2016 — 4 July: Monday
I find it more than a little rich that a chief architect of the EU referendum's "Leave" campaign1 is now lambasting his own party (currently in charge, though clearly not in control) for not explaining the benefits of "Brexit" and for having no plan in place to implement a "Leave" result. I'm still wondering whether this whole Brexit episode is a disaster, mere idiocy, or simple-minded (and sadly misguided) patriotism.
Meanwhile — I hardly dare ask — where's that Chilcot report on the events leading up to the epic disaster of the war in Iraq? I'd better track down Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort and ask him for my morning toad to swallow.
Good grief
Sensible news at last. Finally! An attempt will be made to force the guvmint (if anyone can find it) to put in place an act of Parliament before allowing the "Article 50" self-destruct button to be pushed. Everyone who voted "Leave" will no doubt start howling "Foul!" or "We wuz robbed!" But it's utterly irresponsible to impose "Brexit" on the "say" of less than 37% of the electorate. It seems:
- Some people voted "Leave" without realising it has consequences
- Some people voted "Leave" because (as a chum reminds me) "they believed the lies (£350m/week to the NHS, an end to immigration) that the politicians peddled"
- Many people didn't vote (and now regret this)
- Some particularly stupid people voted "Leave" to register a protest vote (aka a good kicking) against something or other...
... mostly the sort of immigration that has, over many centuries, ensured that this "island race" gets a refreshing blast of intelligence injected into its gene pool on occasion.
One day...
... I really should try to find out if this is true:
Famously, Gödel informed the judge at his U.S. citizenship hearing about an inconsistency that he had discovered in the Constitution, which would allow a dictator to rise in America.
Those pesky immigrants, heh?
What does "goofy" mean?
- Improved resistance against goofy query planner decisions caused by incomplete or incorrect modifications to the sqlite_stat1 table by the application. (Link.)
Just askin'.
Oops
I didn't much enjoy the statistics sections of my engineering studies. They struck me as a bit too much like hard work back in the days of slide rules and log tables. I prefer a cup of Chai to the Chi-squared test these days. As "eny fule kno" statistics can help you prove anything you want (if you're prepared to be, erm, selective enough in picking your data points). Fast forward 45 years. What if there are long-standing bugs (shock, horror) in your apparently-unexamined (but nowadays widely-used) "black box" stats-analysis software?
... we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results...
(Link.)
Wasn't there idle chatter about using fMRI scans of people to assess things like innate criminality?
I have another...
... bit of taxi-to-hospital duty this afternoon, and a walk pencilled in for Wednesday. Having supplied the two lads with the socket set they needed to get at a broken pulley inside their cement mixer they've disappeared (I assume) for lunch. The grand clear-up is promised for tomorrow, at which point one full month of house repair work will be done and, erm, dusted. [Pause] I'll say this much for Soton's General Hospital entrance coffee place — you can lose yourself in a book there and nobody bothers you. (Or, maybe, I lost myself in a book there and didn't notice anyone bothering me.)
Tasty advice...
... that almost makes me fancy a curry:
... if you defrosted some chicken in the hope of making a curry, and then more Brexity stuff happened and you lost the will to believe in (or cook) anything, the chicken was killed, frozen and thawed for nothing. Throw it out and blame it on the lack of leadership in this fractured
country.
But if you cooked the curry, any harmful bugs would have been killed during the heating process, and you can freeze it again (once it has cooled down). Though why anyone would be in this Beckettian situation of endless refreezing is beyond me. There is always the third option: just
eat the damn curry.
Context...
... is key:
The microbes in our lower gut would think of humans as dark, anaerobic pockets of faecal matter in the service of their life. That's the purpose of human life to them.