Really, the death of loved ones are often the worst sadness we ever experience in our lives.
Dredging up those feelings is not exactly what we want to Do at dinner parties.
It's a buzz kill. It's not like you will ever forget the fact that you once cried for 3 straight months while your baby died of a brain tumor, but there are other times to talk about it besides social gatherings.
Isn't 1/2 the same as 1:1 though? 1 chance of either in the two possibilities? (Assuming they're equal in incidence - b/g being slightly askew of equal supposedly probably isn't the best to use though, perfectly weighted coin w/ a perfect flip instead?)
What are you asking? Please clarify.
1/2 is 1:1, yes.
And b/g is fine since we've stipulated that this is theoretical equal probability of boy or girl.
Funny, Actionandy, I was also actually thinking of Mr Bean, but I drew a total blank on his name, could only get his face and the name Atkinson... So after racking my brain for a second or two, i didnt bother to google. I went with Naked Gun and the Nielsen guy form Forbidden Planet whose name I can't remember either.
I too was belly laughing at the idea of this lady enthusiastically giving a "Nailed it!" after producing this... this... finger painting.
I'd not be so harsh Power - as I stated a ways back - it's very easy to fall into the "grammar trap" of it and make a false assumption.
Even I KNOWING the right answer attempting to make a better wording forgot two key words that actually made it 1:11 not 1:5. (Note: Technically you should be typing those as 1:11 and 1:5 or 1/6 and 1/12 with my understanding of how your supposed to present odds 1 incidences of vs 11 w/o and 1 w/ vs 5 w/o rather than 1 in 6 and 1 in 12... 1/11 would be a technically incorrect answer from my understanding of the notation while 1/12 would be correct [1:11 != 1/11])
That would be 1:10, or 1/11.
1 way to win, 10 ways to lose. 1 chance in 11 to win.
So payoff should be 11 to 1. You bet $1 eleven times, so you put up $11. You get paid $11 once in those 11 times. Breaks even.
It is NOT 1:11 and not 1/12.
-
In the example of the couple having two kids:
Some people find that their intuition tells them that learning that a couple has a boy shouldn't increase the chances that a couple has a girl... And in fact it doesn't increase the chance. It actually decreases the chance of the couple having a girl.
Because you have to understand that the starting point of having NO information the odds are 3/4 that a couple has least one girl. We start at 3/4 couples having a girl:
gg
gb
bg
bb
When you say you have AT LEAST one boy, you are only eliminating one possibility.
gg
gb
bg
bb
Instead Of looking at it as increasing the chances of a specific child being a girl from 1/2 to 2/3 (which is incorrect thinking).. Gaining the information about the existence of at least one boy of random age DECREASES the overall probability that the couple has at least one girl from 3/4 to 2/3!
You are being given less information than if the person tells you: "my first child was a boy, what are the chances that my second child is a girl?". Which looks like this:
gg
gb
bg
bb
And in which case the answer is 1/2. The chance of 1 girl in the family is 1/2.
Actually, this whole thing is hilarious. We can only smile and hope that the 80 year old lady is not too embarrassed. It's not a historically important work, and really the whole thing is funny.
Humor comes from the idea of some amateur trying to paint over a masterpiece, like maybe the Mona Lisa in a Naked Gun movie. And the paint job just looks so... unskilled.
But it's no tragedy because this was not a priceless treasure. At most a few hundred bucks worth, maybe a few thousand at most. Leave the poor lady alone.
Here's another way to see it. You enter a lotto... The numbers they used on the lotto tickets are 0s and 1s. The tickets have 20 binary digits on them,
e.g. A ticket might read:
01010 10011 00010 00111
They issue exactly 1048576 unique tickets (2^20 = 1048576) distributed in random order, and sell them for $1 apiece. winner will get $1 million.
After all tickets are sold in random order, the winning ticket is announced!
Winning ticket is 11111 11111 11111 11111 and the ticket holder will get $1 million!!
