"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
by liberal japonicus I'm a bit late with this, but I have a few thoughts about Tucker completing his collection of pink slips (CNN, MSNBC and now Fox) It seems to me that rather than an outlier, Carlson's path was, in hindsight, rather predictable, and is a path that others take as well, though none … Read more
by wj For this weekend's Open Thread, we look at political theater vs reality. The text of Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution is unequivocal: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing … Read more
by liberal japonicus
GftNC noted that Barry Humphries, whose creations of Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson were comic genius of the first order, had passed away. I'm not sure how familiar everyone here is with Barry Humphries, but below the fold are some thoughts and various Youtube videos
by liberal japonicus Seems time to open another thread. Would love to have some informed speculation about Dominion v. Fox settlement. Shootings out the wazoo. Trying to figure out the sweeper pitch. Great chess. ANything else?
by liberal japonicus While I am 2 degrees of separation from the World's Worst Georgian, James Earl Carter (Walter Mondale spoke to my students when they were doing an exchange in Minnesota and in the party afterwards, I managed to spill ice cream on my tie while I was thanking him for his help for … Read more
by wj The latest nonsense out of Florida has to do with book banning. (Which, Gary Sargent suggests, may have unexpected consequences for Gov. DeSantis.) A new bill would require the instant removal of certain books targeted for objections, even before any sort of evaluative process unfolds. [It] mandates that instructional material facing objection in … Read more
by liberal japonicus The discussion of programming brought a lot of math love out, so I thought I'd toss this up as a quasi-open thread. This Guardian article just popped up about two high school students presenting about a trigonometric proof of the Pythagorean theorem. I'm still wondering what the shape of the proof would … Read more
by liberal japonicus Lots of folks say that Trump is going to be charged in NY, which is the first of four listed legal problems facing Trump that are listed in this BBC article. In other news, my wife and daughter have become baseball fans because of the WBC and Samurai Japan and possibly because … Read more
by Michael Cain
Revisiting the topic to incorporate Pro Bono's improvements to the various bits of code found in this post. If this is the sort of competition mentioned in that post, he gets to claim the "my code is faster than your code" crown for now. It's always sort of surprising to me that pretty much every politics/culture blog I visit has its own little contingent of science/tech types. This post doesn't stand alone, it assumes you've read the previous post.
And open thread.
by liberal japonicus
Seems like we need an open thread. Below the fold is what I came to mind with Biden and Zelensky ignoring the air raid sirens. Apologies for the crappy quality and the fact that it is starts late. Was it just me?
liberal japonicus This post is a lot shorter than it should be, but going into it any deeper will have me plunge off the continental shelf. It starts with this piece interviewing Jing Tsu, a Taiwanese-American professor of Chinese literature at Yale. Despite the article's dependence on what and where the two are eating: We … Read more
by liberal japonicus Seymour Hersh reporting on who sabotaged the Nord Pipeline, from former frontpager Thomas Nephew’s FB. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, I am, and … Read more
by liberal japonicus It's been a month, but it is pretty astonishing how much s**t has coming down. A short list Desantis! Ilhan Omar! Haley! Chinese Spy Balloons! Grammys and 50 years of hip hop! Tanks in the Ukraine! AI Arms race! The links are meant only to prime the pump. Take the post where … Read more
by Michael Cain
(submitted by request)
A recent comment thread headed off into a discussion of the attractions of games and puzzles that involve combinatorial search, like Wordle or Sudoku or Freecell. Here's an example of a combinatorial puzzle. My daughter brought this home from math class when she was in eighth grade (long ago).
On the way home from work I stopped at the corner convenience store to pick up four items. The checkout clerk did things on the register and told me "$7.11, please."
"That seems too much. How did you calculate that?" I asked.
"I multiplied the four prices together."
"Aren't you supposed to add the prices?"
"Oh, right." After a moment he said, "Still $7.11."What were the prices of the four items?
She told me the math teacher was explaining a technique he called guess and check: guess at the answer and check to see if it's correct. She thought it was stupid and clearly expected me to think the same. She was surprised when I said, "Cool! There's a whole bunch of neat math in there!" We talked about problems where you had to choose from a set of possibilities and had to find the right combination to solve the problem. That you often needed to find a clever strategy so you could find the right combination in a reasonable amount of time. We played around with this particular problem some, but didn't guess the right answer before it got tiresome. (No one else in the class guessed the right answer either.)
Some years after that I was working at an applied research lab that did lunch-time technical talks. I was asked to do one that had some math, some entertainment value, and that most of the staff would be able to follow. My recollection of the talk about the 7-11 problem is reproduced below the fold.
