring rapid innovation and general social benefits when the initial patents were broken or subverted: this is true for aircraft, cars, movies and steam engines (all the examples are summarised from much more detailed accounts in the Boldrin and Levine reference and all quotes are form their book). Henry Ford had to fight a monopolistic patent on the car before he could bring mass production to motor vehicles. The Wright Brothers were granted a broad patent on flying machines and, instead of inventing anything new, devoted many years of effort and investment to preventing anyone else in the USA from making aircraft. (The issue was aggravated because the government had invested about 70 times more than the Wright brothers in design without producing a working craft). US aviation only really took off as an industry when the government effectively revoked their patent rights in 1917 as a war measure, forcing all firms in the industry to pool their IP). The key message, though, was that there was a lack of further innovation by the original inventors once they had a patent. Movies didn't become successful in California because of the sunlight (they were mostly shot indoors!) They moved because the key firms wanted to escape Edison's very restrictive patents on cinema technology (which is particularly ironic given the way the industry lobbies for IP protection now). Even the industrial revolution might have happened faster if the patents awarded to Watt and Boulton in 1769 (expired 1800) had not been awarded. Watt's monopoly relieved him of the need to innovate further and the power and design of engines changed little until the patents ran out at which point there was a steep change in the rate of improvement of engine efficiency as the patent no longer inhibited the use of other's innovations. Other comparisons that strongly suggest that patents are not required involve either natural experiments where the rules are changed or comparisons among countries with different rules. Both Switzerland and the Netherlands spent a large part of the 19th century not enforcing patent laws: neither notably lacked innovation or industrial success compared to their European neighbours with strict laws. The USA has changed the rules on the patenting of biologicals and software relatively recently. Both provide a sort of natural experiment for the logic of patents. Yet studies on the economic benefits of patents on plants show: ...private sector investment in wheat breeding does not appear to have increased. Moreover, econometric analyses indicate that the PVPA (the Plant Variety Protection Act which, ultimately led to the patentability of plants) has not cause any increase in experimental or commercial wheat yields. On software patents: ... the increase in the number of patents in the US economy was not accompanied or followed by any visible increase in TFP [total factor productivity] or in any other measure of effective innovation or productivity. ...patenting if found to be a substitute for R&D, leading to a reduction of innovation. In short we have evidence and examples that show that patents may actually deliver the opposite of their intent: they lower the incentive to innovate and increase the cost of competition. Update The authors quoted above have a recently published paper in The Journal Of Economic Perspectives which provides a good summary of their argument: The case against patents can be summarized brielfy: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. Another update A recent edition of the Economist has summarised the debate well. In their words (my emphasis): The public-good position on patents is simple enough: in return for registering and publishing your idea, which must be new, useful and non-obvious, you get a temporary monopoly—nowadays usually 20 years—on using it. This provides an incentive to innovate because it assures the innovator of some material gain if the innovation finds favour. It also provides the tools whereby others can innovate, because the publication of good ideas increases the speed of technological advance as one innovation builds upon another. This sounds plausible. But is it true? There is much room for doubt. The evidence that the current system encourages companies to invest in research in a way that leads to innovation, increased productivity and general prosperity is surprisingly weak. A growing amount of research in recent years, including a 2004 study by America’s National Academy of Sciences, suggests that, with a few exceptions such as medicines, society as a whole might even be better off with no patents than with the mess that is today’s system. | {
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6,708 | Mecca considered by Muslims to be the holiest city of Islam. This video about the Mecca makes the following claims: Mecca is at a special point on the Earth's surface in the sense that its proportion in distance to the South and North pole, and also the proportion of eastern and western elongation, are equal to the Golden Mean . Another example here . Are these claims true? | Given the following definitions: S = distance from Mecca to South Pole N = distance from Mecca to North Pole L = distance from left side of rectangular map to Mecca R = distance from Mecca to right side of rectangular map I will make the following statements: The fact that both S/N and (N+S)/S are the golden ratio is not a surprise. That is one of the well-known features of the golden ratio and works for any two numbers 1 . Try it. This is in fact the reason why the ratios of successive numbers in the Fibonacci series converges to the golden ratio 2 . The same can be said regarding L/R and (L+R)/L The fact that L/R is the golden ratio is a function of the arbitrary selection of the starting point of the map projection. With the appropriate starting point of the left side of the map, any point along the same latitude line as Mecca will have the same L/R golden ratio. The video mentions the projection starting at the solstice line, which makes no sense because a solstice is a time of the year, not a geographic location 3 . The convention of world maps centered around Greenwich Meridian as the 0° longitude line is itself an arbitrary convention established in 1884 to standardize locations 4 , long after the city of Mecca was established, and therefore the L/R golden mean location is an accident of history. Similarly, the final point about the distance from bottom-left corner to upper-right is just as uninteresting because the ratios of hypotenuses of triangles will be the same as the ratios of the legs - an elementary Geometry fact 5 . Note that we could also reverse south/north to get another latitude line on an arbitrary world map that have all the properties discussed in the video (except that it would be the ratio from north pole distance to south pole distance instead). Given that the actual location of Mecca is roughly 21.423-21.247=0.176° off from the actual location of the golden mean (according to answer by @userknown ), which is an error of 0.176°/360°*40,075.16 km ~ 20 km 6 , if we thus allow an error tolerance of 20 km we get a total surface area of 569,000*2/510,000,000=0.00224 7 8 , or 0.22%, of the world map that fulfills the requirements in the video. This region would include such major cities as Honolulu, Hawaii and Cancún, Mexico on the north side and Francistown, Botswana on the south side 9 . Therefore, the only interesting concept in the entire video is the very first one, that the ratio of the distance from the South Pole to Mecca has a golden ratio proportion to the North Pole from Mecca (which itself is in significant error). Every other point is arbitrary or a simple mathematical deriviation. That there should be a relationship between an arbitrary number and the significance of a geographical place is a total non-sequitur (and also not unique to Mecca). References: 1 http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoldenRatio.html : Euclid ca. 300 BC gave an equivalent definition of by defining it in terms of the so-called "extreme and mean ratios" on a line segment, i.e., such that Φ = AC/CB = AB/AC 2 http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FibonacciNumber.html : The ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers approaches the golden ratio as approaches infinity, as first proved by Scottish mathematician Robert Simson in 1753 (Wells 1986, p. 62). 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solstice : A solstice is an astronomical event that happens twice each year when the Sun's apparent position in the sky, as viewed from Earth, reaches its northernmost or southernmost extremes. 4 http://wwp.millennium-dome.com/info/conference.htm : Why does the Prime Meridian (Zero Longitude) pass through Greenwich? It dates back to October 1884. At the behest of the President of the United States of America 41 delegates from 25 nations met in Washington, DC, USA for the International Meridian Conference... 5 http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Triangle.html : If a line is drawn parallel to one side of a triangle so that it intersects the other two sides, it divides them proportionally, i.e., AX/XC = BY/YC 6 http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzcircumference.htm : The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers). 7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere - I used this formula to integrate the area of the band from 21.071° to 21.423° on a sphere to estimate the size of the region of tolerance that would satisfy the requirements presented in the video for Mecca. 8 http://www.universetoday.com/25756/surface-area-of-the-earth/ : The surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers or 5.1×10^8 km^2. 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_latitude | {
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6,742 | A Christian claimed to me that: the Y-chromosomal Adam is way younger than the Mitochondrial Eve . Is this true? He argued that this was consistent with the biblical account: that Noah is Y-Chromosomal Adam and Eve is Mitochondrial Eve. Is this result really consistent with that claim? These Christian sites repeat the claim: Molecular History Research Center Evidence for Christianity I think I read somewhere that the most recent universal human ancestor might be less than 5,000 years old. That's younger than Chinese civilization. But, hey, could it be true? Some said I am missing the point that Y-Adam is not the partner of m-Eve. Actually that's the point. Sons of Noah had wives and those wives are decendant of Eve, not Noah. Hence, mitocondrial eve is older than than y chromosome Adam. The m-eve is Eve, and the Y-adam is Noah. Y chromosome adam is actually Noah. That seems to be what the Christians are trying to point out. Now, I am a half-way atheist; I don't know which one is true. | Yes, it is true to the extent that we can date accurately (see the Wikipedia links you provided, or this summary article ). The best estimates right now are that Mitochondrial Eve lived 200+-13 kya, while Y-chromosomal Adam lived 142+-15 kya. It is also true that Genesis describes Noah and his three sons (one Y chromosome) and his wife and sons' wives (4 different mitochondria) as the human passengers on Ark. However, this is just about exactly meaningless. The genetic data doesn't agree very well with this sort of arrangement, especially since there would need to be a massive population expansion after the ark, which means that many male lineages would trace back to a common choke-point; the lineage would look more like a comb than a tree. Instead, the branching pattern seems like a typical tree expected from a more stable population size (see picture on Wikipedia, for example). But so much other genetic data profoundly disagrees with this (e.g. the genetic age of pretty much any allelic variation in humans should be no more than the mitochondrial age of Eve, more or less, and this is absolutely not what is found) that Biblical literalists can only rationally accept such drastically different processes than we observe now that one can draw no conclusions about what happened back then. | {
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6,796 | Uri Geller has often performed in front of audiences where he claims he can sense the contents of an envelope without seeing inside (i.e. remote viewing). A number of witness reports are published here "Before I left home, I had drawn a valentine with an arrow through it, placed the drawing in an envelope which I sealed, and placed that envelope in a Manila envelope, which I also sealed. I asked Geller to draw whatever it was I had drawn. He asked me to concentrate on what it was, to see it in my mind, and to try to project it to him. After five minutes of this, he showed me a drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. When we opened the envelopes and he saw he had been right, he was very excited." Uri Geller claims to use paranormal means to perform these acts. I can say with absolute certainty I do not cheat. I am not a magician.
- Source Can Uri Geller use paranormal means to read envelopes? Aside: Geller has a history of dismissing skepticism and using the legal system to address criticism. | TL;DR Geller's skills could be performed by a competent magician. There is no good evidence that he uses paranormal means, and evidence that at least some of the time he cheats, so the simplest explanation is that he is a competent magician. The claim that Uri Geller can read an envelope through paranormal means is unfalsifiable. Sure, we can show: that his skills can be reproduced by competent magicians. that his skills are never reproduced under conditions which would preclude normal stage-magic. that some of his claims are false. In fact, I'll do all three below. However, that doesn't rule out that he might still be a psychic. Nonetheless, psychic abilities are an extraordinary claim, and we should expect extraordinary evidence, before we provisionally accept them as true. That evidence has not been presented. Note: I use the term "magician" here in the modern sense - i.e. a prestidigitator or illusionist who uses sleight-of-hand and other skillful but non-supernatural techniques to fool people with the impression of supernatural abilities. Now to support my three claims: 1) We can see many of his tricks can be reproduced with by a competent magician. Reproducing a Drawing in a Sealed Envelope Over the years, magicians have developed many different techniques for divining the contents of a sealed envelope. Some of these techniques (such as gimmicked notepads on which the drawing or message is made) are available on the market; others are still used by professional magicians. The methods can be as simple as peeking through one’s fingers to see the drawing being made, holding the envelope up to the light, or even opening the envelope when the viewer’s attention is distracted. A confederate may also be able to assist by conveying information about the drawing. Skeptics allege that Geller’s manager and brother-in-law, Shipi Shtrang, has acted as a confederate, and Shtrang has been present at many of Geller’s successful demonstrations. Observers often forget the presence of an accomplice, particularly if that person appears to have no active role in the proceedings. Source: Wordsmith that describes many other of his tricks. (I wish this question had been about the spoon-bending. I have better references for the spoon-bending: Banacek. I also have a stash of cheap spoons for practice. It is a physically challenging skill! Or I wish it had been about his ability to move compass needles; I saw him do that of TV and the gimmick was obvious, despite his misdirection. I've never watched him attempt the envelope trick.) 2) Under conditions which would preclude stage-magic, Geller's skills disappear. For example, when host Johnny Carson was coached on what to look for by magician James Randi, Geller could no longer demonstrate his skills . (That same video reinforces the earlier point, with Randi demonstrating spoon-binding and remote-viewing secrets.) He has never accepted the JREF Million Dollar Challenge. 3) There has been proof that some of his skills are performed by trickery. For example, he was caught on tape moving the hands of a watch. He was caught on tape bending a spoon with his hands during a piece of misdirection. | {
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6,828 | I've found the following picture online. It is about the moral/paradigm behind consistent behavior. Click to enlarge. The image text says A group of scientists placed 5 monkeys in a cage and in the middle, a ladder with bananas on the top. Every time a monkey went up the ladder, the scientists soaked the rest of the monkeys with cold water. After a while, every time a monkey went up the ladder, the others beat up the one on the ladder. After some time, no monkey dare[d] to go up the ladder regardless of the temptation. Scientists then decided to substitute one of the monkeys. The 1 st thing this new monkey did was to go up the ladder. Immediately the other monkeys beat him up. After several beatings, the new member learned not to climb the ladder even though he never knew why. A 2 nd monkey was substituted and the same occurred. The 1 st monkey participated on [ sic ] the beating for [ sic ] the 2 nd monkey. A 3 rd monkey was changed and the same was repeated (beating). The 4 th was substituted and the beating was repeated and finally the 5 th monkey was replaced. What was left was a group of 5 monkeys that even though never received a cold shower, continued to beat up any monkey who attempted to climb the ladder. If it was possible to ask the monkeys why they would beat up all those who attempted to go up the ladder ... I bet you the answer would be ... "I don't know — that's how things are done around here" Does it sound familiar? Don't miss the opportunity to share this with others as they might be asking themselves why we continue to do what we are doing if there is a different way out there. This seems like an experiment, but now I'm wondering... Was this experiment ever conducted? If not, was any similar experiment conducted that shows the same effect? | The earliest mention I could find of this experiment was in the popular business/self-help book, Competing for the future by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad (1996). Here is the quote from the book: 4 monkeys in a room. In the center of the room is a tall pole with a bunch of bananas
suspended from the top. One of the four monkeys scampers up the pole and grabs the
bananas. Just as he does, he is hit with a torrent of cold water from an overhead shower.
He runs like hell back down the pole without the bananas. Eventually, the other three try
it with the same outcome. Finally, they just sit and don’t even try again. To hell with the
damn bananas. But then, they remove one of the four monkeys and replace him with a
new one. The new monkey enters the room, spots the bananas and decides to go for it.
Just as he is about to scamper up the pole, the other three reach out and drag him back
down. After a while, he gets the message. There is something wrong, bad or evil that
happens if you go after those bananas. So, they kept replacing an existing monkey with a
new one and each time, none of the new monkeys ever made it to the top. They each got
the same message. Don’t climb that pole. None of them knew exactly why they
shouldn’t climb the pole, they just knew not to. They all respected the well established
precedent. EVEN AFTER THE SHOWER WAS REMOVED! ( Source ) The authors did not provide a source for this claim. This story was later repeated in various other popular business/self-help books. Every source online I could find erroneously attributed the experiment to one of the above authors. No one, anywhere , seems to have a reference to the actual experiment. C. K. Prahalad is deceased, but Gary Hamel is still alive. I tried contacting him several times, but unfortunately both he and his secretary were very evasive. The best I could get was Our apologies, but Professor Hamel does not have the original source information at hand in terms of your request. Given that there seems to be no evidence anywhere of this experiment ever actually taking place, that all trails of references eventually lead to the claim in this book, and that this is the earliest available mention of the experiment, until further evidence becomes available the most reasonable conclusion is that C. K. Prahalad or Gary Hamel made up the experiment for their book. Even if the above authors were not the creators of the myth, there is still reason to believe that, as @Chad puts it (comments above), this claim is an "extrapolation of predicted results combined with humanized responses." Here is a quote from an "anthropology professor who's worked with hundreds of monkeys over the last 30 years." When asked what he thought of the experiment, he responded succinctly with: If you have bananas on a pole, you'll lose your bananas. | {
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6,838 | On their website , PETA claimed the following: A recent United Nations report concluded that a global shift toward a vegan diet is necessary to combat the worst effects of climate change. And the U.N. is not alone in its analysis. Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from a standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against climate change than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid. I was wondering if there was any scientific basis for their claims, or if there are scientific proofs about the contrary. | TL;DR: A lacto-ovo vegetarian diet does use less resources than a meat-based diet. However, neither diet is currently sustainable. First off, this is the (very long) "recent United Nations report" PETA is referencing on their website and this is the press release for it The press release: (emphasis mine) Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars, UN report warns Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation , and smarter production methods, including improved animal diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions, are urgently needed, according to a new United Nations report released today. “ Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems ,” senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.” Cattle-rearing is also a major source of land and water degradation , according to the FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow–Environmental Issues and Options, of which Mr. Steinfeld is the senior author. “The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening beyond its present level,” it warns. When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 per cent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. And it accounts for respectively 37 per cent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 per cent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain. With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year , the report notes. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes . The global livestock sector is growing faster than any other agricultural sub-sector. It provides livelihoods to about 1.3 billion people and contributes about 40 per cent to global agricultural output. For many poor farmers in developing countries livestock are also a source of renewable energy for draft and an essential source of organic fertilizer for their crops. Livestock now use 30 per cent of the earth’s entire land surface , mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 per cent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 per cent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing . At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation , with about 20 per cent of pastures considered degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management contribute to advancing desertification. The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources , contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops. Beyond improving animal diets, proposed remedies to the multiple problems include soil conservation methods together with controlled livestock exclusion from sensitive areas; setting up biogas plant initiatives to recycle manure; improving efficiency of irrigation systems; and introducing full-cost pricing for water together with taxes to discourage large-scale livestock concentration close to cities. There was a study at Cornell, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition , that looked specifically at the sustainability of meat based diets vs plant based diets. They studied lacto-ovo vegetarians (who also include eggs and milk products in their diets) not vegans though. The lactoovovegetarian diet was selected for this analysis because most vegetarians are on this or some modified version of this diet. In addition, the American Heart Association reported that the lactoovovegetarian diet enables individuals to meet basic nutrient needs. The study concluded the lacto-ovo vegetarian diet used less land, water and energy than its meat counterpart. Here is the abstract: (emphasis mine) Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet, while an estimated 4 billion live primarily on a plant-based diet. The US food production system uses about 50% of the total US land area, 80% of the fresh water, and 17% of the fossil energy used in the country. The heavy dependence on fossil energy suggests that the US food system, whether meat-based or plant-based, is not sustainable. The use of land and energy resources devoted to an average meat-based diet compared with a lactoovovegetarian (plant-based) diet is analyzed in this report. In both diets, the daily quantity of calories consumed are kept constant at about 3533 kcal per person. The meat-based food system requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet. In this limited sense, the lactoovovegetarian diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet. Another study, also published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition studied the environmental effects of lacto-ovo vegetarians vs meat eaters in California. It came to the same conclusion with some interesting numbers. Here is the abstract: (emphasis mine) Food demand influences agricultural production. Modern agricultural practices have resulted in polluted soil, air, and water; eroded soil; dependence on imported oil; and loss of biodiversity . The goal of this research was to compare the environmental effect of a vegetarian and nonvegetarian diet in California in terms of agricultural production inputs, including pesticides and fertilizers, water, and energy used to produce commodities. The working assumption was that a greater number and amount of inputs were associated with a greater environmental effect. The literature supported this notion. To accomplish this goal, dietary preferences were quantified with the Adventist Health Study, and California state agricultural data were collected and applied to state commodity production statistics. These data were used to calculate different dietary consumption patterns and indexes to compare the environmental effect associated with dietary preference. Results show that, for the combined differential production of 11 food items for which consumption differs among vegetarians and nonvegetarians, the nonvegetarian diet required 2.9 times more water, 2.5 times more primary energy, 13 times more fertilizer, and 1.4 times more pesticides than did the vegetarian diet . The greatest contribution to the differences came from the consumption of beef in the diet. We found that a nonvegetarian diet exacts a higher cost on the environment relative to a vegetarian diet. From an environmental perspective, what a person chooses to eat makes a difference. | {
