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ecoli

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Everything posted by ecoli

  1. My brain accidentally merged yours and Bill Angel's posts: it was he who made the comparison to Nazi germany as well as the other, stronger, claims. My apologies.
  2. Call it an irrevocable philosophical difference, but I can't convince myself to frame a tax cut as a loss of our tax revenue. The loss of tax revenue is detrimental to the treasury's coffers, I understand, but that money didn't belong 'to the people' until the IRS took that money under threat of force (regardless of the potential benefits of gov't infrastructure). Now I believe you're conflating cause and effect... is the economy really better off if people are spending 20% more on iPhones (those of us who have jobs, anyway)? I don't know, but connection between tax & stimulus, job creation and economic health is not as clear [to me] as you seem to be implying.
  3. Attributing lack of job creation or overseas job creation to the Bush tax cuts seem a bit heavy-handed to me. Especially when there are other factors to consider; such as Americans can't do many modern manufacturing jobs and the general shittiness of the economy which obviously has slowed down hiring despite the cuts. Additionally, I also don't necessarily buy the assertion that foreign workers don't contribute as much to the economy. This is still an area which economist debate. If hiring foreign workers allows Apple to drop the price of an iPhone, Americans have more discretionary income. Note that I'm only saying that outsourcing/offshoring is often Pareto optimal, not that all players directly benefit.
  4. I was thinking of this study: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/08/29/from-guts-to-brains-%E2%80%93-eating-probiotic-bacteria-changes-behaviour-in-mice/
  5. Well maybe if you had a ladder. Landscappers do this to trim top branches or large trees (ie- to prevent trees from growing around telephone/electrical wires)
  6. So, rapid (which you define as a few generations) political change is too quick for the inevitable descent into atheistic chaos when the examples are modern Denmark and Sweden, but rapid change turning into chaos is valid evidence with regards to Nazi Germany and the USSR? Even if these were good examples, you'd still be cherry picking the data.
  7. you can't cut it down first then chop it into sections?
  8. However, the tradeoff of coalition type gov'ts is that smaller, fringe parties often have much more power, since a majority party needs to woo extremists to keep power. Imagine, for example, if a mainstream republican party needed to keep a separate tea party happy to retain majority coalition. Things are bad enough with tea parties candidates winning a few local elections and congressional seats, imagine a whole separate coordinated entity? How do you figure this?
  9. That was a study on mice and lactobacillus.
  10. ! Moderator Note Do you want this thread moved to the Religion board?
  11. For a similarity score, 0 is not at all similar and 1 is identical. The diagonal of a square similarity matrix should, therefore, by 1s. 1 - similarity is distance, if your max score is 0, you are measuring distance, not similarity.
  12. pistachios > peanuts > cashew cashews > peanuts > pistachios peanuts > cashews > pistachios My preferences are nontransitive
  13. Hard to compare, while both culinary nuts, neither is a botanical nut. Pistachios are seeds while peanuts are actually legumes.
  14. From http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/allen-quist-michele-bachmann-campaign: "and went undercover at an adult bookstore and a gay bathhouse in an effort to prove to a local newspaper reporter that they had become a "haven for anal intercourse." " sure... Want to know how I know this guy is secretly gay?
  15. if it's a similarity matrix, the diagonal should be 1s (0s would be a distance matrix). As for clustering, it really depends on your task/goals. Hierarchical clustering is a fairly standard approach, however.
  16. Interesting you should bring that up, since belief in "alternative" medicine is stereotypically associated with liberal ideology, though I can't find any data on it but along those lines: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-republican-fluency-with-science/ I will say that Dem politicians are not nearly as proudly outspoken being anti-science, but I'd put that down to the hyper-religious consensus among republicans. However, Black americans are the group most likely to take the Bible as the literal word of God, and are more entrenched in the Dem camp: http://evostudies.org/2010/06/how-does-creationism-harm-african-americans/ How political ideology informs scientific belief is strange indeed.
  17. it depends completely on what alignment algorithm and scoring function you use. For ex - if you assign a negative penalty for a mismatch and you have more mismatches than matches you could get a negative score. This is true for any sequence, biological or otherwise.
  18. Not much to add, but you've made some good points here.
  19. Paradox: the set of mathematics that doesn't include set theory
  20. My hunch is that there wouldn't be enough mass at the core to hold it together... ?
  21. machine code comes down to specific instructions to a processor given in binary, but I believe it sufficient to write your compiler to turn whatever language into something like a lower level language like Assembly (which is already in great shape to be interpreted directly by a machine). For example, python is compiled directly into C code. A language can be designed with a specific mathematical theory behind it, which can ease (or complicate) implementation or design. For example, OCaml is a functional programming language that's based on lambda calculus
  22. * disclaimer - statement doesn't apply in some states if you are gay and want to get married.
  23. I've said this before, but heaping praise on Clinton for prosperity makes about as much sense as blaming Obama for the recession. Clinton came into office during a huge tech and housing bubble which increased prosperity and the coffers of the treasury. Bush II didn't help matters by waging two huge, expensive wars, but was no more directly responsible for the tech bubble bursting than he was for 9/11 (housing + current recession is a different story, I agree). Idk, I agree with the principle, but the premise Well maybe not for this cycle, but you latest post shows that you're perfectly willing to assign blame to a republican (tech bubble burst) for something that really happened during a Democrat's 'reign'.
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