Joining The Herd Of Lemmings
I’ve had cause to consider a few things. Maybe we’re going about it the wrong way, and we need to ditch Trump
Yeah, NO
Trump all the way! Why? Because being hated by the people who hate him is a sign of impeccable character, that’s why.
The haters can go fuck themselves with rusty twelve gauge bore brushes. I’d prefer ten gauge but that’s kind of scarce, so…I’m willing to compromise.
The RINO’s Dilemma
The RINOs who who have burrowed in and taken over most GOP organizations, from the state down to local organizations, have quite a dilemma on their hands, and most of them have their heads too far up their asses to realize it.
OK, I’m not talking about the liberal in a Republican area, who knows they’re in the wrong party, but is there because it’s the only game in their town; they hope to capture a nomination someday, at which point they’re guaranteed to be elected…otherwise, they never will be. These people are a hazard in any heavily conservative area.
No, I’m talking about the guys who are a little bit conservative and want to do some good by going into politics, and they’re in a closely matched area, closely enough that they can join the party they are most aligned with and still have a chance. They think the Democrats…particularly the ones who end up running for office…are nuts.
They don’t think much better of the Deplorable types, either. A bunch of bumpkins whose hearts are in the right place, mostly…OK a bit extreme. But they think Deplorables can’t understand that first you have to get elected, then work within the system to change things…a slow process. They genuinely want many of the things Deplorables want…just not as much. The government is spending too much. Or they need to spend money on highways instead of welfare for illegal immigrants. But they want to work within the system to get these things done.
Or maybe they think things are pretty close to ideal right now, and they want to nail it in place.
The problem is, that means they don’t stand for anything in particular. And it shows. They’re about as unappetizing to the electorate as a puddle of dog vomit. The folks in the middle, who they think they are appealing to because they themselves are not extreme, would honestly prefer a clear-spoken radical to someone who qualifies everything they say to the point where they sound like they don’t believe anything at all.
The problem these “Mild RINOs” have, is they just can’t see that. And the reason they just can’t see that, is their entire sense of self-worth is tied up in not seeing that. In their minds, they’ve worked tirelessly for their party, to keep those crazy Democrats out…only to have to constantly fight with a small number of crazy Republicans–who are only liabilities if they end up as candidates. They’ve fought the good fight, and if they can just find the right candidate, someone with some charisma, they might stop the crazies…without being too beholden to the OTHER crazies. In the meantime it’s not working. What’s a responsible guy in politics to do?
They simply cannot understand that the Republicans can’t succeed as the party of nothing in particular. Not really in the past, and certainly not today when people are starting to realize that no matter what they do in the voting booth, the country is still about to fly off a precipice. If they did see it, they’d suddenly have two choices: Go away and let the GOP succeed, or stay and fight. But “go away” isn’t really an option, because what’s the point of having a party now owned by the crazies, win?
Well, they have a dilemma…and WE, therefore have a problem. And we would have that problem even IF they realized that they had a problem…that they were the problem.
No one ever thinks they are the bad guy. Even Epstein probably thought he was the good guy. Right up to the moment where he didn’t kill himself.
So if you ever wonder why these unappetizing dufuses cling on even when their fingernails are being left behind…that’s why. They don’t understand no one wants them, and can’t imagine that no one should want them. And oftentimes their greatest pride is in all the hard work they’ve done for the party. They’re not going to give that up; it’d be psychological suicide.
If you’ve worked with these people, there’s a good chance you like them and consider some of them your friends. But even if so…we’re going to have to give them a good, hard shove. Because America is more important than those milquetoasts’ egos.
Justice Must Be Done
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot (i.e., paper) Prices
Last week:
Gold $1,948.50
Silver $23.68
Platinum $1,015.00
Palladium $1,459.00
Rhodium $7,450.00
This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.
Gold $1,961.70
Silver $24.38
Platinum $1,018.00
Palladium $1,356.00
Rhodium $7,100.00
Silver up a decent amount. Gold a bit less so (and it went down a few bucks on Friday). Palladium and rhodium continue to slide which either means, someone is finally mining the stuff and meeting the demand, or…the economy is in a world of hurt. (The problem is they tend to piggyback on platinum mining, and no one is bothering with platinum because it’s been a glut on the market for years.)
Arbitrary Powers
No, this is not political, even though our would-be overlords are exercising arbitrary powers.
The last two posts on e and π have probably bent a few minds as people read them. I talked about some pretty wacky arithmetic…and it is arithmetic. Some few people here might not know what fractional and negative powers mean, or that they can even exist, so I’m going to take a break and bring ’em up to speed. Then I’ll bring in the Taylor series.
It seems like it would be a bit tricky multiplying an irrational number by itself, or even by some other irrational number. If it’s a rational number, even a repeating decimal, you can do the multiplication with fractions (where you get an exact answer), then if necessary convert to a decimal. But when the number doesn’t end as a decimal and can’t be represented as a fraction what do you do? You can just take it out to about twice as many digits as you need, do the multiplication, then throw away the digits you don’t need….only some of them at the end were wrong anyway. But that’s not really satisfying to mathematicians (engineers settle for it, because this is the real world and computers can only go so far for rendering numbers–there is a whole branch of mathematics devoted to estimating the errors in approximations).
And especially in the post on e, I talked about raising numbers to fractional powers. OK…at first blush, that is just plain screwy. e you might have a grip on. e2…well you multiply e x e. And e15…well it’s a lot of work and even the most sadistic math teacher wouldn’t expect that done longhand, but you just multiply 1.0 times e, then repeat..a total of fifteen times. But what in the heck does it mean to raise e to the 2.4th power? e2.4 is 1.0 times e…2.4 times. But multiplication is a single operation, you can’t do 4/10ths of a multiplication. It’s either done or it’s not done. And that’s not because e is irrational and transcendental, you have the same issue with 2x.
A similar question arises when someone talks about raising a number to a negative power…what does it mean to multiply 1 by x…negative three times? That one’s a bit easier, and I’ll give you a hint up front…division is the opposite of multiplication. Read on for the answer.
