Michael Flynn's Blog, page 85

The Visualization of Data

This is Kool

The link takes you to a network diagram. The blue circle nodes are e-mail addresses that appeared in the now-infamous UEA Dump. Connecting lines are who sent emails to whom. The sizes of the blue circles indicate the amount of e-mail emerging from that node.

seadragon.com/view/h0i

We can compare that with the social network analysis conducted by Wegman et al of papers authored and co-authored with Mann. See social network graph on p. 41 here: www...

Headline of the Day

Apparently, so can Studies
"Our Feet Can Talk, Says Study"--headline, Daily Telegraph (London), Dec. 2


Does This Mean if I'm Wary I Can Be More Confident?
"Beware of Overconfidence"--headline, The American Spectator Web site, Dec. 2

Where have all the dollars gone? Long time passing

When Will They Ever Learn? When Will They Ever Learn?

MarketWatch reports on a "finding" from the Congressional Budget Office:

The $787 billion fiscal stimulus program approved in February is working pretty much as expected, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. U.S. employment is about 600,000 to 1.6 million higher, and real gross domestic product is about 1.2% to 3.2% higher than they would have been without the stimulus, CBO said. That estimate is nearly identical to the CBO's...

Quote of the Day

Eeyore?


Tunku Varadarajan on the President's Afghanistan address:

What has struck me most about Obama's Afghan enterprise--and his speech did not cause me to alter my view--is how obvious it is that he doesn't really want to do it. He wants to do health care. Obama has tried every delaying trick in the book--waiting for three months after Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops, having meeting after meeting after meeting, sending Gen. Jones to tell McChrystal not to ask for more troops...

Avoid Spreading Loneliness

So if You're Lonely, Avoid Contact With Others

"Loneliness Can Be Contagious, New Study Finds"--headline, MSNBC.com, Dec. 1

Brains R Us

This is Good News For Some of Us

Forget about all those big-brained descendants of ours in all those olf skiffy stories.


Any woman trying to give birth to one of them would die. But the Cult of the Cerebral imagined that "evolution" would move us to bigger and bigger brains because, well, brain is mind, right?

But now it seems that the modern brain is about 10% smaller than it was 10,000 years ago. That means either that a) brain size has no relationship to intelligence or b) we ain't as s...

The Final Solution to Depression

Slippery Slope? What Slippery Slope?

Apparently some folks in the Netherlands are upset because not enough mental patients are being euthanized.

www.nrc.nl/international/Features/article2422766.ece/Euthanasia_still_a_taboo_for_mental_patients_-_even_in_the_Netherlands

The solution: require psychiatrists to justify =not= euthanizing the clinically depressed.

How Do You Do?

Salvete Ubiquaque

Greeting people on the telephone was a problem, esp. in the early years when connections were sometimes unreliable. People wished to avoid the embarrassment of giving an intimate greeting to the wrong person or any sort of greeting to a dead line. Alexander Graham Bell used the nautical word "Ahoy!" but it did not catch on. The British came up with "Are you there?" but after a while you could assume that they were and it began to sound silly. The ferry-boat hail "Hail O!...

Quote of the Day

Words That Think For Us

Today's quote is an extended passage warning us of the degradation of language; but not the way you might at first suppose.

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the...

Was They or Wasn't They?

Meandering With Neanderthals



Sometimes people wonder, regarding the emergence of "intelligence" - that is, the ability to read between the lines - whether it could have happened more than once. Others, of a more waggish turn of mind, wonder if it has emerged even once. But if we restrict ourselves to what is called the "practical intellect" the answer is of course it has, many times. The practical intellect involves nothing more than sensation of the particular, perception/imagination, emot...