


Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Something is not right.

h/t Matt Briggs


  1. Very funny. I will copy to my bog mentioning your source, thanks.

  2. It's all the microaggression: microbes can get pretty aggressive.

  3. Oddly, I posted the link to this cartoon -- one of my favorites -- to John C. Wright's essay on Microaggression on 30 November. It then appears on Matt Briggs' on 3 December, encoring shortly thereafter here.

    I saw it in a science magazine years ago and searched diligently for it about three years ago as I regarded as the perfect skewer to Scidolist Utopians.

    I'm glad you all agreed. :>)


  4. The trouble with that cartoon is that: 1. the air was not necessarily clean, 2. the water definitely was not necessarily pure, 3. exercise does not correlate well with length of life, and 4. organic does not mean nontoxic or healthy, necessarily.

    Yes, there was something not right, alright, and that happens to be the unstated assumptions and incorrect perception of reality, resulting in a 'life expectancy at birth of 30 even though the maximum lifespan had not changed. 'Cavemen' did live past thirty, just not very often relative to today, so the final incorrect assumption is that since those particular 'cavemen' didn't know anyone who lived past thirty, that meant no caveman lived past thirty. /sarc, maybe :P

    1. No offense, but anything that starts with "the trouble with that cartoon is...." is kissing cousin to Babbage's letter to Tennyson.

      However, I may do a post about actuarial tables at some point.

  5. Confrontational hunting would, I think, be mostly to blame.


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