"read up" funny. Is there some group of formal texts on the subject you'd like to reference? In my experience people use the term to refer to series of events for which one initial event necessitates the others (or makes near certain). The fallacy exists due to the assumption of the necessity of the chain of events. So the poster appears to be saying if you allow government to restrict any aspect of your life due to safety then it's near certain that it will restrict some specific other aspect of your life will be restricted on the grounds of safety. This is untrue by virtue of there existing specific aspects of my life which remain unrestricted or unrestricted on the basis of safety..

LD50 for ascorbic acid in rats: 11900 mg/kg That's an insane amount and impossible to ingest for the vast majority of folk.

No theoretical argument can be evidence for the reality or unreality of phenomena, no matter how well-formed.

Well i) That's a theoretical argument making an imposition on reality and ii) your wrong as I hear that you can't write a computer program which deterministically can predict if an arbitrary computer program will halt.

Actually yeah there is an exceptional amount of correlation between what you eat and a few variables about you and your resulting weight. BMR can be reasonably reliably derived from age, sex, weight, height. If people really were so radically different you couldn't actually create a regression from the data (or the coefficients would be small or align by chance). There are lots of things which can affect weight gain but they are all needfully small compared to your caloric input vs your BMR + the energy you use day-to-day.

I always wonder why people say this. It's unclear exactly how much of what Apple produced was Jobs's idea and how much help he had. We probably will never know since it's currently in Apple's best interest to keep the myth alive.

Think so? I think when a prophet dies is a sign that the wars are on their way

Yes, Dijkstra's old saw "Computer Science has as much to do with computers as Astronomy has to do with Telescopes" and it's true to a point but there are some fine points worth mentioning. Because CS isn't strictly about coding a CS student should have written code in multiple languages. This is a big deal if you work in a heterogeneous environment. Far, far, far too many "coders" have exactly one thing on their resume: Java. I've seen a number of these people attempt to work in a different environment and fail. At first I found this inexplicable: Was it really so hard for someone to see the commonalities between one programming language and another? Apparently. Another point is because CS isn't strictly about writing code you're going to see people who *plan* their development a little more. Almost any primate can write code but not just anyone knows how to tackle a large project or see how not to code themselves into a corner.

IMHO hire a "coder" if you need specific language expertise or just someone to churn out code. If you need someone who is more broadly skilled then you might do better with a CS grad (of course there's an inherent problem that CS is often used synonymously with "software developer" even in educational programs). Finding someone who has a passion for development is always a plus regardless of their education.

...and make it a useful system for POS. 10 min transaction clearing might be barely tolerable for internet transactions but I'm not interested in waiting for 10 min for my groceries payment to clear. Also 10 min is not necessarily the maximal amount of time as the block chain grows the length of time to get confirmation increases. You can do it in less time by forgoing confirmation but then you lose one of it's primary benefits.

Please. just. die. Just go, get a hammer and hit yourself repeatedly until you stop moving.

Firstly you confuse the point of analyzing cryptography - it's not that X *can* be weaker than *y* - that could be true for just about any two systems. Rather it's a question of the amount of entropy the system delivers. Yes sentences will follow a Markov chain where each word narrows the potential pool of the next word however there is a rather large number of words that can initialize the system *STILL* makes it better than 8 character passwords. However that's ONLY if the person uses a sentence. If it's just a string of five nouns then you're SOL.

Secondly you seem to misunderstand that targeted attacks might narrow the amount of entropy - it also narrows the number of people who can even attempt the attack.

No, not really. It is just a rather impractical way of making a serial number that can't be forged.

Same argument for Mainframes. IBM would fly people out to us when there was an emergency. All this says is that when you can afford it the right hand side of the curve responds very well. Which means you can afford to hire know-nothings (no offense) for your day-to-day work.

I don't think this model fits most businesses. In which case Linux might make more sense. A bright person who works in a Linux environment has far more power to act in an emergency than someone in a Windows environment.

w.r.t Contracts, I've never seen an exclusive one like the OP mentions but I do notice that MS tends to bundle stuff in their site licenses. Our Sharepoint project was begat due to the fact that it was "free".

Now we just make BT look like skype traffic.

True but the alternative is to seek out some kind of bias which people will pretend is meaningful but very likely isn't. In fact it is significantly more likely that the coin toss would reflect the will of the people than some slim majority vote.

It's funny sometimes it seems no matter the principle there's someone out there who wants to vastly inflate it's importance. Tyranny of the normal distribution I guess. You very rarely ever attempt to determine a value from a graph (Such as in the OECD science example). For example if I want to know the dose of anesthetic a patient gets I don't trot out a graph and take a ruler and do some back of the envelope calculation. With regard to your ideas about fraudulent information in graphs. This is exactly what these exams are teaching people. That graphs are a trusted source of information. IMHO if you taught students the exact opposite lesson - graphs are generally lies - you would probably end up no worse off and possibly better.

Interestingly as a maths student nobody ever needed to teach us to "read" graphs. Make graphs yes, understand how to annotate experimental error, sure but there's no need to do mindless exercises all concerned with deriving data from a graph which is probably beyond it's accuracy anyway.

Given that the article is somewhat focused on the ScienceDebate questions and with the notable exception of the one about climate change. The third option I'd see is that those questions are pretty unfocused and in one case - education a little deceptive.

For example are they referring to the OECD exam results? I downloaded and wrote that math exam and I found it to be weird. In some cases I'm not sure the questions were even about math and very often not the kind of math you use in science (there were huge numbers of graph reading questions). Not to mention that the purveyors of the exam themselves only recognized three statistically significant groups (those working at, beneath and above the median). Not to mention when people start throwing ordinal values around it often makes me wonder how much they actually know about science or math. Ordinals provide zero information about the distance between ranks which is far more important than being 1st or 17th.

Thanks for the link to the current exam. I wrote the 58 question 2008 one in about an hour. This one seems harder and I agree it is oddly worded and while I'm not in a position to comment on what children are capable of. It seems at least plausible that it's obscure enough to be testing something other than the ability to solve mathematical problems.

That said, I think the idea of the article is one of bounding. i.e. If an adult can't do this then... or if an adult can be successful and not know a single question then... which is probably my greatest objection. I would expect that any person who does some degree of quantitative research to be able to pass this kind of test. Likewise I would expect someone with an undergraduate degree in science to be able to do most of these things. I also expect these people to be able to write an exam without having anxiety problems.

The underlying misunderstanding with the argument presented is that while it may be possible for person X to succeed while being terrible at math may in fact be true but that doesn't make it likely nor does it mean that school isn't supposed to prepare people for a wide variety of careers not just ones where they need to do more math than just make change.