alQpr

Thomas Homer Dixon, in the course of urging Canada to prepare for war, refers to Aisha Ahmad’s claim that the result of such a war would destroy the US – in a way that I think is like the so-called “poison pill” defense often used in business to resist a hostile takeover.

Source: Why annexing Canada would destroy the United States

Canada doesn’t need the F35 – or any other fighter aircraft for that matter. The only conceivable military threat to us is from the South, and possesses such overwhelming conventional military strength that any traditional resistance would be futile. Our defense priority should therefore be the training and equipment of all willing Canadians for a period of asymmetrical warfare – with emphasis on drones, sniping, sabotage, and assassination of leadership. Fortunately we share a language with the potential aggressor and have such a deep understanding of their psyche that many of their top comedians are Canadian. So infiltration to their heartland and most sensitive places should be relatively easy for us. And as a nation with many active hunters and the highest per capita rate of long distance sniper kills I have no doubt we can ensure that whoever orders an attack on us will basically be signing their own death warrant.

Source: (281) Alan Cooper’s answer to Sweden and France have no real answer to the F-35. In fact Turkey and South Korea have more viable answers, so if Canada wants to buy something that is all but useless from France and Sweden, they can be my guest. How about it

An article that explicitly acknowledges that the “effect” it reports is probably explained by confounding with other factors (in this case social isolation and lack of access to medical services) should not be titled in a way that suggests the effect is due to “excess” of the relevant parameter.

Source: Time Spent in Nature Is Good for Your Brain, but an Excess Can Negate These Benefits | Scientific American

It is true that water vapour causes more warming than CO2. But what is also true is that the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere is determined by the sea surface temperature and so is not something we can directly affect. So what water vapour does is provide a feedback mechanism that amplifies the effect of any other influence (such as that of CO2). Fortunately the feedback effect diminishes with increasing temperature and so just leads to a new higher equilibrium temperature rather than causing a run-away. But the fact that water vapour acts like an amplifier does explain why tweaking the small CO2 direct effect causes a much bigger end result than that which is frequently suggested by uninformed and over-confident denialists.

Source: (178) Alan Cooper’s answer to Is it true that water vapor causes more warming than CO2? If so, why is CO2 still considered a main cause of global warming? – Quora

A Quoran asks:

Is there a contradiction between the idea that population growth is necessary for economic growth and the fact that eventually we run out of food, fresh water, arable land, and so on? Are economists driving us over a cliff?

My Answer:

Absolutely! And congrats for catching on to the biggest Ponzi scheme ever.

What population growth is “necessary” for is enabling each generation to live with less work and more luxury than they can afford by expecting the next generation to support them rather than by saving properly for their retirement. And yes, eventually it will all collapse.

Economic growth driven by population growth does nothing for the average standard of living, and will just accelerate our progress towards the inevitable cliff.

But even without population growth, continued economic growth causes unsustainable resource pressure (unless the growth comes exclusively as a result of increased information density). And in any case the benefits are typically (especially in recent decades) stolen by a wealthy subclass so that even when GDP per capita is increasing the median standard of living is not.

Source: (170) Alan Cooper’s answer to Is there a contradiction between the idea that population growth is necessary for economic growth and the fact that eventually we run out of food, fresh water, arable land, and so on? Are economists driving us over a cliff? –

Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are dickheads … but look.

The fact that traditional antisemitism always shows up alongside antizionism is entirely to be expected and in no way “makes nonsense” of the claim that antizionism is merely criticism of Israel. Some “antizionists” are indeed just using that as a cover for antisemitism but the claim that all are is basically a dickhead move.

Source: Antizionists and Antisemites – by Brian Henry

Shortly after the conclusion of the Liberal leadership vote today Justin Trudeau will probably submit his resignation as Prime Minister to Governor General Mary Simon.

The purpose of this message is to engage as many Canadians as possible in urging her NOT to accept it.

