It’s been an interesting week here. After years of essentially no street crime, we’ve had four major incidents in our little town, one of which has left a kid in a coma and essentially brain-dead. The photo of the perps looks like one of those DEI posters with a curated assortment of ethnicities. So we got racial harmony goin’ for us. Which is nice. Tomb Raider came down with the ‘vid right after we got back from NYC and is scared shitless she might have given it to a cancer patient we visited (valid concern) or to me (not so valid: I have a cast-iron immune system developed as a child who ate bugs and dirt). We had some snow flurries and frost, signaling the imminence of winter. One of WebDom’s dogs (she has three, all siblings of my magnificent Kaiser) went into her first heat, causing Kaiser to attempt to create a race of giant retarded puppies. I gave my first exam in 40 years and the students coming out of it looked shell-shocked. And appropriately so: class high score was 65, with a median of 45. Oh yes, the fun never ends.
Birthdays today include a guy who was toasty and nuts; a guy with a strong mustache who passed it on; a woman obsessed with her periods; an actor who could light up a room; a guy whom we can thank for the mullahs; a guy whose role in Brazil may have outshone DeNiro; one of SugarFree’s masturbatory fantasies; a man who Wasn’t there; a man immune to iocaine; and the second-most-famous chick from Jamestown, NY.
Let’s Link, then.
The dangers of bowling. Expect yet another round of price increases for ammo. (Heh, heh, he said “round”)
And this must be fake news because Karine assured us that there are no credible threats against Jews. Hey, assholes, try this in Texas or Arizona where (((we))) haven’t been disarmed.
Love tap on the wrist from the people who think obstructing congressional process is treason.
This will surprise exactly zero of you.
To be fair, Richmond is a shithole, the place where you go when Oakland is too classy.
All I can say is that the Old Man loves this band. WebDom loves this band. Tomb Raider loves this band. If you don’t, well, it’s a you problem, not a band problem.
Morning… Old man.
Old Man With Banjos Music?
Morning, all. Thanks for the civil forfeiture nutpunch right after telling us about the poor college kid. Yeah, we know it happens – but reading about it sure raises the old blood pressure.
One of those days when the news just pisses me off all around.
And the Icelandic men should shut off power, sewer and trash service for a day. Somehow I really doubt there’s a high female employment rate in those fields. “unpaid” and “mental” labor is called life, you jerks — adults have to do this shit regardless of your twisted dreams of the New Soviet (Wo)man.
I’ve been noticing a slew of stories in my news feed about how hard the yutes are finding the 40 hour work week, and why they need to suck it up to get to management to change it to a 30 hour, 4 day work week.
Increase their workweek to 60 hours for griping.
One of the more tone deaf ones was asking how people had time for a personal life, friends, and fun when they had to spend 8 hours at a job and 3 hours commuting (by train between NYC of course). Maybe understand that’s the kind of shit you were supposed to be learning as you made your way through high school and college?
Teen #2 is struggling with life/work/school balance. He’ll learn but yeah.
I did everything I could to avoid working in NYC.
It was the only place I could find a job initially and now it’s the place where my skillset is in high demand. I deal with the consequences knowingly, but certainly not happy about them. I don’t, however, expect anybody to accommodate the fact that my commute take 2.5 hours a day out of my life. It is what is and I expect to be compensated for it.
Generally I am.
BC I took the train to NoVA. It was where the work was but I didn’t want to live there. It was a choice.
Sorry. I don’t miss that one bit.
Same with the wife, although Berkeley instead of NYC. But, yeah, a 3-5 hour commute everyday for three years, so as to be able to get out and have the background to get a stellar job in a small college town.
@rhywun, I’m in your area this weekend. Drop me a line at omwc at this domain if you’re around and available for a drink or three. Tomb Raider will be with me, so we can try to get her enraged.
Which one of you is hosting the eclipse party next year?
Sounds like fun. I hope one of you knows where to achieve drinks because I don’t. Or rather, there are bars everywhere but I don’t know which one is which.
5 days/40 hour is an arbitrary and rather recent development. I recall reading interviews in the ACM archives about how Saturday was a 1/2 or whole workday until the Great Depression led their employer to cut back hours to five days a week to avoid laying people off.
I recall reading that in Rothbard’s history of the Great Depression also.
If it turns out he is a reservist, will there be calls to take guns away from the military?
Wonder if CNN/MSNBC have been lobbying the FBI to make sure to drag him into the street for the photo op.
My work pc is acting like a little bitch this morning.
Grrrr.
A forced reboot that does five iterations?
Constant notifications about how he isn’t paying it enough attention and that other PC got the designer m.2 nvme drive…
Future Windows ad feature. Detects older hardware and constantly recommends upgrades.
It’s working. I think I’m gonna get it a dedicated graphics card.
Wait, you don’t already have one?
Nope. Off the shelf, bland Dell Inspiron.
Federal agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and others, have joined the search for a person of interest who police say is connected to the shootings in Lewiston, Maine
That’s a lot of Feds for a shooting which does not have any obvious interstate element.
Talk like that won’t get us to a unitary state.
Sounds like one of their assets was unleashed.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman has been criminally charged for pulling the fire alarm during a House vote that would have avoided a government shutdown.
The New York Democrat called allegations it was deliberate ‘complete BS’ and claimed he thought he was opening a door.
But now the Capitol Police have referred him to prosecutors, who have hit him with one misdemeanor count and ordered him to appear in court.
I never expected him to get the prole treatment, but here’s a thought: maybe the new Speaker can strip him of all his committee assignments and cut funding to
the idiots who elected this assclownhis district by fifty million bucks or so.Pleading not guilty for reason of idiocy.
Thursday Morning Non-Banjos Links
How disappointing.
Click the music link.
Those guys sure are getting a work-out in recent weeks.
About as believable as our press secretaries or Baghdad Bob.
Federal agencies are assisting in search for person of interest in Lewiston shooting
I figured this would be the Maine story today.
“We need a distraction for the masses! Quick, spin up one of our lunatics for a mass shooting!”
– The deep state, probably
And it’s a white guy this time, after a string of non-whites.
And possibly firearms instructor…gun grabbers wet dreams coming true.
Yeah. Their motto will be, “The main thing is to keep the Maine thing the main thing!”
Well it’s Maine
/waits for headline saying “REMEMBER THE MAINE [shooting]”
*narrows gaze*
“I gave my first exam in 40 years and the students coming out of it looked shell-shocked. And appropriately so: class high score was 65, with a median of 45. Oh yes, the fun never ends.”
My contracts professor my 1L year was an old school, Socratic Method guy and really just a difficult guy all around. The aftermath of our first exam was pretty great, students who never experienced any sort academic difficulty got crushed. Much complaining and pleading with the professor ensued. At the time I thought the lack of resilience was stunning for a bunch of people who thought they were going to save the world. Anyway, I found out a few months ago that a third member of my class has been disbarred for drug trafficking.
This in a state where a very well respected professor was cashiered for hard grading. Hope you enjoyed the gig while it lasted Old Man.
