Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Pedestrian
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/t...-fatality.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/t...-fatality.html
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lundi 19 mars 2018
Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Pedestrian
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Weather Control and the Jews.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/19/polit...ent/index.html
An apology for his insensitive remarks was soon posted.
Unless Mr. White was merely indulging in satire, I would have expected some sort of explanation for his sounding so ignorant while on the DC council.
So, did he actually think anyone has that kind of control over the weather?
Ranb
Quote:
|
In a video uploaded to his official Facebook page on Friday morning, White referenced the Rothschilds, a European Jewish banking family who have been linked to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for years. "Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y'all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation," he says in the video, which was shot through windshield of a car driving through downtown Washington. "And DC keep talking about, 'We a resilient city.' And that's a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful." |
Quote:
|
"I want to apologize to the Jewish Community and anyone I have offended," councilmember Trayon White Sr. wrote on Twitter and Instagram. "I did not intend to be anti-Semitic, and I see I should not have said that after learning from my colleagues." |
So, did he actually think anyone has that kind of control over the weather?
Ranb
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The Opioid Crisis
I guess it being put back on the front page of the news is a good enough reason to start a general discussion thread about it.
For context right now America is a pretty big upward trend of deaths due to overdose deaths from opioids, usually legally (if arguably overly) prescribed for treatment of chronic pain conditions. A lot of chronic pain sufferers claim that only opioids are effective at treating their conditions, while studies seem to refute this.
Some info:
- As of this writing over 42,000 people have died from opioid overdoses.
- ~115 people a day die from intentional or unintentional opioid misuse.
- Roughly a quarter of patients that are prescribed opioides misuse them
So I am interested in hearing whatever thinks of this and what should be done.
_________________________________
CNN Opioid Crisis Fast Facts:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/healt...cts/index.html
Department of Health and Human Services Page on the Opioid Crisis: https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/
NBC News: Jury's in, opioids are not more effective: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...c-pain-n854436
National Institute on Drug Abuse: Opioid Overdose Crisis: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abus...verdose-crisis
For context right now America is a pretty big upward trend of deaths due to overdose deaths from opioids, usually legally (if arguably overly) prescribed for treatment of chronic pain conditions. A lot of chronic pain sufferers claim that only opioids are effective at treating their conditions, while studies seem to refute this.
Some info:
- As of this writing over 42,000 people have died from opioid overdoses.
- ~115 people a day die from intentional or unintentional opioid misuse.
- Roughly a quarter of patients that are prescribed opioides misuse them
So I am interested in hearing whatever thinks of this and what should be done.
_________________________________
CNN Opioid Crisis Fast Facts:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/healt...cts/index.html
Department of Health and Human Services Page on the Opioid Crisis: https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/
NBC News: Jury's in, opioids are not more effective: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...c-pain-n854436
National Institute on Drug Abuse: Opioid Overdose Crisis: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abus...verdose-crisis
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How truly skeptical is our skepticism?
I self-describe as skeptic. On the other hand, my skepticism is of fairly recent vintage. That is, while I’ve always been skeptical of very many things, a generally skeptical outlook (towards everything, not just some individual things) is something I’ve ‘converted’ to not very long back.
Here’s one stumbling block I seem to have come up against, and I was wondering if any of the more seasoned skeptics here might have thoughts about this. (And while this occurs to me only now, perhaps this has already been discussed elsewhere, in which case you could just point me to those discussion/s.)
I was, just now, reading this article about some studies that turned out to be rigged by pharmaceutical companies. The article went on to talk about how “evidence-based medicine” is sometimes, in specific instances, not really “evidence-based” at all. It was a newspaper article, which I read in today’s (physical) paper, and I’m not attempting to search the article out online and link to it here, since the article itself is only incidental. I mention it only because it set me thinking : how truly skeptical is our skepticism? Or are there limits to (individual) skepticism?
