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27,566 | I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page of Manahel Thabet recently. Here are some extracts from the Wikipedia page. "At the age of 25, she earned her first PhD in Financial Engineering magna cum laude, making her the youngest person and the only Arab ever to attain such distinction." .... "She went on to earn a second PhD in 2012, this time with a major in quantum mathematics." .... "In 2012, Thabet developed a formula that measures distance in space without the use of light. The formula was considered ground breaking in the field of quantum mathematics and is 350 pages of numbers, calculations, and equations." A google search would suggest that she is quite popular in some circles ( and she has 50k followers on Twitter ). But are things written on her Wikiepdia page facts? As a student of mathematics, I've never heard of the phase "quantum mathematics" being an actual term to describe the branches of mathematics used in quantum mechanics, or the study of mathematical objects coined with phases begin with "quantum" (such as quantum group ). Thus I find it strange for one to "major in quantum mathematics". Or perhaps I am just ignorant. So I went on looking for the papers she published. I was particularly interested in the methodology she devised for measuring distance which involves a "350 pages" formula. Here is an article on gulfnews.com about how the formula "takes world by storm" (but not about the formula itself). And I found this paper . Measuring Distances in Space by Manahel A. R. Thabet American Educational Research Association (AERA) Abstract: Determining distances in space is a technical
phenomenon; astronomers are trying to come up with a correct way to do
it. It is not easy for most of us to imagine the truly immense scale
of the universe. “Scale,” in this case, refers to the size of an
object compared with its surroundings or another object (McGaugh).
Distances in the space are vast from one celestial body to another;
for instance, it takes a light signal 10.5 years to travel to the
nearest star that has planets (Bonnet, 1992). The fact that light
travels 30000 times faster than any fastest rockets renders human
beings unable to reach to some planets even if they travelled their
entire lifetime. To determine space distance, several methods with different variations
are used or have been proposed. These methods, unfortunately, have
faults. In this research, I clearly explain several of these methods
and their faults and errors. We will also observe the universe as
being three-dimensional and flat as explained in Euclidean: Euclidean
means that all the geometry and lines (that are taught in mathematics
and physics) properties applies. Measuring distance from earth to
celestial bodies like star, sun and moon help astronauts to determine
the size of the universe; also it helps to estimate the age of
universe. Therefore it is important to use correct methods in
estimating space distance. This appears to be more of an article for layman audiences. It brought up the standard candle approach for measuring cosmological distances (page 18) without discussing it extensively. And the expanding photosphere method (EPM) was not even mentioned. It does not seem to be the paper I was looking for. But this was all I could find after numerous Google searches. I could find neither the allegedly groundbreaking formula, nor any solid evidence that it actually exists. Arabianbusiness.com ranked her as the 15th most powerful Arab woman in 2015 . But is it true she has written a "350 pages" formula to measure distance in space without the use of light? If so, where is it published and how can one find it? A side question: which graduate school did she attend for her Ph.D in "quantum mathematics"? I couldn't find any information regarding that either. | Did Manahel Thabet develop a groundbreaking formula to measure distance in space without the use of light? NO! This extraordinary claim which came from Wikipedia : In 2012, Thabet developed a formula that measures distance in space without the use of light.[2] The formula was considered ground breaking in the field of quantum mathematics and is 350 pages of numbers, calculations, and equations.[2] is not based on reality, it is paraphrased and misleading. The Wikipedia source [2] referenced the gulfnews.com's article Dubai women's space formula takes world by storm which said: Dr Manahel Thabet may soon join the ranks of the scientists and discoverers she's spent her life looking up to. The Yemeni national has created a formula that may prove ground-breaking in the world of quantum mathematics . It could forever change the dynamics of what we consider space. The gulf article said that she is may soon join the ranks of the scientists and discoverers , while Wikipedia paraphrased it as she redefined . The gulf article said that has created a formula that may prove ground-breaking , while Wikipedia paraphrased it as she developed a groundbreaking working formula in the field of quantum mathematics . But is it true that she wrote a "350 pages" formula to measures distance in space without the use of light? If so, where is it published and how can one find it? Good question. Now, we're asking about whether she wrote a 350 pages formula, regardless whether it is scientifically correct or not. It is reported in another gulf article called Dubai resident brings Arab genius into equation that: Having worked on the 350-page formula relating to ‘Structure Variation Hyper Arithmetical Sort Operators and Applications’ for a few years now, Manahel along with her team is trying to redefine the method of measuring distances across the universe using new particles . Her formula, which has caught the attention of space agencies such as Nasa and the French space agency , could help scientists and space researchers measure distances in space in the absence of light. It is good to start saying that Manahel A. R. Thabet's scholarly papers are not numerous. She has only seven papers in her record . Among her seven published papers, only the paper you mentioned studied the "measure of distance in space". If she had ever developed a groundbreaking formula to measure distance in space it would be on this paper, but it wasn't. So, where is this mysterious formula? It seems that Dr Thabet is trying to sell her formula to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administratio). Dr Tabet is the founder and President of Smart Tips Consultants, a business which existed since 8 years ago. Today, the Dubai-based President of Smart Tips, a consulting firm, is negotiating rights to this formula with Nasa , the French space agency, as well as other space agencies, astro-physicists, etc, all want the honor of developing her formula. " For now, I'm still deciding who would be the best entity to adopt this equation ," says 32-year-old Manahel, the youngest person in the world with a PhD in Financial Engineering. You will find not the formula anywhere online, since it is reported that negotiation rights are still made with NASA - that is, if it exists in the first place. | {
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27,590 | A recent Stack Overflow blog post claims that: With nearly five open jobs for every available software developer, the need for qualified technical talent is higher than ever. I have seen this claim repeated many times, with different numbers cited, but I've not been able to get down to any underlying factual source for these claims. In this case, the article links to another non-authoritative press article about agile developers. Does the number of open jobs surpass the number of developers "on the market"? Does this depend on skill or experience? | A report which was issued by the Economic Policy Institute in 2013, analyzed the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) labor market and workforce and the supply of high-skill temporary foreign workers, who serve as “guestworkers.” A programmer (or a software developer) is indeed in the core of this market. Their research proved that colleges are already producing far more graduates than the STEM market is absorbing on and concluded: In our research we find that there is no lack of domestic graduates or existing domestic STEM workers to fill available STEM jobs . But it turns out that the job gap and growth opportunity is in computer science, not in STEM. According to the chart below, computer science is the only STEM field where there are more jobs than students. The data below comes from the National Science Foundation, comparing jobs data and projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to student data from the National Science Foundation. Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Science Foundation Despite all of the excitement STEM, it turns out that when you exclude computer science from STEM, you see that the remaining STEM fields have too many students, and not enough jobs. Moreover, code.org predicted there would be 1,000,000 more jobs than graduates in 2020: From the 2010 - 2012 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/ , across all industries we are adding 136,620 jobs per year in computing. Subtract 40,000 annual computer science graduates (see NSF data below) and you get roughly a gap of 100,000 jobs. 100,000 jobs adds up over 10 years to 1mm jobs. Furthermore, there The Job/Student gap in Computer Science seems to be real : The source for the job data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/ . Projections for job openings and replacements in computing jobs is 1,366,200 jobs from 2010 - 2020. Projections for all other STEM jobs combined (engineering, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences) is 908,700 jobs over the same period. This is a 60:40 ratio of jobs in Computing vs the rest of STEM. The source for the students data comes from the College Board, surveying 2012 AP examination participation (see http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/participation/2013 ), shows that of the 1,379,585 AP math and science exams taken by US high school students in 2013, only 29,555 were computer science exams. This is a 2:98 ratio of students in computer science vs the rest of STEM But this is all one slice of the puzzle. That is, because almost half of developers don't have a degree in computer science, a survey by StackOverFlow says : 48% of respondents never received a degree in computer science So far, the number of programmers in the US are estimated based on their employment , it would be really hard to estimate the number of programmers who don't have a degree and compare them with the number of jobs available to give you a neat conclusion. | {
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27,607 | After watching Elon Musk's presentation regarding the Tesla Powerwall , I had a question. On his diagram of the USA, he claims that a "tiny blue square" on the top of Texas that consists of solar farms would be enough energy to power the united states. I've watched documentaries, that claim it should be 10 times that size. This seems absurd right? That blue square there is the land area that's needed to transition the United States to a zero-carbon electricity situation | Summary: yes, the area shown is reasonable, as a visualisation of the surface area of panels required to generate electricity equal to total US electricity consumption, on a multi-year average: that area of panels would generate 500 GW, which is above the current US annual average electricity consumption of 425 GW Calculations below are taken from this blogpost at the Energy Institute, University College London. As Thales Pereira has pointed out in the comments on the question, the claim could be taken to mean that that area of PV would displace fossil fuel, and supplement the existing zero-carbon options on the US grid (hydro, nuclear, wind). That would make it an slightly weaker claim. I've assumed that it's the strong version of the claim: that that area would be the same amount of power as total US demand, even before considering existing hydro, nuclear and wind generation. If the stronger claim is valid, then the weaker claim automatically follows. US electricity consumption is about 425 GW on average The area shown is 10,000 km 2 , in NW Texas Eyeballing this google map and comparing with the graphic in the question: using the scale in the bottom-right corner, the square is about 100km along the side Table 2 of Green et al's Solar cell efficiency tables (Version 45) gives the best module as being 24% efficient, giving a PV capacity per unit area of 0.24 GW/km 2 PVWatts gives a capacity factor for Amarillo, Texas, of 21% 10,000 km 2 x 0.24 GW/km 2 x 21% = 500 GW Which is more than current US electricity consumption of 425 GW. So yes, the area shown is reasonable, as a visualisation of the surface area of panels required to generate electricity equal to total US electricity consumption, on a multi-year average. | {
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27,634 | This is making the rounds on social networks: DID YOU KNOW Over 20 Navy SEALs who (allegedly) "killed" Osama Bin Laden are now dead. Is there any truth to this (today as in 8 May 2015) | This is not true . In August 2011, 38 people died in a single helicopter crash , including 15 members of NAVY SEALs' Team 6. The accident has been described as "the worst battlefield calamity in [the team's] history" . A U.S. Boeing CH-47 Chinook military helicopter was shot down while transporting a quick reaction force attempting to reinforce an engaged unit of Army Rangers in Wardak province, west of Kabul, Afghanistan. This is what the above image and caption is referring to. We do not know the exact makeup of the team that killed Osama, however according to official sources: All but two of the SEALs [killed in the crash] were from SEAL Team 6, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden, although military officials said none of the crash victims was on that mission in Pakistan against the al-Qaida leader. The image above has used a photo collage from this article , which also contains the above quote. Confirmation of this can also be found in a report by CNN , BBC , NBC and in other sources. Specifically, an article in USA Today explains that the men killed belonged to the Gold Squadron , while the soldiers involved in the assassination belonged to the Red Squadron . Team 6 has four line squadrons: Blue, Gold, Red and Silver, plus a reconnaissance unit known as Black Squadron. Furthermore each squadron is divided into three troops . The crash wiped out an entire troop in Gold Squadron. TL;DR The image above represents people who have died in a helicopter crash, a lot of them were members of SEAL Team 6 but none of them was involved in the assassination of Osama. Moreover as Philipp pointed out in the comments, SEAL Team Six (United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group) isn't a small group and has roughly around 200 people amongst its ranks. | {
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27,662 | I've heard this claim several times: Q: Why are there so many unfinished houses in Greece? A: as long as the house is not finished, they don't have to pay building tax for it. So the leave it unfinished in order to evade this tax. Is this true? | The short answer to the question is: It's not true . Please let me state beforehand that my answer doesn't try to prove that Greeks in general do not try to avoid paying taxes. Although being a Greek myself, my opinion is that they do so in every possible way and this is for me an undeniable fact. But in this particular case with property taxation though, as you will see below, this is almost impossible. A. About the finished stage and the protruding-up bars It must be clarified that the term "steel girders" mentioned in the Telegraph's article (from the other answer ) most probably means steel reinforcement bars (rebars), which is the technically correct term. The vast majority of all "newer" buildings in Greece are steel reinforced concrete structures (less expensive to build than wooden or stone houses), which additionally do respond very efficiently during the frequent earthquakes. It was a common practice in Greece, when building a one- or two-floor house - especially for summer houses (while the regulations do allow for even higher buildings) to leave the vertical reinforcing bars in the columns of the top floor slab protruding up, so that they could overlap with the bars of the same column, but for the next future floor structure (if and when that might be built). While this is aesthetically not pleasant, it minimizes the cost of adding an additional floor on top in the future (provided of course that the bars are properly anti-rust protected and of the suitable length for welded lap splicing etc., according to the building codes). In conclusion, protruding up steel-reinforcing bars are left there only for construction purposes and have nothing to do with "unfinished" stage or tax regulations . These buildings are considered (and are in fact) finished , and are taxed in the very same way as the rest of the "normal" buildings. I believe that this particular part of the article was due to lack of information on behalf of the newspaper reporter. Furthermore, this particular construction practice has nothing to do with the financial crisis in Greece. It was exercised long before the crisis - and still is in some cases. B. About the alleged tax evasion or avoidance On the other hand, it is true that there are quite a few unfinished buildings in the country ("properly" unfinished in this case :)) due to lack of financing means because of this crisis, but obviously not for evading or avoiding taxes. Nobody wants to pay taxes for an unfinished and hence unusable house or apartment, so it is in any case better to finish it, if one has the money to do so. According to Tax Law # 4223/2013 (in Greek) - Chapter A, Article 4, par A.2.η, there is a 60% reduction on normal taxes due ( Coefficient 0.4 ) for unfinished structures, but only if they are without power supply , or with temporary power supply but empty , regardless of their finishing stage. ν.4223/2013, Κεφάλαιο Α, Αρθρο 4, Παράγραφος Α.2 η)Συντελεστής Ηµιτελών Κτισµάτων (Σ.Η.Κ.), ο οποίος ορίζεται σε 0.4 και εφαρµόζεται στα ηµιτελή κτίσµατα, ανεξαρτήτως σταδίου κατασκευής, που: α) δεν είχαν ποτέ ηλεκτροδοτηθεί και είναι κενά ή β) ηλεκτροδοτούνται µε εργοταξιακό ηλεκτρικό ρεύµα, δεν είχαν ποτέ άλλη παροχή ρεύµατος πλην της εργοταξιακής και είναι κενά (Google translate) Coefficient to be applied on normal tax h) Incomplete Buildings Coefficient (Σ.Η.Κ.), defined as 0.4 and applied to the unfinished buildings , irrespective of the construction stage, which: a) have never been electrified and are empty ; or b) they are electrified with work-site electric current, have never had any power supply other than work-site and are empty . This means that if I own a house in an unfinished stage, either it doesn't have power , so it is unusable, or if it has (but a work-site/temporary one), it must be empty , so again unusable. Therefore, I must pay 40% of the normal taxes, but I can't use it. Otherwise, regardless of its finishing stage, if the house has power (empty or not), or someone lives inside (with or without electrical power), the owner must pay the full 100% of the normal property taxes. Every house supplied with el. power is registered in PPC's (Public Power Corporation) database, and therefore accessible by tax authorities. Thus, it is almost impossible to avoid property taxation. Photos with rebars on top floor slabs (terraces) with anti-rust protection applied on protruding rebars Durostick - top floor slab insulation - pp 16-17 left Insulation - scroll down for photos showing rebars Anti-rust protection - scroll down boxing of top floor column rebars and here Link to the Greek Code for Steel Reinforcement 2008 - Articles 7.3.2 & 10.4 provide for the obligatory embedding/concrete boxing of protruding rebar in case of long exposure (mentioned in the letter below) - which very few follow :) Related article 31/08/12 - Letter of Federation of Owners of Lodged Rooms and Apartments in Dodecanese (cluster of islands in SE Greece) towards the Technical Chamber of Greece Translation To: Technical Chamber of Greece - Dodecanese section Gentlemen, In recent years we have been receiving daily initially questions, and then negative comments from our guests regarding the aesthetically non-pleasing look of the buildings that have the visible iron bars on their roofs / terraces . So, the guests, after initially asking to learn the reason of the existence of iron bars in the terraces, then the legitimate question that arises is why we do not interfere aesthetically with the ugly look of these buildings. This phenomenon is a remnant of another era and mentality; of the 1950s, 60s and 70s - in which owners following the suggestion and encouragement of contractors-builders left the steel rebars exposed in their building in order to benefit from a possible increase in the building factor (my note : building factor is the max no. of floors which is allowed for buildings in every district). Many owners are not even aware of the damage caused to the building by iron erosion over time. We know that there are a lot of faults regarding the aesthetic outlook/image of our islands, some of which require long and radical reforms in order to be corrected, and are blocked due to bureaucracy and the legislative framework. However, this can easily be corrected with appropriate information. We believe that the Technical Chamber of Greece is the most competent body that could, in cooperation with other organizations, launch a campaign (conference organization, promotion through the media) in order to inform contractors-builders and property owners about the necessity of boxing/covering of the rebars , effectively contributing to building safety and beautification. The State has already dealt with and has enacted measures requiring the obligatory boxing of concrete rebars, which can later be removed for any future expansion of the building . But no one seems to respect this institutional framework. We would like to ask you for your own actions and to inform the citizens about the relevant provisions in order to ensure both the quality of these constructions and their aesthetic upgrading. Sincerely, The President of the Federation Panagiotis Tokouzis | {
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27,712 | So I just found out about a Canadian woman who gave birth on an Air Canada flight on her way to Tokyo on mothers day. In this article: Ada Guan, B.C. woman who gave birth on plane, didn't know she was pregnant , it states, ...depending on where Chloe [the infant] was born along the route, she
could be eligible for American citizenship if she was born above
Hawaii in addition to Canadian citizenship Is that really a thing? Does the USA grant citizenship to whomever is born in their airspace? The child has been given Canadian citizenship because the flight originated in Canada, but she was technically born at 35,000 ft somewhere over the pacific ocean (What's her birth certificate going to say? Place of Brith: 27.362444, -161.294046 at 35,000', or "International Waters"?) Would a child be eligible for a US passport if born in the stratosphere somewhere over Hawaii? From discussion in Comments: Either that flight took one heck of a detour, the reporter didn't get their facts straight, or Hawaii is in the Bering Sea. | Page 7 of this Foreign Affairs Manual, titled ACQUISITION OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP BY
BIRTH IN THE UNITED STATES , says, “The rules applicable to vessels obviously apply equally to airplanes. Thus a child
born on a plane in the United States or flying over its territory would acquire
United States citizenship at birth.” | {
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27,723 | This came across my social media feed: U.S. Geological Earthquakes Survey 1973 - 4,539 Earthquakes 1974 — 4,528 Earthquakes 2000 — 19,131 Earthquakes 2010 — 23,040 Earthquakes 2011 — 22,392 Earthquakes 2013 — 89,622 Earthquakes 2014 — 118,404 Earthquakes 2015 — Over 36,000 Earthquakes... One pastor gave this some context: Earthquakes on the rise, USGS stats confirm. Jesus predicted 2000 yrs ago, "And GREAT EARTHquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and FEARFUL sights and great signs shall there be from HEAVEN." (Luke 21:11) Christians, signs BELOW being fulfilled...now watch for signs from ABOVE! The data seems to be a little selective, and I assume earthquake detection instruments have increased in both number and sensitivity since 1973. Are earthquakes numbers increasing significantly and consistently since 1973? | The title of this 2011 paper pretty much answers the question by itself: Global risk of big earthquakes has not recently increased . (For the record: Peter M. Shearer and Philip B. Stark, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1118525109 PNAS January 17, 2012 vol. 109 no. 3 717-721) They noted that there had been an increase in large earthquakes in 2004-2011, and some other apparent clustering, and looked back over the data since 1900 to see if there was sufficient statistical evidence to suggest that large earthquakes were occurring more frequently, or whether it could just be explained by chance. Our conclusion that the global threat of large earthquakes has not recently increased is based both on the lack of statistical evidence that regionally declustered seismicity is temporally heterogeneous on a global scale and on the implausibility of physical mechanisms proposed to explain global clustering. [...] The recent elevated rate of large earthquakes has increased estimates of large earthquake danger: The empirical rate of such events is higher than before. However, there is no evidence that the rate of the underlying process has changed. In other words, there is no evidence that the risk has changed, but our estimates of the risk have changed. While this focussed on large (Magnitude 7 and above) earthquakes, rather than all measured earthquakes, like the source infographic did, I think this is appropriate because (a) it lowers any effect caused by sampling error reduced as more numerous and more sensitive equipment is produced and (b) magnitude 1 and 2 tremors aren't what people are thinking when they hear the word 'earthquake'. | {
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27,726 | One of my favourite information snippets to dish out to unsuspecting friends is that there are roughly only 10 recorded cases of rabies survival without vaccination, while it's estimated that around 160 people die from the virus every day. This also means more people die every couple of hours than there are known non-vaccination survivors (take that, anti-vacciners!). Coupled with it being a very nasty way to die, this factoid acts as a pretty effective conversation killer (yes, I sometimes can be that guy). Anyway, I soon realised that the data I was dishing out (10 survivors, 160 deaths a day) had simply been heard from random sources, and I had no idea if they were actually founded or not. So my question is: Does rabies in fact kill practically 100% of people who contract it, with around 100 deaths per day and only a single- or double-digit number of people having survived it after symptoms developed ? Claim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf2bObJGFkg EDIT: It would also be interesting to learn what percentage of people who are vaccinated still die from rabies. | According to the website of the journal Nature : Jeanna Geise was only 15 years old when she became the world's first known survivor of Rabies without receiving any vaccination. Her miraculous survival has not only challenged a time-honored scientific fact, but has also brought about a new method of Rabies treatment, known as the Milwaukee Protocol. It had long been thought that Rabies is 100% fatal in humans who are not vaccinated. However, to the surprise of the medical world, Jeanna showed that fatal the virus can be beaten sans vaccination. So prior to 2004, the disease was 100% fatal without receiving a vaccination. However, "receiving a vaccination" includes receiving a vaccination after being bitten by the rabid animal. For a recent (April 2015) update see Temporal evolution on MRI of successful treatment of rabies which explains 3 people have now survived, having received the Milwaukee protocol, while 26 have died despite such treatment. So still very fatal, but not 100% fatal. As far as deaths, an NIH presentation states over 55,000 deaths per year world wide, specifically including: India 19,200 China 2,217 Rest of Asia 9,328 Africa 23,979 | {
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27,745 | There have been several reports of "raining fish" where fish fall from the sky (usually during a rain storm). An example such as this 2010 video from National Geographic seems unlikely at best. Has this really happened, or is it a popular hoax? If it happened, was the associated rain salty (sea water)? Were the fish still alive? | Yes. As published in " Do Fish Fall from the Sky ?" Science vol. 109 page 402, On October 23, 1947, biologist Alexander Dimitrivitch Bajkov, PhD was eating breakfast with his wife at a restaurant in Marksville, Louisiana when the waitress told them that fish were falling from the sky. ...J. E. Gremillion, and two merchants, E. A. Blanchard and J. M. Blouillette, were struck by falling fish as they walked to their places of business at 7:45 am. There were spots in the vicinity of the bank (a half block from the restaurant) averaging one fish per square yard. Automobiles and trucks were running over them. Fish also fell on roofs of houses. They were freshwater fish native to local waters, and
belonging to the following species: Large-mouth black
bass (Micropterus salmoides), goggle-eye (Chaenobryttuis
coronarius), two species of sunfish (Lepomis), several
species of minnows and hickory shad (Pomolobuts medfocris).
The latter species were the most common. I [Bajkov] personally collected from Main Street and several yards on Monroe Street, a large jar of perfect specimens, and
preserved them in Formalin, in order to distribute them
among various museums... The fish that fell in Marksville were absolutely fresh,
and were fit for human consumption. The area in which
they fell was approximately 1,000 feet long and about 75
or 80 feet wide, extending in a north-southerly direction,
and was covered unevenly by fish. The actual falling of
the fish occurred in somewhat short intervals, during
foggy and comparatively calm weather. The velocity of
the wind on the ground did not exceed eight miles per
hour. The New Orleans weather bureau had no report of any large tornado, or updrift, in the vicinity of Marksille at that time. However, James Nelson Gowanloch,
chief biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wild
Life and Fisheries, and I had noticed the presence of
numerous small tornadoes, or "devil dusters" the day
before the "rain of fish " in Marksville. Fish rains have
nearly always been described as being accompanied by
violent thunderstorms and heavy rains. This, however,
was not the case in Marksville... Bajkov goes on to refer to the work of E.W. Gudger who published four articles describing 78 instances of fish falling from the sky, and concludes: There is no reason for anyone to devaluate the scientific
evidence. Many people have never seen tornadoes, but
they do not doubt them, and they accept the fact that
wind can lift and carry heavy objects. Why can 't fish be
lifted with water and carried by the whirlwind? An example of the Gudger's work to which Bajkov refers is: More Rains of Fishes Journal of Natural History Series 10, vol. 3, pages 1-26. Gudger's title is given as associate of ichthyology, American Museum of Natural History. This article was a follow up on Grudger's Rains of Fishes Journal of the American Museum of Natural History vol. 21, pages 607-619 Time Magazine 17 November 1947 reported the fish falling in Marksville with only one sentence: Law of Compensation: In Marksville, La., hundreds of little fish inexplicably fell from the sky on poultryless Thursday. See also the United States Fish and Wildlife Service publication Rains of Fishes for more fish falling events and references. update: 29 December 2021, another fish raining event in Texarkana, Texas https://local12.com/news/offbeat/video-captures-fish-falling-from-the-sky-in-texas-terarkana-storm-raining-hailing-windy-national-weather-service-water-spout-cincinnati-ohio | {
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27,785 | I found this on Facebook: It claims that: During his presidency, John F. Kennedy never collected his salary of
$150,000 a year. Instead, he donated the full amount to charity. Initial googling seems to support his charity, but that amount seems to me like a rather high salary for the 1960s. | Drexel University validates the amount: Presidential Salary: $100,000/year + $50,000 expense account (refused
by Kennedy) As DavePhD pointed out, that $50,000 could only be spent on presidential business, so the full amount that JFK could donate from his presidential salary was 100,000 minus taxes. The History Channel backs up the claim that he donated his full presidential income: 6. He donated his congressional and presidential salaries to charity. Kennedy’s father built a family fortune, and when the young politician
entered Congress in 1947, he earned sufficiently ample annual income
from trusts established by his father that he decided to donate his
entire legislative salary to various charities. Kennedy quietly
maintained the practice as president after becoming the richest man to
ever take the oath of office. As The History Channel isn't focused on facts anymore , here's a list of supporting book quotes from this page : "A millionaire by age twenty-one, Kennedy was our wealthiest
President. The only President besides George Washington to decline his
salary, he donated his to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the United
Negro College Fund and Jewish organizations." From: Page 67 "Lives of
the Presidents: Fame, Shame (and What the Neighbors Thought)" by
Kathleen Krull, read using the "search inside" feature at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/015200808X/ "His $100,000 salary as President was being divided, after taxes,
among two dozen charities, including the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of
America, the United Negro College Fund, and the Federation of Jewish
Philanthropies. The schedule of contributions was worked out each year
during a short money meeting Kennedy had with a family accountant
named Thomas Walsh." From: Page 428 "PRESIDENT KENNEDY: PROFILE OF
POWER" by Richard Reeves, read using the "search inside" feature at
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671892894/ "He donated his entire presidential salary of $100,000 to charity,
ranging from hospitals to the Boy and Girl Scouts, to Jewish
philanthropies and retarded children's associations. In 1962, however,
he chose to make what were clearly strategically political
contributions with his private funds?the United Negro College Fund and
the Cuban Families Committee." From: Page 95 "The Kennedy White House
: Family Life and Pictures, 1961-1963" by Carl Sferrazza Anthony, read
using the "search inside" feature at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743214730/ As for being a lot of money for that time: 100,000 USD in 1962 would have the same purchasing power as 783,894 USD in 2014. Yet nominally , it would still be worth only 100,000 USD. | {
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27,821 | One of the persons I follow on twitter recently linked this article . It contains the following claims: [Ray Bradbury] has always insisted that the main theme of the book is
the role of the mass media and its effect on the populace virtually nobody accepts this as the true theme of the novel, even
though it’s an exact-ish quote from the guy who wrote the bloody
thing. The perfect example of this was a time when Bradbury himself was
giving a lecture on the novel to a class of college students and upon
casually mentioning that the theme of the novel was the dangers of
television, he was stopped in his tracks by someone loudly exclaiming
“no, it’s about censorship!“ [...] Bradbury was so pissed off at the
sheer pig-headedness of the students that he straight up stormed out
of the class and vowed he’d never give another lecture on it. All these claims are unsourced in the article and I doubt than any of these are real (for example in the last claim no specific school is mentioned, raising a pretty big red flag). My question is then: did Ray Bradbury ever claim that his book [Fahrenheit 451] was not about censorship? As additional bonus questions, if he did: is it true that virtually nobody accepts it? did he ever walked out of a lecture on the novel because students were contradicting him? | Did Ray Bradbury ever claim that his book [Fahrenheit 451] was not about censorship? Yes, absolutely, you can listen to him explain it in his own words ( Bradbury on Censorship/Television ) on his website . Transcript: I wasn't worried about freedom, I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV... Fahrenheit's not about censorship, it's about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids. All the popular programs on TV, the competition programs, they don't give you anything but factoids. They tell you when Napoleon was born, but not who he was. So it doesn't matter about the date. You should never memorize dates, to hell with it. So we moved into this period of history that I described in Fahrenheit 50 years ago Note that Bradbury is essentially paraphrasing a portion of the dramatic version of Fahrenheit 451 , at pages 44-45 of the script: Plenty of facts but no meaning...no Government Regulation, no dictums, no true censorship...Iron facts are safe. TV NEWS? Of course...Give the people more contests to win by remembering the names of popular songs or state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Fill them with non-combustible facts, chock them so full of data they feel stuffed... And, yes Bradbury confirms he walked out of a lecture, in an interview with Weller in the biography Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews : Weller: have you encounted academic misinterpretation of your work? Bradbury: I was lecturing at Cal Fullerton once and they misinterpreted Fahrenheit 451, and after about half an hour of arguing with them, telling them that they were wrong, I said, “Fuck you.” I've never used that word before, and I left the classroom. The remaining question is: "is it true that virtually nobody accepts [that the main theme of the book is the role of the mass media and its effect on the populace]"? No. For example in Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion (2000) by Robin Reid it is stated (quoting the Fahrenheit 451 section at page 59): Bradbury's main theme is the extent to which technology can be used for social control, specifically through the use of the mass media for all entertainment and education. The novel describes people being bombarded 24-hours a day by "TV class", "film teacher[s]", TV parlors and televisors. She goes on to contrast Fahrenheit 451 with Orwell's 1984 explaining that in Fahrenheit 451: Only after most Americans chose to give up reading, seduced by the simplicity and presence of the mass media, did the government step in. | {
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27,866 | Recently, I saw a post on Facebook, of this image: The caption is: May 26 is celebrated as Science day in Switzerland in honour of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, because on that day, Kalam visited the country Dr Kalam is an acclaimed scientist, and a former President of India. I tried to Google for sources, and couldn't find any that were definitely not Indian in origin: Swiss declare Science Day in Kalam's honour, The Times of India , May 26, 2005 (apparently from the PTI) Kalam arrives in Geneva: Switzerland declares May 26 as science day in his honour, The Hindu , May 26, 2005 CERN Press cutting of an apparently defunct website - newindpress.com Is this true? | It doesn't look like it. Searching for "Kalam" on http://www.admin.ch (which purports to be the official site of the Swiss government) brings up one English result, "Indian President to visit Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich" . It is the press release for President Kalam's visit, dated 17 May 2005, nine days before the date in question. There is no mention of any "Science Day" in that article. Searching in French and German also returns one earlier, shorter press release (translated to each language), which also does not mention "Science Day". Searching the site for "science day" or "May 26" returns nothing. (Searching for "science" returns 250+ results, but since none of them mention Kalam, they are irrelevant.) Furthermore, Science Day is not an official Swiss holiday . Per Wikipedia , there is only one federal holiday (i.e., declared by the Swiss national government): Swiss National Day, August 1. All other holidays are declared by the individual cantons. Wikipedia's list, which includes the holidays of the cantons, makes no mention of Science Day. The claim is that Kalam visited CERN, so it might be asserted that the canton of Geneva, where CERN is located, declared the holiday (which would not be a Swiss holiday exactly, though it would still be true that it's celebrated in Switzerland); however, Geneva's own public holiday list has no mention of it. It seems unlikely that it would have been declared by one of the other cantons. CERN has a list of official holidays, too . There is no Science Day, no mention of Kalam, no listing for May 26. More circumstantial evidence is provided by TimeAndDate.com which has a list of all Swiss holidays and observances in 2005 and has no entry for March 26th. Some light googling only comes up with repetitions of this claim, but no sources. If it were declared by Switzerland, we would expect Swiss record of someone declaring it; if it were celebrated, we would expect record of someone celebrating it. I have found none. | {
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27,874 | I found these images on this image aggregator , which states that the photo credit is unknown for both images. The tortoises are implied to have become deformed from growing up inside the rings of plastic. Are these images authentic, and is it in fact possible for tortoises to become deformed in such a manner? | There are at least two documented cases where turtles were found with constricting plastic rings around their midsection. One with a six-pack ring, another with a milk bottle safety seal ring: turtle deformed from six pack plastic Turtle Mae West There is no evidence that these are hoaxes, nor that some other process caused the deformity. It is reasonable to assume they are solely a result of the plastic rings they were found with. Peanut Peanut, the figure 8 turtle, appears to still be alive and is living in the Busch Conservation Area in the Missouri Department of Conservation. This turtle is used in outreach programs to teach students and other groups the dangers of plastics in the environment, and there exist many reports and images of this turtle over the years. It is very unlikely that it is a hoax of any sort: The story of Peanut the Turtle at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Turtle Cut Free From 6-Pack Rings Is Unstoppable 20 Years Later | {
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27,927 | According to this article the Red Cross raised half a billion dollars and yet only built six houses in Haiti while claiming to have housed 130,000 residents. In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes. Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. [...] The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six. All of the Red Cross claims are on their own site : An immediate priority for
Haitians was the construction of shelters for people then
living under tarps and tents, so the American Red Cross has
helped 132,000 Haitians to live in safer conditions—ranging
from providing temporary homes and rental subsidies to
repaired and new homes. So, has the Red Cross raised half a billion dollars for Haiti and built only six houses? | The statement of the claim in the question is extremely misleading, and the article confuses multiple projects. However, the Red Cross housing projects are receiving scrutiny from investigative news organizations TLDR: The article has accidentally or deliberately confused the earthquake relief project with the much smaller neighbourhood renewal project, and attacked them both for not doing things they weren't intended to do. The Red Cross did much more in Haiti than build six houses, but it may not have been as much as could be expected Let's focus solely on the specific claim in the question, that "all the Red Cross did with half a billion dollars was build six houses".