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6,852 | A SE moderator said : [I]n the US, at least, legal professionals are not permitted to answer questions on a site like this. It seems odd that a law would prohibit someone who has passed a Bar exam from answering questions in a public forum. It also seems odd that someone who is employed as a "legal professional" (practicing attorney, judge, etc) could not answer questions in this way. The most I can imagine is that some employers may prohibit such behavior as a condition of employment. I've also heard attorneys on call-in radio programs offering legal advice (but usually/always with the disclaimer "You should speak to a local attorney about your specific situation!") So in what cases, if any, is it illegal * for a legal professional to answer legal questions in a public forum, specifically on the Internet? * The claim is that it is "not permitted in the U.S." This may not be a claim that it's explicitly illegal, but I'm not sure how else to interpret this, since I don't know how any other form of "not permitted" would encompass the entire U.S. But if there is some other form of U.S.-wide "not permitted", please enlighten me. | First off, I am not a lawyer, and I do not play one on the 'net. This isn't anything remotely like legal advice, assuming I could even provide such a thing. Secondly, although I am an employee of Stack Exchange, I'm not writing this on their behalf (i.e., I didn't ask Robert to pre-approve this). Okay, given that… The important issues here are Unauthorized Practice of Law Attorney-client privilege The article A Quagmire of Internet Ethics Law and the ABA Guidelines for Legal Website Providers , by Margaret Hensler Nicholls, says (section III.C, D): UNAUTHORIZED PRACTICE OF LAW The unauthorized practice of law consists of providing legal advice in a jurisdiction where a person is not admitted to practice law; lawyers must not violate states’ rules on unauthorized practice. The Internet raises the threat of unauthorized practice of law occurrences because lawyers communicate more frequently and easily (often unknowingly) with people outside their licensed jurisdictions. Because an attorney may not be aware of the potential client’s domicile, the attorney may provide incorrect advice based on the wrong jurisdiction’s law. The threat of lay people giving legal advice without any license is even more concerning. As mentioned above, many non-lawyers create and maintain legal websites. These providers believe they offer legal services for less, and consumers either ignore their lack of pedigree or prefer the lower cost. Non-lawyers have been found to have engaged in the unauthorized practice of law with legal websites. In an Ohio Board of Commissioners on the Unauthorized Practice of Law decision, the court found an unauthorized practice when Palmer, a non-lawyer, offered legal advice through his website “amoralethics.com,” which boasted “Free Legal Advice” and elicited questions on legal matters. Online legal forms and software hosted by non-lawyers also pose difficulty; online wills, divorces, and contractual agreements exude an “air of reliability about the documents, which increases the likelihood that an individual user will be misled into relying on them.” ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP Attorneys may trigger attorney-client relationships and potential conflicts more easily based on website interaction. The anonymity of the Internet contributes to this increased likelihood of attorney-client relationship problems. An attorney-client relationship develops when a lawyer gives specific legal advice to a person, consents to providing legal advice, or fails to decline a person’s request, knowing the person reasonably relies on the lawyer. E-mail communication and online referrals can attach a duty as “ Model Rule 1.18 gives prospective clients protection where the attorney-client privilege has not yet descended, but the information the prospective client has provided to the lawyer should nonetheless be considered confidential.” Yet, the Model Rules do not specifically address the existence of attorney-client relationships over the Internet. Again, lawyers face uncertainty in ethics regulation. In turn, this problem impacts the consumer who may rely on a lawyer in an ambiguous situation, given the anonymous nature of the Internet and its lack of spatial and temporal boundaries. From The Ethics of Practicing Law in Cyberspace by Jennifer P. Hopkins (Section III): Can a Disclaimer Prevent a Lawyer-Client Relationship? Many legal web sites use a disclaimer to attempt to prevent a lawyer-client relationship. "Indeed, much of the legal advice-giving activity online seems to hinge on the belief that blanket use of disclaimers will protect lawyers against all risks associated with their conduct." But online disclaimers may not provide the protection that many lawyers would hope. … Even if a lawyer did create a disclaimer that potential clients read and to which they signaled their consent, the question remains whether such a disclaimer would be permissible. Indeed, if disclaimers could be so easily utilized, a lawyer could avoid the prospect of malpractice liability, or even the reach of most ethics rules, simply by expressly disclaiming the intent to create an attorney-client relationship with anyone… At some point the conduct of the lawyer would be so inconsistent with the disclaimer of a professional relationship that the disclaimer would be treated as ineffective. Three states have already ruled that disclaimers will not avoid lawyer-client relationships in the context of 900-number telephone services to provide legal advice. "A lawyer operating a '900' pay-for-information telephone number by which callers are given legal information ... enters into a lawyer-client relationship with the caller and may not avoid it by disclaimer." The validity of a disclaimer is likely to be measured against the lawyer's conduct, depending "in part on the extensiveness of the advice sought and the fact-intensiveness of the answer given by the attorney." Summary (aka the "TL;DR" section) If you're a lawyer: the American Bar Association has Model Rules of Professional Conduct that define attorney-client relationships. These have been adopted by 49 states . Whether you're a lawyer or not: You can get in trouble for Unauthorized Practice of Law. Both of these can be criminal and/or felony offenses. Further reading Legalethics.com blog Focusing on the ethical issues associated with the use of technology by legal professionals Online Legal Services: The Future of the Legal Profession by Richard S. Granat (PDF, pages 4-52) Virtual Law Practice: Taking All or a Portion of Your Practice Online by Stephanie L. Kimbro (PDF, pages 53-78) Cutting‐Edge Legal Ethics Issues for Transactional Lawyers in a Changing, Challenging Economy by Joseph H. Flack (PDF) Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Information Web Site Providers by the Elawyering Task Force (part of the ABA Law Practice Management Section) Watch Where You Set Your Virtual Foot – Advice on Dealing with Varying State Rules by Daniel J. Siegel Multi-jurisdictional Practice Of Law: Merging Theory With Practice by Stephen Gillers The State Bar Of California Standing Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct Formal Opinion No. 2003-164 (PDF) | {
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6,860 | I was surprised by the following claim from NaturalNews : Most clinical research conducted on homeopathic medicines that has been published in peer-review journals have shown positive clinical results This goes against what I heard "It's always been found equivalent to placebo", so what's going on here? | Short answer, No. Explanation of why you hear different best summed up by Ben Goldacre here : So how come you keep hearing homeopaths saying that there are trials where homeopathy does do better than placebo? This is where it gets properly interesting. This is where we start to see homeopaths, and indeed all alternative therapists more than ever, playing the same sophisticated tricks that big pharma still sometimes uses to pull the wool over the eyes of doctors. Yes, there are some individual trials where homeopathy does better, first because there are a lot of trials that are simply not “fair tests”. For example – and I’m giving you the most basic examples here – there are many trials in alternative therapy journals where the patients were not “blinded”: that is, the patients knew whether they were getting the real treatment or the placebo. These are much more likely to be positive in favour of your therapy, for obvious reasons. There is no point in doing a trial if it is not a fair test: it ceases to be a trial, and simply becomes a marketing ritual. There are also trials where it seems patients were not randomly allocated to the “homeopathy” or “sugar pill” groups: these are even sneakier. You should randomise patients by sealed envelopes with random numbers in them, opened only after the patient is fully registered into the trial. Let’s say that you are “randomly allocating” patients by, um, well, the first patient gets homeopathy, then the next patient gets the sugar pills, and so on. If you do that, then you already know, as the person seeing the patient, which treatment they are going to get, before you decide whether or not they are suitable to be recruited into your trial. So a homeopath sitting in a clinic would be able – let’s say unconsciously – to put more sick patients into the sugar pill group, and healthier patients into the homeopathy group, thus massaging the results. This, again, is not a fair test. Actual summaries to the proper reviews in the medical literature referenced here ( original lancet article ; full text on ben Goldacre's blog ) with this conclusion: Five large meta-analyses of homoeopathy trials have been done. All have had the same result: after excluding methodologically inadequate trials and accounting for publication bias, homoeopathy produced no statistically significant benefit over placebo. Update Eduard Ernst summarises a recent (april 2014), and fairly comprehensive, Australian review (pdf) of the subject thus: Not for a single health conditions was there reliable evidence that homeopathy was effective. No rigorous studies reported either that homeopathy caused greater health improvements than a placebo, or that homeopathy caused health improvements equal to those of another treatment. | {
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6,881 | The following claim has been attributed to economist Professor Herakles Polemarchakis. A couple of years ago, there were more Cayennes circulating in Greece
than individuals who declared and paid taxes on an annual income of
more than €50,000, a figure only slightly above the vehicle’s list
price. The quote seems to come from the Bulletin of the Economics Research Institute , and is available here . It has since been picked up by many news organisations, such as The Daily Telegraph (a mainstream UK newspaper). The BBC . However, the figures behind this claim do not seem to be referenced, and seem to be disputed (again, without references). Indeed, in the "comments" section to the linked article, the following is argued: In Greece there are 160000 taxpayers who have income over 50000 euros
per year. This means that according to this article there must be over
160000 Cayennes in Greece. But based on the local Porsche
representative in Greece , from 2000 to 2009 only 1560 Cayennes have
been sold in Greece! Where are the rest 159000; The numbers on this
article are preposterous. Why mr Polemarchakis is telling lies and why
now; Has anyone followed up on the figures behind this claim? Is it true, or is this a slander on Greek society? | The claim is incorrect by more than an order of magnitude. These are the numbers according to database queries we ran at the General Secreteriat for Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. In 2010 there were 130,385 taxpayers individually declaring more than €50,000 taxable income. Adding up the numbers of the published 2009 data (tables Π6Α.09 and Π6Β.09) gives a similar figure (138,060 taxpayers). The registry used for issuing the road tax contains 5808 cars with a vehicle identification number corresponding to Porsche (WP0 or WP1). | {
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6,911 | So I watched the following 1 minute long Youtube clip from CSI New York . In the clip, using what seems to be the recording from a standard bank camera, they zoom in at least 100, and see the image of the culprit in the reflection of the eye of the girl. Now, I thought this was completely ridiculous, so much so that I thought it was actually really funny. However, my friend argued that there are very good tricks for image enhancement, such as "super resolution" a procedure where multiple frames of a video to produce a much higher single resolution image. He did think the show bends the truth quite a bit, but how much? Honestly, I don't actually know anything about these things, so my question is: How good is modern image resolution enhancement? Also, how far off are the CSI television programs? | Short answer: you can obtain some very good results, but only under certain conditions and absolutely not even close to what is shown in the linked video clip. My company, Amped Software , develops image and video processing software for forensic and intelligence applications, so basically we are the real world counterpart of the CSI software. With reference to the general problem of quality enhancement, I can tell you that for our market it is a huge problem to live up to the expectations created by TV series and Hollywood movies. You can see on our samples page that sometimes the results we are able to get are really amazing, but it is important to understand that we can obtain them only under some conditions: if there is information that is covered by disturbs, but it is there , we are able to recover it. If there is no information, we can't and we must not recreate it. In this particular application is essential not only getting the results from a visual point of view, but also following a scientific workflow that must be accepted by the court . In 2010 I presented a research describing issues and results on almost 200 cases I've worked on and the final result was the following: in more than 50% of the cases there is nothing to do (for example recovering a license plate that is 5x2 pixels is completely impossible with any software on the world); in about 30% of the cases we can get some little result (for example restoring some letter of a license plate or improve the overall appearance of a face); in 10% of the cases you get good results (you get most of the license plate, for example). Please note that all these cases had severe quality issues. If their quality was good, we weren't asked to work on them. For what regards specifically resolution enhancement : when you zoom on an image you are interpolating missing pixels: from a single image you can improve visually the appearance of the image but you will not add any real detail ; super resolution techniques may yield good results under certain conditions: you should have enough frames, shifted by a non integer amount of pixels and preferably with few compression artifacts. In the best case you can expect good results within 2x and 3x zoom. What is shown in the video clip can be possible only if the original video has been shoot at several megapixels and then you will have the resolution to zoom very close (more or less like you do on Google Maps). Of course, at that point there still would be other problems, like the right focus, low light condition, the fact that the perspective of the eye is different from that of the whole subject in the video, just to mention a few. Edit 2015-01-01: you can read a more in depth explanation of this on our blog here: http://blog.ampedsoftware.com/2014/12/15/the-untold-secrets-of-forensic-video-enhancement-myth-versus-science/ | {
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6,923 | The claim is that we should be drinking water routinely to the point that we never feel thirsty, and that to not be doing so is to our detriment , at least enough for the notion to be popular amongst hikers, gym teachers, athletes and the like. While I understand that from a medical point of view at the onset of thirst we are "mildly dehydrated" (thirst wouldn't make much sense if nothing was going on), the claim is that the sensation is indicative of an already-made mistake in behavior, and that drinking water now will be of significantly less benefit than if we had beforehand, preempting thirst. Here is an example of one side of the claim: If you wait until you are thirsty, your body is already dehydrated. It takes about TWO HOURS for anything you drink to have an effect on your body’s hydration level. By the time you feel thirsty, you are two hours behind! Drinking something even the second you realize you are thirsty means that you will still be dehydrated for at least two more hours. You should be drinking enough liquids throughout the day so that you rarely (or never) feel thirsty. Here is an example of the other side . Medically, dehydration is defined as a 5% increase in the concentration of solutes in your blood. (Often this can be more conveniently detected based on short-term weight loss.) Thirst sets in at about 2%, so you'll always feel strong thirst setting in long before you're dehydrated. | No, you do not drink water before you feel thirsty. Source - Mythbusting sports and exercise products , British Medical Journal Bottom line: drinking ahead of thirst General public —Drinking ahead of thirst may worsen performance in endurance exercise and carries a rare but serious risk of hyponatraemia. The body’s internal mechanism for staying hydrated is cheaper, easier, and seems to be the best way to optimise performance Professional athletes —Elite endurance athletes perform best when they drink to thirst; some studies suggest exercise induced dehydration can improve performance The review did not find sufficient evidence to be able to say this finding is generalizable beyond endurance athletes: A high quality randomised trial measuring the performance effects of different hydration regimes during shorter
exercise (sprint-type) would determine whether the results of systematic reviews are generalisable beyond endurance athletes. | {
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6,932 | Dr. Gerald Schroeder published an article in Aish.com about the age of the Universe and the Jewish bible: So the only data I use as far as Biblical commentary goes is ancient
commentary. That means the text of the Bible itself (3300 years ago),
the translation of the Torah into Aramaic by Onkelos (100 CE), the
Talmud (redacted about the year 500 CE), and the three major Torah
commentators. There are many, many commentators, but at the top of the
mountain there are three, accepted by all: Rashi (11th century
France), who brings the straight understanding of the text, Maimonides
(12th century Egypt), who handles the philosophical concepts, and then
Nachmanides (13th century Spain), the earliest of the Kabbalists. Then he make this claim: The calculations come out to be as follows: • The first of the Biblical days lasted 24 hours, viewed from the
"beginning of time perspective." But the duration from our perspective
was 8 billion years. • The second day, from the Bible's perspective lasted 24 hours. From
our perspective it lasted half of the previous day, 4 billion years. • The third 24 hour day also included half of the previous day, 2
billion years. • The fourth 24 hour day ― one billion years. • The fifth 24 hour day ― one-half billion years. • The sixth 24 hour day ― one-quarter billion years. When you add up the Six Days, you get the age of the universe at 15
and 3/4 billion years. The same as modern cosmology. Is it by chance? But there's more. The Bible goes out on a limb and tells you what
happened on each of those days. Now you can take cosmology,
paleontology, archaeology, and look at the history of the world, and
see whether or not they match up day-by-day. And I'll give you a hint. They match up close enough to send chills up your spine. Many Jewish websites make similar claims - that their scholars made biblical predictions in advance of modern science long ago. Is this true? | No. To knock the argument down quickly: the generally accepted age of the universe, according to modern cosmology (using the ΛCDM model ) is 13.75 +/- 0.11 billion years . This doesn't match the 15.75 billion years claimed. (Not sure what happened to the 7th day? Presumably that is another 125 million years that has been forgotten about?) For further reading: The ordering of the events described in Genesis do not match the ordering of events described by science - certainly not enough to send chills down my spine. The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite Skeptics Annotated Bible | {
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6,961 | There are a couple of Android apps to detect EMF (for ghost hunting and for hazard-protection). I tried a free one which did not work. Some I can't seem to download. Has anyone tested them (against a fan, microwave or magnet, etc.) and see if it really works and is accurate at all? Here are the ones that claim to be work. Ghost Hunter (EMF, EVP, SCAN) $0.99 Entity Sensor Pro $9.99 I know it might be dependent on phones, too, but it is acceptable if it works on any phone. Edit: Please do not be distracted by the mention of ghosts in this question. The question is about EMF only, not ghosts. Since these apps are mostly used for ghost-hunting, I have listed them. My question is these apps can detect EMF and, if so, how accurately? | Yes, but not in a way that is likely to detect Ghosts if they exist Mobile phones are, by definition, devices that can detect EMF (which is electro magnetic field see wikpedia ) since their ability to communicate depends on radiofrequency fluctuations in EMFs. So apps on a smartphone can, at least in a trivial sense, detect EMF and alter it when they send a signal. Unfortunately, mobile phones are designed to detect only specific frequencies from about 800 to 2.2 GHz which are the frequencies of 2G and 3G cellular phone systems (see wikipedia again). It seems unlikely that software can turn them into devices that can detect general fluctuation in EMFs. Some apps claim to use the magenetometers to detect EMF. And stand alone EMF detectors seem to be calibrated in units like milliGauss (see here for an example) which is a measure of magnetic field strength ( wiki definition ). This suggests that the sort of EMFs sought are low frequency changes in magnetic fields. So perhaps this is more likely to work as that is just what magnetometers can do. However, there are many many sources of interference that alter the background magnetic field of the earth (which is what magnetometers detect) as anyone who walks around a built up area while using the compass app on their phone will know. Large steel-framed buildings, cars, iron lamp-posts all cause major field changes that overwhelm the background field. As one useful site on sensors reports: The magnetometer is commonly found on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets, but it is one of the most difficult sensors to interpret. It is commonly called a compass since it measures the strength of the magnetic field in three dimensions, but does not necessarily point north. In fact magnetic interference can cause it to behave unpredictably, as often seen in augmented reality apps. Even the believers don't seem to take the idea of detecting ghosts via phones seriously. This app claims it is is "just for fun". This discussion (I think fairly characterised as taking place on a believer site) dismisses the idea that phones can be reliable ghost detectors. So, yes phones can detect EMF. But ghost detection apps are likely just reporting random background noise. | {
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6,967 | Many believe because of the placement of specific words in Psalm 46 that William Shakespeare helped in the translation of the King James bible to English . In 1610, the year of the final editing stages, Shakespeare would have been 46 years old (born April 1564). Psalms 46 (approximately the middle of the Bible) has a unique subliminal message, or does it?? Counting from the beginning of Psalm 46, the 46th word is shake. Counting from the end of Psalm 46, the 46th word is spear. Is it possible for these words to be a mere coincident? Or is it true that on Shakespeare’s 46th birthday, while editing the King James Version of the Bible, he chose Psalm 46, and made sure that combining the 46th word from the beginning and the 46th word from the end will read “Shake spear”? While I am inclined to accept that this is just a bit of misplaced pattern recognition, I am interested in what the scholarly evidence actually supports. | TL;DR: The claim has dubious origins and no solid proof I have seen this claim repeated by numerologists , but not by literature experts. In fact, from a literature standpoint, it is a pretty ludicrous claim, since we are not even sure that Shakespeare wrote the text that is actually attributed to him , let alone the King James version of the Bible. The claim in itself is not supported by any facts. So what if Shakespeare was 46 at the time? Why would he use his age to secretly sign a translation—and, by the way, why would he do the translation at all? Are the words shake and spear actually a literal transaltion of the original words? Does it mean that he was also the original hebrew author of the Bible? It is well known who the authors were: The translators were scholarly men who were experts in the biblical languages, and they were convinced of the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. — source Finally, the translation process was tightly regulated, and the translation was peer-reviewed for accuracy. This alone is a good indicator that a single author would not be able to insert terms at will in the translation. Fifteen general rules were advanced for the guidance of the translators: [...] 8 . Every particular Man of each Company, to take the same Chapter or Chapters, and having translated or amended them severally by himself, where he thinketh good, all to meet together, confer what they have done, and agree for their Parts what shall stand. | {
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6,987 | It's a common trope in movies that certain people, either spies or mercenaries, specialize in assassination. (An apparently well-paying but wearing specialty, since generally the assassins are freshly retired before being dragged back in for one last job...) Is there any evidence that such a role has existed in modern times (say, since the end of WW2)? I think there's a common-sense distinction between a movie-style assassin and a military sniper, a Mafia hit man, or a criminal thug: Non-uniformed Killing is primary job description, not a by-product Does not decide on victim; is ordered / paid to perform assassination Is not directly involved with the victim (is "brought in to handle the job") Target is individual (different than a bomb-maker) Reason to believe they've assassinated more than once The last point is to weed out either one-off intelligence assassinations or a willing-but-idiotic psycho who takes out a classified ad in "Soldier of Fortune." | Wikipedia has an article about contract killers where some of them are listed. The ones that look the most like what you're searching for are: Christopher Dale Flannery ("Mr Rent-A-Kill") Richard Kuklinski Alexander Solonik In short: Yes, contract killers exist. | {
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6,996 | The top 10 worst foods listed at planetgreen.com elects diet soda as the number one worst food/beverage, even worse than regular soda. However, I find it a little hard to believe, since the number of calories is much lower and the sugar content is null. Is it preferable to drink regular soda? Diet soda is my choice for the Worst Food of All Time. Not only does diet soda contain most of the problems of regular soda, it contains aspartame, now called AminoSweet. According to research by Lynne Melcombe, author of Health Hazards of White Sugar, aspartame is linked to the following health conditions : anxiety attacks; binge-eating and sugar cravings; birth defects; blindness; brain tumors; chest pain; depression; dizziness; epilepsy; fatigue; headaches and migraines; hearing loss; heart palpitations; hyperactivity; insomnia; joint pain; learning disabilities; PMS; muscle cramps; reproductive problems; and even death. Aspartame’s effects can be mistaken for Alzheimer’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, epilepsy, Epstein-Barr virus, Huntington’s chorea, hypothyroidism, Lou Gehrig’s disease; Lyme disease, Ménière’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and postpolio syndrome. That’s why I give Diet Soda the Worst Food of All Time award. | Hysteria around the aspartame in diet drinks is not justified by the evidence It is quite hard to prove a negative but the simple observation that hundreds of millions of people take aspartame containing drinks every day without apparently causing any notable epidemiological evidence of all the effects should be of some significance. As far as I can tell no such evidence has ever been presented and most of the "evidence" is merely anecdotal. Here is what a 2004 BMJ editorial said about the evidence: Evidence does not support links between aspartame and cancer, hair loss, depression, dementia, behavioural disturbances, or any of the other conditions appearing in websites. Agencies such as the Food Standards Agency, European Food Standards Authority, and the Food and Drug Administration have a duty to monitor relations between foodstuffs and health and to commission research when reasonable doubt emerges. Aspartame's safety was convincing to the European Scientific Committee on Food in 1988, but proving negatives is difficult, and it is even harder to persuade vocal sectors of the public whose opinions are fuelled more by anecdote than by evidence. The Food Standards Agency takes public concerns very seriously and thus pressed the European Scientific Committee on Food to conduct a further review, encompassing over 500 reports, in 2002. It concluded from biochemical, clinical, and behavioural research that the acceptable daily intake of 40 mg/kg/day of aspartame remained entirely safe—except for people with phenylketonuria. For those who argue that aspartame releases toxic substances in the body when metabolised (though it is hard to see how natural amino acids are toxic) it is worth bearing in mind the doses involved in typical diet drinks. This lucid explanation and summary of actual evidence appeared in the BMJ in response to some of the more hysterical critics of aspartame who criticised the editorial quoted above (my emphasis): Mercola talks about “flooding the brain” with amino acids, presupposing that aspartame causes excessive rises in plasma concentrations of phenylalanine that then cross the blood-brain barrier. Plasma phenylalanine rises to 80-120 mmol/l after a protein meal such as a glass of the “natural substance” milk, about the same as after a dose of 34 mg aspartame per kg body weight ( about 28 canned drinks sweetened with aspartame consumed at once ); current consumption data show that average daily intake is less than 1% of this and maximum intake less than 10%. Briffa thinks that aspartame metabolism produces methanol toxicity. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, to cause toxicity in humans, 200-500 mg methanol per kg body weight is needed to produce sufficient amounts of its metabolite, formate (federal register 1984). This corresponds to drinking 600-1700 cans of diet soft drink at once , an amount not achieved after a dose of 200 mg aspartame per kg body weight. It is also worth noting that studies in children show that sugary drinks make them fatter than artificially sweetened drinks, though the evidence in adults is mixed (perhaps because of confounding as people already concerned about weight may tend to drink lower calorie drinks confusing the direction of cause and effect). So, overall, there is no convincing reason to suppose that diet drinks sweetened with aspartame are bad for you, especially when compared to the empty calories of sugary drinks which have plenty of bad effects, especially in children. Update There have been several low quality studies suggesting that aspartame containing drinks don't have the expected effects on obesity (they don't have any calories, so you might think they ought to help compared to sugary drinks). But a better quality recent study (“Consumption of sweet beverages and type 2 diabetes incidence in European adults: results from EPIC-InterAct”) has looked at some of the implications of sugary drinks on long term health and has found a significant association with Type 2 diabetes. The summary of the paper claims: Results In adjusted models, one 336 g (12 oz) daily increment
in sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drink
consumption was associated with HRs for type 2 diabetes of
1.22 (95% CI 1.09, 1.38) and 1.52 (95% CI 1.26, 1.83),
respectively. After further adjustment for energy intake and
BMI, the association of sugar-sweetened soft drinks with type
2 diabetes persisted (HR 1.18, 95% CI 1.06, 1.32), but the
association of artificially sweetened soft drinks became
statistically not significant (HR 1.11, 95% CI 0.95, 1.31).
