Minor, perspective changing facts

It is almost as big as the whole continent of Europe

Huh. I thought Canada would be a lot bigger than Europe, probably because I know that Western Europe is not that big and tend to forget how big Eastern Europe, especially the European parts of the former USSR, is.

Those people must not like pomegranates nearly as much as I do. I spend several months of each year appreciating that Chile is in the opposite season.

Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun was full of many exotic things, but the fact that temperatures were hotter when the characters went north was still reliably weird for me.

Not OP, but I expected Japan to have about 40-50 million, about on par with California and South Korea. 130 million is huge.

I was thinking more in terms of human development. Nations with large populations and high HDI are important because they support a very large number of people with a very high standard of life.

China has a HDI-rank of 101. Japan has a HDI-rank of 10.

Yes, China included developed and not-yet-developed areas. An interesting question would be how many people live in the developed parts of China -- I'd guess that's in the same ballpark as Japan.

China is not considered a developed nation? Dang. The things you learn.

Must be the archaic designation of it as a "second world" country, whereas the developed and developing countries roughly match "first world" and "third world".

Yes, thinking that Africa is just one thing is part of the problem.

In some cases this is true, but the associate between income and crime rate is not hard and fast, and people often overestimate it. Plus, people will often mistake "concentration of racial minorities" for "unsafe."

The book I just finished discusses a particular community where the geographical divide of a particular street also has functioned for decades as a racial divide, and people on the white side continue to believe that the black side is "the bad part of town," and avoid it as dangerous, with businesses even refusing to deliver there, when crime statistics fail to bear out that it's any more dangerous. In fact, there is a dangerous part of town, where crime rates are particularly elevated, but it's only a small part of the alleged dangerous part of town.

I thought areas like that are where poorer people live, which leads to a higher crime rate.

Or higher crime leads to poorer people, or some other factor causes both (this is my bet).

Just because there's a higher crime rate there doesn't mean that each individual there is looking to mug you, though. (Football fans may be more prone to fistfights than baseball fans, but that doesn't mean that every football fan is going to beat you up — or that no baseball fan will do so.)

I suppose the point is that "higher crime rate" is a deceptive piece of language. When people use that phrase there tends to be an implicit assumption that "higher crime rate" = "exactly correspondingly higher danger to you, the average visitor." This is rarely true. You may be subject to more risk in a high crime rate area than you would be in a nearby lower crime rate area, but that leads to the next point - the issue of unqualified relativity.

The word "higher" in "higher crime rate" is relative and allows you to attach whatever meaning you want. "Higher" relative to what? To adjacent neighborhoods? To neighborhoods in similar cities with similar demographics and/or socioeconomic profiles? How much risk do you subject yourself to by taking a stroll down the streets of that area? Is it more or less risk than you take by riding your bicycle a short distance without a helmet, or walking around outside in a rainstorm? I'm sure someone's job is to quantify this information, but when the average citizen tells you "don't go west of 43rd, it's a high crime rate area," you really have no idea what they're trying to tell you and they probably have no concrete idea what they mean.

edit: Lest I confuse my own point, people tend to very often be flat-out wrong about the crime statistics in their own cities. Local consensus about which areas are dangerous follows an availability cascade, where you tell people that an area is dangerous because that's what people told you when you moved there, and nobody ever goes online and notices that the crime rate in that area is actually no higher. I encourage everyone to Google the crime rates in their own cities, for you may be surprised.

Well, the fact that they have about the same calories per gram doesn't mean that they're equally healthy. The fat in bacon is almost all saturated.

Bacon is probably more filling per calorie though, so you'd be less likely to gain weight snacking on bacon than potato chips.

And do you know a good source for finding trustworthy people to pay to do mundane things?

I don't know if some periods of pop-cultural history are simply more remarkable than others and thus leave more vivid memories, or it just comes from aging. I am 37 and everything post-2000 is a blur. I don't think I could name more than one popular song esp. one I liked that was released after 2000. To me the difference between 1992 and 1996 was huge, such as techno-house went from underground to mainstream and transformed the whole musical landscape, 2000 to 2010 is like, meh, some hipster bands got more popular than some other hipster bands?...

This is very misleading. Most of the discomfort would be from the hard table against the back of your hand, and this would be because of local pressure on specific points.

Good point, but it feels about as uncomfortable if you use a padding over the table that eliminates the stress concentrations at your bones and knuckles. Especially if you double the dumbbell weight and recognize that it's only a pressure increase of 10%.

I think colonizing any planet has way too many problems before you confront this one.

Not so sure about that, just dive a few meters under water, and the pressure gets up very quickly, roughly, every 10m you dive, you get an additional atmosphere of pressure, and people are known to be able to dive below 100m with training but without special apparatus. The problems arise mostly when the pressure changes quickly (or when it gets very high), but a pressure of 10 atmosphere, with sufficient preparation and adjusting time, doesn't kill a human being.