Other parts of the article raise some possibly valid concerns about the Red Cross effort in Haiti, which have been noted by other reports, and are to some extent shared by many of the organizations operating in Haiti, but that particular accusation is not one of them. Specifically one of the things the article is doing is confusing two entirely different Red Cross programmes - the earthquake relief programme and the LAMIKA project. The $500 million figure they quote is all about disaster relief. It is probable that the reference to 130,000 promised homes is also a reference to the earthquake relief work, although I haven't been able to track that down. In the article, one of the key points is: After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built. There is a link to a press interview with Gail McGovern , supposedly backing this statement up. The interview does not contain the quote, nor any similar statement. We have to dig around to find out whether there were indeed such plans. It turns out that at a press conference in 2011 McGovern did in fact announce plans for "a hundred million dollar program to provide permanent housing in Haiti" . Several schemes seem to be included in these plans, one of which was the LAMIKA project, which does have the goal of "neighbourhood renewal", and is referred to in the article. However, to be completely clear, it isn't directly funded by the earthquake relief budget and doesn't have a $500m budget. Lamika appears to have a budget of around $9.5m. Regarding what the Red Cross has actually done, the article says the following: The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six. Note the clever insertion of the word 'permanent' in the refutation, but not in the claim. In other words the Red Cross never claimed they had built permanent homes, but the article is taking them to task for not doing so. In fact the Red Cross has never listed 'permanent housing' in its priorities for the $500m relief fund. The earthquake relief fund's focus (or one of them) is on temporary housing. The Gail McGovern interview contains a statement of the Red Cross priorities for earthquake relief in Haiti: McGovern oversaw a six-pronged strategy in rebuilding Haiti that encompassed improving food, water and sanitation; building emergency shelters; jump-starting livelihoods through jobs and grants; strengthening health services and establishing future disaster preparedness. There is also a summary of the Red Cross' actions in Haiti: In Haiti, the Red Cross gave $30 million to the United Nations food program; spent $14 million on readymade meals, clean water and latrines; provided more than one third of the country's tarps; gave more than 1 million vaccinations; provided loans and cash grants to catalyze business development; and trained hundreds of thousands on how to prepare for the next potential disaster. Note the mention of 'emergency shelters', and of 'tarps', which are key components of temporary housing. Where the confusions starts is that the article also makes reference to " Lamika ", speaking as though it were part of the $500m earthquake relief work. However Lamika is in an entirely separate project from the Earthquake Relief work. It is about renewing the Campeche neighbourhood near Port Au Prince. Lamika does not have a $500m budget but a $9.5m budget. It is not clear what happened to the Red Cross plans to provide permanent housing. Current statements of the LAMIKA priorities say that it is specifically about building neighbourhood infrastructure i.e. the things that go around the houses. Priorities in the Lamika project include roads, schools, water and sanitation, public spaces, and "Reinforce or expand more than 300 houses" (i.e. repair existing houses, not build new ones) However reputable news organizations such as NPR are also asking questions about why the permanent housing plans have come to nothing, and about what has happened to the earthquake relief money. | {
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27,940 | Just researching legal oddities and came across this one : Dumb Laws in Australia Only licensed electricians may change a light bulb. Some sources attribute it only to the state of Victoria . Does anyone know if it's true or not? | Victoria is the only state where to my understanding the usual exceptions to requiring licensed electrical contractors are not directly listed in the relevant Act, so my answer focuses on the situation there. Electrical work in Victoria is regulated by Energy Safe Victoria . Their website lists the legislation they administer . One of the documents they have there is this one , pursuant to the 1998 Act, which in part 3 (page 9 of the pdf) lists some exceptions to the broad rule that only licensed electrical contractors can carry out electrical work. In particular, subsection (c) exempts work: (c) involving the insertion or removal of – (i) a plug into or from a socket designed for such a plug; or (ii) a light globe, fluorescent tube or starter for a fluorescent tube, where access to live parts is not required; or (iii) a fuse element. So putting a plug in a socket, (and removing it), changing a light bulb and changing a fuse are all explicitly exempted from the rule. That is, those things are allowed to be carried out in Victoria without a licensed electrician. | {
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27,948 | According to this picture/fact, all gold ever mined is able to fit in a 20x20x20 meter cube. Is there any evidence of this, as this seems like very very little gold? | From Carlin: Where the Train Stops ... and the
Gold Rush Begins , InfoMine Official estimates indicate that total
world gold production since the beginning of civilization
has been 4.97 billion troy ounces. 4.97 billion troy ounces is 155 million kg . The density of gold is 19,300 kg/m 3 . 155 million kg of gold only requires 8000 m 3 . That is 20m x 20m x 20m. That's as of about 2008. A Sklivvz's answer shows, by 2012, the cube had grown to 21m x 21m x 21m. Here's how big that is: (From Gold - Visualized in Bullion Bars , Demon-ocracy.Info ) | {
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28,110 | The general belief, at least amongst the LGBT community, is that gender reassignment surgery will increase the quality of life of transgender individuals. Obviously those that undergo the surgery believe so. I've seen conflicting results as to the accuracy of this statement. Some studies seem to suggest this may not always be the case https://web.archive.org/web/20140701194727/https://waltheyer.typepad.com/blog/2013/11/20-regret-changing-genders-over-40attempt-suicide-and-even-after-surgery-a-large-number-remain-traum.html http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/ However, this article is dedicated to trying to refute the same claims http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/myths-about-transition-regrets_b_6160626.html I would like to get the best assessment of the viability of reassignment surgery as a treatment for Gender Dysphoria. For the sake of this question I am interested in a treatment of those who already identify as transgender and are perusing other treatments (such as hormones). I consider the surgery to be successful if the quality of life for a transgender individual is better post surgery, even if it is still lower then your average non-transgender individual. For instance it seems pretty well agreed that suicide rates of post-surgery individuals are still far higher than suicide rate of non-transgender individuals. However, since suicide rates are higher amongst all transgender individuals, regardless of reassignment surgery, that statistic means nothing to me until compared to suicide rates of those transgender who have not undergone surgery. I'm not quite sure how to better define quality of life, even though I know I need a more exact definition. If anyone can suggest good criteria as a basis to use I'll be happy to update the question with something more exact. For now, I'm interested in how happy, or depressed, the individual is pre- or post-surgery; including how content they are with themselves and their body; via whatever criteria one would use to judge such criteria. I realize that all things considered there is limited data available, owing to the very small number of individuals who perform the surgery, difficulty of setting up anything like a control or double blind study, and disappearance of patients after the study completes. I'm hoping to get data as accurate as possible, understanding that there is an inevitable level of uncertainty due to limited ability to do thorough studies. Edit: as culture can be a factor in such answers, let's focus on transgender people in USA, Canada, and/or England (who all, I feel, share similar enough culture for the sake of this question). | Studies The Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming People has a good summary of studies (starting at page 229 (PDF page 65)). All quotes are from the standard of care (not in order though), and I linked to those studies that I could find freely available online for easy reference. These studies measure more concrete things than "quality of life", including rate of regret (relevant as your blog article mentions this), mental and physical health, sexual satisfaction, etc. Since the Standards of Care have been in place [meaning since 1979], there has been a steady increase in patient satisfaction and decrease in dissatisfaction with the outcome of sex reassignment surgery [...] This study [ J. K. Meyer & Reter, 1979 [only abstract]] focused on patients’ occupational, educational, marital, and domiciliary stability. The results revealed several significant changes with treatment. These changes were not seen as positive [...] Participants in that study [Pauly, 1981] had much better outcomes: Among 83 FtM patients, 80.7% had a satisfactory outcome (i.e., patient self report of “improved social and emotional adjustment”) [...] Among 283 MtF patients, 71.4% had a satisfactory outcome [...] The findings of Rehman and colleagues (1999) and Krege and colleagues (2001) are typical of this body of work; none of the patients in these studies regretted having had surgery, and most reported being satisfied with the cosmetic and functional results of the surgery. [...] A prospective study conducted in the Netherlands evaluated 325 consecutive adult and adolescent subjects seeking sex reassignment ( Smith, Van Goozen, Kuiper, & Cohen-Kettenis, 2005 [only abstract]). Patients who underwent sex reassignment therapy (both hormonal and surgical intervention) showed improvements in their mean gender dysphoria scores, measured by the Utrecht Gender Dysphoria Scale. Scores for body dissatisfaction and psychological function also improved in most categories. Fewer than 2% of patients expressed regret after therapy. [...] The vast majority of follow-up studies have shown an undeniable beneficial effect of sex reassignment surgery on postoperative outcomes such as subjective well being, cosmesis, and sexual function ( De Cuypere et al., 2005 ; Garaffa, Christopher, & Ralph, 2010 [only abstract]; Klein & Gorzalka, 2009 [only abstract]) The standard of care then goes on to list some studies showing less beneficial results, but criticizes them for bad methods or comparing post op trans people with cis people to show that their quality of life is lower (instead of comparing them to pre op trans people or measuring increase/decrease in quality of life of individuals). The swedish study you link to also has a good list of references, here are some quotes from them that I think are relevant: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19473181 80% of individuals with GID reported significant improvement in gender
dysphoria [...]; 78% reported significant improvement in psychological
symptoms [...]; 80% reported significant improvement in quality of
life [...]; and 72% reported significant improvement in sexual
function [...]. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9570489 The results showed that 3.8% of the patients who were sex reassigned
during 1972-1992 regretted the measures taken. [...] The results of
logistic regression analysis indicated that two factors predicted
regret of sex reassignment, namely lack of support from the patient's
family, and the patient belonging to the non-core group of
transsexuals http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16362252 After SRS, the transsexual person's expectations were met at an
emotional and social level, but less so at the physical and sexual
level even though a large number of transsexuals (80%) reported
improvement of their sexuality. Your Links Chris Hydes statements (eg "there's still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatised - often to the point of committing suicide") are not the result of a study (as in published, peer reviewed), but just research he did for The Guardian. The Guardian also says this: "Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex. A 1998 review by the Research and Development Directorate of the NHS Executive found attempted suicide rates of up to 18% noted in some medical studies of gender reassignment.", but doesn't link to it, nor cites it correctly. I could not find it. But it seems that they infer from an 18% suicide rate that 18% (up to a fifth) regret sex reassignment surgery, which doesn't seem like a reasonable conclusion to me (and I doubt that the NHS made this conclusion). As for the swedish study, it is a study comparing post op trans people to cis people, so it doesn't say anything about the success or failure of gender reassignment surgeries (and it doesn't try to do this either). The linked blog post also mentions a 41% suicide rate for transgender people overall, but I agree with you, I don't see how that is relevant to sex reassignment surgery. The only actual study showing adverse effects of gender reassignment surgery I could find in your links is the 1979 study by Meyer & Reter. Conclusion The sources I could find highly suggest that the quality of life of trans people who want SRS increases after SRS, and the majority of trans people do not regret SRS. The linked claims to the contrary rely on decade-old studies or purposefully misrepresent the results of more recent studies. | {
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28,171 | This picture recently showed up on my facebook news-feed. "Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated." - Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood. "I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision." - Hillary Clinton, Democrat, Presidential Candidate "These two have done so much damage to the black community. I will see that I expose these two with every fiber of my being!" - Markeece Young, @YoungBLKRepub, `Republican Thinker' Contributor I wouldn't be at all surprised if the quote from Hillary Clinton is real, but the quote from Margaret Sanger seems very extreme. Did she really say that? Is there a source on that quote somewhere? | It is not an exact quote. A related exact quote is: Birth Control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practised. It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks--those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization. Margaret Sanger, " High Lights in the History of Birth Control ," The Thinker, October 1923 pages 59-61. Several years earlier, in The United States v. Margaret H. Sanger , she was charged under federal law for, in July 1914, using the mail to " incite murder and assassination ", because she used the mail to distribute the following article, "A Defense of Assassination" printed on the front page of her newsletter The Woman Rebel, No Gods, No Masters , Vol. I, No. 5 (quoted in part): It is generally agreed that lower forms of life must give place to higher types, and when the pioneer of civilization makes his way into the forest, he must of necessity destroy the man-killing animals living therein. Exterminating warefare is also waged against the savage members of the human race wherever they oppose the establishment of conditions necessary for the development of the more highly organized types. Of course, where improvement by instruction and subsequent cooperation is possible this extreme of annihilation need not be practiced, but unless it can be shown that there is room enough on earth for both savage and civilized, the savage must go Full text of the article is available in Senate Documents, 64th congress, session 1, vol. 29, page 10891 , made part of the record by Ohio Supreme Court Justice R. M. Wanamaker who testifies about the case. Sanger's bias against people of color is illustrated by her statements about the Immigration Act of 1924 , which banned the immigration of Asians, Arabs and Africans, in her speech MY WAY TO PEACE : (c)keep the doors of Immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race , such as feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred from entrance by the Immigration Laws of 1924 (d) apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring....Open the gates of the U.S.A. to those countries whose inhabitants have the inherent talents and national characteristics desirable, eliminating entirely those countries whose subjects have already been difficult to assimilate . In What Every Girl Should Know: Sexual Impulses--Part II New York Call 29 December 1912 Sanger wrote: The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets. To further understand who exactly she considered to be the "human weeds" and who the "finest flowers of American civilization" one should read her works such as Woman and the New Race , for example starting in the charter "Materials For the New Race" at page 31: Among our more than 100,000,000 population are Negroes, Indians, Chinese and other colored people to the number of 11,000,000. There are also 14,500,000 of foreign birth...Fifty percent are of the native white strain...the slums of Europe dumped their submerged immigrants into America...The 1920 census will in all probability tell a story of an even greater and more serious problem than did the last... Do these elements give promise of a better race? Are we doing anything genuinely constructive to overcome this situation? She goes on to lament the lack of "unmixed native white parentage" and says: These proportions are increasing rather than decreasing, owing to the
extraordinarily high birth rate of the foreign strains. Toward the end of the book, page 229, she concludes: In a word, natural law makes the female the expression and the conveyor of
racial efficiency. Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more
or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit , of preventing
the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives Another use by Sanger of the term "human weeds" further illustrates: So far we have not been gardeners. We have only been a sort of silly reception committee. A reception committee at the Grand Central Station of life. Trainload after trainload of children are coming in, day and night--nameless refugees arriving out of the Nowhere into the Here. Trainload after trainload--many unwelcome, unwanted, unprepared for, unknown, without baggage, without passports, most of them without pedigrees. These unlimited hordes of refugees arrive in such numbers that the reception committee is thrown into a panic--a panic of activity. The reception committee arouses itself heroically, establishes emergency measures: milk stations, maternity centers, settlement houses, playgrounds, orphanages, welfare leagues and every conceivable kind of charitable effort. But still trainloads of children keep on coming--human weeds crop up that spread so fast in this sinister struggle for existence, that the overworked committee becomes exhausted, inefficient and can think of no way out. Margaret Sanger, " The Children's Era ", Proceedings of the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference , Volume IV New York, 1925, 53-58 | {
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28,211 | I've heard a few people claim this. Have any reputable studies concluded that homosexuals live, on average, significantly shorter than heterosexuals? | The source cited in the article comment (which has a anti-homosexual slant) references this article , which does in fact show that the life expectancy of gays and bisexuals in Vancouver in 1996 was 8-20 years shorter than all men (note the large confidence interval). The article was intended to show the effects of HIV on the life expectancy of gay men. One notable factor was the relative difficulty of getting HIV treatment in a timeframe when being homosexual was still considered socially unacceptable, resulting in the high death rates measured. Based on census and vital statistics data, the mid- period Vancouver
male population was estimated to be 180 215 and the total number of
male deaths in Van- couver from 1987 to 1992 was observed to be 13
106, of which 609 or 5% were attributable to HIV/AIDS either as the
underlying or antecedent cause of death... ...CONCLUSION: In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20
years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men.
If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that
nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not
reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions,
gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life
expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the
year 1871. However, the authors have published a rebuttal to the claims made by many anti-homosexual sources based on their work in this paper : ...it appears that our research is being used by select groups in US2
and Finland3 to suggest that gay and bisexual men live an unhealthy
lifestyle that is destructive to themselves and to others. These
homophobic groups appear more interested in restricting the human
rights of gay and bisexuals rather than promoting their health and
well being. The aim of our research was never to spread more homophobia, but to
demonstrate to an international audience how the life expectancy of
gay and bisexual men can be estimated from limited vital statistics
data... ...In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life
expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths
from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since
1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of
British Columbia. The authors then refute the conclusion made by the anti-homosexual links, by statistically defining what their conclusions are, and how "gays are bad" is not a valid conclusion to draw from the paper: It is essential to note that the life expectancy of any population is
a descriptive and not a prescriptive mesaure.5 Death is a product of
the way a person lives and what physical and environmental hazards he
or she faces everyday. It cannot be attributed solely to their sexual
orientation or any other ethnic or social factor. If estimates of an
individual gay and bisexual man's risk of death is truly needed for
legal or other purposes, then people making these estimates should use
the same actuarial tables that are used for all other males in that
population. | {
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28,239 | It's a wide belief between Islamists in my country that in the West, men are not allowed to marry more than one woman even if all parties (both women and the man) accept it, As Islamists view it, this is a restriction of freedom, because those people are not hurting anybody. In the USA, is this the case? | Bigamy - marrying another person while still being married - is illegal in the United States . You can receive fines and / or prison time, depending on the state. For example, in Utah, Bigamy is a " Felony of Third Degree ", meaning you can have between 2 and 10 years in prison (see Sec. 12.34.). Child bigamy second degree , and so is 2 to 20 years (see Sec. 12.33.). It is also enforced . Polygamy is different to Bigamy - it is broader. It includes bigamy, and is not used in legal context. Polygamy also doesn't have to be illegal. You can hold a religious ceremony and declare yourself married to 3, 5, 10 - as many people as you want. As long as you only legally marry one of them, you've not committed a crime. This is because of the difference between a legal marriage and a religious marriage in the US. However, living with them, and committing adultery is illegal in 21 states, but it often seems to be that: no prosecution for adultery shall be commenced except upon complaint of the husband or wife Despite that, This site says that someone is having to argue for them to enforce a law (which seems a little strange), and the post suggests he might not win (saying "could be prosecuted"). US law was also based on English Law (3rd Paragraph) : The principle that a person could only be married singly, not plurally, existed since the times of King James I of England in English law, upon which United States law was based. The 1878 court case Reynolds v. United States was an important test case. | {
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28,279 | While I worked at Walmart during college in the states, we would copy keys for customers, unless the key looked like this. We were told that it was illegal to copy such keys, however, customers would regularly tell us it was in fact legal. Are there any laws that prevent the copying of keys containing a DO NOT DUPLICATE stamp? Asking as this seems to be a claim in the US, But if anyone has a similar claim in their own country feel free to post that as well. | It is hard to prove a negative, but the Associated Locksmiths of America says : Orders for keys stamped “Do Not Duplicate” or similar wording will be handled in the same manner as any unrestricted key (see 8). Paragraph 8 says: For individual, personal property or unrestricted locks, keys, or other qualifying device, the possession of a the qualifying device itself establishes the authority to order duplicates or recombinate cylinders operated by such devices, unless the cylinders or systems are found to be master keyed (see 10) or of a restricted type (see 12), or unless the service technician suspects some wrongful intent. (See 9). In summary, the Associated Locksmiths of America suggests that keys marked "DO NOT DUPLICATE" may be duplicated unless: the key is part of a patented/restricted key control system, part of a master-key system, or the technician suspects wrongful intent. I would have expected the Associated Locksmiths of America to mention a law restricting duplication if such law exists. Several locksmiths agree: The DND message is not legally binding. Unrestricted keys are sometimes marked "Do Not Duplicate" [...] The keys are generally not protected by law. Basically, it's on the honor system. Did you know that there is no such thing as Do Not Duplicate key law? ... there is nothing that actually prevents a DND key from being copied ... Keys marked "Do Not Duplicate," " Do Not Copy," or "Unlawful to Copy" (other than some very specific US government keys) indeed may be duplicated legally. The above is the general case , but there are some jurisdictions with laws that are implicated by a "DO NOT DUPLICATE" engraving. In North Dakota, "... no person shall duplicate or make a key from
another key marked with the words "Do Not Duplicate", "Do Not Copy", or words of
similar intent". ( ND Code 12.1-23-08.4 ). Nebraska mentions the "DO NOT DUPLICATE" label, but it is only an offense if the key is a master key, and it is not unlawful to reproduce a key if "[a]nyone stamps any other type of key with the words DO NOT DUPLICATE." ( Nebraska Revised Statute 28-1316 ) | {
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28,323 | Found it floating around Facebook with comments praising the queen for behaving like ordinary people. Did the Queen Elizabeth actually queue for a sandwich in this photo? Or something else is happening? | The image is a real 1 image of a cardboard Queen. ( http://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/die-queen-macht-ueberall-in-berlin-eine-gute-figur ). That reference mentions "von Pappe", which means "of cardboard" , and in context ("nicht von Pappe") may be a pun. Regardless of what that actually means, the reference also contains these photos, which clearly show what appears to me to be a cardboard stand: 1. I haven't found evidence eliminating the possibility of cosmetic digital post-processing. | {
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28,373 | The viral image below purports to show three TV screenshots of the same photo of a bomb, with the source of the being attributed to three different sources: First image: Ukrainian Channel 5. The text translates to "Russia bombs". Second image: Russian RUSSIA24. The text translates to "Ukrainian chastisers bombed their citizens". Third image: Aljazeera: Israel launches airstrikes in Gaza. What is the true origin of this photo? Additionally, are any of the news report screenshots genuine? A similar photo on Pinterest | The original photo appears to have been posted by Ukrainian soldier Andrew Zaharov on his Facebook photo album. as it predates the articles from any of the news sources below. The initial hit for this image was carried out by cropping the image with Photoshop, then performing a reverse image search, which resulted in a hit to this Ukrainian news site , which has additional images of the truck which was hit by the missile. The site also mirrored Zaharov's photo above. Google Translate of the page has the following information: Ukrainian security officials, who are near the village of Dmitrovka
Donetsk region were fired from a Russian "Hurricane." Fortunately, one
of the rockets that hit in the staff car, did not explode. Therefore, the original photo in this image appears to be an Ukrainian military truck that was hit by a Russian missile, at least according to the news page. The missile is used by both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries but not by Israel , so it is clear at least that the final instance of the missile being labelled as Israeli is false. Furthermore, attempting Google searches for the alleged "headlines" on the 3 images did not yield the original news articles which allegedly had their screenshots taken, but instead yielded the meme-image itself. This, coupled with the fact that all 3 of the images had exactly the same size, position and colour profile made the origin of the image extremely suspicious. Ukrainian: Росія завдає удар Russian: Россия 24 Украинские каратели обстреляли своих граждан English: al jazeera "war on gaza" "israel launches airstrikes" From this, we can infer that it is likely that the creator of this image faked the "headlines" for each of the images. While we can conclusively find that the truck was an Ukrainian vehicle (from an independent report by Reuters courtesy of Anixx's answer ), it will unfortunately be impossible to determine the actual provenance of the missile. Both militaries use the exact same missile model ( BM-27 Uragan ), and both countries' media sources deny firing the missile in a mirror of the MH17 shootdown tragedy . Russian source ( Google translate ) During shelling Russian positions Ukrainian troops soldiers under Dmitrijevka 220-millimeter rockets Russian "Hurricane" has broken Ukrainian staff car and did not explode. This is reported by users of social network Facebook. Ukrainian source ( Google translate ) Near the village of Dmitrovka in Luhansk Russian rocket "Hurricane"
has broken Ukrainian staff car and did not explode. | {
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28,403 | A recent article from Daily Mail cited the case of a woman claiming to be allergic to Wi-Fi, and that it could even kill her. This claim sounded ridiculous and absurd to me. Quoting parts of the exact text: Jackie Lindsey, 50, claims she has electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). Says the condition - not recognized by doctors in the UK - means she is allergic to electricity and Wi-Fi and phones could cause shock . She has diagnosed herself with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), and says anyone using Wi-Fi or a mobile phone signal around her could cause her to have an attack similar to an anaphylactic shock . Four per cent of the population are severely affected by the condition while 30 to 40 per cent are mildly affected. The Daily Mail also features other articles along the same lines in the past: 2011: The cancer survivor allergic to modern life: Mother is so sensitive to electric gadgets she has to live by candlelight 2013: The women who say they are allergic to modern life 2013: The cellphone-free town in West Virginia that offers people who are 'allergic' to radio waves escape from the modern world Does electromagnetic hypersensitivity exist? Does it severely affect 4% of the human population? | Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is believed to be an example of a nocebo . A nocebo is a reverse placebo - one's negative expectations cause harm. EMF exposure hasn't been able to cause symptoms in blind studies. 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. Sufferers are unable to distinguish RF-emitting mobile phones from non-emitting sham cell phones The increase in pain or discomfort (visual analogue scales) in RF sessions was 10.1 and in sham sessions 12.6 (P = 0.30). Changes in heart rate or blood pressure were not related to the type of exposure (P: 0.30–0.88). The study gave no evidence that RF fields from mobile phones may cause head pain or discomfort or influence physiological variables. The most likely reason for the symptoms is a nocebo effect. Or here either In this double-blind study, two volunteer groups of 17 EHS and 20 non-EHS subjects were investigated in regards to their perception of RF-EMFs with real and sham exposure sessions. Experiments were conducted using a WCDMA module inside a dummy phone with an average power of 24 dBm at 1950 MHz and a specific absorption rate of 1.57 W/kg using a dummy headphone for 32 min. In conclusion, there was no indication that EHS subjects perceive RF-EMFs better than non-EHS subjects. Meta-analyses report the same In an earlier systematic review, we reported data from 31 blind provocation studies which had exposed IEI-EMF volunteers to active or sham electromagnetic fields and assessed whether volunteers could detect these fields or whether they reported worse symptoms when exposed to them. In this article, we report an update to that review. An extensive literature search identified 15 new experiments. Including studies reported in our earlier review, 46 blind or double-blind provocation studies in all, involving 1175 IEI-EMF volunteers, have tested whether exposure to electromagnetic fields is responsible for triggering symptoms in IEI-EMF. No robust evidence could be found to support this theory. However, the studies included in the review did support the role of the nocebo effect in triggering acute symptoms in IEI-EMF sufferers. Despite the conviction of IEI-EMF sufferers that their symptoms are triggered by exposure to electromagnetic fields, repeated experiments have been unable to replicate this phenomenon under controlled conditions. This is what the World Health Organization has to say about it The majority of studies indicate that EHS individuals cannot detect EMF exposure any more accurately than non-EHS individuals. Well controlled and conducted double-blind studies have shown that symptoms were not correlated with EMF exposure. It has been suggested that symptoms experienced by some EHS individuals might arise from environmental factors unrelated to EMF. Examples may include “flicker” from fluorescent lights, glare and other visual problems with VDUs, and poor ergonomic design of computer workstations. Other factors that may play a role include poor indoor air quality or stress in the workplace or living environment. There are also some indications that these symptoms may be due to pre-existing psychiatric conditions as well as stress reactions as a result of worrying about EMF health effects, rather than the EMF exposure itself. Some people are moving to Green Banks, WV because it is part of the U.S. Radio Quiet Zone . More info on nocebos . An informative video on the subject I just want to point out - just because the symptoms are not caused by EMF exposure or any known environmental causes doesn't mean they aren't real. People are experiencing real symptoms and real illness, it isn't "just in their head." Psychogenic illness still need to be taken seriously and treated. | {
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28,476 | I've seen this comparison of the ending credits of Rambo III: Original ending credits: Rewritten(?) ending credits: Did this happen, or is it manufactured? I've found this comparison on twitter . | Original sources from the time of the movie's release, 1988, state that the film is dedicated to the "gallant people of Afghanistan". See the BBC's The Listener volumes 119-120, page 218 : When he does pitch in it's only in order to rescue the Colonel, before becoming converted to the cause of the 'gallant people of Afghanistan' (to whom the film is dedicated). And if the previous Rambo films have been replays of Vietnam with... And New York Times Film Review 1987-88, page 281 : "Rambo III" Is dedicated "to the gallant people of Afghanistan," and it clearly intends that its politics be taken seriously. The plot sends Rambo into Afghanistan on a rescue mission after Trautman, who has been educating Afghan freedom... The New York Times article is from the exact day the movie opened in theaters. Rambo III was dedicated to the "gallant people of Afghanistan" from the beginning. The 1995 book Civil War in Pop Culture further confirms at page 152: a note at the end of the movie states that "this film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan" The 1994 book Vietnam war films: over 600 feature, made-for-TV, pilot, and short movies, 1939-1992, from the United States, Vietnam, France, Belgium, Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Great Britain, and other countries also says at page 355: Dedicated to the "gallant people of Afghanistan," the film intends to be taken seriously. It starts with a prologue showing Rambo's newfound inner peace ("My war is over"). | {
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28,509 | Recently, I've often seen this image claiming that some people are dying elephant tusks to prevent individuals from hunting them. Has this actually been done? Is it common? Initially, this seemed a fair idea. However, implementing a staining program seems extremely complicated and, probably, prohibitively expensive. First of all, the dye should be absolutely unharmful for the elephant and the environment around him; researchers do not know how a different color of the tusks could affect the elephant's life. The dye should be capable of staining the whole length of the elephant's tusk, which protrudes into the skull. And of course, tusks grow too; dye should obviously be reapplied as soon as new growth reappears: even a small quantity of ivory holds great value to a poacher. Moreover, a delivery method not requiring anestethics should be found: they are expensive and tranquilizing an animal involves risk to the people and the animal. | I cannot speak to the viability of dying tusks, but it does appear that the photo cited in the question is a fake, as noted on the blog staintuskstostopelephantpoaching.wordpress.com . Here's the original photo for reference: This blog also houses what may be the original source of the proposal, with its first post dated Dec 29, 2012 Could we fight elephant poaching by staining the tusks? , as well as a reasoned explanation of the problems of this approach dated Mar 28, 2013, A conservation biologist’s take on dyeing elephant tusks . To quote from that post (which quotes Dr. Sam Wasser) Thanks for your note. It’s an interesting idea. The big concern is the
time it will take to stain the tusks of 400,000 skittish elephants and
the time it will take for the stain to find it’s [sic] way into the tusk.
