...or if it’s more indicative of a fundamental writing problem.
I'll take this side of the bet. A random group of a half-dozen regular commenters from this blog could have written three or four different versions of the last season of Game of Thrones, all of them superior to the screenplay that was actually used.
It's Colorado. It's like there's a law that says playground equipment must require climbing. Here's an old (low quality, large file) photo of the star of the park. The 13-foot rotator is to the extreme left. I have climbed to the top of the enclosure, once, when granddaughter #2 was younger and insisted I go down the slide with her. It's not a pleasant climb for an adult. All the interior spaces are sized for skinny people no taller than about 4'6". If I had to climb up again to rescue someone's kid, say, I'd go up the interior of the slide.
One of the next steps is supposed to be an investigation by the probation department, including an interview with Trump. That department will make a sentence recommendation to the judge. I would pay to watch that interview.
About the time I turned 60, the docs quit nagging me about aerobic goals and started nagging about strength training goals. I am not consistent in meeting goals, but do try to spend some time doing exercises with body weight and a pair of 20-pound dumbbells every week. Which was useful last week when, as I noted in a comment then, I had to climb up and retrieve granddaughter #3 (aged two and a few months) who had climbed to the top of one of these and couldn't figure out the way down.
I find your lack of faith in how quickly the research community will find ways to apply the ability to fit a billion-coefficient model to data... disturbing :^)
I bought a nicer-than-usual box of wine earlier this afternoon. The nominal reason was that I kept all three granddaughters this morning. We went to the park. The two-year-old believes without doubt that she can climb anything her older sisters can. That may well be true, if she's given sufficient time. It doesn't mean she can get down by herself, so sometimes I have to climb up and fetch her. Including once when I had gotten a good grip on her lower leg and she... just... let... go. And hung there giggling. Giggled the entire time I had to lift her out of the climbing stuff by the leg at arm's length, while she was ten feet off the ground, on a merry-go-round sort of thing that wanted to move.
OTOH, I have the box and no responsibilities this evening and Trump is a convicted felon.
Nah, the necessary tech either existed 20 years ago or was inevitable by then. One of the first inflection points was when chip designers quite asking "Can I fit this much functionality on a chip?" and started "I've got room for another 200 million transistors; what can we do with them?" Ever increasing clock rates went largely away, so performance gains had to come from multiple cores and specialized cores. Spreading a processing problem across a server farm was already a thing. Anyone who thought about it more than suspected that a billion-coefficient statistical model could be fit to large data and complicated questions. Stochastic gradient descent was old when I was in graduate school 45 years ago. Back-propagation to calculate the billion gradient values for a neural net that big is 60s tech. (The chain rule on which BP depends was known in the 17th century.)
I would agree with you about funny, except that a number of LG&M commenters believe -- or at least say they believe -- that a Republican President and six votes on the Supreme Court are enough to invoke the military and run something like Reconstruction in the blue states.
A decade ago the rest of the commentariate there uniformly made fun of such suggestions. Yesterday, Memorial Day, there was much less making fun and much more "of course the military and civilian police will side with the red states" and "I'm planning on how to obtain citizenship in country X and emigrate".
Full disclosure: Yes, I'm the person who believes in an eventual partition of the states, or at least a significant devolution of power to regional authorities, as part of trying to deal with the consequences of climate change.
The Texas platform people think they can still win on a national scale. If you read the comment threads at LG&M, there's a lot of left-of-center people there who also think the Texas platform people can win. If you think you can win, why would you leave?
...the first night she was back I got 8 and a half hours of sleep. Just something about smelling her again made it easy to pass out at 10 and coast until 6:30.
The kids and I put my wife in memory care something over a year ago. There is still not a night goes by when I don't miss having her on the other side of the bed, bouncing it the proper way when she moves, and making the right sorts of odd noises when she dreams or even just breathes.
ThTh4: I was vaguely aware that a change in thinking about "junk DNA" was happening, but have lately seen a few pieces suggesting that the idea there is actually very little junk DNA has become mainstream. The thinking now seems to be that most of what was regarded as junk because it didn't code for proteins actually codes for RNA and mRNA that regulate the proteins.
25 years ago on a long flight I sat next to a guy who did advising for a couple of venture capital firms about where they should invest in biology. His summary then was that we weren't even close to understanding the miracle of protein chemistry each of us is, and more likely than not we would discover that the system is a whole lot more complicated than we thought.
Yesterday the NCAA and the Power Five conferences agreed to a tentative settlement in the case over schools paying players directly. $2.7B for damages to current and former players. Mutterings that schools would be allowed a $20M or so annual budget for paying players going forward.
