aphar

Trump is the first US president since Ford who did not send US troops abroad.
He deserves the Nobel Peace Price three times over.
However, he is personally repulsive (как Валиадис не положил бы палец в рот Бриану, я бы не пригласил Трампа на кидуш).
It's hard to vote for Trump, but one still can vote against

Marxism (violent - Antifa, and "peaceful" - academia)

Racism (violent - BLM, and "peaceful" - affirmative action and "disparate impact" doctrine)

Media bias (CNN, NYT, WaPo) and censorship (Twitter and FB)

I could never remember what was squared and what was cubed in the 3rd Kepler's law, I always had to derive it anew.

Now I finally have a mnemonic.

Distance to the Moon is approximately 10 times the radius of the Geostationary orbit (which is just over the length of the equator)

square root of 10 is just over 3

3 cubed is 27

which is just under the lunar month (29.5 days)

So it's the semi-major axis cubed and period squared.

Интереснейший текст Кузнецова содержит как минимум одну фактическую ошибку:
Негритянские семьи были ничем не хуже белых вплоть то 1960-х годов, когда они начали уничтожаться AFDC/TANF. Именно тогда - а не во времена рабства! - бедным девочкам (не только черным, эта велферная программа ударила по всем бедным, и черным, и белым) стало выгоднее рожать детей вне брака.

Next step after eliminating special treatment for government officials - require all law enforcement officers to carry indemnity
insurance, similar to malpractice insurance carried by physicians and dentists.
Police unions can organize that.
Then insurance companies can assess personal risk of each officer and place the price on police misconduct. Basically, a Derek Chauvin will not be able to afford such an insurance after a few official reprimands and will have to leave the police force.

Since the US Supreme Court invented the doctrine of Qualified immunity in 1983, it became a way for government official to avoid responsibility, culminating in, inter alia, police officers "not violating a clearly established law" when stealing while executing search warrant.

The US Congress must pass a law that mandates immediate impeachment proceedings against

Any DA who does not prosecute complaints about police brutality
Any Judge (at any level, especially Supreme Court Justices) who treats a government employee defendant differently from a private citizen (e.g., by granting them qualified immunity or any other form of deference)

Grounds for impeachment: not upholding the common rule of equality of all citizens in the eyes of the law (putting government employees above private citizens).

PS. Any Judge that declares this law unconstitutional should be impeached on the same grounds (putting DAs and Judges above everyone else).

When my oldest daughter was born in 2000, the hospital nurses instructed us to disinfect daily the base of the umbilical cord with q-tips dipped in isopropanol, and told us that in 2 weeks it will fall off. We did disinfect, and it did fall off, no problems.
When the next one was born in 2004, the nurses told us that meanwhile the medical sciences made a huge progress, and now we do not need to disinfect anything! We did not, and in 2 weeks the umbilical cord fell off, no problems.
When my son was born in 2006, we were told about a next giant stride the medical sciences made, and instructed to disinfect daily the base of the umbilical cord with q-tips dipped in isopropanol. We did disinfect, and it did fall off, no problems.
I wonder what the instructions are these days, and how often they oscillate...

Сам не знаешь, но спросить соседа - унизительно.

Сосед, очевидно, не знает, но помогать ему не станешь, пусть он сядет в лужу, как ты когда-то.

Если есть шанс, что сосед не сядет в твою лужу, то надо его туда специально усадить.

https://bash.im/quote/461083:
В далёком-далёком веке, когда чайные пакетики тoлькo появились в Необъятной, никто не знал как ими пользоваться.

Отец летел в Москву на самолете и им выдали эти пакетики. Отец крутил-вертел – чтo дeлaть? Рядом сидел мужик и ничего не предпринимал. Батя плюнул, разорвал пакетик и высыпал в кружку. Пoтoм долго сплевывал чаинки. Тoлькo пocлe этoгo сосед опустил cвoй пакетик за ниточку.

Батя летит обратно – та же ситуация: сосед вертит пакетик. Батя дождался, кoгдa coceд его разорвет, а потом гордо опустил за ниточку свой.

У меня в детстве (7?8? лет) был похожий случай: лазили мы с другом по стройке, и был там башенный кран, в вертикальной части которого были стальные тросы. Друг шёл впереди и взялся за трос для равновесия, и мне посоветовал - а трос оказался в густой смазке, которую потом пришлось долго оттирать. Друг радостно хихикал.

Неужели свинство - универсальная черта человечества?

My daughter asked me what should an environmentally conscious school child do.
My answer: "Get an A+ in AP Physics".
Because whenever a real problem is solved, it is solved by engineers and scientists, not by politicians.

Current Olympic games ban "performance enhancing drugs".
Everyone still uses them, so, de facto, Olympics is a competition between pharmacology and analytic chemistry.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a purely pharmacological contest?

