Subject: random posts
User: outskirts
Message:
Mansplainers are the same ones who cannot answer a question honestly with "I don't know" to save their lives.
-She backhand whispered to her.
User: outskirts
Message:
PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock 'n' roll route?
DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13- year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?
PLAYBOY: And that's how you became a rock 'n' roll singer?
DYLAN: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.
From the Bob Dylan 1966 Playboy interview
User: TNmountainman
Message:
Something else I did not know......
Why Americans drive on the right and the British on the left | CNN Business
User: BrewCrewOldSkool
Message:
Josh Donaldson retires...(I'll miss his outspoken sense of humor).
User: outskirts
Message:
For ix I'm sure we all miss you and all the other cool peeps who seem to have run off. 💚 green heart for freecell
Hey how you doin' .. I have an awesome fire built but it's too windy today to light it.
User: redberet
Message:
For reasons I cannot fathom, I've been on a Perry Mason binge. Some of the things I've learned from that era, is that the glove compartment seemed to be the logical place to store one's gun, even in a convertible. Second, when coming across a murder victim, immediately rifle their pockets and then destroy evidence. Never call the police. Life was so much simpler back then.
User: outskirts
Message:
The culprit is *always* the one who declares that there is no proof! An innocent man or woman would never say that!
User: BrewCrewOldSkool
Message:
As a youthful drama critic, I enjoyed Burr's stirring portrayal of globetrotting newsman Steve Martin: the character's initial, jaded skepticism, followed hard upon by utter dread, horror, despair (Stanislavski gold).
User: BrewCrewOldSkool
Message:
How metaphorically sublime Our FreeCell game be vis-Ã -vis Global Economics!
Or, no?
User: TNmountainman
Message:
Woody Allen is 88 years old. Eighty-eight.
User: TNmountainman
Message:
There are almost certainly some *would-be* mansplainers out there who just don't quite feel they're very capable of that noble endeavor. (Failing at a mansplantion is really worse than not even trying, amirite?) Well..........there is hope. This site *may* (mileage may vary) allow you all (those to whom it would apply) to up your game. I can't vouch for its quality, however, as it would necessarily depend on one's "starting point". So.......I'm just putting it out there - not necessarily recommending it. And.......methinks it's likely somewhat presumptuous. After all, mansplaining is sort of a 'talent' cultivated and curated over a long time frame, done 'correctly'. So this site may well almost be something akin to "remedial mansplaining", for those amateur mansplainers, or mansplainer wannabes. Worse(?)..............it appears there is far too much emphasis on dating and such as that. While that *can* lead to some mansplaining, I would argue that those thoughts, strategies, etc., dilute true mansplanation ideals. After all, this is called "Mantellignece", not "Mansplaining Made Easy", or "Mansplanations for Dummies".
Mantelligence | Conversation Mastery | Dating Made Easy
(And I think we all know that there is no need for a comparable womansplaining site - for obvious reasons.)
.runs far away and hides
User: TNmountainman
Message:
HUGE 'news' - from last Fall..... Denny must now expunge all losses in freecell caused by 'bad' moves. It wasn't our fault!!
U.S. scientist Robert Sapolsky says humans have no free will - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
User: BrewCrewOldSkool
Message:
Kant would declare the choice be his, sure, but dude's extemporaneous (hard determinist) peers(?) obviously way disagree with such pie-in-the-sky stuff.
User: TNmountainman
Message:
Normally I'd put this in one of the music threads, but since outskirts posted a real nice pic of her just a couple of weeks ago, I'll just stick it here. I *may well* have posted it earlier on one of the music threads, but can't find it with moderate searching. Good stuff.
Emmylou Harris moved to tears by First Aid Kit at Polar Music Prize (youtube.com)
User: TNmountainman
Message:
Here's a *really* good, thoughtful, and thought-provoking essay on invasive species. Somewhat long-ish - but not really. I recommend it for those interested in ecological systems of all kinds. And don't quit in the middle, without going down to the bottom and seeing the TN (not to be confused with myself) response. One strong caveat is that this study in "Science" was limited to only large herbivore species, ignoring insects, etc. - so perhaps limited applicability, in the strict sense.
Here's the article:
Nature Doesn’t Care Where a Species Is From (msn.com)
Here's the study link:
This is a fascinating topic for me, as one who's already fascinated by the movement of humans around our planet going back to the dawns of the various homo species. And.............once again, I've always seen this as another example of entropy at work. Humans gonna move; and they're gonna drag stuff with them in multiple guises.
And all this is NOT to say I side with the denialists.
User: BuzzClik
Message:
I will give the MSN author credit for announcing their bias in writing the article. However, as soon as I read that disclaimer ("I’m on the same side as Lundgren in these debates because I think the fixation on a humanless nature is what’s wrong with environmentalism."), I stopped reading.
This can be a problem with "science writing" -- a writer trained only in writing should stay in their lane. Report the findings of the scientists and move on.
As for the Science article, it isn't surprising. Not all invasive species are bad, but the bad ones are off the chart.
I'm not crazy about meta analyses, but they aren't going away. We all know that statistical/numerical analyses often reflect the bias of the user. Is a statistical analysis of a statistical analysis immune to that, or simply an amplification of the problem.
User: redberet
Message:
I wonder how good at freecell Bryan Berg would be?
User: BuzzClik
Message:
He might be decent. A good command of physical cards is the key to success for some players.
User: TitanicTonys_deckofcards
Message:
Whoa! Makes me feel small and insignificant.... But at least I'm important to at least ONE person!
User: TNmountainman
Message:
Buzz, your reply was about exactly what I expected. I share your (general) disdain for meta- analysis, but there are definitely nuggets in them at times. Context, context, context, confounding, confounding, confounding. And I also give the author significant credit for the up-front 'disclaimer'(?), but I also give her more credit for true depth of knowledge, albeit perhaps lacking in the rigors of hard science. I haven't watched any of her TED talks, and have no real desire to (altho now I'm mildly curious), but she was on staff for Nature for several years - so she's got *some* chops. I think she appropriately couched her comments, making it clear the limited scope of the study (altho imo that end part should have been much closer to the top).
I'm not disagreeing with your points........but maybe being less harsh, because the ideas she puts forth are *not* in general parlance, at least in my experience.
Is "a statistical analysis of a statistical analysis" immune to bias? Of course not; in fact they (as you well know), can be used as ammunition for said bias. On the other hand........properly employed, they can sometimes filter out a lot of the noise. In my extensive reporting here on you-know-what back 2-4 years ago, I read more review articles on any one subject than likely any time in my life. (And as you know, there were lots to choose from.) I actually came away with what I thought was a clear a picture as was possible of the problem(s). I considered it a version of collective intelligence, I guess, altho I didn't think along those lines at the time. Like statistics in general......................gotta *hope* you know what you're looking for, and scrutinize one's own biases.
[update: I *did* just go watch one of her TED talks, and I'm underwhelmed. May I dare say a touch of the Oprah Winfreid-ization of the topic? Pretty broad knowledge base, but broader than deep perhaps. But that's a *very* limited sampling, so......]
User: BuzzClik
Message:
I'll expand a bit on my original comments:
1) The author. My guess is that she is an excellent science writer. and she undoubtedly has absorbed tons of information over the years. However, in her role as a journalist, I would hope for as much objectivity as possible. So, opening a paragraph with, "I side with..." really killed my interest in reading further.
2) The study, meta analysis, and the general conclusions. I soured a bit on meta analysis during the time frame you reference in your post above. I am sure you recall a very early "meta analysis" study by a feisty yet highly credentialed researcher who gleefully concluded, "This is nuttin'. Next!" Of course, he was horribly wrong. But, overall, I agree that meta analysis is not flawed at its heart and holds great potential in unraveling important information in mountains of data. (Human genome, anyone?)
Also, I don't disagree with the authors that human presence isn't necessarily bad, and the invasive species humans introduce aren't always harmful. With so many total disasters from invasive species, though, it's hard for me to develop the dismissive approach of "on the whole, invasive species are okay." Jackrabbits down under, kudzu down South, feral hogs spreading across the entire continent, etc, etc. Yeesh!
I get the authors' point, and no doubt the eco-pendulum swung much too far in the name of protecting weak, vanishing species at great cost. The authors are not attempting the swing the pendulum to the "never met an invasive species I didn't like" side of things; they are simply calling for moderating the thinking. Not a bad idea.
User: TNmountainman
Message:
This is pretty cool:
Incredible Views Of SpaceX Starship Re-Entering Earth's Atmosphere | Watch (msn.com)
User: BrewCrewOldSkool
Message:
Hopefully SpaceX has secretive supply lines for mining whatever rare Earth elements are needed for those heat shields...(hopefully an aid in lowering costs for more stuff like this).
User: TNmountainman
Message:
As you almost certainly know.............they're not really "rare" - they're just *very* difficult to refine and separate from all their brethren. And, there *have* also been some significant new finds, including in the U.S. So it's really a matter of throwing money at refining -- and very importantly -- trying to insure minimal environmental damage along the way. A truly daunting task in their case.
User: BrewCrewOldSkool
Message:
Plastic surgeons warn ‘Ozempic face’ has taken over Hollywood
...ah, the rocky road in pursuit of beauty...
User: BuzzClik
Message:
I love those "you won't recognize them today!" clickbait articles. On the left, Jessica Simpson "before". On the right... OMG! She looks horrible. Except its Sharon Osbourne.
User: TNmountainman
Message:
Horrible hippo happenstance......
Herds of hippos stranded in drying ponds as drought ravages Botswana (msn.com)
User: BrewCrewOldSkool
Message:
Why doesn't Stormy Daniels have her own thread here? Isn't she deserving?
User: Kumquat-of-Conciliation
Message:
It would get deleted rather promptly.
User: BuzzClik
Message:
Well, it depends. If the thread was tastefully discussing her professional career, it might survive.