Yeah. It’s a lot like that old thing they used to tell us in industrial sales many years ago, that if airplanes were 99% safe, there’d be X number of crashes per day, or week, or whatever. The point wasn’t really about the airplanes, but about our doing our own work as accurately as we could.
39.For Low-Risk People, a Positive Result from an HIV Test Is Wrong Half the Time
This may be far less significant than people think.
What this means is, IF a heterosexual male who’s never had gay sex, has never shot heroin, and has never had a blood transfusion tests positive for HIV, there’s a very good chance a mistake has been made.
That doesn’t happen often, in any event.
Why should Hitler’s relatives be treated any differently than anybody else, if they had nothing to do with what Hitler did? Why should anybody care where they live?
It doesn’t just cause health problems, either- it can cause social and financial problems, too. You might have more trouble than a non-smoker with getting a date or finding a roommate, as there are a lot of people who wouldn’t consider dating or living with a smoker. The cost of cigarettes means that you will have less discretionary income than a non-smoker who makes the same amount of money as you.
The papers I’m involved with often have six or more co-authors, each of whom may specialize in a certain area and contribute citations from that area. Often, I haven’t read their citations – I take it for granted that they know what they’re doing. If each co-author of a paper is considered to have individually “cited” every article that appears in that paper’s reference list, then this claim makes a lot more sense.
US immigration policy in the interwar and post-WWII periods was heavily weighted to favor asylum seekers fleeing religious and/or racial persecution. Thus, nearly all of the visas granted to Germans during this period went to Jews and other minority groups.
11.The Korean War Never Ended
as has been pointed out there was never a peace treaty signed just a cease fire.
though there never was any declaration of war to start with so there was never any war, just a conflict where people died and were wounded and property destroyed.
15.The Auschwitz Tattoo Was Originally an IBM Code Number
it may have been a number that could have been tabulated on IBM punch cards, though i don’t think IBM developed the format of the number. IBM sold general punch cards systems and supplies for any alpha-numerical data, these were in worldwide use at that time. punch cards have been used in the USA since 1890 for census data.
lots of material for trivia contests but also wrong trivia too.
Also, as long as we’re nitpicking (and the entire list is basically nitpicking), I’m sure the fakes aren’t innumerable; I’m sure that, like everything else in a museum, they’re painstakingly numbered.
It’s also true that many items purchased and displayed in good faith by museums are later discovered to be fakes. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London had their collection of discovered fakes and forgeries as a separate display (and maybe still do; I haven’t been there in a while).
And that’s not counting Banksy’s various contributions.
This is interesting:
A 1950’s era ICBM was capable of hitting the moon?
We say modern rockets aren’t capable of reaching the moon. Does that assume we’re talking about an Apollo module? Or is it true that an ICBM with only a warhead-sized payload could in fact reach the moon?
This one has already spun off its own thread.
As I understand it, it depends on what kind of “HIV test” we’re talking about: ELISA or Western Blot.
The general point that’s really important to understand, however, is that the chance of a test returning a false positive is not the same as the chance that someone who tests positive has the condition, as Lemur866 explained back in Post #5. The latter also depends on how common/probable that condition is in general. Misunderstanding this is a form of Prosecutor’s Fallacy. The point applies not only to HIV testing but to other situations where false positives are possible, like random drug testing, cancer screening, and DNA matching.
Ah, thanks for pointing it out, actually there’s nothing moon-related in this thread at all, I just posted in the wrong thread.
About fakes in museums:
This Spring I visited the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, former home/seat of government of the Ottoman Emperors and now a museum. They had a room devoted to religious artifacts, including numerous bits of the corpses of various Biblical and Koranic personages, a sword allegedly owned by King David, and most dubiously of all, the staff Moses used to part the Red Sea:eek:, looking remarkably well preserved (actually looking more like plastic than wood, though it was behind display glass so I couldn’t check).
This was all presented as being the real stuff, if there were any disclaimers to the effect that they were “reproductions” they were displayed too discreetly for me to notice. So at least it would appear that the Turkish government employs some notably credulous curators! I have never seen this particular collection mentioned in any tourist guides (though the Topkapi Palace overall is prominently mentioned, and well worth a peek if you are in the neighborhood).
The OP didn’t ask about soap, the OP asked about SUVs. Here’s an article about SUVs and how they were marketed: http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html
Well, but… There was never any declaration of war for the War in Vietnam, nor the Gulf War, nor the War in Iraq, nor the War in Afghanistan. But these “conflicts” resemble wars in ways so classical and so thoroughly that despite no Congressional declaration, they were wars. To say that the Korean War has not yet ended seems to me to be a reasonable statement. On the other hand, to say that the Korean War was never a war seems to me to be ridiculous.
Technically it was never a war but effectively it was. Technically it never ended but effectively it has. Same thing.
the list has a lot of nits to pick, that’s what it is about. it probably was making a nit about no treaty and only a cease fire. i made a nit about that there was no war according to the legal term. though i did state it was a conflict with the same effect as war. i was even tempted to include the phrase, ‘the same as war’ at the end. sometimes i get verbose and sometimes i truncate. i thought what i said implied it was the same as war, so our ideas of those events having the effects of war is the same, i was maybe too concise.
I can accept the concept that the Korean War never ended, but rather has been in cease-fire for 56 years. I can’t accept the concept that I’m “not supposed to know this”. 
For some reason, this reminds me of the Simpsons scene where they’re watching Jeopardy, and when Alex says “The capital of North Dakota was named for this German leader,” Homer yells out “Hitler!”
Thereby proving his idiocy, since he obviously should have said “Who is Hitler?”.