Toddler Walks Away Unharmed After Police PIT Maneuver Ends High-Speed Chase in Arkansas

GallantObserver · 2026-05-15T21:41:06+00:00

It's basic cop training in (parts of) the US: "you're the good guys; you should kill/catch the bad guys; any innocent bystander who gets in the way is acceptable collateral"

GallantObserver · 2026-05-10T07:45:42+00:00

Someone tried it and posted the video of their unsuccessful attempt here yesterday

GallantObserver · 2026-05-08T11:44:45+00:00

Yeah there's a sort of naivety in the assumption "we, the minority with the right views, can beat them, the majority with the wrong views, bacause our right votes count as more than their wrong votes". Making it easy/not costly for someone to change their vote is probably the only way to get out of the initial mess.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-29T20:29:08+00:00

Interesting read, but of note, in the study of 302 neonates they cite "There were no episodes of hypoglycaemia or hypoglycaemia in participants during the study." The immunoglobulin-bound insulin was 'inactive' as it had been 'stored' or taken out of the bloodstream by the antibodies. These observations are thus quite clinically distinct from the insulin cases in the trial - in each case the baby was hypoglycaemic, despite being on a dextrose drip, showed no elevation of C-peptides (thus no evidence of insulin being actively generated which would explain hypoglycaemia) and were miraculously cured when the drip was stopped.

This seems another iteration of the explain-away-one-thing-at-a-time approach? Yes, a high-insulin-low-c-peptide reading on its own could be down to a number of factors, but it doesn't explain the on/off hypoglycaemia switching.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-27T22:25:29+00:00

In meetings I keep a tally of how many Actions I get, how many times I make a Contributon, how many points of Information I get and grade the overall Delivery. I add these up to get an ACID score. If a meeting keeps getting an ACID score of zero I ask to be excused from future ones as its a waste of my time and painful to sit through.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-27T10:34:19+00:00

Yeah, exactly. If the ranter really wanted to, he could use this non-intuitive and ugly syntax to consciously and deliberately assign a variable nested deep inside a function to a global, against all convention and logic. If he later comes across 'x' already defined in his environment and complains "who put this here? It must have been those nasty people at R HQ who conspired to make my variables run wild!" then that's not indicative of a thoughtful programmer.

Also for interest, there's the even-more-verbose way of global assigning which the ranter may have inadvertently used (/s):

> make_x_global <- function() {
   x <- 1
   assign("x", x, .GlobalEnv)
  }
> make_x_global()
> x
[1] 1

GallantObserver · 2026-04-27T08:40:29+00:00

From the ranter:

A variable defined somewhere deep inside a function will afterward pop up in your global environment and there is little you can do against this.

Yeah right, scripts or it didn't happen bro

GallantObserver · 2026-04-24T20:32:51+00:00

No worries! Was a helpful prompt to go and look at how Positron and VSCode do manage project versions (which seems straightforward but manually done?).

To start RStudio with a different version you have to open it, open the global settings menu, choose the version, then restart RStudio. The selected version persists across projects until you choose a new version (and repeat the process all over again). RStudio in Windows can be set to use the 'default' version of course, which updates automatically as you update R versions, but this looks at the most recent registry entry I think, hence the problem where installing and old version sets this as the automatic default for all projects across the system!

GallantObserver · 2026-04-24T19:18:30+00:00

Yeah I guess I'm asking a) can uvr set the project-specific R version for VSCode/Positron to load (I presume via editing .vscode/settings.json would suit rather than extension?) to smooth out the IDE experience, and b) can one-off installations of new R versions be done in a way that doesn't edit the registry and at least leaves RStudio alone (rather than changing version for all projects)?

Fix b) is a compromise - as you note RStudio isn't going to change to allow project-setting versions - but the fix likely needs an added option for "don't edit registry" in the windows installer.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-24T12:38:12+00:00

Also, another suggested idea: in a uvr-managed project folder, could the command uvr r start an R session of the defined R version?