Most likely, permanent stain will have to be delivered by food and
grow into the tusk. You can’t immobilize 400,000 elephants to stain
their tusks as it is too risky for the elephants and the people doing
the immobilizations. Thus, it would take many years to achieve your
goals, if it is even possible. Given the urgency of the situation
(30,000-45,000 elephants now being killed annually), we need a plan
that stops as much of the killing as possible, as soon as possible.
(This is, of course, in addition to programs aimed at decreasing
demand.) Our program aims to achieve these objectives by using DNA
assignment to identify all major poaching hotspots across Africa for
targeted law enforcement. Dr. Samuel Wasser Director of Center for Conservation Biology Research Professor, Department of Biology University of Washington, Seattle The same blog goes on to discuss different problems developing and administering an effective dye. I could find no source to suggest this was actually being done anywhere in the wild. | {
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28,589 | World Education , a group that promote literacy, have a resource for understanding the risks of tobacco , which claims: Chemicals in cigarettes and cigarette smoke are known to cause not only cancer but also other serious health problems. Many of the chemicals are poisonous. If a person ate one pack of cigarettes, he/she would die. Is that claim true for an average adult (say 70kg/154lbs)? Note: I'm not smoker, and rather disgusted by cigarette smoke, and curious about their level of toxicity | In this answer, I do not prove that eating a pack of cigarettes is safe. (Please don't do it!) However, I show that there is a common belief that a pack of cigarettes would contain enough nicotine to kill an adult is based on a urban legend. (That doesn't mean it is wrong, just that it hasn't been proven right.) This is based on this article: Bernd Mayer, How much nicotine kills a human? Tracing back the generally accepted lethal dose to dubious self-experiments in the nineteenth century , Arch Toxicol. 2014; 88(1): 5–7.
Published online 2013 Oct 4. doi: 10.1007/s00204-013-1127-0 The author explains there is a commonly quoted toxic level: Standard textbooks, databases, and safety sheets consistently state that the lethal dose for adults is 60 mg or less (30–60 mg), leading to safety warnings that ingestion of five cigarettes or 10 ml of a dilute nicotine-containing solution could kill an adult. [Special Note: There are two claims here. One is about the lethality of 60mg of nicotine, which is challenged below. The other is that five cigarettes contains (only) 60mg of nicotine. I do not challenge this in this answer. @DavePhD has since added an answer that provides a good reference to refute this claim, which casts my conclusion in doubt. Please give consideration to his answer.] However, the scientific literature doesn't support that 60mg is lethal. Instead: The literature reports on fatal nicotine intoxications suggest that the lower limit of lethal nicotine blood concentrations is about 2 mg/L, corresponding to 4 mg/L plasma, a concentration that is around 20-fold higher than that caused by intake of 60 mg nicotine. Thus, a careful estimate suggests that the lower limit causing fatal outcomes is 0.5–1 g of ingested nicotine, corresponding to an oral LD50 of 6.5–13 mg/kg. This dose agrees well with nicotine toxicity in dogs, which exhibit responses to nicotine similar to humans (Reminder: Not everyone responds the same way to a poison. "LD50" is a dose that is toxic enough to be a lethal dose to 50% of the population.) If these figures are correct, eating a pack of cigarettes is not enough to kill 50% of the people who try it. However, you might be someone who reacts more strongly than the median person or there may be other toxic ingredients that are in cigarettes that haven't been considered here, so this should not be read as a go ahead to eat cigarettes. | {
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28,745 | This Facebook post by 9gag.com makes the claim that customers of A&W thought that A&W's 1/3 pound burgers weighed less than McDonald's 1/4 pound burgers, and preferred to buy the McDonald's burgers due to them thinking that a 1/4 pound burger has more meat than a 1/3 pound burger. One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald's Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W's burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it. Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald's. The "4" in "1/4," larger than the "3" in "1/3," led them astray. ( full meme image ) Was there ever such a customer focus group held by A&W, and did it reach the result described in the image? | The source of this image is an article in NY Times Magazine , the text of which (about a quarter down the page) is quoted exactly. Kevin Drum, a blogger for MotherJones, tried to track down the source of this anecdote . He found a tweet by the article's author, Elizabeth Green , saying that she got it from "Threshold Resistance", the memoirs of Alfred Taubman , then-owner of A&W. Reproducing the quote from that book that's on the MJ site: Well, it turned out that customers preferred the taste of our fresh beef over traditional fast-food hockey pucks. Hands down, we had a better product. But there was a serious problem. More than half of the participants in the Yankelovich focus groups questioned the price of our burger. "Why," they asked, "should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald's? You're overcharging us." Honestly. People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four! Since any actual data on the study performed is probably private data of A&W and the Yankelovich research group, the question comes down to "do you believe Taubman?" | {
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28,850 | I spotted an article on BBC news (repeated on several other news aggregators ) about a farmer who had had his lambs stolen. There was a very specific warning given: PSNI Chief Inspector Graham Dodds has warned abattoirs to be careful
about accepting lambs in the coming week. " The farmer who owned these lambs has informed us that they would not
be ready to enter the food chain for the next six weeks and that their
meat would be poisonous to humans if eaten, " he said. Is this true? Could eating very young lamb prove dangerous (even fatal) to humans? If not, then why are these specific lambs so special? | In the absence of any further information, it seems likely that these lambs have recently been given some vaccines or other drugs. As a result, they will not be fit for human consumption until the levels of those drugs have fallen to within acceptable levels. See the section headed "Withdrawal periods for drugs" in Sheep Medicines (UK source) Withdrawal periods for drugs (Food producing animals) The Animals, Meat and Meat Products (Examination for Residues and Maximum Residue Limits) Regulations 1997 control residues of animal medicines in food producing animals. Maximum Residue Limits (MRL) are set which aim to avoid toxicity in man and technical problems for the food producing industries. Under EU legislation the MRL is defined as: Maximum concentration of residue resulting from administration of an animal medicine which is legally permitted in the Community or recognised as acceptable in or on a food. Withdrawal periods for meat are listed on the data sheet accompanying the drug and must be strictly observed. Withdrawal periods are defined as: The time between the last dose given to the animal and the time when the level of residues in the tissues (muscle, liver, kidney, skin/fat) or products (milk, eggs, honey) is lower than or equal to the MRL. Withdrawal periods are given for time after administration to slaughter (meat production). Where a withdrawal period is not given for a species a minimum of the following "standard" withdrawal periods should be adopted; 28 days for meat. Additionally, some organic food schemes require the doubling or tripling of data sheet and standard withdrawal periods. The text of the law cited, The Animals and Animal Products (Examination for Residues and Maximum Residue Limits) Regulations 1997, is available online . | {
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30,007 | Has Saudi Arabia announced it'll build 200 mosques for those fleeing fighting in Syria and Iraq, but won't accept any refugees? Example claim: "Saudi Arabia Offers to Build 200 Mosques for Syrians in Germany" , Frontpage Mag Why will the Saudis build 200 mosques for these "refugees", yet won't take a single one in? | This question has two claims: Saudi Arabia refuses to accept any Syrian refugees. Saudi Arabia announced it'll build 200 mosques for Syrian refugees in Germany. Claim 1: Saudi Arabia refuses to accept any Syrian refugees. According to a report by Amnesty International , a non-governmental organization focused on human rights with over 7 million members , Saudi Arabia offered no formal resettlement slots to Syrians by the end of 2014. Furthermore, since the civil war broke out in 2011, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees , that is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide, has published data showing that only four applications have been "recognized". (Unrecognized applications do not earn an approval nor a rejection; they go directly to the trash can.): The Financial Times analyzed the data and said: None was formally rejected, but unsuccessful applications were “otherwise closed”. That compares with tens of thousands of successful applications for asylum in Germany and Sweden. Claim 2: Saudi Arabia announced it'll build 200 mosques for Syrian refugees in Germany. Among the news articles who published these news: ArabianBusiness.com and AmericanThinker.com referenced the German newspaper faz.net. German Newspaper faz.net referenced Al Diyar, a Lebanese-Arabic newspaper, as the originator of this piece of news: (Google Translate) Instead, says the Lebanese newspaper al Diyar, Saudi Arabia offer for the Muslim refugees who are received in Germany, the construction of 200 mosques in. Although the newspaper writes that should be done in accordance with the Federal Government. Therefore, it seems that piece of biews was originated by Al Diyar (a Lebanese newspaper owned by the controversial Charles Ayoub). Ibtimes.com referenced Al Diyar too. Going through Al-Diyar's official website, I found an article entitled: Original: اللاجئون في المانيا يطالبون بـ 200 مسجد والسعودية مستعدة للتمويل Translation: Refugees in Germany demand 200 mosques and Saudi Arabia is ready to fund If you look through the article, you will find that it is extremely short (one sentence): Translation: After the arrival of the number of Syrian and Iraqi refugees to Germany, 800 thousand Syrian and a half million Iraqis. The Saudi "committee" has demanded the committee chieftains of Muslim refugees build 200 mosque for Muslims in Germany. Muslim sheikhs said that Saudi Arabia was ready to build 200 mosques in Germany for refugees, subject to approval by the German authorities , but Municipalities Act imposes a referendum on the establishment of a mosque or not, as well as [restrictions?] on dawn and evening speaker broadcasts as they constitutes a nuisance to non-Muslims under the German law. Saudi Arabia are willing to donate USD 200,000,000 or more according to the announcement of the Emir of Mecca in the name of King Salman. The article has no source, whatsoever. Moreover, Al Diyar's reputation in Lebanon is that it is biased and politically aligned with Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria : Charles Ayoub, editor-in-chief of Al-Diyar, newspaper generally aligned with Syria and Hezbollah, published a front-page account in which he described accepting financial assistance in return for taking a middle line in his paper’s coverage of two political alliances , the March 14th movement (Western-backed, anti-Syria) and the March 8th movement (pro-Syria). The "pro-Hezbollah" bias of Aldiyar would make the source unreliable since the relationship between Hezbollah (the Shia ) and Saudi Arabia (mostly Sunna ) is pretty tense . Hezbollah's leader Nasrallah has recently sent a message to Saudi Arabia saying " enough is enough " referring to the Shiite-Sunni war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Until further evidence is found, we cannot determine if this claim is true or not. | {
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30,060 | The following popular article on stretching claims that lack of flexibility is purely neurological (or even psychological) and that [almost] any unconscious person would be very stretchy, e.g. can be put into a full horizontal split: When unconscious, we are all capable of full splits, yet when awake our bodies sense impending danger to the muscles lengthening beyond this preconceived point and begin to tense up to prevent injury. That stiffness you feel when you stretch is all in your head and totally created by you. -- Andrew Read, You Can Already Do the Splits: How to Relax Into Stretch (emphasis mine) I have heard similar claims before. It sounds very implausible but should be easy to test. Is it true or false? | No. The claim, that "when unconscious, we are all capable of full splits", is not supported by evidence. There is not a great deal of literature on this topic. One paper on a similar topic “Neurophysiologic influences on hamstring flexibility: a pilot study” concluded: Averaged over all 11 subjects, no change in the flexibility of the hamstring was measured as a result of anaesthesia, For the 3 patients who had spinal anaesthesia, there was a small increase (of only 8.1 degrees) in flexibility during anaesthesia, Mean popliteal angles with hip held at 90 degrees were around 130 degrees, meaning, the subjects were not particularly flexible, either before or during anaesthesia. So, while the study implicates some neural contributions to muscle flexibility, it is likely not the only one. Also, the fact, that it is possible to increase one's flexibility seemingly instantly eg. by taking advantage of the Golgi tendon reflex , suggests, that a neural component exists. But: the hypothesis behind the claim, that the only thing stopping us having perfect flexibility until we get to the physical limitations of the joints themselves, is our neural control, is inaccurate and not supported by evidence based on clinical experience with anaesthesia. See a longer discussion of the topic here . | {
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30,094 | In the CNN's Republican debate broadcasted in Sept 2015 , Carly Fiorina said the following to Donald Trump: There are a lot of us Americans who believe that we're going to have trouble someday paying back the interest on our debt. Because politicians have run up mountains of debt using other people's money. That is, in fact, precisely the way you ran your casinos. You ran up mountains of debt, as well as losses, using other people's money, and you were forced to file for bankruptcy not once, not twice — four times. Trump protested against Fiorina's claim, and said: I never filed for bankruptcy. Is there any evidence showing that Trump filed for bankruptcy? | Technically, no Donald Trump himself has not filed for personal bankruptcy, but companies he has ownership stake in have. So both statements are true , at least, in a legally defensible sense. This was covered on NPR's All Things Considered recently, Scott Horsley analyzed the statements thusly, from "Fact Check: Fiorina's HP Record; Trump's Bankruptcies; Vaccines And Autism" : Well, you can hear Trump saying in the background, I never filed for
bankruptcy. He is right when he says he never filed for personal
bankruptcy. But Fiorina's also correct when she says Trump
corporations turned to bankruptcy court on four different times to
reorganize their debts. Trump has defended that as perfectly legal
under the law and, of course, it is. Most of those bankruptcies were
tied to Trump casinos in Atlantic City. The debts were restructured.
Trump's ownership stake was whittled down. And like Fiorina, he says,
look, context matters here. Just about every casino operator in
Atlantic City has struggled, and those bankruptcies represent a small
fraction of the many business deals he's done. From "What Trump didn’t say about his four big business bankruptcies" , Washington Post The 69-year-old real estate tycoon has never filed for personal
bankruptcy and has for years portrayed the Chapter 11 bankruptcies of
his glittering hotels and casinos as calculated, even shrewd
maneuvers, and facts of life in the high-stakes worlds of
mega-development and commercial finance. According to one estimate, Trump's bankruptcies have accrued around $4.7 billion worth of debt. I'm not sure if there is enough information to calculate exact total losses. In some cases he still owns a limited amount of stock in some of the entities. From "By the Numbers: Donald Trump’s $4.7 Billion in Bankruptcies" , Dividend Reference | {
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30,147 | I am referring to the claim made by yourbrainonporn.com and also NoFap movement : "It's hard to know exactly how many young men are suffering from
porn-induced ED. But it's clear that this is a new phenomenon, and
it's not rare." According to one of the testimonials : Thanks to NoFap I could at least get it up, and maintain an erection,
but I could not come, and she was a little worried as to what was
going on, but we persevered, and over the next day and week it got
better, now it’s better than it has ever been. This stuff works! I am also aware that there are psychologists who pooh-poohed the idea . Two recent studies have been published by researchers who examined
whether there truly is a potential epidemic of porn related erectile
dysfunction. Prause and Pfaus published this study
in Sexual Medicine, finding that porn use did not predict
sexual dysfunction, but instead, predicted higher levels of sexual
responsiveness. So which is which? Is Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction a real thing? If it's not, then how to explain the testimony above? Could it be possible that although there is no correlationship between porn usage and Erectile Dysfunction on a general scale, but for certain people, porn usage does lead to Erectile Dysfunction? Also, could it be that the usage of porn leads to ED for some, but helps to combat ED in others, and these two effects cancel out each other and thus result in weak or no correlationship on a general scale? | One study in Sexual Medicine, found that that porn use did not predict sexual dysfunction , but instead, predicted higher levels of sexual responsiveness. Another study analyzed European men from Croatia, to find that there was no reliable connection between porn use and sexual dysfunction . The study reports that there was no statistical relationship between men who use higher rates of pornography, and reports of sexual dysfunction. There were inconsistent but weak associations with moderate use of pornography. Matter of fact, urologists and researchers have found that pornography viewing is an effective, noninvasive and reliable test for psychogenic erectile dysfunction. Another study identified that the brain activities of men watching pornography are not significantly different in men with and without erectile dysfunction. Read more: An Erectile Dysfunction Myth - Psychology Today | {
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30,298 | While reading a different question Was Martin Luther King taped by the FBI while committing adultery? I came to the Wikipedia page for
William Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Sullivan Sullivan was one of six current or former FBI officials who died
during a six-month period in 1977, before they were to testify before
the House Select Committee on Assassinations, all men who were slated
to give testimony about FBI circumstances related to the death of
United States President John F. Kennedy, and the FBI role in the
Warren Commission. Stone, R., Cotapietro, M. (2013) The Man Who Killed JFK, The Case
Against LBJ, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, p. 334. ISBN
978-1-62636-313-7 Did six former FBI officials who were slated to give testimony in the House Select Committee on Assassinations die before presenting? | Referring to John McAdams , "a good many of the deaths hardly seem mysterious in that they were caused by accidents, heart attacks, and other phenomena that afflict our entire population." However, when one reads Richard Charnin's 2013 column, the probability of death of 7 current or former FBI officials who died during a six-month period in 1977 before they were to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations when calculated using Probability Sensitivity Analysis was approximately 1 in 100 billion. The List of Witnesses and Cause of Death All these witnesses were to testify, had already testified, or were to be called back for additional testimony. Their deaths with no indication of foul play however cluster about a very specific period of curious time of the hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee and HSCA. William Sullivan-the main figure in the FBI involved in the
Executive Action project was shot dead in a shooting accident near
his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on 9th November, 1977 a week
before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on
Assassinations in 1977. Investigation by New Hampshire authorities
showed no indication of foul play. William Sullivan was one of the former FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover’s top aides, originally, then had a falling out with Hoover.
He was scheduled to be questioned by the Assassinations Committee in 1977. As mentioned earlier, he was found shot dead in a shooting accident having been mistaken for a deer. He had been head of the
FBI’s Division Five, which handled the King and Kennedy
investigations. There was a claim by William Sullivan's friend
Robart Novak that William Sullivan specifically predicted that his
own death by the following words "Someday you will read that I have
been killed in an accident, but don’t believe it; I’ve been
murdered." Donald Kaylor-One of hundreds of FBI employees with marginal connection to assassination who died in October, 1977. He was a FBI fingerprint chemist who examined prints found at the assassination scene and the cause of death was from heart attack. J.M. English-former head of FBI Forensic Sciences Laboratory died in October, 1977 from heart attack with no evidence of foul play. Alan H. Belmont-special assistant to Hoover died in August, 1977 from natural causes due to "long illness" with no evidence of foul play. He had previously testified to the Warren Commission. James Cadigan-FBI document expert with access to documents that related to death of John F. Kennedy died from a fall in his home in August, 1977 with no evidence of foul play. He had previously testified to the Warren Commission. Louis Nicholas-special assistant to J. Edgar Hoover and his liaison with the Warren Commission died from heart attack in June, 1977 with no evidence of foul play. He was a Former No. 3 man in FBI who worked on JFK assassination investigation. Additional deaths during the interview period: Apart from the above listed agents, Regis Kennedy who was a senior agent in the FBI assigned to New Orleans also died during the HSCA interview period. He was one of two FBI agents in New Orleans assigned as contact men for Lee Harvey Oswald in his role as FBI informer. Regis Kennedy’s death would be considered curious, not suspicious, due to the coincidence with his HSCA interview per Jerome A. Kroth. He informed the Assassinations Committee in 1978 that Carlos Marcello, the alleged Mafia boss in New Orleans, was not affiliated to organized crime and was a tomato salesman. Regis Kennedy died shortly after testifying before the Committee in 1978. Kennedy is said to have confiscated a film of the assassination taken by what conspiracy researchers call “The Babushka lady film” which was seized before anyone ever viewed it, and was never recovered. | {
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30,339 | The Daily Mail reports: German woman becomes the second to be evicted from her home to make room for migrants [...] A German woman is being booted out of her home of 23 years to make room for migrants.
Gabrielle Keller is the second such case to emerge in the country as it struggles to cope with an expected influx of some 800,000 refugees this year. Did this actually happen? If so, was there a reasonable explanation such as the evicted families being evicted for unrelated reasons? | These cases have been well covered by German media as well, and since both the tenants, the location and the municipal politicians have been named, the cases can easily be verified and I don't see any reason to doubt it. Just to mention a few of the articles about this specific case: Focus Stern Die Welt Badische Zeitung Deutsche Wirtschaftsnachrichten LZonline The Huffington Post What is not so clear from the Daily Mail article is that Gabrielle Keller is renting an apartment from the municipality, a rather uncommon situation in Germany, since the municipalities themselves usually don't own houses usable as living space. The termination of (housing) rental contracts is regulated in the German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) §573 which rather vaguely states: Der Vermieter kann nur kündigen, wenn er ein berechtigtes Interesse an
der Beendigung des Mietverhältnisses hat. My English translation: The landlord can only then terminate (the contract), when he has a
justified interest in the termination of the tenancy. The civil code continues with an incomplete list of justified interests. Most commonly, the termination of a German rental contract is justified with the landlord's personal need. The highest court in Germany (Federal Court of Justice of Germany, Bundesgerichtshof) has in their verdict VIII ZR 238/11 already ruled that the 'justified interest' requirement is fulfilled for a legal entity (in this case, the municipailty as landlord is a legal entity and not a natural person) if the entity needs the housing space to fulfil official duties. Even if the exact circumstances are different in the high court verdict, the German municipalities have been required to shelter a given number of refugees and they are hence justifying the cancellation of the rental contracts with their demand for housing space to fulfil their official duties. In most of the covered cases, the current tenants have disputed the termination notice and if it comes to a court ruling, the courts may of course rule differently, since the surrounding circumstances are different. Also very different opinions have been expressed on the legal standing of the termination of the rental contracts. In the article from the Badische Zeitung , Udo Kasper from 'Mieterbund Baden-Württemberg' (a tenants' association) claims the termination to be void, since equal interests and requirements of two tenants are played against each other. He continues: 'The last consequence of the situation would be: The municipality evicts the current tenant. The municipality would then be responsible for finding accomodation for the now homeless woman. They would have to provide her with living quarters.' So far so good, however the municipality would not be required to provide the current tenant with a 78m² appartment, in which she lives alone. In a followup article in Focus , 'lawyers' (they are not named) consider the termination void, since it is justified with the municipality's own need. According to the quoted lawyers, the concept of 'own need' or 'personal need' (Eigenbedarf) as defined in the German Civil Code can allegedly only be applied by natural persons and not a municipality. This opinion is however in contradiction with the court verdict I linked to, in which the highest court has already ruled that the principle of 'Eigenbedarf' can be claimed by legal entities as well. In the Die Welt article, Wiebke Werner from another tenants' association finds the termination not necessarily disqualified and states: 'it depends on the assessment of each single case'. | {
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30,356 | An article from the Daily Mail reports about a giant traffic jam near Beijing, China, in the aftermath of 2015's national holiday week. Several times, the article insinuates at least a section of the motorway has as many as 50 lanes : No end in sight: The incredible gridlock took place on one of the country's busiest and widest highways with as many as 50 lanes and The jam began at around 2pm just outside the capital city on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway, which has 50 around lanes. Furthermore, the article then states: The congestion was caused by a new checkpoint at the other side of the toll, which reduced the width of the road from 50 to less than 20 lanes. This sounds like 50-ish lanes is the regular width of a part of the motorway, at least between a pair of very frequented entrances/exits. Alternatively, even if the 50 are not correct, the highway seems to regularly have 20 lanes. Now, I see several clues that cast doubt on this claim: The traffic jam happened around a road toll booth, as is mentioned in the article and visible in the third photo. In particular, the third photo shows the vehicles are waiting in front of the toll booth, rather than after it. Typically, motorways get a lot wider for a few hundred meters in front of a toll booth, precisely because traffic is slowed down there, and parallelization helps. In the last photo, it even seems quite clear that the number of lanes is greatly reduced after the toll booth (possibly shrinking to less than 20 lanes?). According to the Wikipedia article , the G4 expressway was completed in 2004. Google Maps photos of the place appear to be from 2015, according to the footer. The depicted location, just about 40km South of Beijing (map markings are slightly shifted toward the East compared to the photos) shows expressway G4 to be a motorway with three lanes per direction . Neither does it seem likely that the motorway would have to be about ten times as wide only a few kilometers North of this, nor (if we assume the Google Maps photos are indeed some years old) that regular traffic volume could have increased that much within just a few years, to warrant such a drastic expansion of road width. Therefore, my question is: Does any part of the the G4 expressway (or any other Chinese motorway) indeed have a regular (i.e. not just around a checkpoint) width of 20, or even 50 lanes? | The article refers to the northbound Zhuozhou Toll Gate at the G4 motorway just south of the Beijing city boundary. As you can see on the aerial photography from Google Maps, at this location, the G4 motorway has 8 lanes (4 in each direction): https://www.google.de/maps/@39.5485894,116.0341314,675m/data=!3m1!1e3 | {
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30,429 | There's a quote keeps doing the rounds on Facebook and the like. It claims to be from Noam Chomsky and reads "That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital" I can find this quote attributed to him in many places by Googling, but nowhere I'd consider definitive. Although, curiously, it does appear in Google's summary of one of his interviews but isn't present on the transcript when I click on the link. Yet it's also not showing up as an obvious hoax. So can anyone cite a definitive reference? | Yes, he did. A Google Cache version of Chomsky's own website has the text his lecture The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival , given at the The University of Toronto, April 7, 2011 verifies this (emphasis mine): Social Security is actually in pretty good shape despite what everybody screams about. But if you can defund it, it won't be in good shape. And there is a standard technique of privatization, namely defund what you want to privatize . Like when Thatcher wanted to defund the railroads, first thing to do is defund them, then they don't work and people get angry and they want a change. You say okay, privatize them and then they get worse. | {
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30,469 | I just heard Holocaust denier and former academic, Robert Faurisson , explaining a few things about gas chambers. What he claims : The dilapidated chambers, thought to be gas chambers in the Nazi death camps are not secure enough to send Zyklon B in them. In the US jails, when a guy is sentenced to death, it's a very hard job for safety reasons. The wooden doors of the gas chamber can't contain gas, the glass windows in those chamber are not secure enough to avoid prisoners breaking them, etc. There are no pictures of those gas mass-killing chambers. There are no plans of them. All we have are reconstructions based of the descriptions of very few prisoners. There is insufficient evidence that they were used as gas chambers. Is this a view supported by evidence? (source warning this is in french : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_6rE8VoPo ) | The statements of Robert Faurisson plainly contradict and ignore a vast body of primary sources and academic research on the topic . Some of the documents that address the use of gas chambers by the Nazi regime during WWII include the following: Writing for the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies historian Michael Thad Allen (Georgia Institute of Technology) summarizes available research and cites original documents from German and East European archives documenting technical details of gas chambers used at Birkenau and Auschwitz. Contrary to the claims, these include blueprints, purchasing orders, and official German communications (which were carried out openly). The author concluded to say: The precedents were Zyklon‐B chambers for delousing clothing, a
technology widely known throughout a network of specialized firms. Far
from pursuing the halting and somewhat inconscient development of gas
chambers in Birkenau heretofore presented in the historical
literature, the SS first took an interest in Zyklon‐B chambers in the
summer of 1941, and by early October the Central Building Directorate
of Auschwitz intentionally and systematically had adapted such
equipment to the gassing of human beings. 1 Illustration : "An examination of [...] the forced air ventilation system reveals that the ZBL-Auschwitz Planned Morgue 1 of Crematoria II [pictured] as a gigantic Zyclon-B extermination facility." 1 The evidence for gas chambers was tested in court on numerous occasions. For an archive of court-tested evidence see Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals in 15 volumes, published for the United Nations War Crimes Commission by His Majesty's Stationary Office and hosted at the US Library of Congress. Volume I, page 93 contains documents related to the "Zyklon B Case: Trial of Bruno Tesch and Two Others" charged with and found guilty of "Complicity in the murder of interned allied civilians by means of poison gas." 2 In the case (V. X, page 24) against I.G. Farben the German chemical industry conglomerate, Karl Krauch, Walter Duerrfeld, Otto Ambros, Heinrich Buetefisch, and Fritz ter Meer were accused and found guilty of supplying large quantities of Zyklon-B that was "used in the mass extermination of inmates of concentration camps, including Auschwitz." 7 During war crime trials held in the years of 1947-1949 multiple witnesses, on separate occasions, appearing before a variety of legal bodies, in independent jurisdictions, have testified to witnessing the use of gas chambers for mass extermination of prisoners. These include sworn testimony by survivors Annie Jonnas, Abraham Glinowieski, Lidia Sunschein, Helen Klein, Gertrude Diament, and Dr. Bendel among many others. 3,8 Multiple German Nazi officials, on separate occasions, appearing before a variety of legal bodies, in independent jurisdictions, have freely admitted to carrying out the various aspects of using gas chambers for the mass extermination of prisoners. These include, among many others, Josef Kramer, Commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, who spoke at length in front of a British court about the gassing program at Bergen-Belsen and at Natzweiller; 3 Franz Hofmann, Schutzhaftlagerführer in Auschwitz, who testified in the Frankfurt trials before a German court in 1963-1965; 9 and Oskar Gröning, SS-Unterscharführer at Auschwitz, who testified before a court in Lower Saxony (Germany) in 2015. 10 The proceedings of the trial against Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, Commandant of the Auschwitz Camp concluded: Over four million people from all countries occupied by Germany met with with death in the gas-chambers and crematoria installed in the camp. 5 The prosecution in the case of Josef Kramer, Commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, concluded: Could the court have the slightest doubt about the gas chamber or the selections that were made for the gas chamber? It was freely admitted that there were in camp Birkenau five gas chambers attached to the crematoria [...] There was no doubt whatsoever [...] in Auschwitz alone literally millions of people were gassed for no other reason that they were Jews. 3 In the case of the Josef Altstotter, Reichministerialdirektor, before the United States Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1947 the Tribunal concluded that: A certain number of the concentration camps were equipped with with gas chambers for the wholesale destruction of the inmates, and with furnaces for the burning of the bodies. 4 In a war crimes case against Gauleiter Greiser, SS-Obergruppenführer and Reichsstatthalter of Wartheland (Poland), the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland found the defendant guilty of wholesale extermination of Polish citizens of Jewish race [who were] concentrated in a small number of ghettos, deported, [and finally] murdered, mainly in the gas-chambers of the extermination camp at Chelmno. 8 The documents I cite above embody a small fraction of the available factual record on the matter. They represent the testimony of hundreds, the research and verification effort of thousands, and the experience of millions. While it is possible to contest some of the technical details in any one given document (the historical record is never perfect), the sheer number and variety of sources, their legitimacy in the eyes of the law, and their acceptance by the peer-reviewed academic community builds an overwhelming case for the Nazi regime's use of gas chambers in the mass extermination of Jews and other prisoner populations. Did the Holocaust really happen? Yes. The wholesale dismissal of established (if not always precise) historical facts in favor of speculation and innuendo is in effect a sign of conspiratorial thinking in general and Holocaust denial in particular. Allen, Michael Thad. “The Devil in the Details: The Gas Chambers of Birkenau, October 1941.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 2 (January 1, 2002): 189–216. United Nations War Crimes Commission. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals . Vol I. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1947. United Nations War Crimes Commission. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals . Vol II. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1947. United Nations War Crimes Commission. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals . Vol VI. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1948. United Nations War Crimes Commission. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals . Vol VII. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1948. The French historian Georges Didi-Huberman takes up the subject of photographic evidence in his book-length monograph Images in Spite of All , published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in spite of all: four photographs from Auschwitz . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. United Nations War Crimes Commission. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals . Vol X. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1949. United Nations War Crimes Commission. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals . Vol XIII. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1949. Wittmann, Rebecca. Beyond Justice the Auschwitz Trial . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. " Beihilfe zum Mord durch eine Tätigkeit im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz ." Rechtsprechung der niedersächsischen Justiz. 15.07.2015. | {
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30,576 | A Reddit user titled this photo "Kamikaze hit on HMS Sussex" and it currently has 5,532 points (96% upvoted). Here is a cropped version of that photo: Another user cites Wikipedia : On 26 July 1945 her Task Force was attacked by two attack bombers acting as "Kamikaze" suicide weapons. One made an imprint on the side of the HMS Sussex, from which it could be identified as a Mitsubishi Ki-51 "Sonia". They also linked to a gif that purports to illustrate how the plane hit. Does this photo represent the result of a 1945 kamikaze attack on HMS Sussex? | According to Pacific Wrecks, a non-profit organization devoted to sharing information about the Pacific Theater of World War II and the Korean War , it does. The image description reads as: HMS Sussex hull impact by kamikaze Ki-51 Sonia And, is credited to: Credit: Royal Navy Date: July 26, 1945. B&W Pacific Wrecks says it owns the copyright of the image and there is an option where you can acquire it , this is the version posted on their website: Furthermore, two different images were found on FrignateNS's Flickr account of the event: Where he credits one image as: A Kamikaze hit that did'nt succed[sic], but I bet it gave them one helluva fright! Lastly, it is being said that : On 26 July 1945 her Task Force was attacked by two attack bombers acting as "Kamikaze" suicide weapons. One made an imprint on the side of the HMS Sussex , from which it could be identified as a Mitsubishi Ki-51 "Sonia" | {
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30,666 | A statement by Robert Reich on Facebook makes the following claim: America is the only democracy in the world where anyone can declare himself or herself a candidate for the presidency. Which makes it all the more important that we distinguish leaders from demagogues. The former ennoble our society. The latter degrade and endanger it.
