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Conspiracies And Probability
guttentag writes "Sunday's New York Times Magazine is running a feature that looks at the rumored conspiracy that allegedly killed nearly a dozen bioterror and germ warfare researchers during a four month period following the U.S. anthrax scare. "What are the odds," people ask, despite the fact that a "one-in-a-million miracle" will statistically occur 280 times a day in the U.S. These strange things happen all the time, but we hype them because they provide the spice in literature and the comfort of comprehension."
This happened a long time ago and I think Salon covered it. Maybe I read it on another website.
We have Bush as our President. Let's figure out that conspiracy first.
5 out of 4 of people have a hard time with fractions
Hemos posted the same story back in May: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/0 5/0043203&mode=thread&tid=134
Which means there are about 6000 people exactly like you.
sig.
You could find the odds exactly if you knew several figures:
What is the number of bio-whatnot researchers in the group?
What are the odds of one dying in a given time period?
And this is the hardest: How many comparable groups are there in society? For example, politicians dying would be noticed. Baseball players dying would be noticed. And how big are these groups?
If you answer these simple questions, you can answer the main topic.
I noticed a car with the license plate JAA 768 next to another car with the license plate XPA 117.
It was amazing.
I mean, do you have any idea how staggeringly improbable it was for me to see those two license plates next to each other?
And all time time I was afraid that the FBI was monitoring my Inter-.........
million-to-one chances happen 9 times out of ten
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
... is what this reminds me of. Math says that anything that can happen will happen given enough time --- much the same as some number n monkeys typing at n typewriters will eventually produce the Library of Congress. Of course, we're talking about very large values of n and incredibly long amounts of time...
If she was impregnated by feces smeared on the seat, then yes, even by my atheist standards, it's a miracle.
It also probably means that the baby will grow up to be a lawyer.
Why is it so much more comfortable for us to see massive orchestrated conspiracy where there is really nothing but 1) random chance or 2) stupidity.
As in, a lone crazy man slips through some very sloppy secret service security and puts a bullet in the president, 30 years later we're still speculating about secret mafia/cuban/communist/military-instrustrial complex theories. We actually bend the facts to make it fit. Visit the Book Depository in Dallas; if you look out that window down into the street, Oswald's shot looks rather easy to make. It's right there.
Why can't we just accept that? If there's a crime to be investigated, investigate it. Fine. But twenty years from now some conspiracy nut will still be speculating about who or what killed those scientists. Probably the same guy who did Vince Foster and Ron Brown...
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
It is quite plausible to argue that the chance of at least one conspiracy theories being true is also quite high. I mean... It just boils down to which ones, right?
Some of this crap *has* came true, btw. the US government has denied any base in "area 51" for about as long as it existed. until more photos showed up. and russia shot down an U-2, and F117 was unveild to be designed there, etc. the only difference is that by this day and age, "area 51" is no longer considered a conspiracy.
so... the truth is still out there. just have to believe in the right one (or two) and filter out the other million or so...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
What are the odds that nearly a dozen biochemists would die in one way or another over a period of five months, and that an article would appear in the New York Times proclaiming that it wasn't a conspiracy?
He's quoted in the article, and it's worth reading his stuff. His home page is here, and there's an archive of his ABC Who's Counting columns here..
Go read 'em.
Stanislaw Lem's "The Chain of Chance" deals with just about this very sort of thing, actually. Emergent properties of large populations, more, though.
a "one-in-a-million miracle" will statistically occur 280 times a day in the U.S.
This means that there is just a single one-in-a-million miracle that humans can observe, but it is likely that there are many and each of them will occur roughly 280 times a day in a population of 280 million. (this assumes that a one-in-a-million miracle is something which the odds of happening to a specific person on a specific day is 1/1,000,000 and which can be observed by other humans (having an abnormally high number of neutrinos pass through your body in a specific nanosecond would be something that is unlikely but wouldn't be miracle worthy))
...that the media is part of the conspiracies?
Seriously, once we are all aware that these random conjunctions of events happen frequently we will be more likely to ignore/dismiss/deny the seemingly coincidental events that the conspiracies trigger?
Proof that happenstance can cause suspicious events is not proof that all suspicious events are caused by happenstance.
nope, use the random registration generator. (search for it on google im too lazy to find it right now)
"Save me jebus!" - Homer Simpson (btw, I'm probably talkin out of me arse)
Google for "operation northwoods" and you will discover that the military, in the 1960s, as a matter of public record, were laying plans to attack American citizens in order to stir up support for a war on Cuba.
That's not speculation, that is public record, learned through researching and the Freedom Of Information Act. They didn't actually carry out any of these plans, or blow up John Glenn's orbital space flight, because saner heads, including McNamara, refused to even consider allowing the military to make attacks on the country's own citizens for PR reasons.
The plans were still being seriously put forth.
How are you going to explain to people that this was reality, public record, proven, and that the anthrax/researcher killings you're talking about are not proven to that level of confidence? You will only make people less willing to believe the proven and important facts about the military making plans to target US civilians.
And I think that is too high a price to pay. This is the time where people need to learn to listen, not be confused by wild stories.
Choose your stories carefully, and talk about them carefully. It's like traditional investigative journalism- you don't charge madly ahead or you get discredited and lose everything you worked for.
