very common. my school did this as well. your psy100 grade was automatically an F if you didn't participate in X number of experiments. no big deal, it was actually pretty fun.

ick.

racism makes your day? cool bro.

oh please, people have been stuffing ballot boxes since voting was invented. computer systems aren't inherently any less secure than analog ones. go live in a shack in the woods if you hate progress so much.

yup. there does seem to be some evidence of grace scores down near the passing level, and it'd be interesting to theorize about the bimodal distribution he's seeing in places, but the jagged graphs are what he seems to be most concerned about, which are most likely simply a product of how the test was weighted or curved or whatever.

the thing he seems most concerned about are that out of 200,000 or so students, there are many marks that were not received, especially in the middle sections of the grades. values like 81, 83, 85, etc. were earned by zero students while values like 80, 82, 84 were received by tons.

this seems absurdly easy to explain.

say students are graded on a 50-point scale, which is then doubled (eliminating half of all possible values), and then some kind of curve is applied, which bends some values into other-wise unattainable scores, especially at the uppermost and lowermost values, but shifts things a little in the middle too, so that things don't work out exactly that only even values are attainable or whatever. that would result in a similar-looking distribution.

his numbers DO show substantial evidence that people just below passing are being bumped up to passing grades. although again it's hard to know for sure without knowing how the exam is weighted.

i've always found it compelling, how all orcs became docile and listless after their defeat in the first war of orcs vs humans. the orcs were then rounded up and enslaved by the humans. thrall was raised by a human but eventually rebelled, freeing prison camp after prison camp and eventually amassing enough followers to found the horde and begin building a new nation.

i'm sure we will just get lots of dumb eye candy and explosions though, and the world will be blessed with yet another awful video game movie.

describing Geocities as "a blogging network" is like referring to medieval town criers as social media newsfeeds.

Geocities was a free web host that provided some primitive site creation tools and injected a bunch of ads. did some people use them to create sites with regular updates? sure. but there was a heck of a lot more "chewbacca ate my balls"and "JEFFROS AWESOME PAGE OF COOL LINKS!!!! (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)" than there was anything else. i don't even think the term "blog" had been minted by the time geocities peaked.

The Vogons are beside the point. they are simply slug-brained bureaucrats. Ultimately, they were merely pawns, manipulated by a shadowy cabal of psychiatrists, who wanted the Earth eliminated in all possible parallel dimensions because they wanted all possible Questions to the answer of Life the Universe, and Everything completely eliminated forever. (since they'd subsequently be out of a job -- it's a concern as old as Deep Thought itself)

The following paragraph is offered for the confused (who may rest assured that it is unlikely to alter said state).

It is of course well known that the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is "42". Unfortunately, Arthur Dent's brainwave patterns are the closest the Universe ever gets to figuring out what the Question actually is. He was present on the Earth (which was, in fact, a computer built for the specific purpose of sussing out the Question, running a multi-million year program so complex that lifeforms living upon it formed part of its operational matrix), moments before its program was about to reach completion and spit out the Ultimate Question (and indeed moments before it was blown to smithereens by the Vogons ostensibly to make way for a Hyperspace Bypass). As a result, imprinted upon Arthur's subconscious is the final result of the Earth's program: "what do you get if you multiply six by nine?" This is no doubt some kind of perversion of the real Question, due to the fact that a few million years prior, the pre-human natives of Earth were wiped out by the useless castoffs of another civilization, which had cruelly shipped off all their moronic middle-men, telephone cleaners, and advertising agents to exile on Earth. Arthur Dent and every other human on Earth ended up descended from these idiots instead of the Neanderthals that had evolved on Earth as part of its program, and as a result its program had become corrupt.

Even in its corrupted form, Arthur's answer hints that the true Question may indeed be just as inane as the Answer. At the risk of editorializing, this supposition seems in no way inconsistent with my personal experiences within the Universe in question.

old man yells at solid state pinball machine . jpg

the producer here decided to show us this guy's mug for 90% of the run time. i am struggling to understand, though, why it was interrupted with occasional 3-second snippets of PINBALL MACHINES, though.

well, technically, wouldn't the convicted murder BECOME an astronaut by definition the moment we shot him into space?

slashdot is really provoking the deep questions today.

i agree the reversed lower playfield can be a bit disorienting at first, but let's not get melodramatic -- since there are no outlanes in the gravity well, a quick SDTM drain is really the only way to die down there, and completing either bank of drop targets opens the re-entry gate anyway.

swarms of robots.

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