Juice and nectar consumption was not associated with type 2
diabetes incidence. Conclusions/interpretation This study corroborates the
association between increased incidence of type 2 diabetes
and high consumption of sugar-sweetened soft drinks in
European adults. The lack of significance of the effect in artificially sweetened drinks after adjustment is noteworthy as it suggests that one reason why other studies have not seen the effect on weight is that they did suffer from confounding caused, probably, because the already fat are more likely to take diet drinks. This study concludes that, for a given group, taking too much sugary drink is clearly bad for you. | {
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6,999 | Is the attribution of this quote to Marcus Aurelius correct? Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. Examples against the attribution: Three shouts on a hill top blog post and Wikiquote Examples in favour of the attribution: GoodReads and Richard Dawkins.net | No. The main body of writings from Marcus Aurelius is The Meditations . I read The Meditations very carefully when preparing to write my 2005 book, Marcus Aurelius: The Dialogues (Shepheard-Walwyn). I certainly cannot recall having read this particular quote by Aurelius. [Mod note: Having answered the question above, the following is speculation by an expert in the field, which may cast more light on the origins of the misquote.] I did however have MA in my book engage in a fictional debate re the classic question: If evil falls upon the innocent, how can the gods be just? In my book, MA considers each of the standard logical answers to the question: They are not just; They are unaware of the evils that befall upon the innocent; They are aware but powerless to intervene; The gods don't exist. BTW: I have MA dismiss each of the above answers. With all due modesty on my part, I wonder if the above quote may possibly have been triggered by this particular section of my book. Could I imagine MA making such a quote? Yes, in part, I could. Certainly, he was doubtful whether the after-life existed but was convinced that whether it did or not was irrelevant to how we should choose to behave in this life. That said, he disdained the concept of living with the object of achieving honour in the minds of posterity. Hence, I am dubious he would have said "If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones". I believe that MA's key message for himself (and now, as it happened accidentally, for us) was that to achieve peace of mind (the spirit at rest with itself) then we should engage with life in a virtous, charitable and kindly manner: That the peace of mind we thereby earn is sufficient reward in itself; we neither need - nor deserve more. | {
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7,017 | I had thought that Lamarckian evolution had been essentially dismissed in favour of Darwinian evolution. Lamarckian evolution as I understand it is essentially the idea that the traits an organism develops in it's lifetime can then be passed to its offspring. However, Wikipedia states that it is still being considered and investigated and so has apparently not been completely dismissed. Interest in Lamarckism has recently increased, as several studies in
the field of epigenetics have highlighted the possible inheritance of
behavioral traits acquired by the previous generation I am getting out of my depth here, however I thought epigenetics was genes being suppressed or influenced by the environment which is similar but separate from learned traits being passed on. Is Lamarckian evolution disproven and being conflated with epigenetics here, or is there still credence being given to the theory that traits acquired in a lifetime can be passed on? | I’m sorry, this is a long one. Unfortunately, the topic is complicated and I try to make it as understandable as possible. I’ll omit most of the technical details since they are hard to explain and don’t add a lot. Executive Summary (“tl;dr”) Epigenetic modifications do not constitute, nor enable, Lamarckian inheritance. Papers and reviews that claim this use a convoluted and ultimately useless definition of Lamarckism and inheritance. However , a paper from December 2011 does actually demonstrate a very specific case where Lamarckian inheritace does occur (without epigenetic involvement). It bears repeating that this does not in the least violate Darwinism. In fact, the results, though surprising, are entirely in line and predicted by Darwinism – the mechanism actually relies on Darwinism. Contrary to popular belief, Darwinism and Lamarckism are not actually in opposition. Preliminary The problem, as so often, is the unclear definition of terms: what, exactly, is Lamarckian inheritance ? Ask five scientists today and you will get six answers. And Lamarck himself would have disagreed with all of them. This is simply due to the fact that Lamarck wasn’t aware of a lot of mechanistic concepts that were developed long after his death – such as the distinction between somatic cells and germline. This distinction leads to the concept of the Weismann barrier and it’s of eminent importance for our modern understanding of inheritance (and hence Darwinism): simply put, the Weismann barrier postulates that in order for traits to be inheritable, they need to be carried in the germline. As a consequence, modifications in the soma (non-germline cells) are not inherited. Most scientists today see this as a direct opposition to Lamarckism. But there are of course plenty of organisms (most, in fact) that do not have a distinction between soma and germline: notably, all unicellular life. For those life-forms, all genetically acquired traits (be it through mutation or through the integration of plasmids ) are heritable. This is trivially true. Enter Epigenetics Once again, there are different definitions, but the generally agreed-on definition of epigenetics today runs something like this: Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in cell behaviour that are not due to changes in the genetic sequence. Notice that here, “heritable” does not refer to heritability of organisms, just of cells: the daughter cells of a dividing mother cell inherit its epigenetic traits (and once again, this isn’t Lamarckism, it’s not even Darwinism, it’s on a much lower level). There are several known mechanism of epigenetics, notable among them methylation and histone modification . How exactly they work isn’t terribly relevant; what’s important is that they modify the accessibility of genes on the genome: they control whether a cell can actually read a section of the genome and use it. Cells use this to determine their specificity: how do muscle cells and brain cells know which job to do? Epigenetic modifications are (part of) the answer. How Heritable Are Epigenetics? Epigenetics are not generally heritable (due to the Weismann barrier). There have been several papers that, using similar lines of reasoning, have tried to argue that epigenetics can lead to the inheritance of acquired traits. I will showcase the argument using one well-known paper, Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior [1]. The paper examined two different groups of mice which were raised by two phenotypically different mothers. Group 1 had been licked and groomed by their mother in the first six days after their birth. Group 2 hadn’t. Female group 1 mice predominantly developed into mothers which would themselves lick and groom their offspring (“high LG/ABN”). Group 2 females developed into mothers which neglected their offspring (“low LG/ABN”), as shown in the following schematic: It was shown that the mechanism behind this is epigenetic: pups of a high LG/ABN mother had increased serotonin levels which in turn led to decreased methylation of some genetic regions which modified their behaviour. And since the behaviour is self-perpetuating, the authors argued that it’s a form of inheritance (“ soft inheritance ”). However, this is in fact not entirely true: the “inheritance chain” could be broken simply by raising the pups away from their mother for the first six days after birth. “True” inheritance would’t be broken by that. In fact, the whole argument is similar to saying that nationality is passed on by Lamarckian inheritance because children raised by, say, French parents are themselves predominantly French, and raise French kids. Other papers (such as [2]) fall prey to similar flaws. Jerry Coyne has aptly summarised the whole field as follows: In nearly all of these examples, the changes disappear after one or two generations, so they couldn’t effect permanent evolutionary change. […] I am not aware of a single case in which an adaptive change in an organism – or any change that has been fixed in a species – rests on inheritance that is not based on changes in the DNA. This is pretty damning: none of these papers demonstrate what could reasonably be termed Lamarckism. Real Lamarckism In December 2011, there has finally been a paper which convincingly demonstrated a real case of Lamarckian inheritance: Transgenerational Inheritance of an Acquired Small RNA-Based Antiviral Response in C. elegans [3]. The paper examines C. elegans (a nematode or roundworm which serves as a model organism in biology). Normally, those nematodes don’t get infected by viruses because they have developed a highly sophisticated defence mechanism called RNA interference (RNAi). This mechanism relies on so-called small-interfering RNAs (siRNAs) produced by the cell which recognise and pair up with viral RNA that has entered the cell. Those complexes are then in turn destroyed by the cell. The paper looked at nematodes where the RNAi mechanism had been knocked out (removed): the cells could no longer generate siRNAs, and hence had no defence against the virus invaders. Now, if you artificially put siRNAs into the cells, those cells can once again defend against a specific virus. The authors could show that under very specific circumstances, putting siRNAs into the cells was enough to trigger an inheritable virus resistance, even though the siRNA-generating mechanism was still knocked out. The nematodes had inherited an acquired, non-genetic trait (virus resistance) , and this inheritance was sustained over many generations. Since I’ve explicitly mentioned the Weismann barrier before, I should note that this experiment does not invalidate the Weismann barrier: this heritability only occurred in very specific circumstances, namely, when all of the cells in the nematode were provided with siRNAs. This notably includes the germline cells. Summary Despite frequent claims to the contrary, no connection between epigenetics and Lamarckism has ever been demonstrated. Inheritance of acquired traits from epigenetic modifications is transient at best, and it’s contested whether it constitutes inheritance at all. On the other hand, a clear example of Lamarckism has now been observed, albeit under very constrained, artificial circumstances. And while this is a very interesting result, it is not surprising: any competent biologist would have predicted the paper’s result, given the paper’s premises, and ignoring potential ways in which the experiment could go wrong, because its outcome is entirely predicted by modern biology. A Final Remark There are a lot of misconceptions flying around. Articles with titles like Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong abound. There is no nice way to put it – these pronouncements are untrue. Nothing found in the papers cited here, nor in similar papers, either directly or implicitly contradicts “conventional evolution” – Darwinism. In fact, all of these studies heavily rely on predictions made by modern evolutionary theory. It’s just blatant misreporting by the media, due to two unfortunate facts: most science journalists don’t understand the science, even rudimentarily; and most scientists can’t even explain their research clearly to their colleagues, let alone lay people. [1] Ian C. G. Weaver, Nadia Cervoni & al. , Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior , Nature Neuroscience 7, 847–854 (2004) [2] Sheau-Fang Ng, Ruby C. Y. Lin & al. , Chronic high-fat diet in fathers programs β-cell dysfunction in female rat offspring , Nature 467, 963–966 (2010) [3] Oded Rechavi, Gregory Minevich & Oliver Hober, Transgenerational Inheritance of an Acquired Small RNA-Based Antiviral Response in C. elegans , Cell 147 (6) , 1248–1256 (2011) | {
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7,035 | It seems like such an obviously false claim, but I keep running into the claim that men are "Wired differently" than women and therefore can't control their lust. The claim in conversation was "However, at the end of the day, men's brains are wired a certain way, and the only thing they can do is avert their gaze if they're really trying hard to respect a woman that they're talking to but are getting distracted by her looks." ( This forum thread ). I want to refute the idea that men are innately "distracted by [women's] looks" because they are "wired [that] way" and therefore incapable of respecting a woman's opinion or having a proper conversation unless she's covered from head to toe. However, I'd like to do it properly, citing actual studies, since this is a widely-held claim and tied in ultimately with religion. Examples: Anthropology Matters cites a 2000 study on muslim women's opinions: 'Men can't control themselves' [...] Women who wear hajib [...] believe it is men's sexual desires that are being controlled Men are also responsible to control their eyes and minds. However, I think many women are unaware of how difficult this is for men [...] Men and women are wired differently and we women may never understand what men go through." From an article on The Falcon Funny thing is I have taken classes on modesty and have discovered that men are wired different than women. It is a scientific fact that a mans optical nerve is directly linked to his penial nerve and that is why he gets hard when he sees a womans skin" From a forum . Because men and women are “wired” differently when it comes to the human body. The fact is, it doesn’t take much visual stimulus at all for guys to become sexually aroused. The sight of the female body, even just a little bit and even if it’s a complete stranger, can trigger sexual thoughts instantly. This might be difficult for women to understand, but it’s absolutely true. [...] Remember, the sight of a woman’s body is so powerful for men, that unless they’re well-trained and highly disciplined, they’ll have a difficult time refraining from sexual thoughts. [...] Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, if you present yourself in a way that is sexually revealing, even in the slightest of ways, many men will want your body for pleasure without regard for you as a person. Many men will see you as sexually loose. Other men will be constantly distracted with sexual temptations and find it hard to get to know you as a person. from an article on Love Matters Women must learn that men are “wired” differently and the way a woman dresses can have a definite impact on how a man reacts to her. As an example, if a man is watching a TV talk show or interview, and sees a modestly dressed woman sitting on a chair or couch and she is wearing a dress or skirt that extends several inches below the knees, she is viewed as a total woman and the mans concentration is on her, as a complete person, and on what she is saying or whatever her purpose is for being on that particular show. However, if you take the same woman and shorten her skirt so that it is two or three inches above the knees, then the man perceives her in a different manner, more as a sexual object. He no longer views her as a whole person worthy of respect. Instead, he sees her as a collection of parts, with some parts drawing more attention than others. This sexual “evaluation” all takes place in split second in the brain, but has the effect of distracting the man from what she is saying, because her appearance is sending a different message. Even if they are full length and not tight fitting, a pair of slacks on a woman has the same psychological effect of dividing her up into parts”. (from a forum seemingly quoting Dr. Anne Marie McDonnell). | I'm torn whether this addresses the question. That's because I'm not sure if the question, as it stands, is answerable. There has been a very recent set of experiments published exploring this area: More Than a Body: Mind Perception and the Nature of Objectification . Kurt Gray, Joshua Knobe, Mark Sheskin, Paul Bloom, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nov 2011. DOI: 10.1037/a0025883. The experiments looked a number of aspects of how people (both men and women) perceived others differently based on their state of dress, sexualised pose, attractiveness, or emphasis on their bodies, etc. It is a complex paper, and difficult to summarise all the experiments here. (Actually, I take that back: their own abstract does a reasonable job, which I have cribbed from.) They concluded people (men and women) did perceive the minds of others differently based on these factors. However, they found that it didn't fall into a simple definition of "objectifying" (in their words "viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits".) They found that people changed their perceptions to reduce inferences of "agency (self-control and action)", but increase inferences of "experience (emotion and sensation)" The effect of a body focus on mind
perception also influenced moral intuitions, with those represented as a body seen to be less morally
responsible (i.e., lesser moral agents) but more sensitive to harm (i.e., greater moral patients; [...] These effects suggest that a body focus does not cause objectification per se but, instead, leads to a redistribution of perceived mind. It suggests that men (nor women) do not , as the question's quotes suggests, treat "immodestly dressed" 1 women (or men) as merely "as a collection of parts", while supporting the view that men (and women) may treat immodestly dressed women (and men) differently. Limitations This doesn't completely address the question. I couldn't see anything in the paper that suggested women and men reacted differently (except where there was symmetrical differences between the perceptions of photos of the same and opposite genders), but I also couldn't see that they were looking for such a pattern. So, there's no evidence here of being "wired" differently, but I don't see how that could be proven in any case. The subjects were not asked to overcome these feelings, so it is impossible to say whether it would be "easy" for them to compensate for them. 1 I am not a big fan of the term "immodestly dressed", because people's definitions of "modestly dressed" vary so much. | {
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7,069 | Some websites claim that you can know which country printed an euro banknote, by looking at the serial number. Is that technique fool-proof ? | This really depends what you mean by where Euro banknotes are from. It can either mean by which country they are issued (which would be most logical) or where they were physically printed (note, that physically printing is not done by all Eurozone countries, and some non-Euro countries do the printing). In either case you can find information in the numbers printed on banknotes, but only in the first case it's the serial number. euro notes do not have a national side indicating which country
issued them (which is not necessarily where they were printed) . This
information is instead encoded within the first character of each
note's serial number. (source: Wiki ) Currently in use: Z — Belgium Y — Greece X — Germany V — Spain U — France T — Ireland S — Italy P — Netherlands N — Austria M — Portugal L — Finland H — Slovenia G — Cyprus F — Malta E — Slovakia D — Estonia However, where the banknotes have been physically printed can be determined by another number: On each of the seven denominations of the banknote, there is a small
six-character printing code which uniquely identifies the printing
information of each banknote . These printing codes have an initial
letter, followed by three digits, followed by a single letter, and
ending in a digit, for example, "G013B6". The initial letter
identifies the printing facility, as described below. (source: Wiki ) D — Setec Oy, Vantaa, Finland E — F. C. Oberthur, Chantepie, France F — Österreichische Banknoten und Sicherheitsdruck, Vienna, Austria G — Koninklijke Joh. Enschedé, Haarlem, Netherlands H — De La Rue, Gateshead, United Kingdom J — Bank of Italy, Rome, Italy K — Central Bank of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland L — Banque de France, Chamalières, France M — Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre, Madrid, Spain N — Bank of Greece, Athens, Greece P — Giesecke & Devrient, Munich & Leipzig, Germany R — Bundesdruckerei, Berlin, Germany T — National Bank of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium U — Valora—Banco de Portugal, Carregado, Portugal Printing code is bit harder to see than the serial number: In case of the banknotes issued by Greece, they may have been physically printed in 5 different locations:
Austria, Netherlands, Germany (both locations) and the Greece itself. | {
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7,119 | I've seen quite a few of these "tongue maps", showing discrete borders between taste zones and often conflicting setups, like these two: Anecdotally, I can feel all tastes all over the tongue, more or less equally well, so I don't really understand what these map are supposed to indicate. Does the tongue have different taste zones as shown? | I remember learning the tongue map in school, but it's a myth . From The New York Times : In a study published in the journal Nature in 2006 , a team of scientists reported that receptors for the basic tastes are found in
distinct cells, and that these cells are not localized but spread
throughout the tongue . That said, other studies suggest that some
parts may be more sensitive to certain flavors, and that there may be
differences in the way men and women detect sour, salty and bitter
flavors. Origin of the myth : The original myth stems back to the early 1900′s when a German
reseacher named Hanig published data on taste sensitivity of different
areas of the tongue . The differences in sensitivity he reported were
real — but they were so slight as to be of no practical significance.
Nobody bothered to check or refute it until many years later, when the
idea was already firmly rooted in our popular consciousness, and
textbooks. Source: Bartoshuk, L. M. 1993. The biological basis of food perception and acceptance. Food Qual. Pref. 4:21-32 More: Live Science - The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked How Stuff Works - How Taste Works University of Washington - That's Tasty Aroma Dictionary - Challenging the Tongue Taste Map Stephen Fry - QI: Tongue Map | {
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7,167 | I have found the following statement on an article of feminism : Do you know who think all men are rapists? Rapists do. They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again. Do studies support that a significantly higher percentage of convicted or self-reported rapists think it is common to practice rape, in comparison to non-rapists? | I've been trying to answer some of the old, highly-voted unanswered questions recently - which brings me to this attempt to answer one of my own. This has been one of the less fun topics to research; some of the concepts below are distasteful (but not explicit.) Depends What 'Normal' Means It turns out I accidentally hit on a key issue in the question title "Do rapists think rape is normal?"; I need to elaborate on a subtle distinction. One issue is whether or not someone sees rape as a common or typical action for men. Another issue is whether or not someone sees rapists as "normal" - e.g. agrees more with the statement that `Rapists are "normal" men.' than the statement `All rapists are mentally sick.' Even though I do not show whether or not rapists see rape as more common than "regular" people, I will show below that they do NOT see rape as more normal than "regular" people. I believe that it is a reasonable leap to think if they don't see rape as any more normal, they won't think that typical men are rapists, and thus this is counter-evidence for the claim made in the question. The Evidence Feild: Survey of 20 rapists and 1174 non-rapists A key study in this area is by Feild: Hubert S. Feild, Attitudes Toward Rape: A Comparative Analysis of Police, Rapists, Crisis Counselors, and Citizens Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 36(2), Feb 1978, 156-179. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.36.2.156 Feild conducted surveys of many men (n=528), many women (n=528), many police officers (n=258), many female counsellors from a rape crisis centre (n=118) and a small number convicted rapists in a mental hospital (n=20). Note: This was back in 1978. Society's opinions about women and rape have changed a lot in the past 30-odd years [Ref: Segal and Stermac (1985), that I will introduce further below]. The surveys asked a number of questions about their attitude to rape, and they were processed to give each person a score along a number of axes. That is, each person was given a rating according to a number of factors: Woman's Responsibility in Rape Prevention; Sex as Motivation for Rape Severe Punishment for Rape Victim Precipitation of Rape Normality of Rapists Power as Motivation for Rape Favorable Perception of a Woman After Rape Resistance as Woman's Role During Rape Factor 5 is the relevant factor for this discussion. Now, the variability in Factor 5 was partially accounted for by a number of determinants: Race (classified as Black or White), Marital Status, Knowledge about Rape all had a correlated with opinions on Factor 5. For some of the subgroups, some other variables were correlated: For regular Men and Women, their attitude toward women also played a part on their opinion on Factor 5. For police officers, their years of education played a part. However, in the critical question of whether the grouping of the respondents into Citizens, Rapists, Police officers and Counsellors, it turns out Factor 5 is only statistically significantly different for the counsellors. That is, there was not a significant difference between citizens, rapists and police officers when it came to their attitudes about the normality of rape. This is the key table from the study. It is tricky to understand. The important point to notice is that the numbers against "Normality of Rapists" under Citizens and under Rapists both have the same a superscript, indicating they are not significantly different (at p < 0.05). Summarising the weaknesses of this evidence: it's about "normality" not frequency, it is from 1978, the sample size of rapists isn't huge and all the rapists were drawn from a mental hospital. Nonetheless, it shows the attitudes of regular people and rapists were not significantly different when it came to the normality of rapists. Segal and Stermac: Survey of 40 rapists, 40 other offenders and 40 non-rapists I'm veering a little off-topic here, but I think this addresses some of the questions about the above study. In a response to the Feild study, in 1984 Segal and Stermac attempted to address some of its shortcomings. Zindel V. Segal and Lana Stermac, A Measure of Rapists’ Attitudes Towards Women International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Vol 7(3-4), 1984, 437-440. doi: 10.1016/0160-2527(84)90023-2 They increased the sample size to 40 rapists - importantly, they sampled 20 from a mental institution and 20 from a regular prison. They also only took respondents with an above average IQ (the reason for this is unclear). To control for institutionalisation, they compared them against 40 non-sex offenders who had been imprisoned. They also compared to 40 citizens, but they were careful to match against equivalent men at the same low socio-economic status and intelligence. They used a standard "Attitudes to Women" questionnaire. As an aside, they noticed that the community standards for the attitudes for women had changed a lot (become more liberal) since the questionnaire had been first measured, a decade earlier in 1973. They were surprised by the results: Contrary to predictions made, rapists at both centres did not differ from other offenders or from community based males, in their perceptions of women’s roles. ... The findings reported are also consistent with research indicating little difference between rapists and
other low SES men on measures of social competence (Segal & Marshall, 1985; Stermac & Quinsey, in press). In fact, in the Segal and Marshall study, only high SES men differed significantly from rapists and low SES controls in their attitudes
towards women and on other indices of heterosexual social skill. Now, this study has strayed even further from the original question. It is asking about attitudes to women, not if rape is normal or if rape is common. However, it is important because it supports the view that rapists do not have a vastly different attitudes to their non-sex-offending peers. Feelgood et al: Survey of 25 rapists, 36 child molesters and 25 violent offenders Another survey looking at the attitudes, coping skills and cognitive distortions of rapists was examined as part of a Masters dissertation by Steven Feelgood. Steven Feelgood, Franca Cortoni, Anthony Thompson, Sexual coping, general coping and cognitive distortions in incarcerated rapists and child molesters,Journal of Sexual Aggression, Vol. 11, Iss. 2, 2007, DOI:10.1080/13552600500073657 Rapists did not report more support for rape-supportive distortions than the violent offender comparison group. [...]