You did not buy a ticket, but are allowed to ask any ticket holder the question: "does your ticket have at least nineteen 1s?" and the ticket holder must answer truthfully. You also have a temporary multimillion dollar credit line of your own, and you have the option of using it to buy any ticket from any person for $100,000 and he must sell it to you if you offer that price. You may buy form as many people as you like.
So you ask a bunch of people until finally a ticket holder says "yes, my ticket has at least nineteen 1s"
What are the chances that the other digit is a 1? Is it really 50%? What are the chances that his ticket has 20 1s and is the winning ticket? Should you buy his ticket for $100,000? Should you buy tickets from each person who answers "yes" to your question?
ANSWER:
obviously there is only 1 winning ticket with twenty 1s on it and 20 tickets with exactly nineteen 1s on it. If he says he has at least nineteen 1s, he is far more likely to be holding one of the tickets with exactly 19 1s, not the only ticket with 20 1s.
And obviously if you pay $100,000 each to acquire all 21 tickets that have at least 19 1s on them, you will pay out $2.1 million to win $1 million, which is dumb.
-
You can do the same exercise with the lotto tickets using 2 digits. The tickets are
00
01
10
11
If the winning ticket is 11 and you ask a ticket holder if he has At least one 1 on his ticket, and he says "yes", then all you know is that he's not holding the 00 lotto ticket.
He could be holding the 01, the 10, or the 11. Most likely he is not holding the winning ticket with all 1s on it. There are 2 chances in 3 that he has a 0 on his ticket.
I don't know if this is tangential enough to warrant its own thread, but I'll just post it here for now. Came across an article (published yesterday) about the DoD's use of alternative medicine and other unproven techniques in the US Military.
How do you feel about having your tax dollars spent on and trusting the well-being of your troops to stuff like this?
I'd be very surprised if there weren't other countries whose armed forces engage in similar practises but, as I said, this article's all shiny and new so I thought I'd share.
That's really sad. Especially the bit about "ear acupuncture".
When it comes to chronic pain unfortunately, because narcotic addiction is pretty much involved in 90% or more of the cases (but we are not allowed to talk about that part), because psychological bull**** and depression are a huge component (we aren't able to talk about that either without being shouted down as insensitive to all the people with "fibromyalgia" ), because we have nothing truly effective for it... ...modern medicine is already complicit with treating this population with 95% placebo mumbo jumbo while we all look for the "hidden pathophysiology" of diagnoses like fibromyalgia which are obviously brain and psychological syndromes, NOT musculoskeletal ones.
The physician practitioners almost all know this, but the company line in modern medicine is just that we don't know what it is yet. Because there is no diagnostic test other than self reporting pain, the picture is additionally complicated by the fact that easily half (and i believe the majority) of the people with chronic "non-identified" pain syndromes like fibromyalgia have tremendous secondary gain overlay and are "squirrelly" as HELL, not to mention a high number of outright fakers who you see bent over in pain in clinic when you touch their back or ask then to bend, but easily bend over and pick their baby up out of the stroller a minute before that.
But medicolegal suicide to call people out on this, and the patients will even get outright belligerent and you even hint at what is plain as day. So physicians document outright "inconsistencies" in function in exams but you can't call people fakers. We send them to some treatment that hasnt been tried (but we know wont really fix things because most dont even want to get better, not really) pass the buck like some 3rd grade teacher graduating that violent troubled kid who still cant read, up to the 4th grade.
