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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby Dukasaur on Sat May 15, 2021 11:11 am

DoomYoshi wrote:
That article links to another article which describes the single-most important thing that I wish people would understand (very few do):
https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-s ... ery-119200

Species does not have a universally accepted definition (and probably never will due to the arbitrary nature of any cladistics cut-off).

However, to conclude that we should stop thinking in terms of species is not really helpful either.


Nice article.

Yeah, many things cannot be precisely defined, and yet they are still useful concepts. In addition to "species", consider other fuzzy concepts we use every day, like "nationality" and "job description" -- concepts which become progressively more inaccurate the more strictly one tries to define them. I refer you to Darwin's beautiful line (quoted in that article) that "It all comes from trying to define the undefinable."

Ultimately the real world is a world of fuzzy boundaries. This is just something to accept, not stress about. The stress comes when people trained in deductive reasoning demand precise definitions which can be plugged into logical algorithms. In the fantasyland of algebra, something is either A or non-A, and never the twain shall meet. The real world has never been so neat. Trying to decide where Bacillus cereus ends and Bacillus anthracis begins, is a bit like drawing a strict boundary between orange and yellow. In the end it comes down to largely arbitrary decisions that are based more on what is convenient to work with than on any really meaningful difference.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby jonesthecurl on Sat May 15, 2021 12:07 pm

Back when I was studying a History degree, I encountered an article in one of the journals on medieval history called "Towards a definition of the word 'Field'." I did not bother to read it.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Sun May 16, 2021 6:17 am

jonesthecurl wrote:Back when I was studying a History degree, I encountered an article in one of the journals on medieval history called "Towards a definition of the word 'Field'." I did not bother to read it.


Do they mean field of study? I was unable to find such an article. It must not have successfully defined the word.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby jonesthecurl on Sun May 16, 2021 11:32 am

It meant 'field' as in bit of ground.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Thu May 20, 2021 4:28 pm

Does eating fungus constitute murder?
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Mon May 24, 2021 3:15 am

What do the Presidential family, aging British Rock stars and a couple of hillbillies who peddle trinkets have in common?

They are all characters in the next Battle of the Alamo!

https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texa ... -of-alamo/

Some excerpts to whet your whistle:
Like many boys his age, Phil Collins fell in love with the Alamo in the mid-fifties while watching Walt Disney’s movie Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. “The memories I have . . . were that this group of people were going—and they knew that they were going—to die,” he said during a panel appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival in 2016. “That just moved me as a five- or six-year-old. From that moment, I was obsessed.” He drew the facade of the chapel on the garden wall of his childhood home, in West London, and recreated the Battle of the Alamo with his toy soldiers.

Even as an adult, Collins nurtured his fascination. In 2004 he traveled from Houston to San Antonio during his First Final Farewell tour to show the Alamo to his wife, his three-year-old son, and his assistant. Afterward, they walked around the corner to the History Shop. Guimarin struck up a conversation with Collins, whom he did not recognize at first. “He was interested in documents, and I had a Sam Houston document,” Guimarin says. “He bought that later, but he left me his information and said whenever I got something, he would like first look at it. He was interested in anything to do with the Alamo.”

---------------------------------

Fast-forward to California in the early seventies, where Musso spotted a handsome Bowie knife at a gun show that looked as if it could date to the nineteenth century. Musso noted that the blade had an unusual feature: a strip of brass that extended from the hand guard to the dip in the knife called the clip. Musso bought the knife for a small amount and says he didn’t think much about it until eleven years later, when he was cleaning his firearms and decided to rub a little solvent on the knife to get the crud off. “In doing so, I found it had the initials ‘J. B.’ on it,” Musso says. “I had to sit down and have a long talk with myself because I knew that I didn’t put [them] on it.”

Of course, there was no proof that Jim Bowie had owned the knife; anyone could have scratched those letters into the metal, including the blacksmith James Black, who also had the initials “J. B.” Musso has hired several companies over the years to determine the age of the knife metallurgically. He says the first report he received revealed that the steel dated to the 1830s and was made in a relatively primitive charcoal furnace. Another lab determined that the brass was consistent with alloys made in small workshops during that era and had trace elements matching those found in a fairly uncommon type of green sand, derived from marine sandstone, that could be found 250 yards from James Black’s Arkansas workshop.

Musso decided to take the knife to a psychic. But because, he says, he doesn’t really believe in the paranormal, he wanted the best: Peter Hurkos, a Dutch clairvoyant who claimed a head injury had given him special powers. “I figured he was the only one I could believe in because he was decorated by a Catholic pope and he was supposed to have an eighty-seventh-percentile degree of accuracy,” Musso explains.

Hurkos, who had worked on the Charles Manson and Boston Strangler cases, agreed to a meeting, Musso says. After Musso handed him a brown paper bag with the knife inside, Hurkos reportedly named the man who had sold the knife to Musso. Musso says he then laid out several photos facedown and Hurkos pointed at one, which Musso then flipped over. It was Bowie’s portrait; Hurkos declared the knife had belonged to him. To Musso, this was just another piece of evidence that would help him build a case for authentication.

