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More Cirn Cibbles
Latest from Kirn: They’re really mainstreaming prison culture now. Everyone has to pick a gang, time outside is a privilege granted by the warden, hard drugs are available but cigs are rare, and the guards stand around and do absolutely nothing while the prisoners get violent. Mostly wrong. An excellent author like Kirn should avoid […]
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Elon is serious.
Looks like I’ll have to take back my initial guess that Elon was just screwing around or trying to move share prices. The Twitter board has given a final recommendation to proceed with the takeover, and Elon has been talking to the employees and tossing around some very smart ideas. The best ideas: Senders should […]
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Another UFO?
Polistra and friends are greeting another UFO. This UFO may have appeared before in the dimly remembered past, but it has certainly been absent for the last three months. Rain every day. Sometimes real thunderstorms, sometimes all-day drizzle, sometimes a threat of storms. The threats and the actual storms ALWAYS came just when I was […]
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Biden on a bike
Politics is NOT my department, but being old is my department. The commentators on Biden’s bike fall seem to be missing a point. Most old men shouldn’t be riding a bike. (I used to be a serious biker, and gave up at 36 when my heart started to warn me.) An old president, whose mind […]
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Valid reason then, not now
Denyse takes down Sabine, but not quite far enough. Hossenfelder: A lot of media coverage on science policy remembers that science is fallible only when it’s convenient for them. When they’ve proclaimed something as fact that later turns out to be wrong, then they’ll blame science. Because science is fallible. Facemasks? Yeah, well, we lacked […]
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Ockham, Machiavelli, Kernighan
Following on previous item with the simple advice DON’T PLAY. Watching the coiner idiots respond to the total collapse of their project is fun. Instead of running away, they continue arguing about PRECISE DETAILS AND PRECISE NUMBERS. Side A: This is an opportunity to 12.59347% short XTJIOERJY and long 36.78946859% UUEYHHGNOTC. Side B: No, FUD […]
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Best card-counting strategy
MindMatters hosts Sal Cordova for a second podcast. This one includes details of card-counting systems used in blackjack. The systems require considerable skill and give you at most a 1% advantage over the house. If you can maintain a 1% advantage and control your betting, you can compound a pretty good pile in one night. […]
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Nothing advances
The wonderful 1845 satire on psychopaths and other types included this crucial line: All was bustle, uproar, and confusion; yet nothing seemed to advance. This is the worst consequence of allowing psychopaths to rule. They can’t physically torture and kill everyone, and the less extreme demons don’t go very far into mass murder. All psychopaths […]
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Speaking of repetition
Speaking of repetition in news, and speaking of the delicious collapse of Bitcoin….. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, change one word.
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Not so weird after all
A new international Reuters poll is reassuring. I threw out the TV in 2010 and turned off the radio in 2020. I thought I was weird, but it turns out that HALF of the people in most countries have been doing the same thing for the same reasons. The proportion of news consumers who say […]
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Brits understand demons 2
Neil Thomas, writing a defense of intelligent design, mentioned the old British satirist Thomas Peacock, who had summarized all such arguments in 1845. I hadn’t heard of Peacock, so found the book Headlong Hall and read the first few chapters. The characters are the best part; the action seemed to get a bit repetitive. Three […]
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Numbers all the way dooooooooooooown
Musical accompaniment. Time for a sip of Chateau Schadenfreude, now that the Holy Bitcoin has dropped off the scale at $20k. This number is not just a ‘chartist’ threshold. Some crucial loans and margin calls were designed to be triggered at this number. When your fake “economy” is built on Magic Numbers All The Way […]
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Unusually sane, considering
Connected to the branding theme of previous item. Most online Catholic writers are drunk on autistic theology. They fuss and fidget endlessly and CRUELLY about microscopic details of insane liturgy, trying to defend Bergoglio because he’s authorized by Canon Law 84390854689 subpart A.410, but he failed to pronounce the 59.12th word in Catechism Subphase u48356xx834834yq75689 […]
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Not a plan, just an intention
Kirn’s latest pithy point: Simulating all aspects of the Creation so that they can be monetized — and destroying those that can’t — is pretty much the whole of the evil plan. True, but it’s not a very effective plan. A vast pile of money and effort and influence is going into the Metaverse. Zuck […]
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Ain’t got no azimuth
Yet another apparent “signal” from outer space, this time through China’s shiny new radio telescope. To their credit, the Chinese scientists are realistic: “These are several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation,” Zhang Tongjie, head scientist at the China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at Beijing […]
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