Instead I urge her to request Mr Trudeau to seek parliamentary support for a GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL UNITY along similar lines to that which was led in the UK by Winston Churchill through the crisis of the Second World War. This government should include all parties and stay in power until the current existential threat to our nation is resolved. Unlike the UK WWII situation it would have the advantage of a Prime Minister who has explicitly excluded himself from subsequently seeking a return to office (and for those seeking a change of government it should be noted that once the crisis was averted the UK did indeed transfer power to the party that had previously been in opposition but agreed to join in the unity government until the existential threat was resolved).

https://www.facebook.com/alQpr/posts/pfbid0gZNfjM3o7rsXNUMDEhePvFC3jGFGuVeME7EK4tLWA2Gc1PaggmEZoUpcnt36rF8Gl

One of my pet peeves is failure to reject false arguments for a conclusion one believes to be true.

And climate change is very much a case in point.

While it may seem reasonable to “follow the evidence”, I have to say that I don’t find the evidence for catastrophic consequences of human CO2 emissions to be at all convincing. What I do find convincing is the basic physics which predicted (long before there was any actual evidence) that, in the absence of unconfirmed negative feedbacks, each doubling CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will increase average surface temperature by a couple of degrees. And the possible effects of this are sufficiently likely to be sufficiently severe that the only prudent course of action is to curtail CO2 emissions as quickly as possible. Exaggerated claims that we have already seen evidence of such effects are counterproductive though, as they provide an opening for those deniers who claim the whole thing is a scam. (But despite my own irritation at the exaggerations, I find it difficult to support those such as Roger Pielke Jr who devote themselves so strongly to the task of exposing them that they are effectively agents of the “other side”)

-Alan

PS A much more trivial example is the use curved horizons in photos taken from airplanes as “proof” that the Earth is not flat (see https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-there-any-curvature-at-the-horizon-when-we-look-out-if-we-live-on-a-ball/answer/Alan-Cooper-5)

YES!!!

Source: X Threatens Our Democracy. Canada Should Ban It | The Tyee

This story  about a Jewish man in Miami who shot at two Israeli tourists whom he mistook for Palestinians (and who then posted “Death to Arabs” on social media due to the same misperception) makes me wonder whether ten years from now we’ll have Americans shooting one another in the mistaken belief that they are Canadian freedom-fighters.

A black hole has been spotted heading towards Earth, and we have 200 years before it arrives. Does our species have a chance of survival?

Perhaps. But not on Earth. (Assuming any kind of astronomically plausible black hole, there is no way of avoiding substantial perturbation of the Earth’s orbit followed by tidal distortion and probable destruction of the Sun.)

However, it may be possible to colonize some asteroids and by small manipulation of their orbits ensure that they get slingshotted so as to end up at sufficient distance from the accretion disc (into which the sun and planets will be converted by tidal forces) so that the body of the asteroid is sufficient to shield its residents from the radiation.

Since the colonies will of necessity be small, most humans will be stuck on Earth and not survive; but if sufficient genetic diversity is brought along in the form of germ cells and/or frozen zygotes or blastocysts then perhaps the species itself might survive and adapt to the new low gravity environment.

Source: (1001) Alan Cooper’s answer to A black hole has been spotted heading towards Earth, and we have 200 years before it arrives. Does our species have a chance of survival? – Quora

Even just the title of the article linked to in the post below should make it clear that Prussian Blue stains were NOT found in the homicidal gas chambers but only in the de-lousing ones. And the whole purpose of that article is to explain this absence in terms of how the cyanide preferentially reacted with zinc in the exhaust nozzles. But perhaps the writer here is just a denier in disguise – exploiting the fact that giving false arguments in support of a position actually in the end works in favour of its opponents!