Higher ed is all about the connections and networking.
and the protests and parties
Parties are out. Parades are in.
And getting drunk and getting laid. I remember that time my frat brothers and I went on a roadtrip in my brothers car, picked up a girl by convincing her I was the boyfriend of her roommate who had just died, and then damn near got killed at a black bar. True story…
Otis, my man!
You mind if we dance with yo’ dates?
Landis: No, no! “WIF yo’ dates!”
I’m no fan of the easy A, but I’ve always felt that the actual test design should cluster for the desired median grade. Mind you that’s not always possible, especially similar to here where you are using a new test.
I just think it’s ridiculous what has happened with grade inflation and expectations of both employers and students. My university had a 0 to 4 grade with no half steps. You needed a 2.0 to graduate. That’s it. Classes were essentially structured so most liberal arts courses got you 3 with appropriate work and in STEM it was 2.
And honestly, the exam wasn’t very hard- open book and I dumbed down one of the questions (a manual calculation of a Fourier transform) because the integrals were a bit tricky otherwise. The way I gave it, a sophomore finished with Calc 3 could breeze through that problem in under ten minutes. And these are all engineering grad students. I blame the two year Coof-driven shutdown.
I warn you, he’s a Fourierist. – It’s only a joke, Rick.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/40825db6-082a-4d58-a05e-46fe47fb8a2a
My thought too.
Ideally, each question of your test should have 50% of the people answering it incorrectly. It makes the stats easier to crunch.
A lot of students–even grad students–think that “open book” means they don’t have to study because they can just look everything up and figure out answers. They fail to realize the extra time it takes to do that.
The real test will be on the next exam, where you find out who learned from their experience and who didn’t.
Not the case I had in mind, but relevant.
Hey, I remember that movie!
Heads full of mush!
shared updates on the most pressing humanitarian needs
“Humanitarian” assistance is going to the governing body of Gaza, which is Hamas, which is preventing it from helping the people there. Isn’t it great funding both sides of a conflict?
We have cash on hand and are trying to find best way to get it to KY without fear of it just being taken by the state.
That sounds like structuring prole.
Convert to btc in NV, convert back in KY?
That does risk currency/exchange loss. Of course, the tradition in the old pulp novels would be rare stamps, coins, or art that would be easy to conceal and/or be carried surreptitiously through any searches. This was also common in the 70’s novels as a way to avoid inflation eating away the worth of your money.
Everything old is new again.
I mean…I guess we might look like drug dealers in a blue tacoma with a dog and two cats pulling a trailer full of household goods.
Dem’s some powerful animals!
Re: money – can’t you put it a local NV bank, write a check to yourself and deposit at new KY bank? That’s what I did when I had to move funds when my father died. No wire fees, no hassle, no hiding cash in the floorboards.
I didn’t even change banks. My pay still goes to a bank in another state. I haven’t needed to go to a branch for more than a decade.
Bury your cash in your household goods. These fuckers are too lazy to do a real search, they’re just looking for dufflebags.
I sold a car to a friend in MN. I was driving the car up from TX and had the hatch filled with dirty spare parts. I got stopped in IA for a cracked windshield. He clearly didn’t give a shit about the windshield and just wanted to search the car. Normally, I wouldn’t consent but was genuinely curious just how dedicated he would be when he’s elbow deep in greasy car parts. I was let go minutes later and he had blackened hands from just moving a couple of parts aside to not even get a good look at anything.
*scribbles notes*
Hide your contraband in the luggage with the visibly soiled undergarments.
That begs the question of how you obtain the soiled undergarments.
Vending machines.
Make friends with a Muslim who can direct you to a Hawala service.
Or some kind of money belt
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hidden+money+pouch+for+travel&adgrpid=56337886259&hvadid=570432450846&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9021461&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=4734220443049186438&hvtargid=kwd-343661735233&hydadcr=399_1014972950&tag=hydsma-20&ref=pd_sl_6u85fyvg3b_e
Sew it in your clothes.
Money orders.
48 hour rule and all… But if true, the shooter was a firearms instructor.
twitter.com/GeromanAT/status/1717516477429907468
I’ve seen that and that he was an Army reservist without any further details to back either up.
The military shouldn’t have access to weapons of war.
Supposedly he was also on a two-week psychiatric hold a while back. If true, look for a big push on red flag laws to deprive people of their second amendment rights without due process.
A security team at Cooper Union College in the United States locked Jewish students in the library on Wednesday night to protect them against a pro-Palestinian group, which tried to break down the door.
But the MAGAts are the anti-Semites…
Blatant Islamaphobia.
You know who else locked up Jews to protect them?
Rep. Jamaal Bowman has been criminally charged for pulling the fire alarm during a House vote that would have avoided a government shutdown.
Dian official proceeding is a crime punishable by years in prison if we are sticking to the J6 standard. Also put him in solitary for a couple years pre-trial. We are all equal under the law, right?
[Ray Epps laughs his ass off, under his breath.]
*Disrupting an official proceeding…
And one more time, a mass murder is committed by someone with known, obvious, serious mental health issues.
I’m not even in the mental health field – but I’ve been around long enough to have seen examples of these kind of things, up to and including murder-suicides of co-workers.
When somebody says something like “I’m thinking of shooting up so-and-so place”, it’s not like “I’m thinking of applying for that other job”, or “I’m thinking of going to Pensacola for vacation this summer”. Whatever the right term is – split-personality, or paranoia, or psychosis, or whatever, they mean “I’m seeing something coming. It’s me but it’s not me at the same time. And Smeagol can tell that’s a problem but Golllum seems fine with it. And I’m telling you so YOU can do something about it.”
And the “mental health professional” doesn’t do anything. Somebody somewhere in that world knew this was going to happen and was fine with that.
Wouldn’t want to stigmatize him.
It’s almost expected now. And yes, the country made this choice decades ago. Deal with it, I guess.
Closing the mental hospitals led to some this and much of the homeless problem. An ugly trade-off either way.
plain-clothed DEA agents seized
Then they are not agents. Defend yourself.
And end up dead or in jail for a long time.
I know. Just in principle…
How much self defending do you think you can do in an airport (inside the security boundary)?
So, fish in a barrel?
The latest mass shooting that left at least 16 people dead and dozens injured in Lewiston, Maine, added to a list of 565 reported across the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Only 565? If gun grabbers are correct, there should have been eleventy billion. Would gun grabbers lie?
The charge was for ‘willfully and knowingly [giving] a false alarm of fire, in violation of DC code’ and the New York Democrat was ordered to appear in court for arraignment on Thursday.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that he doesn’t spend as much time in jail as the January 6th folks.
Tuesday’s demonstrations drew a crowd of tens of thousands in central Reykjavik, according to the police, a large number in the country of fewer than 400,000 people. Even the country’s prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir, took part. It was the seventh such gathering over the years, and the latest since 2018.