In that modern setting of half fakers, half squirrelly people, half depressed, huge secondary gain, incentive to not to get better, and the majority addicted to prescribed narcotics, OF COURSE how can the medical establishment argue against letting ONE MORE UNPROVEN TREATMENT (acupuncture, chiropracty, cupping) to be added to all our already NON-PROVEN MEDICAL TREATMENTS for NON-VERIFIABLE CHRONIC PAIN DIAGNOSIS categories (that only exist in industrialized countries where disability doesn't equal starvation)? Heck it's a big tent! Having one more unproven treatment to add to your arsenal just makes the industry more money. And there's now enough people with a "fibromyalgia" label that if I talk frankly like this, 5 random people will come up and claim I'm just wrong and it's a "real disease", etc. Almost every pain practitioner realizes all these things and will discuss them in private, but tell themselves that is some decent percentage of their patients with some real disease that they're really helping with and that "functional treatment" is making some patients capable of functioning with the pain... The good practitioners restrict narcotics a lot, but that just means the junkies in your practice flee to see somebody who is liberal with their narcs. Acupuncture is no worse and far less costly than most of the crap we throw at chronic pain, the multibillion dollar revolving door.
I did chronic pain clinics for 3 years in my residency, and I cringe at the thought of being anywhere near that patient population... Ugh. I talk to modern chronic pain practitioners on a regular basis nowadays because most adult rehab guys work in that area, and the story hasn't changed. Every pain doctor knows the clinic is full of junkies and the squirrelly, and that the medicolegal PTB lacks the balls to call them out on it. It's too widely accepted that if you say you have pain, we just accept it. It's just not acceptable to tell people they're faking or squirrelly anymore. It's just not acceptable to tell people "get back to work, live with it". They'll sue their employer, despite having no tangible evidence to verify their pain: "I got fy-bro-my-al-jah! The doctor said so!"
So what difference does if make if we throw acupuncture or Physical therapy, Vicodin, or back surgery at it?
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but I want to drop a line or two:
@Op
I know what you mean, I feel the same. In a lot of ways. Though, there are lots of people who think alike. I am not even extreme or something about this whole issue (I just know I don't need much and don't just buy stuff), but this mass of people being in love with consuming, exploiting third world countries, destroying the environment, ... like a duck takes to water actually make me cringe.
It's just most people don't start to think for themselves, and live in our society without reflecting it, or knowing how and by what means our society is living/working. If they belittle you, or call you a snob, or preaching, or w/e, just be sure, they are not right. They just prefer to close their eyes to certain aspects of current life, society and consumerism.
i think they are right because it sounds like a lot of show-caring or faux-caring about exploiting third world countries or destroying the environment.
If you really care about third world countries, then send your money over there. Consuming feeds third world countries. Talking about "consumerism" while not spending, does nothing to help them.
The fact that your consumer neighbors enjoy themselves, but you "open your eyes, put a sad (or mad) expression on your face, and criticize consumers" helps nobody. Your "sympathy" helps nobody.
Put your money where your mouth is. Send it overseas to somebody poor. THEN you can consider telling your friends that they're exploiting the poor. As it currently stands, you're doing worse than your friends are to the poor.
You can probably learn a lot from books and tutorials. Local community college course even.
But I'm confused. Back in the probability thread on dice, you implied that your quantum mechanics knowledge contributed to bad intuition on the dice problem. Or maybe I'm confusing you with somebody else. Probably my bad.
Just as a passive observer here, FakeMcCoy, what are you talking about? Did you really take Number Theory in college? I did, and you just don't sound like you know anything about it other than some problems you dabbled with. It really sounds like you don't know what you're talking about. You don't sound dumb, actually you sound smart... but you sound like you're over-representing your knowledge base.
I'm not necessarily siding with paths... but you drop gads of jargon in a way that makes it sound like you're hinting you have some deep understanding of the math.
Maybe they figured out their viewing model for most people on comedy central is to drop in and sample? and use their cable and dish boxes to schedule programming.
British scientists have determined that plants in fact communicate with each other through clicking noises. This is in addition to studies that have found that plants have the ability to think and remember.
With the understanding that plants in fact have the ability to think and communicate, what does that mean for the relationship between plants and humans?
Is this the end of vegetarianism and veganism?
Absolute garbage conclusions.
(1) They demonstrated "XYZ" about SOME plants, not most plants, not all plants. If you're going to randomly expand your conclusions so broadly, you could just as easily argue: "Some living things (humans) are proven to have feelings and think... therefore we should not eat any living creatures."
