iconjack

You can get more fuel by entering a negative Thrust value.

From the introduction: "At the time of writing, these notes do not contain anywhere near a proof of FLT, or even a sketch proof."

I started a TMBG fan club called Church of the Possible Giants around the time this album was released. One of the requirements for membership is that your given first name is John. If you want to join, drop me a line, convince me your name is John, and I will send you a CotPG pencil.

In a Senate hearing today, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said, under oath: “One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers. One of the things that I was briefed on very early, senator, was by the CIA records management folks about the use of Signal as a permissible work use. It is. That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”

I watched the full debate. The proposition was "Don't Trust the Mainstream Media". On the pro side were Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray; the con side was made up of Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg.

It wasn't great. There were lots of personal attacks on both sides. Biting remarks can add spice to a debate, but this got a little ugly for my tastes. Gladwell went especially foul by intimating Taibbi's fondness for Walter Cronkite and other trusted journalists of his era was due not to these iconic newsmen's integrity, but because they were white men, a suggestion Gladwell made three or four times.

The Pro side brought up several of the big stories of the past few years on which the mainstream media went rather hard, but turned out to be widely accepted as wrong, like Trump-Putin collusion and Hunter Biden's laptop, but the Con team essentially dismissed these as nothingburgers.

Before the start of the debate, the audience is polled on their opinion about the proposition. It was 48% Pro (don't trust the media) and 52% Con. Another poll was taken at the end, and it was determined the Pro side (don't trust the mainstream media) won, with 67% now agreeing with them.

The most impressive person on the stage was the moderator Rudyard Griffiths. He struck me as an educated, composed, and immanently fair man.

the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times

I believe the young economist mentioned in the article is simply wrong in his analysis. The most efficient 4-denomination set is {1,5,18,25} (tied with {1,5,18,29}) at 3.89 coins per transaction, better than the economist's {1,3,11,38} at 4.10. This result is from a 2003 paper by Jeffrey Shallit called "What's This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece". Just before posting, I verified Shallit's result with a Python program.

[1] https://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~abenoit/algo09/coins1.pdf

Worth noting that 2016 election denial (Russia hacked the election!) was never banned. Here's an entertaining compilation of some of it, but there's plenty more where that came from.

[1] https://twitter.com/0rf/status/1664745495288225805

I'm old enough to remember when Antarctic sea ice extent set a record high in 2014. The cause? Probably global warming.

"So as counterintuitive as expanding winter Antarctic sea ice may appear on a warming planet, it may actually be a manifestation of recent warming."

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/antarc...

Literally the subhed of the article: "Director has criticised the practice of re-editing older films while expressing remorse over removing guns in a later edition of ET"

Still broken for me.

Password requirements in general are off-putting. It's my password.

The verdict came in around 7pm. Anyone else find it ironic that the author submitted, and the NY Times published, a 1750-word opinion piece the very next morning, complaining that the jury was too rash in reaching a verdict?

It may save the business of baseball, but it won't save baseball itself, because the game will no longer be baseball. C'est la vie.

What are some of your stories?

Can you share a few examples out of the 30,000 entries that you consider actual lies? (not mere puffery, not trivial errors, not simple difference of opinion)

Something substantive and fairly verifiable as false, along the lines of Biden's claim that he earned three degrees, or that he got arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela, or that he marched in the civil rights movement, or that his son died in Iraq, or that he finished the top half of his law school class.

Spot-checking works best if we remotely agreed on a random number, but here's one a just looked in on.

Trump claim: “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90% of which floods across from our southern border.”

WaPo's own "factcheck", ironically, confirms what he said was true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/live-updates/tr...

Most of the entries in the database are things like "we have the greatest economy in history" and other such vague puffery. And if Trump repeats it 100 times, it counts as 100 lies.

Spot check the Post's database of 30,573 lies. It's a joke.

*This very sentence, if uttered by Trump, would be entered in their database: a joke is an amusing action or story with a punchline; our database is an objective list of lies.

The author uses the Clinton email scandal as an example of how the media over-covered certain stories.