Iceland is the most gender equal country in the world based on economic opportunities, educational attainment, health care outcomes and political leadership, according to the World Economic Forum, a title it’s held onto for the past 14 years. It has closed 91.2% of its gender gap according to the forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, where 100% denotes full parity, and compares with about 75% for the US.
What they really need is a spanking.
Old Guy Music is good.
What they really need is a spanking.
https://youtu.be/zXT_IOt81Xs?t=41
Good point. This would just reward bad behavior which results in more temper tantrums.
The prime minister joined other women in Iceland on a strike to call attention to the remaining inequalities in their society even though the country ranks highest globally in terms of gender parity.
They sound bossy and ungrateful.
Richmond is where my mother’s aunt and her husband lived before emigrating to East Berlin.
Silly Jews.
The Richmond, Calif., City Council voted early Wednesday to support the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip with a resolution that accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing and collective punishment” nearly three weeks after war broke out in the Middle East.
At least it’s not the old dominion Richmond. And no mention of how the “Palestinians” would eliminate all Jews given the opportunity.
Our Richmond is probably too preoccupied with expanding corruption to bother.
Duh, don’t you even intersectional? Jews are white, or white adjacent?, and thus have no rights, nor have ever had rights, and only achieved superiority by way of tricknology, and sucking up to Hitler. Who is now cool, so don’t punch any Nazi’s! They are the good guys.
/derp
Fide Grand Swiss Day 2:
Standings after day 1: https://grandswiss.fide.com/open/
You will see the tiebreaker columns are mostly meaningless at this point (all zeros in TB1 and TB2, in fact). The tiebreakers are:
1. Average Ranking of Opponents, drop lowest
2. Total score of opponents, drop lowest
3. Total score of opponents
4. Head to head
5. Random draw
In lots of tournaments, the first tiebreaker would be 3rd or not used at all. But it is very unlikely to be tied, so that is good. And it tends to favor the higher rated players and players who get off to a good start in the tourney.
Anyway, 32 players are in group with 1 pt now and 32 with 0 pts. That leaves 50 with a draw yesterday at 0.5 pts.
Todays featured matchups, * means American, first listed is white:
One point group
1. Caruana* (2786) v Niemann* (2667)
2. Bacrot (2669) v Rapport (2752) — Rapport is Romanian…well, he is Hungarian playing for Romania federation
3. Aronian* (2742) v Cheparinov (2658)
4. Predke (2656) v Duda (2726)
5. Yu (2720) v Shirov (2655)
9. Sevian* (2698) v Aravindh (2649)
1/2 point group
17. Sadhwani (2641) v Nakamura* (2780)
28. Karthikeya (2611) v Shankland* (2698)
31. Nguyen (2618) v Xiong* (2693)
32. Akobian* (2582) v Grandelius (2689)
Zero point group
47. Santos Latasa (2650) v Mishra* (2592)
# in front of pairings is board number. Lower numbers are closer to top of standings. With 114 players, there are 57 boards.
Jan-Krysztof Duda probably had the game of the day yesterday. He followed Tal’s advice: “I can sacrifice everything, but they can only take one piece at a time.” Duda left pieces hanging all over the board and forced a pawn to advance. His opponent resigned when Duda had two queens staring down at the king.
Why?
A “small number” of Ukrainian pilots began training with the 162nd Wing of the Arizona Air National Guard earlier this week in “F-16 fundamentals,” according to a service spokesperson.
“The training curriculum will align with the foundational knowledge and skills of each pilot and is expected to last several months,” a U.S. Air Force spokesperson said in a statement provided to Air & Space Forces Magazine.
A few F-16s is not going to change the inevitable outcome of the war. Never mind the fact we should not be supplying/funding it anyway.
I have been seeing a few think pieces lately about how the Ukulele war is a lost cause*. Methinks that with the Israeli situation blowing up, money is going to be moving around to a closer “friend”. IE, we can firehose cash to both sides!
*Duh, I mean, no shit Sherlock, we always knew that.
Dunno. The main point of the war from DC’s side has been to pay blackmail to the guys who could (officially) spill the beans on Biden, and it seems to be working so far. I guess it has to go on forever, or until somebody snuffs those particular guys.
It’s darkly humorous that some of them are openly calling out the benefits to the MIC. It makes one wonder what is the even more sinister motive they’re not talking about.
There was a MSNBC (I think) broad saying on her show that “the money isn’t going to Ukraine, it’s going to American workers at Lockheed”
It was always a money-laundering operation. All the death and destruction is just the cost of doing business.
Lockheed Martin need business?
They’re jealous of the profits big pharma got from the vax.
Cunte, partisan judge says cunte, partisan judge things.
Donald Trump unexpectedly took the witness stand Wednesday in his civil fraud trial to face questioning from the judge about out-of-court comments in which Trump appeared to disparage the judge’s law clerk.
Finding Trump “not credible,” the judge then fined him $10,000 for defying a gag order that bars Trump from attacking court staff, marking the second time in the past week that the judge has fined Trump for violating the gag order. …
“I am very protective of my staff, as I should be,” Engoron said Wednesday, appearing agitated. “I don’t want anybody killed.”
“I stated the last time that any future violations would be severely punished,” Engoron said. “Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal of a court order?”
Thou shall not be indignant while being railroaded by a corrupt system.
That judge is straight out of Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.
“I am very protective of my staff, as I should be,”
The rights of defendants, not so much.
If they wanted rights and protection, they should declare their loyalty to a liege who will protect them!
Fuck judges and their unearned dictatorships. They are the hired help, not lords. Fuckers need a course of WCs.
From Taibbi
Preet was unavailable for comment.
That’s our Special K…
They keep using that word…
REPORTER: “If you win reelection in 2024, are you worried that a Speaker Johnson would again attempt to overturn the election?”
BIDEN: “No. Just like I was not worried that the last guy would be able to overturn the election. […] I understand the constitution.“
Is that why you violate every provision?
I saw some of that “press conference” where old Joe looked at his notes to see which “reporter” he was supposed to call on with their friendly, pre-vetted question. He actually was looking down at his notes as he read the name and affiliation of each reporter he was told to call.
That’s an apt criticism of the Libertarian Party, not libertarians.
Libertarians are victims of their own success, and the rest of us are victims of the few remaining libertarians, who – like CrossFitters, militant atheists, and vegans – can’t seem to shut up about their obsession. The fact is that conservatism has absorbed most of libertarianism, at least the useful parts of it. I don’t have much use for a conservative who has no libertarian tendencies, but I’ve got no use at all for the self-identified libertarians we see all too often today. They are a bunch of rigid scolds with zero conception of how the world works but no hesitation to explain it to the rest of us.
“At least the useful part of it”
Not a damn thing about the Republicans is libertarian. They took the libertarians behind the barn and clubbed them like baby seals. Just like the Tea Party. Go ahead, make them your scapegoat. Who’s next to cover for the failures of the republicans? Kennedy? New guy Johnson? Fuck off and look in a mirror.
Agree. Fuck that guy. Republicans today are neither libertarian nor conservative.
