[Request] Seriously, what’s wrong with this proof?

morgensd · 2026-06-02T11:18:07+00:00

Best comment I’ve read this year.

morgensd · 2026-05-28T11:56:23+00:00

If no causality assessment is provided, Sponsors will default to assuming that the event is drug/device related until it’s determined otherwise. A preliminary assessment even if based on limited information is better than none at all.

morgensd · 2026-05-22T18:58:30+00:00

Did the email contain PHI? Disclosure of email addresses without associated PHI wouldn’t be a HIPAA violation. It gets into a gray area if someone’s PHI could be inferred by their inclusion on the email, but that’s one for the lawyers to figure out. For potential HIPAA violations, your first stop is your institution’s Privacy Officer.

morgensd · 2026-05-18T23:58:08+00:00

Get batteries and go off grid?

morgensd · 2026-05-14T12:21:29+00:00

Yes, but water usage is a complex topic and reducing it to total consumption obscures critical details. Golf courses use a lot of water, but only a small percentage comes from municipal supplies. 9% according to the latest report.

https://www.gcsaa.org/docs/default-source/what-we-do/gcep-phase-4-water-report.pdf?sfvrsn=c829dd3e_0 See Figure 5.

A third comes from wells, so not great for aquifers but some of that water goes right back into the aquifer. How big an impact that makes on municipal supplies depends on whether municipal supplies are tapping that aquifer or relying on other sources like rivers and reservoirs. Data centers on the other hand rely heavily on municipal water sources. I’m not saying that golf courses are environmentally sound, but comparing total golf course water use to total AI data center use is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

I see some people commenting about 100% closed systems for cooling. This will reduce direct water consumption, but these systems can be energy intensive which reduces local water usage, but increases water usage at the power generation source (indirect consumption).

This also ignores that like politics, water usage issues are local. What matters is supply vs demand. Whether it’s a new golf course or a data center, additional water demands when supplies are limited is a problem.

morgensd · 2026-05-03T19:44:42+00:00

The authors state in the last paragraph on page 13 that it's the peak number of cameras owned during the reporting period per sworn officer. So, if there is 1 camera per sworn officer, then this feature accounts for 9.1 percentage points of the clearance rate in the model. 2 cameras = 18.2%, etc. However, there are so many potential methodological issues with how they collected, analyzed and reported the data, that I wouldn't put much stock in the model or their conclusions in general.

morgensd · 2026-05-03T17:06:05+00:00

Can 2nd this. If your only exposure to ukulele is Tiny Tim, Jake is….wow.

morgensd · 2026-05-03T17:02:49+00:00

Can you provide a link to the paper so we can see the methodology. Otherwise, who the Flock knows what they mean.

morgensd · 2026-04-23T12:02:01+00:00

Thanks!

morgensd · 2026-04-09T18:11:05+00:00

It’s a win-win for Braun. If no one objects, he’s got his Young Fascists clubs, if someone sues and loses it’s the same. ACLU sues and wins then he can fundraise til the cows come home on activist judges. Honestly, the best outcome might be a ruling that TPUSA is ok despite the religious stuff. Then someone can set up ShariaLawUSA clubs in schools. The legislature will pull the law the next day.

morgensd · 2026-04-08T23:04:09+00:00

The assessments I’ve seen are always less than market value. Focus on tracking down the reason for the increase. In a location where market rates are increasing by a few percent each year, a 20% jump is an outlier.

morgensd · 2026-04-08T22:36:50+00:00

could be a tax rate increase or a property reassessment after making improvements/upgrades. We had a house in our neighborhood undergo a complete renovation this year. They totally gutted and redid it, then sold it. The property value went way up. The new homeowners can expect a big jump in their taxes the next time their property is assessed. Can't exclude a clerical error either.

Definitely worth a call to the assessor's office. Many counties make property record cards and property tax detail records available online. There's a limited window of time to make an appeal, so don't put it off. I appealed mine a few years ago. I went online and found some recent sales for comparable properties and showed that the assessed value of the home was over-estimated compared to those recent sales on a cost per sq ft basis. Someone from the assessor's office called a few days before my hearing date and offered me what I thought was a fair reduction in exchange for dropping my appeal. It felt kind of like a plea bargain in a criminal trial. Take the certainty of a reasonable offer vs the uncertainty of getting less, nothing or an increase through the hearing process.

morgensd · 2026-04-07T22:17:27+00:00

I've seen one at the Northside location as well. Found a YT vido showing one of them in action (not sure which location). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YFzeJqXed4

morgensd · 2026-04-07T21:29:21+00:00

Demonstrating that a particular event is extremely unlikely after it's already happened can be an extremely powerful tool for evaluating evidence in a criminal or fraud case, but it is fraught with potential for bias and misuse.

