Sorry to reply to myself, but this CDC report says that the main reason the US does poorly is that it has a larger proportion of preterm births.

Why does the US have more preterm births? This article mentions a few factors: a greater percentage of mothers may be teenagers or older than 35, mothers may have worse preventative health care, and/or mothers have higher risk factors like diabetes and obesity.

So anyway it seems like a complex situation; I'm sure there's plenty in here anyone can cherrypick to support their political views.

The normal quoted newborn survival statistics are in fact from the CIA world fact book [cia.gov], which is quoted as "the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year", thus not really warped at all.

All statistics are warped in some way. The issue isn't whether the baby is 100 days old as GP said, but what counts as a "live birth". This page has some discussion of the complexities. Apparently some, but not most, of the US's poor record is due to these issues.

As other people have pointed out, this isn't necessarily a good measure. If two animals have the same brain size and one is smaller, it doesn't mean the smaller one is smarter.

A better measure may just be the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex. See this list for example. Humans come out on top by this definition, even though whales have much bigger brains.

if (TEST) return bar(); else return baz();

That's more a "problem" with dynamic typing. Statically typed functional languages like Haskell or the ML family use type inferencing systems to detect these types of problems at compile-time. There's been a lot of progress made on type systems since C/C++ were developed. As the previous poster mentioned, Haskell has a particularly nice type system that can catch at compile-time issues that would generate run-time errors in C-like languages.

Wow, thanks for the thoughtful and constructive post that is a refreshing change from the kneejerk cynicism/fatalism that is the usual Slashdot groupthink.

I once was on a plane and sat next to a state legislator. I brought up the concept of gerrymandering electoral districts, and argued that it's unfair to moderate voters and creates a less responsive, more divisive political culture. I think he honestly hadn't thought much about these issues before and I hopefully influenced his opinion a bit. Also it's not hopeless—quite a few states have moved to a fairer process recently.

But anyway, if I can be the typical Slashdot cynic for a moment, how do we know that the politicians actually pay attention to these letters or conversations? Do you have any specific stories or evidence which let you to believe you made a difference?

Look at the federal budget. Military spending, is the biggest portion, bigger than all entitlements combined.

Social security and medicare/medicade are both individually more expensive than defense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

Thanks. From now on I'm googling the full text of every post I reply to, just in case it happens to reference some obscure civil war quote.

No way, it's totally ridiculous to try to understand someone's post before you publicly call them a moron.

I wish I had mod points, parent post is actually a pretty interesting list of topics that the scientific consensus has reversed course on. He's not saying that all science is garbage or even saying that this list should make you doubt science (maybe it should instill faith in science that it catches its mistakes). Anyway it's an interesting list.

But because he's on the wrong end of the mob on this topic he get's modded to 0 and a couple replies that basically say "Wrong, you're an idiot" get +5.

Also, how is the 3d effect in general? Even worth it? Last 3d thing I owned was the (lol) iglasses in like 1996, with an amazing resolution of like 320x200 or something ridiculous. it was fucking horrible. =/

My current computer has version 1 of the Nvidia 3D vision. I only used it a few days for novelty's sake and have no intention of using it again. Here are my reasons:

• 1. Most importantly, bad eyestrain. I can handle 3D movies, but 3D on a monitor is much "worse" because it is only 2 feet away from your head. I think I get a headache because my eyes are trying to focus on something far away (e.g. binocular angle) and close up (lens focusing) simultaneously. I don't see any way of fixing this; it's just the nature of the technology.
• 2. I already wear glasses, so wearing the Nvidia 3D glasses over my current glasses isn't very comfortable. These new glasses are supposed to be lighter so that might help.
• 3. Finally, I had no problems getting immersed in traditional non-stereoscopic 3D games. Sure, if you go back and forth, then for the first 3 minutes the 3D games will seem awesome and traditional displays will seem lacking, but your brain quickly compensates. Once someone has been playing a game 15 minutes, I think the 3D and non-3D experience is basically identical, and the gamer is thinking about the art design, gameplay, etc. For the same reason better graphics haven't made games for fun in the last 3 years (for me), neither did the 3D glasses.

Anyway, above are my experiences with 3D gaming, and why I won't be doing any more of it. However, all my reasons are pretty specific to me. The stuff does work pretty much as advertised and it's probably a good product for some people.

Apart from the occasional idiot who never learns, you can only take people for a ride so often. Eventually people are going to get a feel for these cash-sucking parasites

Yep, that's why no one does hard drugs today.

is that we have to sue our own government in an attempt to force them to tell us about the laws they are enforcing against us. That alone indicates a huge problem with the system, regardless of the nature of the laws themselves.

Totally agree, but that may be just how messed up our system is. I think it's an example of why at least some of the money that traditionally went to newspapers was helpful. If the NY Times didn't do this I doubt there'd be a long line of bloggers and community news aggregators with the money and ability to sue the government for this information.

People just dismiss the problem and say "the press needs to adapt or die". I hope they don't just die and take with them a vital source of pressure on the government.

I guess I still don't get your point that it's "insane" that food isn't part of the CPI.

True, it is not part of core inflation. However, it's not insane to have a separate measure that excludes food and energy. For some purposes (e.g. some monetary analyses) you want to factor out the effects of, for instance, a bad harvest or an oil refinery explosion. It's OK to have a separate measure that excludes these things as long as you don't use it to index important payments, such as Social Security. But as mentioned above, those are based on the CPI, not core inflation.

Oh, but I forgot... food is no longer part of the official government Consumer Price Index. How insane is that? The fact is that the "inflation" figures being fed to you by the government don't even remotely reflect reality.

Actually, food, energy, and medical expenses are all part of the CPI. (Food is 17% of it according to wikipedia.) Somehow the government gets blamed for substituting hamburger for steak AND for not including food at all.

Some of the confusion is because there is another index called core inflation which doesn't include food or gas. This is useful for some purposes, but the CPI is more important because it is intended to reflect actual spending, and because inflation-adjusted payments (such as Social Security checks and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities coupons) are generally keyed off the CPI.