Yet with all these questions about what powers other than 1, 2, 3, etc. mean, you see a nice smooth graph of ex, like this one, with values drawn in between the integer powers:
You’ll note that the line goes through x=1, x=2 and so forth as if it’s meaningful to raise e to any power…fractions, compound numbers, irrational numbers, transcendental numbers, you-name-it. How do we know that line is smooth between e1 and e2, e2 and e3, and so forth, instead of jiggling all over the place in some wacky way that only just has to cross through the integer powers?
Well, it seems fairly intuitive that e2.5, whatever the heck it means, should be somewhere between e2 and e3. And that e2.25 really ought to be somewhere between e2 and e2.5. Follow that one far enough and you have a plausible argument that whatever that line should do, it should climb the whole way between e squared and e cubed, and not jiggle around. That’s not a solid proof, but a fairly strong suggestion. And of course that still leaves the possibility of the line being straight or even convex upward between the knowable, sensible points.
But we can actually go there, in a much more rigorous way–and the graph has it right. Nice smooth curve.
Consider what it means to raise some number, like, say, two, to an integer power…like, say, ten. In other words, 210. That;s simply 2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2·2 = 1024 (and that’s where You-Know-Who’s fraction of Indian (feather, not dot) ancestry comes from).
What happens if you multiply 24 by 23? Let’s see…that’s 2·2·2·2 multiplied by 2·2·2…which is to say, 2·2·2·2·2·2·2 or 27. And 7 happens to be 4 + 3. That’s not a coincidence. Provided you’re working from the same base, here 2 in both cases, (rather than doing 24 times 35, where they are different) you simply add the exponents. That’s a quick shortcut in algebra, where you might have to multiply x4 by x3. You just write x7. (But if you’re faced with x4 multiplied by y3, you’re stuck with x4y3.)
You can similarly divide by subtracting exponents, because dividing is the opposite of multiplying, and subtracting is the opposite of addition. So: x4/ x3 is x4-3 = x1 = x. Or written out, x·x·x·x/x·x·x. The three xs on the bottom cancel out three xs on top leaving you with x. And if the latter number is bigger than the first number, you end up with a negative power. That means more xs on the bottom, and (if you’re dealing with x3-4, you end up with x–1 = 1/x.
So a negative power is just the reciprocal of the same positive power. Thus x-3 is 1/x3, etc.
And you now know that any number raised to the zeroth power is 1. In other words, x0 = 1, no matter what x is. Don’t believe me? Do some algebra. Divide x2 by x2 to get 1, then do the same thing by subtracting the exponents.
OK, now for the next trick. There is a number–let’s call it s, which, when you square it, gives you 2. So s2 is 2. Or, s·s = 2. Or strictly speaking, s·s = 21. But we’ve already seen that you can get a number, raised to a power, by raising that number to other powers and adding the powers. So, you could figure s is two raised to some power, and multiply them together, like this 2p·2p=21. So what is p then? What is the one number, which when added to itself equals one? That’s ½.
So we have: 2½·2½=21.
Of course, s, which is equal to 2½, is simply the square root of 2. So…raising a number to the 1/2 power gives you its square root. And raising a number to its 1/3 power is the same as taking its cube root. And so on. That means to take the nth root of a number…you can divide the exponent, whatever it is, by n. The cube root of some number, x, is symbolized by first writing x as x1, so that it has an exponent…then dividing the exponent by 3.
So do you want to know what 22.4 is? Now we can figure it out. It’s 22 x 21/5 x 21/5 because 2.4 = 2+1/5+1/5. Or you can treat it as 212/5. To compute that, multiply 1 by 2…repeating 11 times for a total of 12 multiplications. Then take the fifth root.
No, I am not suggesting you do this, but at least now you can see what a calculator might be doing behind the scenes when you enter 2, then xy, then 2.4.
How about raising the power of some number, to yet another number? Like, say, raising 2 to the third power, then raising that to the fourth power? In other words, (23)4? Well, let’s see, that would be (23)·(23)·(23)·(23) which we already know you can figure out by adding 3+3+3+3 to get 212. But it’s also multiplying 3 by 4 to get 12. So when you raise a power to another power, you multiply the two exponents. (And again the base…the number you’re raising…has to match–in this case it will match.)
I said a couple of paragraphs ago that your calculator might be raising a number to a power, then taking some root of it, to compute a fractional power. But it’s probably not. Taking some weird root of a number is hard. (It’s easier using certain tricks, but still…) There is instead something called the Taylor Series. And unfortunately, deriving it requires calculus, but it can be used for any “infinitely differentiable” (i.e., “smooth-curve”) function.
You use it to approximate the value of some function that might be otherwise very hard to compute. Just run it out as far as you like; eventually you’ll see your answer isn’t changing enough to change the last digit on the calculator’s display, and you stop. (That’s called “converging on the value.”)
Here’s the full Taylor series. Don’t worry too much about it; it’s about to get much simpler.
(For calculus geeks and the brave: A is some number you want to start from; most of the time that just gets set to zero and when you do that, it’s called the Maclaurin series. The fs with all the tick marks are derivatives of the function f. And the ! notation means to multiply a number by all the smaller numbers, so 6! is 6x5x4x3x2x1=720.)
As I said, you can use any smooth function here. And it just so happens that raising a positive number to the power x gives you a smooth function. So we can use the Taylor/Maclaurin series.
If that number you’re raising happens to be e then it gets very simple. The Taylor series for ex simplifies as follows if a=0…because the derivatives of ex are all themselves ex. So you’re taking ex of zero…over and over again. But that’s just one. And with a equals zero all of those (x-a)s become simply x. So you’re left with:
(Sorry if you don’t know calculus…you can take my word for it…or dig, somewhere. If you can’t dig, ask other people who know calculus to confirm I’m not just some guy on the internet bullshitting you…rather, I’m just some guy on the internet actually giving you the straight dope. Will miracles never cease?)