(2) The "XYZ" that they demonstrated for SOME plants was NOT that they "think or communicate" or have consciousness. The "XYZ" that they demonstrated for SOME plants is something that my bluetooth headset can far exceed. Is my bluetooth headset entitled to being saved from destruction?
Your drama between you and your sister is a two way street, and there is no way to judge what baggage the two of you have.
(1) if you normally go to her for advice, and actually value her opinion, I'd strongly consider what she has to say about fitness & beauty, but at the same time, tell her that it bothers you that she would tell you to DUMP the game, rather than encouraging you to change it.
(2) if you don't value her opinion, what do you care what she thinks about this game? Just stop telling her about your ambitions and projects, if you know she's just going to give you negative energy.
It sucks that your sister is so unimpressed with your dream, but only you can know whether she said it because she gave her honest opinion, or whether she said it because you just don't get along.
Its actually staggering what this backwards piece of crap really believes, based on what he clearly said, and intended to say. Where he got this idea is utterly beyond me:
"If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.... But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."
Its really just an even STUPIDER version of the "if she really didn't want to be raped, she would have fought harder" attitude. Blame the victim. Yeah, she's crying in a corner, but if she didn't want it, she would have stopped me.
He's basically saying to women that got pregnant through rape: Clearly if you had actually hated the rape 100%, you would have used your female mechanisms to 'shut the whole thing down'. The fact that you're pregnant proves you enjoyed it, at least a little bit.
NON-"legitimate rape" is just code for "she enjoyed it".
This loathsome POS is too stupid and ignorant to stay a Senator. HE NEEDS TO GO AWAY. I would not be shocked if this scumbag has date-raped women before in college when he was younger and left some woman crying and upset, and this is his cognitive construction that rationalizes that his actions were consensual.
The whole mindset STINKS of rationalization for personal loathsome behaviors.
The prize was from at least a month or more back, but awesome stuff.
He got a BRILLIANT idea for a practical, fast cancer screenin test from reading journal articles and information that's out there.
Then he submitted his proposal to multiple labs and was rejected by over 100, until a JHU cancer researcher said yes, and let him work on it in his lab.
Really, just a great thing.
It will be interesting to see how something like this will be implemented in practice. The test would cost 3 cents a stick to make... And it's sensitive... But pancreatic Cancer is usually very fast growing and rare... While being one of the most lethal cancers. And is usually pretty much ASYMPTOMATIC until its ready to kill you.
Will it make sense to screen every 2 weeks for your whole adult life? Every month? Every 6 months? Because of the nature of the disease and the nature of the test, it might actually see extremely widespread use... Or very little.
If its something ultimately recommended as a monthly test for everyone, could it be worth billions if sold at just $1 a pop? $5 a pop? If so many would not buy it, but much more money would be made... Or sold at close to cost and shared with the world? it's the classic case of inventing something medical: (a) If your new medical invention is just a little bit better than whats already out there, you're welcome to price yourself a hefty amount above the existing competition. (b) if it's too valuable or too much better than existing stuff, they just take it from you and you can't gouge people for money because you're "killing people" by pricing then out
(It's a dilemma. Clearly a super cheap urine dipstick test for cancer screening could conceivably marketed for anywhere from a nickel apiece to $30 apiece. For example, look at Urine dipsticks for pregnancy marketed to consumers are like $8-12 a shot in consumer packaging, and the identical test, without the plastic packaging, is sold 50 a pack on the internet for a few bucks. I cracked on open once. It's the same little strip of paper. Actually the bulk strips worked better)
I wonder if JHU owns the rights or if Andraka does.
It could all be moot if there is no practical regular screening schedule for this test, but it might turn out to be monstrously lucrative. Ultimately the important thing is that we have another tool against cancer.
Dredging up those feelings is not exactly what we want to Do at dinner parties.
