No, he's right. The LD50 dose for water is somewhere around 6-10L in a sitting. With an average "dose" of maybe .5-1L, this would put it in the same range as alcohol. Of course, it is incredibly difficult to actually achieve that, since the quantity consumed is so large, which incidentally is the exact problem with comparing alcohol and heroin on this basis. Consuming a lethal dose of alcohol is generally a time consuming process, injecting a lethal dose of heroin is no more complicated than injecting a regular dose.

They are being a bit more specific than that. As in "when x increases by 1.00, y increases by 0.73".

Also, common sense thinking is a notoriously bad way to evaluate anything, as it is highly dependent on the selection and weight of initial premises. It is not at all a given that cities existing thousands of years before mass transportation, elevators, and combustion engines would work anything like modern cities.

If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defense of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.

Amusingly enough (in a dark comedy sort of way), science has shown this too. They don't even have to "want to believe", it just comes naturally.

Second this. Not only is the summary totally misleading, it bespeaks an insecurity that might well be grounded in truth. Or it's just rabble rousing, hard to tell intent with so little of the submission.

So I read through the paper, and it was certainly above my maths, but it seems the most important point was actually left out. If I understood it correctly the "extortionate" idea simply seems to be you can arbitrarily cheat, then enforce a tit-for-tat strategy until your opponent decides to give you another chance. As the modern "evolutionary" play styles seem to be built around cooperation and avoiding falling into long negative spirals, you gain an advantage. Certainly realistic, as I (as have we all) have seen these behaviors in the real world. Also not super surprising.

What I thought was interesting, and perhaps more important, was they seem to show that the player with the shortest memory controlled the game - that having a thousand turn memory didn't help against tit-for-tat, because you would end up playing tit-for-tat regardless of your larger strategy. This is an idea that I think should be explored further.

Overall it seems interesting but I imagine the applicability of the IPD to biology is somewhat limited, in that it doesn't compare the overall gains of the prisoners as a system to other prisoner's systems. i.e. a "winning" strategy very well may end up with a disproportionately large piece of a very small pie.

The group you are linking to gleefully mixes measles cases with measles deaths, (which declined earlier to cases due to better treatment of secondary infections, and better medical care all around), switches between logarithmic and linear scales on its graphs, and ends its analysis with a stirring endorsement of homeopathy. The years before the vaccine reported cases hovered around 500,000 (as the disease was considered part of growing up, many or most cases were likely not reported) by 1972 there were less than 50,000, now we could have less than 1000. This is not coincidence.

Yes, "exponential growth" has a definite, scientific meaning. Its meaning is a function whose rate of growth is proportional to its current value. Like, say a quantity which grows at a growth rate of 1.2 times its current value. We call it "exponential growth" because you can write it in the form (1*a^x), where a is a constant. In this example, it would be (1*1.2^x)

Does this mean I'll be able to play City of Heroes again?

The reason you can't live in an abandoned house is that it deprives the current owners the right to use the land that it is placed on, which in the example would be the servers the game was hosted on. No one is asking that the servers be handed over. If you could copy the house onto a different plot of land, and live in it while depriving the owner of nothing, then you certainly would be allowed to.

People with healthy immune systems don't die of flu.

What about people without healthy immune systems? Is your immune system healthy, or is the way to check just to see if you die of the flu? Or maybe you get a type that kills you because you have a healthy immune system, like the 1918 pandemic, who knows.

As for the MMR vaccine causing measles, what? Before vaccinations, 90%+ of children contracted measles. Now it's down to a few hundred a year. That's a very strong correlation, but not for your theory.

13,000 documents is a lot of documents, when you are considering that they each will have to be viewed by a person. There is no way that a software solution could provide the necessary level of security while preserving enough of the documents to be useful to anyone... which brings me back to my original question: What are they looking for? If they are looking for public support then they should make it more clear why this is an issue of public concern. Right now, all I know is that the government captured a Mexican cartel leader, which doesn't seem like something I should be concerned about. For all we know about this the request is from his associates looking for people to retaliate against. (If that's the case, we may find out when they pay the fee)

But why do they want these documents? It seems like an extraordinarily large ask without some similarly large rationale behind it.

I've known a number of people who had no need of a job for income, but worked anyway. I've known far more who could have found a higher paying job, but liked the one they had. Money is not the only motivator in the world.

Uber runs a risk in being so bold in trying to get rid of its workers. Until it has these cars in hand, it needs its driver fleet. Rational self-interest tells those drivers to maximize their income, but also to mitigate as much risk as possible. The most conservative when it comes to risk are frequently the most dependable employees as well, so if Uber jumps the gun they could scare off some of their best associates.

Thank you, that is actually a pretty neat resource. However, I would contend my point still stands. That 7pm peak is for today, in the middle of the winter. In August, the peak is at 4:30, and is 66% higher than the February peak. In June and July the peak times seem to be around 5pm, well within the time solar is active for those months.

That is a chart for Oregon, which is has relatively little air conditioning demand. In contrast Los Angeles has a "high peak" at 1 to 5 pm, and "low peak" from 10am to 8pm, and in Atlanta peak is between 2pm and 7 pm. Even cities like New York and Boston see their biggest loads from summer air conditioning. Oregon is somewhat of an outlier.