What do you think? Is this true? To clarify, the claim is that in the US, any (eligible) person can declare him or herself a candidate for president. That is to say, I believe, they needn't be nominated by a specific political party, or be the member of some other governing body (congress, parliament, etc). | No, this is not true. A counter-example is Ukraine. My interpretation of the claim is that: America is a democracy where it is possible to self-nominate for Presidency, without having to get permission or pre-selection from existing parties, cartels or government bodies as part of the normal administrative process for candidacy, AND There is no other country with a democracy that has that property, for Head of State or Head of Government . From discussion on the question and other answers, I see that some people challenge the former of these propositions. I am ignoring that and targeting the latter. The President of Ukraine is: elected by the citizens of Ukraine on the basis of universal, equal and direct suffrage by means of secret ballot for five years. In 2014, Intefax reported : a total of 23 candidates will take part in the presidential race, seven of them are nominated by political parties, 16 are self-nominees. So, the electoral system support self-nomination, and everyone votes for the candidates directly. Note that nomination requires the collection of massive numbers of signatures . I consider this to be merely administrative evidence that the potential candidate is a serious contender, as opposed to getting permission from a party, so I argue this still fits into the definition. I understand Russia to have a similar signature-gathering hurdle. I suspect there are many more examples. So the USA is not the only democracy in the world where anyone can declare himself or herself a candidate for the presidency. | {
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30,796 | From https://twitter.com/dannolan/status/665409197685764096 (408 RTs, 495 likes), though another comparison between the two exists in Australian Popular Science [US flag, picture of American Bald Eagle] American Bald Eagle One of the smallest Eagles in the world Only eats little fish Basically a glorified seagull [Australian flag, picture of Australian Wedge Tail Eagle] Australian Wedge Tail Eagle One of the largest Eagles in the world Hunts large mammals including Kangaroos Can see infra red and ultraviolet Only eagle in the world that attacks Parachutes and Paragliders Is this comparison describing wedge tailed eagles as more bad-ass than bald eagles accurate? Related question: Is Australian fauna more dangerous? | American Bald Eagle - Haliaeetus leucocephalus Claim #1: One of the smallest Eagles in the world. False Length of the American Bald Eagle is 94-106 cm (this is in the length range of 85 - 106 cm for Aquila audax) and wingspan is 5.9-7.5 ft (1.8-2.3 metres). Weight is approximately 6.5 to 14 lbs (3 kg to 6.5 kg) which is more than the weight of Aquila audax which ranges between 2 kg to 5.3 kg. The size range of the adult Bald Eagle is a wingspan of 168-244 cm, and body masses range from 3.0-6.3 kg (Buehler, 2000). Second in size only to California condors (Gymnogyps californianus) and about the same size as golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), bald eagles dwarf most other North American raptors . Based on information from data in 'Raptors of the World' by Ferguson-Lees, J and Christie D, 2001 present here , the size dimensions of American Bald Eagle when compared with eagles from other parts of the world is within the range of the heaviest eagles of the world, longest eagles of the world and eagles with the largest wingspan . Claim #2: Only eats little fish. Partly False American bald eagles are known to prefer fish but they also scavenge carrion or steal the kills of other animals. They also take birds, especially waterfowl, and occasional mammals.
In addition to eating other animals such as ducks, muskrats, and sometimes turtles, they eat carrion willingly, and are notorious for robbing osprey of their catches. They are also reported to feed on human flesh and consume Harbor Seal placenta . Claim #3: Basically a glorified seagull. Debatable Bald eagles are shown to hunt seagulls. Australian Wedge Tail Eagle - Aquila audax Claim #1: One of the largest Eagles in the world. True The Wedge-Tailed Eagle is known to be the largest raptor in Australia and fourth largest among the 10 largest eagles of the world based on the data in 'Raptors of the World' by Ferguson-Lees, J and Christie, D in 2001. The largest wingspan ever verified for an eagle was for this species when a female killed in Tasmania in 1931 was found to have a wingspan of 284 cm (9 ft 4 in) and another female measured barely smaller at 279 cm (9 ft 2 in). Size - Length: 85 - 106 cm or 1.06 m (3 ft 6 in), Wingspan: 182 - 232 cm or 2.27 m (7 ft 5 in), Male weight: 2 - 4 kg, Female weight: 3.1 - 5.3 kg. This eagle's great length and wingspan place it among the largest eagles in the world but its wings, at more than 65 cm (26 in), and tail, at 45 cm (18 in), are both unusually elongated for its body weight and 8-9 other eagle species regularly outweigh it. In comparison, the wingspan of Steller's sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus) is one of the largest of any living eagle in the world, at an median of 2.13 m (7 ft 0 in) and its weight is 5 to 9 kg (11 to 20 lb) which makes Aquila audax smaller in overall size (including body mass). Claim #2: Hunts large mammals including Kangaroos True The Australian wedge tailed eagle is known to cooperatively hunt mammals such as adult kangaroos and kangaroo joeys which are baby kangaroos , birds such as emu and reptiles such as bobtail skinks. You would expect such a huge, powerful bird to be a ferocious hunter. In fact, the Wedge-tailed Eagle is not nearly as swift or as deadly as other birds of prey such as falcons and sparrow hawks. Often it will swoop down onto a fleeing rabbit or wallaby, only to come up empty- handed (or empty-clawed!). Wedge-tailed Eagles eat a wide variety of mammals, lizards and birds, depending on their local abundance. Mammals make up the greatest share of their diet, and rabbits are the most important live prey taken. They will also eat possums, gliders, cats, dogs, piglets, kangaroos, wallabies, lambs, goats, calves and foxes . Simon Cherriman who has done extensive research on Wedgies has a lot of pictures of Australian Wedge Tail Eagle prey here . Claim #3: Can see infra red and ultraviolet Ultraviolet vision True Many bird species including other eagle groups and pigeons can see UV light . Infra red vision False The majority of animals and birds are not sensitive to near-infrared spectrum (720nm-1500nm) based on this answer . Infrared detection in vertebrates is known in snakes and vampire bats . Claim #4: Only eagle in the world that attacks Parachutes and Paragliders Partly true but debatable The known documented event was an attack of pair of wedge tailed eagles on a paraglider named Nicky Moss . However, other eagle species such as the Himalayan golden eagles are also known to attack paragliders which is documented here and here . | {
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30,829 | Refer to the Fox News item here , Putin said that: To forgive the terrorists is up to God, but to send them to Him is up to me It seems that the only source I can trace to is a tweet from Remi Maalouf : Putin : to forgive the terrorists is up to God but to send them to him is up to me #ISIS #Syria #Moscow Remi Maalouf is a news anchor for Russia Today (RT), which lends some credibility to the quote, but it is not formally reported by any official news channel, just a tweet, so that dampens the credibility somewhat. Given Putin's character, I can believe that this really came out of his mouth and not made up by someone. But did he actually say it? | Remi Maalouf has since deleted original tweet and posted this tweet . This is the danger of social media! I took Putin's quote from a post
on Facebook & it turned out to be false. I apologize. | {
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30,903 | My Mother and aunties always asked with alarm how I got even a minor scratch when I was young. If an injury was caused by anything rusty, I was to be transported immediately to the doctor for a "tetanus shot" so I would not get "lockjaw". Do injuries from rusty object cause tetanus? Is there a significant chance of contracting tetanus this way in first world countries? | Rusty or not, any contaminated object that causes an injury could result the injured person to have a Tetanus infection. And it is not just the first world countries, because Tetanus occurs worldwide. More than a rusty nail The New York Times has demystified the claim in a short article [1], which is good for a prompt reading. It is more than just a rusty nail for one to have a Tetanus infection. A rusty nail will do. But the infection can come from many sources -- sewing needles, animal bites, gardening tools, splinters. Injuries that create dead skin, like burns and frostbite, can also lead to infection. Quora has similarly short answers [2] to debunk the claim; The most upvoted answer explained well in a paragraph, albeit had misspelt the bacteria name (corrected name with emphasis mine). It is neither the nail nor the rust that causes Tetanus. Tetanus is caused by the infection with Clostridium Tetani , an organism that is ubiquitous and more likely to be found in dust and dirty places. If it is present on a rusty nail, it can cause Tetanus, only if the person is not immunized against it. HowStuffWorks has explained further on the exposure of the bacteria to the people. Neither people in farms and cities are completely safe, according to its article [3], notably page 2 as quoted below. Tetanus is caused by bacteria known as Clostridium tetani, which is commonly found in soil, dust and animal feces. Because of its presence in soil and manure, gardeners and others who work in agriculture are particularly at risk for exposure to this bacteria [...] But city-dwellers aren't completely safe -- a dusty sidewalk or street may harbor just as many bacteria. Clostridium tetani (C. tetani) Centers for Disease Control and Precention (CDC) explains about Tetanus and the bacteria that causes the infection in its publication, which is available as an HTML page [4] and a PDF file [5]. Tetanus is an acute, often fatal, disease caused by an exotoxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium tetani. [...] The organism (C. tetani) is sensitive to heat and cannot survive in the presence of oxygen. The spores, in contrast, are very resistant to heat and the usual antiseptics. They can survive autoclaving at 249.8°F (121°C) for 10-15 minutes. The spores are also relatively resistant to phenol and other chemical agents. There is no mention of "rust" found in the text of publication, which would disagree with the claim that "rusty nail wounds cause tetanus". Regardless of minor or major wounds, contamination leads to a successful infection. Transmission is primarily by contaminated wounds (apparent and inapparent). The wound may be major or minor. In recent years, however, a higher proportion of patients had minor wounds, probably because severe wounds are more likely to be properly managed. Tetanus may follow elective surgery, burns, deep puncture wounds, crush wounds, otitis media (ear infections), dental infection, animal bites, abortion, and pregnancy. Tetanus treatment and prevention While Tetanus is a preventable disease [4][5], a person who has been infected should be treated immediately with human tetanus immune globulin (TIG) (or equine antitoxin) [6][7]. Tetanus is not contagious from person to person. It is the only vaccine-preventable disease that is infectious but not contagious. One should have received Tetanus vaccine when one was younger than 7 years of age. A booster dose may be given to adults, but the amount of dose varies by whether the adult was unvaccinated or after an exposure to the infection under some circumstances [8]. References [1] The Claim: Stepping on a Rusty Nail Can Cause Tetanus by Anahad O'Connor, Feb. 22, 2005. [2] If you step on a rusty nail, will you really get tetanus? on Quora, asked 15 weeks ago to this date. [3] If you step on a rusty nail, will you really get tetanus? on HowStuffWorks. [4] Tetanus Chapter of Pinkbook: Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases on CDC, 13th Edition (2015) retrieved on Nov. 24, 2015. [5] Printer friendly version of Tetanus Chapter of Pinkbook: Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases on CDC, 13th Edition (2015) retrieved on Nov. 24, 2015. [6] Tetanus: Diagnosis and Treatment on CDC. [7] Tetanus Immune Globulin (Injection) on National Library of Medicine - PubMed Health. [8] Vaccines: VPD-VAC/Tetanus/main page on CDC. | {
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31,008 | In a video , Obama appears to be saying that "We're speeding up training of ISIL forces, including volunteers from Sunni tribes". Is this video genuine or fake? | The video is real, but when brought to his attention he said it was a slip of the tongue, and that in context it obvious that he misspoke: http://www.snopes.com/obama-isil-training/ The President's comments merely included slip of the tongue, as
evidenced by the President's following statement (i.e., that Sunni
volunteers were being trained as "a new force against ISIL") and a
correction issued by the White House (which noted President Obama's
slip and placed the word "Iraqi" in brackets where it should have been
used) | {
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31,089 | The Raonoke Chowan News Herald reported on 8 December 2015 reports that the town of Woodland, North Carolina, USA rejected a solar farm, citing concerns on photosynthesis and cancer: Jane Mann said she is a local native and is concerned about the plants that make the community beautiful. She is a retired Northampton science teacher and is concerned that photosynthesis, which depends upon sunlight, would not happen and would keep the plants from growing. She said she has observed areas near solar panels where the plants are brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight. She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her that solar panels didn’t cause cancer. ...and quoting another resident: Bobby Mann said he watched communities dry up when I-95 came along and warned that would happen to Woodland because of the solar farms. “You’re killing your town,” he said. “All the young people are going to move out.” He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland. The content screams satire at me, but I cannot find any hint that this article or the entire Raonoke Chowan News Herald is satirical — it appears to be a serious article. Comments on the article state the same. It was picked up by Russia Today , probably to give the impression that Americans are ridiculous. But is the article truthful? Did the town of Woodland, North Carolina, USA really reject a solar farm citing concerns about cancer and energy from the Sun being sucked up? Please tell me it isn't. | I decided to communicate directly with the town itself. The response to my email is reproduced below: Please read the interview with Mayor Manuel on (witn.com). Also, there will be a message from the Mayor on our website (townofwoodlandnc.com) by this afternoon. During our Board meetings public comments are always welcomed and we listen to anything a person has to say. Please be advised however, this particular vote by our Board was not based on certain comments as the media portrayed. Thank you for your interest in our Town. Following the first link to WITN , they did indeed interview the mayor. The first part of the story states (emphasis mine): When a Northampton County resident said the building of a new solar farm would "suck up all the energy from the sun," the comment received international attention. But officials in the small town of Woodland say that concern isn't the reason a solar farm proposal was rejected. The mayor goes on to say: "With this 4th solar farm being proposed we're looking at being cornered in on all 4 corners primarily of the town and the citizens of the town felt they did not want that," Manuel said. This was supported by a petition signed by 80 residents So this was a decision based on zoning laws, not the unfounded concerns of the citizens, but rather more legitimate concerns regarding the use of the land. The town itself has posted a PDF document explaining the reasons they rejected the proposal on their website. SOme additional concerns about the fourth site are mentioned in that PDF: All three of the proposed sites were in locations that were elevated, or partially obscured from the roadway view. The fourth proposed solar farm site is located on 42 acres of open farm land at the East entrance of the town limits, off of State Highway 258. So this would seem to align more with what is commonly referred to as NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The first three sites were not visible, but this fourth one appears to be visible to more of the town's population. The document goes on to state: The town council's decision to deny the rezoning of this fourth proposed solar farm site was due, in part, to a circulated petition by a group of concerned town citizens opposing the change of zoning for this fourth site. The citizens opposed the site location, because to grant the zoning request would create a situation in which the town would be completely surrounded by solar farms. So, while it may be humerous to laugh at a perceived "small town yokel" that makes some assertions that are wildly detached from reality, it would be unwise to paint the entire proceedings with the broad brush of one or two individuals. While the town has not posted detailed minutes, the interview on the news site, as well as the town post, seem to agree in essence with what was said on Snopes , although I would say that it's not quite "Mostly" true, instead a mixed bag. I would rate the reporting of this entire incident as wildly hyperbolic, and I do feel sorry for the media attention this town and decision has garnered. | {
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31,119 | This gif has been widely distributed on imgur/reddit/twitter/media and it is meant to represent Molecules of the protein myosin drag a ball of endorphins along an active filament into the inner part of the brain's parietal cortex, which produces feelings of happiness. However, I have some doubts. For example, on imgur there are people that claim it isn't so: That's kinesin transporting a vesicle along a microtubule. I hope OP's not one of my students ... And the video looks uncannily similar, but not identical, to this Harvard BioVisions "Inner life of the cell" video (about halfway through) where it represents inner cell activity unrelated to endorphin or the brain. Was this video meant to represent a ball of endorphins being transported into the brain cortex or is it a different biology video which has been misrepresented? | No , this is not an image of "myosin dragging a ball of endorphins". As you suspected, it is showing kinesin walking up a microtubule. The reason the animated GIF looks uncannily similar to the Inner Life of The Cell video is because it was created by the same artist of the same subject material. The company behind the animation, Art of the Cell has a blog article by the artist John Liebler, where he describes some of the history and inspiration for the animation. As my workload allows, I plan on spending some time revisiting many of the subjects from The Inner Life of the Cell, and where better to start than with a new version of this guy. The kinesin motor protein was a real scene stealer in Inner Life, although it wasn’t even in the original treatment for the short. The original plan was to omit the motor protein in the vesicle shots, but when I saw Graham Johnson’s animation of the way a kinesin takes a step from April 2000(below), I secretly went ahead and modeled one of my own, animated a walk cycle for it, and added it into the vesicle shot. After I showed it to Dr. Viel, it not only got into the animation, it got several more shots as well. Check out the stills and animations to understand the context of which version is which. | {
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31,156 | This claim is made in an article published on december 18th on the online version of the French newspaper Le Monde . Des études scientifiques ont estimé que près de 1,4 million de Chinois meurent chaque année, directement ou indirectement, de la pollution de l’air. Which translates to Some scientific studies estimated that almost 1.4 million Chinese
people die each year, directly or indirectly, from air pollution. This claim is made without referring to any source. It sounds like a huge number to me, so I'd like to know if this is true. | The following is accurate according to a scientific report published in Nature: Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015) The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale doi:10.1038/nature15371
Received 10 May 2014 Accepted 27 July 2015 Published online 16 September 2015. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature15371.html Scientists from Harvard University and other countries such as Cyprus and Germany measured the most detailed estimates yet of the toll of air pollution, in a quest to find the cause. The study found that outdoor air pollution is killing 3.3 million people a year worldwide , that is divided as follows: China: 1,400,000 deaths/year. India: 645,000 deaths/year. European Union: 180,000 deaths/year. Pakistan: 110,000 deaths/year. United States: 54,905 deaths/year. And so on... The Guardian also reported that this study: is the first study to single out different outdoor air pollution sources and estimate the number of premature deaths they each cause, considering road traffic, fossil fuel power stations and other sources. Furthermore, global WHO estimates suggest that the result of the scientific report published in Nature is accurate: Regionally, low- and middle-income countries in the WHO South-East Asia and Western Pacific Regions had the largest air pollution-related burden in 2012, with a total of: - 3.3 million deaths linked to indoor air pollution. - 2.6 million deaths related to outdoor air pollution. As you see: WHO estimated in 2012 that 2.6 million deaths are related to outdoor air pollution. Nature study estimated in 2015 that 3.3 million deaths are related to outdoor air pollution. Note that the The Nature study did not measure indoor air pollution , which obviously mean, according to the WHO estimate, that more deaths/year could result from indoor air pollution . Here is a list of caused/deaths published in WHO : Outdoor air pollution-caused deaths: 40% – ischaemic heart disease; 40% – stroke; 11% – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); 6% – lung cancer; 3% – acute lower respiratory infections in children. Indoor air pollution-caused deaths: 34% - stroke; 26% - ischaemic heart disease; 22% - COPD; 12% - acute lower respiratory infections in children; 6% - lung cancer. The Nature study also predicted that the yearly death total will double to about 6.6 million a year by 2050. To sum up: 1.4 million Chinese people die yearly due to outdoor air pollution. WHO suggests that a large number of Chinese people die from indoor air pollution too. | {
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31,178 | There is a persistent urban legend that a Japanese department store got confused and crucified Santa Claus in a Christmas display. Today's BBC Magazine : Remembering our mongrel Christmases reminds me of the Tokyo department
store which erected on its roof a giant Santa on a cross. Don't laugh
- we can all get our wires crossed. And who's to say the store wasn't crucifying Santa as a gesture of multicultural goodwill? Snopes lists a whole bunch of other reports and the story has certainly been around for a while: I seem to recall first reading about this in Jack Seward's The Japanese (1972), although Google Books disagrees. In any case, did a Japanese department store actually ever crucify Santa? | Snopes calls this legend false, and I will add to their judgment that Santa and Christmas were already well-known in Japan due to foreign literature like Dickens, and the persistent and futile efforts of missionaries to convert the locals. Christmas was a national holiday from 1927-1947 since it happened to coincide with the death of Emperor Taisho in 1926. The idea that by the postwar period, when this supposedly happened, there were still designers in Japan unfamiliar with Santa seems terribly unlikely. However, in light of DavePhD's answer below, I will say that the truth is actually kind of undetermined at this time. Here's Japanese Santa doing his job in 1916: How did he get in without a chimney? That's a mystery no skeptic can solve. Postscript: When you Google these keywords, you will more likely than not see this photo: This is a photomontage made by a Japanese artist specifically attempting to recreate the legend for artistic effect. Here's the original source (note that clicking "Next" goes to a NSFW image). | {
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31,292 | As a germophobic , I almost consume a soap bar each day due to the touch of a door handle or other daily used items around the house. This is instigated due to OCD perhaps. This is unhealthy and bad for the skin (As using too much is harmful and thus there needs to be some control over the issue. One proposed by someone was that just washing the hands by water and not consuming the soap. Would washing hands with only water be equally effective in most common cases? | Washing your hands with plain water of a normal temperature is significantly less able to effectively sanitise against bacteria, viruses, and many protozoa. The oil on your skin will hold pathogens pretty effectively. The detergent in the soap helps to break down the cell walls in some types of prokaryotes (bacteria) and eukaryotes (other living microbes) and also to remove the oil so that virus particles can be removed in sufficient numbers. Different soaps and detergents will have varying levels of effectiveness. The CDC provides quite a bit of information about sanitisation. This page explains how to wash your hands effectively to remove pathogens. Here is a quote from a study specifically comparing hand washing with and without soap: Handwashing with water alone reduced the presence of bacteria to 23% ... Handwashing with plain soap and water reduced the presence of bacteria to 8% ... The effect did not appear to depend on the bacteria species ( PubMed 21318017 ). The above results may or may not be similar to those for viruses or protozoa. Also, the amount and type of oil on the skin before washing probably plays a large role, as probably does the method and material used to dry the skin. Different situations call for different approaches and levels of sanitation. Interestingly, the same study mentioned that no specific instructions were given for the washing technique, other than using a paper towel to dry: Participants assigned to handwashing were asked to wash their hands as they would normally do, without instructions on length of time or thoroughness. The volunteers allocated to handwashing were then provided with a paper towel to dry their hands ... Participants took on average 12 seconds to wash their hands with water alone, and 14 seconds to wash their hands with water and soap ( PMC3037063 ). | {
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31,328 | According to Daily Mail , the Cologne town center has been declared a No-Go Zone for women. Cologne town centre has been called a 'no-go area' by its own city council. Are there any statements from the city council that substantiates this claim? There are similar claims from other blogs and editorial websites: Now The End Begins 1 Germany Finally Admits Muslim Migrant 'No-Go' Zone Problem In Cologne Independent 2 The German city of Cologne has been branded a “no-go zone” for women by the 18-year-old victim of sex attack carried out by up to 30 men. Jihad Watch 3 German police have admitted to losing several urban areas to migrant gangs as so-called no-go zones, but this is possibly the first time a
public square in the centre of a European city has been acknowledged
by officials as having been lost to criminality, and out of the
control of police at night. Breitbart 4 The latest admission of the developing problem of no-go zones in Europe comes from state police in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), a
west German state that borders Belgium and the Netherlands. 1 This site is extremely religious in nature and intertwines current events with events in the 'gospel.' 2 A *minor publication within the UK and is regarded as an extremely politically influenced publication. Getting news without 'extreme' political spin is very rare. *Minor being used loosely to humorously point to it's political lean (credit: Konrad Randolph ). 3 This site is basically a blog by Robert Spencer. Having to do with all things Muslim, it has a very apparent religious bias. 4 This news site is regarded as extremely politically influenced. Getting news without 'extreme' political spin is very rare. | No, the statement in that form does not appear to be true. There has been no official statement by the city council that I could find, and the city council had its last meeting before the events. Its next scheduled meeting won't be before February . Judith Wolter - a member of the right-wing extremist, racist, and nationalist Bürgerbewegung pro Köln [*] and a member of the city council - did write an open letter which was published at the pro koeln website, in which she called the area around the train station at new years eve a no-go-area for women. This is probably what is meant, but she does not speak for the whole city council, and she limited the phrase no-go area to that specific place and time. Other people have been using the phrase no-go-area as well, such as the president of the police union of the state Arnold Plickert , or the president of the CDU of the state Armin Laschet , both of which said that they would not tolerate no-go-areas. [*] sources: - 'die rechtsextremistische Partei "pro Köln"' [english: 'the right-wing extremist party "pro Köln"'] - 'die Inhalte sind geprägt von teils verklausuliertem, teils offenem Rassismus' [english: 'The positions are characterized by partly coded, partly open racism'] - 'Im Verfassungsschutzbericht [...] wurde die Partei als nationalistisch, rassistisch und völkisch-kollektivistisch eingestuft.' [english: 'The domestic intelligence service considers them to be nationalist, racist, and völkisch-collectivist'] - 'The [NRW] domestic intelligence service [...] has observed the grouping [...] for the suspicion of right-wing extremist aspirations. [...] Since 2011 the intelligence service has stated that the indications for anti-constitutional aspirations went beyond the scope of mere suspicion. [...] the movement violates the human rights as specified in the German constitution' | {
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31,376 | The Stack Exchange 2015 Year in Review blog post claims: After five years of democratically electing moderators, it’s mind blowing that Stack Exchange is still the only major network that embraces this form self-governance . It’s a strategic advantage we wish more internet communities would adopt. We simply cannot thank our 476 volunteer moderators enough for their patience and dedication. Is Stack Exchange the only major network where moderators are democratically elected? | Wikimedia holds democratic elections for its board member positions. Wikipedia's nomination and selection process for administrators and bureaucrats is roughly democratic, with requests for adminship almost always being accepted if they receive at least 75% support and request for bureaucratship almost always being accepted if they receive at least 85% support. Physics Overflow holds democratic moderator elections. Young socialists united subreddit holds democratic moderator elections. Rational wiki uses democratic moderator nominations. Which, if any, of these is "major" is a subjective judgement call, but beware falling into a no true Scotsman fallacy . | {
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31,405 | Please disregard the website on which this is found. Were these "rules" actually found in 1919? From: http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/newspaper-clipping-from-oct-13-1975/104739 A reader who has kept a copy since we first published it in April 1970, has suggested that "lest we forget" the following be published again: In May 1919 at Dusseldorf, Germany, the allied forces obtained a copy of the Communist Rules for Revolution. Fifty years later the Reds are still following these rules. A. Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial, and destroy their ruggedness. B. Get control of all means of publicity thereby: Get the peoples minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and other trivialities. Destroy the people’s faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit and produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders, and foster lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such disorders. By Specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues, honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness. C. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view towards confiscating them and leaving the populace helpless. | While it would be impossible to prove that no communist ever said anything like this, the answer is still not at all legitimate. This appears to be a recurring myth used to discredit political opponents every so often since the 1970s. From snopes : [N]obody has ever managed to turn up the mysterious issue of
Examiner-Enterprise that supposedly printed this list. When columnist
Bob Greene checked out this piece with Russian specialists at the
University of Chicago and Northwestern University in the mid-1980s,
they said the list was "a total fraud," "an obvious fabrication," and
"an implausible concoction of American fears and phobias." (Greene
also wrote: "I always wanted to meet a communist who was carrying the
list around, so I could ask him what 'obloquy' means.") Besides the alleged source not containing this list, it has never appeared anywhere else either: When The New York Times ran an article on this piece back in 1970, it
had already been circulating for about twenty-five years. The Times
reported that neither the National Archives, the Library of Congress,
nor university libraries had a copy of any such document . When Montana
senator Lee Metcalf looked into the issue back then, he checked with
the FBI, CIA, and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee; he found
that "exhaustive research" had proved the rules to be "completely
spurious," and he declared that "the extreme right also follows rules,
one of which is to make maximum use of false, misleading and
fear-inspiring quotations." Nonetheless, numerous members of congress
have received copies of the Communist "rules" list from alarmed
constituents over the years and, believing that nobody else was yet
aware of them, have inserted them into the Congressional Record. This
list has also been reproduced in many newspaper columns and letters to
the editor. The earliest known publication of these rules dates from February
1946, and it's significant to note that publication coincided with
events such as Winston Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech, in
which he issued a warning to citizens of the United States that
"Communist parties constitute a growing challenge and peril to
Christian civilization." The timing suggests it's far more likely this
list was compiled by Americans in 1946 than by Russians in 1919. So it would appear that this is the other side of making up quotes to support your self; making up quotes to discredit your opponents. This particular case has been around for a while, and has been thoroughly researched. | {
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31,439 | One hiking book my family owns described Spain as the second most mountainous country in Europe . Several online sources claim the same: Spain then and now : After Switzerland, Spain is the most mountainous country in Europe. Sustainable event alliance : it [Spain] is the second most mountainous in Europe after Switzerland. Wikipedia, Tourism in Spain : Spain, as the second most mountainous country of Europe, (...) I've travelled in Spain and there are indeed quite a few mountains. None of those sources define what they mean by most mountainous . I can think of quite a few possible definitions, and although I did not back it up by sources, for all of those I suspect there are at least two European countries that would rank higher: Total area covered by mountains? What is a mountain? Probably more in Norway, Sweden, Russia, maybe Switzerland, Austria… Fraction of total area covered by mountains? (Again, what is a mountain?) More in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Norway… Actual surface area divided by surface area projected onto the geoid (close but not equal to previous one)? See also Is La Palma the steepest island in the world? . Number of (ultra) prominent peaks ? Switzerland, Austria, Italy have more. Number of ultra prominent peaks per unit area? Is there any (reasonable) definition of mountainous by which Spain is the second most mountainous country in Europe? | As the question demonstrates, the actual definitions used are unclear, and there could be many possible answers. Chapter 3 of the Nordregio 's 2004 report for the European Commission, Mountain Areas in Europe:
Analysis of mountain areas in EU
member states, acceding and other
European countries provides a number of different measures, most of which Spain is nowhere near the top, but some in which Spain comes second - but not to Switzerland! - or even first. % of municipalities that are at least 50% mountainous, by area: FALSE See Table 3.1. Spain (at 55.59%) is well behind Switzerland, Norway, Slovenia, Austria and several others. Percentage of total country area that are mountain areas: FALSE See Table 3.2. Spain (at 55.7%) is well behind Switzerland, Norway, Slovenia, Greece, Austria, Ital and other countries. Population that live in mountain areas: TRUE See Table 3.3. Spain (at 15,681,826) is second to Italy. Percentage of total population living in municipalities that are at least 50% mountains by areas: FALSE See Table 3.3. Spain (at 38.5%) is behind Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway and Switzerland. Total Mountain Area: TRUE See Table 3.4 and the description above. Norway, Spain and
Sweden are the countries with greatest extent of mountain areas in absolute terms The table shows Norway beating Spain, and Spain beating Sweden. Switzerland doesn't make it into the top 11. Mountain Population: TRUE See Table 3.4 and the description above. As regards population, Italy, Spain, and France have the largest
mountain populations The table shows Italy beating Spain; Switzerland is further down the list. Percentage of Mountain Area: FALSE See Table 3.5. Spain doesn't rank in the top 11. Percentage of Mountain Population: FALSE See Table 3.5. Spain ranks 8, with Switzerland at the top. Number of massifs : FALSE Spain is number #1 in this measure. The number of massifs per country ranges from one massif (Belgium, Slovakia) up to
13 for Spain. In conclusion, the claim is poorly defined. Under some measures Spain is second only to Italy or to Norway. In other measures, it doesn't make the top ten. Of course, there could be some other definition that places Spain second to Switzerland that wasn't considered here. | {
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31,452 | Is there a source for this claim? | The source is a poll conducted by 'Public Policy Polling': Trump Lead Grows Nationally; 41% of His Voters Want to Bomb Country From Aladdin; Clinton Maintains Big Lead The poll was conducted on Dec 16th and 17th 2015, partially by phone, partially over the internet. There was a total of 1057 respondents, of which 532 usually vote for the Republicans, of which 34% (about 180) answered the following question with 'Donald Trump': Given the choices of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz,
Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, John
Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, and
Donald Trump who would you most like to see as the GOP candidate for
President in 2016? One of the following questions in the poll was: 'Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?' The respondents were given the following alternative answers: Support bombing Agrabah Oppose bombing Agrabah Not sure Among the Trump supporters, 41% answered 'support bombing Agrabah', 9% answered 'oppose bombing Agrabah' and 51% answered 'not sure'. So, at least at a first glance, it may seem as if 41% of Trump's supporters want to bomb Agrabah. There are of course several issues with this poll. As already pointed out, none of the options really reflect the fact that Agrabah is a fictional country. There has been a lot of speculation in the comments, e.g. Ryan writes: 'I think it's worth noting that there's probably a significant number of people "In support of" bombing Agrabah because they realize it's a BS question.'. I am honestly trying to avoid speculations or subjective interpretations when answering questions here, but since Sklivvz asks for more elaboration in his comments and the only possible option to get a definitive answer to 'why did you answer X, Y or Z' would be the unfeasible contact with the respondents, here we go: If I as a respondent had known that Agrabah is a fictional country, the only reasonable answer would IMHO be to oppose bombing. Supporting the bombing is fruitless, since the bombing cannot be conducted and answering 'not sure' does also not really fit my intentions. If I had not known Agrabah, one could of course imagine reasonable opinions fitting the different options: Support bombing Agrabah: I support bombing anything sounding kind of Moslem or Arab. Oppose bombing Agrabah: I oppose military operations in foreign countries without exceptions. Not sure: I don't know Agrabah and I am also not sure if they have done anything worth bombing them for. Another perhaps more disturbing issue is the margin of error due to the unusually small sample size for the poll. Even if the total number of respondents was 1057 (roundabout 1000 respondents is a common sample size for polls), the sampling error increases significantly when splitting the group into smaller subsets. There are several statistical approaches to estimate the error margin for a poll result, but using a rather common formula M=2*sqrt(P*(1-P)/N) with P being the fraction of respondents (41%) and N being the number of respondents (180) gives a margin of error (M) of about ± 7 percentage points, meaning that the real value probably lies somewhere in the range 34-48%. With even smaller sample sizes, the numbers for the other candidates' supporters have an even larger estimated margin of error. In addition to these two issues, it is also not a big secret that it is easily possible for polling firms to influence the response by e.g. carefully choosing the wording of the question or answer alternatives or by modifying the context of the question. In this particular case, the Agrabah question follows several other legit questions regarding Moslems, Arabs or Islam and even if I am now just speculating again; it is of course not impossible that PPP here on purpose tries to trick the respondents into some kind of 'anti Moslem/Arab/Islam state' to lure them towards a supporting answer. On the other hand, even if PPP tries to influence the answer, one could of course ask why Trump's supporters are statistically significant more easily tricked to support the bombing of Agrabah (41% ±7pp) than the other Republican voters (23% ±4pp) or the Democrat voters (19% ±3pp). To summarize: The 41% count is the result of a relatively silly poll question. There are several flaws in the poll, but even considering the expected margins of error due to the small sample sizes, the results of the poll shows that Trump's supporters are significantly more eager to bomb Agrabah than both other Republican or the Democrat voters. The difference between the other Republicans and the Democrats is so small, that it falls within the estimated margin of error. | {
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31,521 | I hear many folks talking about the founders of ISIS and they say that USA created it to make chaos in the Arabic countries. Mark Danner in an episode of Talking Heads by Vice News "In effect the United States created ISIS, nothing like it existed before the American occupation. We created it, it's ours, and now we are trying to deal with the consequences." Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a speech These criminal organizations – including al-Qaeda, DAESH and the like – were created with the purpose of pitting us against one another and making nations confront each other. Donald Trump claimed in a rally that Hillary Clinton and Obama created ISIS: “They’ve created Isis. Hillary Clinton created Isis with Obama,” Trump said. Is it true ? | Some interpretations of this question are highly opinion-based and can't be answered on this website (try Quora), but others can be factually answered. Are the leaders of ISIS Americans? No , it's run principally by Iraqis and Syrians, and has Muslim supporters from around the world. Wikipedia on sources of support Did American politicians meet with ISIS? No , such images were mislabeled; see this question . Did Obama claim to be training ISIS? No , this was a misstatement . Are there leaked documents, namely from Edward Snowden, that say that U.S. and Israel conspired to create ISIS? No , this is an online hoax . Did a 2012 United States government document claim that a Salafist state in Syria would be "exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime" and that the creation of such a state is a "possibility"? Yes . Did the CIA route funds and weapons through the Salafist Saudi Arabian government in 2013 to unspecified "rebels" in Syria? Yes . Were the "rebels" that the CIA was funding through Saudi back channels Salafist themselves, or was Saudi Arabia helping to bring moderate democracy to the Middle East? Was the US creating/funding ISIS? We have no knowledge of who the US was supporting at the time. We do know that the US government has been continuously bombing ISIS since 2014. ( source ) [updated, October 2016] A leaked memo from Hillary Clinton's email has shown that Saudi Arabia was funding ISIS in 2014, and that the State Department wanted to pressure the Saudi government to stop this. ( source ) Has the US government intended to "make chaos in the Arabic countries"? It was their open position in 2011-2015 that Assad needed to step down, which included the covert and open training of anti-Assad rebels, ( source ) but whether this constitutes a desire for "chaos," or if there are more sinister secret motives, is a matter of individual opinion. An additional point, suggested in the comments: most people would hold the US responsible for the 2003 Iraq War and the mismanagement of the country that followed, in which Islamist groups came to power. Whether this constitutes "creating ISIS" is again a matter of personal opinion. Also suggested in the comments: ISIS has picked up a lot of weapons and technology left behind by American-backed groups such as the Iraqi army. Amnesty International claims that most of ISIS' weapons were acquired this way ( source ). Again, it's arguable whether this amounts to "creation", but it can add to a possible case. In short, we have no damning evidence that the US created ISIS; we have solid information that the US was involved in Syria from an early period, but connecting this to ISIS requires conjecture and opinion-based statements. This question was edited to include al-Qaeda. The US has been in a relationship with al-Qaeda since its very beginning during the Soviet–Afghan War , and the CIA is currently arming al-Qaeda's allies , but in the long run the relationship has been more antagonistic. We lack evidence that the US had influence over al-Qaeda at the time that ISIS formed and broke off from it. | {
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31,529 | I found this posted in multiple news sites The findings, to be published in the November edition of ‘Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin’, concluded that men find the propect [sic] of dating intelligent women intimidating. -- The Independent Does the study have those conclusions? Is the study reputable/reliable? | This is the study the article mentions. Does the study have those conclusions? Not really. The experimental results could equally be explained by a simpler conclusion, that people are less likely to ask others out when they feel disappointed, deflated or embarrassed by something (in this case, the public revelation of a poor test result). The researchers acknowledge that such an explanation is potentially valid and supported by prior research on "affective experience", and acknowledge this as a limitation. It's also just one study, on about 100 U.S. psychology undergraduates, with a systemic bias excluding more intelligent students. It therefore can't be generalized without being replicated on other populations. Here's an example of the kind of target used by the study: Seventy-three male undergraduates (M age = 18.95) participated in a “Study of Interpersonal Attitudes” in exchange for psychology course credit. Age, field of study and personal maturity are confounding factors on psychological behavior. As such, the news reporting by "The Independent" is incorrect and misleading. Is the study reputable/reliable? While the study is "serious science", is being peer-reviewed (or is in pre-print) and is quite interesting, the methodology has systematic bias against intelligent men, and the conclusions are not supported by the experiment set-up: the study merely shows that embarrassing or diminishing people in front of a potential date makes them feel a bit more antagonistic towards her. Likewise, it shows that flattering people in front of a potential date makes them feel more sympathetic and likely to ask them out. As reported, it does not measure anything else. Systematic bias The study in question consists in letting participants take a math test, and then be told that their result was average. After a few minutes, the experimenter returned with the
“graded” tests and announced their scores while handing
back the tests. Participants always got 12/20 questions
correct At the end of the experiment, they were asked whether they believed the results and were discarded if they did not. This is a clear systematic bias because it excludes all candidates that are smart enough to expect a nearly perfect score and know that they can't possibly have an average result. [P]articipants
responded to the following questions in written form: “What
do you think this experiment was about? Was there anything
odd or suspicious about this experiment? If yes, what?”
