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fredup

-3 karma · joined May 15, 2014

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fredup··on U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
It is certainly an exaggeration. A more accurate number could be 7-9 years.

Israel uses 1016 million m^3 of water [1] or about 800,000 acre feet on agriculture per year. While studies have shown that California as a whole could save 5.6-6.6 million acre feet per year while maintaining productivity and the same acreage farmed [2]. It is a bit more difficult to restrict the number to the central valley, but the central valley accounts for more than half of California's total agriculture [3], so we can just use the statewide number.

The entire state's annual agricultural water usage is less than 45 million acre feet [2]. Even if Israel had all of this water they would max out at under 60 years.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in... 2. http://www.nrdc.org/water/files/ca-water-supply-solutions-ag..., p.2 3. http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publ... p.22-38

fredup··on Declassified photos from Tinian Island as the B-29 “Enola Gay” was being loaded
I'm not trying to make a point. I just got the impression that upwards of 200,000 people were incinerated in the bombings, but I was skeptical of that number. I investigated a bit and just wanted to leave a note that the number was incorrect.

I don't think 120,000 lives qualifies as splitting hairs. I thought I was delivering good news, but judging by my karma, it has not been well received.

fredup··on Declassified photos from Tinian Island as the B-29 “Enola Gay” was being loaded
You wrote that "they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians", which implies that at least 200,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated in the bombings. The 129,000–246,000+ killed figure you cite covers 2-4 months after the bombings. I am confident that no one was incinerated 2 or more months after the bombing.

Wikipedia gives an immediate death toll of 70,000–80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were soldiers for Hiroshima and 22,000-75,000 people for Nagasaki. This is far from hundreds of thousands of incinerated civilians.

fredup··on Declassified photos from Tinian Island as the B-29 “Enola Gay” was being loaded
> (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians).

This is inaccurate. Much fewer than 200,000 people were killed immediately (totaled across both bombings), including both incinerated and not, civilian and not.

fredup··on Ticketmaster Ticketfast Barcode Format
You almost certainly aren't going to see the show.

In theory it should be simple to identify who you are in conflict with if the ticket is not general admission. They would just have to send an usher to the seat. However, it is difficult to determine who defrauded who without a whole lot of investigation.

You would have to establish the entire chain of custody for both of the tickets. Three possibilities with different culprits are: the original purchaser double sold the tickets, a third-party got the barcode and sold a fraudulent ticket to whoever is in your seat, or the person in your seat made the fraudulent ticket themselves.

fredup··on Game Theory Is Counterintuitive
I think you need to do the algebra. You can't make a blanket statement like you want to.

You have taken things to an absurd extreme and gotten one result, I can "relax the assumptions" to the opposite extreme and get the opposite result:

Suppose the goalie only blocks 10% of shots when guessing correctly, and the kicker makes 80% to the strong side and 50% to the weak side. In this model it is obviously better to always kick to the strong side.

fredup··on Game Theory Is Counterintuitive
"Soccer players should kick toward their weaker side more frequently than their stronger side."

I thought this was an interesting result, so I took a look at the source. It turns out it is a toy problem where the goalie always stops the penelty kick if she guesses right and the kicker always makes the goal if kicking to one side, and misses with some probability when kicking to the other.

This is clearly a toy problem that you can't draw any sort of real world soccer advice from.

fredup··on How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark
Journalists have been, and continue to be the gatekeepers. In the days before Wikipedia it is easy to imagine a journalist visiting Brazil and talking with a friend in the local coffee shop about the raccoon-like creatures he just saw when the local crank slaps him on the back and tells him, "round here we call 'em Brazilian aardvarks." If the journalist believes him, you would see it in print.

Now, with Wikipedia it is easier for the crank to get to the journalist. If the journalists had fact checked and never reprinted the "fact", it would have eventually been removed from the Wikipedia entry.

fredup··on Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)
In trying to "fix" this problem have TVT potentially made themselves liable for all the content posted there? They now assert "ownership" of all the content. In order to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act courts have held that they must not be "information content providers"[1], but TVT asserts full rights over all the content, including relicensing and use without attribution.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...