It's probably not that meaningful, anyway. Somewhere around 20-40% of the info in these documents will turn out to be wrong or misleading in some critical way. Mostly, it'll just be a case of "name files", with info about different people with the same (or similar) names entered in the wrong place. People will learn pretty quickly to deny anything they don't like. Of course, others will believe whatever they want about you, especially if it was in some "secret" document. But they too will learn that the info about them is also full of errors. More importantly, your friends and relatives will learn the same thing.

I've yet to see any official document about me (including medical records) that didn't have some bizarre thing with unknown origin. The people who keep the records just respond with a grin and a comment starting with "Yeah ....".

Actually, my favorite example, which my wife loves telling other people, is one of those "not even wrong" things that a nurse wrote down after a routine exam, saying that I was 5'13" tall and weighted 135 pounds. I am in fact about six feet one inch, but 135 pounds would make me one of the scrawniest six-footers on the planet. She'd used one of those old-fashioned scales with sliding weights, and had forgotten that she'd slid over a third 50-pound weight. But I've since then seen several personal histories that include that 135-pound weight back then. Once such things get into the database, they're almost impossible to correct. This is especially true of medical records. This can be really annoying to those that've had a "false positive" diagnosis somewhere along the line. But such things are pretty good at teaching you how much you can trust the "official" data about other people.

(I sometimes wonder if official records in other "advanced" countries are as screwed up as they are here in the US. I'd guess that they probably are.)

Not really; according to the US Census Bureau, there are about 1800 Americans with my (first+last) name. And probably a whole bunch of them have the same middle name, which is also one of the top 10 men's names in the US. My parents didn't have much imagination when it came to baby names.

OTOH, my wife continues to use her birth name for most purposes (which is fine by me). She likes the fact that, as far as she can determine, she's the only living human with that name. (And it's not even some unpronounceable "foreign" sounding name. She also likes to point out to people that her name is a syntactically correct English sentence. She has even found archived newspaper images that have her name at the top of a story. ;-)

But anyway, most of us don't "have" our names in any meaningful sense. We're just one of many who are using the name for a few decades, until we drop out of the crowd that are using it.

In college, I had a friend who was a member of the Bill Smith Club, whose only membership criterion is that you be named (or married to someone named) Bill Smith (or William Smythe or Wilhelm Schmidt or anything else that maps onto the name).

Actually, the same could be said about every generation/cohort. Most of the population are usually the anti-thinking sort who contribute nothing much to our knowledge. The advances have always come from a tiny minority who are typically not much respected by their cohorts. There's a tiny minority of "millennials" who are involved in making the advances that most of us won't live to appreciate. They're not hard to find if you hang out with the right crowds, but most people (including the /. crowd) would never bother with that.

So you don't? You have my sympathy ... ;-)

I think this is the first time I've ever seen or heard the phrases "intelligence community" and "in good faith" in the same sentence.

Huh? Just this morning, I bought a 7-pound bag of sugar. Granted, that's about a year's supply for the two of us. (And it's mostly an artifact of my local reputation as a maker of good margaritas. ;-) It isn't at all hard to find sugar packaged in 2- or 5-pound bags hereabouts; most of the food stores that I frequent sell it that way. Coffee I've always bought in sub-pound packages, mostly because the taste tends to decay slowly, and it's more noticeable the larger the package is. The advent of home and in-store coffee grinding machines was the main cause of the switch to smaller packages, rather than the price. (The real coffee connoisseurs buy the beans green, and roast and grind it themselves, but their numbers are too small to seriously affect prices. ;-)

Yup, and I've used the same explanation for why I'd prefer coffee to plain water. Water is just boring; adding a bit of flavor (with or without the mild stimulation of the caffeine) makes it more palatable. Any tasty plant material will work. I've also run across the same explanation for why soups of various kinds are so common in most of the world. They have fewer nutrients than their ingredient, so why not just heat up and eat the meats and veggies? Well, you need a good amount of water in your diet, and you want it boiled to make it safe to drink, so why not take some of the tougher cuts of meat , mix in assorted other tough and/or tasty ingredients, simmer them for a while, and consume the result? It adds variety to your diet, and is a good way to use up the odds and ends from other meals in a way that's a lot more palatable than just drinking water.

Actually, if you have a good whetstone (and know how to use it), you'll find that a small knife works just fine for trimming nails, both finger and toe. I've used my Swiss Army knife's small blade for just that purpose a few times while on vacation without a nail clipper. The small knife blade actually works better than the small scissors that are part of the package. You do need to be a bit careful, of course.

People will no doubt laugh at this, but it's actually a good observation (though we should include wine in the list). The reason is simple: We humans need to ingest a fair amount of water each day to stay healthy. But historically, water itself has been rather dangerous stuff. Consider all the other people and animals upstream who have been using it for both bathing and disposing of waste of various sorts. Do you want to drink that water? Not if you want a long, healthy life.

Part of the year, our ancestors could get some of the needed water by consuming fruits, which are high in water. But they mostly don't keep very well, and they spoil. Fermented juices have their sugars partly converted to ethanol, which is toxic to most of the spoilage micro-organisms, so the resulting wine or beer is much less likely to spoil. (If it does, the result is often vinegar, which is another way of preserving the juice in a way that's safe for humans to consume).

It's pretty well understood among historians, anthropologists, etc., that fermentation processes were a significant part of our ancestors' development into a long-lived species that eventually dominated much of the planet. Yes, it's fun to get drunk, and to joke about getting drunk. And some other animals can get drunk, since ripe fruits often contain around 1% ethanol. (I've read some funny stories about groups of elephants getting a bit tipsy from the consumption of ripe fruit. Imagine a crowd of drunk elephants partying in your neighborhood. ;-) But the fact is that ethanol-laced liquids are historically an important part of our history, because ethanol provided a way to make those liquids safe to drink.