Responses were later coded for whether participants
mentioned (a) that their partner was not real or part of the
study or (b) thought their test score was fake. Participants
who reported suspicion on one or more of these items were
excluded from analyses. In fact, it excluded 10% of the participants. Participants and Procedure Ninety male undergraduates participated in a “Study of
Interpersonal Attitudes” in exchange for psychology course
credit. Nine participants were excluded because they were
suspicious of the confederate or did not believe the test
feedback; the final sample consisted of 81 participants
(M age = 18.81). Validity First an experiment is set up where the fake results are given in a separate room from the potential date. In this case, performing worse than the date predicts more likelihood to ask the partner out or find them attractive. Secondly another experiment is set up so that the fake results are given in front of the potential date. In this case, performing better than the date predicts more likelihood to ask the partner out or find them attractive. I don't see how that supports that "men are threatened by intelligent women". It simply shows the obvious result that when someone's ego is boosted by good results they are more optimistic and when their ego is deflated they become timid. The authors themselves admit to that, although they simply dismiss this as a "limitation". Previous research suggests that when people interact with
a potential partner in a live context (e.g., spatially near
context), they rely primarily on their affective experience—
positive or negative—to determine their attraction toward
the target (Eastwick et al., 2014). In addition, research on
SEM suggests that people experience negative feelings
(e.g., jealousy) when they are outperformed in a self-
relevant domain (Salovey & Rodin, 1984). Together, these
two strands of research suggest that men who interacted with
a female confederate in the near condition may have felt
badly when they were outperformed in a self-relevant domain
such as intelligence, and these feelings shaped their evaluations of the confederate. Although we did not measure feelings of jealousy in the present studies, we did assess self-rated
masculinity, which produced mixed results. | {
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31,540 | According to this article , 95% of inmates in the U.S. have never received a trial, choosing a plea bargain to avoid potentially punitive sentencing if found guilty. The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial,” explains award-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, in a recent Truthdig column. “There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining.” Of those millions who bargained away their right to a trial by accepting plea deals, “significant percentages of them are innocent.” Is this true? Have any reliable studies been performed to validate this number? | The Bureau of Justice Statistics(part of the Department of Justice) publishes tables of felony convictions by type of conviction. Here is one such report from 2002, which shows that about 5% of incarcerated felons in prison that year received a trial. (Source: BJS, State Court Sentencing of Convicted Felons ) A slightly more comprehensive article about plea bargaining, released by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (also part of DoJ) explains more about the process. They also cite some academic literature. I didn't review the academic article cited, but BJA claims that their results show a similar result (that 90-95% of inmates pled guilty) (Source: BJA, Plea and Charge Bargaining ). | {
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31,602 | The image below is widely circulated on Facebook : The caption says: Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer of the Apollo Project, stands next to the code she wrote by hand and that was used to take humanity to the moon. [1969] Is it true that: The photo depicts Margaret Hamilton Margaret Hamilton was the lead software engineer of the Apollo Project Depicted is a print-out of the Apollo Project code Margaret Hamilton wrote the depicted code by hand Margaret Hamilton single-handedly wrote the code | The photo depicts Margaret Hamilton Yes, this is an official NASA picture of her: Margaret Hamilton was the lead software engineer of the Apollo Project Indeed, from the same source : Margaret Hamilton, leader of the team that developed the flight software for the agency's Apollo missions [...] Depicted is a print-out of the Apollo Project code Yes, she says so herself in a Vox interview : "In this picture, I am standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code," Hamilton says in an email. "To clarify, there are no other kinds of printouts, like debugging printouts, or logs, or what have you, in the picture." The source code is here (pdf scans) and there are about 11,000 pages, which is not inconsistent with what we see on in the picture: the paper is likely continuous stationery and 11,000 pages of that are 165cm tall, since a box of 2,000 is about 30cm ( ref ). Margaret Hamilton wrote the depicted code by hand It's unclear what it means: Is the code in the pile handwritten? No, it's printed with a typewriter or a daisy printer -- see the scans . Was it written by her in rope core memory? No, it was written in core rope memory by hand by a team according to her interview on Vox : The process of actually coding in the programs was laborious, as well. The guidance computer used something known as "core rope memory": wires were roped through metal cores in a particular way to store code in binary. "If the wire goes through the core, it represents a one," Hamilton explained in the documentary Moon Machines. "And around the core it represents a zero." The programs were woven together by hand in factories. And because the factory workers were mostly women, core rope memory became known by engineers as "LOL memory," LOL standing for "little old lady." Margaret Hamilton single-handedly wrote the code No. Vox says so, but doesn't cite the source: It's just her and her code. NASA contradicts this by saying that it was a whole team lead by her, which seems entirely more likely: The Apollo flight software Ms. Hamilton and her team developed was truly a pioneering effort | {
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31,635 | An article on WGNO.com makes the following claims on the Zika virus: A relatively new mosquito-borne virus is prompting worldwide concern because of an alarming connection to a neurological birth disorder and the rapid spread of the virus across the globe. ... The WHO estimates 3 million to 4 million people across the Americas will be infected with the virus in the next year The Zika virus is a flavivirus, part of the same family as yellow fever, West Nile, chikungunya and dengue. But unlike some of those viruses, there is no vaccine to prevent Zika or medicine to treat the infection. ... Since November, Brazil has seen 4,180 cases of microcephaly in babies born to women who were infected with Zika during their pregnancies. To put that in perspective, there were only 146 cases in 2014. So far, 51 babies have died. So the questions are: Is the Zika virus "relatively new"? Is it true that the Zika virus is prompting worldwide concern by
health officials? Is it true that "the WHO estimates 3 million to 4 million people
across the Americas will be infected"? Is there "no medicine to treat the infection"? Does the Zika virus cause microcephaly? | The best summary is probably to quote from the WHO director general Margaret Chan's statement on announcing that zika had been declared a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" : The experts agreed that a causal relationship between Zika infection during pregnancy and microcephaly is strongly suspected, though not yet scientifically proven. All agreed on the urgent need to coordinate international efforts to investigate and understand this relationship better. The experts also considered patterns of recent spread and the broad geographical distribution of mosquito species that can transmit the virus. The lack of vaccines and rapid and reliable diagnostic tests, and the absence of population immunity in newly affected countries were cited as further causes for concern. After a review of the evidence, the Committee advised that the recent cluster of microcephaly cases and other neurological disorders reported in Brazil, following a similar cluster in French Polynesia in 2014, constitutes an “extraordinary event” and a public health threat to other parts of the world. So, it's being taken very seriously - and a big part of that is because there are so many uncertainties, and difficulties in controlling the rapid spread. It's also not just pregnant women who are affected - another, seemingly rarer, linked complication, Guillain-Barré syndrome, can cause paralysis and, in rare cases, death - although there doesn't seem to be any evidence so far that such serious complications for the infected individual are as common as the (also relatively rare) serious or fatal possible complications from dengue fever. On to the specific claims in the original question: Is the Zika virus "relatively new"? No. The way it is behaving is relatively new, but was still seen prior to this outbreak that begin in Brazil. It was first discovered in Uganda in 1947 , and was found to be prevalent across much of Africa and Asia, but wasn't considered a major concern and no major outbreaks were recorded until 2007 in Micronesia . Compared to other diseases in the flavivirus family, like Yellow Fever and Dengue, it was relatively benign, and these populations appeared to have relatively strong immunity to it. What is relatively new is: The apparent (not yet proven) link to microcephaly and Guillain–Barré syndrome, the first evidence for which is from the 2013-14 outbreak in French Polynesia (note that the association with microcephaly wasn't observed until the French Polynesia data was re-examined following the South American outbreak, but the association with Guillain–Barré was observed at the time ) Its rapid spread through South America - a population who appear to have poor immunity to it (although it was also very fast spreading through the South Pacific islands after the 2007 outbreak - not as fast, but this is to be expected given the differences in population density) The strain in Brazil comes from the Asian lineage (there's also a separate African one). It is possible it might have mutated , and there is evidence suggesting that the exact strain in Brazil is related to the 2013 French Polynesia outbreak : Phylogenetic studies showed that the closest strain to the one that emerged in Brazil was isolated from samples from case-patients in French Polynesia and spread among the Pacific Islands Is it true that the Zika virus is prompting worldwide concern by health officials? Yes, very much so, but it's their job to be concerned, and it's mostly precautionary - we don't yet know how serious it is, just that the risk is high enough to take urgent coordinated action. They've been describing its growth as "explosive" , and an International Health Regulations Emergency Committee meeting was held on Monday 1st Feb 2016 , at which: Members of the Committee agreed that the situation meets the conditions for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. They're promoting research on a vaccine and increasing surveillance immediately. Here's that "explosive" comment in context - in an official, on-the-record speech by WHO Director General, Margaret Chan : In the wake of Ebola, health officials are more alert to alarming signals coming from the microbial world. Last year’s MERS outbreak in the Republic of Korea showed the devastation a new disease can cause, even in a country with an advanced health system. The explosive spread of Zika virus to new geographical areas, with little population immunity, is another cause for concern, especially given the possible link between infection during pregnancy and babies born with small heads. Although a causal link between Zika infection in pregnancy and microcephaly has not been established, the circumstantial evidence is suggestive and extremely worrisome. The American Centre For Disease Control (CDC) did issue a travel warning , but this was: Out of an abundance of caution Even after declaring it an international emergency, WHO are advising against such travel bans or trade restrictions, and instead recommend avoiding mosquito bites while staying informed in case of developments. Is it true that "the WHO estimates 3 million to 4 million people across the Americas will be infected"? This is a ball-park figure given by Marcos Espinal, an infectious disease expert at the WHO's Americas regional office : We can expect 3 to 4 million cases of Zika virus disease I can't find any evidence that it's an official estimate, and there's nothing resembling this estimate in any of WHO's official fact sheets or information pages that I can see. I'd be amazed if they were publishing official estimates when so little is known. Bare in mind that 60%-80% of cases are asymptomatic - which makes it very hard to judge how many people have had it. It looks like this was an unguarded ball-park comment by one official which the media have jumped on. Is the number of people potentially infected large compared to other tropical diseases? The speed and rate at which it is spreading is very high - even in an article questioning the claimed risks, Nature describe it as: an unprecedented epidemic in Brazil In terms of total numbers, projections are comparable to Dengue Fever, of which there were 1.5 million cases in 2015 in Brazil alone, and don't look likely to overtake, for example, malaria, which had 2.35 million suspected new cases in Brazil alone in 2012 and, worldwide, an estimated 214 million new cases in 2015 . But the fact it could shoot from seemingly nothing to numbers not far off malaria in South America in one year is remarkable. Don't forget, of course, that many of these cases have no symptoms or known side effects. This is within the Americas. In theory, populations in Asia and Africa have good immunity and so its worldwide growth would be limited - and another limitation is climates suitable for the species of mosquito. The NY Times published a map showing areas in the Americas believed to be at risk. Is there "no medicine to treat the infection"? This is true, however, your article is being a touch alarmist by talking as if this makes Zika worse than related diseases. It's identical to the closely related Dengue Fever. CDC say : No vaccine or medications are available to prevent or treat Zika infections ...and advise rest, plenty of fluids, and painkillers if necessary (but not aspirin or anti-inflamatories like Ibuprofen, which might increase risk of haemorrhage). Their advice on Dengue is near-identical - but for the fact that Dengue is more likely to require urgent hospitalization. What percentage of Zika virus victims are estimated to conceive babies with microcephaly? This is unknown right now - many of the suspected cases of microcephaly are proving to actually be false positives. From a previously-linked article in Nature : Many experts agree the reported size of the microcephaly increase so far is probably inflated — and this chimes with the latest figures from the Brazilian government. On 27 January, it said that of 4,180 suspected cases of microcephaly recorded since October, it has so far confirmed 270 and rejected 462 as false diagnoses We won't know rates until we've weeded out the false diagnoses that result from heightened awareness of a rare condition. I'm trying to find a plausible published ball-park estimate, no success so far. But as always, beware of alarmist reporting of relative increases in rates. Plenty of sources talk plausibly about 1,000% increases - but a ten-fold increase in something very rare is still rare. Do other mosquito-born diseases cause birth defects and how does their threat level compare to the Zika virus? It does appear to be unusual: Dengue Fever - not notably, although it seems to often cause premature birth Yellow Fever - not notably. Vaccination isn't recommended while pregnant, but the risk of harm to the baby is purely theoretical Malaria while pregnant has major risks including low birth weight, but there doesn't seem to be any specific commonly associated birth defects West Nile in pregnancy seems to not harm the baby I can't find any other mosquito-borne disease with a link to a specific pattern of birth defects. It's worth mentioning that there are other infections that cause microcephaly, notably : Rubella (virus, aka German Measles) Toxoplasmosis (parasitic infection, often contracted from cat litters) Cytomegalovirus (virus, related to herpes, aka CMV) Is there a reason for an average person living in an area infected by the Zika virus to worry about it more than other diseases? We simply don't know yet. Questions that need answering: What exactly is the link with microcephaly? A key unanswered question here is, why hasn't any link been found in regions where Zika has been known to be present for decades How often does it cause microcephaly, and can this be prevented any other way? It's been theorised that there might be some additional factor necessary Is there also a link to Guillain–Barré syndrome (also theorised after an outbreak in Polynesia, but unproven) Why exactly has it spread so rapidly in Brazil (compared to, for example, Dengue fever, which has been increasingly rapidly in incidence recently but has taken years to reach millions of cases) 60-80% of cases have no effect, which might seem like a reason to think it's not too bad (most individuals are unaffected) - but if it is true that a small but significant minority have a very serious effect, this actually makes it much worse from a public health point of view. As Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, was quoted in the Guardian : In many ways the Zika outbreak is worse than the Ebola epidemic of 2014-15. Most virus carriers are symptomless. It is a silent infection in a group of highly vulnerable individuals – pregnant women – that is associated with a horrible outcome for their babies. It's a matter of perspective. One average individual is likely to suffer less from contracting Zika than they would from many other diseases, including the much more unpleasant and more often deadly Dengue Fever. But looking at whole populations, Zika is much harder to monitor, trace, predict, control or treat - for many people, there may be little to no sign they had it or were even at risk until it's too late. The (very effective) strategy used against Ebola was all about tracking and tracing, isolating people and beginning treatment as soon as they were found to be at risk, before symptoms developed. And there's another good reason why it's difficult from a public health point of view, quoted from Mike Turner, head of infection and immuno-biology at the Wellcome Trust, in the same article: The real problem is that trying to develop a vaccine that would have to be tested on pregnant women is a practical and ethical nightmare | {
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31,779 | HealthTipsSource writes in Natural Ways to Put an End to Moles, Warts, Blackheads, Skin Tags and Age Spots: This is a scientifically proven method of warts removal. In one study, 61 patients with warts received either duct tape treatment or cryotherapy. After a period of two months, 85 percent of those people treated with duct tape had no warts at all, whereas only 60 percent of those with cryotherapy. You apply a small piece of duct tape over the entire wart for 6 days, by replacing the tape as needed. After 6 days, the wart should be washed with water and then rubbed off with a pumice stone or an emery board. In the morning, you apply a new duct tape for another 6 days, and continue to do so for two months, or as long as the wart does not go away. Is the claim that duct tape is an effective treatment for warts true? | According to Are salicylic formulations, liquid nitrogen or duct tape more effective than placebo for the treatment of warts in paediatric patients who present to ambulatory clinics? Paediatr Child Health. 2014 Mar; 19(3): 126–127. : Duct tape has not been shown to be superior to placebo and side effects, including redness, itching, eczema and bleeding, are possible. ... Applying duct tape over warts is a less invasive treatment that gained support after a single trial of silver duct tape showed favourable outcomes compared with cryotherapy (RR 1.52 [95% CI 0.99 to 2.31]) (1). However, two additional trials (198 participants) in the updated review comparing clear duct tape occlusive treatment with placebo indicated no significant effect (RR 1.43 [95% CI 0.51 to 4.05]), with one trial reporting adverse events in the intervention group (redness, itching, eczema and bleeding) (1). Reference (1) above is Topical treatments for cutaneous warts Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2012;(9):CD001781 | {
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31,932 | There is a meme going around the conservative news sites and aggregators that 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders didn't "earn a steady paycheck" before the age of 40. See, for instance: The Gateway Pundit The American Spectator Louder with Crowder The origin seems to be this Politico article : But if his positions are well known, the person, it turns out, is less
known. Before Sanders was a U.S. senator, before he was a congressman,
before he was mayor of Burlington — before he won one shocking
election, then 13 more — he was a radical and an agitator in the
ferment of 1960s and '70s Vermont, a tireless campaigner and champion
of laborers who didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was
an elected official pushing 40 years old. What truth is there to this claim? | All biographies record that Sanders earned a living between graduating college and running for Mayor of Burlington at age 39. Wikipedia is typical , and gives references. After graduating from college, Sanders initially worked in New York City in a variety of jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide and carpenter. In 1968 Sanders moved to Vermont because he had been "captivated by rural life." After his arrival there he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker and writer. and Sanders worked as a writer and the director of the nonprofit American People's Historical Society Nowhere does it say that he was not paid for these jobs. Claim is false. | {
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31,950 | I saw this on Facebook. Is it true? pretty cool A pack (wolves): The first 3 are the older or sick and they set the pace of the group. If it was on the contrary, they would be left behind and lost contact with the pack. In ambush case they would be sacrificed. The following are the 5 strongest. In the center follow the remaining members of the pack, and at the end of the group follow the other 5 stronger. Last, alone, follows the alpha wolf. It controls everything from the rear. That position can control the whole group, decide the direction to follow and anticipate the attacks of opponents. The pack follows the rhythm of the elders and the head of the command that imposes the spirit of mutual help not leaving anyone behind. | No, the pack is led by the alpha (breeding) females. The picture is taken from the BBC 2011 documentary Frozen Planet . This Guardian article which features pictures from the documentary describes the picture as: A massive pack of 25 timberwolves hunting bison on the Arctic circle in northern Canada. In mid-winter in Wood Buffalo National Park temperatures hover around -40C. The wolf pack, led by the alpha female , travel single-file through the deep snow to save energy. The size of the pack is a sign of how rich their prey base is during winter when the bison are more restricted by poor feeding and deep snow. The wolf packs in this National Park are the only wolves in the world that specialise in hunting bison ten times their size. They have grown to be the largest and most powerful wolves on earth emphasis by me Snopes has an article on the picture which also include the history of the post, and also a note about the use of the term "alpha" for wolf packs. | {
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31,967 | Reiki is a form of alternative medicine which has its origins in Japan. Palm healing and auras are central aspects of Reiki. The practice of Reiki is getting more common, however, I was not able to find credible sources confirming or disputing the effects of Reiki. Are there any scientific publications, studies or other credible sources confirming or disputing Reiki? Edit : To be clear, by "medically valid science" in the title was a bit strangely worded. What I meant was, whether or not its medical effects could be scientifically conformed or disputed. | There is a review article: Effects of reiki in clinical practice: a systematic review of randomised clinical trials International Journal of Clinical Practice
Volume 62, Issue 6, pages 947–954, June 2008. In conclusion, the evidence is insufficient to suggest that reiki is an effective treatment for any condition. | {
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32,194 | According to 23andme's Twitter Image reads, Approximately 8% of DNA is originally from viruses, which infected your ancestors and became integrated into their cells. | Normal viruses infect cells in order to take advantage of cellular mechanisms to reproduce themselves. A class of viruses known as "retroviruses" have a slightly peculiar mechanism to achieve this - they synthesise a special enzyme called "reverse transcriptase", which translates their own RNA into DNA which is incorporated into the host cell's genome . The host cell then replicates the virus' DNA alongside the rest of its own. Should a retrovirus happen to infect a germ line cell - i.e., a sperm or an ovum - the retroviral DNA will be copied into the offspring's DNA . And their offspring. That's called an "endogenous retrovirus". Some cause or contribute to cancers - and sometimes (for example) that DNA even gets co-opted for a useful purpose. Given thousands or millions of generations, these endogenous infections accumulate. It doesn't even have to be independent infections - when a cell is infected it produces new copies of the RNA virus which can insert itself again somewhere else in the germline genome - even across the generations. They eventually tend to get deactivated by one mutation or another, but phylogenetic studies have shown that the some 98,000 retroviral elements and fragments in the human genome come from relatively few infections . Estimates vary - many of the retroviral sequences have been modified by mutation over the aeons, making it hard to find them all - but recent estimates do come to about 8% of the human genome having a retroviral origin. There's a fair chunk of virus in all of us. | {
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32,439 | Recently, I came across a video and a news report where it has been reported that a man from India has invented a car which uses water as a key fuel component. The car runs on acetylene gas produced by the reaction of water and calcium carbide in the car's fuel tank. The source of the video is this post off Facebook from History TV18. The claims are too good to be true and I doubt them. However, I do not know much about cars, automobile/mechanical engineering, and chemistry to check the veracity of the claims. How legitimate are the claims? Do they hold any merit? | The car does not run on water. The article you link says quite clearly that "The car runs on acetylene gas". Acetylene is an explosive gas that is used for welding, and before the invention of electric lamps it was used for lighting. It is produced from the reaction of calcium carbide and water, as follows: CaC 2 + 2H 2 O → Ca(OH) 2 + C 2 H 2 The problem is that, while water is cheap, CaC 2 is not. It is normally made from methane - which would be a better and cheaper fuel. Converting it to Calcium Carbide is done by partial combustion, so some of the energy available in methane is lost. For more information on acetylene, see the Wikipedia article . | {
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32,474 | Many people believe that Earth was one big ocean at some point in its past . During Noah’s time the earth was completely covered with water. There are many other examples, not all related to Noah. See here , here , here , here and so on. Is that true? I'd also be interested to know when this was the case, or what was the largest percentage of the Earth that was ocean at any one point. | I could not find any scientific evidence that the earth was once completely covered by water (not lava). However, Australian scientists have hypothesized that the land share on a planet 2.5 billion years ago was only 2-3% . If it is true, then the largest percentage of the Earth that was ocean is 98% . Also: According to the modern scientific views, the ocean appeared 3.5
billion years ago as a result of magma degassing and subsequent
condensation of atmospheric vapor. Most modern ocean basins emerged in
the last 250 million years as a result of the splitting of the ancient
supercontinent and the cleavage (spreading) of lithospheric plates.