From the article... For instance, although the numbers 9/11 (9 plus 1 plus 1) equal 11, and American Airlines Flight 11 was the first to hit the twin towers, and there were 92 people on board (9 plus 2), and Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year (2 plus 5 plus 4), and there are 11 letters each in ''Afghanistan,'' ''New York City'' and ''the Pentagon'' (and while we're counting, in George W. Bush) ... Good God! George W Bush is an Al Qaida terrorist!
I am always amazed by the gullibility of the general populice. How can people honestly believe that a modern government could harbour ANY kind of conspiracy given that they can't even keep the affair of a President with an intern secret?? If there really were aliens on earth, UFOs circling the solar system, etc., you'd be guaranteed that somebody, somewhere who wasn't hushed up by "the government" would have reported it on the 'net. Conspiracy theories are just another method for selling media to the masses.
Anybody remember the urban legend running around that Microsoft had previous knowledge of September 11th? If not, check out this site:
http://198.64.129.160/rumors/wingding.htm
The short explanation is that if you take the letters NYC and put them into the 'Webdings' font, you'll get an icon of an eye, a heart, and a building. It looks a little like "I love New York". Then, if you change the font to Windings, you get a Skull/Crossbones, a Jewish star, and a Thumb's up.
This sparked a heated controversy accusing Microsoft programmers of hiding anti-Jewish messages in software. They used lines like 'The odds of that occuring are trillions to one, it had to have been intentional.'
Well I'll tell you guys what I think: To imply that anybody left a message like that in a font is absurd. What really happened was that somebody was presented with some icons, and they extracted a meaningful message from them. That's it! The 'Death to Jews' icons that show up in Wingdings are only interesting because "NYC" calls them up. The link between 'NYC' and 'death of Jews' didn't become meaningful until 9-11. Before 9-11, it took a lot of creativity to try to paint MS in a bad light with that 'message'.
Now, one could could measure the probability of NYC creating a message that implies death to Jews and realistically say it's astronomically improbable. However, one cannot use that to establish guilt. The simple fact of the matter is that anybody can pull symbollic meaning out of any combination of letters. Common sense and evidence must factor in to questions like these. Did somebody at MS intentionally hide anti Jewish messages in a font? To convince me of that, I'd have to talk to the programmer.
I remember somebody used the 'odds of safely going to the moon and back' to prove that the moon landing was a hoax. If memory serves, it was well over 1 in 1000. Frankly, common sense says that the odds weren't anywhere near as bleak as he had measured. Nasa had a pretty good idea what was involved and built a vehicle to withstand those conditions. The only real/i odds they had to face were uncertainty. "What are the odds of something happening to cause greater forces than we had anticipated?"
Nasa maniuplated the odds in their favor, and they succeeded. End of story.
In any case, I find probability to be a relatively useless topic when attempting to establish possibilities of achievement or in judging guilt. It's one thing to measure them in Las Vegas, it's another to measure them when trying to predict anything nature has control over.
"Derp de derp."
"What are the odds," people ask, despite the fact that a "one-in-a-million miracle" will statistically occur 280 times a day in the U.S.
Probability that this "280" number is just a big fat guess: 0.999999999999
(And it depends on how one defines "miracle".)
Table-ized A.I.
As for this particular issue of the dead scientists, there's been no good evidence either way, and so it hasn't appeared at all in my blog.
Three years ago I coulda told you about pedophile priests and get this now.....a church conspiracy to cover it up. Thank god I was full of shit.....oh wait.....
Don't feel bad though, I too was once a snot-nosed kid who thought he knew everything there was to know. Here's one for all you "sceptics" out there. I know y'all are real good at saying what something isn't. Check out the cattle mutilations in Argentina. Can any of your explain what it IS? Didn't think so...---Most Definitely not a Karma Whore---
Specifically, in a probability textbook I saw a long time ago, the preface opened with a rivetingly complex proof, well beyond my ability to follow in detail both then and now. But I got the jist. The quick version is that, "mathematically speaking," something nearly impossible happens nearly every instant. A logical pun, so to speak.
And yet, am I really paranoid for suspecting that the Enron executive who committed suicide recently was murdered? Is that a hollywood-addled sense of the world, or is it simply realistic; it's not a difficult to accept fact that people have been killed over far, far smaller amounts of money. And the money is only the tip of the iceberg of conspiracies that was Enron.
Call it a coincidence that all of these scientists died in such rapid succession if you want. But I will do you one better. I won't say it's proof of a conspiracy, and I won't say it's a coincidence either.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
"Odds are, unlikely things will happen."
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
There was quite a little condescention in the mathematician's reply to the author, and there were problems with assumptions he suggested as well. You could almost suspect he was trying to redirect the reporter's attention, no, wait . . .
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
While yes its true that a one in a million event can occur 280 times per day..
a chain of one in a million events occuring in a very small time frame is more than coincidence..
its simple permutations and combinations math to show why this is so..
Someone forgot to error check again!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Me and my girlfriend (at the time) won a trip on WestJet airways to fly anywhere in Western Canada so we decided to go to Edmonton. We thought we'd do some shopping.
Anyways, we are walking around West Edmonton Mall and as far as I know, I do not know a SINGLE PERSON living in Edmonton. Anyways, we stop somewhere in the mall and decide we need to get at least one picture of us in Edmonton taken by somebody else. So I find the nearest guy walking in the mall and ask him to take my picture.
As I'm asking him, I have absolutely no clue (even though if I was paying the least bit of attention I would have) that this is my partner from the one business I had started at school to sell my study notes. I didn't know he lived in Edmonton (obviously since I didn't know anyone who lived there) but I eerily asked the only person I probably knew living in Edmonton to take my picture without even having known it was him before I asked him.