Evaluation of these comparisons was aided by effect sizes. The effect sizes reveal that there may indeed be differences between rapists and the comparison group with respect to cognitive distortions and sexual coping. Again, rapists did not have strongly different views to their non-sex-offender peers. The Conclusion While this isn't a knock-down argument, it is strong evidence against the claim. In study after study, rapists do not have attitudes to rape that differ from similar control groups. The evidence certainly isn't as clear cut in the other direction ("it comes out again and again") as the original claimant would suggest. | {
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7,212 | A recent meta review (mentioned in some articles in the media, e.g. The Telegraph or CBS News ) examining the association between abortion and mental health problems "Abortion and mental health: quantitative synthesis and analysis of research published 1995–2009" by Priscilla K. Coleman in the British Journal of Psychiatry claims Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk
of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental
health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion. I've heard previously about a possible correlation between mental health problems and abortion, but I had the impression that no reliable studies could substantiate that. The claim in this meta review, that 10% of mental health problems are attributable to abortion seems to me extraordinary. Is there any additional evidence that this claim is true? Does this meta review actually support this claim adequately? | Is there any additional evidence that this claim is true? Does this
meta review actually support this claim adequately? Apparently the answers are "No" and "No": http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-skeptical-sleuth/201111/is-having-abortion-likely-damage-womans-mental-health http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-skeptical-sleuth/201111/more-review-claiming-abortion-hurts-womens-mental-health Although there is a vast literature concerning mental health effects of abortion, Coleman selects only 22 studies, 11 of them her own. She indicated that she has excluded other studies as being too poorly designed, but she fails to identify which studies were excluded and specifically why. The Royal College of Psychiatrists... considered all of the Coleman studies that they reviewed to be methodologically poor. A number of her papers were rejected because they had inappropriate control/comparison groups and still other papers were rejected because they used inappropriate measures of mental health after the abortion. In addition to its other limitations, still another Coleman paper was rejected because of a lack of statistical control for mental health prior to the abortion. The Royal College of Psychiatrists report did include one of Coleman's papers, but with serious criticism. [Coleman] relied heavily on comparisons between women that [sic] received an abortion for unwanted pregnancy and women who had completed a pregnancy that was planned or wanted. Of course, this strategy cannot get at the effects of abortion because presumably the circumstances of having an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy are different from the circumstances of completing a wanted pregnancy. It is not surprising that women having a wanted pregnancy have better mental health than women who did not want to be pregnant. Do you think the Coleman knew what she was doing and proceeded anyway? Another criticism of Coleman's review is that she often did not control for prior mental health. So, if a woman smoked marijuana or consumed alcohol after an abortion, she was compared to women who dealing with a newborn child, and any differences were attributed to the first group of women having had an abortion, even in situations where ascertainment of drug or alcohol use occurred before the abortion. [Coleman] states that the population attributable risk (PAR) associated with abortion is 10% of all mental health problems and 34.9% of all suicides in women of reproductive age. PAR is intended to represent the proportion of such problems that can be causally attributed to abortion. Near the end of her article, Coleman reveals her intention to affect public policy by burdening women interested in terminating an unwanted pregnancy with the necessity of first being warned about the dangers of abortion: "Until sound evidence documenting mental health benefits of abortion is available, clinicians should convey the current state of uncertainty related to benefits of abortion in addition to sharing the most accurate information pertaining to statistically validated risks." Further evidence that the article was politically motivated (evidence my own): Anti-choice websites, apparently alerted in advance of the article's publication, created an immediate buzz about it across the US. The article was quickly sent to the Florida state legislature in support of a bill restricting abortion and the article was introduced as evidence in the appeal of a Wisconsin court decision ruling against necessity of warning women seeking abortion of the risk of suicide they face. See also the published responses to the article itself: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/199/3/180.short#responses | {
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7,247 | I have read that honey never spoils . Is this claim true? If so, what is it about honey that can cause it to remain edible for thousands of years? | It is common knowledge that sugar will help microorganism growth (that's why, for instance, when you rehydrate freeze-dried yeast you add a pinch of sugar to help it restart its activity). Too much sugar (or any other solute, really), however, is not good for microbial growth. One parameter that is usually taken into account is the water activity . Quoting Wikipedia : [ Water activity ] is defined as the vapor pressure of a liquid divided by that of pure water at the same temperature; therefore, pure distilled water has a water activity of exactly one. As the temperature increases, aw typically increases, except in some products with crystalline salt or sugar. Higher aw substances tend to support more microorganisms. Bacteria usually require at least 0.91, and fungi at least 0.7. Honey generally has a water activity between 0.5 and 0.6. (See this PDF ), too low to support microbial growth. Honey is in fact a well known antimicrobial, although the high sugar content is not the only factor contributing to this (low pH and presence of several antibacterial compounds play a role there). To answer the question: does honey ever go bad? From the US National Honey Board website Honey stored in sealed containers can remain stable for decades and even centuries! However, honey is susceptible to physical and chemical changes during storage; it tends to darken and lose its aroma and flavor or crystallize. These are temperature-dependent processes, making the shelf life of honey difficult to define. For practical purposes, a shelf life of two years is often stated. Properly processed, packaged and stored honey retains its quality for a long time. If in doubt, throw it out, and purchase a new jar of honey! So, essentially, if you stored it properly you will not have any issue. | {
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7,276 | I read in a book that NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost on September 23, 1999, at a cost of $125 million, because one engineering team used metric units, while another one used inches for a key spacecraft operation. Was it really a conversion problem in software or were reports oversimplified? | The MCO MIB has determined that the root cause for the loss of the MCO
spacecraft was the failure to use metric units in the coding of a
ground software file, “Small Forces,” used in trajectory models. Specifically, thruster performance data in English units instead of
metric units was used in the software application code titled
SM_FORCES (small forces). A file called Angular Momentum Desaturation
(AMD) contained the output data from the SM_FORCES software. The data
in the AMD file was required to be in metric units per existing
software interface documentation, and the trajectory modelers assumed
the data was provided in metric units per the requirements. (emphasis mine) Source: Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase I Report Project Cost: $327.6 million total for both orbiter and lander (not including Deep
Space 2). $193.1 million for spacecraft development, $91.7 million for
launch, and $42.8 million for mission operations. Source Mission Logo: | {
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7,287 | Obviously, I am talking about simple charger without any indicator lights etc. If yes, why does it use energy when the circuit is not closed? Examples of the claim: http://www.treehugger.com/culture/treehugger-homework-unplug-your-cellphone-charger.html http://news.cnet.com/Your-cell-phone-is-charged--please-unplug/2100-1041_3-6118116.html http://practicallygreen.com/unplug-cell-phone-chargers-and-other-appliances-when-not-in-use | Inside virtually every phone charger is a transformer. Transformers have a finite resistance, and hence there will always be current flowing through them if they are plugged in, even if there is no load (i.e. nothing charging). That's basic physics. But the obvious follow-up question is: how much energy does it use? Estimates vary, but its certainly not much. This article claims (without reference) that its 1-5 watts. This page claims that it's less than half of a watt. And further claims that this represents one hundredth of a percent of a typical person's usage. This article gives more figures for different standbys, and gives that for a phone charger at about 0.4W. You can consume that power for 380 days to get the same amount of energy as a hot bath. Of course with very many people using phone chargers, that can add up to a very large amount of electricity. | {
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7,391 | Venezuela's entertaining president, Hugo Chavez, was recently reported to have speculated that the USA has developed a secret technology to give cancer to left-wing leaders in Latin America. I think this claim is a little too crazy to merit skeptical analysis. However, according to the BBC report he said the instances of cancer among Latin American leaders were "difficult to explain using the law of probabilities". Now that constitutes a simple claim that does merit some skepticism. Reworded the question is this: is the incidence of cancer in South American political leaders unusually high? Is the answer different for the subgroup who are left wing in their politics? | There are 20 countries in Latin America 1 , of which 5 have had cases of leaders with cancer (one country, Brasil, had two cases). This equates to 6 in 20 cases, or ~33% incidence of the disease. Note that the original article does not include Fidel Castro in the list of cancer victims, I did. Is this figure "difficult to explain using the law of probabilities"? The average incidence of cancer 2 is ~41% (counting both genders). So, no, it's not really surprising. Actually, it's even a bit low according to statistics. It seems to me that Chavez is actually an unintentional victim of the fallacy of cherry picking 3 : Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. It is a kind of fallacy of selective attention, the most common example of which is the confirmation bias. Cherry picking may be committed unintentionally. 1 See "Latin America" . 2 See "Lifetime Risk of Developing or Dying From Cancer" . 3 See "Cherry picking (fallacy)" . | {
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7,487 | My dad could tolerate long periods of time outside during the winter while wearing shorts and a t-shirt. He told me he started wearing warmer-weather clothing during the winter, and eventually his body simply adapted. Is this possible, and if so, what is the mechanism behind it? | Your dad has the right of it. Unfortunately, the literature on human cold adaptation is not very lay-person friendly. US military publications seem to provide the most accessible information on the subject: Habituation, the most common pattern observed in both acclimatization and acclimation studies, is characterized by a blunted shivering and vasoconstrictor response to cold exposure. Habituation appears to require only brief, intermittent cold exposures to he induced, and can develop when only small body regions are exposed unprotected to cold. It allows extremity skin temperatures to be maintained higher during cold exposure. The higher skin temperatures coupled with the absence of shivering are advantageous in that manual dexterity and comfort are enhanced. In one acclimation study in which subjects were exposed to moderate cold conditions for a prolonged period, a metabolic form of cold acclimation appeared to develop. This adaptation was characterized by an enhanced shivering thermogenesis during cold exposure. When individuals acclimatize or acclimate to cold conditions severe enough to repeatedly cause a significantly body temperature fall, an insulative pattern of adaptation develops, characterized by enhanced mechanisms for body heat conservation. The mechanisms determining the pattern of adaptation to chronic cold exposure appear related to type of cold exposure conditions, the amount of body heat lost and the degree to which shivering thermogenesis compensates for heat loss and defends body temperature. Above is from this abstract Humans get significantly better at handling heat or cold by repeated exposure to the extreme, and working in those extreme conditions. | {
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7,494 | It seems to be an often-repeated saying that "there are no camels in the Koran". But I just repeated this factoid in the presence of a guy from Syria who insisted it's not true and that there is a sura about camels in the holy book of Islam. So I googled a bit and there were lots of inconclusive hits, the best being a quote from Jorge Luis Borges, but I still don't know the truth. So are camels ever mentioned in the Qur'an or not? Is there a whole sura about them? | There are a few mentions (although a bit less than one would expect): 91:13 And the messenger of Allah said: It is the she-camel of Allah, so let her drink! [...] 7:73 And to (the tribe of) Thamud (We sent) their brother Salih. He said: O my people! Serve Allah. Ye have no other God save Him. A wonder from your Lord hath come unto you. Lo! this is the camel of Allah, a token unto you; so let her feed in Allah's earth, and touch her not with hurt lest painful torment seize you [...] 11:64 O my people! This is the camel of Allah, a token unto you, so suffer her to feed in Allah's earth, and touch her not with harm lest a near torment seize you. Etcetera See this google search for more examples. | {
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7,527 | I heard once that when two Chess Grandmasters play a five hour game of chess, the intense concentration and focus they have causes their bodies to burn as many calories as someone playing a sport during that time, such as running. For example, Dr. Robert Sapolsky claimed that : … [with] chess masters in the middle of a tournament, they are going through six to seven thousand calories a day thinking. [They are] turning on a massive physiological stress response simply with thought and doing the same thing with their bodies as if they were some baboon that’s just ripped open the stomach of their worst rival — it’s all with thought. Is there any truth behind this? Running for that long would be the same as running a marathon, and I just don't believe that sitting playing chess can use as much energy. However I do believe that it must burn more calories then usual. | People have used chess as a model for studying stress responses and therefore have done a detailed metabolic analysis . The key data is in table 1 (p. 347); here it is, reformatted and converted to Calories/hr: Energy expended (Cal/hr) Before Beginning Middle End
------------------------ ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------
Mean 91.8 100.2 91.8 93.0
Minimum 68.4 70.8 70.2 68.4
Maximum 120.0 132.0 120.6 122.4 These are comparable to light physical activity (desk work, etc.), and not even close to jogging (400-500 Calories/hr for someone weighing ~70 kg). So, no, chess grandmasters do not come anywhere close to runners when it comes to caloric expenditure . Extremely stressful games could perhaps exceed even the maximum bounds here (the participants were competitive chess players, but not at the master/grandmaster level). (Also, note that if chess grandmasters did burn that many calories, they would get at least as hot as runners do, and although you may seen top chess players mop their brow, you generally don't see them in light clothes sweating profusely even in cold weather.) | {
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7,533 | I ran into this common belief today, and was surprised that it has not been addressed here before. I think this belief is common enough that most anyone has heard it. Especially if they are touring a medieval villa in Europe, or other ancient structure with glass windows. Invariably someone will state that the panes are thicker on the bottom than the top because the glass is slowly flowing. This is even an idea spread in Ed Greenwood's description of the "Elves of Myth Drannor" where he imagines an art form where the long lived elves would leave glass out for centuries to flow and attain specific shapes (sorry, I sold my print version of that Forgotten Realms source-book and can't find it on-line). | A lot of people hear that glass is a liquid when they hear about this particular misconception. Actually it is probably better to describe glass as an amorphous solid. Any variation in thickness comes strictly from manufacturing processes . Molten glass is gathered on a blowpipe, and blown to an elongated balloon shape . The ends are cut off and the resulting cylinder is split with shears while still hot, then flattened on an iron plate. This is the forerunner of the Cylinder process. The quality of the glass was not good, with many imperfections. (By the way, finding original source documents on actual manufacturing of glass is bloody difficult... Many reference pages are dead, and most other pages are referring to this particular "flow" question.) A bit of history on glass. Humans have known how to make glass starting as early as 3000 BCE (Yale PDF) . And the idea of making windows dates back to the height of the ancient Egyptians (though none survive that I am aware of). However, many other glass objects are available for measurement. The University of California Riverside has a much more in-depth description on their web page concerning the structure of glass, and explaining why it doesn't flow . It concludes with: There is no clear answer to the question “Is glass solid or liquid?”. In terms of molecular dynamics and thermodynamics it is possible to justify various different views that it is a highly viscous liquid, an amorphous solid, or simply that glass is another state of matter that is neither liquid nor solid. The difference is semantic. In terms of its material properties we can do little better. There is no clear definition of the distinction between solids and highly viscous liquids. All such phases or states of matter are idealisations of real material properties. Nevertheless, from a more common sense point of view, glass should be considered a solid since it is rigid according to everyday experience. The use of the term “supercooled liquid” to describe glass still persists, but is considered by many to be an unfortunate misnomer that should be avoided. In any case, claims that glass panes in old windows have deformed due to glass flow have never been substantiated. Examples of Roman glassware and calculations based on measurements of glass visco-properties indicate that these claims cannot be true. The observed features are more easily explained as a result of the imperfect methods used to make glass window panes before the float glass process was invented. Glasslinks has some additional information about the properties of glass itself : “The idea that glass is a fluid is a very widespread myth,” says Yvonne Stokes, a mathematician and spoilsport at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “I was told it as a fact by my adviser. And once, a class of schoolchildren came into the lab, and one of them told me the very same thing. If you want to talk microscopically, then you can call glass a fluid. But people understandably tend to think that if it’s a fluid, it flows. It’s that notion that’s false.”Stokes has recently proved with detailed calculations that old windows could not have flowed perceptibly. If the myth survives, it will be because it contains a kernel of truth – and because glass is a confusing kind of matter, quite unlike the three ordinary kinds. A gas is an anarchy of molecules going every which way; a liquid is a tighter but still disorderly society in which molecules constantly dissolve and reestablish weak bonds; a solid is a molecular army in rigid formation.But glass is … none of the above. It is rigid like a solid, but its molecules are not arranged in repeating crystals. It is amorphous like a liquid. In fact, structurally there is no sharp line between a liquid and a glass. You form glass by ‘super cooling” a liquid below its freezing point, then cooling it some more. If you cool it fast enough, the molecules can’t organize themselves into crystals. As the temperature drops, the liquid becomes more viscous and the molecules more sluggish. It’s like a game of molecular musical chairs in which the music never stops and the players never sit down; instead they seem to move through honey, then tar, until they are all but motionless, like bugs in amber. | {
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7,542 | There’s a controversy going around whether the benefits of water fluoridation outweigh the potential harms. What is the evidence for the harm this may cause and what evidence supports the health benefits? | Typically No, but it depends on the dose. The World Health Organisation released a fairly comprehensive report (PDF Warning) called "Fluoride in Drinking-water" that covers this topic. I apologise for quoting so extensively from this report, but, well, it's excellent. I'd suggest anyone that is skeptical, have a look at the report and the (many) papers it cites to justify its findings. Firstly, fluoride is naturally occuring in all types of water. Seawater typically
contains about 1 mg/l while rivers and lakes generally exhibit concentrations of less than 0.5 mg/l. In groundwaters, however, low or high concentrations of fluoride can occur, depending on the nature of the rocks and the occurrence of fluoride-bearing minerals. The major risk cited by fluoride-in-water-skeptics is the risk of fluorosis. Unfortunately for them, this only occurs after excessive ingestion of fluoride. This typically occurs in regions that do not control the levels of fluoride in their drinking water and the levels are naturally high. Typically the effects are worse in hotter regions where people require more water. Fluoride has beneficial effects on teeth at low concentrations in drinking-water, but excessive exposure to fluoride in drinking-water, or in combination with exposure to fluoride from other sources, can give rise to a number of adverse effects. These range from mild dental fluorosis to crippling skeletal fluorosis as the level and period of exposure increases. Crippling skeletal fluorosis is a significant cause of morbidity in a number of regions of the world. ... The beneficial and the detrimental effects of fluoride naturally present in water were well established by the early 1940s. High levels of fluoride present in concentrations up to 10 mg/l were associated with dental fluorosis (yellowish or brownish striations or mottling of the enamel) while low levels of fluoride, less than 0.1 mg/l, were associated with high levels of dental decay (Edmunds and Smedley, 1996), although poor nutritional status is also an important contributory factor. What most of the governments in fluoridated-water countries do is attempt to find a middle ground between too much fluoride (causing fluorosis): in China some 38 million people are reported to suffer from dental fluorosis and 1.7 million from the more severe skeletal fluorosis (WRI, 1990). In India, Susheela and Das (1988) suggested that around one million people suffer from serious and incapacitating
skeletal fluorosis. Using the Chinese dental:skeletal fluorosis ratio, India could
therefore have up to 20 million dental fluorosis sufferers. and too little (contributing to high levels of dental decay): The level of dental caries (measured as the mean number of Decayed,
Missing or Filled teeth) falls from seven at a fluoride concentration of 0.1 mg/l
to around 3.5 at a fluoride concentration of 1.0 mg/l. As fluoride concentration
increased further (up to 2.6 mg/l) dental decay continues to fall, but only
slightly (Dean, 1942; USPHS, 1991). For a government, based purely on cost I would expect it's worth controlling the fluoride levels in drinking water. The cost of treating the water is lower than treating severe fluorosis or unnecessary dental caries, particularly if millions of people are likely to be affected. The WHO therefore recommends that a moderate level of fluoride be maintained in drinking water: In 1984, WHO conducted an extensive review and found that there were insufficient data to conclude that fluoride produces cancer or birth defects. In addition, WHO noted that mottling of teeth (i.e. dental fluorosis) is sometimes associated with fluoride levels in drinking-water above 1.5 mg/l and crippling skeletal fluorosis can ensue when fluoride levels exceed 10 mg/l. A guideline value of 1.5 mg/l was therefore recommended by WHO as a level at which dental fluorosis should be minimal (WHO, 1984). The 1.5 mg/l fluoride guideline value that was set in 1984 was subsequently
re-evaluated by WHO and it was concluded that there was no evidence to suggest
that it should be revized (WHO, 1996, 2004). The 1.5 mg/l guideline value of
WHO is not a “fixed” value but is intended to be adapted to take account of local
conditions (e.g. diet, water consumption, etc.). The same report actually covers the (pretty ridiculous) claims of birth defects, cancer, etc. and debunks them. As they're not specifically claimed in the question, I'll leave it to people to read the report if they're interested. I would suggest people also read @Oliver_C's post on a similar question for more information. | {
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7,571 | I've heard that skimmed milk has more added chemicals than whole milk. Is this true? | The prescriptionist scientist in me rejects the question as meaningless! The descriptivist in me compels me to try to answer the question you meant to ask. Both whole milk and skim milk (in the USA) may be fortified with vitamins A and/or D. Sharon Gerdes wrote in Dairy Foods (Feb 2009) : The dairy industry has been adding vitamin D3 to milk since 1932. In the 1940s, the dairy industry also began fortifying with vitamin A. They can also be fortified with other nutrients such as Calcium. However, the milk must be labeled if they are fortified. There are limits to what can be added to milk and still call it "milk". (See Section 131.110 of Standards of Identity .) The fortification is optional, so it depends on the source. So, to see what additives are in your preferred brands of milk, check the labels . Before you discard the ones with more Vitamin A and D, ask if you are really concerned that the risks of extra vitamins outweigh the benefits - ditto with the fat content. However, Cornell University's Milk Facts suggests a motivation for additional Vitamin A fortification in skim milk: because it is naturally lower in vitamin A, it needs more added to bring it to the same levels as whole milk. Whole milk is considered a good source of vitamin A. Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin that is found in the fat phase of milk. The vitamin A content that occurs naturally in 2%, 1% and skim milk is less than in whole milk because of the lower fat levels. Nutritional concerns about consumption of lower fat milk in the late 1970s led to the required fortification of vitamin A in lower fat milks. To achieve the nutritional equivalence of whole milk, lower fat milks should be fortified to 300 IU vitamin A per 8 oz serving. The FDA encourages fortification to a level of 500 IU of vitamin A per 8 oz serving, which is 10 % of the recommended daily allowance (RDA). Letting my inner prescriptionist off his leash for a moment: In science, the word "chemical" means the same as chemical substance . (Ref: High school chemistry, plus the above Wikipedia article that states: 'the term chemical substance is a precise technical term that is synonymous with "chemical" for professional chemists'.) Under this definition, everything is either a chemical substance or a mixture of chemical substances. (Okay, not everything. Not light or heat or love or skepticism, but everything made of solids, liquids, gasses or plasma. Everything you can touch, taste or smell.) So, 1kg of whole milk is 100% chemicals, and 1kg of skim-milk is 100% chemicals. No difference. | {
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7,626 | Until recently, I have only heard about studies proving electrosensitivity being entirely a nocebo effect. Now I just found out about a study: Electromagnetic Field Sensitivity, William J. Real et al., 1991 . I have not myself read the study, but it claims it was a double blind test containing 16 subjects. 100% of the ones that were allergic responded to the electricity. Are there any attempts to repeat the same study? Does it have any known critisism? | Where you have a number of studies with conflicting results, it is time for a meta-analysis, which carefully combines a number of studies, to get a more statistically powerful sample. This study was cited by a meta-analysis: G. James Rubin, Jayati Das Munshi and Simon Wessely, Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity: A Systematic Review of Provocation Studies Psychosomatic Medicine 67:224-232 (2005), doi: 10.1097/01.psy.0000155664.13300.64 Their abstract covers the territory very well: Objectives: The objectives of this study were to assess whether people who report hypersensitivity to weak electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are better at detecting EMF under blind or double-blind conditions than nonhypersensitive individuals, and to test whether they respond to the presence of EMF with increased symptom reporting. Perfect - that seems to be directly aimed at your question. Results: Thirty-one experiments testing 725 "electromagnetically hypersensitive" participants were identified. Twenty-four of these found no evidence to support the existence of a biophysical hypersensitivity, whereas 7 reported some supporting evidence. For 2 of these 7, the same research groups subsequently tried and failed to replicate their findings. In 3 more, the positive results appear to be statistical artefacts. The final 2 studies gave mutually incompatible results. Our metaanalyses found no evidence of an improved ability to detect EMF in "hypersensitive" participants. I'm not sure where the Real et al study fit in here, but if it gave a positive result, it was in the minority. (Although, it should also be considered by its sample size and methodological strength, which aren't covered by the numbers here.) Conclusions: The symptoms described by "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" sufferers can be severe and are sometimes disabling. However, it has proved difficult to show under blind conditions that exposure to EMF can trigger these symptoms. This suggests that "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" is unrelated to the presence of EMF, although more research into this phenomenon is required. So, nocebo appears to be a plausible explanation. | {
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7,639 | In the Batman movies, Batman is called when a powerful yellow spotlight with the bat drawing is projected in Gotham City's clouds. The unique drawing then become very clearly visible in the clouds on the entire city. Is this actually possible or at least plausible? | YES , it is possible to project images onto clouds, and it has been for quite some time. A Sky Projector from 1931 : From Fortean Times : By the late 1920s, Harry Grindell Matthews was back in Britain with a series of new,