Notice One Very Cool Thing: You’re computing ex without actually using the number e. And you’re doing it without having to take some weird root of the number for a fractional case. And x can be a fraction, a compound number, the square root of 2, some negative version of any of these…you name it! It’s all multiplication, division, and addition. You just have to keep going until it converges. Which, granted, might be a long time.
Yes, it’s a lot of arithmetic…but arithmetic is what calculators do.
I just set this up in a spreadsheet. Each term is simply x/n times the previous term, then you add them all up. So if I raise e1, it converges on 2.718281828 after twelve steps (and you’re just adding 1+1+1/2+1/6+1/24+1/120…). So you can compute e this way, as far out as you like. However, if I raise e10, it takes 35 steps to converge on 22,026.46579. The farther away from zero you get, the longer it will take to converge. Your calculator would probably take some shortcuts; I could guess what they are (and bore you, if I haven’t already) and probably be wrong anyway.
OK, well that’s bloody nice, you might be saying. But what if I want to raise some other number to a fractional exponent? Like, say, ten? Surely ten is a more useful base than friggin’ e is! So….just for an example, what’s 103.7?
This series can help you do that!
There is some number, call it q, that if you raise e to that power, you get 10. In other words, eq=10. Or in yet other words, q is the natural logarithm of 10, q = ln(10). (Apparently ln was chosen as the symbol for this by the French…or some other language that would want to put “natural” after “logarithm.”)
[Logarithms deserve their own post…and they’re not going to get one, at least not in this little miniseries. Suffice it to say you can figure out what two numbers multiplied together is…by adding their logarithms. Calculators probably use them a lot, too, inside and behind the scenes.]
How does that help us? Well, your original problem, “what’s 103.7?” is equivalent to “what’s (eq)3.7? But we already know that that is the same as: eq·3.7. Remember how you multiply exponents, to take the exponent of an exponent? And we know how to raise e to any power; use the series!
You just need to know what the natural log of your desired base is. And your desired base can be anything…a fraction, an irrational number…you name it, as long as you can get there by raising e to some notional power, you can use it. You just need to know what that notional power actually is.
Well, guess what, there’s a Taylor series for that too, a series for ln(x). I’m not going to hit you with that, though, because it won’t matter down the road. Suffice it to say natural logs are readily obtainable…naturally.
OK…so where are we?
We went from wondering how the heck you can raise numbers to negative and fractional values, and wondering how to raise an irrational, even transcendental, number like e to a power…to realizing that fractional and negative powers actually do mean something, and being able to raise e to any fractional or negative value without even having to use the number e to do it, using nothing but multiplication, division and addition. Pretty slick. And going from there to being able to raise any real number to any real power.
You might not be impressed but your calculator loves it.
Fuck Joe B*d*n
Due to complaints about foul language, I’ve censored the most objectionable word in the title of this section.
B*d*n, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.
(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
A lot of the problem is that people are taught half of what they’ll need to know about, say, exponents…..and then are given YEARS to forget all that before they are taught anything more.
Coothie, you asked about Benedryl and ponies yesterday.
First, the smell of smoke has arrived in my neck of the woods and my allergies have gone nutz … DARN IT!!!
…
Ponies DO get allergies, either heaves (sort of like asthma where they cough and their lungs fill up and they can die.) Also they can get hives from insect stings or they get runny eyes. I actually have one pony allergic to hay (The mold in the hay to be precise.)
So far it has ALWAYS been the ‘red heads’ who have the problems.
It used to be you could get Tri-Hist Granules## that worked for 12 hours. It is in a corn meal base and very easy to feed. Unfortunately the product contained Sudafed so it was taken off the market and now we have NOTHING to replace it. For a while my vet gave me Guaifenesin which is used to help clear mucus or phlegm from the lungs in humans. However he found it was pretty useless in ‘heavy’ horses and quit prescribing it. So that leaves OTC benedryl. I grind up 2 caplets per 100 lbs of body weight. I spread molasses on bread and then add the powder — CAREFULLY — and try to get the molasses to ‘wet out’ the powder without having the powder spill onto the bread. A real PITA!! The powder likes to sit on top of the molasses and NOT mix so it takes a while to get the powder coated.
The powder is very bitter and Hubby did not mix it well one time. I now have a pony who panics at the sight of a slice of bread. 🙄 So with him I use a LOT of molasses mixed with the powder and placed in a syringe. I layer it. pure molasses/ medicated molasses/ pure molasses so he gets the proper dose.
…
## I am going to have to ask the vet if I can now get it via prescription although now it has more than doubled in price.
Gail Combs
Yesterday, the air quality index of 113 in the Raleigh-Durham area was the worst one has ever experienced. You could smell the smoke in the atmosphere even in the house with the windows closed. The atmosphere was filled with a weird-looking “haze.” They closed the golf course that backs up to one’s property for the day.
Today’s index isn’t much better.
Ours has gone up higher, but is still under 50 in east TN. Got some rain coming tomorrow night and Monday that will help.
But there are times you can really smell the smoke and see the haze in areas that normally don’t have it.
113, really? We were thanking God when it got DOWN to 113, as it had been 350+ for an extended period. You don’t even want to know how it looked and smelled. On the candy-ass east coast.
What a tiny bunch of self-absorbed jackasses this place has become – going around your cul-de-sac.
I realized I had not signed out. Done deal.
I must be sporting an iron lung or something but in my neck of the woods in Cali there were so many times it was bad smoke and ash but I never heard of many having hospital visits and major issues other than it being irritating.
Is there something in this Canadian smoke, like chemicals or something ?
It passed over East Palestine Ohio.
Candy Ass East coast.
hahahahahah right ?!
Mainly jus funnin.
But DC area and NYC, candy asses.
BQQM!
I was at a Fish Club meeting, talking with one of the guys, and mentioned Candy Ass East Coast — and he said, “that’s just what my wife calls ’em.”
Right. Almost 400 air quality for an extended period, right here in NJ, the candy-ass east coast. As I said above, we were happy when it went DOWN to 113. What a jerk.
