Sandbox (3)

Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.

This is also a continuation of previous Sandbox threads (1) and (2) that have fallen victim to the dreaded page bug.

1,013 thoughts on “Sandbox (3)”

  2. I just came across this essay by an agnostic:
    Why I am no longer a Leftist

    My life as a leftist began with a May Day Parade in 1948, when I was nine years old, and lasted for more than twenty-five years until December 1974, when a murder committed by my political comrades brought my radical career to an end.
    ….

    They had thought they were fighting for social justice, for the powerless and the poor.

    But in reality they had served a gang of cynical despots who had slaughtered more peasants, caused more hunger and human misery, and killed more leftists like themselves than all the capitalist governments since the beginning of time.
    …
    By crowning the criminals with the halo of humanity’s hope, the left shields them from judgment for their criminal deeds. Thus in the name of revolutionary justice, the left defends revolutionary injustice; in the name of human liberation, the left creates a new world of oppression.

    The lesson I had learned for my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst results. I had believed in the left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.

    The national debt is 19 trillion dollars. The banksters and indirectly the wall streeters are loving being creditors since they know the government won’t default, but will pillage and plunder by the rule of law to ensure solvency. Crony capitalism at its best — they must love all the rhetoric about raising taxes and all those new federal programs that will ensure more debt is made.

    Socialism and crony capitalism is such a powerful way to empower the few at the expense of the many, and the worst part of it, people vote the catalysts of their own destruction into office.

  3. stcordova:
    I just came across this essay by an agnostic:
    Why I am no longer a Leftist

    Socialism and crony capitalism is such a powerful way to empower the few at the expense of the many, and the worst part of it, people vote the catalysts of their own destruction into office.

    Uhh…Sal? You do realize (I hope) that socialism and crony capitalism are pretty much mutually exclusive in the US, right? Socialism is a liberal political perspective here reflecting the notion of everyone should get a near equal slice of the collective Great American Pie even if it means that those who are the most successful contribute a greater percentage to the overall pie. Crony capitalism is pretty much exclusively a conservative economic practice wherein business success and wealth accumulation depends on a close-knit “club” of like-minded self-serving participants who in turn depend on close-knit “special” relationships with government representatives and other leadership authorities for favoritism at the expense of those outside the “club”.

    In case you haven’t been paying attention to the current presidential race issues, here are two basic cue cards for you:

    Bernie Sanders: for socialism
    Donald Trump: into crony capitalism
    Hillary Clinton: leans more towards socialism, but not as far as Bernie.

    So I really can’t figure out what your point actually is.

  4. Uhh…Sal? You do realize (I hope) that socialism and crony capitalism are pretty much mutually exclusive in the US, right?

    No. Socialism in the US is means of crony capitalism, they are in bed together. The welfare monies, medicare part D, medicade, food stamps, housing government programs are financial boon to businesses and banks and bloated government programs.

    The “Crony” in Capitalism is Socialism

    http://capitalismmagazine.com/2014/07/crony-capitalism-socialism/

    Bernie Sanders: for socialism
    Donald Trump: into crony capitalism
    Hillary Clinton: leans more towards socialism, but not as far as Bernie.

    So I really can’t figure out what your point actually is.

    Crony capitalism and socialism are forms of intrusion into individual liberties. All politicians listed above are promising utopias, and neither will deliver.

    Excessive centralized control by corrupt politicians promising utopias is economically inefficient. I favor the Austrian school of Economics.

    Prosperity is highly correlated with technology and innovation. I’m libertarian leaning, I don’t like either party right now, and the populace is trying to get their problems solved and looking for economic messaiahs in politicians who want more regulation and taxes.

    I cited Horowitz’s work, because I found his book:
    Unholy Alliance Radical Islam American Left

    I’ve been appalled at all the whining by the American left about LGBT bathrooms and then they practically say nothing about Islamists who want sharia law and killing of gays. Do lefties on the news network ever complain about the intolerance of Islam toward the LGBT community?

