toucana
-
Posts
286 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
9
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by toucana
-
-
According to the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution (passed in 1803) there is no constitutional requirement upon states to even hold a popular vote at all. US Presidents were to be chosen on the basis of votes cast by nominated state electors, or by contingent elections in Congress if such votes were tied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
The popular vote wasn’t formally recorded until 1824, and didn’t become the customary basis for selecting electors in all states until the presidential election of 1880.
In one of the most contentious presidential elections of US history in 1876, the Democratic party contender Samuel J. Tilden lost to his Republican opponent Rutherford B. Hayes - in spite of the fact that Tilden had won both a plurality of the popular vote (50.9%), *and* a majority of the Electoral College votes (184-165).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
Q. So how on earth did he lose ?
A. Twenty of the Electoral College votes were disputed and passed to an Electoral Commission who voted along party lines to award the disputed Electoral votes and the presidency to the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes who became the 19th President serving from 1877-1881.
This incidentally was the last US Presidential election in which both candidates were sitting governors.
0 -
-
Duolingo the popular foreign language learning app is famous for offering quite bizarre sentences as exercises. This one turned up at an early stage in the Duolingo Scottish Gaelic course when I was trying to improve my grasp of an ancestral language. I'm still struggling to imagine an appropriate social context for this remark.
0 -
An article published yesterday by The New Republic (TNR) discusses at some length the malign influence of so called ‘polls’ released by right leaning US firms in the last few weeks, which in a number of cases appear to be openly partisan attempts to shift the aggregate polls in favour of Trump, and to create a false illusion of momentum trending in favour of MAGA
https://newrepublic.com/article/187425/gop-polls-rigging-averages-trump
What is happening is that the psephological marketplace is being flooded with new polls from right-wing fly-by-night operators, and this data is then being included into national polling averages by such aggregators as FiveThirtyEight and The New York Times - among others. The latter adamantly deny that GOP polls are seriously harming their averages and forecasts - but a better question would be - Why is this garbage being included by aggregators in the first place ?
The aggregators say that they apply negative weightings to polls which are thought to be systematically biased to ensure they have less influence than high-quality polls with better standards of empirical accuracy and more methodological transparency. Critics are sceptical about this - and with reason.They point out that while many of the distortions introduced into the averages by these skewed MAGA leaning polls may be statistically insignificant - e.g. a ‘lead’ of 0.4% - they are being actively exploited for psychological propaganda effect by social media entities such as X/Twitter who will claim that Trump is “Winning the state”, and then even more irresponsibly assign electoral college votes based on such narrow leads to ramp up partisan claims that ’Trump is now winning’ - not just even leading, but winning the election - when the underlying data says nothing of the sort.
Earlier today I read a report on Sky News whose headline uncritically claimed that “Trump is now the bookies favourite”
The reality (as previously noted) is that these claims derive entirely from online betting markets like Betfair and Polymarket which are being heavily manipulated by conservative MAGA investors who are sinking up to $14 million dollars a time into these forums - precisely to generate headlines of this sort.
1 -
To return briefly to the point of the original OP - Two points come to mind:
i. One of the reasons why Paul addressed the issue of marriage and offered guidance to Christians in the way that he did was because most of the early Christians were Chiliasts (from the Greek - χιλιαστες ‘a thousand years’) - meaning that they believed as a matter of faith that the Second Coming would occur within their own lifetimes, and that the risen Christ would return to earth and establish a Messianic age of universal peace and brotherhood prior to the Last Judgement.
Quote“Verily I say unto you there be some standing here who who shall not taste death before seeing the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28).
Given that schedule, it was reasonable for Christians to ask - Why get married at all when the Second Coming was just around the corner ? Paul’s advice was primarily aimed at those members of the faithful who really couldn’t control their lustful drives and wait chastely for a decade or so until the eschaton arrived.
We know a certain amount about what early Christians believed from the surviving texts of patristic writers like Papias Bishop of Hierapolis (c.60 -130 AD) who visited various parts of the Holy Land and interviewed many other travellers passing through Hierapolis. Papias was said to have heard the apostle John speak, and to have met with Church elders of the first generation of Christians who had received their teaching and baptism directly from the original apostles of Christ. Unfortunately most of his writings (extant until the middle ages) have now been lost apart from some that survive in quotation. According to his principal commentator Eusebius, Papias himself was definitely a Pre-Millenial chiliast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papias_of_Hierapolis
ii. Pauls most explicit advice on marriage is found in the epistle 1 Corinthians :
Quote“To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:8-9)
There is some debate among contemporary Christians as to whether he was advocating celibacy or simple abstinence, but given the apocalyptic mind-set mentioned above, it is difficult to see his advice as anything other than a form of short-term tactical pragmatism.
