Thank your mother in law.

From the Register website:

Wonder why you live longer than a chimp?:

Hawkes and colleagues of hers have long sought to advance their theory of grandmothering, which goes roughly like this. In the remote past, the common ancestral mothers of humans and great apes couldn't generally move on to have another child until their most recent nipper was no longer breast-feeding (breast feeding acts as a contraceptive, in order to prevent a mother being overburdened with children she can't support).

This could take quite a long time, much longer than it now does, as the infants need to be quite old before they can feed themselves and generally in an ape-man tribe nobody else was going to get hold of suitable food - for instance by digging up suitable root veg etc - and feed it to them.

Back then, female apes would generally die once they were past childbearing age: but naturally a few genetically different individuals might live on for longer. According to Hawkes and her colleagues, these older ape ladies in many cases would get hold of suitable infant food and pitch in to help feed their descendants. The nippers would thus be weaned earlier, allowing their mothers to have another child sooner, so spreading the grandma's unusual long-life genes faster and conferring an evolutionary advantage.

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Physicians are overpaid

Simple, doctors are overpaid:
By Rin   Follow


I think it's time that we stop the lies and admit the truth, doctors are simply overpaid. GPs are at ~$150K while specialists and surgical specialists are from $200K to $500K. Most engineers and scientists simply do not have sustainable salaries of that amount "\
..............

Yes, there's no free market, in terms of supply, in the field of medicine. Here's my solution, if one can score a 30 or higher on the MCAT, he/she should be able to transfer into the clinical years of an MD program, typically into year number 3.
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One jelly donut is a fine thing, 35 jelly donuts are not

David Einhorn-

"We have just spent 15 years learning that a policy of creating asset bubbles is a bad idea, so it is hard to imagine why the Fed wants to create another one"

Quotes of Norman Augustine

1. A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better.

2. A recent government publication on the marketing of cabbage contains, according to one report, 26,941 words. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Gettysburg Address contains a mere 279 words while the Lord's Prayer comprises but 67.

3. All too many consultants, when asked, 'What is 2 and 2?' respond, 'What do you have in mind?'

Norman Augustine,
Retired chairman and CEO
Lockheed Martin Corp.

http://www.wsu.edu/augustine/quotes.html

Italian experts convicted of manslaughter over deadly 2009 quake

Defying assertions that earthquakes cannot be predicted, an Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter Monday for failing to adequately warn residents before a temblor struck central Italy in 2009 and killed more than 300 people.

The court in L'Aquila also sentenced the defendants to six years each in prison. All are members of the national Great Risks Commission, and several are prominent scientists or geological and disaster experts.

Scientists had decried the trial as ridiculous, contending that science has no reliable way of predicting earthquakes. So news of the verdict shook the tightknit community of earthquake experts worldwide.

"It's a sad day for science," said seismologist Susan Hough, of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif. "It's unsettling." That fellow seismic experts in Italy were singled out in the case "hits you in the gut," Hough added.

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Green Jobs Wilt

 "Workers at an LG Chem plant in Holland, Michigan have already been put on furlough before a single battery has come off the line. Workers have three weeks of paid “work”, and one week off unpaid at the $300 million plant.
As early as 2010, the Holland plant was touted by President Obama as the return of manufacturing jobs to America, and green ones at that. The facility was estimated have produced 15,000 batteries a year and added hundreds of jobs. So far, 200 workers are being paid to do nothing."


http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/10/workers-at-lg-chem-plant-on-furlough-as-green-jobs-wilt/
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Presidential Debates Are Scripted Beauty Contests

ZeroHedge:

The "spontaneous" questions from audience members are actually pre-screened, and even the moderator is forbidden from asking follow-up questions.

France's Hollande Wants To Ban Homework

Business Insider:

French president pushing homework ban as part of education reforms. Reason for the homework ban?

Francois Hollande doesn’t think it is fair that some kids get homework help from their parents while children who come from disadvantaged families don’t.

Does everyone have an air conditioner who arguably needs one? If not, is the solution to ban them?

If you were looking for further proof that Hollande was a socialist nut case, now you have it.

Why A Balanced Budget Is Impossible In America

ZeroHedge: "If the US government cut all government services except Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest payments, federal spending would still outpace revenues. "

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Rosenhan experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosenhan experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "

St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital, Washington, D.C., one of the sites of the Rosenhan experiment

The Rosenhan experiment was an experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted
by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973. It was published in the journal Science under the title
"On being sane in insane places."^[1]The study is considered an important and influential criticism
of psychiatric diagnosis.^[2]

Rosenhan's study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men) who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The second part involved an offended hospital challenging Rosenhan to send pseudopatients to its facility, whom its staff would then detect. Rosenhan agreed and in the following weeks out of 193 new patients the staff identified 41 as potential pseudopatients, with 19 of these receiving suspicion from at least 1 psychiatrist and 1 other staff member. In fact Rosenhan had sent no-one to the hospital.The study concluded:

It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals and also illustrated the dangers of dehumanization and labelling in psychiatric institutions. It suggested that the use of community mental health facilities which concentrated on specific problems and behaviors rather than psychiatric labels might be a solution and recommended education to make psychiatric workers more aware of the social psychology of their facilities.