Cali has a lot of eucalyptus which is used on inhalants. May counterbalance the smoke
Ozzy – just a note. You are using an email hider, and that is why all your comments went into moderation. You have to use your regular email to show up with all the bells and whistles, and not be a “guest”. OTOH, you can now comment as a guest using the email hider, and it should post.
good. I think the email hider is automatic.
I am impressed, and my calculator wishes I would use this sometimes instead of just adding numbers and figuring percentages. 😀
Sadly, calculators seem to make people less familiar with numbers — they want to stuff ’em in a box and hit “equals” instead of thinking about what they are doing.
There’s a famous tale of a young mathematician in Elementary School. The teacher, looking to fill time, had the entire class add up the numbers from 1 to 100. This kid (IIRC, Goethe), popped up with “5,050” before the class even got rolling.
He reasoned as following — take the first number, 1, and the last number, 100 — they add to 101. Then, take the second number, 2, and the second-to-last number, 99 — and they also add to 101. If he kept doing that 50 times, he’d end up with 50 and 51 — which still add up to 101. Fifty times 101 is 5050.
If he’d taken the “easy” way and used a calculator, he’d still be punching numbers….but he lived in a pre-calculator world. He had learned to understood numbers in a different way.
Interesting!
Yes…so now everyone is taught (and then forgets) n*(n+1) / 2 is how to compute a “triangular number”
I was asked a question at an interview. You have a list of numbers, 1-10000, but one number is missing–and they’re not in order. Figure out which one is missing.
Correct answer….add them up and see by how much the answer deviates from that formula.
Sad to say I didn’t see it until they started explaining it to me then I felt like a dufus.
Then, again, I always liked the one about the student measuring the height of a building with a barometer….
“Find the Building Super. Offer to give him the barometer if he tells you the height of the building.”
Method 2: Drop the barometer and time its fall.
Another method — pick a sunny day and measure their shadows….
Sell the barometer at a pawn shop (or to a passing stranger) and get a subway ticket. Go downtown to City Hall and ask to review the permits for the building…..
Going to wikipedia and using the first of the two pendulum methods (the one where you swing it on the end of a short string at both the top and bottom of the building) seems to me would require a very accurate clock, more so than was available for less then four figures back then. (The other one, making a pendulum the height of the building, assumes absolute dead calm weather.)
My favorite of the physics solutions is tossing the thing off the roof and timing its fall. Straightforward physics from Galileo/Newton’s day, first or second week physics; nothing that came afterwards. Stone knives and bearskins
In case you’re wondering, the “official” answer is to use the barometer to measure air pressure at the top and bottom of the building. A pesky kid refused to give the “official” answer on a test and got an F. He was offered a “make-up” and took it, using a different method which was not “official” — so he got an F. Then he sued, and made the school system eat their stupid question — slowly, chewing it thoroughly.
Ah, it is said that this was raised in an academic setting — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question
It’s a very old story. Poor kid was bored.
Actually I’d likely have listed the three alternates…then written a note saying “But I know this isn’t what you’re looking for so…” and then summarized the “correct answer” briefly enough to make it clear I knew damned well what it was, but without going into TOO much detail.
Nothing like a Smart Ass Kid that is really really intelligent.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: ALWAYS check if the kid has lawyers for parents, BEFORE you pull stupid commie schiff on the kid.
And accommodate the kids’ intelligence. Encourage them instead of punishing them.
They used to sort kids by intelligence so the teachers could make the correct adjustments based on the kids abilities.
Then the Commies got into the act. So now they mix the kids and give Ritalin to the intelligent kids to MAKE them like the slower kids….
And NO I AM NOT KIDDING!
I can not find the article I want, No doubt it is long gone, but I did find this:
Ritalin stunts growth of children; long-term risk to children’s health unknown
Get the kids OFF sugar and caffeine and ON to bikes or other good exercise! There was a reason we had a bit of ‘recess’ before classes started and again after lunch as well as Gym. Kids NEED to run around just like puppies or kittens or goat kids!
Ritalin ‘may cause damage to brains’
https://web.archive.org/web/20050209042116/http://www.srmhp.org/0201/adhd.html
…
http://archive.azcentral.com/families/education/articles/0801back-ritalin-ON.html
They are DELIBERATELY destroying our children and have been for decades.
^^^ This. This. This!
I am fortunate that in the early years (1st-4th grade) I had teachers with the good sense to just let me run loose at my own pace.
Then I ran into the Never To Be Named asswipe who taught fifth grade. I hated him; my mother hated him. I lived through it and overcame, obviously. But someone like that could have done permanent damage in first grade.
Grrr! My oldest son had such a teacher in 5th/6th grade combined class. His doc that diagnosed ADHD when I thought he had dyslexia (he’d get the beginning & end of a word correct but just make up the middle) said if he had another year with that teacher he could be scarred for life. Fortunately she left that school & his issues eventually dissipated to some degree.
Probably teaching gender theory now
Good guess but I Really hope not!
Have things Finally lighted up there on the former prison planet? Hope you & yours are doing OK…AND it’s Really Good to see you!!!
We are ok. Skullduggery in politics-wrap up smear but the wheels are coming off as the messages between lefty journo and alleged sa victim nave been leaked
Glad you’re OK! Despise the ubiquitous corruption…grrr
Someone like that was given to you totemper you. Teach you self control, humility and to open your eyes to crap wearing the cloak of authority
“Nothing like a Smart Ass Kid that is really really intelligent.” Q-Tree club motto? 😂
Now they too busy indoctrinating them in woke genderbull to worry about maths
With a spread of shit on the paper?
The real question we are thinking is Was that you?
How hot is it?
building vary in height depending on the ambient temp
before/without abacus &/or slide rule? Neither of which I know I how to use…
Slide rule: MAJOR application for logarithms…
I got into higher math just a few years after slide rules had been superseded by calculators. So I know about them in theory, but would really struggle to use one (and the fancy ones have all sorts of scales on them to do really clever things; I don’t know what they’re all for). I do have my dad’s slide rule…it was top of the line.