Maybe the Republicans have decided to mimic the Democrats and just start changing labels as they destroy the old ones (liberal, progressive, socialist, etc.).
Sure feels that way. Red State in particular seems to have been “wandering off the reservation.”
They don’t care about principles or moving forward in a principled direction. It’s more rewarding to have electoral or political “wins”, own the libs, and be liked by people who hate you and want you dead.
“Libertarians are victims of their own success”
What world is this guy living in?
Maybe he means success in owning him on Twitter.
You’ll take everything or you’ll take nothing.
Scholastic Planned to Segregate Diverse Titles at School Book Fairs. Then Came the Backlash.
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/scholastic-walks-back-move-to-separate-books-about-gender-race-for-school-book-fairs-ff7ccadc?st=t03mfrgp17jxksf&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
JFC. Why is a law even needed to prevent the pushing of child porn and racist brainwashing materials on public school kids? Society is sick.
My ex falls hook, line and sinker for every MSM stone the media chucks – the latest about “book banning”. So I sent her the list from PEN of the most “banned” (i.e. not made available in school libraries) books. Number 1 on the list: GenderQueer.
Whatever happened to Dick and Jane? After watching Spot run did they grow up, marry and have a small home with a white picket fence surrounding the front yard?
My kids loved the Scholastic books, I had to limit the amount they were willing to spend to 5 books per kid per order. Fortunately they were able to read when they started school.
WRT to OMWC’s story…
A few months ago, I taught a high school statistics class for 2 weeks. I gave a test which the previous teacher prepared and graded it according to her answer key. The high score was 6 out of 12, and there were several smart students in that class. I made an executive decision to give everyone a 70. Had I been allowed to continue teaching, my grading policy would have been: if you show up and try, you’ll get at least a 70. If you want an A or a B, you need to get enough questions right.
One day, I wrote on the board before class started:
***
Yoda: Do or do not; there is no try.
Me: Sorry, Yoda. That advice sucks.
***
I had another class at the same time called Math for College, which turned out to be a euphemism for remedial pre-algebra. I wrote a math textbook in August. In the introduction, I wrote:
***
This book is for anyone who has struggled with math. I wrote it because math education in the US as a whole has been mediocre for a long time despite large amounts being spent on textbooks and other teaching aids. Although there are calculators everywhere today, calculators don’t know when you’ve hit the wrong button, and they can’t tell you the right buttons to push. In this text, I will explain math mostly with words rather than equations or pictures. Let’s start from the very beginning.
***
Different calculators give different answers to the same input:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x-BcYCiKCk
Knowing how the order of operation works on the device you’re putting equations into is important.
+1 RPN
Eh, exams really ought to test comprehension of the material. If everybody fails, well, they don’t understand the material and should not move on to situations where comprehension is a prerequisite. Not to be trite, but curving the grade is a disservice to students in the long run.
I don’t understand why you would ever curve a grade. It’s supposed to be an assessment of the individual student’s grasp of the subject matter. The same performance amidst a class of dullards shouldn’t get a higher score than when amidst overachievers. What the other students do or do not understand is immaterial to the performance of the student being graded.
Yes, curving a grade just means you don’t have confidence in the validity of your own test.
I thought it was to remove the lowest tranche?
God morning!
Re: tests, I (and I believe Unreconstructed) had the Same Physics I instructor that taught my dad.
His tests were of the following format:
-10 questions, multiple choice
-Open book
-Two hours
-One point for a correct answer, -0.5 points for an incorrect answer
Points to achieve letter grade:
A – 6
B – 4
C – 2
D – 0
People failed.
It was the most mentally challenging thing I’ve experienced until I discovered practical shooting. Of course I made straight As.
I’m still not sure how I got an A in multivariable calculus. The tests were also 10-question, multiple choice, but 8 possible answers instead of 4 per question.
There was a midterm and a final. No homework, no attendance credit. Great teacher though, if you bothered to listen to him.
Bovine University: Where Greatness is Learned and Couches are Burned
2003 to 2007
Back when I thought I might be going into academia, I decided what grading system I wanted to use and how tests should be structured.
I based it off what my Dynamics prof did. His class the average was the BC borderline and 1 SD was a letter grade. So beat the average by more than 1 standard deviation and you got an A. 0-1 was a B. 0 to -1 was a C. -1 to -2 a D. And below -2 was an F.
So far so good, but average bounced around too much for my taste. Part of that was the nature of dynamics, it starts easy and gets hard. 30+ years later, I remember that 1st test I got an 93 and it was a low A (92 was a B) and 2nd test 58 was a high B (59 was an A). So thru two I was on the AB borderline exactly. 3rd test was about the same as the 2nd and I got an 80 something, so I was pretty set going into the final.
My change would be to target specific scores. I would design for an average of 60 with a SD of 15. That allows you to pretty much use the entire range of 0-100 to test. And preferrably, the score is open ended. Realistically there would be a perfect 100, but since that is 2.67 SDs above average, it would be pretty rare. About .4%.
Basing grading off of a Tech dynamics prof is pure sadism.
I didnt say I would be a fun professor.
Maybe a long shot on this, but out of curiosity did you have Dewey Hodges for Dynamics? Nice guy with the instructional mannerisms of an old-time preacher.
I remembered loving Statics and hating Dynamics, and then DefBods was just like a fight the whole time. But the interesting grading thing in DefBods was that ALL of us had failing grades at Drop Day – and then more than half the class dropped and everybody who didn’t passed.
DefBods kicked my ass. I had one of the professors known as “the bamboo shaft”. But not THE one.
Dynamics I had a young Middle Eastern dude who was a fairly new professor. He was pretty good. No idea if he got tenure eventually or not. Probably not, because he was competent in the classroom.
About grading and professors’ habits: my Thermodynamics prof was James Hartley. He and somebody named Black wrote our textbook, complete with 5.5″ floppy of the Steam Tables in the back. He was a really really good professor.
Well, whenever we had a quiz or test, he’d return them all in descending order of grades. He never said that, but everybody figured it out pretty quick and it was always interesting/tense to watch the process and see when he was coming to you. So we all knew where we stood, for better or for worse.
I had a really good Thermo prof too. I dont think it was Hartley, but we used that book also. My version didnt have the floppy, you were a few years after me, IIRC. That book was really well written, IMO.
My Calc I professor decided that the average score should be half the points on the test. Equal opportunities to succeed or fail.
I had a high school history teacher who, on the first day of class, handed out the final, which was four essay questions out of the twenty or so on the paper he handed us. He would pick three, and we got to choose a fourth. The questions were on the line of “Explain the Teapot Dome scandal. What was the method of it, who was affected, and what were the long term repercussions, both socially and politically. Backup any claims you make.” Hardest final I ever took, including all of the engineering classes I took in college. Those were just math.
My reactor physics prof gave us open book/open notes tests. He also gave us all his previous tests and the answer key for them. We would each grab 3 desks so that we could set up for the test.
They were the hardest freaking tests I ever took.
