Nevis was no better the last time I was there, admittedly a few years ago. I have always struggled to see the attraction of going to considerable effort to seek out upland wilderness and then stand in a queue to climb what amounts to a staircase of a "made path". I understand the desire to contain the damage caused by excessive numbers and to improve safety but it makes the whole exercise soulless and pointless.
+1
Ben Nevis is the worst mountain in Scotland, by a huge margin. Total waste of a day.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Imagine you had a machine that could generate a million permutations of a deck of cards every single second. You run it every single second, every day, for the entire time span of the universe (13.8 billion years). Now suppose everybody on the planet (8 billion people) has one of these machines and is also running it constantly. Now suppose that every single star in our galaxy (400 billion stars) has the same number of people doing the same thing, from the Big Bang to now. Now suppose that every single galaxy in the observable universe (2 trillion galaxies) has the same number of stars each with the same number of people churning through a million combinations a second from the beginning of time.
The question is, how many universes do you need to get through ALL the combinations? Assuming the best case scenario that nobody on any planet in any galaxy across the span of all history ever gets the same combination that anyone else has ever got in any of the million combinations per second they are all churning out?
The answer is: you need 29,000,000,000 universes to get there.
So that's 29 billion universes each with 2 trillion galaxies each with 400 billion stars each with 8 billion people each shuffling a pack of cards a million times per second without a break for the entire span of time that has ever happened.
But there is an infinite number of universes. So it has already happened.
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Makes lottery jackpots look virtually nailed on
You've got about the same chance of guessing a random card order as winning the lottery, then winning the lottery on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then rolling six dice and get six on all of them, then tossing 6 coins and getting heads every time.
The UK PM who nearly lost Scotland and then actually lost an unloseable EU referendum, which he called, on his terms, and on his timing?
Cameron is a fucking idiot. Possibly the worst prime minister in 200 years.
“Nearly lost Scotland”. Love the proprietorial arrogance. Keep up the good work.
Looking back, I'm not so sure his Scottish referendum was such a bad move. It wasn't that close. And it has effectively been kicked in to the long grass with this 'once in a generation' thing. The fate of Independence seems to be tied up with the fate of the SNP, who will not be in power forever. Once something has become associated with the 'establishment', it inevitably loses some of its appeal.
Blimey. If that isn't designed to provoke ...!
Just the ramblings of an idiot, I laughed out loud at the stupidity of the troll
The ‘light the blue touch paper with some low information drivel and watch the Nats go mental’ then absolutely nothing happening meme is pretty well established on PB.
Sunak is less the new May than the new Michael Portillo or David Miliband. The young Crown Prince and Cabinet star seen as the heir apparent who dithered when they had their best chance in government and failed to become PM.
Worryingly for Sunak Portillo and Miliband lost leadership elections to become leader of the opposition too.
I would though now put Ben Wallace rather than Jeremy Hunt as likely next Conservative leader after Johnson, although either would be good
Good morning
Boris and Rishi continue to embarrass and this coming week looks as if it could be one of the most embarrassing for the conservative party as Boris seemingly is going to 'beg' to stay in office
I just hope sufficient of his mps remember integrity matters and sends both Boris and Rishi packing and start the process to elect a new leader
Enough is enough, Boris's time is over, but if his mps keep him in office then they deserve to hand Starmer a landslide in 24
Even on yesterday's polling Starmer would not get a landslide but yes he would become PM with either most seats in a hung parliament or a small majority.
Boris needs to get a grip going forward on domestic politics, as does Sunak
An 11 point Labour lead and on HYUFD's analysis there could still be a hung Parliament.
Starmer fans please explain!
It's Labour piles up votes in safe seats innit.
When Labour polls 100%, Liverpool's polling stations heave whilst those in Mid Dorset have tumbleweed running through.
Either that or, at some point, the Tory boundary advantage dam bursts and Labour majority rises 50 or more for a further 1% swing. Just one more waffer thin piss take Boris?
Only faux-"Christians" like yourself get het up about abortion.
On this day of all days surely even a pretendy-Christian like you might want to think about Christ's actual teachings. I can think of many of Christ's sermons about the poor and needy etc, even one about paying taxes, but not a single one from Christ himself about foetuses or any of the other nonsense you work yourself up about.
Maybe Welby is inspired by the teachings of Christ himself in what he's speaking about, rather than whatever bothers you. But if he wants to shape politics, perhaps he should consider running for election.
As long as we have an established church (and I know you disagree with that but let’s not get sidetracked on that discussion as it’s not the main point) ++Welby has a duty to speak up on national issues
There are multiple verses on the Bible about helping the poor, the weary, the needy, so if you start from the perspective that all of these individuals are genuine asylum seekers we have a moral duty to assist (which doesn’t necessarily mean residence in the UK)
The issue is that there are an indeterminant number of economic migrants mixed in and falsely claiming to be refugees. That is a purely transactional decision for the UK if someone adds value to the country.
If anyone can come up with a way to distinguish between the two classes that would be fantastic. It would also be beneficial if the advocates of unlimited immigration didn’t spend their time making life difficult … I remember the case where they took the government to court for using dental examinations to determine whether individuals without papers were eligible for a scheme designed to aid children. If a scheme is designed to aid children it doesn’t seem unreasonable that there should be a mechanism to verify who qualifies rather than just taking peoples word as being true
They should cut off an arm and count the annual growth rings.
Teeth have growth rings IIRC. But significant uncertainty, I presume, so you can't use dental x-rays to say if someone is 18 precisely, surely? Was that the argument?
You're thinking perhaps of the closure of the epiphyseal plates at th ends of the human long bones but again that is a gradual process from what I recall. Edit: also needs X-rays, so there is an issue there either way in terms of invasive medical procedures, and p[rofessional standards.
Heartless non-analogy based on trees
I understand horses change their teeth in a set pattern annually up to the age of 12 which is why "past mark of mouth" means what it does. i don't think humans can be carbon dated in this way, but perhaps some sorts of dna copying errors accumulate at a fixed rate or something.
If you mean HMG rather than I is being heartless, then quite so. Doesn't make sense to me.
Didn't know that about equines ...
No, I meant my tree ring suggestion was the heartless analogy.
Still, I think you might have got a key insight - that HMG is pretending one can be precise about such things. I really do wonder.
It is, especially as the MRI idea resolves the radiodose issue. But has HMG budgeted for a MRI machine in the processing centre, I wonder? Also, one of the references it cites makes it clear that different populations can vary by a year or even more in their skeletal maturity on certain criteria.
Edit: could be done in one of the local hospitals of course.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
The comments below are interesting. A pretty universal agreement that he should go with only the odd grifter saying "just a bit of cake" before being shouted down.
When the Hate Mail readers are against you, its all over.
Seems the only way he might go before the GE is if there is an absolute shellacking in early May locals.
We can but hope.
One of my Tory opponents is running as the "Unionist" candidate. No blue, no "Tory", absolutely zero mention of the party at all. We know its an absolute shellacking if my ultimate paper candidate non-campaign beats him...
Interesting. Is he aware of the ambiguity of the word in Scots discourse? Or playing on it? Though Banff & Buchan is not Lanarkshire, obviously.
Edit: must be one of those Independents who so often turn out to be Tories who daren't call themselves that, or have had a temporary throwing-of-toys-out-the-local-party-pram.
He is an official Conservative candidate...
Do you get to write your own leaflets Dale?
If I was standing as Libdem right now I would have Lebedev on front page in ermine. And questions for Boris. “Are you aware your good friend had a campaign to infiltrate the establishment?” “How many visits to villa and castle in Italy? How much of free flights, accommodation and private cars? Is there any such thing as a free lunch?” “At the time of these free flights, visits to villa and castles, were you aware your friend suggested MI6 killed Alexander Litvinenko, played down invasion of Crimea, said Putin showed leadership in Syria and Russians thanked Putin for “unimaginable freedoms? Everyone else seemed aware of this.” “At what point did you decide to recommend your friend a peerage, and for what reasons?” “When you were told no, blocked on national security grounds, what did you do next?”
Lebedev the most serious lapse of Boris Johnson’s judgement yet - a hundred times worse than Partygate. He made this guy a lawmaker.
The greatest scam perpetrated by the Tory party is this: the suggestion that the max they are creaming off is the odd £100,000 here and there to party funds, or £60k worth of wallpaper. Looking for instance at the size of the PPE contracts I think the reality is that there are MPs out there taking 7 or 8 figure sums for their own personal enrichment, all in little tax haven accounts to access on their retirement from the front line
I am not for one moment suggesting that the Prime Minister is one of their number. The reverse is the case, thank the Lord.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It is an extremely poor article in which Meeks pontificates on a subject (Bayes Theorem) about which he characteristically knows nothing.
I once tried to explain what a Fisher matrix was to Meeks ... I was told law is more important than mathematics.
I had to stop reading when he said “I understand the maths, I really do”; I couldn’t risk tossing my phone at the Pyrenees due to his ignorance of the subject.
Well, hang on. Take the R & C Are Dead situation where you are tossing a coin and telling me the outcome. When you get to the 90th heads in a row I am coming to conclusions about your honesty and/or the fairness of the coin. Surely what I am doing is updating my priors, which is exactly what Mr Meeks is correctly on about?
Entirely different. A coin is far easier to rig than a shuffle. Meeks is talking about card games; the cards are already shuffled by the game. For anyone to rig them for exactly the same deal with another shuffle is beyond even belief.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Easy: voters will look at their bills and go "fuck this, I'm voting for the other lot". If you think they're examining the manifesto and reading OBR reports, that's an error.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Promise them the known world, and all the gold they can eat.
Windfall tax on oil
Scrap VAT on fuel
Not saying these are wise or sustainable promises. Words is cheap.
