William Law

In his final speeches and writings at Nauvoo, the Prophet occasionally mentions William Law, his estranged counselor as someone with a grudge against Joseph. This story helps put those statements in perspective.

http://scottwoodward.org/josephsmith_williamlawtriestokillinNauvoo.html

Joseph Smith had asked Charles Stoddard, age 14, to serve as a house boy for William Law. William Law was one of the Prophet's enemies, and felt by many to have led the charge on Carthage. Joseph would have Charles keep his eyes and ears open and report back to him what he heard William Law planning.
________________________________

[The following was recorded by Sarah Woodward Stoddard, mother of Charles Stoddard, in April 1844].

Dear Diary,

Charles had another faith promoting experience last night. Early in the morning, even while the darkness still hemmed out the light of day, Mr. Law, after he had been drinking and planning with his associates throughout the night, got Charles out of bed to clean and oil his gun. He said he was going to shoot the Prophet—only William Law called him "Old Joe Smith." Poor Charles was frightened beyond description, but Mr. Law stood over him and prodded him with his foot when Charles hesitated through fright and anxiety. Finally, when Mr. Law was satisfied with the way the gun was working he put one bullet in. He boasted he could kill the prophet with one shot. He sent Charles to bring the Prophet. He ran as fast as he could and delivered the message, but he begged the Prophet not to go to Mr. Law's as Mr. Law was drunk, and Charles was afraid he would carry through on his threat to shoot the Prophet in cold blood. As they walked the few blocks from the Mansion house to the Law residence, the Prophet assured Charles that no harm would come to him that day. Charles was frightened, and he said that it kept racing through his mind, "I am the one that cleaned the gun that is going to be used to kill the Prophet," until he was sick with fear. The Prophet, in the final attempt to calm my dear son, uttered the fateful words, "Mr. Law may someday kill me, Charles, but it won't be today."

As they approached their destination, Mr. Law came staggering out of the house shouting out what he intended to do. The Prophet said kindly and unafraid, "You sent for me, Mr. Law?" To which Mr. Law replied with oath that now he was going to do the whole world a favor by disposing of the Prophet with one shot. Calmly, the Prophet unbuttoned his shirt and bared his chest, and then said, "I'm ready now, Mr. Law." Charles said at this point he nearly fainted. Sick fear strangled him until he was speechless and paralyzed, unable to move a muscle. Mr. Law paced a few steps, turned, aimed, and pressed the trigger. There was complete silence. Then the air rang with profanity and Mr. Law turned on Charles, accusing him of fixing the gun so it would not go off and threatened to kill even Charles—my innocent, frightened, but faithful son. The Prophet, to divert Mr. Law's blame of Charles, suggested that a can be placed on a fence post for Mr. Law to take a practice shot. Relieved, Charles ran for a can and laid it on its side on a post. Mr. Law paced back, took aim, and fired. His one shot streaked through the exact center of the can. Even Mr. Law was quiet as if stunned. The Prophet buttoned up his shirt, gave Charles a meaningful look, and then said, "If you are finished with me now, Mr. Law, I have other things needing to be done." (As quoted by Robert H. Daines at BYU-Idaho Devotional, 28 May 2002)

-Max

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Scala vs F#

I suspect the reason why people say Scala is more OO and F# is more functional actually has little to do with functional programming per se: it's because F# is more oriented toward ADTs and Scala is more about OO. Since ADTs package functions in modules instead of object scopes, this gives F# a more applicative, function-oriented feel, even though there's really no technical difference between F# and Scala in terms of what you can express functionally. It's not that you can't do OO in F# or ADTs in Scala, it's just a matter of the native idiom leaning one way or the other.

If you want to understand ADT vs OO, the best paper I know is here:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf (hat tip to Lambda the Ultimate). Essentially, in ADTs there is a hidden, shared implementation: the black box obscures the class implementation, but doesn't obscure the objects within the class from each other. (This is like C++ "private".) In OO, the public interface is the ONLY interface: every object is a black box. ADTs are suitable for efficient abstractions like sparse matrix multiplications which need access to each other's internals. When people say "object-oriented" they are often not clear on whether they really do mean object-oriented programming or ADT programming. Certainly C++/C#/Java/etc. are schizophrenic about which style they are trying to support. (For example, an "abstract class" in C++/C#/Java is a hybrid of interface and implementation, which makes it neither/both OO nor ADT. However, a Java interface is pure OO.)

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Technological advancement

[Cc J. and K.]

