We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Well, Bird Dog is worn out. He's weary of finding fascinating links every day. He's gone off to get his groove back. He's going to get his covfefe sharpened. Er, I mean, he's getting his covefefe trimmed. That is to say, his covfefe needed a world class overhaul. Bigly. He's left me in charge of finding a Yuge set of morning links for the Maggie's Farm morning roundup. I'm Haile Salassie to help out.
I found it amusing that everyone in the reglar media pretended that they didn't know that covfefe was simply a typo of the word coverage. In context, it couldn't mean anything else. They like to cast Trump as a vicious bumpkin, so it had to be gibberish, not fat thumbs. And unlike all the misspelled words I see on the internet, covfefe really was just a typo. Everyone claims that they made a typo when they misspell a word, or more usually, use one word when they mean another. Mis-keyed words you're trying to spell correctly are typos. Misspelled words, because you don't know how to spell, aren't.
Back when I was in school, and Galileo used to cheat off me, the teachers instructed us that if you can't spell a word, then you don't know what it means, and you shouldn't use it. I can spell covfefe. I know what it means. It means you're an idiot if you think a sentence fragment typed with your thumbs delivered via mass email is an actionable piece of information. Covfefe away, you Twits!
Using data from dozens of different sources and techniques from a wide range of technologies and disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, statistics, machine learning, network science, topology, architecture and urbanism, we constructed a new partitioning of the city that resonates with our contemporary moment — 5 boroughs for the 21st century.
Bird Dog claims to like New York City. Me? I think it's a trailer park with a subway. The yokels there marry their own relatives (Hi Woody!), are all tattooed and drug-addicted (Xanax is a drug), and mostly piss outdoors. They can reassemble their five deck chair burrows, er, boroughs, any way they like. It's their covfefe.
The European Union has decided to fine Google an unprecedented $2.7 billion after a years-long investigation into the company’s comparison-shopping product found that it unfairly favored itself over competitors.
The persons in charge of all large internet companies are idiots. They have no idea how they ended up with all that cash. Not one of them can get a repeat success no matter how hard they try, because they ascribe to genius what was dumb luck. They build up huge cash hoards overseas, occasionally fritter them away on pointless boondoggles, refuse to pay taxes so they can distribute them to shareholders, and then childishly think that socialist governments will let them keep it.
Sleeping on the job is one of those workplace taboos — like leaving your desk for lunch or taking an afternoon walk — that we’re taught to look down on. If someone naps at 2 p.m. while the rest of us furiously write memos and respond to emails, surely it must mean they’re slacking off. Or so the assumption goes.
Yes, by all means, take productivity and career advice from the New York Times. I'm fairly certain that the monthly federal unemployment numbers is no longer issued in percentage form, and consists solely of a list of the names of people laid off from the New York Times, and the occasional FBI director.
Awareness and education are key tactics to protect the public as well as the animals. Research from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and the National Parks Service about the biology and behavior of these sharks has helped inform seashore staff and beachgoers about best practices to stay safe.
Awareness and education? Look fellas, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish. And I am not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock.
I first learned about Feynman from his Feynman Lectures on Physics.This was, and maybe still is, scripture for undergrads curious about Physics. What undergrad is not?
Nobel prize and all that, but what Feynman could do best was to communicate, and he could communicate in humorous, self-deprecating, and humble ways. I believe that he truly believed that he wasn't too smart, just curious and persistent.
Here's Feynman's speech titled What Is Science? delivered to the National Science Teachers Association, 1966, in New York City. He talks a lot about how his father inspired his curiosity. Read it. One quote:
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson.
It is often claimed that the happiest two days for a boat owner are the day they acquire it and the day they sell it.
That is hyperbole of course, but it makes a point about the burdens, expenses, and hassles of ownership. Even having a closet full of firearms means taking them out and cleaning and oiling them once a year. Hassle. New roof for a house or barn? Major.
So our survey question is this: What were you once thrilled to possess and later thrilled to get rid of?
I hope nobody says a spouse, but they probably will. I'll start it off with more than several acres my wife and I inherited on Martha's Vineyard. The old house on the land had been sold decades ago to pay estate taxes, but an elegant family compound could have been built on the land. Just a dream. I never had the spare dough to do that, and, really, I have a perfect set-up now although we are too far from salt water. Sold the land a few years ago, big capital gains and fees, etc., but I got off the hook for the property taxes, maintaining the right of way, and maintaining the fields in the center of the property which we never used. Big relief. Fact is, if we love the Vineyard (it's an ok yuppie place) we can rent a house for ten days and go there whenever we want. We never do. We go to Rhode Island instead, and rent.
In DC, D.C.’s massive Woodner apartment building has lived many lives—from fancy hotel to one of the last bastions of affordable housing in a gentrifying neighborhood. Now, it’s on the brink of another change.
