You may well guess wrong. From the UK Government's own COVID data page, the total number of deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID test is LOWER than the total deaths where COVID was listed on the death certificate as a cause (though the pattern is reversed for deaths over the past week). I recall that the official death toll is also somewhat lower than the total number of excess deaths. The suggestion that the government is using inflated death figures is simply not borne out by the facts.

Citation please. Here's one to set the ball rolling: March 2020: Whitehouse predicts 100k-240k deaths.

So is ground glass. Would you be happy sprinkling it on your cornflakes?

I agree that population density is not a perfect predictor of the difficulty in implementing broadband, but it's much more relevant that just stating how big the country is - which is what the great-great-grandposter I was responding to was doing.

That'd definitely a non-sequitur - you haven't provided any data on NZ to support that.

If we're going to be picky, then none of the population density data you or I could come up with will give a watertight prediction of the cost of implementing broadband. An empty field more sparsely populated (zero population density) than any county in the US. But note that a more heterogeneously distributed population is not necessarily more expensive to wire up than a more uniform one - quite the opposite, in fact. Vast uninhabited wastes do not need broadband at all; the individual cost of wiring up a small number of isolated people is high, but the cost per head of population in the country can be low. Meanwhile, the flip side of an uneven population distribution is that many people live close to each other, so are cheaper to wire up.

Wiring up the US is indeed a much bigger problem than wiring NZ, but you also have proportionally more resources to spend on it.

The economics of broadband depend on population density - it's more expensive to connect the same number of people over a greater distance.

Population of US: 320 million; area 4 million sq miles; population density 80 per square mile.

Population of NZ: 4 million, area 103 sq. miles, population density 40 people per square mile.

New Zealand has HALF the population density of the US, so connecting it up is actually MORE difficult (per capita).

And these things DO scale well: revenue, and workforce, is proportional to population size. Wiring up two towns is only twice the cost of wiring up one town

(Of course, things are slightly more complicated because you also need to connect up the two towns. However, those overheads only scale logarithmically with population size so are much less important. Also, there's an economy of scale I didn't take account of in the above: length of wiring is not proportional to area, but to linear size (square root area)).

No it wasn't - the National Geographic article had a section titled "Is this harmful?"

It wasn't addressed in the original research article in "Environmental Science and Technology", but that's because it's a different question that requires different expertise and completely different sort of data. Hardly "suspicious" that the researchers addressed a valid question in their own area of expertise. Assessing the health risks of environmental exposure to microplastic is much more challenging, both economically and ethically. It would be profligate to do so without quantifying the exposure first.

I would welcome this, and don't imagine this will show electric vehicles in a poor light. My 4 year old Nissan Leaf shows no significant battery degradation, and can still achieve better range than the official US Environmental Protection Agency figures. The manufacturers' figures are always an exaggeration, but the real-world carbon emissions of electric cars are still about a third of a fossil-fuel powered equivalent - and will only get better as electricity generation gets greener.

Your final point about the importance of random sampling is a good one, but on the way I'm afraid there are a number of misconceptions about how and why statistics works:

No, statistical methods are based on whatever probability distribution is appropriate - they are not limited to stable distributions

Not quite: a stable distribution is one where the *sum* of a sample of independent random variables has the same distribution.

The sample mean will always approach the population mean (in the limit of large sample size), whatever the distribution - stable or not. This is known as the "law of large numbers", and all that it requires is that the sample is unbiased. Similarly, the sample variance will also approach the population variance (if this is finite) - whatever the probability distribution.

No, statistical methods aren't (necessarily) based on the properties of the mean of a sample. The majority of them infer the properties of the population from a "likelihood" function, that quantifies the probability of getting the full set of measurements in terms of the parameters that describe the population. This doesn't require an underlying stable distribution - generalised linear models, for instance, can be based on any probability distribution you like. Bayesian methods don't even require a parametric form for the population distribution. It does rely on the sample being independent, or at least that the correlations between measurements is quantifiable.

I wish we could avoid this usage of the word "safely" - the plane may have landed without loss of life, but the landing was certainly dangerous. If I drive a car with my eyes closed, and happen not to crash, no-one would say that I was driving "safely".

I often read that a plane suffered incident "X" in flight, and then landed safely. I can't tell whether the writer means that incident "X" did not make the landing hazardous, or whether the landing was actually hazardous but resulted in no death or injury. Far clearer to say "the plane landed without further incident" if that is what you mean.

It only took me a second or two to think of a very high profile conservative thinker who has recently been a professor in Oxford - enough for you to lose the bet you were prepared to make (that there had been none in 30 years).

and sweeping, unsupported statements can be disproved by one data point. Can you point me to your evidence that less than 1% of Oxford academics are conservatives?

How about Roger Scruton?

"insightful"?

If you look at the data (scroll down to "grouped by vote position", all but three Republicans voted against it, and all but one democrats in favour of it. So, a lot more than "a couple".

Actually, the publishers DO care about generating income from their copyright, and for instance require extra subscription fees from universities in order for students to be allowed to copy articles that they already have access to. I'm repeatedly warned that my University could be fined if I copy a figure from a paper into my lecture slides and then "publish" them by distributing them to my students.

Academics do need to publish but they don't need commercial publishers to do so. There's a growing movement against the traditional journals - fuelled by the extortionate fees required for electronic access to the catalogue of publishing houses such as Springer and Elsevier. Universities cannot function without access to the literature, and this is your tax dollar being funnelled into the pockets of the publishers.

The people who do the hard work behind the articles - the authors, the editors, and the reviewers - are not paid by the journal. The only paid staff are administrators and copy editors, who in my experience introduce more mistakes into the text than they correct.

Agreed, many trivial things can be handled by email. However, if you need to discuss or explain anything that's even slightly difficult conceptually then nothing beats an interactive conversation. It's much easier to gauge how much your peer understands (and therefore background you need to cover) when you can interact in real time.

I couldn't read the article you referenced ("server not responding"), but the accident report states this was caused by pilot error, not malfunctioning computers. From Wikipedia: "A selection by the pilot of the wrong mode on the onboard flight computers prevented power from being reduced to idle, which inhibited thrust reverse and spoilers from being used. The offending engine was shut down, and brakes applied, but the aircraft was unable to stop before the end of the runway".

There's a surprising number of people who believe that the high level of automation on Airbus is intrinsically more dangerous, but the figures show that the Airbus A320 is the safest narrow-body jet you can fly on. It's true that automated stuff can go wrong, but this can be more than compensated for by the ways it makes flying (or driving) safer.