One further point is the question of quite how many of the epistles attributed to Paul were actually written by him ? There was an interesting stylometric analysis of these texts done a few years ago using Rasch analysis which offers some useful insights:
https://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt151k.htm
1 -
3 hours ago, swansont said:
As I mentioned above, there were a bunch of polls known to skew right that were recently released. They did this is ‘22 as well. Makes things seem tighter, which I think is thought to boost turnout some folks stay at home if they’re convinced you’re going to lose
‘In a tweet thread, Rosenberg explained:
“Of last 15 general election polls released in PA, 12 have right/GOP affiliations. Their campaign to game the polling averages and make it appear like Trump is winning — when he isn’t — escalated in last few days.” ‘
One of the ‘polling’ sources currently being touted by right-wing MAGA cheerleaders like Elon Musk as showing a decisive advantage for Trump is an online political betting market called Polymarket which gave Trump a 60% chance of winning the election as of Wednesday.
https://www.newsweek.com/who-polymarket-mystery-trader-fredi9999-1969646
The problem is that Polymarket (which is partially funded by sometime Trump ally Peter Thiel) is apparently being manipulated by conservative investors. One particular trader known as Fredi9999 has purchased more than 15 milion shares valued at $8.7 million betting that Trump would win the election - according to reports by Newsweek and The Beast (amongst others).
The same trader also purchased more than 3 million shares betting that Trump would win the popular vote, and nearly 1.5 million shares that Trump would carry the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. The total holding of Fredi9999’s position is valued at in excess of $14 million on that one platform - which they only joined in June 2024.
When cable news media in the US start uncritically confounding electoral polling stats with manipulable betting trends on forums like Polymarket, then you really are entering LaLa land.
0 -
Posted on X by David Coverdale (!)
0 -
40 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:
It doesn't seem to be showing in the polls though, at least not overall nor in critical States. Or am I missing something?
It seemed to be heading in the right direction for a while but seems otherwise lately.
A recent article in The Hill highlights some of the problems US pollsters face nowadays when conducting US Presidential election polls.
Up until the early 2000’s, pollsters in the USA regarded telephone landline polling as the ‘Gold Standard’ for obtaining responses from voters (some still do). The problem is that nowadays an estimated 183 million Americans (7 out of 10 US adults) do not even have a landline anymore - they rely solely on their cellphones for day-to-day communication - according to US Chamber of Commerce Statistics:
https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/landline-phone-statistics
Those who do still use landlines in the US tend to be seniors who are more likely to hold conservative views and favour right-wing candidates. This immediately introduces a significant bias into the responses obtained by such old-fashioned polling methods.
Pollsters have belatedly begun switching to combinations of phones, text-to-web and online panel discussions to improve their response rates. But they still face the problem of reaching younger voters and ethnic minorities who are often the least likely targets to answer a call, and then sit there for 15 minutes answering a poll.
Basically I don’t have a lot of confidence in the US polls right now, as I suspect their sampling methods are fundamentally flawed - a suspicion borne out by the woefully wrong ‘Red Wave’ predictions offered in the last set of mid-term elections.
1 -
7 hours ago, exchemist said:
I'm not great on the physics of this but my likely imperfect understanding is there is a change in phase velocity, when the frequency of the light is close to an absorption band of the medium. This arises due to an increasing degree of coupling of the atoms of the medium with the EM field, as the frequency approaches the absorption frequency more closely. The resulting phase velocity can be either <c or >c depending which side of the absorption frequency you are.
But this seems to be talking about the group velocity, not the phase velocity. I hadn't realised this too could be slowed down by passage through the medium. Is that what they mean or am I misinterpreting it? It crossed my mind that this "-ve time" thing could perhaps be associated with reconciling a phase velocity >c with the fact that no actual information is transmitted >c. Can anyone shed light (haha) on this for me?
Sabine Hossenfelder has just posted a YT video about this paper within the last hour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErLHm-1c6I4
And yes, it is the group velocity of wave packets, not the phase velocity of individual packet elements that is under discussion here.
