fredup

I'm not trying to make a point. I just got the impression that upwards of 200,000 people were incinerated in the bombings, but I was skeptical of that number. I investigated a bit and just wanted to leave a note that the number was incorrect.

I don't think 120,000 lives qualifies as splitting hairs. I thought I was delivering good news, but judging by my karma, it has not been well received.

You wrote that "they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians", which implies that at least 200,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated in the bombings. The 129,000–246,000+ killed figure you cite covers 2-4 months after the bombings. I am confident that no one was incinerated 2 or more months after the bombing.

Wikipedia gives an immediate death toll of 70,000–80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were soldiers for Hiroshima and 22,000-75,000 people for Nagasaki. This is far from hundreds of thousands of incinerated civilians.

> (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians).

This is inaccurate. Much fewer than 200,000 people were killed immediately (totaled across both bombings), including both incinerated and not, civilian and not.

You almost certainly aren't going to see the show.

In theory it should be simple to identify who you are in conflict with if the ticket is not general admission. They would just have to send an usher to the seat. However, it is difficult to determine who defrauded who without a whole lot of investigation.

You would have to establish the entire chain of custody for both of the tickets. Three possibilities with different culprits are: the original purchaser double sold the tickets, a third-party got the barcode and sold a fraudulent ticket to whoever is in your seat, or the person in your seat made the fraudulent ticket themselves.

I think you need to do the algebra. You can't make a blanket statement like you want to.

You have taken things to an absurd extreme and gotten one result, I can "relax the assumptions" to the opposite extreme and get the opposite result:

Suppose the goalie only blocks 10% of shots when guessing correctly, and the kicker makes 80% to the strong side and 50% to the weak side. In this model it is obviously better to always kick to the strong side.

"Soccer players should kick toward their weaker side more frequently than their stronger side."

I thought this was an interesting result, so I took a look at the source. It turns out it is a toy problem where the goalie always stops the penelty kick if she guesses right and the kicker always makes the goal if kicking to one side, and misses with some probability when kicking to the other.

This is clearly a toy problem that you can't draw any sort of real world soccer advice from.

Journalists have been, and continue to be the gatekeepers. In the days before Wikipedia it is easy to imagine a journalist visiting Brazil and talking with a friend in the local coffee shop about the raccoon-like creatures he just saw when the local crank slaps him on the back and tells him, "round here we call 'em Brazilian aardvarks." If the journalist believes him, you would see it in print.

Now, with Wikipedia it is easier for the crank to get to the journalist. If the journalists had fact checked and never reprinted the "fact", it would have eventually been removed from the Wikipedia entry.