http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

as a resident of Newton, MA, I'm sad to share my home town with Pear (typical of fly by night companies, there is no easy to find physical address - not even a mailing address on the website

you do know that the propellor at the front of the airplane is just a fan to keep the pilot cool ? I mean, when the fan stops turning, the pilot invariably breaks out in sweat.. there are 3 good things for a pilot: a good landing, a good orgasm, and a good bowel movement A night landing on a carrier is one of those rare moments in life where you get all 3 at thesame time

abstract is here http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/307/7/685.abstract
story itself, paid for probably with tax dollars is paywalled
The abstract says that yes, at 3 days, amoxicillin and placebo similar, but there was a diff at day 6
Also, total number of patients studied is quite small - Typical Bull**** "MD" science - mds just don't know how to do science, and they constantly flood the literature with these worthless studies, so the net result is a negative, cause you have towaste brain power to not pay attention

However, what is of more interest is the hard to read format of the abstract, which is a deliberate format imposed by the medical journals; the use of statistics in parenthesis, eg quote, mean difference between groups of 0.03 [95% CI, 0.12 to 0.19]) and on day 10 (mean difference between groups of 0.01 [95% CI, 0.13 to 0.15]), but differed at day 7 favoring amoxicillin (mean difference between groups of 0.19 [95% CI, 0.024 to 0.35]).
makes the abstract almost impossible to read; this practice has been criticized, but the idiot mds of course don't listen.
Not only that, with the number of people in the study, if you know naything of the history of medical studies, to give CIs is just BS, crazy statistics for no reason other then to tget a publication or satisfy the wierdness of hte editors; everything that is wrong with academic medicine is in this abstract
sorry for rant

At first, I thought I'd say something smart about how "good" predictors change over time as people learn to game the system then I read the original piece; is there any serious there there ? Is slashdot really posting random musings based on sample sizes of ~ 1 as something worth thinking about ? maybe thats why I find myself spending less time on /. then I used to

I wonder if you have hit on a good business - design consultant when someone builds a new store...

About two years ago, our coffee pot, a nice simple goodlooking Braun that didn't take up a lot of counterspace, broke. here in Boston, one of hte shopping meccas is Route 9 in Framingham - I went out there, and looked at Wal mart, and Target and Sears, and a couple of other stores. The ALL had the same stuff, and although they all had 15 or so different coffee makers on teh shelf, there was no real variety Just 2 or 3 basic models, with lots and lots of minor differences. Vacumn cleaners are even worse; Dyson is like a giant setback to civilization: why on earth would you buy a vacumn with a plastic thing you have to empty, spreading dust everywhere, as opposed to a dispo bag ? You would have to be crazy to buy a vacumn cleaner that doesn't have a throw away bag for the dirt Not to mention all those stupid plastic tailfin equivalents. and in all those stores, nothing like the basic 100 upright with a dispo bag (true story: in the 80s, by upright broke; on going to the store, I was told that Vacumns generate vacumn with a plastic fan blade; in the american models, teh fan is before the filter, so it can shatter if a penny gets sucked up; in the Japanese models, the fan is behind the filter. In my particular model changing the 5$ plastic fan blade was very nearly impossible, due to the snap together construction method) (end of rant)

so we have to be careful of what we choose for kids I would argue that psychology is more important then programming - happyness, family, sex, friends, these things are more important then programming

re read Kahnemanns thinking fast and slow; people have a built in bias to be overly optimistic if the answers are honest, this is probalby why so many think next year will be better - because our brains (system I in kahnemanns language) is hardwired to excessive optimisim, that is, optimism that based on any data basis, is more then you would think probable

maybe this school board guy isn't as successful as he thinks he is overconfidence is a major theme in psychology (I've just been reading D Kahneman's thinking fast and slow, not as good as the reviews say it is, but Kahneman talks at length about overconfidence, and how very successful people (financial advisors, pundits) don't know much

that countermeasures may, or may not, be cheaper. 1) Star wars was originally based, (and may still be) on detection of the short "boost phase" of an ICBM, when the ICBMs rocket is firing off and is, to use a colloquial term, bright as the effin sun.
turns out, you make the rocket a little faster, add some chaff, you can slow down the time the rocket motor is hot, and make detection harder; it is cheaper to do this then upgrade the starwars; advantage not to us
2) during the 1st Iraq war, the US tank, the M1 abrams battle tank, long derided as an example of super $$ pentagon engineering that was to complex to work in the field, toasted the soviet made Iraqi tanks for a very simple reason: the M1 could shoot a shell further then the Iraqi tanks; all the US had to do was sit their tanks at the right distance; advantage US.
3) Henry Kissinger, the mass murderer of the Vietnamese, Chileans and Kurds, remarked after leaving office that every technological advance made by the US was a waste of time, as the Soviets (this is cold war stuff) quickly matched it; MIRVing of ICBMs was a specific example
4) We know from Postol and others that the pentagon has greatly *cough* exagerated the effectiveness of anti missle missles , esp those used by the israelis against scuds in the 1st iraq war; how do we know that the pentagons claims about the bunker buster are not just total exageration

The debates, an hour or two in total length, are the only time the citizenry get to question the candidates directly Yet the time alloted to people to ask questions is so short, no intelligent question can be asked. further, the audience is discouraged from reacting, and the questioner cannot interrupt when the candidates don't answer the question I would like to see one 3-4 hour debate per week, where it is almost open mike - people get three minutes to talk, and they can harangue the candidates, interrupt them, ask serious questions etc would need tape delay to remove the ***k words, and editing to take out the tedium, but we might get something worth watching

but that was all they had at the store; I was perfectly happy with XP; my hardware died and I didn't see anything I like with XP on it, so got one with windows 7 IMO, and in the opinion of everyone here at my office, XP was MS's best OS; most of us like it a lot more then windows 7 ymmv

We measure reasonable not by comparision to a std, but by comparision to the extremes
So, if someone like R Paul or H Cain takes a super extreme posistion, suddenly previously "extreme" things become "reasonable'

This tactic has worked well for the right in the last 40 years, and instead of arguing with Paul supporters - there is no point, they add 2+2 and get the color of the sound of thunder- I think people should advocate antiPaul posistions, to ensure that the center doesn't change
So, my proposal is that all corporations are required to remit 10% of gross revenue to the gov't
All corporations, and officers, are banned from any political activity
All corporations are required to pay their senior staff no more then 15X the min wage, or no more then 15X the wage of the lowest paid employee or subcontractor or part timer, or, for companies that try to avoid this rule by outsourcing stuff, no more the 15X min wage at the contractor Corporations are not people; they may not publish any information, in any form, not directly related to their sales

over the years, I've downloaded open/libre 3 or 4 times, and each time I come to the same conclusion: it just isn't anywhere near as good as MS office; fewer features, not as well organized, etc. and I just checked, on ebay you can get a office 2003 suite for ~40$ +S&H, which considering you will use it every day for a year or two, ain't much. I admit, sometimes my docs have some formatting, like TOC, TOF, cross refs, paragraph styles, etc, and I do a lot of graphs in excel, so maybe libre just isn't right for me, but I just don't get it. IT just doesn't have the features. am I missing something ?