But putting out a 'schizophrenia simulator' that emphasizes perceptual hallucinations completely glosses over that mental disorders alter the processing of thoughts. There's no way to communicate the subjective experience of reality, and emphasizing the visual and auditory aspects risks turning a serious disorder into a fun-house ride. It suggests that you can just learn which experiences are real and filter out that which is not.

Another example: it's quite common for people with stroke to draw clocks with all the numbers scrunched into one quadrant. They'll report that this looks just like the clock on the wall (or sometimes to know that there's something off about the drawing, without being able to say what). This is not a visual hallucination, but a disruption of the comparative processes and a disruption of spatial awareness. A VR system that distorts reality to match the drawings of stroke patients would be a terrible stroke simulator.

These are pretty much the assumptions made by all those people saying "buying is a sucker's bet." They're basing their math on comparing renting a 2BR apartment against the costs of maintaining a 4BR house. Or pretending that a renter is smart enough to choose an apartment that "comes with" a pool, but that a buyer chooses to add one after the purchase. They believe that the renter is perfectly happy to use the same stove and appliances for 20 years (or that the landlord replaces them "for free"), but the owner has to replace them periodically.

The only circumstances where it's better to pay mortgage, maintenance, taxes and landlord profit than just mortgage, maintenance and taxes, are if you want the landlord to help you forgo improving your lifestyle. If you can make it all the way to retirement, in the same residence, with the same fixtures, as you lived as a newlywed, then you will definitely have more savings than anyone who spent those 40 years upgrading their house or moving into ever-nicer apartments. Never mind any small distinction due to equity in the house.

I think you've got it exactly right. It's absolutely passive-aggressive, and you might imagine it's a abbreviated form of "I'm just saying that you're wrong, not that you're an idiot."

A home is an asset; a mortgage is a liability. Or do you mean you incur risk from home ownership: liability, taxes, fire? Because you incur all of those risks living in rented property, too, just that they're mostly obscured in your rent payment. Think about this: the property you're living in is owned by someone, and all the costs associated with maintaining that property are paid by someone. If you're not paying those costs directly, then you're paying a middleman's profit on top of the actual costs of ownership. The arguments against owning a home are the same as those in favor of leasing a car and Rent-a-Center TVs.

I agree that a home is high-risk as an "investment," with a much higher cost-of-carry than, say stocks. Calling your home an "investment" is often used to rationalize expensive and unnecessary projects that you would not do for an actual investment. (eg, when's the last time your landlord remodeled your kitchen?) It might be better to think of ownership as a way of economizing on your living expenses, because if you're renting, then you are paying the profit on someone else's investment.

Only as a temporary imbalance. Typically, landlords expect 10+% yield on their investments, meaning that their cost of ownership and operation is at most 90% of rent. If current purchase prices are literally twice current rent, then an owner can either 1) sell his property for 120% instantaneous gain (assuming 0 equity), equivalent to about 20 years' (net present value) rent or 2) double the rent charged. If neither of those things happens, then Seattle is filled with terrible capitalists.

If you think that the reduction in all-cause mortality associated with moderate alcohol consumption is because drinkers go out and socialize, then you should be encouraging the stay-at-home non-drinkers to go out and socialize, not to stay at home and get drunk alone.

Most of the humans that came before you died as children. Most of your ancestors were killed by injury, infection, or parasites before they made it to 60 years old. In that environment, diet is not a huge risk factor. If you want to live to 90, or if you want to be able to move around on your own for a couple of decades after 60, then diet and activity are more important.

(Everyone knows this, but we're just too lazy to keep saying "peanut" all the time) It turns out that "allergies" have a spectrum. About 80% of people with childhood food allergies outgrow them. For peanuts in particular, about 20% of people will outgrow their reaction.. A small number of allergy sufferers experience severe anaphylaxis. These are the people for whom epi-pens were developed, and there are probably 5000 of them in the US. These people can not likely be acclimated to their allergen by repeated exposure.

The incidence of adult lactose intolerance ranges from about 2% among Scandinavians through 20-40% among central Europeans and white US, to nearly 100% in southeast Asia. Source It seems to be less about your gut microbiome and more about recent evolution: if you come from a culture that exploited cattle and sheep, being able supplement calories with milk or cheese helped you survive the winter, and you evolved to maintain lactase expression post-weaning.