Anyways, I thought this was an opportune moment to notice that, yes, indeed, coincidences do happen.
Sunny
Be my Friend
And read Heinlein's "Year of the Jackpot" (1952)- fun story about a year when all kinds of vastly improbable things happen to come all at once: bizarre fads (compulsive nudism and lawn-watering), natural disasters, invading communists, the reemergence of Atlantis...
Though the concept of "YotJ" is more that these things come in cycles, and this is the year all the cycles line up.
Collected in "The Menace From Earth".
This one in a million thread got me thinking... As we work with higher and higher data rates, with bit error rates remaining relatively constant, things that use to happen infrequently happen alot. On a gigabit ethernet, which has a bit error rate of 10^-12, there will be a bit error once every 1000 seconds or once every 16 minutes. Luckely, most phys seem to have a much better BER than that. With the advent of 10G ethernet that number drops to 1.6 minutes. Good error detection (CRC-32) is useful here.
enough rambling for now...
-tpg
Funny how there was lots of Anthrax scares happening on a daily business, people getting sick all over the place and then poof , no leads, no one caught , no more attacks, no more questions.
what are the odds that a determined phsycopathic Anthrax killer just got bored ? yet with the entire FBI/CIA looking for them they still escaped,
or maybe something more sinister is going on ?
and did you see any wreckage of a plane at the pentagon in any of the photos taken ? cockpit ? wing ? fuselage ?
what are the odds of smashing a plane into the side of the pentagon (not exactly the height of the WTC) and no-one took a photo of plane wreckage at the scene ?
oops gotta go, a black car with some men in suits just pulled up, i'll be back in a minute....
Mad cow disease. There's been outbreaks of something at least similar to mad cow disease for quite a while in areas outside of the U.K. This includes the United States where there are also cattle mutilations.
Now, suppose a rancher recognizes the symptoms. If he goes public he'll jeapordize his and other ranchers livelihood. If he does the right thing and slaughters his herd he'll be out a lot of money. If he claims that somebody (or something) else slaughters his herd than he can possibly get money from insurance.
There's chronic wasting disease, which is similar to Mad Cow Disease, in Wisconsin deer. They both have similar symptoms and are caused by prions.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
and i know what the next governemnt consppiracy is: they will take away our capital letters and newlines, so we will all have to write inpenetrable stream-of-consciousness screeds.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Holy shit. My wacky socialist friends aren't as paranoid as I thought. Holy shit.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Sure... it's all coincidence... That's just what THEY want you to believe. :-P
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If your are not part of the solution so be it! OK harsh but if you're a scientist involved with buidling killing you should be willing to die for what you do. End of Story! o-o.
Media trying to disprove a conspiracy?
Sounds like a conspiracy to me....
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
An interesting coincidence, no doubt, but nothing more than that.
Why doesn't it focus on the ones that actually preoccupy peoples' minds?
I've never even heard of this business with the microbiologists.
But what about TWA-800? There are a lot of people who think a missile brought that plane down, so why doesn't the Times investigate this?
Here is an Executive Order Bill Clinton signed the day after Paris Match released the radar tapes showing that something else was in the sky and closing on TWA-800's position. The order removes members of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group from the Whistleblower statutes. It is quite clearly an attempt on the part of the administration to cover-up the events surrounding TWA-800.
Neither the New York Times nor any other corporate media outlet chose to publish this fact, however. To a man they all dismiss the notion that a Navy missile brought down TWA-800 as nothing more than conspiracy theory.
By exposing this rather silly theory about the microbiologists being murdered their intent is to throw doubt on the many other theories that do merit our attention... that still hold the rank of conspiracy theory only because papers like The New York Times refuses to publish the truth.
This is a disgraceful story.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
*woke up* There were good candidates in the race?
Why do conspiracy theroies abound?
It's pretty simple: it's very hard for an unintelligent person to credit stupidity for something that could have been the result of malice.
-- Terry
My favorite coincidence was the Superbowl Dow Jones correlation from Super Bowl I to superbowl 20 something. It turned out that if a pre-merger AFL team won the market went down, but if an old NFL team one the market went up. No causation, and the correlation hasn't held but it did for about 20 years.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
In other words, if you have 'paranoid friends', maybe their interpretation of things is a bit off, but there can still be facts they know of that aren't just made up. For instance, somebody might argue that McNamara vetoed the proposed plans to attack American citizens because (fill in Le Carre double twist explanation here). I think it was more a case of McNamara quietly screaming inside his head, "ARE YOU PEOPLE FUCKING CRAZY????" and vetoing the plans, hoping that the continuous rejection would settle the crazy people down. I picture him as being perfectly happy to wage war on Southeast Asia, perfectly happy to be resolutely anti-Communist, but still appalled at the idea of waging war on his own country to trick them into battle.
Like McNamara, you don't get the luxury of deciding, 'this is all good, this is all nuts, this is all bad'. You may be in a situation where some of the things you thought you could depend on are betraying you- much like McNamara, sworn to defend the United States and discovering subordinates busily preparing to wage war on their own country to manipulate it. Hopefully you can respond at least as well as he did- he did manage to turn off all of those plans, at the time, but had he been able to do more, we might be better off now.
Dr. Jacob Daley used to do a magic trick where he would determine the sex of someone's offspring from some convoluted mathematics; he was right about 50% of the time. When asked why he did this trick, his reply was "No one remembers the misses, but no one ever forgets the hits." Or words to that effect. Lots of things, like "Crossing Over", for instance, use this principle.