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-concrete-in-the-walls-of-the-homicidal-gas-chambers-porous-thus-allowing-for-some-of-the-Zyklon-B-gas-to-penetrate-deep-into-the-pores-of-the-concrete-thus-leaving-forensic-evidence-of-the-gas/answer/Robert-Clouse?comment_id=453808599&comment_type=2

Source: (1001) Was the concrete in the walls of the homicidal gas chambers porous thus allowing for some of the Zyklon B gas to penetrate deep into the pores of the concrete thus leaving forensic evidence of the gas? – Quora

Sorry Jim Baggott, but I do not for a moment believe that soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory .

While I can believe that some believers in social determinism felt threatened by the inherent uncertainties of quantum mechanics I can’t believe that anyone who understood the physics ever thought that there was any link in either direction between the questions of social and physical determinism.

It has been known since before the advent of quantum theory that randomness at the microscopic level can lead to virtually certain determinism of various macroscopic variables  corresponding to just physical thermodynamic and chemical quantities (let alone those associated with the complexities of biological or social sciences); and on the other hand it is also well known that a completely deterministic physical system can have behaviour that is so sensitive to initial conditions that even the tiniest amount of experimental error in the determination of initial conditions can lead to macroscopic differences of outcome that are effectively indistinguishable from the effect of an actual random macroscopic perturbation. [Laplace’s proof of local stability of planetary orbits (while famously eliminating Newton’s need to plead for divine intervention in the face of his own failure to complete that proof) applies only to a very specific class of models, and even there does not preclude wide divergence over time from starting points that are arbitrarily close in their initial conditions; and we now know of models which do exhibit such divergence in a fixed finite time regardless of the accuracy of those initial measurements.]

So I do not think that the political pressures that may have existed (to either underplay or overplay the role of uncertainty in popular press accounts) actually ever had any effect on the thinking of those who were concerned with the physical question of how quantum mechanics might or might not have local deterministic underpinnings.

Source: How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory | Aeon Essays

Note: This is not a work of scholarship so I have included no references, but all of the claims that follow are true – as can easily be verified by using google searches on the terms used to find links to authoritative documentation.

A random variable which is binary has just two distinct possible values (such as a tossed coin of negligible thickness always landing Heads or Tails – with the edge-based landing being of essentially zero probability, and also quite unstable even when it occurs).

Many people allege that human sex is binary because most humans have two sex chromosomes, one of which is always of ‘X’ type and the other may be either ‘X’ or ‘Y’. But these are not the only possibilities. There are also humans with XXY XYY and various other combinations, which while “abnormal” are vastly more common than edge-on coin landings. So even just in terms of chromosomes, sex is not binary.

In fact, although the number of possible chromosome combinations is finite, the actual distribution of sexual characteristics is not even discrete. This is because what we identify as the sex of an individual is not determined by the chromosomes alone. What might be expected from the genome in a normal environment can be changed substantially by external factors such as hormones (or hormone-emulating pollutants) absorbed from the mother’s blood, and/or by the effects of other genes such as that for androgen insensitivity syndrome (which can produce a completely normal-looking female form from an XY zygote in a perfectly normal external environment). Sometimes such an individual lives a full life as an apparently very feminine (albeit usually infertile) woman, and other times an infant identified at birth as female develops various kinds of male characteristics at puberty – or conversely, a male-appearing infant may develop various kinds of feminine characteristics (either physical or just mental).

So far as I am aware there is really no sexual characteristic that does not exhibit an essentially continuous range of values; and although sex could be defined as a binary property by choosing an arbitrary dividing point for some particular variable (such as relative location of urethra and erectile tissue), it is possible that the partition would be different if based on different variables (such as the effectiveness or location of testes).

So the claim that “science says that everyone falls into just one of two clearly defined sexes” is entirely wrong.

However it is also true that there are various characteristics commonly used to define sex that are strongly bimodal. This means that the variable in question has a possibly continuous range of possible values with two identifiable peaks in its probability distribution (such as  the distribution of body mass of black widow spiders – but not the combined distribution of heights of men and women because the difference in mean heights of men and women is too small relative to their standard deviations to produce bimodality when the two distribution curves are combined). Of course there are sex-related properties of humans that are more definitely bimodal with a substantial separation of peaks. (Examples include amount of erectile tissue, relative position of urethra, location and functionality of gonads, etc.)  BUT there is still an apparently continuous range of intermediate forms, and it is possible for an individual to be in the “male” range with respect to one such variable but “female” with respect to another.