Sunak is less the new May than the new Michael Portillo or David Miliband. The young Crown Prince and Cabinet star seen as the heir apparent who dithered when they had their best chance in government and failed to become PM.
Worryingly for Sunak Portillo and Miliband lost leadership elections to become leader of the opposition too.
I would though now put Ben Wallace rather than Jeremy Hunt as likely next Conservative leader after Johnson, although either would be good
Good morning
Boris and Rishi continue to embarrass and this coming week looks as if it could be one of the most embarrassing for the conservative party as Boris seemingly is going to 'beg' to stay in office
I just hope sufficient of his mps remember integrity matters and sends both Boris and Rishi packing and start the process to elect a new leader
Enough is enough, Boris's time is over, but if his mps keep him in office then they deserve to hand Starmer a landslide in 24
Even on yesterday's polling Starmer would not get a landslide but yes he would become PM with either most seats in a hung parliament or a small majority.
Boris needs to get a grip going forward on domestic politics, as does Sunak
An 11 point Labour lead and on HYUFD's analysis there could still be a hung Parliament.
Starmer fans please explain!
At this point the Tories go to the same lengths to explain "here is how Johnson can still win" as we Corbynites did for Corbyn.
Re-weighting of the polls will surely follow
But there are things to say though to be fair?
1. It is mid term, when Margaret Thatcher was mid term, getting on with the job and getting the big calls right, she had bad polls and local election shellackings, followed up with landslide wins. 2.. So regardless of fun mid terms, country rarely moves dramatically from general election date to general election date? 3. Labour are coming from a long way behind this time in terms of seats? A good general election night usually can be adding 30 or 40 seats, as incumbency dies hard, but in this instance that would merely be a disaster for Labour, end of Starmer and possibly a more leftish new leadership? 4. You are a Tory and you really want to win, do you really want to swap Boris midterm for Truss, or see if Boris can wave his wand in the next election and tough it out to them. 5. The delta poll might be the outlier. Other polling companies have it tighter. How much bigger the gap this month from Kantor compared to last month. 6. I have been ticked off overnight for mentioning a sub sample, but ALL the midland subsamples point to Labour not making much traction there? Firstly why? Secondly, in election night does lead in polls give huge majorities in some places but miss out in key targets in other parts of country?
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It is an extremely poor article in which Meeks pontificates on a subject (Bayes Theorem) about which he characteristically knows nothing.
I once tried to explain what a Fisher matrix was to Meeks ... I was told law is more important than mathematics.
I had to stop reading when he said “I understand the maths, I really do”; I couldn’t risk tossing my phone at the Pyrenees due to his ignorance of the subject.
Well, hang on. Take the R & C Are Dead situation where you are tossing a coin and telling me the outcome. When you get to the 90th heads in a row I am coming to conclusions about your honesty and/or the fairness of the coin. Surely what I am doing is updating my priors, which is exactly what Mr Meeks is correctly on about?
Entirely different. A coin is far easier to rig than a shuffle. Meeks is talking about card games; the cards are already shuffled by the game. For anyone to rig them for exactly the same deal with another shuffle is beyond even belief.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Easy: voters will look at their bills and go "fuck this, I'm voting for the other lot". If you think they're examining the manifesto and reading OBR reports, that's an error.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Makes lottery jackpots look virtually nailed on
You've got about the same chance of guessing a random card order as winning the lottery, then winning the lottery on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then rolling six dice and get six on all of them, then tossing 6 coins and getting heads every time.
But Alastair was talking about bridge hands. The order in which each player’s thirteen cards are dealt to them doesn’t matter, just the cards themselves.
Sunak is less the new May than the new Michael Portillo or David Miliband. The young Crown Prince and Cabinet star seen as the heir apparent who dithered when they had their best chance in government and failed to become PM.
Worryingly for Sunak Portillo and Miliband lost leadership elections to become leader of the opposition too.
I would though now put Ben Wallace rather than Jeremy Hunt as likely next Conservative leader after Johnson, although either would be good
Good morning
Boris and Rishi continue to embarrass and this coming week looks as if it could be one of the most embarrassing for the conservative party as Boris seemingly is going to 'beg' to stay in office
I just hope sufficient of his mps remember integrity matters and sends both Boris and Rishi packing and start the process to elect a new leader
Enough is enough, Boris's time is over, but if his mps keep him in office then they deserve to hand Starmer a landslide in 24
Even on yesterday's polling Starmer would not get a landslide but yes he would become PM with either most seats in a hung parliament or a small majority.
Boris needs to get a grip going forward on domestic politics, as does Sunak
An 11 point Labour lead and on HYUFD's analysis there could still be a hung Parliament.
Starmer fans please explain!
At this point the Tories go to the same lengths to explain "here is how Johnson can still win" as we Corbynites did for Corbyn.
Re-weighting of the polls will surely follow
But there are things to say though to be fair?
1. It is mid term, when Margaret Thatcher was mid term, getting on with the job and getting the big calls right, she had bad polls and local election shellackings, followed up with landslide wins. 2.. So regardless of fun mid terms, country rarely moves dramatically from general election date to general election date? 3. Labour are coming from a long way behind this time in terms of seats? A good general election night usually can be adding 30 or 40 seats, as incumbency dies hard, but in this instance that would merely be a disaster for Labour, end of Starmer and possibly a more leftish new leadership? 4. You are a Tory and you really want to win, do you really want to swap Boris midterm for Truss, or see if Boris can wave his wand in the next election and tough it out to them. 5. The delta poll might be the outlier. Other polling companies have it tighter. How much bigger the gap this month from Kantor compared to last month. 6. I have been ticked off overnight for mentioning a sub sample, but ALL the midland subsamples point to Labour not making much traction there? Firstly why? Secondly, in election night does lead in polls give huge majorities in some places but miss out in key targets in other parts of country?
You are doing a HYUFD, which is to say you are taking a bad-news poll and trying to cherry pick the positives out of it. "Look at the midlands!" is all well and good but what about the rest of the country? You're always ramping the Conservatives, but you haven't quite dropped this "I'm a Lib Dem me" schtick. You're nearly there, but you won't quite come clean.
Only faux-"Christians" like yourself get het up about abortion.
On this day of all days surely even a pretendy-Christian like you might want to think about Christ's actual teachings. I can think of many of Christ's sermons about the poor and needy etc, even one about paying taxes, but not a single one from Christ himself about foetuses or any of the other nonsense you work yourself up about.
Maybe Welby is inspired by the teachings of Christ himself in what he's speaking about, rather than whatever bothers you. But if he wants to shape politics, perhaps he should consider running for election.
As long as we have an established church (and I know you disagree with that but let’s not get sidetracked on that discussion as it’s not the main point) ++Welby has a duty to speak up on national issues
There are multiple verses on the Bible about helping the poor, the weary, the needy, so if you start from the perspective that all of these individuals are genuine asylum seekers we have a moral duty to assist (which doesn’t necessarily mean residence in the UK)
The issue is that there are an indeterminant number of economic migrants mixed in and falsely claiming to be refugees. That is a purely transactional decision for the UK if someone adds value to the country.
If anyone can come up with a way to distinguish between the two classes that would be fantastic. It would also be beneficial if the advocates of unlimited immigration didn’t spend their time making life difficult … I remember the case where they took the government to court for using dental examinations to determine whether individuals without papers were eligible for a scheme designed to aid children. If a scheme is designed to aid children it doesn’t seem unreasonable that there should be a mechanism to verify who qualifies rather than just taking peoples word as being true
They should cut off an arm and count the annual growth rings.
Teeth have growth rings IIRC. But significant uncertainty, I presume, so you can't use dental x-rays to say if someone is 18 precisely, surely? Was that the argument?
You're thinking perhaps of the closure of the epiphyseal plates at th ends of the human long bones but again that is a gradual process from what I recall. Edit: also needs X-rays, so there is an issue there either way in terms of invasive medical procedures, and p[rofessional standards.
Heartless non-analogy based on trees
I understand horses change their teeth in a set pattern annually up to the age of 12 which is why "past mark of mouth" means what it does. i don't think humans can be carbon dated in this way, but perhaps some sorts of dna copying errors accumulate at a fixed rate or something.
If you mean HMG rather than I is being heartless, then quite so. Doesn't make sense to me.
Didn't know that about equines ...
No, I meant my tree ring suggestion was the heartless analogy.
Still, I think you might have got a key insight - that HMG is pretending one can be precise about such things. I really do wonder.
It is, especially as the MRI idea resolves the radiodose issue. But has HMG budgeted for a MRI machine in the processing centre, I wonder? Also, one of the references it cites makes it clear that different populations can vary by a year or even more in their skeletal maturity on certain criteria.
Edit: could be done in one of the local hospitals of course.
Indeed - but we know the nature of skeletal development over age to a considerable degree. One of the first things that anatomists studied over the centuries.
The issue here isn't 19 year olds pretending to be 16. they are 25 year olds (and up) pretending to be 16.
EDIT: There is an amusing side point here. There is a history of people claiming that there "is no test for X" or "a test for X is difficult, dangerous and immoral", when the possible results of the test are not what they want. A perusal of some of the comic statements made by the various Depleted-Uranium-Is-Resposible-For-X outfits is a good example of this.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Makes lottery jackpots look virtually nailed on
You've got about the same chance of guessing a random card order as winning the lottery, then winning the lottery on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then rolling six dice and get six on all of them, then tossing 6 coins and getting heads every time.
But Alastair was talking about bridge hands. The order in which each player’s thirteen cards are dealt to them doesn’t matter, just the cards themselves.
ok, I didn't read the article, I was just trying to communicate the enormity of the permutations.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It is an extremely poor article in which Meeks pontificates on a subject (Bayes Theorem) about which he characteristically knows nothing.
