Interesting Links for 17-04-2012

[andrewducker]

• Sceptic debunks "miracle", is arrested for blasphemy
  (tags: religion scepticism india law )
• Majority of England now declared to be in drought - may last until Christmas
  (tags: water england uk )
• When your non-patented drugs are spontaneously converted into patents ones. I love nanotech.
  (tags: replication drugs patents nanotech )
• The conviction rate for rape is 58%, higher than the average. Reporting it as 6% just puts people off reporting it.
  (tags: rape law uk )
• Greece,Portugal and Spain all fucked. They can't devalue, and they can't be competitive _and_ pay debts off.
  (tags: greece spain portugal euro debt money )
• When Eton and Goldman Sachs run charities, the system needs reform
  (tags: charity uk tax )
• Volcano eruptions follow Benford's Law
  (tags: volcano mathematics patterns )
• North Korean Press Bus Takes a Wrong Turn, Gets Some Unauthorised Pictures
  (tags: NorthKorea )
• Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all
  (tags: war intelligence WMD Iraq )
• Abuse At Scale: How GMail deals with outgoing spam.
  (tags: gmail email spam technology google )
• Most people not aware how much sugar there is in "healthy" drinks (like fruit juice).
  (tags: sugar diet health food )
• Can a stroke change someone's sexuality?
  (tags: lgbt sexuality stroke brains )
• The Official Doctor Who Fan Club - the story of how the BBC handed Who fandom to a 13-year-old
  (tags: drwho bbc )
• Ann Widdecombe can fuck off. "Bring back the concept of shame" my arse. (Tories trying to clamp down on drunk people)
  (tags: alcohol society AnnWiddecombe Conservatives )

Comments

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

Either I've got a virus or odwfc.com has been hijacked so that it redirects to advertising pages.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Benfords Law is all well and good, but the only reason it works at a tool for detecting fraud is that fraudsters are unaware of how random numbers *should* be distributed. The more potential fraudsters are made aware of it, the more they'll pick realistically distributed random numbers, nullifying the utility of Benford's Law as a fraud detection tool.

Oh well.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Re the last link - so she wants to try to make it socially unacceptable to go out and deliberately get falling-down drunk and end up in A&E and waste NHS resources, and you oppose this? Why?

She compares it to the way smoking is becoming less socially acceptable. Do you oppose that too? Why or why not?

(Also, the link about rape goes to a Page Not Found page.)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I don't understand at all why the European Central Bank has not figured out that the only realistic way to get out of the current multi-national fiscal crisis is to devalue the Euro.

It's not even like lowering the Euro by 30 percent would be without historical precedent. Several years ago the Euro was at Dollar parity. In fact when it was launched it was intentionally launched at a level that was near Dollar parity. Now a Euro is worth $1.31. Bringing it down to the same value against the Dollar and other currencies as it was originally expected to be would wipe out 31 percent of the current debt.

It would also greatly increase exports. It would even be good for the Germans (think how many more BMWs would be sold if the price suddenly dropped by 31 percent.) You'd create jobs! And tourism would boom - creating more jobs - as vacations to Europe became more affordable.

It's been clear for two years now that devaluation would be much more effective then austerity and yet they won't go for it.

It's bizarre.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

"Majority of England now declared to be in drought".

It's currently pissing it down here. Of course whether "here" is in England or not is something of a vexed question.