| Michinaga
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In Japan
Registered Sep 17, 2009
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Michinaga's most recent comments:
- On 21 Jan 2013
in
I didn't know income had anything to do with real estate.,
Michinaga said:
PockyClipsNow says
Income doesnt matter only permaZIRP matters now.
In 20 years your grandkids wont believe u ever earned 6% from a bank account or CD they will be buying up rental homes just to get a 1% return.
I'd happily accept a 1% return on everything, if we had sound money and zero inflation. The problem is that Helicopter Ben wants us to earn 0.01% on our savings while the value of that savings is shaved off by 2% a year. - On 21 Jan 2013
in
For the Married Guys (And the Guys Who Have Been Married),
Michinaga said:
New Renter says
Life expectancy was 47 for adult males, 35 for affluent Londoners, and 25 for the less well off. Most children died early. A 13 year old bride may have several mishaps before having a child survive longer than 3 years of age. So lets say her first viable child is born when mom is 17. That kid may well be an orphan by the time it's 8.
This notorious fallacy is one of the most widely misunderstood statistics today.
A societal life expectancy of 25 years, or 35, or 47, does not mean that people were old and gray with one foot in the grave at those ages.
And it definitely doesn't mean that someone who has already made it to age 17 (i. e., escaped the many illnesses that affected infants and young children -- and grown up healthy enough to bear a child, to boot) has a mere eight more years to live!
This is elementary statistics and it drives me crazy to see people misunderstand it. The life expectancy was low because of all the infant deaths combined with sicknesses and plagues that could take people at any age. The age of an "old" person, whom you might expect to die at any time and who you could say has lived a full life, is in the 80s now and was perhaps 70 ("threescore and ten", in the Bible) in pre-modern times.
Historically in Japan life expectancy has been calculated based on how many years a person of a given age is expected to have left to live (余命). This curve is typically very flat in low-tech societies where an illness could take you at any time, and becomes steeper as infant mortality is eliminated and the majority of the population can expect to reach old age.
The last time age 25 (or 30, or 45) was genuinely "old" was when the Olduvai Gorge was not yet populated, before we had evolved into humans. There were no gray-haired 25-year-olds in Elizabethan times or in ancient Babylon or Egypt.
(Aside: how is it that British men in general lived 12 years longer than "affluent" Londoners?) - On 25 Nov 2012
in
China to Build World's Tallest Building, 220 Stories, in 90 Days,
Michinaga said:
Mark D says
in case you don't know, ONLY 2000 years go, when the Germanic tribes (aka the Barbarians) first came out of that tiny area called Icelands, running around naked, making funny noises, the Chinese already had astronomy observatories and algebra.
Assuming that you're talking about the mathematics that the Chinese were able to do with their rod numerals, the calculating boards with sticks on them (called 算木 in Japanese; I forget the Chinese name) were indeed impressive, but not significantly superior to the abacus-like devices seen in Rome at that time. (Chinese numerals trounce Roman numerals, I admit.)
It wasn't until after AD 1400 that you started hearing about the famous modern abacus or suan p‘an (算盤) that until very recently could be operated faster than a Western calculator. And by that time China had already been receiving influence from the West, and notably India. It is difficult to imagine that these two cultures progressed in mathematics totally in parallel, not sharing anything, and indeed the complete lack of the use of the zero by the Chinese until it suddenly shows up in India, and then immediately after in China, implies that they learned from each other.
Instead of Chinese supremacism, how about appreciating all the mathematical and scientific achievements of mankind? When I first learned about China's, I was mightily impressed, but I wasn't about to start ignoring the rest of the world,
in fact, Europeans didn't learn how to take shower until a Mongolian named Genghis Khan went there and taught them how over a millennium later. think of the Black Plague if you want proof.
Whether water runs through shower pipes or not is immaterial: Westerners most certainly have been bathing since ancient times. Here's a trivia question for you: over 2000 years ago, when the great Archimedes discovered how to measure the volume of irregular objects, and at the same time, the concept of density, what was he in the middle of doing?
...
...
...Eureka!
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