#37: See? Distracted. And I seem to remember that Agatha wears more clothes as underwear than some people do to an office job.
Two sources, two different statements on how Iran runs its elections:
The Counterpunch article quoted in #176 says
[...] there were less than 860 ballots per box. Unlike other countries where voters can cast their ballots on several candidates and issues in a single election, Iranian voters had only one choice to consider: their presidential candidate. Why would it take more than an hour or two to count 860 ballots per poll? After the count, the results were then reported electronically to the Ministry of the Interior in Tehran.[...]
It also says
When it comes to elections, the real problem in Iran is not fraud but candidates’ access to the ballots (a problem not unique to the country, just ask Ralph Nader or any other third party candidate in the U.S.) It is highly unlikely that there was a huge conspiracy involving tens of thousands of teachers, professionals and civil servants that somehow remained totally hidden and unexposed.
FiveThirtyEight -I don't know Nate Silver's expertise on the Iranian election system, but he nailed the US election with uncanny accuracy-
points out that
In the United States, it is actually rather difficult to steal an election: because of our federalist system, elections are monitored and voting totals are reported by hundreds or thousands of individual officials at the state, county, and precinct levels. There is therefore a rather substantial marginal cost to stealing additional votes: you have to recruit some number of additional people into the conspiracy, and hope they don't rat you out or leave some kind of paper trail that makes obvious your intention. It is probably not that difficult to find a few corrupt (but competent) stooges who will help you out, but for each additional vote that you want to steal, you have to go lower down the food pyramid, soliciting the help of people who are less loyal and might undermine your plan.
But this is simply not the case in Iran. All votes are counted are reported by the Interior Ministry. There is no other source of information. There are no election monitors. Nor does the fraud alleged involve any sort of physical process (e.g. stuffing ballot boxes). It is simply a matter of changing numbers on a spreadsheet. Under these conditions, it is essentially no more difficult to steal a thousand votes than one, a million than a thousand, or 11 million than one million.
... I'm inclined to think that this would have been a pretty easy election to steal.
I would call it a grand tradition, indeed.
I was going to say something about "Agatha doesn't get all that undressed", but it turns out that I just get distracted by all the OTHER cool stuff.
number of cleavage shots in that link: 5.
Number of things in that link I found REALLY FUNNY: 6.
Is it me or do those pajamas ... umm... match the snacks?
For some reason Dresden Codak didn't resonate with me.
However, the guy who has decided to spend his time picking on extremely easy targets, and still screwing it up, resonated even less.
Dresden Codak seems like it should resonate with me, and yet it did not. When the infamous wall of text happened, I didn't care enough to read it even once. I'm getting increasingly irritated at people who throw in celebrities and think that counts as creativity. The big plot struck me as derivative("jvgu sbyqrq unaqf"), and I sort of expected the singularity to be more interesting than that. Maybe I didn't get it. Maybe I just didn't like it.
I am not a skilled enough lit-geek to analyze WHY whether it didn't work at all, or just didn't work for me.
For all you people who loved it,stop having fun!
I've come up with a couple of theoretical ways of changing the odds in craps. Just a little. I don't have a lot of manual dexterity, I'm not willing to practice for several hundred hours, and the standard deviation can kill ya pretty quick even if your theory is sound and the execution flawless.
For reference, the magician John Scarne claimed he could throw whatever he wanted, tossing the dice twelve feet onto dirt. Someone asked him to prove it. He grabbed the dice, threw, called "heads" in the air... and two pennies landed twelve feet away. They were heads.
#231, John A Arkansawyer:
"As it's designed now, the system is designed to get exactly that effect. The students who need the least help get gifted and talented programs, and those who need the most get roughly jack shit."
I believe that there's tremendously more spent on "Special needs" programs than on gifted and talented programs. I will admit the only statistic I have right now is this, which isn't quite what I was looking for. Still, for every dollar the Federal government spends on gifted and talented students, it spends $3000 on No Child Left Behind. That's kind of a large discrepancy.
...coming to the discussion a little late and a little scattered.
168/ C. Wingate: " Dr. Manhattan doesn't have a nature except insofar as Moore gives him one."
Maybe it's me. I feel like I understand Dr. Manhattan. His "nature" seems much like mine. Alienation and withdrawal are very human reactions. Recreating yourself a foot taller, with a really great body, is a very human reaction. (Pre-accident, Jon Osterman was shorter than his girlfriend...) Claiming that you're post-human, or ubermensch (sp?), or a Big Genius, or whatever, so other people's morality is unimportant, is hardly uncommon.
Hallelujah discussion: I agree. Good song. Didn't fit in Shrek, and doesn't fit here. I hadn't realized that Cohen did two utterly different versions.
Big Jerk Scriptwriter debate (mostly re Mike@101): I wouldn't put this down to Coddled Hollywood Boy against Real Working Class Genius. You have to take the person as an individual. I don't think Privileged Insensitive Upperclass Bigot is any better of a stereotype than Uneducated Insensitive Lowerclass Bigot, and Working Class Hero is not inherently better than Noble By Birth. (I'm overwriting that; hope it comes out coherent. ) Joss Whedon and David Hayter both fit the "grew up in Hollywood" stereotype, and they produce different work. Having said that, there is some amount of Hayter thought process- or people who think like him- that made it into the movie. Which leads to the next point.
