science

Visualizing 10 unusual causes of death in the CDC mortality database

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Let me make two things clear right up front: The metrics I used to decide what causes of death are unusual are purely subjective, i.e. which of the thousands of causes I skimmed through caught my eye and made me go, “Huh.” It is in no way my intention to make fun of anyone’s death. … Read more Visualizing 10 unusual causes of death in the CDC mortality database

It’s not hard to remember a different, strong password for every website

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Let’s take it as a given that it’s a good idea to have a long password with upper case, lower case, numerals and special characters. Let’s take it as a given that it’s a good idea to have a different password for every website, and the main reason people don’t is because it’s very difficult … Read more It’s not hard to remember a different, strong password for every website

Hurricanes with male names are at least as deadly as those with female names

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Lots of new services have been passing on the startling conclusions of a recent academic paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a quite high-impact journal, that, and these are direct quotes from the paper in question’s abstract: feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is … Read more Hurricanes with male names are at least as deadly as those with female names

the irony of soviet silver fox

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Genetics was an outlaw science in the early Soviet Union: the idea that characteristics are inheritable smacked of an elitist plot to claim the class system was biologically predetermined. Biologist Dmitri Belyaev (1917-1985) was dismissed from his post in a Moscow fur breeding laboratory in 1948 for his insistence that Darwinian artificial selection could produce … Read more the irony of soviet silver fox