bold inventions which actually worked. His piece de resistance was a
device to project advertisements on clouds . On Christmas Eve 1930 he stunned London by projecting the image of an
angel onto clouds above Hampstead Heath. The apparition was so
realistic that people miles away apparently fell to their knees in
worship, believing the Second Coming was at hand! He followed this
with demonstrations in New York, where he projected the Stars and
Stripes 10,000ft (3,000m) above the city. Matthew's improved Sky Projector A more recent example: From The New York Times (2008) Like the giant Batman sign projected into the night skies of Gotham
City, the text " Beware of the God " suddenly appeared in the
Singaporean sky mid-September . The 30-minute projection, repeated over
several nights, was the work of Deborah Kelly, part of the opening
week of the Singapore Biennale 2008. Photos from Sydney (projected from the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art ) can be seen here : | {
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7,668 | Yesterday a friend of mine told me that most of the money which is made in the internet is going to the porn industry . First I didn't believe any word and I was like "Hey, shut up! There is still Google and Amazon to count in. This must be some hoax!" My friend told me of some source he found on the internet and, when I went home, I just fired up my favorite browser and googled for the words "statistics income erotic internet" to see the truth for myself. Eventually, I came across this and I was astonished ! I quote: The pornography industry has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined. 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues ballooned to $97.06 billion. Is this a joke? That website even has a Wikipedia entry! | Good numbers are hard to find, but the answer is still certainly NO. One of the key problems in evaluating anything to do with the Porn industry is that almost nobody has any incentive to report honest numbers. All the really big numbers come either from dodgy sources trying to "big up" the industry or from campaign groups opposing porn who want to exaggerate how big the problem is for their own reasons. Even the famous $97bn estimate ( from here ) is often misunderstood. That isn't internet revenues at all but a crude estimate of worldwide revenue from all sources which includes three huge contributions from countries where the statistics are most likely very ropey (about $72bn from China, Japan and South Korea alone with the porn spend in Korea topping $500 per person ). The estimates from the USA suggest about £13bn total spend in 2006 with about $3bn on the internet, $1bn on magazines and maybe $4bn of videos. These numbers look more plausible but far less impressive compared to mainstream media and internet companies. Some skeptical analyses, though, suggest far smaller numbers. This Forbes piece from 2001 estimates US revenue at less than $4bn. It concludes: The industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion in 1999 revenue, according to Veronis Suhler), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion). A more recent study done as part of an attempt to understand the social impact or porn is more generous to the industry. The study, Industry Size, Measurement, and Social Costs is by K. Doran In an attempt to validate the Adult Video News estimate that internet porn generates about $2.5bn in revenue in 2005 he goes throughout the following logic: According to the PIAL 2005 May tracking poll, 66% of Americans aged 18 or over used the internet, and 11.25% of these (about 16.7 million) accessed pornography. According to the May 2004 tracking poll data, 20% of internet pornography consumers admit to paying for online
content, which, combined with PIAL’s finding on consumption, yields about 3.3 million paying internet pornography consumers in 2005. These numbers could be an underestimate, because people may fear revealing themselves as an internet pornography user during a telephone survey. But dividing the revenue estimate by the pornography consumer estimate helps evaluate whether either of them seems to be biased in the directions we fear. So I divide the $2.5 billion by 3.3 million consumers to get $737 per paying customer per year, or $61 per month. Pay sites charge $10 to $100 per month (in 2007, for example, Vivid.com charged $30 per month), so $61 per month is a fairly reasonable average. Thus, the $2.5 billion in annual internet pornography revenue and the 3.3 million internet pornography paying customers seem reasonable estimates. The numbers become more plausible if you accept that many actual paid consumers of pornography won't admit it to strangers. Putting all this into perspective suggests that the porn industry in the USA might reasonably be of the order of a $5bn to $10bn a year industry. This is small compared to internet commerce (Amazon alone is $30bn-$40bn) or Hollywood (in the USA about $10bn box office and $20bn DVD, see this great visual aggregation here ). It isn't even obvious that porn constitutes a big proportion of internet search traffic, according the The Straight Dope . So I think it is fair to say that the internet has propagated badly sourced and low credibility estimates about the scale of porn because they sound sensational rather than because they are plausible. Update with a recent internet survey A recent survey of internet searches ( reported here, possibly NSFW ) reported the following: Neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, authors of the best-selling book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, provide much of the inspiration for “Universe of Desire.” Ogas and Gaddam gathered and coded 400 million internet searches, 55 million of which (or roughly 13 percent) proved to be searches for some kind of erotic content. That is much lower than the numbers often quoted. Further update A recent estimate of the amount of web traffic related to porn made a good attempt to put some of the exaggerated numbers in context and also arrived at a low estimate. In addition to debunking many recent "shock horror" newspaper headlines it came to this conclusion on web traffic by studying Alexa statistics: Of the 400 sites ranked from 101–500 on Alexa’s list just ten are in the business of delivering adult content; there are eight more free porn tubes to add to the six in the top 100 plus one more adult webcam site and an adult dating site, and collective these sites generate just 0.158% of global monthly page views, which is 2.65% of the total amount of page view traffic generated by those 400 sites. Overall, the figures here seem to present a relatively consistent picture, one which suggests that overall, adult websites account for no more than 2–3% of global Internet traffic, measured in terms of both individual visits to websites and page views, and to put that in perspective, if you add together the monthly visitor figures for the ten busiest porn tube sites on the Internet, you’ll still come up 25 million visitor short of the traffic figures for Wikipedia. So, to sum up, online porn is less popular than search engines, web portals, social media, video sharing, blogging, online shopping, email, keeping your computer’s software up to date and virus-free and Wikipedia. So while this doesn't make any attempt to judge revenue, the traffic numbers are not consistent with the idea that porn has a major share of the internet's revenue. | {
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7,670 | Naturalnews.com claims that in explaining why Monsanto doesn't run human clinical trials on GM crops on its own website , the company uses 'absurd logic' to justify its stance and makes 'pseudoscientific' claims that "everything can be considered non-toxic and safe because it is all made of atoms, just like our bodies!" Monsanto claims that There is no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in
humans. So long as the introduced protein is determined safe, food
from GM crops determined to be substantially equivalent is not
expected to pose any health risks. Given that the page would probably be aimed at the non-scientific reader trying to understand more about genetic modification, are the claims correct and if so, are such claims justified? | Summary The FDA requires toxicology and allergy tests for GM foods for human consumption before the product can be sold in the US (similar mechanisms are in place in the EU as well). If some of these tests have already been made in a different context, the FDA does not require repeating the animal trials, since that would be pointless killing of lab rats. Clinical trials are for medication, not for food, though new food additives (as well as other substances, such as pesticides) may be tested on humans for potential allergic reactions. Details on the original claim Clinical trials are performed for new medication in order to test whether they provide a significant benefit compared to placebo and/or to existing medication. GM food is not medication. Therefore, Monsanto is not required to run clinical trials on GM food. However, they cannot claim GM food cures cancer, either. Toxicity tests are performed for food and medication, and are performed on animals, usually rats. A toxicity test aims to determine LD50 , the dose (relative to the specimen's weight) at which 50% of the animals die (which is why you don't perform this on humans). The safe dose for humans is then determined as "much less than LD50". Once an LD50 is known, it is possible to test the substance at realistic dosage in humans to see whether they may have an allergic reaction. Toxicology studies on BT have been done, and the protein has even been tested in humans, when the product was being tested as a pesticide for organic farming. BT turns out to be harmless in humans. Since the BT protein is indeed the same between what is produced by bacteria as organic pesticide, or by GM crops, Monsanto may indeed not have had to do any toxicology testing on GM food. "everything can be considered non-toxic and safe because it is all made of atoms, just like our bodies!" This is a misrepresentation of the issue. What naturalnews.com asks is more similar to requiring that if Kellogg comes out with a new formulation of cereal, they need to test whether wheat flour is fit for human consumption. What needs to be tested by the FDA? The FDA tests new food additives FDA field investigators inspect food companies, examine food shipments from abroad, and collect samples. Laboratory scientists analyze samples. Compliance officers recommend legal action and follow through on enforcement issues. What undergoes premarket approval? New food additives and color additives must be approved before they can be used in foods. These additives are considered food under the law. New food additives, including substances added intentionally to food and substances that may migrate to food because they contact food (e.g., food packaging) must be shown to be safe to FDA's satisfaction before companies can market them. Companies that want to add new additives to food bear the responsibility of providing FDA with information demonstrating that the additives are safe. FDA experts review the results of appropriate tests done by companies to ensure that the additive is safe for its intended use. An approved food additive must be used in compliance with its approved uses, specifications, and restrictions. Certain food ingredients, such as those with a long history of safe use in food, do not require premarket approval. As part of the approval process, food additives have to be tested for toxic effects. HIGHLIGHTS OF TOXICOLOGY RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE 2002 GUIDANCE
Safety
Summary and Comprehensive Toxicological Profile (CTP). The safety
information for a food contact notification (FCN) should contain both
a safety summary and a comprehensive toxicological profile (CTP) of
the food contact substance (FCS) that is the subject of the
notification. The safety summary is Part III of FDA Form 3480 and
should provide the basis for the notifier's determination that the
intended use of the FCS is safe. The CTP should provide summaries of
all the available toxicological information pertinent to the safety
evaluation of the FCS. In some cases, a notification may need to
include a CTP for a toxicologically relevant constituent of the FCS.
If a constituent of an FCS is carcinogenic, the CTP in the
notification should include a quantitative risk assessment. Safety
Testing Recommendations for Food Contact Substances (FCSs) and Their
Constituents. This document recommends safety testing of FCSs and
their constituents, primarily based on a series of genetic toxicity
tests and, when justified by the exposure level, subchronic toxicity
studies. The recommendations describe the minimum level of safety
testing generally considered appropriate at various exposures. For an
initial or incremental exposure of an FCS at or less than 0.5 parts
per billion (ppb), no safety tests are recommended. For a cumulative
exposure between 0.5 ppb and 1 part per million (ppm), genetic
toxicity tests and/or subchronic tests are recommended. At a
cumulative exposure at or greater than 1 ppm, FDA normally requires,
under the authority of Section 409 (h)(3)(B) of the Federal Food, Drug
and Cosmetic Act, that a food additive petition be submitted for the
use of an FCS. Evaluation of Structural Similarities to Known
Toxicants. To the extent feasible, knowledge in predicting potential
toxicity based on structure/activity relationships may be incorporated
into the safety assessment of an FCS. Such information may be used as
part of an overall strategy for assessing the safety of an FCS or to
help interpret safety test results. Specifically in the case of GM foods, the FDA states In formulating FDA policy, we reviewed new foods under development
through biotechnology, and found they shared certain common
characteristics: (1) Recombinant DNA techniques are being used to
introduce copies of one or a limited number of well-characterized
genes into a desired food crop. The introduced gene or genes then
become integrated in the plant and are passed to successive
generations of plants by the natural laws of genetics; (2) In most
cases, these genes produce proteins, or proteins that modify fatty
acids or carbohydrates in the plant, in other words, common food
substances; and (3) The proteins, fatty acids, and carbohydrates
introduced into food crops are well- characterized and not known to be
toxic and they would be digested to normal metabolites in the same
manner that the body handles the thousands of different proteins, fat
and carbohydrates that make up our diet today. Since newly introduced substances in foods derived using recombinant
DNA techniques would be proteins, fats or carbohydrates, we then
examined the safety questions that should be addressed before products
reach the market. We identified four broad safety issues that should
be evaluated: (consumption; (2) the need to ensure that the changes in
the food, such as the level of natural toxins in the food, if any,
stay within normal safe levels; (3) the need to ensure that
significant nutrients stay within normal range; and (4) the need to
analyze the potential for introduced proteins to cause allergic
reactions. We incorporated these and other issues into a comprehensive
guidance to industry that is central to our policy. | {
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7,701 | I hear this claim every now and then. That US currency is legal tender and that it is illegal to not accept it. The most recent example of this was on an old episode of 30 Rock: The head and the hair. I was not able to find a clip online, however I did find this transcript . Cashier: No $100s, Small bills. Liz: Oh, I knew this was gonna happen. Cashier: Store policy. Liz: Yeah, Well, That's an illegal policy. You have to take this. Cashier: No, I don't Gray: Yeah sir you do, it says "legal tender for all debts, public and
private." Cashier: Does it say anything about $100 for a bottle of water? Gray: You can't decide what money you'll accept. That's illegal. Is this claim accurate? | This is one of the more irritating claims I hear repeated. It's not specific to the US either. The answer is no, merchants have no obligation to accept money for a purchase. The simple reason is that US currency is only legal tender for debts. It is illegal to refuse legal tender for a debt. When you make a purchase at a store, there is no debt. Rather, you and the merchant are agreeing to enter into a (very brief) contract. If the merchant doesn't agree to the terms of that contract, i.e. the currency denominations someone wants to pay with, he has no obligation to enter into that contract. This is based on Federal law which states that legal tender must be accepted for all debts. There is no law stating that legal tender must be accepted for other purposes. The U.S. Treasury states quite clearly: There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private
business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as
for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to
develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless
there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may
prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition,
movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to
accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a
matter of policy. Coinage Act of 1965, Section 31 U.S.C. 5103 United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and
circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are
legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign
gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts. | {
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7,722 | This is a pretty specific question – in the Wall Street Journal article dated January 27, 2012 entitled "No Need to Panic About Global Warming. There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy." The article claims that 16 scientists argue against a need to react to climate change, including agreeing in writing to statements such as: Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed. The issue is not about whether their statements are true, but rather whether these 16 people are what could be considered "scientists", i.e. "one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge". Would these 16 people qualify as what one would ordinarily call scientists? If so, is their expertise in a relevant field? I ask because I would like to know whether the qualifications and reputability of these individuals lends any credence to their claims. e.g. are these the forerunners of scientific thought, or are they somewhat peripheral ideologues? | (Just an up-front statement for folks who may be new here.) First of all, the entire question of climate change has been addressed here quite throughly . Several times in fact . With several of the canards addressed as well . Those repeatedly as well . The term scientist can be applied to anyone with a Bachelor of Science degree (a fact that has been abused before, see below). The article states that these scientists are (emphasis mine): Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris ; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting ; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology ; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT ; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service ; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva. In looking at that list, of those 16, I would say 5 are in a relevant field of study as Flimsy asked (this is my opinion only based on their stated titles, a slashdot post by [Tacroy] 5 did a better analysis , I was trying to be generous for their sake). And again, just because an incredibly small number of scientists disagree on a subject and have the capital and clout to publish in a major newspaper does not lend any particular veracity to their claim. And since there are indeed a large number of climate scientists (by some estimates, 30,000 in the US alone), and that worldwide 97-98% agree with humans causing global climate change , I am surprised that the Wall Street Journal went with such a weak list. This seems to be an extension of the previous dissent list that was debunked . In fact, OISM signatories represent a tiny fraction (~0.3%) of all US science graduates (petition cards were only sent to individuals within the U.S) According to figures from the US Department of Education Digest of Education Statistics: 2008, 10.6 million science graduates have gained qualifications consistent with the OISM polling criteria since the 1970-71 school year. 32,000 out of 10 million is not a very compelling figure, but a tiny minority - approximately 0.3 per cent. If anything, this article, along with all the dissent seems to be just the same as Project Steve instead of true scientific dissent. This is more sophistry to muddy an issue that has firm evidence supporting it, and people are attempting to play politics with science. The United States seems to be the worst nation on the earth for this type of manufactroversy . I know it's a wikipedia link , however they are reporting just statements that are in the public record. The important thing to note is that these are statements of consensus from these organizations. A question that frequently arises in popular discussion of climate change is whether there is a scientific consensus on climate change. Several scientific organizations have explicitly used the term "consensus" in their statements American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2006: "The conclusions in this statement reflect the scientific consensus represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Joint National Academies' statement." US National Academy of Sciences: "In the judgment of most climate scientists, Earth’s warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. ... On climate change, [the National Academies’ reports] have assessed consensus findings on the science..." Joint Science Academies' statement, 2005: "We recognise the international scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Joint Science Academies' statement, 2001: "The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the consensus of the international scientific community on climate change science. We recognise IPCC as the world’s most reliable source of information on climate change and its causes, and we endorse its method of achieving this consensus." American Meteorological Society, 2003: "The nature of science is such that there is rarely total agreement among scientists. Individual scientific statements and papers—the validity of some of which has yet to be assessed adequately—can be exploited in the policy debate and can leave the impression that the scientific community is sharply divided on issues where there is, in reality, a strong scientific consensus.... IPCC assessment reports are prepared at approximately five-year intervals by a large international group of experts who represent the broad range of expertise and perspectives relevant to the issues. The reports strive to reflect a consensus evaluation of the results of the full body of peer-reviewed research.... They provide an analysis of what is known and not known, the degree of consensus, and some indication of the degree of confidence that can be placed on the various statements and conclusions." Network of African Science Academies: “A consensus, based on current evidence, now exists within the global scientific community that human activities are the main source of climate change and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible for driving this change.” International Union for Quaternary Research, 2008: "INQUA recognizes the international scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Australian Coral Reef Society, 2006: "There is almost total consensus among experts that the earth’s climate is changing as a result of the build-up of greenhouse gases.... There is broad scientific consensus that coral reefs are heavily affected by the activities of man and there are significant global influences that can make reefs more vulnerable such as global warming...." The important thing to take away is that just because a few people have a loud platform for their appeals does not lend any greater credibility to their agendas. | {
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7,748 | This picture is currently being spread virally: Some Muslims were saying that this is mentioned in the Quran where it is said: He has set free the two seas meeting together. There is a barrier
between them. They do not transgress. (Quran, 55:19-20) and He is the one who has set free the two kinds of water, one sweet and
palatable, and the other salty and bitter. And He has made between
them a barrier and a forbidding partition. (Quran, 25:53) My question is, is this claim true? Is the phenomena real? If so, is it common? | Kent Smith, a.k.a Flickr user kentsmith9 claims to be the original photographer of this image. He writes : I thought this was the most unusual thing I saw on the Alaskan cruise in the water. These two bodies of water were merging in the middle of the Alaskan gulf and there was a foam developing only at their junction. I thought this was an example of a Halocline described on Wikipedia . A few people have commented that a Halocline is more of a horizontal phenomenon and this is more vertically oriented. I am pretty confident that what you are seeing is a result of the melting glaciers being composed of fresh water and the ocean has a higher percentage of salt causing the two bodies of water to have different densities and therefore makes it more difficult to mix. I'm told they will eventually mix given enough time. People have asked me if I just happened to look out over the edge of the ship deck and see this. Actually I had been on the deck for quite some time when I noticed what appeared to be a shadow cast by clouds over the ocean about 5 miles in front of the ship. As we approached the shadow I realized it was something different. I took many shots up to the point I shot this one, but never posted them until a year after this image went viral. I really posted them to convince people I did not Photoshop this image. See the other shots here . He goes on to describe the recent viral spread of this image. While Kent Smith is apparently not an expert in oceanography, he proffers a plausible explanation, and doesn't claim that the two kinds of sea-water will never mix. The question asks "is it common or can it be counted a miracle?" This is a false dilemma . Phenomena can be both uncommon and have natural, rather than supernatural, explanations. | {
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7,801 | There are plenty of examples of people doubting ( [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] ) or denying ( [6] , [7] , [8] ) the existence of atoms. Is there any compelling evidence for the existence of atoms? Has anyone ever actually seen one? Are there any pictures of atoms? I am skeptical that atoms are anything more than a useful mathematical model. | Atoms are too small to see with microscopes that rely on light (also due to problems such as the Abbe diffraction limit ). Essentially, with a conventional microscope you cannot distinguish points that are too close. Even the recently introduced superresolution microscopes , which can surpass this limit, are still not able to image single atoms (they can, however distinguish single molecules, with a distance of <20nm). This is mostly due to the fact that these microscopes rely on light, which has a wavelength that is too long to "catch atoms" (pardon the non-scientific wording of this sentence). However, several other techniques exist that allow us to "see" atoms. I would like to stress that the very nature of atoms prevents us to actually have a photo of them like we take a photo of a macroscopic object. Various techniques exist: High resolution electron microscopy (HRTEM), which uses the phase-shift of a wave of electrons thrown at the sample. This is an example of an indium nanoparticle imaged with HRTEM: (From: " Current Research ", Prof. Dr. Nicola Pinna ) These are HRTEM images of a superconductor: (From: " Structural order and disorder in Co-based layered cuprates CoSr 2 (Y,Ce) s Cu 2 O 5+2s (s = 1-3) ", National Institute of Material Science ) Another technique is X-ray crystallography .
I am not going to explain the mathematics and physics beyond it, as they are quite complex but essentially you take a crystal of the molecule you like, shine an X-ray beam on it and look at how the X-rays are scattered by the atoms in the crystal. The diffraction pattern does not per se show the single atoms, but mathematical analysis of the diffraction spots allows for reconstruction of an electron density map and subsequently of the structure of the molecule. Probably one of the most famous X-ray diffraction patterns is Photo 51 made by Rosalind Franklin of DNA, which was then used by the Nobel prize winners James D. Watson and Francis Crick. See also some published papers at this regard. Finally another technique is the Atomic force microscope . The principle is to have a very small cantilever that can pass over the sample and gets pushed up and down due to interaction with the electron fields of atoms.
An enhanced version of AFM was developed in 2009, which allows to see atoms and bonds in a molecule. The Chemical Structure of a Molecule Resolved by Atomic Force Microscopy - Gross et al. - Science 2009 Pentacene molecule. Top: ball and stick model, middle: classical SFM, bottom: enhanced SFM. Scale bar 5 angstrom. Update: Scientests have now taken a photograph of a single ytterbium atom, showing the shadow created by a laser hitting it. | {
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7,873 | I've heard this most commonly in that you're either a shower or a grower. For example this site talks about the claim accepting it as true. Is there any proof that a smaller flaccid penis (<10cm) can result in a larger penis when erect, than a penis which is large when flaccid (>12.5cm)? | Penile length in the flaccid and erect states (1996): METHOD : We prospectively measured flaccid and erect penile dimensions in 80
physically normal men before and after pharmacological erection . RESULTS : Mean flaccid length was 8.8 cm., stretched length 12.4 cm. and erect
length 12.9 cm. Neither patient age nor size of the flaccid penis
accurately predicted erectile length . Stretched length most closely
correlated with erect length. More: Summaries of several studies regarding "Penile Size" | {
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7,882 | Sword-swallowers, such as Dan Meyer claim to be putting a real metal sword down their throats. Are they really pushing a piece of metal down their throats, or are they some sort of magic trick with fake swords? | Sword swallowers are indeed placing a real metal sword down their throats and into their stomachs. It is (obviously) extremely dangerous and risky, which is part of what makes it so captivating to see. This site which is affiliated with Sword Swallowing International has some good information and photos. Quoting from their FAQ : Q: "Don't you use a gimmick, a fake sword that curls or folds up?"
"Don't you swallow a sheath first, or use a plastic tip on your
sword?" A: No. Many people think that sword swallowers use a fake sword
(known as a "gaff" in the business) that curls or folds up into the
handle, but this is simply not the case for real sword swallowers. Photos from the same site shows an X-ray of a swallowed sword: This clip from Discovery Health shows Dan Meyer swallowing a sword and being X-rayed. HowStuffWorks also has a nice article explaining that it is real and how it works: There is a trick to real sword swallowing, but it doesn't involve
illusions or preemptively-swallowed metal tubes. Instead, it involves
lots of physical and psychological preparation. For some performers,
learning to swallow a sword can take years. In this article, we'll
examine what it takes to swallow a sword and why sword swallowing is
an extremely dangerous practice. There is also a 2006 study from the British Medical Journal which acknowledges that sword swallowers swallow real metal swords and looks at the side effects: Sword swallowers know their occupation is dangerous. The Sword
Swallowers' Association International (SSAI, www.swordswallow.org)
recognises those who can swallow a non-retractable, solid steel blade
at least two centimetres wide and 38 centimetres long. As we found
only two English language case reports of injury resulting from sword
swallowing,1 2 we explored the technique and side effects of this
unusual practice.
