I’m usually the grammar nag (being an old editor), but am switching hats to math nag on your first item. The 0.99 is not off by one-thousandth of the 1.0 minimum; it is off by one-hundredth.
But there’s a bigger problem with your decimal point. You are getting seconds and tenths of seconds mixed up. Millions of people could get off the starting block under one second (1.0). You are disqualified if you are under 1/10th of a second, ie under 0.1.
The recent (last decade or so) rule changes in NFL football around what constitutes a "catch" when the ball comes loose just after being caught are another similar point (ie, whether something is a catch and then a fumble versus a ball that wasn't ever caught and should be an incomplete pass).
Because they know they have slow-motion hidef replays with a hundred different camera angles as of a few years ago, they changed the wording in the rule book about what has to happen for something to be called a "catch" versus an incomplete pass.
It is now defined stringently to make it totally objective so they can determine every instance as either a catch or an incomplete pass without any subjectivity at all... the thinking no doubt being that there's less likelihood of an instance where one team's fans feel cheated because of some referee making a bad judgement call. It's either a catch or not based on meeting certain established criteria involving a certain number of steps and making some kind of "football move" before the ball comes loose for it to be a catch and fumble instead of an incomplete pass, and naturally there's stipulations about what constitutes a "football move".
But now we have a growing library of examples where something gets called an incomplete pass by those rules even though if you polled a hundred random people on the street after showing them the play, and 99 of them would just be able to look at it and tell very obviously that the receiver caught the ball.
You can just tell if someone catches something. It's impossible to perfectly define. But you can clearly just intuitively tell.
But the NFL rulemakers feel they have to be able to completely remove subjective judgement and intuition to standardize all instances and derisk the potential for an obvious injustice based on poor human judgement. I guess that's the point that's interesting to me. There's this issue we are running up against where we are making a trade-off that involves subordinating intuitive judgement to computational logic, knowingly making everything less functional, but fairly distributing that dysfunction among everyone without any possible credible claim of bias.
But then we have the Galaxy Zoo project, which is sort of proof in the other direction. It's a project where you can sign on to help distinguish among spiral or globular cluster galaxies in deep space photographs because it turns out that we can't program a computer to reliably make that distinction even though any high school dropout can instantly tell between the two at a glance. That's a huge sign that we are improperly devaluing human fuzzy intuitive judgement.
Read today's Politicususa for something really terrifying. Doug Mastriano essentially doing a Hitler type rally complete with Nazi salutes. If there are any true lovers of America in PA R Party, they had better get their asses in gear and vote D as if their lives depended on it. Their R party in PA is gone. Sieg heil, Mastriano!
"Baseball with super-slow motion, 4k replays and cameras that “definitively” determine balls and strikes."
If the robots were assisting the batters or pitchers, your point would stand. However, removing the uncertainty and randomness introduced by an ump having a bad day seems to be fairer to the human players than what we have now.
I’d love for JVL or someone else here at Bulwark+ to do a piece on “National Conservatism,” the group that held the Miami shindig for the alt-right that Rob the doomsaying gourmand dandy attended. The Atlantic had a piece that clued me in to the conference’s existence in the first place. (NRO had one as well.) To me, the NA-Cs seem like warmed over John Birchers, but I’m not that steeped in far right ideologies to know. What I do know is that they scare the bejeesus out of me, just a bit … And De Santis is their anointed. Oh no.
I can only believe that people crave authoritarian government because of over population. Which is odd since most authoritarian governments push for marriage, children, curtailment of women's rights. They are also anti birth control, abortion, premarital sex and homosexuality. The real reason is they are opposed to either the over population of non white, or people of other nationalities, or religions. The correct, desirable people should be reproducing and the wrong people should be eliminated, thereby leaving a reasonably populated homogeneous nation.
Rod Dreher would spend the post-American hellscape being led around by a leash held by guys like Neegan. Dreher and people like Sohrab Ahmari are beyond insufferable the way they cheerlead for their imagined authoritarian utopia.
I’m starting to think that generational demographics explain everything.
Old people like Dreher are rooting for civilization to collapse because they don’t want a new generation with different values to make the world a better place after they’re gone. It means they were wrong about some big things.
Every generation has to go through this, but because of the simultaneous extension of lifespans and collapse of fertility in developed countries, the olds outnumber us and can give reactionaries real power to enact policy built around their frustrations.
I loved the point about being a transitory catastrophist. Having lived for in hurricane territory, blizzard territory, and tornado land, I joke that I am prepared for any apocalypse that lasts shorter than two weeks. Wood burning fire place with gear for cooking over an open flame? Check. Means to purify water? I've got three, in case I run out of bottled water. Food? Backyard vegetable garden, a couple of fruit trees, and dried grains and legumes to feed the whole neighborhood. But part of the point to me is having enough to share. I've relied on the generosity of others when bad events hit, I'd like to pay it forward now that I have the mans.
I can't imagine actively rooting for my elderly neighbors' savings to become worthless, the moms not to have clean water to mix with formula or wash a baby, and for a continent to run out of energy to heat houses as temperatures plummet. It's sick.
And it's Marennes Oléron, not Marennes-Olerons. If you want drop some French for the sake of demonstrating how cosmopolitan you are, get it right! What a pretentious fop.
I’ve always wondered about the civil war/ apocalypse desiring types…do they not realize they will no longer be able to get their blood pressure medication at the local CVS? Or their favorite food at the local restaurant? It’s insane…people have no idea how good we have it even in the modern conception of the “bad times” we live in.
I just want to say that the Rod Dreher tweet and the contrasting Negan GIF is the funniest thing I've read all week.
Dreher has never been that bright.
"I'm a bit of a catastrophist myself..."
Sounds like something Grouch Marx would tell Mrs. Claypool over dinner.