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line. -- Oscar Levant
"Remember the Maine?"
/mike.
Err, no I don't, to be honest. Probably because I'm a) younger than 100 an b) not a US citizen.
Can you explain what happened to that warship?
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Okay, so here's the situation: everyone is stunned by an elaborate terrorist strike. There seems to be the beginnings of another one, and it's got something to do with your field of study. There are bad economic times, but your field is still somewhat in crazy startup mode.
What are the chances that you'll suddenly die of a stress-related illness?
Far more often than conspiracies, and probably competing well with coincidences, are the situations where people's perceptions of the situation actually significantly affects what happens. Remember, the placebo effect is significantly stronger for a number of conditions than the best medicine we know of. There are many conditions (including RSI) which turn out to be caused by a slight physical effect, a lot of stress, and the knowledge that the condition is common.
I have to point out something about the classroom experiment mentioned in the article. The students whose birthdays are the same as other students in the room reported being more surprised than the other students. But this is, of course, totally logical. As the article says, it takes over 200 people to have better than even odds that someone has your birthday. Therefore, you should be surprised whenever someone does. Of course, it's likely to happen to somebody. And so somebody should be surprised, and people who know this person (and not most of the others) should be a bit surprised, and most of the people should be totally unfazed.
Maybe, just maybe, Gore is a sucky candidate.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
How many of them were abducted, probed, impreganted with hybrid fetuses and implanted with tracking devieces before they were hunted down by the shadow government under the orders of the military- industrial complex?
A conspiracy is so much easier to explain than the truth. Read further down this thread for a detailed link about derbis. By the way what temperature does aluminum melt at? A lot less than the steel beams of the world trade center. Every throw an aluminum can into a camp fire? In a few minutes its melted and oxidized into almost nothing. Now what are most airplanes made from...?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
When his family made inquiries in 1975, Congress paid $750,000 in damages to the family. What was really weird was that during this time, a letter was sent between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who were working for Gerald Ford at the time, saying that if there was a trial, it could be "necessary to disclose top secret information concerning national security".
These guys are at the top today, and since assassination and cover-ups (even specifically regarding biological warfare) clearly are not foreign to them, I don't see why the default theory should be an extremely improbable coincidence.
It took what, $40,000,000 and three years to nail that one down? I'd say that example goes directly against your point.
Well it was docked in Havana's (Cuba) harbor to protect American property and to be ready to ferry out American nationals, and then it blew up during a rather intense period of sabre rattling. An inquest board was formed, and after a month or so they reported back that the explosion was the work of an external explosive device, according to the inquest probably a Spanish mine. This was coupled with the tabloid jounralism at the time (which didn't wait for the inquest to be over to blame the Spanish) to form a popular cause for intervention in Cuba; oh and BTW all that agitation was formed in part by the Cuban exiles feeding stories, so the US has long been controlled by Cuban exiles see. Anyways, demands were made, and the Spanish ceded to the demands but the declaration of war passed the Spanish cession in tranist (some say intentionally).
Anyways the Maine was eventully looked at in the 1930s or so. Vauge mutterings were made, and the wreck was towed out of the harbor into deep water and sunk, so that no one could look at it too closely. Then later technology got to the point where the wreck could be rexamined and it was found that source of the explosion was iternal. Current thinking is that the coal dust in the coal bunker exploded, ie. an accident.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
What you never heard of the bay of pigs?
Failed coup attempt by the CIA...pretty famous.
First time america found out about the monster the capitalists (rockefeller and cronies had a huge hand in creating the CIA to fight communism[read: Protect their assets])had created.
The Cuba thing didn't work out at least.
In Guatamala a leftist government threatened to nationalize a rockefeller owned fruit business. The people where sick of getting exploited by the american elites and finally elected someone to do something about it. Well since Rockefeller was also an insider in the CIA he simply had them stage a right wing coup. Tens of thousands of Guatamalans died in purges of communists, but hey at least the capitalists assets where safe....
Sounds crazy, but hey it's all out there in fact, get your freedom of information act on and check it out for yourself.
I can't wait till i'm 70 and i can see what crazy shit they are doing right now to protect american oil and technology interests!
[...] But the actual answer is 23. [...]
hm, i always get told the answer is 42...
if you've got nothing to say, don't tell me.
Joking aside, the problem I have with this article is that it is applying statistics where there is not enough information to apply statistics. If we were talking about pulling marbles out of a bag then, sure, plug away with statistics.
:)
But we're talking about coincidences in a chaotic environment. You simply can't apply statistics to these situations without thousands of simplifying assumptions.
Take the example in the story of a bird landing on the boy's head. Can you imagine trying to compute the probabiliy for this kind of an event. Compute the probability of him grabbing the bird given that the bird landed on his head given that he just said the word "mother" given that he was giving a speech about his mother dying.
Now I'm no writer but I can imagine millions of other ways this could have turned out. For example, the bird lands on his head and he freaks out and falls down some stairs to his death. Even if we ignore the part about his mother dying, what are the probabilities that a boy is giving a speech and a bird lands on his head. Certainly it could happen but how would you ever calculate a probability for it. Its madness.
That's just an example so don't get hung up with that particular example. If someone thinks they can calculate these kinds of probabilities, the department of homeland security would love to have you
Never underestimate the power of fiber.
Here you are, my friends!
NYTimes Random Login Generator
Enjoy!
The only conspiracy story I like goes along the lines of...
