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To be true to Taubes, my memory was too approximate. The actual claim was that in 1976 Fred Stare, the director and founder (in 1942) of the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard School of Public Health was exposed by Michael Jacobson having received around 200.000 dollars in the course of the preceding 3 years from Kellogg's, Nabisco e and their foundations, after he had testified before the Congress about the virtues of cereal as a breakfast food. Apparently this discredited Stare as a scientist.

Wikipedia also states that "Kellogg's funded $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard. The foundation was independent of the university and published a journal Nutrition Reviews that Stare edited for 25 years." But I cannot find this is Taubes's book.

I don't know why this was re-posted today (kind of suspicious that this floats again after 10 year just by chance) anyway, there is a full citation-heavy book by Gary Taubes about this, and one of his points was that the sugar industry paid 2 million in 1970's dollars to create the nutrition department of Harvard, which was the first nutrition department in the world. (This was to say that nutrition science itself has been corrupt since its birth).

Money alleviates poverty. It’s not complicated. By Annie Lowrey

"You might want to grab a cup of $beverage before continuing, this is going to take a while."

Instead, I launched a compilation.

This blog post is unfair to horseless carriages.

"lack of suspension"

The author did not see the large, outsized, springs that keep the cabin insulated from both the road _and_ the engine.

What was wrong in this design was just that the technology to keep the heavy, vibrating, motor sufficiently insulted from both road and passengers was not available (mainly inflatable tires). Otherwise it was perfectly reasonable, even commendale, because it tried to make-do with what was available.

Maybe the designer can be critizised for not seeing that a wooden frame was not strong enough to hold a steam engine, and maybe that there was no point in making the frame as light as possible when you have a steam engine to push it, but, you know, you learn this by doing.

>> imagine a world without advertising

> I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.

I don't know, in my country advertising tobacco products is forbidden since at least 20 years, how did they pull this magic trick?? go figure

They look symmetric to me, but that's not point anyway, I guess they are parables, only they are rotated, their axis is not parallel to the y axis.

If those are 2nd order functions in the 2d plane, then we don't agree on terminology.

The reason why I feel an expert is that it is clear at first sight to me that if you really implement the Newton method in that situation, the approximating functions that you will get are totally different from those that were drawn in the illustration.

The third parable from the left on the lower left figure, is definitely not a second order approximation to the target function: the convexity is reversed!

You are thinking of those parables as parametric curves, I guess, but Newton's method is about approximating an arbitrary function by its Taylor expansion truncated to the second degree, which is a polynomial function of second degree. The graphs of these functions can be thought as parametric curves, but (my point is also) these are not those that were drawn in the illustration.

Yes, that's what I guess has happened.

Maybe I had my Gell-Mann effect moment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect)

The illustration of the Newton method is wrong, isn't it? The approximating second order polynomials that were drawn are not really graphs of second order polynomials, they are not even functions... those are parables in the 2D plane, but Newton's method won't work like that... Besides, the convexity of the target function looks negative near to the first guess, the Newton method shall probably miserably fail here

At first I thought you were not getting it, but, thinking it through, I now think the real problem is that the article gave us the averages (600, 701, 5000) without giving the standard deviations and nobody is outraged!

The combined result of the three experiments can be either surprising or absolutely obvious: if the standard deviation of each of the three experiments was around 1 cm, it would be troubling, if it was 100 cm, it would be troublesome yet, but if the standard deviation is 5000 cm, there would be nothing wrong in what happened.

I have found this long read a useful summary of deliberate practice https://fs.blog/deliberate-practice-guide/

"By learning how the Shire worked, we can start to understand how our own past worked, in all its complexity and contradictions."

Sorry but this is totally preposterous. Why should we look at our past through a fictional creation of one author? Why don't we go directly to the sources that that same author had? Makes much more sense.

"Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat, and there’s rarely much left over."

This i contentious, I have actually read scholars that argue the opposite.

Don't you see that 90% of these is just

"There is plastic in the environment"

It does not say "plastic harms this or that".

The equality "plastic presence"=="plastic harm" is not obvious to me

To me it is just like "man-made electromagnetic waves are everywhere, they are not natural, ergo this harms the environment"

I do totally remember.

I remember the time when the press cried "there is no cork left on earth!!".

I remember the time when cheap wine came with plastic corks.

I remember the time when cheap wine had cork corks again.

"I don’t think we need to argue plastic incurred harm, it should be obvious."

? I'd like a clear and obvious reference.

Italian television brought coffee to the lab, and the results where not reassuring (from minute 18 onward, only Italian, I am sorry)

https://www.rai.it/programmi/report/inchieste/Un-espresso-a-...

aluminum was at around 1/6 of the EU recommended maximum safe concentration. But you could cut this in half using the stainless steel moka. Apparently about half of the aluminum came from the coffee powder itself and half from the moka.

A lot of metals from the coffee itself, apparently because of fertilizers and insecticides.

Anyway the moka itself released around 0.3 mg per liter of aluminum

Just read the title...

can something that happens over a 50 years span be correctly described as a "collapse"?

go figure

The author does not know what it is meant by "deliberate practice" nowadays. Everytime they use it, they should have written "rote practice" or, simply, "practice".

It never occurred to me that "being able to solve basic math problems I had not seen before", implied that I "could threaten humanity". Wow!

rocket propulsion has been used in forced sterilizations?

This only tells you in what dire conditions lay psychology and psychometrics.

IQ is only propaganda for an ideology.

Stephen Jay Gould wasn't making excuses.

"being unbiased" can be fairly honestly called a "value". Europeans apparently have chosen it as one of their own values.

If you are arguing that being truly unbiased cannot ever be realized, I counter that neither truth nor justice can ever be truly realized, by this should not stop anyone from taking them as their values.

     signed by: an expert

What do you make of this

https://twitter.com/thwjanssen89/status/1570426961411067904?...

comment?

mmmmh, if your criterion is the happiness of the least happy... I guess C++ is a total failure!

Only to underline this common fallacy: "Name an economically successful communist country."

The purpose of communism has never been that of being "economically successful".

If you want to dismiss communism as a failure, first off, you should not measure money, and not even wealth, but simply happiness. Second, you should measure equality, and, finally, you should measure the happiness of the least happy, not that of the most happy.