About half the inhabitants of Gaza are under 18 years old, so 1/3 of the dead being children corresponds to a ratio of two civilians killed for every combatant. This is not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties.

S

The fact that it won’t have any record of calls I missed while the phone was off or didn’t have reception, although actually that’s probably the fault of the service provider. They can send me texts I missed. Why can’t they send me a list of missed calls?

I don’t understand why browsers support this “functionality”.

But who can stop an oven with a gun?

He doesn’t look particularly concerned.

There’s already a genetic mutation that does that.

Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy is not known to cause any medical problems, and affected individuals are intellectually normal.

And it makes you look like this:

That’s a house-cat, and it looks like that without having to lift weights. Some people have this mutation too, and it’s particularly dramatic in children who would otherwise never be that muscular. (I’d post pictures but I’m not sure about the ethics of sharing photos of other people’s swole toddlers even when they’re already available online.)

And Picard is nine feet tall. I guess that’s why he’s in charge.

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I understand that that’s the intent. The problem is the methodology, which is as I said just multiplication by five. Calling it a gold standard implies that there’s actually some sophisticated analysis going on, and there isn’t.

The “gold standard in the field” is apparently to multiply the Hamas numbers by five. I’m not kidding. That’s where the 186,000 number comes from. This is low-effort bullshit.

Edit: Also this article is just wrong about what the 335,500 number is claimed to be. It is what you get if you extrapolate the 186,000 number to the end of the year, not to September.

I assume that in this case, they did the imaging before starting the surgery. Even if the spleen really was on the wrong side, they should have known in advance.

Does… Does this mean Harris actually isn’t the lesser of two evils? Now I don’t know who to vote for.

How?

Shaknovsky told Beverly Bryan her husband’s spleen was so diseased that it was four times bigger than normal and it had moved to the other side of his body

Oh, of course. I’m sure organs do that sort of thing all the time.

My naming convention for C++ is that custom types are capitalized and instances aren’t. So I might write User user;.

Those numbers aren’t right.

First, the total-gun-death numbers are not population-adjusted and therefore useless without additional context. The same article does have the population-adjusted numbers and the USA is, predictably, not in the top ten.

Second, once the numbers are adjusted for population, there are some very strange results. For example, apparently Iraq actually has slightly fewer gun deaths per capita than the USA. Nigeria, the country where Boko Haram is based, has four times fewer gun deaths per capita than the USA?! Clearly the gun-death numbers correspond more to how well records are kept in a country than they do to the actual numbers of gun deaths.

Oh, and those gun death numbers include suicides, not just murders. Most gun deaths in the USA are suicides. A suicide is technically a gun death, but not usually the sort that people have in mind when discussing a school shooting.

I don’t understand why the father would just confess like that, but I suppose I shouldn’t expect good judgement from him.

Only if I intend to use them as weapons.

It took me months to recover after I learned that I couldn’t stick weapons to my back like refrigerator magnets.

FourPacketsOfPeanuts has already given a good answer specifically about Israel’s situation, but I want to say something about international law in general. Law may be written based on moral principles, but law is still not the same thing as morality. In our daily lives, we follow our moral principles because that’s what we believe is right, and we follow the law because otherwise cops will put us in jail.

The situation for a sovereign country is different - there are no cops and there is no jail. If other countries wanted to take hostile action, they would even if there was no violation of international law, and if they did not want to take hostile action, the wouldn’t even if there was a violation. Morality still exists (although morality at the scale of countries is necessarily not the same as morality at the scale of individuals) but the law might as well not exist because it is not enforced. It’s just pretty language that may be quoted when a country does what it was going to do anyway.

I’m not trying to imply that I think that Israel is violating international law. I’m saying that discussing whether it is or not is a purely intellectual exercise with no practical relevance. If I support Israel but you convince me that it is technically breaking some law, I’m still not going to change my mind. If you oppose Israel but I convince you that it is technically obeying every law to the letter, you’re still probably not going to change your mind.