Our overall (rational) worldview comprises so many elements that we take simply on trust. Our trust in medication that research apparently pronounces beneficial is one egregious example of this. Similarly, our trust in certain dietary and lifestyle choices that research apparently validates (and which research could be vitiated by junk-food manufacturers, for example, or tobacco manufacturers, or cell phone manufacturers, just as medical research is sometimes subverted by pharmaceutical companies). But these examples are very focused, very specific. What I’m talking about now, in this post and thread, is in a more general sense, and this applies to most things that make up our worldview.
Take, for instance, the ‘fact’ that nothing can go faster than light. Even schoolchildren ‘know’ this. But you and I, ordinary individuals, how sure are we of this after all? If we wanted to make sure of this, at the individual level, then what would we do? Read up a bit. Browse through the Internet. Read some books. Talk with friends and acquaintances who happen to be physicists. Perhaps laboriously work our way through some research papers. And yet, these are only words written online, talks delivered by someone online, or words written in a book or paper. How ‘true’ are they?
If we’re really really determined, we could educate ourselves, get the necessary training in physics and mathematics to be better able to evaluate this question. Perhaps we could go even further, and get ourselves the qualifications, perhaps even the jobs, that would give us direct access to actual experiments, and we could then actually verify this for ourselves. Yes, then we could really and truly verify this!
But doing this would take up years and years of our life! And what we’d have verified would be only one single thing/idea, or at least, one single class of things/ideas. That would still leave unverified all of the other things that we think we know about the world. To take a random instance, the veracity of, say, evolution. That’s a wholly different subject altogether, a wholly different disciple. And these two (the speed of light, and evolution) were just two random examples, there are so many other things the “knowledge’ of which we simply take for granted, isn’t it?
My point is, all of our skepticism notwithstanding, it seems to me that we are still, at the individual level, reduced to taking most of the elements of what we know simply on trust.
Had we been born five, six centuries before today, perhaps a couple of millennia before today, then could our skepticism (assuming we could have somehow, magically, been equipped with an uncompromisingly skeptical outlook back then) have led us to reject the nonsense that made up the worldview of people back then? We could have read, and ‘researched’, and still gone round and round exploring the minutiae of theology and philosophy. But could we have broken out of the system, into realization that we don’t actually know anything at all? Back five hundred years ago, or a couple millennia ago, I mean?
Can we really do it now, today? At the individual level? (And after all, for true skepticism, the “individual level” is ultimately the only/truly meaningful level, right? Or am I wrong in assuming that?)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!
Here’s one stumbling block I seem to have come up against, and I was wondering if any of the more seasoned skeptics here might have thoughts about this. (And while this occurs to me only now, perhaps this has already been discussed elsewhere, in which case you could just point me to those discussion/s.)
I was, just now, reading this article about some studies that turned out to be rigged by pharmaceutical companies. The article went on to talk about how “evidence-based medicine” is sometimes, in specific instances, not really “evidence-based” at all. It was a newspaper article, which I read in today’s (physical) paper, and I’m not attempting to search the article out online and link to it here, since the article itself is only incidental. I mention it only because it set me thinking : how truly skeptical is our skepticism? Or are there limits to (individual) skepticism?
Our overall (rational) worldview comprises so many elements that we take simply on trust. Our trust in medication that research apparently pronounces beneficial is one egregious example of this. Similarly, our trust in certain dietary and lifestyle choices that research apparently validates (and which research could be vitiated by junk-food manufacturers, for example, or tobacco manufacturers, or cell phone manufacturers, just as medical research is sometimes subverted by pharmaceutical companies). But these examples are very focused, very specific. What I’m talking about now, in this post and thread, is in a more general sense, and this applies to most things that make up our worldview.
Take, for instance, the ‘fact’ that nothing can go faster than light. Even schoolchildren ‘know’ this. But you and I, ordinary individuals, how sure are we of this after all? If we wanted to make sure of this, at the individual level, then what would we do? Read up a bit. Browse through the Internet. Read some books. Talk with friends and acquaintances who happen to be physicists. Perhaps laboriously work our way through some research papers. And yet, these are only words written online, talks delivered by someone online, or words written in a book or paper. How ‘true’ are they?