The conclusion seems to be that no violation of causality is involved here - so you can stand down your time-machine construction projects 😉
2 -
Home solar energy systems have now started exploding in parts of Beirut according to the official Lebanese news agency - (video report)
0 -
According to the BBC, Reuters are now reporting (as of 6 minutes ago) that hand-held Walkie-Talkie radio units have begun exploding in south Beirut, the day after the wave of pager explosions:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t
These hand-held radios were apparently acquired by Hezbollah about 5 months ago, at the same time as the pagers.
0 -
2 hours ago, StringJunky said:
I wonder what the hit rate is of autonomous guns in that situation.
My father was an anti-aircraft gunner during WW2 who worked with both 3.7” HAA guns, and the fin-stabilised ‘Z-Rocket’ systems.
In general AA fire wasn’t particularly accurate. At the start of the war, Air Ministry estimates were that 6,000 shells were fired for every enemy aircraft brought down. This improved during the war to a ratio of about 1,830 shells per aircraft with the help of better fire-control, new searchlights with radar detection, and the introduction of shells with radio proximity fuzes .
The real point of AA fire in WW2 was to force enemy bombers to fly higher than they really wanted to, and avoid flying straight-line approaches on their bombing runs. If an enemy plane was flying at 200mph at 20,000 feet, it could take nearly 20 seconds for a shell to reach that height, in which time the plane would have flown another mile. AA crews had predictor machines that could help the gun-layers calculate how far ahead of the target to aim; and the longer the enemy flew in a straight line, the easier it became for the predictor. Hence the necessity for enemy pilots to fly jinking runs which made the job of their bomb aimer much harder.
1 -
Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese firm who manufacture these AR-924 pagers say that they licensed the technology and trademark to a Hungarian firm in Budapest called BAC Consulting. The latter deny actually building the pagers, which probably means they sub-contracted the job to another local electronics firm.
As noted in iNow’s clip from Axios, various sources suggest that Israel planned to trigger these explosions as the prelude to an all-out attack on Hezbollah, but were forced to activate the plan prematurely because they feared that its secrecy had been compromised - i.e. it was a ‘use it or lose it’ scenario.
0 -
New reporting from the NYT says this was a joint Mossad/IDF operation in which explosive material was planted in a batch of new Taiwanese-made pagers recently imported into Lebanon by Hezbollah.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-pagers-explosives.html
The explosives were concealed next to the battery, with an embedded detonation switch that could be remotely triggered by a text message.
0 -
Thousands of members of the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon have been injured when handheld pagers they use to communicate with one another suddenly exploded without warning this afternoon.
https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-pagers-attack-hezbollah/index.html
The wave of blasts in Beirut and other areas began around 15.45 local time (1345 GMT), causing mass panic and many hundreds of signficant injuries. The casualties reportedly include Mojtaba Amani, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.
According to Reuters, Hezbollah spokesmen say the incident constitutes the biggest security breach of their communications infrastructure in the history of their conflict with Israel.
There is much speculation as to how this was achieved. It would appear that a malware exploit caused the lithium-ion batteries inside the pagers to overheat and explode. Battery fires can burn at up to 590 degrees celsius (1,100F) when a unit is sent into thermal runaway.
Earlier this year Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Narallah urged members of his organisation to revert to using pagers for vital communications, reasoning that modern smartphones would be more susceptible to cyber attacks by Israeli forces.
In reality, pagers often use unencrypted comms channels and outdated software, making them easy targets to attack and plant viruses in.
0 -
A third way of making warplanes ‘bullet-proof’ during WW2 was to make them fly so fast that enemy interceptors simply couldn’t catch up with them for long enough to shoot them down.
This was done by the allies with a unique plane called the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito which first flew in 1941, and was said to be the fastest operational aircraft in the world at that time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito
The Mosquito had an airframe made almost entirely of wood, and was designed as an unarmed fast bomber, pathfinder, and photo-reconnaissance aircraft.
From 1942 onwards, Mosquitoes were also used by BOAC as fast transports to carry small high-value cargo from neutral countries through enemy controlled airspace. In particular this meant ferrying consignments of high-grade industrial ball-bearings from Stockholm in Sweden to RAF Leuchars in the UK. Sweden was a neutral country during WW2, but the Germans controlled Norway and Denmark and western Europe, which meant the Luftwaffe could simply shoot down any conventional allied cargo craft over the sea.
The RAF Mosquitoes used by BOAC for their blockade running flights to Sweden were stripped of their guns and cameras to reduce weight, and they flew so fast that not even the Luftwaffe Focke-Wulf FW 190 interceptors could catch them.
