Homeopathy is not just alternative, it's downright crazy. I didn't realize how weird it is until I read the wikipedia article on it during an argument. Take a look at some of this genuine 19th century wackiness!
801 karma · joined January 10, 2011
"On average, [Women who discovered a lump] took 8.7 weeks to inform the family and 17.2 weeks to first physician visit. Fifty three percent delayed seeking medical advice. Common reasons were;
antecedent use of complimentary/alternative therapies (34%), lack of significance attached to the lump (23%), fear of surgery (22%), conflicting personal commitments (7%), fear of cancer (5%), and others (8%).
Twenty nine percent practiced CAM before visiting any physician.
Common methods used were
homeopathy (70%),
spiritual therapy (15%) and
Ayurvedic medicine (13%).
CAM use was associated with delay in seeking medical advice (OR: 5.6; 95% CI: 2.3, 13.3) and presentation at an advanced stage of disease (OR: 2.2; 95% CI: 1.01, 4.6). Patients who delayed seeking medical advice more often had positive axillary nodes and stage III/IV disease. Breast cancer patients in Pakistan frequently (53%) delay seeking medical advice. Antecedent practice of CAM is widespread and a common underlying reason. The delay results in significant worsening of the disease process."
tl;dr - people delay medical treatment, and part of the reason is that they try alternative treatments, and only go to the doctor when the problem gets worse. This worsens the progress of their disease.
This is why alternative medicine is bad. Because it kills people. Imagine how mad you would be if someone you loved delayed treatment for a real problem because they were following advice to try alternative, "natural" medicine they'd received from a friend.
We are responsible for the outcomes of what we do, not just the sentiment behind it.
N-back for doing n-back (it's the one with an orange goldfish icon)
Check out crazystone's stats: http://kgs.gosquares.net/index.rhtml.en?id=CrazyStone&y=...
72% win percentage as a 4d.
It makes for a really tough game, cause if you do get ahead, you have to face a series of attacks which almost but don't quite work, and if you mess up any of them it's over.
The US still has laws requiring businesses to put price tags on products to prevent price discrimination.
This doesn't prove what he thinks it proves.
This is the exact same argument: There is more variation within male heights than there is between the male & female average height. This is true - the difference between the average male height and female height is only a few inches, and it is quite a bit smaller than an interval which covers 90% of men. But, this has nothing to do with his point. The height difference between males and females is still relevant to us, even though the in-group variation for males & females is also high.
tl;dr: male height variation is much bigger than the gap between male & female heights, yet we still think the male-female height gap is a real & meaningful phenomenon.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_diversity:_Lewont...
I've seen a nice version of this in linux somewhere - when you push F2 two boxes come up and the cursor is positioned in the one to the left of the dot but you can move across to it easily.
EDIT: Ah, this is available in windows 7 too. Nice, finally.
Obviously this site is a huge target for government organizations who have a lot of secrets - whenever a service like this springs up I bet the first order of business is for someone to install a permanent tap on it, and a way to block the emails if need be.
from the article: >In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.
The right to know the specific charges lodged
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Amendment_to_the_United_S...
"A defendant has the right to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation against him. Therefore, an indictment must allege all the ingredients of the crime to such a degree of precision that it would allow the accused to assert double jeopardy if the same charges are brought up in subsequent prosecution.[8] The Supreme Court held in United States v. Carll, 105 U.S. 611 (1881) that “in an indictment ... it is not sufficient to set forth the offense in the words of the statute, unless those words of themselves fully, directly, and expressly, without any uncertainty or ambiguity, set forth all the elements necessary to constitute the offense intended to be punished.” Vague wording, even if taken directly from a statute, does not suffice."
So the charges have to be specific enough. In this case, they are super general.
Pretty much all the other parts of justice are denied by google too (except the right to a speedy trial). These include the right to a public trial, an impartial jury, legal representation, the right to call witnesses in one's own favor, and the right to confront one's accusers.
Obviously Google is not required to give anyone these rights. But not even giving a semblance of them puts google on the evil side.
These rights aren't just made up for no reason - in the past people realized that just trusting leaders to do the right thing doesn't work, and gets corrupted. To stop this corruption they came up with ideas for how to make things more fair, and built systems around this. In some cases they even died to get these rights. Just trusting google to do the right thing is a scary, primitive way to deal with their power - and google seems to be wilfully ignoring that progress.
this actually applies everywhere you are showing group merged data related to a particular person.
i.e. your height, your friends heights, and global heights
imagine a news article that has interactive graphs that query g+ or fb and use the info to put a friends layer next to the global info.
But that allows automated solutions. As far as I know, all of the best solvers there use a greedy algo, although there are some cases where you can prune massively by using logical deductions as well.
"We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us."
"We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."
from "A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting."
source: [http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html]
and evolutionarily, we dodged lots of bullets.
Imagine if we used the alligator's method of sex determination - based on temperature of the egg at fertilization. Even in ancient times kings would have been able to grow armies.
Imagine if our skull wasn't as thick and primitive humans had institutionalized personality altering brain surgery, and our world were descended from them.
Have you thought about what would happen if china lowered the marriage age for women? 50 million+ new women in the marriage market. Problem delayed.
There's already age disparity in chinese marriages. The idea that millions of young men simply won't get married is absurd. They'll just wait longer, or expand the group of women they're willing to marry.
And I assume you're joking about chinese men marrying african women.
So basically, gmail doesn't work in china anymore.
This despite the fact that you are not legally allowed to own property in the first place - and that the average lifespan of a building is 20 years.