OrganicMSG

One way to reduce this is to try and enforce that structure is to be dependent on whatever is currently being done, so that any bureaucracies that are created are explicitly shut down at the end of a given task, with a meta-bureaucracy that just has the job of spinning off structures and winding them up, like job management in an OS.

I think RAND have been doing this for quite a while.

He is just being Canadian. It would be very impolite not to apologise, having just screwed up your neighbour's entire political landscape.

The takeaway is that if you give a load of academics a database, they are like children left unattended with a running chocolate fountain and a sign saying "no fingers".

Well, they may not officially permit it in public, however they clearly allow it, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

We are utterly shocked to discover that people have been invading our customer's privacy to manipulate them politically, without our consent. Sorry, their consent, I meant to say without their consent. Furthermore, we had no idea that this was going on, as we were reading a really good book at the time and the radio was on really loud. That said, we are paying attention now and you can trust us with everything from here on in, as we are really nice and competent, honest.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

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John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions - Excerpt from Meditation 17

On their own, maybe not. If taken as examples of two classes of environmental effect, namely environmental toxins and transmissible diseases, I would be surprised if those two broad types did not have a significant effect on the variability of developmental IQ in rich countries.

This is somewhat simplistic, but I cannot help but feel that at least a part of this current drama is about giving a Boris Yeltsin variant back to the west.

I sense strong elements of Milo Minderbinder in there too -

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“If they had any loyalty, they would buy my cotton till it hurts so that they can keep right on buying my cotton till it hurts them some more. They would build fires and burn up their underwear and summer uniforms just to create a bigger demand. But they won’t do a thing. Yossarian, try eating the rest of this chocolate-covered cotton for me. Maybe it will taste delicious now.”

Yossarian pushed his hand away. “Give up, Milo. People can’t eat cotton.”

Milo’s face narrowed cunningly. “It isn’t really cotton,” he coaxed. “I was joking. It’s really cotton candy, delicious cotton candy. Try it and see.”

“Now you’re lying.”

“I never lie!” Milo rejoindered with proud dignity.

“You’re lying now.”

“I only lie when it’s necessary,” Milo explained defensively, averting his eyes for a moment and blinking his lashes winningly. “This stuff is better than cotton candy, really it is. It’s made out of real cotton. Yossarian, you’ve got to help me make the men eat it. Egyptian cotton is the finest cotton in the world.”

“But it’s indigestible,” Yossarian emphasized. “It will make them sick, don’t you understand? Why don’t you try living on it yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“I did try,” admitted Milo gloomily. “And it made me sick.”

My local high-school was also the wider area's sink-school that kids got expelled into from other schools, though there wasn't any way of particularly escaping, should you just happen to be going there anyway. Anyway, the transport arrangements for some of the kids was a nightmare.

edit - also, from my observation, concentrating all the nutters under one roof does not really help, if your aim is educational. It just takes a lot of little problems across a lot of schools and turns them into one big unmanageable problem that can be politely ignored.

Well, there is the continuing mass lead poisoning in Flint - http://time.com/5197427/flint-water-samples-lead-increase/ - and congenital syphilis is on the rise in the USA - https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/01/health/syphilis-newborns-...

There are many environmental poisons that affect brain development, consumption of lead, for instance. Also there are many diseases that can effect brain development, such as congenital syphilis.

Streaming by ability wouldn't solve that. To illustrate why, I am reminded of a quote by Stephen Hawking;

“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”

You could stream by behavioural attributes to achieve that if you wanted, but then you would have to accept that the classes would be very wide in ability, unless you stream by both behaviour and ability and then end up with a massive logistical nightmare.

Have you never had the experience of only really getting a deep understanding of something that you are learning, when you take the time to try and teach it to someone else?

Given that the concept of race was defined by family/tribal grouping and observable physical features, which are biological in nature, to point out that it is biological is entirely tautological.

Of course it is biological. Doesn't stop it being an appallingly crap system for human taxonomy. Especially given that there are a very large quantity of people out there whom you would really have to give a long list for in this taxonomy, rather than a word, as people have a habit of not sticking to these neat little groupings when they have sex, even if you force them to with law.

Have you read up much on the education system of Finland? As this is more or less the opposite of their approach.

They do not stream the education system and the quicker children are expected to help explain what they have learned to those still getting to grips with the material. Integrating this method within the lesson structure has the effect of raising the standard of both the slower and quicker kids, for fairly obvious reasons.

The majority of politics is to do with the exceptionally mundane and politics in market based economies are as much about what people buy as who they vote for.

If you want a perfect example of this, go back to the start of modern advertising and look up the phrase "Torches Of Freedom" and Edward Bernays.

How can you say that with any confidence, while at the same time admitting you have not looked into it?

From that article;

"The bill starts by giving the executive branch dramatically more power than it has today. It would allow Attorney General Sessions to enter into agreements with foreign governments that bypass current law, without any approval from Congress. Under these agreements, foreign governments would be able to get emails and other electronic information without any additional scrutiny by a U.S. judge or official. And, while the attorney general would need to consider a country’s human rights record, he is not prohibited from entering into an agreement with a country that has committed human rights abuses."

"That level of discretion alone is concerning. Even more, however, the bill would for the first time allow these foreign governments to wiretap in the U.S. — even in cases where they do not meet Wiretap Act standards. Paradoxically, that would give foreign governments the power to engage in surveillance — which could sweep in the information of Americans communicating with foreigners — that the U.S. itself would not be able to engage in. The bill also provides broad discretion to funnel this information back to the U.S., circumventing the Fourth Amendment. This information could potentially be used by the U.S. to engage in a variety of law enforcement actions."

I do wonder if they are being slightly coy here in their analysis. This isn't at all paradoxical, unless you are giving the players some serious benefit of the doubt.

I thought it was mainly about lying to others about how well you are doing, given that the central idea is that of giving an impression of success before you are successful, in order to gain access to the people and markets you require in order for you to become actually successful.

These are galaxies of very different sizes but yet sharing an oddly similar time signature which have another similarity, that is that they have developed without a major collision since the big bang, given they are disk galaxies.

I am asking whether there could be a scale invariant function acting here that makes the rotation of the galaxy more dependent on age rather than size, that got started when the vortices that ended up as galaxies were much closer together and at much smaller scales.

This is strikingly scale invariant. I know it seems insane to ask it of something that big, but could it possibly be an effect that is bootstrapping up from the smallest scales?

Maybe because we gave them a midnight deadline, and this is the reply?

To know exactly why they might be knocking off people would require a good inside knowledge of the current realpolitic, not just looking at elections and the world cup.

These deaths are not the only recent ones that are being linked to Russia here, off the top of my head, there is also the January death in Guernsey of a Latvian who was assisting in Ukraine.

In total, the home office has said that there are 14 recent murders on UK soil that it thinks are probably down to the Kremlin.

Another Russian exile, Nikolai Glushkov, died this morning in London.

It could just be a massive coincidence, however there do seem to be a lot of coincidences to write off if we are to assume that the trail of dead Russians does not lead to Russia.

Wasn't he still working on physics? If so, I prefer the terminology of Erdős, he hasn't died, he has merely left.

Late Night with Humorbot 5.0?

I guess that's one way of managing customer expectation.

Am interested that they also blocked the sale of Lattice, as I just started teaching myself the icestorm toolchain for coding their fpgas.

There is certainly a debate over which parts of advertising work most effectively, however I have never heard anyone seriously suggest (until maybe now) that the entire concept of advertising may have no effect at all.