-----------------------------------

While the Alamo has long commanded a leading role in the story of Texas, much of the mission’s original footprint, which is bisected by city streets and encompasses tourist traps, has long been an afterthought. The historical exhibits inside the Alamo aren’t much better. The “Cradle of Texas Liberty” hasn’t made a great impression on visitors. The average time spent inside Texas’s most visited historical site? About ten minutes. The site is boring and gives tourists no sense of the Alamo’s original scale.

And what is shown inside the Alamo is, to put it gently, one-sided. Anecdotes abound of Mexican American students discovering on field trips that their forebears were the bad guys—and, eventually, the losers—in Texas’s creation myth. The Alamo has, over the years, become a story that white Texans retell and many Hispanic Texans, especially in San Antonio, ignore or resent. Historical findings of the last few decades that challenged the traditional narrative—most notably evidence that Davy Crockett did not go down swinging, as was portrayed by Fess Parker, but instead begged that he be spared—are considered taboo by many. And evidence that some of the Alamo defenders were motivated by their desire to retain ownership of their slaves rather than be subject to Mexico’s prohibition of the practice is regarded by many Alamo traditionalists, including many elected officials, as incendiary. Yet the need to tell a more accurate, inclusive story of the Alamo, especially given that the site is located in the middle of the country’s largest majority-Hispanic city, seems undeniable.

---------------------------

The 2014 report recommended that the site tell the story of the centuries-long sweep of the Alamo’s existence. And it proposed doing so in a history museum that would take longer than ten minutes to breeze through. It also recommended closing the streets in front of the Alamo and moving the Cenotaph, which badly needed repairs, outside the walls of the Alamo. The sixty-foot-tall monument to the Texans who fell at the battle is a twentieth-century creation; its relatively recent vintage, it was felt, violated the historical integrity of the fort.

That’s where George P. Bush entered the picture. He moved into Texas politics at flank speed, winning a 2014 statewide election in his first bid for public office. His timing was opportune. Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, the GOP convinced itself that it needed to reach out to Hispanic voters, and a photogenic, Spanish-speaking, half-Mexican heir to the party’s greatest political dynasty must have looked like the man for the job.

When he assumed the land commissioner job in 2015, Bush was on board with the master plan produced by Castro’s citizens’ committee. Bush, a former high school history teacher, was even on board with the city’s requirement, in its lease with the state, that the site not focus solely on the thirteen famous days in 1836 and instead teach the warts-and-all, three-hundred-year-long history of the site. “The Alamo can be a centerpiece for taking on the controversial issues of the past,” he said at the same Texas Tribune Festival panel that Collins appeared on, specifically mentioning slavery, Mexican control of Texas, and Spanish colonization.

This was in late September 2016, when nearly everyone believed that Donald Trump’s coarse pluto-populism, including his invective against Hispanic migrants, was going to doom him to defeat in the presidential race. The GOP’s elite was still committed to a multicultural future for the party, and Bush was all in with that vision. In 2015 he toured Gettysburg National Military Park, in Pennsylvania, to get a sense of how to create a historical site that balanced fact and legend. San Antonio City Council member Roberto Treviño, who cochaired the Alamo Plaza Advisory Committee, joined him for the trip, and came away convinced of Bush’s sincerity. “I had the impression all of us on the trip had the same vision for the Alamo,” Treviño says.

---------------------------------------------------------

But the issue that really brought the situation to a boil was the plan to remove the Cenotaph for repairs and then relocate it just outside the footprint of the Alamo fort.

This move had drawn little complaint earlier. But in 2017 the world had changed. The violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in May spurred many across the country to engage in a reckoning with America’s racist past. Statues of Confederate soldiers were removed from cities all over the U.S. In September, San Antonio removed a Confederate statue in Travis Park—without public notice, in the middle of the night—and sent it to an undisclosed location, ostensibly for repairs. That clandestine removal set off alarms among the state’s more militant Alamo traditionalists, who were now convinced that the plan to repair the Cenotaph was a lie, and that Bush planned to stick it in storage somewhere.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Thu May 27, 2021 5:33 am

I was watching a movie, but I didn't quite understand the premise of the racket in the movie:


So I found this article that really helps explain what was going on.

https://erenow.net/biographies/the-outf ... rld/10.php


Some quotes seem remarkably timeless.
Appearing before McFarland’s committee, the heads of both AT&T and Western Union played dumb, attempting to convince the probers that they had no inkling of who leased their lines or for what purpose. An exchange between the committee and Western Union’s Assistant Vice President Walter Semingsen was typical and revealing. McFarland’s interrogation of Semingsen is worth reprinting at length, so revelatory it is about the upperworld’s attitude toward, and involvement in, the propagation of organized crime. The ludicrous back-and-forth comprises dozens of pages of testimony, with exchanges that presaged both the self-serving responses of the jukebox manufacturers, and the end-of-century strained testimony by tobacco-company executives professing that nicotine is not addictive. At one point in the hearings, Senators Tobey and McFarland expressed disbelief when the company VP claimed to have no interest in what was being transmitted over the company’s wires:

Semingsen: “We have no way of knowing about illegal use of these facilities until the law-enforcement authorities so inform us.”