Movie violence, etc: I think that the Watchmen movie has some really good parts, and not all of them were in the credits. There's a wonderful scene when Rorschach (spelling reference please? I beg mercy of thee) and Nite Owl hit the bar, and gur pebjq sybjf njnl sebz gur Bar Thl Jub Xabjf Fbzrguvat. The qrngu bs Ovt Svther was beautifully filmed. However, there were a lot of flaws that I think can be put under one umbrella heading. I'm going to call it "Zach Snyder is a Rorschach fanboy." It explains a lot of things. Everyone ELSE in the movie has their brutality level amped up and Rorschach has his slightly lowered. That bit with Ovt Svther I mentioned before stood out because it was subtle and elegant ... and because it was in the same movie and the same PART of the movie as n thl trggvat uvf nezf phg bss bafperra. Or ubg bvy va gur snpr, ba fperra.
In the comic, Rorschach stood out because he WAS the guy who would do that to Captain Carnage. In the movie... he doesn't quite stand out as much.
#39: "Property is theft? (who said that?) "
Pierre Joseph Proudhon.
I looked up another of his old quotes that I thought I loved, and my memory of it is far more lucid and pithy than the actual quote. Alas.
137, Caroline:
"It reminds me of a conversation that happened over at Boingboing a while back -- a team of researchers had made a robot that simulated emotion in interactions with people. If you were nice to it, it acted happy; if you hit or yelled at it, it acted hurt and scared. I was really creeped out by the number of people who immediately, and in some excitement, wanted to try hitting or kicking it. It bothers me that people would get that kind of thrill from being able to realistically simulate hurting something, but being able to get away with it because it's actually a machine."
Without having read the conversation, there might be other interpretations.
When you give people a simulation, a good percentage of them want to see how well it handles bizarre situations. Give them a driving simulator and they'll run over people, drive off bridges, and try to find out if that flagpole is modeled or just visual decoration. Testing the robot's pain reaction may be evil, or it may be curiosity. ("What happens when you brush the robot's hair? Did they put tactile sensors on the eyeballs? Eeew, they did." )
Humans are natural debuggers of the world, natural finders of loopholes, natural testers of limits. If someone kicked their robot EVERY DAY, that's clearly not testing the boundaries.
Higglety pigglety
Writing an elegy
Thomas Grey's possibly
The Man From Stoke Poges.
Failing to segue, I
can't get this poem to the
field where the Lionheart
died, in Limoges .
... dammit, I almost managed to write a higglety-pigglety limerick.
I keep crashing when I try to put all the TNH-style links in my posts. #48: you are correct! The drummer for the Vandals did a few other things, it turns out.
OK, I didn't get that one...I'm not good at setting these up. I give too much information.
What do the following bands have in common?
Meredith Brooks
Ricky Lee Jones
Poe
Kelly Clarkson
Avril Lavigne
Katy Perry
Sting
Rob Zombie
The Vandals
Guns and Roses
Nine Inch Nails
Devo
("They all suck these days" is not the answer I'm looking for, even if you think it's true. )
11:28 PM Eastern time. Go!
Argh. Geometry.
V znqr n zvfgnxr ba gur zngu, naq vg pnzr bhg evtug naljnl orpnhfr OQR naq NRQ ner rdhny natyrf.
Now I need to PROVE it.
... rot13 may not be strong enough of a cypher.
You get better punk rock under republican administrations.
Bad Religion, IMO, had the first good album since Bush I under Bush II. There may have been other things at work there, though.
I can live with worse punk rock, all things considered.
Slack is rewarded. As is, presumably, living in a relatively small town.
Voted at 10:30 AM, and it took me about 15 minutes.
(Normally I take Election day as a vacation day/holiday. This year, not working, so not an issue. )
Don't know if this has already been shown off on this site somewhere:
knitting together, taking apart.
"Troll roll" is sort of... in reverse.
Pardon me while I think in public.
Rickrolling punishes the people who are rickrolled. "Look at this [thing of interest]!"
(Never gonna give you up... never gonna let you down...)
Trollrolling punishes the target. "Yell at this [thing of disdain]" and they do.
I was working on "Troll stampede" but it's not punchy enough. Trollcharge?
My parents were married about 45 years and in love the whole time. It's a good example to have growing up. I'm glad to see that there's an example out there, live and celebrified, for the gay kids growing up today.
But mostly I'm glad to see two really nice people getting married. I don't know them personally but if you guys vouch for 'em, that's good enough for me.
Welcome back home! Sorry I didn't hear about this in time to attempt to spoil you.
That's a grammatically correct sentence, but it LOOKS wrong. I'm tired.
I was ready to see if I could get you, somehow, on the list for these guys:
http://www.childsplaycharity.org/
with the promise to replace said game Real Soon.
Yeah, I'm a "try to solve it" guy.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 10 |
| 2008 | 18 |
| 2007 | 67 |
| 2006 | 158 |
| 2005 | 155 |
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