Great, unusually-insightful article on American manufacturing. I view this as the quintessential 21st century social dilemma: in a world where unskilled labor can be cheaply automated, what do you do with unskilled workers? As far as I can tell, the way education is lagging behind technological advancement is the chief cause of inequality growth, even though it gets blamed on other, politically-convenient factors. We need better, faster ways of learning.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/?single_page=true

Some good quotes:

I had come to Greenville to better understand what, exactly, is happening to manufacturing in the United States, and what the future holds for people like Maddie—people who still make physical things for a living and, more broadly, people (as many as 40 million adults in the U.S.) who lack higher education, but are striving for a middle-class life.

There's a joke in cotton country that a modern textile mill employs only a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.

Standard will not drop a line in the U.S. and begin outsourcing it to China for a few pennies in savings. "I need to save a lot to go to China," says Ed Harris, who is in charge of identifying new manufacturing sources in Asia. "There's a lot of hassle: shipping costs, time, Chinese companies aren't as reliable. We need to save at least 40 percent off the U.S. price. I'm not going to China to save 10 percent."

Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie's job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it's simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense.

Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing. Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve. Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don't all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat... Throughout much of the 20th century, simultaneous technological improvements in both agriculture and industry happened to create conditions that were favorable for people with less skill. The development of mass production allowed low-skilled farmers to move to the city, get a job in a factory, and produce remarkably high output. Typically, these workers made more money than they ever had on the farm, and eventually, some of their children were able to get enough education to find less-dreary work. In that period of dramatic change, it was the highly skilled craftsperson who was more likely to suffer a permanent loss of wealth. Economists speak of the middle part of the 20th century as the "Great Compression," the time when the income of the unskilled came closest to the income of the skilled. The double shock we're experiencing now—globalization and computer-aided industrial productivity—happens to have the opposite impact: income inequality is growing, as the rewards for being skilled grow and the opportunities for unskilled Americans diminish.

-M.

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

"Knife control"

This is what comes of focusing on symptoms ("gun control") instead of root causes. You just wind up with a different set of symptoms.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/british-doctors-call-for-ban-on-long-kitchen-knives-to-end-stabbings/

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.

The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime.

"We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect."

-Max


--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

"Omitted variable fraud"

"Omitted variable fraud." I like the term. This concisely describes the behavior I have been observing for as long as I have been paying attention to the issue, ever since Gavin Schmidt took on Jerry Pournelle with the repeated assertion that direct solar forcing failed to explain the temperature change in NASA's models, and that CO2 was responsible. He never acknowledged the gigantic leap of faith he was taking in believing his models over the historical data.

Anyway, I quote the money paragraph first and then some of the background.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/22/omitted-variable-fraud-vast-evidence-for-solar-climate-driver-rates-one-oblique-sentence-in-ar5/

My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call "the omitted variable problem" (or when it is intentional, "omitted variable fraud"). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included. This problem is manifest at the very highest level of AR5, and is built into each step of its analysis.

Introduction to the "omitted variable fraud" critique, continued

For the 1750-2010 period examined, two variables correlate strongly with the observed warming (and hence with each other). Solar magnetic activity and atmospheric CO2 were both trending upwards over the period, and both stepped up to much higher levels over the second half of the 20th century. These two correlations with temperature change give rise to the two main competing theories of 20th century warming. Was it driven by rapidly increasing human release of CO2, or by the 80 year "grand maximum" of solar activity that began in the early 1920′s? ("Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: new observational constraints," Usoskin et al. 2007.)

The empirical evidence in favor of the solar explanation is overwhelming. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have found a very high degree of correlation (.5 to .8) between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature going back many thousands of years (Bond 2001, Neff 2001, Shaviv 2003, Usoskin 2005, and many others listed below). In other words, solar activity "explains," in the statistical sense, 50 to 80% of past temperature change.

Such a high degree of correlation over such long time periods implies causality, which can only go one way. Global temperature cannot be driving solar activity, so there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving or modulating global temperature change. The high degree of correlation also suggests that solar activity is the primarydriver of global temperature on every time scale studied (which is pretty much every time scale but the Milankovitch cycle).

In contrast, records of CO2 and temperature reveal no discernable warming effect of CO2. There is a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, but with CO2 changes following temperature changes by an average of about 800 years (Caillon 2003), indicating that it is temperature change that is driving atmospheric CO2 change (as it should, since warming oceans are able to hold less CO2). This does not rule out the possibility that CO2 also drives temperature, and in theory a doubling of CO2 should cause about a 1 degree increase in temperature before any feedback effects are accounted, but feedbacks could be negative (dampening rather than amplifying temperature forcings), so there no reason, just from what we know about the greenhouse mechanism, that CO2 has to be a significant player. The one thing we can say is that whatever the warming effect of CO2, it is not detectable in the raw CO2 vs. temperature data.