It's a buzz kill. It's not like you will ever forget the fact that you once cried for 3 straight months while your baby died of a brain tumor, but there are other times to talk about it besides social gatherings.
1/2 is 1:1, yes.
And b/g is fine since we've stipulated that this is theoretical equal probability of boy or girl.
I too was belly laughing at the idea of this lady enthusiastically giving a "Nailed it!" after producing this... this... finger painting.
1 way to win, 10 ways to lose. 1 chance in 11 to win.
So payoff should be 11 to 1. You bet $1 eleven times, so you put up $11. You get paid $11 once in those 11 times. Breaks even.
It is NOT 1:11 and not 1/12.
-
In the example of the couple having two kids:
Some people find that their intuition tells them that learning that a couple has a boy shouldn't increase the chances that a couple has a girl... And in fact it doesn't increase the chance. It actually decreases the chance of the couple having a girl.
Because you have to understand that the starting point of having NO information the odds are 3/4 that a couple has least one girl. We start at 3/4 couples having a girl:
gg
gb
bg
bb
When you say you have AT LEAST one boy, you are only eliminating one possibility.
gggb
bg
bb
Instead Of looking at it as increasing the chances of a specific child being a girl from 1/2 to 2/3 (which is incorrect thinking).. Gaining the information about the existence of at least one boy of random age DECREASES the overall probability that the couple has at least one girl from 3/4 to 2/3!
You are being given less information than if the person tells you: "my first child was a boy, what are the chances that my second child is a girl?". Which looks like this:
gggb
bg
bb
And in which case the answer is 1/2. The chance of 1 girl in the family is 1/2.
Humor comes from the idea of some amateur trying to paint over a masterpiece, like maybe the Mona Lisa in a Naked Gun movie. And the paint job just looks so... unskilled.
But it's no tragedy because this was not a priceless treasure. At most a few hundred bucks worth, maybe a few thousand at most. Leave the poor lady alone.
e.g. A ticket might read:
01010 10011 00010 00111
They issue exactly 1048576 unique tickets (2^20 = 1048576) distributed in random order, and sell them for $1 apiece. winner will get $1 million.
Ticket numbers:
00000 00000 00000 00000
00000 00000 00000 00001
00000 00000 00000 00010
00000 00000 00000 00011
.
. (count up in binary)
.
11111 11111 11111 11111
After all tickets are sold in random order, the winning ticket is announced!
Winning ticket is 11111 11111 11111 11111 and the ticket holder will get $1 million!!
You did not buy a ticket, but are allowed to ask any ticket holder the question: "does your ticket have at least nineteen 1s?" and the ticket holder must answer truthfully. You also have a temporary multimillion dollar credit line of your own, and you have the option of using it to buy any ticket from any person for $100,000 and he must sell it to you if you offer that price. You may buy form as many people as you like.
So you ask a bunch of people until finally a ticket holder says "yes, my ticket has at least nineteen 1s"
What are the chances that the other digit is a 1? Is it really 50%? What are the chances that his ticket has 20 1s and is the winning ticket? Should you buy his ticket for $100,000? Should you buy tickets from each person who answers "yes" to your question?
ANSWER:
obviously there is only 1 winning ticket with twenty 1s on it and 20 tickets with exactly nineteen 1s on it. If he says he has at least nineteen 1s, he is far more likely to be holding one of the tickets with exactly 19 1s, not the only ticket with 20 1s.
And obviously if you pay $100,000 each to acquire all 21 tickets that have at least 19 1s on them, you will pay out $2.1 million to win $1 million, which is dumb.
-
You can do the same exercise with the lotto tickets using 2 digits. The tickets are
00
01
10
11
If the winning ticket is 11 and you ask a ticket holder if he has At least one 1 on his ticket, and he says "yes", then all you know is that he's not holding the 00 lotto ticket.
He could be holding the 01, the 10, or the 11. Most likely he is not holding the winning ticket with all 1s on it. There are 2 chances in 3 that he has a 0 on his ticket.
