iNow

And today he got it. Senator Scott surrendered his integrity card and bent the knee

Your tick and my tick are not the same. We're moving at different speeds. We are at different elevations with different gravitational potentials. When I'm on a plane and you're on the ground, our ticks differ. When you're walking and I'm still, our ticks are different. The difference tends to be small at human speeds, but it is not zero. There is also the issue of human awareness and how our awareness comes after the tick already happened, and when that awareness comes depends on our levels of fatigue, electrolyte saturation, and copious other neurological variables off topic here. As in my signature, "time is one of those concepts that is profoundly resistant to a simple definition." ~C. Sagan https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/sagan.html

Google DeepMind’s new AI system can solve complex geometry problems. Its performance matches the smartest high school mathematicians and is much stronger than the previous state-of-the-art system. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/17/1086722/google-deepmind-alphageometry/

Stop being daft. This isn’t your thread. You’re not on staff. That isn’t your choice to make

There are 2.1 Million registered voters in Iowa. Last night, only 110K of them caucused. That's 5% turnout overall. About half of those, around 2-3%, declared for Trump. Even if we look just specifically at those voting eligible constituents registered as Republican, approximately 85% of those stayed home and didn’t even bother to show up. That 49% you cite is closer to 2% of the state… having a rather sizable impact on who gets to be the next POTUS with a huge per vote weighting. I don’t think it will matter, especially if she can’t then carry the 3rd state in the primary (South Carolina) where she happened to serve as Governor. It seems Trump called Senator Tim Scott (R senator from SC and who dropped out of the GOP primary) immediately after the Iowa results to request his endorsement. He’s gotten better at it all this time around. Less sloppy.

90% reporting

I’m unsurprised by Alberta since that’s oil country, but I’d love a more granular age breakdown that showed 18-24 separate from 25-44.

Empán-iricism, as it were

No. It’s a misspelled autocorrect version of blackhole. Sorry for the confusion and not catching that in previous post.

Yawn

The logical question back is, where is the backhole located if the universe itself (which is everything including all black holes) could fall into it?

When the name brand Oreos are the same price as the storebrand knockoff “cream filled cookies,” you get the real thing. The cult has selected their messiah and DeSantis will always be second fiddle to their preferred godhead. His shtick has been to “out Trump Trump,” and voters seem to prefer the original. His poor management of his campaign and his annoying way of speaking and bot-like lack of normal human behaviors has only magnified that problem.

That which does not yet exist cannot cease to

It’s like interacting with an addict in withdrawal

My wife begs to differ Until you explain the mechanism by which those two events come to pass, they can be treated as fictional and have any fictional answer you prefer.

People who share things like this are probably lying, and when they’re not they’re clearly:

What is a person who doesn’t know that answer doing challenging every correction from people who quite clearly know better?

Probably more bc the farmers were too smart to bother showing up. Good luck with the frozen lines and keeping them unfrozen. Never fun. I had to put a portable space heater in front of the thermostat to get it to turn on a furnace. It refused to engage without an actual temp reading (reading said “Lo” and needed to go above 33 to send the flame command to the heaters circuit board). Put a space heater toward the thermostat and voila! Furnace flame engaged! Then shutoff the space heater a short bit afterward.

No one has distance in a bottle, either. So what? ”Hey barkeep! Give me a pint of centimeters and a plate full of inches, please.”

I like the way Axios summarized this same idea in table format: In addition to my previous reply yesterday, I realized last night that weather like this will also selectively assist those candidates with the strongest ground game. Specifically, those candidacies with lots and lots of volunteers, interns, college kids, etc. showing up to peoples front doors, picking them up in their cars / vans, and shuttling people to and from their caucus locations. Candidates lacking that level of city by city, county by county, town by town coordination and human centered operations will be weaker overall than those candidates who’ve spent the last several months building out that “infrastructure.” And all because Mother Nature kissed us with her blizzard tongue this weekend.

We usually go with the light ones

Better biochemistry lends to nicer narratives.

Looks like it’s gonna be closer to minus 3F and minus 30F windchill that evening. It’s nasty out. Effect: Older voters far more likely to stay home. Representation for the 30-50 something crowd gains higher per vote power / weighting in the totals. More extreme voters more likely to show up than uninspired or lukewarm ones. Life in Iowa as I type this:

No. US President is Commander in Chief of the armed forces and has implicit authority to strike, defend, and respond to attacks without express declaration of war from Congress. More broadly, perhaps that needs to change (see also: Iraq and Afghanistan), but Biden doesn't need to check with the right-wing MAGA extremists in Congress before tossing a missile toward those attacking us and our allies.

I also sometimes see shapes in the clouds!