The thing about slide rules is that you can multiply 6.3 x 10^4 and 2.7 x 10^3, but you have to keep track of the 10^7 part yourself.
Precisely.
Sorry, overcome by flashbacks…..
If you’re looking for financial information about any public company, you can look for it here — https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch
If you want to see a quarterly report, that’s a 10-Q. An annual report is a 10-K. In it, they include financial statements.
When you’re maintaining the books of a company, everything has to balance to the penny. When you’re presenting financial statements to the US markets and the SEC, you typically round to the millions or something…..
The thing is, the stuff on the page has to add up.
Let’s say you have 10.4 + 10.4 + 10.4 + 10.9 = 42.1.
Then you round it to even numbers and it says 10 + 10 + 10 + 11 = 42.
So someone, generally a junior staff member, has to manually screw around with rounding to make it 10 + 11 + 10 + 11 = 42.
You have to preserve the big number, the 42. You can’t change a number that will have to be changed back in a subsequent year — so you can’t revalue your headquarters building. You can’t change a number that shows up in a bunch of different parts of the financials. You can’t change anything that the CFO has mentioned in a conference call….but you have to bury the rounding discrepancy — and there’s no automated way of doing it (at least, back when I was involved).
Two ways to solve that, neither of which will actually happen: Report down to the penny. or B) train people to accept that sometimes roundoffs do weird things. 2.4 + 2.4 = 4.8. Rounding: 2+2 = 5. Deal with it.
There was some fictional End Times book I read way back, I think it was written by the late Christian author & financial “guru” Larry Burkett. Anyway his creative solution to funding the survivors of the Apocalypse was to somehow take the fractional pennies of bank rounding calculations & collect them in an account for use by the latter day Christians. He made is sound “legal” & plausible…if only we could get those crumbs from our “masters'” tables, hmmm 😉
Same gimmick as in Office Space.
I’ve never seen/read that…
You need to see the movie “Office Space”. It explains a lot of Silicon Valley.
I’ll try to look for that at some point. I know hubby watched “Pirates of Silicon Valley” way back in the day 🙂
🤣
You should, it’s iconic. A fair number of memes are based on it.
TY for the tip 🙂
I promise, it is worth watching.
Looking forward to it 🙂
And have the wit to realize that your 1.7 answer is actually times 10^8. (Yes I did that on the rule–then checked on a calculator…I only lost the 4th digit; answer should be 1.701 x 10^8). I think it’s safe to say that if you have to use the right index on the slide as described in your video, you have to bump your answer a power–which he didn’t mention unless I dozed through that.
My dad has/had a slide rule somewhere. I’ll have to see if he can pull it out & explain some of how that worked. Could be an interesting homeschool project for when the grandkids get a bit older 🙂
Yes…that would deepen their understanding. Plus who knows if we are going to end up in a “dark ages” with no electrical power?
I read a novel one time where a group of soldiers was marooned on a Medieval world. The commander had a pocket calculator. He made sure to copy off a table of logarithms before the irreplaceable battery died…because that will be useful for a long, long time with no calculators in existence.
I read a novel where some type of space time wormhole effect dropped a small section of modern America into the midst of the Hundred Years War (actually 30 years war), like in Germany I believe. I think it was called 1517 or some other year…oops, 1632. Very interesting to see how modern theories could be adapted to make middle ages situations & industry so much more productive. AND finding a way to meld disparate times & cultures. I got one of my history buff kids to read it too 🙂
Ring of Fire Main Line Novels #11632
Eric Flint
4.05
12,413 ratings914 reviews
FREEDOM AND JUSTICE — AMERICAN STYLE 1632 And in northern Germany things couldn’t get much worse. Famine. Disease. Religous war laying waste the cities. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy. 2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia, and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn’s sister (including the entire local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time. THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED…. When the dust settles, Mike leads a group of armed miners to find out what happened and finds the road into town is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell: a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter attacked by men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don’t have to ask who to shoot. At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of the Thirty Years’ War.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16967.1632
I had heard of that book…maybe I should seek it out.
I enjoyed it but never went on to read the series.
Sounds very American and I can think of several people I would love to torment with this.
It was very American, including having modern people basically re-install the Constitution & adapt it to times before America even existed!
YUP, I have my Dad’s slide rule and used it but, I am not sure I could use it now. Calculators were made but VERY pricey when I hit college.
Same here, I think I have it packed in his memories box to pass down. He taught me how to use it back then, I would be clueless now.
I know we’ve had this conversation before. I was able to find the instruction book online. Unlike Cooth’s video his didn’t have an A scale for finding squares/square roots…it had a scale that was double length (and wrapped) for square roots. You put the slider on the D scale for the number you wanted to extract the square root of, then picked one of two halves of the scale to read the answer off of (and there was text to tell you which one to use, based on the number of digits). There was yet another triple-length, wrapped scale for qube roots. I guess if you need a fifth root, you were SOL or had to divide the logarithm by five. And yes, I have some tables of logarithms too (CRC Handbooks if nothing else). Ready for Stone Age Computing.
The front side also has the trig scales on it, plus one scale that runs backwards (not sure what that’s for). The other side is a mystery to me since I’ve forgotten what the manual said.
I have no idea what the thing cost new, but I am sure it was expensive.
An abacus is an adding machine. Slide rules multiply using logarithms and force people to understand magnitudes.
Yep. All over Robert A. Heinlein…”Did you drop a decimal?” for “Are you out of your mind? Are you having a brainfart?” Something you could do on a slide rule, but won’t happen on a calculator.
But first I need to attempt to understand logarithms LOL AND I’m not sure I want to work that hard any more 😉
You don’t need to fully understand logarithms to use a slipstick.
I saw what he did but don’t understand Why that would work that way…hopefully Dad can enlighten me 🙂 He loves to recall how he helped me with some high school math by asking me a series of questions & forcing me to figure it out & in my adolescent arrogance I huffed away, after completing the assignment, & saying that he’d been no help at all, even though his questions forced me to work my way through the problems…a necessary life skill ❤
The more you want to know about why, the more you have to know about logarithms.