It's at least, some evidence in that direction.

What's interesting about the Fermi Estimate post is that its examples encourage you look for predictors that are unexpectedly reliable, rather than those that first jump to mind.

That I haven't heard of many plane crashes in the past decade, this sounds like something I might hear on a post arguing an opposite point. "Sure, you've haven't heard of plane crashes in a decade, but why suspect that reliable predictors are in the neighborhood of your daily activities rather than your knowledge about the world? And now I will eye you knowingly until you learn something of your cognitive biases!"

Although, perhaps there aren't any estimated-statistics approaches that would be any good here, that wouldn't rely on other more incidental bits of information you happen to possess. Sure, you could try to list the top causes of flight disasters (human error and mechanical malfunction?) and estimate the likelihood these things occur, and also estimate how many of these flights result in large scale deaths. But there may be too many variables; either that, or I have ways to go in making Fermi estimates. In any case, it would be hard to incorporate the time variation of flight disaster outcomes. For all I know, flight safety has skyrocketed in the past decade due to widespread process improvement resulting from studying past disasters. And how could I ever predict that effectiveness, or predict how long it would take to come about?

I can't think of many car crashes either. That just means that I don't hear about them.

Of course it's more reliable to look them up, but the point of doing a Fermi estimate here is to figure out what else you might be mistaken about. For example, if you do a Fermi estimate about how much a rocket costs and it turns out to be really inaccurate, you might learn that that's because you have a really inaccurate picture of how much engineers get paid, or how many engineers it takes to build a rocket, or how much the materials for something like a rocket cost, or...

Anna and I actually did a Fermi estimate of the fuel for the Apollo 11 mission over dinner last week, and we were off by a factor of two. Some of the available inputs:

• A crude estimate of the potential energy of mass lifted from Earth's surface to a distance of many times its radius
• The heights reached by jet aircraft using fuel amounting to only a very small portion of their mass
• A crude estimate of the energy content of gasoline (one approximation is to energy content of food, and/or the energy output of humans), with adjustment for the need to carry oxygen into space
• Images of rockets launching, which show that the fuel tanks are much bigger than payload, but not thousands or millions of times bigger
• Knowledge of the price of consumer gasoline, or the price of oil
• The existence of science fiction writers with physics backgrounds, SpaceX, the L-5 societies, and other groups seriously pushing for advancements to slash cost-to-orbit
• Rough knowledge of NASA's budget, either directly or by bounding it relative to known US budget items
• Knowledge of the enormous cost of producing military aircraft and naval vessels, which can be in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars
• The existence of an ecology of NASA contractors condemned for their enormous costs (these would be trivial if fuel was the major cost)

Estimate how many people you would have needed to employ and what their salaries might be, estimate the cost of materials...

Besides, it's much easier to be "fast growing" when you start from a low base. That's why "fastest growing" almost always indicates hype when used to try to sell you something.

Unfortunately I cannot epistemically responsibly do that.

There's been a similarly large fuss over gay marriage in the UK, where 1) the NHS provides healthcare to everyone and 2) existing civil partnership legislation gave gay couples all the benefits of straight couples. So I don't think that practical issue is very important.

(Also, there are many far easier ways of getting health insurance than by upsetting arguably the most important institution in the history of the world!)

I don't know exactly what you mean by that, but my (optional) employer-provided health insurance had a premium increase when I opted to include my family vs just insuring myself. Of course, the increase wasn't the same as doubling the price, but the coverage was contingent on my having a full-time job that chose to offer it and my paying more for it.

Thing is, they don't know about that either, and/or don't care.

I guess there really were WMDs in Iraq.

Holy shit. You're not even kidding! Check out the definition here. Under the definition, it says that it includes (among other things) anything that is a 'destructive device' as defined here which in turn includes,

any type of weapon...by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter...

This is so funny, it's not even funny.

Note: the above links say it's a U.S. Code prelim (i.e. some revisions might happen). But I found similar things here.

I want to believe this is a pun. That definition includes swords.

...that we can bring it to our homes in discrete little pieces, since we are part of it, and by doing so benefit nature, too. (Interestingly, I have heard people tell me that it was we who 'murdered the flowers'.)

Many Diabetes drugs, like PPAR agonists, stimulate Insulin sensitivity, but where do they do it? The body has PPAR receptors pretty much everywhere EXCEPT in the Muscles, so patients taking these drugs & continuing to consume excessive amounts of Carbohydrates are basically switching on every mechanism they can to make sure all of their calories are being stored as Fat.

These drugs were approved by the FDA based on surrogate endpoints (they reduce Insulin resistance!) but they increase the risk of having a Heart attack by something like 28%, so I think we really need to question whether decreasing Insulin resistance without any finer specification (ie, in Muscle vs. Fat, Fasting vs. Post-prandial) is the goal we want to have in mind. Maybe it is just solving 1 part of a bigger problem & exacerbating other parts of that problem.