Replace 1 with boy and 0 with girl.
When it comes to chronic pain unfortunately, because narcotic addiction is pretty much involved in 90% or more of the cases (but we are not allowed to talk about that part), because psychological bull**** and depression are a huge component (we aren't able to talk about that either without being shouted down as insensitive to all the people with "fibromyalgia"
The physician practitioners almost all know this, but the company line in modern medicine is just that we don't know what it is yet. Because there is no diagnostic test other than self reporting pain, the picture is additionally complicated by the fact that easily half (and i believe the majority) of the people with chronic "non-identified" pain syndromes like fibromyalgia have tremendous secondary gain overlay and are "squirrelly" as HELL, not to mention a high number of outright fakers who you see bent over in pain in clinic when you touch their back or ask then to bend, but easily bend over and pick their baby up out of the stroller a minute before that.
But medicolegal suicide to call people out on this, and the patients will even get outright belligerent and you even hint at what is plain as day. So physicians document outright "inconsistencies" in function in exams but you can't call people fakers. We send them to some treatment that hasnt been tried (but we know wont really fix things because most dont even want to get better, not really) pass the buck like some 3rd grade teacher graduating that violent troubled kid who still cant read, up to the 4th grade.
In that modern setting of half fakers, half squirrelly people, half depressed, huge secondary gain, incentive to not to get better, and the majority addicted to prescribed narcotics, OF COURSE how can the medical establishment argue against letting ONE MORE UNPROVEN TREATMENT (acupuncture, chiropracty, cupping) to be added to all our already NON-PROVEN MEDICAL TREATMENTS for NON-VERIFIABLE CHRONIC PAIN DIAGNOSIS categories (that only exist in industrialized countries where disability doesn't equal starvation)? Heck it's a big tent! Having one more unproven treatment to add to your arsenal just makes the industry more money. And there's now enough people with a "fibromyalgia" label that if I talk frankly like this, 5 random people will come up and claim I'm just wrong and it's a "real disease", etc. Almost every pain practitioner realizes all these things and will discuss them in private, but tell themselves that is some decent percentage of their patients with some real disease that they're really helping with and that "functional treatment" is making some patients capable of functioning with the pain... The good practitioners restrict narcotics a lot, but that just means the junkies in your practice flee to see somebody who is liberal with their narcs. Acupuncture is no worse and far less costly than most of the crap we throw at chronic pain, the multibillion dollar revolving door.
I did chronic pain clinics for 3 years in my residency, and I cringe at the thought of being anywhere near that patient population... Ugh. I talk to modern chronic pain practitioners on a regular basis nowadays because most adult rehab guys work in that area, and the story hasn't changed. Every pain doctor knows the clinic is full of junkies and the squirrelly, and that the medicolegal PTB lacks the balls to call them out on it. It's too widely accepted that if you say you have pain, we just accept it. It's just not acceptable to tell people they're faking or squirrelly anymore. It's just not acceptable to tell people "get back to work, live with it". They'll sue their employer, despite having no tangible evidence to verify their pain: "I got fy-bro-my-al-jah! The doctor said so!"
So what difference does if make if we throw acupuncture or Physical therapy, Vicodin, or back surgery at it?
If you really care about third world countries, then send your money over there. Consuming feeds third world countries. Talking about "consumerism" while not spending, does nothing to help them.
The fact that your consumer neighbors enjoy themselves, but you "open your eyes, put a sad (or mad) expression on your face, and criticize consumers" helps nobody. Your "sympathy" helps nobody.
Put your money where your mouth is. Send it overseas to somebody poor. THEN you can consider telling your friends that they're exploiting the poor. As it currently stands, you're doing worse than your friends are to the poor.
But I'm confused. Back in the probability thread on dice, you implied that your quantum mechanics knowledge contributed to bad intuition on the dice problem. Or maybe I'm confusing you with somebody else. Probably my bad.