If we’re really really determined, we could educate ourselves, get the necessary training in physics and mathematics to be better able to evaluate this question. Perhaps we could go even further, and get ourselves the qualifications, perhaps even the jobs, that would give us direct access to actual experiments, and we could then actually verify this for ourselves. Yes, then we could really and truly verify this!
But doing this would take up years and years of our life! And what we’d have verified would be only one single thing/idea, or at least, one single class of things/ideas. That would still leave unverified all of the other things that we think we know about the world. To take a random instance, the veracity of, say, evolution. That’s a wholly different subject altogether, a wholly different disciple. And these two (the speed of light, and evolution) were just two random examples, there are so many other things the “knowledge’ of which we simply take for granted, isn’t it?
My point is, all of our skepticism notwithstanding, it seems to me that we are still, at the individual level, reduced to taking most of the elements of what we know simply on trust.
Had we been born five, six centuries before today, perhaps a couple of millennia before today, then could our skepticism (assuming we could have somehow, magically, been equipped with an uncompromisingly skeptical outlook back then) have led us to reject the nonsense that made up the worldview of people back then? We could have read, and ‘researched’, and still gone round and round exploring the minutiae of theology and philosophy. But could we have broken out of the system, into realization that we don’t actually know anything at all? Back five hundred years ago, or a couple millennia ago, I mean?
Can we really do it now, today? At the individual level? (And after all, for true skepticism, the “individual level” is ultimately the only/truly meaningful level, right? Or am I wrong in assuming that?)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!
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Detecting other universes: Hawking's final paper
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...al-multiverse/
Sounds intriguing. I look forward to learning more when the paper is published
Quote:
|
A final theory explaining how mankind might detect parallel universes was completed by Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, it has emerged. Colleagues have revealed the renowned theoretical physicist’s final academic work was to set out the groundbreaking mathematics needed for a spacecraft to find traces of multiple big bangs. Currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal, the paper, named A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation, may turn out to be Hawking’s most important scientific legacy. [...] The new paper seeks to resolve an issue thrown up by Hawking’s 1983 “no-boundary” theory which described how the universe burst into existence with the big bang. According to that account, the universe instantaneously expanded from a tiny point into a prototype of what we live in today, a process known as inflation. But the theory also predicted an infinite number of big bangs, each creating their own universe, a “multiverse”, which presented a mathematical paradox because it is seemingly impossible to measure. Carlos Frenk, professor of cosmology at Durham University, told The Sunday Times: The intriguing idea in Hawking’s paper is that [the multiverse] left its imprint on the background radiation permeating our universe and we could measure it with a detector on a spaceship.. |
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Boy shoots sister in head because she didn't hand over game controller
Quote:
|
Authorities in Mississippi say a nine-year-old boy has shot his 13-year-old sister in the head and wounded her after an argument over a video game controller. Monroe County Sheriff Cecil Cantrell told local news outlets that the girl would not give up the video game controller when her brother wanted it on Saturday (local time). He said the boy shot the girl in the back of the head and that the bullet entered her brain. "Last night she wasn't doing real good. This is a very serious situation," he told the Clarion Ledger."He's just nine. I assume he's seen this on video games or TV. "I don't know if he knew exactly what this would do. I can't answer that. I do know it's a tragedy |
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-1...roller/9564702
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Science? Magic? CG? (The Amazing Self-Sorting Galton Board)
This was the first one from January 2018:
https://giant.gfycat.com/QualifiedBarrenHyena.mp4
Then a week or two later someone posted this:
https://imgur.com/Rv2CkWt
https://giant.gfycat.com/QualifiedBarrenHyena.mp4
Then a week or two later someone posted this:
https://imgur.com/Rv2CkWt
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