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Comment Re:Court packing (Score 1) 122

Well they packed the courts with pro corporate right wing judges and here we are.

You, sir, along with all who modded you up, are idiots. Two of the three judges on the appellate decision were appointed by Democrat governors. The decision frequency refers to "we", meaning they were unanimous in the decision. In NJ in 2022, "Two-thirds of sitting assignment judges are Democrats", along with 63% of sitting appellate judges. It wasn't even that hard to find this information. Do better.

Comment Rebekah Jones Is Human And Truth Is Bad For Clicks (Score 2) 272

The truth of it is incredibly boring.

The truth is that Jones made a mistake in allowing an auto-export of a PDF before the data had been reviewed by Florida’s epidemiological team for accuracy. The director, seeing that the unchecked data had gone out into the wild, requested that it be removed until it could be verified. This message is relayed to Jones through her boss and she, anxious that this data removal would impact people checking the dashboard, argued that they should keep it as it is. She was overruled and complied with the request, disabling the auto-export.

The dashboard used the old exported data for approximately 80 minutes before the data was verified and the auto-export was re-enabled. UPDATE: From further conversations, it looks like the dashboard did go down & did not fallback to older data, which is why Jones was so upset about it.

Dr. Carina Blackmore is the director for the Division of Disease Control and Health Protection and the State Epidemiologist. She is a researcher and public health manager with 27 years of work in environmental epidemiology, toxicology, and public health oversight. When she gives an order to turn off auto-export in order to perform a data review, she should get the auto-export turned off for the data review. She should not get her request rebuffed by a dashboard operator with an email that says “this is the wrong call”. That is not appropriate workplace behavior.


Source: https://polimath.substack.com/...

Other interesting pieces: https://polimath.substack.com/... and https://polimath.substack.com/...

Comment Logic Gates (Score 1) 533

Arguably, given that ultimately all code is executed by microprocessor/controller/ASIC/whatever logic gates, I would say it has to be one of AND, OR, or NOT (or one of their base combinations). Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gates

Also note that this answer satisfies the "non-assembler format" constraint (in letter if not in spirit).

Comment Re: Oh the bible, you make me laugh..... (Score 1) 611

Actually you miss the context of 1Co26. That passage isn't referring to intelligence per se, but to those who think they are more intelligent than God (like, for instance, those individuals quoted by the original thread author).

The thing that struck me in reading all of those quotes is that Russell seems to have been unaware (ignorant?) of the parable of the shrewd (intelligent?) manager. Cf. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2016:1-15&version=NLT

Comment Re:Republicans always lie about Clinton. (Score 1) 633

(From your own link)...so let's take a look at the controlling congressional parties during those years:

Reagan +9.3%, Democrat House, Republican Senate followed by Democrat Senate
George H. W. Bush +13.0%, Democrat for both
Clinton -0.07%, Democrat House followed by Republican House, Democrat Senate followed by Republican Senate
Clinton -9.0%, Republican for both
George H. Bush +7.1%, Republican House, Split Senate followed by Republican Senate
George H. Bush +20.7%, Republican House followed by Democrat House, Republican Senate followed by Democrat Senate

If you fail to discern the underlying pattern there, then you are not paying attention. Presidents get far too much credit and blame for the debt load of the country; it is Congress that writes the laws - the President signs or vetoes them. So when Joe Randomcitizen or some Talking Head tries to give credit to Clinton (or too much blame to Republicans) for a particular debt load without recognizing Congress's far-greater contribution, that too is misleading. Possibly known as lying? You be the judge.

(Side note on Clinton: he presided during one of the biggest economic booms in our history. As one presidential candidate recently put it: "when you're dealt four aces, it's easy to win the hand.")

The logical counterargument is that the buck stops with the president. Ultimately he decides whether to sign whatever congress puts on his desk. And arguably there are times where a president signs something that does not match 100% with his fiscal (or other) ideology. That's called compromise, and I think that our current congressional gridlock (Cf. funding the nation for months at a time rather than a full year) is due to the virtue of compromise being retrospectively mis-cast into a vice. Our congresspeople have no choice but to dig in their ideological heels or risk being outcast by their peers, Talking Heads, and even their opponents for not strictly following their chosen party doctrine.

Interesting that the captcha for this entry is 'revival'. That is truly what this country needs.

Comment Feynman agreed...though much earlier (Score 3, Interesting) 465

From Gleick's "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman"...

"'People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not...If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it--that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers...then that's the way it is.' He believed that his colleagues were claiming more success at unification than they had achived--that disparate theories had been pasted together tenuously. When Hawking said, 'We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature,' many particle physicists agreed. But Feynman did not. 'I've had a lifetime of that,' he said on another occasion. 'I've had a lifetime of people who believe that the answer is just around the corner.... But again and again it's been a failure. Eddington, who thought that with the theory of electrons and quantum mechanics everything was going to be simple...Einstein, who thought that he had a unified thoeiry just around the corner but didn't know anything about nuclei and was unable of course to guess it...People think the're very close to the answer, but I don't think so....

Whether or not nature has an ultimate, simple, unified, beautiful form is an open question, and I don't want to say either way.'"

(From the epilogue of the book, pp. 432-433, emph. added.)

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