The premise seems to be:

1. There is a gene associated with a brain pathway responding to the smell.
2. The more this gene is expressed, the more the stronger the pathway.
3. Brain functions that depend on this pathway have a feedback mechanism that result in hypomethylation of the gene in at least sperm cells (egg cells weren't mentioned). This increases expression in the descendants. From what I understand, hypo methylation does not entail any alteration of base pair sequences.
4. As the parent post mentioned, this doesn't mean passing on aversion/affinity, but potentially increased sensitivity which may aid in speed of learning these traits.

That's based on my reading of the abstract. The abstract didn't mention any kind of known or discovered chemical signal for the brain activity to result in the hypomethylation in the sperm. My question would be if anything else in the experimental protocol could have triggered this in a manner not directly caused by the brain activity. My next question would be if this work can be reproduced with a different chemical pathway.

The theory doesn't really work that way. The theory says that under arbitrage free conditions there exists a probability measure that results in the expected return between the risky investment and the low risk investment being identical relative to that probability measure. This does not constitute an assertion that this probability measure is predictive, merely that it exists. The probability measure is essentially a rationalization applied to market prices. The spread between high quality corporate bonds and government bonds is much larger than the difference in default rates between the two.

Basically the theory doesn't say that risky investments even out with safe investments over time, it says that there is a premium you pay for safety. That premium can be neutralized by creating a fun house mirror probability measure that overstates the risk of the investment failing. The fun house probability measure isn't real, it's just something used to analyze prices.

It does work for group insurance which is what 90% of people who have private insurance have. Most people who have group insurance don't want to buy individual insurance.

Whoops, I forgot to mention that since the survey was from 2009, those numbers have grown with 4 years of medical cost trend (plus one more to grow on to project to 2014). Fortunately that's been lower the past few years compared to the average for the last 20 years. I think it was only a bit over 6% last year, compared to a more typical trend of around 10%.

http://www.aon.com/attachments/thought-leadership/2011_Health_Care_Trends_Survey_Final_FINAL.pdf

http://www.ahip.org/Individual-Health-Insurance-Survey-2009/

In 2008, 12.7% of all individual insurance applications were denied. For ages 50-64, the denial rate was 20-30%.

Did you say you are paying $75 per month for your current plan? For 2009, the national average premium for individual insurance with single coverage and a $500 deductible was $259 per month.

You haven't been the one who's been seeing the worst of the current system and I'm not convinced that you are going to be the one who's seeing the worst of it next year.

You realize that as someone who was satisfied with the individual health insurance market you are something of an oddity?

How old are you? If you're young that may explain what you're seeing.

Here's the deal. The individual insurance market has premiums that are heavily biased towards expected claims for sicker people, but if you look at how premiums vary by age and other underwriting characteristics, it's more proportional to how the average claims change with those characteristics.

For group insurance, there isn't as much bias towards the cost of sicker people. The contract bundles the healthy and the sick people together so healthy people opting out is less of an issue. But the demographic component of the cost is basically averaged across the group, plus there is rating based on the actual experience of the group.

The exchanges are basically a group insurance scheme. However, they do allow charging different premiums based on age. The ratio between the highest premium and the lowest premium is capped at 3 to 1, whereas before in the individual market, this was more like 6 to 1.

Monetarily, the law is going to be worst for people who are young, have good underwriting characteristics and who already have individual insurance. But you are also getting a guarantee that you will be able to buy insurance next year. You don't have that under your current plan. Also, that 3 to 1 cap will work in your favor over time. You are getting less per dollar for the upcoming year of coverage, but you are getting guarantees that extend far beyond that year of coverage.

If it were possible to buy an individual insurance policy with guaranteed renewal for life under the pre-ACA regime, I'm guessing it would have cost an awful lot more than that bronze plan since they would have to price in the possibility of you moving into a higher risk class later.

Let's say I have a computing job I want to complete some time in the next couple of years. I'm not especially concerned about when it's done but I want it done for below a certain price. With a futures market, I could look for a good time of year when prices are low and lock that in now, establishing a contract that the counterparty will either provide the service at that time or pay whatever it costs to find a provider that can.

The benefit to providers is that they can sell anticipated capacity in advance and lock in their budget numbers.

