And how much of a problem are these accidents as a percentage of the whole? I'd guess it's some miniscule fraction of a percent, relatively safe compared to, say, medicine or automobiles or bathtubs. But like a plane crash (also a rare risk) it's spectacular compared to everyday risks.

Also, let's not forget that a great many of today's housing developments grew up AFTER the pipeline or refinery or whatever nasty-NIMBY. Who is really liable when you move in next door to a known potential risk?

I don't think it's about selling merchandise. I think it's more likely about becoming the one-low-monthly-payment access to an internet of micropayments... basically they'd be a reseller for such websites, same as Prodigy did in the olden days. Meanwhile, they still can sell your eyeballs to advertisers for a little over-and-above the guaranteed monthly rent paid by subscribers.

Think on that when someone promotes the notion of micropayments... who will it really benefit?

Indeed... even tho I'm rather more "I'd rather do it myself" than most folks, I see no reason why I should dink around with my own mail server and FTP (I keep a mirror of a large FTP site) when I can pay $6/mo. for unlimited space/mailboxes, with automatic backups and probably better security than I could reasonably manage, via my 1&1 hosting account.

Sort of like AOL and Prodigy in the olden days, where they were also walled gardens... try this on for size:

Say we have an internet of logins and micropayments. Access via a paid account with FB or Google gives you 'free' access to all these login and micropayment sites (as FB and G buy bulk accounts).

I think this is not at all implausible as their eventual goal. Makes you rethink the notion of logins and micropayments, don't it??

High frequency trading isn't the issue. The banks are the real "insiders", and are pointing fingers at small, high frequency prop shops to deflect attention from themselves, and to get back to the bad old days when they could really gouge their customers with wide spreads.

High frequency traders make their money by having better pricing models, narrowing spreads in the market, and being able to execute and then get out of a position quickly to lock in their profits and eliminate risk. The banks like to be the middleman, with wide spreads, so that they can pocket the difference.

The net result of high frequency traders is that the rest of us can get a stock much closer to their actual value (due to narrow spreads). Yes, the high freqency traders make good money by selling the stock $0.005 off the "real" value to me and then immediately getting out of the position by reselling it a millisecond later and locking in that $0.005 profit, but I have only paid a premium of $0.005 instad of the $0.35 or worse the banks would love to gouge me for (and used to, a few short years ago).

We get rid of high freqency trading and we'll be back to the bad old days, when the real insiders really did gouge us, and we all paid far too much for our investments, and were able to sell at far too little, with the likes of Goldman Sachs pocketing the enormous difference.

As for the front-running nonsense on 60 Minutes, that's always been illegal (contrary to what we're being told), and it is not at all how high frequency trading works. If someone was in fact doing that, then they're in a whole world of hurt with the SEC (and rightly so), but this entire exercise appears much more like a distraction: blame small outsider firms who've made the marketplace more effecient and tightened spreads for problems created by corruption within the big banks, and hope no one notices...at least until the next bank-induced crash.

Yep, it's a pile of speculation at best. When it evolved there could have been some other factor at work, and that flies dislike stripes might be serendipitous. We can guess, but we can't really know.

It can be a good way to =start= teaching math. It's not so good if the student is not subsequently taught how to extrapolate it to ordinary long division without needing to draw a pile of boxes first.

By the time I finished 2nd grade (this was in 1962) we had the abstract concept of numbers down pat; we didn't need visual examples any more, and we didn't need them when we went from the times tables we learned in 2nd grade, to the new (to us in 3rd grade) concept of long division. Funny thing, we had nowhere near the level of basic-math illiteracy that I see in today's kids, either.

Thanks for the info -- I had not realised it had gone so stupid, or that CommonCore was at this level. What you describe is not so much teaching to the test as to the lowest common denominator, to the student who =cannot= extrapolate "take 10 boxes and divide them into two equal piles" into long division applicable to any numbers.

Then make the test work at that level, and only the lowest common denominator will pass. How to dumb down education in one easy step!!

What you describe with dividing boxes and calling it math reminds me of "whole word recognition" (which teaches everyone to read the same way dyslexics often do, by guessing ahead) and how that gave us a generation of students who could not read above the base level.... and from which education has never recovered, because those students are today's teachers.

And what happens when the camera fails?

A broken mirror will still show you at least some of what you're running into.

A broken camera shows you nothing at all.

I think this falls under "just because we can doesn't mean we should", like so much of 'modernizing' vehicles of late.

Someone above touched on this, but I'm guessing the flies didn't evolve to get past the stripes because of the size of fly eyes and what an eye of that size can interpret. If they could grow larger eyes maybe stripes would cease to bother them. ... but then we'd also have giant flies.

When there's a strong preference for sweets, with no calorie starvation to instigate it, it's worthwhile to check thyroid function.

And my observation has been that the damned roundabouts cause more issues than they solve. They sure as hell cause issues when icy streets are common...

I've personally seen two accidents at a roundabout, where no one was going over 10mph, but that needless curve and wet ice made predictable results.

Second, any vehicles longer than a car cause backups much in excess of what you get from a four-way stop.

Third, have fun sharing 'em with 18 wheelers who can't make that curve without cutting across two lanes.

And the habit of putting a raised mini-park in the middle means they've got needless blind corners.

They're great when you have a population that doesn't respect stop signs and has to be forced into sharing the road (which from what I've seen seems to well describe Europe). When you have sign-abiding drivers to start with (as is true in most of America), they're a step backwards in traffic flow.

Just as well. Fish oil has its own problems, notably that it is typically too far toward rancid, which in turn uses up Vit.E in the body. The resulting deficiency can be minor (itching skin results) to catastrophic (known to cause retinal degeneration and blindness in dogs, and no doubt would do something similar in humans). The aftertaste was probably rancidity, not the fish oil itself.

Conversely you can live on milk with very little else, if need be, in good health.

I'm getting the picture that his 'food instincts' are actually pretty durn good (ie. good sense of smell where it counts) and that it's probably wise to listen when he refuses something.

I think you're right about kids and what they'll eat. And I think what they'll eat is often controlled by instinct. I reached this conclusion after watching toddlers refuse spinach, not as a normal "I don't like it" refusal, but rather with an extreme and severely *panicked* reaction, more like "this is poison and will kill me" -- I'd guess they can detect the oxalic acid (not so good for a busy calcium system as with growing bones) and instinct says "that's poison".

So my feeling is that parents shouldn't be too insistent when a kid refuses to eat something; there may be a perfectly good biochemical reason, and that may vary a lot from one child to the next (frex, a kid that's a little marginal on some nutrient may crave one thing and refuse another, because instinct says that's how to balance out the deficiency).

You can get unfriendly colonies of gut bacteria from adding fibre to the diet, which one gets largely from the same source as gluten. I'd guess that after long abstinence, the relevant bacteria simply aren't there in enough quantity to make a problem. Gut bacteria are not at all uniform from one person to the next, and the resident flora mix is highly dependent on what you eat. (Because of this, Dr.Eades' standard cure for acid reflux is to remove fibre from the diet -- and it works!)

[I went to univ in biochem and microbiol, so I kinda speak this stuff.]