Ivermectin has anti-viral properties, and has been used to treat viruses for a long time because of that.
The only FDA-licensed human uses for ivermectin are orally for certain parasitic worms, and topically for lice and rosacea.
That said, licensed physicians may prescribe it for off-label uses and at other (typically higher) dosages.
Relevant, at least IMO, is that we're four years after the start of the pandemic and no one has been willing to pay for the sorts of trials for safety and efficacy that would convince the FDA to license it for anti-viral use.
Years ago when I was in my mid-40s I was diagnosed with low bone density. After ruling out pretty much all known causes -- at least one blood sample went to Paris because that was the only place in the world that could test for some exotic bone cancer -- the specialists offered to write me a prescription for the then most-used bone density drugs. They made a point of telling me it was off-label use, because no one had ever been willing to pay for FDA safety and efficacy trials for any group other than elderly females.
Friday Night Smackdown from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I notice that the female talent is wearing tight form-fighting costuming, but the only skin that actually shows is hands and face.
Counter-point... It's not the effectiveness of the drones by themselves, it's those in combination with artillery. The Ukrainians are running through about 10,000 rounds of artillery ammo per month, and would like to have much more. The Russians are, I believe, still managing to fire off about 30,000 artillery rounds per month. Both figures dwarf the number of drones. The surprises are that armor has been largely useless*, and attack helicopters as well, because one infantryman can carry a tank- or helicopter-killer.
The war is an artillery duel at various ranges and with various means of improving accuracy.
* Armor meaning tanks. Armored infantry vehicles have played a role. The only chance that this was going to be settled by armor was if the Russians had pulled off the initial three-day dash to Kyiv.
Nit-pick... Trump's hair has run the gamut from very dark brown to quite blond over the course of his life, irregularly changing in both directions. Plus the occasional stretches where he was almost a redhead.
Being 70 myself now, and knowing a number of other 70+ people, my guess about his falling asleep in the courtroom is that it's an irregular sleep pattern that's still "normal" for an oldster.
He's not under any sort of house arrest, he just has to be in court four days each week. He could get from Manhattan to Teterboro by helicopter in 15 minutes, and from there to anywhere east of the Mississippi River in less than three hours. Travel Tuesday evening, say, after the court adjourns. Do a rally whenever he wants on Wednesday, fly back Wednesday evening. Teterboro can't take his 757, but he could use his Cessna Citation X or rent a bigger business jet.
I used to do single day trips from Denver to any of the cities on the West Coast. (Flight times run from 115 minutes to 140 minutes, give or take.) Flying coach it's a pain, but doable. Got to do it on the corporate jet once, which was a piece of cake.
The largest single change in the typical state's general fund spending compared to 1965 is the large share of K-12 education funding that comes from the state rather than local taxes.
Here in Colorado, about 34% of state GF spending is K-12; about 27% is Medicaid.
Long ago there was a radio commercial with the purpose of selling radio advertising. The message was about doing weird events with sound effects. As I recall, the voice-over described the completion of draining Lake Erie, refilling the lake bed with whipped cream, and then a group of fighter jets flying over to drop a 10-ton maraschino cherry into the whip. Appropriate sound effects throughout. The tag line was "Let's see you do that on television!"
Two-three years ago I happened to see US Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) on one of the Sunday morning talking heads shows. He had a slide with five things that he said must be absolutely expunged from voting systems in the US. Eg, vote by mail and automatic registration. I chuckled, since the Republican legislature in Utah had added four of the five within the last couple of years.
Another alternative is to request an absentee ballot. If you qualify to vote absentee, you can get your ballot in advance and take your time researching the candidates before you vote.
Or live in a civilized state with vote by mail and everyone gets a copy of their ballot long enough in advance to do any research they feel like they need. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I'll repeat myself. In the Census Bureau's 13-state western region, more than 90% of votes cast this year will be done using ballots distributed by mail.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Safe Nerdy and the Early Adopter Problem”
...or if it’s more indicative of a fundamental writing problem.