"That Clinton was somehow a criminal for doing what her predecessor Colin Powell had also done—conduct government business using a private server—was a staple of the Trump campaign"

How does an educated person, journalist or not, not know the difference between using a private email account, which is what Colin Powell confessed to, and having a private email server set up in your home? (rumored to be quite insecure in the first few months)

There are several such "mistakes" in this article. It indeed read like a parody.

I'm pretty sure this first appeared in Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in the March 1962 issue of Scientific American. Gardner later collected some of his columns and published them in books, which is what you see in this HN submission.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24937263

https://archive.is/tdKcy

That is not what happened at all. In the first poll, he asked when the journalists should be unsuspended and the options were (a) now, (b) tomorrow, (c) in 7 days, and (d) longer. Choice (a) got 43%, not the majority. Choices (c) and (d) totaled 52.5%, which means the 𝗺𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 voted for a minimum suspension of 7 days. Elon then essentially invoked "rank choice" voting and ran a new poll with only the top two choices (a) now, and (b) 7 days. "Now" won, and he made good on it.

I watched the full debate. The proposition was "Don't Trust the Mainstream Media". On the pro side were Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray; the con side was made up of Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg.

It wasn't great. There were lots of personal attacks on both sides. Biting remarks can add spice to a debate, but this got a little ugly for my tastes. Gladwell went especially foul by intimating Taibbi's fondness for Walter Cronkite and other trusted journalists of his era was due not to these iconic newsmen's integrity, but because they were white men, a suggestion Gladwell made three or four times.

The Pro side brought up several of the big stories of the past few years on which the mainstream media went rather hard, but turned out to be widely accepted as wrong, like Trump-Putin collusion and Hunter Biden's laptop, but the Con team essentially dismissed these as nothingburgers.

Before the start of the debate, the audience is polled on their opinion about the proposition. It was 48% Pro (don't trust the media) and 52% Con. Another poll was taken at the end, and it was determined the Pro side (don't trust the mainstream media) won, with 67% now agreeing with them.

The most impressive person on the stage was the moderator Rudyard Griffiths. He struck me as an educated, composed, and immanently fair man.

It's interesting that a platform of pro-worker, anti-war, anti-censorship, which used to be central tenants of the left (and I would say the best of the left), now make up the core of Trumpism.

Yes, I agree. If you are tasked for example with analyzing a coin to assess its bias, you could do a very thorough job, measuring precisely its mass distribution, its contours, etc and come up with an extremely accurate estimate that say, the probability of it landing Heads is 73.22%.

If the coin is subsequently flipped and comes up Tails, it doesn't mean your analysis was wrong.

On the other hand, 538's simulation was based on probabilities of winning each state, and as I think most will agree, before and after the election, the most important states were Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. On election day, 538 gave the following probabilities:

Wisconsin 83.5% Clinton [1]

Pennsylvania 77.0% Clinton [2]

Michigan 78.9% Clinton [3]

I think Nate really screwed the pooch here. The vast bulk of his effort should have been spent on these states. If that is in fact the case, then I retract my criticism.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/... [2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/... [3] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/...

In my opinion, a fair evaluation of "expert" opinion, at least over the last decade or so, would conclude experts are almost worthless. I have no doubt there are true experts in the world, who's analysis and predictions do much better than monkeys throwing darts, but the landscape is so littered with grifters, and there is such a lack of fair scorekeeping, that identifying true experts is impossible. Most certainly that is true when it comes to politics, and unfortunately just about everything, including a lot of science, is just politics pretending to be otherwise, whether it be covid, global warming, economics, what have you.

Some good news on this front: the individual-rights organization FIRE recently rebranded itself from Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in order to widen its mission and hopefully take the reins from the once-great ACLU, which has unfortunately become yet another partisan grifting operation.

There are many millions of car accidents every year, with less than 1% resulting in death. The most important factor in fatal accidents is the speed at which the crash occurred. In the city, traffic density often prevents fast driving, regardless of speed limit. Less traffic means people can drive faster. This doesn't seem like a mystery to me.

She has claimed for 5 years (and still going) that Trump is an illegitimate president. Here is a recent example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSTyHYiLtRY.

Fantastic. The audio (as suggested by Knuth) is a nice touch. If people don't like it, they can easily mute.