- Source So yes, sword swallowers swallow real swords. | {
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7,883 | My friend is a smoker. His dad is a doctor. Both claim there is no firm proof that cigarettes cause lung cancer. This article makes a similar claim -- in particular that smoking cigarettes is not proven to cause cancer, but that it is linked to an increased risk of dying from lung cancer: Yes, a US white male (USWM) cigarette smoker has an 8% lifetime chance of dying from lung cancer but the USWM nonsmoker also has a 1% chance of dying from lung cancer. Is there any firm science behind the argument that smoking does or does not cause lung cancer? | I don't have much to say here, because Cancer Research UK have already written a winning answer. (Sometimes the giants are tall enough that there's no need to stand on their shoulders.) If you visit Tobacco, smoking and cancer: the evidence you will find explanations of all these facts: Smoking is the single biggest cause of cancer in the world Smoking greatly increases the risk of lung cancer The people with the highest lung cancer risks are those who: smoke the most cigarettes per day smoke over long periods of time, and start smoking young Smoking is a major cause of several types of cancer Stopping smoking can reduce your risk Tobacco smoke contains many dangerous chemicals Tobacco smoke contains significant amounts of dangerous chemicals Chemicals in tobacco smoke can build up to harmful amounts The chemicals in smoke are more dangerous in combination than individually The poisons in cigarettes can affect almost every organ in the body Nicotine is a very addictive drug Smokers are still exposed to dangerous chemicals if they smoke filtered or ‘low-tar’ cigarettes Alcohol and other substances worsen the effect of smoking Second-hand smoking also causes cancer and kills thousands of people every year Children are especially at risk from second-hand smoking. Smoking while pregnant can harm your baby Smokeless tobacco can also cause cancer They explain it all clearer than I could hope to, and include references to 93 different journal articles. You've got to admit they've certainly done their research on cancer, those guys at err.. Cancer Research UK . Oh look, a donate button. Maybe you can persuade your mistaken friend and his father to donate to make up for all the people they have misled with their ignorance and semantic word games? | {
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7,904 | In movies there seems to be an easy method to find out if a diamond is real or fake : If a diamond is able to scratch/cut glass, then it's the real deal But does that simple test work in real life? Are fake diamonds generally not able to scratch glass? My Questions: What materials are commonly used for faux diamonds ? And are they hard enough to scratch glass? | Interesting question. A quick search reveals lots of people claiming that only diamonds cut glass, and a lot of people claiming that many other stones will. When it comes to scratchability, Moh's Scale is a good measure. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness is based on the ability of one natural sample of matter to scratch another. Under this scale, Diamond (and variants) sit at the top at 10 while glass is at 5.5. [ Ref ]. Cubic Zirconia is a common faux diamond, which is still fairly new (probably ante-dating this test for diamonds). economically important competitor for diamonds since commercial production began in 1976. Cubic Zirconia sits in between at around 7.5-8.5 on the Mohs scale ( Ref , Wikipedia puts it at 8, but the source refers to (generic) Zirconia, and I don't know if Cubic Zirconia has the same hardness.) As Mohs Scale is based on the ability to scratch lower numbered minerals , it seems cubic zirconia can scratch glass. It would be nice to get experimental confirmation of this theory, but I was unable to find any evidence (e.g. videos) of people actually trying it. For other faux diamonds, see some descriptions here . | {
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7,912 | I am sure most people will have heard this claim in some form or another: Cockroaches are so resilient that they will survive the nuclear holocaust. source Is this true? | Image Source From May Berenbaum , entomologist at the University of Illinois (a character in The X-Files was named after her): Rad Roaches (2001) In a study ( Wharton
and Wharton 1959 ), the authors conclusively
demonstrated that the American
cockroach was, compared with the rest of the
known irradiated insect world, a wimp; Periplaneta
americana died at doses of 20,000 rads. In comparison , it was noted that Drosophila
melanogaster (Fruit fly) had an LD 100 ( 100% probability of causing death ) of 64,000 rads
and the parasitoid wasp Habrobracon an
LD 100 of 180,000 rads. In retrospect, it could be argued that Periplaneta americana might
have been atypically sensitive to radiation as far as cockroaches go,
but it’s hard to find any subsequent studies that might have created the
reputation of roaches as tops among the
ranks of the radiation-resistant. ... Ross and Cochran (1963) examined the effects of ionizing radiation on
the German cockroach, Blattella germanica , and found that doses as low
as 6,400 rads killed 93% of nymphs after 35 days , and effects on
reproductive capacity could be detected at doses as low as 400 rads. Granted, German cockroaches proved capable of surviving 10 times the
dosages over the same time period that would be lethal to humans , but,
in point of fact, they ultimately succumbed to dosages that don’t even
disturb many other insect species. ... Deinococcus radiodurans (is without doubt the
most radiation-resistant organism known on the planet. A pinkish
bacterium that smells vaguely of rotten cabbage, it was isolated
originally from canned meat that had spoiled despite being irradiated
(it has turned up in irradiated fish and duck meat, as well as in the
dung of elephants and llamas and in granite from Antarctica) ( Travis
1998 ). It grows happily in radioactive waste sites in the presence of
levels as high as 1.5 million rads (keep in mind that’s over 1,000
times the 1,000 rads that kill humans and sterilizes American
cockroaches). In a frozen state it may even be able to withstand 3
million rads. MythBusters: COULD ROACHES REALLY SURVIVE A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION? To test whether this doomsday scenario has any legs, the MythBusters
subjected German cockroaches to three levels of radioactive metal
cobalt 60. They started with a baseline exposure of 1,000 radon units
(rads) of cobalt 60, capable of killing a person in 10 minutes, and
followed it up with 10,000 and 100,000 rad exposures on separate
guinea pig — er, roach — groups. ( As a comparison, the bomb on
Hiroshima emitted radioactive gamma rays at a strength of around
10,000 rads ) Since radiation gradually destroys organisms on the cellular level, the MythBusters monitored the radiated roaches for 30 days . After a month, half the roaches exposed to 1,000 rads were still kicking, and a remarkable 10 percent of the 10,000 rad group was alive. The results confirmed that cockroaches can survive a nuclear explosion — but only to a point, as none of the critters in the 100,000 rad group made it through. [ Watch video clip on YouTube ] Taken from the Annotated MythBusters website: To evaluate the longer term affects of the test on the insects, the MythBusters took them home along with a control group that hadn't been exposed . They monitored the insects over the next 30 days and counted how many died. They exposed the three different sets of bugs at 1000 rads, 10,000 rads, and 100,000 rads. The bugs in the 1000 rads and 10,000 rads tests appeared fine but 90% of the cockroaches in the 100,000 rads group immediately died . Based on these results, the cockroaches clearly weren't the best survivors of a nuclear blast. They are quite hardy, able to survive radiation doses at 10,000 rads, which is 10x the lethal dose for humans. However, the flour beetles did much better and the fruit flies might have done better if their normal lifespan wasn't 30 days. Survivalists? Cockroaches have been around for at least 300 million years , and there are 5000 species worldwide . ... most people (including many biologists who do not study cockroaches)
are generally familiar with just a handful of “pest” cockroach species
that have become associated with human habitation . Few people realize
the extent of cockroach diversity in life history, habitat, behavior,
and morphology. Cockroaches occupy a wide variety of habitats including
tropical and temperate forests, deserts, grasslands, and salt marshes . Similarly, they have a wide vertical distribution ranging from
tropical rain forest canopies to deep in the soil . The broad habitat
is reflected in a number of features such as diet and foraging
, morphology, physiology, reproduction, diet, circadian
rhythms, and seasonal activity [ Source ] Most species of roaches live in the tropics. But roaches live all over the world , including the North and South Poles. Pest cockroaches can withstand temperatures as cold as 32°F (0°C) , but will die if the temperature goes much below that. In extremely cold places, however, they survive by moving in with humans . [ Source ] What do they eat? They feed on just about anything of vegetable
origin. But cockroaches also like meat. While they prefer starch, they thrive on grease, sweets,
paper, soap, cardboard, book bindings, ink, shoe polish, and even dirty clothes . They’ve been known
to gnaw on a fingernail while people sleep and on infants’ eyelashes. They are especially fond of
beer. Cockroaches can live for 3 months without food and for 30 days without water . Since they taste
their food before eating it, they learn to avoid chemically-treated products. [ Source ] Due to the large variety of species it's hard to make a general statement about how well "a cockroach" would fare in the aftermath of a nuclear war. But it seems they have a better chance at surviving the radiation and they are less picky eaters than we humans. More: ABC Science - Cockroaches and radiation Slate - Will Cockroaches Inherit the Earth? | {
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7,973 | I have widely heard that Gandhi has said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Is there any evidence of this? Where is this recorded? | I can't find any source for him stating the quote as such. I did find a book, The Knights Templar & the Protestant Reformation , which states that when Stanley Jones, a missionary, met with Mahatma Gandhi he asked him: Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is that
you appear to so adamantly reject becoming his follower? Gandhi replied: Oh, I don't reject Christ. I love Christ. It's just that so many of
you Christians are so unlike Christ. The book seems to have a reference, although I can't check what it is as the references page is not on Google Books. The quote seems to be from the book Mr. Gandhi, the man by Millie Graham Polak although the book is not viewable online. Searching the book for the first part of the passage quoted in the knights templar book, "Is Mr. Gandhi a Christian?" returns a hit , although searching for "stanley jones" or "reject christ" does not. In The Christ of the Indian Road by E. Stanley Jones, Stanley Jones asked Gandhi how to naturalize Christianity into India. Gandhi replied in part: I would suggest first of all that all of you Christians, missionaries
and all begin to live more like Jesus Christ. This could be in part where the quote came from, if it was never said directly by Gandhi. Given the amount of consistent references to the quote being said in reply to a question from Stanley Jones, I think it is likely something very similar to the oft quoted passage was said. I can't find anything online that shows this for certain and don't have access to the books where the quote may appear to check, so it's hard to say for sure. | {
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7,998 | So-called pox parties have been around in various forms in varying degrees of popularity since the 1980's, and are described on Wikipedia as: A pox party, or flu party or flu fling, is a social activity where children are deliberately exposed to a virus to promote immunity. Such parties are typically organized by parents on the premise of building the immune systems of their children against diseases such as chickenpox and measles (which can be more dangerous to adults than to children) or flu. Such practices are highly controversial and are discouraged by public health officials. Is there any immunological advantage to having pox-parties for children, which advantage would not be gained in a safer way by taking the vaccine suggested by the WHO ( varicella vaccine )? | Short answer: No, pox parties are NOT safer than vaccines. This was asked at the Parenting StackExchange . Here is my answer from that: PROS of VACCINES : The vaccine is administered in a doctor's office. Understand that NOTHING is 100% safe (even breathing), so should there be any reactions, you will be with a doctor. The patient that gets the vaccine will most likely not suffer from the disease, and the numerous possible side effects (scarring, pneumonia, liver damage, brain damage, death). A vaccinated individual contributes to Herd Immunity without going through a contagious stage, thereby offering protection to individuals who are immune-compromised, or may be unable to get the vaccine. The rate of SERIOUS complications with a vaccine are about 1 in 1,000,000 (and keep in mind, the majority of these complications are non-permanent treatable reactions such as anaphalaxis if in the presence of a doctor). Other complications appear at about a rate of 1 in 100,000. The complications from the disease itself are about 1 in 10,000 for chicken pox (and depending on the classification, as high as 1 in 50). The economic impact is lessened by a vaccine (a good counter argument to the "Big Pharma" lie... In general, a vaccine nets any company much, much LESS than treating someone with the same disease). CONS of VACCINES : None beyond those listed above that have any scientific merit (i.e. the 1 in a million chance of a severe negative reaction). Or the minor issue of the vaccine not totally providing immunity. PROS of POX-PARTY : A very high likelihood that immunity will be gained through exposure (although it should be noted that the level of immunity is the same as for a vaccine...) CONS of POX-PARTY : The much higher possibility of side effects (1 in 10,000 versus 1 in a million) such as brain damage, liver damage, death The possibility of spreading the disease to immune-compromised or those who may not know their immunity is somehow compromised. Not being in the presence of a doctor during administration The economic impact of having to care for a sick child (staying home from work, the child missing school, the cost of additional medicines to deal with symptoms ) You get sick! Some good educational sites for you: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia . Stanford (and I) think it's a good idea to eliminate deaths from this preventable disease . Not sure if this link will work in this format, but here is an interesting video about opting out of vaccines in general (and the consequences): http://www.newsy.com/embed-video/9802/ The whole idea of these parties are based on the false premise that somehow natural immunity is better than a vaccine, or that vaccines are dangerous. Both of these ideas are outright false, and quite often deliberate lies spread by anti-vax pro-disease individuals . | {
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8,020 | A northern Indiana hospital that erected billboards with the message “Obesity is a Disease. Not a Decision” is facing a backlash from people offended by the signs’ suggestion that obesity isn’t a lifestyle choice. I am sceptical of the notion that obesity is a disease in the classic sense. Is there any medical evidence to support the notion that it is? | No doubt it is a disease in medical sense of the word. It has a code on WHO's ICD-10 ( The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision ) ICD-10 E66.0 Obesity due to excess calories Common definitions of disease: "A disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an
organism." (Dorland's Medical Dictionary) or disease: a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts
that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by
distinguishing signs and symptoms ( Merriam-Webster ) There is little doubt that obesity is a disease according to both of above definitions. Now, complete misunderstanding comes from interpreting "obesity is a disease" as "obesity is caused by a disease" . However, in reality diet and lack of exercise are the leading causes. The cause of obesity is complex and multifactorial. Within the context
of environmental, social and genetic factors, at the simplest level
obesity results from long-term positive energy balance — the
interaction of energy intake and energy expenditure. The rapid
increase in the prevalence of obesity over the past 20 years is a
result of environmental and cultural influences rather than genetic
factors. With progressive improvements in the standard of living in
developed and developing countries, overnutrition and sedentary
lifestyle have supplanted physical labour and regular physical
activity, which has resulted in positive energy balance and
overweight. ( 2006 Canadian clinical practice guidelines on the management and prevention of obesity in adults and children ) There is absolutely no contradiction between obesity being a disease, and the fact that it's caused by peoples' bad habits. There are numerous diseases, which are caused by bad habits. For example alcohol abuse if considered disease ( ICD-10 F10 ), so is cocaine addiction ( ICD-10 F14 ). However this does not mean that you can just use "it's a disease" as excuse, they are results of one's decisions. In Global Burden of Disease metrics, high body-mass index ranks as the 6th highest death risk factor . | {
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8,067 | I saw a while back a YouTube video that appears to show a news report of a man who patented technology to turn water into "HHO" . The video makes some big claims — 161 km (100 mi.) on 0.1 L (4 oz.) of gas, developing water-powered Hummers, something "as hot as the surface of the sun", etc. but I haven't seen anything to officially refute it. Is there an official verdict on this? | The technology he demonstrates for welding is well known and understood (see this patent from 1962 ), and is generally called an oxyhydrogen electrolytic torch or water torch. Water is decomposed into Oxygen and Hydrogen on demand. This has some benefits in difficult environments (e.g. underwater) and others where you wouldn't want to have cylinders of compressed flammable gas, as well as for some other niche applications. It's not commonly used today. The core problem with his "100ml of water for 160km" claim (not that that's impressive, he just re-captures the water after the combustion) and similar efficiency claims is that the splitting of H2O into "HHO" (actually 2H₂O → 2H₂+O₂) requires energy. The combustion of "HHO" produces energy, but there is always a net loss - heat, friction (as in a car engine), and losses in the original splitting. His claim is that he has refined this process to get more energy out than is put in, which puts his claims in the realms of perpetual motion machines, and breaks a lot of very well understood laws of physics. Without making a more specific claim - a special catalyst he uses or some new technology, this is not even a claim worth investigating. The electrolysis of water is well understood, as it is widely performed on a commercial scale. Most plants have overall efficiency of less than 70%. | {
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8,146 | A statement that I've heard over and over, is that U.S. companies are legally obligated to maximize profits for shareholders, and that this explains why companies act socially unresponsible. In this speech at Netroots Nation , Al Franken says: it is literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits. I think I may have read somewhere that this is a myth, and unfortunately pervasive in many companies. Bonus question: do Western companies have any different obligations in this matter? | No. Because the idea itself is too poorly defined and naive interpretations are often bad for shareholders in practice If the legal obligation to maximize profit for shareholders existed, we would have to develop a good definition of how it is to be measured. Alas, there isn't even a unique way to summarize a stream of known cash payments over time into a single current value (the net present value calculation yields different results for different discount rates). The standard way of thinking about quoted company values, which claims to resolve the problem of which discount rate to choose (the capital asset pricing model), has serious problems despite its wide acceptance (well summarized by Wikipedia ). Many of the issues come down to a judgement call about making a costly investment now for higher profits in the future or just giving the cash to shareholders instead. This is a hard matter of judgement and coping with uncertainty in the future. The Shareholder Value movement has been influential in promoting the idea that cashflow to shareholders should be the focus of senior management in quoted companies. The movement has led to some beneficial changes in business practice, but has also led many leaders to become overly obsessed with their share prices. As John Kay (a British economist and commentator) has pointed out : Managers who focus closely on the stock price, whether by inclination or because they have incentives to do so, will often fail to serve the best interests even of their stockholders. In another of his regular columns in the Financial Times he describes his own journey with the idea of shareholder value: In my academic life, I taught the standard concepts of modern economic theory, based on efficient markets populated by maximising agents. Yet, as I saw more of successful businesses, I understood that they didn’t maximise anything. Such businesses were complex political organisms: they contained and were influenced by diverse individuals and groups with diverse goals, and the effective manager was someone who could mediate between these conflicting forces. If these companies talked about shareholder value – and increasingly they did – it was an instance of Franklin’s Gambit, a legitimising rhetoric rather than a real guide to action. And the more shareholder value became a guide to action, the worse the outcome. On the board of the Halifax Building Society, I voted in 1995 for its conversion to a “plc”. We would allow the company to pursue the goal of maximising its value untrammelled by outmoded concepts of mutuality: in barely a decade, almost every last penny of that value was destroyed. In 1996, as my thoughts on this began to form, I went to the CBI annual conference and described how ICI, for decades Britain’s leading industrial company, had recently transformed its mission statement from “the responsible application of chemistry” to “creating value for shareholders”. The company’s share price peaked a few months later, to begin a remorseless decline that would lead to its disappearance as an independent company. ...These unanticipated results reflected the profit-seeking paradox, well described in James Collins and Jerry Porras’s fine book Built to Last: the most profitable companies were not the most profit-oriented. As he summarizes: the idea that good decisions are the product of orderly processes – is more alive than ever in public affairs.
