Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- AMERICAblog News: Rove’s Republic, a billionaire’s playground – The only thing that’s unexpected is how fast folks have leapt on Citizens United to start gaming the system.
- Op-Ed Columnist – The End of the Tunnel – NYTimes.com – “It’s a terrible thing in itself, but, beyond that, it’s a perfect symbol of how America has lost its way. By refusing to pay for essential investment, politicians are both perpetuating unemployment and sacrificing long-run growth. And why not? After all, this seems to be a winning electoral strategy. All vision of a better future seems to have been lost, replaced with a refusal to look beyond the narrowest, most shortsighted notion of self-interest.”
- Chris Christie Destroys Largest Mass Transit Project In The Country – This is why we can’t have nice things any more: lack of vision. This is critically needed AND a tremendous economic growth investment AND something a goodly amount of money has already been poured into. This sort of short-sightedness will haunt the citizens of that region, in NJ and beyond, for many decades.
- Gingrich Blasted From Center And Right – “This is the problem for politicians who have been around for a long time. No one has been elected President with more than 14 years in elected office since Nixon. You make too many enemies and you take too many positions that can later be held against you.” That’s an interesting stat — and a disturbing one, honestly.
- Limbaugh: “There’s Not One Single Male Endeavor That Women Haven’t Invaded Now” – Yeah! They should just damn well KNOW THEIR PLACE and STAY THERE! (Yeesh.)
- Among Republicans, 4% Support A Mosque Near Ground Zero; 21% Support A Strip Club – ‘Long as they’re AMURRICAN strippers!
- Calvin and Hobbes enter the Twilight Zone [Concept Art] – The Twilight Zone one is awesome …
- Disease + mosquitoes + climate change = Uh-oh | Wired Science | Wired.com – But let’s not worry about global warming — it will just mean we can grow crops longer, right?
- “3 billion and counting” — the errors one makes when using Howard Stern as a science advisor – DDT is a stellar case of something that, in controlled use did (and still does) have some worthwhile effect. But it was never a panacea, never the only answer to anything, and its simplistic overuse makes it far less effective today in most applications than it once was. The pro-DDT movement today seems primarily interested in (or funded by those interested in) laying the emotional groundwork for the pesticides of the future.
- Run Toppers – Okay, I’m sure my wife the statistician will be happy to explain it to me. I’ll just sit here, confused. (On the plus side, how many people realized you can see the statue of Lincoln inside the memorial on the reverse of the penny?)
- The National Ignition Facility – I’ve been a hopeful proponent of nuclear fusion as an electrical source for many, many years. A bit over a billion a year is chicken feed compared to what we spend outright on oil and gas industry support.
- Daily Kos: State of the Nation – Obviously the fire chief didn’t pay his annual Bodyguard fee. (I don’t approve of this, mind you, but as George notes, were this a movie, witnesses — and everyone in the theater — would be cheering.)
- Activism of Thomas’s Wife Could Raise Judicial Issues – NYTimes.com – I tend to take a “Caesar’s wife must be beyond reproach” view of this sort of thing (and would for a more liberal justice). I’d argue that full disclosure should be a minimum ethical requirement, not to impugn either Thomas’ integrity, but to clarify any concerns about it.
- The Food Lab’s Top 6 Food Myths – This one’s for Margie.
- Whom Do I Call to Get More Stands?
- Icelandic Horse in Winter – The pony equivalent of the Scottish highland “cu”.
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I don’t think that coin-flipping statistical claim is correct. If you follow their procedure enough times, you form a loop. Each one in the loop is supposedly more likely than the last, but that can’t be true if they form a loop since that would mean that each pattern is more likely than itself. That’s a contradiction, so the claim on which it’s based must be false by reductio ad absurdum.
Hmm. There’s clearly something going on here that I don’t fully understand. I found a link that tries to explain the weird coin-tossing result above. I don’t yet see what’s wrong with my argument above, but here you go:
http://www.differ.freeuk.com/learning/maths/nontransitive.html
Another link on the dice problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penney%27s_game
I still don’t understand it, but I played with a similar game using dice(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice), and by examining every possible outcome of that game, it’s easy to see that “x is more probable than y” is not a transitive relation. It puzzles me because probabilities are numbers, and “x is greater than y” is transitive on the set of numbers.
So, I still don’t understand how it can be true, but I now agree that it must be true.