They not only brought back cargoes of ball-bearings that were vital for making aero-engines and instrumentation, they also brought back VIP refugees such as the Danish nuclear physicist Nils Bohr who escaped the Gestapo by fleeing to neutral Sweden, and was flown back to Britain in the bomb-bay of a Mosquito in 1943.
This 'high & fast' strategy was subsequently used by the Lockheed U2 and Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy-planes flown by the USA in the 1950s and 1960s respectively.
0 -
5 hours ago, Photon Guy said:
With airplanes they have to be both light and strong. That being the case, is it possible to make an airplane that's bulletproof? Can they make an airplane that's strong enough that bullets can't penetrate the fuselage?
Short answer - No, it isn’t possible or practical to make airplanes that are completely bullet-proof. But dating back to the days of WW2 several methods were used by the allied forces to try and mitigate the damage done to their warplanes by enemy fire.
One was the installation of self-sealing fuel tanks in bombers and fighters to prevent a large loss of fuel, and avert the risk of high octane fuel fires when a gas tank was hit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sealing_fuel_tank
These self-sealing tanks made use of a double skin of rubber, one layer of which was vulcanized rubber (hardened with sulphur), and the other was natural rubber. When the tank was perforated by a bullet, leaking fuel would come into contact with the untreated layer which would swell and seal the leak. These tanks could allegedly withstand .50 rounds.
Another interesting approach was that of Austrian mathematician Abraham Wald who escaped to the USA and worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG) in New York during WW2.
Abraham Wald was asked to analyse the pattern of bullet holes found in heavily damaged US bombers returning from combat sorties over Europe, and to recommend where to place additional armour plating to protect the planes better without adding too much weight to them.
Wald made the highly counterintuitive suggestion that the extra armour plating should be added to those areas of the planes that *didn’t* have bullet holes in them ! He did so because he realised that his SRG only got to study those planes which had actually made it back to base because they *hadn’t* been hit in any vital area of their fuselage - e.g. the engines.
This is a good example of recognising and avoiding ‘Survivorship Bias’ in engineering analysis.
1 -
Apparently a MAGA group called 'Action 4 Liberty' set up a 'Never Walz' stall at Minnesota State Fair to hand out election propaganda and merchandise against Minnesota Governor and newly confirmed VP pick
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/26/never-walz-website-trolls-trump-supporters
Unfortunately they neglected to purchase the web domain www.NeverWalz.com as well
1 -
An obituary of UK software tycoon Mike Lynch in The Register discloses in passing that his super-yacht was named Bayesian as a nod to his lucrative software company Autonomy that was later sold to Hewlett Packard for $11billion.
QuoteFounded in 1996 by Lynch – along with media and internet entrepreneur David Tabizel and technologist Richard Gaunt – the company designed software to employ adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference and apply them to business problems including enterprise search and knowledge management.
0 -
There was a geek T-shirt joke about this topic
151.194.25.39 —> is a Public IPv4 address quad.
127.0.0.1 —> is the special ‘Loopback’ address for your own computer on a LAN.
19:08:AF:51:11:08 —> is the MAC or ‘Ethernet’ hardware address of your device in hexadecimal.
3 -
On 8/7/2024 at 9:50 AM, exchemist said:
I was trying to find out my IP address, as a question to put to scammers calling me to tell me there is something wrong with my computer (heh heh, that should fox them). However I am now confused. I read there is a public, or external IP address, which seems to identify the WiFi router for the house and then individual, internal IP addresses for the various devices (laptop, tablet, phone) that communicate with the router. So far so good.
I've found the internal address on my laptop, but when I look up the external one using whatismyipaddress.com , I get different answers for the laptop (Mac) and the tablet (iPad). Furthermore, the answer I got today for the iPad doesn't seem to be the same as when I tried this a couple of days ago, though it could just be my poor memory.
At all events, from what I have read I would have expected the public, external IP address to be the same for everything using the same router. Is this not the case? And should this external address be permanent, or does it change when you reconnect each time or something?
A typical home WiFi router makes use of something called DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) to assign LAN (local area network) addresses to all the different devices logged into your home network.
These LAN addresses usually take the form of IP quads formatted as 192.168.x.x where the 192.168. prefix is a special index which is only valid as an address on a local network - i.e one that can’t be reached directly from the WAN (wide area network) or the public facing side of the internet. The router’s DHCP protocol assigns these local LAN addresses to your devices on ‘leases’ which are time limited and can expire. This can be one source of confusion - if a lease expires, and/or a new device is added to your local network, and the DHCP process bounces these 192.168.x.x values around, it will unexpectedly assign a new address to a particular device. Your home router has an internal address table of all currently connected devices on your LAN that you can inspect.