An exception is the Pacific Ocean, representing a shrinking of the
ancient Panthalassa ocean remnant. Translation from Wikipedia At the same time, the oldest known rocks on Earth are almost exactly 4 billion years old. | {
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32,562 | There is a common pro-vaccination argument that attempts to equate the amount of formaldehyde injected into the body when receiving a vaccine, with the amount of formaldehyde ingested into the GI tract when eating a pear. Here is a classic example: Refutations to Anti-Vaccine Memes A 200g pear contains up to 12,000 μg of formaldehyde naturally. Vaccines contain up to 100 μg, or 0.83% of the formaldehyde in a pear. i.e. A pear contains 120 times more formaldehyde than a vaccine. I loathe this argument mainly as a non-sequitur factoid, but also because it is often parroted without references in a hypocritical argument to tell people not to believe everything they are told. For example, it is not hard to find (repeated) examples of similar claims with different numbers: Science Alert: Six myths about vaccination – and why they’re wrong there’s 600 times more formaldehyde in a pear than a vaccine. Just the Vax: The Toxin Gambit Part 1: Formaldehyde Put another way, the amount contained within a vaccine is more than 50 times less than what is in a pear. I found this image on a Mothering.com forum The difference is subtle, but notice it is 600 times as much (a factor of 5 increase), and the level of blue has changed by maybe 10%. Vaxplanations repeat the 120 times claim, but I give them credit for also addressing the ingestion versus injection difference. Gizmodo says a 220 g pear contains 8,600 to 13,200 µg of formaldehyde, putting the original 12,000 µg for a 200 g pear at the upper end. This forum commenter seems to have lost a percentage sign: A typical vaccine may contain up to 100 ug, or 0.83 of the formaldehyde available in a typical pear. So what is the real ratio of formaldehyde between a typical pear and a typical vaccine? 50:1, 120:1, 600:1, 1:0.83 or a different number? | No. The amount of formaldehyde in 200 grams of pear is about 7 times the maximum that an infant would receive from a single vaccine, as explained below: According to Determination of formaldehyde in foods, biological media and technological materials by headspace gas chromatography Chromatographia December 1996, Volume 43, pages 625-627: Sample: Pears Formaldehyde content: 7.4 mg/kg Number of samples: 18 Given 200 grams of pear, 7.4 mg/kg corresponds to 1.48 mg (1480 μg) of formaldehyde According to Children's Hospital of Philidelphia's page Vaccine Ingredients – Formaldehyde The average quantity of formaldehyde to which a young infant could be exposed at one time may be as high as 0.2 mg It lists the formaldehyde concentrations (or upper limits) of various vaccines. It lists Japanese encephalitis vaccine as having up to 0.2 mg (200 μg) of formaldehyde. So the proper ratio is 1480:200 or 7.4:1. | {
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32,583 | A set of photos from a Russian web-site apparently show Stonehenge being built in the 1950s, rather than the more customary dates of 3000-2000 BC. An conspiracy theory web-site Max Resistance attempts to explain the claims in English: 1954 PHOTOS SHOW STONEHENGE BEING BUILT Was Stonehenge built (or rebuilt) in or around 1954? | The photograph in the OP is by R. J. C. Atkinson, January 1958 and its caption is : STONEHENGE, Wiltshire. Re-erection of Trilithon lintel 158 by the 60 ton 'Brabazon Crane', the larger of two cranes used to lift stones. The lintel is being lowered and man-handled into its final resting position on upright stones 57 and 58 While Stonehenge definitely existed before 1954, with photographs going back to the 1867 , it has not been simply left to the forces of nature over the past couple centuries, but instead has been subjected to further human activity such as stabilization and restoration efforts. See RESEARCH REPORT SERIES no. 06-2014
STONEHENGE WORLD HERITAGE SITE
LANDSCAPE PROJECT
‘RESTORING’ STONEHENGE 1881-1939 for historical photographs and an explanations of modern changes to the site in that period of time and later. Numerous references, such as Stonehenge by Malone and Barnard confirm that: In 1958 a 60-ton mobile crane was used to restore the stones that had fallen in 1797 and 1900 And according to the New Scientist article Concrete evidence : virtually every stone was re-erected, straightened or embedded in concrete between 1901 and 1964... ...The first restoration project took place in 1901. A leaning stone was straightened and set in concrete, to prevent it falling. More drastic renovations were carried out in the 1920s. Under the direction of Colonel William Hawley, a member of the Stonehenge Society, six stones were moved and re-erected. Cranes were used to reposition three more stones in 1958. One giant fallen lintel, or cross stone, was replaced. Then in 1964, four stones were repositioned to prevent them falling. The 1920s ‘restoration’ was the most “vigorous”, says Christopher Chippindale of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “The work in the 1920s under Colonel William Crawley is a sad story,” For early descriptions of Stonehenge, see the 1740 Stonehenge: A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids and the 1747 Choir Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain . Unfortunately Google Books omits many of the drawings in these books, but the 1747 is considered the earliest quantitatively accurate description. Between pages 32 and 33 of the 1740 book, there is a drawing of Stonehenge dated August 1722, showing that it was reasonably similar then as now. Stonehenge as photographed in 1867 (see second link in answer above): | {
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32,763 | Leicester City were recently confirmed as winners of England's top football (soccer) league. Last year they were facing relegation a dozen matches before the end of the 38 game season and, at the start of this season, betting odds on winning the premiership were 5,000-1 (in the realm of bets on Elvis being found alive or an alien spacecraft landing in England). Some fans placed bets at those odds. Many football pundits were still claiming a Leicester victory to be impossible mid-season and some made foolish promises conditional on such a victory. Simulation modellers (usually more reliable than betting odds) had the probability of a Leicester win as about 5 in 100,000. Several sites have described the victory is the most improbable win in betting history. For example, ESPN says : There is no previous example of an underdog the likes of Leicester City beating odds as long as 5,000-1. Are they right? Has no underdog won when odds have been set against them (by major bookkeepers) at 5000-1? | Almost certainly yes , if you only count single bets with "underdog" long odds on single sporting outcomes - several sources have looked into this, including betting companies themselves, and found nothing that comes close. If you allow any type of bet and aren't fussy about it being an "underdog" story (something that was added to the question after I wrote this), and you simply look for the longest odds won for a single competitor winning in a single competition, series or fixture , then arguably Frankie Dettori's "Magnificent 7" at Ascot Champion's Day in 1996 edges out Leicester with accumulated odds of 25051-1. According to the BBC , this cost the betting industry an estimated £40m, compared to Leicester's £20m, but there are several reasons why it might not be comparable. Counting any win in a single event, league or series, by a single competitor If we treat this as any case of one competitor winning one event, series or league, arguably, the longest odds would be jockey Frankie Dettori winning all 7 consecutive races in one day at Ascot Champion's Day, 1996, at odds of 25,051-1 . Great British Racing magazine : The cumulative odds of these wins was 25,051-1 The Daily Telegraph newspaper also describe the odds as being 25,051-1, and the Independent tell the story of some of the lucky punters that day. This is debatable though, since it's classed as an "accumulator" bet, and isn't a classic "underdog story" like that of Leicester (Dettori was a respected jockey riding horses whose individual odds were not especially remarkable), but it does refer to a single improbable achievement in a single sporting fixture or competition by a single sporting competitor. Counting single bet "underdogs" only If, however, you discount accumulators or pools and count only events treated by the bookies as single bets and given very long odds, I can't find anything close to 5,000-1. It's hard to prove a negative, but ESPN have an analysis that concludes that Leicester have the record (written shortly before their win was confirmed): Why Leicester City could become the biggest long shot champion in sports history If they hold on to claim the title, it would be the biggest upset in sports history, according to William Hill press officer Joe Crilly. ... There is no previous example of an underdog the likes of Leicester City beating odds as long as 5,000-1. There have been a few 100-1 or longer shots that either shockingly came through or fell tantalizingly short. They then list 10 examples, of which the longest odds were 1,000-1. Sporting Life magazine also make a reasonable case that it is the most unlikely sporting event ever (if only single bets are counted): Sport's greatest-ever upset ... the greatest sporting upset of the modern era, according to the bookmakers ... Sky Bet reporting it is the first time they have ever paid out a single outright bet at 5,000/1 ... It has also resulted in their largest-ever payout ... with the industry as a whole paying approximately £20 million. They then go on to list seven other sporting upsets, the most unlikely of which had odds of 500-1. They also mention in passing that some of the odds listed might have been longer if there was something comparable to modern betting comparison websites forcing competition for unlikely bets. These two articles cover sports from an American (ESPN) and European (Sporting Life) perspective. Two articles from Asian outlets Gulf News and Channel News Asia and one African sports blog also reach the same conclusion (but they aren't nearly as thorough), as does the internationally-minded Reuters . Thanks to Jeremy French's comment, here's a BBC article that gives two more betting companies reporting it's the longest single bet odds they've ever paid out. A quote from a representative of Coral: "In the history of betting, certainly since it was legalised in 1961, a [single event] winner with odds of 5,000-1 has never happened ... Every bookmaker is crying out in pain" A quote from a representative of Ladbrokes: "This is the biggest sporting upset of all time" | {
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32,766 | I've recently read this BBC article which makes the claim that Judaism originated some time around 2000 B.C, if not earlier. I've seen a number of sources which make similar claims ( 1 , 2 ). Perhaps I'm mistaken, but don't all surviving Jewish texts date back to the Hellenistic period (~330 – 100 BCE)? After my preliminary search, I stumbled on The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives , which seems to reduce the credibility of claims that many notable figures of the Old Testament even existed. It claims these figures were products of the Iron Age, which would make these stories around 700-1000 years younger. Is the only primary source which places the origins of Judaism at around 2000 B.C or earlier the Old Testament? And if so, is the Old Testament a sufficient source for the history of early Judaism? If not, then how old is Judaism? | The comments on this question have correctly pointed out that it is possibly unanswerable because of the variety of meanings attributed to the word "Judaism." The question, as well as the encyclopedia sources it cites, seems to equate Judaism with the monotheistic worship of the Jewish people. When the Jews became monotheistic believers in "Judaism" is up for debate, even if you believe in the literal truth of the Bible . (Remember the golden calf?) The ancient Jews seem to have worshiped several different gods. They were certainly united in a kingdom at several points, and still considered themselves a nation even after their kingdom was captured by the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Romans; however, the meaning of "nation" differed strongly between Jewish communities, as we learn from non-Biblical sources. Eventually all gods were excluded other than Yahweh, who received the sacrifices at the Second Temple . (source: review article ) The history of the Jewish people spans thousands of years, going back to Bible narratives like Exodus that take place centuries before what archaeology can confirm, and the quasi-theological question of when "real" monotheism began can't be answered scientifically. But to most people, in common parlance, Judaism means Rabbinic Judaism , which arose after the destruction of the Second Temple. Even scholars agree that this is the best way to define the term. Philip R. Davies , in his article "Beyond 'Biblical Archaeology'" (in Hjelm and Thompson, eds., Biblical Interpretation Beyond Historicity: Changing Perspectives, vol. 7 , Routledge, 2016), gives a summary that justifies this definition through significant methodological background: Reinhard Kratz has recently pointed out [in Historisches und biblisches Israel (Mohr Siebeck, 2013)] that Wellhausen 's distinction
between the religion of "ancient Israel" and the religion of Judaism
remains a fundamentally important insight. . . . the biblical Israels are a product of various Judahite/Judean communities and not the other way around. . . . The religion of Judaism – which can intelligibly be dated only to the
second century CE at the earliest – is much more a product of the
scriptures and the "Israels" , depicted in those scriptures, than it is the outcome of any events that occurred in the Iron Age. Davies does acknowledge that Abraham and Moses lie at the "beginning" of Jewish religion, but the religion itself is much better defined, at least for outsider scholarly purposes, by the image of them in Scripture centuries later than by whatever was going on in Iron Age Israel. There is no such thing as a search for the "historical Abraham" by modern scholars, because it's no longer considered relevant who Abraham might have been outside of Scripture. This answer may be confusing, but hopefully it can shed a bit of light on why the Dead Sea Scrolls are so important for Biblical scholars. The Jewish people were still in the process of defining their beliefs over the period of 400 BCE-300 CE when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, and they had not yet consolidated around the styles of transmission, interpretation, authority, reading, and practice that developed into modern Judaism. Yet there is plenty in the Scrolls that seems almost monotheistic and quite familiar. Short answer: The Jewish people have existed for thousands of years, but the term "Judaism" before the rabbinical era (meaning the late Roman Empire) is basically not useful. | {
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32,779 | This statement is doing the rounds on Facebook: Going one year without paper saves 8.5 trees Going one year without beef saves 3,432 trees Alas, as with so many of these 'claims' on FB, actual data is missing. And in this case, the lack of units does not help either. How can you compare paper with beef? What is 'saving a tree'? My guess is that the underlying statement is 3432 trees are felled for one year of beef consumption . I don't dispute that eating meat has a large environmental impact, but can anyone explain this number (and prove my assumption - because alternatives are possible * )? This Reddit thread has no answers (with numbers) yet. * For instance, it could be a comparison life cycle analysis where everything is reduced to CO2 emissions | The cartoon seems to originate from Resources Spent on Consumption of Animals (citing to a video from Bite Size Vegan) which gives slightly more detail: 1 lb of beef = 55 square feet of forest (45-55 trees) One year using NO paper saves 8.51 trees vs. foregoing 1 lb of beef, which saves 45-55 trees One year eating no beef saves 3,432 trees So the assumption is that cattle are grazing upon land that would be forested without human intervention. The most obvious problem with this analysis is that there are much fewer than 45 trees per 55 square feet . One acre is 43560 square feet . According to Tufts University Office of Sustainability : Tree density varies, and we used an average of 700 trees per acre (this number was taken from DOE’s "Sector-Specific Issues and Reporting Methodologies Supporting the General Guidelines for the Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases under Sections 1605(b) of the Energy Policy Act of 1992") (Even 700 trees per acre is a very high estimate. See the recent Nature article Mapping tree density at a global scale , Fig. 3, that shows that depending upon the type of ecosystem tree density varies from 200 to 1000 per hectare, or 80 to 400 per acre) 700 trees per 43560 square feet is 1 tree per 62 square feet . So even assuming that all cattle graze on land which was previously forested (rather than the Great Plains of North America which were naturally grasslands with millions of bison), the cartoon is off by a huge factor on the number of trees per acre (trees per pound of beef). The next major problem with the cartoon (as PhillS is commenting) is more subtle, but also very severe. The time for trees to grow to make paper is 25-40 years . So, when comparing to using trees for paper, it doesn't make sense to count the acreage (square footage) as if 700 trees could grow on one acre in one year. For comparison to reality, taking the United States for example, according to the United States Forest Service : In 1630, the estimated area of U.S. forest land was
1,023 million acres or about 46 percent of the total
land area. Since 1630, about 256 million acres of forest
land have been converted to other uses—mainly
agricultural. So if everyone in the United States just killed themselves, and let the full 256 million acres of forest lost regrow, this would be 256 million acres per 323 million people or 0.79 acres per person. With 700 trees per acre, 555 would be saved per person. Not 555 trees per year, but 555 trees per lifetime of a tree. Furthermore, according to the Nature article cited above, globally there is a: gross loss of approximately 15.3 billion trees on an annual basis This is about 2 trees per person per year. So stopping all deforestation for all reasons (not just beef, not just all meat, but all human activity) would save 2 trees per person per year . | {
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32,792 | The Economist isn't a fan of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. In an analysis of his ascendence to the Republican nomination they try to discern some of the factors. As part of their list of factors driving Trump support they argue that terrorism has become a national bogeyman while quoting an odd statistic (my emphasis): Terrorism— though it claimed fewer American lives last year than toddlers with guns —has become a national bogeyman. This isn't an appropriate place to discuss the relative merits of Trump, but that is one unexpected statistic. Is it true? Were there really more American deaths from gun-toting toddlers than from terrorism in 2015? NB This isn't a question about politics . This is merely the context in which the statistic was quoted. The question is whether the statistic is true. Please keep the politics out of any answers. | It depends on your definition of terrorism and your interpretation of the quote: is it about American lives anywhere in the world, or about death in America including non-Americans. For the purpose of this answer I'll assume the second interpretation. If terrorism only includes Islamic terrorism, it would be true, although quite close. See for example the Snopes article on this question : In 19 instances a toddler shot and killed themselves, and in two
others, the toddler shot and killed another individual. That brings
the total of toddler-involved shooting deaths in the United States in
2015 to 21 . By contrast, if we count both the Chattanooga shootings and San
Bernardino as strictly terrorism, 14 Americans were killed in San
Bernardino and five in Chattanooga. As such, 19 Americans were killed [...] in instances of Islamic terrorism in 2015. Ultimately, even the broadest leeway led to the same mathematical
conclusion. The meme was basically correct; more Americans were shot
and killed by toddlers in 2015 than were killed by Islamic terrorists. But your question isn't really about Islamic terrorism, but terrorism in general . Inclusion of only two other events provides insight: the Charleston church shooting (white supremacist terrorism, 9 dead) and the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting (Christian terrorism, 3 dead) may be included, leading to 31 victims of terror attacks in the US in 2015 , compared to 21 victims of toddlers. This would make the claim as stated false. | {
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32,829 | Recent news stories have reported on the discovery of a lost Mayan city by William Gadoury, a 15-year-old from Canada. According to these reports, Gadoury noticed a correspondence between the locations of Mayan cities and Mayan constellations (the articles I have read do not go into more detail) and then analysed satellite imagery in the region of a "missing" city, and noticed the outlines of several rectangular structures beneath a forest canopy. For example, see this article in The Independent, which says William Gadoury, from Quebec, came up with the theory that the Maya civilization chose the location of its towns and cities according to its star constellations. He found Mayan cities lined up exactly with stars in the civilization's major constellations. Studying the star map further, he discovered one city was missing from a constellation of three stars. Using satellite images provided by the Canadian Space Agency and then mapped on to Google Earth, he discovered the city where the third star of the constellation suggested it would be. Is there any truth to this story? What evidence is there to suggest that Gadoury has discovered a hidden Mayan city (as opposed to, for example, some reasonably old but much more recent set of man-made structures hidden beneath the forest canopy)? | Probably not. There are two factors here: Did the Mayans actually base their city locations on their civilization's constellations? Given A, is the structure discovered actually a city? The answer to both is probably "No". This article has multiple updates that feature expert commentary on both issues. On the constellation issue, from Ivan Šprajc from the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia: Very few Maya constellations have been identified, and even in these cases we do not know how many and which stars exactly composed each constellation. It is thus impossible to check whether there is any correspondence between the stars and the location of Maya cities. In general, since we know of several environmental facts that influenced the location of Maya settlements, the idea correlating them with stars is utterly unlikely. OK, but maybe he got lucky and the structure he found was actually a city anyway. In reality, it is almost certainly a cornfield that is a few decades old: Thomas Garrison, an anthropologist at USC Dornsife and an expert in remote sensing, says these objects are relic corn fields (or milpas): I applaud the young kid’s effort and it’s exciting to see such interest in the ancient Maya and remote sensing technology in such a young person. However, ground-truthing is the key to remote sensing research. You have to be able to confirm what you are identifying in a satellite image or other type of scene. In this case, the rectilinear nature of the feature and the secondary vegetation growing back within it are clear signs of a relic milpa. I’d guess its been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands. David Stuart, an anthropologist from The Mesoamerica Center-University of Texas at Austin summarizes the situation: The current news of an ancient Maya city being discovered is false...The ancient Maya didn't plot their ancient cities according to constellations. Seeing such patterns is a rorschach process, since sites are everywhere, and so are stars. The square feature that was found on Google is indeed man-made, but it's an old fallow cornfield, or milpa. | {
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32,866 | An article in The Atlantic makes following claim: Human Extinction Isn't That Unlikely “A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash,” says a new report This is all based on assuming that there is annualized 0.1% chance of a global extinction event. However that number seems to be just trumped up. Is there any hard scientific evidence for these estimates? | Summary. There's no factual basis to the claim that there is a 0.1% annual risk of human extinction. What happened is that this figure was used by the authors of the Stern Review as a conservative assumption in their calculation of a discount rate for future costs and benefits, but a game of whispers has caused this context to be lost. Details. Let's chase down the references and see where this came from, starting with the source given in the OP: Robinson Meyer (2016). " Human Extinction Isn't That Unlikely ". The Atlantic . The Stern Review, the U.K. government’s premier report on the economics of climate change, assumed a 0.1-percent risk of human extinction every year. It looks as if Meyer based this sentence on: Cotton-Barratt et al. (2016). " Global Catastrophic Risks ". The Global Priorities Project. The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year. Notice that this is not quite the same as the claim in Meyer. Meyer wrote "assumed" but this only says "suggested". Cotton-Barratt et al. cite this claim to: Nick Bostrom (2013). " Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority ". Global Policy 4:1 15–31. The UK’s influential Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (2006) used an extinction probability of 0.1 per cent per year in calculating an effective discount rate. Note that, again, this is quite not the same as the claim in Cotton-Barratt et al. Bostrom says that the Stern review "used an extinction probability ... in calculating an effective discount rate". Using a probability in a technical calculation is not the same as suggesting its truth. Bostrom cites this to: Nicholas Stern (2006). " Stern review on the economics of climate change ". H.M. Treasury. Section 2A.2 is a technical discussion of "Intertemporal appraisals and discounting". The problem under discussion is how to compare costs and benefits across long periods of time: Different strategies for climate change will yield different patterns of consumption over time. We assume that a choice between strategies will depend on their consequences for households now and in the future. The approach taken is to use a " discount rate " — costs and benefits are accorded lower utility the further they are in the future. The discount rate takes into account various forms of uncertainty about the future, and one of these factors is: uncertainty about existence of future generations arising from some possible shock which is exogenous to the issues and choices under examination (we used the metaphor of the meteorite). Some illustrative figures are drawn up (see table 2A.1) to show the effect of various values for the extinction rate δ, and it is at this point that the authors write: For δ=0.1 per cent there is an almost 10% chance of extinction by the end of a century. That itself seems high – indeed if this were true, and had been true in the past, it would be remarkable that the human race had lasted this long. It's clear that this figure is just plucked out of the air: no basis is given for it. It's not a serious attempt to estimate the risk of extinction. The point is that unless δ is really high (much bigger than 0.1%) it is dominated by the other contributions to the discount rate in the model (namely elasticity of marginal utility and growth rate) and so the Stern Review's conclusions don't depend on its exact value, and so there is no need for them to make a serious estimation. Update. After the problems with the Atlantic article (see this article by nostalgebraist ) were brought to their attention, the Global Priorities Project issued an erratum : We were aware that the Stern Review used this figure merely as a modelling assumption, and were trying to give a concise accurate statement. Our intention in using the figure from the Stern Review was not to try to pin down an accurate estimate of the likelihood of global catastrophe, but to demonstrate that existing serious analysis treats the 0.1% probability as a plausible modeling assumption, which would have consequences that are interesting and non-intuitive. [...] The car crash comparison was picked up in The Atlantic , which reported it as an unconditional claim and emphasised it in their article. We did not intend to argue that the 0.1% figure was an accurate estimate of extinction risk (as we did not plan to offer an estimate of extinction risk), so this was inadvertently misleading to Atlantic readers. | {
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32,925 | There is a rumour which states that chefs increase their likelihood of developing lung cancer if they work for long periods of time in the kitchen with oily steam. Does anybody here have such evidence? | There have been a number of case-control studies on Chinese women. Here are three open-access papers: Ko et al. (2000). " Chinese Food Cooking and Lung Cancer in Women Nonsmokers ". Amer. J. Epidemiology 151(2) pp. 140–147. The subjects were 131 nonsmoking incident cases with newly diagnosed and histologically confirmed primary carcinoma of the lung, 252 hospital controls hospitalized for causes unrelated to diseases of smoking, and 262 community controls; all controls were women nonsmokers matched by age and date of interview. Details on cooking conditions and habits were collected, in addition to other epidemiologic data. Lung cancer risk increased with the number of meals per day to about threefold for women who cooked these meals each day. The risk was also greater if women usually waited until fumes were emitted from the cooking oil before they began cooking (adjusted odds ratios = 2.0–2.6) and if they did not use a fume extractor (adjusted odds ratios = 3.2–12.2). This study was carried out in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Metayer et al. (2002). " Cooking oil fumes and risk of lung cancer in women in rural Gansu, China ". Lung Cancer 35 pp. 111–117. We investigated the association between lung cancer and locally made rapeseed and linseed oils in a population-based case-control study in Gansu Province, China. Two hundred and thirty-three incident, female lung cancer cases diagnosed from 1994–98 were identified. A control group of 459 women was selected from census lists and were frequency matched on age and prefecture. Interviewers obtained information on cooking practices and cooking oil use. The odds ratio (OR) for lung cancer associated with ever-use of rapeseed oil, alone or in combination with linseed oil, was 1.67 (95% CI 1.0–2.5). Yu et al. (2006). " Dose-Response Relationship between Cooking Fumes Exposures and Lung Cancer among Chinese Nonsmoking Women ". Cancer Res. 66; p. 4961. We carried out a population-based case-control study in Hong Kong. Cases were Chinese female nonsmokers with newly diagnosed primary lung cancer. Controls were female nonsmokers randomly sampled from the community, frequency matched by age groups. Face-to-face interviews were conducted using a standardized questionnaire. The “total cooking dish-years,” categorized by increments of 50, was used as a surrogate of cooking fumes exposure. Multiple unconditional logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratios (OR) for different levels of exposure after adjusting for various potential confounding factors. We interviewed 200 cases and 285 controls. The ORs of lung cancer across increasing levels of cooking dish-years were 1, 1.17, 1.92, 2.26, and 6.15. After adjusting for age and other potential confounding factors, the increasing trend of ORs with increasing exposure categories became clearer, being 1, 1.31, 4.12, 4.68, and 34. Case-control studies are not the highest level of medical evidence, but I couldn't find a longitudinal or cohort study on this question. Statistical discussion. An odds ratio is a statistic computed by dividing the odds of exhibiting the condition of interest (here, cooking with oil) for study members with the outcome (here, lung cancer) by the odds for study members without the outcome. For example in Metayer et al. (2001), of the 233 cases 148 cooked with rapeseed oil and 85 did not, while of 459 controls 205 did so and 254 did not. This gives a raw odds ratio of (148 ÷ 85) ÷ (205 ÷ 254) = 2.16. The authors adjusted this computation to take account of socioeconomic differences between the make-up of the case and control groups, getting the adjusted odds ratio 1.67 reported in the abstract. Odds ratios are straightforward to compute but hard to interpret . One would much rather know the risk ratio : in this case, how much more likely is someone in the population to contract lung cancer if they cook with oil. However, for rare enough conditions, the odds ratio is often a good estimate for the risk ratio (the rare disease assumption ). The incidence of lung cancer in women in China is rare (about 30 per 100,000 per year ) so we could summarize Metayer et al. as saying that they found that there was a 67% higher risk of contracting lung cancer among women who cooked with rapeseed oil. But we should also note that the 95% confidence interval (1.0-2.5) is quite wide and includes 1.0 (meaning that the study is compatible with there being no increase in risk). | {
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33,114 | In the context of Barack Obama's 2016 visit to Japan, this image was made. Obama apologizes to Japan for this [Nuclear mushroom cloud] which was retaliation for this... [Pearl harbor pictures] when he should be sorry for the 2,403 dead and 1,178 wounded of [sic] attacking our country! "Like" if you agree Did he apologize for the bombing? If not, did he do something that might be reasonably interpreted as apologizing? | No. He laid a wreath, mourned the dead, spoke about a moral duty to prevent the horrors of war, but didn't apologise, didn't separate the nuclear attacks from the other horrors of war, and didn't express any view on whether the use of nuclear weapons at that moment in history was right or wrong. From the BBC : Mr Obama said the memory of 6 August 1945 must never fade, but did not apologise for the US attack In an interview before the speech , he made it clear he wasn't going to apologise: Barack Obama said on Sunday his visit to Hiroshima, the first city to suffer an atomic bombing, would emphasize friendly ties between former enemies. But the US president reiterated he would not apologize for the devastating attack. ...“It’s important to recognize that in the midst of war, leaders make all kinds of decisions, it’s a job of historians to ask questions and examine them,” Obama said. Snopes have looked into the claim that he apologised, and found it to be false . The Atlantic have published an analysis piece around why it is common in diplomacy to stop short of an apology like this, and why the line is drawn where it is. When Barack Obama goes to Hiroshima.., he will not apologize on behalf of his country for carrying out that strike 71 years ago. He will neither question the decision to drop bombs on two Japanese cities, nor dwell on its results: the deaths of more than 200,000 people and the dawn of the atomic age. But he will affirm America’s “moral responsibility,” as the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, to prevent their future use. He will recognize the painful past, but he won’t revisit it. When it’s all over, we still won’t know whether or not he thinks there’s something about the atomic bombings to be sorry for. But why is expressing remorse such a big deal in the first place? ...When I put this question to Jennifer Lind, a professor of government at Dartmouth College who has studied these issues extensively, she gave me a one-word answer: “politics.” [analysis continues] Here's the official transcript , and the NY Times also published the full transcript of Obama's speech. It doesn't contain an apology, but is reconciliatory. For example, he does: Mourn the dead: We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Express a duty to "curb such suffering" in future: That is why we come to this place. ... We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow... we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again. Some day, the voices of the hibakusha [ nuclear attack survivors ] will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. Express a desire to work towards ending wars and eventually aim for a world with no nuclear weapons: And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope... An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons... among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. Unlike what the image implies, Obama didn't single out the nuclear attacks and separate them from the other horrors of the war, he treats them as a symbol of all the horrors of war: In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die. Men, women, children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death... Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction. And unlike what the image implies, he didn't focus solely on Japanese losses and neglect American losses - the speech treated all losses from war as being the same, as products of war itself. For example: We see these stories in the hibakusha. The woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself. The man who sought out families of Americans killed here because he believed their loss was equal to his own. | {
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33,117 | Having worked at the Amazon Mechanical Turk for a long time, I find that some ReCaptcha questions are very similar to the 1c tasks there. Identify this, identify that. A search shows that several web authors share the same suspicion. Most of them are high in the tinfoil scale, so they are not that reliable of a source. Included below for notability purposes. claim source 1 claim source 2 claim source 3 WP/ReCaptcha#criticism claim source 5 Given that Google is not a charity, and that recaptcha is free, the claim might hold water. What is Google getting out of ReCaptcha? Free labour? Big data behavioural analysis? Something else? | Yes, and ReCaptcha have always been open about it, before and after being acquired by Google. From its formation, one of ReCaptcha's main selling points was that the data would be used. At first, it was used for fixing errors and ambiguities in the digitisation of books. Here's an example of this being praised back in 2007 , 2 years before Google acquired it, when ReCaptcha was new: reCaptcha makes captchas more useful than just preventing spam; by tapping into the reportedly 150.000 hours spent daily typing in captchas, reCaptcha has users proofread book text that OCR could not recognize and which would otherwise have to farmed out to a Mechanical Turk or other distributed proofreader. ...reCaptcha’s ingeniousness lies in making an otherwise cumbersome task worthwhile Today (2016), it's expanded to include improving maps, machine learning/AI, and possibly other uses. Google are open about this, and even have a gallery of examples of how recaptcha data is used: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html#creation-of-value Millions of CAPTCHAs are solved by people every day. reCAPTCHA makes positive use of this human effort by channeling the time spent solving CAPTCHAs into digitizing text, annotating images, and building machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems. Google were also open about this back when they first acquired it. In fact, at the time, not only did their slogan reference how the data was used, but the tool itself also explicitly stated it: reCAPTCHA. Stop spam, read books. The words above come from scanned books. By typing them, you help to digitize old texts. Screenshot from this blog They promoted the product as a form of "crowdsourcing", using labour people were giving freely anyway on existing captcha systems to do something useful. For example, from the official blog post by Google from 2009 announcing the acquisition: Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text. In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Whether or not that's efficiency or exploitation, smart or immoral, is subjective - but there's never been any doubt or secrecy about the fact it happens. [edit] of course, with some of the challenges coming from "text" software had failed to identify, there's always the possibility it might be unreasonably difficult or not even text at all. With thanks to Mateo's comment: | {
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33,127 | I'm skeptical of this claim: And did he even say that? | On the basis of relating the claim to proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (%) as a part of elected governments referring to World Bank Inter-Parliamentary Union data , the answer would be yes. United States has lesser percentage of proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments than the other countries per numbers mentioned below. Cuba-49% China-24% Iraq-27% Afghanistan-28% United States-19% | {
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33,191 | Daniel Engber writes in Who Will Debunk The Debunkers? : Sutton thinks that story has it wrong, that natural selection wasn’t an idea in need of a “great man” to propagate it. After all his months of research, Sutton says he found clear evidence that Matthew’s work did not go unread. No fewer than seven naturalists cited the book, including three in what Sutton calls Darwin’s “inner circle.” He also claims to have discovered particular turns of phrase — “Matthewisms” — that recur suspiciously in Darwin’s writing. The Wikipedia page on Sutton summarizes his stance as: In 2014, Sutton published an e-book, Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret, alleging that Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace plagiarised the theory of natural selection from Scottish naturalist Patrick Matthew. Matthew had published On Naval Timber and Arboriculture in 1831, twenty-eight years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but Darwin claimed that neither he, nor any naturalist he knew, had read Matthew's work. Sutton rejects this claim, identifying seven naturalists who cited the book before 1858, and that three of those (John Cloudius Loudon, Prideaux John Selby and Robert Chambers) were well known to Darwin and his associates. He also analysed similarities between Darwin's, Wallace's and Matthew's writings, particularly unpublished essays by Darwin and Wallace's 1855 Sarawak paper. [...] Sutton's claims garnered media attention, and a paper on the topic was also accepted for the British Criminology Conference that year. Sutton's university, Nottingham Trent University, has backed his claims, but Darwin biographer James Moore declared it a "non-issue", and said that "I would be extremely surprised if there was any new evidence had not been already seen and interpreted in the opposite way." Is it true that Patrick Matthew propogated the theory of natural selection before Charles Darwin to the scientific community? | Yes, Patrick Matthew recognized and published the basics of evolution by natural selection prior to Darwin. It is also well-known that Alfred Russell Wallace independently developed the same theory apart from, but at the same time, as Darwin. Neither Matthew nor Wallace, however, devoted a lifetime to researching and publishing a ground-breaking, full explanation of evolution. Darwin freely acknowledged the prior work by Matthew... I have been much interested by Mr. Patrick Matthew's communication in the Number of your Paper, dated April 7th. I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection. I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, had heard of Mr. Matthew's views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture. I can do no more than offer my apologies to Mr. Matthew for my entire ignorance of his publication. If another edition of my work is called for, I will insert a notice to the foregoing effect. Quoted from Darwin's letter to the Gardeners' Chronicle in the Darwin Correspondence Project As he promised, he did in fact insert "a notice to the foregoing effect" in subsequent editions. For example the Sixth Edition of On the Origin of Species contained a section "An historical sketch of the progress of opinion on the origin of species previously to the publication of the first edition of this work" which included: In 1831 Mr. Patrick Matthew published his work on "Naval Timber and Arboriculture", in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the "Linnean Journal", and as that enlarged in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the "Gardeners' Chronicle", on April 7, 1860. The differences of Mr. Matthew's views from mine are not of much importance: he seems to consider that the world was nearly depopulated at successive periods, and then restocked; and he gives as an alternative, that new forms may be generated "without the presence of any mold or germ of former aggregates." I am not sure that I understand some passages; but it seems that he attributes much influence to the direct action of the conditions of life. He clearly saw, however, the full force of the principle of natural selection. The differences in the presentation of the theory by the two authors are profound. Matthew stated the key concepts of evolution without evidence, references, or other supporting information. His complete presentation consists of a few sentences on page 108 and pages 307-8, and about 8 pages in the appendix to his book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture: With Critical Notes on Authors who Have Recently Treated the Subject of Planting . The fundamentals of evolution by natural selection are addressed in this appendix, essentially by declaration. For example: The table of contents includes this entry in "Part III Miscellaneous Matter Connected with Naval Timber" A principle of selection existing in nature of the strongest varieties for reproduction, . . 108 Page 108 includes a discussion of the poor quality of trees produced in nurseries, including the following sentence May we, then, wonder that our plantations are occupied by a sickly short-lived puny race, incapable of supporting existence in situations where their own kind had formerly flourished--particularly evinced in the genus Pinus, more particularly in the species Scots fir; so much inferior to those of Nature's own rearing, where only the stronger, more hardy, soil-suited varieties can struggle forward to maturity and reproduction? Within the appendix are a number of passages such as: THERE is a law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possibly suited to its condition that its kind, or that organized matter, is susceptible of, which appears intended to model the physical and mental or instinctive powers, to their highest perfection, and to continue them so. This law sustains the lion in his strength, the hare in her swiftness, and the fox in his wiles. As Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time's decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing—either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind, who are pressing on the means of subsistence. and The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life, may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of Nature, who, as before stated, has, in all the varieties of her offspring, a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and pre-occupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other kind; the weaker, less circumstance-suited, being prematurely destroyed. In a completely different approach, Darwin extensively researched every aspect of the theory to develop and present a convincing and supportable argument. Just the Table of Contents of his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life demonstrates the level of detail and wide range of subjects considered: CHAPTER I.
