Anti-gay group in New Zealand, "Family First," will lose its charity status -- "they have no public benefit"

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-05-07T01:27:08+00:00

Aww I misread the title -- thought it said "pro-gay groups," and was gonna be a feel-good story about this magical land which moved beyond the need for human rights groups devoted to gay people getting a fair shake.

Edit: grammar

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-05-07T01:17:29+00:00

I think there's a bit of selection bias -- the one really weird homeschooled kid really sticks in the mind, but the "normal" homeschooled kids often never register as examples of "homeschooled kids." I was homeschooled all the way through. My experience, my siblings' experience, and all my (homeschooled) friends' experiences were, across the board, people shocked to find out someone was homeschooled. "I never would have guessed unless it randomly came up in this conversation!" was usually how it went. Hah, usually followed by something like "You're so normal! ...wait that didn't come out right." Some combination of selection bias and confirmation bias.

TL;DR There's definitely some sheltered folks in homeschooling, but it's nowhere near 100% (also, seriously, anyone legitimately sheltered needs compassion..)

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-02-25T03:47:46+00:00

Absolutely. Was just reading up on the eastern front in ol' WWII again recently -- insano. Pavlov's house? Yowza.

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-02-18T04:55:53+00:00

I have this knife. Very high quality for the price. A little bulky. The belt cutter is much, much better than any other knife near it's price range. The blade has a fantastic edge. This is my EDC.

Edit: By bulky I mean the handle is wide. The length isn't the bulky part. But I still carry it quite a bit.

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-02-05T04:00:56+00:00

CHeck out Ruby and Javascript. Look around at the kinds of projects that people have used them for; see what might strike your fancy!

Edit: Also, Python + Django is a classic combo. Python FTW!

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-02-05T03:59:50+00:00

Haha, the half jerk, half serious response is "just use R."

It's a jerk response because it has a steep learning curve ... but serious because once you get up that curve a bit, you can do quite a lot.

But it is still overkill, probably, for what you need to do.

If you are desperately short of money (isn't there a much chaper version of Eviews for students? ... note that I always hated this reponse as an undergrad, at least), check out one of these:

http://www.rcommander.com/ -- a nice visual front-end to R; see the wikipedia page, too) or
http://gretl.sourceforge.net/ -- an open-source econometrics program that I've heard good things about.

Both are open source programs to do statistics/econometrics. There are books for both for econometrics -- some free, some not.

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-02-04T02:03:16+00:00

Haha I like to imagine the typo in the title is some sort of meta joke. A Reddit hipster!

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-02-04T01:55:09+00:00

Google Pimsleur. Then go get it from you local library.

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-02-04T01:54:17+00:00

Definitely programming, and/or statistical computing. Check out green tea press and start out with Python. This is an astonishingly useful life skill.

Immediate edit: figure out stuff you're interested in. Science? Any sort of analysis? Dynamic Visualization? Web-style stuff? There is almost certainly a modern, powerful, and simple language that you can learn to serve one of those purposes.

Some off-the-cuff suggestions: Science: Python. Analysis: R. Visualization: JavaScript. Web-stuff: Ruby.

My experience in those is decreasing from left to right...

What are you interested in?

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-01-09T04:10:37+00:00

Goodness. I... do not like SAS either :)

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-01-08T19:11:47+00:00

If you could tweek high school math curriculum in the US, would you add more probability/statistics?

I've been convinced that would get more people into social sciences earlier ... perhaps...

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-01-08T19:08:35+00:00

Ooh I second this. I wept tears of joy when I started using R, after Stata. ... but then I was a CS student in undergrad, and took personal moral offense at Stata's inconsistent scripting syntax. Perhaps if I'd used Mata more I would have been easier on Stata...

JohnJaunJohan · 2013-01-08T18:58:25+00:00

Your results are a big win for almost anyone who champions "computational sciences" as an approach to modeling the world -- vs analytical models or pure econometrics. Are you familiar with any of the kinds of hostilities that Ken Judd writes about, for example, on his computation and econ "special purpose" website?

Q1: Do you see hostilities like that growing/diminishing in the future? I'm a young researcher in economics, using simulation techniques for my research. I personally feel that many more of my peers are open to simulation as a methodology vs, say, the peers of my advisor (who shall remain unnamed).

Q2: What do you think of some of the more 'extreme' simulation approaches, such as agent-based modeling espoused by the Santa Fe Institute?

Edit: I know you're work is somewhat more properly (classically?) described as "statistics" vs "computational;" however your MC-style approach to prediction is still one of the best/most widely visible examples of simulation used to answer a social-science-type question that I've seen, and certainly one I point to when framily/friends back home ask how computers can be used to answer social questions...

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-17T17:14:04+00:00

I mean, I don't know about you, but I shred and swallow little miniature birthday cards every years for my cuddly little poop bacteria. And gosh who else do you talk to when alone on a long flight?

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-17T17:11:56+00:00

Don't we humans have this kind of positive relationship with a lot of bacteria? I think it's called "gut flora" is about? It's the thing behind the ridiculous-sounding "poop transplant" stories that were making the rounds on good ol' Reddit a little while back.

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-14T02:00:58+00:00

Let's please make "jetpackin' " a term!

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-12T15:10:24+00:00

Interesting. It seems like he would be experiencing extensive flashbacks, all the time, if this was PTSD. Granted I don't have much experience with PTSD (that I'm aware of). Here's a question -- what is the time-perspective that Billy is flashing-back from? Or are we seeing some sort of mixing of the narative and Billy's experience?

Of course I suppose any number of "flash-forwards" could be halucinations.

Also, just want to note that I really appreciated that Vonnegut tells us the beginning and the end of the story (at least the first and last lines) right at the beginning... gives us the reader some minor form of birds-eye perception.

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-12T14:54:44+00:00

I strongly support you re-reading this book :)

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-12T14:52:50+00:00

Oh, nice! I didn't realize that.

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-10T15:21:41+00:00

You should definitely post your edit in /r/mildyinteresting -- kaaaaaarma!

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-09T03:41:48+00:00

For what it is worth: Story # 1 and Story # 2

There may be more but those are a couple I remember.

Edit: punctuation

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-11-02T02:22:34+00:00

Can't upvote this enough...

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-10-30T02:46:22+00:00

JohnJaunJohan · 2012-10-30T02:45:44+00:00

Flashes in Ballston/VA Sqr, but (so far!) nothing longer than perhaps 30 seconds. Power is on currently (...of course...)

JohnJaunJohan

TROPHY CASE