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Comment Re:What if we overcorrect? (Score 2) 343

Fertilizing the ocean with iron will not increase the fish population, it will rather kill it off. Yes, phytoplankton will increase, but at the same time this will bind much of the oxygen in the ocean, thus animals (including fish) will just suffocate. Ask someone who lives near the ocean what happens if you have an algae bloom: fish populations die.

Comment Re:What if we overcorrect? (Score 1) 343

Climate change is quite well understood (science is never settled). And the question if climate change is something we are largely responsible for is answered with a sound yes. There are some nests of people still trying to argue that, but they are mainly located in the U.S.. The rest of the world just shrugs the shoulders about the ongoing debate in the U.S. and thinks: Americans, ey? Can't just accept a fact, if it means they might be wrong.

Comment Re:Why do people listen to her? (Score 5, Interesting) 588

There are times when a child can receive up to 6 vaccines at the same time and that's a little bit shocking.

Yes, they get a preparation that is called Hexavac. It is one shot with six vaccines. It works. And you prefer your child to get six shots? Six times in a doctor's office, six times being pierced, being hurt and feeling dizzy afterwards? I prefer Hexavac everytime (and both my children got it).

Comment Re:Why do people listen to her? (Score 2) 588

Actually, she is against vaccination in general, and the alleged vaccination-autism-connection was just playing in her hand. Now that the anti-vaccination stand shows to have detoriating effects like the outbreak of illnesses that once were thought to be in check, she backpedals on the anti-vaccination stand and uses the alleged connection to defend herself.

Comment Re:Luck resets every time you guess. (Score 2) 136

Not only that, but people with some distance to the situation and only superficial knowledge are not blinded by facts and details. We have the same phenomenon with predicting sport results. There, people who are not absolute fans or professionals in the sport usually fare better at predicting results as they don't give too much weight on some details, or their own preferences, which in the long run prove to have much less influence than expected. Instead they basicly tend to put teams or athletes they often heard about in front and less famous ones more to the back.

So you have three group of people: Those who don't know anything, and who indeed are the worst predictors, then those who have some basic understanding of the situation, who are the best predictors, and then the specialists, who know intricate details and have very profound knowledge, who aren't very good at predicting because they give too much weight to single aspects and have some very strong opinions or emotions about the situation which blinds their judgement.

Comment Re:The spokesman for the AHA said... (Score 1) 408

Carbon atoms don't cure anything either, but in combination with hydrogenium atoms, oxygen atoms, nitrogenium atoms, sulfur atoms, phosphorus atoms etc.pp., they do. What we need is to account for the fact that the brain believing to have received a dose of medication has some effect. So we have to compare the actual medication and the brain believing to get the actual medication.

Comment Re:The spokesman for the AHA said... (Score 2) 408

Homeopathy is indistinguishable from, "Take good holistic care of yourself and keep psychologically strong!" - two important pieces of advice which are significant to health. If medicines alone were so effective, you wouldn't need to do the whole double-blind placebo-controlled trial thing, would you? It'd be obvious from the medicine's effect alone.

Not quite. You need the double-blind placebo-controlled randomized studies because medicines are not the only source of improving health. We are able to overcome most illness by ourself. Our tissues can regrow, we have an immune system to fight of diseases, and our liver and kidneys getting us rid of toxins all the time. If medicine was the only game in town, then yes, we could just do a simple before-after analysis and see solely the effects of medicine. As we have enough abilities to self-heal, and we are constantly under other internal and external influences (diets, environmental influences, behaviour etc.pp.), we have to filter out the effects of medicines against all those other influences, and thus we need those complicated settings for medical studies.

Comment Re:Other animals (Score 2) 351

Herbs and other plants are not "alternative medicine". They are medicine, pure and simple. Many of our pills are herbs and other plants too, you just don't recognize them anymore. Aspirin is basicly willow bark cooked in vinegar, and many cough medications contain thyme as their main ingredient for instance. What we don't have are good natural sources for antibiotics as most molds, our main sources for antibiotics, are toxic and need heavy processing until their antibiotic substrances can be used for medication. So those tribes are depending solely on general good health and their immune system to fight off infections, and if their immune system doesn't have an answer to a new strain of bacteria, they die quickly.

Comment Re:Sweet! (Score 1) 77

I think it shows a deeper problem. Data retention was active already (PRISM is one of the programs that are known), but in the hand of the intelligence agencies. Police departements were envious of the capabilities of the agencies (and probably got some information considered useful from them) and rallied for their own data retention programs, but they had to be legal to be admissible in court.

So in each country where the Minister of Interior affairs or a top police officer was always pressuring for a data retetion law, there was probably a data retention program already in place, whose results were just unusable in public (e.g. in court).

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