I'm not necessarily siding with paths... but you drop gads of jargon in a way that makes it sound like you're hinting you have some deep understanding of the math.
Maybe they figured out their viewing model for most people on comedy central is to drop in and sample? and use their cable and dish boxes to schedule programming.
(1) They demonstrated "XYZ" about SOME plants, not most plants, not all plants. If you're going to randomly expand your conclusions so broadly, you could just as easily argue: "Some living things (humans) are proven to have feelings and think... therefore we should not eat any living creatures."
(2) The "XYZ" that they demonstrated for SOME plants was NOT that they "think or communicate" or have consciousness. The "XYZ" that they demonstrated for SOME plants is something that my bluetooth headset can far exceed. Is my bluetooth headset entitled to being saved from destruction?
(1) if you normally go to her for advice, and actually value her opinion, I'd strongly consider what she has to say about fitness & beauty, but at the same time, tell her that it bothers you that she would tell you to DUMP the game, rather than encouraging you to change it.
(2) if you don't value her opinion, what do you care what she thinks about this game? Just stop telling her about your ambitions and projects, if you know she's just going to give you negative energy.
It sucks that your sister is so unimpressed with your dream, but only you can know whether she said it because she gave her honest opinion, or whether she said it because you just don't get along.
Its really just an even STUPIDER version of the "if she really didn't want to be raped, she would have fought harder" attitude. Blame the victim. Yeah, she's crying in a corner, but if she didn't want it, she would have stopped me.
He's basically saying to women that got pregnant through rape: Clearly if you had actually hated the rape 100%, you would have used your female mechanisms to 'shut the whole thing down'. The fact that you're pregnant proves you enjoyed it, at least a little bit.
NON-"legitimate rape" is just code for "she enjoyed it".
This loathsome POS is too stupid and ignorant to stay a Senator. HE NEEDS TO GO AWAY. I would not be shocked if this scumbag has date-raped women before in college when he was younger and left some woman crying and upset, and this is his cognitive construction that rationalizes that his actions were consensual.
The whole mindset STINKS of rationalization for personal loathsome behaviors.
The prize was from at least a month or more back, but awesome stuff.
He got a BRILLIANT idea for a practical, fast cancer screenin test from reading journal articles and information that's out there.
Then he submitted his proposal to multiple labs and was rejected by over 100, until a JHU cancer researcher said yes, and let him work on it in his lab.
Really, just a great thing.
It will be interesting to see how something like this will be implemented in practice. The test would cost 3 cents a stick to make... And it's sensitive... But pancreatic Cancer is usually very fast growing and rare... While being one of the most lethal cancers. And is usually pretty much ASYMPTOMATIC until its ready to kill you.
Will it make sense to screen every 2 weeks for your whole adult life? Every month? Every 6 months? Because of the nature of the disease and the nature of the test, it might actually see extremely widespread use... Or very little.
If its something ultimately recommended as a monthly test for everyone, could it be worth billions if sold at just $1 a pop? $5 a pop? If so many would not buy it, but much more money would be made... Or sold at close to cost and shared with the world? it's the classic case of inventing something medical: (a) If your new medical invention is just a little bit better than whats already out there, you're welcome to price yourself a hefty amount above the existing competition. (b) if it's too valuable or too much better than existing stuff, they just take it from you and you can't gouge people for money because you're "killing people" by pricing then out
(It's a dilemma. Clearly a super cheap urine dipstick test for cancer screening could conceivably marketed for anywhere from a nickel apiece to $30 apiece. For example, look at Urine dipsticks for pregnancy marketed to consumers are like $8-12 a shot in consumer packaging, and the identical test, without the plastic packaging, is sold 50 a pack on the internet for a few bucks. I cracked on open once. It's the same little strip of paper. Actually the bulk strips worked better)
I wonder if JHU owns the rights or if Andraka does.
It could all be moot if there is no practical regular screening schedule for this test, but it might turn out to be monstrously lucrative. Ultimately the important thing is that we have another tool against cancer.