Mine was probably Desai’s Fluids III exam. Near the end of the 3 hours he just came in and asked whether anybody had made any progress, and then he did about half of each problem on the board and let us work from there for a little while.
With a system like that and a professor like that you know those tests are going to be hell.
Its questionable whether its a good thing or not, but I learned things about reactor physics DURING his tests.
Reactor physics is the class I loved in concept — but the midterm was (iirc): “Derive the neutron transport equation”. Holy hell I flunked it.
This is why I’m now a MSCS not a BSNE. Sigh.
Probably a good move. I have a BNE but work in CS.
It’s kinda funny, the local school was a top ten engineering university that my dad was a prof at. I shoulda gone to a SLAC, but I was a kid who was getting some on the regular, so I stayed in place.
I used to do this in my history of math course. It worked pretty well except that too few students actually reviewed the questions during the semester and kept track of which material was relevant to which question.
Ooh, fun memories! And the best part (IMO) was that there were 10 multiple choice answers for every question, with ~10% variation from one to the next (so there were no obvious outliers), and NOTA was *always* one of the 10!
I also got straight As 😀
Y’all make me feel like a complete retard.
A double dose of THICC Thursday because you deserve it you beautiful people.
https://archive.ph/hmSsm
https://archive.ph/ZDDgz
I think we’re working off a different definition of thicc. Thin Thursday with Tits is more like it.
Re: SF,
Why is it we have such good horror writers here?
We are libertarians living in THIS universe.
Probably because a lot of people here are fans of horror? Libertarians and high-IQ people have a lower sensitivity to disgust and fear.
“Fear is the mind-killer.”
I wrote a horror story: https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-devils-observatory.html
***
Darwin was the first modern observer to drop a pebble into the scummy pond of disgust studies. In “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” he describes a personal encounter that took place in Tierra del Fuego, where Darwin was dining on a portion of cold preserved meat at a campsite. As he ate, a “naked savage” came over and poked Darwin’s meat with a finger, showing “utter disgust at its softness.” Darwin, in turn, was disgusted at having his snack fingered by a stranger. Darwin inferred that the other man was repelled by the unusual texture of the meat, but he was less confident about the origins of his own response. The hands of the “savage,” after all, did not appear to be dirty. What was it about the poking that rendered Darwin’s food inedible? Was it the man’s nakedness? His foreignness? And why, Darwin wondered — moving on to a remembered scenario — was the sight of soup smeared in a man’s beard disgusting, even though there was “of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself”?
***
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/magazine/disgust-science.html
I hate it when I get startled by a house centipede. Those bastards are harmless, but when they dart out from somewhere, it gives quite a jump scare.
The problem is the only thing that eats them that might be around is mice, and I got rid of the mice for being worse vermin. So, the house centipedes are back, and ugly as ever.
“house centipede”
I would build a centipede house and make it live in the backyard.
I like house centipedes, they eat the bugs I don’t like.
I’m allowing a couple ladybugs to be temporary house guests until the rest of my peppers ripen indoors. They’re there to keep the aphids in check.
Yeah, but Ladybugs Don’t look like this
It probably means your house has rot somewhere.
What desert do you live in?
And?
MAINE DOES NOT:
Require background checks on all gun sales
Have a red flag law
Prevent domestic abusers from accessing guns
Ban assault weapons
Limit magazine capacity
Require concealed carry permits
Restrict open carry
Have a waiting period
Now explain how these unconstitutional policies would have prevented the crime.
So with all of the above, no one in the restaurant or bowling alley returned fire? That was my wife’s first question. Why was no one packing? The shooter should have been hit from several directions as soon as he opened up.
Maybe the two locations had signs posted for no guns. Our local bowling alley does that. We have not been back since they posted it.
Lewiston is close enough to Portland that I can see there being no one carrying.
Worse than the Inquisition.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/dear-deidre/24400128/sad-wife-booked-breast-reduction/
| The prime minister joined other women in Iceland on a strike to call attention to the remaining inequalities in their society even though the country ranks highest globally in terms of gender parity.
They’re gonna just keep on nagging until that gender parity thingy gets fixed.
| To be fair, Richmond is a shithole, the place you go when Oakland is too classy.
Aside from Point Richmond, I totally agree. Just driving through that stretch of Interstate 80 you are absolutely guaranteed to see some insane driving. And not just the not paying attention kind, it will be someone doing 40 mph more than traffic frantically weaving in and out of traffic with another car following doing the same thing. A few weeks ago I took a circuitous route through Richmond city streets to get around traffic going to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and man that town is spotty, even in the daylight.
When I was with the phone company, I would often do work in Richmond. And there were a couple B-Boxes (neighborhood connection level access) that you needed to cruise by slowly at first, and let the D crew clear out the stash they kept in it before working on any connections. Kept everyone happy and alive that way.
The quest for gender “parity” is going to continue until something major happens, such as a war, that gives men a leg up on who does what. Then it will be “draft them, not us, we are girls!”
Heheh, I can imagine.
I’ll not hold my breath waiting for the gender parity protests in favor of equalizing lifespan, or on the job deaths, or homelessness.
Through the glass ceiling and into the glass coffin…
MAINE DOES NOT:
Require background checks on all gun sales
Have a red flag law
Prevent domestic abusers from accessing guns
Ban assault weapons
Limit magazine capacity
Require concealed carry permits
Restrict open carry
Have a waiting period
They should try passing a law against murder.
This would at least make for an amusing ride home on the train.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/flipper-zero-can-lock-up-an-iphone-running-the-latest-ios-17/
It’s relatively benign in that it just a DoS attack, but I’d estimate that 75% of people surrounding me would have no idea to turn the Bluetooth off.
Watch these hackers crack an ATM in seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2A5Ld-QWnU
Fun fact: most ATMs use a form of Windows XP.
Take a moment to ponder how much NSA knows about such things.
People don’t think of ATMs, smartphones, vending machines, gasoline pumps, etc as computers, but that’s what they all have inside.
I don’t see where they say how they connect to the ATM in the first place. The ATMs are apparently communicating over an IP network, does that traffic actually traverse a public network? That would be super stupid, but I guess they are still running XP, so… If the traffic is internal to the bank’s LAN, then you need to penetrate that network before you can attack the ATM.
A number of times they show network traffic between a 1.x.x.x address and 127.0.0.1, that’s a routeable address talking to the loopback interface. That doesn’t happen unless the interface with the routeable address is on the same machine as the loopback interface.
An educated guess: the receipt printer is a USB device, just like any other wireless printer. If an attacker gains access to the printer, they can get to everything else it connects with.
The Stuxtnet worm spread through networked printers.
***
In order to infect the Windows PCs in the Natanz facility, Stuxnet exploited no fewer than four zero-day bugs—a Windows Shortcut flaw, a bug in the print spooler, and two escalation of privilege vulnerabilities—along with a zero-day flaw in the Siemens PLCs and an old hole already used in the Confickerattack.