I once tried to explain what a Fisher matrix was to Meeks ... I was told law is more important than mathematics.
I had to stop reading when he said “I understand the maths, I really do”; I couldn’t risk tossing my phone at the Pyrenees due to his ignorance of the subject.
Well, hang on. Take the R & C Are Dead situation where you are tossing a coin and telling me the outcome. When you get to the 90th heads in a row I am coming to conclusions about your honesty and/or the fairness of the coin. Surely what I am doing is updating my priors, which is exactly what Mr Meeks is correctly on about?
Entirely different. A coin is far easier to rig than a shuffle. Meeks is talking about card games; the cards are already shuffled by the game. For anyone to rig them for exactly the same deal with another shuffle is beyond even belief.
I think Alastair Meeks has a point about card shuffling. The one that annoys me is FA Cup draws. I don’t think the balls get shuffled nearly enough.
The world cup draw make me chuckle the most. Poor "shuffling" and then all the self imposed restrictions on groupings. We have drawn out country x, they can't now go in group A,B,C,D,E ...so they go in F.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Channel 4 is preparing to target the TikTok generation with a new production arm as it fights to remain relevant with younger viewers and “future-proof” the business as ministers prepare for its privatisation.
The broadcaster will start making viral video content across social media apps including Snap, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube to bolster its digital advertising income and drive more young people to its catch-up service, All4.
Sunak is less the new May than the new Michael Portillo or David Miliband. The young Crown Prince and Cabinet star seen as the heir apparent who dithered when they had their best chance in government and failed to become PM.
Worryingly for Sunak Portillo and Miliband lost leadership elections to become leader of the opposition too.
I would though now put Ben Wallace rather than Jeremy Hunt as likely next Conservative leader after Johnson, although either would be good
Good morning
Boris and Rishi continue to embarrass and this coming week looks as if it could be one of the most embarrassing for the conservative party as Boris seemingly is going to 'beg' to stay in office
I just hope sufficient of his mps remember integrity matters and sends both Boris and Rishi packing and start the process to elect a new leader
Enough is enough, Boris's time is over, but if his mps keep him in office then they deserve to hand Starmer a landslide in 24
Even on yesterday's polling Starmer would not get a landslide but yes he would become PM with either most seats in a hung parliament or a small majority.
Boris needs to get a grip going forward on domestic politics, as does Sunak
An 11 point Labour lead and on HYUFD's analysis there could still be a hung Parliament.
Starmer fans please explain!
At this point the Tories go to the same lengths to explain "here is how Johnson can still win" as we Corbynites did for Corbyn.
Re-weighting of the polls will surely follow
But there are things to say though to be fair?
1. It is mid term, when Margaret Thatcher was mid term, getting on with the job and getting the big calls right, she had bad polls and local election shellackings, followed up with landslide wins. 2.. So regardless of fun mid terms, country rarely moves dramatically from general election date to general election date? 3. Labour are coming from a long way behind this time in terms of seats? A good general election night usually can be adding 30 or 40 seats, as incumbency dies hard, but in this instance that would merely be a disaster for Labour, end of Starmer and possibly a more leftish new leadership? 4. You are a Tory and you really want to win, do you really want to swap Boris midterm for Truss, or see if Boris can wave his wand in the next election and tough it out to them. 5. The delta poll might be the outlier. Other polling companies have it tighter. How much bigger the gap this month from Kantor compared to last month. 6. I have been ticked off overnight for mentioning a sub sample, but ALL the midland subsamples point to Labour not making much traction there? Firstly why? Secondly, in election night does lead in polls give huge majorities in some places but miss out in key targets in other parts of country?
You are doing a HYUFD, which is to say you are taking a bad-news poll and trying to cherry pick the positives out of it. "Look at the midlands!" is all well and good but what about the rest of the country? You're always ramping the Conservatives, but you haven't quite dropped this "I'm a Lib Dem me" schtick. You're nearly there, but you won't quite come clean.
I just shrug. Farooq just being Farooq. And I thank you because you have given me chance to use my new emoticon on you 🥹
You know I am not gone “full HY” in that post. What is special about my posts is they are full of analysis not opinions, as I put different heads on to think it through.
It is mid term. It is just 1 poll. Polls did look good for Milliband and balls, even within the election campaign they lost and had less seats.
Why don’t you just write your own analysis against all six points, saying, that’s not true you are making it up and lying MoonRabbit? But it’s all true Farooq.
My Dad told me, always vote Tory to keep the socialists and unions out of power. But I never have, I even voted for man with bucket on head more than Tory! 😝
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It is an extremely poor article in which Meeks pontificates on a subject (Bayes Theorem) about which he characteristically knows nothing.
I once tried to explain what a Fisher matrix was to Meeks ... I was told law is more important than mathematics.
I had to stop reading when he said “I understand the maths, I really do”; I couldn’t risk tossing my phone at the Pyrenees due to his ignorance of the subject.
Well, hang on. Take the R & C Are Dead situation where you are tossing a coin and telling me the outcome. When you get to the 90th heads in a row I am coming to conclusions about your honesty and/or the fairness of the coin. Surely what I am doing is updating my priors, which is exactly what Mr Meeks is correctly on about?
Entirely different. A coin is far easier to rig than a shuffle. Meeks is talking about card games; the cards are already shuffled by the game. For anyone to rig them for exactly the same deal with another shuffle is beyond even belief.
Only faux-"Christians" like yourself get het up about abortion.
On this day of all days surely even a pretendy-Christian like you might want to think about Christ's actual teachings. I can think of many of Christ's sermons about the poor and needy etc, even one about paying taxes, but not a single one from Christ himself about foetuses or any of the other nonsense you work yourself up about.
Maybe Welby is inspired by the teachings of Christ himself in what he's speaking about, rather than whatever bothers you. But if he wants to shape politics, perhaps he should consider running for election.
As long as we have an established church (and I know you disagree with that but let’s not get sidetracked on that discussion as it’s not the main point) ++Welby has a duty to speak up on national issues
There are multiple verses on the Bible about helping the poor, the weary, the needy, so if you start from the perspective that all of these individuals are genuine asylum seekers we have a moral duty to assist (which doesn’t necessarily mean residence in the UK)
The issue is that there are an indeterminant number of economic migrants mixed in and falsely claiming to be refugees. That is a purely transactional decision for the UK if someone adds value to the country.
If anyone can come up with a way to distinguish between the two classes that would be fantastic. It would also be beneficial if the advocates of unlimited immigration didn’t spend their time making life difficult … I remember the case where they took the government to court for using dental examinations to determine whether individuals without papers were eligible for a scheme designed to aid children. If a scheme is designed to aid children it doesn’t seem unreasonable that there should be a mechanism to verify who qualifies rather than just taking peoples word as being true
They should cut off an arm and count the annual growth rings.
Teeth have growth rings IIRC. But significant uncertainty, I presume, so you can't use dental x-rays to say if someone is 18 precisely, surely? Was that the argument?
You're thinking perhaps of the closure of the epiphyseal plates at th ends of the human long bones but again that is a gradual process from what I recall. Edit: also needs X-rays, so there is an issue there either way in terms of invasive medical procedures, and p[rofessional standards.
Heartless non-analogy based on trees
I understand horses change their teeth in a set pattern annually up to the age of 12 which is why "past mark of mouth" means what it does. i don't think humans can be carbon dated in this way, but perhaps some sorts of dna copying errors accumulate at a fixed rate or something.
If you mean HMG rather than I is being heartless, then quite so. Doesn't make sense to me.
Didn't know that about equines ...
No, I meant my tree ring suggestion was the heartless analogy.
Still, I think you might have got a key insight - that HMG is pretending one can be precise about such things. I really do wonder.
It is, especially as the MRI idea resolves the radiodose issue. But has HMG budgeted for a MRI machine in the processing centre, I wonder? Also, one of the references it cites makes it clear that different populations can vary by a year or even more in their skeletal maturity on certain criteria.
Edit: could be done in one of the local hospitals of course.
Indeed - but we know the nature of skeletal development over age to a considerable degree. One of the first things that anatomists studied over the centuries.
The issue here isn't 19 year olds pretending to be 16. they are 25 year olds (and up) pretending to be 16.
EDIT: There is an amusing side point here. There is a history of people claiming that there "is no test for X" or "a test for X is difficult, dangerous and immoral", when the possible results of the test are not what they want. A perusal of some of the comic statements made by the various Depleted-Uranium-Is-Resposible-For-X outfits is a good example of this.
A Conservative MP lied under oath, behaved in an abusive, arrogant and aggressive way, and was so dishonest that his claims about a multimillion-pound family dispute could not be taken at face value, a high court judge has ruled.
Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, has spent years taking legal action against his family’s £27 million potato and vegetable business, which he claims forced him out and treated him unfairly.
He could face millions of pounds in legal bills and a referral to the parliamentary standards watchdog after he was found to have been an unsatisfactory, evasive and combative witness who tried to cover up his misconduct.
Last month Judge Brian Rawlings found that Bridgen, 57, had pressured a police inspector to investigate his brother over false allegations of fraud, prompting a costly inquiry lasting more than a year. He denied it after realising it would look “inappropriate”.
Bridgen also made false statements about why he had resigned from the business, AB Produce, almost a decade ago. In court he argued he had been forced out by Paul, 55, his brother, a claim the judge described as a lie. In fact, the judge ruled, he had quit because he thought it might reduce the amount he owed his first wife, Jackie, 57, in divorce proceedings.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Makes lottery jackpots look virtually nailed on
You've got about the same chance of guessing a random card order as winning the lottery, then winning the lottery on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then rolling six dice and get six on all of them, then tossing 6 coins and getting heads every time.