AND it’s the weekend so it’s almost straying into punishment territory LOL
Yeah, what he said was correct, but doesn’t tell you why it works. He’s teaching a procedure, which is liable to be somewhat complicated (try with the left index, then the right index…) If you understand the why, the procedure almost doesn’t need to be taught at all (though sometimes there’s a handy trick that’s not obvious at first so it’s worth listening to the teacher drone on about what seems painfully obvious to you even if not to anyone else).
It’s one of those things you’d eventually get the feel of…multiplying two numbers that start out with 3 or higher, you’ll end up bumping up a digit in your answer so you’ll want the right hand index and don’t have to waste time trying the other one.
concepts underpinning actions are always helpful for my way of thinking!
nor slapstick, which is more at my level here in the cheap seats 😉
Ah! You beat me to it!!! 😂
Score!!!
Hilarious. Three Stooges were great stuff.
We AND our kids grew up on this stuff!
found on #counteroffensive. Seems slightly applicable.
Well you’d be slightly not wrong 😉
And you don’t need to understand them at all for slapstick.
Logarithms are the opposite of the exponential functions such as e^x or 10^a or 2^n. To the extent that these exponential functions also are called antilogs.
The practical utility, which was big before the days of calculators, was that in order to multiply or divide some large numbers, it was easier to take the logarithms of them, (done by looking their digits up in a table) then add or subtract these, then do the antilog (the exponent, look for the value of this in the logarithm table, using it in the opposite direction) on the sum or difference, in order to convert back to what is the product or quotient.
This will work no matter whether the base of the logarithm and the antilog is e, 10, 2, or anything else, but as most practical numbers are decimal, the base-10 logarithms were the most useful for this.
So they were a form of a shortcut mathematically speaking…as long as one had access to the table (or perhaps the slide rule?) so Not knowing How to “do” a log wasn’t necessarily the issue but being able to Use a log table (when & how) was?
The funky scale on the slide rule is spaced out according to the logarithms. That’s actually why the same actual distance on the line is always the same ratio of numbers on the scale. So without realizing it you’re adding the logarithms of of the numbers, but since the actual numbers are printed on the scale, you read off the “antilog” when you’re done. The slide rule basically mechanizes the process of looking up the two logarithms in the table, then finding the logarithm of the answer and working backwards to find out what it was the logarithm of. The tables can have tens of thousands of entries and you can get a more precise answer with them, but the slide rule is a LOT faster.
That was some math genius who came up with the slide rule apparently. Thanks for this explanation, which makes a lot of sense to me 🙂
We learned about the logarithms and what they were useful for, back in high school. We had a booklet, with the various tables for logarithms, sine, cosine, tangent, error-functions; as well as the factors, 2nd and 3rd powers and roots of all the integers up to 1000.
This was just before small handheld calculators with scientific functions were available and affordable. The practical uses was in physics classes where things were measured and values calculated — in the math classes the answers usually should be exact, that is, leaving square-roots and fractions as such: sqrt(2)/2 in math class, 0.7071 in physics class.
I must have hit HS just after that so I missed the pre-calculator tables as far as I can recall.
I think that I was exposed to logs in college in calculus but cannot recall now. HS was 3 years for me & one was algebra, one was geometry, & one was trig. Physics was in college for me too. HS was bio, chem, & anatomy I think.
I had a toy abacus as a kid but just liked to make noise with the pretty colored beads 🙂
You were halfway there.
That was very understandable. My toy wasn’t aligned like that so may not have actually been an abacus at all but just some beads on wires in a curving frame 🙂
There is another sort of abacus that has four beads down and one bead up — it’s like the “speedster version” but is less easy to get to know.
Mine was sort of like this one
That one is not so optimized for computation.
clearly, but I liked the colors & sounds when very young
Mine just had all those colored marble things in a jar. I could never make heads or tails out of it.
LOL
He talks about that in the video you linked…and subsequent videos even deal with it. He calls it the “modern” abacus.
The fundamental “gimmick” of a slipstick is the funny way the scale is spaced out. It’s set up so that (say) the distance between 1 and 2 is the same as the distance between 2 and 4. So instead of a certain distance being equal to an additional one, there’s a distance that represents a doubling. And another that represents a tripling. So to multiply 2 x 3, you put the one on the top scale over the 2 on the bottom scale. On the top scale, you read over to 3–which is the triple of 1. That SAME DISTANCE on the bottom scale is also a tripling, but because of the way you lined it up, you tripled 2 with it to get six. You’ll see the 6 on the lower scale, right below the 3 on the top scale. Voila, you can multiply with a slide rule.
Thank you for that explanation, which makes sense–whew! You do have a gift 🙂
And that is a very good reason to NOT allow grade schoolers calculators, computers or phones. Get them to really LEARN first before you give them the short cuts.
Pedophiles is the other reason.
Absolutely!!!
Sippycup on top of the wall — must mean something.
All the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men?
The FIB knows his claims don’t hold water, so they’re holding it for him? 😝
JB’s tongue looks awfully red, like his hands. I don’t even want to think about that one.
Laura Loomer:
JUST-IN: MAGA Star Kari Lake is Going to Miami to Support President Trump During Arraignment on Tuesday in Miami
I’d have been surprised if she didn’t.
Every single Democrat who supports the Rule of Law should be there, too.
Then we can see how many people that is.
I can think of two: Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley. Every now and then Bill Maher says something reasonable. But I think that people will think their presence would indicate support for Trump rather than the rule of law.
Yep. That’s exactly it. Any dem who shows up will simply be assumed to be a Trump supporter…and they all know it, so they won’t.
Because opposing Trump is more important than the Rule of Law…..message sent and received……
From their point of view, supporting Trump is treason to the Democrat party. So they dare not be thought of as doing that. I actually kind of understand that. (Though I don’t understand being a Democrat.)
That said, I am sure many of them actually don’t support the rule of law. But you can’t tell which ones are which just from THIS.