***
***
Intramar, the French Navy computer network, was infected with Conficker on 15 January 2009. The network was subsequently quarantined, forcing aircraft at several airbases to be grounded because their flight plans could not be downloaded.[23]
***
another guess
***
Jackpotting
The term jackpotting is used to describe one method criminals utilize to steal money from an ATM. The thieves gain physical access through a small hole drilled in the machine. They disconnect the existing hard drive and connect an external drive using an industrial endoscope. They then depress an internal button that reboots the device so that it is now under the control of the external drive. They can then have the ATM dispense all of its cash.[110]
***
“At least 16 people dead”
Unfortunately, none of them were judges or politicians. We need a better class of spree killer.
22 as of the last I read.
I played https://squaredle.com 10/26:
44/44 words (+8 bonus words)
🔥 Solve streak: 4
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 10/26:
*24/24 words (+1 bonus word)
🎯 In the top 30% by accuracy
I swear, quordle is making up words again today.
My brain just locked up today… stared at these on and off for 2 hours.
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 10/26:
*24/24 words
🎯 In the top 7% by accuracy
I played https://squaredle.com 10/26:
44/44 words (+8 bonus words)
🎯 In the top 13% by accuracy
🔥 Solve streak: 68
Still staring.
Work keeps interfering.
Demonology Today
House Republicans finally picked a speaker of the House when GOP members coalesced around Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson on Wednesday afternoon.
With this decision, MAGA wins again.
Johnson is no moderate. While free of any major known scandal and gentler in demeanor than Ohio’s Rep. Jim Jordan — the far-right choice of the House rebels who ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the speakership who failed to win the office last week — that’s about it. Johnson might be a nice person, he carries himself in a reasonable way, but make no mistake about it: He is perfectly aligned with the new generation of Republicans who are replacing the generations of the upstart tea party and smash mouth partisan Newt Gingrich as they push their party even further to the right.
Indeed, the nomination speech that New York Rep. Elise Stefanik gave for Johnson was pure red meat for the party. She accused the left of wanting to stop paying for police, being weak on defense and undermining the values of the nation. She railed against President Joe Biden’s “radical, failed, far-left Democrat policies” on energy and warned that the government had been “illegally weaponized” against “we the people.” For comparison, Speaker Tip O’Neill in 1984 condemned as the “lowest thing” he had seen in his career in Congress the attacks on the patriotism of Democrats leveled by then-Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich and his allies on televised House proceedings when Democrats weren’t present to respond. That was child’s play compared to Stefanik’s words.
On almost every issue, Johnson is hard right. He has been a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. He has been at the forefront of opposing reproductive rights. He opposed funding for Ukraine. He wants to deregulate the economy, cut taxes and deny the very real problems facing our climate. He supported “expunging” former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and has questioned the Justice Department for how it has handled investigations into Hunter Biden.
That sounds pretty bad.
“He has been a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage” – That’s a negative.
“He has been at the forefront of opposing reproductive rights” – Meaning sex change operations for kids. Good.
“He opposed funding for Ukraine.” – Very good.
“He wants to deregulate the economy” – Excellent.
“cut taxes” – Great.
“and deny the very real problems facing our climate” – Stop.
To quote Swissy: “Stop! i can only get so hard!”
Too far left.
the far-right choice…push their party even further to the right
Right?
“radical, failed, far-left Democrat policies” on energy and warned that the government had been “illegally weaponized”
Accurate observations have been made.
On almost every issue, Johnson is hard right.
I already like him. You don’t have to sell it to me.
At least it’s the opinion section, but get a grip Julian.
“Indeed, the nomination speech that New York Rep. Elise Stefanik gave for Johnson was pure red meat for the party. She accused the left of wanting to stop paying for police, being weak on defense and undermining the values of the nation. She railed against President Joe Biden’s “radical, failed, far-left Democrat policies” on energy and warned that the government had been “illegally weaponized” against “we the people.” ”
If by red meat, you mean “factually accurate”, sure.
“It’s important for currency rates to move stably reflecting fundamentals. Excess volatility is undesirable,”
Perhaps that’s exactly what they are doing. The dollar to yen is at a 30 plus year high.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/japan-finmin-says-he-is-watching-yen-moves-with-sense-urgency-2023-10-26/
“There are many reasons why I chose to go with Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light, most importantly because I feel we are very aligned when it comes to our core values and what the UFC brand stands for. ”
And the estimated $100m had nothing to do with it. Also not following this I didn’t realize the prior sponsorship was Modelo.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ufcs-massive-bud-light-deal-triggers-conservative-snowflakes
Well, to be fair, UFC does let that dude who dresses like a woman break women’s skulls in the octogon.
Selling out to a company that’s known for staging fake* matches?
*please don’t repeat that to David Schultz
Fake beer for fake tits.
The payout and sponsorship sounds more like trying to limit Modelo than boosting Bud Light.
As McKay Coppins documents in his new book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” Romney kept agreeing to live with Trumpism despite his understanding of the dangers that entailed, reportedly thinking he could contain the extremes as he worked to protect his party. He was wrong.
It’s a political biography. Every word is the gospel truth. If you can’t believe a hack journalist’s retelling of a hack politician’s struggles to attain enlightenment, who can you believe?
Live with Trumpism? Dude, he was elected. For a reason. That has everything to due with your failures.
A forgotten scientist and his ground-breaking work on the intelligence of animals:
***
oysters taken from a depth never uncovered by the sea, open their shells, lose the water within, and perish; but oysters taken from the same place and depth, if kept in reservoirs, where they are occasionally left uncovered for a short time, and are otherwise incommoded, learn to keep their shells shut, and then live for a much longer time when taken out of the water.[9]
***
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/40459/pg40459-images.html
fun fact for OMWC: the term “catalysis” was coined by a chemist named Fulhame. She received little credit for her work, which she lamented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Fulhame
***
According to the introduction of her book by her American editor in 1810, her work was lesser known than it could or should have been, adding that “the pride of science, revolted at the idea of being taught by a female”.[25][4][26]
Fulhame says as much in her own preface to the work:
“But censure is perhaps inevitable: for some are so ignorant, that they grow sullen and silent, and are chilled with horror at the sight of anything that nears the semblance of learning, in whatever shape it may appear; and should be the spectre appear in the shape of a woman, the pangs which they suffer are truly dismal.”
Such a reaction, she says, was particularly acute amongst some who held esteemed positions, who she described as having a ‘dictatorship in science’. [15]
***
Democrats have some big decisions ahead. The distance between what Johnson and the House Republicans will push for after agreeing to an expected continuing resolution to keep the government open for a few months will be hugely different from the concessions Democrats can accept. From assistance to Ukraine to funding for basic social safety programs, the two parties will be very far apart. To keep government functioning while protecting core programs that have been created since the New Deal, Democrats will have to choose whether to make massive concessions to their opposition that will no doubt leave voters feeling dispirited when the next election rolls around.
It’s just like if the UAW went on strike for lower pay and more hours.