Variation under Domestication.
Causes of Variability — Effects of Habit — Correlation of Growth — Inheritance — Character of Domestic Varieties — Difficulty of distinguishing between Varieties and Species — Origin of Domestic Varieties from one or more Species — Domestic Pigeons, their Differences and Origin — Principle of Selection anciently followed, its Effects — Methodical and Unconscious Selection — Unknown Origin of our Domestic Productions — Circumstances favourable to Man's power of Selection 7–43 CHAPTER II.
Variation under Nature.
Variability — Individual Differences — Doubtful species — Wide ranging, much diffused, and common species vary most — Species of the larger genera in any country vary more than the species of the smaller genera — Many of the species of the larger genera resemble varieties in being very closely, but unequally, related to each other, and in having restricted ranges 44–59 CHAPTER III.
Struggle for Existence.
Bears on natural selection — The term used in a wide sense — Geometrical powers of increase — Rapid increase of naturalised animals and plants — Nature of the checks to increase — Competition universal — Effects of climate — Protection from the number of individuals — Complex relations of all animals and plants throughout nature — Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species; often severe between species of the same genus — The relation of organism to organism the most important of all relations Page 60–79 CHAPTER IV.
Natural Selection.
Natural Selection — its power compared with man's selection — its power on characters of trifling importance — its power at all ages and on both sexes — Sexual Selection — On the generality of intercrosses between individuals of the same species — Circumstances favourable and unfavourable to Natural Selection, namely, intercrossing, isolation, number of individuals — Slow action — Extinction caused by Natural Selection — Divergence of Character, related to the diversity of inhabitants of any small area, and to naturalisation — Action of Natural Selection, through Divergence of Character and Extinction, on the descendants from a common parent — Explains the Grouping of all organic beings 80–130 CHAPTER V.
Laws of Variation.
Effects of external conditions — Use and disuse, combined with natural selection; organs of flight and of vision — Acclimatisation — Correlation of growth — Compensation and economy of growth — False correlations — Multiple, rudimentary, and lowly organised structures variable — Parts developed in an unusual manner are highly variable: specific characters more variable than generic: secondary sexual characters variable — Species of the same genus vary in an analogous manner — Reversions to long-lost characters — Summary 131–170 CHAPTER VI.
Difficulties on Theory.
Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification — Transitions — Absence or rarity of transitional varieties — Transitions in habits of life — Diversified habits in the same species — Species with habits widely different from those of their allies — Organs of extreme perfection — Means of transition — Cases of difficulty — Natura non facit saltum — Organs of small importance — Organs not in all cases absolutely perfect — The law of Unity of Type and of the Conditions of Existence embraced by the theory of Natural Selection Page 171–206 CHAPTER VII.
Instinct.
Instincts comparable with habits, but different in their origin — Instincts graduated — Aphides and ants — Instincts variable — Domestic instincts, their origin — Natural instincts of the cuckoo, ostrich, and parasitic bees — Slave-making ants — Hive-bee, its cell-making instinct — Difficulties on the theory of the Natural Selection of instincts — Neuter or sterile insects — Summary 207–244 CHAPTER VIII.
Hybridism.
Distinction between the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids — Sterility various in degree, not universal, affected by close interbreeding, removed by domestication — Laws governing the sterility of hybrids — Sterility not a special endowment, but incidental on other differences — Causes of the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids — Parallelism between the effects of changed conditions of life and crossing — Fertility of varieties when crossed and of their mongrel offspring not universal — Hybrids and mongrels compared independently of their fertility — Summary 245–278 CHAPTER IX.
On the Imperfection of the Geological Record.
On the absence of intermediate varieties at the present day — On the nature of extinct intermediate varieties; on their number — On the vast lapse of time, as inferred from the rate of deposition and of denudation — On the poorness of our palæontological collections — On the intermittence of geological formations — On the absence of intermediate varieties in any one formation — On the sudden appearance of groups of species — On their sudden appearance in the lowest known fossiliferous strata Page 279–311 CHAPTER X.
On the Geological Succession of Biological Beings.
On the slow and successive appearance of new species — On their different rates of change — Species once lost do not reappear — Groups of species follow the same general rules in their appearance and disappearance as do single species — On Extinction — On simultaneous changes in the forms of life throughout the world — On the affinities of extinct species to each other and to living species — On the state of development of ancient forms — On the succession of the same types within the same areas — Summary of preceding and present chapters 312–345 CHAPTER XI.
Geographical Distribution.
Present distribution cannot be accounted for by differences in physical conditions — Importance of barriers — Affinity of the productions of the same continent — Centres of creation — Means of dispersal, by changes of climate and of the level of the land, and by occasional means — Dispersal during the Glacial period co-extensive with the world 346–382 CHAPTER XII.
Geographical Distribution—continued
Distribution of fresh-water productions — On the inhabitants of oceanic islands — Absence of Batrachians and of terrestrial Mammals — On the relation of the inhabitants of islands to those of the nearest mainland — On colonisation from the nearest source with subsequent modification — Summary of the last and present chapters Page 383–410 CHAPTER XIII.
Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology:
Embryology: Rudimentary Organs.
Classification, groups subordinate to groups — Natural system — Rules and difficulties in classification, explained on the theory of descent with modification — Classification of varieties — Descent always used in classification — Analogical or adaptive characters — Affinities, general, complex and radiating — Extinction separates and defines groups — Morphology, between members of the same class, between parts of the same individual — Embryology, laws of, explained by variations not supervening at an early age, and being inherited at a corresponding age — Rudimentary Organs; their origin explained — Summary 411–458 CHAPTER XIV.
Recapitulation and Conclusion.
Recapitulation of the difficulties on the theory of Natural Selection — Recapitulation of the general and special circumstances in its favour — Causes of the general belief in the immutability of species — How far the theory of natural selection may be extended — Effects of its adoption on the study of Natural history — Concluding remarks 459–490 | {
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34,205 | I have seen many claims that devices such as laptop computers contain components that can "connect to the internet" even when the main device is powered off. The implication is that such devices could be backdoored by the NSA or others in order to share private data without the user's knowledge. One example, which would affect nearly every laptop and desktop computer, is that the Intel Management Engine (a controller chip in Intel processors which, for design reasons, is able to access all data being processed by the computer) updates its own firmware autonomously and can connect to the internet (in order to do so?) even when the computer is powered off. Here is an example of such a claim, from an answer on Information Security Stack Exchange : Intel ME features a processor attached to your CPU, which runs closed-source software and which can access all your hardware and main memory. It operates without being visible to your CPU, but can see all your CPU does and control it. It can update itself and connect to the internet even when your computer is turned off. It's pretty damned creepy to me. Is it true that the Intel Management Engine, and/or similar components in other brands of processor, has the capacity to connect autonomously to the internet when the computer is powered off? | Yes, most modern computer processors include hardware with the capability to fully control all components of the computer (regardless of the power state of the system as a whole) , to access all data while the computer is running, and to connect to the internet (in any power state). However, the remote control aspect of the functionality this hardware provides is not enabled on most devices targeted at the consumer market. Intel Management Engine (and similar systems) The Intel Management Engine , referenced in the question, is present in almost all Intel chips sold since 2006. It is an independent computing environment, which has access to (and control over) the main processor, the memory, the network interfaces, and other systems. One of the primary purposes of the ME is security: it verifies the integrity of the firmware running on the processor and on the Trusted Platform Module. Additionally, the ME enables a remote management system for enterprise use, called AMT (see below). Most consumer devices ship with this functionality disabled in the firmware. AMD has a similar system called PSP . Remote management (AMT etc) One of the services provided by the Intel ME is called Intel Active Management Technology . AMT enables " lights-out management ", meaning it enables system administrators to remotely control and modify virtually all aspects of the system, including the ability to download and update software and firmware regardless of whether the computer's operating system is running. (Obviously the battery or power supply has to be connected.) This type of remote management originated in servers, where it originally used a dedicated network interface. However AMT uses the system's normal built-in networking interfaces including ethernet, wifi, and (in rare cases) 3G. AMT is part of Intel's " vPro " technology, which is found in a wide variety of devices. It is primarily targeted at enterprise users, however it has made its way into may devices available on the consumer market including laptops primarily targeted at business use, as well as high-end gaming hardware. The AMT system is normally not enabled on computers targeted at the consumer market; however the hardware is still there and the Intel Management Engine is still active because it provides other functionality too (see above). Security It is important to note that the one of the main purposes of the Intel Management Engine and similar technology is to increase security. Because it verifies the integrity of the firmware running on the processor and other vital system components, it ensures that this firmware has not been modified or replaced with potentially malicious versions. (Or any other modifications – it simply ensures that only the original firmware can be used.) However, the Management Engine itself is not entirely immune to compromise. In the past researchers have been able to remotely compromise the system and gain control of machines without physical access to them. Another concern (more relevant to high-risk users such as non-US governments and political dissidents) is that technically there is no reason why the Management Engine (or similar components in other chips) couldn't contain backdoors allowing government agencies the same access and control over the system. Intel is a US company (though a significant part of their engineering is based in Israel), and they could be required by US government to implement hidden backdoors. Since it is impossible to audit the firmware, no proof either way is possible as to whether backdoors exist or whether the risk is purely theoretical . This Hackaday article is informative, if somewhat hysterical, look at the features and security risks of the Management Engine. (Thanks to @William-remote for sharing it in a comment on his answer below.) Further references See Intel's page on AMT . In the past Intel provided an anti-theft service to enterprise and consumer markets, whereby the ME would regularly check ion with Intel servers and disable the computer if it had been reported stolen. Intel have now discontinued this service . An HP document on the use of AMT (thanks to Igor Skochinsky for sharing in his answer below). There is a generic set of standards for a functionality similar to AMT, called IPMI . I hadn't expected to answer this question myself, but having done some research I felt I was in a position to do so. Thanks to everyone who has contributed with additional information. I will continue to incorporate any new information I find into this answer. | {
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34,270 | Blog post by US academic Juan Cole ( sometimes linked to in twitter ) Twentieth Century Deaths in War and Political Violence by Religion Total: 102 Million Killed by Christians of European Heritage [very large slice] Killed by Muslims [very small slice] Text from the blog post: I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so
in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly
in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in
Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame. Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100
million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those
were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial
wars.) In the comments section, the Armenian genocide, which wasn't mentioned by Cole in the blog post, is discussed: Commenter: Well bethought, but I think you should add the Armenian massacres at
the hands of the Turks to Muslim side of equation. It doesn’t alter
your main point, but adds a percentage point to the Muslim side of the
equation. Cole: The Iran-Iraq War killed about 250,000, the Afghanistan War 1 million,
so there’s room for other things in the original estimate. But if it
was 3 million it would not change my point. Is the ratio of people killed by political violence by Christians compared to people killed by political violence by Muslims roughly thirty to fifty to one? Whether or not Nazi Germany counts as political violence by Christians isn't my main point of concern - it's more whether he's sweeping under the carpet lesser known cases of political violence by Muslims, just like he initially didn't mention the Armenian genocide. | No , the figures that were used to produce this graph are inaccurate, exaggerating the ratio. The basic numbers being claimed are: Christian Europe killed 100 million in the 20th Century, consisting of: 60 million in World War II 16 million in World War I millions more in colonial wars. Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire 20th Century. Look at those claims: World World II Deaths The overall death count estimate of 60 million is reasonable. However, it is incorrect to attribute these deaths to Christian forces . The responsibility for deaths in WW2 by country breaks down like this: Asia/China/Pacific: 20 million + - Japan Soviet Union: 15 - 20 million + - Soviet Union/Germany European theater: 20 million - US/UK/France/USSR/Germany/Italy If we adopt the stance of the original blog post, where the dominant religion for a country is assumed, we can group the countries and their death counts by religion: Christians: USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Others(for simplicity) Those countries were responsible for about 20 - 24 million deaths. It is hard to be precise as it's hard to pin how many deaths in the USSR were caused by Germans . Atheists: Soviet Union, China These countries were responsible for 20+ million deaths. China was mostly on the receiving end. Buddhist/ Shinto/Other : Japan Japan was responsible for 20+ million deaths, mostly in China. World War I Deaths The estimate of 16 million deaths is low. 30-37 million is more accurate 9 million that died in Russia were in large part due to a civil war that broke out there which was led by socialists/atheists. The Ottoman Empire was a large player in WW1 and suffered between 2.5 and 5 million casualties depending on the source , most of which were self-inflicted . No clear conclusion can be drawn for exact numbers from WW1 but 16 million at the feet of Christian nations is clearly off. Colonial War Deaths Best I can tell about 4-5 million died. It is far short of the 23 million assumed to reach the total in the claim . Muslim Deaths A cursory glance at Wikipedia's list of modern conflicts in the Middle East and some addition of the numbers from 1900 to 1999 leaves us with a total of 4 million deaths, not counting the Armenian/Turkish genocide mentioned in the Ottoman Empire in WW1. Combine them and you have between 6.5 and 9 million deaths. Some other conflicts of note are, the Partition of India in which an estimated 2 million people went missing (roughly split between Muslims and Hindu). And the Bangladeshi Genocide where a middle of the road estimate brings in other 1.5 million dead . This is by no means an all-inclusive list. My estimate then for Muslim caused deaths is 9.5 - 15 million deaths. In summary, using the upper estimates from each category, the graphic should read total deaths of 116 million (only if it included non-Christians/non-Muslims). Using no deeper categorisation than the country/party**, this should be broken down as: Christian countries: 40-45 million Muslim countries: 15 million Other countries: 55-60 million So in regards to the claim, Christian nations haven't killed 30-50 times as many people as Muslim nations. The ratio is closer to 3:1. * By definition in claim. ** Bolshevik party in Russia Finally: this is by no means an exhaustive list of any of the war categories and grossly oversimplifies something that Rudolph Rummel spends 300 pages writing about in his book, Statistics of Democide from which I pulled lots of this information. | {
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34,279 | Geneticist Dr. Eugene McCarthy claims that humans have descended from hybrids of pigs and chimpanzees: A 2013 Phys.Org article explained: he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees. Extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence and McCarthy does not disappoint. Rather than relying on genetic sequence comparisons, he instead offers extensive anatomical comparisons, each of which may be individually assailable, but startling when taken together. McCarthy documents his hypothesis at Macroevolution.net Is this hypothesis correct? | The hypothesis that humans descended from chimp-pig hybrids can be denied on the following points. Hybrids between different orders of mammals are very rare due to the genetic differences and differences in chromosome number. Despite McCarthy's suggestions to the contrary, reports of hybrids between different orders of mammal, though, are, literally, incredible. His suggestion that the platypus is the result of hybridization between mammals and birds – an even bigger ask – seems to rest on a misunderstanding of the inheritance of chromosomes. Although some of the genetics of platypuses seems birdlike, this is much more consistent with its primitive state, and a mark of a shared inheritance between birds and reptiles (preserved in primitive mammals) than direct evidence for miscegenation. Source: "No, Humans Are Not Chimp-Pig Hybrids", Observation Deck No genomic evidence is currently present for the chimp-pig hybrid hypothesis. There is also no evidence of the occurrence of similar genetic material from both parents in the hypothesized chimp-pig hybrid which will confirm or predict the success of a hybridization event. He offers no such evidence, possibly because every published genomic study of pigs, human, and non-human apes suggests that the former are only distantly related to the latter two. Pigs and apes are both placental mammals, but not very related to one another. So their last common ancestor may have been sometime in the late Cretaceous, 70ish million years ago. The claim that the gametes of a pig and a chimp would be compatible in any sort of way requires evidence that other such large crosses are possible. Source: "No, Humans Are Not Chimp-Pig Hybrids", Observation Deck . A major genetic difference between humans/higher apes and pigs is that they do not share a working version of gal-transferase. That gene is called galactose-alpha-1,3,galactotransferase — gal-transferase for short . All mammals except humans and higher apes have a working version of gal-transferase, which coats cells with an antigen (a molecule that our immune system reacts to). This means if pig tissue is transplanted into humans our immune system will mount a drastic rejection response as our bodies detect the antigen and attack it. Pigs weren't part of that lineage. This is a fact, established by comparative research on genomes. Humans are closely related to chimpanzees (and gorillas), with whom we share this missing gene. We simply aren't particularly close, genetically, to pigs. And that means we aren't the offspring of cross-species sexual relations. Source: "Pigs and Chimpanzees Living in Sin?", Psychology Today TL;DR: Referring to Dr Du and Prof Feng, physiological similarities between pigs and humans was maintained at a genetic level of 84% homology between the two species. However, detailed analysis showed that there were several important differences. The analysis of the pig genome, published in Nature last year and available free does reveal shared similarities with humans – and why not? It shares similarities with many other mammals, too. But there seems no especially close relationship between the pig genome and the human genome, which is what one would expect had some hybridization occurred in the past few million years. Source: "Evolutionary theory that a chimp mated with a pig is pure sausagemeat", The Guardian | {
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34,310 | There's this graph on the internets: But I was unable to find any sources of the data. Most of the sites that present the graph seem to be politically oriented. Is this backed by any hard data? | The source of the graphic in the OP is Mother Jones . This is what they consider a "mass shooting". Our research has focused on seemingly indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed. A Guide to Mass Shootings in America Mother Jones considered a specific list of 56 US mass shootings starting with the 8/20/1982 machine shop shooting where the shooter was killed by civilian using a car to hit the shooter and run over his body and ending with the 7/20/2012 Aurora theater shootings. Mother Jones originally reported that of these 56 shootings, the data is as shown in the OP, but updated/revised the data to say out of 62 shootings through 2012, in 49 cases the gun(s) was/were obtained legally, 12 illegally, and 1 unknown. Looking at the data table spread sheet, in many cases where they acknowledge that it is "unknown" where the gun was obtained, they assume it was obtained legally. Also the list is incomplete. For example it does not include the 01 March 1983 fatal shooting of 6 people by Louis D. Hastings in McCarthy, Alaska . See 6 KILLED IN ALASKA IN SHOOTING SPREE New York Times March 3, 1983 For another source see Where'd They Get Their Guns, An Analysis of High Profile Shootings 1963-2001 . This report gives more-detailed explanations of the legality of the gun purchases in the first 20 years of the Mother Jones data set. | {
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34,322 | I found a picture with a quote on facebook today quoting Einstein. The quote states: When we first got married, we made a pact. It was this:In our life together, it was decided I would make all of the big decisions and my wife would make all of the little decisions. For fifty years, we have held true to that agreement. I believe that is the reason for the success in our marriage. However, the strange thing is that in fifty years, there hasn't been one big decision. Is there any truth to that he actually said this? (Given that he did divorce once) | Very unlikely . This is sometimes attributed to Einstein on his 50th Wedding anniversary Einstein was married twice : The first marriage was to Mileva Marić, from January 1903 until their divorce on 14 February 1919 - i.e. 16 years of marriage. The second marriage was to Elsa Löwenthal on 2 June 1919 until her death in December 1936 - i.e. 17 years of marriage. [I used Wikipedia as a source, as I don't think these dates are in dispute.] He never had a 50th wedding anniversary, and he never had an opportunity to say " in fifty years , there hasn't been one big decision." This doesn't prove the quote isn't a distorted version of something he did say. | {
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34,409 | Some news sources have reported that in the 24 hours after the UK's results on the EU referendum came through, the UK dropped from 5th largest economy in the world, to 6th, being overtaken by France. For example, this headline in the Metro : France overtakes UK as fifth largest economy as pound plummets Another example : Overnight the UK economy has already slumped from the fifth largest in the world to sixth. And another, this from the pro-Brexit Daily Express : Brexit shock - France overtakes UK as world's fifth largest economy FRANCE has overtaken the UK as the world's fifth largest economy... economists say Britain has dropped into sixth place in the wake of a vote for Brexit This has also circulated widely on social media, but doesn't seem to have been picked up by more "official" sources. Is it true? | It's impossible to definitively prove: GDP is calculated annually, and compared based on purchasing power, rather than currency fluctuations - countries can't officially change position like this overnight. But the UK's status as 5th largest economy is certainly in doubt. At least one estimate, detailed below, based on applying currency fluctuations to previous GDP figures, suggests that the UK may have dipped below France for 15-20 minutes in the 24 hours after the referendum, then recovered, then dropped back down again, stabilising at a point that would suggest the UK is now below France; but this is a very crude methodology (it doesn't take into account changes in economic activity since 2015 or differences between currency value and purchasing power), so it's not possible to use this method to say that the countries' positions have definitely changed. Here's an example of how the BBC are talking about this uncertain status of the UK economy, from a recent article Nick Robinson of the BBC , describing the UK as: ...what was until last week the fifth largest economy in the world City AM , a UK newspaper aimed at the financial industry, published some calculations to see if any case can be made that at any point the two economies could be argued to have crossed: In 2015, the UK economy, measured in gross domestic product (GDP), was £1,787bn in local prices. France's was worth €2,181bn in local prices. Obviously, when you come to compare the two, you need to use a common currency. That could mean converting the UK's from sterling to euros. In doing so, the pound would need to be worth less than €1.21 for the UK to be smaller than the French economy. ...Between 6.20am and 6.35am sterling was trading at less than €1.21 according to Bloomberg data... [before stabilising at] more than €1.23 They emphasise that this isn't a standard or advisable way of comparing GDP... Economists generally prefer to use purchasing power parity (PPP), which adjusts exchange rates to make comparisons between two countries based on their purchasing power. That is calculated by comparing how much it costs to buy a basket of goods in one country with the same costs of buying that basket of goods in another. It was designed specifically to rule out making comparisons of things like GDP based on market exchange rates. ...and conclude that the claim is not true, and could at best be argued as true: for 20 minutes and using a dodgy calculation However , since this article was published, the pound has dipped further and somewhat stabilised below €1.21. Here's a 3-day chart from the Financial Times , which matches data from Bloomberg . This doesn't prove that France is now above the UK, due to the methodolical limitations, it's merely suggestive: The Independent, a UK newspaper who supported the Remain campaign and so might be expected to favour a story emphasising negative economic impacts of the vote, have also analysed the claim and concluded that it's based on unreliable non-standard comparisons: ...the size of an economy is not measured in real time in the way that currencies and company share prices are. We have an estimate of UK GDP up to the end of the first quarter (the end of March) of 2016 from the Office for National Statistics. And the French statistics agency data up to the same point. ...But does a single quarter of output represent the size of an economy in any case? Usually, these things are measured by looking at a year’s output or GDP. They quote Andrew Goodwin of Oxford Economics: “[UK and France GDP in 2015 had] a difference of almost 18 per cent” Mr Goodwin says “so while they may have very briefly crossed this morning when sterling reached its 31-year low (though I’m not sure they actually did), sterling’s subsequent rally means it certainly won’t be the case now. And that’s before we get onto whether converting at market exchange rates is an appropriate thing to do! They elaborate on that last point: The major fall in sterling will hurt UK living standards because the price of imports will rise. But we should resist the urge, however politically tempting, to use currency swings to make GDP comparisons that are inherently dubious Basically, we don't know. We can't yet prove it dropped to be the sixth largest, but we can't say with any confidence that it remained the fifth largest. All we can be sure about is, like how the BBC put it above: It's the economy formerly known as the fifth largest. | {
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34,413 | I saw a friend "like" this news article on Facebook which claims that phytoplankton would stop oxygen production: "If the world’s oceans warmed by 6 degrees Celsius—a realistic possibility if global emissions continue unabated—the tiny plants would halt oxygen production, according to the study, which was published Tuesday in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology." Of course, the article writer didn't include a link to the study, or even the name of the study and Google is not forthcoming. Does a significant portion of Earth's oxygen come from phytoplankton? Are phytoplankton as temperature-sensitive as the article suggests? | The study in question was linked at the top of the article ( http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11538-015-0126-0 ). The full name is "Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change", it was written by Yadigar Sekerci and Sergei Petrovskii and published in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology December 2015, Volume 77, Issue 12, pp 2325-2353. The journal seems to be credible, and the article seems to be peer-reviewed. So the results of the paper are likely to be quite scientific and in that sense truth . You might be able to find out more about the credibility of the journal ac Academia.SE, but since my university lists it as credible journal and offers access I'd say the journal is credible. This, however, does not necessarily mean the article is correct. Its seems to be peer-reviewed, but not completely without controversy. The study answers your points: This contribution appears to be massive: It is estimated that about 70% of the Earth atmospheric oxygen is produced by the ocean phytoplankton (Harris 1986; Moss 2009). And further It is well known that the water temperature has a notable effect on the phytoplankton growth (Andersson et al. 1994; Eppley 1972; Raven and Geider 1988). References: Andersson A, Haecky P, Hagstrom A (1994) Effect of temperature and light on the growth of micro- nanoand
pico-plankton: impact on algal succession. Mar Biol 120:511–520 Harris GP (1986) Phytoplankton ecology: structure, function and fluctuation. Springer, Berlin Moss BR (2009) Ecology of fresh waters: man and medium, past to future. Wiley, London Raven JA, Geider RJ (1988) Temperature and algal growth. New Phytol 110:441–461 These references are quite old. So I would consider these things as well-understood and credible. So there is a definite yes to 1., this is simply true. As for 2., they are sensitive to temperature change, but how much? In the end, the study has the following conclusion: We then considered the dynamics of the corresponding nonautonomous system where the oxygen production rate slowly changes with time to take into account the increase in the water temperature due to the climate change. We showed that a sufficiently large increase or decrease in the production rate results is a bifurcation leading to a sudden depletion of oxygen and plankton extinction. So yes, the effect is drastic. The Figure of 6° is also given: Even if the current state of the system is safe, a sufficiently large warming (roughly estimated as 5–6 ◦C, see Robinson 2000) would inevitably lead to an ecological disaster resulting in a complete depletion of oxygen. So all in all, the most of the claims made in the news article are really made in that study. | {
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34,644 | I heard this claim back during the Bush years, and recently I've been hearing it again. For example: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All - The New Yorker I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization. Sometimes, a "button" is used metaphorically . Hillary Clinton refers to a button as well. Is there some mechanism through which the President of the United States can deploy nuclear weapons without anyone else's approval? | According to retired Lt. General Mark Hertling, who personally participated in such drills, and wrote Nuclear Codes: The President's Awesome Power That bag -- carried by the military aide -- has been within feet of the commander in chief ever since for any situation where the president believes the use of nuclear weapons is warranted. If that is the case, he is able to order the military aide to open the briefcase and issue an alert to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While that is occurring, the president reviews options from the nuclear triad -- submarine launched missiles, aircraft with atomic weapons, or land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS) -- and then decides on a course of action. The aide then connects the president with the National Military Command Center (NMCC) -- in the Pentagon or an airborne command and control element -- and positively identifies himself with a special code issued on a plastic card. Most presidents have kept that card -- called the "biscuit" -- in their possession at all times. Should this happen, the code on the president's card would be confirmed by either the secretary of defense, or the watch officer (a general or admiral on duty) at the NMCC, and the president could then order a strike. The president always has the authority to order an attack, with his options ranging from the launch of one missile to extensive, massive strikes from one or several elements of the triad: bombers, submarines, missiles. So, according to General Hertling, while it must be confirmed by a general, admiral or the secretary of defense that it is really the president giving the order, "The president always has the authority to order an attack". For more information see Nuclear Command and Control in NATO: Nuclear Weapons Operations and the Strategy of Flexible Response . I'll only quote a portion: Although the President had the sole authority and responsibility to order the use of nuclear weapons the control of nuclear weapons operations was exercised by the NCA [National Command Authorities] which, according to the 1971 Department of Defense Directive 5100.30, consisted only of 'the President and the Secretary of Defense or their duly deputised alternates or successors'. The NCA could also be widened to include the most senior US military officer the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS). The sharing of operational control – if not authority – enabled even this most senior level of decision-making to meet the 'two-person' rule which governs all US nuclear weapons activities. This rule stated that all decisions, procedures or processes involving nuclear weapons had to be carried out by at least two individuals, and was intended as a hedge against unauthorised or irrational action by anyone in the command chain. See also Department of Defense directive NUMBER 3150.02 : The President, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, is the sole authority for the employment of U.S. nuclear weapons. In Conclusion , physically the president alone can not use nuclear weapons; the involvement of other people is absolutely required. However, if the chain of command is followed, policy is that the president is the sole authority for use of nuclear weapons. For historical comparison, according to the New World Encylopedia : The Washington Post [reference 21] reported that many Europeans and leaders around the world thought that Reagan was "a cowboy" and "scary." Carter's campaign implied that Reagan was "a trigger happy cowboy."[22] The Iranian hostage-takers in particular reported being unsure of what Reagan would do.[23] Iranian uncertainty about Reagan's plans may have been the main motivation behind the timing of the release of the hostages | {
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34,756 | On the first page of Mathematics for the Nonmathematician , mathematician Morris Kline quotes Augustine of Hippo as saying: The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who
make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the
mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the
spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell. Later in the same work, he says that "despite St. Augustine, the reader is invited to tempt hell and damnation by engaging in the study of the subject." Is this quote genuine? If so, in which work can it be found and is it a reasonable interpretation of the text? | You ask whether it's a reasonable interpretation of the text. Book IV of Augustine's Confessions ( in Latin ), which was cited in this answer , includes: Itaque illos planos, quos mathematicos vocant, plane consulere non desistebam, quod quasi nullum eis esset sacrificium, et nullae preces ad aliquem spiritum ob divinationem dirigerentur. So the text includes the word mathematicus (- cos ). Looking at the definition of this word according to Lewis and Short it means, A. Măthēmătĭcus , i, m. 1. A mathematician, Cic. de Or 1, 3, 10; id. Ac. 2, 36, 116; id. Tusc. 1, 2, 5; Sen. Ep. 88, 26.— 2. An astrologer (post-Aug.): “mathematici, genus hominum potentibus infidum, sperantibus fallax, quod in civitate nostra et vetabitur semper et retinebitur,” Tac. H. 1, 22: “nota mathematicis genesis tua,” Juv. 14, 248; Tert. Apol. 43: “qui de salute principis ... mathematicos consulit, cum eo qui responderit, capite punitur,” Paul. Sent. 5, 21, 3.— So I think that dictionary is saying that in "post-Aug." times the word is used for "an astrologer". The same sentence (of Augustine) includes the word divinationem which Lewis and Short defines as , dīvīnātĭo , ōnis, f. divino. I. The faculty of foreseeing, predicting, divination, μαντική (cf.: “augurium, auspicium, vaticinium, praesagium, praedictio),” Cic. Div. 1, 1; 2, 5, 13; 2, 63, 130; id. N. D. 1, 22, 55; id. Leg. 2, 13, 32; id. Rosc. Am. 34, 96; Nep. Att. 9, 1; 16 fin.: “animi,” Cic. Fam. 3, 13: “mendax,” Vulg. Ezech. 13, 7.— So that (context, including also the context of the previous sentences) supports the "astrology" sense of the term. So instead of "beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies", a more faithful translation might be, "beware the astrologer" (and presumably other people who practice augury ). My personal guess is that the practice of astrology might have looked like a branch of what we know as mathematics: including e.g. geometry to divide the zodiac into houses or whatever. Looking at the (ancient) Greek the word derives from a root meaning "learning", so it means like "fond of learning", and can be used to mean "scientific" (especially "mathematical"); "astronomical"; and/or "astrological". Can you find an expert confirmation that your interpretation is correct? Do historians or philosopher agree with your (somewhat arbitrary) choice of meaning? Yes, for example this translation with footnotes talks about astrology w.r.t. that passage, e.g.: Astrology recurs pastorally throughout Augustine's career. The same vocabulary, and the same scriptural quotations, appear over and over. The place of astrology in African life etc. | {
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34,792 | In an interview with an Ohio television station, the 2016 Republican nominee for President said : when you have radical Islamic terrorists probably all over the place, we’re allowing them to come in [to the United States] by the thousands and thousands. Later in the same interview: “And, you know, I’m not going to change my views on that. We have radical Islamic terrorists coming in that have to be stopped. We’re taking them in by the thousands.” Relatives of mine have expressed the same idea to me. Are thousands and thousands of Islamic terrorists entering the United States? | This is a claim that he has used multiple times and there has been no evidence to support his claim. As the article notes, "Trump is in the numerical ballpark if he’s referring to the number of refugees being admitted into the United States every year" but it would be wrong to suggest that these immigrants are all terrorists. Trump seems to be referring to terrorists and violent extremists. But there is no evidence that tens of thousands of terrorists are being admitted into the United States today -- much less that they are being "allowed" in, as if there is a visa preference program for terrorists. On the other hand, Trump is in the numerical ballpark if he’s referring to the number of refugees being admitted into the United States every year -- something else he’s expressed reservations about. | {
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34,825 | I've frequently heard the claim that fewer Jews died of the Bubonic Plague than their Christian neighbors in the Middle Ages because Jews took regular ritual baths ( mikva ) and ritually washed hands before eating ( netilat yadaim ), while the Christians rarely washed themselves. Supposedly this lead to antisemitism and harsh persecution because the Christians saw their Jewish neighbors surviving and assumed they had control of the plague and were deliberately cursing them. Is there any truth to this claim? I found some sources making this claim from citations in the Wikipedia Article "Black Death Jewish persecutions" : Example from jewishhistory.org : "And even if Jews died at a lesser rate, it can be attributed to the sanitary practices Jewish law. For instance, Jewish law compels one to wash his or her hands many times throughout the day. In the general medieval world a person could go half his or her life without ever washing his hands." Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe After the Black Death (2000), Page 146: "There were several reasons for this, including, it has been suggested, the observance of laws of hygiene tied to ritual practices and a lower incidence of alcoholism and venereal disease" | So, the JewishHistory.org website touts the hygiene of the ghettos in this way: The sanitary conditions in the Jewish neighborhood, primitive as it
may be by today’s standards, was [sic] always far superior to the general
sanitary conditions. However, when I started digging into the citations given by Anna Foa for her claim, I soon bumped into this: The exceptionally miserable and unhygienic external environment in
which the Jewish settlements live must be added as a constant
pejorative of all their morbid manifestations. (1) This author, an Italian scholar named Livi, claimed that the Jewish ghettos were so dirty that they actually weeded out weak immune systems, which led to lower death rates. We might guess this scholar was an anti-Semite. So, is there evidence refuting this? Anna Foa cites an English-language article (2) but it contains no claims about hygiene at all. In fact she has made a mistake, because her bibliography also points to longer Italian-language version of the same article (3), which contains this footnote disagreeing with Livi: Nor should it be forgotten that, if the environment in which Jews
lived in the era of the ghettos was particularly unhealthy, the trades
they exercised were among those with lower risks of morbidity and
professional mortality, and that their living arrangements, pursuant to
religious requirements, were particularly favorable for increased
resistance against causes of lethality. (3) No source is given for the author's claim. The other source given by Foa is correctly cited. In translation, it states the following: What we know about the evolution of mortality, indicates that throughout
it appears significantly lower than that of the Christian populations.
