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.
Pr(A|X) = Chance of having cancer (A) given a positive test (X).
This is what we want to know: How likely is it to have cancer with a
positive result? In our case it was 7.8%.
Pr(X|A) = Chance of a positive test (X) given that you had cancer (A). This is the chance of a true positive, 80% in our case.
Pr(A) = Chance of having cancer (1%).
Pr(~A) = Chance of not having cancer (99%).
Pr(X|~A) = Chance of a positive test (X) given that you didn’t have cancer (~A). This is a false positive, 9.6% in our case.
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005: “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
That was written 8 years ago but I believe, to be more accurate, there has been slight cooling since 1995, not 98.
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009: ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
"Worried"? I thought we were supposed to get worried if it got warmer, not if it didn't...but I don't really care what the weather does. I like any and all weathers except for tornadoes.
Sugar protectionism is government planning. It is industrial policy —
government picking winners and losers — applied to agriculture. It is
politics supplanting the market in allocating wealth and opportunity.
And it is perfectly all right with 20 of the 45 Republican senators.
Climatology Prof. Salby explains why the climate models are wrong. It's slightly technical for our handicapped challenged readers who can't do fairly simple math and is intended for a sophisticated audience, but the message is clear. (h/t Powerline)
He is not, of course, the first to note that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lag behind temperature rises, but he makes a compelling presentation. (It begins in German but quickly switches to English.)
This is a serious man. "The models have no predictive skill."
“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.” Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Nov. 16, 1999
Mrs. BD gave me an early Father's Day/Anniversary present two weeks ago, and it pleased me greatly. It was five (legal) strong and energetic Mexican yard guys for 9 hours to clean up various unpleasant outdoor messes which had gotten out of control around the semi-elegant but rusticated Maggie's HQ.
If you knew me personally, you would know that I naturally worked alongside of them all day (with chain saw mostly, and some carrying of firewood, rocks, and branches), tipped them with $20 each, and gave them cold Coronas with lime slices at the end of the day. They arrived at 8 am with chipper, giant dumpster, tools, grass seed, hay, weed-whackers, an industrial tiller, etc.
Among other tasks, we cleared out almost 1/5 acre of weeds and dying shrubs and trees, removed roots and stumps, removed evil porcelain berry vines, thinned out some of my older spruce and cedar plantings, cut firewood out of some trees and large branches fallen from Sandy, shrunk my vegetable garden by 1/2, tilled, raked, and planted grass. While I tend to be opposed to lawns on principle, it was the only way to make this particular area not look like crap. Luckily, it has been cool and rainy almost every other day since we finished and the grass is coming in nicely. Thanks to global cooling, it's cool, windy, and rainy yet again today. Grass loves cool and wet.
Feels like Ireland up here. I like it. Got a sweet-smelling fir-log fire going right next to me as I type.
What a good present that day was. Thanks, Mrs. BD. These guys work as hard as I do, but they have bigger muscles. Well, I spent most of this past weekend trimming all of the hedges and misc. gardening, weeding, log-splitting, and transplanting at the direction of Mrs. BD. Are gardens ever done? Never. I do all of the outdoor work I have time to do. It's good exercise and the results can be gratifying. Next weekend, I plan to do the necessary lawn plugging but not, of course, on the new area.
Owning properties is an endless war against nature and her insidious Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Now I just need those 5 guys for one more day because I still have a to-do list and I need a dump truck load of mulch and a truck load of fresh driveway gravel. Maybe next Spring?
You Won’t
Believe What People Think is the Leading Cause of Poverty in America -
See more at:
http://menrec.com/you-wont-believe-what-people-think-is-the-leading-cause-of-poverty-in-america/#sthash.bfLkA6Mk.dpuf
You Won’t
Believe What People Think is the Leading Cause of Poverty in America -
See more at:
http://menrec.com/you-wont-believe-what-people-think-is-the-leading-cause-of-poverty-in-america/#sthash.bfLkA6Mk.dpuf
You Won’t
Believe What People Think is the Leading Cause of Poverty in America -
See more at:
http://menrec.com/you-wont-believe-what-people-think-is-the-leading-cause-of-poverty-in-america/#sthash.bfLkA6Mk.dpuf
“In order to train for this method of Jihad, you must consent to being sodomized for a period of time, so that your anus becomes wider, making room for the explosives."
Few summer drinks are more refreshing than the Cape Codder.
I think it tastes best with a little lime squeezed into it, like this recipe. (Come to think if it, most things taste better with a little fresh lime.)
Try a Cape Codder tomorrow, at breakfast.
When you add some grapefruit juice, that's a Sea Breeze. That's healthy too. It would probably be just as tasty without the vodka, but what would be the point?
My mixology research revealed that the Cape Codder is one of a family of cocktails known as "New England Highballs." I didn't know drinks had formal categories. I am still learning about the world.
"...... if you drink coffee, drink red wine, and have lots of sex, you should live a longer, healthier life. Luckily, these are some of my favorite things to do anyway."
My recent linking problem is tending to link many of the same things which our friends Insty and Vanderleun do, but entirely independently. Is Maggie's part of an "echo chamber"? I sure hope not. Maybe great minds think alike...
Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) wrote "Oh, Susanna," "Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)," "De Camptown Races," "Old Black Joe," "Beautiful Dreamer," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," "Hard Times," - and lots more.
Where would the American songbook be without him? Nowhere.
Here's his Wikipedia listing. It's the usual: made pennies from his songs, died drunk and alone in New York City. Only visited the deep South briefly, once, on his honeymoon.
Photos of his German piano teacher in Pittsburgh, his first guitar, and the first piano he played, here.
Why the Swanee River? It fit the meter and the feeling. Here's "Old Folks at Home," a true heart-breaker of a sentimental popular song, with a lovely simple tune, as Foster wrote it in NYC for the minstrel shows.
A small hilltop village in Umbria in the foothills of the Apennines, a couple of years ago. Mrs. BD and I were driving our Lancia to Norcia for lunch and to meet the Monks of Norcia. Naturally, we explored this place (forget the name) and, naturally with Italians, we were met with suspicion.
The Hidden Jobless Disaster - At the present slow pace of job growth, it will
require more than a decade to get back to full employment defined by
prerecession standards.
What level of domestic data collection is currently engaged in by what government agencies? And what degree of privacy do Americans want and expect in their digital and electronic communications?
President Obama is now caught in a trap of his own making. By downplaying the threat and trying to create an atmosphere of peace and normality in the country, he has delegitimated the measures he believes that our safety requires. Having tried and failed to keep these secrets dark and hidden, he must now try to explain what many Americans will find inexplicable. If the terrorists are really on the run, and we can finally go back to a 9/10 state of mind, why are you assembling and wielding the most powerful and intrusive systems of surveillance ever conceived?
In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.
At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."
New Study Finds
Mrs. BD gave me an early Father's Day/Anniversary present two weeks ago, and it pleased me greatly. It was five (legal) strong and energetic Mexican yard guys for 9 hours to clean up various unpleasant outdoor messes which had gotten out of control around the semi-elegant but rusticated Maggie's HQ.
Few summer drinks are more refreshing than the Cape Codder. 
808 Cities, 2,503 Shows, and 1,007,416 Miles
Foster (1826-1864) wrote "Oh, Susanna," "Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)," "De Camptown Races," "Old Black Joe," "Beautiful Dreamer," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," "Hard Times," - and lots more.
