I'd gotten the impression that it was a bit larger than that, though I really can't say why. The film version of the Quidditch World Cup showed tens of thousands of people. One can assume that it's practically everybody, so perhaps your guess is low by an order of magnitude, but it's still roughly in the ballpark. A few other numbers I ran also put it roughly in that area.

The thing with Snape's potions research is that he never showed his work. He scribbled notes about improvements, but never seemed to establish any kind of theoretical basis for it. That seemed on par with the rest of wizarding practice.

That kind of makes sense for her notion of a pre-scientific world that shut itself from society about the time of the Enlightenment, due to oppression. But they never really seemed to feel the loss, and I think that they were missing something important. The Wizarding and Muggle worlds had a lot to offer each other.

The graph includes the cite, so you can check up on their methodology. The sample size is 5,000, which is actually pretty good for a sample like this. (1,000 is more common, with a 3% margin of error, though since they're breaking it down into three roughly equal subgroups they'd need a larger sample.)

In this case, these are bank checks. They happen to be fake, but it takes a while to determine that, and most sellers don't realize that.

Most commonly they were simply routed around.

OK, maybe I made that sound more simple than it was. When every route is covered by 'bandits' of one stripe or another, 'just route around' is easier said than done... but, what happened is that the bandits started competing.

There were two routes that could be taken to market, each harbored a different gang. One year, gang A simply took everything that tried to pass. Big gains for them that year. The same year, gang B was a little more restrained, and only 'taxed' caravans but let them go on through after coughing up a fee. Their gains were smaller that year, but the next year, caravans came through their territory and contributd to their coffers again. Gang A's territory received no merchants. Gang A got no gain from this, and would see no gains from it again for a decade or more, until they were finally driven out by a new gang which behaved differently. Gang B, on the other hand, gained more than the first year, as they now had all the traffic rather than half of it passing through their territory.

And thus was born taxation. Eco-friendly theft, sustainable banditry. The first guy to try it was no doubt considered an imbecile by his peers, at first, but it soon proved to be an advantage that only increases over time and the taxers not only held on but soon enough put the old-school bandits at a permanent disadvantage that continues to this day.

And so over time the taxer chiefs became Barons, and the Baronies were organized into Kingdoms, and the Kingdoms into Empires, and the the Empires fell apart into Baronies and Kingdoms again, a cycle that in some older areas has probably repeated a dozen times, and then after much time all of these groups were swept away by the new secular religion of nationalism, and Nations were invented to replace them. But the scam remains essentially the same regardless of the time and place.

How would that translate today? Well if we could get a clear corridor through the country of jurisdictions that repudiated this and other forms of robbery clearly, a lot of travellers would be willing to detour significantly in order to remain within that corridor. The jurisdictions that continued the robbery would, like gang A, effectively be cut out of the game, and even though travellers would make it through with most of their belongings each one would certainly drop a few dollars in taxes on these jurisdictions as they passed through. But getting the ball rolling, getting the initial free corridor on line, I got nothing practical on that at the moment, I am sorry.

It probably was not easy to do that the first time around either though. We may have existed as a species for a couple of hundred thousand years before we actually progressed to the point where travelling more than a few miles did not involve a likelihood of mortal combat to begin with.

We wouldn't care about science if it weren't "useful" in the sense of providing value. It would be just another random bit of epistemology.

Which isn't to say that all science has to provide value immediately. We never know what's going to come in handy. Some sciences can go centuries without ever turning over anything of interest to the layman. Many are "useful" only in the sense of giving us some sort of feeling of understanding.

But that feeling of understanding is fake if you never actually apply tests to it. The evo psych stuff is a good example of that. It propagates as myth rather than as science: poorly-performed tests result in poorly-stated and overgeneralized rules that mislead rather than inform. There is, at core, something to that science, but the popular conception of it (as, sadly, with many sciences) is more wrong than right.

"The global warming people haven't shown us the value of anything, so far as I can see."

That's because your definition of value and theirs are different.

Their work has inestimable value - both in terms of promoting their own careers, and their own political and pseudoreligious goals.

The fact that it does not serve YOUR goals is not really their concern, now is it?

They don't need it. They want it. Every dollar they save in taxes is a dollar that their shareholders (including Musk) get to pocket. And the state gives it to them willingly, in the hopes that it brings jobs to the area. Tesla really is a "jobs creator", unlike a lot of other self-proclaimed masters of the universe, and so the tax breaks really are win-win. It's not zero-sum because value is being added: raw materials come in and batteries go out.

