Old Al, he came out the blue and said, “Not only do rays move at c if what puts them out is held fast or not: they move at c even if you are held fast or not.” Now that may not look like such a big deal on the face of it, but hold on. What this says is that you can move as fast or as slow as you want, and rays will go by you at c all the time. You can have a pal run past you and when you both look at a ray go by at the same time, you will both see the same ray go by at c! That is a bit wild, no? You, back in that void, you just can not say if you move or not — with the lamp or no. Not that you can’t tell: it can’t be said. It’s moot!
Part of the “Incapacitation” strategy Frum celebrates involved putting the maximum number of arrests and maximum penalties on marijuana smokers. A 2600% increase in New York, with significantly more detainment and jail time for minorities. Broken Windows isn’t about being harder on murderers. It’s about a radically more aggressive enforcement of minor misdemeanor laws, such as those surrounding marijuana, because by not enforcing those laws disorder will set in and increase the potential for future crimes. Today’s pot smoker is tomorrow’s hardened criminal.
That’s insane, but so is our criminal justice system.
That’s why I don’t trust Julian Assange. To date, all he’s given us is a strange sense of importance in himself by convincing us that the world’s out to get him. Take a look at the Wikileaks wikipedia page from a year ago. You’ll see that a year ago, Assange was barely a mention on the entry but the current version is much more focused on Assange. No organization like Wikileaks can survive a cult of personality, or one person’s delusions of grandeur.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the goalies on your teams use their hands all the time. Hardly anybody ever scores a goal in soccer so obviously this works. And Uruguay’s Luis Suarez, who plays the position of “thwacker” or “slacker” or something, used his hands to defeat Ghana and was carried off the field in triumph. (Why a triumph over Ghana was a cause for celebration I’m not sure. Poor Ghana has been triumphed over by British, Portuguese, German, Dutch and Danish colonialists, the Kwame Nkrumah regime, a CIA-sponsored coup and at least four other coups just since the 1900s. But I guess this is a separate question from why people don’t use their hands in soccer.)
Ironically, when Aristarchus proposed the heliocentric model, his contemporaries dismissed it, on the grounds that they did not observe any parallax effects… The heliocentric model would have implied that the stars were an absurdly large distance away.
Which, of course, they are.
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The Cosmic Distance Ladder - Terence Tao
This is the single best presentation I have ever read. It has no equations, but it has history and science, and is extremely well written. It’s also by Terry Tao, hero among men, so please go read it. I promise you will enjoy it and you will learn something.
As a medium, photography spans a wide range of merit, from a vacation snapshot to an Ansel Adams creation. In this sense, I believe that there are many people who take pictures but only a few photographers who create photographs. And I’m not talking about Photoshop creations. It’s a creative imagination behind the lens that makes a few photographs stand apart from the ubiquitous copycats.
Let’s say that I wander around in Glacier Park until I find a “pretty” scene. I choose a pleasing composition, carefully select my camera settings (manual, always!), and wait for the best light. But when I press the shutter, I am taking a copy of something that is already “pretty.” In this case, I’m just a technician, and there are thousands of technicians with cameras out there. Not much different than some guy pressing the button to Xerox a glossy calender.
In some cases, this is where I begin the image making process. But in many cases, this is where a lot of self-described “photographers” end their efforts. I see these guys over and over at art shows. Oh look, yet another “picture” of flowers in front of Mt. Reynolds in evening light. Gag me with an Instamatic.
…a sum, he thought when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them), numerologists who read one’s fortune for next to nothing believed in correct sums. Scientists, meanwhile, knew that all numbers were only approximate. Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one’s way in the dark.
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill [American citizen Anwar] al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
Currently scholarly publishers vie for the position of biggest barrier to communication. The stronger the filter the higher the notional quality. But being a pure filter play doesn’t add value because the costs of publication are now low. The value lies in presenting, enhancing, curating the material that is published. If publishers instead vied to identify, markup, and make it easy for the right people to find the right information they would be working with the natural flow of the web. Make it easy for me to find the piece of information, feature work that is particularly interesting or important, re-intepret it so I can understand it coming from a different field, preserve it so that when a technique becomes useful in 20 years the right people can find it.