I didn’t post that, despite being on call for the press office this week
One of Sam Powers’s underlings (also a Biden appointee) is a convert Jew STRONGLY supportive of Israel. I wonder what she’s been told by her bosses regarding her support.
Probably “keep your fucking mouth shut if you like your job” or similar.
“And you ever want another job. Ever.”
High wire act
Hours before President Joe Biden gave a rare prime-time address last week, his head speechwriter sat down with a group of senior Arab and Muslim American officials to go over the draft and take suggestions.
Dissent was sprouting even inside the White House, where some aides worried that Biden hadn’t shown enough empathy for Palestinian civilians and a Muslim community facing a torrent of anger, said a person familiar with the discussions, who, like others, requested anonymity to talk freely.
The hourlong editing session reflects a vigorous outreach effort the White House is undertaking to reassure Arab Americans who feel they’re being scapegoated for the atrocities Hamas has committed half a world away. Senior advisers have been calling Muslim officials throughout the country and inviting community advocates onto the White House campus for frank conversations. Cabinet secretaries are sounding out federal workers to see how they’re coping with the Israel-Hamas war, which has sparked angry protests in the U.S.
Shaken by reports of Hamas militants’ killing unsuspecting Israelis on Oct. 7, Biden gave remarks in the first days of the war that channeled Israel’s anger and resolve to fight back. He met with Jewish leaders and said the Hamas attacks evoked the horrors of the Holocaust.
Some allies in Congress complained that he seemed indifferent to innocent victims of Israel’s counterattack. Now Biden is calling more attention to Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire and the discriminatory backlash against Muslims back home.
Quick, do a poll!
It also shows that the Dems are so confident that the (((Reforms))) won’t leave the reservation, they feel comfortable both-sides-ing it and tacitly playing apologist for murderers and terrorists. Further, I’m unaware of *anyone* painting Muslims and Arabs with a broad brush and blaming them collectively for Hamas’ actions; the ones getting vilified are the ones showing up at rallies calling for Jews to be exterminated.
Or, that there aren’t enough jews in the party to make up for the new guys.
The backlash must be written in invisible ink.
Narratives don’t really require factual input.
Well! Making Newsome look like an idiot took all of 24 hours.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/unprecedented-in-human-history-five-eyes-intelligence-chiefs-sound-alarm-on-chinas-technology-theft-5515753
The Epoch Times seems to get a lot of exposure here. But, I have yet to read anything linked, because I refuse to sign in.
If there is a way around the sign in, please let me know.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theepochtimes.com%2Fchina%2Funprecedented-in-human-history-five-eyes-intelligence-chiefs-sound-alarm-on-chinas-technology-theft-5515753
thanks
Curse your nimble fingers!
12ft.io works on Epoch Times links.
I am not familiar with 12ft.io
Just block JavaScript for that specific site. This will get you around 40-50% of the paywalled sites.
You don’t do that by default for all sites? I block JavaScript unless whitelisted.
No, I’m not that paranoid / annoyed by it.
The internet became so much less annoying when I started browsing that way.
I’ve tried that route but it breaks every site and I got tired of whitelisting nearly every site I wanted to visit.
My adblocker (AdGuard) must be working around it cuz I’ve never seen a login there.
Oddly enough, I finds some of the most evenhanded journalisming comes from cult-run organizations.
The Knife ,/em>was particularly good,
But they often fucked up closing their tags.
Better spent on more reporters, vs. more editors.
In his West Wing office, speechwriter Vinay Reddy read aloud from the draft to make certain his Arab American colleagues were comfortable with language denouncing “Islamophobia” and name-checking the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian populations that felt vulnerable, a White House official said. The group listened and approved.
Said the official: “There will be things that the United States does in the Middle East that the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian populations don’t like. And there will be plenty of disagreements to come. But as an Arab American, I felt very seen and respected.”
You could always denounce Hamas.
Haha, just kidding.
“We had great concerns with what we saw at the beginning” of the war, said Hanna Hanania, former president of the Detroit-based American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine, who voted for Biden in 2020. “We thought the messages were as if we were totally left out. The messages were going totally for the other side, as if we never existed.”
In the past two weeks, Democratic members of Congress have phoned senior White House adviser Anita Dunn and other top officials and warned that Biden needed to address the isolation and fear their Muslim constituents were experiencing, according to White House and congressional officials.
What a bunch of whining children.
for Halloween
How to Donate Your Body to the Mütter Museum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cKYP2HSMfQ
One guy with an enlarged heart donated it to the museum. The donor had a successful heart transplant and later came to see his previous heart on display.
I visited that museum shortly before leaving for Peace Corps in Africa in 2007.
I decided to become an organ donor when I got my Florida driver’s license a few months ago. The oldest organ donor on record was 92. Not sure how many of parts will still be useful if I live an average lifespan.
Visited about 50 weeks ago. Interesting/freaky/classic as you’d expect.
Derpy, how difficult is Hindi for muricans to learn?
You’d better hurry. Diwali is in just a few weeks.
It does mean some good food will be at the office.
So many cultural differences. I don’t know how long it’ll be before she tells any of her family and friends about my existence. Very much only wants to meet outside of her town.
They kiss the same though.
Hindi is classified as a Category III language by the US government and military, which puts it in the same group as Russian. You’d need to study it for about 900 hours to read newspaper headlines without using a dictionary. It’d take an average native speaker of English about 600 hours to learn Spanish, 750 hours to learn Swahili, 900 hours to learn Russian, and 2,000 hours to learn Chinese.
***
The School of Language Studies provides training in over 70 languages.
Category I: Languages closely related to English.
Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
Category II: Languages that take a little longer to master than Category I languages.
German, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili
Category III: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.
Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Czech, Dari, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Khmer, Kurdish, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Tagalog, Tajiki, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese
Category IV: Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
***
By “Learn” what level of ability are you expected to have attained?
“My pencil is red.”
“Mein Bleistift ist rot.”
You have now graduated German I. Get your diploma, and go to Octoberfest.
Our High School German textbook started with a conversation between Uwe and Thomas that we had to read through and generally understand before we learned anything about the language, evidently so that we got the point that it ain’t that far from English.
“Tag Uwe”
“Tag Thomas”
“Wie geht’s?”
“Ganz gut”
“Was machts du jetzt?”
etc.
Was Uwe about to punch Thomas out for insulting his movies/tax scam?
I still remember my French one as well.
Bonjour Guy.
Ça va?
Oui, ça va. Et toi?
Pas mal.
He was originally headed home (“gleich um die Ecke”) and they decided to head into die Stadt instead.
“Wie geht’s?”
That sums up what I remember from two years of high school German.
I could follow the German conversation, but you lost me on the second line.