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The Skeptic's Dictionary

The Skeptic's Dictionary: Mayan prophecy 2012

In a nutshell: The Mayan prophecy for 2012 is something made up by people who don't know much about the Maya. The Maya didn't predict anything, much less the end of the world.

The Maya had several calendars and one of them starts over in 2012. Some people think this means they predicted the end of the world. Why? I don't know. Maybe they like to scare people. The Maya didn't predict the end of the world. But even if they did, so what? The Maya couldn't even predict the end of their own civilization, which collapsed over one thousand years ago.

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Christmas Gift Idea: Pickle has an on/off switch.

Yodeling Pickle Ornament

While some say the Germans are the ones who came up with this tradition, people in Germany have never heard of it. Let's not let the implausibility of a tradition prevent us from having fun with it. Our plastic Yodeling Pickle Ornament is not a only sanitary alternative to an actual pickle, it is also equipped with a motion detector that goes off whenever someone gets within about 3 feet of it. You can set up the plastic, 4-1/2" tall ornament near the presents to act as an alarm when someone snoops. Buy a bunch of them and you'll have a chorus of yodels whenever someone walks past your tree.  Pickle has an on/off switch. Endorsed by Santa Pickle.

http://mcphee.com/shop/lucky-yodelling-christmas-pickle-ornament.html

Dr. S. O. Teric does not profit from any sales of this item.

Ryan has a bad plan, Biden has no plan at all.

http://brucekrasting.com/on-the-rise-of-the-mu/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=on-the-rise-of-the-mu

Before 2016 the SS Disability Fund will run dry. They next administration has to confront this reality. A fix is required in less than 36 months. There is a gun to your head for action Joe. You have two choices. Raise taxes or cut DI benefits. Which one is it? You can’t hide under a rock for another four years, so what are you going to do?

The retirement side of SS will run off the cliff in 20 years according to the CBO. But that estimate is off the mark. It is not possible to run the SS Trust Fund to zero; a minimum of one-year’s worth of benefits has to be retained as a minimum reserve. Over the next decade there will be at least one recession, when that happens the SS death spiral will be advanced by five or so years (as it was from the 08 blowout). The reality is that the SS drop dead date is closer to ten-years away from today.

The Medicalization of Rebellion

The Medicalization of Rebellion

In our scientific age, many people find scientism, the application of the concepts and techniques of the hard sciences to persons and economic/social phenomena, comforting. In truth it is dehumanization in the name of health.

Szasz, a prolific author who celebrated his 92nd birthday earlier this week, writes,

People do not have to be told that malaria and melanoma are diseases. They know they are. But people have to be told, and are told over and over again, that alcoholism and depression are diseases. Why? Because people know that they are not diseases, that mental illnesses are not “like other illnesses,” that mental hospitals are not like other hospitals, that the business of psychiatry is control and coercion, not care or cure. Accordingly, medicalizers engage in a never-ending task of “educating” people that nondiseases are diseases.

The Mathematicization Of Economics-a bad development

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-11/guest-post-mathematicization-economics


The Mathematicization Of Economics

If one thing has changed in the last one hundred years in economics it has been the huge outgrowth in the usage of mathematics:

This is largely a bad development, for a number of reasons.

First of all layers of mathematics acts as a barrier to public understanding. While mathematics is a useful language for communicating complex ideas, those without training in mathematics will struggle to grasp what an author is trying to communicate if a paper consists mostly of equations untranslated into English. This is bad practice; it is easier to baffle with bullshit in an unfamiliar language than it is in plain English.

Second, mathematical models are always simplifications. Human action and economic behaviour is complex and unpredictable. While mathematical models can sometimes approximate a pattern quite well and so have some limited uses as toys, the complexity of human behaviour means that there are always unmodelled variables that can throw off a model’s output. Over-reliance upon or excessive faith in mathematical models can lead to bad forecasting and bad policy decisions. The grand theoretical-mathematical approach to economics is fundamentally flawed.

Third, attempting to smudge the human reality of economics into cold mathematical shackles is degenerative. Economics is a human subject. Human behaviour is not mechanical, it is not mechanistic. Physicists can very accurately model the trajectories of rocks in space. But economists cannot accurately model the trajectories of prices, employment and interest rates down on the rocky ground.

Economics would benefit from self-restraint in regard to the usage of mathematics.

Last Night's Presidential Debate

Postal Service Defaults on a $5.6 Billion Benefits Payment - NYTimes.com

Postal Service Defaults on a $5.6 Billion Benefits Payment - NYTimes.com: "WASHINGTON — The Postal Service sank deeper into debt on Monday after the agency defaulted on a $5.6 billion payment due at the end of September, the second time it has missed a deadline this year to set aside money for its future retiree health benefits."

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