Filed under: Comics, Dinosaur Comics, General Musings, Government, Humor, Science, Violence
Well, you gotta die from something, so you might as well make it interesting. Here are the latest stats on what your odds are of dying from various non-natural causes:
The table below was prepared in response to frequent inquiries asking questions such as, “What are the odds of being killed by lightning?” or “What are the chances of dying in a plane crash?”
The odds given below are statistical averages over the whole U.S. population and do not necessarily reflect the chances of death for a particular person from a particular external cause. Any individual’s odds of dying from various external causes are affected by the activities in which they participate, where they live and drive, what kind of work they do, and other factors.
I think “Ignition or melting of nightwear” is probably my favorite. That’s some hot sex, folks.
And it is interesting to see what the real risks are for many things which people fear. 10 people died from spiders – more than snakes (7) – but still, that’s a pretty tiny number. Yet I have an immediate and irrational response to spiders. But you’re almost as likely to die from “High and low air pressure and changes in air pressure” – and who the hell fears that?
Anyway, have some fun seeing how we die – always a great topic for discussion at parties!
Jim Downey
Via Dinosaur Comics, of all places. Cross posted to UTI.
Man, this stuff never gets old:
I am happy that I lived at the right time to see this whole technology develop. Amazing stuff.
Jim Downey
PS: That’s footage from the STS-125 mission. More available here, naturally.
Via Phil Plait, a delightful illusion:
Just had to share that.
Jim Downey
(Yes, I am still frightfully busy. But in mostly good ways.)
Just under a month ago I wrote about launching the major upgrade to BBTI. Since then, we’ve had 217,390 hits to the site, bringing us to just shy of one million hits (986,999) as of midnight. Given how things have been going the last couple of days, I expect we’ll break a million today or tomorrow. [edited to add: we had over 21 thousand hits on 6/27, thereby crossing a million.]
And that’s kinda cool.
So, thanks to all who passed along word of our project. In particularly, our top ten referrers have been:
- www.darkroastedblend.com
- www.google.com
- www.defensivecarry.com
- www.thefirearmblog.com
- www.ar15.com
- www.thehighroad.org
- www.thefiringline.com
- ballisticsbytheinch.wordpress.com
- forums.somethingawful.com
- www.saysuncle.com
I find it interesting that the top referrer (by a long shot) isn’t even a firearms-related site. That we’ve risen high in Google searches comes as very little surprise, and I’m pleased that the BBTI blog itself has such a prominent spot, just after five of the best known gun forums/blogs. That’s kinda cool, too.
Anyway, thought I would pass this bit of good news along.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Just a follow-up to this post the first of the month. From Richard Wiseman’s blog:
In short, all four trials were misses.
When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups. So the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing, and suggested that those who believe in the paranormal are good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target .
* * *
Update: I have just looked at the data from those who claimed some kind of psychic ability, and had a high confidence in their choice of target. This sub-group of participants also scored zero out of four.
Surprise, surprise.
Thanks, Richard –
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Humor, Phil Plait, Science, Space
Via Phil Plait, a glimpse into how far woo can go wrong:
Orbiter crashing into the moon
There is a Japanese lunar orbiter named Kaguya that is scheduled to crash into the moon today at about 2:30 pm ET. Scientists hope to learn something about the moon’s composition by observing the debris that is kicked up.
In many traditions, including astrology, the moon represents the feminine. It is the yin, the intuitive, the emotions. Women are connected to the moon by their menstrual cycles while they are fertile, and all beings, including the earth herself, are affected by the pull of the tides.
* * *
Did these scientists talk to the moon? Tell her what they were doing? Ask her permission? Show her respect?
Wow.
Just . . . wow.
Believe it or not, I got similar comments from a number of people when I did my “Paint the Moon” project back in 2001. I don’t know if Ms. Harvey was one of the people who contacted me, but I did hear from people who were really worried that we were going to somehow ‘insult’ or harm the Moon by pointing laser pointers at it. I mean, I expected a fair number of folks who would miss the whole point of it being an art project, but some of these people were seriously lacking in any sense of scientific reality, who were actually worried that our little laser pointers would destroy the Moon or something.