    After what happened in Nice France, I was pretty upset last night, and I wondered why the American left is so friendly with muslim ideology compared say to Christian values.

    I was sick of what happened in Santa Barbara California, then Orlando Florida last month. I have friends in church who worked in the Pentagon Washinton DC when Muslim terrorists slammed an airplaine into the pentagon on September 11 2001 when the Twin World Trade Center towers were simultaneously attacked. I have Christian missionary friends whose associates are killed in muslim countries.

    Where are the femminists crying out for their sisters in muslim countries?

    So that’s how I learned or Horowitz because I googled “left islam alliance” and found Horwitz book after hearing of the terror attack in Nice France last night.

    I thought his conversion away from the left was compelling. It echoes my sentiments that the left has a way of doing unwise things for societies, and the left is crony capitalism instrument and now the left are called the “useful idiots” for Islam.

    http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2006/08/islams_useful_idiots_1.html

    Well, any way thanks for the conversation.

  6. Thanks, Sal, about your remarks on terrorism. The events in Nice are still very raw for me. My 16 year old niece is visiting and went off with friends to watch the firework display in Carcassonne. I’m caught between my personal concern that it is not inconceivable that an attack could have been mounted there and my immunity to the number of innocent deaths that occur with depressing regularity elsewhere in the World.

    There has to be a better way.

  7. Not sure where to post this so I’ll try here.
    A couple suggestions:

    1. A (pinned?) thread suggestions thread where we can propose topics, perhaps aimed at some particular member(s) who may of course decline or ignore the suggestion altogether if they see fit.

    2. A resources thread where we can compile references to books, papers, online resources, etc.. on different fields of evolution / ID. For example, introductory books on evolution, comparative genomics, embryology… online databases of protein sequences (uniprot and the likes), and maybe some primer on BLAST, PHYLIP, MrBayes… interactive online phylogenetic trees, etc… etc..

    Not sure if the format of these boards is of much use to build a resource compilation like that. Ideally we would ask/add new entries as something relevant comes up in some other discussion.

    I don’t know. Of course it shouldn’t be too time consuming for the ones in the know here.. or maybe such a compilation or something similar already exists elsewhere.

    Thoughts?

  9. Richardthughes:
    Who is everyone voting for?

    In Spain we might be in for the third presidential election in one year after one failed and another likely failed investiture process. I can confirm no one will be voting Trump tho :p

  14. Richardthughes:
    Who is everyone voting for?

    Given the choice of a buffoon who is not a Republican running as a Republican, a criminal who is at best vaguely Democratic running as a Democrat, and two non-libertarian conservatives running as Libertarians, I’m going with the non-libertarian former governors.

    Johnson/Weld 2016

  16. petrushka:
    None of the above.

    The Libertarian Party has that as a binding option on all ballots. If NOTA wins, none of the candidates are eligible for the next round. I’d love to see it implemented in all elections.

  17. I’d be a Libertarian if they all weren’t a bunch of nutcases.

    As for me, I belong to the Contrarian Party.

    Who’s with me!? Vote Contrarian!

  18. Mung:
    I’d be a Libertarian if they all weren’t a bunch of nutcases.

    A two term governor of New Mexico and a two term governor of Massachusetts are “nutcases”? Either of them are more qualified than Donald or Hillary, even leaving aside the respective demagoguery and criminality of the incumbent party candidates.

    Your nutcase detector may be broken from prolonged exposure to UD. I understand that voids the warrantee.

  20. It occurs to me that if there is in fact a “God Delusion” that it is horribly ill defined.

    Anyone have a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) handy?

    If someone has a God delusion, what on earth are they deluded about?

  21. Over at ENV there’s a claim that selection is hard to measure. Given how easy it is to measure selection in computer programs this cannot possibly be true.