See also: Spurious Appeals to “Science” | alQpr

This avoidance scheme described below is a good part of the reason why I have always advocated that the value of all gifts should be taxed as income in the year received.

Source: (1001) Colin Riegels’s answer to How do I get the UK government to stop their inheritance tax theft? – Quora

When I was little I enjoyed being read to – or listening to stories being read on the radio. And the performance of a raconteur still has its appeal for what it adds by way of  expression. It can also be enjoyable as a shared experience and is useful as a way of absorbing material when visual attention is required elsewhere (eg driving or walking) or for those whom reading is difficult (eg those with poor vision who have not learned braille). But I have to say that once I discovered the freedom of reading at my own pace I rarely looked back. And I often find it irritating when my search for information or instructions on how to do something leads to a bunch of videos and podcasts but no plain text alternatives.

Source: Audiobooks and Written Books are Different (thank god!)

Source: Kingston ‘health homes’ put Jane Philpott’s vision of primary care to the test – The Globe and Mail

The word “woke” is either real or imagined Afro-American “slang” for figuratively having awakened from a previous state of sleepwalking through life unaware (or in denial) of differences of privilege between ourselves and others. As such its use by me would smack of cultural appropriation of a kind that I consider not politically correct.

This of course now raises the question of what I mean by “politically correct” and “cultural appropriation” (not to mention “privilege”).

The term “politically correct” (or “PC”) is often used dismissively to refer to attitudes that are deemed unfairly critical, but I eschew that usage. For me the question of what is or is not politically correct just means what it says on the box – ie what does or does not seem to me appropriate as a way of thinking and acting in a social or political context. This is consistent with its original use in debates within political groups about what positions to take, and the unqualified use of “correct” for rhetorical emphasis was something that I consider unfortunate.

As to “cultural appropriation”, this is not something I am generally prepared to avoid or disapprove of. It is only when the appropriation has an overt or covert demeaning intent or effect that I am prepared to consider that it might be unacceptable. Unacceptable appropriations might include copying a style of special cultural significance and using it in a context which the originating culture would find offensive, (but I might also be prepared to do that if I thought that giving such offense was for some reason necessary). They also include copying a style of no special significance if done in form of a caricature, and use of the word “woke” does have that kind of a feel for me. It seems a bit like the use of “blackface” in the context of a “minstrel show” with exaggerated gestures – as opposed to the (imo perfectly legitimate) use of makeup to honestly portray a character of different skin colour.

Nate Silver is crowing that his model predicted the actual outcome as “most likely” but that’s a bit like saying that exactly 50 heads is the most likely outcome in a series of 100 coin tosses (which it is) despite its still being extremely unlikely. To actually see results so close to the predicted means in all states is an indication that the variances were grossly over-estimated and so that the likelihood of a Trump win should have been estimated as much higher.

According to commenter ‘Gabe’ on another of Silver’s posts:

Model held pretty well (using NYT website for result numbers):

PA: Model R +.1, Result R +1, Difference .9

MI: Model D +1.2, Result R +1.4, Difference 2.6

WI Model D +1, Result R +.9, Difference 1.9

NC Model R +1.1, Result R +3, Difference 1.9

GA Model R +1 Result R+2, Difference 1

NV Model R +.6, Result R+5, Difference 4.4

AZ Model R +2.4, Result R+5, Difference 2.6

Uuh! NO!! Although these are (almost) all within $#\pm#$3%, the differences are ALL in the same direction – which has almost no chance of happening if they were truly random.

So Silver’s “gut” feeling was a much better predicter than his actual model.

Source: Comments – The story of Trump’s win was foretold in New York City