This is in glaring contrast to solar activity, which lights up like a neon sign in the raw data. Literally dozens of studies finding .5 to .8 degrees of correlation with temperature. 

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Inflation-adjusted revenues/outlays for federal government

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist.pdf

See table 1.3.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

"I said, 'Ye are gods'"

K,

This thought may be of interest to you.

-Max.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Hi J.,

Remember how you were reading your way through the Old Testament the other year? I know you like the whole context to things; do you mind if I share with you some of the most interesting parts of the scriptures, and some associated cultural/historical/scriptural context that goes with it? Form your own opinions of course, but I'll give you what information I can.

One scripture that almost nobody seems to know about or talk about is in Psalms 82. It's not really clear who wrote it or when--it claims to be written by Asaph, King David's court musician--but someone thought it was important enough to include in the Hebrew Bible, and it reveals an interesting attitude toward human beings: we are "gods" ("elohim" in Hebrew, literally "powers", from "el" = "force" and "im"=pluralizer).

Psalms 82:1-8 God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods. How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah. Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked. They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course. I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations. [emphasis added] [BTW, I'm not sure what Selah means, but I think it's a musical term of some sort.]

What is especially interesting about this scripture is that Jesus used it to win an argument which almost got him killed. In John 10, Jesus is in the middle of teaching some fairly radical things, including claiming God for his father, when the Jews accuse him of blasphemy. They weren't stupid--they understood that claiming kinship is claiming similarity; the potential to grow up to be like one's parents. So to them claiming God as his father was basically claiming to be a God, which was blasphemy to them. Jesus basically responds, "Hey, in your own scriptures it calls all of you gods (without approving your conduct). How then can it be blasphemous for me to merely say I'm the son of God, which I actually am, when he sent me and commanded me to teach you in his behalf?" Since they couldn't win the argument, they just went back to trying to kill him. Funny, huh? :)

John 10:23-39 And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch. Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not: the works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me. But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and noman is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand. 30 I and my Father are one. Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God? If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him. Therefore they sought again to take him: but he escaped out of their hand,

What this says to me is that the King James translation of Psalm 82 is correct. There are people who will tell you that Psalm 82 is talking about angels, or false pagan gods, but if these people were right, Jesus wouldn't have used the scripture to win his argument. No, what Psalm 82 says is that we, human beings, are the offspring of God and share his nature--there aren't separate things called "humans" and "angels" and "demons" and "gods". Rather, these are all the same fundamental kind of thing, and which one a given individual turns into in the long run depends upon the individual.

Maybe this is why we find stories about superhumans (Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, Castiel, Rand al Thor, etc.) so interesting: because we sense at some level that this is who we really are, if the scriptures are true--and they are. If you ask God, he will tell you so. He's your Father and you are his daughter, and he cares about you. It's true and I know it.

But my words don't mean anything. You have to ask for yourself, when you're ready. Good luck, be well, be happy!

Love,

M.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Probability

J.,

Two really cool factoids for you. (From http://gamebalanceconcepts.wordpress.com/)

-M.

1.) The Gambler's Fallacy is something we can exploit as gamers. People assume that long streaks do not appear random, so when trying to "play randomly" they will actually change values more often than not. Against a non-championship opponent, you can win more than half the time at Rock-Paper-Scissors by knowing this. Insist on playing to best 3 of 5, or 4 of 7, or something. Since you know your opponent is unlikely to repeat their last throw, on subsequent rounds you should throw whatever would have lost to your opponent's last throw, because your opponent probably won't do the same thing twice, so you probably won't lose (the worst you can do is draw).

2.) There's a variant of the Gambler's Fallacy that mostly applies to sports and other action games. The Hot-Hand fallacy is so called because in the sport of Basketball fans started getting this idea that if a player made two or three baskets in a row, they were "running hot" and more likely to score additional baskets and not miss. (We even see this in sports games like NBA Jam, where becoming "on fire" is actually a mechanic that gives the player a speed and accuracy advantage… and some cool effects like making the basket explode in a nuclear fireball.)

When probability theorists looked at this, their first reaction was that each shot is an independent event, like rolling dice, so there's no reason why previous baskets should influence future ones at all. They expected that a player would be exactly as likely to make a basket,regardless of what happened in the players' previous attempts.