  23. …Then, in 1912, a group of Europeans released mirror carp into the wild in Madagascar as a food source for people living there—until that time, there were no carp present at all. The program was considered a success as the fish flourished in the new environment. It did not take long for the breeding process to begin reversing itself, however—as early as 1950, people in the area were reporting that the carp were becoming scalier. In this new effort, the researchers sought to better understand the evolutionary process that the fish have been undergoing over the course of the past century.
    The study consisted of capturing approximately 700 specimens in Madagascar and analyzing both their scales and DNA. In studying their results, the researchers found that approximately 65 percent of those they caught were fully scaled—back to where they had been before the monks got involved. But surprisingly, they also found that the new scales were not the result of reversing the DNA changes that had occurred during the time they were bred to have fewer scales—those gene changes were still present, which suggested that different genes were involved in rescaling. This meant that the fish had evolved back to its original form over the course of just 100 years, which translated to approximately 40 generations—a mere blip in general evolutionary terms.

    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-carp-rapid-de-evolution-scales.html#jCp

  25. Mung: Given how easy it is to measure selection in computer programs this cannot possibly be true.

    Who are you talking to?

  26. Thanks, Sal, about your remarks on terrorism. The events in Nice are still very raw for me. My 16 year old niece is visiting and went off with friends to watch the firework display in Carcassonne. I’m caught between my personal concern that it is not inconceivable that an attack could have been mounted there and my immunity to the number of innocent deaths that occur with depressing regularity elsewhere in the World.

    There has to be a better way.

    You’re welcome Alan. I hope you are well old friend. I look forward to visiting here at TSZ again. God bless you.

  30. Testing Markdown plugin.

    Italics

    Strong

    Link

    Some code:

    (defmacro while (test &body body)
  "A little syntactic sugar around DO."
  `(do () ((not ,test)) ,@body))

  34. def calculate_chunk(iteration):
    comb_length = 1
    threshold = len(char_set) ** comb_length

    while iteration > threshold:
    comb_length += 1
    threshold += len(char_set) ** comb_length

    threshold -= len(char_set) ** comb_length
    leftovers = iteration - threshold - 1
    chunk_index = int(float(leftovers) / CHUNK_SIZE) + 1
    iteration_res = leftovers - ((chunk_index - 1) * CHUNK_SIZE)


  35. def calculate_chunk(iteration):
    comb_length = 1
    threshold = len(char_set) ** comb_length

    while iteration > threshold:
    comb_length += 1
    threshold += len(char_set) ** comb_length

    threshold -= len(char_set) ** comb_length
    leftovers = iteration - threshold - 1
    chunk_index = int(float(leftovers) / CHUNK_SIZE) + 1
    iteration_res = leftovers - ((chunk_index - 1) * CHUNK_SIZE)

  42. # this is a comment
    class SkunkWeaselFactory
      def self.create_skunk_weasel
        Array.new(TARGET_LENGTH).map {CHAR_SET.sample}
      end
    end

  43. Mung,

    Patrick, what needs to be done to get indentation working?

    Surround your code block with <pre><code> and </code></pre> tags.

  44. ah, thanks. I just used html. ampersand nbsp semicolon but will try that.

    ETA: the pre doesn’t work, it just disappears.

    Back to using html for a non-breaking space.

  47. keiths: There must be a way to get it to keep the tags, because Patrick does it in this comment.

    I’m assuming that what we see in his comment is HTML generated by the markdown plugin. I’ve just not been able to duplicate it.

  48. Mung,

    I’m assuming that what we see in his comment is HTML generated by the markdown plugin. I’ve just not been able to duplicate it.

    My experience has been that the <pre> tags get stripped out whether I code them directly or use the Markdown syntax for code blocks (both indented and fenced).

  49. Mung:
    Patrick, what needs to be done to get indentation working?

    With the Markdown plugin you precede and follow the indented material with three backticks:

    Line one
    indented line 2
        further indented line 3

  50. I just checked and keiths is correct, the Markdown plugin modified that to use pre and code tags. Here’s an attempt at entering those directly:

    
line 1
    indented line 2
        further indented line 3

Comments are closed.