It is ludicrous, but it's also kind of brilliant. The NSA is arguing that they can use correlations to figure out what data they can snoop in. However that is also an admission of technical capability to determine other kinds of correlations. And it is in fact illegal for the government to build a gun ownership database. The NSA would have to argue that they cant figure out who gun owners are with their data. They cant just argue that they don't do that, they have to argue that they can't do that.

It's technically correct... The best kind of correct.

Now that the mood lighting has been disabled I can proceed with my insidious plot.

No one is capable of working outside their cultural narratives. Glib analysis of other people's cultural narratives is part of the culture you associate with. You're attempting to express his subjective reality in a manner that relates to your own subjective reality. That does not mean that you're working outside that subjective reality. Awareness of other people's limitations does not free you from your own. You have no basis for asserting superiority.

A cognitive bias is really just a heuristic strategy that's being applied in circumstances where it isn't effective. The things that people believe are driven by a mixture of their assessments of the frequency of events and the priority the weight they assign to different outcomes. The brain doesn't really adequately distinguish between the assessment of frequency and the priority piece.

This is the state of things. People's perception of the facts is muddled up with what's important to them. And you can't live with other people if you dismiss what's important to them, regardless of how much you think they're wrong. Democracy is the manifest reality of what you have to do in order to cooperate with people who you think are wrong.

While there are some genuinely pathological people and some genuinely pathological ideas, they really don't play as much of a role in the world as people tend to think. The world really is as bad is it is even despite the fact that most people are making their best efforts to improve it. The state of the world reflects how tiny and futile people's best efforts are.

The only way forward is to try to find a basis for agreement. Most people aren't completely wrong and occasionally they pick up on something that's worth paying attention to even if you don't agree with them. The key is to address people's fears rather than dismissing them as something insidious that just needs to be swept away by history.

To Smitty's credit, there's not a great history of successfully ruling nations made up of two groups of people who can't talk to each other. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium#Communities_and_regions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_Czechoslovakia#Reasons_for_the_division, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_sovereignty_movement. There is some validity to the theory that not pressuring immigrants to assimilate and adopt the common language undermines national unity.

One time amnesty deals do nothing to address the underlying cause of illegal immigration which is that there's an underlying economic benefit to Mexican workers in seeking American income and that benefit significantly exceeds the hardships imposed by immigrating illegally. Really it's not much different than the flow of ions across a semipermeable membrane; it's going to continue until the underlying difference in potential is neutralized.

Past attempts at dealing with the issue by increasing the hardships imposed on illegal immigrants haven't been effective and now, I've presented the question to you if you feel it is morally correct to impose those hardships on a particular individual. What do you feel is best to put this specific situation right? What is important to you? Are individual human concerns subjugated to the macro-level goal of prevention of illegal immigration?

A mouse button has a hair trigger while you have to push a keyboard key down a pretty good bit before it registers a press. On the reaction time test, the margin between keyboard and mouse narrows to about 10-20ms when I try to make sure that I press down on the key as quickly as possible.

I've had an illegal immigrant do work on my house for me. I didn't know he was illegal when I first hired him. He speaks perfect English. He runs his own business, with business cards and shirts with the name of the business and everything.

He's married to an legal immigrant and their son is also legal.

I'm not going to argue that there aren't any people in the US that we shouldn't deport if we have the option. But for people who broke the rules once, but have since then made themselves into contributing members of American society, why shouldn't we offer amnesty? What good would be accomplished by deporting this guy? If applying the rules strictly creates bad outcomes, then the rules need to be changed.

As an aside, I'd say that the traditional strength (and also the traditional source of dysfunction) of the US is that we take in people who are undervalued in their home countries. To that end, I think we should make immigration available to most people who don't have a warrant outstanding for their arrest.

The Carrington Event caused aurora borealis to be visible around the world. I'm not aware of anything else like that being reported in recorded human history. Even if it had happened before the development of writing, you would think it would be the sort of thing that would have a major impact on legends across all world cultures. So my best guess is that from the span of time from, let's say, 3000BC to 2013AD, this has happened exactly once.

Wikipedia says that ice core studies show that events like this which produce high energy protons comparable to the Carrington Event occur with a frequency of roughly once every 500 years, however it briefly mentions that these other events aren't necessarily comparable in terms of geomagnetic impact.