"All the conspiracy theories are started by the government to keep all the nutters of the world worring about all sorts of crazy stuff. This way they will never notice now fucked the operations of government really are"
can be used to prove or disprove anything.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I attribute the gullibility of conspiracy theorists to pure psychology. It's called intermittent (partial) reinforcement. It's the same reason many people are addicted to gambling.
Rewards (in the case of conspiracy theorists, the reward is being right) in intermittant reinforcement are not given every time a particular behavior is performed, but rather once in a while, and for best results, at a variable rate, rather than a fixed rate.
This is the reason you don't feed stray animals on the street, because they will occasionally be rewarded, and so it will stick in their heads that they should visit a particular place to get food. If you feed that stray animal after each visit or at a fixed rate, it will be easier to get off your back once you stop. However, with intermittant reinforcement, it will take a long time to get the animal off your back since it will continue to expect that one day you will feed it.
Conspiracy theorists have been right in the past (mere statistics will prove this, as this article makes note of), and that is enough to get large numbers of people convinced enough that others are worth their time and energy to prove correct.
Gullible they may be, but they have history to blame for that.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Now I've had this happen quite a lot. I suspect that in an initial glance at a given scene, you subconsciously see the word, in this case "beauty", which sets off a train of thought. A moment or two later, you spot the word on a sign, or in a newspaper, or something. It really does seem like subconscious trickery.
The chain of probabilities was incredible. It took days of 3D computer simulation coupled with ballistics analysis to work out what had happened - yet it happened and someone died as a result. The guy that fired the pistol didn't even realise his gun had fired twice.
I guess they though it was just too bloody obvious to point out how many people may have decided to go into work early because they had plans that evening or something similar and thus were "miraculously" killed. Of course we never heard from those guys telling us how unlucky they were.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Professor Robins of Harvard points out that "the Web has changed the scale of these things." Had there been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather than 2002, he says, it is possible that no one would have ever known. "Back then, you would not have had the technical ability to gather all these bits and pieces of information, while today you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known that if you take a lot of random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and the Net makes it easier to collect random noise."
:
... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.
Unfortunately, DARPA is now in the process of designing the TIA (Total Information Awareness) system (here and here)
It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards
So, in other words, the TIA system is DESIGNED to attempt to find pattens in a few petbytes of random noise.
Those claims that Hitler was a man of peace are simply ridicilous. Do you really think Germany invaded countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, etc. to preserve peace? If he ever tried to avoid war with major european powers like England, France or the Soviet Union, this was simply for tactical reasons. Nazi Germany has broken more or less every single treaty it signed, both in letter and in spirit.
The article indirectly cites some guy saying " Hitler was not thinking of war [...] as the Führer's immense social and cultural plans would take years to fulfill". These immense social and cultural plans consisted in robbing, enslaving and murdering some ten millions of people, as well as crushing any political opposition. The leaders of germany at that time were nothing but criminals, acting on global scale. It's that simple.
If you are really interested in evidence, check out original sources. In this case, I recommend to read Hitler's "Mein Kampf". This book has been printed millions of times and distributed to more or less every household in the third reich, so you can be pretty sure it is authentic. (OK, it is written in german, as a matter of fact in pretty poor german, so reading it might be difficult for you). This book was written long before Hitler seized the power. It states pretty clear his plans to kill and enslave "inferor races" and to fight a war to avenge the german defeat in WW I. Everybody who tries to deny this is simply a liar or a moron.
Please do not believe everything just because some URL says it is true. Just like in coding: "Use the source, Luke."
sig intentionally left blank
The USS Maine was sunk in 1898, resulting in the U.S. attacking Spanish colonial interests. In 1912, the Maine was raised, investigated by the U.S. and then scuttled. These are the known facts. The conspiracy theories arise over the question of who or what sunk the ship. Did the U.S. intentionally sink the ship to provide a reason to attack Spain's colonies? Hmmm.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
Ah, I see.. Thanks! /xm
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
The article is misleading. Listen, if everybody in the US toss their coins a few would get a large number 6 heads in a row (1 in a 64 chance). Yes, that is the law of large numbers at play. But if you have a coin and toss it six times and you get six heads, teh reasonable thing, ask any statistician, is to have the coin check for fairness... Coincidence happens, yes, but that doesn't mean you should just shrug your shoulder and ignore them...
The case of death related to biotechnology should be investigate. It may be a coincidence, but after the investigation you can get clues as to whether it is just that.
Efron is a venerable statistician, but this is plain wrong. There are many things that are so unlikely that, for practical purposes, they simply do not occur in this universe. For example, all the air molecules in a room don't all get on one half of the room, leaving the other half with a vacuum. Statistically, this arrangement is (approximately) as probable as any other. But there aren't enough rooms in the universe to make this an event that could occur with "fairly high" probability.
Much of physics relies on things that are "astronomically unlikely", and much of engineering consists of changing conditions so that something that is very unlikely becomes common. We have enshrined these "astronomically unlikely" principle as a the laws of thermodynamics, and we don't even bother to say "a perpetual motion machine is possible but very, very unlikely", we just say "you can't build one", because for practical purposes, you can't.
[Tibshirani] ''The chance of getting a royal flush is very low,'' he says, ''and if you were to get a royal flush, you would be surprised. But the chance of any hand in poker is low. You just don't notice when you get all the others; you notice when you get the royal flush.''
