Beyond Labels

William Proxmire campaign costs. $145.10.

Default mental mechanism is belief

“Why you can’t help believing everything you read”

Dan Gilbert research on how belief works:

“How mental systems believe”

“Unbelieving the unbelievable”

Japanese Innovations

Japanese innovations that changed the world

Foreign Policy: Is Japan the most innovative country in the world

At 1,200 patents per million people, Japan has the highest rate of patents in the world—even when you account for multiple counting.

Military spending as % GDP

Wikipedia: Countries by military expenditure

US spending over time, from here

Interactive data from World Bank

Economic Growth Worldwide

Interactive resource here

Immigration in the US

Foreign-born population by state

Fish and North Korea

Salmon that funds North Korea

Since the library will be closed on Monday, our next meeting will be the following Monday (16 October). We’ll turn to the “cold war aftermath” topic that was proposed for last Monday–the group got distracted and didn’t address it.

Trump approval rating declining and now stable.

7 Rules for reading Trump’s numbers

On historians talking about Trump ,100 years in the future, the apocryphal statement from Zhou Enlai about the significance of the French Revolution “It’s too soon to say”

Stats on Medical costs (including projections).

Cancer survival rates:  (from here)

In the UK, more than 330,000 cases of cancer were diagnosed in 2011. That compares favorably with the rate of cancer in the US—396 per 100,000 people in the UK vs. 451 per 100,000 in the US.

But even though people in England, where the UK’s largest population is, are less likely to get cancer, five years after diagnosis, only 56% of English cancer patients survive, compared to 65% of American patients.

<snip>

However, if American healthcare was indeed better than Britain’s National Health Service, then the number of deaths from cancers should be fewer in the US than in England and Wales. This can be explained and measured by another statistic—the cancer mortality rate—and it turns out that they aren’t very different for the two countries.