Home routers also make use of something called NAT (network address translation) which usually works in conjunction with its protective firewall and TCP Port numbers. The latter are used to ensure that incoming data packets from the internet reach the correct device on the local network. You can set up NAT ‘Port Forwarding’ rules in your router to ensure that particular services/message types are routed to one specific device on your local network.
The public facing WAN address of your broadband home router is assigned by your ISP (internet service provider) and should in theory be static - i.e unchanging. When I first got home broadband, I was given a static public IPv4 address which didn’t change for the next 17 years. Unfortunately that ISP went out of business last year, and we switched to a new provider whose ‘Static’ public IP addresses turned out to be anything but static - they seem to change every time the router is rebooted, or receives a software/firmware update. My new router has now changed its public IP seven times since being installed last December.
The amount of time you are likely to spend fiddling with such networking details depends on quite what you normally do with your home computers. I’m a long-time IRC user and Eggdrop channel protection bot admin - and those ancient things are hell on wheels to configure correctly behind a home router if network IP values start changing under your feet. You wind up getting a crash course in TCP networking theory !
1 -
27 minutes ago, StringJunky said:
What do you mean?
There have been a number of recent reports of Orcas (aka Killer Whales) attacking and even sinking smaller yachts>
Reports of such attacks off the coast of Spain and the straits of Gibralter date back to around May 2020.
QuoteScientists think a traumatized orca initiated the assault on boats after a "critical moment of agony" and that the behavior is spreading among the population through social learning
0 -
On Monday August 19 a luxury yacht called the Bayesian was sunk at anchor at Porticello near Palermo on the NE coast of Sicily by a freak storm that struck without warning at 4am in the morning. Violents winds of around 150 Km/hour and a large waterspout capsized the vessel which sank within 2 minutes according to eyewitnesses. Of the the 22 people onboard, six are still missing, including British tech magnate Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah, along with Jonathan Bloomer (the CEO of US investment firm Morgan Stanley International) and his wife.
Mike Lynch, a tycoon who was once hyped as the ‘British Bill Gates’ had only recently been acquitted in June on 16 counts of wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy in a San Francisco court after a 5 year battle against extradition following the $11 billion sale of his firm Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011. The Mediterranean sailing trip aboard the Bayesian had been arranged to celebrate his acquittal, along with members of his family and legal team.
By a bizarre coincidence, Steve Chamberlain the former CFO of Autonomy who stood trial alongside Mike Lynch died just 48 hours earlier after being hit by a car while out jogging in Cambridgeshire UK.
Ship designers have expressed astonishment that a modern 56 metre long super-yacht could capsize and founder so rapidly in these circumstances - and they point to several factors:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0nwe4d7k5o
One was the abnormal height of the 76m (246 feet) aluminium mast, said to be the tallest in the world. CCTV seems to show the vessel being blown over onto its starboard side, and there is speculation that even with no sail set, the windage effect was enough to put the boat on its beam-ends, and that the drag of the mast in the water then created a turning moment around the anchor line which fully capsized it.
Reports suggest that portholes and hatches had been left open to improve ventilation on a hot summer night which led to a rapid inrush of water into the hull. Only the deck watch and those who had chosen to sleep out on the topside seem to have survived.
Yet another factor may well have been elevated sea temperatures in the Mediterranean which are currently at a record high thanks to ongoing anthropogenic climate change. This is causing increasingly violent weather events, and there is speculation that parts of the Mediterranean may soon become too dangerous for pleasure sailing during high summer in the near future.
0 -
On 8/15/2024 at 3:21 AM, TheVat said:
. HL Mencken: nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities." (Attributed to W. Churchill and others).
Sources from inside the Trump campaign say that he is endlessly rewatching the 7 second clip of the July 13 shooting that almost claimed his life, and may be developing symptoms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) as a result .
Meanwhile, Trump’s ongoing cognitive decline led him to tell a Pennsylvania rally audience that they were all in North Carolina the other night.
On current form is there a chance that FPOTUS might be remanded in custody to a secure medical facility for psychiatric evaluation when he next appears in front of Judge Juan Merchan for sentencing on September 18 ?
0
Finite Monkeys - It’s not to be
in Science News
Posted
A pair of Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta have published a new paper called A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem which demonstrates that the estimated lifespan of our universe renders it impossible for an infinite number of monkeys to type out the complete works of Shakespeare.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014
As a BBC news article explains: