Thanks for that! LOL! I wish I had known about that clip when I was teaching. I would have used it both in my general physics course and the junior level thermodynamics course. I could have played it, and then said the exam will be in a week, and then walked out of the room and wait for their reaction.
“Trigger” Warning: The following is NOT COMEDY.
Important article by Lee Smith on how, and why, the “great shift” of the American elites resembles the “Thirty Tyrants” of Ancient Athens: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants=
H/T Powerline blog.
When I was in the Air Force Forecasting school in Chanute AFB I wish I had this video while studying thermodynamics. Would have been easier.
we shall see if our thirty tyrants meet the same fate as the Athenian tyrants.
Neo … yet another excellent post!
Somehow … my head is suddenly filled with a song about a lost french horn 🙂
Robert Schotzberger:
That will take some work.
Neo: so good to know that you, too, were raised to the tunes of Flanders & Swann. My parents played “At The Drop Of A Hat” until the grooves fell off the LP. I was too young to get much of the humor but every word, every note, is part of my deepest memory.
Tom Lehrer was the other voice frequently heard in our house. Good times.
My 2nd-year college roommate was a Flanders & Swann fan so I heard a bunch of it, but all I remember is:
“That’s irrelevant!”
“No it’s not, it’s a hippopotamus.”
So of course that goes through my head every time I hear “that’s irrelevant”.
My parents had these records, too. Of course, as a kid, the “Mud” song was a favorite, as well as the Hippopotamus and Gnu (a ganother gnu) songs. Also, Have Some Madeira, M’Dear! I keep remembering! It’s amazing how much sticks around from the early formative years.
Neo,
Instapundit highlights a tweet from Scott Adams that emphasizes two points I tried to make in a comment here a short while back about election fraud:
“Our burden of proof standards are backwards because we are conditioned to think of trials. But the world is not a trial. If any part of your election system is electronic and impossible to audit, the starting assumption has to be fraud. The government needs to prove fairness.”
He is advocating a major change by shifting who bears the burden of proof. As you know, the party bearing the burden of proof is often stymied by that burden. Evidence is often difficult to get before the trier of fact. I agree wholeheartedly with his shifting of that burden.
I think there is something else equally important. When we think of trials we tend to focus on criminal cases where the burden is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Civil cases use “more likely than not”. Literally, 50.1 % likelihood is sufficient.
As a practical matter, the election of 2020 is done. All that is left is what we think about it and what we do to fix the enormous problems of election integrity. I’ve argued that the evidence of serious fraud is massive. If we use the same standard to evaluate the statistics that we do for science, we have to conclude that the election was stolen. In any event, once the evidence of serious fraud is established, I believe it only reasonable to place the burden on the cheaters to prove that their fraud didn’t sway the outcome.
Republicans/conservatives/Trump supporters make a huge mistake in buying into the lefty narrative that there has to be foolproof evidence that establishes with absolute certainty beyond any possible doubt that the election was stolen. Without a prosecutor with subpoena power and a judiciary and news media willing to punish severely any and all politicians and election officials who don’t cooperate fully, meeting that kind of standard is impossible.
We are emboldening the cheaters to ramp up their fraud to ever higher levels.
My wife learned the 3 laws of thermodynamics from one of her Physics teachers as:
You can’t win.
You can’t break even.
You can’t get out of the game.
Frank, I’ve used that one many times. Especially since Mohegan Sun was just up the road and students would go there.
Barry, take that tablet article and combine it with the Peter McCullough interview, and the whole idea of intentional release of an engineered covid becomes more probable.
Yes Barry and physicsguy that Tablet article by Lee Smith is excellent. It is from earlier in the year and reprinted as a “best of 2021”, still highly relevant of course.
My own physics guy husband laughed hard at this!
hilarious video of brain surgery vs rocket science
physicsguy, I’m not going to go THERE.
My gut instinct (such as it is) tells me (always told me) that it was quite obviously a lab release—to my mind the bat-origin crowd was always blowing smoke, the bat-to-human transmission vector being the first phase of the scramble to cover up the fiasco—but that it could NOT have been an INTENTIONAL release, this simply because I don’t believe, though I could be wrong, that the CCP would do this to its own population, at least not in such an unsupervised, and random, manner.
Having said that, I think it WAS intended to be released intentionally AT SOME FUTURE POINT IN TIME…or at least POTENTIALLY at some future point, if deemed necessary—though once again this is purely speculative.
Therefore, this particular release HAD, it seems to me, TO BE an accident.
If it was an accident, then—and it seems an astonishing thing to say—the world, particularly the West, has dodged a bullet. That is, had COVID been deployed “tactically”, it, conceivably, would have had far more virulent and dangerous consequences. OTOH, one could well ask how much more virulent and dangerous could it have been?
Nonetheless, one could conceivably try to rebut the “Accidental Release” view by arguing that launching such a biological/virological attack in the context of a war scenario would have given the governments of those countries being attacked FAR LESS TIME (or no time at all) to plan and disseminate false information, plant rumors and enforce absurd injunctions (e.g., NOT to treat the virus but to WAIT until vaccines would be available and then vaccinate EVERYONE in a mad, one-size-fits-all manner) and mandates, all under the specious, not to mention laughable, rubric of “following the science”. In other words, amidst the chaos of war, governments would have been tied down, enabling the virus to have run its course through the population and people would have died, certainly; but the chaos caused by the wartime scenario would have meant focusing on TREATMENT and thus many would have survived having been TREATED—thus developing natural immunity—and (if I understand this concept correctly) enabling a more stable and far-reaching herd immunity to develop more quickly, while at the same time preventing absurd—and sinister—government overreach.
(Which is, of course, just more speculation.)
But if the above is accurate, it may well bring us full circle… meaning that perhaps McCullough is RIGHT, and it WAS an intentional release…to GIVE TIME to governments to formulate its sinister policies, precisely to enable government overreach; precisely to enable government to behave tyrannically….”for the good of the people”…etc.
(Except that I’m not convinced of it…since the conclusions of the previous paragraph seem to reek of a post-hoc fallacy.)
The most troubling part of all this is that where once upon a time (e.g., the 50s/60s), BC warfare may once have been considered to be tactically ineffective (and thus militarily unreliable) because not really controllable (i.e., it was subject to the vagaries of weather/climate and wind conditions), today that might not be such a hindrance to its use. In fact if ‘the prevention, or reduction, of collateral damage’ is no longer a value—and that seems to be the direction that asymmetric warfare (along with its government-adapted version) has been taking us, then we are truly in grave danger.
“I was raised on these guys . . . ”
That explains so much. So very much. Indeed it is so profound that it even explains the much of the muchness.
Thanks FOAF, I overlooked the date on it.
(I think it’s interesting, though, that Lee Smith is addressing the current crisis using a “Victor D. Hanson”-style methodology….)
Owen:
Likewise, I was also raised on Tom Lehrer.
@physicsguy:
“Frank, I’ve used that one many times. Especially since Mohegan Sun was just up the road and students would go there.”
Barry Meislin on December 30, 2021 at 11:10 am
You need to remove the “=” at the end of your hyper link for it to work.
I skipped interim comments to post this so if it is a duplicate of someone else’s reply, my apologies.
Edward O. Wilson, sometime victim of early cancel culture, and target of notorious neurotic liars Gould and Lewontin, has died.
“Wilson’s death is one of the last of the generation of scientists who overwhelmingly held to a fundamental belief in the importance of “truth” above all else—possibly because they were raised on an overwhelmingly conservative and religious society in which something higher came above individual feelings and “truth” was sacrosanct.
The 1978 physical attack on Wilson foreshadowed the current Cancel Culture–dominated, scientific Dark Age. The people who threw iced water over Wilson then are in charge of places like Harvard now.
God help us all.”
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
Thanks for that! LOL! I wish I had known about that clip when I was teaching. I would have used it both in my general physics course and the junior level thermodynamics course. I could have played it, and then said the exam will be in a week, and then walked out of the room and wait for their reaction.
“Trigger” Warning: The following is NOT COMEDY.
Important article by Lee Smith on how, and why, the “great shift” of the American elites resembles the “Thirty Tyrants” of Ancient Athens:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants=
H/T Powerline blog.
Coach from “Cheers” on the importance of music when studying difficult topics: https://youtu.be/-F_tT-q8EF0
And now for some balance—from the non-comedic to the (somewhat) witty…perceptive…and wise:
“30 Years in America”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-12-29/30-years-america
When I was in the Air Force Forecasting school in Chanute AFB I wish I had this video while studying thermodynamics. Would have been easier.
we shall see if our thirty tyrants meet the same fate as the Athenian tyrants.
Neo … yet another excellent post!
Somehow … my head is suddenly filled with a song about a lost french horn 🙂
Robert Schotzberger:
That will take some work.
Neo: so good to know that you, too, were raised to the tunes of Flanders & Swann. My parents played “At The Drop Of A Hat” until the grooves fell off the LP. I was too young to get much of the humor but every word, every note, is part of my deepest memory.
Tom Lehrer was the other voice frequently heard in our house. Good times.
My 2nd-year college roommate was a Flanders & Swann fan so I heard a bunch of it, but all I remember is:
“That’s irrelevant!”
“No it’s not, it’s a hippopotamus.”
So of course that goes through my head every time I hear “that’s irrelevant”.
My parents had these records, too. Of course, as a kid, the “Mud” song was a favorite, as well as the Hippopotamus and Gnu (a ganother gnu) songs. Also, Have Some Madeira, M’Dear! I keep remembering! It’s amazing how much sticks around from the early formative years.
Neo,
Instapundit highlights a tweet from Scott Adams that emphasizes two points I tried to make in a comment here a short while back about election fraud:
“Our burden of proof standards are backwards because we are conditioned to think of trials. But the world is not a trial. If any part of your election system is electronic and impossible to audit, the starting assumption has to be fraud. The government needs to prove fairness.”
He is advocating a major change by shifting who bears the burden of proof. As you know, the party bearing the burden of proof is often stymied by that burden. Evidence is often difficult to get before the trier of fact. I agree wholeheartedly with his shifting of that burden.
I think there is something else equally important. When we think of trials we tend to focus on criminal cases where the burden is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Civil cases use “more likely than not”. Literally, 50.1 % likelihood is sufficient.
As a practical matter, the election of 2020 is done. All that is left is what we think about it and what we do to fix the enormous problems of election integrity. I’ve argued that the evidence of serious fraud is massive. If we use the same standard to evaluate the statistics that we do for science, we have to conclude that the election was stolen. In any event, once the evidence of serious fraud is established, I believe it only reasonable to place the burden on the cheaters to prove that their fraud didn’t sway the outcome.
Republicans/conservatives/Trump supporters make a huge mistake in buying into the lefty narrative that there has to be foolproof evidence that establishes with absolute certainty beyond any possible doubt that the election was stolen. Without a prosecutor with subpoena power and a judiciary and news media willing to punish severely any and all politicians and election officials who don’t cooperate fully, meeting that kind of standard is impossible.
We are emboldening the cheaters to ramp up their fraud to ever higher levels.
My wife learned the 3 laws of thermodynamics from one of her Physics teachers as:
You can’t win.
You can’t break even.
You can’t get out of the game.
Frank, I’ve used that one many times. Especially since Mohegan Sun was just up the road and students would go there.
Barry, take that tablet article and combine it with the Peter McCullough interview, and the whole idea of intentional release of an engineered covid becomes more probable.
Yes Barry and physicsguy that Tablet article by Lee Smith is excellent. It is from earlier in the year and reprinted as a “best of 2021”, still highly relevant of course.
My own physics guy husband laughed hard at this!
hilarious video of brain surgery vs rocket science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
physicsguy, I’m not going to go THERE.
My gut instinct (such as it is) tells me (always told me) that it was quite obviously a lab release—to my mind the bat-origin crowd was always blowing smoke, the bat-to-human transmission vector being the first phase of the scramble to cover up the fiasco—but that it could NOT have been an INTENTIONAL release, this simply because I don’t believe, though I could be wrong, that the CCP would do this to its own population, at least not in such an unsupervised, and random, manner.
Having said that, I think it WAS intended to be released intentionally AT SOME FUTURE POINT IN TIME…or at least POTENTIALLY at some future point, if deemed necessary—though once again this is purely speculative.
Therefore, this particular release HAD, it seems to me, TO BE an accident.
If it was an accident, then—and it seems an astonishing thing to say—the world, particularly the West, has dodged a bullet. That is, had COVID been deployed “tactically”, it, conceivably, would have had far more virulent and dangerous consequences. OTOH, one could well ask how much more virulent and dangerous could it have been?
Nonetheless, one could conceivably try to rebut the “Accidental Release” view by arguing that launching such a biological/virological attack in the context of a war scenario would have given the governments of those countries being attacked FAR LESS TIME (or no time at all) to plan and disseminate false information, plant rumors and enforce absurd injunctions (e.g., NOT to treat the virus but to WAIT until vaccines would be available and then vaccinate EVERYONE in a mad, one-size-fits-all manner) and mandates, all under the specious, not to mention laughable, rubric of “following the science”. In other words, amidst the chaos of war, governments would have been tied down, enabling the virus to have run its course through the population and people would have died, certainly; but the chaos caused by the wartime scenario would have meant focusing on TREATMENT and thus many would have survived having been TREATED—thus developing natural immunity—and (if I understand this concept correctly) enabling a more stable and far-reaching herd immunity to develop more quickly, while at the same time preventing absurd—and sinister—government overreach.
(Which is, of course, just more speculation.)
But if the above is accurate, it may well bring us full circle… meaning that perhaps McCullough is RIGHT, and it WAS an intentional release…to GIVE TIME to governments to formulate its sinister policies, precisely to enable government overreach; precisely to enable government to behave tyrannically….”for the good of the people”…etc.
(Except that I’m not convinced of it…since the conclusions of the previous paragraph seem to reek of a post-hoc fallacy.)
The most troubling part of all this is that where once upon a time (e.g., the 50s/60s), BC warfare may once have been considered to be tactically ineffective (and thus militarily unreliable) because not really controllable (i.e., it was subject to the vagaries of weather/climate and wind conditions), today that might not be such a hindrance to its use. In fact if ‘the prevention, or reduction, of collateral damage’ is no longer a value—and that seems to be the direction that asymmetric warfare (along with its government-adapted version) has been taking us, then we are truly in grave danger.
“I was raised on these guys . . . ”
That explains so much. So very much. Indeed it is so profound that it even explains the much of the muchness.
Thanks FOAF, I overlooked the date on it.
(I think it’s interesting, though, that Lee Smith is addressing the current crisis using a “Victor D. Hanson”-style methodology….)
Owen:
Likewise, I was also raised on Tom Lehrer.
@physicsguy:
“Frank, I’ve used that one many times. Especially since Mohegan Sun was just up the road and students would go there.”
https://tech.winton.com/2018/07/ed-thorp-claude-shannon/
Some more details here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roulette#House_edge
More than a few guys made a lot of money from Roulette and Blackjack in the 80s and then parlayed that into other ventures.
Mistah Kurtz, He Dead (New Zealand Edition):
https://people.com/human-interest/new-zealand-broadcaster-becomes-first-person-with-maori-face-markings-to-anchor-primetime-news/
Barry Meislin on December 30, 2021 at 11:10 am
You need to remove the “=” at the end of your hyper link for it to work.
I skipped interim comments to post this so if it is a duplicate of someone else’s reply, my apologies.
Edward O. Wilson, sometime victim of early cancel culture, and target of notorious neurotic liars Gould and Lewontin, has died.
https://www.unz.com/article/on-edward-o-wilson-a-genius-so-massive-and-important-was-his-contribution-and-the-last-of-the-scientific-generation-that-believed-in-truth/
“Wilson’s death is one of the last of the generation of scientists who overwhelmingly held to a fundamental belief in the importance of “truth” above all else—possibly because they were raised on an overwhelmingly conservative and religious society in which something higher came above individual feelings and “truth” was sacrosanct.
The 1978 physical attack on Wilson foreshadowed the current Cancel Culture–dominated, scientific Dark Age. The people who threw iced water over Wilson then are in charge of places like Harvard now.
God help us all.”