But Alastair was talking about bridge hands. The order in which each player’s thirteen cards are dealt to them doesn’t matter, just the cards themselves.
Yes, sorry, that is a good point, but intuitively it only knocks a few trillion lifetimes of the universe out of the caculation. The improbability remains so large that astronomical understates it.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It is an extremely poor article in which Meeks pontificates on a subject (Bayes Theorem) about which he characteristically knows nothing.
I once tried to explain what a Fisher matrix was to Meeks ... I was told law is more important than mathematics.
I had to stop reading when he said “I understand the maths, I really do”; I couldn’t risk tossing my phone at the Pyrenees due to his ignorance of the subject.
Well, hang on. Take the R & C Are Dead situation where you are tossing a coin and telling me the outcome. When you get to the 90th heads in a row I am coming to conclusions about your honesty and/or the fairness of the coin. Surely what I am doing is updating my priors, which is exactly what Mr Meeks is correctly on about?
Entirely different. A coin is far easier to rig than a shuffle. Meeks is talking about card games; the cards are already shuffled by the game. For anyone to rig them for exactly the same deal with another shuffle is beyond even belief.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Makes lottery jackpots look virtually nailed on
You've got about the same chance of guessing a random card order as winning the lottery, then winning the lottery on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then rolling six dice and get six on all of them, then tossing 6 coins and getting heads every time.
But Alastair was talking about bridge hands. The order in which each player’s thirteen cards are dealt to them doesn’t matter, just the cards themselves.
ok, I didn't read the article, I was just trying to communicate the enormity of the permutations.
It takes a bit over 272 trillion completely random deals to have a better than evens chance of getting two identical bridge deals. http://www.rpbridge.net/8j57.htm
For a single identical hand, it’s less than a million.
Only faux-"Christians" like yourself get het up about abortion.
On this day of all days surely even a pretendy-Christian like you might want to think about Christ's actual teachings. I can think of many of Christ's sermons about the poor and needy etc, even one about paying taxes, but not a single one from Christ himself about foetuses or any of the other nonsense you work yourself up about.
Maybe Welby is inspired by the teachings of Christ himself in what he's speaking about, rather than whatever bothers you. But if he wants to shape politics, perhaps he should consider running for election.
As long as we have an established church (and I know you disagree with that but let’s not get sidetracked on that discussion as it’s not the main point) ++Welby has a duty to speak up on national issues
There are multiple verses on the Bible about helping the poor, the weary, the needy, so if you start from the perspective that all of these individuals are genuine asylum seekers we have a moral duty to assist (which doesn’t necessarily mean residence in the UK)
The issue is that there are an indeterminant number of economic migrants mixed in and falsely claiming to be refugees. That is a purely transactional decision for the UK if someone adds value to the country.
If anyone can come up with a way to distinguish between the two classes that would be fantastic. It would also be beneficial if the advocates of unlimited immigration didn’t spend their time making life difficult … I remember the case where they took the government to court for using dental examinations to determine whether individuals without papers were eligible for a scheme designed to aid children. If a scheme is designed to aid children it doesn’t seem unreasonable that there should be a mechanism to verify who qualifies rather than just taking peoples word as being true
They should cut off an arm and count the annual growth rings.
Teeth have growth rings IIRC. But significant uncertainty, I presume, so you can't use dental x-rays to say if someone is 18 precisely, surely? Was that the argument?
You're thinking perhaps of the closure of the epiphyseal plates at th ends of the human long bones but again that is a gradual process from what I recall. Edit: also needs X-rays, so there is an issue there either way in terms of invasive medical procedures, and p[rofessional standards.
Heartless non-analogy based on trees
I understand horses change their teeth in a set pattern annually up to the age of 12 which is why "past mark of mouth" means what it does. i don't think humans can be carbon dated in this way, but perhaps some sorts of dna copying errors accumulate at a fixed rate or something.
If you mean HMG rather than I is being heartless, then quite so. Doesn't make sense to me.
Didn't know that about equines ...
No, I meant my tree ring suggestion was the heartless analogy.
Still, I think you might have got a key insight - that HMG is pretending one can be precise about such things. I really do wonder.
It is, especially as the MRI idea resolves the radiodose issue. But has HMG budgeted for a MRI machine in the processing centre, I wonder? Also, one of the references it cites makes it clear that different populations can vary by a year or even more in their skeletal maturity on certain criteria.
Edit: could be done in one of the local hospitals of course.
Indeed - but we know the nature of skeletal development over age to a considerable degree. One of the first things that anatomists studied over the centuries.
The issue here isn't 19 year olds pretending to be 16. they are 25 year olds (and up) pretending to be 16.
EDIT: There is an amusing side point here. There is a history of people claiming that there "is no test for X" or "a test for X is difficult, dangerous and immoral", when the possible results of the test are not what they want. A perusal of some of the comic statements made by the various Depleted-Uranium-Is-Resposible-For-X outfits is a good example of this.
25+ to 16? Should be clear then, one hopes.
There was a considerable amount of effort devoted to the idea that you couldn't tell the difference, medically, between adults and children and/or that it was medical fascism to try.
As usual, the desire for a certain outcome influenced people's beliefs until reality got a bit stretched.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
Sure, but not enough to re-elect the Tories. You’re not persuading me to close out my Labour most seats position, even though it’s showing a healthy profit.
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Its why as a former professional poker player I never went to play in private home games, despite them being on the surface much more attractive than online or in casino setting.
I think Alastair Meeks has a point about card shuffling. The one that annoys me is FA Cup draws. I don’t think the balls get shuffled nearly enough.
The world cup draw make me chuckle the most. Poor "shuffling" and then all the self imposed restrictions on groupings. We have drawn out country x, they can't now go in group A,B,C,D,E ...so they go in F.
The constraints on these draws leads to the same teams meeting again and again. If Brazil, Serbia and Switzerland seems familiar, that’s because they were in the same group in 2018. And had Nigeria qualified, I’m sure they’d have been in Argentina’s group for the billionth time.
Channel 4 is preparing to target the TikTok generation with a new production arm as it fights to remain relevant with younger viewers and “future-proof” the business as ministers prepare for its privatisation.
The broadcaster will start making viral video content across social media apps including Snap, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube to bolster its digital advertising income and drive more young people to its catch-up service, All4.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
Sure, but not enough to re-elect the Tories. You’re not persuading me to close out my Labour most seats position, even though it’s showing a healthy profit.
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Yes. Anyone saying that they have put in place safeguards to make this impossible should review the history of card sharping and casinos.
Channel 4 is preparing to target the TikTok generation with a new production arm as it fights to remain relevant with younger viewers and “future-proof” the business as ministers prepare for its privatisation.
The broadcaster will start making viral video content across social media apps including Snap, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube to bolster its digital advertising income and drive more young people to its catch-up service, All4.
Whenever I see suggestion like this, I get a picture in my head of Prince Charles "dancing" in a youth club....
I just envision a group of middle aged upper middle class types (men in mustard coloured slacks because they are cool and hip) sitting around in their "thought" pods, going yaaa nooo yaaa nooo my Imogen is always watching TikTok, we should do that...
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Makes lottery jackpots look virtually nailed on
You've got about the same chance of guessing a random card order as winning the lottery, then winning the lottery on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then rolling six dice and get six on all of them, then tossing 6 coins and getting heads every time.
But Alastair was talking about bridge hands. The order in which each player’s thirteen cards are dealt to them doesn’t matter, just the cards themselves.
ok, I didn't read the article, I was just trying to communicate the enormity of the permutations.
It takes a bit over 272 trillion completely random deals to have a better than evens chance of getting two identical bridge deals. http://www.rpbridge.net/8j57.htm
For a single identical hand, it’s less than a million.
And of course shuffles aren’t random.
And that's two arbitrary but identical deals of any kind. Stipulating a "perfect" deal cranks it up a notch or two.
The comments below are interesting. A pretty universal agreement that he should go with only the odd grifter saying "just a bit of cake" before being shouted down.
When the Hate Mail readers are against you, its all over.
Seems the only way he might go before the GE is if there is an absolute shellacking in early May locals.
We can but hope.
One of my Tory opponents is running as the "Unionist" candidate. No blue, no "Tory", absolutely zero mention of the party at all. We know its an absolute shellacking if my ultimate paper candidate non-campaign beats him...
Interesting. Is he aware of the ambiguity of the word in Scots discourse? Or playing on it? Though Banff & Buchan is not Lanarkshire, obviously.
Edit: must be one of those Independents who so often turn out to be Tories who daren't call themselves that, or have had a temporary throwing-of-toys-out-the-local-party-pram.
He is an official Conservative candidate...
Do you get to write your own leaflets Dale?
If I was standing as Libdem right now I would have Lebedev on front page in ermine. And questions for Boris. “Are you aware your good friend had a campaign to infiltrate the establishment?” “How many visits to villa and castle in Italy? How much of free flights, accommodation and private cars? Is there any such thing as a free lunch?” “At the time of these free flights, visits to villa and castles, were you aware your friend suggested MI6 killed Alexander Litvinenko, played down invasion of Crimea, said Putin showed leadership in Syria and Russians thanked Putin for “unimaginable freedoms? Everyone else seemed aware of this.” “At what point did you decide to recommend your friend a peerage, and for what reasons?” “When you were told no, blocked on national security grounds, what did you do next?”
Lebedev the most serious lapse of Boris Johnson’s judgement yet - a hundred times worse than Partygate. He made this guy a lawmaker.
Leaflets? No leaflets for the paper candidate. Money is being spent in the seats we are contesting. I'm just a name on the ballot paper so that people in every ward can vote for the party.
