When Shefali Kulkarni, a reporting fellow at the Village Voice in New York City, is asked for her name while ordering coffee at Starbucks, she tells the barista a little fib. She uses "Sheila," her "coffee name."
That guy in front of you at the coffee shop might not actually be named "Bob."
However, we still don’t know whether Fermat’s Last Theorem follows from the standard axioms for arithmetic.Colin Mclarty says that the big modern cohomological number theory theorems, including Fermat’s Last Theorem, were all proved using Grothendieck’s tools, making use of an axiom stronger than Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZFC). He says that there is a belief that these theorems can be proved in ZFC, but no one has done it.
To complete his proof, Wiles assumed the existence of a type of large cardinal known as an inaccessible cardinal, technically overstepping the bounds of conventional arithmetic. But there is a general consensus among mathematicians that this was just a convenient short cut rather than a logical necessity. With a little work, Wiles's proof should be translatable into Peano arithmetic or some slight extension of it.The article says that large cardinals are needed to decide other arithmetic statements.
My own first sexual experience with another woman was rape. Like many women, I didn’t know that women could rape other women. It wasn’t until I recounted the incident to a friend and she said, “So you were raped?” that I truly recognized this is what it was. ...Weird. It might be a few more years before she convinces anyone. When you hear a woman claim that she was raped, it could be something like this.
But each subsequent time she stayed at my house, the same scenario played out: She waited until I was asleep and then began having sex with me. It was years before I could acknowledge this was rape.
New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.The paper is here (and also here), and I don't find it so convincing. It seems possible that the revenue decline was caused by an economic downturn, and that the tax cuts led to more tax revenue than there would have been without the tax cuts.
For the most part, it didn’t.
Dear Annie: Years ago, parents used to put up placards in their children's bedroom windows to let firemen know where they were in case of fire. That proved dangerous because pedophiles also knew which bedrooms the children were in.Life must be difficult when your bizarre paranoid fears conflict. It seems to me that if a pedophile were going to follow a car, he would follow a car with kids and not a car with stick figures in the window. But then, I had no idea that pedophiles follow placards that were put in bedroom windows to guide firemen. The whole letter seems like a joke to me.
Now parents are putting up stick figures of their families on the back of the car windows, including how many boys and girls they have.
Yesterday, I saw a car with two soccer ball emblems in the back window, each with the name of one of two girls. I assume those two girls were their daughters. To me, this is as dangerous as the window placards because any pedophile could follow the car home and target the children in the future. Should I be concerned for these children? — New York
Professor Geoffrey Munro took about 100 students and told them they were participating in a study on "judging the quality of scientific information", ...If people find out that supposedly-scientific research was faulty in one area, then it stands to reason that they would be more skeptical about other research.
Then they were asked about the research they had read, and were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement: "The question addressed in the studies summarised … is one that cannot be answered using scientific methods."
As you would expect, the people whose pre-existing views had been challenged were more likely to say that science simply cannot be used to measure whether homosexuality is associated with mental illness.
But then, moving on, the researchers asked a further set of questions, about whether science could be usefully deployed to understand all kinds of stuff, all entirely unrelated to stereotypes about homosexuality: "the existence of clairvoyance", "the effectiveness of spanking as a disciplinary technique for children", "the effect of viewing television violence on violent behaviour", "the accuracy of astrology in predicting personality traits" and "the mental and physical health effects of herbal medications".
According to a 2003 article in the American Heritage Invention and Technology magazine, a surge in bicycle helmets from 1991 to 2001 -- to the extent that 69 per cent of child cyclists and 43 per cent of adult cyclists wore helmets by the end of the period -- was accompanied by a decline in ridership and an increase in cyclist accidents, resulting in 51 per cent more head injuries per cyclist. ...The real purpose of the helmet laws may be just to discourage bicycling.
One source cites statistics from Western Australia where head injuries fell by 11 to 21 per cent when helmet requirements were put in place, but cycle use fell by 30 per cent or more, meaning the risk of head injury increased for those who continued to cycle. ...
In the Netherlands, there is high a rate of cycling and a low rate of cycling injuries. Virtually no one wears a helmet.
There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit — the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us — the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.Now Obama is known for his skyrocketing federal budget deficit, and his own personal empathy deficit. I guess he was speaking from experience, as his advisors have been begging him to fake some empathy for the BP oil spill.
As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier. ... Not only that — we live in a culture that discourages empathy.
SIT, or “mind-wandering,” is a phenomenon generated during times of non-purposeful attention. This construct is virtually identical to the concept of free association, discovered by Freud, and most effective during psychoanalytic therapy. How far we have come since 1895, when Freud attempted to develop a comprehensive dynamic neurological theory of psychological functioning.It is funny how these shrinks can pretend that Freud said something useful, when he only said some untestable trivialities.
Leon Hoffman, M.D.
In anticipation of the Mehserle verdict, the City of Oakland has suggested that city retailers take one of more of the following actions to avoid the kind of destruction witnessed after Oscar Grant’s death last year:Wow. Baghdad would be safer. If I still lived in Oakland, I would make sure that my gun is loaded and accessible. It is amazing that we have four US supreme court justices who deny that we have right to use a gun for self-defense, and Pres. Obama is appointing another one.
Remove or secure large trash cans;
Park cars in safe locations;
Provide employees with the option to close shop;
Stock up on plywood to board windows;
Make sure all spaces are well lit, closed circuit TVs are working and turned on, and all doors and windows have strong locks.
The city also recommends that all exterior doors be equipped with deadbolts, gaps in door jams be covered with a steel plates, and cash drawers be left empty and open after business hours.
