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Anthony turned 21 on Friday and wanted to celebrate. We met at Applebee’s and as I arrived first I ordered a round of drinks where Tom Leitz requested that Anthony not get a girly drink so I got him a Philadelphia Black and Tan in a 23 oz. glass. Everyone arrived and I was quite relieve that when Tom said “Bill was coming” that it was Schilling and not Mischke.

Anyway, Anthony’s glass’s fluid level slowly dropped but I’m certain that this was largely due to evaporation. I accosted him about this to which he responded “I had a number of daquiri’s on my birthday and I’m still recovering”. He didn’t finish his drink so I did what any reasonable person would, I made him steal it so he could finish it at camp. He declined, so I stole it (after paying for it which I suppose makes it not stealing) and I now a curvy iced tea glass.  On the plus side, it would have been hell to try to hold his hair back as he worshiped the porcelain god.

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In actuarial modeling we discussed estimating parameters as represented by phi.  We went over various methods of  estimating and other determinations and one student was having trouble figuring out what phi was doing.  After a tense interchange the instructor finally blurted out “don’t make a point estimate, only God knows phi!”

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Mark Lutz and I were assigned to do troop 280’s election.  Troop 280’s been dropping off a lot at their active roster list 32 Scouts.  Only 13 were present so we couldn’t do the election until the adults started calling Scouts to get them to show up.  Three eventually did, two of which were playing basketball outside and a third that lived across the street and was watching TV.  During this, I got to correct a CPR instructor that was telling people that 15/2 was the correct ratio of chest compressions to breaths when doing CPR and 5/1 for children.  If I were 200 lbs smaller I would have literally dove in front of the children to intercept the wrongness of this statement.  Correct info. Anyway, while waiting for the election I took a picture.

STP80323

I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration but it’s only our children.  Anyway, the group ended their meeting with the Scout Law and a Hail Mary, two of the kids that’d arrived late fiddled awkwardly not knowing the words along with two other Scouts that just stared at the floor.  Some units seem to forget that A Scout is Reverent is done differently by each Scout…

Redeeming Event:  A fat women was seated on an up-folding cafeteria bench and throughtout the meeting the bench slowly crept up at the center caused by her… leverage.  When she got up to leave the meeting, the bench crashed down startling her.  She turned around and glared at the child walking by.

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As winter descends, the mice have returned to the house of Robinson and the cabinet containing our cookies, crackers and cereals has fallen victim to several daring midnight raids.  The mice have become smart enough to avoid the traps, maybe because they smell like dead mice, so I tried a new tactic.  I took all my brother’s excess liquor and placed rows against the cabinet.  They could probably more a single bottle, so I used 3 layers thing of bottles to stop them starting with daquiri mix and getting harder as one goes forward finally ending in a row of 141 and vodka.

I don’t think they’ll get through.  And if they do, I imagine they’ll have an Absolut blast doing it.

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The Argument from Incredulity is a pretty little fallacy that arises whenever someone states a statement is false because they personally believe it to be false or are unwilling to deal with a fact being true. The Argument from Incredulity is frequently ventured forth by the dumb so tends to be bundled with other fallacies. This fallacy often tends to be obvious unlike some more subtle fallacies but tends to take some heavy lifting to overcome.Continue reading

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Sometime in I’d say 2000, I stated that Sir Putts-a-lot was uncreative or at least failed to express it.  I wouldn’t say he was offended but it’s not exactly a “howdy” either.  He mentioned the next day that he’d created a picture by drawing a large number of small circles.  He then went through in successive cycles and connected close dots and removing others to get a new field of dots.  I called this process uncreative and it’s taken me 7 years to realize I was wrong.

I’d failed to think through the ramifications of that process and I was failing to be sufficiently creative.  I wonder what would have occurred if new dots were added to open spaces.  This procession is the source of Conway’s Game of Life, at least in a somewhat primitive way.  A slightly educated guess also makes me think that dots would be distributed along a power law distribution.  A phenomenon that governs markets, sand grain size and a host of other shit.  The scale factor would depend on Sir Putts-a-lot and probably could have been used as a proxy of his mood.  The Boltzmann function sparked my curiosity of statistical physics as well as leading me to things I’d grow to realize I’d never understand any time soon.  Boltzmann was a scientist ahead of his time but sadly a man of his time.  Science mourns his departure but his is a tombstone I want to see before I die and simply says “S = K log W” (this was written before ‘ln’ became standard notation for natural logs).

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Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com had a nice quote in an October podcast on the God of the Gaps argument used by Anne Coulter.

“Finding evolutionary biology to be invalid as a science because some examples of one foundation of its evidence are buried under millions of years of rock and can’t reasonably be expected to ever be found, despite the fact that other foundations of its evidence such as genetics, resistant bacteria, and observation are perfectly intact, is a logical fallacy, and someone as smart as Ann Coulter should know that. The crime lab doesn’t throw out all the DNA evidence, blood stains, and the murder weapon just because many of the fingerprints were wiped clean.” –Skeptoid show notes

It’s a swell podcast and is usually brief but dense in content.  I’ve gone through about 50 episodes in the last 3 days.  There’s an infinitude of linking options on his page so I won’t bother.

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The advantage to eating while on a treadmill is that crumbs on the track are quickly dropped on the floor where they form a nice pile that my dog Max sucks up like our Dyson.

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I’m doing they type of testing I hate, where it’s busy enough that you can’t do anything else at the same time and dull enough that you’d envy sorting sand by size.  In the two minute testing cycle I have one 25 second break and one 17 second break where I stare at the stuff around me.  It’s also not easy enough that I can hold more than bits of conversation while doing it, so it may be the dullest test I’ve done to date.

Anyway, while staring around I started looking at all the calibration stickers in the lab that I could see from my station and noticed one that was partly peeled and said “CALIBRATION VOID IF REMOVED”.  Most of the time, a shitty cellophane tape is used so it’s obvious if they’re removed, except for this one looked matte rather than glossy so during my 25 second break I started picking at it and peeled it off.  I looked on the other size and imprinted on the back was this: Avery EZ-reMOVE.  So, how did I use my new weapon?  I placed it over the casette deck section of the boom box so one of my co-workers could put any of his gaiye free-jazz tapes.

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BA 4196 – Instructed by the world’s ugliest man. In fact, during the opening discussion I had trouble talking with him as I was distracted by all the hideous he had on his face. He has bat-like vision and dog-like hearing and doesn’t like computers so I’ve been trying to find a way to type quietly.

Econ 3563 – Instructor’s taught the course for 38 years and does the entire course without notes or an outline and I’ve always admired teachers that could that. He has no concept of formatting and it appeared he was equally likely to double space after a period as to simply hit tab.

Him: Unless your an accountant or an actuary, most of the material in this course is useless.
Me: WOOOOOOOOOOOOO! (my shout of joy lasted a good three seconds and was impolitely loud)

He also made fun of Philadelphia for using the term jimmies instead of sprinkles.

Lunch-A delicious chicken Caesar sandwich. If tasty needed a representative on the UN Security Council, this sandwich would be in the running as a delegate from Tastionia.

Act Sci 3503-Worst handwriting I’ve ever seen, like difficulty making somewhat straight lines bad.   He read the syllabus as someone who’s retiring remembers the milestones of his work “Credibility indexes, we had some wild times when those first came on the scene.  We were young” and the like.

Train-Sandwiched between woman thinking I was reading her book and women whose book I was reading.