...logic, rationality, and ideology? Like mixing salt, sodium, and water... the results are always messy and explosive.

well, technically a "white" man can be on of many various shades of pink and/or tan/olive** in skin color, and a "black" man's skin can range from a very pale beige to nearly jet-black. An Asian man's skin isn't really yellow at all (unless something like jaundice is involved).

"African American" could just as easily describe a pale blue-eyed dude from South Africa as it could a dude with jet-black skin from Rwanda or a more Arabic-looking gent from Egypt. QED: The term is ignorant at best. "Caucasian" is a holdover from days when scientists thought that pale folks all stemmed from folks who lived in the Caucasus region of the world, as you half-stated. IMHO, the only term that even halfway seems to fit would be "Native American", but as a group, they all emigrated from Asia about 100k years ago, and as time goes by even that particular distinction will fuzz and fade.

It would just be easier to call 'em all "people" and be done with it, no? I figure in about 500 years (assuming civilization holds up that long), skin color will be too blended and mixed to even hope to tell any differences by mere sight.

FYI: I'm currently typing this missive while on business in Atlanta, Georgia; I've seen nearly every shade of skin color in the past 24 hours. I've seen folks getting along in social situations just fine, the participants individually bearing radically differing skin colors. I grew up under similar circumstances, and I can tell you that Obama is very inept, very ideological, very selfish, and a very lousy president; not one of the worst, but pretty close to it.

** BTW, maybe we can just call 'em pink?

Without some reasonable sample of the universe of correlative and causative relationships, I don't think we can even go so far as to say that half the time A causes B and half the time B causes A--maybe we're more likely to observe relationships that go one way than the other? In my disease example, we started observing symptoms long before we discovered pathogens, for example, and some symptoms were identified earlier than others (I'm willing to bet we knew what diarrhea was long before we knew about fevers). It would be interesting to study the history of this, in various fields, although it still might not be enough for reasonable inference.

Indeed. There is simply no good use case for Access, IMO.

Thank you!

Yeah, I think the toned-down version is better; you can't make inferences about the relative probabilities of each possible relationship without data specific to the situation. But it's certainly a point worth making, either way.

Correlation implies 25% likelihood of causation.

50% chance before discovering temporal data. 25% chance a causes b, 25% chance b causes a. But if you have correlation, causation is unknown without further data.

Most of my bosses have been statisticians holding PhDs in the field (I manage the databases, NOMAD is my favorite language but the bastards make me use Access now, I'm glad I'm retiring) and I learned a lot from them.

BTW, both journals were excellent.

Cool != popular.

I'm not sure "innocent" is the right adjective

Look, fascist, these are people who have already been cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations. You know, people willing to trump up petty bullshit into lengthy sentences in Federal Pound Me In the Ass penitentiaries, when they aren't torturing or killing people with bombs. And they've cleared these people for release because they have no reason to hold them.

But other countries? Most wouldn't tell you that the prisoners exist.

"Most" countries aren't assassinating people on the other side of the planet from their own country, or have the largest number of prisoners, both per capita and in raw numbers.

Really, just for typing it? Well in that case:

We're even, RACIST! Fuck you. Let's move on.

It's not hard to innocently get evidence of explosives on you. If they run this test regularly, this would have been far from their first false/innocent positive. And if you RTFA'd, you'd see that an FBI agent admitted that he was singled out because of his "background." Unless you think he just made that up to make the news.

Many of them actually.

Then you'll have no problems rattling off 10 of them, much less 38.

Many of them have stateless persons in custody that they don't know what to do with.

We know what states these people are from, because we kidnapped them. So, again, how many countries keep dozens of innocent people in prison when the government in question has cleared them for release years ago.

Don't be naive; most big nations have almost certainly committed political and military assassinations of citizens and others. The fact that they do it covertly doesn't make it any better.

Then you'll almost certainly have no problem rattling off a bunch of examples. When was the last time Canada assassinated one of their citizens? How about New Zealand? Poland?

Nice journal post! Good, lively discussion, too.

True enough. I guess I was kind of assuming the kind of crash where someone blindsides you and it doesn't matter how well (or poorly) you're driving. To be sure, the best way to survive a crash is not to be in one in the first place, and if you can't do that, react in a way that causes the actual collision to take place at the lowest possible speed.