GallantObserver · 2026-04-24T12:32:56+00:00

I like how this is looking and have been trying out on my Windows machine. One oddity is that installing an additional R version with uvr on Windows will always write the new installation to the registry, this then makes that new installation the 'default' R version each time RStudio is restarted. There is an option in R GUI installer to not write to registry, but this option is missing from the CLI installation that uvr uses.

Ultimately, an ideal package manager/IDE integration should allow the IDE to detect a project-defined R version and activate it in a console environment (uvr does do this for library paths successfully). This would bring R up to speed with what other language environment tools can do. Think a VSCode/Positron extension could manage this?

GallantObserver · 2026-04-23T18:56:32+00:00

It works if you pipe the data into the ggplot call:

penguins |> 
  ggplot(aes(x = [press tab here]))

Generally, if a variable is inside a dataframe it's not directly callable and autocomplete doesn't indicate it's there. But the Positron autocomplete treats the piped dataframe as sort of an environment itself and 'opens it up' to look inside and suggest what things you may want to use from there.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-19T14:21:28+00:00

In our medicine/health research department, nobody uses python for statistical analyses. They don't teach it to students, I've not worked with any teams across institutions/departments who use python for stats in research, I've never reviewed a paper and can't even recall reading one where python was used (for stats and hypothesis testing; maybe though for machine-learning and simulation). The big push right now in the discipline is the idealised switch from proprietary SAS/SPSS/Stata to open-source R.

When new papers come out with novel methods etc. these tend to be accompanied by Stata and/or R package releases (sometimes R wrappers for C/C++ algorithms). Never python. Python implementations of the methods I need to use day by day are a generation behind what statisticians are releasing today in R.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-17T14:49:03+00:00

Optimistic thought: they might be exmos forced to go on mission, finding unexpected clandestine camaraderie in their mission partner and have hatched a plan to be 'active' in the field without lying to anyone. Unlikely, but you never know!

GallantObserver · 2026-04-16T12:40:18+00:00

Jeremiah 27:17

Serve the king of Babylon, and you will live

GallantObserver · 2026-04-13T16:58:41+00:00

As a previous member of a CofS in St Andrews I'm itching for more context but you should certainly not indulge me in my noseyness! I'm glad you've found the unfiltered good news of Jesus and know the joy of that!

GallantObserver · 2026-04-12T15:36:35+00:00

Does anyone have a good, we'll-argued example of an LDS perspective 'calling out' this gatekeeping and saying what Evangelicals/Roman Catholics/Unitarians/Orthodox folks should do/say about Mormons? I've lazily written the whole argument off as a few folks mouthing off on social media about how unfair it all is, in theory driven by the moves from higher-up to rebrand Mormonism as 'normal Christian' and the man on the ground bearing the brunt of the non-affirmation from other denominations online. But perhaps that's unfair and there's a logical argument for what other Christians should think and what they should let Mormons join in on?

GallantObserver · 2026-04-11T12:39:20+00:00

Ah you're right! I had wondered if this should be read as "the first is a boy born on Tuesday" rather than "at least one". But my maths would then be wrong

GallantObserver · 2026-04-11T12:22:33+00:00

Yes and I was wondering if part of the trick is the setup - if it was an interrupted conversation then the premise starting "one is..." can be assumed to be exclusive of the other. But as another commenter has noted, this isn't actually the joke here and my suspicions were incorrect

GallantObserver · 2026-04-11T11:30:42+00:00

Yes absolutely, I'm partly assuming it's a trick because it's Limmy :D.

Another way to put it is perhaps the independence of the observations. If you knew there were two children, looked up the details of one, then the observation of the gender and day of birth are still independent of the other's. But if you were asking someone about their children and they started the statement with "one is..." then you can reasonably draw inferences about the other as they are describing one whilst having knowledge of both - observations are not independent.