...There is not, and never will be, such a science. Our objectives are typically imprecise, multifaceted and change as we progress towards them – and properly so. Our decisions depend on the responses of others, and on what we anticipate these responses will be. The world is complex and imperfectly known, and this will remain true however much we analyse it. And this summary explains why the idea of "maximizing" profit is not a sensible objective in itself: the world is too complex and no formula can reduce it to a meaningful value. Update A recent Washington Post blog includes some useful references and commentary. For example, the blog argues: this supposed imperative to “maximize” a company’s share price has no foundation in history or in law. Nor is there any empirical evidence that it makes the economy or the society better off. What began in the 1970s and ’80s as a useful corrective to self-satisfied managerial mediocrity has become a corrupting, self-interested dogma peddled by finance professors, money managers and over-compensated corporate executives. And: There are no statutes that put the shareholder at the top of the corporate priority list. In most states, corporations can be formed for any lawful purpose. Cornell University law professor Lynn Stout has been looking for years for a corporate charter that even mentions maximizing profits or share price. She hasn’t found one. Nor does the law require, as many believe, that executives and directors owe a special fiduciary duty to shareholders. The fiduciary duty, in fact, is owed simply to the corporation, which is owned by no one, just as you and I are owned by no one — we are all “persons” in the eyes of the law. Shareholders, however, have a contractual claim to the “residual value” of the corporation once all its other obligations have been satisfied — and even then directors are given wide latitude to make whatever use of that residual value they choose, as long they’re not stealing it for themselves. This provides a relatively concise summary of the case in the USA. Second Update A recent article by the previously mentioned Lynn Stout has summarised the case in more depth (and has written a whole book, The Shareholder Value Myth , on the topic). Summarising some of the previously discussed analysis she argues: Shareholder primacy theory is suffering a crisis of confidence. This is happening in large part because it is becoming clear that shareholder value thinking doesn’t seem to work, even for most shareholders. On the core idea that shareholders "own" the firm: Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves , just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights. On the idea that shareholders are the residual claimants of the corporation's wealth: A more sophisticated but equally mistaken claim is the residual claimants argument. ... But the residual claimants argument is also legally erroneous. Shareholders are residual claimants only when failed companies are being liquidated in bankruptcy. The law applies different rules to healthy companies, where the legal entity is its own residual claimant, meaning the entity is entitled to keep its profits and to use them as its board of directors sees fit. The board may choose to distribute some profits as dividends to shareholders. But it can also choose instead to raise employee salaries; invest in marketing or research and development; or make charitable contributions. On the legal duties of directors: Provided directors don’t use their corporate powers to enrich themselves, a key legal doctrine called the “business judgment rule” otherwise protects them from liability. The business judgment rule ensures that, contrary to popular belief, the managers of public companies have no enforceable legal duty to maximize shareholder value. She further argues that the idea of shareholder value is itself incoherent and there is little or no evidence that firms who have pursued it have performed well. In short, shareholder value is a bad theory of how to manage the firm; a legal fiction; and a stick used by anti-business activists to demonise capitalist activity. | {
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8,188 | I've been seeing this claim on Facebook a lot recently, somewhat virally: Debt added by the previous 43 U.S. presidents combined $6.3 trillion dollars (sic) Debt added by the president Obama $6.5 trillion dollars (sic) Is this claim valid? I tend to think something is being misrepresented, although I can't say what. | No, this is a false claim In debunking this it is important to clarify that there are two types of debt the claim could be referring to. There is public debt , which refers to all money borrowed by the US government through the issue of securities by the Treasury and other federal government agencies. The other is gross federal debt which is the total of all public debt as well as any debt held by the government, such as social security or medicare. It doesn't specify which type of debt in the claim, although in both cases the claim is false. It is very easy to prove this claim false, by using the Debt to the Penny calculator on the TreasuryDirect website . As of February 23, 2012: Debt Held by the Public: $10.6 trillion Intragovernmental Holdings: $4.8 trillion Total Public Debt Outstanding: $15.4 trillion President Obama was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009 So, using the penny debt calculator to look at the timeframe from the date of President Obama's inauguration to now, we can get the figures needed to validate the claim. On the date of President Obama's inauguration, rounded debt figures for debt accumulated by all previous presidents are as follows: Debt Held by the Public: $6.3 trillion Intragovernmental Holdings: $4.3 trillion Total Public Debt Outstanding: $10.6 trillion So, if we subtract these (unrounded) figures from the (unrounded) current figures above, we are left with the accumulate debt that can be attributed to President Obama. Debt Held by the Public: $10.6 trillion - $6.3 trillion = $4.37 trillion Intragovernmental Holdings: $4.8 trillion - $4.3 trillion = $0.44 trillion Total Public Debt Outstanding: $15.4 trillion - $10.6 trillion = $4.8 trillion In all cases, the debt attributed to President Obama is less than the total debt accumulate by the past 43 presidents for both types of debt. | {
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8,245 | Related: Does smoking cigarettes cause lung cancer? A friend of mine related today, as shocked as I was to hear it, that he heard that every single study that had ever been conducted on second hand smoke effects was flawed. While I was fairly shocked to hear this (if cigarette smoke causes cancer, why would second hand cigarette smoke not cause cancer?), apparently there's others who think this. For example the site: Second hand smoke studies: the hype and deceit "Secondhand smoke kills, according to a new study!," is frantically shouted from the bold type headlines of newspapers and magazine articles. Mostly it is uneducated and/or issue biased newspaper reporters who add the hype to the already deceitful study. Either they don't bother to read the study for themselves (or they do and don't understand the scientific implications), relying on misleading statements from the researchers themselves, or they are far more interested in the fear mongering factor that makes for good reading and do not bother to check with anyone how accurate or reliable a study is. Not to mention it is more politically correct to nod their head yes and insert their own views and conclusions based on the scary sounding research title and bits of information that they have heard. Whether it is a reporter with no concept of what it is they are actually reporting, simply relaying the study du jour, or a health organization or researcher submitting a report, none of what they say can be taken at face value. News reports are manipulated and then hyped, as are practically all of the studies on secondhand smoke. The site appears to go through about 10 various studies on second hand smoke, proceeding to illustrate why they don't show what they intend to show: that second hand smoke, does, indeed, cause cancer. For once and for all: Is there current good, non-flawed evidence from studies showing that second-hand smoke does cause cancer? | When there is doubt about individual studies, the place to go is a meta-study - one that looks at many different experiments, evaluates the quality according to a strict methodology, and pools the results to get stronger statistical findings. Here's one from 2007: Meta-analysis of studies of passive smoking and lung cancer: effects of study type and continent. Taylor R, Najafi F, Dobson A. Int J Epidemiol. 2007 Oct;36(5):1048-59. Epub 2007 Aug 9. It extracted 55 high quality studies from a pool of 101 that looked at never-smoking women with smoking spouses. They found an increased risk of lung cancer, across each continent, with no evidence of publication bias. The abundance of evidence, consistency of finding across continent and study type, dose-response relationship and biological plausibility, overwhelmingly support the existence of a causal relationship between passive smoking and lung cancer . But wait, that's only in the home . Why would we ban tobacco in the work-place? Oh, because there is another meta-analysis that shows the effect can be even stronger there! Stayner L, Bena J, Sasco AJ, Smith R, Steenland K, Kreuzer M, Straif K. Lung cancer risk and workplace exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. Am J Public Health. 2007 Mar;97(3):545-51. Epub 2007 Jan 31. They looked at 22 studies from around the world. A strong relationship was observed between lung cancer and duration of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. The findings from this investigation provide the strongest evidence to date that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke in the workplace is associated with an increased risk of lung cancer. Extra Reading: Cancer Research UK give an easier-to-read explanation of the science. This paper reflects the claims of bias straight back. It shows that the bias, in this not-really-but-presented-as controversy, comes from the tobacco companies. | {
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8,259 | Global IQ: 1950–2050 Essentially the idea is that while smart people are getting wealthier, their birth-rate tends to drop. On the other hand poor countries, which are generally populated by less intelligent people, have constant birth rates. So theoretically this would lead in drops of the global IQ, as the global population is rising. Is this true? | N.B. IQ scores are standardized for a given population at a given
time. The average IQ is always 100, and its standard deviation is always 15. To compare between times or populations, we must use “raw IQ,” by which I mean the raw scores of a few tests,
especially: Raven's Matrices , a test of pattern recognition Digit span, a test of short-term memory It's been discussed
before whether such
tests measure intelligence, and whether intelligence even exists. But
if intelligence does exist, and it increases generation-by-generation as children receive
better care and nutrition, then Raven's and digit span are
particularly good tests for showing that increase. The Flynn effect is a very well-known phenomenon by which the raw IQ of a population increases over time. It's been specifically studied in rural Kenya, where the paper's authors found that – mainly due to smaller families, better nutrition, and an increased literacy rate among parents – the raw IQ of Kenyan children is increasing, at a rate comparable to that in industrialized nations. As the birth rate decreases and nutrition and literacy improve, that rate will increase. As it rises above the rate in industrialized nations, the "IQ gap" will disappear. The site you link to ignores the Flynn effect entirely. It takes average raw IQ scores from a few dozen nations, estimates the rest based on “demographic mix,” and then assumes that each nation won't change in intelligence, even for 100 years (despite Flynn's studies having proved an increase). The site hand-waves this, saying that the Flynn effect is “undisputed yet enigmatic” and then arguing that it doesn't exist , since: It would imply that people in the past were far less intelligent than the current standard, yet “the literature and music of a century or more ago is clearly not the work of marginally retarded minds.” Most parents think their children are dumber than they are. The second isn't worth responding to. The first fundamentally misunderstands the Flynn effect. Let's compare the increase in intelligence to the (better documented) rise in life expectancy . Life expectancy at birth remained at about 30 years for 50 000 years of human history, then skyrocketed at industrialization. The overall trend isn't people have lived progressively longer throughout history, but rather there has been a dramatic increase in life expectancy tied to industrialization. It's also worth noting that as the average life expectancy rose, the distribution changed as well, since most of the change is due to lower infant mortality. Just as today, some people in medieval and ancient times lived to be 90. Similarly, the Flynn effect doesn't imply that people have gotten more intelligent throughout history, nor that there weren't any geniuses in the past. Clearly, intelligence in industrializing nations is growing along with that of industrialized nations. As their HDI increases, the rate of intelligence growth will increase as well. So not only is the world getting smarter, but also currently industrializing nations will produce the greatest future gains in aggregate intelligence. | {
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8,380 | Some westerners think that people from pre-modern cultures considered photography "stealing somebody's soul". ( Comment on Travel.SE , article by a photographer ). Was this the case? | American Indians of the Pacific Northwest - Library Of Congress [ Carolyn J. Marr ] illustrates a change in Native Americans' attitudes towards photography from the late 19th to the early 20th century . At first, many Native Americans were wary of having their photographs
taken and often refused. They believed that the process could steal a
person's soul and disrespected the spiritual world. Over time,
however, some Native Americans came to cherish photographs as links to
ancestors and even integrated them into important ceremonies. More: RIIC - Aboriginal Customs and Protocols | {
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8,440 | A recent survey in the UK claims that about 10% of women have been raped but that most do not report the incident even to friends. In the words of one news report: One in 10 women has been raped, and more than a third subjected to sexual assault, according to a major survey, which also highlights just how frightened women are of not being believed. More than 80 per cent of the 1,600 respondents said they did not report their assault to the police, while 29 per cent said they told nobody – not even a friend or family member – of their ordeal. Wikipedia's summary suggests similar numbers in the USA and some other countries but there is a huge discrepancy between officially recorded numbers and the numbers reported in anonymous surveys. The gap between officially recorded rape and what the surveys suggest is partially a result of statistical misunderstandings (official figures tend to report incidence (rapes per year) whereas surveys report lifetime prevalence (number of people who have ever been raped at any time in their life)). But, even taking the statistical confusions into account the reported numbers are much smaller than the numbers implied from anonymous surveys. So, given the size of the gap between official numbers and the survey results, which is right?Are these recent estimates that one in ten women have experienced rape credible? | The 10% quoted in the British survey is not credible because of how the survey was conducted, but reliable numbers might be as high as 4% The original survey that prompted the Question was conducted by UK campaigning website Mumsnet as part of their Rape Awareness Campaign . Unfortunately their good intentions are undone by bad survey design and some statistical illiteracy in how they quote their results. The situation is analysed here and here by UK fact checkers Straight Statistics. The first problem is that the survey was not a properly conducted random sample but a self selecting voluntary survey. This is always a major source of bias but a good way to back up campaigns when you are less than choosy about the statistical rules. As Straight Statistics says: The Mumsnet survey is part of a campaign called We Believe You. I certainly don’t disbelieve Mumsnet’s respondents, as it’s unlikely they are making it up. But I don’t believe that any self-selected survey of this sort provides a basis for reaching any conclusion at all. But they also showed some illiteracy when adding up their numbers. In the second comment in Straight Statistics the problems is explained like this: I overlooked the very strange way in which the survey was reported by Mumsnet. The PDF of the survey results on the Mumsnet website shows one question that read as follows: Mumsnet reported this as 10 per cent reporting having been raped and 35 per cent sexually assaulted. But this ignores the third answer, those who have suffered both rape and sexual assault. Taking this into account, the true figure should be that 27 per cent have been raped and 52 per cent sexually assaulted, with only 38 per cent experiencing neither. Even worse than Mumsnet claimed!
The figures make it even more unlikely that the responses represent a true representation of women’s experiences, but the survey was widely reported, using the headline figures in the Mumsnet press release. So they underreported the answer but didn't give a convincing account of their statistical skills. To put this in perspective Straight Statistics quote the results of a more reliable source: The best data we have, from the British Crime Survey (BCS), suggests this is an overestimate.
The latest bulletin on Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence , published in January, indicates (Table 3.01) that 3.7 per cent of women report having been raped since the age of 16 (4.5 per cent if attempted rape is included), and 18.6 per cent report having experienced any form of sexual assault – around half the proportions reported by Mumsnet. The BCS figures come from a properly-chosen sample of more than 6,000 women. The Mumsnet results come from “write-in” responses on its website from 1,609 women. To me the much more reliable BCS results are still disturbingly high and the mumsnet survey just muddied the waters by exaggerating by bad survey design. Newspapers mostly swallowed the numbers with little critique or reference to previous, better, work. On topics as important as this they should have done a better job. | {
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8,614 | Electronic cigarettes pose as a replacement of cigarettes. It is claimed that they help in quitting smoking. They do come in flavors, and in various levels of nicotine.
But, are they less harmful? Do they have any side effects? For example, Health Canada issued an advisory against electronic cigarettes . Health Canada is advising Canadians not to purchase or use electronic smoking products, as these products may pose health risks and have not been fully evaluated for safety, quality and efficacy by Health Canada In recent months, a number of electronic cigarettes, cigars and pipes as well as cartridges of nicotine solutions and related products have been marketed in Canada, and through the Internet. Most of these products are shaped and look like their conventional counterparts. They produce a vapour that resembles smoke and a glow that resembles the tip of a cigarette. They consist of a battery-powered delivery system that vapourizes and delivers a liquid chemical mixture that may be composed of various amounts of nicotine, propylene glycol, and other chemicals. Nicotine is a highly addictive and toxic substance, and the inhalation of propylene glycol is a known irritant. Although these electronic smoking products may be marketed as a safer alternative to conventional tobacco products and, in some cases, as an aid to quitting smoking, electronic smoking products may pose risks such as nicotine poisoning and addiction. A research study in late 2015 seems to add weight to Health Canada's claims. In the press release (which was quoted uncritically in many newspaper headlines e.g. The Guardian ) one author stated: Based on the evidence to date, I believe they are no better than smoking regular cigarettes So the question is, is an electronic cigarette significantly healthier than a normal cigarette?
Is an electronic cigarette with non-nicotine cartridges not harmful whatsoever? | Electronic cigarettes may not be harmless but they are clearly much less harmful than cigarettes Public Health England (PHE) produced a review of e-cigs in the middle of 2015 which came to this conclusion: The role and impact of electronic cigarettes has been one of the great debates in public health in recent years and we commissioned this independent review of the latest evidence to ensure that practitioners, policy makers and, most importantly of all, the public have the best evidence available. Many people think the risks of e-cigarettes are the same as smoking tobacco and this report clarifies the truth of this. In a nutshell, best estimates show e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful to your health than normal cigarettes, and when supported by a smoking cessation service, help most smokers to quit tobacco altogether. From a public health perspective where the goal is minimising harm , this is a major and significant conclusion. E-cigs help people quit real cigarettes and they are inherently safer (though whether you should take the back-of-an-envelope 95% number seriously is a subject of much contention.) This is unsurprising from a chemical point of view. Nicotine is the active ingredient of cigarettes, it provides the key physiological effect, and it is somewhat addictive. But it isn't what causes the harm: that would be the thousands of other chemicals associated with it when tobacco is burned. This include polycyclic aromatic compounds and tars which are both known to be potent carcinogens. This is well known, Wikipedia-level knowledge. E-cigs don't contain most of those harmful ingredients and the mechanism of inhalation doesn't create them (some are produced by burning). Some would argue that nicotine itself is a poison. After all plants produce it to deter animals and insects from eating them. But then, so is caffeine. So it looks as though chemical intuition would support the PHE conclusion. But a recent study (mentioned in the question) suggests e-cigs are carcinogenic. This headline-friendly study was rebutted in The Guardian by Linda Bauld, a professor of health policy (my emphasis): ...the key issue for this current study of e-cigarettes is not whether extensive and prolonged exposure to e-liquid vapour (of a duration and intensity that wouldn’t occur in human use) changes human cells, but rather what the e-liquid was compared to, and what this can tell us about the relative harm of tobacco smoking compared with e-cigarette use. The authors claim their study shows that e-cigarettes are no safer than tobacco, and experienced science editors in newspapers were quick to reproduce these claims without careful scrutiny of the original article. In reality this study tells us little or nothing about the safety of e-cigarettes compared to smoking... In only one small part of the article, not covered in the press release and not picked up by the media, do the authors mention that they also exposed some cells to tobacco smoke... Yet the authors could not directly compare the cigarette and e-cigarette treated cells, because the cigarette treated samples all died within 24 hours. Cigarette smoke was so toxic that the cells did not survive beyond this short period, whereas the e-cigarette cell lines were topped up with e-liquid every three days, and the testing continued for several weeks. ...Indeed an alternative headline for the press release, as a colleague from a cancer charity has already pointed out, could have been ‘cells can survive for 8 weeks in e-cig liquid but only 24 hours in cigarette extract’ . In other words, if we compare e-cigarette vapour with fresh air we find the presence of some toxicants, as previous research has done. But it seems from the results of this study that if we compare e-cigarettes with tobacco smoke, e-cigarettes are safer. Conclusion If we look at the comparisons actually being done in tests, even the ones that are used as evidence to cast doubt on the safety of e-cigs, the actual conclusion we reach is that they are much safer than real cigarettes. Supplement: why there is a controversy But not everyone agrees. The PHE report was heavily criticised and understanding the debate provides useful insight into why there is a great deal of fear, uncertainty and doubt around its conclusion but also why it looks like a good judgement call on the current science. The response to the PHE report was led by this article in the BMJ . Its key criticisms were: Public Health England’s endorsement of the safety and efficacy of e-cigarettes is based on uncertain evidence The quality of evidence that e-cigarettes help smokers to quit is weak Recent evidence questions the conclusion that e-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking Until better evidence is available public health strategies should follow the precautionary principle The tone of the article, especially that last point, suggests that the right standard is not harm reduction but absolute proof that e-cigs are completely safe. The critique also made the strong claim that some of the evidence relied on by PHE was based on studies containing serious conflicts of interest (CoI). In responding to this critique , David Nutt , a renowned expert on harms for legal and illegal drugs said (my emphasis): The justification both commentaries use for this claim is not the data we reported but the fact that a few of the experts in our group of twelve had declared potential conflicts of interests (CoIs) in relation to tobacco harm reduction products. Also it was implied that the funder of the MCDA project, EuroSwiss Health, was paid by the tobacco industry. These claims were publicly refuted by those named straight after the Lancet editorial [where the results were previously discussed], so why did the BMJ article continue in the same vein? We suggest that in repeating these allegations the BMJ authors were following a sadly all-to-common path for those who disagree with research conclusions to use CoI claims to undermine confidence in the findings rather than to critically analyse the data. A charitable view could be that they in fact can find no fault with the data (other than they dislike the conclusions), so have no alternative but to attack the scientists who generated it. Another response pointed out that the critique of the PHE report was ideological: McKee seems to start with the view (in not just this piece but in many others) that we must crusade against anything associated with the evil tobacco industry. If the industry likes it, we should oppose it. Other players in the debate (including that of Public Health England) adopt a more pragmatic position that the focus of tobacco policy should be harm reduction. You don't actually need to look at the quality of evidence to know how it will be interpreted, you just need to know which camp the author is in. The ideological position of fighting a crusade seems to lead to position where every weakness in a piece of evidence is interpreted as industry spin, conflict of interest or a damning fundamental flaw. All things not proved to be harmless should be opposed even if they clearly reduce harm dramatically compared to the alternative. The slightest hint of e-cigs being a gateway to tobacco use is proof that they are even if the clear weight of evidence suggest this effect is insignificant. But ideology does not make a good basis for rational policy assessment. And it encourages exactly the same unscientific tactics as the evil tobacco industry adopted to try to deflect the evidence of harm when it first appeared. McKee et. al. demand absolute proof of safety and seek every possible piece of uncertainty and doubt on the existing studies. But their standard is a poor basis for health policy (harm reduction not absolute harmlessness is surely a better position) and exacerbating every flaw in studies is exactly how the evil industry tried to minimise the evidence of harm. Just because you are on the side of the angels doesn't mean this tactic is a sensible scientific way to build public health policy. These two responses do a good job of summarising the debate. A key point is the issue that absolute safety is a distraction and better safety than cigarettes is more reasonable (the evidence is pretty clear on this point: e-cigs are much safer). Critics are not showing that e-cigs are as bad as cigarettes; they are arguing that they are not absolutely safe. This alone explains why there is so much FUD on the topic. | {
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8,635 | Roger D. Nelson , PhD (Experimental Psychology), claims to have proven using scientific methods that humans can influence the outcome of random number/event generators (RNG or REG) with their mind. The influence is claimed to be rather small but statistically significant. He has founded the Global Consciousness Project ( wikipedia page ) based on this results. The project installed random number/even generators on 65 locations around the world. It is claimed that this system detects changes in the level of randomness when important events happen, like during the September 11, 2001 attacks . If such a claim would come from a non-scientists, it would be quite easy for me to ignore it. However, this one comes from a scientist which works/has worked for a research group Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory at Princeton University, which has published journal papers about it. Is there a scientific consensus on this claimed effect? Like were there any neutral scientific tests which were able to repeat or refute it? | Examining psychokinesis: The interaction of human intention with random number generators — A meta-analysis. Bösch, Holger; Steinkamp, Fiona; Boller, Emil; Psychological Bulletin, Vol 132(4), Jul 2006, 497-523. Séance-room and other large-scale psychokinetic phenomena have
fascinated humankind for decades. Experimental research has reduced
these phenomena to attempts to influence (a) the fall of dice and,
later, (b) the output of random number generators (RNGs). The
meta-analysis combined 380 studies that assessed whether RNG output
correlated with human intention and found a significant but very small
overall effect size. The study effect sizes were strongly and
inversely related to sample size and were extremely heterogeneous. A
Monte Carlo simulation revealed that the small effect size, the
relation between sample size and effect size, and the extreme effect
size heterogeneity found could in principle be a result of publication
bias. As for Global Consciousness Project, they are using their own "random events generators" . However, unlike other commercially available random number generators, this one has no independent certificates at all. One would expect such a device to be tested independently, and conform to at least basic level of NIST FIPS-140-2 . | {
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8,644 | The following quote has been widely attributed to Desmond Tutu : When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “let us close our eyes and pray.” When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land. Examples of the attribution: Tumblr Homelands Productions Afhir Europe - misspelling his name, and describing him as an 'African novelist'. Think Exist Scots Independent , attributing the source as The Observer . The Guardian Desmond Tutu is an outspoken activist, but this sentiment seems unlikely coming from a former Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican church. None of the attributions I found suggested when and where he uttered these words. The quote has also been attributed to Jomo Kenyatta , former Prime Minister and then President of Kenya. I am unfamiliar with him, and the attribution might be apocryphal, but it seems a little more plausible, at least. | Wikiquote mentions this. As quoted in Desmond Tutu: A Biography (2004) by Steven Gish, p. 101; this is a joke Tutu has used, but variants of it exist which are not original to him. So he didn't make it up, but he did say it. He may not have meant it completely seriously. On the other hand he may have thought it humourous way of presenting a significant truth. Being a Christian doesn't automatically mean you approve of everything other Christians do. Here is an extract from the book , giving more context. Before [Tutu] left for the Nobel Prize Ceremony in Oslo, Norway, he spoke at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, and told one of his favorite stories. "When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “let us close our eyes and pray.” When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land." | {
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8,646 | There is a popular belief that drinking tea shortly after meal can cause health problems and is also dangerous to anemic people. Drinking tea just after a meal restricts the body's absorption of iron (Fe) consumed with the meal. [...] Tea or coffee consumed at least one hour after a meal does not interfere with iron absorption Source: Today's Zaman 7 Things Not To Do After a Meal Don't Drink Tea Because tea leaves contain a high content of acid. This substance will cause the Protein content in the food we consume to be hardened thus difficult to digest however Japanese Green tea is known as a drink which has many benefits for your health. Source: Health Time I just want to know if this claim is true and if it is, exactly what kinds of problems it can cause? | Drinking tea immediately after a meal can inhibit iron absorption from vegetable sources, however it does not inhibit iron absorption from cooked meat. Source - The effect of tea on iron absorption The effect of tea on iron absorption was studied in human volunteers. Absorption from solutions of FeCl3 and FeSO4, bread, a meal of rice with potato and onion soup, and uncooked haemoglobin was inhibited whether ascorbic acid was present or not. No inhibition was noted if the haemoglobin was cooked. The effect on the absorption of non-haem iron was ascribed to the