Not so fast, said Basketball fans. Who says they're completely independent events? Psychology plays a role in sports performance. Maybe the player has more confidence after making a few successful shots, and that causes them to play better. Maybe the fans cheering them on gives them a little extra mental energy. Maybe the previous baskets are a sign that the player is hyper-focused on the game and in a really solid flow state, making it more likely they'll continue to perform well. Who knows?

Fair enough, said the probability theorists, so they looked at actual statistics from a bunch of games to see if previous baskets carried any predictive value for future performance.

As it turned out, both the theorists and sports fans were wrong. If a player made several baskets in a row, it slightly increased their chance of missing next time – the longer the streak, the greater the chance of a miss (relative to what would be expected by random chance). Why? I don't think we know for sure, but presumably there is some kind of negative psychological effect. Maybe the player got tired. Maybe the other team felt that player was more of a threat, and played a more aggressive defense when that player had the ball. Maybe the crowd's cheering broke the player's flow state, or maybe the player gets overconfident and starts taking more unnecessary risks.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Quote

"My experience is that the situation is never so bad, nor so good as first reports indicate." -Sir Douglas Haig (World War I British general)

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Awesomeness

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Duel

[Sent this to the White House via their web site]

Dear Mr. Obama,

Your vile and baseless assault on womanhood in your most recent campaign ad compels me to respond. Though I have in the past had a high opinion of you, I say now that you are a varlet and a knave. No honorable man would say or allow such insinuations to be made about any woman, let alone his own constituents. I demand that you immediately disavow and apologize for the Lena Dunham ad and face me on the field of honor, or admit that you are no man at all.

I await your craven response with eagerness.

Sincerely,

Max Wilson

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Elegance

So far, Elegance of the Hedgehog reminds me of an old Asimov question, "How do you justify your existence?" I.e. I exist, yes, but why me and what am I for? This is not a religious question, it's a personal one, and everyone (even God(s)) must find an answer that satisfies them to be happy. For me the answer is "learning, teaching, and love" which incidentally appears to be God's answer too. It will be interesting to see how Renee and the girl answer theirs in the end. The girl obviously needs one. Wouldn't it be awful if she killed herself and woke up dead, and still felt life was absurd? What would she do then?

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Models

The following statement from this article on politics, makes me want to say about models: "The University of Colorado model, which has correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1980, has Mr. Romney taking all nine swing states plus New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Maine. If this plays out, Republicans will more than run the table. It's starting to look like Mr. Obama is behind the eight ball."

Models can be wrong. There are other models predicting exactly the opposite (clean Obama win) which have ALSO "correctly predicted" the results of the last several elections. (I can dig one up if anyone cares, but you've probably seen them in news reports.) Models always make simplifying assumptions, and frequently they are "trained" formally or informally using past results--and testing models against their own training data proves nothing. It's also provable from computer science that purely empirical testing of models will fail: the No Free Lunch theorem establishes that there 

is no optimal empirical method for generalizing statistically from past results to future results. You HAVE to understand the "why", or your model is just black magic and may break at any time.

Ultimately the test of a good model/hypothesis/theory is twofold: 1.) Does it accurately predict outcomes OTHER than the ones used in its own creation, e.g. future outcomes or historical outcomes? 2.) Does it yield useful insights into the underlying causal mechanisms?

Remember this next time someone talks about their (political, economic, climate, etc.) models. Ask, "What data did you use to make this model, and what data did you use to test it? Are the predictions the model makes about human behavior or climate plausible given what else we know about human psychology, meteorology, or physics?" Until you've asked these questions and listened to the answers, their model isn't really telling you anything. Until then, it's just noise.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Effort or results

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/10/03/we_fund_dependency_115648.html

WorkForce1 is a program designed to "help people find jobs". That means it's important to fund it as much as possible, right? No, first you need to find what it does, not just what it is ostensibly supposed to do.

"Finally, I met with an 'adviser.' She told me I lacked experience. I know this. I asked for any job she thought I was qualified for, and she scheduled an interview at Pret, a food chain that trains employees. At Pret, I learned that my 'interview' was just a weekly open house, publicized on the company's website. Anyone could walk in and apply. Workforce1 offered no advantage. Despite my 'scheduled interview,' I waited 90 minutes before meeting a manager. He told me that WorkForce1 had 'wasted my time, as they always do.' He said, 'They never call, never ask questions.' He prefers to hire people who seek out jobs on their own, like those who see Pret ads on Craigslist.'"