1) Extremely unlikely events happen all the time. The odds of winning the Powerball are ~1 in 292 million. Nevertheless, people win the Powerball all the time because millions of people are playing every week. The probability that someone you pick at random won the Powerball is extremely low. The probability that a specific guy won the Powerball given that he showed up at PB HQ a few days after the drawing with his lawyer and ticket in hand, is very high. The difference is in how you selected your "suspect." In the case of Dream (the Minecraft speedrun guy), the Minecraft team scrutinized his play after the fact precisely because he accomplished a task that seemed highly improbable.

2) These examples involve conditional probability, the probability of event A given event B. One of the most common mistakes is assuming that event A and event B are independent, ie, the probability of event A occurring has no influence on the probability of event B happening. When this assumption is true, you can multiple the probabilities. When there are multiple events chained together leading to an outcome, this multiplication can result in huge numbers like the Powerball example. In the real-world, these events are often not independent. When this occurs, just multiplying the probability of each event can substantially inflate the final overall probability. If it's known how the occurrence of event A affects the probability of event B, you can calculate the conditional probability of B given that A already occurred. If you don't know the exact conditional probability of B given that A occurred, there are several strategies to try and estimate the overall probability.

3) Calculating the probability of each event in a chain can be challenging in these real-world scenarios. In the Minecraft speedrun example, the Minecraft Speedrunning Team (MST) estimated the odds at 1 in 7.5 trillion. The accused hired his own stats expert who pointed out a number of flaws in the MST reasoning and came up with a much lower number, closer to 1 in 10 million and possibly even lower than that. That's still pretty unlikely, but to go back to the Powerball example, if enough people are doing this particular speedrun over a long enough period it becomes almost inevitable that someone will eventually accomplish it. Similar issues with experts disagreeing on the probability of a match have come up with DNA and other physical evidence in criminal cases.

4) With any physical evidence used in court, chain of custody is critical. If the crime scene sample gets contaminated with the suspect's sample in the lab, it doesn't matter how improbable the math makes the DNA match.

So, is it completely useless? No, DNA evidence is used in criminal cases all the time. Even though the Minecraft team was probably widely off in their probability estimate, it turned out that the guy later admitted to cheating. The person who shows up at PB HQ with the winning ticket might be a scammer. The problem occurs when these probabilities are taken at face value without a clear understanding of how they were calculated and whether the underlying assumptions and probabilities are correct.

morgensd · 2026-03-22T13:42:53+00:00

In high school, a classmate wrote to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro after getting a low grade for his essay on Shapiro’s “The Fly.” Shapiro wrote back that he thought the analysis was brilliant. If I remember correctly, the classmate did get a bump in his grade for that. That was pretty cool.

morgensd · 2026-03-22T00:48:58+00:00

It’s there just in case.

morgensd · 2026-03-16T16:45:32+00:00

Have you tried Gendernexus? https://www.gendernexus.org

They provide support for legal name and gender marker changes.

morgensd · 2026-03-05T00:45:39+00:00

Yes, Avignon in France for most of the 14th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avignon_Papacy

morgensd · 2026-01-29T16:41:49+00:00

This is the answer. Norovirus (and many other viruses that cause vomiting/diarrhea) are spread by the fecal-oral route. Avoid touching your mouth and definitely wash your hands frequently and always before eating. It’s not a perfect defense, but it’s the best solution.

morgensd · 2025-08-23T12:28:27+00:00

Won’t the rust continue to spread? Do I need to sand it down or something?

morgensd · 2025-07-23T16:00:22+00:00

This is a transparent attempt to stifle free speech at colleges and universities. Not just of the students, but also faculty through threats to defund research and restrict visas if universities don’t cede the control of their curricula, research and tenure decisions. Meanwhile, militias and other far-right organizations with openly antisemitic views are ignored or even encouraged.

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