Oh, and open thread, because why not?
by wj An Open Thread for the New Year Today, for the first time since 1923 (that’s right, a whole century) the US House of Representatives failed to elect a new Speaker on the first ballot. (Or the second or the third.) McCarthy could afford to lose no more than 4 votes. He lost 19 … Read more
by liberal japonicus
We’ve discussed this a bit in the comments and Charles WT has posted some of its output, so I thought I’d toss up a collection of articles about the ChatGPT. I’d recommend that you try it out, it is here
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
More below the fold
by wj Also Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, dōng zhì kuài lè (Happy Dongzhi Festival), Merry Pancha Ganapati, etc. We’re over due for a new Open Thread. And I expect most of us will have better things to do for the next week or two than come up with something substantive to tie one to. So … Read more
by liberal japonicus For me, it’s with a sigh of relief that not only Japan and the US, but the UK and Korea as well have been eliminated from the World Cup. It’s not that I was rooting against them, it is just that this whole World Cup seems like a totally tawdry affair that … Read more
by JanieM Gloom, rain, and wind here in central Maine. Family stuff keeping me busy, so feel free to bring up any topic that has caught your fancy on this December Saturday. Open thread.
by liberal japonicus Since twitter is apparently pain grillé, I felt like I should serve up this morsel. Maricopa County, AZ Board of Supervisors were called on to resign, nullify the election, use paper ballots & more Here’s a quick 2:20 video compilation I did of the 1st public meeting post Election Day This went … Read more
by liberal japonicus A thread for everyone to talk about election aftermaths. I realize that in a lot of places we still don’t know, such as Georgia (runoff), Alaska (ranked voting) and counting mail-in ballots (Nevada, California, other places), but certainly a lot to mull over. The thing that I’m wondering about is how much … Read more
–by Sebastian There are a bunch of media discussions about various voters being inappropriately afraid of violence in cities that I am deliberately not going to link because focusing on per capita numbers doesn't get to the way our brains work. We want to get to them eventually, but I don't think you can without … Read more
by wj We are overdue for a new (and hopefully working for a while) Open Thread. So here it is.
by liberal japonicus Well, that was instructional. https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2005/12/typepad-outage-details.html We could move to a wordpress blog, though we really don’t need the bells and whistles. The thing I would like (though it may not be possible) is to keep all the comments in a way that attaches them to the posts. Feel free to chat about … Read more
by wj Yesterday, I saw a TV** ad regarding one of the partisan positions on the California ballot next month. And it occurred to me that this is the first, and only, such ad I’ve encountered. Apparently all the other races are considered inevitable enough that there’s no reason to spend on it. We have … Read more
by liberal japonicus Opening a new thread, pretty amazed by the happenings in the UK. This analysis of Suella Braverman’s resignation letter can provide some background. Braverman is an odd bird, imo. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/19/who-is-suella-braverman-home-office And, most importantly, a round up of social media jokes https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/19/be-careful-what-you-wish-for-suella-braverman-your-removal-is-complete Talk about this or anything else you like
by liberal japonicus In a discussion about how to set up and evaluate moodle discussions, I wanted to make the point that there were a lot of assumptions that were being made and I passed on this article from 2013 about WEIRD (Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries) subjects of psychology research … Read more
by wj It’s an old military truism: “Good generals study strategy, Great generals study logistics” Judging from the War in Ukraine, Russia has a seriously lack of great generals. Logistics have been chaotic — and that’s being generous. That’s before the Ukrainians started killing Russian generals in large numbers, and Putin started firing the ones … Read more
by liberal japonicus Seems we are due another open thread. Seems an approrpriate continuation to note that October was the eighth month, but turned into the 10th. Any other date related trivia to share?
by JanieM From the Wikipedia page on “Permanent Time Observation in the United States”: Permanent standard time is considered by circadian health researchers and safety experts worldwide to be the best option for health, safety, schools, and economy, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, National Sleep Foundation, American College of Chest Physicians, National Safety … Read more
by liberal japonicus Something that might interest some, the Asia-Pacific Journal has a nice collection of articles on the Abe legacy. All of them are from a left of center perspective, so you aren’t going to get anything about what a great statesman he was. It is an interesting comparison between Abe, who will have … Read more
by wj …be sure to use a gun rest on your knee. A bunch of Republican candidates for various offices, especially statewide or national offices, were very adamant during the primaries on the subject to their absolute “pro-life” stances. Having won their primaries, they are now busy scrubbing any mention of abortion from their websites, … Read more
by liberal japonicus I have a short essay that I send to foreign friends teaching at universities in Japan when they lose a parent, and here is a bit of self-plagiarism: Japanese culture generally accords a great amount of respect to death and the process of grief. Oftentimes, these are related as quaint behavior of … Read more
by wj We spend so much time discussing politics in the US, it seems like it past time to talk about what’s happening elsewhere. In particular, in the UK. They have finally got a new Prime Minister. No doubt our members in Britain will have something to say on the subject. And it won’t hurt … Read more
by JanieM Not that these are hard to find, but maybe it’s helpful to have them together in a convenient place: UNITED STATES’ RESPONSE TO MOTION FOR JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT AND ADDITIONAL RELIEF Amicus brief filed by some (former?) prosecutors and former NJ gov Christine Whitman (why her? I don’t know). There are lots of delicious … Read more