Wow. Sometimes I think I am not nearly cynical nor pessimistic enough, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Just a quick update – one week ago I wrote about launching version 2.0 of Ballistics By The Inch, considerably expanded with a lot of data and graphs. Well, since then we’ve had over 100,000 hits and our total hits for the site is now at 875,000. I am still waiting for DRB to post their new set of links (which is supposed to include us) and they were our top referrer for the first launch back in November. This time around all I have seen are good reviews on referring sites, without any of the negative or dismissive comments we got with the initial launch. I think more people “get it” now, and it doesn’t hurt at all that we added in a whole bunch of additional real world guns.
It’s very rewarding to see the news and use of the site spread.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Government, Heinlein, Humor, Nuclear weapons, NYT, Publishing, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Terrorism
Heh:
U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally
The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.
* * *
Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.
“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”
Yeah, everyone knows where their local stockpile of enriched uranium is, right? I mean, really. I can’t see the problem here.
Jim Downey
*Sorry, I couldn’t resist the connection to Heinlein’s classic SF story “Blowups Happen” because of the topic and attitude.
Cross posted to UTI.
This past weekend, after we had ‘launched’ version 2.0 of BBTI, I sent out a few emails to places where I thought they might be interested in mentioning the new and expanded site, in addition to announcements on the four gun forums where I post. The Firearm Blog. Dark Roasted Blend (pending). Ammoland . And to several gun organizations and firearms-related magazines. I know that there’s a high level of interest in our work (we’ve had over 800,000 hits since the initial launch last Thanksgiving), and the word would get out, but it doesn’t hurt to do a little promotion.
Anyway, I got back a brief email from the editor of one leading publication. Let’s just call them “Firearms & Ammunition Review”. Here’s the response:
Sorry, but because we discuss ballistics on the “F&AR” web-site, we’re considered competitors.It sounds like you guys are having a lot of fun, though, and I wish you the best of luck.
And that, right there, is why we did this whole project.
Because far too often the data which has been generated has been considered “proprietary.” Secret. Not to be trusted to the average guy who just wants to make an intelligent decision about what caliber and barrel length will suit his purpose.
Now, I understand capitalism. I’ve been a small business owner for almost 20 years. Magazines are under a lot of pressure to try and generate revenue one way or another. But the mindset of “no, we can’t discuss *that* – people might stop paying for access to our data” escapes my understanding. What, they think that people aren’t going to find out about BBTI? That if they just ignore us, the “threat” we pose will go away?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to do an article on our project, to help push their publication/website as having a solid handle on all that is going on in the world of ballistics research? They can still do their other articles. Still have real experts on ballistics comment on our project (none of us involved in BBTI has any illusions about being an expert in this field). Still cover reviews of this or that firearm, discuss how this or that new ammunition performs.
So, this is why we did it. Because the data generated by ammunition manufacturers and firearms makers was locked away in corporate databases somewhere, inaccessible. Because we wanted to know. And because once we knew, we thought that others might like to know, too. And that maybe, just maybe, having an “open source” resource like this would benefit everyone, us included.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
I’m not quite sure what to make of this:
Twitter’s first scientific study needs you!
Can some people correctly identify a place using mind power alone?
Psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, wants to find out, and New Scientist readers can help.
Over the course of this week, we’ll be carrying out an experiment to find out if there’s any substance to claims that some people are “remote viewers” – able to psychically identify a distant location without being shown or told where it is through conventional means.
I dunno – I’d think that twits and woo make a bad combination. The sort of thing that would have you hunched over a toilet after the party, if you know what I mean. But the way that they are doing it at least seems reasonable on first glance:
So, how is the experiment going to work?
Well, at 3pm (UK time) each day, I will travel to a randomly selected location. Once there, I will send a Tweet, asking everyone to Tweet about their thoughts concerning the nature of the location. Thirty minutes later, I will send another Tweet linking to a website that will allow everyone to view photographs of five locations (the actual location and four decoys), think about the thoughts and images that came to them in the thirty minutes before, and vote on which of the five they believe to be the actual target location.
If the majority of people select the correct target then the trial will count as a hit, otherwise it will count as a miss. There will be trials at 3pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week. Three or more hits in four trials will be seen as supporting the existence of extrasensory perception.
Not in any way scientific (I can think of many ways the results could be skewed), but could be interesting. And is at least as good a use of Twitter as any that I have heard of so far.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)
Communion Of Dreams 