In the past though I absolutely did write leaflets. Including being on the team of 3 who created, wrote and executed Dr Paul Williams unexpected win in Stockton South in 2017.
I wouldn't put any national issues on leaflets though, other than this: Can you trust a party which lies to you?
Channel 4 is preparing to target the TikTok generation with a new production arm as it fights to remain relevant with younger viewers and “future-proof” the business as ministers prepare for its privatisation.
The broadcaster will start making viral video content across social media apps including Snap, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube to bolster its digital advertising income and drive more young people to its catch-up service, All4.
Whenever I see suggestion like this, I get a picture in my head of Prince Charles "dancing" in a youth club....
I just envision a group of middle aged upper middle class types (men in mustard coloured slacks because they are cool and hip) sitting around in their "thought" pods, going yaaa nooo yaaa nooo my Imogen is always watching TikTok, we should do that...
Perhaps - maybe I am being kind. When Prince Charles tried that kind of thing, he was genuinely trying to reach out to various communities/groups.
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Yes. Anyone saying that they have put in place safeguards to make this impossible should review the history of card sharping and casinos.
Its reminds me also of the "psychic" research academics did in the 60/70s. Some magicians / card sharps faked having ESP and got themselves invited and beat the tests, despite them supposed being engineered to stop any such trickery. It was a lot of similar stuff can they predict cards etc and they were just manipulating decks, bamboozling the academics who didn't even really remember the small things they did to cheat.
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Yes. Anyone saying that they have put in place safeguards to make this impossible should review the history of card sharping and casinos.
Its reminds me also of the "psychic" research academics did in the 60/70s. Some magicians / card sharps faked having ESP and got themselves invited and beat the tests, despite them supposed being engineered to stop any such trickery.
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Yes. Anyone saying that they have put in place safeguards to make this impossible should review the history of card sharping and casinos.
Its reminds me also of the "psychic" research academics did in the 60/70s. Some magicians / card sharps faked having ESP and got themselves invited and beat the tests, despite them supposed being engineered to stop any such trickery.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
It's not Remain v Leave, though, is it. Nor a Brexit election. It's a 14 year old and looking every inch of it Tory government trying to get another 5 years having trashed any reputation they ever had for competence and integrity. With no scary man Corbyn to point to.
Can HYUFD, who is our resident expert on what God thinks, pitch in ?
Rwanda's main problem is it is full to the gunwales with Christians whose main takeaway from the bible is that God hates queers. I wonder what Welby thinks of that
Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda.
It is however in much of Muslim majority North Africa and the Middle East
No, but outlawing it was debated by Parliament as recently as 2010
Homosexuality is illegal under legacy UK colonial law in former colony and now majority Christian countries like Ghana and Malawi, so I really wouldn't be claiming this as a Christian vs Muslim thing
90% of the countries where homosexuality is banned globally are Muslim majority.
Now plenty of Muslims are not homophobic but that is the fact
Fact check: total lie
There are 69 countries where homosexuality is illegal. 33 of these can be described as "Muslim majority" (I have included countries where the number of Muslims is slightly below 50% but still a plurality:
Meanwhile, the other 36 are not: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Bhutan, Burundi, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Myanmar, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe They are mostly Christian, with some Buddhist, and one or two others.
Certainly in terms of population the former is a far bigger group than the latter.
50% of British Muslims also want to make homosexuality illegal in the UK
Religion holds us back. HYUFD, time to give up your bronze-age superstition.
Stalin was an atheist, he made homosexuality a crime in the Soviet Union punishable by 5 years hard labour in 1933.
There is no gay marriage in atheist majority China or North Korea either.
In any case on your very link only a quarter of Christians in the UK oppose gay marriage now, in the US the Episcopal Church already conducts gay marriages but it should be up to individual churches
Can HYUFD, who is our resident expert on what God thinks, pitch in ?
Rwanda's main problem is it is full to the gunwales with Christians whose main takeaway from the bible is that God hates queers. I wonder what Welby thinks of that
Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda.
It is however in much of Muslim majority North Africa and the Middle East
No, but outlawing it was debated by Parliament as recently as 2010
Homosexuality is illegal under legacy UK colonial law in former colony and now majority Christian countries like Ghana and Malawi, so I really wouldn't be claiming this as a Christian vs Muslim thing
90% of the countries where homosexuality is banned globally are Muslim majority.
Now plenty of Muslims are not homophobic but that is the fact
Fact check: total lie
There are 69 countries where homosexuality is illegal. 33 of these can be described as "Muslim majority" (I have included countries where the number of Muslims is slightly below 50% but still a plurality:
Meanwhile, the other 36 are not: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Bhutan, Burundi, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Myanmar, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe They are mostly Christian, with some Buddhist, and one or two others.
Certainly in terms of population the former is a far bigger group than the latter.
50% of British Muslims also want to make homosexuality illegal in the UK
Religion holds us back. HYUFD, time to give up your bronze-age superstition.
Stalin was an atheist, he made homosexuality a crime in the Soviet Union punishable by 5 years hard labour in 1933.
There is no gay marriage in atheist majority China or North Korea either.
In any case on your very link only a quarter of Christians in the UK oppose gay marriage now, in the US the Episcopal Church already conducts gay marriages but it should be up to individual churches
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Yes. Anyone saying that they have put in place safeguards to make this impossible should review the history of card sharping and casinos.
Its reminds me also of the "psychic" research academics did in the 60/70s. Some magicians / card sharps faked having ESP and got themselves invited and beat the tests, despite them supposed being engineered to stop any such trickery.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
It's not Remain v Leave, though, is it. Nor a Brexit election. It's a 14 year old and looking every inch of it Tory government trying to get another 5 years having trashed any reputation they ever had for competence and integrity. With no scary man Corbyn to point to.
They have their work cut out.
Of course they have, but the voters as yet have no idea what Labour is proposing. Sunak like very CoE before him will loosen the purse strings as the election beckons and voters will get round to thinking about the government closer to the time.
Meanwhile there's a war, a pandemic and a cost of living crisis on the boil and nobody has any idea how things will pan out
This might be unfashionable but I am feeling rather sorry for Rishi. Maybe because I am comparing him to Boris but let's look at the evidence:
I don't know how good a chancellor he is compared to those who have gone before, but even taking into account his latest budget, he is not evidently bottom of the pile.
Re partygate there may be more to come but currently he looks like he is being brought down by all the nonsense surrounding Boris. If he truly was only there because he went to meet Boris and wasn't invited, then although guilty it doesn't fall into the resigning category to me. There for the grace of god and all that. I accept more may appear that makes my forgiveness there unjustified.
Re Non Dom and Green Card - OK now I am struggling. Firstly this very much appears to be a stich up, but even so it was rather stupid of him not to have tidied up his/her affairs before becoming chancellor (or possibly even an MP)
Can HYUFD, who is our resident expert on what God thinks, pitch in ?
Rwanda's main problem is it is full to the gunwales with Christians whose main takeaway from the bible is that God hates queers. I wonder what Welby thinks of that
Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda.
It is however in much of Muslim majority North Africa and the Middle East
No, but outlawing it was debated by Parliament as recently as 2010
Homosexuality is illegal under legacy UK colonial law in former colony and now majority Christian countries like Ghana and Malawi, so I really wouldn't be claiming this as a Christian vs Muslim thing
90% of the countries where homosexuality is banned globally are Muslim majority.
Now plenty of Muslims are not homophobic but that is the fact
Fact check: total lie
There are 69 countries where homosexuality is illegal. 33 of these can be described as "Muslim majority" (I have included countries where the number of Muslims is slightly below 50% but still a plurality:
Meanwhile, the other 36 are not: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Bhutan, Burundi, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Myanmar, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe They are mostly Christian, with some Buddhist, and one or two others.
Certainly in terms of population the former is a far bigger group than the latter.
50% of British Muslims also want to make homosexuality illegal in the UK
Religion holds us back. HYUFD, time to give up your bronze-age superstition.
Stalin was an atheist, he made homosexuality a crime in the Soviet Union punishable by 5 years hard labour in 1933.
There is no gay marriage in atheist majority China or North Korea either.
In any case on your very link only a quarter of Christians in the UK oppose gay marriage now, in the US the Episcopal Church already conducts gay marriages but it should be up to individual churches
Putin is a Christian
Homosexuality is not illegal in Russia now. Nor has he conquered all of Eastern Europe like Stalin nor yet introduced gulags.
Leaflets? No leaflets for the paper candidate. Money is being spent in the seats we are contesting. I'm just a name on the ballot paper so that people in every ward can vote for the party.
In the past though I absolutely did write leaflets. Including being on the team of 3 who created, wrote and executed Dr Paul Williams unexpected win in Stockton South in 2017.
I wouldn't put any national issues on leaflets though, other than this: Can you trust a party which lies to you?
Whether to feature national issues on local leaflets is something I argue about with colleagues. We don't have elections this year, so are just delivering leaflets to stay visible and pick up new members. Colleagues, murmuring "all politics is local", say we should major on something like local housing supply, even though there's not that much going on in that connection. I feel that a heading like "Enough is enough! - help get a sensible government!" featuring the national scandals and urging people to join the national effort, will be more effective.
We all know that most people aren't going to read it whatever we write, but the ones that do? I think they'll respond more to things they've caught on the national news.
Channel 4 is preparing to target the TikTok generation with a new production arm as it fights to remain relevant with younger viewers and “future-proof” the business as ministers prepare for its privatisation.
The broadcaster will start making viral video content across social media apps including Snap, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube to bolster its digital advertising income and drive more young people to its catch-up service, All4.
Whenever I see suggestion like this, I get a picture in my head of Prince Charles "dancing" in a youth club....
A bit old fashioned and out of date.