There was a fun study some time back, in which some researchers traveled around the world, stopping in various eateries, ordering food, and taking it back to their hotel room to feed to the lab equipment they'd brought along. They were testing it for safety (and ate the food that passed their tests ;-). Their main summary of their results was that, if you want a simple rule for ordering something safe to drink, no matter where you are, order beer. They didn't always like the beer everywhere, but their tests never found beer that was unsafe for human consumption. Wine was in second place, but they did find contaminated wine in a few places.

The explanation seems to be that, as anyone who has tried brewing beer knows, you have to be really careful about cleanliness during the brewing, or you get an awful-smelling glop that nobody will drink. With wine, the process seems easy, and you can get good-smelling wine by just letting the fruit juice (with perhaps added yeast) ferment, but sometimes the result has contaminants that aren't obvious. But with beer, this doesn't work; you have to boil it all to sterilize it, add a yeast culture, make sure that stuff floating in the air can't get into the containers, or everyone will know that you've failed the instant they sniff it. So beer probably is the most significant brewing achievement in human history.

Actually, he didn't even say that. His comment is consistent with the conjecture that they didn't find anything because they didn't even bother looking.

;-)

That's a nice example of how poorly people often handle reporting of such stories. The setback was to the polio eradication efforts, mostly in Pakistan and Nigeria where polio is still a problem. Smallpox has been eradicated (at least until one of the places that keep preserved sample of that virus manages to screw up and release a sample to the general public ;-).

But the polio part is wrong, too, since the CIA's agents were disguised as medical people providing accinations for hapatitus B. The religious folks in Pakistan and Nigeria apparently couldn't get this right, and turned on medical people providing polio vaxination.

But it's a nice example of how poorly parts of the public (both the religious folks and the people posting here at /.) can't be bothered to even get the easily verified information right. It also illustrates how damaging things like the CIA disguising their agents as medical workers can actually be. When made public, the story was a setback to lots of medical projects, not just for the disease involved in the original story, but for other unrelated diseases. How can people around the world be sure that visiting medical workers aren't actually agents of some nefarious military spy agency with a record of hunting down and killing people? If the CIA can get away with it, how many other such agencies are now working on the same approach?

Maybe, or it might be the other way 'round: Immigrants tend to be the people who were smart enough to get themselves out of a bad social environment where they were born, and moved to another environment where they'd have better access to education and/or better jobs.

Or maybe both are true, and there are multiple processes that produce the widely-recognized "immigrants are smarter" phenomenon.

On a somewhat related track, I've read of a few studies showing that children with multiple "parents" (through whatever processes) tend to turn out smarter, better educated, etc. Or, more generally, variety in their environment tends to turn kids indo adults who seem smarter, more knowledgeable, etc.

How so? I'd think that pulling out into traffic coming from behind (and in the "blind spot" for most cars) is inherently more difficult than pulling out into oncoming traffic that you can clearly see without turning your head or using a rear-view mirror. Both have inherent dangers, but safely entering traffic in a way that requires watching other vehicles coming from both directions seems like the more dangerous.

So do we have statistics dealing with this? I don't think I've ever seen any, and a quick google check doesn't seem to turn up anything at all based on facts.

Also, the laws about this in the US seem to be generally local and quite inconsistent. Is there actually a federal law that deals with this? I've never heard of one, and don't seem to be able to find it. Without a few [citation needed]s, I'd suspect that people are just making rules up based on whatever they might have heard in a driver's ed class years ago. ;-)

Hereabouts (western suburbs of Boston), it's common to see cars parked on "local" streets in pretty much any orientation, and I've never heard of anyone getting ticketed for something so inherently silly. OTOH, as a student in a midwestern university a few of decades back, I do recall my surprise when I actually got a parking ticket for parking on the "wrong side". It was on a very local street that was narrow enough that two cars couldn't pass if there were cars parked on both sides, and I'd parked there temporarily to make it easy to carry stuff from the car into a friend's apartment without interfering with the (minimal) traffic. At the time, I'd never heard of the concept of "parking on the wrong side". On local streets, you parked in the place closest to where you were going, though if you were a nice guy, you might also try to leave as wide a path in the center of the street that you could, so you might park farther away if there was a wide vehicle across from where you preferred to park.

Well, I fired up a new Chrome window and went to maps.google.com. I then looked around for the options/settings/whatever controls. I didn't find them. I googled "google maps settings options controls" (without the quote), which gave 2.76 million hits. The first few looked encouraging, so I looked at them. They all failed to enlighten me on the topic. One did find "Search options", which has a rather sketchy set of checkable items dealing with google searches. There were several that showed me javascript that I could use to control some options, but attempts to learn how to enter the JS into my copy of google maps didn't turn up anything that worked.

So how might we find the controls that will re-enable the missing city/road names that TFA is talking about? (Yes, I tried adding "city road names" to the list, but it didn't turn up much more than complaints about what's now missing. ;-)

It seems that google has not only dialed such things down; it has also hidden the controls so that we don't have to worry our pretty little heads about such arcane things that we can't possibly understand.

And yeah, I expect that if I had only guessed the right keywords, I'd have found exactly what I wanted. Too bad there's no way to ask google what are the right keywords to find something. ;-)

If that's true, then how do you explain the way they've cut way back on the number of street and town names on their maps? You'd expect they'd use the small text size to enable labelling of more things, not fewer.

Methinks it's just a classical case of Dumbing Down, which seems to happen to most successful companies as their management shifts into the usual "sell to the maximum number of people, especially the half of the population who can't read" mode.