Low wage jobs are not meant to be living wages. They are entry-level. Higher min wage laws drive jobs out of the country, or just close businesses. Wonderful only for unions who peg wages to min wage.
How the media was able in a matter of hours after the election to rebrand Democrats as anti-Russian hawks and Republicans as colluders with Putin is one of the strangest and yet most successful political fabrications in recent history.
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The media fed off the hysteria. In its fusion role with the Democratic Party to delegitimize Trump, journalists saw collusion as the most effective way to create a sort of national madness directed at the Trump presidency.
Pleasant waterfront summer cottage in New England, as seen on an outing last week. Either our boat was rocking, or I was. Or it was global warming tilting everything.
‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’
Charles Darwin, via an Aeon piece on the Dunning-Kruger Effect (how poorly-informed people tend to over-estimate their competence, while the best-informed tend to doubt themselves)
Interestingly, really smart people also fail to accurately self-assess their abilities. As much as D- and F-grade students overestimate their abilities, A-grade students underestimate theirs. In their classic study, Dunning and Kruger found that high-performing students, whose cognitive scores were in the top quartile, underestimated their relative competence.
Moral: Self-doubt is always a rational position, and a good foundation for a realistic self-confidence. Maggie's Farmers tend towards wholesome skepticism about everything, including oneself.
Helped roast a 130-lb. hog this weekend for a pal's garden party. It's quite the project. Night before, our cooking team seasoned the cavity with spices, filled it with apples and oranges, then stapled the cavity shut and pinned the ears back. Ran the spit through the mouth and out the back end, then the heavy prongs on the spit to hold the pig firm and acouple of long lug bolts with large square washers to pin the pig to the spit. Then chicken wire wrapped tightly around the whole thing to hold it all together.
After that, ten hours of tending the apple wood and charcoal fires in this corrugated steel contraption. Have to be careful because too much heat can set the pig on fire, and too little won't cook it. We figured keeping the temperature in there around 220-240 F. Slow cooking, and some smoking but not too much. After the first couple of hours, smoke can't penetrate anyway. You can not leave the thing unattended but it's good redneck fun with good company.
In strength training, concentric motion means the muscle or muscle group we are addressing is shortening, and eccentric means it is contracting while lengthening, under control. Of course, whenever one muscle contracts, its opposing muscle must lengthen. It's complicated, though, because during controlled effort neither relaxes.
Getting stronger entails breaking down muscle so it can regrow stronger and it seems as if the eccentric motion does a better job of that than the concentric although the latter tends to be where we feel we are working hardest.In the simplest example, when you do a barbell squat the squatting requires eccentric contraction for your quads and glutes, and the stand-up is concentric for them. Vice versa for the hamstrings. That's why your trainer may demand that, in a curl or bench press, for examples, you lower the weight to a count of 5 or 10 instead of letting gravity do more of the work. Some people call that "negative" training, or just say "control it down."
Strength training offers a fun chance to brush up on your human anatomy. While most powerlifts engage the entire body to some extent (which is why they are efficient strength-training tools, like the deadlift), generally most of the work is done by specific muscle groups. Let's consider the bench press, which is designed to not be a full-body exertion but instead to isolate upper body muscles - chest, upper back, shoulders, and arms. The concentric and eccentric contractions of the bench are explained well here.You can see why your biceps get pumped during bench even though pecs and triceps do the lifting - the control down is an eccentric move for the triceps and pecs but concentric/stabilizing for the biceps. After all, you can't drop that barbell.
The only place I can think of where you let gravity do most of the work is in the deadlift where the control-down is less important. You can almost let the bar drop.
Who are these pussified idiots? If kids don't break an arm, get poison ivy, get stung by bees, fall off jungle gyms, light firecrackers, eat bugs, and do all sorts of stupid things, then they aren't kids
If they weren’t trying to destroy the president, Democrats would have to focus on an agenda most Americans don’t support.
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The point is that somewhere between 2006 and 2009, Bill Clinton’s formerly competitive Democratic party aged and then evaporated. It was replaced by a hard-left coastal coalition, a pyramidal party — ethnic-identity groups at the base and wealthy elites on top, all united by a mutual disdain for the half of the population that covers 85 percent of the geography.
There is no Russia threat. Obama and Hillary tried hard to cozy up to Putin. Russia is a pathetic country, but no danger to the US at all. This whole thing was started by the Clinton campaign. From now on, I will ignore it all.
I was lukewarm about Trump, but I figure I felt like the Hillary supporters did - it was a rotten character but preferable to the other one. I never expected Trump to have a chance.
"...All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you're just like, that's adorable. That's adorable. This is a business."
CNN producer John Bonifield. If anybody doubted Trump's accusations of fake news...
It is not just the compensation that discourages physicians, especially internists and pediatricians, from working for the government (eg Medicare, Medicaid). A major issue is the paperwork burden. The government paperwork requires a specialized back office staff which only large practices can afford.
I first learned about Feynman from his 
James Beard's 