That's what business looks like when it's working, and states compete to be in on it. Nevada won, this time, and one can hope that they're not being ripped off in the process. A lot of other companies have been lured with tax breaks in return for promises of economic value that they fail to provide. Often, it was obvious that they'd fail to provide it, but legislatures and governors can be pretty gullible when it comes to "jobs jobs jobs". I've got high hopes for Tesla, since Musk actually is interested in making money by making stuff, but we won't know until it's underway.

The scam in this case involves more expensive items, in the $1,500 range. (The limit is $1,000 rather than $100; I assume that's just a typo, but it's still above that range.)

And apparently the scammers are also on that: they're starting to work up fake money orders as well. I gather that's used more on stores than on Craigslist buyers, where the store can't validate the money order before they hand over the merchandise, but I assume it'll develop.

That is correct. This is a legalized armed-robbery ring preying on US travelers. That, folks, is how low this country has fallen.

Yeah, like that's gonna help. If they had the faintest bit of intellectual curiosity they would have found it themselves. They're just going to continue to believe what Fox News tells them. I don't really know how they live with the cognitive dissonance, but apparently they manage it very well. Every piece of data that contradicts them is somehow tainted, so they can live in their own perfectly smooth ball, untouched by any outside information.

That "you can't see the data" lie has been going around for years, and it's so trivially refuted with even the slightest effort. I applaud you for tilting at that windmill, but it is still a windmill.

Unfortunately, it was a very poor kind of science, and that's one of the things that really irked me about the series. The potions (chemistry) class was especially bad. They were taught things by rote, and they learned only that if they didn't follow the procedure then they'd get bad results. Often, interestingly bad, but they thought of them as simply "the wrong thing" to be discarded rather than investigated.

The wizards looked down on "muggles", but they had an awful lot to learn from them. Applying muggle science would have made them vastly better wizards than they were. And they could have done a lot of good for the muggle world as well: people suffered and died needlessly.

I know, it's just a kid's book, and I'm putting too much on it. For drama, Rowling separated the magical and non-magical worlds in a rather unlikely way, and you were supposed to just chalk it up to suspension of disbelief. But I had kinda hoped that the series would go in a direction that realized this. I think it would have made better drama.

The problem, as I see it, is with the uselessness of such studies.

The whole point of falsifiability is that for a scientific finding to be "useful", it has to have the potential to be wrong. You have to be able to say, "If this theory isn't true, then this thing that I want to do will fail." If it couldn't fail, then nothing you do would change whether it were true or not. It's only the possibility of failure that makes success meaningful.

So when I read that these studies aren't repeated, what I hear is that the studies aren't useful. If they were useful, then people would have built on them to make more elaborate structures, and when those structures failed, we'd know that one of the underlying theories was wrong.

Evo psych is rife with conclusions that are popularly held but not actually useful. The myths persist, but never feed into more science. Unfortunately, an awful lot of people who are nominally scientists buy into them, which means that it could be argued that they just plain aren't practicing science.

Wow. That is an extremely disturbing graph.

This isn't your usual 419 scam. They're not offering millions of dollars to suckers.

What they're doing is buying stuff from Craigslist sellers with bogus checks that look awfully real. There's another step where they send a too-large check and ask for a partial refund. The checks are so good that they clear, and the fraud isn't discovered until weeks later, at which time your bank yanks the money back.

There's still hints of the usual 419 stuff in there, but you don't have to be either gullible or greedy. You simply have to misunderstand the idiotic system under which checks are processed, which is most of us. The idea that a certified check could fail, a month after you deposited it, is baffling to the majority of people who think of a certified check as practically good as cash.

The checking system is so screwed up that most sellers need to treat all checks with suspicion. But credit cards are expensive to process, and Paypal... is Paypal.

You might enjoy reading http://www.ast.leeds.ac.uk/Aug... for an introduction. But to answer your question, the incoming cosmic rays usually (always?) begin interacting in the upper atmosphere, I don't know the cross sections particularly well, but it is possible that only very rarely do they make it to the ground. What we detect down here is the cascade of particles - like an avalanche - initiated in the upper atmosphere. The resultant cascade can affect detectors across hundreds of square kms.