Tobey: “What do you think goes on? . . . The point is that these [wire] messages are their means of doing business and carry information on which the bets are based. Is that not correct?”

Semingsen: “I do not know.”

Tobey: “What do you think they are used for?”

Semingsen: “I have never been in any of the establishments, and I could not tell you personally.”

Senator McFarland then ticked off the names of dozens of “racing information” parlors in different states that leased the wires, asking, one by one, what Semingsen believed they did with the information. To each query Semingsen’s responses were similar: “I have not the slightest idea,” “I have no way of knowing,” “I have not the slightest idea how they make use of the information.” Tobey then began to lose his temper.

Tobey: “Do you know what the trouble is in this country? Nobody accepts responsibility . . . We know that these lines are being used for disseminating race track information. We know it is so; you know it is so. A child six years old knows that.”

Semingsen: “I disagree with you. We do not know it is so.”

Tobey: “Do you mean to stand there and say, under oath, that in your judgment you do not know that these leases are being used for disseminating race track information? . . . When you carry the information into the state where bookmaking is illegal, you become an accessory after the fact, do you not?”

Semingsen: “You are assuming that all these persons to whom we are leasing facilities are bookmakers.”

Tobey: “No; I do not assume that at all. I assume some of them are, and so do you . . . The moral law - the law of society - does not interest you a bit, as long as you get the revenue; is that right? . . . Western Union is a necessary cog when the Western Union is used to accept money from the bettor and transmit it to the bettee, through their offices, by accepting the money and paying out at the other end on the facts circumscribed in the telegram; is that right?”

Semingsen: “That is correct.”

Tobey: “I should think - and I say this without prejudice - that certainly makes Western Union a party to the illegal transaction of business, because in some states those things are illegal.”

Semingsen: “ . . . I do not know what the laws are.”

In the end, not one director or employee of Western Union or AT&T was ever charged with collusion in the bookmaking racket. The huge profits they reaped from illegal betting were somehow deemed beyond the law, whereas countless underworld bookies in the Outfit and other crime consortiums regularly faced the prospect of hard time.

In contrast to the free ride given to the white-collar criminals, Moe Annenberg felt the full weight of the government’s muscle. In 1935, the combative, omnipresent Elmer Irey focused his attention on Annenberg’s operation. Instead of investigating “the backbone of the wire service,” Western Union, its stockholders, or board of directors (such as Vincent Astor, Percy Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, William Truesdale, Donald Geddes, William Vanderbilt, W. A. Harriman, and Jay Cooke), Irey’s IRS chose to persecute the most recent immigrants, such as Annenberg, to have become millionaires. After all, Western Union’s founder, Ezra Cornell, had long ago legitimized his company when he endowed Cornell University. For Annenberg and the gangsters, this lack of prestige-purchasing turned out to be a key oversight.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby Dukasaur on Thu May 27, 2021 9:50 am

Yup. That is ever the way.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Sat Aug 14, 2021 3:50 pm

Despite every cell in my body containing a Y chromosome, I can declare myself a lady?
Thank God for algebra...

https://thecritic.co.uk/how-algebra-cures-wokeness/
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Mon Aug 16, 2021 6:57 am

Meanwhile, in Canada:
“This pandemic is not over,” Justin Trudeau, who said in May that “nobody wants an election before the end of this pandemic,” told reporters on Sunday outside Rideau Hall. So today he was calling an election. It only hurts if you try to make it make sense.

The Liberal leader hopes the electoral system he promised to end in 2015 will work its distorting magic and give him a majority in the House of Commons with a plurality of votes. A vaccine mandate that wasn’t federal government policy before Friday and won’t be implemented before Halloween had already, he said, become the measure of any party’s seriousness. Meanwhile his government stands ready to protect Afghans whose plight it ignored in 2017; they need only apply to a Canadian embassy that had closed a few hours earlier until further notice.


https://www.macleans.ca/politics/electi ... ing-begin/
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Tue Sep 28, 2021 9:27 am

Posting to save this thread from page 2.

https://www.nongnu.org/enigma/download.html

It only took 7 years but the next version of Enigma is out. This if for people with proper mice; touchscreens and trackpads won't work.
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Re: The DoomYoshi Musings thread

Postby DoomYoshi on Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:22 am

Prime number of the day: 8269

Non-prime integer of the day: 9082

Evenly divisble by 3 number of the day: 3051

The fourth-best number today is 1153

Way down in 27th place, you can find 325. Other than that, it's all 4-digit numbers.
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