I need an instant messaging app.
My requirements are

Runs on both phone and desktop, even when phone is dead

End-to-end encryption

Group chat support

Trusted vendor

Available options:

Vanilla SMS: Fails 1 & 2
WhatsUp, FB messaging: Fails 4: I cannot trust FB - huge corporation with political aspirations (fact-checking posts &c)
Google Hangouts: about to be disconnected (replaced by Google Duo which lacks text messaging), also - same problem (4) as FB - huge corporation with political aspirations
Telegram: Fails 4: Headquarter in Dubai
Signal: Looks most promising

Lottery Wins and Satisfaction: Overturning Brickman in Modern Longitudinal Data on Germany:
Paradoxically, the published literature on the psychological consequences of lottery wins has found almost no evidence that winners become happier. This famous puzzle was originally documented by the psychologist Philip Brickman and colleagues. Using new German panel data, we offer results that are more in accord with common sense and economic theory. We have been particularly influenced by the pioneering work of Richard Easterlin: in this paper we explicitly consider the idea of ‘domain’ satisfaction levels. First, our estimates show that lottery wins raise people’s satisfaction with their overall income. Second, lottery wins’ increase people’s satisfaction with life. The effects documented here are, as might be expected, especially pronounced for big wins. One of the advantages of our data set is that it allows access to a greater number of large winners than has typically been possible in the published literature.

And, again the problem was making dramatic conclusions from insufficient data.

https://qr.ae/TWKH9T

Bernie Sanders walks into a bar and yells, “Free drinks for everyone!”
Then he looks around and says, “Who’s paying?”

Deutsche Physik was a movement in Germany that condemned Relativity and Quantum theories as "Jewish". It started around WW1 and briefly flourished under Nazis.

Today, we have a similar movement in the US: in Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit Donna Riley writes:
Rigor is the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality ...
Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege.
Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.

According to Pierre de Coubertin, it is more important to participate in the Olympics than to win.
Similarly, in a war it is better not to participate than to win.

В спорте главное не победа, а участие.
В войне тоже главное не победа, главное в ней не участвовать.

On July 19, Shimon Yitzhak was traveling by bus from Boston to NYC.
As a good father, I monitored his progress on Google maps using location sharing.
At some point Shimon was found in Perth, Australia:
Shimon in Australia

and then he teleported back to Connecticut.
He claims that there are no kangaroos on the streets of Perth.
Should we believe him?

Evidence shows significant income mobility in the US – 73% of Americans were in the ‘top 20%’ for at least a year

12% of the population will find themselves in the top 1% of the income distribution for at least one year.
39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5% of the income distribution,
56% will find themselves in the top 10%,
73% will spend a year in the top 20% of the income distribution.

Yet while many Americans will experience some level of affluence during their lives, a much smaller percentage of them will do so for an extended period of time.
Although 12% of the population will experience a year in which they find themselves in the top 1% of the income distribution, a mere 0.6% will do so in 10 consecutive years.

Муж на час:: приезжает мужик и час пьёт пиво перед телевизором.
Жена на час:: приезжает баба и объясняет, что заказчик испортил ей лучший час её жизни.

ПС. Заметим, что муж на час самодостаточен, ему заказчица не нужна.

Whenever politicians have something to sell us, they frame it in terms of war to blunt our senses and prevent us from thinking straight.
How many times will we be caught in this cycle?
All these wars have cost a fortune and made no positive effect.

War on Poverty -- failed

War on drugs -- makes no sense

War on Terror -- spent trillions, got...? erm... theater

We are now being sold two brand new wars:

We must look at climate change as if it were a devastating military attack against the United States and the entire planet. And we must respond accordingly -- apparently, we must toe the line and stop talking

War on Guns -- disarm law-abiding citizens instead of criminals.

How about we limit the number of wars we fight at the same time?
How about we stop a few existing wars before starting a new one?

PS. The subject is a mis-quote from Hanns Johst.

Yesterday my clothes washer stopped working.
Fixing it required a reboot (wtf?!)
If you are thinking "okay, flip the switch, what's the big deal" you are so wrong you might have been born in the pre-semiconductor age.
No.
Resetting the washer required

Disconnect from the power source for 1 minute

Reconnect power, then, within 30 seconds, open and close the lid 6 times within 12 seconds

Rotate the dial to 4 o'clock and hold the start/cancel button for 3 seconds

Rotate the dial to 6 o'clock while holding both the start/cancel and add softener buttons

It worked then.
I kid you not.

A Treatise On Government, Book V, Chapter X
... a tyranny ... places no confidence in the people; and therefore deprives them of the use of arms

(and many other quotes that can be used to prove any desirable proposition).

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aphar

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US Elections

3rd Kepler's law

Посттравматическое стрессовое расстройство (PTSD)

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Proposed Government Response to Police Brutality Epidemic

Medical progress

Свинство как часть культуры

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Chemistry

instant messaging - what to use?

More CogPsy research debunked.

Economics for Dummies

Deutsche Physik in American Academia

War vs Olympics

Teleportation without teleport control.

Income mobility

... на час

When I hear the word "war", I reach for my gun.

Creeping complexity.

Aristotle on arms and tyranny