formation of insoluble iron tannate complexes. Drinking tannin-containing beverages such as tea with meals may contribute to the pathogenesis of iron deficiency if the diet consists largely of vegetable foodstuffs. | {
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8,682 | One of James Joyce's characters explains, in his book, Ulysses : The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved traditions of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres, causing the pores of the cobra cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been dominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis. i.e. when a man is hanged with a rope around the neck,
this can provoke the corpse to have an erection. This same idea seems to be wide-spread. Is this true? | Yes. This is known as a death erection or a terminal erection, amongst other names. Helen Singer Kaplan wrote in 1983, in The evaluation of sexual disorders: psychological and medical aspects (page 167): Acute cervical spinal cord transection produces immediate erection. Men subjected to capital punishment by hanging and laboratory animals sacrificed with cervical dislocation have terminal erections. The implication is that either central inhibition of erection is released and erection created or that a sudden massive spinal cord stimulus generates an erectile response. There is ample experimental and clinical evidence to support the former supposition. | {
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8,716 | I have heard this used in arguments (and even used it myself several times): that 20% of the US population pays 80% of the taxes. But I am starting to wonder if that is statistically accurate. Also, as a sub-question, I have also heard that 40% of people in the US don't pay taxes at all. These are specifically for US Federal income tax. Are either of these true, or are they just myths? | Yes, it's pretty much true if by taxes you mean federal Income Tax. Both in case of 20% paying 80% of taxes, and bottom 40% paying insignificant amount of taxes. Data from 2009: Top 1% (income above $343,927) paid 36.73% Top 5% (income above $154,643) paid 58.66% Top 10% (income above $112,124) paid 70.47% Top 25% (income above $66,193) paid 87.30% Top 50% (income above $32,396) paid 97.75% Bottom 50% (income below $32,396) paid 2.25% Source IRS via National Taxpayers Union | {
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8,807 | Source From The Independent (1999): Claims that one of history's greatest ships could never sink were never made during the Titanic's short lifetime and are a classic example of myth creation , according to a British academic. Richard Howells, lecturer in communications studies at Leeds University, says in a new book, The Myth of the Titanic , that it was only after the liner had gone down that she was described as being unsinkable. "As soon as the Titanic sank, everyone decided it was the great unsinkable ship, but it was never, in fact, publicised as being an unsinkable ship, " he said. [...] ... The belief that the Titanic's builders had promoted her as the world's first unsinkable ship has been repeatedly reinforced over the years in books and films about her maiden voyage in 1912, when she sank after hitting an iceberg. James Cameron's film Titanic has the heroine's mother looking up at the ship before she set sail and remarking: " So this is the ship they say is unsinkable? " Yet, Dr Howells claims that an extensive search of the Titanic literature at the time has revealed only three instances when the word "unsinkable" was mentioned in print - and then only with the proviso "practically". " The population as a whole was unlikely to have thought of the Titanic as a unique, unsinkable ship before its maiden voyage, " he said. My question: Was the Titanic ever advertised as being "Unsinkable"? | source Yes , multiple times. See for example the statements of Captain E. J. Smith, captain of the Olympic: the Olympic is unsinkable, and the Titanic will be the same when she is put in commission. — Captain Smith Believed Titanic To Be Unsinkable source (The above statement is only reported to be coming from him. While the page claims that the Washington Post is the official source, I can't confirm at this time) Also, you may want to review the official press statements by P. A. S. Franklin, vice-president of the International Mercantile Marine Co. , the day after the disaster, when the ship was still claimed to be "unsinkable": “While we have had no direct wireless communication from the Titanic,” said Mr Franklin, “we are satisfied that the vessel is unsinkable. — She cannot sink, says official of White Star Line There is then the following image, reportedly from a White Star Line brochure : I cannot confirm the image is original, but I have no reason to doubt it either. This is also confirmed by an article in the Denver Post of 15 April 1912: Belfast, April 15, 1912. — A representative of Harland and Wolff, the constructors of the Titanic, interviewed today, said that if the Titanic were sinking, the collision must have been of great force. The plating of the vessel, he said, was of the heaviest caliber and even if it were pierced, any two of her compartments could be flooded without imperilling the safety of the ship. — Builders of Titanic say she’d survive great blow There is also this nice, but old page which describes the available evidence. Contrary to popular opinion, there is a considerable body of evidence which proves pretty conclusively that the Titanic (as well as the Olympic) was called unsinkable not only in pre-disaster publicity brochures and newspaper articles but that there was a widespread oral tradition to that same effect -- a tradition that seems to have been promoted by top individuals at both Harland and Wolff and the White Star Line. Funnily enough, Wikipedia looks at the same evidence and finds it relevant to claim that the ship was only claimed to be "virtually unsinkable" until the sinking — they do not provide any reason or strong reference as to why it would make a difference. Finally there is at least one book ( The Myth of the Titanic , by Richard Parton Howells, Macmillan, 1999, ISBN 0333725972, 9780333725979 ) taking the opposite stance. I cannot access it or review the quality of the evidence presented. | {
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8,813 | According to one prolific contributor to Yahoo Answers : So-called "Israeli settlers" can shoot Palestinians at will without fear of prosecution so you do want a lot of doctors,and although it rarely does any good an attorney can at least try to keep your home from demolition because you aren't of the "right" ethnicity or religion. Note: The same author makes other claims, like the brother of PLO's representative in the U.S., Michael Tarazi, was crucified on the hood of an Israeli jeep in 1988. I couldn't find any other source corroborating that either. Is it true that Israeli settlers can or have shot Palestinians without any legal reprisal? | In short NO . The longer answer is that while many things are not allowed, in a conflict zone, like in all wars, soldiers and other participants sometimes do things that are not allowed. In the cases where the (Israeli) authorities learn about it, they prosecute the offenders to the full extent of the law, just like other Western democracies treat violations in a time of war. Most of the sources I'll present will be in Hebrew, and I'll try to give a translation of what I consider to be the most important parts. On the site of the peace organisation Hamoked given the story of Shlomo Adir, a settler from Ptzael who shot a Palestinian worker to death : At that time Shlomo Adir, the guard of Ptzael, noticed two [Palestinian] workers in the field and suspected them to be thieves... Adir entered the area of the greenhouses and called them to stop with a loudspeaker, stepped out of the car, loaded his weapon and shot approximately 10 shots at the air, immediately after he saw one of the workers next to him and shot three bullets at his upper body from close range resulting in his immediate death. ... In March 2008, Adir was convicted in a court in negligent manslaughter and was sentenced for 200 hours of community service, conditioned incarceration and compensation to the victim's family of 25,000 NIS. The judge ruled that Adir opened fire too quickly and in a negligent matter. Appeals that Adir filed in higher courts and the Supreme court were rejected. ... On the 25/11/2010, 7.5 years after the deadly and unnecessary shooting, an agreement was reached in court saying that the shooter and the settlement Ptzael would pay 763,670 NIS to the victims family as compensation. Here are some links to occurrences where Israeli military personal were charged for killing Palestinians: Border police officer who shot a Palestinian boy charged with negligent manslaughter (in English) Lieutenant colonel is charged with negligent manslaughter in Jenin (in Hebrew) There are many more examples. The Hebrew Wikipedia has an article about Jewish terrorism and in it a section of Jewish terrorism against Arabs. All of the people performing such acts who survived them were prosecuted and sentenced. Another act is the act of price tag where settlers go and hurt Arab property as a "price tag" for an action of the Israeli government against them. Those acts are also dealt with by the law authorities. So the answer to your first question is no. Neither settlers nor anybody else can go around shooting or hurting Palestinians and Arabs without consequences. As to your second question, it's possible that what Michael Tarazi describes happened to him, but, if it happened it was the act of rogue soldiers. If the authorities learned about it they dealt with the offenders, and Tarazi can follow legal actions against the perpetrators and the state of Israel for compensation. | {
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8,873 | Being a computer programmer I assumed that every single spin of a poker machine was pre-calculated by the machine thus avoiding the chance of multiple large pays being payed out in a short period of time. e.g Some guy puts in 5 bucks but spins 3 x $10,000 in three spins. I am just reading a government designed pamphlet and I am surprised to see the following: There are millions of possible combinations on modern poker machines and every spin has an equal chance of bringing up a winning
combination It does say later that the operator can change the bias of the machine so that there are fewer chances to win, that is adjusting the probability, but the above statement suggests that the provided payout is still left to chance. Meaning you could effectively get multiple large payouts in a row. Most slot machine players I have met suggest that a machine "goes quiet" after a medium/big payout and you are better off pulling your money out and switching machines because the machine knows it has already paid you. Are poker machine payouts for each spin calculated on the fly or is purely down to statistics? | No, it is not the case that results are pre-calculated in gaming machines. The result of each game is calculated independently and on-the-fly. Gaming machines' randomness is validated statistically by independent companies such as Gaming Laboratories International . [Warning: Site has annoying voice-over.] At GLI, we have one job: to test electronic gaming equipment. In fact, our clients are gaming regulators in jurisdictions all over the world, more than 450 in all. They test against standards such as Gaming Devices in Casinos , although the appropriate standard depends on jurisdiction and there is not yet a universally accepted standard . Example rules from the Gaming Devices in Casinos standards: Each possible permutation or combination of game elements that produces winning or losing game outcomes shall be available for random selection at the initiation of each play, unless otherwise denoted by the game; [...] The RNG [Random Number Generator] shall be cycled continuously in the background between games and during game play at a speed that cannot be timed by the player. [...] Unless otherwise denoted on the payglass, where the gaming device plays a game that is recognizable such as Poker, Blackjack, Roulette, etc,, the same probabilities associated with the live game shall be evident in the simulated game. For example, the odds of getting any particular number in Roulette where there is a single zero (0) and a double zero (00) on the wheel, shall be 1 in 38; the odds of drawing a specific card or cards in Poker shall be the same as the live game. For other gaming devices (such as spinning reel games or video spinning reel games), the mathematical probability of a symbol appearing in a position in any game outcome shall be constant. Note: Some machines manage a growing jackpot. Where there is a jackpot, the expected payouts between games are not independent. Disclaimer: I have a friend who used to work in the gaming validation industry, but not for this company. I have no connection with Gaming Laboratories International. | {
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8,881 | The pictures of nebulae are always depicted as vividly colored and with a great variety of colors: Source Omega nebula Source Eagle nebula pillars According to the English wikipedia article on nebulae , under the section Formation , «as the material collapses under its own weight, massive stars may form in the center, and their ultraviolet radiation ionizes the surrounding gas, making it visible at optical wavelengths .» This means that we can see the nebulae, but not whether we see them colored or not. Furthermore, in this article on Wired.com, there is a photograph of the Omega Nebula, which states: «Looking more like a painting than an astronomy photograph, the Omega nebula glows with vivid colors in this new image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. [...] The heart of the Omega nebula contains roughly 35 stars, the hottest of which spew out ultraviolet radiation that causes the surrounding hydrogen gas to glow red and pink.» On another site, seasky.org , the article states: «They are also among the most beautiful objects in the universe, glowing with rich colors and swirls of light. Stars inside these clouds of gas cause them to glow with beautiful reds, blues, and greens.» What I want to know is: if we could observe directly these nebulae, either by telescope or with our own eyes, would they appear like this? If not, how? | From HubbleSite - Behind The Pictures : The Meaning of Color The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft . We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye. Example: The Eagle Nebula Note: The three B&W images each correspond to a certain wavelength (=color). Left : Oxygen - Green Middle : Hydrogen - Red Right : Sulfur - Red Each of these B&W images are then (re-)assigned a unique color, because otherwise the red light from hydrogen and that from sulfur would be hard to tell apart. Choosing Colors Why are the inital images B&W? The digital camera you have at home basically works the same way: Light is "converted" into electrons. From Panasonic : Since a CCD can only distinguish whether light is strong or weak, color filters are used to obtain each color's light and dark information. ( I modified the above picture to make it more clear ) One can see that the yellow flower emits more in red and green (light) and less in blue (dark). [ RGB Color Model on Wikipedia ] Hubble's Color Filters Hubble uses special filters to "screen out" the types of light from an object that astronomers are not currently studying. These filters allow only a certain range of light wavelengths through. Once the unwanted light has been filtered out, the resulting light is allowed to fall onto one or more light-sensitive detectors. This produces a "picture" of the star in the selected wavelength. Since the detectors can detect light outside the visible light spectrum, the use of filters allows scientists to see "invisible" objects — those only visible in ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. [ Source ] Example: The Eagle Nebula ( Source: ESA ) The Eagle Nebula in Visible Light (Wide Angle) Three-colour (blue, green, red) composite mosaic image of the Eagle Nebula (Messier 16, or NGC 6611), based on images obtained with the wide-field camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2 m-diameter telescope at the La Silla Observatory . At the centre, the Pillars of Creation can be seen. This wide-field image shows not only the central pillars, but also several others in the same star-forming region, as well as a huge number of stars in front of, in and behind the Eagle Nebula. ( Source: ESA ) More Slate - How Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty? Space.com - Truth Behind the Photos: What the Hubble Space Telescope Really Sees Universe Today - True or False (Color): The Art of Extraterrestrial Photography | {
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8,972 | When I was an engineering student, I had many friends who were atheist, or otherwise became so as the years progressed, including myself. Because I grew up with a religious background, I tend to notice when others took the same turn in the road as I have, but I can't help noticing that most of these people have engineering backgrounds. I'm wondering if the nature of the studies is less conducive to the belief in any religion. Is there any statistical evidence that shows that engineering (or science) students / graduates have a high percentage of atheists? Update: I found an article stating that there are high number of scientists being atheist, but I'm not sure how credible it is: Popsugar social blog about statistics of scientists being atheist Only 33% of scientists believe in "God" while another 18% believe in a "universal spirit" or "higher power". (See source 1. ) The study concluded that scientists are less likely to believe in a "God" or "Higher Power" as the general public. | There have been several studies over the years on the rates of atheism in the top scientists in various fields, the people who are recognized as being highly accomplished. This is a letter in Nature in 1998 describing the findings of the most recent iteration of this study. In 1998, members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences were polled on their beliefs in human immortality and a personal god. Only 7% of the respondents reported belief in a personal god. In earlier versions of this study (in 1914 and 1933), with different groups of "greater scientists," rates of belief in a personal god are always less 30%. Moving down a step in terms of scientific street cred, there was also a 2007 paper which surveyed 1,646 academic scientists at 21 top universities on their belief in god. Their findings show rates of atheism at about 30% and agnosticism also at 30%, and find that the rates are not dependent on academic discipline; academic scientists in the natural and social sciences have similar rates of atheism. In contrast to the high rates of atheism among academic professionals, there was a study carried out by The Pew Forum on religious belief in the general population along with several other social factors, including education. 17% of American adults surveyed identified as "unaffiliated" and only 1.6% of the population said that the were atheists and 2.4% agnostic. The ~4% of the general population that identify as non-believers is clearly significantly different than the ~60% of professors and ~90% of top scientists who are non-believers. The Pew study also shows that in the population of adults with at least a high school diploma, rates of atheism do not increase with increasing educational attainment. This neat plot , from a Discover Magazine blog post graphs the amount of Biblical literalism in a specific religion vs the amount of postgraduate education level of its adherents found in the Pew Forum survey. As for students in the sciences going through a change from theism to atheism, a 2009 study of 26,200 college students over 6 years actually showed that students in the social sciences and humanities are more likely to become less involved in, and lose interest in, their religion than students in the physical sciences. The explanation the authors give for the lack of change among science students is two fold: 1) Religions have already effectively worked to integrate belief in science with belief in religion, so learning about science doesn't change the way a student views the world and 2) There's a lower level of religiosity in science students to start with. Very religious students are drawn to humanities and social sciences degrees, and have more potential for a significant change in their religiosity than the less religious students in the physical sciences. Bottom line: Becoming a scientist doesn't seem to make you an atheist, but badass scientists tend to be atheists. (This has been a guest answer by my wife, an atheist pre-badass scientist, who refuses to sign up for anything) | {
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8,990 | Someone in my Twitter feed said today: TIL starbucks put ground up insects in stuff, and milk has blood in
it. The ground up insects part is true for now, but I'm not sure about the blood-in-milk one. It sounds half-way plausible, considering that breastfeeding mothers can sometimes suffer bleeding. A more specific example of the claim, from notmilk.com : Also, all cows' milk contains blood! The inspectors are simply asked
to keep it under certain limits. You may be horrified to learn that
the USDA allows milk to contain from one to one and a half million
white blood cells per millilitre. (That's only 1/30 of an ounce). If
you don't already know this, I'm sorry to tell you that another way to
describe white cells where they don't belong would be to call them pus
cells. Snopes says (no links due to its dodgy advertising) that the blood in milk (specifically, blood in chocolate milk) is false, but doesn't provide any specific references. Most of the other top Google hits for cow's blood milk are for anti-milk sites, user-generated content, or pages unrelated to this topic. For convenience, assume that the claim is about the processed and government-approved milk that people in the USA drink, not what immediately comes from the cow. | We can debunk this just by analysing the claim: "White blood cells", despite their name, are the cells responsible for the immune system, and occur throughout the body (see reference number 2). Also called leukocytes, the presence of these cells is not an indication that blood (or pus) is present. The claim actually says "all cows milk contains them". So even if you milked your own pure-bred grain-fed cow in perfectly clean conditions you would still find leukocytes. This is not a contaminant, it's a perfectly normal part of milk. It's no worse than saying "milk contains fat". The math is hideously wrong here. A million cells weigh about a millionth of a gram , not a thirtieth of an ounce. So even according to the claim, only one part per million of milk is allowed to be leukocytes. Yes I referenced Wikipedia, because this is very basic stuff, which Wikipedia is allowed for. | {
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9,083 | One of the premises of a new film, " Anonymous ", due to come out in a couple of weeks, is that Shakespeare's plays were authored by Edward de Vere, instead of by Shakespeare. The producers have also created educational materials arguing that Shakespeare was a fraud. The notion that de Vere was the author has been around a while, having first been proposed in 1920 by a schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney. But what's the evidence? Is there a consensus among historians who've looked into the topic? Were Shakespeare's plays written by Shakespeare, de Vere, or someone else? | Shakespeare wrote the plays and the arguments that he didn't are mostly based on very implausible assumptions. I hope I'm not misrepresenting any of the arguments against Shakespeare authorship, but it seems to me they all rely on just a handful of key assumptions. First, that the the plays and sonnets are about the author's life , and not primarily imagined. Second, that they are therefore coded references to the identity and experience of the author. And, third, that Shakespeare didn't have the relevant experience to write the content because he could not have had the necessary range of experiences. I don't know how easy it is to definitively prove any point one way or the other, but it seems to be a big stretch to assume that an author cannot write fiction from their imagination rather than their life. Moreover it is a very modern assumption that everything is autobiography. According to James Shapiro's review of the evidence (In Contested Will ) nobody at all made this sort of assumption about Shakespeare until 1780 at the earliest. And it was decades more before anyone used the assumption to build a case for a different author. It makes no sense in general to assume that all fiction is really about the author or their experience. Did Thomas Harris have to experience cannibalism or psychopathology to write about Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs ? Or did he do some research and imagine the character? How can we judge so long after his life that the author was writing from experience and not the imagination? And if we don't establish that he did, the other assumptions fall down. If the works emerge from the imagination, perhaps based on research, we can't use them to challenge authorship on the grounds the author didn't have the relevant experience. Even the literary evidence backs this up. As Shapiro summarises: The evidence strongly suggests that imaginative literature in general and plays in particular in Shakespeare's day were rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation. And there is concrete evidence in favour of Shakespeare as the author. Shapiro estimates that there were nearly enough extant copies of Shakespeare's works in London for every household to have one. He was extremely well known. Other writers talked about him and knew him well. No hint of alternative authorship appears in their writings. The plays were written to be performed not published and show many hints of an author intimately familiar with stagecraft (some versions offer stage directions with actors names instead of the characters they play, the sort of slip not likely to be made by a distant author but not unexpected of a fellow actor or director). Many other writers knew Shakespeare (and record their opinions of him) and some collaborated with him. It would require a monumental conspiracy to make sure no hints of another author appeared in these comments (all his collaborators and performers would have needed to be in on the conspiracy for a start). In summary, unless we are prepared to make a leap of faith that the plays provide clues to the author's experience rather than his imagination , we have no basis to even start to question Shakespeare as the author. None of the other evidence in the plays even makes sense if we can't establish this assumption (and it's hard enough to judge even for authors still living). | {
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9,099 | Michael Savage thinks so. A psychiatrist, Dr. Lyle Rossiter wrote a book about it back in 2006, and thinks so as well. Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by both Barack Obama and his Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton can only be understood as a psychological disorder. On what basis is this claim made, and is there any validity to it? | No it is not. The definitive answer as to what is, or is not, a psychological disorder is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) ( 5th edition release has been delayed to 2013 ). A search of the document for the word "liberal" (with wildcards) only turns up three entries. Application of Trait Theory in Personality Synopsis at ALLPSYCH Online Openness to experience refers to the dimension ranging from outgoing, liberal, interested in new things, and imaginative to reserved, conservative, traditional, and conforming.
allpsych.com/personalitysynopsis/trait_application.html Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Related to Prisoners of War in AllPsych Journal Once liberated, soldiers are given a medical exam and ... years after the former prisoners of war have been liberated and readjusted to life. Sometimes this happens when other
allpsych.com/journal/pow.html Trait Theory in Personality Synopsis at ALLPSYCH Online Openness to Change liberal versus traditional Perfectionism compulsive and controlled versus indifferent Privateness pretentious versus unpretentious Reasoning abstract versus
allpsych.com/personalitysynopsis/cattell.html Two of the links are about the trait of liberalism without making any statement in regards to any psychological disorders. The second return only got caught in the search because it mentions "liberation" in the context of being freed from captivity, and how that applies to PTSD. None of them even hint at there being any association with a psychological disorder. Your citation of the two sources are a bit problematic. First of all, Michael Savage is a well known ideologue. You even use WorldNetDaily as your citation for him. I would suggest that going to professional psychology sites where there are peer reviewed papers is a better and more impartial source. Not books, which are not subject to that peer reviewed process. In looking over a synopsis of Dr Rossiter's book , in a nutshell, the book's thesis is, "My political views are so obviously correct that anyone who doesn't accept them just has to be nuts." It presupposes the truth of a right-wing political outlook and then tries to plumb the reasons why other people do not accept this truth, the conclusion being that they have to be in massive denial. This is not particularly neutral either. Upon further research, it appears that Dr. Rossiter's book is a direct rebuttal to a government funded study titled Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition . A study published in 2003. Most of the claims in Dr. Rossiter's book are not so subtle reversals of the conclusions reached by Drs Jost JT, Glaser J, Kruglanski AW, and Sulloway FJ (listed authors of the paper, which HAD received peer review in the Psychological Bulletin as well as being supervised by the National Foundation as well as the National Institutes of Health). As a counter point to some of the assertions by Dr. Rossiter, Dr Kruglanski states (about this study in particular): "The variables we talk about are general human dimensions," he said. "These are the same dimensions that contribute to loyalty and commitment to the group. Liberals might be less intolerant of ambiguity, but they may be less decisive, less committed, less loyal." Dr. Kruglanski added a disclaimer that their study " does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false ". Some of the items that Dr Rossiter objected to in particular were statements like: "This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes." and The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat. Neither of those statements make any particular value judgments, unlike Dr Rossiter's book. As a counter to the Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition study, there is Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact , published by Sage Journals. This was published well after Dr. Rossiter's book, and carries a message that aligns with the political outlook that Dr Rossiter espouses, yet this paper makes no judgment on liberal (or "left") ideologies being a mental illness. Instead the paper focuses on: Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. Furthermore, there are many nuances that seem to get ignored in social discourse regarding conservatism and liberalism. One can't really equate conservative with right-wing in all cases. For many, right wing is a fiscal policy stance, while conservatism is a social policy, and people cross over those definitions in numerous permutations. So again, Mr Savage and Dr Rossiter appear to have political and ideological motivation, and are using the hallmarks of that rhetoric. There is no evidence their statements regarding liberalism (or any other political viewpoints) are supported as being a psychological disorder. | {
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9,139 | I've heard this claim quite a few times and have even repeated it as fact. The basic claim is that 'gravity compresses the spine' during the waking hours and since (most people) sleep at night, they are tallest first thing in the morning. I can find examples of the claims online - many with answers - but most are from non-reputable sites without sources. In my own personal experience, I believe this to be true; but I would like something more official than my own experience to support my claim (or I'd like to know that I'm wrong). Examples: Answers ScienceForums Yahoo! Answers | Yes , we are taller in the morning. From The transformation of spinal curvature into spinal deformity (2005): The effects of gravity on the upright human posture are powerful:
Individuals are as much as 25 mm taller in the morning than in the
evening (1)(2), as a result of compressive forces bearing down all day, And astronauts 'grow' by nearly 75 mm when released from the
force of the earth's gravity (3). (1) Diurnal variation of Cobb angle measurement in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (2) Postural and time-dependent effects on body height and scoliosis angle in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (3) Diurnal changes in the profile shape and range of motion of the back From NASA (2004): Did you know that astronauts are up to 2 inches taller while they're in space? As soon as they come back to Earth, though, they return to their normal height. To some degree, a similar stretching of the spine happens to you every night. When you lie down, gravity isn't pushing down on your vertebrae. You can do your own experiments with a meterstick. Measure your height carefully as soon as you get up or while you are still lying down. You will find that you're about a centimeter or two taller. That's not as much as astronauts change in space. The idea, however, is the same. As the day passes, your vertebrae compress through normal activities, and you'll lose those few centimeters you "grew" overnight. | {
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