I think Alan Dershowitz has already chimed in saying the case is complete Bull Schiff.
Dersh said that a Republican “leader” should draft an indictment of Biden and Hunter and present it to the American public in response to the indictment of Trump.
I replied to a tweet of his and told him, if he loves America as much as he claims he does, HE should draft the indictment!
Way to go!
🙂 Thanks!
Epic genius!!!
I wish!
granted 😉
Lol! Thanks!
an iconic scene to be sure!
CannCon said he is going to go as a reporter for Gateway Pundit.
President Trump’s birthday is coming up June 14, Wednesday, and he plans to bring LOTS of balloons and other stuff. The audience is sending funds.
Snail mail address.
President Trump
1100 South Ocean Boulevard,
Palm Beach, Florida 33480
If you also send a check — Memo line on check. Trump 2024
^^^ Face of evil.
Where would one wear, the demonic outfit he has on?
I think it would look quite fashionable on a gallows.
Maybe here (from Wiki)?
“Where would one wear, the demonic outfit he has on?”
____________
At the Garth Brooks Woke-Ass Bar & Grill.
Saturday is Spot-a-Tranny night.
Fun for the whole family.
Half price Bud Light 👍
Who knew the “Friends in Low Places” were in the gutter?
And the thunder rolls…. ⚡ ⛈ ⚡
Lol!
This morning, I counted 110 motorcycles riding together down the Hwy 211 mountain past my house. As always, I love seeing and hearing them go by. Rolling thunder is out today.
To me that face shouts psychopath with a chip on his shoulder.
Yes.
Why does one think of “Sweeney Todd” when looking at this man’s face?
Any man with a beard that unkempt should be living in a cave in Afghanistan. The resemblance is striking:
Put a turban on him, and he could be his brother.
IMO that’s a hint. There’s something about Jack Smith that is literally deranged.
We need to dig.
The wife (from Wiki):
I removed the links in that text – they were leaking information about your system.
Yikes! Do you mean the Trump quote with the pic of Jack Smith?
How can one guard against something like this?
The Wikipedia stuff about the wife – the links in it were not regular links – they were “reader” links indicating the browser.
Okay. Thank you!
In contrast, the links in the blurb about Smith in the other selection from Wikipedia are normal.
Does that happen if you access an article in “reader” mode? I can’t remember if I had done that or not.
I’m thinking there is a connection.
The VM I use to cruise this site…has no bookmarks. No memory of anything other than the cookies this site leaves on it. (That way I don’t have to log in.) It will otherwise forget this session the instant I close the browser, because that shuts the VM down and it self-lobotomizes.
And I probably still leak like a damned sieve.
What do you get at https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ ?
I leak 13.1 bits.
This one leaks 17.49. And is unique. But let my try some of my others…
Hmm, 16.49 bits, but NOT unique. Which is actually GOOD, because I never went to that site before. Unless somehow it and this browser have the same fingerprint (they shouldn’t).
Reading in detail, they show my timezone wrong as well as other info, wrong. So I may be “unique” but I’m not “me.”
OK, I shut that one down, and restarted that VM. Second time around, 15.9 bits (this is the exact same VM, so there seems to be some randomness in the score). And it doesn’t seem to recognize it as being the same browser. So I am successful, somewhat, in looking like something different every time I use that VM.
The biggest single leak seems to be my browser window dimension, which is pretty generic. I could try to randomize it I suppose.
Yes, it does assume that everything you leak is truthful. I leak 8.89 bits as being Mozilla on Ubuntu — I need to figure out how to lie about this.
Well here’s the thing.
What use is it to anyone to know you’re using Mozilla? Almost everyone else is doing the same thing! I won’t be that unique guy who’s running some custom-built browser who sticks out like a sore thumb.
It says my fonts are consistent with a specific OS. Good. I look generic, not eccentric.
“ I look generic, not eccentric.” A clear mask for Any Q-Treeper!
My OS is simply Linux x86_64. Again, pretty vanilla.
Websites nowadays have to take into account your browser so all the html and other scripts present the info to you the way the website designer intends. It’s purely about helping them get through the variations in how different browsers handle things. MSoft always seems to deviate from the standard because their engineers always thought they had to rewrite stuff. They wrote their own memory manager that Apple provides for the Mac OS and that’s why Msoft was always slower to release Mac updates of their software.
Whoah….my user agent says “Windows NT 10.0”
SCORE!!! Your system is built to lie by its lonesome!
Yeah, but that’s bizarre enough to stick out.
Basically, you could follow the strategy of looking like so many other people that they look at it and say, “Well that don’t narrow things down worth a *shit*.” Thus it wouldn’t matter whether it lies or not.
That said, I’m gratified when I open up google maps and it clearly doesn’t know where I am.
Basically you want it to lie, preferably lie differently every time, and not lie in a way that sticks out like a sore thumb. (So Ixnay on using the Godzilla browser.)
I just tried my bonestock firefox.
Basically this is a disposable where firefox is freshly installed and has never been run before (as far as it knows, ha ha), and has zero customizations.
Leaks “at least” 17.49 bits. Partially protected against ads and invisible trackers. (My others are completely defended).
The bonestock has a unique fingerprint. Shutting down and restarting (thus restoring its “virginity”) it does seem to recognize it as the same browser as before. But now, 16.49 bits. Huh.
Running a third time, however, it doesn’t say that TWO browsers before me had the same fingerprint. So it might not be connecting my browsers to each other. Which would be fine.
Been reading all this and did the test, it said I could be fingerprinted.
In FF I set the “resist fingerprinting” to true and did the test again, and it made no difference to the results.
It takes a lot of work not to be fingerprinted. If using firefox you can look up Arkenfox and be overwhelmed with the geek factor involved.
I’m overwhelmed just doing basic stuff so I’ll play safe.
I’ll summarize. There are files you can tweak, that firefox reads when it starts that set all kinds of parameters, including ones you cannot find on “settings.”
