Majors, so they wanted to be there. I managed to get through the day, but it was touch-and-go; I passed out in my office after the third lecture.
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You kids. Thinking there’ll be an election in 2020. Keep hope alive!
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Umm you do know that @JemmieDuffs is a green card holder and can’t vote don’t you?
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By the way, a big chunk of my lecture (and the prep beforehand) stemmed from an error in the textbook. No, author of at least 3 statistics textbooks and member of a national committee on numeracy education, a pair of normal random variables are not automatically independent just because they are uncorrelated.
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Neither can I. I’m just asking that people stop playing the blame game and either come up with a plan that has a place for the socialists who felt alienated by Hillary, or offer nothing and just accept that they may choose not to support the Democrats as a result. I’d rather it be the first option.
I’m not asking that the Democrat candidates should pass a socialist purity test, as some people seem to think I am. I am asking for a candidate who recognises that they need the support of the left as well as the right of the party and can come up with a plan that offers something in return. “Vote for me or the evil candidate will win” really didn’t work this time, and now we’re stuck with kleptocrat Trump for four years.
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Yeah, but you don’t live here. @JemmieDuffs and I are both here but not as citizens. It’s a distinctly uncomfortable feeling, even as people who are in a progressive city in a progressive state, and not being directly targetted by Trump.
The cow retweeted something on twitter recently…
The thing is, Clinton’s platform actually was progressive. People just didn’t believe it coming from her - and I can understand why.
Of course, not voting for her has ushered in Trump, who meant every word of what he said.
Lesser of two evils sucks, but the primary (rigged or not) is your chance to get the good candidate. In the general you have to be sensible. People who decided that they couldn’t support Clinton were de facto saying they were okay with Trump’s policies, because they wouldn’t do the one thing they needed to do to stop them. That’s definitely on them.
Yes, Clinton should have put more effort in to convince them, but how much convincing should they have needed?
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There was a Parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, who is credited with these quotes:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.
Now, I know Burke was not English, but he did serve in London as an MP.
Also, I remember something about a world-famous Englishman had his re-entry visa rescinded by a US Attorney General in September 1952? He’d apparently been in the U.S. for forty years until then. When he had his portrait taken by Avedon he joked about having it as a passport photo:
I guess for some to trivialize your and my fears of instant deportation can be a sport, or abstract away the arduousness of cleaning house and uprooting, knowing it’ll NEVER happen to them 'cos bwhaha they’re not immigrants, for the sake of bickering or conflating the apathetic with the left (I can’t see President Jill Stein or President Gary Johnson issuing these kinds of executive orders, but a Truman administration Atty-Gnl telling a Hollywood pioneer he can’t go home was out of left field in my view), but it makes my blood boil, then curdle.
I’m proud many Americans went to airports today to exercise their right to free speech.
Merely as a tidbit of trivia and, ahem, non sequitur, I share what my son told me he learned in his History class. Resemblance to any present and real persons is completely coincidental:
An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs. Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education. In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education (although citizenship was also largely hereditary). “Idiot” originally referred to “layman, person lacking professional skill”, “person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning”. Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state), was considered dishonorable. “Idiots” were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters.
I can’t be an idiot by those terms, because I voted in the October 2015 election. I drove 430km round-trip to do so.because I care about my country and its government.
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Sounds interesting and surprising, can you elaborate?
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Sure; I think the following example works (it isn’t the one I showed the students yesterday, which is trickier). Let X be a standard normal random variable, flip a fair coin independently of the outcome of X, and let W=+/-1 depending on whether the coin is heads or tails. Let Y=WX. Then it is easy to verify that Y is also a standard normal, the covariance of X and Y is E(XY)=E(XWX)=E(X^2)E(W)=0 so they are uncorrelated, but P(X>17 & Y>17)=P(X>17 & W=1)=P(X>17)(1/2) =/= P(X>17)^2=P(X>17)P(Y>17), so X and Y are not independent.
The interesting question is why anyone believes the false fact that uncorrelated normals are independent. The answer is that this is true if the two random variables have a jointly normal bivariate distribution. In the result in the textbook from which I was quoting the two variables are in fact jointly normal, but it is far from obvious, and the author made no effort either to mention it or refer to the correct result; he explicity stated the false fact.
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Could you start a wrath thread about this? I don’t think this is a great thread to point fingers at other people for finding blame in an election you couldn’t vote in for a nation you’re not located in. I think it’s a worthy topic, but I just don’t think this is the place for it.
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Trump’s executive order is affecting people in Britain and across Europe. There is an MP who’s a dual Iranian / UK national now banned from US travel, a postgraduate student in Costa Rica prevented from transiting through USA on her way back to Glasgow, one of our Olympic athletes of Somali birth whose four children are currently in the USA. Trump is just manifestly incompetent. Today is a bit fucked. The only good thing seems to be that the courts in the USA are striking down the executive order left right and centre.
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not arguing that. Churn the politics in another thread, please.
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Just to chime in this thread’s a great place to vent and find sympathetic folks for bringing up life’s greater and lesser pain points. Pulling politics in here derails things, and in bringing in the inevitable squabbling harms the purpose. There’s lots of other places for that where it’s not needlessly adding to the pain others’ were already coming here with.
I was guilty of talking politics here, regretted it quickly, apologize to you guys for it, and will not do it again.
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My mother broke her humerus right at the base of her shoulder cuff. She was standing next to a wall, turned around, got caught in her own cane, and fell.
They’re doing surgery to put a pin in today. This brings her to 3 different spots in her body with metal parts…which don’t last long, because the bones they’re attached to are basically chalk.
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This afternoon we let our daughter watch a cartoon on the computer upstairs while I did the washing up downstairs. She seemed fine at the time; we’d just finished dinner and she had eaten well. After a few minutes we heard her crying a bit and were just in time to see her projectile vomit from the top of the stairs. Artist’s reconstruction:
'Twas quite an impressive amount of coverage for such a young girl. I went up to see a trail leading through our bedroom and up to the keyboard, which was also covered.
A family came to visit on Friday, and their youngest had some kind of stomach bug. I haven’t been affected yet, but two others are looking a bit iffy.
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Oh, ouch. That socks.* Tell her to get better and feel better soon.
(*my overly aggressive auto-correction…should be s-u-c-k-s.)
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Donald Trump is president of the US and Steve Bannnon seems to be writing all his speeches and executive orders.
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Isn’t he one of those vote fraudsters that Trump was going on about?
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Yep… but when white dudes do it, it’s apparently not a problem.
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