Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Terribly unhealthy?
Vintage.es has a feature on smoking in movies, mainly among female stars in the '20s and '30s. Silents and flappers.
The text says:
While smoking is a terribly unhealthy habit, there’s something about it that automatically makes a person feel cool. Especially when a character is supposed to be rebellious, famous, or just super cool.
I'm old enough now that I can focus on text and numbers when something more interesting is present. This wasn't possible just a few years ago.
Looking at the numbers, it struck me that the lifespans weren't especially short. So I downloaded the page as html, sorted out the dates, and calculated.
The mean lifespan of these 28 "terribly unhealthy" beauties is 76. Median is 80. Their mean birth year was 1911, median 1913.
The official life expectancy for females born in 1911 was 54. As always, this mean was pulled WAY down by child deaths, but even so, 76 was not a "terribly unhealthy" lifespan for people born in those years.
Labels: coot-proofing, NOT blinded by stats
¶ 1:57 AM
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Major question by a real expert
Via RCS, a major piece by a major expert with unquestionable credentials, raising major questions about all of our assumptions on Branded Swine Flu.
Ioannidis is a prof of public health at Stanford. His big point is that we simply HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA what this flu will do. He runs the numbers, such as they are, and concludes that the dire scenarios are much less likely than a typical flu scenario. Flu is always serious but not worth closing the world.
Note especially what he does with the Diamond Princess cruise ship, where we know for sure that a specific number of people were fully exposed to the virus, and we know for sure that a specific number died.
In contrast, we KNOW what happens when we close down half the jobs in a country for an indefinite period. Lots of people die, lots of people switch to crime. We're already seeing the latter here, after the police department stated that they were releasing some prisoners and going slow on arrests to avoid putting more criminals in jail.
Ioannidis agrees with those sane 1938 experts that Nature does sin and tanh, not exp. Our modern idiots presume that Nature always does exp, because exp is their Share Value wet dream.
Labels: NOT blinded by stats
¶ 10:29 PM