Inability to digest certain foods are legitimate pathologies. Celiac disease is a real thing; Lactase production is genetically regulated. You can't cure them by force-feeding. They may be over-diagnosed, egged on by hypochondriac parents and overworked physicians, but just because enjoy a good slice of cheese on crackers with peanut butter doesn't mean everyone can be 'trained' to eat them.

This is not fraud, it's marketing. Of course there's no gluten in your peanut butter. No one who takes a moment to think about it would find this either surprising or a selling feature. Most people don't take that moment, though. They will happily choose the "No added arsenic" product over the unlabeled alternative, even though neither of them actually has arsenic.

Gluten is an awesome example of popular gullibility. For the 0.5-1% of people with defective HLA-DQ genes, gluten is a serious problem. For them, knowing whether a product contains gluten is as important for the peanut-allergic to know whether it contains peanuts. Labeling complex foods as gluten free targets the Celiac disease population and helps these people. Now you've got products labeled as "gluten free," and the public, including physicians, media, and pop-nutrition hucksters can start weaving this into their otherwise uninformed narratives.

Once again, this is free-market pressure, not government conspiracy or fraud. It turns out that, if you remove the fats from food, it tastes awful and feels chalky. People don't buy those products twice, and your company goes out of business. Thickening proteins and sugar are added to mask the absence of fats and make the food palatable.

If companies would stop devising ever more clever ways to mislead, cheat, and defraud while remaining technically within the letter of existing rules, then government might be able to stop revising the rules.

I continue to be baffled that people believe the timing of 1s-and-0s coming out of the CD drive are in any way relevant to the analog signal. Those 1s-and-0s are read out at vastly higher rate than the audio they represent and are buffered in memory between the CD device and the DAC. Data comes out of the CD somewhere between 1.2-30 Mbps. Let's say each "1" lasts about 60ns. "Jitter" in this signal of picoseconds or even nanoseconds is irrelevant to the data that ends up in the buffer.

The only relevant form of jitter is in the timing signal sent to the DAC itself. Analog devices has a nice study demonstrating that clock jitter of a picosecond or so (a full cycle at 1GHz) can produce signal distortions as large as -70 dB, once you get up to signals of 100 or so MHz. AD didn't even bother to check anything less than 1 MHz, because there's no possible influence. Since your ears are pretty well limited to 20 kHz or so (assuming you're 12 years old), and the actual information contained on the CD is limited to 25 kHz or so, "CD transports" are absolutely bogus.

This can be a misleading calculation. First, not all of the days without classes are teacher vacation days. Second, if the job offers a good wage, but the hours are restricted, then it may still not be a good job.

eg: you may complain about only getting 3 weeks of vacation every year, but how would you feel about a mandatory week of unpaid vacation every month? No overtime those other three weeks, and it'd be nice if you spent some of your vacation time earning continuing education credits.

The trouble is getting a sample size large enough for meaningful determination. In the case of teaching phonics vs whole-language, the outcomes depend on student - meaning income, race, geography, parental engagement, preparation, etc - and on the teacher. So you really need a national-scale study, with many different teachers (each following the same syllabus), coordinated over years, with some way to make sure that students don't switch methods just because their parents move.

No one's going to pay for that. No one's patient enough to wait for this year's first graders to graduate from high school to evaluate the techniques.

People will pay to summarize anonymized student data over a few years and a handful of school districts, but that gets you the kind of hand-wavey outcomes everyone's complaining about.

You can do great physics because you can make sure that every piece of steel you test is almost identical. Do a test 5 times, and you can be confident to 4 significant figures. You can do good biology because you can make sure that your mice all have the same genotype, diet, and general environment. You can usually tell +/-10% with a couple dozen animals. Humans? You can't control their genetics or their environment. You can't trust them to finish the experiment. You can't even make many reproducible measurements, because you can't take the subjects apart when the experiment is over, and none of the cognitive tests are objective.

Sounds to me like ganjadude has never been rickrolled or goatse'd. It's nice to know that such naivete still exists.

Graphic content is one thing. The message in these videos is "This is an appropriate way to kill infidels. Get to it." That may not be the message that you, a well-adjusted participant in Western society perceives, but that is the message intended by the video producers.

Many countries restrict hate speech, and "Convert the infidels or burn them" seems to fall into that category. Most countries restrict speech intended specifically to incite violence, and "Here's how you burn a caged heathen," seems like it falls into that category.

To me, the question is whether you want to report on the story and explain the distorted vision of Islam being propagated by these groups, or whether you want to propagate their message. You won't see Anderson Cooper reading Klan propaganda to marginalize the KKK; why would you use ISIS propaganda to marginalize them?