This is true but not relevant. If you randomly think of some particular hand and then have it dealt, you do have reason to be surprised, although, since the prior probability on the existence ESP or telekinesis is so minute, you should probably still attribute it to randomness. On the other hand, you have no reason to be surprised if you get a royal flush once over many games, just like you have no reason to be surprised to get any particular hand once in many games.
Similarly, statistically, having all the air molecules in a room be present only on one side of the room is (approximately) as probable as any other particular arrangement of air molecules, but I guarantee that if you were in that room, you would notice, and you would have reason to be surprised. In fact, you would almost certainly be correct in concluding that that arrangement of air molecules didn't come about by chance but involved something like a vacuum pump and a partition.
Which brings us to the death of Benito Que, who was not, despite reports to the contrary, actually a microbiologist. He was a researcher in a lab at the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center, where he was testing various agents as potential cancer drugs.
Now we are getting to the good stuff. The problem with the conspiracy surrounding these cases has nothing to do with statistics or people's ignorance of it.
The death of half a dozen germ warfare experts under the age of 60 within a span of four months would be an unlikely event, whether or not it follows 9/11. Not astronomically unlikely, but something that would certainly warrant closer investigation. If you assume that there are maybe 100 such world experts, you can look at standard mortality tables to bound the probability of this event occurring.
What's wrong with that analysis is that these people were not "germ warfare specialists"--they were biologists. Journalists constructed the label "germ warfare specialists" after the fact. But there are a lot of biologists in the world. The death of half a dozen biologists over a four month period is a much more probable event--simply because there are a lot more biologists around.
The whitewashing NY Times neglected that detail.
For more on the story, see here.
Lets think....
Bio reasearch started to go nuts ohh 50/60 odd years ago maybe a little longer,
The adverage age of a newbee bio researcher say 20-25.
so thet put there age at arround 70-85
take into account of all the nasty shit they deal with and...
odds are there dropping like flies.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Was anyone else suspicious of the mention of this movie citation? this FULL citation, which they went WAY out of their way to make, and which mentions the full name of both the actor, the main character he portrays, and the director (with his spooky, stagey name) in addition to the title. It had everything except a hyperlink to Fandango and the Disney web site.
Exactly like the character in a much advertised movie, eh? What a surprising simile.
What are the odds of THAT happening.
Probability has nothing to do with the state of the world. It only has to do with the state of our knowledge about the world. If something has a probability of occuring of 0.5 a day or year ( that is an odds of 1) it means there is no evidence to support it either occuring or not occuring. Only evidence can sway the probability in one direction or another. This new evidence does not mean that the world has changed, it just means that we have learned more about the world so we have to adjust our beliefs about it.
... will ..."
I'm sick and tired of journalists making statements like:
- One in ten women will develop breast cancer,
and all the variations of "x in y
If you still think probability has anything to do with the state of the world at all then answer this:
Consider a person who has no information whatsoever about aviation history, what are the odds of a plane crashing in flight according to him?
Now give him all the information -- aviation history. What is now the odds of a plane crashing in flight according to him?
Assuming of course that he is reasoning as logically as we would expect any honest human to.
So you see that probability is just the state of our mind about something based on evidence, and not a projection of the state of the world.
Anybody who fails to see this, is committing what is normally called the "The mind projection fallacy".
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
I am always amazed by the gullibility of the general populice. How can people honestly believe that a modern government could harbour ANY kind of conspiracy given that they can't even keep the affair of a President with an intern secret??
You mean like Iran-Kontra ??? Or Nixon's tapes ??
Yep, the gullibility of the population is amazing ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
It is incumbent upon you as a free-thinking individual to read, understand and evaluate the writings of Congress.
I know a lot of people that break a bunch of silly laws before they get out of bed in the morning. Most of them don't vote because they feel that is implicit support for the government. I can't say they are all that wrong, loss of confidence is a pre-requisite for replacing the current regime. At this point in the States the confidence is low enough, there's just no concensus on what would come in it's place.
It would have to be peaceful too, as it was in the Soviet Union. So the military needs to be convinced and that is much harder since it's a volunteer army so it is even more conservative than a conscript one. And it still doesn't mean you should be unaware of the idiots in congress, since their actions can be used to convince the soldiers. But what's more important is to figure out a better form of government that can unite a good majority of the populace behind it.
Are you kidding? Jeez, talk about "touchy touchy...!"
As an impartial observer who couldn't give a rat's patootie about Operating Systems (Is there any more boring topic in all the world? I mean, for me and 88 ga-billion other people, it's "Does my Word Processor work? Does my Spreadsheet work? Yes? Good! Now get outta here, I got work to do..."), allow me to point out that any slack you perceive MS receiving on this board is purely the product of your over-caffeinated imagination.
The degree to which MS (and Bill Gates personally!) is slammed hereabouts is comical, boarding on Monty Python-esque. That's not to say the quality of the jibes is always worth the price of admission, but the sheer tsunami-level volume is usually good for a chuckle.
I hope for your sake, however, that the success of your Open Source Movement (did I get that right?) does not require many average joe's having to take these juvenile anti-MS tirades seriously, 'cause if so, it's doomed. With very few exceptions, it all looks like High School kids arguing over whose music is better, Britney Spears or MegaDeth.
("Britney Spears or MegaDeth" -- did I get that right?)
Rather than being a coincidence, this is where the word "synchronistic" fits better.
These situations are arranged by your Higher Self to either show you that more exists than statistics or to bring you together with someone that you need to meet.
Here is a true story. I woke up one morning with the thoughts about an old friend of mine that I had not seen in 2 or 3 years. i left for the office and realized that I had forgotton a diskette that i needed.