Picture instead coked off his tits Michael Gove raving away in a bar in Aberdeen. Or frankly coked off his tits Michael Gove ranting away at the dispatch box. The compare and contrast between him on drugs and him off drugs is spectacular to behold.
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Yes. Anyone saying that they have put in place safeguards to make this impossible should review the history of card sharping and casinos.
Its reminds me also of the "psychic" research academics did in the 60/70s. Some magicians / card sharps faked having ESP and got themselves invited and beat the tests, despite them supposed being engineered to stop any such trickery.
Scary thing is he is still successfully grifting, even in the internet age where it is trivial to find out about him, compared to back in the day where going from small town to small town in US, nobody is going to keep up with your scams.
But then there are now all these fake gurus who do the same, constantly reinventing themselves online selling courses for whatever is the new easy money maker, drop shipping, house flipping, crypto etc.
The comments below are interesting. A pretty universal agreement that he should go with only the odd grifter saying "just a bit of cake" before being shouted down.
When the Hate Mail readers are against you, its all over.
Seems the only way he might go before the GE is if there is an absolute shellacking in early May locals.
We can but hope.
One of my Tory opponents is running as the "Unionist" candidate. No blue, no "Tory", absolutely zero mention of the party at all. We know its an absolute shellacking if my ultimate paper candidate non-campaign beats him...
Interesting. Is he aware of the ambiguity of the word in Scots discourse? Or playing on it? Though Banff & Buchan is not Lanarkshire, obviously.
Edit: must be one of those Independents who so often turn out to be Tories who daren't call themselves that, or have had a temporary throwing-of-toys-out-the-local-party-pram.
He is an official Conservative candidate...
Do you get to write your own leaflets Dale?
If I was standing as Libdem right now I would have Lebedev on front page in ermine. And questions for Boris. “Are you aware your good friend had a campaign to infiltrate the establishment?” “How many visits to villa and castle in Italy? How much of free flights, accommodation and private cars? Is there any such thing as a free lunch?” “At the time of these free flights, visits to villa and castles, were you aware your friend suggested MI6 killed Alexander Litvinenko, played down invasion of Crimea, said Putin showed leadership in Syria and Russians thanked Putin for “unimaginable freedoms? Everyone else seemed aware of this.” “At what point did you decide to recommend your friend a peerage, and for what reasons?” “When you were told no, blocked on national security grounds, what did you do next?”
Lebedev the most serious lapse of Boris Johnson’s judgement yet - a hundred times worse than Partygate. He made this guy a lawmaker.
Can HYUFD, who is our resident expert on what God thinks, pitch in ?
Rwanda's main problem is it is full to the gunwales with Christians whose main takeaway from the bible is that God hates queers. I wonder what Welby thinks of that
Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda.
It is however in much of Muslim majority North Africa and the Middle East
No, but outlawing it was debated by Parliament as recently as 2010
Homosexuality is illegal under legacy UK colonial law in former colony and now majority Christian countries like Ghana and Malawi, so I really wouldn't be claiming this as a Christian vs Muslim thing
90% of the countries where homosexuality is banned globally are Muslim majority.
Now plenty of Muslims are not homophobic but that is the fact
Fact check: total lie
There are 69 countries where homosexuality is illegal. 33 of these can be described as "Muslim majority" (I have included countries where the number of Muslims is slightly below 50% but still a plurality:
Meanwhile, the other 36 are not: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Bhutan, Burundi, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Myanmar, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe They are mostly Christian, with some Buddhist, and one or two others.
Certainly in terms of population the former is a far bigger group than the latter.
50% of British Muslims also want to make homosexuality illegal in the UK
Religion holds us back. HYUFD, time to give up your bronze-age superstition.
Stalin was an atheist, he made homosexuality a crime in the Soviet Union punishable by 5 years hard labour in 1933.
There is no gay marriage in atheist majority China or North Korea either.
In any case on your very link only a quarter of Christians in the UK oppose gay marriage now, in the US the Episcopal Church already conducts gay marriages but it should be up to individual churches
Putin is a Christian
Homosexuality is not illegal in Russia now. Nor has he conquered all of Eastern Europe like Stalin nor yet introduced gulags.
Putin is a bad man, atheist Stalin was worse
Just as well Stalin wasn't a Christian too, isn't it? Since religion makes people even worse.
Will we ever see any of the Trump family/mafia brought to trial over anything?
In many countries of the world, Trump would have been jailed/executed for his Treason.
The irony is come January 2025 he will be the one doing the jailing/executing.
Democratic America is sleep walking into totalitarianism.
Sleepwalking towards Gilead.
The 2024 Presidential Election is shaping up to be something amazing. It's going be a cross between the Fyre Festival and the fall of the Roman Empire yet nobody seems remotely interested in it. Trump is definitely going to run. Biden is physically and mentally fucked. It's going to be a Gotterdammerung of hyper partisan lying and probably exchanges of small arms fire. Can't wait.
Both TMay and Sunak lost public support when they tried to convince people to end unsustainable spending: TMay on social care, Sunak on the Covid deficit. The lesson is that democracies, or at least British democracy, reward unsustainable spending.
Both TMay and Sunak lost public support when they tried to convince people to end unsustainable spending: TMay on social care, Sunak on the Covid deficit. The lesson is that democracies, or at least British democracy, reward unsustainable spending.
Didn't the Conservatives and Lib Dems run in 2010 on the platform of reigning in unsustainable spending, and win?
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
Both TMay and Sunak lost public support when they tried to convince people to end unsustainable spending: TMay on social care, Sunak on the Covid deficit. The lesson is that democracies, or at least British democracy, reward unsustainable spending.
Didn't the Conservatives and Lib Dems run in 2010 on the platform of reigning in unsustainable spending, and win?
Indeed. And trumpeted their success, with a promise to double down, to a Tory majority in 2015.
JRM. "His Grace...is a true witness for Christ...I don't agree with him." Logically that makes him a non-believer in Christ doesn't it?
JRM is RC, isn't he, which gives him a bit of wriggle room, though I can't imagine that the Pope is keen on this scheme either.
The final escape will be to claim that how we treat strangers and refugees isn't a matter where the church's moral teaching should intrude, which is going to be a stretch. I'm sure he will manage, though.
The most Christian way to annoy JRM is probably to forgive him, whether he likes it or not.
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
spitballing here.. if you get two reds in a row, you keep guessing black until you get two blacks in a row. because the pairs of red and pairs of blacks will always match. am I close?
If someone else has raised this, apologies, but does it not look likely that Johnson or his camp have leaked Sunak's green card, wife's tax affairs and so on? It seems to have been a very effective way to banjax Sunak's chances of being PM. Is banjax a word used outside Scotland by the way? It seems to have an unknown, perhaps Irish etymology.
Can HYUFD, who is our resident expert on what God thinks, pitch in ?
Rwanda's main problem is it is full to the gunwales with Christians whose main takeaway from the bible is that God hates queers. I wonder what Welby thinks of that
Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda.
It is however in much of Muslim majority North Africa and the Middle East
No, but outlawing it was debated by Parliament as recently as 2010
Homosexuality is illegal under legacy UK colonial law in former colony and now majority Christian countries like Ghana and Malawi, so I really wouldn't be claiming this as a Christian vs Muslim thing
90% of the countries where homosexuality is banned globally are Muslim majority.
Now plenty of Muslims are not homophobic but that is the fact
Fact check: total lie
There are 69 countries where homosexuality is illegal. 33 of these can be described as "Muslim majority" (I have included countries where the number of Muslims is slightly below 50% but still a plurality:
Meanwhile, the other 36 are not: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Bhutan, Burundi, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Myanmar, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe They are mostly Christian, with some Buddhist, and one or two others.
Certainly in terms of population the former is a far bigger group than the latter.
50% of British Muslims also want to make homosexuality illegal in the UK
Religion holds us back. HYUFD, time to give up your bronze-age superstition.
Stalin was an atheist, he made homosexuality a crime in the Soviet Union punishable by 5 years hard labour in 1933.
There is no gay marriage in atheist majority China or North Korea either.
In any case on your very link only a quarter of Christians in the UK oppose gay marriage now, in the US the Episcopal Church already conducts gay marriages but it should be up to individual churches
Putin is a Christian
Homosexuality is not illegal in Russia now. Nor has he conquered all of Eastern Europe like Stalin nor yet introduced gulags.
Putin is a bad man, atheist Stalin was worse
Don't be silly. That is like trying to weigh up who was the best out of Ted Bundy, Peter Sutcliffe or Fred West.
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
spitballing here.. if you get two reds in a row, you keep guessing black until you get two blacks in a row. because the pairs of red and pairs of blacks will always match. am I close?
Both TMay and Sunak lost public support when they tried to convince people to end unsustainable spending: TMay on social care, Sunak on the Covid deficit. The lesson is that democracies, or at least British democracy, reward unsustainable spending.
Didn't the Conservatives and Lib Dems run in 2010 on the platform of reigning in unsustainable spending, and win?
1. Darling did a lot of the dirty work. 2. The fall in living standards after 2008 drove a lot of VI change. 3. Cameron's face on posters in every town promised more cash for the NHS. 4. The Lib Dems never recovered. 5. Then the Conservatives lost their majority next election too.
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Imagine you had a machine that could generate a million permutations of a deck of cards every single second. You run it every single second, every day, for the entire time span of the universe (13.8 billion years). Now suppose everybody on the planet (8 billion people) has one of these machines and is also running it constantly. Now suppose that every single star in our galaxy (400 billion stars) has the same number of people doing the same thing, from the Big Bang to now. Now suppose that every single galaxy in the observable universe (2 trillion galaxies) has the same number of stars each with the same number of people churning through a million combinations a second from the beginning of time.