If this is a real pattern, the program is not worth funding, no matter how noble its purported design goals.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Math

[Written after the first Romney/Obama debate]

The dangers of mathematical illiteracy: if your opponent wants to cut tax rates in a "revenue neutral" way, and you want to paint him as a tax-raiser, it's useful to understand some math. Just imagine how different it would have seemed if Obama had displayed some policy knowledge. "Okay, you say your rate cuts would be revenue neutral, but with respect to what baseline? Current law or current policy?" Presumably Romney then says, "I would leave revenue unchanged from where it is today." Then Obama would come back and say, "But tax revenues are $300 billion under historical levels because of emergency measures that we've taken to help the economy recover from the Bush recession." [It makes me feel ill even to write "Bush recession", but that's what Obama ought to say because that's how he thinks of it, and how the majority of Americans still think of it.] "You're saying that you're leaving $300 billion dollars a year of your tax cuts unpaid for, $3 trillion over the next decade. That's 60% of your tax cut that isn't paid for? Tell me, how is that responsible?"

The trap is twofold: suck Romney into a wonky discussion of baseline math ("You based your claim that you would 'cut the deficit in half by the end of [your] first time' on emergency spending under Bush! And you didn't even manage it!"), and undermine Romney's credibility.

Because Obama doesn't know any math, he couldn't talk about specifics and couldn't go on the attack. All he could do was repeat, "You have a five trillion dollar tax cut. Somebody told me so. There's a study."

In 2016, the Democrats will nominate somebody from the business world who understands math. The era of nominating Senators from D.C. on the theory that they have "government experience" is drawing to a close.

-Max

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Learning programming

Great article on learning programming. Has implications for any kind of UI design, since any kind of GUI interaction is really just another way of "programming" your computer. In particular, has implications for my plans to incorporate programmable AIs into my Android games.

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

A programming system has two parts. The programming "environment" is the part that's installed on the computer. The programming "language" is the part that's installed in the programmer's head.

This essay presents a set of design principles for an environment and language suitable for learning.

The environment should allow the learner to:

• read the vocabulary -- what do these words mean?
• follow the flow -- what happens when?
• see the state -- what is the computer thinking?
• create by reacting -- start somewhere, then sculpt
• create by abstracting -- start concrete, then generalize

The language should provide:

• identity and metaphor -- how can I relate the computer's world to my own?
• decomposition -- how do I break down my thoughts into mind-sized pieces?
• recomposition -- how do I glue pieces together?
• readability -- what do these words mean?
  

[snip]

Khan Academy's tutorials encourage the learner to address these questions by randomly adjusting numbers and trying to figure out what they do.

Thought experiment. Imagine if you bought a new microwave, took it out of the box, and found a panel of unlabeled buttons.

Imagine if the microwave encouraged you to randomly hit buttons until you figured out what they did.

Now, imagine if your cookbook advised you that randomly hitting unlabeled buttons was how you learn cooking.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Income tax interactive graph

For future reference:

http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/top10-percent-income-earners

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Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Welfare spending now 25% of budget

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/restoring-a-true-safety-net 

I didn't know this. I was still thinking of the budget in 2008 terms, from the Death and Taxes poster.

The Obama years have seen unprecedented growth in spending on what used to be known as the federal "anti-poverty" or "welfare" programs: means-tested initiatives to provide food, health insurance, housing benefits, and income support to the poor. These programs certainly grew during the Bush administration, with spending increasing by a total of about $100 billion over that eight-year period ($12.5 billion per year in 2010 dollars). But that spending increased another $150 billion in just the first two years of the Obama administration.  

The scale of these increases is staggering. In three years, from 2008 through 2010, total annual spending on welfare programs (in 2010 dollars) increased from $475 billion to $666 billion — a 40% increase after accounting for inflation. At a combined annual cost of two-thirds of a trillion dollars, these programs are now on the same scale as the defense budget ($693 billion), Social Security ($700 billion), and Medicare ($551 billion).

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Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Organ regeneration

Extracellular matrix + stem cells = regeneration. I wonder how far you can push that. Could you regrow whole limbs? How much capability for regrowth does a human adult retain, or is there something special about the prenatal environment that makes it only work once? (What happens if you try regeneration therapy on a Thalidomide child who didn't grow limbs right in the womb? Can it work correctly this time?)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/health/research/human-muscle-regenerated-with-animal-help.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www 

-Max

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Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Marchetti's constant

J.,

You may find this interesting. Apparently the 30-minute commute may be a universal human constant. :)

http://persquaremile.com/2012/09/13/marchettis-constant/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+psm-articles%2Ffeed+%28Per+Square+Mile%29 

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.