I thought that i would get it at lunch time and drove home to get it and on impulse decided to eat at a Wendy's that was a couple of miles down the road. I thought of my old friend a couple of times while driving there.
I went in almost expecting to see him in line in front of me but after I got my food there he was sitting alone at a table.
He said it was the first time he had eaten there in a couple of years.
His wife had told him the night before that she wanted a divorce and he was suffering very deeply.
I am sure that some one could calculate the odds of he and I eating at a place neither of us had been for several years, but what of the thoughts of him before hand and the fact that he needed my words of comfort at that exact moment?
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Michael: My father's no different than any other powerful man. Any man who's responsible for other people, like a Senator, or a President.
Kay: Do you know how naive you sound?
Michael: Why?
Kay: Senators and Presidents don't have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
between a pro-Linux supporter and a pro-Microsoft supporter on Slashdot? Answer: The former isn't paid to express 'their' ideas.
Well, if you actually read the recount data rather than just the headlines you'd have seen that if all the votes in the state were counted (as the Florida constitution requires), Gore won by a significant number. It was only in selected partial-count scenarios that Bush got more.
And that's not dealing with the issues of Black voters taken off the voter roll, closed polls in Black districts, fraud in military ballots, the use of accurate voting machines in Republican districts and worn out machines in Democratic ones, the questionable legality of having a partisan campaign director running the election, the "bourgeois riot" paid for by the RNC and staffed by Republican Congressional staff halting the recount, the Supreme Court's ruling that isn't allowed to be precedent, the Supreme Court members who under ABA rules should have recused themselves for their family's working for the RNC...
Really, I expect more from Slashdot posters than I do from Limbaugh dittoheads. Apparently I shouldn't.
I would have considered it a proper debunking if it had done a peoper statistical analysis of the deaths -- or something like that. Instead, it simply explained away a couple of the deaths, and hand-waved the others. When the original story went out, I was willing to explain away 3 of the original 11 deaths as 'normal' That still left a cluster of 8 wierd disappearances. This article hand-waved at least one of the deaths that I had already considered 'normal'.
On the pro-cosnpiracy side of this story:
A similar story occured in Vancouver: about 50 or 60 women mysteriously disappeared over the last 10 years in Vancouver. Most of these women were drug users and/or prostitutes. The nature of a prostitute's business is such that a prostitute would be a very juicy target for a serial killer (where else can you consistently get a woman to wander off with a stranger to a remote and secluded area?)
In any case, the Vancouver Police department continued to pooh-pooh complaints of Downtown Eastside residents that these disappearances were unusual. They simply explained it as 'they probably just skipped town'. It wasn't until America's Most Wanted did a story about how Vancouver was a great place to be a serial killer, that they responded at all to the complaints. They still spent a year, or more claiming that it was just a coincidence, despite the fact that a forensic statistician on their own staff found clear evidence of improbability.
It wasn't until last year that some real manpower was put into the investigation, and this year a pig farmer was charged with the murder of a half dozen or more of the missing prostitutes. This summer police hired a bunch of anthropology students to help look for bone fragments and body bits in the dirt pile on his farm.
The moral of the story: Just because something MAY be a coincidence, doesn't mean that it is. If you want to prove, or disprove, a conspiracy around this cluster, you need to look at the whole cluster -- not just point out the easily explainable (or more worrisome) deaths and hand-wave about statistics.
The story at the base of this article neither proves nor disproves the probability of a conspiracy around this cluster of deaths. It simply points out that they're not all unexplainable (something that was clear some time ago).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
And in fact, one of the first things people learn in basic statistics/probability classes is how many striking blind spots the human mind has for math. It's why Vegas works, and its probably part of why we tend to systemmatically misunderstand how "coincidental" things really are (or aren't).
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Apparently you're too clueless to be aware of the crime pulled off by Katherine Harris (Florida Secretary of State, overseer of the state board of elections). Her office directed the company doing voter roll processing to bar ~30,000 eligible voters from exercising their constitutional right to elect their government officials (probably because they would mostly vote Democrat).
There is no direct linkage to this act in the conspiracy to elect Bush. But its obviously an illegal manipulation of the the electoral process in order to elect Republicans, and it probably made the difference in the presidential election.
Finally, the only agency that can pursue a criminal case against Harris is the US Attorney General's office. It's head, John Ashcroft was appointed by the current US President. The federal gov't has chosen to pursue legal action against local election officials, but not Harris.
Still need a clue?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Furry cows moo and decompress.
From the article:
"'a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.' In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to something that transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe. Like Mel Gibson's character Graham Hess in M. Night Shyamalan's new movie ''Signs,'' we want to feel that our lives are governed by a grand plan."
The definition of coincidence (which starts the quote above) says "no APPARENT connection" (my emphasis). The author is factually incorrect, by their own definition, in saying that "no apparent connection" equals "pure happenstance" (the definition of happenstance is, by the way, "A chance circumstance").
The author then bounces from this shaky springboard into a big leap indeed: the assertion that a person who thinks that something without an "apparent" connection might have a hidden of obfuscated connection is equal to "want(ing) to feel that (their) lives are governed by a grand plan." The rest of the article merely strives to make the reader feel better about this supposed personal weakness.
The article, then, is essentially designed to make the reader feel foolish for considering the possibility of a connection, and in fact suggests that those who consider the possibility of a connection are merely trying to make themselves seem more important to themselves than they are.