The question is, how many universes do you need to get through ALL the combinations? Assuming the best case scenario that nobody on any planet in any galaxy across the span of all history ever gets the same combination that anyone else has ever got in any of the million combinations per second they are all churning out?
The answer is: you need 29,000,000,000 universes to get there.
So that's 29 billion universes each with 2 trillion galaxies each with 400 billion stars each with 8 billion people each shuffling a pack of cards a million times per second without a break for the entire span of time that has ever happened.
Now, imagine all those deals are completely random.
How long - on average - before the first 'collision', i.e. the time for two deals (anywhere) to be exactly the same?
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
spitballing here.. if you get two reds in a row, you keep guessing black until you get two blacks in a row. because the pairs of red and pairs of blacks will always match. am I close?
Not as such because I freestyle it rather than use a system, but on the right lines. I think what's going on is that with each prediction I'm adjusting for the cards gone (and thus left). But the speed I'm flipping the cards means the adjustment is subconscious. It's quite interesting to do. Some people score much higher than others. Not 100% sure but I think it might be a measure of how much probability is ingrained in you, ie comes without thinking and overtly calculating.
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
spitballing here.. if you get two reds in a row, you keep guessing black until you get two blacks in a row. because the pairs of red and pairs of blacks will always match. am I close?
I just tried this and I got 32/52
Unless you get them all right. That's Out of this World.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
Sure, but not enough to re-elect the Tories. You’re not persuading me to close out my Labour most seats position, even though it’s showing a healthy profit.
not time yet
give it a year
Of course. I'll be quite prepared to close the position when it's 2/1 on.
Senior Conservatives fear traditional voters will desert them after Partygate https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/16/senior-conservatives-partygate-fines-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak … “If you go to our newer working-class, blue-collar voters, I’m not sure they’re that bothered,” said one northern Tory MP. “But if you go to our traditional middle-class Tory voter, they’re angry. That’s how I would define it. I think he should’ve resigned.”
A minister said: “We’re going down a route that isolates the people in the middle. I don’t know whether there’s enough votes on the right and the core of the party to get us through. I just think it’s offensive and it’s doing real brand damage. I’m just appalled.”…
So partygate pisses off the core vote, fuel bills get everybody else.
Remarkable
Remind me how Labour will win over voters on fuel bills. Spoiler - they can't.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was won. The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
Remind me how the Brexit vote was lost Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
Sure, but not enough to re-elect the Tories. You’re not persuading me to close out my Labour most seats position, even though it’s showing a healthy profit.
not time yet
give it a year
Of course. I'll be quite prepared to close the position when it's 2/1 on.
and it might very well get there.
On the other hand we appear to be living in a time when politicians the world over are reacting to events - brexit, pandemic, war - rather than driving them so just about anything is possible
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It was excellent and I rather enjoyed the first half as well for its humour.
Morning all.
I gave up at this, I'm afraid:
Someone mentioned that if you properly shuffle a pack of cards, the probability of the cards dealt ever being repeated in the same order in a later deal were astronomical (being blocked, I don’t have the exact wording)
It takes fully half a second to log out of twitter so you *can* read it...
yes 52 ! is a huge number - you are indeed making history when you shuffle a pack of cards as it will never have been done before in that order
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations
Makes lottery jackpots look virtually nailed on
You've got about the same chance of guessing a random card order as winning the lottery, then winning the lottery on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then winning the lottery AGAIN on your very next attempt, then rolling six dice and get six on all of them, then tossing 6 coins and getting heads every time.
If someone else has raised this, apologies, but does it not look likely that Johnson or his camp have leaked Sunak's green card, wife's tax affairs and so on? It seems to have been a very effective way to banjax Sunak's chances of being PM. Is banjax a word used outside Scotland by the way? It seems to have an unknown, perhaps Irish etymology.
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
As you know how red or black the remainder of the deck is, this doesn't sound very complicated.
I will now run a thousand python simulations, and tell you what the expected number you should get is (given you always choose whatever is the value option).
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
spitballing here.. if you get two reds in a row, you keep guessing black until you get two blacks in a row. because the pairs of red and pairs of blacks will always match. am I close?
Just keep a running count of red and black, and adjust calls accordingly. With a bit of practice not too difficult.
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
As you know how red or black the remainder of the deck is, this doesn't sound very complicated.
I will now run a thousand python simulations, and tell you what the expected number you should get is (given you always choose whatever is the value option).
Re Alastair on cards, related but not at all the same, I have a party piece which goes as follows -
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
spitballing here.. if you get two reds in a row, you keep guessing black until you get two blacks in a row. because the pairs of red and pairs of blacks will always match. am I close?
I just tried this and I got 32/52
Sounds about right using your system. So I reckon if you drop that and kind of just 'feel' it, you'll go a few points higher and become an expert. Over 40 is premier league. That wows people.
The latest from Alastair Meeks, formerly of this parish. The first half is not quite up to his usual standard, being a fairly obvious statement of the risk of assuming that events are completely random. But he then leads on to Covid and Ukraine. Anyway, it's an renjoyable read, as his pieces always are.
It is an extremely poor article in which Meeks pontificates on a subject (Bayes Theorem) about which he characteristically knows nothing.
I once tried to explain what a Fisher matrix was to Meeks ... I was told law is more important than mathematics.
I had to stop reading when he said “I understand the maths, I really do”; I couldn’t risk tossing my phone at the Pyrenees due to his ignorance of the subject.
Well, hang on. Take the R & C Are Dead situation where you are tossing a coin and telling me the outcome. When you get to the 90th heads in a row I am coming to conclusions about your honesty and/or the fairness of the coin. Surely what I am doing is updating my priors, which is exactly what Mr Meeks is correctly on about?
Entirely different. A coin is far easier to rig than a shuffle. Meeks is talking about card games; the cards are already shuffled by the game. For anyone to rig them for exactly the same deal with another shuffle is beyond even belief.
anti-aircraft missile systems production has been suspended; workers are ordered to go on leave or to war against🇺🇦 Almost no🇷🇺-made[parts] were used.Until recently main supplier was🇩🇪.The plant tries to circumvent sanctions(via🇰🇿)but it's costly—🇺🇦Intel https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1515669731596193794
Can HYUFD, who is our resident expert on what God thinks, pitch in ?
Rwanda's main problem is it is full to the gunwales with Christians whose main takeaway from the bible is that God hates queers. I wonder what Welby thinks of that
Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda.
It is however in much of Muslim majority North Africa and the Middle East
No, but outlawing it was debated by Parliament as recently as 2010
Homosexuality is illegal under legacy UK colonial law in former colony and now majority Christian countries like Ghana and Malawi, so I really wouldn't be claiming this as a Christian vs Muslim thing
90% of the countries where homosexuality is banned globally are Muslim majority.
Now plenty of Muslims are not homophobic but that is the fact
Fact check: total lie
There are 69 countries where homosexuality is illegal. 33 of these can be described as "Muslim majority" (I have included countries where the number of Muslims is slightly below 50% but still a plurality:
Meanwhile, the other 36 are not: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Bhutan, Burundi, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Myanmar, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe They are mostly Christian, with some Buddhist, and one or two others.
Certainly in terms of population the former is a far bigger group than the latter.
50% of British Muslims also want to make homosexuality illegal in the UK
Religion holds us back. HYUFD, time to give up your bronze-age superstition.
Stalin was an atheist, he made homosexuality a crime in the Soviet Union punishable by 5 years hard labour in 1933.
There is no gay marriage in atheist majority China or North Korea either.
In any case on your very link only a quarter of Christians in the UK oppose gay marriage now, in the US the Episcopal Church already conducts gay marriages but it should be up to individual churches
“ time to give up your bronze-age superstition HYUFD “. My politics and values IS DEFINITELY closer to HYUFD than yours to be honest Farooq.
I would be immediately suspicious of anecdotal reports of any card games being dealt "perfectly". Skilled card mechanics can engineer these situations (with relative ease).
Yes. Anyone saying that they have put in place safeguards to make this impossible should review the history of card sharping and casinos.
Its reminds me also of the "psychic" research academics did in the 60/70s. Some magicians / card sharps faked having ESP and got themselves invited and beat the tests, despite them supposed being engineered to stop any such trickery. It was a lot of similar stuff can they predict cards etc and they were just manipulating decks, bamboozling the academics who didn't even really remember the small things they did to cheat.
I've just started watching Servant Of The People - available on Channel 4.
I have to say after 4 episodes I'm enjoying it. Comedy doesn't always translate well but it works for me. Vasyl (Zelensky) decides to take the bus to work much to the chagrin of the Sir Humphrey figure Yuri (who gives off a Harvey Keitel vibe). Eventually they get off the bus a little early and we see that it's been trailed by about 4 cars worth of bodyguards. Made me think of David Cameron. I liked this line:
Vasyl - I'm the servant of the people now Yuri (aka Sir Humphrey) - I prefer to say manager
They seem to average about one Putin joke per episode so far. Vasyl's parents are busy helping themselves to freebies now their son is the President and hope to arrange for their granddaughter to marry Prince Harry. Dad jokes about leaving mum for a teenage gymnast....
Yes Minister isn't quite the right comparison really. It's hard to imagine the first episode of Yes Prime Minister in which the previous incumbent refuses to leave the office, demands vodka be brought to him and points a gun at Sir Humphrey. It's also a bit uncomfortable when they start talking about things like the Kennedy assassination. You also have the oligarchs generally seen from behind in darkened rooms eating caviar confused as to who Vasyl 'belongs' to.
Comments
Ben Nevis is the worst mountain in Scotland, by a huge margin. Total waste of a day.
An infinite number of times.
Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.
https://archive.ph/2022.04.15-154312/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/15/women-dont-know-women-unless-test-chromosomes-says-stonewall/#selection-1427.0-1427.152
When Labour polls 100%, Liverpool's polling stations heave whilst those in Mid Dorset have tumbleweed running through.
Either that or, at some point, the Tory boundary advantage dam bursts and Labour majority rises 50 or more for a further 1% swing. Just one more waffer thin piss take Boris?
Edit: could be done in one of the local hospitals of course.
So the real brand damage to the Conservative Party is Bed-blocker Boris.
I am not for one moment suggesting that the Prime Minister is one of their number. The reverse is the case, thank the Lord.
Unless we’re playing against “God”.
If you think they're examining the manifesto and reading OBR reports, that's an error.
Windfall tax on oil
Scrap VAT on fuel
Not saying these are wise or sustainable promises. Words is cheap.
1. It is mid term, when Margaret Thatcher was mid term, getting on with the job and getting the big calls right, she had bad polls and local election shellackings, followed up with landslide wins.
2.. So regardless of fun mid terms, country rarely moves dramatically from general election date to general election date?
3. Labour are coming from a long way behind this time in terms of seats? A good general election night usually can be adding 30 or 40 seats, as incumbency dies hard, but in this instance that would merely be a disaster for Labour, end of Starmer and possibly a more leftish new leadership?
4. You are a Tory and you really want to win, do you really want to swap Boris midterm for Truss, or see if Boris can wave his wand in the next election and tough it out to them.
5. The delta poll might be the outlier. Other polling companies have it tighter. How much bigger the gap this month from Kantor compared to last month.
6. I have been ticked off overnight for mentioning a sub sample, but ALL the midland subsamples point to Labour not making much traction there? Firstly why? Secondly, in election night does lead in polls give huge majorities in some places but miss out in key targets in other parts of country?
https://aperiodical.com/2011/12/four-perfect-hands-an-event-never-seen-before-right/
9 reports of "perfect" bridge deals. The assumption is not rigging, it's randomness on top of imperfect shuffling
You need to update your priors
ETA and the game *unshuffles* the cards. If you collect in hands at the end of a game of bridge they are partly sorted by suit.
Oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them.
The order in which each player’s thirteen cards are dealt to them doesn’t matter, just the cards themselves.
You're always ramping the Conservatives, but you haven't quite dropped this "I'm a Lib Dem me" schtick. You're nearly there, but you won't quite come clean.
The issue here isn't 19 year olds pretending to be 16. they are 25 year olds (and up) pretending to be 16.
EDIT: There is an amusing side point here. There is a history of people claiming that there "is no test for X" or "a test for X is difficult, dangerous and immoral", when the possible results of the test are not what they want. A perusal of some of the comic statements made by the various Depleted-Uranium-Is-Resposible-For-X outfits is a good example of this.
Ok..
The fuzzy promise of something better to those who were unhappy with what they had.
There will be a lot of very unhappy people at the next election, and they are not particularly likely to trust those who led them into that unhappiness.
The broadcaster will start making viral video content across social media apps including Snap, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube to bolster its digital advertising income and drive more young people to its catch-up service, All4.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/04/17/channel-4-targets-tiktok-generation-viral-videos/
I predict it will go down like a lead balloon.
You know I am not gone “full HY” in that post. What is special about my posts is they are full of analysis not opinions, as I put different heads on to think it through.
It is mid term. It is just 1 poll. Polls did look good for Milliband and balls, even within the election campaign they lost and had less seats.
Why don’t you just write your own analysis against all six points, saying, that’s not true you are making it up and lying MoonRabbit? But it’s all true Farooq.
My Dad told me, always vote Tory to keep the socialists and unions out of power. But I never have, I even voted for man with bucket on head more than Tory! 😝
Pointless scare mongering, voter name calling and nothing positive to relate
There will be a lot of happy people at the next election thinking Im not trusting my future to that lot, they cant even see what they got wrong
Truss FAV at 6/1
You talk a good game of Bayesianism, but I may have to adjust my priors about you...
http://www.rpbridge.net/8j57.htm
For a single identical hand, it’s less than a million.
And of course shuffles aren’t random.
As usual, the desire for a certain outcome influenced people's beliefs until reality got a bit stretched.
You’re not persuading me to close out my Labour most seats position, even though it’s showing a healthy profit.
Its why as a former professional poker player I never went to play in private home games, despite them being on the surface much more attractive than online or in casino setting.
give it a year
In the past though I absolutely did write leaflets. Including being on the team of 3 who created, wrote and executed Dr Paul Williams unexpected win in Stockton South in 2017.
I wouldn't put any national issues on leaflets though, other than this: Can you trust a party which lies to you?
They have their work cut out.
There is no gay marriage in atheist majority China or North Korea either.
In any case on your very link only a quarter of Christians in the UK oppose gay marriage now, in the US the Episcopal Church already conducts gay marriages but it should be up to individual churches
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Popoff
But probably not as funny as Clinton Baptiste.
Meanwhile there's a war, a pandemic and a cost of living crisis on the boil and nobody has any idea how things will pan out
I don't know how good a chancellor he is compared to those who have gone before, but even taking into account his latest budget, he is not evidently bottom of the pile.
Re partygate there may be more to come but currently he looks like he is being brought down by all the nonsense surrounding Boris. If he truly was only there because he went to meet Boris and wasn't invited, then although guilty it doesn't fall into the resigning category to me. There for the grace of god and all that. I accept more may appear that makes my forgiveness there unjustified.
Re Non Dom and Green Card - OK now I am struggling. Firstly this very much appears to be a stich up, but even so it was rather stupid of him not to have tidied up his/her affairs before becoming chancellor (or possibly even an MP)
Putin is a bad man, atheist Stalin was worse
We all know that most people aren't going to read it whatever we write, but the ones that do? I think they'll respond more to things they've caught on the national news.
Picture instead coked off his tits Michael Gove raving away in a bar in Aberdeen. Or frankly coked off his tits Michael Gove ranting away at the dispatch box. The compare and contrast between him on drugs and him off drugs is spectacular to behold.
But then there are now all these fake gurus who do the same, constantly reinventing themselves online selling courses for whatever is the new easy money maker, drop shipping, house flipping, crypto etc.
Logically that makes him a non-believer in Christ doesn't it?
'Now gentlemen, as Our Lord said unto Moses and in my opinion quite rightly...'
20 months until the Iowa Caucus.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/17/eu-anti-fraud-body-accuses-marine-le-pen-france-election
Somebody shuffles a pack of cards and gives it to me. I hold it face down and start flipping them over, one by one and quick. Before each one, I predict Red or Black, and if I’m right I score a point.
Beforehand I explain what I’m going to do and I ask people how many points they think I’ll manage to get. They say 26 or thereabouts. Why? I ask. Because it’s about a 50/50 chance each time, they say.
And I go, well I bet you I get at least 33 and maybe even close to 40.
Go for it, they say, and they crowd around excitedly (it’s a slow party).
So I do, and I always meet my mark. Much admiration ensues. Quite rightly because only a minority of people can do this.
Nevis via the Carn Mor Dearg arete is a classic, one of the best walks I've done.
The tourist track is grim on the way down, but you shorten by heading east at the halfway lochan.
And trumpeted their success, with a promise to double down, to a Tory majority in 2015.
The final escape will be to claim that how we treat strangers and refugees isn't a matter where the church's moral teaching should intrude, which is going to be a stretch. I'm sure he will manage, though.
The most Christian way to annoy JRM is probably to forgive him, whether he likes it or not.
How long - on average - before the first 'collision', i.e. the time for two deals (anywhere) to be exactly the same?
I'll be quite prepared to close the position when it's 2/1 on.
On the other hand we appear to be living in a time when politicians the world over are reacting to events - brexit, pandemic, war - rather than driving them so just about anything is possible
https://dsl.ac.uk/results/banjax
is pretty conclusive.
I think it's Irish. In Scotland only from the West Central Belt immigration, etc., or from T. Wogan on the TV.
Chambers says it's an Anglo-Irish word. Possibly compination of bang + smash.
I will now run a thousand python simulations, and tell you what the expected number you should get is (given you always choose whatever is the value option).
With a bit of practice not too difficult.
Tougher to pull off with suits.
Because each card is assigned to one of four hands, and the order they enter the hand is irrelevant.
I can't be bothered to do the math, but I'd reckon that cuts the number of deals by at least ten orders of magnitude.
Almost no🇷🇺-made[parts] were used.Until recently main supplier was🇩🇪.The plant tries to circumvent sanctions(via🇰🇿)but it's costly—🇺🇦Intel
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1515669731596193794
I have to say after 4 episodes I'm enjoying it. Comedy doesn't always translate well but it works for me. Vasyl (Zelensky) decides to take the bus to work much to the chagrin of the Sir Humphrey figure Yuri (who gives off a Harvey Keitel vibe). Eventually they get off the bus a little early and we see that it's been trailed by about 4 cars worth of bodyguards. Made me think of David Cameron. I liked this line:
Vasyl - I'm the servant of the people now
Yuri (aka Sir Humphrey) - I prefer to say manager
They seem to average about one Putin joke per episode so far. Vasyl's parents are busy helping themselves to freebies now their son is the President and hope to arrange for their granddaughter to marry Prince Harry. Dad jokes about leaving mum for a teenage gymnast....
Yes Minister isn't quite the right comparison really. It's hard to imagine the first episode of Yes Prime Minister in which the previous incumbent refuses to leave the office, demands vodka be brought to him and points a gun at Sir Humphrey. It's also a bit uncomfortable when they start talking about things like the Kennedy assassination. You also have the oligarchs generally seen from behind in darkened rooms eating caviar confused as to who Vasyl 'belongs' to.