The causes of this more favorable situation — very well documented
from the end of the eighteenth century — are certainly many, ranging
from compliance with hygiene standards prescribed by religion, rooted
in moderate customs for eating and drinking, the low incidence of
venereal diseases, and an economic level on average higher than average. (4) The citation for this paragraph, however, is Livi! So back I go to Livi, vol. 2, looking for proof of this assertion; but all I can find there is an overload of data, accompanied by the bare observation that the "Jewish race" stands apart in mortality statistics. Evidently what is "well documented" is the low death rate, not the reasons for it. Not only is there no proof of causation for this claim, there is no responsible scholar pushing the claim all the way back to the Black Death. Anna Foa is not making such a claim herself, as she is talking about the period 1527–1592 (the Black Death lasted from 1346–1353). I think there is good reason to find this claim historically dubious. It appears to be a mischaracterization of Foa's book, which itself cites some bare assertions which need to be more closely examined. (1) " L’ambiente
esteriore eccezionalmente miserabile e poco igienico nel quale vivono
le colonie israelitiche devesi considerare come un costante
peggiorativo di tutte le loro manifestazioni morbose. " Livio Livi, Gli Ebrei alla luce della statistica (1919), vol. 1, p. 199 (2): Roberto Bachi, “ The Demographic Development of Italian Jewry from the Seventeenth Century .” Jewish Journal of Sociology 4/2 (1962): 172–91 (3) " Non si deve dimenticare inoltre che, se l’ambiente in cui vivevano gli ebrei nell’epoca dei ghetti era particolarmente insalubre, i mestieri da essi esercitati erano tra quelli che comportano minori rischi di morbosità e mortalità professionale, e che il regime di vita conforme alle prescrizioni religiose era particolarmente favorevole per una maggiore resistenza contro le cause letali. " Roberto Bachi, " La demografia dell'Ebraismo italiano prima della emancipazione ." La Rassegna Mensile di Israel (1939): seconda serie, Vol. 12, No. 7/9, p. 310 (4) " Ciò che conosce sull’evoluzione della mortalità, indica che ovunque essa appare sensibilmente inferiore a quella delle popolazioni cristiane. Le cause di questa più favorevole situazione — assai ben documentata fin dall’ultima del XVIII secolo — sono certamente molte, e vanno dall’osservanza di norme igieniche prescritte dalla religione, a radicati costumi di moderazione nell’alimentazione e nel bere, alla bassa incidenza delle malattie veneree, ad un livello economico mediamente più elevato della media " Livi Bacci, M. (1983) ' Ebrei, aristocratici e cittadini: precursori del declino della fecondità ', Quaderni Storici XVIII (54), p. 924 | {
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34,863 | According to UK Conservative MP Adam Holloway, quoted in the Daily Express : “Likewise, we have people in this country who have come here, claimed asylum and then go back on holiday in the places where they’ve claimed asylum from." Is there any evidence for this claim? (Edit: literally speaking, this question is true if there are at least two people for whom it is true. It may be implied that Mr. Holloway MP considers this to be somewhat typical. I prefer answers addressing the implication, i.e. that this is not exceptional, but answers focussing on individual cases are also welcome.) | No, there is no evidence for this claim. The reason the MP - Adam Holloway - thinks this is that his barber - a refugee - wasn't available one day: “We have people in this country who have come here, claimed asylum and
then they go back on holiday in the places where they’ve claimed
asylum from,” Holloway said. “I couldn’t have my hair cut the other
day for that reason.” source However, the person in question says that he was not in Iraq but in Great Yarmouth, England : But Shivan Saeed, who regularly cuts Holloway’s hair at Kent Barbers,
Gravesend, has now come forward to reveal that, far from going to
Iraq, he in fact spent a week with his family in a caravan in Great
Yarmouth. “It’s dangerous to go back to Iraq – if I wanted to go back there why
would I have come here?” the 23-year-old told the Daily Mail. “Next
time I see him, I will tell him. I am not annoyed – I am alright with
it. He just got it
wrong.” source | {
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34,938 | Tera Dahl at Breitbart writes: As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton refused to designate Islamic State affiliate Boko Haram in Nigeria, which was named the deadliest terrorist organization in 2015, a terrorist group. She not only refused, but she hindered the efforts of Members of Congress who were trying to make the designation. The FBI, CIA and Justice Department wanted Boko Haram designated but, ultimately, the State Department opposed the designation despite hard evidence from our Intelligence services. Is that true? | No, this is a twisting of the facts. It's true that there was a period in 2011-13 when Clinton's State Department debated whether Boko Haram should be classified as a direct threat to the US , while the government fighting Boko Haram in Nigeria warned that doing so would aid their fundraising and status. They chose not to until 2013, but, in 2012 under Clinton and with Clinton's approval, they did classify Boko Haram's leaders as international terrorists. The Justice Dept and others did advise around this time that Boko Haram could be considered a threat to the US. This isn't the same as recommending that it should be done and doesn't amount to contradicting the State Department's judgement as to what was the best strategic move. The policy was led by State Department regional experts and there's no evidence Clinton was applying political pressure in either direction. This was all years before Boko Haram were an Islamic State affiliate, while they were almost exclusively active in Northern Nigeria. They were classified as a "Foreign Terrorist Organization" that does constitute a threat to the US in 2013, which was also the first year their reach expanded to neighbouring countries (Niger and Chad) . There are lots of fact-checks into this and related claims, the most thorough seems to be this from the Washington Post from 2014 about a closely related claim. In detail To be classified a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the US state department: Three key criteria must be met: It must be a foreign organization. The organization must engage in terrorist activity or terrorism... ...[which] must threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security (national defense, foreign relations or the economic interests) of the United States Obivously, Boko Haram met the first two criteria since they were founded in 2009. The first suggestion that Boko Haram might meet this third criteria (specific threat to the US ) appears to be a House Homeland Security Committee report in 2011, but this isn't definite on the matter: Based on Boko Haram’s evolution and recent public warnings by the U.S. State Department to U.S. citizens in Nigeria, Boko Haram may meet the legal criteria for State Department FTO designation. Such designations are subject to a rigorous statutory process and through investigation, which the State Department needs to initiate. This, and the "Boko Haram Terrorist Designation Act of 2012" , are the main thrust of the "efforts of Members of Congress who were trying to make the designation" discussed in the question, but even they didn't outright call for Boko Haram to be immediately designated, they simply called for the State Department to consider doing so, and explain its decision. That act of congress called for: (A) a detailed report on whether... [Boko Haram] ...meets the criteria for designation as a foreign terrorist organization... (B) [if not] ...a detailed justification as to which criteria have not been met ...and it did get passed into law in an altered form in 2012, as an amendment to another bill. A version of the bill became an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, passed in December 2012, requiring the secretaries of state and defense to produce a classified report on the strategy for countering Boko Haram The case against classifying Boko Haram as an FTO came primarily not from the state department, who "vigorously debated" it, but from the people responsible for actually fighting Boko Haram: the Nigerian government. From Nigerian Ambassador Adebowale Adefuye: “Our government is working hard to defeat the motley band of criminals popularly known as Boko Haram... Recognition through FTO designation by a sovereign the size and stature of the United States would give Boko Haram the title they seek and status they desire, stimulating a fundraising effort that has not yet been attainable from their current perch in northern Nigeria.” This was confirmed as being a factor in the State Department's policy: “The debate was really about the Nigerian attitude toward designation,” Robert P. Jackson, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told Congress. “The government of Nigeria feared that designating these individuals and the organizations would bring them more attention, more publicity and be counterproductive. The State Department under Clinton did actually go further towards designating Boko Haram as an FTO than the Nigerians wanted. In 2012, under Clinton, Boko Haram's three leaders were designated international terrorists. This policy was devised (as is normal for such things) as a recommendation by appropriate regional staff, diplomats, regional experts, etc: The strategy, which represented a compromise in the positions of Benjamin and Carson, was set in discussions with Deputy Secretary William J. Burns, who is a career Foreign Service officer. The administration would name three leaders of Boko Haram as specially designated global terrorists while holding out the possibly of a broader designation of the entire group as a means of improving the behavior of Nigerian forces battling Boko Haram. The article goes on to discuss how this compromise approach gave the US diplomatic leverage over the Nigerian government, which was important given concerns that the Nigerian army were using the fight against Boko Haram as a cover for politically-motivated human rights abuses in a region containing many opposition supporters (something many argued at the time was actually fuelling support for Boko Haram). In other words, it was a step-by-step diplomatic process. It was made clear that formal designation of the group could come later — and it did, the very next year. But in the meantime, the State Department hoped it could use the threat of designation — and the pressure from Congress — to induce better behavior by the Nigerian military and a more serious approach to the threat by the Nigerian government. In 2013, Boko Haram expanded to have a presence in neighbouring Chad and Niger, and could no longer be argued by Nigeria to be a domestic matter. Boko Haram were given FTO status that year. Breaking down the specific claim As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton refused to designate Islamic State affiliate Boko Haram in Nigeria, which was named the deadliest terrorist organization in 2015, a terrorist group. Highly misleading, it misrepresents three things: General acknowledgement of terrorism and recognition as "a terrorist group" is conflated with formal designation of FTO status. For a localised regional group (like Boko Haram were at the time), the latter involves potentially flattering them with an official statement that they're a threat to the US or its interests. A state department decision agreed by relevant state department officials to do something across a time frame in a certain diplomatic way is misrepresented as a personal refusal by Hillary Clinton to do that thing at all, which also ignores the fact that she approved a major step towards it (designating Boko Haram's leaders). Boko Haram are talked about as if their current status ("Islamic State affiliate Boko Haram... deadliest terrorist organization in 2015") applied during the time period in question (2011 and 2012), which is false: at that time they were a brutal but largely localised insurgency with no links to ISIS. She not only refused, but she hindered the efforts of Members of Congress who were trying to make the designation. The FBI, CIA and Justice Department wanted Boko Haram designated but, ultimately, the State Department opposed the designation despite hard evidence from our Intelligence services. Also misleading and in some places simply untrue: It misrepresents real recommendations that Boko Haram could be so designated as if these departments recommended they should be immediately designated despite warnings from Nigeria that doing so would benefit them. It talks as if Hillary Clinton was actively progress towards designation, when actually, the state department did begin the process of moving towards designation, and did go further towards it during Clinton's tenure than the Nigerians wanted. It claims the State Department opposed designation, which isn't true: they were in favour of bringing in designation in a measured way which didn't boost Boko Haram or undermine efforts to co-operate with and influence the Nigerians to take "a more serious approach to the threat". | {
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35,118 | Donald Trump claimed this in November 2015: "I
watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of
people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of
people were cheering." New York
Times He later specified: It did happen. I saw it. It was on television. I saw it. There were
people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you
have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade
Center came
down factcheck.org The NYT article claims: [A] persistent Internet rumor of Muslims celebrating in Paterson,
N.J., was discounted by police officials at the time. A search of news
accounts from that period shows no reports of mass cheering in Jersey
City. New York
Times And factcheck concludes: [T]here is no evidence of it, the celebrating was not on TV and did
not involve "thousands and thousands of
people." factcheck.org However, a month later, other websites report differently. For example breitbart states: The DC Media has spent the last two weeks attempting to destroy Donald
Trump with lies. Outright lies, and they are doing so in order to
protect a 14 year-old cover up. Not only have eyewitnesses and
contemporaneous reports proven Donald Trump 100% correct about Muslims
celebrating 9/11, a just-uncovered local CBS News (WCBS-TV in New
York) report completely vindicates Trump’s claim of “thousands and
thousands” of Muslims celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center. [...] FACT: Donald Trump is now 100% vindicated. breitbart.com They post a CBS report, but it doesn't seem to show recordings of thousands of people celebrating, nor does it seem to talk about thousands of Muslims celebrating. The political insider claims: Now, Former New York Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik has
vindicated Trump in his claims, noting that there were many post-9/11
celebrations by NYC-area Muslims. As One American News reports, Trump was
right! thepoliticalinsider.com The video seems to mention some reports about celebrations, but doesn't mention if these reports were confirmed, or if they involved thousands of Muslims. My questions are: Did thousands of Muslims celebrate the attack on 9/11 in New Jersey? Was video of this celebration broadcast on TV? In case neither is true, is there proof of celebrations that involved more than a handful of people somewhere in the US? | This has been a widely debunked claim. At best, it is based on second- and third-hand reports of people seeing some people on the rooftops that they assume were Muslims and were celebrating. Snopes has a piece about it. Donald Trump insisted he witnessed television footage "thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey "cheering" the 9/11 attacks, despite the fact that claim was long since debunked. The article discusses many attempts to track down the source of these rumours, which found nothing, and discusses some theories about where these rumours might have originated from. It ends with a discussion of a newspaper excerpt Trump pointed to on Twitter in 2015: ...(originally published by the Washington Post on 18 September 2001) described individuals who "allegedly" celebrated the attacks on rooftops in Jersey City (indicating that the celebrations were rumored, not confirmed). Trump claimed to have seen "thousands and thousands" of individuals in New Jersey on television, footage that has long been cited in rumors but doesn't appear to exist and doesn't jibe with the material he cited. Finally, it's unlikely thousands of any group of people could physically congregate on a rooftop. Politifact has a piece about it. They give it the "pants on
fire" rating. If thousands and thousands of people were celebrating the 9/11 attacks on American soil, many people beyond Trump would remember it. And in the 21st century, there would be video or visual evidence. Instead, all we found were a couple of news articles that described rumors of celebrations that were either debunked or unproven. The Washington Post has a (repeatedly updated) piece about it.
They give it "four Pinocchio's" Trump says that he saw this with his own eyes on television and that it was well covered. But an extensive examination of news clips from that period turns up nothing. ...Neither can we find any examples of Trump previously talking about this. Here, for example, is an article in the New York Post interviewing Trump just eight days after the attack; he makes no mention of having witnessed the alleged celebrations. And in a foreword for a book titled “Where Were You On 9/11?,” Trump makes no mention of this: “I was in my apartment in the Trump Tower [on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001]. I knew what was happening because I can see downtown to the Financial district.” | {
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35,171 | The Daily Caller reports: Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill deducted $1,042,000 in charitable contributions last year — $1 million of which went to their own family non-profit, the Clinton Family Foundation. Mediaite.com : 96 percent of the roughly one million dollars given to charity by Bill and Hillary Clinton in 2015 was given to the Clinton Family Foundation, a tax-exempt charity controlled by the Clintons. Are these claims true? Does that mean it didn't go to charity? | 96% of donations went to the Clinton Family Foundation , not the Clinton Foundation , and this is an important distinction. Both of the articles you link carry corrections to this effect, but this article goes into more detail about why it matters in the context of a Wall Street Journal article carrying the same claim (I can't verify whether the WSJ have issued a correction, because the article is behind a paywall). The organisation commonly called the Clinton Foundation , officially the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation , is a charity in its own right, with many donors. It largely carries out initiatives independent of any other charity. Its own FAQs go into more detail . It has sometimes been the subject of controversy (many charities are), but it is not the subject of this particular "revelation" . The Clinton Family Foundation , on the other hand, is a clearing house, which organises most of the donations the Clintons make on their behalf. This is not unusual, and can be thought of as like having a separate bank account for money you plan to donate. The actual money donated to the Clinton Family Foundation is then donated, on behalf of the Clintons, to many different charities. It is not at all surprising to find that it received 96% of her donations, since that is its purpose — to act as a clearing house for donating them to the appropriate charities. According to the Daily Caller article you cite, in 2014 the Clinton Family Foundation donated — on behalf of the Clinton family — $1.87 million to the Clinton Foundation, out of a total of $3 million. If we take that proportion as representative of how much Hillary gave, it amounts to roughly 60%, not 96%. To the second question, "could you consider this to be 96% (or even 60%) that did not go to charity?", the answer is a simple "no", since the Clinton Foundation is recognised as a charity. Regarding the claim that she donated to "a charity she controls", the Clinton Family Foundation is controlled entirely by the Clinton family ( this form linked in Abedin's answer lists Bill as President, Hillary as Secretary/Treasurer, and Chelsea as Director). Again, this is in keeping with its role as a vehicle to manage their donations. They are also on the board of the Clinton Foundation but do not have sole control. So they controlled the fact that the Clinton Family Foundation passed on 60% of their donations to the Clinton Foundation, and have some say in what the Clinton Foundation does with that (and other people's) money, within its established framework. | {
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35,186 | I spotted this on Facebook: Cynthia [sic]: Flesh-Eating Synthetic Bacteria that has Gone Wild In 2011, Cynthia was unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico and in its initial stages of life it was absorbing oil slicks at breathtaking speed. In January, 2011 the Register reported that scientists were particularly impressed by the speed with which the bacteria was eating up its “meal”. But then this bacteria mutated and soon was feeding on organic lifeforms. Strange reports started coming from the US, like five thousand birds falling victims of an “unknown disease” in Arkansas, or more that a hundred thousand dead fish found off the coast of north Louisiana. It was also reported that a total of 128 British Petroleum employees that participated in the liquidation of the oil slick were struck by some mysterious illness. According to various sources they were forbidden to seek relief in public hospitals, to prevent them from talking to anyone about what has happened to them… Only relevant mainstream article I could find: The Mysterious Thing About a Marvelous New Synthetic Cell “The 2010 paper was basically the control experiment,” says Venter. Their true mission was to create a cell with a minimal genome. [...] And they’ve done it. Six years after Synthia, they’ve finally unveiled their bare-bones bacterium. And in piecing together its components, they realized that they’re nowhere close to understanding them all. Of the 473 genes in their pared-down cell, 149 are completely unknown. They seem to be essential (and more on what that means later). Many of them have counterparts that are at work in your body right now, probably keeping you alive. And they’re a total mystery. A Google search for "Synthia bacteria" gets all kinds of interesting results, but nothing that really tells me the origins of this alleged massive coverup. Has Synthia gone rogue? | Upon closer inspection, it seems that this story can be traced to a single, very creative conspiracy theorist writing in 2010. As of 2020, the "World Vision Portal Forum" on which it was posted is no longer online , but an archived version can be found on the Wayback Machine . The surprisingly well-written blog post "GULF BLUE PLAGUE: It's Not Wise to Fool Mother Nature" invents an extremely tenuous conspiracy from whole cloth. After explaining how Synthia was developed, the author abruptly switches to the Deepwater Horizon spill: In a paper published in the journal Science, Terry Hazen and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory discovered in late May through early June 2010 that a previously unknown species of cold-water hydrocarbon-eating bacteria have been feasting on the underwater oil plumes degrading them at accelerated rates. (11) This is the writer's sole direct evidence that there is a mutant GMO bacteria in the water: the fact that the press release (the cited source) described the bacteria in the water as "previously unknown". Unfortunately for him, the species may have been unknown, but Hazen et al. did determine the genera of these new bacteria: "Oceanospirillales, Colwellia, and Cycloclasticus of Gammaproteobacteria". These were confirmed by several independent studies in the years afterward. ( source ) Synthia, in contrast, is of the genus Mycoplasma of the class Mollecutes. It's true that the team behind Synthia has a deal with Exxon-Mobil for future technology. But for this conspiracy to work, we would have to accept that this research team, which seems to enjoy publicity, kept secret their development of an entirely different genus and class of synthetic bacteria, which was then taken out of the laboratory and used in a secret oil cleanup project for the good of the environment. I'll be going with Occam's Razor for this one. | {
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35,213 | It's widely claimed that we share 50% of our DNA with bananas. Does this have actual basis or is it a myth? Example claims The Mirror (UK) , NHGRI | Finally, a question covering my nominal area of expertise.
To answer this question meaningfully we'll need to define some concepts but first. Yes, sort of. The statement is factually correct for reasonable interpretations. So, on to the terms. I'll link to a more specific stackexchange to support the definitions Homology. To draw an analogy: If someone said "humans share 90% of their skeleton with birds" would it be a reasonable statement? the overall structure is the same, most bones have an equivalent that's longer, shorter, thicker, thiner. The bones might have adaptions for strength or weight but stretch and squish things a little and you'll get something that looks the same. Orthology Orthologs are genes in different species that evolved from a common ancestor. Orthologs normally retain the same function. Paralogy Paralogs are genes which have been duplicated. One copy may end up doing something very different to the original but retain some things in common. When do 2 genes count as the same? Lets look at an example Histone H1 Histone is found in most species and it's highly conserved. It's not identical across species but it's mostly the same. In fact a lot of the genes which we need to live are common across many species . Genes to copy DNA, genes to repair cell walls, genes to control temperature, genes to metabolize various sugars . No matter whether you're a human or a banana plant you need a lot of the same basic machinery to live. The genes aren't perfectly identical but since they mostly have to do the same job and you'll likely die or fail to breed without them, they tend to be highly conserved, with most differences being at less important points in the genes. The genes get moved around, they get flipped back to front or swap chromosomes or chromosomes get merged or split, but they're generally there somewhere. For example, here's a mouse genome colored by what sections have homologs in the human genome. It's all about how strict you are with what you count as "sharing" DNA If you count genes sequences with a single base different as not the same, then most humans wouldn't count as very similar to other humans. If you allow for 1, 2, 3, 4 or more mutations per 100 bases while still counting something as "the same", then you can get almost any percentage you want. That's why I said "sort of" above. I could link to some paper where they give some number, but that wouldn't be terribly informative. I could point to 3 more which give different numbers for the same thing because it's all about where you set the cutoff points when deciding if something counts as the same. | {
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35,259 | I recently came across a video on YouTube claiming to present evidence that Hillary Clinton faked a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina on 9/15/2016. The video presents two major pieces of evidence: You cannot see Hillary Clinton walking on the phones held up by people recording the rally. At the end of the rally, Hillary waves first to the crowed ahead of her, and then behind her where there is just a large flag On closer examination of the original video of the rally, I noticed that there were some people behind her, just below the platform and cropped out in the video claiming the rally was faked. However, this still does not explain to me why she points so high after waving, considering the small crowd was below her stage. This also does not explain the videos captured on the camera phones. Obviously, I believe the video claiming the event was faked to be a hoax. However, I am having trouble explaining the evidence they present. | Here is a video that goes into details very thoroughly, and answers your question perfectly, because it goes into detail of the actual physics behind why the video of the rally and why it looks the way it does. To summarize, it has to do with how cameras work, especially the zoom feature. In a nutshell, the news cameras that were at the other side of the gymnasium were elevated and had to zoom in extremely far, in order to capture Hillary and have her take up most of the screen (requiring narrow lenses), this results in distortion for everything in the background. Because of the very narrow lenses used in the news cameras, compared to the very wide-angled lenses in the phones of the people in the video, a different image is created by the phones and the news cameras. What you see in the phones of the crowd is what you would see if you were standing right beside them. Also in the video you will see videos and pictures taken from other perspectives, which look "natural": | {
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35,288 | Donald Trump claimed in the presidential debates (September 26th 2016) that he had always been against the Iraq war. Most others claim he supported it. Is there documentary evidence of him expressing support for the war in Iraq? | Factcheck.org covers this: "Donald Trump and the Iraq War", FactCheck.Org On September 11, 2002: Howard Stern asks Trump if he supports invading Iraq. Trump answers hesitantly. “Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish it was, I wish the first time it was done correctly.” Whether that is "support" is a semantic argument, so I just present the facts about what he said. Factcheck.org couldn't find any more expressions of support for the war, and said: Trump expressed concerns about the cost of the war soon after it started. If Trump did support the war, he turned on it quickly. | {
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35,307 | During the first Trump-Clinton presidential debate, Clinton said: He called this woman "Miss Piggy." Then he called her "Miss
Housekeeping," because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado. Trump responded by asking "Where did you find this?", repeating the question three times. However, I'm not aware that Trump made any real attempts to debunk the claim. I've tried searching for when and where Trump said this, but I couldn't find where it's supposed to have originated from. | Machado made the same claims in an interview with Inside Edition in May 2016 : Machado, who claims she actually gained closer to 15 pounds, told IE
she felt publicly shamed. She said he called her “Miss Piggy." It made
her feel “so fat” that it made her “very depressed," she said. The Huffington Post reports Trump's other insult was featured in the same program: Machado said Trump also made fun of her English language skills and called her “Miss Housekeeping” in an apparent jab at her Venezuelan
accent. To me, this interview looks to be a possible (and likely) source for Clinton's claims. Sure, her story was already out there, but both of the terms Clinton cited appear in this interview, and the interview seems to have been a follow-up of sorts to a NYTimes piece about Trump's insults towards women. Surely this was added to the opposition research. I doubt video evidence of Trump's actually calling her these terms exists, but they certainly don't seem out of character for him. | {
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35,513 | While referring to the the Podesta emails which were leaked by WikiLeaks this week, CNN's Chris Cuomo said on live TV: Also interesting is, remember: It's illegal to possess these stolen
documents. It's different for the media, so everything you learn about
this, you're learning from us. And in full disclosure, let's take a
look at what is in there and what it means. Here's a video of this quote. Here's the full clip. This question is about Cuomo's claim that it's illegal for non-media personnel to possess the Podesta emails. By logic, this would also imply that it's illegal to read them, as it's impossible (or at least very difficult) to read them without possessing them. (If you're browsing WikiLeaks' website, the documents get stored in the memory of your computer, which means that you possess them, if only temporarily.) Of course, it's technically possible to read without possessing and we could argue the finer points of that. Regardless of that, though, the fact that Cuomo goes on to say "So, everything you learn about this, you're learning from us" implies that normal people are not allowed to read the documents directly. Since CNN is based in the US, I'm asking this question with regards to United States law. Is it illegal to possess or read the Podesta emails? | In current U.S. case law, it might be illegal to publish stolen documentary material, but prior case law rules it legal if the material is "of great public concern" , which I think most media would claim the Podesta emails to be. Obviously it is legal to possess what you publish, so it is legal to read it as well. If the Podesta material contains extensive creative work such as books or music, there could be copyright issues involved with downloading those specific files, but as per the previous source, "e-mails would be seen as predominantly factual rather than highly creative." Cuomo has probably confused the role of the media in discussing the unclassified Podesta emails with the role of the media in discussing the classified State Department WikiLeaks material, which is illegal for U.S. government employees to read, and in a gray area with regards to those seeking employment with a U.S. agency. | {
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