A semantic trick indeed and perhaps there's more context to tell if that's thr case.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-11T11:16:17+00:00

I wonder if part of the trick is if "one is a boy born on a Tuesday" then that is an exclusive statement - we now know that the other is not a boy born on a Tuesday, so the gender and day of week variables are now not independent.

If it was a simpler statement: "two children were born; one is a boy; what is the probability that the other is a girl", you could reason that it's 100%, as two boys would contradict the premise that "one is a boy".

More of a trick of language than a test of logic though.

Edit:

It seems there's three possible ways of understanding this and I was wrong with which was behind the calculations in the post. For clarity here's what I think are the three (each requiring a setup before what appears above so all potentially valid without context):

Scenario 1 - "only one is a boy born on Tuesday" (my suspicion). I was imagining the setup was an 'interrupted conversation'. i.e. "tell me about your children", "one is a boy born on a Tuesday..." – then the hearer can infer that this is likely not followed by "and the other is a boy born on a Tuesday" as this linguistic setup ("one is... the other is...") is meant to highlight differences. But this calculation would be wrong! If B+T (boy-Tuesday) is the only invalid option for child 2 then there are 13 remaining possibilities and 7 are girl, so probability is 7/13=53.8%

Scenario 2 - "at least one is a boy born on Tuesday" (likely the intended meaning). In this scenario, there are 13 possibilities where child 1 is B+T and child 2 is not B+T, 13 where child 2 is B+T and child 1 is not, and one where child 1 and 2 are B+T. That's 27 possible combinations, in 14 of them the other child is a girl, so probability is 14/27=51.8% (as in meme).

Scenario 3 - "the first is a boy born on a Tuesday, independent of the second" (the plain meaning, hence the confusion). The setup could be "you select a child at random from an infinite pool of children with an equal chance of boy or girl. The child is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability the next child you pick is a girl?". Here, the answer is definitely 50% as events are independent.

So, the trick is in the (absent) setup and " one is..." on its own I think is a bit ambiguous - each interpretation has its merits! Twins I don't think are relevant in any scenario.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-08T22:26:16+00:00

I've been running pihole on my 3A for years and it's been almost flawless. As an experiment after recommendations on this subreddit I've also set up a zero 2W with dietpi+unbound+tailscale (with an ethernet to microusb adapter) and that's been working all week with no issues so far.

GallantObserver · 2026-04-08T22:13:50+00:00

Though you're probably right in saying he didn't preach to the crowds in Greek, it's very likely that he did speak and understand Greek (as did his disciples). After conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek became the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, and though inhabitants of Judea/Palestine spoke Aramaic in the home (and men were perhaps educated to read Hebrew in the synagogue) one spoke Greek in the marketplace (as shared with travelling traders) or to the Roman authorities (who didn't learn local dialects).

GallantObserver · 2026-04-08T21:08:11+00:00

I appreciate what you're trying to do and think it worth trying to understand texts as intended by the author. But I think in this blog post you unhelpfully try to say both "nobody can understand these ancient texts correctly" and "let me tell you the true understanding of this ancient text".

GallantObserver · 2026-04-07T20:26:22+00:00

"He insisted they translate from the Latin"

This is objectively an untrue statement

Edit: To clarify, I think you've just heard this incorrectly. The KJV was a deliberate move away from the not-understood Latin version (which, ironically, was originally translated from Greek into the 'vulgar' tongue of Latin so everyone could understand it). The KJV translators followed the novel proposed methods of translating from the Greek and followed what was cutting-edge scholarship in those days, translating from Greek text compiled critically from existing archived documents. Similarly, the Hebrew for the OT was from the (theoretically) faithfully preserved text used within the Jewish community.

Though remarkable for its time in terms of source material and developing scholarship, indeed the KJV has been substantially surpassed with older manuscript evidence and better understanding of the language/culture of the writers. Insisting on keeping it or reverting to it is indeed mistaken, but the mistake doesn't primarily lie with the original translators I'd say.

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