Haha, I was typing "make excuses to procrastinate" and didn't delete enough words when revising the post.

When I want to go somewhere and it's too much trouble, I make procrastinate until it's too late to make it to whatever appointment I was going for, and that way I don't even have the bother of traveling anywhere at all.

Wrong again.
You can't make any predictions about a single lottery draw. You can make reasonable predictions about 100 lottery draws, better ones about 1,000 lottery draws. You can make extremely accurate predictions, within a fraction of a percent, about 1,000,000,000 lottery draws.

If everything the medical industry has been doing has been wrong, why has human life expectancy consistently gone up?

That's an illusion. You only think life expectancy has gone up, because you look at evidence. But suppose we ignore dubious things such as evidence, measurements, math done on those measurements, inferring general rules and then testing them, as well as all our everyday experiences where reality seems to be functioning according to understandable rules. Then what reason is left, for believing that life expectancy has been going up? None, that's what.

Balancing out that nothingness, there's my feelings and intuition and paranoia and whatever dogma I've been exposed to. And those things tell me medicine is bad. Ergo, it sure looks like life expectancy is going down.

HTH.

Oh yea, and also... They would not need foreknowledge of the desired value as the ratios they use are sound. They would only need confidence in the random distribution of holes in the target.

I don't think they'd need to game it that much. They'd need a random dispersion of a large number of holes on that square to achieve the result, and I don't think that getting close to that ideal would be difficult given a large number of discharges at the target using fine shot shells. The law of large numbers would be in their favour.

Do you have a citation to that medical paper and a robust dissection of it? It'd be great to know from where all this nonsense started.

Predicting local perturbations from data is very hard. Identifying long term trends is, by comparison, easy.

Yep. Not sure what GP was on about, but I'd trust a Google Car over a teen driver any day of the week.

Well, a dictionary doesn't have any preference for either method, so she can still look up words as required. Also: Root words come in handy; she's much better at identifying word etymology than I am, but she also took Latin and I took Spanish. :D

And no, it doesn't quite work that way, i.e. Kanji (and even kanji has a similar root system at times: see kanji for tree vs forest, if meaning is what you're looking for). I just asked her how she learns to pronounce things: Mainly through root identification and through conversation, etc.

I was raised on the phonics approach; my girlfriend was raised on the whole word approach. I'd never knowingly met anyone educated in the whole word approach and had read "Why Johnny Can't Read" years ago, wondering, "where the hell is it that they teach this crap! This sounds insane!" And yet, studies show that while we learned phonics to learn how to read, our minds actually read whole-word once we're well-practiced. Anyway, the gf has 2 master's degrees and is working on yet another post-graduate degree, so apparently it works well enough.

I'd trust a 16 year old on a cellphone over a self driving car and roads that look like a battlefield here in Massachusetts.

Have another look. Self-driving car tech is a lot more advanced than people realize.

For many years, Gnome was the most popular desktop environment. Many of the people who got into Linux on the desktop moved into a Gnome environment. It provided a familiar UI with standard metaphors. While the Linux desktop has moved on for better or worse, the fact remains that it was Gnome that provided the soft landing for many when they jumped ship.

Pay some respect to those who went before and the work they did.

It knows what it's done.

The open source movement owes much to the Gnome foundation. Yes, they have alienated their core support base, and perhaps this situation is a result of those cows coming home to roost. Nonetheless, a gutted or even dead Gnome foundation hurts the whole community, if only because it highlights the fragility of open source focused organizations as going concerns.

(Yes, yes I know it's supposed to be chickens.)