DLI graduates must reach the 2/2 level in listening and reading. A level 2 speaker can do the following:
***
able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements
can handle with confidence most basic social situations including introductions and casual conversations about current events, work, family, and autobiographical information
can handle limited work requirements, needing help in handling any complications or difficulties; can get the gist of most conversations on non-technical subjects (i.e. topics which require no specialized knowledge), and has a speaking vocabulary sufficient to respond simply with some circumlocutions
has an accent which, though often quite faulty, is intelligible
can usually handle elementary constructions quite accurately but does not have thorough or confident control of the grammar
***
For comparison, I’m pretty sure our good friend Pie here is a level 5 speaker of English
***
Native or bilingual proficiency is rated 5 on the scale. A person at this level is described as follows:
has a speaking proficiency equivalent to that of an educated native speaker
has complete fluency in the language, such that speech on all levels is fully accepted by educated native speakers in all of its features, including breadth of vocabulary and idiom, colloquialisms, and pertinent cultural references
***
Well Shit, I’m not fluent in English after all.
ILR LEVEL 3 – PROFESSIONAL WORKING PROFICIENCY
Professional working proficiency is rated 3 on the scale. Level 3 is what is usually used to measure how many people in the world know a given language. A person at this level is described as follows:
able to speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most conversations on practical, social, and professional topics
can discuss particular interests and special fields of competence with reasonable ease
has comprehension which is quite complete for a normal rate of speech
has a general vocabulary that is broad enough that he or she rarely has to search for a word
has an accent that may be obviously foreign; has good control of grammar; and whose errors virtually never interfere with understanding and rarely disturb the native speaker
https://strommeninc.com/what-are-ilr-and-cefr-levels/
LOL German alone among the common Euro languages is bumped up? That’s kind of funny.
It’s not Romance and more removed from English than some of the other non-Romance European languages.
But it makes sense – it’s harder to learn than Spanish for sure.
Mark Twain said he’d rather decline 2 drinks than 1 German noun.
That’s… some definition of good news there.
Devangari does look cool though.
Devanagari = of the city of the gods
Diva and divine share the same root as deva.
Many cities in India contain the suffix -nagar like Srinagar (city of gentlemen).
I seem to recall you did some Japanese. So you’re good to go on the syllabary aspect.
Yes, but Hindi apparently has a fuckton more consonants than Nihongo.
Looks to be about 3x as big sound wise as Japanese.
If you include hiragana, katakana and the “ten ten” sounds (diacritics) is might be more similar number of written characters, but far more unique sounds.
Good luck…
Japanese: 15 consonants
English: 24 consonants
Hindi: ~30 consonants
AIEEEE!
bole tena bor vechaay = the one who speaks is heard
That’s Gujarati, not Hindi, though there’s big overlap between the 2.
I’ve dated a few women from India. However much you learn, it will be more than about 99% of Americans. It doesn’t take much language knowledge to impress them.
Learn a joke or 2. That’ll be more than enough.
***
सन्ता (अपनी मम्मी से) – माँ खुशखबरी है,
हम दो से तीन हो गये हैं…🤪
माँ – बधाई हो बेटा, क्या हुआ है
बेटा 👶 या 👧 बेटी ?🤷♀️
सन्ता – ना #बेटा, और ना #बेटी,
मैने दुसरी शादी कर ली है ।😜😂😂
***
***
Santa (to his mother) – Mother, good news,
We have become two to three… 🤪
Mom – Congratulations son, what happened?
Son 👶 or 👧 daughter? 🤷 ♀️
Santa – neither #बेटा, nor #बेटी,
I got married for the second time. 😜😂😂
***
Not sure how many of parts will still be useful if I live an average lifespan.
Most. I think the upper age limit on harvesting was 80-90 years if I recall correctly. They don’t really care about the organ, at least for transplants. Hearts are usually diced up into tissue patches. The money is in stripping the skin, replacing bones with pvc, and removing the tendons. These, including the heart tissue, are all broken down into manufactured parts (bones are pulverized into particulate or sold as cubes), made shelf stable or prepped for freezing, packed in little cardboard product boxes with bar codes, and sold for $$$ around the world.
Not Adahn, I am giving Death Wish coffee a try. It’s not bad.
Coffee is a deeply personal/idiosyncratic preference. Even more so than whisky.
My wife just started drinking coffee. She got a few to try, including Death Wish’s chocolate hazelnut. And of course that’s the one she likes best. She had no idea there was a higher caffeine content.
Random thought: Women’s traditional mating strategy (hypergamy- preference for high-value males, even if they’re already ‘taken’) is predictive of pareto-like distributions. That is, if you can observe the one, you should be able to predict the other result.
Expand a little, pls….
Pareto’s Law = 80/20 rule
20% of the men mate with 80% of the women
(not really, but many mammals are like that)
The Wilt Chamberlain Wall of Fame
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOE8vrTaQPs
Been well debunked though.
About 20% of the men and 20% of the women are promiscuous and date a lot of different people in the same 20% group.
There are also 20% of both men and women who basically never have sex.
Also, Wilt Chamberlain was of course exaggerating.
I have mathematical proof that people lie about sex. Basically:
1) there are nearly equal numbers of men and women
2) every time a man has sex with a woman, a woman has sex with a man
Therefore, the average number of sexual partners for men and women must be the same. Things get a little more complicated when LGBT people are involved, but the logic is the same.
Indeed. I used to get a kick out of the talking point that men are more promiscuous than women…. in defiance of basic mathematics.
Then we have this incel talking point that all the women are basically just spreading their legs for handsome rich guys all the time. I mean I have no doubt that being handsome and rich gets you more opportunities, but it’s an exaggeration.
You’ve overlooking quantum partners, who only exist when they’re being observed having intercourse.
nice.
Further, I’m unaware of *anyone* painting Muslims and Arabs with a broad brush and blaming them collectively for Hamas’ actions; the ones getting vilified are the ones showing up at rallies calling for Jews to be exterminated.
But according to that NBC story, American moslems are universally terrified of leaving their homes because they are certain to be shot down in the street like dogs by deranged zionist thugs.
Certainly not the opposite. And certainly not in NYC.
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-770180
Fucking internal server errors again
A spokesperson for Harbourside Place said the incident happened not in the splash pad area but in the fountain where there are signs warning “no climbing” and “no swimming,” the station WPTV reported.
Pay no attention to the fact that the fountain was electrically alive and accessible.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/25/news/dad-dies-by-electrocution-saving-sons-from-water-fountain/
Isn’t a GFCI supposed to trip if something gets wet?
You could have another line that isn’t supposed to be associated with the fountain actually contacting it. That wouldn’t be GFCI protected.
Or this GFCI wasn’t working properly or a bunch of other things.
Reading between the lines – the kids were kids and weren’t playing where they were supposed to. I’ve no idea how close the area they were supposed to be was to the where they weren’t supposed to be be. However, the fountain should never have been electrically live ever. The spokesperson isn’t helping here.
However, the fountain should never have been electrically live ever.
The signs clearly weren’t doing the job.
Booming
Gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services produced in the U.S., rose at a seasonally adjusted 4.9% annualized pace in the July-through-September period, up from an unrevised 2.1% pace in the second quarter, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 4.7% acceleration in GDP, which also is adjusted for inflation.
Bidenomics, FTW!