JVL turned me onto Damian Penny and I've been a fan ever since. I'll have to try the other two.
I’m usually the grammar nag (being an old editor), but am switching hats to math nag on your first item. The 0.99 is not off by one-thousandth of the 1.0 minimum; it is off by one-hundredth.
But there’s a bigger problem with your decimal point. You are getting seconds and tenths of seconds mixed up. Millions of people could get off the starting block under one second (1.0). You are disqualified if you are under 1/10th of a second, ie under 0.1.
The recent (last decade or so) rule changes in NFL football around what constitutes a "catch" when the ball comes loose just after being caught are another similar point (ie, whether something is a catch and then a fumble versus a ball that wasn't ever caught and should be an incomplete pass).
Because they know they have slow-motion hidef replays with a hundred different camera angles as of a few years ago, they changed the wording in the rule book about what has to happen for something to be called a "catch" versus an incomplete pass.
It is now defined stringently to make it totally objective so they can determine every instance as either a catch or an incomplete pass without any subjectivity at all... the thinking no doubt being that there's less likelihood of an instance where one team's fans feel cheated because of some referee making a bad judgement call. It's either a catch or not based on meeting certain established criteria involving a certain number of steps and making some kind of "football move" before the ball comes loose for it to be a catch and fumble instead of an incomplete pass, and naturally there's stipulations about what constitutes a "football move".
But now we have a growing library of examples where something gets called an incomplete pass by those rules even though if you polled a hundred random people on the street after showing them the play, and 99 of them would just be able to look at it and tell very obviously that the receiver caught the ball.
You can just tell if someone catches something. It's impossible to perfectly define. But you can clearly just intuitively tell.
But the NFL rulemakers feel they have to be able to completely remove subjective judgement and intuition to standardize all instances and derisk the potential for an obvious injustice based on poor human judgement. I guess that's the point that's interesting to me. There's this issue we are running up against where we are making a trade-off that involves subordinating intuitive judgement to computational logic, knowingly making everything less functional, but fairly distributing that dysfunction among everyone without any possible credible claim of bias.
But then we have the Galaxy Zoo project, which is sort of proof in the other direction. It's a project where you can sign on to help distinguish among spiral or globular cluster galaxies in deep space photographs because it turns out that we can't program a computer to reliably make that distinction even though any high school dropout can instantly tell between the two at a glance. That's a huge sign that we are improperly devaluing human fuzzy intuitive judgement.
Read today's Politicususa for something really terrifying. Doug Mastriano essentially doing a Hitler type rally complete with Nazi salutes. If there are any true lovers of America in PA R Party, they had better get their asses in gear and vote D as if their lives depended on it. Their R party in PA is gone. Sieg heil, Mastriano!
The world is collapsing and the only remedy is Christofacism is not exactly the thread we need for the weekend?
"Baseball with super-slow motion, 4k replays and cameras that “definitively” determine balls and strikes."
If the robots were assisting the batters or pitchers, your point would stand. However, removing the uncertainty and randomness introduced by an ump having a bad day seems to be fairer to the human players than what we have now.
"He's not going to make it." LMAFO!
I’d love for JVL or someone else here at Bulwark+ to do a piece on “National Conservatism,” the group that held the Miami shindig for the alt-right that Rob the doomsaying gourmand dandy attended. The Atlantic had a piece that clued me in to the conference’s existence in the first place. (NRO had one as well.) To me, the NA-Cs seem like warmed over John Birchers, but I’m not that steeped in far right ideologies to know. What I do know is that they scare the bejeesus out of me, just a bit … And De Santis is their anointed. Oh no.
Good newsletter.
I can only believe that people crave authoritarian government because of over population. Which is odd since most authoritarian governments push for marriage, children, curtailment of women's rights. They are also anti birth control, abortion, premarital sex and homosexuality. The real reason is they are opposed to either the over population of non white, or people of other nationalities, or religions. The correct, desirable people should be reproducing and the wrong people should be eliminated, thereby leaving a reasonably populated homogeneous nation.
Rod Dreher would spend the post-American hellscape being led around by a leash held by guys like Neegan. Dreher and people like Sohrab Ahmari are beyond insufferable the way they cheerlead for their imagined authoritarian utopia.
I’m starting to think that generational demographics explain everything.
Old people like Dreher are rooting for civilization to collapse because they don’t want a new generation with different values to make the world a better place after they’re gone. It means they were wrong about some big things.
Every generation has to go through this, but because of the simultaneous extension of lifespans and collapse of fertility in developed countries, the olds outnumber us and can give reactionaries real power to enact policy built around their frustrations.
I loved the point about being a transitory catastrophist. Having lived for in hurricane territory, blizzard territory, and tornado land, I joke that I am prepared for any apocalypse that lasts shorter than two weeks. Wood burning fire place with gear for cooking over an open flame? Check. Means to purify water? I've got three, in case I run out of bottled water. Food? Backyard vegetable garden, a couple of fruit trees, and dried grains and legumes to feed the whole neighborhood. But part of the point to me is having enough to share. I've relied on the generosity of others when bad events hit, I'd like to pay it forward now that I have the mans.
I can't imagine actively rooting for my elderly neighbors' savings to become worthless, the moms not to have clean water to mix with formula or wash a baby, and for a continent to run out of energy to heat houses as temperatures plummet. It's sick.
And it's Marennes Oléron, not Marennes-Olerons. If you want drop some French for the sake of demonstrating how cosmopolitan you are, get it right! What a pretentious fop.
I’ve always wondered about the civil war/ apocalypse desiring types…do they not realize they will no longer be able to get their blood pressure medication at the local CVS? Or their favorite food at the local restaurant? It’s insane…people have no idea how good we have it even in the modern conception of the “bad times” we live in.