I'll take this side of the bet. A random group of a half-dozen regular commenters from this blog could have written three or four different versions of the last season of Game of Thrones, all of them superior to the screenplay that was actually used.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Pikmin Bloom and Getting Your Steps In”
It's Colorado. It's like there's a law that says playground equipment must require climbing. Here's an old (low quality, large file) photo of the star of the park. The 13-foot rotator is to the extreme left. I have climbed to the top of the enclosure, once, when granddaughter #2 was younger and insisted I go down the slide with her. It's not a pleasant climb for an adult. All the interior spaces are sized for skinny people no taller than about 4'6". If I had to climb up again to rescue someone's kid, say, I'd go up the interior of the slide.
http://mcain6925.com/ordinary/playground.jpg
On “Trump Guilty On All Counts”
One of the next steps is supposed to be an investigation by the probation department, including an interview with Trump. That department will make a sentence recommendation to the judge. I would pay to watch that interview.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Pikmin Bloom and Getting Your Steps In”
About the time I turned 60, the docs quit nagging me about aerobic goals and started nagging about strength training goals. I am not consistent in meeting goals, but do try to spend some time doing exercises with body weight and a pair of 20-pound dumbbells every week. Which was useful last week when, as I noted in a comment then, I had to climb up and retrieve granddaughter #3 (aged two and a few months) who had climbed to the top of one of these and couldn't figure out the way down.
https://www.dynamoplaygrounds.com/product/apollo-with-floor/
On “Why AI Could Be Good for the Liberal Arts”
Or into people who think they're programmers.
"
But not the art. Not the music.
I find your lack of faith in how quickly the research community will find ways to apply the ability to fit a billion-coefficient model to data... disturbing :^)
On “Donald Trump Found Guilty on All 34 Counts”
I bought a nicer-than-usual box of wine earlier this afternoon. The nominal reason was that I kept all three granddaughters this morning. We went to the park. The two-year-old believes without doubt that she can climb anything her older sisters can. That may well be true, if she's given sufficient time. It doesn't mean she can get down by herself, so sometimes I have to climb up and fetch her. Including once when I had gotten a good grip on her lower leg and she... just... let... go. And hung there giggling. Giggled the entire time I had to lift her out of the climbing stuff by the leg at arm's length, while she was ten feet off the ground, on a merry-go-round sort of thing that wanted to move.
OTOH, I have the box and no responsibilities this evening and Trump is a convicted felon.
On “Why AI Could Be Good for the Liberal Arts”
...and impossible 10 years ago.
Nah, the necessary tech either existed 20 years ago or was inevitable by then. One of the first inflection points was when chip designers quite asking "Can I fit this much functionality on a chip?" and started "I've got room for another 200 million transistors; what can we do with them?" Ever increasing clock rates went largely away, so performance gains had to come from multiple cores and specialized cores. Spreading a processing problem across a server farm was already a thing. Anyone who thought about it more than suspected that a billion-coefficient statistical model could be fit to large data and complicated questions. Stochastic gradient descent was old when I was in graduate school 45 years ago. Back-propagation to calculate the billion gradient values for a neural net that big is 60s tech. (The chain rule on which BP depends was known in the 17th century.)
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/27/2024”
I would agree with you about funny, except that a number of LG&M commenters believe -- or at least say they believe -- that a Republican President and six votes on the Supreme Court are enough to invoke the military and run something like Reconstruction in the blue states.
A decade ago the rest of the commentariate there uniformly made fun of such suggestions. Yesterday, Memorial Day, there was much less making fun and much more "of course the military and civilian police will side with the red states" and "I'm planning on how to obtain citizenship in country X and emigrate".
Full disclosure: Yes, I'm the person who believes in an eventual partition of the states, or at least a significant devolution of power to regional authorities, as part of trying to deal with the consequences of climate change.
"
The Texas platform people think they can still win on a national scale. If you read the comment threads at LG&M, there's a lot of left-of-center people there who also think the Texas platform people can win. If you think you can win, why would you leave?
On “Weekend Plans Post: THREE DAY WEEKEND!!!”
...the first night she was back I got 8 and a half hours of sleep. Just something about smelling her again made it easy to pass out at 10 and coast until 6:30.
The kids and I put my wife in memory care something over a year ago. There is still not a night goes by when I don't miss having her on the other side of the bed, bouncing it the proper way when she moves, and making the right sorts of odd noises when she dreams or even just breathes.
On “Throughput: Fireball Edition”
ThTh4: I was vaguely aware that a change in thinking about "junk DNA" was happening, but have lately seen a few pieces suggesting that the idea there is actually very little junk DNA has become mainstream. The thinking now seems to be that most of what was regarded as junk because it didn't code for proteins actually codes for RNA and mRNA that regulate the proteins.
25 years ago on a long flight I sat next to a guy who did advising for a couple of venture capital firms about where they should invest in biology. His summary then was that we weren't even close to understanding the miracle of protein chemistry each of us is, and more likely than not we would discover that the system is a whole lot more complicated than we thought.
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/20/2024”
Yesterday the NCAA and the Power Five conferences agreed to a tentative settlement in the case over schools paying players directly. $2.7B for damages to current and former players. Mutterings that schools would be allowed a $20M or so annual budget for paying players going forward.