This is inappropriate, for a simple reason embodied in the hackneyed phrase "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you". The reason is this: Cause and Effect is a real, everyday occurance. The absence of immediate and irrefutable proof is not cause for dismissal of the possibily of correlation (and potentially causation). If it were, police detectives wouldn't bother investigating crimes -- the lack of immediate and irrefutable proof would be sufficient to rule out guilt.
Instead, I have found (in my own limited life experience) that those who avoid arguments against the allegation, and instead present arguments against he/she making the allegation (as this author is doing), are unable to refute the allegation. Instead, I have found that this inability generally stems from their being:
(a) convinced that they know more than the person with the opposing viewpoint (the closeminded and/or cynical)
(b) lacking sufficient knowledge to refute the allegation, but unable to stay uninvolved (the ignorant and/or nosy) or
(c) aware that the allegation is potentially/partially/completely correct yet is in a position where they must refute the allegation (the guilty and/or the paid off).
Please note that my argument above does not prove that there IS a connection, any more than the article in question proves that there is NOT. My point is simply that the author is either cynical, close-minded, ignorant, nosy, guilty or paid off, and can thusly be safely ignored by intelligent people who are considering the issue for themselves.
Nice to see someone reads...
And yet:
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=4, Funny=1, Overrated=2, Total=9.
Apparently Feynman wasn't as clever as he thought.
... people want there to be conspiracy theories so that there's a distinction between "us" and "them". Nobody wants to admit it's "us" doing the bad things - a sinister panel of people in a darkened room is a much more convincing force for bad than "ordinary people".
"well when blender goes Open it will be better than lightwave so pffft !"
Yeah because we all know how much better 'Open' software becomes than commercial. *eyeroll*
Gurney is the author of ''The Cassandra Prophecy: Armageddon Approaches,'' a book that uses clues from the Bible to calculate that Judgment Day will occur in or about the year 2023.
Isn't that when time_t rolls over? Fixing y2k was hard, but this...damn!
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
That's the SAME combination I have on my luggage!
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Yet, nobody who developed apache's making any money.
Perl better than VB? Let's see, I can write a quick little app with a visual interface rather quickly in VB. And Perl can.. uh.. script? Heh.
ROFLMAO
Why do you wanna cripple mouse support by only supporting prompts?
Do I even care? I can use VB to write apps useful to ME for what I am doing NOW. My only point is Perl has it's place, VB has it's place elsewhere. There is no 'Vs'.
Perl is no better than VB at visual stuff than VB is better than Perl at scripting and efficiency.
There, settled, grow up and move on.
Don't needta. Windows 2000 is just fine for what I'm doing today. When I have time to play I'll investigate Linux.
Even if Linux was supercalifragilistic (and it's not, I have a box running it at work.), there's still the following problems:
1.) I run Lightwave. LW is PC/Mac only.
2.) I run Photoshop and After Effects. See point 1
3.) I play with new hardware quite often. New hardware is best supported in Windows 2000. Sorry.
4.) I do a lot of web based stuff. Windows provides the best experience for the internet. Sorry.
5.) I'm already up and running, I don't have the time to start over with a brand new OS just so i can gain popularity points wiht Slashdot.
6.) See point 5.
7.) See pooint 6.
Get my drift?
1.) No there are not. You have Maya and Softimage. That's it. They both cost more, plus they have inferior renderers. Oops, $5,000 for Renderman to fix that
2.) Gimp isn't quite there yet, tried it.
3.) any.
4.) SSL does not a web experience make. Did you miss all of the 'all sites are designed for IE nowadays' thread that happened about 4 times in the last month?
5.) Im not bashing anything. It is a fact: Installing Linux will not improve anything I'm doing today. End of story. If you're offended by that comment, grow up! For what I do, Windows wins.
6.) Actually I have used Linux, that's how I know it won't help me. I'm fully qualified to comment on it, thank you. I'm running an Apache Webserver on RedHat as a matter of fact. I love it for that, hate it as a desktop OS. Sorry, Windows wins there. I'd be a real idiot if I switched to Linux.
BTW, I have one more comment to make about #6: You have no idea what all I do with my computer. You have no idea what's involved in making 3D animation. How can you honestly expect to know more than I do about what I need? It's called zealousy.
The only reason you're bothering to reply to me at all is because you can't stand the idea that Linux just isn't for everybody. Sorry! It still has some evolving to go through.
"no actually i couldnt care less if you use/like linux. my point is very simple your sig is making a statement that is untrue."
Um yes, my statement is very true. Linux won't help me.
" you obviously think because you have a webserver running the most bloated and commercial flavor of linux that you know linux."
Okay.. so based on your logic, I don't know that After Effects really does exist for Linux. I also don't know that Photoshop is available for Linux. (and no, not Gimp. Used it. It sucks.) I'm also unaware that Lightwave is running on Linux with full i386 plug-in support.
My mistake, you're right, Linux will solve all my problems. I'll start installing it right away!
"and i dont give a good hoot nany weather you agree with me or not. you just imply there is no alternative on linux, - WRONG !"
Im not implying there are no alternatives on Linux, I said that it wont solve my problems! Can't you read?
"what i said was simply that our sig comes off as saying there is no good rendering software for linux - and thats wrong"
:P
It shouldn't. It should come off as saying "It wont solve my problems". Cos that's what I meant.
It's silly to think I meant there's no alternatives. I talk about Maya and Renderman (completley superior to Lightwave) all the time. Those run on Linux.