TomorrowYesterday

Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Damnation is for liars, damned liars, and statistics.

Interesting.

Yahoo! News – Fear of Death Wins Minds and Votes, Study Finds

Talking about death can raise people’s need for psychological security, the researchers report in studies to be published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science and the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
“There are people all over who are claiming every time Bush is in trouble he generates fear by declaring an imminent threat,” said Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, who worked on the study.
“We are saying this is psychologically useful.”
Greenberg, Solomon and colleagues then decided to test the idea further and set up four separate studies at different universities.
“In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV,” Solomon said. “What we found was staggering.”
When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq (news – web sites). But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.
“They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq,” Solomon said.

September 11th. Suicide bombers. Random shootings. People dying. Poisons. Deadly gases. Infectious diseases spreading out of control. Skynet.
Be sure to read TomorrowYesterday everyday.

Bulk of year’s PC infections pinned to one man | CNET News.com

Sven Jaschan, self-confessed author of the Netsky and Sasser viruses, is responsible for 70 percent of virus infections in 2004, according to a six-month virus roundup published Wednesday by antivirus company Sophos.
The 18-year-old Jaschan was taken into custody in Germany in May by police who said he had admitted to programming both the Netsky and Sasser worms, something experts at Microsoft confirmed. (A Microsoft antivirus reward program led to the teenager’s arrest.) During the five months preceding Jaschan’s capture, there were at least 25 variants of Netsky and one of the port-scanning network worm Sasser.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said it was staggering that one person could be responsible for so many infections. Richard Starnes, president of security industry group ISSA UK, was also impressed: “Is he going to put this on his CV?” he asked.

Evil!!

So today there was this bizarre article that went around saying that countries that believed in Hell are richer because they are more honest:
Yahoo! News – Believing in Hell Has Its Benefits

Economists searching for reasons why some nations are richer than others have found that those with a wide belief in hell are less corrupt and more prosperous, according to a report by the Federal Reserve (news – web sites) Bank of St. Louis.

Well, it’s not completely true. Check out this BoingBoing page to read about why.
If you actually read the report, you’ll see that in the list, Sweden least believes in Hell and has the lowest GDP. And yet it is one of the happiest countries in the world.
Maybe not believing in Hell (which doesn’t exist anyway) means being happy.

Jeff Maurone: Metanoya: More on My Dinner with #1 on the Forbes

There is only one way that I can describe the home: utter perfection. As someone that is considerably interested in architecture, interior design, landscape, etc, I can’t name any one piece of the home that stood out as incredible, because all facets were equally perfect. We entered the home via what seemed to be the entertainment entrance and, at that, it was quite understated. The entrance organically rose from the hill in distinct pacific northwest style and was elegantly adorned by perfectly oriented halogen lighting that just screamed, “experience like no other.” Interestingly enough however, this entrance was at the top of the hill into which the home is built and so it truly was just a small portal rising from the ground.

Very interesting read!

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Miracle on Probability Street — The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America

I cannot always explain such specific incidents, but a principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials. Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.
Dyson explains that “during the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.”

I guess there are no miracles.

WSJ.com – Fatal Medical Errors Said To Be More Widespread

If hospital errors were counted by the Centers for Disease Control as a cause of death, they would rank sixth, ahead of diabetes, influenza and pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, the study said.
The costs associated with treating patients in need of excess care because of medical errors is substantial. The additional cost to taxpayers to treat the Medicare patients who were victims of medical errors, including both those who lived and those who died, was $2.9 billion a year, the study estimated.
“Medical errors seem to be the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge or talk about,” Dr. Collier wrote in the study. “The lack of recognition…fosters a culture of denial and complacency.”

Scary!

Yahoo! News – “Simpsons”: A Gay Old Time

“We have a show where, to raise money, Springfield legalizes gay marriage,” producer Al Jean told comic book fans. “Homer becomes a minister by going on the Internet and filling out a form. A longtime character comes out of the closet, but I’m not saying who.”

Interesting!