What Arkenfox does is create a config file that locks down firefox’s more leaky settings…and puts it in a place where firefox will read it before it even starts. What it won’t do, though, is completely reset firefox to an freshly installed state. Your configuration lives in a directory inside the mozilla folder, with a randomly generated name on the folder; that can be used to “track” you from one session to another.
(Combine that with my virtual machines, and I literally start, every time, with a fresh install configured to block leaks–and that random name gets regenerated every time.)
And the way to deal with that in a copy-and-paste is to first paste it into Notepad. All the formatting and reader links vanishes, leaving pure text. The paragraph breaks remain.
Good info, thanks!
“In July 2011, he married Katy Chevigny, a documentary filmmaker known for Becoming, an award-winning 2020 documentary of Michelle Obama.”
____________
Sounds like a documentary of Mike becoming Moochelle.
bwah-ha-ha
Wait a second — are you saying our favorite president is being prosecuted by an ex-pat???
Kinda looks like it.
Her wiki is vary sparse, previously married to Dr. Jonathan Michael Chen, and his website looks very ordinary.
He looks deranged. I don’t remember having seen a picture of him before today. He reminded me of what Humphrey Bogart might look like after a 3-day bender.
Like death warmed over.
Looks Demon Possessed.
See above comparison photo.
NOTICE THE PURPLE!!
Hilary Clinton and the PURPLE REVOLUTION
November 11, 2016 The Clintons and Soros Launch America’s Purple Revolution
Unlike the author, I interpret that to mean the DemonRats and RINOS are UNITING to DESTROY POTUS Trump.
BEWARE: The Purple Revolution Comes To America –themillenniumreport.com — 2016/11
They EVEN TOLD US!!!
From Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and White House Senior Advisor, David Plouffe. He also was a Hillary Clinton Campaign Advisor
I see his wiki was last edited today.
very interesting…
Oh, yeah…..
Here’s How Every 2024 GOP Candidate Responded To Trump’s DOJ Indictment
https://trendingpoliticsnews.com/heres-how-every-2024-gop-candidate-responded-to-trumps-doj-indictment-mstef/?utm_source=sheri&utm_medium=twitter
My summary: They clutched their pearls about the fact of it, then threw Trump under the bus.
Asa Hutchinson called for Trump to drop out of the race. 😂 Nice try, but no dice.🤣
Chris Christie said we don’t get our facts from Trump’s Truth Social account, that we have to see what the facts are, and that no one is above the law. 😡😡😡
Tim Scott made an empty promise: “As President of the United States, I would purge all of the injustices and impurities in our system so that every American can have confidence that they will be seen by the Lady of Justice with a blindfold on.” How he would do that, we don’t know, of course.
Same for DeSantis: “The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.” Yawn.
Vivek Ramaswamy, too: “We have to restore the rule of law in America.” Yesterday he was generous enough to say he would pardon Trump. (/sarc , but he really said it)
Nothing in the article from Nikki Haley, Larry Elder, Doug Bergum, or other no-name people who have zero chance of even making it to the debate stage (which is probably why they were left out).
Let’s see how many show in Miami….
IMO, the most politically savvy of them all is Vivek, although I don’t trust him since his first reaction was not to state Trump’s innocence, but to say he would pardon him. (In other words, campaigning off of this.) It would not surprise me if he showed up.
The poor babies are in a tough position. If they show up, someone might think they have an ounce of support for Trump in their selfish, power-hungry psyches. And if they don’t show up, the MAGA base will chalk it up as another strike against them, never to be forgotten.
But if they do go, it will be to campaign, so I’d rather they stay away.
“…the most politically savvy of them all is Vivek…”
Yes, I would agree. He, unlike the rest, knows he has to woo the diehard Trump supports and NOT antagonize them. It is a real tightrope walk. Ronda is TOO STUPID to realize that and is losing ground FAST!
no Pence posturing?
How could I have left out Pence? 😀
Not a bad idea on its face, but given the players, it would just be a meaningless exercise.
ONLY if he explains why BiteMe and his Crime Family are NOT indicted AND when they WILL be indicted.
Otherwise, Garland has nothing I am interested in.
I’d be very interested to watch Garland suck a muzzle.
I wouldn’t mind seeing him block a muzzle, a la North Korea….
I read somewhere that is the preferred exit method for homosexuals and prostitutes.
We All want to forget about Pence…grrr! Thanks for sharing the details for all these pretender-contenders 😉
YW!
🙂
Me: Just do it. File the articles, and get it done. Stop talking about it.
Why has it taken this long for someone to stick their finger in the wind to see if it might be politically viable to think about forming a committee to make an announcement that they might consider talking about the possibility of stating that they’re wondering if it might be a good idea to impeach Biden?
Jus NOISE.
Biggs will be asking for donations in 3, 2, 1…
Wow. Andy Biggs, acting as IF he were decisive, bold, a leader.
Traits we wish R-Cons exuded. They and he do NOT.
MTG has already filed so it is just a ME TOO.
May 18, 2023 MTG Files Articles of Impeachment Against Joe Biden – But That’s Not All
Then I repeat my question above, only regarding getting on with it. I saw Nancy Mace being interviewed yesterday, and Congress is investigating, to their credit. There are other 1023 forms that they are trying to get from Wray. If they have to wait on all that to actually impeach, it could take years.
1023s NOT NEEDED to impeach BiteMe.
Border.
Afghan fiasco.
Bank records.
—
R-Cons ARE Owned AND Afraid.
DC_Draino:
IF this ever gets to trial, let ALL of these documents be placed in evidence AND presented to the jury.
AND the American people!
Of course. I’m guessing, it’ll be live for us.
We live in interesting times!
REMEMBER POTUS TRUMP DECLASSIFIED THOSE PAPERS BEFORE HE LEFT OFFICE!!!
Amazing rant by “Five Times August” in response to being asked why they’re afraid of gay people. 👏👏👏
In the responses as “Pride Month Never Ends”. Too True.
Wow.
The left can create an endless number of divisive identity groups in service to the Cabal.