"
Ivermectin has anti-viral properties, and has been used to treat viruses for a long time because of that.
The only FDA-licensed human uses for ivermectin are orally for certain parasitic worms, and topically for lice and rosacea.
That said, licensed physicians may prescribe it for off-label uses and at other (typically higher) dosages.
Relevant, at least IMO, is that we're four years after the start of the pandemic and no one has been willing to pay for the sorts of trials for safety and efficacy that would convince the FDA to license it for anti-viral use.
Years ago when I was in my mid-40s I was diagnosed with low bone density. After ruling out pretty much all known causes -- at least one blood sample went to Paris because that was the only place in the world that could test for some exotic bone cancer -- the specialists offered to write me a prescription for the then most-used bone density drugs. They made a point of telling me it was off-label use, because no one had ever been willing to pay for FDA safety and efficacy trials for any group other than elderly females.
On “Weekend Plans Post: THREE DAY WEEKEND!!!”
Friday Night Smackdown from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I notice that the female talent is wearing tight form-fighting costuming, but the only skin that actually shows is hands and face.
On “Ukraine is Changing the Face of Warfare”
Counter-point... It's not the effectiveness of the drones by themselves, it's those in combination with artillery. The Ukrainians are running through about 10,000 rounds of artillery ammo per month, and would like to have much more. The Russians are, I believe, still managing to fire off about 30,000 artillery rounds per month. Both figures dwarf the number of drones. The surprises are that armor has been largely useless*, and attack helicopters as well, because one infantryman can carry a tank- or helicopter-killer.
The war is an artillery duel at various ranges and with various means of improving accuracy.
* Armor meaning tanks. Armored infantry vehicles have played a role. The only chance that this was going to be settled by armor was if the Russians had pulled off the initial three-day dash to Kyiv.
On “A Song of POTUS And Game of Thrones: US Presidents Placed in the Great Houses of Westeros”
Nit-pick... Trump's hair has run the gamut from very dark brown to quite blond over the course of his life, irregularly changing in both directions. Plus the occasional stretches where he was almost a redhead.
On “Throughput: Superintendent Chalmers Edition”
The three most impressive naked-eye observations related to astronomy are (1) total solar eclipse, (2) a good aurorae display, and (3) the Milky Way.
On “Libertarians for Trump?”
Being 70 myself now, and knowing a number of other 70+ people, my guess about his falling asleep in the courtroom is that it's an irregular sleep pattern that's still "normal" for an oldster.
"
He's not under any sort of house arrest, he just has to be in court four days each week. He could get from Manhattan to Teterboro by helicopter in 15 minutes, and from there to anywhere east of the Mississippi River in less than three hours. Travel Tuesday evening, say, after the court adjourns. Do a rally whenever he wants on Wednesday, fly back Wednesday evening. Teterboro can't take his 757, but he could use his Cessna Citation X or rent a bigger business jet.
I used to do single day trips from Denver to any of the cities on the West Coast. (Flight times run from 115 minutes to 140 minutes, give or take.) Flying coach it's a pain, but doable. Got to do it on the corporate jet once, which was a piece of cake.
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/13/2024”
Indeed. In most states it started as explicit equality funding aimed at poor (typically rural) school districts.
"
The largest single change in the typical state's general fund spending compared to 1965 is the large share of K-12 education funding that comes from the state rather than local taxes.
Here in Colorado, about 34% of state GF spending is K-12; about 27% is Medicaid.
On “Apple Ad Misses the Mark”
Long ago there was a radio commercial with the purpose of selling radio advertising. The message was about doing weird events with sound effects. As I recall, the voice-over described the completion of draining Lake Erie, refilling the lake bed with whipped cream, and then a group of fighter jets flying over to drop a 10-ton maraschino cherry into the whip. Appropriate sound effects throughout. The tag line was "Let's see you do that on television!"
We've reached the point where it's feasible.
On “Do Your Down-Ballot Homework”
Two-three years ago I happened to see US Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) on one of the Sunday morning talking heads shows. He had a slide with five things that he said must be absolutely expunged from voting systems in the US. Eg, vote by mail and automatic registration. I chuckled, since the Republican legislature in Utah had added four of the five within the last couple of years.
"
Another alternative is to request an absentee ballot. If you qualify to vote absentee, you can get your ballot in advance and take your time researching the candidates before you vote.
Or live in a civilized state with vote by mail and everyone gets a copy of their ballot long enough in advance to do any research they feel like they need. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I'll repeat myself. In the Census Bureau's 13-state western region, more than 90% of votes cast this year will be done using ballots distributed by mail.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.