rflrob

23 ms·

181.
by rflrob 9y ago
I can’t find any super up-to-date info on the UK murder rate, but extrapolating trends from the early 2010s, it seems to be about the same as the 70s [1]. Deaths by Terrorism in the UK are way down [2], though if you care whether the peop
182.
by rflrob 9y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted here—I disagree with you, but nothing you're saying is objectively unhelpful. > I find it very sad that the people that are making these critical decisions that could affect my life is some
183.
by rflrob 9y ago
"Herein we report the prevalence of acne in 2 nonwesternized populations: the Kitavan Islanders of Papua New Guinea and the Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay." They also mention reports from an Inuit community as it transitioned
184.
by rflrob 9y ago
> I completely disagree with the “race to the bottom” framing of the idea that cities shouldn’t compete to provide the best services for the commercial enterprises which reside there. I think the idea is that cities definitely should
185.
by rflrob 9y ago
Once you've established that people are willing to pay a $2-5/lb premium to ensure that their meat is organic, I think another similar premium for non-meat meat is reasonable to call "comparable", especially when the alt
186.
by rflrob 9y ago
You don't actually have to subscribe to Blue Apron to get the recipes—you can create an account, but not pay for anything, and (at least in the app) it will tell you what's coming up on their menus and give you access to a fairly
187.
by rflrob 9y ago
> I personally still think we are headed towards a second dot-com bust, but I’ve been saying that for so long that at this point, I’m just wrong. As a wise man once said[1], “the market can remain irrational a lot longer than you can rem
188.
by rflrob 9y ago
> Did you read the article? I did not. :( Turns out that not only Plato is too curmudgeonly to read things. Perhaps if I had a longer attention span from not using my cell phone too much, I could have read it.
189.
by rflrob 9y ago
I'm always a little skeptical of arguments that new technologies are actually damaging . I'm willing to accept that people are sometimes unhappy adjusting to new things (and that people are unhappy with how other people use thei
190.
by rflrob 9y ago
The sheer conventional-ness of that idea makes me doubt it (but I don’t know of any data one way or the other), but the article doesn’t strongly contradict or support the idea that women tend to be interested in “non-physical” attributes. T
191.
by rflrob 9y ago
It's also an alternate spelling for libricous, which dictionary.com defines as: adjective 1. (of a surface, coating, etc.) having an oily smoothness; slippery. 2. unstable; shifty; fleeting. So "shifty" could be what they we
192.
by rflrob 9y ago
There's also a fascinating RadioLab piece from a few months ago about this kind of thing: http://futureoffakenews.com/videos.html It's remarkable to me how little the ML researcher they interview in that episode s
193.
by rflrob 9y ago
If the complaint is that you can't find enough workers because too many are failing drug tests[1], then your hypothetical of having "two job applicants" (for an implicit one spot to be filled) is already moot. [1] https:&#x2
194.
by rflrob 9y ago
It's common sense that they scam you. How they do it can be more subtle.
195.
by rflrob 9y ago
> No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war. Or if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that the other nuclear power has declared total war. There's been a number of false alarms that have been success
196.
by rflrob 9y ago
Clinical use is definitely coming, no argument there. What I am arguing is that most people don't have any medical issues that are worth the risks, expense, and ethical considerations of gene editing. I'd also doubt that will chan
197.
by rflrob 9y ago
Actually, the retina is one of the few places that gene therapy has been really successful. Adeno associated virus can be injected, and it has a fairly conservative safety profile (for instance, it doesn't normally integrate into the g
198.
by rflrob 9y ago
While direct editing of bases will be a really useful tool, I think it's worth pointing out to any alarmists about human editing that our ability to make directed changes far outpaces our knowledge of what changes to make (and our abil
199.
by rflrob 9y ago
Sorry, but I think you mean the integer bleem between three and four. http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-secret-number/
200.
by rflrob 9y ago
I wonder if the standardization of directions, rather than boustrophedonic writing, is due to the technology of paper and ink. If you're carving into stone or clay, then your hand isn't as likely to smudge the already written text
201.
by rflrob 9y ago
A sibling comment suggests that it's to help encode the direction, but I wonder if there's a less intentional reason, which is: why not mirror the letters? If I were coming up with conventions for reading and writing for the first
202.
by rflrob 9y ago
The 90% who show up to an election that was declared illegal by the national courts aren't likely to be representative of the population at large, though. I recall seeing numbers that the overall turnout was something like 40%, so how
203.
by rflrob 9y ago
Not obviously, though most people I knew were in reasonably well funded departments/programs, and at any rate they were unionized well before I got there, so I wasn't around to observe any changes. For what it's worth, I&#x27
204.
by rflrob 9y ago
Any idea what the criteria were? Was it by department? Degree status? Teaching vs fellowship status?
205.
by rflrob 9y ago
I went to grad school at a unionized school (UC Berkeley), and was generally fine with the union. I never directly took advantage of the union protections, but it's nice knowing that you won't just be at the mercy of your advisor
206.
by rflrob 9y ago
Since Uber is in control of the dispatch, do drivers trust Uber not to throttle the rate of their rides as they approach/pass the break-even point? Given the shenanigans they've pulled with geofencing around regulatory agencies, I
207.
by rflrob 9y ago
The fact of the matter is that we don't know a lot about how our ancient ancestors behaved—what they ate is on the firmest footing, but most of the evidence there is based on residues found on the teeth of skeletons. Just about the onl
208.
by rflrob 9y ago
"They aren't driving like I would" is a major red flag for me, causing me to either drive/bike/walk more carefully, get well away if possible, and keep them in view if necessary.
209.
by rflrob 9y ago
On the other hand (debates about the unity of the trinity aside), Christians believe in a single God as well (and that God is understood by Muslims to be Allah). So while the shahada is strongly associated with Islam, I doubt it would parti
210.
by rflrob 9y ago
Not just lacking meaningful words—sometimes including designs clearly meant to look like Arabic, but not even real letterforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Kufic

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