The mercury level in a dose of a vaccine is less than the amount you might get from eating a tuna steak.

It's also in a different form - fish contain methylmercury, which is extremely toxic, while thimerosol is metabolized to ethylmercury, which isn't something you want to have a lot of in your system, but isn't as awful.

There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe.

Minor pedantic quibble: some vaccines are unsafe for a very small subset of the population, mainly people with compromised immune systems or severe allergies to components of the vaccines. I'm pretty sure doctors check for this before sticking the needle in. These people are one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, because the only thing protecting them from certain diseases is the fact that the rest of the population can't act as carriers. Most of us won't be harmed if one of Jenny McCarthy's kids coughs on us, because we've had the shots - but the unlucky few who really can't get vaccinated are screwed.

My wording was probably unclear - what I meant was "a few tens of thousands of dollars". $100k for three new violins is about the range I would expect.

Bassoonist here too - I'm currently saving for a new Fox, since I'll never be able to afford a house where I live anyway. But we're unusual; none of the other winds cost nearly that much, although those players are more likely to buy auxiliary instruments.

String players definitely have it much worse, but a really top-of-the-line new violin isn't going to cost that much more than a new Heckel bassoon. Anyway, these are still orders of magnitude less than some of the older instruments. Simply the name "Stradivarius" inevitably counts for somewhere near $1 million regardless of quality (the same way the Heckel label guarantees a buyer for anything that isn't rotting from the inside).

This is 100% about entertainment, so the Strad may be better IF you are allowed to tell the audience that is what you are playing.

You can be certain that if a string player is using an instrument by a famous maker, it will be specifically mentioned in the program. Wind players only mention the brand of instrument they play on if they're paid to endorse it - of course most wind players seldom play on anything more than a few decades old.

If that were the case, then you'd expect them to think the older, more valuable one sounded better right away, not the newer, less special one; so this seems to be a statement against confirmation bias.

The problem is that the quote I was addressing was comparing a more subjective, post-hoc judgment to an approximately objective evaluation. (I say "approximately objective" because it's hard to do something like this perfectly objectively; the article addresses a number of the limitations involved.) The blind test showed that the violinists' preferences - based purely on sound qualities - after an hour of playing had no correlation to the provenance of the violin. The complaint of the quoted study participant was that this was unfair because she only understood how special the Strad she used after months of playing it. The difference is that she knew exactly what that instrument was, and her knowledge almost certainly informed her feelings about it.

The older violins are worth several million of dollars and they were loaned on the condition that they could not be tuned.

First, your link refers to an earlier article (also in PNAS) with a smaller sample size. Second, the condition wasn't that they couldn't be tuned, it was that "tonal adjustments" like moving the bridge or replacing the strings were not allowed. I would assume that simply tightening the pegs was permissible.

Articles and comments like this are made by people who are not musicians, let alone people who play violin professionally.

This probably isn't what you meant, but the actual PNAS article makes it clear that the authors have some real expertise:

The team thus included several scientists, a violin maker and researcher who builds and sells new violins, a violin soloist who owns and plays an Old Italian violin, a professional violist and instrument dealer who owns several Old Italian instruments, and a string engineer and amateur violinist who owns and plays an Old Italian violin.

And of course the actual players used for the study were all professional violinists.

I can tell the difference between my crappy violin and nicer ones in the store. Do you know how much a top quality modern violin costs?

Perhaps a few multiples of $10,000; I've never heard of new instruments going for significantly more than this. (Only the best grand pianos cost that much.) If you're a professional musician, an investment like this isn't unreasonable, and is certainly much more attainable than a Strad. I also know amateurs who play on instruments (not just violins) that cost as much as a decent new car; obviously these are all upper-middle-class people for whom music is a huge part of their life (even if they aren't being paid for it), but they're never, ever going to be able to afford a Strad either.

A modern instrument may sound better right away she says, but an old Italian may be able to produce more colors of sound that only become apparent after months of use, she says.

The phrase "confirmation bias" springs immediately to mind. People hear what they want to hear, and the knowledge that they're playing on a three-century-old, million-dollar violin gives them certain expectations.

I got off the Windows treadmill when Windows 95 came out. I was young, but lucky enough to have some education and some contact with clued-up people and I got the whole Emperor's New Clothes thing.

I went straight to Slackware Linux (where I still am) which has been a great education and got me into Solaris, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, CentOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu and MINT.

I have never needed to run a Windows desktop since. Ever. Period. You can do it, and you can run your DOS and Windows stuff if you really, really need to.

In 99% of cases it's just fear, ignorance and laziness stopping people getting off of Windows.

Even Mrs Turgid has found herself at work booted off of Windows/IE/MS Office onto google's cloud stuff. There was no training provided and none required. IE no longer required either.

Perhaps, we'll develop incubators capable of replacing women's wombs

At the current rate of development, I think it's a pretty safe bet that we'll figure out that technology long before we have the tech to launch interstellar colonization methods.

No, there isn't. I wish there was, but the problem is that all the stories that this community really cares about are here and not on technocrat.

The quality of stories here has been in steady decline for 10 years and the standard of the associated discussions is pretty abysmal. Occasionally there's something good but it's 80% filler and non-stories.

You can't have a decent discussion about anything because it's all anti-FOSS zealots, ignorant newbies and pro-MS "sensible" people these days. Gone are they days when CPU architecture and OS kernel design were discussed.

You know, I was going to make a Roland Picquipaille joke, and then I looked, and lo it was Hugh Pickens, the second copypasta/clicktroll master.