Bwwaaa! Ha! Even for a non-native speaker, I can't believe that some people can be such idiots! Like a commentator to that article says, dairies beware when you advertize your homogenized milk :rofl:

[url]http://www.northwestgeorgianews.com/associated_press/news/national/otter-attacks-swimmers-in-washington-river/article_27c056a2-1a38-11e4-b7a1-0017a43b2370.html[/url]

Unrelated: [url]http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenkusek/2014/08/02/marijuana-ad-in-the-nyts/[/url]

US police detain giant tortoise after brief chase
 

[url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28635902[/url]

Git around, git around, I git around
 

[url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-28638586[/url]

[URL="http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/magnitude-45-earthquake-strikes-hawaii/33535/"]Magnitude 4.5 earthquake strikes Hawaii[/URL]

[QUOTE]Meanwhile, Hawaii is preparing to take its first direct hurricane hit in 22 years. A rare hurricane warning has been issued for the main Hawaiian Islands, the first time since Hurricane Fernanda in 1993.[/QUOTE]

Mother charged after son sets himself on fire for Facebook video
 

[url]http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/12/us-usa-north-carolina-fire-idUSKBN0GC18A20140812[/url]

Suggestion for better headline: "Latest crop of Darwin Award candidates shows that evolution really does work!"

[QUOTE=ewmayer;380314][URL]http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/12/us-usa-north-carolina-fire-idUSKBN0GC18A20140812[/URL]

Suggestion for better headline: "Latest crop of [U]Darwin Award [/U]candidates shows that evolution really does work!"[/QUOTE]

This statement would only really apply if the boy had rendered his genitals inoperative.

[QUOTE=kladner;380316]This statement would only really apply if the boy had rendered his genitals inoperative.[/QUOTE]

No, that is the key point - evolution only requires "adverse effects on fecundity" to be reliably (in the large-sample-size sense) correlated with dumbassedness. While the "instantly fatal" incident variety is generally highlighted by the DA citations, evolution requires no such binary effect to do its thing.

In the above case, one hopes that burn scarring (and possibly the existence of a damning "dumbass" video clip to supplement the news story) will reduce the odds of the guy quickly finding a mate and thus having fewer offspring than he would have absent the dumbassery.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;380314][url]http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/12/us-usa-north-carolina-fire-idUSKBN0GC18A20140812[/url]

Suggestion for better headline: "Latest crop of Darwin Award candidates shows that evolution really does work!"[/QUOTE]
Seems like there was a faulty selection of fuels.:furious:

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;380323]Seems like there was a faulty selection of fuels.:furious:[/QUOTE]

Failure to do due diligence (heh, i said "doo doo") is a valid evolutionary selection metric, wouldn't you say?
[i]
p.s. to my pvs post - this is more "math" than "wtf?", but just to illustrate the extent to which tiny changes can have dramatic effects in this arena:

It's by now pretty well established that "invading" modern humans (call the species H) coexisted with the indigenous Neandertals (call this species N) in what is now Europe for on the order of 20000 years (please no quibble about the precise value, we're only interested in ballpark estimates here). Let us say for 1000 generations, and let's assume the initial N/H ratio was 100:1, and ignore further migrations for simplicity.

Question: What H/N fecundity ratio (roughly, average #offspring surviving to adulthood) is needed to completely flip the population ratios over 1000 generations (assume same average reproductive age for both species, again for purposes of illustration), i.e. for the humans to out-reproduce the Neandertals by a factor of 10000x?

Answer: [spoiler]Less than 1%. (More precisely, solve for A in (1+A)^1000 = 10000.)[/spoiler]

In other words, the extinction of the Neandertals as a species - as opposed to the genetic imprint left in modern Europeans by interbreeding, which appears to have been of benefit to the humans via a kit of "cold weather survival" genes - was likely so gradual that neither species noticed the ongoing populational shift, except perhaps in anecdotal "damn humans - couple decades ago there were just a handful, now they're everywhere" terms which likely had more to do with regional migrations than fecundity advantages.[/i]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;380325]Failure to do due diligence (heh, i said "doo doo") is a valid evolutionary selection metric, wouldn't you say?
[i]
p.s. to my pvs post - this is more "math" than "wtf?", but just to illustrate the extent to which tiny changes can have dramatic effects in this arena:

It's by now pretty well established that "invading" modern humans (call the species H) coexisted with the indigenous Neandertals (call this species N) in what is now Europe for on the order of 20000 years (please no quibble about the precise value, we're only interested in ballpark estimates here). Let us say for 1000 generations, and let's assume the initial N/H ratio was 100:1, and ignore further migrations for simplicity.

Question: What H/N fecundity ratio (roughly, average #offspring surviving to adulthood) is needed to completely flip the population ratios over 1000 generations (assume same average reproductive age for both species, again for purposes of illustration), i.e. for the humans to out-reproduce the Neandertals by a factor of 10000x?

Answer: [spoiler]Less than 1%. (More precisely, solve for A in (1+A)^1000 = 10000.)[/spoiler]

In other words, the extinction of the Neandertals as a species - as opposed to the genetic imprint left in modern Europeans by interbreeding, which appears to have been of benefit to the humans via a kit of "cold weather survival" genes - was likely so gradual that neither species noticed the ongoing populational shift, except perhaps in anecdotal "damn humans - couple decades ago there were just a handful, now they're everywhere" terms which likely had more to do with regional migrations than fecundity advantages.[/i][/QUOTE]

Ted Kosmatka, "N-words", 2008.