That is the expected result for a sub-population that has a shorter lifespan.
My sibling comment addresses deaths lagging over time. But even in the steady state of (say) 18% smokers, you expect more than 18% of deaths to be smokers because their life expectancy is shorter.
If every time a smoker dies you blame it on smoking, then sure. But while smoking is really terrible, it's not quite that terrible; smokers still manage to die of unrelated things sometimes.
I believe the grandparent's comment was a bit misleading if not wrong. (http://xkcd.com/386/ ..)
In most dialects of English (notably British English), the short form of the subject is "maths". In North American English, it is "math". In all dialects, the full form is "mathematics". In all dialects, both the short and full forms are singular and accept singular verbs. For example, "mathematics IS the study of numbers and patterns".
If you like to tailor to your audience, you may consider using "maths" for a British audience and "math" for an American audience.
I believe you have misunderstood your parent comment. The question "Do you actually believe suicide can be caused by someone playing dress up?" asks whether suicide can be caused by Richard Branson playing dress up.
The question does not appear to confuse "transgender" and "transvestite", nor does it use "playing dress up" to refer to either.
I believe the suggestion is to use the "From:" field of the email, which for a significant fraction (perhaps even majority) of people includes their name. I think it's an interesting idea.
As a correction to my sibling comment, orange _is_ counted as a color in English. The most widely-cited list of colors in English, as seen on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
for example is that English has eleven basic colors: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. That page also provides criteria for being considered a basic color term.
People actively look to credit other people's success to anything but their work all of the time. Just this week, such a webpage was heavily discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6546325
The submission attributes Bill Gates's success first and foremost to his grandparents and parents. This is part of a very common pattern of attributing success to everything but work.
gwern, if you're reading, this section is misleading if not wrong ...:
"But that doesn’t seem very true any more. Devices can differ dramatically now even in the same computers; to take the example of Bitcoin mining, my laptop’s CPU can search for hashes at 4k/sec, or its GPU can search at 54m/second."
This is an example of parallelism and parallelism only.
Are you implying that GPUs execute each hash as slowly as a CPU and are better at hashing simply because they have more processing elements? I knew GPUs had a lot of small cores, but I was unaware that mine had 54000000 / 4000 = 13500 cores.
More or less, yes, that is my implication. Luckily, my sibling comment provides some extra information.
For the example of SHA-1 computation, you mention using FPGAs that finish in 400 clock cycles, which is at most an order of magnitude away from a naive CPU implementation of around 4000 clock cycles. I'm not as familiar with SHA-256.
I think you were using a bad algorithm on your CPU. Assuming any half-recent x86 processor you should be looking at a number like 4 Mhash/second, not 4K.
Hi, thank you for your insightful comment. Can you provide a source for the sentence "The Federal government does (more than 90%, in point of fact), through the FHA."? I am unable to find any similar statistics. Thanks.
I don't have a link to hard data, but it's a widely reported fact.
> An estimated 90% of all mortgage issuance is government-related (either Fan/Fred or Ginnie). The government now bears 50% of the credit risk of the entire mortgage market. For all intents and purposes, the U.S. mortgage market is more or less nationalized.
> Currently, the government backs about 90 percent of newly issued mortgages, more than ever before. The proportion fell in the years leading up to 2007 as subprime loans proliferated and then soared after that market collapsed. Since then, the Federal Housing Administration has expanded its role in backing home loans on the low end of the scale.
Any way you slice it, the government has a HUGE role in mortgage issuance in the US. And they have said:
> The federal housing agency, which regulates Fannie and Freddie, on Thursday made clear it doesn't intend to let this happen. The agency said it would instruct Fannie and Freddie to 'limit, restrict or cease business activities' in any jurisdiction using eminent domain to seize mortgages.
To be fair to mathematics, in your example the proper notation is df = (del f/del x) dx + (del f/del y) dy, which does not suggest the possibility of cancelation.
My sibling comment addresses deaths lagging over time. But even in the steady state of (say) 18% smokers, you expect more than 18% of deaths to be smokers because their life expectancy is shorter.