Take a look at this screenshot taken 2010/07/07: The [InTrade] market says there’s between a 42 and 70% chance James will sign with Cleveland, between a 5 and 40% chance he’ll sign with Chicago, etc.
In other words, it doesn’t say much. The spreads between the best bid and ask prices are wide and so its predictions are not terribly useful. We can occasionally tighten these ranges by being smarter about handling multiple outcomes, but in the end low liquidity takes the prediction out of markets.
Even if someone does have information, they may not be able trade on it so may simply go away.
In other words: A police officer who kills a civilian in the course of an unlawful arrest is a murderer; a citizen who kills a police officer when threatened with lethal violence in the course of an unlawful arrest is exercising his innate right to self-defense. The jury agreed with that view, convicting the officer of murder. The verdict was overturned on appeal because the jury hadn’t been permitted to consider the officer’s argument that he acted in self-defense. The Mississippi Supreme Court conceded that an officer “attempting to make an unlawful arrest is not cut off from the right of self-defense … he is only the aggressor in the difficulty and is in no worse attitude than any other aggressor.”
There is one significant problem with that view: Armed aggressors have no right to self-defense. An armed criminal has no right to shoot back if his victims offer armed resistance. That principle should apply to aggressors of any variety – including police who stage illegal and unnecessary home invasions, or who commit violent acts in the course of unlawful arrests. Once again, all of this was widely understood until just a few decades ago. Today, not only is that right all but unheard of, it is increasingly common for people to be arrested for resisting arrest.
George Akerlof and Paul Romer describe similar incentives in the context of the S&L collapse. In Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit, they describe how the owners of S&Ls would book accounting profits, justifying a large salary even though those profits had little or no chance of becoming real. They would generate cash flow by offering an attractive rate on the savings accounts they offered. Depositors would not worry about the viability of the banks because of FDIC insurance. But the owners’ salaries were ultimately coming out of the pockets of taxpayers. What the owners were doing was borrowing money to finance their salaries, money that the taxpayers guaranteed. When the S&Ls failed, the depositors got their money back, and the owners had their salaries: The taxpayers were the only losers.
As you can see, the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are. People who perform worst at a task tend to think they’re god’s gift to said task, and the people who can actually do said task often display excessive modesty. I suspect we find this sort of explanation compelling because it appeals to our implicit just-world theories: we’d like to believe that people who obnoxiously proclaim their excellence at X, Y, and Z must really not be so very good at X, Y, and Z at all, and must be (over)compensating for some actual deficiency; it’s much less pleasant to imagine that people who go around shoving their (alleged) superiority in our faces might really be better than us at what they do.
Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people.
After having my money stolen and business ruined by the FBI because I dared speak my mind in a lawful manner, I am no longer in decent financial shape. I have been denied a public defender by the Fayetteville courthouse. I have had all my computers seized on a warrant which could not possibly have had probable cause, and thus am lacking the very materials I would need to take this pro se. My requests to get a copy of the secret warrant used to steal my property have been stonewalled by state and federal authorities.
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Hypocrites and pharisees - weev
Is this guy a toolbag? Yup. Should you care about his freedoms anyway? Absolutely.
Read what he says with a barrel full of salt, but I suggest you read it anyway. This is how the FBI acts when they want to take somebody out.
We believe that, at the point of publication, enough information should be available to reconstruct the process of analysis. This may be a full description of algorithms and/or software programs where appropriate. We note the action of NASA‘s Goddard Institute for Space Science in making the source code used to generate the GISTEMP gridded dataset publically available. We also note the recommendation of the US National Academy of Sciences in its report ―Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age that: “…the default assumption should be that research data, methods (including the techniques, procedures and tools that have been used to collect, generate or analyze data, such as models, computer code and input data) and other information integral to a publically reported result will be publically accessible when results are reported.
