As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. This chart provides a really good overview of the hideously complex stimulus package without making you read a small book.
Can a torn-up application for a credit card still be used? Does posing the question betray the answer?
Thankfully, this is clearly an excess of easy credit from back in the days when banks didn’t know better.
I should note, though, that if credit card applications or banks in general insisted that you call from a phone traceable to a permanent residence, I would be unable to get credit despite my single place of residence and continuous gainful employment for over a year.
The barbarians running rampant in the Ethereal Land are known for their sometimes-violent dislike of academic mathematics. The present author appreciates this and recognizes that this article on statistical probability may cause pain and suffering if read. Nevertheless the reading of the same is recommended, because it is making an important point: that statistics are useless if you are not measuring precisely the right event.
To generalize, the fallacy presented here is the assumption of causual relationship between physically unrelated events. These hypothetical word-problem test questions could have been constructed in a way to actually make the probabilities compound, but they weren’t; the facts as stated do not warrant the assumption of relationship that the “right” answer supposes.
To apply, when people make unwarranted assumptions of relationship, they can then make further proofs using statistics (or logic) and then champion it as scientifically proved and incontrovertible. But statistics and logic are processes; they require inputs; all of the inputs affect the outcomes; and not all of the inputs are always confessed openly. Just because someone uses more complicated science than you understand does not mean that they used the science correctly or are right in their results.
A medical theory that has led to dozens of women being jailed for shaking their babies has been called into question by new scientific research.
Child abuse claims often cause the normal standards of evidence to be thrown out the window. There is no doubt that some babies have been shaken so hard that it caused them harm. But as this article points out, some of the symptoms that have been used to prove harm can come from natural child birth. I don’t doubt that at least some people who have been convicted of shaking their babies were innocent.
FEARS are mounting that Ireland could default on its soaring national debt pile, amid continuing worries about its troubled banking sector.
It is hard to tell, but I think an eastern European country will beat Ireland to the punch as far as defaulting goes. Still, it will be forever to Ireland’s shame if they default before one of the Mediterranean countries do. They are supposed to be the ones that are poorly governed.
But bird flu, it seems, is back. Last month’s five deaths — one of the highest tallies of bird-flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month — were in locations as far removed from one another as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east. “From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable, as is the wide geographic spread,” says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization’s representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated to spread easily between humans, he says. But while such a nightmare scenario, which could set off a global flu pandemic that could kill millions, has shown no signs of being an immediate threat, serious concerns remain. “The fact that this is the highest number for a single month in China reminds us that the virus is entrenched and circulating in the environment,” Troedsson says. (See pictures of the resurgence of bird flu.)
On Feb. 10, authorities in the far-Western region of Xinjiang culled more than 13,000 chickens in the city of Hotan after 519 died in a bird-flu outbreak. But until this week, China had reported no widespread outbreaks of the virus among bird populations, prompting concerns among some public-health experts that mainland health and veterinary authorities could be missing — or even concealing — the spread of the disease through poultry and wild birds.
(h/t Scott Mcpherson who is rather worried about the whole thing)
A federal aviation official says the plane that crashed into a house near Buffalo, killing 50 people, was on autopilot when it went down, a possible violation of airline policy in icy weather.
For those that don’t already know why being on autopilot is a very bad thing, watch this video.
This week’s poem of the week is Phyllis McGinley’s “Intimations of Mortality: On being told by the dentist that this will be over soon”.
It was rather hard to find a half way decent presentation of the poem on the internet. In spite of being a modern female poet (a trendy thing in this day and age) who hit the big time in her day and age, almost nothing Phyllis McGinley wrote can be found online. We can’t but help think that this is because she came down on the wrong side of the cultural wars that her generation fought.
Granted, she will never rank among the greatest poets of all time. But there are a lot worse poets than her who are more widely known simply because they had the right beliefs.
This week’s rant of the week is the Audacity of Doing Nothing by Philip Greenspun.
The scale of angry comments that he has received is quite amusing. People refused to believe that pain can be good. And they refuse to believe that there is not some magical pill out there that will make the pain go away.