Bruce: longarch- yes, bunch of cases like that convinced me. And I don’t think stick time is always bad police work. Kirk- Kill them. Simple as that- Come now. If you think killing people is a magic wand, who are you? And what have you done with Kirk? I’d rather we issued Air Tasers more and the ones you can just stand there thumbing the button to make a guy squirm less, but so far Air Tasers need at least a 12-gauge. Maybe offer the Taser company a sweet contract for something more handy?
longarch: https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Robert_Dzieka%C5%8 4ski_Taser_incident Also: “repeated shocks are police torture”
Kirk: That whole thing reads like he had his lawyers and PR flacks standing over his shoulder the whole time. Personally, I have my doubts about the whole TASER concept, from the tactical side of things. The root problem is this: The damn thing is not a 100% solution to the issues that it’s meant to deal with. The barbs may not lodge properly, the subject may be wearing heavy clothes, and some people just don’t seem to be at all phased with the damn things, even when you’ve got proper...
Graham: Ezra poses what to me is a very interesting question. One that might traditionally have varied somewhat [though possibly not that much], and likely has changed a bit in modern times. That is to say, in the unlikely event a modern passenger vessel founders prior to the arrival of external authorities and rescuers, or the survivors at least are left ashore any significant length of time before these show up, how encompassing is the captain’s authority under maritime law, and is it affected by...
Bruce: I like tasers, and cops using pain compliance aren’t always wrong, but repeated shocks are police torture and should automatically get the cop at least fired.
Ezra: A captain of a ship normally by law has great authority over the crew. After the ship sinks and they make landfall I am not so sure. Crew are then free operators?
Lu An Li: I would imagine most of deaths from TASER a combination of the electrical shock AND a whole lot of illegal drugs in the body of the deceased AND perhaps an underlying medical condition not treated.
Graham: I guess we’re in good shape now that three commenters have already, one way or another, highlighted the problem of correlation not equaling causation here. It did make me want to go and get a dynamometer, though. Less a marker of any individual’s mortality, and more just a marker of our slow transition into Eloi. Finally I’m a trend leader.
EDM: Bruce, Why is he asking for donations instead of using his smarts to earn money?
Felix: For grown men, this graph looks like a mortality graph, leading by 10 or 20 years. In women, it looks less so. That is, men start croaking at, what, 60 to 70? And this graph’s value takes a dive at 50. So grip strength predicts age, which predicts death. Now, if you want to use grip strength to predict mortality, then you’d compare your subject to the grip strengths of his age-cohorts, not to age-cohorts of a few decades ago. Lifestyle changes, as Wang Wei Lin points out. I wonder...
Wang Wei Lin: Modern society has less manual labor thus lower grip strength. Growing up most of us older people did manual work like push mowing, automotive repairs, construction as opposed to playing with keyboards and touch surfaces. The study if anything is a snapshot of the change in labor. As a health indicator the metrics will have to move the bell curve left to reflect the younger generation’s limp grip.
Wang Wei Lin: The shipwreck is an interesting microcosm of the world. Whether defined as a success or failure any group of people can be considered a society. To me success is defined by the society’s ability to move toward improvement. In the case of shipwrecks, success is getting rescued with the successful shipwreck societies defaulting to civil behaviour instead of barbarism/tribalism. Successful societies can be spotted across history by the relatively simple matter of following the track of...
Harry Jones: Jordan Peterson is either overrated or underrated, depending on what your expectations are. I have moved on from following Jordan Peterson, but without any regret for the time I spent reading and viewing him. It’s important to know when you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns. Because there is always is one.
Alrenous: Seems it’s still legal to get a midwife and give birth at home.
Bert: Of course, if lots of people take to specifically training their grip strength, its correlation with overall health will decrease.
Kirk: This is pretty much in perfect alignment with what I’ve been saying for years: IQ testing really and fundamentally only tests the ability to do well on an IQ test, and your attempted application of that information outside the realm of the IQ test is going to produce some really wildly variable results…
Aretae: I’m fascinated but unconvinced at least on the uncorrelated side. As you know, I focus on implicit leaning models … research like this is super interesting.
Alistair: On all 3 occasions my wife has given birth, I’ve noticed just how noisy and stressful the wards are. Daytime noise is constant; nights are a bit quieter, but still broken by constant monitoring, crying infants, and distant slamming doors. Hard, washable floors and surfaces don’t help at all. On all three occasions my wife’s mental welfare deteriorated sharply after 72 hours of exhausted exposure. This of course, made her a “risk” for even more invasive monitoring...
Sam J.: And just for fun look at this operating system. Jehanne Operating System http://jehanne.io/ I really like this. I like the ideas behind it and if it was to take off, probably never happen, the world would be a better place. Seems to be a combination of plan9, QNX with a Unix user space laid on top.
Sam J.: “…The economics of open source are archetypally communistic…” ; No I believe people program open source projects for status. Very much like the American Indian practice of potlatch.
Isegoria, may you have a rational yet funny Christmas! ;-)
Thank you kindly, Borepatch. In fact, I’ll try to keep things rational yet funny into the New Year.
..and that’s why I come here often.
Happy coming New Year!
Happy New Year to you, too, Tatyana. (S Novim godom!)